Where Everything Seems Double by Penny Freedman (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📗

As she walked away, her mother called, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to the B and B. Please don’t get the police out looking for me.’

Pleased with her exit line, she swaggered out of the café, but then set off at a sprint towards the B and B, desperate to get to her room before the storm of tears building in her chest overwhelmed her.

DC Abington takes notes

Chapter Twenty MEET WE ALL BY BREAK OF DAY

Wednesday and Thursday

The police really let me off very lightly. Not that I had done anything criminal, of course, but my experience has been that they don’t much like amateur detectives wandering onto their pitch and may even retaliate by repurposing them as suspects. But there was none of that. They clearly don’t know that I have form, didn’t link me to Colin’s past in spite of the Marlbury connection, and happily assumed, without my having to lie except by omission, that I am just up here for a nice holiday. I think I must have Freda to thank for this and I don’t know whether to be pleased or not. Of course, I was glad not to be berated for interference in police matters but I have always found Freda a truthful child and I am not altogether happy to find that adolescence has turned her into a skilled liar.

Anyway, the upshot was that I was treated as a bit of a heroine – a feisty grandmother who took off to rescue her missing granddaughter, called an ambulance to a man who was bleeding to death and confronted an armed attacker. They asked me, of course, why I hadn’t informed them instead of going off to find her myself but accepted fairly readily my explanation that I had no evidence to offer except my guesswork based on Freda’s mind map. The issue of the mind map was a bit tricky. I couldn’t see that it was any of their business, I didn’t want to risk losing it, and it is just too personal to be shared, so I went vague and dappy and said it had somehow gone missing in all the havoc of the previous day. I’m not sure that they believed me, but there it is.

I saw Ellie when I came out of the police station. She was sitting in the café on the other side of the square, on her own, and she looked as though she had been crying. I was tempted to go in and join her, to sit down at the table opposite her and force her to talk to me, but my courage failed and instead I went and bought Kendal mint cake to take home with me.

And then I had to get through the rest of the day. I wanted news. I wanted to know how Dumitru was, how Susan Buxton was, how Ruby and Grace were doing, whether Freda was all right, but nobody was telling me anything. I took the ferry back to the hotel, my eyes glued to my phone while I had a signal, and then sat in my room, trying to read, eating biscuits, feeling abandoned and resentful. I rang David twice, but he was already back in London and I got his terse voicemail twice; I rang Eve but got her more friendly but no less unhelpful message; I pointlessly tried Freda’s phone, though I knew it was likely to be in Dumitru’s car, probably still in Oxfordshire, and was told it was switched off anyway; I even considered ringing Annie, in case she somehow had news via Ellie, but it’s a working day and I wasn’t strong enough to be shouted at again anyway. I looked in the minibar and seriously considered just drinking everything in it, but I was saved by the arrival of a chambermaid with clean towels for the bathroom and went down to the bar to eat a sensible ham sandwich. I hoped Gheorghe might be there with news of Dumitru, but there was a barman I didn’t recognise, who only shrugged when I asked if there was any news. Walking along to Eve’s studio after my lunch, I found, as I expected, that it was closed.

It was not until late that afternoon that my room phone rang as I was sitting looking glumly out of the window at a view which had lost its charm. It was Eve.

‘How are you doing?’

‘Going cold turkey on adrenaline withdrawal and starved of news. What have you got for me?’

‘I know everything. I am sharing my house with people who are wired in to the local intelligence network. What do you want to know?’

‘Well, how is Susan for a start?’

‘That was the most difficult information to get hold of. They took a while at the hospital to grasp that Susan’s next of kin is appearing in court tomorrow morning, charged with attempting to murder her, and beyond that her only kin are her teenage daughters, and they still wouldn’t talk to me. But Grace rang and had the sense to claim to be eighteen, so she got a bulletin, and it was cautiously optimistic. She has a couple of broken bones and a fractured skull and she is in an induced coma, but the scans suggest that brain damage may not be permanent, and they expect to bring her out of the coma in the next day or two.’

‘I suppose Neil thought she knew where Ruby was.’

‘I went with the girls to their police interviews. They were adamant that she didn’t know.’

‘Maybe she just guessed.’

‘And he forced her guess out of her? It’s possible, I suppose.’

‘We’ll probably never know. Men like that don’t make confessions. Refusing to talk makes them feel that they’re still in control.’

‘Other casualties: Dumitru, I hear, is going to be all right. The police told Freda that, apparently, and she rang on Ellie’s phone to tell Grace. She’s a bit out of the loop because the