Where Everything Seems Double

by Penny Freedman

‘Who from?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anyone.’

  What I hope for, of course, is some miraculous message from Freda, and we both know that.

  ‘There might be something from Ellie,’ Annie says.

  ‘There might,’ I say, and my stomach lurches dangerously.

  I get nothing from the police station but the bland reassurance that they will let me know of any developments, and David’s phone offers nothing but his terse ‘David Scott, Leave a message’. In the car park my phone remains resolutely uncommunicative, while Annie has several messages from the world beyond this nightmare, none of them helpful here.

  As we are walking through the hotel foyer on our way back, Annie responds to the clatter and aroma from the restaurant.

  ‘Are you having breakfast?’ she asks.

  ‘Don’t think I can face it.’

  ‘I think I’ll have some toast or something,’ she says. ‘My last meal was lunch yesterday – apart from chocolate on the train.’

  ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Eat. You should.’ And glad of the time on my own, I go back to my room.

  I am tempted to slump back in my chair and gaze blankly at the lake but I should do better than that. I have a friend whose Polish grandmother survived in one of the concentration camps. Her mantra in any time of stress was ‘You must eat and you must wash’. If I can’t eat, I can at least wash, so I go and take a shower and clean my teeth and then put clean clothes on. I don’t feel any better but I have passed fifteen minutes and now I can slump. I pick up the sketch of Freda, which is lying on the coffee table, and I am looking at it as though it could give me an answer when Annie thunders on the door. She bursts into the room as I open it, and says, ‘I think they’ve found a body by the lake.’

  ‘No, no, no, no…’ I am shouting this over and over again, my arms flailing, beating at Annie, who has my wrists in a powerful grip. She is saying something but I can’t hear it above the sound of my own wailing. Finally, she gives me a hard shove, so that I stumble back and fall onto the bed.

  ‘It’s not Freda!’ she shouts. ‘It’s a woman.’

  Now I want to batter her all over again.

  ‘Why did you let me think…? How could you?’ I yell.

  ‘You didn’t give me a chance,’ she yells back.

  And then I start to sob and I can’t stop. I lie on the bed and I weep tears and snot into the ornate satin bedspread while Annie presses handfuls of tissues into my hand and urges me to pull myself together.

  Eventually I ask, ‘Do they know who it is?’

  ‘The people at the next table to mine said the rumour was that it’s Ruby Buxton’s mother, but the police haven’t got a proper identification because they can’t find her husband.’

  ‘He’s missing?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  I see the two of them, so pale and insubstantial, standing in Eve’s studio. I was surprised, I remember, that they didn’t seem more distressed, but perhaps it was all internalised and finally hollowed them out, so that only oblivion would do. I picture them with stones in their pockets, wading out into the lake. Did they hold hands? Why hasn’t Neil Buxton been found? Perhaps he got caught in something under the surface. I have a vague idea that drowned women float face upward and men face downward. Would that make a difference?

  Annie walks over to the window. ‘The police are down there. Are you all right now?’ Annie asks. ‘Because if so, I’ll go down and see what I can find out.’

  I nod.

  She says, ‘And it may have nothing to do with Freda, you know.’

  I nod again and watch her go.

  As soon as the door closes I am drawn back to the window, where I stand, mopping up the residual tears and blowing my nose. There are three uniformed police officers out there, milling around on the jetty, consulting in twos and threes and then drifting away again in the way that others’ activities always have of seeming aimless because you don’t understand what motivates them. Now I can see Annie out there. She is still wearing the lawyer’s clothes that she had on when she jumped onto a train yesterday evening, and though she has spent the night in most of them they still look pretty professional – a dark grey suit and black patent heels. Whether because of this air of professionalism or because she is an attractive young woman, one of the policemen seems to be willing to talk to her. I can see him gesturing out over the lake and her nodding sagely. Are they looking for Neil Buxton? I turn away. She will be able to tell me more than I can guess from standing here.

  I go into the bathroom to wash my face, and when I come back I see that the sketch of Freda has fallen on the floor. I must have dropped it when Annie came thundering at the door just now. It is upside down, and as I bend down to pick it up I see that there is writing on the back. I almost decide not to read it because if it is a loving message to me from Freda I won’t be able to bear it, but when I look at it I see that, though it is in Freda’s writing, it seems to be just a random scattering of names – the names, in fact, of everyone she has met or heard about since she has been here. I sit down with it. It is odd – not a list, but spaced in a way that looks deliberate.

  I stare at it. Is it a message? Is it intended for me? Am I supposed to understand it? I stare until my eyes water. If I read it across in rows it makes no sense. Venetia and her father on separate rows, then Grace and Milo (is there something I don’t know about those two?), the Buxtons, Ruby, Colin and Eve (what do those question marks mean?), Micky’s dad, Micky and Fergus, and finally, ominously capitalised and underlined but also question-marked, Dumitru. I try looking away and then quickly back again, to see if the names form a different pattern, and I do see something. Ruby is at the centre, of course, so this is about her. And the names have a sort of family grouping – the Buxtons with Grace, Micky and Venetia near their fathers, Colin and Eve near Milo and Fergus. But why like this, Freda? I try again the trick of looking away and looking back and then, very tentatively, I fetch the pencil that lies with a notepad near the bedside phone and I try putting some arrows into the medley of names.

  When I have finished, I stare at what I have done. Then I close my eyes and try to conjure up that conversation I had in Eve’s studio. What was it she said? I get a glimmer – just a suggestion – but it is enough to get me trawling on my phone. Thank God it’s just the phone signal that’s blocked here and the wi-fi seems robust. I find what I’m looking for. Now the sensible thing would be to ring the police – or at least to ring David and get him to act as an intermediary – but even with his influence I don’t trust them to move fast. This is something I have to do myself, and if the niggling voice in my head is right when it tells me that this is the way I avoid being confronted by Ellie, then so be it – just add cowardice to my list of sins and I’ll deal with it later. I do make one call, though, just to assure myself that I really do have to go. I go back to the website I found earlier and I get a phone number. Then I call from the room phone and I get an answerphone message: ‘Thank you for contacting us. We are closed at present. Please consult our website if you wish to make further enquiries.’ As I expected. I go back to my phone and look at distances. It’s a hell of a long way and I’m not prepared to mess about with trains. I fish in my wallet for the card that our taxi driver gave me on the day we arrived and I make a call.

  Gary, who answers the phone – and who may indeed be a one-man-band despite the impressiveness of the shiny car he drove us in – remembers Freda and me and starts to ask polite questions about our holiday. He is obviously taken aback when I cut him short, but I can’t help that. He might as well get used to the idea that I am not going to be making jolly conversation with him on our five-hour journey. So I don’t explain why I want him to drive me three hundred miles. ‘Can you do it?’ I ask, and accept without comment the estimated fare, which he seems to pluck out of the air. He says he will be with me in fifteen minutes.

  I cons
ider what I need to take with me. There is really no blueprint for this expedition and I am fairly clueless, but the prospect of doing something has lifted me out of lethargy and I whirl about, picking up a jacket, changing my shoes, checking the contents of my bag – wallet, phone, tissues, biscuits and water from the hotel’s complimentary offerings and – a last minute thought –the sharp little fruit knife that has been left with the bowl of apples and oranges which Freda and I have overlooked up till now.

  I am waiting for Gary as he sweeps up to the front doors, and in my weak state I am absurdly reassured by the luxury of the car and the courteous way I am ushered into it. I am relieved when he doesn’t invite me to sit in the front, though I was all prepared with an excuse about a sleepless night (true) and my intention to sleep the journey away (not true). Annie has noticed the car and is drawn away from hobnobbing with the police. She comes over just as we’re moving away. I roll down the window.

  ‘I was going to text you,’ I say. ‘Tell Ellie I think I know where she is and I’ve gone to find her.’

  I leave her open-mouthed and give Gary full marks for professional discretion when he asks no questions. I am going to have to tell him something eventually and think about what to tell him when we get there, but for the moment I sit back and wait for us to eat up the miles. Gary is a model chauffeur: he doesn’t have the radio on, his satnav is silent and he doesn’t swear about other drivers. He just drives the car and I am cocooned in comfort. Drifting between the security of the hours that must intervene before I have to do anything and pleasant though inchoate reveries about afterwards – the triumphant return, reconciliation with Ellie, general jubilation – I am able to slide past the messy, unpredictable scene in the middle, in which I arrive at my unknown destination to find – what? Freda, I hope, obviously, but who else? And how easy will it be to get Freda away, armed only with a small fruit knife? Reluctantly, because he has disappointed me to my very soul with his mealy-mouthed, ‘I don’t have any authority’, I text David. I don’t expect that he will actually do anything but I need some sort of insurance policy – not least for afterwards when I will need to stave off all the Why didn’t you? questions and I shall at least be able to say, ‘Well, I informed the police. What more do you want?’

  I get out my phone, note that here I have a robust four bars and could phone anyone I wanted, and text David. I could speak to him, of course, but then Gary would hear me and I would have to start on explanations. Actually, thinking about it, I realise that he would probably insist on turning round and driving us back to Carnmere. So I send David a postcode and a name. I lean forward to scan the satnav on the dashboard, add in time for a loo/lunch break, and add, ‘Heading there now. ETA 3.0.’ I don’t get a reply but I feel irrationally comforted.

  I think I doze, because when I next look at the time it is already midday, and I am hungry. I suggest a break to Gary, who says there is a service station coming up. It turns out that he, paragon that he is, has brought his lunch with him, so I can slip in for a quick sandwich without the awkwardness of having to make conversation with him. But inside I am hit by an unnerving sense of unreality. I watch the noisy family groups, off on holiday, and wonder whether anyone would guess that I am on a rescue mission. I buy a bottle of water, a ham sandwich and a very small chocolate bar from the Plain and Simple counter, aimed, I assume, at picky children. I don’t take it back to the car because I’m sure Gary would quail at the idea of spills and crumbs in his lovely motor, but perch at a corner table, eat too fast, go to the loo, and am about to leave when I am arrested by a headline on the news-stand just inside the sliding doors to the outside world. SECOND GIRL MISSING IN RUBY’S TOWN it screams at me, and underneath there is Eve’s sketch. Photographs of missing children usually break your heart because they are smiling trustfully at the camera as though they expect nothing but good from the world. Even children who turn out to have been horribly abused by their parents seem to be able to summon up that happy smile when called upon. What would the casual reader make of Freda here – pensive and inward-looking? I don’t know, but I want to rip every one of these pages to shreds. I don’t, of course. I find a cashpoint and take out a huge wodge of notes to pay Gary with and I hurry to the refuge of the car. Checking the time on my phone when I get back, I see that I have a text message. It is from David and is so enigmatic that it defeats me: ‘Yes. Because Ruby had her phone with her.’

  I don’t settle after this. The miles ahead no longer feel like a protection from what is to be found at the end of them. That headline makes it a reality. What do I think I am doing? There is a nationwide search for Freda. How did I think that I could just jump in a taxi and bring her back to her mother magically unharmed? Well, the answer is that this is the only way I put things right. I lost Freda and I have to find her. Ellie rightly blames me and my only chance of being forgiven is through finding her. It makes sense in my head but I am not crazy enough yet to believe that it will make sense to anyone else.

  The drive seems to speed up in defiance of the brake I am wishing on it, but the last bit takes time. The traffic here in the suburbs thickens up, and the satnav gets confused, announcing that we have reached our destination when we can see nothing but a field. Gary has to ask a woman walking a dog, and she tells us we are ‘on the wrong side’. We follow her instructions and suddenly there it is and I am paralysed with panic. There are wrought-iron gates here, standing wide open, and in front of us is a long gravel drive and a smug, symmetrical Queen Anne mansion of rosy red bricks and gleaming white stonework. Two vehicles are parked near the house, one a beaten-up Volvo, the other a white van. The Volvo I expected, but the van worries me. My intention was to pay Gary and send him home, and this is right, of course; I have no business involving him in whatever I find inside this building. And yet I can’t quite do it. I climb out of the car and thank him, pressing my notes into his hand, but the picture of him turning round and driving away is more than I can cope with. I hear myself saying, ‘Give me twenty minutes. If I’m not out by then, could you call the police?’ and before he can question or protest I walk boldly to the elaborate stone porch and turn the heavy iron handle on the oak front door.

  It won’t turn of course. I try one way and then the other. I try the various tricks for dealing with a door that sticks. I pull the handle towards me and turn, I push and turn, I give it a smart kick or two. It is locked. Of course it is locked. The open gates lulled me into thinking this was going to be easy, but they were probably forced open by the driver of the car or the van. A small, hopeful thought suggests that the van might belong to a caretaker who will be on the premises, an authority figure I could get on my side. I back away from the porch and, avoiding looking towards Gary in his car, I start a circuit of the house. Memories of climbing into college after curfew, when I was a student, come back to me. My college was a building not unlike this one, in fact. Fire escapes are what you need to look for, and flat rooves when you get round the back.

  There is a fire escape at the side of the house – the traditional kind with a metal staircase leading up to platforms on the first and second floors, giving access to the fire doors. I walk up but I am not hopeful. In college, we used to leave fire doors open for one another, but I can hardly expect that here. I can see that these doors are firmly closed and the only way of opening them would be to break one of their glass panels and hope to put an arm through and yank up the bar on the inside of the door, but this is a non-starter, not only because I doubt I could do that without tearing my arm to ribbons on the broken glass but because I have nothing to break the glass with. A shoe would be the conventional answer but I am wearing soft, flat pumps, chosen this morning for speed and stealth, not for breaking and entering. I come down again and continue my circuit of the building.

  Round the back the building has a startling change of character. A big modern extension has been added – the business end of this establishment I can see as I peer in through the plate g
lass windows and see dance and drama studios, musical instruments, rostra, and a room that seems to contain instruments of torture, so is probably a gym. There are flat rooves on offer here, with windows above them that might be accessible if I were able to get up onto the roof in the first place. I prowl round but can see no way of scaling the walls. What I need is someone to hoist me up (in college, obviously, that was the job of the chap who had escorted you back in the early hours). If Freda is in here, I wonder, how did she get in? Was she hoisted up onto the roof to slip in through a window like Oliver Twist when he is kidnapped by housebreakers?

  The thought that Freda is in there somewhere drives me on and I push on past the studios and round to the other side of the building. And I am rewarded. Here is a matching fire escape and I can see, squinting up to the second floor, that the door at the top is not quite closed. On unsteady legs I climb the steps, my sweaty hands slippery on the rail. The door swings open easily and I step into a narrow corridor and a row of closed doors.

  I move quietly down the corridor, adjusting to where I am, and tentatively try one of the doors. It opens into a small bedroom, a standard student room with a single bed, a chest of drawers and a desk. There are some blobs of Blu Tack on the walls which suggest that posters were up there until recently but the bed is stripped, surfaces clear and there is no sign of occupation. Summer holidays. Presumably the students have all cleared out of their rooms. Perhaps the building offers itself for conferences. But Freda could be in any one of these, so I go back to my starting point and go down opening each door in turn. At the end I turn round and return, opening the doors on the other side. Nothing. All are neat and bare.

  I have noticed an entrance to a staircase about halfway along – narrow back stairs, I think, designed for the servants who originally slept in these rooms. The staircase has a door at the end of it and when I go through it I am startled to find that these were not back stairs; in fact, I have not ended up in the kitchens but on an elegant gallery with fine polished oak spindles overlooking an impressive tiled entrance hall. At one end of the hall I can see the inside of the massive front door that was locked against me. I am about to look for a route to further bedrooms that may be on this floor when my eye is caught by something. The marble tiles of the entrance hall floor are classic black and white, but on the white tiles on the far side there are splashes of what I think can only be blood.