about the author
Penny Freedman has taught classics, English and drama in a variety of schools, colleges and universities. She is also an actor and director. Her earlier books, This is a Dreadful Sentence, All the Daughters, One May Smile, Weep a While Longer, Drown My Books and Little Honour, featuring Gina and Freda Gray and DCI David Scott, are all published by Troubador.
Copyright © 2021 Penny Freedman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9781800468092
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This book is dedicated to the Theatre by the Lake
in gratitude for pleasures past and hope for the future.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Carnmere encompasses many of the delights of the Lake District but it is an invented place, as are its hotels, cafés and shops, its ferry, its craft centre and its theatre, as well, of course, as its residents.
Some readers may feel that I have played a cheap trick in giving my fictional town conveniently poor mobile phone reception. The advent of mobile phones has been a mixed blessing for fiction writers: they offer all sorts of possibilities – mysterious text messages, tracking and tracing, phones as beacons, as decoys, as give-aways – but they also deny us one of the essentials of drama – failed communication. Plots need the letter gone astray, the messenger delayed, the telegram garbled, the phone lines brought down by a storm. If characters carry their convenient little communication devices with them wherever they go, we have to be ever more inventive in breaking the chain.
And so it happened that when I discovered a town in the Lakes where there were genuine mobile black spots I seized on the opportunities that offered and found a way for Gina and Freda to take a holiday there. So that is my excuse; the black spots are real, and they made the story.
The Lake District of course evokes thoughts of Arthur Ransome and it seemed natural for Freda, a budding artist, to make sketches in tribute to Swallows and Amazons. I am immensely grateful to Mary Wells for seeing Carnmere through Freda’s eyes and giving me my illustrations.
‘Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter One
WHETHER THOU WILT OR NO
Prologue
I don’t even see the email at first. In fact, it’s only because it’s a slow day that I don’t despatch it unread as junk. ‘Flynn@googlemail’ means nothing to me, but the subject line, ‘Paying a Debt’ suggests some sort of financial scam, and I decide to open it because I’m at a loose end and I just might be amused/impressed/appalled by the ingenuity of the scammers. Even when I open it, I don’t think immediately that it is from someone I know.
‘Dear Gina,’ I read, ‘I am not going to start by apologising,’ and I think that’s a rather original opening. Then I read on:
‘I didn’t reply to your phone messages or your emails – of course I didn’t. You had just completely derailed my life. Did you think I was going to say, Never mind, no harm done? Harm was done – more harm than you can imagine, or we guessed at. It looked as though it was going to be all right at first. We all went off to Donegal, Laura’s craft centre went pretty well, I made things and looked after the grandchildren, and Colin started a little plant nursery and did a bit of A level science coaching. It wasn’t the old life and we felt too young to be the old folk, but it was all right. And then, three years in, someone got hold of Colin’s story and that was it. We were non grata. You would think he had been convicted of the murder itself the way people behaved – no more coaching for their precious young, no more play dates with Laura’s kids if he was likely to be around. We were messing up their lives, so the two of us left and tried a couple of other places but the same thing always happened in the end. Somebody would put the story out and that would be it. So, we’re back in England under new names: my maiden name, which is why you won’t have known who this was from. We’re in the Lakes, and have been here for a couple of years. I have a unit at a little craft centre on the shores of a lake and help with sets for the local theatre, the grandchildren come and stay with us in the school holidays and Colin was getting back to gardening and coaching, until last week. Last week, Ruby Buxton went missing on our doorstep. You’ll have seen it all on the news. This place is now red-hot with rumours, the police have tracked down Colin’s record and I can see they are just gagging to fit him up as their prime suspect.
You put us here, Gina. Your meddling, your need to be the great sleuth. Colin is a good man, and you know it. You were happy enough to have him as your doctor for years, and then you turned him into a criminal. If you feel any responsibility for that, then you can bring your sleuthing up here and find out what has really happened to Ruby.
You owe us, Gina.
Eve’
My immediate reaction is a great wave of nausea and I rush to the bathroom expecting to throw up. That doesn’t happen, in fact, but I sit with my head between my knees for a bit and then go and make a cup of tea. Shock, I tell myself, is all it is, though I stop short of sugaring the tea. I take my mug back to my computer and steel myself to read Eve’s message again. This time I actually feel the urge to laugh. I stop myself because I’m perilously close to hysteria, I know, but really, if you were going to ask for help from an old friend you hadn’t seen for years could you go about it in a more unpromising way? But that’s Eve – sort of. Her voice comes at me off the screen, the Irish punch of it. It comes with a picture of a lifted eyebrow, a hovering, sardonic smile. But it used to be warm; it came with ready hugs and an irreverent laugh. It came with happiness. Well, whatever Eve chooses to claim, it was no
t me who put an end to the happiness; it was Colin – or, if you like, the murderer of a thirteen-year-old girl who involved Colin in the cover-up. What was I supposed to do? Not try to find out who the killer was, when the police had my daughter in the frame for the role? Not tell anyone when I worked out the truth because that would implicate a respected local GP? Not tell anyone because it would ruin my best friend’s happy life?
Well, I did tell, because you need a better reason than that to let a killer go free, and Colin lied to the police. He didn’t know he was protecting a murderer, but he knew he was lying, and you don’t lie in a murder inquiry, do you? In the end, they didn’t charge him with perverting the course of justice; he pleaded guilty to wasting police time and was given a suspended sentence. He took early retirement and he and Eve, with their daughter, Laura, and her family, went off to Donegal, where Eve has family, to raise rare breeds and run a craft centre. But Colin has a criminal record and why anyone should care about something that happened nearly ten years ago I don’t know, but they obviously do. The murder of thirteen-year-old Marina Carson was a big media story because her mother was a celebrity and the circumstances were shocking, so I suppose that is why it goes on generating enough interest for even the minor players to find their way into the social media bear pit. (Actually, I don’t think of social media as a bear pit so much as a bubbling cauldron performing a kind of malign alchemy by which the tawdry acquires a gilded gloss and the milk of human kindness is curdled with venom – but that’s for another time.)
Ten years. It must be: Freda, my granddaughter, was just a mite, I remember, and I was still pushing her around in a buggy. Laura’s children must be strapping teenagers by now, and Eve and Colin are in their sixties. Eve was my mentor at William Roper school in Marlbury, where I taught for years. She was the head of art and she managed her domain with a deft mixture of humour and firmness that I wanted to emulate. I wanted, in truth, to be Eve, with her popularity, her easy relationship with her four talented, cheerful daughters, her comfortable marriage to kind, good-looking Colin. I was wrestling with the aftermath of an unhappy marriage, an ill-tempered divorce and a daughter with whom I was, at best, in a state of armed truce. I went around, in those days, propelled by a constant simmering rage while Eve was all sunshine.
Well, I’m not an angry woman now: I have a job I am rather good at, a home of my own which I love, daughters with whom I am on pretty good terms, a pair of likeable grandchildren and a semi-detached lover who does not live with me but can be called on to spice up my life from time to time. I am content and Eve is angry. Eve is possessed by fury, and I am her target.
I have no idea how to reply to her message. When the crisis came and she stopped speaking to me, I sent mollifying words of regret and sympathy. I hoped our friendship could survive; I hoped Eve and Colin would survive. Now, faced with her unrelenting blame, my immediate reaction is to kick back. I read her email once more and then I type furiously:
‘Well, if you’re not apologising, I’m certainly not. I can’t believe that you are still blaming me. If you tried to be honest just for a moment you would know that I did what I had to do. A child was murdered, Eve, and her killer had to be caught. You know that really, so why not start facing up to it? If you want me to come and help, we need to start by being honest. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.
Gina’
I read this through with my cursor hovering over Send, and then I stop. The truth is that I will go; I have known that since I read Eve’s message the first time. I will go because a girl is missing and I might be able to help; I will go because I like to be asked for help; I will go because I can’t resist a mystery; I will go because I have missed Eve; I will go because I might heal the rift with Eve; I will go because her message is a cry of desperation; I will go because absorbing myself in this just might detach me from the endless non-news cycle as my country bickers and blusters and badgers its way towards a chaotic break with its European partners. Some of these reasons are more creditable than others and some more powerful, but I am not allocating points to them. You can, if you like.
Brexit pervades everything these days – as the October 31st deadline looms I live with grinning Hallowe’en masks, laughably terrifying, dancing before my inner eye – and so my terms for going to Cumbria reveal themselves as the phantom conditions they are: I am going, and Eve knows that I will go. What is the point of blustering?
I delete everything and start again, a different person now, calm and forgiving, above the fray:
‘Lovely to hear from you though sorry about the circumstances. Not sure how I can help but always glad of an excuse to spend time in the Lakes. I can rearrange a few things and be with you soon. Let me have details about where you are.
Gina x’
Well, you can’t fault it as an answer to a very rude message, can you? But I think it will freak Eve out. Bland is the last thing she’ll be expecting. She won’t know what to make of it. I start with the upper hand. I read it again. You couldn’t call it passive aggressive; it’s better than that. It says that I am the grown-up here, that I haven’t been fretting for ten years about her rejection, that I am busy but flexible, that I am happy to see an old friend. If she thinks that there is any kind of implied apology here, let her. In her heart she knows the truth. I press Send.
To ‘rearrange a few things’ is not simple, though. In two days’ time, Freda is due to arrive at my Bloomsbury flat for a week of London delights – shopping, theatre, museums, restaurants. Her mother, stepfather and brother will be in Italy and she is joining them later, but for the coming week she is my responsibility. Would she like a week in the Lakes instead of in London? To tell the truth, I am a bit scared of Freda at the moment. We have always had a happy rapport: she is independent, outspoken and funny, with good taste in books and an interest in almost everything, and we have always enjoyed ourselves together. But last week she had her thirteenth birthday, and my experience, not only of my own daughters but generations of pupils in my teaching career, is that, in the summer holiday, that small gap of time between Year Eight and Year Nine, ninety-five percent of thirteen-year-olds are infected by some kind of communal disease: they leave school in July still smiling, bright-eyed, eager children and they return, barely six weeks later, slouching, scowling, slothful neo-adolescents. Some catch a milder version of the infection, but even they have to take on protective colouring and follow the new rules: treat all adults as the enemy; display no enthusiasm for anything; adopt resentment as your go-to emotion. A year later, most of them will emerge from this pupa-like state, as suddenly as they went into it, and will stretch their wings as flighty teenagers – restless, sex-fuelled, funny, competitive, given to crazes and hates, insecure and invulnerable, fearful and assertive, often exhausting, sometimes exhilarating. But they have to get through being thirteen first.
Freda was showing symptoms of Year Nine Syndrome last week, I thought, when I went down to Marlbury to celebrate her birthday: snappiness with her mother, sarcasm to her brother, a compulsive commitment to silent texting – and, I felt, a slippery avoidance of me, a reluctance to engage, despite the fact that my birthday present had been an expensive session at a hairdressers, where her blonde curls had been straightened into a smooth sheet which she tossed self-consciously as she left the house with her friends for a celebration supper at a new pizza place. I was not too worried about how we would get on for a week in London because there I am the source of grown-up delights, but how will it be in the Lakes, off my home turf and with the psychodrama of Eve, Colin and a missing child to deal with? I am, as I said, scared.
I hesitate before I call her, but she sounds like her old, usual, bright self.
‘Hello, Gran. How are you?’
(‘Gran’ is new – ‘Granny’ is too babyish, I surmise.)
‘I’m fine,’ I say, ‘and I’m looking forward to seeing you…’
‘But?’ she says
. ‘You’re going to say, but, aren’t you?’
‘Why are you so clever?’ I say. ‘The thing is, I wonder if I could ask for your help with something.’
‘What sort of something?’ She is suspicious, with good reason.
‘A mystery,’ I say.
‘Like before? When you found out who killed that friend of Auntie Annie’s?’
‘You remember that?’
‘I certainly do. You were a legend.’
‘Well you were pretty much of a legend too, finding out what had happened to the dog. And that’s why I think you might be able to help. Only this time it’s not a dog that’s missing.’
‘A person?’
‘You’ve heard about Ruby Buxton?’
‘Of course, I – you don’t mean you’re looking for her?’
‘I think I’m going to be. I’ve got a friend who lives near where Ruby disappeared and she thinks I could help. But actually, I think you could help too. Maybe help more. You might be able to talk to the local kids, Ruby’s friends, and—’
‘Kids?’ she asks coldly. ‘Ruby is thirteen, you know.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Teenagers, I mean. Sorry.’
‘And that would be instead of shopping and Evita and galleries and…’
‘We’ll do that later, I promise. I’ll swap the Evita tickets for when you come back from Italy, and we’ll have our week in London then.’
There is quite a long pause. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘It might be cool.’
‘I’ll book us into a swish hotel,’ I say, recklessly, and I can hear her smiling.
‘Even cooler,’ she says.
The first thing to do is to swap the Evita tickets. I have a testy exchange with a woman in a box office, who says that they don’t do exchanges. I have been on the website and I know that they are sold out for the evening next week when I have tickets, but not for the end of the month when I want the new tickets. I point this out. She says they don’t do exchanges. In the end, I have to give in: I buy the new tickets, then go upstairs to my neighbour, Melissa, who is an eBay queen and will be happy to sell them for me.
Where Everything Seems Double Page 1