Sophie's Run (36 page)

I was interrupted in my musings by the teacher, who had come in search of her missing assistant.

“Are you okay?” she asked with genuine concern. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I tried a feeble laugh. “I have, in a manner of speaking. I’m sorry, I got completely distracted. That was very unprofessional of me. I’ll quickly photocopy this and be right back.”

The teacher sat down next to me and put a steadying hand on my arm. “Your morning shift has almost finished anyway. Why don’t you make the photocopy and go home? We’ll see you again tomorrow, won’t we?”

I nodded gratefully, seizing on her offer like a drowning man grabs a life ring. “That would be good,” I said, “thank you. And yes, I’ll definitely be back in the morning.”

Having photocopied the incriminating article, I decided to visit Greetje instead of rushing home.

I found the tea shop closed with a note in the door saying “
Bitte laut klopfen
.” I knocked loudly, as instructed. Greetje appeared from behind the counter, quickly let me in, casting a suspicious look up and down the road, and locked up again. She bustled back to the kitchen, where she immersed herself elbow deep in some green vegetable that looked vaguely familiar.

“Are you closed?” I wondered, bemused.

“Not really, but the lunch crowd isn’t due yet and everyone else can knock. I’m busy. Today it’s
Grünkohl mit Pinkel
for dinner,” she explained, seeing my incredulous face at the sight of her pile of green stuff. “It’s a regional delicacy, you must come and try it.”

“Okay,” I laughed, “I will. What, exactly, is it?”

“You’ll have to wait and see,” Greetje teased me. “Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be in school? Did they let you out early today?”

I nodded and waved my photocopied piece of newspaper about. “They did; that’s why I came. I needed to talk…”

Greetje continued chopping her vegetables with unbroken vigor. “Talk away, as long as you don’t mind if I get on. I need to get this prepped because I can’t do it this afternoon and it takes a good couple of hours to cook.” She motioned for me to sit down at the table, never once taking her eyes off her work.

I sat down and cleared my throat. “Remember I told you about Dan and Steve and Rachel?” Greetje nodded, so I continued. “Well, it appears that they met up a while back in London, all three of them, and had a bit of a bust-up.”

“A bust-up?”

“A bust-up…you know, a fight. With fists.
Fäuste
.” I tried to clarify, waving my fists about.

“Oh, okay. I see. What about?” Greetje was listening intently.

“I’m not sure, the article doesn’t really say. And it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is…”

Greetje spun round, pointing at me with her knife and startling me immensely. “They probably talked about you,” she cried.

I simply nodded. What else could I say?

“Ach Du je,
” Greetje exclaimed and sat down with me, still clutching her knife in one hand and taking the paper from me with the other. “This is serious, huh?” She scanned the article and took a good look at the picture.

“He’s handsome, your Dan,” she pronounced.

I smiled sadly. “He’s not
my
Dan anymore. And anyway, what about your Grunkohl?”

“Gr
ü
nkohl,” Greetje automatically corrected my poor pronunciation of the umlaut. “It’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” She returned her attention to the article. “When was this written?”

“Seven weeks ago.”

“So. That means they’ve had quite a bit of time to get organized, right? And it didn’t take them long to notice you’d gone missing. That must make you feel better, not?”

I grinned. “It does, but there’s a lot of supposition in there. We don’t even know what this is all about.”

“Yes, but it stands to reason that it’s connected to you. There are three people here who would not normally meet, right?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so,” I conceded, pouncing on my own choice of words. “See—I told you it’s full of supposition.”

“Rubbish, leave me alone with your supposings. Hm.” She looked pensive, as though she was withholding something.

“Greetje,” I prodded her on the arm. “What is it? What are you not telling?”

Instead of responding, she waggled her head from side to side as if weighing things in her mind.

“Greetje!” I insisted. “What is it?”

She very cautiously got up and placed her sharp chopping knife on a board by the sink. She washed her hands and dried them meticulously at one of her ubiquitous white-and-blue checked cloths. Finally, having run out of displacement activities, she sat down again.

“I was going to tell you a little later but…maybe now is a good time.”

“Tell me what?” I prompted.

Greetje rubbed her face with her hands, clearly unsettled by something. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“It may be nothing, but this morning in the tea shop, a man was asking questions about you. In English.”

Talk about dropping a bombshell. My ears started burning and I had that weird hard feeling in my tummy that I got when I heard bad news.

“Are you sure?” was all I could manage in response.

Greetje nodded her head. “Sure. He was quite specific, and he even had your photo.”

My
photo
? I gasped, aghast. “Oh my God. Who was he?”

Greetje picked up the article again and examined the photograph carefully. “Well, he wasn’t Dan or Steve, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then who?” I prompted.

Greetje shrugged. “Maybe they engaged a private detective.”

A private detective
? This was getting worse and worse.

Greetje saw the shock and confusion on my face and decided to offer a positive outlook. “They must have hit rock bottom when they couldn’t find you, and they must have really wanted to find you. Right?”

I stared at her blankly. I supposed that was one way of looking at it.

“I didn’t tell him anything, of course, and he won’t have gotten anything from anyone else. He didn’t speak any German. Talk about a lousy choice of private investigator. And it’s a good job the cottage is so far out, huh?” Greetje was rather pleased with herself for managing things so well on my behalf.

“What
did
you say?” I needed to know.

“Well, he was asking questions of my customers, who were very uncomfortable with being thus assaulted, I can tell you.” Greetje gave me her best officious voice. “So naturally I asked him to leave. He thrust your picture in my face and asked me if I had seen you. Well, you know I’m totally far-sighted so of course I couldn’t see anything on the photo at all, and I said no, I hadn’t.”

“And then?”

“And then he left before I could throw him out.”

“And
then
?”

Greetje smiled a big beaming smile. “Well, Klaus was there while this was happening. So he declared, to no one in particular, that there was no Sophie on the island, and no one fitting your description. And of course the other folks nodded, and left in great haste.” She patted my hand reassuringly. “It’ll have been all over the island within minutes. You’re safe.” Her telephone rang in the shop, and she jumped to answer it. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but it didn’t last long, and she looked very happy indeed when she came back.

“That was Folke from the ferry. Mystery man has given up and is on the way back to Bensersiel.”

Even though I had had several weeks of getting used to the island’s unbelievable communication network, my mouth hung open in surprise. “How on earth did Folke know that you would want to know when this particular chap was leaving?”

Greetje merely grinned. “Folke was in the shop this morning,” she stated simply. “I think you are safe, for now. We haven’t given you away.”

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. “I’m sure you haven’t, thank you. But anyway, I think I need to go home and have a quiet think. It’s all a bit much to take in.”

“You do that,” Greetje agreed, “and don’t forget, dinner is at six.”

“At six,” I repeated.

My mind was reeling as I walked home to the cottage. So they
were
looking for me. Did I want to be found? I supposed the answer was yes; otherwise I would have to run again.

So was this whole time-out-adventure merely a big test, to see if my friends wanted me back and wanted to make up? I sat down on a bench overlooking the dunes to mull this over.

No
, I concluded. My time out had been about more than that. My time out had been about me, not them. Ultimately, I had always planned to go back some time before Christmas. Certainly in the New Year.

“But if I allowed for the possibility that they
might
find me…” I talked to myself, “then surely there’s no need to run now.” And all of a sudden, I knew what I had to do.

I raced back to the cottage, collected my bike, and cycled into town to do some shopping. I bought party food—sausages, crisps, smoked salmon, cream cheese. I stocked up on fresh pizza and fresh fish. I bought wine and champagne. Anna at the checkout looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“Are you expecting company?” she asked, ever curious.

“I am, Anna, I am,” I shot back happily, but refused to engage in further conversation. I piled my goodies high in the basket of my bike and pedaled home excitedly.

When I returned to the cottage for the second time, I stopped dead in my tracks, skidding the bike on the gravelly path. The light in the kitchen was on. In fact, it had been on when I had come to take the bike, but I been too distracted to pay much attention to this weird fact.

However, I was absolutely certain that I hadn’t left it on this morning.

So.

It was extremely unlikely that I had been burgled. The crime rate on this lovely island was practically nil, and everybody knew that I hadn’t brought much worth stealing anyway. There had only been one reported odd stranger lately, and while he had been snooping, I doubted he would have been stealing. But he had certainly paid me a visit.

My heart pounded anxiously in my chest as I contemplated my options. I parked the bike by the fence and did a slow walk around the cottage. All the windows and doors were shut and locked. There was no sign of forced entry.

I cupped my face with my hands and pressed it against the lounge window—nobody there. Same with the kitchen.

Was I brave enough to go inside? I decided to have a try. I unloaded the bike, piling the shopping neatly by the front door, and leaned the bike against the front fence, pointing outwards and ready to go for a quick escape, should I need one.

Thus prepared, I gingerly unlocked the front door and pushed it open. “Hello!” I shouted. “If you’re in there, I’m back. I’m going to call the police.”

Nothing.

I entered, feeling unbelievably stupid, and did a quick tour of the downstairs. I just about managed to resist the urge to peek around doorjambs with my finger-gun loaded and aiming at any prospective intruders. Nonetheless, a long diet of watching crime dramas on the telly prompted me to shout, “downstairs clear, going up.”

I tiptoed upstairs, trying to hear whether there were any suspicious sounds.

Nothing.

Five minutes later, I was back downstairs, confident now that I was alone. I barricaded myself in, locking all windows and the front door
just in case
, even though I was certain that it had been Mr. Private Detective who had performed a totally unlawful breaking and entering on my rented property.

I knew that because he had made one mistake. One tiny mistake. Two, actually, if you counted leaving the light on.

He had double locked the door.

And I
never
double locked the door. Never. Ever. I was simply too lazy.

Mr. Private Detective hadn’t paid attention when he had picked my lock, and I hadn’t realized the significance of needing two turns of the key when I first unlocked, but now it all fit together.

I sat down with shaky legs, but got up again to make myself a swift cuppa.

“Well, well, well,” I said to myself, not knowing what else to say. I had never been the subject of a private investigation before. In a weird way, it was exciting. It made me feel important, and clandestine—like a heroine in a movie or a book.

What was next, I wondered? Now that my three musketeers knew where I was, what would they do with that information?

A certainty popped into my head. They wouldn’t ring, or write, or email. They knew I wasn’t going to respond, and they would worry that I would disappear again. The only logical answer would be a surprise visit.

How long, I wondered, before Steve would turn up here? Or Dan? Or Rachel? Or would all three of them make the trip?

Who had hired the private detective? It had to have been either Steve or Dan; somehow, it wasn’t Rachel’s style. But sleeping with Dan wasn’t her style either, so what did I know?