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

and closes her eyes. ‘All right so far. You can keep going. I’ll stop you when you go off track.’

‘Good. So, this is all about Ruby, obviously, and there she is in the middle, and the others round her are like a protective ring. I wondered at first whether it could be a threatening ring, but Grace being there made me think not. So Grace thought Ruby needed protecting, and that’s the start. We won’t talk about why Ruby needed protecting, because that’s police business.’ I shoot a glance at David but am met by the impassive profile once again. ‘We’ll just say Grace thought it was a good idea for Ruby to leave Carnmere.’

I look again at the paper. ‘I assumed that we are supposed to go clockwise round the circle – I didn’t think this was widdershins business – so next to Grace comes Venetia. What’s the connection between Grace and Venetia? I didn’t know, except that Grace had been part of the gang, and she and Venetia are the same age. But next to Venetia is Milo, and there are two things we know about Milo in this business. One is that he took the phone call on the backstage phone that night that summoned Dumitru back to work and left Ruby, to some extent, free. And the other is that he had Ruby’s phone and told nobody that he had it. At the very least, it means that he saw Ruby that night. Maybe significant, maybe not.’

I stop. Freda has been very quiet and I wonder if she has actually fallen asleep. She hasn’t. She says, ‘Keep going, but I do hope you’re going to get something wrong.’

‘Don’t worry, there are bits I don’t know at all. But I think I know this bit. Milo took the phone call from the hotel. And who, in this little inner circle, could have made a call from the hotel? Who else but Venetia, whose dad owns the hotel? I don’t know where she made the call from. Did she slip into her father’s office, or was it from somewhere else in the hotel?’

‘The kitchen phone,’ Freda murmurs, still with her eyes shut. ‘There’s a phone in the storeroom. She uses it sometimes instead of going over to the car park to use her mobile. They don’t mind.’

‘So they’re used to her using it and it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to link it up to the mystery message that called Dumitru back to work when he wasn’t needed. So far so good. So Venetia makes the call to the theatre, where Milo is primed to take it. There had to be a call, of course. Milo couldn’t just invent it. They knew the police would check that. You all watch TV crime dramas. You know what the police do. So Milo takes the call, goes and finds Dumitru, and Dumitru goes back to the hotel.’ I pause.

‘Go on,’ she says.

‘Well here I’m not sure, and I think you weren’t either. That’s why you’ve got a question mark against Dumitru’s name. You weren’t sure whether he was a part of this. But we’ll come back to that – if we’re allowed to.’

I resist looking again at David and being ignored. Instead I plough on. ‘My theory is that Ruby wanted to make sure that Dumitru didn’t get the blame when she disappeared. She knew how her father felt about him, and she wanted to make sure that he was well out of it. So with Dumitru safely back at the hotel, Ruby gets on with the business of the evening, and when the interval comes, she gets into her boat and a mysterious young man joins her. He’s masked and dressed as one of Oberon’s attendants. Everybody saw him and maybe some noticed that he wasn’t Dumitru, but nobody wondered who he was. I wouldn’t have guessed if your mind map hadn’t told me. My money was on Gheorghe. But you worked out that it was Fergus. Nobody had thought of Fergus – we all thought of him as just a boy. But he’s pretty tall for thirteen, and with Dumitru’s costume on to bulk him out, he looked like all the others in the lantern lights.’

Freda has opened her eyes and is leaning forward. She is getting into this now, seeing the chance of being the instructor for once and turning me into the eager student.

‘So what happened then?’ she asks.

‘I guess that in all the melée of the floating boats and the flickering lights, he paddled Ruby along the lake to that convenient little inlet, where she took off her costume and put on clothes that she had brought with her, or Fergus had brought for her – who knows? Anyway, it was a place to change, and if they left the boat there with her costume in it, that had the advantage of suggesting that Ruby was a victim, stripped of her clothes, and it would keep the search for her local.’

David speaks at this point and I swing back from looking at Freda, as startled as if a statue had suddenly given tongue.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he says, ‘they considered the hours of overtime the search would involve – the cost. They very nearly dredged the bloody lake.’

‘Will they be in trouble?’ Freda asks, and we both look at the sleeping girls.

‘There will be some sharp words tomorrow, I imagine, but if it’s clear that Ruby was running away from abuse, I don’t suppose it will go further than that,’ he says.

I look at the mind map again. ‘David and I did talk about this sort of scenario as being possible. We didn’t have the specifics but we could see that Ruby might have been running away – with help. But we couldn’t work out what happened next. How could Ruby have got away at this point? That was what puzzled us. She didn’t catch a bus from up on the road and we didn’t believe