Where Everything Seems Double

need to be the great sleuth. Colin is a good man, and you know it. You were happy enough to have him as your doctor for years, and then you turned him into a criminal. If you feel any responsibility for that, then you can bring your sleuthing up here and find out what has really happened to Ruby.
You owe us, Gina.
Eve’
My immediate reaction is a great wave of nausea and I rush to the bathroom expecting to throw up. That doesn’t happen, in fact, but I sit with my head between my knees for a bit and then go and make a cup of tea. Shock, I tell myself, is all it is, though I stop short of sugaring the tea. I take my mug back to my computer and steel myself to read Eve’s message again. This time I actually feel the urge to laugh. I stop myself because I’m perilously close to hysteria, I know, but really, if you were going to ask for help from an old friend you hadn’t seen for years could you go about it in a more unpromising way? But that’s Eve – sort of. Her voice comes at me off the screen, the Irish punch of it. It comes with a picture of a lifted eyebrow, a hovering, sardonic smile. But it used to be warm; it came with ready hugs and an irreverent laugh. It came with happiness. Well, whatever Eve chooses to claim, it was not me who put an end to the happiness; it was Colin – or, if you like, the murderer of a thirteen-year-old girl who involved Colin in the cover-up. What was I supposed to do? Not try to find out who the killer was, when the police had my daughter in the frame for the role? Not tell anyone when I worked out the truth because that would implicate a respected local GP? Not tell anyone because it would ruin my best friend’s happy life?
Well, I did tell, because you need a better reason than that to let a killer go free, and Colin lied to the police. He didn’t know he was protecting a murderer, but he knew he was lying, and you don’t lie in a murder inquiry, do you? In the end, they didn’t charge him with perverting the course of justice; he pleaded guilty to wasting police time and was given a suspended sentence. He took early retirement and he and Eve, with their daughter, Laura, and her family, went off to Donegal, where Eve has family, to raise rare breeds and run a craft centre. But Colin has a criminal record and why anyone should care about something that happened nearly ten years ago I don’t know, but they obviously do. The murder of thirteen-year-old Marina Carson was a big media story because her mother was a celebrity and the circumstances were shocking, so I suppose that is why it goes on generating enough interest for even the minor players to find their way into the social media bear pit. (Actually, I don’t think of social media as a bear pit so much as a bubbling cauldron performing a kind of malign alchemy by which the tawdry acquires a gilded gloss and the milk of human kindness is curdled with venom – but that’s for another time.)
Ten years. It must be: Freda, my granddaughter, was just a mite, I remember, and I was still pushing her around in a buggy. Laura’s children must be strapping teenagers by now, and Eve and Colin are in their sixties. Eve was my mentor at William Roper school in Marlbury, where I taught for years. She was the head of art and she managed her domain with a deft mixture of humour and firmness that I wanted to emulate. I wanted, in truth, to be Eve, with her popularity, her easy relationship with her four talented, cheerful daughters, her comfortable marriage to kind, good-looking Colin. I was wrestling with the aftermath of an unhappy marriage, an ill-tempered divorce and a daughter with whom I was, at best, in a state of armed truce. I went around, in those days, propelled by a constant simmering rage while Eve was all sunshine.
Well, I’m not an angry woman now: I have a job I am rather good at, a home of my own which I love, daughters with whom I am on pretty good terms, a pair of likeable grandchildren and a semi-detached lover who does not live with me but can be called on to spice up my life from time to time. I am content and Eve is angry. Eve is possessed by fury, and I am her target.
I have no idea how to reply to her message. When the crisis came and she stopped speaking to me, I sent mollifying words of regret and sympathy. I hoped our friendship could survive; I hoped Eve and Colin would survive. Now, faced with her unrelenting blame, my immediate reaction is to kick back. I read her email once more and then I type furiously:
 
‘Well, if you’re not apologising, I’m certainly not. I can’t believe that you are still blaming me. If you tried to be honest just for a moment you would know that I did what I had to do. A child was murdered, Eve, and her killer had to be caught. You know that really, so why not start facing up to it? If you want me to come and help, we need to start by being honest. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.
Gina’
 
I read this through with my cursor hovering over Send, and then I stop. The truth is that I will go; I have known that since I read Eve’s message the first time. I will go because a girl is missing and I might be able to help; I will go because I like to be asked for help; I will go because I can’t resist a