Where Everything Seems Double by Penny Freedman (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

all laughing and look extraordinarily unharmed, until, as though at some bat-squeak signal, they throw their arms around each other and start to cry.

There is nothing I would like more than a weepy hug myself, but that’s not my role here, so I locate some glasses in a wall cupboard above a small sink in the corner and run three glasses of water. This room must be a sort of green room, I realise, close to the studios at the back, and that cupboard I can see, by a glance at its interior, is a costume store. I put the glasses on the table and go over to the weeping trio.

‘Drink some water,’ I say. ‘You’ll be dehydrated. And I’ve got some chocolate.’

That breaks the spell. They pull apart, gulp the water and fall on the two small chocolate bars that I bought at the motorway services. Grace starts to divide them with scrupulous fairness, but Freda says, ‘You have them. You haven’t eaten properly for days. I’m all right.’ Then, at last, she turns to me and puts her arms round me. Leaning her head into me she whispers, ‘I’m sorry, Granny. I’m so sorry.’

Ellie! Disentangling myself I say, ‘You must ring your mum.’

‘No phone,’ she says. ‘Dumitru took it.’

‘Why?’

‘Later,’ she says. ‘There’s loads to explain, isn’t there? Is he all right?’

‘I hope so.’

As I am speaking, I am getting my phone out. ‘Here,’ I say. ‘Mum isn’t speaking to me but I said I was coming to get you, so I expect she’ll answer.’

I don’t need to worry about giving her privacy for the call. There is a tremendous banging going on at the front door and shouts of ‘Police. Open up!’ and I go out to find a melee in the hall: the handcuffed Neil slumped in a chair with Gary standing guard over him; David talking to three uniformed police officers, one female, two male, and two paramedics heading for the room where Dumitru is. I go over to talk to Gary. ‘I can’t sort out the police,’ he says. ‘I rang after twenty minutes like you asked, and they said someone had already called police and ambulance. And then that bloke turned up,’ – he gestures at David – ‘and says he’s police. So I told him you’d got in round the back somewhere and then I thought I’d better follow him in case, you know, he wasn’t police.’

‘You did exactly the right thing,’ I say. ‘Way beyond the call of duty.’

He grins and looks down at Neil Buxton, who seems to have shrunk somehow. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ he says.

The paramedics come by at a run with Dumitru on a stretcher. He has an oxygen mask over his face. I want to ask if he’ll live but I know I won’t get a reassuring answer. They are not going to tell me it’s “just a scratch”, are they? I just have to take what comfort I can from the fact that they are running.

The woman police officer comes past me, asking, ‘Are the girls through there?’ and a terrible thought comes to me, dredged up deep from early this morning, which seems impossibly long ago. Susan Buxton is dead and Grace and Ruby don’t know that. I follow the policewoman back into the green room where the three girls are huddled together on the sofa and Grace, who has the only phone, is busy typing.

‘Is everyone OK here?’ she asks, and they look up and nod abstractedly. Their virtual world calls.

‘Just stay in here, will you, girls?’ she says, ‘and breathe deep. I know you’ve been through a nasty experience but we will need to talk to you and check that you’re not hurt.’

I am the only person here who knows that their mother is dead – killed, I am beginning to suppose, by their father – but I am not the person to tell them. It needs someone official as well as kind. This woman sounds nice enough, and she’s all we’ve got, so I grab hold of her arm and steer her back along the passage into the hall.

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say.

Against my expectations, she doesn’t brush me off. She takes note of who I am, introduces herself as WPC Tracey Arnold, and then listens to my information. She asks a couple of questions and then looks round for a quiet place, climbs the stairs, sits down halfway up and gets out her phone. While she is having, it seems, multiple conversations, the two other police officers finish their negotiations with David and take Neil Buxton outside. They seem to be dragging him, not because he is resisting but because his legs aren’t working particularly well. As they are leaving, their female colleague looks up from her phone and performs a thumbs-up pantomime which seems to mean that she can manage the mopping up here.

David, who has ignored me throughout, goes to have a look at the room where I found Dumitru and I am just about to start a chat with Gary when Tracey Arnold comes down to us. She dismisses Gary with a look and takes me aside.

‘Who’s that bloke?’ she asks.

‘My taxi driver.’

She raises an eyebrow. ‘If the meter’s still running, you must be stacking up quite a fare,’ she says. Then she lowers her voice. ‘Susan Buxton is alive, but she has been badly beaten and she’s unconscious. I spoke to the local police and to the hospital – she’s been taken to Penrith. She has head injuries and they are still assessing the extent of the damage. She’s in ICU – serious but stable is the line at the moment.’

‘Will you tell her daughters?’

‘I will. Can you take your granddaughter away somewhere and I’ll talk to the girls in there. In the normal way of things, we would interview the girls at the station in our vulnerable victims unit, and get them medically checked, but since we’ve got