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
