Where Everything Seems Double, Penny Freedman [best inspirational books txt] 📗

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 vehicles 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.

‘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