Page 20 of Old Girls Behaving Badly

‘Not clueing, ladies?’ asked Leonard as we attempted to walk past him without taking the outstretched piece of card with the first clue.

‘We were just going to have a wander, if that’s okay,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’m feeling a bit tired to be honest, but don’t want to be a complete party pooper.’

‘No problem at all. Have a wander, enjoy the sunshine, and don’t forget your hat,’ he said, looking directly at me. ‘Perhaps you’d like to have a go at solving the first clue, at least.’

He handed the card to me and I took it reluctantly.

‘I’ll give it a try, but I’m not great at puzzles,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t believe that for a moment,’ he said, with a sinister smile.

We left Leonard at the entrance and disappeared into the bowels of the maze.

10

GINA

‘What does it say?’ Dorothy whispered urgently, dropping her nonchalance as soon as she was out of sight of the master of the house.

I looked down at the piece of card and read the words on the front. It was a riddle and there was a code on the bottom with directions relating to the letters of the alphabet. It was the sort of thing I would have concocted with my brother when we were kids on those very wet Sunday afternoons that seemed to go on forever. I could feel Leonard listening on the other side of the hedge as I read out the clue.

‘I am an odd number. Take away a letter and I become even. What number am I?’

It was an obvious conundrum that I understood immediately, but I kept it firmly to myself.

‘No idea,’ I said to Dorothy. ‘Let’s go for a walk and if we get lost I’m sure someone will come and rescue us.’

I took us a short way along the first stretch of hedging and then stopped to show Dorothy.

‘If you take away the letter S from the front of the word seven you have the word even. Do you get it? Seven: an odd number,’ I whispered.

‘Oh, I suppose I get it,’ Dorothy said with a raised eyebrow. ‘Not my sort of thing really.’

‘Dorothy, you do the crossword; you must have some idea.’

‘I buy the newspaper and I try to do the crossword, but in truth I’m much happier with a gritty thriller,’ she said with a smile.

‘Right, well the answer to this is seven and if you look at the code at the bottom, the letter S means go right, then the letters E and V take you left, so that’s left three times and then N takes you right again. You see?’

Dorothy frowned and then shrugged.

‘Can you see now why I chose you as my companion?’ she said with a grin, and then linked her arm through mine as we set off and I steered her confidently into the maze.

The others had clearly worked out the answer quickly and had long disappeared, although their chatter and laughter could be heard at various points as we traversed the hedgerows back and forth.

Our pace was quite slow as Dorothy couldn’t walk very quickly and soon the excited voices of the others seemed to have grown softer and more distant.

‘Hang on, here’s another clue.’

I pulled out a card that was stuck into the edge of the hedge and read it out.

‘If two’s company and three’s a crowd what are four and five? God, he’s not very imaginative, is he,’ I said. ‘So, it’s another right, then a left and then a right, then a left again.’

‘What was the answer?’ Dorothy asked. ‘I’m honestly not very good at quizzes.’

‘Nine,’ I said. ‘He asks the question what are four and five? Four plus five equals nine.’

‘Oh, I see!’ Dorothy said, delighted.