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

case before I left our room and I am not sitting shivering foolishly in my London jacket.

‘I do portrait sketches for the visitors,’ Eve says, pointing to a board which carries a cartoon of a woman at an easel and reads, Your Portrait Drawn in One Hour. ‘I like to sketch outside when I can and I keep the chairs here for the sitters’ friends and relations.’ She must catch something in my expression because she adds, ‘It’s all right – I don’t need the money. We both have good pensions. I just like to be busy.’

Because you don’t want to be at home with Colin? I wonder, but I say, ‘What a coincidence that Georgia is Freda’s art teacher. I’ve heard about the wonderful Mrs Wade but I didn’t put it together.’

‘No.’ She cuts a very small piece off her cupcake and picks it up. ‘Georgia realised. Same surname, of course – and she used to babysit Freda when she was little, if you remember.’

I do remember, and I remember how all that stopped after Colin’s downfall. Eve’s lovely girls, who had been in and out of my house all their lives, walked past me in the street without a glance. I suppose I should be grateful that Georgia doesn’t take out her resentment of me on Freda.

‘So you’ve been keeping tabs on us,’ I say. ‘How did you know about the senior lectureship?’

‘I googled you, of course. And there you were on the university website, with a photo and everything. I notice you’ve airbrushed out your time teaching at William Roper from your CV, though.’

‘It’s an academic CV,’ I say, feeling myself blushing. ‘It wasn’t relevant.’

‘No,’ she says. She pushes away her plate with the uneaten cupcake on it. ‘My family keep trying to fatten me up,’ she says. ‘I’ve not been well.’

I look at her. ‘Serious?’ I ask.

She bats the thought away. ‘No, no,’ she says.

There is more to be said but neither of us is saying it, so I finish my cupcake and drink my tea, and then I ask, ‘Would you do Freda’s portrait? She’d love it. She’d like to watch you working.’

‘We’ll see,’ she says. ‘Let’s see what you can do for us first, shall we? What do you know so far about Ruby Buxton going missing?’

‘Some bare facts from the Guardian. Freda has seen some of the social media stuff but I’ve avoided it.’

‘And the Guardian says…?’

‘That Ruby Buxton, aged thirteen, went missing during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she was playing one of the fairies, at the Boatyard Theatre, and that a canoe, containing some of her clothes, was found abandoned.’

She pushes her mug away and leans forward. ‘What the media couldn’t seem to get hold of was the moonlight revels,’ she says.

Moonlight revels? Now I’m thinking about The Crucible and the girls playing at black magic in the dark. Please don’t tell me that the youth of Carnmere are into the occult. This is not my thing.

‘Moonlight revels?’ I ask.

‘Well, I don’t know about revels, actually. A moonlight farrago, you might say.’

‘Consisting of what?’

‘Boats. Fairies in boats. Floating about. On the lake. Singing. In the dark. With lanterns.’

‘And this fitted into the play how?’

‘Fits in. It’s still going on. The production started last week and it’s on till tomorrow. You’ll want to see it.’

‘I’m sure I will. But fill me in in the meantime. Does the whole thing happen round the lake?’

‘Oh no. It’s in the theatre. Just over there.’ She points across the lake to a modest, white building which announces its purpose only by the fly tower that rises from it. ‘A very nice little 300-seat theatre, The Boatyard, built about twenty years ago. The site was a boatyard and they moved the business across to where it is now, down here.’

‘So the play is in the theatre,’ I say, ‘but the fairies are on the lake. How does that work, exactly? You’re going to have to help me here, Eve.’

‘The interval,’ she says. ‘The audience are encouraged to take drinks out to the lakeside and there they find the fairies singing and floating about in boats. And again at the end, actually, when they’re going home.’

‘And that’s when Ruby Buxton disappeared? When she was floating about?’

‘Yes.’

I ponder this. ‘Did nobody think,’ I ask, ‘that there might be health and safety issues in having children out in boats in the dark? Do they have adults with them? Are they paddling themselves? What do their parents think about it?’

‘Well, of course, after Ruby disappeared there were lots of questions raised. But I gather that the parents gave formal consent at the beginning. You have to remember that these kids have grown up on and by the lake. They can all manage boats; they can all swim. And, actually, they were supposed to be in two-person canoes with an adult with every child.’

‘But?’

‘But?’ she echoes.

‘You said, “supposed to be”.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, Titania’s fairies are all girls, and then there are Oberon’s knights. They don’t have much to do except stand around looking threatening. Several of them are on the staff at the hotel – Eastern Europeans. They’re not up to speaking parts, but they look good, and one of them was in each canoe with one of the fairies.’

‘But?’ I repeat.

‘But when Damian, who owns the hotel, agreed to them being in it, there was an understanding that if they got really busy at the hotel, work had to come first and one or two of them would have to work and Oberon’s train would shrink a bit. Usually they had time to serve dinner and then get ferried across for their first entrance, but on the night in question the chap who was paired with Ruby claims that there was some sort of flap on at the hotel and he was called back to work.’

‘Claims?’

‘You’ll need to talk to him about that. I’ll introduce you. In fact I have a plan – but I’ll tell you