Where Everything Seems Double Read online

  By the time I get back from seeing Melissa, and having a glass of wine because, ‘Gosh, it’s nearly lunch time,’ there has been a reply from Eve. She has obviously decided to take her cue from me and is channelling the cool and breezy approach:

  ‘Great. We are in Carnmere. Can’t offer to put you up I’m afraid as we have Laura’s boys with us but every other house here is a B&B.

  See you soon.

  Eve’

  I don’t get kissed with an x at the sign-off, I notice. (I dithered over that one in my message and decided to go for it.) Carnmere. I wasn’t really thinking when I promised Freda a swish hotel. Are there even any swish hotels in Carnmere? Have I promised Freda a unicorn? I have stayed in the Lakes a few times, the most memorable occasion being an ill-judged family camping holiday some twenty years ago which involved relentless rain, a lost tent peg, a stomach bug, a lot of shouting and an early return home. I can surely do better than that, at least.

  I am cheered to find that there are several hotel websites for the area, and delighted when an imposing, ivy-festooned, balconied vision looms onto my screen. Carnmere Manor Hotel sits up high, with hills rising behind it and the vista of the lake before it. It is not only a hotel but a spa, and it is eye-wateringly expensive. It is so expensive that my heart starts to do panicky little skips when I work out the cost of a week there, but I pick up the phone. The woman on the other end has a reassuringly cosy tone, and I begin to realise that it might be possible to bargain. The hotel is not oversubscribed, I can tell, and for an immediate booking a deal might be made. First, we agree that a stay of more than five days merits a discount, then, when I explain that I want a twin-bedded room for myself and my granddaughter, I am offered a ‘family suite’ at the same price. This, it turns out, is a double room with a small room with bunk beds leading off it.

  ‘Nicer, really, if your granddaughter’s thirteen,’ she says. ‘I know what they’re like at that age.’

  I agree fervently and seal the deal, reading off my credit card number and then putting down the phone with a shaking hand. When I am breathing more calmly I text Freda:

  ‘Look at Carnmere Manor Hotel. We have a suite!

  Xxxxx’

  Shortly afterwards I get a reply:

  ‘Excellent. Will we need smart clothes?’

  Clothes are the next hurdle. I associate the Lakes with walking boots, padded anoraks and woolly hats; after five years of living in London I have nothing like that. On the other hand, it is notionally summer, in spite of the apocalyptic rainstorms that have been sweeping the country along the path to its virtual cliff edge. Layers, I think. I may somewhere have the anorak that I wore for dog-walking when I lived by the seaside, and if not there are shops in Cumbria, after all. Do we need smart clothes? I would like to pay homage to the hotel restaurant’s rosette by wearing something smartish in the evenings. Casually elegant is what I picture, but when I throw open my wardrobe doors I find nothing answering to that description. The problem is that we have such short, unreliable summers these days that proper summer clothes don’t wear out. You take a look at them in May, and there they all are. Just a bit limper and saggier but still with another year in them, you think. And here are mine, drooping apologetically from their hangers, elegance way beyond them. I would buy something new since expense seems to be no object at the moment, but it’s the end of July and the shops will already be offering their sale rails – garments even sadder than the ones I already own. I fish out a two-year-old maxi-dress and a pair of reliable silk trousers and hope Freda will not be mortified. I am not sure how to reply to her query. ‘Smart’ is a concept that doesn’t cross two generations with much conviction. When she went out with her friends on her birthday the girls were all wearing tiny shorts and vest tops or halter-necks; they were dressed for the beach, in fact, although they were heading for a town centre pizzeria, it had been raining all day and the temperature was in the low teens. It is possible that the Carnmere Manor has a “No shorts” rule in their award-winning restaurant. I text:

  ‘Maybe a skirt for dinner? Bring what you feel comfortable in but add a jumper and a rainproof! xxx’

  I send this, pull a few more clothes out of my wardrobe, leave them in a disconsolate heap on the bed and go off to up-end the recycling bag in search of back copies of the Guardian and what facts I can find about the disappearance of Ruby Buxton.

  Chapter Two

  THE VOYAGE TO THE ISLAND

  Wednesday morning

  Would it have been different if there had been girls on the island? Freda Gray considered this as she sat with her copy of Lord of the Flies on her lap and looked out idly at the summer fields as they sped past the train window in a green blur. She glanced down at the book. It was their summer holiday reading for English and she was halfway through it already, fascinated and horrified both at the same time. She had asked Mum what happened to the boys in the end, but she wouldn’t say, so now she was racing through, and when this was finished she hoped she could lure Granny into a bookshop to restock for the rest of the summer. You could usually trust Granny to buy books; actually, it was hard to stop her.

  She did have another book in her bag but she was a bit embarrassed about it. When Granny said they were going to the Lakes, Swallows and Amazons came into her mind. It was too young for her now. She had read it three or four years ago, when Granny had given her the whole set of books and she had binged on them all summer. The first one – Swallows and Amazons itself – had been the best one, and she had decided to bring it with her, even though it was a kids’ book. She had read a bit of it before she packed it, and thought how funny it was that those children were so different from the boys in Lord of the Flies. They were about the same age, she thought. The boys on the island were prep-school boys, so the oldest were twelve or thirteen. Maybe John, who was the oldest of the Swallows, was fourteen. He would have to be for their parents to let him take the others off to camp on their own, wouldn’t he? And the Amazons, Nancy and Peggy, were a bit older, but not at all like the older girls at school, who were all into makeup and hair and boyfriends. Nancy and Peggy wore woolly pirate hats. They seemed more sensible, somehow, but less grown-up, which was odd.

  And this brought her back to her original question: would things have gone differently on the island in Lord of the Flies if there had been girls there as well as boys? On the whole, she thought they would. The girls would have looked after the little ones a bit, wouldn’t they? And girls could be bitchy, she knew that well enough, but would they have ended up in armed gangs? And so many girls were vegetarians or vegans; she didn’t think they would have gone mad for the pig meat. She was having a go at being a vegetarian herself, though she hadn’t told Granny that in case there were delicious meat things on the menu at the hotel and she couldn’t resist.

  She picked up her book and then put it down and looked out of the window again. There was a persistent churning of anxiety in her stomach; what were the Carnmere teenagers going to be like? Granny had said that there would be ‘lots of young people’, that her friend Eve’s grandsons would be there and they knew a lot of the locals. They were fifteen and thirteen and would look after her, she said, but fifteen-year-old boys were, frankly, scary – huge and loud and taking up lots of space. Supposing all their friends were boys? And even if there were some girls, you couldn’t just fit in to a group who were already friends, she knew that. How were they going to react to an outsider who was only just thirteen? She tugged at her ponytail to get it higher up on her head, which she thought made her look older, and wished that her birthday straightening session had lasted a bit longer. The question, she thought, when it came down to it, was whether Carnmere was going to be more Arthur Ransome or more William Golding.

  She put her face to the window and sighed, watching her breath condense on the glass. Friendships, she thought, were difficult even when you were on home ground. It had been so easy at primary sch
ool; she and Charlie had been best friends from the start, and that was that. They had rows at times, of course, but they were Charlie and Freddie and always there for each other. When a teacher told them to get into pairs, there they were, and at break times they played with other girls too, but they were always together. When Freda had got a place at the grammar school and Charlie hadn’t, they had promised each other that they would still be friends, and they had been for a while, especially in the holidays, but now Charlie had new friends. Freda saw them sometimes, a little posse, out in the town, and Charlie barely gave her a wave. She had new friends herself, but you never felt safe somehow with friends at school. Everything was competitive, everyone wanted to be friends with the cool people, and Freda was afraid that she wasn’t quite cool. She worked too hard, and she wasn’t that good at sport, and her hair wasn’t straight enough. Girls were friends one minute and then ignored you the next, and she dreaded being ill and off school because when you got back you found that all the friendships had changed. When she talked to Granny about it, she said the girls were practising for flirting with boys. They were like kittens play fighting, she said, which was interesting and quite clever, but not necessarily very useful. What Granny said was quite often like that, she thought.

  She turned from the window and surveyed her grandmother. She was looking rather too smart for this kind of holiday, wasn’t she? She was wearing a blue linen jacket that looked new, and she had just had her hair cut, she could tell, and had new highlights. She looked down at her own clothes. She hadn’t had much choice about what to bring – she hardly had what you might call an extensive wardrobe – so she had put in her only skirt to satisfy Granny’s plan for elegant dining, and her new jumpsuit, but otherwise she just had shorts and tops really. The jeans she was wearing were all right, if not as cool as they might be, and she had put her trainers in the washing machine, so they were looking good for the moment. She thought she would do.

  Granny, though, was dressed to impress, she thought, which wasn’t usually her thing. (Freda could remember how she was when she lived in a funny little cottage by the seaside and her hair was all wild and she forgot to cut her fingernails and really made a very convincing witch.) So all this grooming must be to do with this friend of hers they were going to see. Eve. There was a mystery there. Granny was rushing up here to help Eve out – cancelling the week of London treats that Freda had been looking forward to – and Freda had never heard her mention her before. She thought she knew why Eve needed help, though; she had been on the internet to find out what she could about Ruby Buxton.

  This was what she knew: Ruby Buxton was thirteen, and she had been playing one of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the theatre in Carnmere. Four days ago, she had disappeared during a performance and nobody realised that she was missing until her father came to pick her up at the end. From what she could gather, the theatre was very near the Carnmere lake and everyone seemed to think that she had drowned. There was a YouTube video of girls dressed as fairies, floating about in little boats on the lake, in the dark, which seemed weird, and she couldn’t see how that fitted into the play exactly. They had read it in English lessons at school, and she couldn’t see that it was a particularly watery play – it all happened in a wood, didn’t it? But anyway, the police had found a boat with Ruby’s fairy costume in it, and now they were talking about her being murdered. And the reason why Granny was here, she felt sure, was that there was a man called Colin Fletcher, who people said was a paedo, and he had been involved in the murder of a girl in Marlbury. There was lots of really angry stuff on Facebook about him being free and not having been sent to prison, and Freda had tried to ask her grandmother about it, but she had got cross with her for believing stuff that was on social media and told her she couldn’t say anything until she had had a chance to find out for herself what had gone on. ‘Fake news, Freda,’ she had said. ‘We’re not having any of that.’

  She dug into her bag for her phone and encountered her sketch pad, which she had put in at the last minute. Her school report for art had been so good it had been almost embarrassing. ‘Talent’ and ‘potential’ Mrs Wade had said, and when she bumped into her in the corridor on the last day of term, she said, ‘Take a sketch pad with you wherever you go during the holidays, Freda. Draw what you see.’ So, she had the pad and the pencils with her but she really couldn’t see how she could possibly sit and sketch like a proper artist. Pretentious or what? She wasn’t going to sketch in front of strangers, and certainly not in front of the scary boys. What was Mrs Wade thinking? Freda liked her but she did wonder if she lived in the real world.

  She checked her phone for messages and the time and saw that there was more than an hour of the journey still to go. Not feeling like getting back into Lord of the Flies, she looked furtively at her grandmother to see if she would notice her playing a game on her phone. If she did, she would have all sorts of sarcastic things to say, but Freda was pretty sure that she was asleep, actually, so she was safe for the moment and whiled away a happy half-hour and more until a voice suddenly asked, ‘Do you know where we are?’ and she hurriedly slid her phone into her bag.

  ‘Don’t you mean, “Are we nearly there?” Gran?’ Freda asked.

  Her grandmother grinned; she quite liked to be teased, Freda had realised – unlike Mum who sometimes didn’t get it.

  ‘Well, are we?’ she whined, in a good imitation of a six-year-old.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Freda said.

  ‘Good. I’ve booked a taxi to pick us up at the station. There are buses but there seems to be a forty-five-minute wait, so I thought we’d arrive in style.’

  This was looking encouraging, Freda thought. The Carnmere teenagers might be scary but at least Granny was in treats mode, and if she could bank on that then things couldn’t be too bad, could they?

  Why is she looking so smart?

  Chapter Three

  A MARVELLOUS CONVENIENT PLACE

  Wednesday afternoon

  The taxi was an excellent idea. I can be as frugal as the next worthy woman but three-quarters of an hour is too long to stand around in drizzle, and drizzle is de rigeur up here. Eve says she will meet me at the hotel when we arrive and I don’t want to get there looking bedraggled. I am not quite sure why, since Eve has seen me in all sorts of disarray in the past. That was a few years ago, though, when disarray didn’t just make me look old and slightly mad, and now I seem to have something to prove. I suppose I don’t want my appearance to carry any hint of sackcloth and ashes. If Eve thinks that the reason why I am here is that I feel guilty then she needs to be put straight. It isn’t and I don’t. There are two reasons why I am here, one creditable and one less so: my good angel tells me kindly that I still love Eve and naturally want to help her; my bad angel whispers low in my ear that this is an opportunity to get ahead of the police, find out what has happened to Ruby Buxton and cover myself in glory. I am feeling short of glory. I have achieved the odd bit of it in the past through my skills in detection, but I haven’t shone much recently. My “relationship” (and that really does need to be in inverted commas) with Detective Superintendent David Scott has allowed me a foot in several murder cases, but on two occasions at least the police got ahead of me in the end, so I guess I have something to prove, and that is probably a bad start, so I tell myself sternly that I am here to offer Eve support but the local police have probably got it all under control and they won’t give me a look-in anyway. And of course I don’t believe a word of it.

  But the taxi is a good start. It turns out to be rather up-market – neither like a rattling London cab, nor like the tourist wagons that pass for taxis in Marlbury these days, but something smooth and purring into which we sink luxuriously. And the driver makes a fuss of us, taking our bags and stowing them carefully, and enquiring about our preferences as to temperature and fresh air. As we wind along the narrow road, squeezing to the side for buses and agricultural vehi
cles coming the other way, Freda gives me a smile of satisfaction and starts typing on her phone – sharing this piece of good fortune with her virtual social circle, no doubt. And then the hotel even exceeds its website images: it looks majestic and yet welcoming as we round a corner and see it revealed. A weak stream of sunlight warms the ivy-covered frontage and glints off the mullioned windows, and a glance to the right to see what those windows are seeing finds the lake, rippling and glinting just exactly as it is supposed to.

  Inside, I announce our arrival at reception, take possession of proper keys rather than those annoying electronic cards and head for the grand staircase to take us up to the first floor, but am stopped by a voice calling my name. I turn round to see an elderly woman approaching me. I had vaguely noticed her sitting in the lobby as we walked through, but even if I had looked at her properly I don’t think I would have recognised Eve. The Eve in my mind is plump and vital, dressed in a vivid swirl of home-made garments and topped with a head of curls that changed colour with each visit to the hairdressers; on this Eve – and I can see now that it is her – the home-made clothes hang from a lean, if not skinny, frame, and her hair is wild and white around her sallow, weathered face. I turn awkwardly, still holding my bag, and then, because I walked by her without seeing her, I try to make amends by dropping my bag and taking her into a hug. She doesn’t really respond but she doesn’t pull away either, and when I let her go I see a flash of the old Eve as she looks me up and down with just a twitch of a smile.