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

till we’ve been interviewed by the police, but I just needed to explain why we’re being such pigs.’

‘Fish and chips we had,’ Ruby says. ‘Twice.’

‘True.’ Grace looks round the table. ‘Somebody change the subject,’ she says, ‘or we shall start blabbing.’

No-one, though, can think of anything to say. If these children can’t talk about what has just happened to them, how can we prattle about anything else? We munch on in silence. I see Gary’s fist clench as though regretting reflexively that he didn’t have a chance to use it on Neil Buxton, but he munches his way stolidly through his pizza. David eats most of his. I start off with enthusiasm but quickly start to feel nauseous. I watch the girls eating and hope they won’t throw up in the car.

And then we’re off. I thank Gary and tell him he’s a hero and a gentleman, causing him to blush horribly and hurry away. We get back into David’s car and start our five-hour drive with a slow crawl through suburban rush hour.

Chapter Eighteen METHINKS I SEE THESE THINGS WITH PARTED EYE

Tuesday evening

We are all very quiet in the car. I can hear a certain amount of whispering from the back but the girls are daunted, I think, by being trapped in this car with a pair of adults. David is focusing on the driving, intent, serious – grim, even – and I am suddenly pole-axed by tiredness, the adrenaline of tension and terror leaking away to be replaced by a thirst for oblivion. I lean my head against the window frame and close my eyes but I don’t sink into the slumber I’m hoping for; I doze shallowly and when I jerk awake I know exactly where I am and who is with me. I turn to look at the back seat. Ruby and Grace are curled together, deeply asleep, like babes in the wood; Freda looks sleepy but is still awake.

I look at David. ‘Freda’s the only one awake,’ I say quietly, ‘and I would like to ask her some questions but I’m not sure how much is sub judice. What am I allowed to talk to her about?’

He has been expecting this, I can tell, because his answer is immediate. ‘Well, nothing. There will be charges against Dumitru if he pulls through, so anything Freda says will be evidence, and the Cumbrian police will want that fresh from her when they interview her, and not tainted by discussion with you first. So, I’m afraid the answer is there is really nothing she can talk to you about.’

I am extraordinarily – and probably unreasonably – irritated by this, not just the word ‘tainted’ but the tone – the lofty pronouncement delivered without so much as a glance at me. All right, I know he is driving, but he could manage a momentary flicker, couldn’t he, rather than maintaining the stony profile? Well sod him. I dig in my bag and pull out Eve’s now rather crumpled sketch of Freda, with the enigmatic diagram on the back. I turn round in my seat and show the paper to Freda, who is sitting immediately behind me.

‘This is a sort of flow chart, isn’t it?’ I ask, keeping my voice down. ‘This is your theory about what happened to Ruby?’

She glances at Ruby, sleeping beside her. ‘I like to think of it as a sort of mind map,’ she murmurs, ‘but whatever.’

Brilliant! I look at David. ‘A mind map, Detective Superintendent. I’m not sure that the police can object to our discussing that, can they? This isn’t Oceania, is it? We don’t have Thought Police yet.’

He still doesn’t look at me. His head is rigid, his eyes are on the road in front of him. He allows himself a single grunt of irritation before he says, ‘By all means talk to Freda about what has been in her head. Dreams and imaginings are outside our remit.’

I think of pointing out that Freda has spent time with Ruby and Grace since she made her map and has had a chance to verify everything, so we shall not actually be confining ourselves to imaginings, but then I realise that he knows this perfectly well and – as annoyingly often – he is way ahead of me. I watch his face, hoping for just a flicker of complicity, but he gives me nothing, so I just murmur, ‘Lovely!’ and look again at the mind map before twisting awkwardly again to get as close as I can to Freda.

‘So, I would like to see if I’ve interpreted this right,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, and you can tell me if I’m getting it right or wrong. Is that OK?’

‘All right,’ she says. ‘Fire away.’

I take a deep breath, but keep my voice low. ‘Well, I made a mistake at first because I tried to read it across and then, of course, it doesn’t make any sense. But then I saw it’s a circle, isn’t it? It’s that kind of flowchart, not the sort that goes from top to bottom, with branches ending in possible outcomes. So there’s an inner circle and a sort of outer circle – satellites if you like.’

‘So far so good. Carry on.’

‘OK. So, I started by thinking about Grace. This inner circle, that’s all the young people you’ve met in Carnmere, but Grace is there too, and she wasn’t in Carnmere – you didn’t know her – so why does she feature here?’

‘And your answer was…?’

‘My answer was that she had to be important – and that meant that she had to be either the beginning or the end of the flow. I put some arrows in, by the way – I hope you don’t mind my interfering but I thought it might help me – and then I thought, Let’s imagine that Grace is both the beginning and the end. Because it is a circle after all. How am I doing?’

She leans back in her seat