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

He looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her, Freda thought. Hadn’t Ruby and Grace already told them all this? Maybe they’d been interviewed by other people. Perhaps that was how it was done – and then they compared notes.

‘And then what happened?’ Jane Hapgood asked.

‘Then their dad came in and he knew where we were, and he tried to get the door open but he couldn’t, so he said he was going to wait there until we came out or suffocated when the air ran out. And that’s where we were when my gran found us.’ She shot a look at her mum that she hoped was full of meaning, but she saw that she was wiping away tears.

‘Well, thank you, Freda,’ DS Hapgood said, and then her tone changed as she stood up and made a little speech, which Freda could have done without. ‘I’m sure you know that you behaved very irresponsibly, and I’m sure your mum has spoken to you about it. You caused a great deal of anxiety, you put yourself in serious danger and you wasted police time and resources. I hope you won’t ever be so foolish again. It may feel like an adventure now because it turned out all right, but things could have ended very differently.’

What was she supposed to say? DS Hapgood seemed to be expecting an answer and Mum was no help. She was really crying now and mopping herself up with a tissue. This was, she thought, very unfair. Mum and Gran had every right to be upset with her because they had been worried but the police? It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she might have wasted police time but she had also saved them the time they would have gone on spending looking for Ruby. What if you’d dragged the lake finally? she wanted to ask. What would that have cost? Instead she asked, ‘When will I get my phone back?’

DS Hapgood sighed. ‘When are you leaving for Italy?’

‘Friday,’ her mum answered.

‘Come in tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. ‘And think about what I’ve said.’

When they got outside, her mum said, ‘I need coffee,’ and marched across to the glass-fronted café on the other side of the square. Neither of them said anything except to order their drinks – coke for Freda and a large filter coffee for her mother, to which Freda added a request for a buttered teacake. The breakfast-time row with her mother had stopped her from eating much and now she was starving. As they waited for their order to arrive, they both looked out at the square, busy with the weekly market. All placid and ordinary, Freda thought, and would anyone looking at the pair of them guess how un-placid and un-ordinary they were feeling? She waited until they had their food and drink, until her mother had taken a good swig of her coffee and she herself was fortified by half the teacake before she said, ‘So you see it really wasn’t Granny’s fault.’

Her mother made a noise that was supposed to be a laugh but really wasn’t one. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘She didn’t drag you up here on one of her adventures. She didn’t involve you in her self-promoting amateur sleuthing. She didn’t use you in the weird psychic games she plays with David Scott. She didn’t introduce you to a dishonest hotel waiter. And she didn’t encourage you to think you can behave as selfishly and stupidly as she does, did she?’

Freda felt as though she had been punched in the stomach, but she wasn’t going to let her mother see that. She kept her eyes on her plate and took a deep breath. ‘The police don’t seem to be blaming her,’ she said.

‘No!’ her mother hissed furiously, ‘because you managed to tell your story without including any of that, didn’t you? In your version your grandmother was the heroine who turned up just at the right moment and saved the day.’ She gulped some more coffee. ‘How did she know where you were, actually? She was the one who worked out where Ruby was, wasn’t she? She put you up to it.’

‘No, she didn’t!’ Freda was hissing now too. ‘I worked it out and she found my mind map.’

‘Your what?’

‘Mind map. It’s when you—’

‘Yes, I know what a mind map is. But what was yours a map of?’

‘How Ruby ran away. It was the easiest way to think about it. And I left it behind and Granny found it and worked out what it meant. Because she gets me. Because we’re alike.’

‘And that’s just the problem. You’re too alike and being with her isn’t good for you.’

‘Why not? Just because I went off without telling anyone it doesn’t mean she’s a bad influence.’

‘Yes it does. Thinking you know best and having no respect for people who know better. Thinking you’re superior to everyone else doesn’t bring you friends. If you model yourself on her you’ll end up as lonely and sad as she is.’

‘She’s not lonely and sad. She’s got friends. Eve for a start. She loves Eve.’

‘Oh yes, loves her so much she hasn’t seen her for ten years.’

‘And there’s David.’

‘David! David, who she could have married only she’d rather keep him dangling on a string.’

‘Anyway, she’s not lonely.’

‘Really? Living alone in that flat without even a cat. We had to take her cat because she couldn’t even manage that.’

‘Because she lives in the middle of London.’

‘But she doesn’t have to.’

‘She likes it there. And so do I.’ A thought struck her. ‘You’re not going to stop me going there at the end of the holidays, are you?’

Her mother looked away from her and out of the window. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We might stay longer in Italy, after this disruption.’

Freda stood up. ‘Well I’m sorry you hate her,’ she said, ‘because she loves you, though I can’t think why