‘Well, look at you,’ she says. ‘Aren’t we the professional woman these days? Senior lecturer, isn’t it?’
I feel terrible, of course, and I deserve to. What was I thinking with the expensive hairdo and the inappropriate jacket? This is Eve, for heaven’s sake; when did those things ever impress her?
‘Sorry,’ I mumble, ‘still in work mode. Wait till you see the pedal pushers in my bag.’
Then we stand looking at each other and I can feel Freda jiggling with impatience behind me.
‘Just let us drop our bags,’ I say, ‘and then we can go into the bar over there and get some tea.’
‘Well, my studio is just down on the lake shore,’ she says. ‘I can offer you a cup of tea there. Not posh, but free.’
‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘Give us five minutes.’
Our “suite” is highly satisfactory: both our rooms have views out over the shiny lake, the bathroom offers an invitingly deep tub and a multitude of little bottles, and Freda’s investigations reveal high-end chocolate biscuits among the tea and coffee paraphernalia. I don’t want to leave her alone just yet and, anyway, I think I might need her as a buffer between myself and Eve, so I persuade her to come with me. She would like to stay here really, to unpack and create a nest, but she agrees to come along, quite intrigued by the idea of a studio and drawn, inevitably, by the lure of the lake. We clatter downstairs and Eve leads us to the lake shore.
The lake is mainly fringed with trees but there is an open space almost immediately opposite the hotel and a boatyard with an assortment of small boats for hire – canoes, little rowing dinghies and a few larger boats for team rowing. On a jetty to the side of the yard a gaggle of teenagers is gathered, socialising in that odd, restless, apparently purposeless way that such groups work. They could just as well be mooching around the bus station after school or sharing chips in the pedestrian precinct. The only difference is that they are all wearing shorts and a couple of them are sitting on the jetty’s edge, dangling their feet in the water. Further along the shore there is a collection of wooden huts, nestling under the trees. One of the boys – a floppy-haired lad whose face still has the soft roundedness of childhood but whose body is moving into gangly adolescence – peels off from the group and comes towards us.
‘Fergus,’ Eve says. ‘Good lad. This is Freda. You’ll look after her, won’t you? Introduce her to the gang and show her around. Then bring her back to the studio.’ She turns to Freda. ‘I hear you’re a bit of an artist, Freda,’ she says.
Freda goes scarlet and looks accusingly at me. I hold up my hands, protesting innocence.
‘It’s all right,’ Eve says. ‘Your granny hasn’t put your school report on Facebook. Mrs Wade, your art teacher, is my daughter – Georgia. She says you need encouraging.’
And then before Freda can say anything, she waves them away and leads me off towards the cabins. For a moment there she was herself again, and I am reminded how good she was with the pupils at William Roper, how she gave the shy ones refuge in the art room, how she nudged the awkward ones into line with her combination of cheerful bossiness and resolute good humour. I so want to believe that it is still there, somewhere, behind the lined and weary face.
She unlocks one of the cabins, removing a Back in 15 minutes notice hanging from the door, and we go inside to a room that actually catches me by the throat, so that I have to produce a fake coughing fit to cover my confusion. I always loved Eve’s house; it bounced at you, brimming with too much of everything. Sketches and watercolours elbowed each other on the walls, every chair and sofa had at least three cushions, vivid in colour, bold in design; curtains draped luxuriantly, plants flowered abundantly, and on every surface pieces of pottery and glass glowed and shimmered. This room I am standing in now is like a monochrome version of that abundance. Abundant it is, and crammed with beautiful things, but the colour is gone. Drained as if in a permanent twilight I think at first, but then, as my eyes adjust from the sunlight outside, I see that the colours are there. They are muted, not drained; they are, in fact, the colours of the landscape that has produced them. They are the misty greys and blues, the sludgy greens and ochres of the lake and the moorland; they are the colours we came through on our taxi ride as the cloud lifted and the bleary sun came through. Eve is watching me intently and I turn to smile and praise, but she waves a dismissive hand around her work.
‘Tourist fodder,’ she says. ‘They like to take home their little bit of tasteful tat. I’ll make us a cup of tea. Come through when you’ve had enough.’
She disappears through a curtain at the back and I do the rounds of the room. I don’t know much – as far as the visual arts go, I’m a but I know what I like woman – but I really don’t think this is tat. The witty portrait sketches and the landscapes with their subtle washes of colour seem to me to be lovely, and there are blue and grey patchwork cushions with tiny beads that I would buy instantly if it weren’t too complicated to buy something from Eve. ‘Tasteful’, Eve said, as if it was a dirty word, and I suppose you can see how tourists will take these things back to fit nicely into their cool urban homes, to place a single cushion on a sleek sofa or hang a landscape on a Farrow and Ball grey wall. Does tasteful make them worthless in Eve’s eyes? Would she really like still to be producing the cushions with mirror sequins on them that she used to sell at the indoor market, where we bought our kaftans in the 1980s? I would like to ask her but I don’t dare.
I put my head through the curtain. I imagined that I would find a little kitchen here, but this is actually the real studio. There is a kettle and a few pottery mugs, but the room is set up for painting or sketching. Here, I think, is where she does her portraits. I look at the easel and the sitter’s chair and have a flash of memory. When I was about eight, an artist who was a patient of my mother’s offered to paint my portrait. My mother had seen her mother through a long and difficult final illness, I think, and this was a sort of thank you present. My mother wasn’t sure about it – she distrusted anything that smacked of vanity – but I was already a literary child and this was the kind of thing that happened in books. I was fascinated by the whole business and had no trouble sitting still (when she wasn’t actually painting my face, I was allowed to have a book in my lap). The best part was our breaks, when my painter would heat up milk on a primus stove to make us cocoa. I liked the cocoa but even more I liked the romance of the attic studio and the primus stove. The finished result, I am sorry to say, was disappointing. I had hoped that she would magic me into a beauty, but though she was kind to my freckles I emerged simply as a beady-eyed little girl with a rather pointy chin. I have kept it, though; it hangs watchfully in a corner of my bedroom and judges me.
‘We can take this outside,’ Eve says, and picks up a tray with pottery mugs on it and a pair of cupcakes with rather violently pink icing. Eve catches me looking at them. ‘Fergus made them,’ she says. ‘His hand slipped, I think.’
We sit down on slightly wobbly wooden chairs at a small, round table just outside the cabin door. There is a nippy little breeze coming off the lake and I am glad that I pulled a sweater out of my 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 c
ourse – 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 about that later.’
‘I can’t wait.’
She says nothing and I sit, trying to picture the scene.
‘So does that mean that Ruby was left to manage a two-person canoe on her own, because if so isn’t the most likely thing that—’
‘She wasn’t,’ she interrupts. ‘Someone else was in the boat with her. People remember that.’
‘So who?’
‘No-one knows. I told you, the men were in costume as Oberon’s followers. They were all wearing animal masks.’
‘Oh, wouldn’t they be, of course! And the boat was found in the reeds somewhere?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the police have questioned Colin?’
‘The police have questioned everyone, but they’ve questioned Colin a second time – and then there’s all the other stuff. Anything from threatening emails to graffiti on our front door.’
‘You’ve been here for a couple of years. Before this, did anyone here know about what happened with Colin in Marlbury?’
‘I don’t think so. Our name change helped, and people here aren’t nosey. They don’t google their new neighbours to see if they have a criminal record.’
‘So how has it come out now?’
‘I’m afraid it’s the grandchildren. Fergus, who you met, and Milo, his brother. They didn’t mean any harm, of course. We’ve never told them about why we left Marlbury – though we’ve had to tell them now. They come here every school holiday. They know Ruby – her father has a glass-making studio just along from here – so of course when she went missing they were all over Facebook and WhatsApp and whatever else to their friends, and that included their cousins in Marlbury, who passed it on to their friends. And those friends told their parents, who – because Marlbury is really a very small town – remembered Laura Fletcher, now Maguire, and remembered that the Fletcher girl’s parents had had to leave Marlbury because Dr Fletcher had been involved somehow in the murder of a girl – and wasn’t there a paedophile ring involved? He had got away with it somehow, but now Laura Fletcher’s children were caught up in the disappearance of Ruby Buxton, and why? Because they were staying with their grandfather in Carnmere – that very same Dr Fletcher.’
She pauses, breathless, and then starts coughing, alarmingly. I jump up to go for some water. But she waves me back and drains her mug of its cold tea.
‘I’m fine,’ she says, eventually. ‘But I’m eaten up with rage at people’s stupidity. And I’m exhausted by it. I can’t deal with it any more. That’s why you have to help.’
‘And Colin?’ I ask. ‘Is he coping?’
‘Colin?’ she says, looking away across the lake. ‘I can’t say. You’ll have to judge for yourself.’
I have a moment of panic, thinking that she means that he is nearby, coming to accuse me, but no-one is approaching, so I ask, ‘What was he doing when Ruby disappeared?’
‘He was ushering at the theatre. I persuaded him. I’m helping backstage and I thought it would be good for him. Fergus and Milo are doing scene shifting and Colin would have been on his own at home They need ushers at the interval to manage the move to the lakeside, so there he was – in prime position for snatching a little girl in the dark. And I put him there.’
I wait for a moment and then I ask, ‘What exactly have the police said to Colin? How do you know they have him in the frame?’
She picks up her cup, finds it empty and puts it down again.
‘They’ve interviewed him twice. Once was routine – they talked to everyone who was there that night – the second time they had had the back story and they summoned him to the station. He came back—’ She stops and looks out over the lake. ‘He came back looking like an old man. He was white, he was shaking, he looked as though he could hardly walk.’
‘What exactly had they said to him?’
‘I DON’T KNOW!’
She is suddenly yelling and I put up a placatory hand.
She stands up and walks towards the edge of the lake. I sit and wait. Eventually, she comes back but she doesn’t sit down.
‘He won’t talk about it,’ she says, quietly now. ‘He’s gone into himself and I can’t reach him.’
I feel sorry for Colin and I hate to see Eve’s pain but there is a danger of seeing them as the prime victims here.
‘How are Ruby’s parents doing?’ I ask. ‘You know them, don’t you?’
‘I told you – Neil’s studio is the one just down there.’ She points further along the lakeside. ‘I’ll introduce you but not now.’
I don’t know if we could have gone any further. As it is, Fergus and Freda appear, walking towards us with another boy who must be Milo – taller and broader than Fergus and with the same floppy hair. Freda is looking bright-eyed and rather pink.
Where Everything Seems Double Page 3