Mirrorland

CHAPTER 19

17 April 2018 at 05:50

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john.smith120594@gmail.com

Re: HE KNOWS

To: Me

CLUE 10. BEHIND THE BERLIN WALL

Sent from my iPhone

I’m in the Clown Café. Bluebeard and Blackbeard are here. They’ll drag us out of the cupboard and carry us to Bedroom 3, and hang us on hooks until we’re dead. And as we die, we’ll scream in the dark like the sea, like dying pirates on a deck full of blood. And they’ll throw our bodies to the sharks.

I’m in Mirrorland, sitting cross-legged on the gun deck of the Satisfaction, looking across at El. We’re wearing matching tartan dresses over starchy white shirts. If it wasn’t for Ross balancing on his haunches between us, it would be like we were both looking into a mirror. Like one of us wasn’t really there. In his hand is a single sheet of paper covered in red and black pen. THE PLAN.

We’re in this together, okay? Ross says. The three of us. Together.

And Annie winks solemnly at me from behind the ship’s wheel. Sometimes you have to be brave. Even when you’re a grand wee coward.

I’m in the kitchen, sitting at the table. Scrambled eggs on toast and porridge that’s too hot to eat. A bird is trapped inside the old chimney flue. I can hear it scratching and flapping. My hand is shaking. I miss my mouth and Mum’s goes thin. Don’t slitter, Catriona. Grandpa sits with his bad leg up on the spare chair, throws back his head to laugh, but his hands tremble, and worse than mine. He looks at El next to the door, her fingers on its handle. Ye’re bein’ a stander, lassie. Sit the shit doon. And El looks at me. Her smile is terrible. I pretend I can’t see it. Can I have some tea?

The pantry’s black velveteen curtain was the Berlin Wall. El was always Alec Leamas, the heroic spy who came in from the cold, while I’d always be on the other side with the Clowns – the cruel George Smiley and his Circus – leading Alec to his doom. I find the diary page pushed inside the curtain’s hem.

September 4th, 1998

Today at breakfast everyone pretended everything was Normal. Even me really I suppose, even tho it’s not, even tho I’m just about as scared as I’ve ever been my Whole Life.

And Mum and Grandpa and Cat were all like pass me the salt and pour me some tea and hurry up it’s time for school. And I’m like how can you be Normal? Didn’t you Hear? Didn’t you See? Aren’t you Scared?

HE’LL COME BACK.

But I didn’t say any of that either so maybe we were all thinking it in our heads and none of us could say it out loud. In case He did. Come Back I mean.

So after breakfast I pulled Cat behind the Berlin Wall and I put my hand over her mouth and I whispered in her ear ‘IT HAS TO BE TONIGHT’!!

Because It Does. No matter what she says. No matter how scared we are. It’s THE PLAN. It’s what we agreed.

I’m behind the curtain in the pantry, struggling to breathe through El’s clammy hand and the dusty dark. The ghosts whisper and thump around us. It has to be tonight.

No, I think. NO.

Yes, says El. I feel her smile under my fingers as if we’ve swapped places – I’ve become her and she’s become me. And when I let her go and pull back the curtain, every wall in the hallway and kitchen is painted ugly wet crimson. I hear an owl hoot: high and long. I hear boots, I hear RUN! I hear rings. The noise is deafening. The wooden board shudders, every one of its bells shaking left and right, star-shaped pendulums flashing in the gloom, the dark. I see the moon.

Wake up! El screams in my voice. Our voice. Wake the fuck up.

I fall off the stool onto the pantry floor. My arms and legs feel too heavy. My stomach is empty, queasy. My head aches, aches, aches. Is this what grief feels like? Or guilt? Is this what it feels like when half of you is gone? When half of you is dead?

I pick up my phone, press reply. The screen stays blurry no matter how many times I blink.

Answer me. Meet me. Explain. Or leave me the fuck alone.

Ross is standing by the kitchen window, looking out at a back garden distorted by rain. It pounds against the roof and the flue cap, the guttering. He turns around when he hears me. Last night, I insisted that we both sleep alone, and spent the entirety of it longing for his breath on my neck and his arm across my belly and his legs tangled between mine. Today, I can’t even look at him.

‘The tea’s stewed,’ he says, picking up the pot. It shakes in his hands, enough that the lid starts to rattle. ‘I’ll make some more.’

I take it from him. ‘It’s okay.’ I fill a mug and sit down. Take too large a swallow. Don’t slitter, Catriona.

‘Cat.’ Ross sits down next to me. His fingers are warm against mine. I try to tell myself their touch doesn’t help, doesn’t straightaway soothe a hollow place deep inside my chest. ‘Please don’t shut me out.’

I take back my hands, press them between my knees instead. ‘I need to see her.’

Ross almost recoils. ‘What? Why? The DNA—’

‘You’re the one who said she wasn’t suicidal,’ I say. Because just about the only thing still holding me together is that stubborn and enduring I’d know. That I would have felt the moment she died, the moment she drowned, the moment she left. That those hopeless, helpless, horrifying seizures of yesterday were only shock, only shame.

‘Maybe she didn’t mean to do it.’ He takes hold of my hands again, pulls them in hard against his breastbone. I can feel the too-fast thud-thud of his heart. ‘Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she just wanted me to notice she was in pain.’ His eyes are wet with unshed tears. And when I take back my hands again, he stands up, turns away from me.

I look down at the two tiles in front of the Kitchener. That cracked line of grout stained dark. My smile feels tight, like my lips might split and bleed. ‘Years ago, I read about this tribe. It was in one of Grandpa’s encyclopaedias. And it … it was one of those lucky tribes that had managed to avoid the rest of us for centuries. In South America somewhere, I don’t know.’

‘Cat—’

‘If a member of this tribe did something wrong, got caught doing something wrong, or even just thought they’d done something – anything, you know, from telling a lie to committing a murder – this tribe, this entire tribe, would take them into the centre of their village, and they would form this circle around them, so tight they couldn’t escape, couldn’t hide. And then they would tell that person everything that was good about them. Every good thing they’d ever done. Every good thing they’d ever been. Over and over. And they wouldn’t stop. Not until that person heard them. Believed them.’

My voice breaks. My eyes burn with tears I refuse to cry. My hands twitch to hold his. My body aches to lie down. To feel his hard, warm, sure weight against me, inside me. And all of me wants to look in a mirror and see only El. To stand on a freezing cold beach and say this is where I’ll stay. To never allow her to let go of my hand. No matter how much it hurts. No matter how many times she pushes me away.

CHAPTER 20

Marie stands on the doorstep inside a swathe of bright morning light. She’s holding a huge bunch of calla lilies, and tears are running down her cheeks.

‘Je suis désolée. C’est affreux. Je suis tellement désolée.’

I take the flowers – their antiseptic smell waters my eyes and stings my nose. ‘Thank you, Marie.’

She takes out a beautifully embroidered handkerchief and dabs at her skin. ‘I knew … I knew she had to be … mais …’

‘Sorry – I’d invite you in, but I’m just about to go out.’

She blinks at my denim jacket. Today, I can’t even look at the grey cashmere coat hanging on the stand behind me.

‘Is Ross here?’

‘No.’ I’m pretty sure she knows he isn’t here. That she waited until he’d left for Colquhoun’s before deciding to come over.

She leans close to me, her eyes suddenly sharp and dry. ‘Did you ask him? About what he said to me? How he threatened me?’

‘Marie—’

‘You are in danger.’ Her fingers close around my wrist. ‘Tu comprends?’

‘Marie! Stop.’ I snatch my hand back.

She shakes her head, takes a phone out of her pocket, and then thrusts it at me. ‘Regardez. Look what he says to me one week before Ellice disappears. Look!’

Stay away from her. Stay away or you’ll regret it.

It’s Ross’s number. I think. But I shove the phone back towards her, start trying to close the door. ‘I can’t do this now. I have to—’

‘You must! You’re in danger!’ She pushes back. Tries to grip hold of me again. ‘S’il te plaît!’

I’m glad of the fury that burns suddenly through me, laying waste to everything else. I drop the flowers and wrench the door wide, pushing Marie aside as I step out and slam it shut behind me.

‘Catriona—’

I battle to lock the door as her hands continue to touch me, pull at me. I want to scream. I want to run away from all of this, and never look back.

‘Catriona. Listen to me! You—’

‘I’m going to the morgue!’ My shout sounds, even to my own ears, more like a scream. Marie closes her mouth and steps back, drops her hands to her sides.

I can feel other eyes on me as I run down the steps and through the gate, along the road towards the number 49 bus that’s pulling in to the stop. But I don’t slow, don’t turn around. Don’t look back.

The City Mortuary is an ugly concrete block sandwiched between beautiful Victorian terraces. Logan is leaning against a set of double doors next to a big metal-shuttered garage. When he sees me, he straightens up, and his smile is solemn, fleeting. I fight the threat of another choking seizure by biting down hard on my bottom lip and pushing my fingernails deep into the fattest part of my palms.

‘Hi, Cat.’

A sign on the wall alongside him says EDINBURGH CITY MORTUARY. It’s a very grand, gold-coloured plaque, polished enough that I can see my face in it. I blink hard, look up at the sky instead. It’s white and heavy with the threat of spring snow.

‘You’re bleeding.’

I feel the heel of Logan’s palm against my cheek, the rough warmth of his thumb against my skin. I turn my head and pull my lip between my teeth.

‘I’m okay.’

He nods. Drops his hands down by his sides. ‘Okay.’

‘Logan.’ Rafiq is standing inside the double doors. Just looking at her sleek ponytail and intense stare transports me back to the house. I’m sorry, Catriona. It’s definitely her. It’s definitely El. ‘You’re needed back at the station.’

He doesn’t argue, but there’s some defiance in the way he steps closer to me, briefly squeezes my hand. ‘Take care, okay? You’ve got my number.’

Rafiq holds the doors open, nods at me as I pass her. The waiting room is a soft magnolia. It’s very warm and very empty.

‘Sit down a minute,’ she says. ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’

I nod. Even though I’m not.

She sighs. ‘Would it help if I showed you the DNA report?’

I don’t know what she means by help. Although I do know that I want to see it enough to nod again.

She takes out her phone and hands it to me.

DNA ISOLATION TEST

Reference Samples:

ID 1551204: Soft-bristle toothbrush belonging to Ellice MacAuley (dob 01/07/86) [Collected 04/04/18]

ID 1551205: Wide-barrel hairbrush belonging to Ellice MacAuley (dob 01/07/86) [Collected 15/04/18]

Kinship Sample:

ID 1551206: Buccal swab from identical twin sibling, Catriona Morgan [HID1551_201] (dob 01/07/86) [Collected 15/04/18]

Jane Doe [HID1551_200] Samples:

Partial facial and upper body saponification; DNA extracted from femoral bone marrow

DNA isolation was carried out separately for all samples. Genetic characteristics were determined by the following PCR single-locus-technology analysis.

Results were confirmed by retesting original samples. All laboratory analyses and interpretations follow the recommendations of the DNA commission of the International Society for Forensic Genetics, ISFG.

Conclusion:

Based upon our analysis and the biostatistical evaluation of its results, it is practically proven that Jane Doe [HID1551_200] is > 99.9999% Ellice MacAuley (dob 01/07/86), of 36 Westeryk Road, Leith.

And that Catriona Morgan [HID1551_201] (dob 01/07/86) is > 99.9999% the living identical sibling of the deceased.

Expert Witness:

Dr Iain Patterson MB ChB, BMSc(Hons), FRCPath, MFFLM

Head Forensic Pathologist

North Lothian CID

I read it twice, three times, until my eyes go blurry. When I give back the phone, my hand is shaking.

‘I want a copy of that,’ I try to say with some authority, but my voice is shaking too. White noise rushes through my ears as if I’m underwater.

‘Of course,’ Rafiq says.

‘I still want to see her.’

‘I really think that would be a bad idea. It won’t help. If anything—’

‘I have to.’ I make myself look at Rafiq. Her brow is wrinkled, her mouth thin, her eyes full of concern. ‘Please.’

She finally nods. ‘But afterwards, I have to ask you some questions, Catriona. Okay? It’s important.’

I barely hear her over the beating of my heart or the roaring in my ears.

Rafiq takes me through another door: VISITOR FACILITIES. As if we’re in a stately home. In the corridor beyond, more doors: INTERVIEW ROOMS, COUNSELLING ROOMS. I follow on behind Rafiq. I don’t speak. I don’t think.

We pass a door labelled BIER ROOM, but before I can ask her what a bier is, Rafiq opens the door alongside it. VIEWING ROOM. And my mouth clamps shut.

Everything inside it is soft focus, unobtrusive, warm. Non-institutional. The lights are low, and the acoustics somehow muted. I realise that what I’ve been imagining ever since Logan’s The Greenock Dive and Marine Unit recovered her this morning is one of those sterile white-tiled rooms with metal storage drawers and steel tables with big plugholes, like something out of CSI or Silent Witness.

When Rafiq asks me to sit down, her voice has lost all of its sharp edges too. The armchair is beige and cushioned. There are watercolour landscapes hanging on the walls, reminding me of that hospital waiting room of nearly thirteen years ago, its plastic-framed seascape of rocks and sand and waves. I look everywhere but at the big blue-curtained window on the wall opposite.

The knock makes me jump. The door opens, and I spring up, grateful to stop sitting, to stop trying not to look.

‘Catriona,’ says Rafiq. ‘This is Dr Claire MacDuff.’

Dr Claire MacDuff is about mid-fifties, and five feet if she’s lucky. Her sandy hair is short but thick, her glasses green-rimmed, her smile solicitous. She’s wearing jeans and a jumper, which is the thing I find most disconcerting of all. I’d been expecting scrubs, shower cap, gloves, gumboots, the works.

I accept her offered hand, and halfway through a very vigorous shake, she tells me, ‘Hello. I was the lead doctor on your sister’s post-mortem.’

‘Oh,’ I say, swallowing the ridiculous great that wants to follow it.

She finally lets me go. ‘I understand why you’re here, but I’m afraid that I’ve recommended no relatives view the body in this case. As SIO, DI Rafiq was also in attendance at the PM, and so is aware of the reasons for my objections.’ She holds up a palm before I can speak. ‘However. She has also explained the circumstances, and I’m not unsympathetic. But you’ll hear me out before I agree to anything, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Ordinarily, when we find a body in the Forth, it’s because decomposition gases bring it up to the surface after a few days. But your sister was in the Forth for thirteen days. That means that in addition to normal decomposition, the body has been subjected to many other changes and traumas. It’s important that you know that, and it’s important that you know what before I’m happy for you to see her, okay?’

For the first time since phoning Logan, it occurs to me that what I’m about to see might be just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Even though I’ve been shaking since I woke up – since probably before I woke up – I suddenly go still.

‘When a body has been in water for some time, it can undergo a natural preservation process known as saponification. This process forms something called adipocere, which means that much of Ellice’s body tissue has become waxy, brittle, and deformed.’ She looks at me. ‘Think of a well-used candle or soap on a rope.’

‘Aye, okay.’ Rafiq bristles, laying the flat of her hand between my shoulder blades. ‘Is it necessary for you to be quite so—’

‘She needs to know what she’s asking for,’ says Dr MacDuff. She turns her steady gaze back to me. ‘The head, more specifically, the face, is always the most disfigured part of a submerged body. It’s why we almost always rely on DNA for ID. Ellice’s lips, ears, nose, and larynx have been colonised and partially eaten away by comestible marine predators. There has been significant damage.’

I have no clue what comestible marine predators are, though I’m not about to ask. ‘Okay.’

‘Cat,’ Rafiq says, now rubbing slow shallow circles across my back. Her eyes are so black I can’t see their pupils. There are two deep lines between her eyebrows. ‘Are you hearing this? Seeing her isn’t going to help. She’ll not be recognisable as your sister any more. I’d strongly advise – we’d both strongly advise – that you don’t do this.’

I step away from her, and out of reach of her hands, her concerned gaze. I preferred it when she was a cold and efficient robot who called me Catriona; I can’t bear this strange kindness.

‘I want to see her.’

‘Okay,’ Dr MacDuff says. ‘If you wait here, I’ll have the technicians move her from the bier room.’

I wait until she’s gone to take in an unsteady breath.

‘Cat—’

‘I’m sure,’ I say, and wish that my voice wasn’t wavering.

Rafiq squeezes my shoulder, moves towards the curtain. A small green light comes on in a switch panel close to the door.

I’m holding my breath. And even when I realise it, I can’t stop. I can’t let it go and breathe in another. Shivers are trickling down from my scalp, pressing my shoulder blades together, cricking my neck. My bottom lip throbs when I bite down on it again, and I taste old blood, new blood. ‘I’m sure.’

Rafiq’s nod is short. She pulls back the curtain, exposing the well-lit room beyond in slow increments. I close my eyes. Open them.

I need to know. That’s all there is.

And then. There it is.

It has no hair. Its scalp is completely bald. Shiny, creamy, and rippled thick – and the first thing I do think of is a well-used altar candle, its wax melted and remelted into asymmetric waves. Its nose is just a hole, a black maze of sinus passages. It has no eyelids. No eyes. Its teeth are fixed in a lipless grin. Beneath its waxy grey neck and a blue drape, I can just about see the thick black closing stiches of Dr MacDuff’s Y incision at the wide end of each collarbone. I try to imagine the body underneath the drape, so still and flat on top of the metal stretcher. I stop.

When I back away from the window, Rafiq is there to help turn me towards the door, and this time I don’t resent those hands against my back. My legs give way as soon as I reach the corridor, and when she pulls me close, when she comes down to the tiled floor with me, I don’t resent her strange kindness any more either. I reach for it instead, just as hard as I reach for her, and I let all that silvery horror and shame spill out of me in sobs and cries and retches against her neat black suit jacket.

‘Here you are.’

I take the mug from Rafiq’s hands. The tea is too hot, too sugary, but I drink it anyway. Her office is cold. I can barely remember the car journey from the mortuary to the police station. I feel sick and my head is pounding. My eyes are so swollen I can hardly see.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to see someone? A doctor, or—’

‘How did she die? I didn’t ask how she died.’

Rafiq looks at me, shows me the flat palms of her hands. ‘We can’t be sure. Not enough to satisfy the procurator fiscal anyway. The most obvious CODs would be drowning or hypothermia. But … there wasn’t enough intact lung or circulatory tissue to confirm either.’

Comestible marine predators, I think, and I see that black maze of sinus passages, those deep eyeless holes.

‘What we do know is that El had very high levels of diazepam, fluoxetine, and oxycodone in her bone marrow.’

I think of those pill bottles behind the bathroom mirror. ‘Enough to kill her?’

‘We can’t be sure of that either. The time that toxins are deposited in bones can’t be accurately calculated, and samples measured in bone marrow are generally found to be higher than those in blood specimens.’ She leans forwards. ‘Oxycodone is an opioid, commonly used for severe pain. Stronger than morphine. Her GP never prescribed them. Do you know if your sister had a history of drug abuse? Recreational drug use?’

‘What? No. Of course not.’ I can no more imagine El taking opioids than Valium. She didn’t even like to drink. Could never risk letting go of control for even a moment. I look down at Rafiq’s desk, at a photo of a grinning man in scrubs. ‘Is that what killed her, then?’

‘It’s probable that they contributed to her death, one way or another.’

I think of standing on cold wet stone. Looking out at the eastern breakwater wall and the volcanic rise of the Binn behind stony studs of houses. At the white-frilled waves of high tide and the distant flat of the North Sea. And thinking that this place – the place we once ran to – was the place El had disappeared from. But she hadn’t. She’d been right there, all that time, under the howling wind and rain and all those grey waves, down in the thick black murk of the deepwater channel.

‘When will you be bringing the boat up?’ I manage. ‘For forensics or whatever. Because someone removed that drain plug and drilled holes in the hull. They took down the mast. They—’

‘They also disabled the onboard toilet,’ Rafiq says. And not in the manner of somebody who’s on my side. ‘So that it would let water in instead of flushing it out.’

I look at the heavy white day through the window: the city’s gothic and steel towers, its distant green hills. My skin itches and shivers. I inhale as if I’m getting ready to hold my breath, dive underwater.

‘El didn’t kill herself. She wouldn’t.’

‘Well, you say that, and I can understand you needing to believe it, but in 2005, she—’

‘For fuck’s sake, I already told you that she never tried to kill herself back then! She did it to piss me off, to get Ross’s attention, to make me leave. It wasn’t – she took just enough paracetamol to have to go to hospital and have it pumped out of her, that’s the—’ I stop. Will myself calm. ‘Ross doesn’t think she killed herself either,’ I say, even though I suspect that might no longer be true. ‘We won’t leave this alone. If that’s what you want, neither of us is going to do it. This isn’t her fault. Someone else did this to her. I know it.’

Rafiq doesn’t remind me that I also knew El wasn’t dead, but the look she gives me says she’s thinking it.

‘Listen,’ she says. ‘Neither the Marine Accident Investigation Branch nor the Scottish Environment Protection Agency will fund a recovery of The Redemption. It’s not a commercial vessel, and we already know how—’

‘So you’re just going to leave it down there to rot?’

‘Sometimes, CID will get an amount granted by the government to fund further investigation in certain cases of murder. But this is not one of those.’

The finality in her voice makes me want to punch something. ‘But what about the cards? Someone was threatening her. And I’ve had more! I’ve kept them. There’s a kayak in the shed! And I’ve also been getting—’

Rafiq shakes her head, holds up a hand. ‘I don’t think that the cards are connected to what’s happened to El. We investigated them, followed up on every suggestion Ross and El gave us, but the cards never explicitly threatened El’s life – or yours. If anything, Ross was the target, and we’ve already investigated him too. They weren’t getting on. Maybe El was seeing someone. Maybe he was. People always love to meddle, to interfere in dramas that have nothing to do with them.’

I feel numb, frustrated, backed into a corner. For days, I’ve been emailing El, I’ve been angry with El. And all the time, it really was Mouse. And if Ross is right, and the cards are from her, too, then I should tell Rafiq. I should show her the emails. Because even if they’ve already investigated her, Mouse is involved. She’s been telling me that she knows what’s going on from the very start. I KNOW THINGS. THINGS HE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW. EL IS DEAD. I CAN HELP YOU. I think about Ross’s text on Marie’s phone. Stay away from her. Stay away or you’ll regret it.

‘Catriona.’ Rafiq reaches her hands across the table. ‘Listen to me, okay? El’s previous suicide attempt, her depression and the drugs she was taking at the time of her disappearance, the leaving behind of her wallet, her phone, her passport, The Redemption not being found anywhere near where she’d told the boatman she was going – all of these things point to either accident or suicide. And you’ll not want to accept this either, but we’ll probably never know for sure which.’ She lays a small hand over mine. ‘I’m sorry. I truly am.’

I feel dizzy. My head throbs. I don’t know what to say. What to do. If I tell Rafiq about the emails, I have to tell her about Mirrorland, El’s diary. I have to tell her what happened on September the 4th, 1998. And I can’t.

I want to get up, I want to run. I want to keep on setting fires no matter how brutally efficient Rafiq is at putting them out. Because if I don’t, all I’m left with is this leaden savage knowing, this terrible emptiness that’s bigger, deeper than everything else. Than being more special than a hundred thousand other children, rare like owlet-nightjars or California condors. Than lying sick in bed and still being able to fly, to feel the fast, cold air against my skin, the tickling scratch of leaves and branches, the terror of falling, the agony of landing, the wonder of knowing. Than being half of a whole, never alone; days, hours, minutes away from being fused into something new, like sand and limestone into glass. I don’t want to be left with only savage emptiness. I don’t want to realise that nothing before it was true. That we were never special at all. That El died and I didn’t feel it. That I can survive alone in the world after all.

I’m crying again, I realise. Crying and choking and crouching on the floor, clinging to the legs of my chair like a toddler.

Anna was right. I’ve done all of this wrong. I’ve let El down. Worse, I’ve betrayed her in every way. I stole from her, hated her, disbelieved her, deserted her, over and over again. I thought only the worst of her for years, when I was the coward. I was the one who ran away. And now I can’t even get justice for her. I can’t even say sorry.

Rafiq doesn’t try to calm me down. She stays with me until my grief runs out of fuel, and then she helps me back up onto my chair, produces a bottle of whisky from her desk drawer.

I gulp down one measure, and she pours me another. Every few seconds, tired tremors shake through me like aftershocks.

‘She always said she wanted to be cremated,’ I whisper.

‘It’ll be a wee while yet before you can start making arrangements,’ Rafiq says. ‘The procurator fiscal has to see our report and the post-mortem report and make his own ruling before the body can be released to the next of kin. And if El did want to be cremated, the PF has to sign off on that as well, I’m afraid.’

‘But why? If it was an accident, or if she killed herself like you say she did, why do you—’

‘Because no matter what we might think or know, all evidence must still be collected, reported upon, and ruled upon in exactly the same way, in every single case, without prejudice.’ She looks me square in the eye. ‘Besides, there have been some complications in this particular case. Some anomalies, uncertainties.’

I sit up straight. ‘What anomalies? Why didn’t you tell me about them earlier?’

And I recognise far too late the return of that speculative look. The sharp scrutiny in her too-dark eyes.

‘These days, we can ID a body in a variety of ways, but we always follow the same checklist: personal effects, distinguishing marks, visual ID, dental records, DNA.’ She holds my gaze. ‘In El’s case, like Dr MacDuff said, there was significant trauma and decomposition, so distinguishing marks and visual ID weren’t possible.’

Just like in the viewing room, I suddenly can’t let go my breath, can’t breathe in another.

‘And I know this is a traumatic time for you, I understand that. But what you want is what I want. For El’s body to be released, for her case to be correctly and properly closed. Which is why these … anomalies need to be addressed.’ She blinks. ‘Explained.’

I don’t speak. Don’t breathe out. Don’t breathe in.

Rafiq leans forwards until we’re nearly touching. ‘Do you remember I said there were questions I had to ask you, Catriona?’

I don’t nod, even though I do remember. And even though I know now what those questions will be. What has been behind all those sidelong stares and pregnant pauses, as if she always thought I knew something she didn’t, as if she was waiting for me to trip up, to give it away. She was right. And I think I just have.

‘After the forensic divers went down to collect any personal effects,’ Rafiq says, ‘we moved on to El’s dental records. What do you think we found, Catriona?’

I swallow.

‘We found no dental records for El at all.’ Rafiq’s smile is small, humourless. ‘So I had Logan run a more detailed case history on her while we started DNA investigations. Just the basics: birthplace, parents, schools. And what d’you think we found then, Catriona?’ Her voice is still kind, but her words are steely.

I manage to shake my head.

‘Nothing. We found nothing.’

I close my eyes.

‘Because before September the fifth, 1998, it’s as if El – and you – never existed at all.’

CHAPTER 21

El and I are sitting cross-legged on the bed in the Clown Café. El, in shiny pantaloons held up by spotty braces. Me, in tartan dungarees, an orange wig. My face is painted to match Dicky Grock’s sad eyes and sad mouth. El is white-faced and red-lipped, grinning like the terrifying Pogo.

We’re sitting at a plastic table in a fifties American diner. Drinking black coffee and eating fried doughnuts. Pogo sits next to us, while Dicky Grock mans the deep fryer. A jukebox plays ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘Love Me Tender’, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. I whisper to El, When can we leave? When can we go? Because we’re not really Clowns and they might know it, they might work it out. Because Clowns are clever, Clowns are scary, Clowns are a species entirely separate from people. Clowns hate people. Everyone knows that. But El’s big red grin says, Not yet, not yet. Because she’s more scared of the Tooth Fairy, and everyone knows that the Tooth Fairy is terrified of Clowns.

But Bluebeard isn’t.

The café is busy, hot, too noisy. Chatter and the constant scrape of chairs, the grind of coffee beans and the loud hissing of steam. I look out of a big window running wet with condensation, watch the bob of umbrellas and bundled-up bodies fast-marching along the streets outside.

‘Snow in bloody April,’ Rafiq says as she sits down, pushes a huge cappuccino and a three-pack of bourbons towards me.

I warm my hands around the cup. On a table behind us, a child starts to yell and a baby starts to scream.

‘Try and eat the biscuits,’ Rafiq says.

Nausea sits inside my stomach like a stone. Another baby starts to wail.

‘Never wanted kids,’ Rafiq says, rolling her eyes. ‘Apart from a very weird day in 2006. One wee tick-tock, and then my clock stopped for good, thank God.’

When I still don’t speak, still don’t look at her, she sets down her cup, clasps her hands tightly.

‘Look. It’s not my intention to cause you any more grief, but this needs to be sorted.’ She pauses. ‘Instead of a birth certificate, or a hospital report, or even one of those wee hand-and-feet prints, the first actual document we have for either of you is the police report of one PC Andrew Davidson dated the fifth of September, 1998, stating that you were runaways found by a Mr Peter Stewart, sixty-six, of 10 Muirdyke Place. And when Logan and I took a closer look at that report, d’you know what was even more bizarre?’

The heat from the coffee cup burns my skin.

‘Mr Peter Stewart found you at Granton Harbour.’

My fingers tingle, as if they can still feel El’s heat, the tight grip of her hand. I shiver from the bone-cold North Sea wind trapped inside the firth’s gullet, whipping up waves, rattling masts and buoys. And instead of a white sky heavy with snow, I see a red dawn creeping over the breakwater like a bruise. Like blood, sour and dark and sly.

‘When you’re both twelve years old, you appear – poof! – out of nowhere at Granton Harbour. You refuse to say why you’re there, where you’ve come from, anything but your names. Not one person ever reports you missing, comes looking for you, although you’ve both got injuries indicative of physical assault. Your names don’t exist on any register of any sort. You don’t exist.’

She pauses again, leans back in her chair. Waits. I say nothing, do nothing, look back out the window at the worsening snow.

‘So, what happened then? Social services take you into care, ask you no questions, just give you new lives?’

They asked plenty of questions. We just never answered. And when it became obvious that we wouldn’t be adopted, they helped us apply and register our names, our new lives, as long as it took, as hard as it was. Mum had always told us our surname was Morgan. After the pirate king who’d abandoned us. The father we had never known. I watch fat flakes of snow disappear into the wet pavement.

‘Okay, Cat. Then start with this. Why did El have no dental records?’

I close my eyes. Pretend I’m not shivering. Shuddering. ‘She had a phobia about dentists.’

‘Okay.’

‘She was always meticulous about cleaning, hygiene, all of that. Mum made sure we both were. And when we were in the Rosemount, El always refused to go to the dentist.’ I swallow. ‘I guess that didn’t change.’

‘Why?’

One of the wailing babies passes by our table, its arms and legs fighting to escape a sling, its mother grim-faced.

‘Mum would pull our teeth. You know, like parents do.’ I chance a quick look at Rafiq, but her expression is blank. ‘If a tooth was loose, she’d tie one end of a piece of string around it and the other around a door handle, and then slam the door shut. That usually worked. And if it wasn’t loose enough, she’d just pull it out with pliers.’

Rafiq frowns. ‘Your baby teeth.’

I don’t know if it’s a question. ‘Mostly. And once or twice, when we were older. If we got a bad cavity or an abscess.’

‘Jesus,’ Rafiq says.

‘Parents do that. Sometimes.’

‘No, they don’t, Cat.’

I remember El screaming and screaming. Me banging on the locked bathroom door, feeling the fear, the pain, the helplessness. I remember what it was like to have a mouth full of blood. To be spitting it out for days. I remember the silvery, shivery dread of hearing the squeak of the kitchen cupboard where the bent-nose pliers lived.

‘Mum was scared of clowns.’ I try to laugh, but it comes out as a choking cough. ‘She was scared of a lot of things, but she was terrified of them. I think there’s a word for that; I’ve never looked it up, but she had it. So El got the idea that if one of us had toothache, we’d dress up as clowns so Mum couldn’t … you know, do anything. Grandpa bought us the costumes, thought it was just fun. He always said Mum was too afraid of everything, that she’d pass it on to us.’ I only realise I’m twisting my fingers back and forth when one of them makes a loud crack. ‘We’d paint a clown on the bathroom mirror as a warning, and then dress up and hide in the spare room – we called it the Clown Café – and stay there. For days sometimes. Till we got too hungry or thirsty, or bored. And Mum would never come in.’

‘Jesus,’ Rafiq says again.

‘It wasn’t her fault.’ I think of her pinched, unsmiling face. Her endless stories and lessons and warnings. ‘She just … worried. She just wanted us to be safe. They both did – her and Grandpa. Why do you want to know all this?’

‘Why did they not just take you to a dentist? What happened if you got sick?’

I remember lying in bed and wondering if you could die from the flu. El’s black-and-blue ankle after falling out of Old Fred. How when it healed it left a knobbly bump. Separating us a little more. ‘We got better.’

‘But they never took you to a doctor, right? They couldn’t. Just like they couldn’t take you to a dentist. Because your births were never registered. What about school?’

‘We were home-schooled. Mum was a great teacher.’ I think of the pantry and its walls of messy orange and yellow daffodils, the wooden desk that looked out across the exercise yard and the orchard beyond. The Tempest, The Count of Monte Cristo, Jane Eyre, Crooked House. I think of lying in the Princess Tower as she told us about Snow-white and Rose-red; Bluebeard, Blackbeard, and the pirate king.

‘They kept you prisoner?’

‘No. No!’ But I think of those long crooked nails driven into every windowsill; the turn of the red door’s deadlock. And I start to get up, the back legs of my chair scraping noisily along the floor.

Rafiq grasps my wrists, pulls me back down.

‘Were you ever allowed outside?’

‘Yes. We played in the back garden all—’

‘Outside the garden?’

‘No. But that—’

‘Did you ever see or talk to anyone but your mum and grandpa?’

‘Yes!’ I say, and the first person I think of is not Ross, not even Mouse, but the Witch: tall and skinny and full of black fury.

‘Who?’ The quick flash of Rafiq’s eyes is the only indication that she isn’t as calm as she wants me to think she is, and that frightens me suddenly. Revives my dread. I know exactly what name she’s expecting me to say.

I start shaking my head, start trying to get up again, but not even my legs will obey me any more.

‘Where was your house, Cat?’

I still can’t seem to move, to get up. My teeth are chattering.

‘Cat. It’s okay. Try to relax.’ Rafiq lays her palms flat on the table between us. Takes a long breath. ‘Okay. Here’s what I think. Most of it’s what I know. But some of it’s what I think.’

I say nothing. Look at nothing.

‘Back in September 1998, I was a lowly shit-for-brains PC, working in the East End of Glasgow. Not much happened there back then, same as in Leith, I suppose: drugs and drunks. But after Logan and I read that PC’s report from the fifth of September, someone in my team who was working in Leith at that time remembered something. On the morning of the fifth of September, he remembers an anonymous 999 call was made by a young male, directing officers to an address on Westeryk Road. Less than three miles from Granton Harbour. And when the police went to 36 Westeryk Road and eventually broke in, d’you know what they found?’

I say nothing. Look at nothing.

‘They found two bodies. One male, one female. A murder–suicide it was reckoned.’ She looks at me, looks for a response. And I go on trying my hardest not to give it to her. ‘So I wondered about that anonymous caller, that young male. Had Logan run a check on everyone doorstepped or interviewed in relation to the case. And imagine our surprise when whose name should come up but one Ross MacAuley, living right next door at number 38.’ She stops, softens the sharp voice she probably uses in interrogation rooms. ‘That’s what I know, Catriona. So, do you want to tell me what it is that I think?’

I shake my head.

‘I only want to clear things up, that’s all. It was nearly twenty years ago. You were both just kids. Kids who, as far as I can see, had a pretty frightening upbringing.’ She looks at me as if she expects me to object. ‘Seems like the police did investigate the possibility that you had come from 36 Westeryk Road that night. Because in that first report from Granton Harbour, Mr Peter Stewart insisted that one of the girls had been wearing a jumper covered with blood. Now, PC Davidson also reported that Mr Peter Stewart was drunk as a skunk. And no bloody clothing was ever subsequently found. Nor did a search of number 36 find any evidence that anyone other than the victims – much less two children – had been living at the address. So it stayed what it was: the moving mystery of two identical twin girls exhibiting signs of abuse, who appeared from nowhere and belonged to no one.

‘But now, a young woman – an identical twin – who lived at the very same address of that murder–suicide, has been found dead after leaving that very same harbour. So maybe I’m just a wee bit ahead of the curve. Because, you know, the first rule of being a detective, apart from the fact you can no longer be a shit-for-brains, is that coincidences do happen – but they don’t come in multipacks.’

I try to breathe, but I can’t. I try to speak, but it’s even more impossible. I have no idea what to say.

Rafiq takes pity on me, leans back in her chair again, gives me a good smile. ‘I don’t think you’re guilty of anything, Cat, that’s not what this is. But I need to be able to tell the story the way it was. Because someone else will ferret all of this out. And when they do, I need to be able to head them off. To explain it, draw a line under it. So, please. Tell me. Do you know the names of the two people who were found dead at 36 Westeryk Road?’

I can’t stay still. I can’t settle my thoughts on anything at all. I want to run. I want to hide. I want everything to stop. I want to tell her. ‘You must already know their names. Why do—’

‘You know why. Because I think you were there – you and El both. Because I think that was where you lived. Because I think you witnessed what happened the night they died. And that’s why you ran. Because I need to know that these things are true. I need you to tell me. Do you know who they were?’

‘Yes.’ I whisper it. I can hear children crying, babies wailing, hot-water hissing, chair legs scraping, my heart beating. I can smell damp coats and umbrellas. Coffee and doughnuts. I can see the snow, the dull white sky, the slick wet pavements, the bundled-up bodies rushing past the window. I can see Rafiq’s small bright eyes. The warmth that has always been behind their dark scrutiny. She reaches for my clenched fists, wraps them tightly inside her own.

‘Tell me their names, Cat.’

I swallow. I look at her and look at her until I can’t see anything else.

‘Nancy Finlay and Robert Finlay,’ I whisper, but the names still sound too loud.

‘Your mum and your grandpa?’

No, I think. The Tooth Fairy and Bluebeard.

CHAPTER 22

The house is as empty as it ever gets. It echoes with silence, is thick with threat, with memory. I stand inside the hallway and look around at its closed doors, the grandfather clock, the telephone table, the dark curlicue of staircase, the spill of green and gold light across mosaic tiles, the dusty black curtain hiding the pantry and the entrance to Mirrorland. I look around at all the mounted plates: finches, swallows, robins perching on leafy branches, bare branches, snowy branches. I hear Mum’s voice: There’s a bird called a glorious golden curre, and she’s the cleverest of all birds. Because whenever she spreads her big golden wings and flies away, where she lands is where her next life begins as if the one before it had never happened at all. All she knows, all she remembers, is who she is now. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Don’t be like me. Be like her. Never be too afraid to fly.

I have to lean against the hallway wall. All this time, I’ve pretended that twelve years ago I flew away; that twelve years ago my life began again. But it was a lie. I’ve gone nowhere at all, because I never forgot who I was, who I had been, and the memories that I took with me were only one half of a whole. Their goodness, their fairy tale, has turned sad and sour inside me, has haunted me far more than this house and its ghosts. And what loosened and broke free inside me on the day I walked back through its big red door might have been sharp with brittle edges and warm with deep dark chasms, but it wasn’t fear, or dread, or expectation. It was relief.

And I owe it the truth.

One truth is I need a drink. I don’t want one, I need one.

There’s a half-full bottle of cheap vodka sitting on the kitchen table next to an empty tumbler and a note.

Cat, I’ll be back soon. I just need some time alone. We both probably do. I’m sorry I couldn’t go to see her with you. I love you xxx

I sit, pour the vodka.

Another truth is that I thought – I absolutely believed – that El was still alive even after the body was found. That it was someone else. That she had escaped the boat, the firth. That the blue Gumotex kayak in the shed had been left there by her. That it wasn’t my hate or my hurt that needed it to be true – that it was just the truth. Some people find strength in courage, fortitude, hope. Ross was right: I have always found mine in denial.

Another truth. Grandpa was the worst and best person I’ve ever known. I shake my head. A half-truth. I drink some more, look across at the bell board and its bells, its faded calligraphy. I think of I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER. I WANT YOU TO WANT TO REMEMBER. I don’t want to. But I will. Because the ways in which I betrayed El – by lying, sneaking, hating, leaving – they were only symptoms and never the disease. I betrayed her first and last by denying, by pretending, by forgetting.

There’s an arsehole on every boat. And if there’s no, it’s prob’ly you.

Grandpa was vast sideburns and the smell of pipe tobacco, a loud laugh, grinning still-white teeth, and shrieking hearing aids that didn’t work. An Old Salty Dog. A salve for Mum’s indiscriminate terrors. A grandpa who liked the sun and orange Tic Tacs; who would spend whole summers making daisy chains in the back garden and forts under the stairs. Who could always be relied upon for comfort: a wink, a grin, a pat of our hands. Ye’re a long time dead, lassie. Nothin’ else ever worth greetin’ over.

But Bluebeard. Bluebeard was a tyrant. Bluebeard liked the night and dark rum. He told us that he hung his oldest friend, Irvine, from a hook just so he could be the one to let him go, to let him drown – for freedom, for money, for a house full of gloom and ghosts. And he hammered long nails into its windows – windows with small, thick panes and hardwood Georgian bars – so that everything in it would always belong only to him. Bluebeard ranted and raved and chased our mother through hallways and rooms with a stovepipe. Called us nasty wee bitches and shook the house with what he wanted to do, what he promised to do. Because Bluebeard loved to hate, loved to be feared, needed always to be everyone’s worst fuckin’ nightmare.

I stop. Look at those tiles in front of the Kitchener. I can’t think about Rafiq’s murder–suicide, not yet. But I can make myself remember how it was before. Not that night. Not even every night, but enough of them. And more and more. Until it was the quiet – the respite – that we stopped expecting.

I remember the heavy clunk and turn of the red door’s deadlock just like the jail cells in the Shank. Over and over, echoing with the quality of habit. Because a wise sailor never leaves port on a Friday. He goes down to the Mission instead, drinks rum on dry land. And every time he did, every time he closed and locked the big red door against the light and the outside, Mum would send us into the entrance hall to listen for the bells. She’d go around the house and into every room, pulling on every bell pull, ringing every bell. And we’d write down which rooms they belonged to in pencil, so she could check them, rub them out, begin the test again the next Friday. Because it was never a game, never a telepathy test. It was so she could always warn us exactly where Bluebeard was. When he came back.

And then the long hours of running up the stairs, down the stairs, along hallways, across corridors, under tables and beds, into cupboards, into Mirrorland. El and I whispering and laughing; our hearts beating fast and well because these were only Mum’s drills, they weren’t real. Never fire drills, intruder drills, nuclear war drills either. Run faster! He’s coming! They were Bluebeard drills.

After dark, El and I would lie in our bed, holding hands and fighting sleep. Some nights there would be nothing, and we’d wake up to light and birdsong. But if a bell rang loud and long in the darkness, we’d get up quickly, already dressed, ears straining for the next. The kitchen was easiest to recognise because it had no bell of its own; Mum used the pull in the drawing room instead, ringing its bell twice and short. If we heard that, we always had more time, because the kitchen was where his rum stores were. We’d creep down the stairs, slower and slower as we neared the bottom. Mum would always try to shut the door of whatever room they were in; we’d hear her voice high and wild like the Throne Room bell, like a laughing stranger, and we’d rush around the oak bannister and the Berlin Wall, past the orange and yellow daffodils, and up into the cupboard. We’d find our torches and shine their light onto the blues and yellows and greens of The Island as we drew back the bolts and crept down into the dark. Into Mirrorland. On those nights, we’d always turn east to the wide decks and tall sails of the Satisfaction. And we’d wait for Captain Henry to come to our rescue while we battled frigates and brigantines, our ears ringing with the screams of splintering wood and dying men, the bellows of cannon and musketoons, the roar of the squall.

But some nights – more and more nights – we were what Bluebeard wanted. Instead of Mum. Some nights, the bells rang too many and too quickly. Some nights, he’d turn out all the lights – with a loud metallic thud of the fuse-box master switch – so that his deadlight was all we could see, jagged as it searched for us, roared for us, caught us. Some nights, it was the stovepipe; some nights, his big-buckled belt; more nights, his fists. And those nights were the nights that Mum didn’t only have to warn us but save us. Those were the nights we had to pretend never happened. Bluebeard demanded it. Mum demanded it. Mirrorland demanded it.

I’m shaking. I’m freezing cold. I remember crouching inside the dress-up cupboard in the Clown Café. Terrified. Because the Clown Café was only for hiding. It couldn’t protect us like Mirrorland could. I remember the thunder of boots on the stairs, the landing. Screaming at the ripped-open door, at the deadlight and Grandpa’s grinning teeth inside it. The smell of pipe tobacco and rum. The fist that grabbed me by the hair. The fist that squeezed El’s arm enough that I heard – felt – her bones groan. I’m goin’ tae kill ye this time, the both ae ye. Nasty wee ungrateful bitches. A sly look, cold and flat. Or maybe it’s time ye start earnin’ yer keep.

And I remember Mum’s voice, shrill and high, No! You can’t. They’re just children! Take me instead. Please. El and I holding on to each other and crying; hoping, praying that he would, the back of the cupboard rough against our clothes, our skin, as we pushed against it, feet scrabbling for purchase, for any way to keep hiding, to disappear.

In the thick, awful quiet, I hear the front door open. I get up fast, furious, desperate to do anything to escape all this truth at once like an avalanche, a terrible landslide, a towering wave – high and wide and freezing bright. I run through the hallway, wrench open the hallway door, see the card on the hessian mat with my name capitalised across it, and then I’m barging through the front door, throwing myself down the steps.

Marie freezes, her hand on the metal gate, her horror so great it manages to make her look ugly, childlike. She recovers more quickly than I do, slamming the gate shut and running across the road towards the Gingerbread Coop.

I don’t give myself time to reason, to stop, because that’s what I always do. Another truth. Marie’s already closing her door, but I ram into it, gritting my teeth and pushing. She cries out, the door gives way, and I stumble in.

She backs down a short hall and into the kitchen. Leans against a counter, breathing heavily. But when she looks up at me, her eyes are defiant. She glances at the big steel-handled knife in the block next to her. And then she looks back at me.

I should probably be afraid of her, but I’m not. ‘Why have you been leaving those cards?’

She presses her lips together. I make myself walk towards her.

‘Why have you been leaving those cards?’

Marie folds her arms. ‘Because I didn’t want Ross to hurt you. Either of you.’

She sighs, sits heavily down on a chair. The sadness that comes into her eyes infuriates me. ‘Sit down, Catriona,’ she says. ‘Sit down, and I’ll tell you.’

But I don’t. I’m done doing what people tell me to do.

‘D’accord.’ She sighs again. Squares her shoulders. ‘My name isn’t Marie Bernard. I’m not from Paris. In the nineties, I paid a lot of money to come here from the Democratic Republic of Congo.’ She looks at me. ‘I loved my country. Very much. Its motto is “Justice, Paix, Travail”. I worked very hard for my life here, and once I had it, I finally found peace. So all that was left was justice.’

‘Justice?’

‘I help people. Women.’ She stares down at her scarred hands. ‘Anna saw El’s bruises. We saw the changes in her character, her habits. The fear in her eyes. How much her husband always needed to be in control.’

‘And that – that – was enough to tell you Ross was abusing her? Do you realise how—’

‘Non.’ She pushes up the sleeves of her shirt, exposing crisscrossing scars that carry on past both elbows. Pulls wide its neck where the skin beneath her collarbone is mottled and raised like the burn on her face. ‘What I left behind in the Congo told me.’ Her gaze sharpens. ‘Tells me.’

‘He isn’t abusing me.’ But those sickening scars have doused my outrage.

She smiles. ‘That’s what she said at first too.’

I shake my head. ‘How many times have you done this?’

Her chin goes up. ‘Many.’

‘You terrorise the terrorised. That’s how you help?’

Marie’s smile turns pitying. I want to smack it off her face. ‘After a while, it’s all they understand. As much as I wish it wasn’t so.’

‘El never knew, did she? That it was you?’

Marie shifts in her chair, for the first time looks uncomfortable. ‘She was frightened of him.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘She was going to run, and I was going to help her. But then she changed her mind. Said she couldn’t. Wouldn’t tell me why.’

‘Marie. I don’t fucking believe you.’

Her mouth flattens and she folds her arms. ‘You saw his text. I just wanted her to be safe.’

‘It didn’t work, though, did it? Your genius plan. So why the hell did you think the same threats would work on me?’

She smiles again. It’s a bad smile, maybe even a mad smile. It pulls taut her scarred skin. Turns her eyes sly. ‘The cards weren’t for you.’

‘What?’

‘They were for him. I wanted Ross to know that someone knew. That he’d killed her. That he’d probably kill you.’

I remember Rafiq’s the cards never explicitly threatened El’s life – or yours. If anything, Ross was the target.

‘Do you know how insane that—’

‘Abuse fears only exposure.’ She shrugs. When she gets up and starts coming towards me, I back up the hall towards the open door.

‘Have you done anything else?’

‘Que veux-tu—’

‘Have you been following me? Watching me? Have you done anything, do you know anything – anything – else?’

The look she gives me is confused. ‘Non. What—’

‘I don’t believe you.’

Her expression clears. ‘I lied only about my name and where I came from. Never once have I lied to you about anything else.’

I recoil as she reaches towards me, and only barely resist slapping her hand away. ‘He is not abusing me.’

She drops her hands to her sides. ‘Yet.’

‘I’m sorry for whatever happened to you.’ My voice wavers, and I turn around, step back down onto the path. If I don’t get away from her, I know I’m going to say something I’ll regret. ‘But you’re the one who needs help, Marie. Leave me alone. Leave us alone. Or I’ll tell the police what you’ve done. And that’s not a threat. That’s a promise.’

I march back across the road and into the house, stopping only to pick up the card before slamming shut the front door. I can already see what’s written in bold black through the thin envelope.

GOOD LUCK

CHAPTER 23

I go into the kitchen and shove the card down to the bottom of the bin. I try to calm down, force myself to sit. I look at the bottle of vodka, at Ross’s note. Okay. Since I was facing things, I’d face this. I pour out two measures of vodka, drink one of them.

Logically, it doesn’t make sense. He loved her. Why would he hurt her? If El was having an affair, he could have just left her. Ross has a good job, more money than she did. He never wanted to live in this house, this mausoleum, anyway.

And if he was abusive and controlling—

I drain the last of the vodka as I suffer through a montage of Ross touching me and kissing me, the warm slide of his skin, the warm welcome in his eyes. The bruises I dismiss out of hand. They were sex. Good sex. Great sex. And while I don’t like to think of him having the same kind of sex with El, the fact is that people like what they like. It’s in his nature to be passionate. It’s just the way he is. The way he has always been. I think of his grief and then his fury when the Coastguard gave up on the search. His sobs and desperation. What am I going to do without her?

If he was abusive and controlling, why didn’t El just leave him? This time I’m rewarded with a flash of Grandpa’s grinning, snarling face, but I dismiss that too. El was always stronger than me. She didn’t forgive, she didn’t forget. If Ross was hurting her, she would have left him. And if Marie is right, if Vik is right, if Mouse is right, and Ross is exactly what they say he is, he would have killed her in passion, in anger, like any other violent husband. He wouldn’t have orchestrated some elaborate plot to sink her and her boat in the Firth of Forth. And how would – could – he have done that anyway? Rafiq confirmed that Ross was in London when El went missing. And when she left Granton Harbour she was alone. How could Ross, witnessed by no one, reach her, overpower her, sink her boat, and get back to shore, all while he was supposed to have been somewhere else? Apart from anything else, he can’t swim, is afraid of the water.

But.

There’s the Gumotex kayak in the shed. And someone who had orchestrated some elaborate plot to sink his wife and her boat in the Firth of Forth would say that he can’t swim, is afraid of the water. I think of that Presumption of Death application. Of Ross insisting he didn’t know who Marie was.

I think of forgetting Mouse. Forgetting all the bad that has happened in this house. The lengths Mouse is going to in order to make me remember. I need to email her again. I need to make her meet me this time, no matter what. Because I can’t trust what I believe or think I know any more.

I pour more vodka. Because it’s Ross himself who’s the biggest, reddest flag. When I ignore those old familiar stabs of jealousy every time I think about the HOT GRIEF-STRICKEN HUSBAND who screamed into the sea, I have to admit to myself that it’s pretty hard to reconcile him with the man who’s been in my bed for the past week, whispering into my ear, my skin, my heart, how much he wants me, needs me, loves me. Guilt, or even remorse, could probably look a lot like grief.

I put down the vodka. It hasn’t helped one bit. I tried to drown my sorrows. But the bastards learned how to swim. My head feels heavier, thicker, my body achier. I stand up, holding on to the table for balance.

For God’s sake, Catriona, why are you so useless? But I’m not useless. Or helpless. For weeks, I’ve been trying to look like El, think like El, be like El because I don’t want to be me. I know that. But it’s not the me that came back to this house that I’m scared of. It’s the me that lived in this house. The me that was always afraid. Of falling, of running, of flying. Of facing the truth.

So I go up the stairs, hanging on tight to the bannister. And I only hesitate outside the Kakadu Jungle for a moment. I don’t know when Ross is going to come back. I push open the door to our old bedroom. The biggest shock is that it doesn’t look the same. There are no wooden shutters, no rain-forest wallpaper, no golden yellow bedspread. Instead of the old oak armoire and dressing table, there’s an antique writing bureau and chair, a white chintz wardrobe. The room is magnolia, the carpet lush. This is the only room in the whole house that has been entirely erased and redrawn.

I go to the bureau and its many drawers, start rifling through them. I’ve no idea what I’m looking for, but all I find are empty notebooks and postcards, paper clips, business envelopes, dozens of pens.

I regret the vodka again when I turn too quickly, and the floor starts to list, enough that I have to grab hold of a bedpost to stay on my feet. My mind is sticky, too slow. I look at the double bed, blindsided suddenly by a far too vivid image of Ross and El together. When I glimpse the leather satchel leaning against the legs of a bedside table, I reach for it quickly, glad of the distraction as I try to open its stiff buckles. Inside, there are loose papers and a thick plastic binder. ‘Southwark University’ is printed along the length of its spine in gold lettering below a blue-and-red crest. Bingo.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY

THEME: PSYCHOACTIVE DRUGS: GOOD VS BAD MEDICINE;

THE EFFICACY OF THERAPIES VS SAFE RATIOS

APRIL 2ND, 9 A.M.–APRIL 3RD, 4 P.M., 2018

SOUTHWARK UNIVERSITY, ST JAMES ROAD, LONDON

I thumb through the conference timetable, extracts of papers to be presented, Ross’s name on the list of attendees. I remember his By the time I got back, she’d already been missing for at least five hours, and skip to the Contacts page. The first listed is the phone number and email for a Professor Catherine Ward, head of Pharmacy and Pharmacology.

I sit down on the bed, take out my phone, go online, create a new email address. When DI Kate Rafiq isn’t accepted as a username, I give her a middle initial of M. I’ve no idea how to spoof an email address, and I’m too keyed up and too drunk to try to find out. I’m just going to have to hope that Professor Catherine Ward doesn’t stop to wonder why a detective inspector from Police Scotland would be using Gmail. If – when – I get found out, I don’t care. If this breaks a law, I don’t care. I need to know. Something. Anything. My email is short: a follow-up to original enquiries seeking confirmation of Ross’s attendance and movements. As soon as I’ve sent it, I wish I hadn’t.

And then I start a new email to john.smith120594.

Mouse, I know El’s dead. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. Please meet me. Please.

I stand up and put the folder back, this time swaying only a little. I return to the landing. The house is still uncharacteristically quiet. The hairs on my forearms and the back of my neck prickle and itch against my skin as I look towards the dark mouth of that corridor between the Clown Café and the Princess Tower. Towards the matte-black door at its end. Bedroom 3. Bluebeard’s Room. The pull of it is like my childhood vertigo: the dizzying paralysis of waiting to fall. Wanting to fall. And when my phone suddenly starts vibrating against my leg, I cry out – high and long – fumble it out of my pocket and answer without looking, such is my sudden and absolute terror of being alone.

‘Cat! Thank God you’ve finally answered.’

‘What do you want, Vik?’ My voice is unsteady, but I’ve already begun to feel foolish.

‘I …’ There’s a pause. A long one. ‘I heard about El, and I—’

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Thank you. I—’

‘No. You don’t understand …’ The signal breaks up, hisses and roars. ‘… something I have to tell you … I didn’t know …’ His words are swallowed up by the nearing wail of a siren, the honk of a horn.

‘Vik, I can’t hear you. Where are you?’

‘Where are you?’

I stand inside that swathe of gold light from Westeryk Road, and turn in a lethargic, dizzy circle. ‘I’m upstairs.’

‘Cat, listen to …’ His voice cuts out, comes back louder. ‘… have to leave.’

‘Why?’ I’ve stopped moving, but the walls are still turning, turning.

‘… can’t tell you. I’m sorry. I’m so … but you have to believe me.’

‘Why?’ My stomach squeezes, and I wonder – with distant concern – if I might be about to throw up.

‘Cat …’ Some shouting; the roar of another passing car. Maybe bigger. A van. ‘… hear me? You have to get out of that house.’

And then he’s gone. And I’m alone with the silence. Alone with the glass globe that hangs from the ceiling rose, the closed doors, the gold light, that narrow dark corridor. Alone with the house.

I shake my head. My voice is steady, calm. ‘Where else would I go?’

It feels physical, the sudden wrench back into Mirrorland: less of a pull than a yank. Hard and sharp and real. And painful, because my throat is hoarse from screaming, and I’m on my knees in the dark, the storm tossing us from main deck to gun deck, roaring its rage, choking El’s breath.

No.

Grandpa was on his knees. He shoved me away hard enough that I banged my head on the deck and saw stars, but I could still see El’s bulging red face, his hands tight around her neck, the sweat running off his nose. I could still hear Mum screaming, Leave them alone! Hoarse now, too, because it was the night after the Clown Café and Bluebeard’s Room, it was the last night of Mirrorland. The last night of our first life.

And when I try to yank myself away, to yank myself back – Mum lets out a scream and moves through me like a ghost. She stands behind Grandpa, her good arm raised up over her head, in her hand the Satisfaction’s stern lantern. And when Grandpa turns, looks at her with a wink and a grin – Put it doon, lassie – she doesn’t. She brings that lantern down on the crown of his head instead. Again and again. Until the sound is no longer hard and short and white, but soft and long and copper-dark.

‘God.’

I’m on my hands and knees at the top of the stairs. My breath is hot and quick as if I’ve been running. Cold sweat slides down my spine.

When I hear the hallway door creak open, snick closed, I stand up too fast – the world spins and briefly staggers before righting itself again.

‘Cat?’ Ross shouts. ‘You up there?’

I swallow, reach for the bannister. I no longer feel drunk. I feel sick, feverish, and horribly sober. Horribly awake. The vertigo comes again, and I ignore it. I can’t let it belong to me. Any more than that sound. That wet, soft, long sound.

Ross is waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I step down into the hallway, and he moves forwards without warning, pulls me close. ‘Hey, Blondie.’ And when I have no choice but to let him in, to breathe him in, I feel all that heavy slowness, that brittle dread and uncertainty fall away. I hate myself for it, I’m afraid of myself for it, but it happens anyway.

He squeezes for a moment too tight, and then pulls back, his palm warm against my cheek. He’s been crying again, his eyes are bloodshot. His skin is damp. His hair has been tangled by the wind.

‘I’ve been walking,’ he says. ‘Just walking. Round and round. For hours.’

I swallow past the lump in my throat. Everything Marie and Vik said, everything I thought, suspected, tried to do my best to drown in vodka, all of it turns to dust when he’s standing in front of me, looking at me the way that no one else ever has. Even though he knows. He’s always known about everything that has happened in this house. And still, he looks at me in exactly the same way. The same good way.

I can’t believe he hurt El. The police don’t even believe it.

And I feel so much guilt and so much grief. Guilt at wanting him, having him, doubting him. Guilt at everything I’ve done in pursuit of all three. Grief for two children abused and terrorised until they couldn’t recognise it. For that melted, shiny, eaten thing under a blue surgical drape in Edinburgh City Mortuary. For the sister who used to hold my hand as we fell asleep; who always shared the same pain and the same nightmares, and the same wretched hope. For my poor, tortured, fucked-up Mum. On her knees next to Grandpa’s body. The cruel twist of her mouth, the black of her eyes, cold and calm and full of fury.

‘Are you okay?’ Ross says. He shakes his head. ‘Shit, that’s a stupid—’

‘It’s been a very bad day,’ I say. Because it has. When I think about sitting at the kitchen table and telling him about a lost tribe in South America, it feels like it happened weeks ago.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t …’ He blinks. ‘Was it – I mean, I know it was, but, I thought maybe …’ There’s hope in his eyes. A hope that could surely never be faked.

‘It was El. It was …’ I’ve reached out to grip hold of his forearms. I know I must be hurting him, but he doesn’t even wince. ‘She was—’

‘It’s okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ And the tears that run off his cheeks, his chin, are as real and as terrible as mine. I don’t know who grabs hold of who first. Which of us starts the kiss, which of us starts to pull at whose clothes, which of us demands and which of us yields. He pushes inside me as I lie on the stairs, and I look up at the high coved ceiling and the green-gold light as I let him, as I hold him, as I feel him, the stairs cold and hard against my skin and my bones.

And I come so hard that I scream. I forget.

Because where else would I go?

He’s all I have left.

CHAPTER 24

I speed-walk past Colquhoun’s, but before I’m even a few yards beyond it, I hear the door bang open and Anna’s ‘Wait!’

I stop, turn around. Though I don’t want to.

Anna is already crying; big ugly sobs that get in the way of what she’s trying to say. ‘It’s so terrible. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s dead. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

When she pulls me into a fierce hug, I hug her back in the hope that will be enough. I can’t deal with other people right now – not their sympathy, their grief, their need. Finally, she lets me go, and I step back. She sniffs hard, takes two big breaths as she wipes her cheeks. Smears a long black line of mascara from her left eye to her temple.

‘When I heard yesterday, I couldn’t even think,’ she says, lowering her voice and fixing me with the hard stare I better recognise. ‘But now … now I know that I have to go to the police.’

‘Anna—’

‘No, listen. I do. I have to tell them that she was scared. I have to tell them about the bruises. Marie said El wanted to leave Ross.’ She raises her palms when I start to interrupt. ‘And that’s when husbands murder their wives, isn’t it? When they’re about to—’

‘Anna! I can’t deal with—’

She grabs me hard by the elbows. ‘But you have to! I should have pressed her more, should have helped her more.’ Her grip tightens. ‘She’d want me to help you, Cat. You need to get away. You need to—’

I step backwards, dig my nails into her fingers until she lets go.

‘You do what you have to, Anna,’ I say. My voice is unsteady. My legs tingle with the panicky urge to just start running. Instead, I turn around and make myself walk away. ‘I can’t talk now.’

And I ignore her shouts and that urge to run, until both have gone.

The Links is completely deserted. But here, I feel eyes on me; my skin crawls with the familiar certainty of being followed, examined. I turn back once, look around the flat, empty parkland. No Anna. No one at all.

I pull up my hood and keep going. Past the same trees fighting the same bitter wind as on that freezing dawn morning all those years ago: sycamores and elms hiding tormented ghosts swollen black with plague. Past the same brownstone tenements and terraces where the murderers of children lived and lurked. And watched.

All those obstacles, those booby traps Grandpa laid so that we would never want to leave 36 Westeryk Road. He’d overegged it, I suppose, as abusers do; by the time we’d crossed over the Links, we were as tired of being afraid as we were of running. And we knew by then that he was a liar. 36 Westeryk Road was just as frightening, as dangerous, as anywhere else. But we loved him still, even against all of that fear and lying, the hot copper stink of blood on our skin. Because then, as now, it was still so easy to separate Grandpa from Bluebeard. So necessary. Far harder and more painful to push them together, to accept that the biggest nightmare from my childhood was once my very favourite person after El. There’s grief for that, too, now as then – as if I’ve lost him twice. As if he never existed at all.

I glance back towards the road before turning onto Lochinvar Drive and heading down towards the yacht club. I have to squeeze around a few more boats on raised blocks to get close to the water. The wind coming off the Forth is as cold as ever, but it’s low; the jostle and rattle of the moored yachts seems muted, faraway. I stand still at last. Breathe in, breathe out.

I look down at the stone slip and then up beyond Granton’s breakwater wall, northeast towards the small squat islet of Inchkeith, the yellow smudge of its lighthouse barely visible. The dark water beyond it. The deepwater channel. I look and I look, and I’m nearly glad when the clouds drop lower over Burntisland, and the rain starts bucketing down, hard and fast enough to drum at my aching skull and obscure my view.

My phone beeps. It’s a text from Ross.

Have to check in with work, then I’ll pick up something for dinner. Any requests? x

I don’t reply. Even though there’s nothing wrong with what he’s said. He has a job. We have to eat. We haven’t died. Which doesn’t stop me flinching when the phone beeps again.

18 April 2018 at 14:55

Inbox

john.smith120594@gmail.com

Re: HE KNOWS

To: Me

YOU’RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME.

REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED ON THE 4TH OF SEPTEMBER.

THEN YOU’LL UNDERSTAND.

YOU’LL KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.

Sent from my iPhone

I won’t know. I don’t know. I’ve remembered everything – every last horrible fucking thing – and I still haven’t a clue what it is I’m supposed to understand. To do.

No more riddles, Mouse. This isn’t a game. This isn’t Mirrorland. Tell me what you know. Meet me. Tell me. Or leave me alone.

I send my reply, turn back for the road. The rain is getting worse. The sky has become so dark it’s as if dusk has arrived. I struggle to negotiate my way around the boats in the yard. Their hulls are jagged with rust and barnacles. They smell of the sea, of the things that lived and died in it. I shiver. And when I hear something too close behind me, I whirl around, the knuckles of my hand smacking loudly against the nearest boat. I go down hard and fast, dizzy and sliding against the slick concrete, ending up spread-eagled on my back. I turn my head, straining to hear anything over the rain – and then, through that narrow space under the raised hull, I see boots. Leather with steel-cap toes. And above them, jeans.

I scramble backwards, struggling for purchase on the slick ground. By the time I manage to get back onto my feet, I’m breathing too hard, too loud. But I don’t run. I want to run – I always want to run – but instead, I inch around the boat, and then launch myself into its black shadow. And when I come up against movement, solidity, I punch and I kick and I shout. And I scream.

Hands reach for me, and I scratch at them, punch them away. A greater weight pushes against me, but it isn’t as angry, as desperate, as prepared to fight dirty. I stab with my nails, kick up my knee again and again and again.

‘Stop! Stop.’

Vik lurches into the little remaining light, holding up his palms.

‘You!’ I shout, and the loud, outraged fury in my voice – the authority – hides the relief.

‘Cat, please. Stop!’ The last he shouts as I come towards him again. He’s soaked to the skin, his jacket plastered against his torso, rain dripping into his eyes and off his chin. He looks wretched.

I stop. It takes about all the energy I have left, but I do. We stand staring at each other in the shadows and the rain, both breathing hard and too fast.

‘How long have you been following me?’

‘Cat, I—’

‘How long, Vik?’ I shout. Because now that all the rage inside me has finally escaped, not even the promise of an explanation – of any possible end to all this not knowing – is enough to call it back.

He looks down at the ground. ‘Since you came back from America.’

‘How the fuck did you know I was back?’ I ask – before it occurs to me that the question I should be asking is Why? And then a sudden suspicion turns me in a new direction. ‘Do you know Mouse? Is she – are you—’

But although Vik is already shaking his head no, the weariness in it, his lack of confusion as to who Mouse is, only makes my suspicion more certain. ‘You know her. You know her! You’re both—’

‘Cat. I need to—’

‘Wait. Is Marie in on whatever the hell this is too? Is that what your bloody phone call yesterday was about? You have to get out of that house. Are all of you—’

Vik steps forwards. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

‘Then tell me.’

I can hear him swallow, even over the hammering rain. And then he looks at me without blinking. ‘I’m Mouse.’

‘What?’

His gaze slides away. ‘I’m sorry. I’m Mouse. At least, I’ve been pretending to be her. I’m the one who’s been sending you those emails.’

I step back, shake my head. ‘I don’t – I don’t understand. Why?’

‘Because El asked me to,’ he says.

‘Show me your phone.’ I’m still shaking my head. I can’t seem to stop. ‘Show me your phone, Vik. Now.’

He reaches into his jeans pocket, brings out an iPhone, and keys in its passcode before reluctantly handing it over.

I open his inbox with trembling fingers, smearing rain across the screen. And right at the top:

Cat Morgan

No more riddles, Mouse. This isn’t a game. This isn’t Mirrorland.

‘Oh, God.’

He lets out a long sigh. ‘She said it was to keep you safe. She said if something happened to her, you’d come back and … when I agreed, I thought she was being paranoid, I didn’t believe anything would happen. I knew she was scared of Ross, but I never thought …’ He stops, closes his eyes. ‘And when she went missing, I felt like – I felt like I had to do what she’d asked. And now – now – she’s dead, and I—’

‘Are you trying to tell me that in the event of El’s death – in the event of her being murdered by the big bad brute of a husband she just couldn’t bring herself to leave – she asked you to start stalking and threatening me? To keep me safe. From him. Is that what you’re saying?’ It’s better to stay angry. Better not to think or feel anything else.

‘I never threatened you.’

‘Were you having an affair?’ Because I can’t think of any other reason on earth why he would do any of this.

‘I loved her.’ And there is such affection, such adoration in his eyes that I want to punch him again.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘I already told you, no. Nothing ever happened.’

‘What exactly did she ask you to do?’

‘To follow you, make sure you were okay. To email you messages that she’d already sent me before she … disappeared. To send them in a specific order at specific times.’ He clears his throat. ‘To answer any of your questions with the same replies. That El was dead. That I was Mouse. That I couldn’t meet you. That you had to remember what happened on the fourth of September. I didn’t – don’t – know what any of it means. I promise you.’

‘Right. So you don’t know what she wanted me to remember? What the fuck she wanted me to do?’

He shakes his head, miserable again. ‘She just kept on saying it was about the end of your first life. She kept saying, He knows.’

A chill works its way down my spine, but I refuse to feel it. I hear the rattle of the Clown Café door, the dress-up cupboard. The rusty scream of the Satisfaction’s lantern. A sound no longer hard and short and white, but soft and long and copper-dark.

‘Why?’

Vik blinks at me. ‘Why what?’

‘Why did he kill her?’

‘Because she wanted to leave. She’d planned to leave.’

‘Then why didn’t she just leave? Why didn’t she go to the police?’

‘I don’t know. I wish she had.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you go to the police?’

‘I did! After she went missing, I phoned them. Told them about her being scared of him, being scared he was going to do something to her. I told them—’

‘No. The police haven’t mentioned you, Vik. I only know you exist because apparently you’ve been following me around for two weeks!’

‘I didn’t give them my name. I didn’t want—’

‘What?’ I spread my hands wide across the space between us. ‘To be involved?’

‘You don’t understand. El made me promise not to contact the police at all. She said she was afraid Ross might come after me. I couldn’t have given a shit about that, but I was afraid that … I’m engaged. And I—’

‘You’re engaged.’

He looks at me, and not even the defiant square of his shoulders or clench of his jaw can hide the shame in his eyes. ‘El made me promise, Cat.’

‘Right.’ I can’t look at him any more; I look at the rusty wet hull, its peeling paint instead. ‘What about Mouse? Does she know about all of this? Is she involved?’

‘I don’t even know who she is,’ Vik says, subdued now. ‘El said that pretending to be her would help you remember.’

‘What about Marie? D’you know her?’

‘No. I swear.’

‘Have you been in the house?’ And I’m not only thinking of the diary pages, the lantern, the pirate code taped to Mirrorland’s ceiling, but the kayak in the shed, the whispers in my ear, the feeling that I am never alone inside 36 Westeryk Road.

‘Of course not. What—’

‘Did you leave pink gerberas at Mum’s grave?’

‘Yes. El—’

‘Asked you to.’ When he only looks more miserable, my flagging anger revives. ‘Just over a week ago, you stood here and comforted me. You made me feel better. I liked you. You cried.’

‘Cat, I—’

‘And when I told you that I didn’t think El was dead because she’d been sending me emails, you stood there shaking your head and didn’t say a word. Not a fucking word! And now you expect me to believe a single thing you say?’

‘Don’t you get it?’ He looks frustrated now, as if he suspects he’s failing. ‘She knew this would happen – all of it! She knew he’d kill her, and he did. She knew you’d come back, and you did. She knew what questions you’d ask. She knew the police would think it was an accident.’ He looks at me. ‘I’m telling you the truth, Cat. You have to believe me.’

But I don’t. Vik loved El, I can see that. I can see, too, that his devastation is just as real, and maybe his conviction, but I can see something else too. In his eyes, his body language. I’m good at pretending. Better than Vik is. And I can recognise another liar with my eyes closed. This isn’t just guilt or some kind of warped obligation. He wanted to follow me, to spy on me, because then El isn’t dead. She’s still in the messages he sends, and she’s in me – her eyes, her face, her voice; that mirror I always carry under my arm. I’m his last remaining link to her.

How? How is it possible that she can still be manipulating all of us like this? Me, Vik, Ross. The police. And without any of us having the first clue why.

‘I’m going to the police today,’ Vik says, staring down at his boots. ‘Make a proper statement this time, tell them everything El told me. I should never have—’

‘Are there any more?’

‘What?’

‘Are there any more messages that you haven’t sent me yet?’

‘No.’

‘Vik.’

His shoulders sag. ‘One more, that’s all.’

‘Show me.’

Vik reaches for his phone. And for the first time since confronting and punching him in the chest, I can feel the rain streaming down my face, running off my nose and chin and fingers, drumming hard against my skull. I can hear it: tinny and quick against metal masts and frames, duller and slower against concrete, tarmac, wood. Loudest of all against the firth: deep and sharp and resonant, like an old memory, a forgotten fear, a yank – hard and sharp and real.

‘Here,’ he says, handing the phone back, and when I take it, I stare at him long enough that he has to meet my gaze.

‘Don’t go to the police yet, Vik. Not yet. If needs be, we’ll go together. But I need you to let me do this first. You owe me that.’

When he nods, slow and uncertain, I take a long, deep breath. Okay, El. One more, that’s all. And then we’re done.

Drafts

john.smith120594@gmail.com

Re: HE KNOWS

To: Cat Morgan

CLUE 11. THE ONLY PLACE OUTSIDE MIRRORLAND WHERE YOU WERE EVER RED INSTEAD OF WHITE.

Sent from my iPhone

CHAPTER 25

I stand on the paving in the back garden. I’m soaked to the skin. But my head no longer pounds or pulses. I feel more clear and awake than I have in a long time. I pace in circles a few times before realising what I’m doing: kicking up silver and grey chuckies, pulling up old waxy fishing dungarees. Marching around the exercise yard behind El’s Andy Dufresne. The only time I was Red instead of White.

I go to the first ugly concrete plinth, look inside its urn. Empty. When I try to shift it, it doesn’t budge. The second is empty, too, but it moves when I push – enough that I have to grab hold of it before it topples to the ground. Underneath, there’s an envelope inside a ziplocked freezer bag. I pick it up, push the urn back into place, and climb the stairs to the scullery. In the kitchen, I pour myself a vodka I probably shouldn’t have and sit at the table. I should go to the Clown Café, in case Ross comes back, but I can’t wait even the length of time it would take me to climb the stairs. Because of the word written across the envelope in El’s heavy scrawl.

SNOW-WHITE

I take it out of the bag, rip the envelope open. It’s only one piece of paper: narrow-lined and thin.

Dear Cat,

I’ll say it and then it’s said. Maybe I should start with I’m sorry. Or How are you? Or What has your life been like for the past twelve years? But you have to still know me well enough that what’s first on my mind is what’s last too. So I have to just say it. And then it’s said.

He’s going to kill me. If you’re reading this, he already has. I’m already dead.

If you’re thinking good riddance, I guess I can’t blame you. If you’re thinking serves you right, I guess I deserve that too. I hated you once. I don’t blame you for hating me back. And if you’re thinking liar, then all I have is this letter to convince you I’m telling the truth.

It started out as love – or what I thought love was. You know what he was like, you can’t have forgotten that. The intensity of it – of him – how good it could feel when he turned his light onto you. And then all that passion and angst became suffocation, jealousy, control. All men are pirates, remember? Good Prince Charmings don’t exist. He made me feel so small. I’d thank him for looking after me. I’d thank him for his scorn and then his rage. The first time he hit me, he cried for a week. The second, less than a day. By the third, I was the one saying sorry to him. I used to wonder what it was he’d seen in me, but now I think I know. He knew what Bluebeard had done to me. He knew I was weaker than you. He knew I would be a goner for him from the start.

A few years after we were married, he heard about the auction for the house. Our house. I begged him not to, but he bought it anyway. Anything to lock me up inside this prison again. He had me describe every detail of every room. And everything bought, everything put back in place, made my prison smaller, more secure.

You loved Grandpa the most. You loved Mum’s stories the most. Your imagination was always better than mine – when you didn’t want something to be true, you just pretended it hadn’t happened. I think that’s why you forgot the end of our first life, and why you never tried to remember it. I used to think it was for the best.

I could just tell you, right here, what happened the night Grandpa and Mum died. I could tell you and I could promise that it’s the truth, and maybe you’d believe it, maybe you’d even remember it. But I don’t think you would. It doesn’t take a psychologist to know that all those unconscious fantasies you’ve created – embedded – are so much stronger than what they’ve repressed. And the only way I can think of to destroy all of them is to give you back what was real, piece by piece, clue by clue. Until you’re forced to remember all of the truth for yourself. Because it’s the only way you’ll believe it.

I know you’ll be angry about the treasure hunt. I hid the diary pages and wrote the clues. And a friend – a good friend, who I know, after I’m gone, will respect my wishes – is emailing them to you. I’m sorry for the subterfuge. I’m sorry I had him pretend to be Mouse. She turned up to the house last year out of the blue. And instead of being her friend, instead of being happy that she was back, I saw only how mad it would make Ross, how badly he’d take it out on me. Because I’m a coward. And maybe it was cowardly to pretend to be Mouse in the emails too, but I thought it would help. I thought you wouldn’t listen to me, but you might listen to her. I’m sorry if the emails or my diary have frightened you. But I guess I want you to be frightened. I want you to remember what happened the night Mum and Grandpa died. I want you to remember what Ross did.

I’ve left something for you in the Silver Cross. That and this letter are all I’ve got left to give you. You have to believe them. You have to believe me. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I know it won’t look like murder. Because he was born to be a pirate.

I think about you all the time. Please don’t think I don’t. When you left, I cried every day, every night, for weeks. And he’d hold me and tell me it was okay. It was okay because at least we had each other. It suits him for you and me to be apart. It always has. I wanted to reach out to you so many times. But I didn’t. Because I knew you were better off without us. Because I knew he’d take away what freedoms he’d allowed me to have if I did. I have my painting, some voluntary work, some friends. I have my boat. He agreed to buy it before he realised that it would be my best escape from him. That’s why I called it ‘The Redemption’. If you’ve found this, then you must remember. How much I loved that story. Any escape is better than none.

I can’t ask you to trust me, because I know you don’t. I can’t ask you to believe me, because I know you won’t. I regret every day what I did to us. I should never have given him control. Not in our first life, and certainly never in our second. Remember HE KNOWS. Remember THE PLAN. The Silver Cross. X MARKS THE SPOT. Remember them and you’ll remember the rest. You’ll know the truth. You’ll know him. You’ll believe me. You’ll be safe.

I’m sorry.

All my love,

Rose-red x

I read the letter again. And again. Run my fingers over El’s pen strokes. It’s her handwriting, her voice, I know it, I know her, but at the same time it feels false. Too careful, too scripted. If you’re reading this I’m already dead; El would once have rolled her eyes in dismissive scorn at something like that. Because surely what she’s saying is madness. I try to imagine Ross hitting her, and I can’t. It’s like trying to imagine him hitting me. It can’t be true.

But it was Ross who told me El had wanted to come back here, had wanted the house to look exactly the same as it always had. And I realise now how ridiculous that sounds. How false. Why would she want to come back here to our prison of twelve years? To this place of death and dread and darkness?

But. If I believe that El really was afraid of Ross and is only trying to protect me, why wouldn’t she have told me what she thought I’d forgotten – whatever it is that he’s supposed to have done? Because everything that I repressed I now remember. Those memories are not false. They can’t be. I remember everything that happened in our first life, including the night Mum ended it by smashing Grandpa’s skull with the Satisfaction’s stern lantern. What else is there?

My head pounds. Silver Cross. I know I should know what that is – I know I know what that is – but I can’t think. I can’t remember.

I finish the vodka. Stand up. Because El was right about one thing at least. A thing that makes me feel cold and afraid and uncertain. She thought she was going to die. And now she’s dead.

I stand at the entrance to that narrow corridor leading to Bedroom 3, fumbling for a light switch I can’t find. I force myself to walk into the darkness, arms outstretched. Cringe when my fingers hit against the panels of the door at the corridor’s end. Hesitate inside the memory of Don’t go in! We can’t ever go in! This is the only room I’ve never been inside, not even as a child. Mum made sure of that; made sure that El and I were so afraid of it we’d pass by the corridor without ever looking. I think of her screams. The echo of this door’s slam. Grandpa was afraid of it too – sometimes I saw him standing inside the doorway to the Donkshop, staring across the landing at this corridor, and all of him would be shaking, his mouth slack, eyes blank. Would El have hidden something in Bluebeard’s Room? Would she have come in here? I don’t know. But I know I have to look.

When I touch the handle, I realise I’m muttering hard and fast under my breath, ‘He only comes out at night, he only comes out at night.’ I make myself stop. All of Bluebeard’s wives ended up hanging on hooks rusted red with blood, except for the last. And what saved her was ignoring her fear long enough to look, to unlock the only door he told her never to open. And so I turn that handle. Push open that dusty dark door. And go inside.

Bluebeard’s Room has no windows. I knew this on some level because its exterior wall is Mirrorland’s alleyway, but still, it catches me unawares. The darkness. I find the light switch. Turn it on before I venture inside.

The air feels coldly heavy, smells of old paint. In one corner is a battered leather armchair, a standard lamp. Everything else is hidden under draw sheets. I look at every wall, every shadow, as if I still expect to see the corpses of Bluebeard’s wives. Or hear Mum’s shrieks echoing and thrashing their way through the floorboards to the pantry and cupboard and ocean below.

Focus.

I step farther into the room, start pulling off sheets, coughing out dust. Under the second sheet is a big wooden box. I stop. My heart stutters. Not a box. Our treasure chest on the Satisfaction. Bound with bands of black leather and a padlock gold with rust.

I kneel. The padlock hangs open. I take hold of the lid and lift it up, cringing at the loud squeak of its hinges.

It’s full of old sheets. I start taking them out, piling them on the floor. When my fingers hit against something hard, I instantly snatch them back.

Come on.

I reach back in, take out the last sheet.

There are two objects. One large, one small. The large: a blue-handled drill with a hollow cylinder attached. The small: a round steel handle at one end, a black rubber screw plug at the other.

I rock back on my heels. Press my clammy fingers to my face. El didn’t put these things here. She didn’t put them in this awful room for me to find. Because I know instinctively what they are.

I think of Logan’s face, the careful tone of his voice. We found evidence it was scuttled. Deliberately sunk.

I look back down at the hole saw. The transom drain plug.

They’re Treasure Trophies.

The stairs are in darkness. The only light comes from the red milky Victorian lamp in the hallway. I feel my way down the staircase, the bannister cold under my palm. The house continues to sleep, loud and old; its clanking, creaking veins like a hidden map of black roads and copper wires, like secrets locked behind doors and inside cupboards, oceans, midnight worlds of fire and fury and fun.

I pass the kitchen, look at my face in the mirror above the telephone table. I open the door to the drawing room. Finally let go of my breath.

The room is warm, golden. The big floor-to-ceiling curtains have been closed against the rain and the night, and the fire is feeding noisily on a pile of shaved logs, dancing against the bottle-green tiles. There are clusters of tealights on side tables and along the length of the Poirot, reflecting gold and silver in mirrors and polished wood, so that it looks like every Christmas Eve. All that’s missing is the eight-foot Fraser fir, twinkling white and shedding its needles, making the whole room smell like a winter forest.

Unconscious fantasies. I think of the words until they blur inside my head. Until all I can see is Bluebeard chasing us with his deadlight. His blood coughing out of his ruined skull, seeping black into the Satisfaction’s gun deck.

Ross gets up from the chesterfield, smiles cautiously.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes.’

His eyes dart quick around the room. ‘Say if this is too much.’

‘No. No, it’s fine.’ But I can’t seem to come any farther into the room. I can’t seem to make myself do anything.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ The deep frown line between Ross’s brows is back. I want to press the pad of my thumb against it, smooth it flat.

‘Yes.’ I make myself move towards the couch, towards him.

‘Sit, please,’ he says, briefly reaching out to squeeze my cold hand before moving past me to the bar.

I sit. Watch him. The silhouette of his narrow waist and broad shoulders in the flickering, twinkling light, the thick curl of his hair against his neck. My fingers move to the pocket of my jeans, where El’s letter sits inside its ziplocked bag. Its presence both comforts and terrifies me. I see the sherries sitting on the turquoise tiles of the Poirot. Gold inside carved crystal. Two instead of four. El really did tell him everything.

‘Aperitif,’ Ross says, setting them down on a candlelit coffee table, reminding me of that special romantic occasion corner in the Italian restaurant. When he sits next to me, I can feel the heat of him against my thigh. I can smell the piney, musky familiarity of him. I can hear my heartbeat, heavy and too loud.

‘Cheers,’ he says and solemnly enough that I finally drop my frozen smile. The low, long ringing of our glasses outlives my sherry. I feel its wonderful burn all the way to my stomach. I should ask him about his day, I know. What happened when he went into work. How he’s feeling, coping. I’m doing a very poor impression of normal. Ross thinks so too. He reaches for my chilly fingers, wraps them inside his own.

‘It’ll be okay, Cat,’ he whispers. ‘At least we have each other.’

And I close my eyes against the warm press of his lips against my temple.

CHAPTER 26

I sit at the kitchen table, while Ross stands in front of Mum’s Kitchener. The rain batters against the window; the wind howls, trapped inside the garden’s high stone walls. The kitchen is hot and wet, yet still somehow cold. I’m shivering.

I pick up the Shiraz that Ross poured for me. Put it back down without drinking. The smell of minced beef turns my stomach. My head aches, feels thick and boggy, and I’m too jumpy, too nervy. Every few minutes, my heart skips one beat and then overcompensates with too many. Maybe it’s grief, shock: too many ground-shifting tremors in too short a space of time. El dying. Marie’s confession. Vik’s ‘Mouse’. El’s letter. Everything that’s ever happened in this house. I need to ask Ross about what I found in Bluebeard’s Room. I need to ask him about Marie and that text. About what Vik said. And I really need to ask him about everything that El has accused him of. But I can’t.

Ross sets a lid over the chilli pot and comes back to the table, sits close enough to me that I can see those silver flecks inside his irises.

‘There’s something I need to talk to you about. Jesus, you’re freezing.’

I look down at my hands inside his. I hadn’t even felt him take them.

‘I’m okay,’ I say, but he starts to rub my fingers, blows warm breath against my palms.

‘I know it probably isn’t the right time to say this, but … I’m going to sell up.’

‘What?’

‘As soon as I can, I mean.’ His voice is gentle, like I’m a skittish horse. ‘It’ll be a while. El didn’t have a will, and then there’s all that registering-the-death stuff.’ When I try to take back my hands, he only holds them tighter. I wonder how he knows that El didn’t have a will. ‘I know how this all sounds, Cat. I know how hard it is. I know …’ He falters, bites down on his lip.

‘It’s okay.’ It’s ridiculous how much I still want – need – to comfort him. Smooth away that line between his eyes, rub my thumbs against his skin, its dark, tired shadows.

‘Stay with me.’

‘What?’

He stares at me so closely, so minutely, I can’t bring myself to even blink. ‘Stay with me. Be with me. I know it’s not the right time for this either, but I love you, Cat. Not the same way that I loved El. Different, it’s different.’ He closes his eyes as if he’s in pain. ‘Better.’

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to feel.

‘I know we’ll be judged. But, Cat, I’ll put up with it if you will. We can stay here until the house is sold. Or we can leave, go somewhere, anywhere else. It’s up to you. Everything is up to you. I love you. I need you.’ He lets go of my hands to cup my face, stroke my cheek. His fingers are shaking, his eyes are shining. ‘And El loved us both. She’d want us to be happy.’

I don’t know if the drain plug is the drain plug. And the hole saw could just be a hole saw. I need to go to Logan and Rafiq. Show them everything. Let them run traces, forensic tests. Because it’s Ross. And neither my shame nor my grief can erase the memory of El’s cleverness, her sometimes casual cruelty. She was right: I don’t trust her. I haven’t trusted her for a very long time. She is still pulling our strings. The letter could be just another lie. Like the emails from ‘Mouse’.

Because someone has lied to me. They can’t both be telling the truth. Some large part of my life, its conviction, is false. A parallel universe where a person I love is a monster. Where a mirror’s reflection lies. I remember El’s She thinks if she pretends something hasn’t happened then it hasn’t happened. I don’t want that to be true any more. I’m confused, uncertain. Most of all, I’m scared. Because when I was twelve, I ran away from Mum and Grandpa and this house. And when I was nineteen, I ran away from El and Ross and my heartbreak. But I’m not running away this time. I’m not going anywhere until I find out the truth.

I close my eyes, and instantly the room is colder, brighter. I smell overcooked eggs and burnt toast. Hear the frenzied panic of flapping wings. Don’t slitter, Catriona. Mum’s hunched back, arm trapped against her torso inside a tea-towel sling, a fist-sized bald spot close to her crown, the raw pink nakedness of it. The horror in Grandpa’s loud and familiar laugh. Ye’re bein’ a stander, lassie. Sit the shit doon. Silvery, shivery dread. Something coming closer. Something nearly here.

I open my eyes. Ross is looking at me with a mixture of concern and impatience.

‘Where did you go?’

I shake my head, pick up the wine. Swallow, and then shudder. ‘I’ve been thinking about the past. About this house. About Grandpa.’

Ross sits up straighter.

‘About what he used to do. The drinking, the violence.’

‘There’s no point dwelling on the past. It’s not important any more.’ His fingers trace my cheekbones, and his smile is tentative. ‘That’s why we need to sell up, leave. It’s why we—’

‘But I’d boxed it all away, Ross! So much of it. What happened here. What happened to us. Don’t you think that’s important?’

‘Your fucking grandpa was decades ago, Cat! This is important.’ He takes hold of my hands again. ‘We are important. I don’t see why—’

I pull away and stand up. My chair screeches against the tiled floor, its back legs wobbling, sliding, until Ross lunges towards me to catch it. I cringe, and far too obviously – the incredulous hurt that flashes across his face makes me look away.

‘Because what if I’m wrong? What if there’s something else – something worse – and I can’t remember it? What if I’ve pretended it didn’t happen?’ I’m shaking, still standing, but little of the fog in my head has lifted. Ross looks confused, angry. But of course, he can’t understand, because I’m talking about fantasy versus the truth. The answers to the terrible questions that I still can’t bring myself to ask him.

But it has to be tonight.

El’s bloodshot eyes. Her terrible smile behind the Berlin Wall. It has to be tonight.

Ross is shaking me, his fingers squeezed tight around my upper arms.

‘Cat! Can you hear me? Are you okay?’

‘Stop! I’m okay. I’m okay.’

He doesn’t let me go. ‘Jesus, are you sure? I thought you were having a fit or something.’

Maybe I should stop. Cram everything I’ve kept packed away for so long back inside that box. Except that there’s just too much of it. I can see now that choosing not to face anything that scares you – including the worst of your past – is not normal, and it strikes me as even stranger that I haven’t thought so until now.

Mum pulling out the black rucksack from under my bed, tossing out-of-date tins of food onto the floor. For God’s sake, Catriona, why are you so useless? This is important! Rapping her knuckles on the flat of our desk, stoking that ever-present hum of dread, of doom. Look, listen. Learn. The pantry walls of orange and yellow daffodils, and the high steady sound of her reading voice. A Tale of Two Cities, Papillon, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Count of Monte Cristo, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Don’t be like me. Never be too afraid to fly.

‘Oh my God.’ I sit down with a thump. I press my hand against my mouth. When I pick up the wine, my fingers tremble so much I can’t drink. My stomach clenches.

‘Cat, what the hell’s going on? Should I call someone?’

Not Survival Packs. Not English lessons. Not fairy stories or make-believe. Paranoia, cruelty, or delusion. Not even just trying to survive living in the same house as a monster.

Ross stares at me. ‘What?’

All of it the same thing. The same PLAN. It has to be tonight. That last night of our first life. That last stripe of gold light across the hallway carpet, that last clunk and turn of the deadlock on Friday. Silence, darkness, and then running down the stairs, rucksacks rattling, dragging at our shoulders. Mum buttoning up our coats over our jumpers, face pinched and raw and alive, her left cheek dark and swollen, eye little more than a black-purple slit. Holding us too tight with her only working arm. Are you ready?

‘God.’ My voice is flat. Something halfway between hope and horror is trying to claw its way up my throat towards it. We never ran away from this house. We never ran away from what had happened in this house. We were always supposed to be going. That had been THE PLAN. ‘It was about escape. It was always about escape.’

‘Cat—’

I look at Ross. The hairs along both of his forearms are standing up straight, like his spine; it’s as if his whole body is at attention. ‘That was it, wasn’t it? The night they died? September the fourth? We were escaping. El and I. And you and Mum knew. You and Mum were helping. That was THE PLAN. Wasn’t it? For us to escape him. Here. For us never to come back.’

Ross sags. Turns his hands palm upwards to curl his fingers around my wrists. ‘Of course it was.’

I hear a sound. Above the batter of the rain and the rattle of the wind. Eerie, long and low, like the hoot of an owl.

We stood in this kitchen, just a few feet from this table, moonlight streaming across the floor. Uncertain, impatient, frazzled by nerves, dazzled by excitement, terrified by Mum’s furious urgency. Even then we didn’t know what was happening. Any of it. We had no concept at all of what escape meant.

An owl hoot. A heartbeat in which I looked at El and she looked at me. Mum’s frown. That slow slide of suspicion reserved only for us.

‘Someone’s helping us,’ El said.

Someone we can trust, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Because Mum believed handsome Prince Charmings were sly. Never ever to be trusted. Because Ross had always been our secret from the very start.

‘The owl hoot means Danger, Mum! It means Run!’

And so we did.

‘You were the lookout,’ I say.

Ross has gone pale. He glances out at the black wet night – so different from the eerie moon-bright calm of September the 4th, 1998 – and then he stands up. His shoulders are rigid. I can see the veins in his neck, the tic inside his jaw. He won’t look at me at all.

‘I tell you that I love you. That I want to live with you, be with you. I expected you to want to talk about El. And all you actually want to talk about is this house and your fucking loony grandpa.’ He marches towards the door. ‘I’m going upstairs. When I come back, we’re going to have a normal fucking conversation, all right?’

And then he’s gone. His footsteps stomping their way up the stairs.

A rumble of thunder makes me jump. The window frame rattles, lifts, and thumps back down. My thigh starts to vibrate, and when I realise it’s my phone, my shaking fingers struggle to reach it. By the time I do, the caller has hung up. I don’t recognise the number, but there’s a text. Phone me when you get this. Rafiq. And when I listen to the voicemail, she says exactly the same thing, but the tense, terse order of it alarms me. She sounds like a DI Kate Rafiq I haven’t met yet. She sounds worried. Maybe even afraid.

I should call her back. But I feel so close to the edge of something. And I’ve already looked down. I want to fall. It has to be tonight.

There’s an unread email in my inbox. From ProfessorCatherine Ward@southwarkuni.com. The kitchen light flickers as it downloads, and I stare at the buffering symbol, trying to ignore my hammering heart, my slow muzzy thoughts.

Dear DI Kate Rafiq,

Many thanks for your email. I’ve only just returned from a three-week Arctic cruise, but when I heard about your investigation, I had already resolved to contact you even before receiving your email. My colleagues (through no fault of their own, I hasten to add) were incorrect when they told you that Dr Ross MacAuley did not leave the conference until it finished at 4 p.m. on April 3rd. He did, in fact, leave on the evening of the 2nd. Specifically, at 5:45 p.m.

I am certain of the time because my Bergen flight had been brought forward due to predicted bad weather – I had only a few hours’ notice to leave the university, pack, and get to Gatwick. I saw Dr MacAuley loading his suitcase into his car and driving out of the car park exit. I know Dr MacAuley by sight; last year, he presented a paper at the BPS Symposium held in Glasgow.

Many apologies that this account should come so late in your investigation. I saw on the news that the missing woman had tragically been found, but that her death was not thought to be suspicious. It is my hope, then, that my omission so late in the day matters little, although I am, of course, available should you need me to be. My personal and office contacts are below.

Kind regards,

Catherine Ward

She’s right, of course. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. Another rumble of thunder rattles the window frame. I swallow. It means he lied. To me. To the police. It’s exactly why I emailed her in the first place. It’s exactly what I worried she might say. It’s exactly what I expected her to say.

Lightning turns the kitchen white and bright like a flare, and I blink. Imagine that I see something in the garden, something wrong, something out of place, before the window returns to darkness. The house groans, restless and awake. I can hear Ross moving around upstairs; old floorboards creaking as if in warning.

I stand up. Stumble against the table, suddenly light-headed enough to see black dancing spots. My head rolls forwards, too heavy, and the accompanying dizziness is bad enough that I grab for my chair. When it falls, the crash it makes is muted, as if I’m underwater. Only when I bang my hip hard against the table do my ears recalibrate with simultaneous pops, and the sounds of the weather and the house roar back in. I set my palms on the table, steady my breathing, lean against the wood until enough of its solidity transfers to me.

I look across at the Shiraz. It’s red like old blood in the dull flickering light. It occurs to me that I’ve felt like this, strange and slow and leaden, for many, many days. I think of all those twelve-hour sleeps. All the drinks that Ross has made me while standing in front of the Poirot. The bottle of vodka on the kitchen table. The tea he always makes fresh because the pot is stewed. El’s tox screen after she died. All those pills. It’s probable that they contributed to her death, one way or another. PSYCHOACTIVE DRUGS: THE EFFICACY OF THERAPIES VS SAFE RATIOS.

I stagger over to the sink, pour out the wine, and then drink straight from the tap, tepid swallow after swallow until my stomach feels hard and full, and my head clearer. Another flash of lightning, the rumble of thunder this time scant seconds behind. I look back at the window. The thick hardwood Georgian bars and panes too small for even a child to fit through. The long, crooked nails set into its sill. Ross’s I didn’t mind them too much. Thought they would help keep El safe when I wasn’t here. And El’s everything bought, everything put back in place, made my prison smaller, more secure. Maybe they aren’t the same nails Grandpa hammered into the old scarred wood after all.

I look at those tiles in front of Mum’s Kitchener and, for the first time, I see the blood running fast and dark between them, pooling in the cracks of grout.

The floorboards creak overhead. Danger. Run.

I do. The rest I’ll think about later. Including whether or not running is a mistake. I sprint through the hallway, ignoring the warning rattle of the bird plates. In the entrance hall, I snatch a quick glance back at the staircase. Another flash lights up the empty hallway, the stained-glass window. I run for the front door.

It’s locked.

I waste stupid moments pulling back on the night latch over and over again, but I know it’s useless. I know there’s only one deadlock key.

I run back through the hallway, casting another look up to where the stairwell curves into darkness before I race back into the kitchen, ease shut its door.

Run.

I sprint across the tiles, into the icy scullery. I can’t find the light switch, but another flash of lightning exposes my worst remaining fear. The mortice key is gone. When I turn the handle, the door to the back garden is locked too.

There’s nowhere left to go. I need to calm down. Ross will be back soon. I need to think. And then I need to act.

I go into the kitchen. Right my fallen chair. Take out my phone and return Rafiq’s call.

‘I’m in the house,’ I say, when it goes to voicemail. And I’ve no time to say anything more before thunder breaks over the house in an explosive roar, my signal cuts off, and the garden reappears in a frozen white sheet of light.

The orchard, the ugly plinths and paving, the washhouse and its slate roof, its chained door. And there, on the naked expanse of wall alongside, standing out in stark relief against it, like an overexposed photo flash: high and wide and blood-red. Loud enough to be a shout. A scream.

El did scream as she stared out the window, her finger pointing. I saw her reflection against the dark glass, her mouth a horrified O. The moonlight made silver shadows of the apple trees, the exercise yard, the high prison walls. And the words painted in an ugly red warning.

HE KNOWS

The horror of them froze me still.

Until I heard the deadlock. Turning over with a clunk, heavy and loud. Just like the jail cells in the Shank.

The lights go out in another bellow of thunder, and I scream, drop my phone with a clatter. I’m on my hands and knees on the floor, frantically scrabbling around, when the lights flicker back on with a low humming buzz.

‘Cat?’

I freeze. My phone is under the table. I lunge for it, scramble to my feet.

‘You okay?’

Creak, creak, pause. He’s at the top of the stairs.

‘Yeah.’ My voice cracks on the word.

Another creak, a longer pause. ‘I’ll get the torch just in case we’re in for a power cut, and then I’ll be back down.’ Creak. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’ He sounds too cheerful; the smile in his voice has teeth. Especially after our argument. Especially after what I said, and what he didn’t. Especially after my scream.

The bell ring stops me in my panicked tracks. Low and heavy, ponderous. I look up at the bell board, at the violently swinging bell. Thin, tinny, F sharp or G flat. Bathroom is nearly obscured behind the frantic star-shaped pendulum. I look up at the ceiling. Why the fuck would Ross be pulling the bell pull in the bathroom? I look at my reflection in the kitchen window, the dark shadows of my face distorted by the rain. It isn’t him.

This time, when the lights brown out and then flicker before turning the kitchen back into black, I don’t scream. Nor when thunder shakes the house from ceiling to floor and the garden lights up white again. I expect the words to be gone. I want them to be gone, because then I’m just crazy, a person so determined to forever run away that she invents more fantasies than she can ever possibly examine or refute. But there they still are, in the second before the garden turns back to darkness, and the kitchen to light. The words, the facts. The writing on the wall.

HE KNOWS

Mum did scream when she heard the deadlock. Seizing El with her good arm, and me with her bad, she pulled us away from the window, pushed us back into the hallway. We didn’t want to go. Mum shoved us towards the pantry, the Berlin Wall. Get to Mirrorland now. Her lopsided, black-bruised face so determined, her nails scratching, feet kicking – she was never afraid to hurt us. A glance over her shoulder like a bird about to peck, about to fly. I’ll stop him. But you have to be quick. It’s time. It has to be tonight. You have to go NOW. RUN!

There are two bells ringing together now, discordant and frenzied, their stars swinging drunkenly, the bell board shuddering, shedding dust. Bedrooms 4 and 5. The Princess Tower and the Donkshop. Ringing together, because both are opposite each other at the end of the landing. Then Bedroom 3: low and long inside their fading echo. He’s coming back. I stumble out of the kitchen as the lights flicker again, as the bells change again. Bedrooms 1 and 2. The Kakadu Jungle and the Clown Café. He’s at the top of the stairs. I run for the pantry, tear back the curtain. Because it doesn’t matter if those blood-red words are only repressed memory. It doesn’t matter if the ringing bells are real or only in my head. It doesn’t matter that there hasn’t been a Mum or a Bluebeard or a drill in nearly twenty years. They are a warning. A warning that I have to obey. Because even more than fantasies or creaking old floorboards, those bells have always been this house’s best alarm system. And Mirrorland has always been its sanctuary.

In the wake of another roar of thunder, I hear Ross’s shout. I don’t look out the window as I run for the cupboard, lift up its latch, drag the stool over, climb up inside. The lights flicker, and I turn on my phone’s torch, close the cupboard door behind me. The light throws deep shadows; they advance and retreat as I reach up to slide back the two heavy bolts. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can’t stop it, I don’t even want to. For just once I have to trust myself. I open the door to Mirrorland, step down onto the wooden staircase. Freeze when I hear another bell, twice and short. Ross is in the kitchen. He shouts again, closer this time. A jangling, nervy bell. A moment’s silence, and then another. Both muffled, but still my old muscle memory wins out. Drawing Room. Dining Room. He’s running out of places to look.

I close the door, but that’s all I can do. Ross knows it’s here. And he knows that just like the cupboard door, there are no locks on its inside, nothing to wedge up against it. Vertigo has me groping for a hand that isn’t there, and I stop, breathe through it. I move into the dark, stepping down onto the next step and the next, and all I let myself think of is Ross swinging up through the skylight in the washhouse roof like a chimpanzee. Escaping into the day. I whisper the words I thought in this very place eleven days ago. I’m no longer a child. This time, I won’t be too afraid of climbing, of falling.

The rucksacks were too bulky. They dragged and scraped against the staircase walls. El’s hand held mine, too tight, too hot, our torchlight dancing angry spikes. Grandpa roared above us. Mum’s protests soon turned into screams. And when an almighty crash shook the walls, El pulled me down faster. Come on, come on. Quick.

A high, polite tinkle like an old-fashioned clothes shop door. The Pantry. It has to be – the only bell I’ve never heard, not once. Because Grandpa never came into the pantry. He thought it was a narrow, cold schoolroom. Up until that last night, he didn’t even know Mirrorland existed; didn’t know there was a way into the washhouse that wasn’t padlocked or chained. I look up and over my shoulder, but only for a second – the darkness is too thick and the steps too steep. And Ross will be behind me soon enough anyway.

CHAPTER 27

I reach the bottom of the steps, and flail around for the bulb’s dangling cord, pull down hard when I find it. This time, the light is neither immediate nor strong. It flickers, browns, settles on a muted butter glow.

When El pulled down on that same cord, flooding Mirrorland in cold silver, I dropped my rucksack, cringed from an overhead bang loud enough to vibrate the wooden rafters. What do we do now? And I hardly cared that it was the wail of a child, or that El thought so too, pushing me towards the border between the Shank and the Satisfaction. What Mum said. Come on!

Now I run along the alleyway to the washhouse, wrench open its door, shine my light up towards the ribs of its roof, searching for the skylight. All I can see are deep-braced shadows and old cobwebs.

Please, please.

I see it. Not a skylight. But a square of pale new wood. It’s gone. The skylight is gone.

I whirl my light around the icy space. It stutters over that stern lantern and its hook screwed into the eastern wall. It’s not the same lantern, of course. I know that now. The lantern that caved in Grandpa’s skull must be sitting in an evidence locker somewhere. But just like the lantern under the Clown Café bed, it frightens me. Reminds me that I’m not okay. I’m not safe.

I run back into the alleyway; my light stalls this time over the bricked-up wall at its end. I’m trapped. I feel sick and afraid. My head pounds and my stomach twists with poison. I suppose I expected to know what to do once I got here. Perhaps I expected Mirrorland to tell me. Instead, it’s more of a prison now than it ever was.

I stumble into the wide three-wheeled pram as I fight off another wave of dizziness. My light catches the white faded label in the corner of its cover in the instant that I remember it. Silver Cross.

My fingers are unsteady as I pull back the hood. Lying across a mouldy pillow is a blank postcard with a tack hole in its corner. I pick it up, turn it over. Recognise Ross’s handwriting. And then the butter-yellow light goes dark with that familiar metallic thud. And he bangs through the entrance to Mirrorland.

He comes down fast, too fast for me to do anything but hide. I hunker against the wall beneath the staircase, wince against the thunder of his boots as he shouts my name. He sees me straightaway, although I can’t see him. His face is obscured by a hurricane lantern. In place of a candle stub, a kerosene flame dances and splutters.

‘What the hell are you doing down here?’ His voice sounds normal, bemused. ‘Didn’t you hear me shouting?’

I blink against the too-bright light. ‘Why did you turn the power off?’

‘I didn’t. The power’s out everywhere.’ He holds the lantern higher. ‘Come on, it’s freezing. Let’s—’

‘Did you board up the skylight?’

The kerosene hisses. I can hear the steady drip drip of the washhouse’s guttering.

‘I took it out,’ Ross says. His voice is lower, less bemused. ‘Anyone could have used it to get into the house. You could open it from the outside, remember?’

I swallow. Take a long, deep breath. ‘I know you came back from your conference on the second not the third.’ I know, too, that this is terminally stupid. If Ross is guilty, confronting him down here in this dark and forgotten space is lunacy. Even if it seems like the only place I’d ever have the courage.

A pause. And then low, too steady: ‘You’ve been checking up on me?’

He’s still little more than a silhouette. Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is the imprint of the lamp’s gold flame. But I can smell him. And I can feel him.

‘I left early because El begged me to come home, said she was scared, she needed me. She was so unstable by then, I was worried she’d do something stupid.’ The shadow of his shrug leaps across the wall. ‘There were no flights available, so I drove. But I didn’t go back to the house in the end. I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face her.’ He makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort. ‘I didn’t do anything to El, Cat.’

‘Then why lie to the police?’

‘I panicked. They always go for the husband, and I knew – even then – that she was gone. That my leaving the conference early would look bad. I mean, for fuck’s sake’ – that half-snort, half-laugh again – ‘even you don’t believe me.’

He puts down the lantern. When he moves nearer, I make myself be still. I can see him now: hollowed cheekbones and wild hair. Ross.

‘Why are all the doors locked?’

‘What?’

‘Why did you lock the front and back doors?’

‘Because when I came back from town today, I found two reporters standing in the front garden and peering into the drawing room.’ He throws up his hands. ‘I’ll unlock them again if that’s what you want.’ A long pause. ‘Did you come down here to escape?’ He makes it sound like the craziest thing he’s ever heard. ‘Through the skylight?’ He takes two steps back, runs his fingers through his hair. ‘Jesus, Cat. Are you scared of me?’

‘The fourth of September. You were there. You said you’d help us. You helped us.’ This time it’s not a roar of too-close thunder that makes me jump, it’s a snapped crack of lightning directly over the house. I imagine its icy white fingers chasing through the webs and wires and hidden spaces to the ground under our feet.

Ross sat between us on the deck of the Satisfaction when El first told him all of it. How Mum had said that every bad night from now on would be just like that night Grandpa found us in the Clown Café’s cupboard. And beat us so hard that she’d lost her voice screaming at him to stop. Because hurting Mum was no longer enough for Bluebeard. Because we’d grown up too fast despite Mum’s insistence that we shouldn’t. We couldn’t hide any more. She couldn’t save us any more. And so we had to escape. We had to come up with THE PLAN.

‘Cat!’

I shake my head. Press my palms hard against the cold stone at my back. Remember that tester pot of red paint in the shoebox.

‘You painted “HE KNOWS” on the wall that night. Didn’t you?’

Ross gives an annoyed sigh. ‘Fine, we’re doing this, then. Yes. You know I did. That was part of the plan. I was the fucking lookout. I saw him coming back from the Mission, and the first thing I thought of was all those tins of red paint in the washhouse. I had to warn you, Cat. That was the fucking plan. What—’

‘You could always get into the garden, couldn’t you?’

‘What?’

‘I remember now. I used to think – afterwards – that it was like you were a superhero that night. That your love for us – for me – had somehow flown you over the wall or down from the washhouse roof and into our garden to save us.’ I make an ugly sound in the back of my throat.

He frowns, his jaw working. ‘So I could get down into the garden from the roof. What does it matter?’

‘It matters because it’s another lie. You told us you could only ever reach us through the skylight – because you wanted to be able to drop right into our lives, our world, whenever you wanted.’ I look at the narrow planes of his face, the shadows that smooth flat whenever he smiles. Don’t tell your mum about me. She’ll ruin it. ‘You wanted to be our secret.’

‘Cat.’ He grabs my arms without warning, and when I wrench them backwards, he only holds on tighter. His eyes are furious. ‘Why are you down here in the cold and dark, banging on about a night twenty years ago? I know the last few days have—’

‘He never came back early from the Mission,’ I say. ‘Not ever.’

Ross lets go of my arms. ‘He did that night.’

‘Why? He never ever came back early. How did he know? Did you tell him?’

‘Are you – are you serious? First, you all but accuse me of killing my wife, then of locking you in this fucking house, and now … what? You think I was once in cahoots with your crazy grandpa?’

‘No. No.’ Because, of course, that makes no sense. No sense at all. My head is pounding, my mind is racing as fast as my heart. Faster.

I try to push past him, and my light jumps drunkenly across the boundary wall on the opposite side of the alleyway. I see an X drawn in black marker on a brick half a foot from the ground, and sink to my knees, press my fingers against it. I think of El’s letter: X MARKS THE SPOT. It was here. El’s life-size painting of the pirate Captain Henry Morgan, The Island’s blues and yellows and greens behind him. It was here.

Mum knew that there was a bolted door in the alleyway of next door’s house – Ross’s house – a door with no lock that led to a front garden with no gate. She knew, too, that I could no more climb up a ladder to the skylight than climb back down over the washhouse’s roof and the boundary wall. She’d never been able to cure my terror of heights, of falling – neither through kindness nor cruelty. And El and I had to escape together – because we would not leave each other. Never so long as we lived. But what Mum knew the most – what Mirrorland had shown her, had shown us – was that there was always another way. A way through. A way out. And in the end, that way out was this snecked-rubble boundary wall between two alleyways.

Andy Dufresne took twenty-seven years to tunnel out of Shawshank Prison. Mum said we had only weeks, but could afford to be no less careful, no less meticulous. We never questioned her. Never complained. El took to THE PLAN like a duck to water, if only to follow in the footsteps of her hero. And I did what I have always done. I followed her.

We didn’t use a rock hammer, but a heavy claw hammer that made our shoulders ring and ache. Sometimes, when we stopped and leaned heavily against the cool stone of Mirrorland, we could hear Mum’s calm and steady voice filtering down from the pantry above as she pretended to read to us, to teach us what we’d already learned.

We hid the growing hole in the garden wall behind Captain Henry’s painting, and we hid our excavations in cardboard boxes and the umbrella bases on the Satisfaction. When they became too full, Mum sewed cloth bags inside the legs of our prison-gear clothes. Andy Dufresne had called them cheaters: long, narrow sacks that could be opened by pulling on lengths of string in his pockets, scattering the evidence of his excavations all over the Shawshank’s exercise yard. And so we would pack our own cheaters with stones and powdered brick, and traipse slowly through the kitchen and the scullery – if we were unlucky, past Grandpa’s rolling eyes, his Aff tae join the chain gang again, bloody wee mentalists – and then down the scullery steps to our exercise yard. Where we would march around and around, kicking up the silver and grey chuckies, while pulling on the strings in our dungaree pockets and scattering our secrets, just like Andy Dufresne. Over and over, day after day, because Mum was too afraid for half measures. Because Grandpa might not have known about Mirrorland, and he might have been deaf as a post, but he wasn’t stupid. And the whole house was his domain.

‘Cat, will you talk to me? What the hell is going on?’

I ripped Captain Henry away from the wall, and momentarily balked at the dark hole through to the alleyway on the other side. El pinched my arm, pushed me down. We have to go! The cold ground scraped against my knees as I turned, reached for my rucksack. And then that terrible thud of the fuse-box master switch, and the lightbulb winked out, leaving a darkness darker than anything. When the door to Mirrorland crashed open, El whimpered. When the stairs started shaking, shouting, Mum screamed. And when I started pushing into the hole, I knew there wouldn’t be enough time. Not for both of us.

A roar like hot wind, like thunder, like ironwoods and banyans torn out of the earth, a landslide of mud and stone. Where the fuck d’ye think ye’re goin’? His fists, his feet, a breath before each punch or kick landed. For once I didn’t feel it, any of it. El screamed, she grasped hold of my coat before she was jerked back into space. And for a second – just one pure second – I kept on going without her, kept pushing into our escape, the edges of it rough and jagged, catching on my hair, my hands, my coat.

But after that second there was no air, no night, no autumn smells of woodsmoke or rotten leaves. No freedom. No hole. My fingers scrabbled in the dirt and the debris, but something on the other side of the wall was blocking the way. Something cold and hard and impossibly heavy. My mind imagined an African elephant in iron chain-mail armour, a tank with gun turrets and stencilled black numbers. You cannot pass.

And then I was hauled back into Mirrorland, my head smashed hard against stone. A curse, a loud and booming laugh. Mum lying prone and unmoving on the ground, a thread of light washing cold silver across her hair and bloody temple.

A deadlight. Because Bluebeard had finally caught us.

‘What was it?’ My voice is a dull, flat monotone. ‘A grit box? A garden waste bin?’

‘What?’

I close my eyes. They sting, even though they’re bone dry. I push against the wall as I stand up, and I make myself look at Ross, keep looking at him. ‘You blocked our escape into your alleyway. You pushed something up against the hole, so we couldn’t get out.’

‘What?’ His horror is palpable. ‘No! Of course I didn’t.’ He moves forwards. His gaze locks onto mine. ‘I was – I am – on your side. Always. I hated that old fucker. I helped you. I’d never hurt you.’

‘Did you hurt El?’

‘No.’

‘Did you kill her?’

His fingers dig into my arms. ‘No! For fuck’s sake, I loved – I love – both of you!’

I take a breath. ‘You’re lying about that night. I know you are. The hole was blocked from your side, Ross. Yours. And if you’re lying about that, then you’re—’

‘This is El talking. Or this house. This fucking house.’ He stops, lets go of my arms. ‘Look. It’s been a shitty few days, a shitty few weeks. Come back upstairs, and I promise we’ll talk. Just—’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Because here is where I get to remember, here is where I get to be whole again. And I’m not scared enough of Ross to sabotage that. Not yet.

He holds his palms up. ‘All right. Then stay here. I’ll go upstairs, I’ll unlock the doors. And then I’ll bring us down something to drink and we can talk right here, okay? If that’s what you want.’

I don’t answer. Outside, the storm seems to be waning; the roars and cracks are getting farther and farther apart, the drum of rain is no longer hard and echoless.

Ross moves closer. He’s smiling with his teeth, his eyes. He kisses my cheek, and his skin is smooth. I think of the Bathroom bell – F sharp or G flat. He shaved for me. I shiver.

He leaves me the hurricane lamp, his shadow passing over its light before I hear the resumed creak of the staircase.

I take the phone out my pocket. No signal. And no reply from Rafiq. This should freak me out every bit as much as Ross’s promise to return with something to drink; as still being trapped down here – and, for that matter, up there – but it doesn’t. Panic tries to return, but it’s only an itch, a dull suggestion. I feel eerily calm, removed from the present. Perhaps because at least half of me got left behind in this place twenty years ago. When I press my cold fingers against my cheek, I can still feel the ghost of Ross’s touch.

Annie winks solemnly at me inside the washhouse door, standing tall in her high buckled boots, alligator-skin belt, and cowhide jacket with buttons made from whalebone. Sometimes you have to be brave. Even when you’re a grand wee coward.

I take the postcard out of my waistband. Turn it over.

EL,

God, thank you, baby. I’ve missed you so fucking much. You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you to get back in touch. It’s been like dying, you know? I don’t know if you do. I don’t know if you could ever love me half as much as I love you. Your letter was pretty cold, but I understand why – I was just GLAD to get it!! I understand why you didn’t want anything to do with me that day outside the National Gallery. I understand how much he fucked you up. You’re wrong, but it’s not your fault.

Meet me – just you and me. No Cat this time. I heard the Rosemount is having a May Day party next week, and I know you’re invited (YEAH, I’m your stalker, what can I say? I fucking LOVE you).

Just text me your old room no. I’ll meet you there. 2 p.m. Just do this for me, meet me this once, and if after that you don’t want to ever see me again, I’ll leave you alone. I promise. Even though it’ll break my heart to do it.

Please come, baby. Come so I can show you just how much I need you. Want you.

I love you, Blondie. You know I do.

All my love forever and always, Ross xxx

(P.S. DON’T tell Cat. She’ll ruin it.)

My laughter is just the wrong side of hysterical. I think of El’s face over Ross’s naked shoulder. Her grey, slack horror, her furious reproach. When the staircase door bangs open again, and Ross starts creaking his way back down, my laugh turns into a more alarming giggle.

Doom, I think. Fucking doom.

CHAPTER 28

Six months after I moved to LA, still shellshocked and alone, but certain that I’d done the right thing – the brave thing – I met a man whose crooked smile so badly reminded me of Ross that I ended up having sex with him less than an hour after we met. In the staff car park of a seedy late-night bar. So frantically, so desperately, that it shocked even me. Afterwards, I stalked him around Venice Beach for weeks, mindless with hope. And when he let me down gently – probably more gently than I deserved – I sobbed in his arms and begged him for just one more night. One more night when I could feel. When I could pretend. And El had thought she was the weak one; the one who’d been a goner for him from the start.

Ross steps back down into the lantern’s pool of light. He smiles his smile and holds out a glass of red wine. Stay with me. Be with me. I love you. Not the same way that I loved El. Different. Better. I accept the wine, feign a small sip.

HE KILLED HER

HE WILL KILL YOU TOO

One postcard doesn’t make that true. Any more than my weakness or Ross being a manipulative bastard makes him a murderer. Annie snorts in the darkness. A sudden bellow of thunder makes me start. In its aftermath, the silence is broken only by the return of torrential rain, a jarring flash of white-silver through the washhouse’s window. My hand presses against my breastbone and the erratic thump of my heart. Nothing has passed. Nothing is over. I’ve only been hiding inside the brief eye of the storm.

But what about you, Blondie? Do you love me too?

I take out the postcard.

Ross blinks. ‘What’s that?’

I move incrementally closer to him as if he’s a wild animal; hold out the postcard until he takes it from me and I can retreat again. I watch him read, a muscle working in his jaw, the frown line deepening between his eyes.

‘Why do you have this?’

‘It was here.’

‘Here?’ He looks at me. ‘This isn’t true. You can’t believe it.’

I put the wine glass on the ground. ‘It’s your handwriting.’

‘All right.’ He screws up the postcard in his fist. ‘All right. I wanted her to find out about us. That’s why I wrote it. Why I set it up. I was sick of lying. I wanted her to know how much we wanted each other. And I know how bad that sounds, I know how bad it was, believe me.’ He drops the postcard, breaches the space between us, and inside the next roll of thunder, takes hold of my hands, presses his lips quick and warm against mine, and looks at me with such sincerity and sorrow that I almost forget why we’re here.

‘But then she tried to kill herself. Because of what I’d done. She begged me. She told me I was the only man she could ever love. That she would destroy all of us before she’d ever let you have me.’ He strokes his fingers up and down my skin. ‘She wasn’t in her right mind, Cat, she needed help. And I already felt so guilty. You know I did.’

‘I know you did.’

‘She blackmailed me, that’s all. You’re the one I always wanted.’

There’s no point in me asking him about El’s letter or ‘Mouse’s’ accusations. His text on Marie’s phone. Every answer will be the same. She’s crazy. Delusional. She needs help.

When I move away from him, from the relentless stroke of his fingers, he steps between me and the staircase.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m leaving.’

‘No.’ He folds his arms. I make myself walk towards him.

‘Let me past.’

He grabs for me, pulls me against him, pushes his cold hands up under my T-shirt, licks and kisses my neck.

‘Ross. Let me past.’

His hands move around to my bra, his thumbs pressing hard against my nipples, teeth grazing the underside of my jaw just enough to hurt.

‘Let me go!’

But of course, he won’t. That’s not what he does.

I have a sudden sharp memory of El and me sitting inside our cells in the Shank. Ross, the wing guard, looking in at us through chicken-wire mesh. Brown eyes, warm smile. I’ll let you out. I’ll let both of you out, but only if you promise never to run away. If you promise to stay with me forever.

The minute I retreat backwards, he lunges for me again. When I slam my knee up into his crotch, he grunts, eyes widening in shock. He lets go just long enough for me to dodge around him and up onto the first step. His shout is almost a wheezed cough; I feel the heavy topple of him against the stairs, and I start sprinting upwards, my body and mind suddenly – finally – awake.

He catches me on the second-from-last step, his fingers closing tight around my ankle like the clichéd kind of monster I’m beginning to think he is. I kick out, but his fingers only wind tighter, higher, digging into the muscles of my calf. My palm slaps echoless against the door out of Mirrorland before Ross turns me around and drags me back down alongside him, the stairs’ hard edges scraping my bones, banging hard enough against the back of my head that I see brief black spots.

After Grandpa dragged us away from the wall, from our escape, he let us go long enough that we tried to run. He caught El on the stairs. By the time she stopped screaming, my eyes were blurred with blood and panic. I reached down for her hand and it was gone. Bluebeard’s deadlight shone its thin silver thread against the staircase ceiling. I could hear grunts and mutters over a wet dreadful choking.

Ross’s sweat is sour. I struggle to get out from under him. Furious tears sting inside my eyes. I can’t breathe.

I’m here. And her voice isn’t an echo, it’s as hot and urgent against my ear as Ross’s curses against my face.

I screamed when I climbed down close enough to the bottom of the stairs to see Grandpa’s hands around El’s neck, her mouth half open, eyes wide white. Our slingshots and war clubs were shut inside the armoire, but I punched him like a cowboy and kicked at him like a Sioux. Screamed at the impotent horror of seeing El’s bloodshot eyes fix onto mine and knowing Mum was right: I hadn’t practised enough. I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t stop him.

I look up. Stop struggling against Ross and go limp when I see that piece of white card fixed to the ceiling with black electrical tape.

SNOW-WHITE SAID: ‘WE WILL NOT LEAVE EACH OTHER.’

ROSE-RED ANSWERED: ‘NEVER SO LONG AS WE LIVE.’

The silence is thick and urgent. Even the storm retreats.

‘She’s here.’

‘Who’s here?’ Ross sounds uncertain, maybe even afraid.

‘What are you doing, Ross?’ I muster as ordinary a voice as I can – no small feat under the circumstances.

He looks down at me, draws his bottom lip between his teeth. That familiar furrow between his eyes returns, and he plants his hands against a step somewhere above me, takes away his weight with slow reluctance. He turns, backs up a few steps towards the pantry. Stares down at me, and then up at the ceiling. That furrow drives deeper. He doesn’t know it’s our pirate code. He doesn’t know we had a pirate code. And he certainly doesn’t know that it means Trust me. Trust me and no one else. Even when you don’t want to.

The rain rattles against the wooden roof, and I think of the door behind Ross and the cold dark wet outside with a longing worse than thirst. ‘You sabotaged our escape. You blocked our way out and then you warned him, you helped him. And then you pretended you didn’t. You pretended to warn us, to help us instead.’

‘No. No.’ He scrambles back down towards me, banging his knuckles against the wall hard enough to make me wince, though it hardly gives him pause at all. ‘Baby, you’re wrong. This is wrong.’ He looks at me, cups my face between his hands. And this is worse, so much worse than him coming after me like a movie monster, suffocating the breath and fight out of me. His thumbs stroke my cheekbones, my tears. ‘Please, Blondie. I love you. You know I do.’

I always remembered a good grandpa and a bad mum. But I always remembered, too, a mean, cantankerous bully and a mother that stroked our hair and told us that more than a hundred thousand other children had to be born before a mum got to have children as special as us. But this – only this – is why I never wanted to remember what truly happened in this house. Not because I couldn’t bear the truth about my bad grandpa and my good mum, but because I couldn’t bear the truth about my Prince Charming. Easier to cover dirt and dark and dread with gold and twinkling, glittering lights, the smell of burning wood and winter forest, the feel of his hands on me, all the same as it ever was. The same wonderful. The same rush. The same madness. El was right: if she’d told me the truth about Ross, I never would have believed her. Because I’ve been pretending – lying – to myself ever since I ran from this house.

El was already going limp before I remembered the shank in my pocket. I took it out – two razor blades parcel-taped to half a toothbrush – and it didn’t seem like it would be enough until I jammed it into Grandpa’s neck and he gave a high female scream. He reared back and pulled it out, and I gave precious seconds away to the horror of waiting for El to start breathing again. And then Grandpa was on me, teeth snapping open and shut like he wanted to bite, blood pulsing out of his neck, thick and dark. I pushed him, and he slipped an elbow in his own blood, giving me space enough to scramble down the last few steps. El was still clutching at her throat, and as we ran back into Mirrorland, I realised that it wasn’t her screams that were echoing around the narrow space, deafening and frightening. It was mine.

‘It was you, it was always you,’ Ross says. Pleads. ‘I always wanted you. And she ruined it. She did.’

‘She’s here,’ I say again. Because I know it’s true. The house has helped me, Mirrorland has helped me; it seems like the most natural thing in the world that El should help me too. Not the El that has festered and grown inside my heart and my dreams. But my sister. My friend. The smell of her, the smile of her, the thoughts of her, running parallel to mine. It’s as if my whole world has changed from mono to stereo, 2D to 3. And it’s the first time I’ve felt it in so long – that I’ve even realised it was as missing as she was – I want to sob, I want to say sorry, I want to plead for her forgiveness.

‘Stop saying that!’ In the dim light, Ross’s expression is furious, but his eyes flicker up and around as if trying to find her.

I step back down onto the stony slabs of Mirrorland, let go of the bannister. I’m already stronger, braver. ‘Just tell the fucking truth.’ Because the truth is the only way out of this place for either of us.

He stays silent for a very long time. Comes out from the shadow of the staircase. His jaw is no longer tight, and his eyes are warm, full of the love I always longed for. His hair is too long, his shaved skin looks pink and vulnerable; I want to rub the back of my fingers against it. This is Ross.

‘You were going to leave. You were going to leave and never come back.’ He moves towards me. Reaches out his hands in supplication. ‘I would never have seen you again. I would have lost you. Just like Dad lost me.’

My breath stops at the moment the rain does. The silence is suddenly absolute.

‘He killed himself. Five years after Mum took me away. Hung himself from the ceiling light in my old bedroom.’ Ross’s smile is terrible. His hands shake. There is less than three feet of space remaining between us. ‘And I loved you so much. What would have happened to you? No one would look after you like I could. No one.’

I swallow. I don’t know who the you is in his mind. Maybe there, El and I were always fused together like sand and limestone. When he comes one last step closer, El’s musky perfume waters my eyes, and her whisper is loud in my ear.

RUN.

I do.

We ran east into the washhouse, Grandpa thundering behind us. The stone gave way to wood as we ran across the deck of the Satisfaction, the shriek of its boards spiking my terror. He was too close, too close. Ye’re goin’ naewhere, ye wee bitches.

I run towards the stern and the barely faded spectre of Blackbeard’s ship. Towards the small red-framed window. I frantically search for something, anything, I can use to break it, until I realise that its glass panels are even smaller than those inside the house.

‘You can’t leave.’

‘Ross, please.’

‘I’ve never told anyone about my dad before, Cat. Not even El.’

‘Ross. You’re scaring me. I won’t leave. I promise. Just let’s—’ When he keeps on coming, stepping back is as automatic as breathing. ‘Please don’t—’

‘I won’t hurt you.’ He looks affronted, wounded, but still he keeps coming, still the passion in his eyes is wild and dark. But I don’t think it’s love any more. Here, after all, is where we first sailed away from him. Left him on his knees in the Caribbean Sea. Left him bloody and sobbing and calling out to us, while we pretended not to hear him.

Grandpa slammed El against the wall above the stern. I howled, launched myself at him, but his elbow thrust backwards into the softness of my belly, winding me enough that I couldn’t get up. He grinned until all I could see was teeth. And the blood around his neck like a scarf, soaking into his shirt. Dinnae worry, lassie. He laughed. Ah’m feelin’ nae pain. And then he punched me in the side of my head so hard that my legs collapsed.

‘Ross, no. Stop.’ I cringe from him, batting his hands away, and I’ve time enough to wonder if this was what it was like for El. If this is what happened when she tried to leave him too. Until I remember what happened to her instead.

‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He reaches out again, catches my hands and squeezes them tight inside his, tight enough that my bones crack. ‘I won’t ever hurt you.’ I wonder if he knows he’s nodding his head.

I can’t stop struggling, but he’s too strong and I’m too weak. He holds both of my wrists one-handed; the other he moves up along my shoulder, my collarbone, softly enough to make me shudder. There’s another kind of shining madness in his eyes now. A war between taking what he really wants and settling for what he’s always had instead. His hand slides up the side of my neck, his fingers tracing the skin under my ear, tighter, then tighter still, his thumb suddenly pressing down hard enough against my windpipe that I let out too much air in a gasp. And that madness shines brighter.

When I came to, Grandpa was choking El again. Her eyes were rolled back, her face was purple, her fingers blindly grasped at the air. I staggered towards them, but it was too hard. I couldn’t save her. I wasn’t enough. That was it. That was all.

‘I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you,’ Ross mutters in a horrifyingly reassuring voice, the veins in his neck getting fat with the exertion of choking me tighter. I slide down the wall, rough and cold against my back.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he says. In that same calm voice, sweat dripping off his nose. ‘I didn’t.’

But he did. Just like he’s going to kill me.

My head feels heavy, full. El’s liquid gasps are mine. My sight begins to shrink and curl black around its edges.

And then El grips hold of my hand. Hard enough to hurt, to punish. Deadlight, she says. Screams. Deadlight.

I lurched across the deck, scrabbling for purchase as if we really were pitching and rolling against a Caribbean storm. I ignored Grandpa’s desperate grunts of exertion, made myself look only at the stern. The lantern. Hanging on a rusty hook over the hull. Grandpa turned to see me lift it high up over my head. His frown was startled, then almost tender. A wink. A grin. Put it doon, lassie.

I almost did. And so automatically I hardly registered I was doing it, until I saw Mum crawling along the deck towards us, blood running into her eyes. Her hoarse, rasping cries as Grandpa turned dismissively back to the job in hand: Leave them alone! They’re just children!

I open my eyes. No. Tell the fucking truth.

Leave them alone! They’re your children!

Ross makes a sound like a sob in the back of his throat, and I feel his fingers loosen around my neck, feel the air rushing back into my lungs. But it doesn’t matter. I know he won’t stop. One way or another. He won’t ever ever stop.

As I scramble backwards, grab on to the lantern hook to pull myself back to my feet, I hear all of the bells at once. High and discordant, low and long – loud enough to tremble eardrums and shake stone.

Your children. That horrifying truth of what we were. Not cowboys or Indians or Clowns or pirates. Or prisoners. Our grandfather’s children.

My fingers shook against the lantern; its hinges squeaked. I looked down at El’s lifeless body. The back of Grandpa’s head, his hunched and working shoulders.

And I bring the lantern – my deadlight – down on top of Ross’s skull. Just as hard as I brought it down on Grandpa’s. With the same black fury and icy horror. Again and again, until all the strength left in me has run out through my fingers. Until the sound is no longer hard and short and white, but soft and long and copper-dark.

It takes me a long time to climb the stairs out of Mirrorland, but once I have, I find that I can’t leave. Instead, I sit down on the top step, lean against the door. I think about phoning Rafiq, but don’t. I look down into the shadows of the Shank, the turn of the corner east towards the Satisfaction.

Mum didn’t speak again for a long while. She was angry. Then, I imagined, at us; now, I imagine, at herself. At how badly her plan had gone awry. She looked at Grandpa for a long while too before dropping down to her knees. At first, I thought to touch him, to wail, to mourn, but instead, she pushed him onto his side like he was a sack of potatoes. When she let him go, a gasp of air pushed out of him, and either I or El shrieked.

‘He’s dead,’ Mum said. And then she stood, knees cracking. Looked around at our painted walls and the long cells of the Shank with a pained kind of anger. ‘We can’t leave him here. Help me get him up the stairs.’

It took at least half an hour. By the time we managed to drag him into the kitchen, exhaustion had burned away our shock.

‘Go upstairs,’ Mum said. ‘Get together what’s left of your clothes, your books. And then go back down to Mirrorland, lock it all in the armoire with everything else.’

She’d already had us pack and store most of our meagre belongings in the armoire weeks before she first told us about THE PLAN. Just another game. Another drill we never questioned.

When we went back down to Mirrorland, numb and silent, our arms full, Mum was pulling apart the Shank, stacking the old boardwalk planks against the boundary wall. Our claw hammer was at her feet.

‘I need to cover up the door in the cupboard,’ she said. She frowned, looked at us both in turn. ‘No one can ever know you were here. Do you understand?’

We nodded, even though we didn’t. Even though we’d barely thought of anything that might happen beyond escaping through a hole in a wall, a door with no lock, and a front garden with no gate.

When Mum had dragged the last of the wood up into the pantry, she put her hands on her hips, nodded back towards the cupboard.

‘Close the door to Mirrorland.’ The look she gave both of us was fierce in her bruised and bloodied face. ‘And bolt it shut.’

We did. And then followed her back into the kitchen. She sat down at the table. There was a key in the centre of it. Grandpa’s key.

‘It’s for the front door. I want you to do what we planned. Go as quickly as you can.’

‘But now you can come too,’ El whispered.

‘I told you. I have to sort this out, that’s my job. It was always going to be my job.’

She sighed, stood up, took hold of the tea-towel sling that now hung only around her neck, and began scrubbing hard at the cuts on our faces and the blood under our nails with her usual brutal efficiency. We knew better than to complain, never mind cry, even though the pain soon swallowed up our fear. My head throbbed in the places where Grandpa had punched it or slammed it against the ground; it ached inside as if my brain had grown too big for my skull. El was struggling to swallow now; her eyes were full of tears. Both of us couldn’t stop staring at Grandpa’s body slumped next to the Kitchener; his blood running fast and dark across two tiles, pooling inside the grout between them.

‘El. There’s a tartan scarf on the coat stand. Wind it round your neck and don’t take it off. And there’s a powder compact in the drawer of the telephone table. Take that with you and cover the worst of each other’s bruises and cuts.’

We stood, stock still and silent, throbbing with pain, the remnants of horror, the beginnings of regret.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Is Grandpa …’ I looked at his face, the dark red blood still coughing out of his ruined skull. ‘Is Grandpa our dad?’

Her lips thinned, eyes narrowed. ‘Only follow the route on the treasure map. Go nowhere else. Only the harbour, only the warehouse. There’s always someone there, so you’ll be all right.’

‘Mum,’ El whispered. ‘Was Grandpa—’

I winced when Mum grabbed for my right hand and El’s left.

‘You must always hold onto each other’s hand. Because?’

‘We will not leave each other,’ I said.

‘Never so long as we live,’ El whispered, pushing her cold hand into mine.

‘Rely on no one else. Trust no one else. All you will ever have is each other.’

We nodded, tried not to swallow, to blink, to cry.

‘Remember, you’re the eldest, Ellice, the poison taster. Be brave, be bold, look after your sister.’ Mum’s hands were trembling; the blood at her temple had begun to run freely again. ‘Remember, Catriona, don’t be like me. Be brave. Always see the good instead of only the bad.’

And I nodded, thought of the shrieking, squawking Kakadu Jungle, all the nights El and I had run through the darkness and the lightning, the roaring wind and towering water, the shadows crouching, bristling with rage and sharp teeth. This would be no different, I thought, even as I knew it would be.

Mum stayed on her knees, and though nothing about her softened, tears ran down her lopsided face, soaked into the bloodied collar of her blouse. ‘Never forget how special you are. How special you have been.’

And then she let go of our hands, closed her eyes. ‘Go now.’

When I opened my mouth to object, El squeezed my hand tighter.

‘Go.’

When we didn’t, Mum’s eyes snapped open black, her hands uncurled to show their nails, her mouth flattened into a thin, cruel line. ‘Run!’

It wasn’t how she’d wanted – planned – to do any of it, I suppose. No long goodbye, no I love you – nothing beyond the awful, practical now. She knew we would obey because, in many ways, we were more afraid of her than of anyone else. El and I had been numbed by a lifetime of her anger, her disapproval and disappointment, but perhaps she had been too. That was how she’d protected us, safeguarded us against even the smallest part of what she’d had a longer lifetime to suffer. Her love was cruel; she built us mercilessly piecemeal.

El and I only discovered a week later that she’d killed herself, in a news headline on the TV in the Rosemount’s common room. A murder–suicide, probable history of domestic violence, a screen-crawling helpline number. She’d swallowed all of Grandpa’s heart pills and then lain down right next to him on the kitchen floor.

The last picture I have in my head of Mum is her kneeling on those tiles, blocking our view of Grandpa’s body. The fierceness of her jaw, the raw pink nakedness of that fist-sized bald spot close to her crown. And the last thing I remember that she said – shouted in echoes that shook against the thick walls and high ceilings as we ran towards the blood-red entrance hall – was no less terrible or kind.

Don’t ever come back.

But we did. Both of us. Because we didn’t keep our promises. We relied on someone else. We trusted someone else. We left each other. We forgot.

I open my eyes. They sting, my head aches, my throat throbs. I run my fingers across the smooth wood of the door, and though they leave trails of Ross’s blood in their wake, they’re steadier than they’ve been in weeks. I can remember Mum’s treasure map of black roads and green spaces now. Long blue water and a volcano. Its X drawn in the space between breakwater walls, alongside a huge wooden warehouse and a vast rusty crane. Where we believed we’d find a pirate ship to take us to The Island. Where Mum believed we’d find a second life worthy enough that we could forget our first.

I lean back against the wall, look up at the ceiling. The rain sounds like hail, hard and echoless. El has gone. Everyone has gone. And that’s when I finally start to cry. I curl up small enough that I can wrap my arms around myself as I sob. As all my grief, my regret, my horror, and my shame spills out of me and into the heavy dark corners of Mirrorland, leaving me nothing but empty.

CHAPTER 29

Logan finds me first. Though his shake is gentle, I come awake with a scream. Just as well then that I have no voice. He’s inside the cupboard, crouched down over the threshold into Mirrorland. His hair is soaking wet, plastered to his skull. He doesn’t touch me again, for which I’m grateful, but his expression is not one of a detective sergeant. I’m even more grateful for that.

‘Cat. Are you all right? Can you get up?’

The answer is probably yes, but I don’t really want to. I feel bone-weary. Maybe now that the adrenaline has worn off, whatever was in the Shiraz is kicking in again.

Light floods the cupboard as Rafiq pulls back the door, elbows Logan aside. I wonder if they had to break down the big red front door to get in. I hope so.

‘Catriona?’ She gives me a long assessing stare, head to toe. Never once stops looking like a detective inspector. And I find that I’m most grateful of all for that. ‘Where’s Ross?’

I swallow. It hurts even more than I expect it to. ‘Are you here to arrest him?’

She points at my neck. ‘He do that to you?’

I nod.

‘Where is he?’

I look down into the darkness of the staircase.

‘All right, we need to get you out of here, and then we can go take care of Ross. Logan, take her to the front room, get a uniform to sit with her.’

But I’ve no intention at all of limping quietly away. When I manage to stand, I don’t take Logan’s arm; instead I start stepping back down into Mirrorland.

‘Shit, stop her, Logan!’

He tries to. It’s too awkward in the confined space, and he’s too focused on not hurting me. Evading him is easy, until he stops trying to manhandle me and takes my hand instead.

‘Okay. You can come down with us. But we go first. All right?’

I hear Rafiq’s tut, but she doesn’t object.

I press myself up against the wall, let them both shuffle down past me. It’s something of a relief. I don’t know what we’re going to find at the bottom.

‘What the hell is this place?’ Rafiq mutters, as we go down through the gloom towards the gold circle of Ross’s hurricane lantern. She momentarily stops, turns to me. ‘Is this where—’

I nod once, quickly, and her expression sharpens.

At the bottom, Logan picks up the lantern.

‘Left.’ My voice is whisper-thin.

We pass the armoire, the Silver Cross pram. Our feet sink down into the floorboards of the washhouse. My heart is beating faster, but only a little. I don’t know what I want to find. I don’t know whether I want Ross to be alive or dead.

The lanternlight swings left, finds him. He’s crawled from the stern – as far as the gun deck and El’s chalk scrawls of Rum and Water Stores HERE!! – but he isn’t moving now. And then he flinches against the light, moans loud enough to kick-start my heart again. He looks up, tries to rise. His left eye is completely shut, the wound above it scabbed over with blood.

Rafiq turns back around to me. ‘You do that to him?’

I nod.

‘What’s going on?’

I recoil from his voice, I can’t help it. He still sounds like Ross, and I don’t see how that’s possible.

Rafiq moves around Logan, drops down to her haunches. ‘Can you stand?’

Ross looks up at her with his one good eye. ‘I think so.’

‘We’ll get those head wounds seen to down at the Royal,’ Rafiq says. ‘Logan, give us a hand.’

I stand there on deck as they both haul him to his feet. He sways for a few seconds, leans heavily against the washhouse wall of sea and sky. He looks at me.

‘What … what’s going on? Cat?’

Rafiq takes one short step away from him. ‘Ross MacAuley, I am arresting you on suspicion of common-law assault to injury. You’re not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say can and will be used against you. Do you understand?’

Ross’s mouth opens and closes twice. He shakes his head. ‘I haven’t done anything.’ He pushes off the wall, and only Logan’s grip on his arm keeps him from lurching towards me. ‘Cat, tell them! Nothing’s happened. It was just a disagreement and it got out of hand, that’s all. I haven’t done anything!’

I touch my still-burning throat out of little more than reflex, and he inhales sharply, as if he’s only just noticed the marks there. He looks horrified. I wonder if he’s as practised in forgetting what he doesn’t want to remember as I am.

‘I think you have, Ross. In fact, I think you’ve been pretty busy.’ There’s something quite dangerous about Rafiq down here. Her crust is much thinner. She’s angry, but more than that, she’s excited. ‘We were coming here today to detain you for wasting police time and hindering an investigation. We believe the statement you gave us regarding your whereabouts on the day of your wife’s disappearance is false.’

Ross says nothing.

‘I’ve had a very interesting conversation with a Professor Catherine Ward.’ Rafiq gives me a sidelong look. ‘She wanted to follow up on her reply to an email I apparently sent her.’

‘I don’t know who that is,’ Ross says, but the confusion in his voice has been replaced by caution.

‘Well, she knows who you are. Has made, in fact, a statement to the effect that she witnessed you loading your suitcase into your car and leaving Southwark University twenty-two hours before you said you did.’

‘No, I—’

‘We’re currently checking ANPR cameras and CCTV footage, so we will track the timeline of your journey all the way back here, Ross.’ She folds her arms. ‘We also got a warrant to check your phone records on the third; lucky for us, your phone was switched on when PC Thompson phoned at eighteen-thirty to tell you about your wife’s disappearance. And where do you think your phone company’s cell-site dump placed you?’

‘I was just driving.’ Ross looks worried. He’s no longer leaning against either Logan or the wall. ‘I was just fucking driving!’ He points a finger at me. ‘I told her that. Ask her!’

‘I don’t need to ask anyone. I already know you were in Edinburgh.’

‘She phoned me – El phoned me! She asked me to come back.’

‘So, why did you not tell PC Thompson—’

Logan steps between them. ‘He’s got a head injury, boss.’

‘And, like I said,’ Rafiq says, never taking her eyes off Ross, ‘we’ll be getting that seen to down at the Royal.’

‘I don’t know!’ Ross shouts. ‘We were having problems, I told you that. I just needed time to think. I had no time to bloody think! I just parked somewhere after driving through the night and slept in the car. That’s all! I knew it would look bad, I … maybe I panicked. I don’t know. I don’t—’

‘There was one phone call logged to you at seventeen-thirty on the second, but it wasn’t from El. It was from an insurance company based in Newhaven. And when Logan here gave them a ring, they told him it was likely a courtesy callback because you’d completed an online quote enquiry the previous day. And can you imagine our surprise when we found out what kind of insurance it is they specialise in?’

Ross’s face is grey. His whole body is vibrating, and even now, my throat swollen and throbbing, my stomach clenched tight with something like hate, it takes far too much effort not to go to him.

‘Accidental or negligence-based marine insurance,’ Rafiq says. Her eyes shine. ‘Bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? That why you didn’t take it out in the end? Thought even us plods might find that a wee bit too suspicious the day before your wife disappears in her boat?’

‘This is wrong,’ Ross says. ‘You’re fucking wrong.’

Rafiq shakes her head. ‘D’you remember that anonymous phone call I questioned you about two days after El went missing? Well, yesterday, two people actually came forward to make official statements alleging that you were hurting El—’

‘What? Who?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ Rafiq says. But I think of Anna’s determined grief, the long black line of mascara from her left eye to her temple. And Marie’s dismissive smile when I threatened to report her if she didn’t leave us alone.

Rafiq pauses, then reaches into her pocket. ‘We’ve also got a second warrant to search this house.’ Her voice drops, softens. ‘So I’ll ask you just once more, Ross. Do you know what happened to your wife?’

‘Boss,’ Logan says, ‘we can’t do this, not until he gets seen by a doc. You know that.’ And then closer, under his breath: ‘We can’t fuck this up now.’

‘He knows,’ I say. As loud as I can, even though it hurts. It hurts more to look at Ross, but I do that too. Because now, surely, even he can see the writing on the wall. Red and stark and bloody. ‘He knows. Because he killed her.’

‘No!’

Rafiq turns, cocks an eyebrow at me. ‘Do you have any proof of that?’

‘The kayak in the shed. And I found a chest inside Blue—inside the bedroom at the end of the corridor upstairs.’ I swallow before I remember it’s a bad idea – the pain is momentarily so bad it eclipses everything else, even the burn of Ross’s horrified gaze. I raise my head, look back at him without faltering. ‘I found your Treasure Trophies.’

‘Cat.’ Rafiq turns me towards her.

‘I think it’s a drain plug,’ I say. Sorrow washes through me, leaving me emptier still. ‘And a hole saw.’

Ross makes a sound somewhere between a shout and a moan, and I close my eyes as Rafiq thunders back up the stairs.

‘What are you doing, Cat?’ His voice is broken, as hoarse as mine. ‘How can you—’

‘Ross, I’d advise you to stop talking.’ Logan’s expression is pained. ‘For your own sake.’

Rain drums against wood. Pain is everywhere now, not just in my throat, and I have to numb myself against it: the fear, the horror, the regrets that are growing – too fast for me to think of anything else. Think of El. Not him. Think of El.

When Rafiq comes back, I’ve stopped shaking. She marches over to me, ignores both Ross and Logan.

‘Is there anything else?’

I can hear the flat, echoless rhythm of police boots against mosaic tiles. The groan of the landing, the scream of a dusty black door. I stand on the Satisfaction and look up into the dark of Mirrorland’s alleyway, my thin sips of breath getting thinner as I think of us battling storms and brigantines. Looking up, always up. Towards the screams of splintering wood and dying men, the bellows of cannon and musketoons, the roar of the squall.

I reach into my jeans pocket for the letter El wrote to me, hold it out to Rafiq.

She pulls some latex gloves out of her coat. Opens the letter, reads it, takes a sharp inhalation of breath. And when someone shouts down from the summit of Mirrorland, ‘They’ve found them, ma’am,’ something a lot more savage than relief lights up her face.

Ross makes a sound that’s half gasp, half moan.

‘Don’t look at him, look at me,’ Rafiq snaps. But her eyes are shining, shining. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘He’s been drugging me.’ My voice is less than a whisper now. I point towards the glass of wine on the corridor floor. ‘I think he drugged El too.’

‘No!’ Ross shouts. When I look around, I see that Logan’s actively having to restrain him now. ‘She’s lying!’

But I don’t cringe from him any more. Not even from his shouts, his curses. I hear the spin and click of handcuffs. Logan’s grunts of effort as he tries to drag Ross back towards the Shank.

‘It wasn’t me! I didn’t kill her! I loved her. Tell them, Cat. Tell them, you lying bitch! It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything! I loved her! I loved you!’ His eyes trap mine one last time. ‘I let go!’

My fingers press hard against my throat, so that the pain is all I can feel or see or hear. And when I open my eyes again, Ross is gone.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Rafiq says, and her voice is kind. She pulls my fingers from my throat. The arm she puts around me is still and sure and comforting.

‘I know,’ I whisper. Because in Mirrorland, anything – everything – is possible. In Mirrorland, you are safe. Fear is never to be feared, horror is only make-believe, and escape is inside every bone and vein and breath and brick. And all it asks for in return is one thing. Only ever one thing. That you have to be brave.

And so, for the first time in a long time, I am.

CHAPTER 30

I arrive early. Sit behind the wheel of Vik’s beat-up Golf, watch the car park fill up through a windscreen obscured by rain. My eyes are gritty, sore through lack of sleep and a new kind of merciless grief that sits heavy and strange on my chest. I can’t get rid of it. I can’t pretend it’s not there. It’s taken everything that was sustaining me, keeping me alive throughout the trial and the two months since – my anger, my pain, my need for revenge and justice and closure. And it’s eroded all of it down to nothing. A once-towering cliff ground into powder and washed out to sea.

The prison looks modern, sleek, not at all what I’d been imagining. The slit-windows and dark guard towers of Shawshank maybe. Instead, it’s smooth and curved and no more than two storeys high, matte-beige sandstone and big windows, HMP SHOTTS in grey glossy relief over the revolving entrance door.

I feel nervous, scared, sick to my stomach, but more clear-headed than I have in a long time. It’s been two weeks since I last had a drink. Every morning throughout September, I used vodka to fortify myself for another day of HM Advocate vs. MacAuley in Court 9 of the High Court of Justiciary. Invariably, I’d end up drinking behind closed curtains instead, but some days my resolve would win. And every one of those days – reporters, cameras, stares, whispers, intimate details, Ross – would be followed by long, numb spaces of nothing. Familiar fantasies kept me company in the darkness, and I would become convinced that the trial was just another dream, another place inside the cold stone walls of Mirrorland.

I was drunk on the day the jury of seven women and eight men finally came back with a verdict. The sticky-hot Court 9 hummed and thrummed; my stomach squeezed, my hands shook. I hid close to the back of the court, but, just like all the journalists and rubberneckers on Parliament Square, Ross saw me straightaway. He looked tired, so thin. And I loathed the ache in me, the echo of longing.

I barely heard the jury find him guilty by majority verdict of the common-law murder of El. But I did hear him cry out – once, long and loud; the back of his voice broke on it – before the courtroom erupted into chaos and Rafiq appeared to pull me away from gawking faces and shouted questions.

I close my eyes. I don’t know if I can face this. If I can face him. I think of that terrible cry again. Try to use it to make me feel brave, strong, better. But I’m no good at lying to myself any more. I’ve lost the ability.

I take the letter out of my pocket again. Battered and crumpled because I can’t leave it alone. ‘CAT’ printed in El’s handwriting across its envelope. It came two months after Ross’s conviction. Two days after Vik texted me asking for my new address. I’d used my dwindling savings to pay the deposit and first month’s rent on a cheap bedsit on the edge of Leith, because every new day of square lawns and apple trees, of grey ashlar bricks and Georgian bar windows, copper bells, red doors, and gold light, had become a torture – one that I’d started to crave, to need, to look forward to. Like a toxic love affair. Or a fantasy world of monsters and ghosts. When I first closed the bedsit’s door and sat down on its sagging bed, I cried with relief.

I take the letter out of the envelope, pick up the smaller piece of paper inside before it can fall onto my lap, look down at the Dear Cat and All my love, El, and all the dreadful words in-between. When I first opened it, there was a scrawled note too. She told me not to read it. So I don’t know if it will help or make things a hundred times worse. Vik.

April 3rd

Dear Cat,

This is the last letter I’m going to write to you. I should have written it before now, but I didn’t know how. And now I can’t put it off any longer.

I’ve lied to you. More times than I can count. More times than I should have. But you need to know that it was for you: everything I kept from you, every lie I told you, every time I said trust me, this is the truth now – and it never was.

Trust me. This is the truth now.

I look out at the cars, the people, the blurred beige and grey, open the glove box and push the letter inside. This new grief might be heavy and cruel, but this new sense of responsibility is worse, heavier; a dread no longer silvery but black and thick like cooling tar. I used to think that people whose lives were stuck in limbo carried on only because it was easier. Easier than giving up. Easier than stopping. But now I know it’s because there’s no alternative, no escape. That the tide will come, and all you can do is stay afloat. And wait for it to turn.

I fold up the smaller piece of paper and push it into my jeans pocket. Open the car door and get out. Face those smooth stone walls and high windows.

Because I can’t put it off any longer either.

I try not to look at the receptionist who checks my ID, or at my unsteady hands as I put my phone and bag inside a locker, or at the guard as I walk through the metal detector and consent to a rub-down search. The secure waiting area is upstairs, and I sit down, keep my eyes trained on the neutral carpet. Maybe no one knows who I am anyway, or who I’m here to see.

Ross’s sentencing was big news. It was televised. I watched it alone, in the dark, while reporters banged on my door. The judge’s voice reminded me of Mum’s: high and hectoring, inviting neither opinion nor dissent.

Mr Ross Iain MacAuley, a jury has found you guilty by majority verdict of the callous murder of your wife, Ellice MacAuley. After subjecting her to months, perhaps years, of physical and mental abuse, you decided and then planned, motivated in part perhaps by the realisation that she was intending to leave you, to murder her and pass it off as an accident at sea. I find that showed significant premeditation and cold-headedness. I also find that you believed you would profit financially from her death. You pled not guilty. You have shown no remorse. Against these aggravating factors, I find little in the way of mitigation. Therefore, I feel I must pass a sentence of life imprisonment, with a punishment part of fifteen years for the murder of Ellice MacAuley, and three years for attempting to defeat the ends of justice.

The reporters have stopped hounding me now. The trial, the conviction, have already been all but forgotten. And Rafiq was wrong. No one has made any connection between us and the two twelve-year-old girls found at Granton Harbour in 1998. And no one has mentioned the murder–suicide at 36 Westeryk Road, except as macabre coincidence.

I catch the eye of an old man with yellow whiskers, and when he grins, I look away. The intermittent bang of vending machines turns my headache into a dull throb.

A guard opens a door, beckons us all with a half-arsed finger. ‘Twelve,’ he says to me as I pass him inside the doorway. I find the table, sit down, clasp my fingers together. I don’t want to see him. I never wanted to have to see him again. And yet.

The prisoners file in. I feel Ross before I see him: a trickle of cold against my spine, a flutter in my heart. He stops next to the table, long enough that I have to look up. He looks great. His hair is short. His eyes are no longer bloodshot, the skin beneath them clear. On the day he took the stand, the flesh beneath his cheekbones was sunken, dark with stubble. He was charming, passionate, credible. He cried. Though I’d felt his stare throughout most of the trial, that day he never glanced in my direction once.

‘Hello, Cat,’ he says, and his smile is warm, unsure. ‘It’s good to see you. I didn’t think I would.’ The last is a question, but I refuse to answer it, not yet. I need to be in control of this whole conversation; I can’t let any bit of him in until I’ve made my choice.

He sits down, keeps his smile. When he stretches out his legs, I cross mine at the ankles under the seat of my chair. But when he clears his throat, I make myself look at him. If I can’t do that, I’m screwed before I’ve even started.

‘Why are you here?’ His gaze is too intense. Peat-brown eyes flecked with silver.

I close mine, and they sting. Because I’ve been grieving for him too, I can’t pretend I haven’t. ‘I don’t know yet.’

He leans closer. Close enough that I can smell him. ‘I want – I need – you to know how sorry I am about what happened that night …’ He swallows, and his throat clicks. ‘I’m so sorry that I hurt you, Cat. I’ve thought about it every day, and I don’t blame you for what you said at the trial, I don’t blame you for anything. I promise you I don’t.’

Because I am the main reason he’s here. I am why there was so little in the way of mitigation. I was the Crown’s best witness, and the most damning part of my testimony was not what I’d found or heard, not even the oxycodone and diazepam that they found in my wine glass and my blood – but the fact that Ross and I had been having sex. I endured the telling of that truth, even the snide cross-examination of it by Ross’s QC and then the wider, snider world, because it was so damning. So much of the prosecution’s case was circumstantial: El’s letter, Ross’s false statements, the physical finds, the mobile phone data, camera footage, even the turning up of a will that Ross knew nothing about, in which El left everything of hers to only me. None of it perhaps would have been enough. But her husband – her charming, handsome, grief-stricken husband; YouTube’s wailing widower – shagging her twin sister within days of her disappearance carried a deliciously scandalous weight that would not be moved. Even as I was testifying, I could see the jury members bristling.

‘That last night in Mirrorland, I want you to know that I would never … I would never have – everything just got out of hand, and you wouldn’t listen.’ He shakes his head hard. ‘But I let go, Cat. I let go. You know I—’

‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

He purses his lips, furrows his brow. ‘But I need you to believe that I wouldn’t—’

‘You wouldn’t have killed me.’ It’s an effort to keep my voice steady, neutral, because I’m not sure that’s true. But I believe he believes it. He believes that there was never a shining madness in his eyes, nor fat pulsing veins in his neck as he choked mine tighter. We only ever believe what we want – what we need – to believe.

He smiles. There’s a dried spot of blood under his chin, and I find myself wondering if he shaved for me again. But this time I don’t shiver. I don’t hate him any more. I’ve worked hard at not hating him. Perhaps too hard.

Under the table, I pinch my skin. ‘It’s kind of ironic.’ My voice is too high, too loud. ‘Me visiting you in prison, instead of the other way around.’

Ross flushes, and although his smile endures, it’s insecure, uncertain, hides its teeth. Should he laugh? Is it a joke? Is it a joke he’s supposed to laugh at? I’ve never been disposed to studying his reactions before, but now it’s as if every thought process is lit up in neon above his head. I wonder if he’s always had to pretend to be human, if it’s always been this obviously hard.

It suddenly occurs to me that the prison might be listening in on our conversation. Is that allowed? The possibility makes my heart beat too fast again; cool sweat slides between my shoulder blades. Ross looks at me, and I reach for my calm, my anger, because it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but the choice I’m here to make.

I lower my voice, soften my tone, look into his eyes as if I want to. ‘There are some things I need to ask. Things I need to know. And I need you to tell me the truth.’

Ross casts his gaze quick around the room. ‘I’ve told the truth, Cat.’

‘Then it should be easy.’

He blinks. ‘And then can we start over?’

‘I don’t know what happens next yet.’

‘Okay.’ Another smile. When he sees me hesitate, he leans even closer. ‘I didn’t kill her. I swear it, Cat. I didn’t kill El.’

‘That’s not what I want to know.’

He can’t hide his surprise, his relief.

‘Why did you drug us?’

When he immediately shakes his head, I stand up fast, start moving away from the table.

‘Wait. Wait!’ His shout is loud enough to attract the attention of the prison guard closest to us, tall and bored and chewing gum. Ross shows him the palm of his hand and drops his head down, stares at the table between us. ‘Please, Cat. Sit down. I’ll tell you the truth.’

I sit down.

When Ross finally looks up again, his eyes are blurry. ‘Because I wanted you to stay. I always want you to stay.’

‘You didn’t think we’d stay without being drugged?’

‘I know it was wrong, weak. But when Mum left – when she just woke up one day and decided to take me and leave Dad, it shocked me. That someone could do that and never look back.’ He closes his eyes tight like a child. ‘And then, after he killed himself, it terrified me.’

He reaches his hands across the table. His nails are ragged. ‘When El was – when she got depressed … I got scared. I didn’t know what to do. I thought she might try to hurt herself again. I just wanted to look after her, to help her, that was all.’ He leans closer. ‘And with you … I was so scared of losing you again – I could feel it happening. Because when you went to America, Cat’ – he swallows – ‘you never once looked back. Not once. But I’m—’

‘Why did you want me?’

‘What?’ The confusion is back. His hands are reaching for me again, though I don’t think he knows it. ‘Because I love you. I’ve always loved you. You know that.’ He holds my gaze, until I feel something inside me giving way. This is Ross, it says. But straightaway, I harden against it. The reflex and the longing.

‘Then why did you choose El instead of me? Why was it always her?’

For a moment, he’s silent, but the neon over his head is still flashing panic, uncertainty. What does she want me to say?

‘Was it because you wanted her more? Or because you loved her more? Or maybe because she needed you more than I did? Or you needed her?’ I force myself to relax. ‘Just tell me the truth, Ross, that’s all. Not what you think I want you to say, or what you think is the right thing to say. Just the truth. That’s all I want.’

The brightness that comes into his eyes then has all the confidence of someone who’s sure their answer will be all three: what I want, what is right, and the truth. He beams all that brightness onto me. ‘I didn’t love her more than you, you know I didn’t. I did love her, but with you it’s always been different. Easier. Better.’ His smile is sad, eager. ‘I chose El because you’re right, she needed me more than you did. I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t.’

I let out a long, slow breath. ‘That’s what I thought you’d say.’

He hears something in my voice, some remnant of anger that I’m no longer trying so hard to hide. He withdraws his hands, his smile disappears. It hasn’t worked, his perfect answer, and he knows it.

‘Cat, this is beginning to feel a bit like an interrogation, and I’ve just about had enough of them. I told you I didn’t kill El. I would never have killed El. But if that’s what all these bloody questions are leading up to, I’ll tell you again. I didn’t do it.’

I don’t answer him, barely manage to look at him. But a part of me – the good little girl who has never been able to learn that love can’t ever be trusted, still – still – wants to comfort him, wants to press the pad of my thumb against that deep frown line between his eyes and smooth it flat.

Emboldened, he sits up taller. ‘I mean, think about it, Cat. You must have. If I’d wanted to kill her, if I’d organised it all down to the most minute detail like that fucking oily lawyer said, why would I screw up my alibi so badly? Why would I have let a witness see me leave? Why would I have left my phone on? And why the fuck would I have left all that so-called evidence lying around the house? That Treasure Trophy stuff was juvenile crap, and you know it. He twisted it, just like he twisted us.’ He’s angry now and can’t help directing some of it at me. ‘And you let him. You helped him.’

‘Maybe I believed him.’

‘You didn’t!’ He bangs his fists on the table, making me jump, and the prison guard looks over. Ross lifts up his palm again, drops his head, but when he looks back up at me, his gaze is anything but submissive. ‘Why would I do it, Cat? Why the fuck would I have done any of it?’

I think of that terrible day under the willow tree when he cupped my face in his hands, tried to catch my tears with his thumbs, his eyes full of grief as I begged him Don’t, please. I think of him barefoot, in old jeans and a Black Sabbath tour T-shirt. His messy hair, his dear and familiar face. The filthy, wonderful words he always whispered against my skin: the promises, the kindnesses, the hope. The fierceness with which he held me, touched me, kissed me. As if nothing else mattered. As if there was no one left in the world but him and me. How much I wanted that to be true.

And I think of a child who chose to believe in superheroes and fairy-tale villains rather than in anything real. Anything sharp enough to wound, to cause scars that she’d be unable to forget. To unsee.

‘You did it because, one day, we might have sailed away from you again,’ I say. ‘Because you couldn’t trust us to stay. Better to be sure. Better to make us. So you lied and you manipulated, and you drugged and you plotted, and you divided to rule. Because you’re a coward.’ I think of the Shank. I’ll let both of you out, but only if you promise never to run away. If you promise to stay with me forever. ‘Because stealing someone else’s air is how you breathe.’ Stay with me. Be with me. I love you. I need you. El would want us to be happy.

I look down at the plastic tabletop, its stains and scratches. ‘You chose El because you thought she was weaker than me.’ I think of her lying in that hospital bed, dark-ringed eyes in a talc-white face, that tired and trembling smile. But I can’t. I can’t. If I think about that, I’ll unravel completely. ‘And you’re so good at it, Ross. You can make someone believe that your want is their want, their idea, their betrayal. And afterwards, when you banish them into exile, you can make them believe that was their fault too.’

‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’

I haven’t heard this voice before. Low, snide, sharp. I wonder if it’s the one he was born with.

‘Mum was the only one who saw you, who knew you for what you were. And she never even met you. She tried to warn us, but she’d brought us up in a dark and exciting world, full of pirates and witches and red poisoned apples. It was why we wanted a sly and handsome Prince Charming who couldn’t ever be trusted in the first place.’

I watch his face change. All his rage twisting and boiling under his handsome, careful mask. And it bolsters my resolve. I prefer him angry. ‘Except that was never what you were, was it? It was never who you were. Are.’

‘What the fuck are you—’

‘You’re Blackbeard.’

Mum pinching our skin, pointing at that black ship always on the horizon. You hide from Bluebeard, because he’s a monster. Because he’ll catch you, and make you his wife, and then hang you on his hook until you die. But you run from Blackbeard, because he’s sly, because he lies. Because no matter where you go, he’ll always be there, right behind you. And when he catches you, he’ll throw you to the sharks.

His eyes darken, his mouth curves up into a sneer that’s pretending to be kind. All that boiling rage is calm now; I’m not worth its trouble. ‘Cat, I think maybe you need to see someone. The last few months have been—’

‘I’ve made a choice, Ross.’ I look at him, commit every line and colour and shadow of him to memory; everything on the surface and everything beneath. This is Ross. This is what I’ll remember if ever I think of him again.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘I wasn’t sure what my choice would be, but now I am.’ I reach into my pocket, take out the small piece of paper. I allow myself just one more second’s hesitation before I put the Black Spot on the table and push it towards Ross. ‘I choose Punishment.’

He reaches out a hand, and then snatches it back. His face is a study in baffled anguish.

‘Cat, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what you mean.’ He looks down at the Black Spot. A single tear splashes against the underside of his wrist. I flatly ignore the clench in my belly. ‘I don’t know what this means.’

I stand up, put my palms flat against the tabletop, lean as close as I can bear to. ‘It means give it up, Ross. I can see you.’

When he looks at me, I recoil from his expression, stumble against my bolted-down chair.

‘You’re witches,’ he says, and his smile is pure Ross: crooked and sexy, slow and intimate. Left canine overlapping his front incisor. ‘Both of you. Crazy, fucked-up witches. You’ve ruined my life.’

The last gasp of doubt drains out of me. I smile, and it’s easier than I ever imagined it would be. ‘You just chose the wrong victims,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’

And then I start to walk away from him, towards the waiting room.

‘No!’ Ross shouts, standing up and lunging for me, squeezing my arm tightly inside his fingers. Hard enough that I know I’ll have to see their black imprint for days. ‘You can’t leave me. You don’t get to leave me!’

Everyone is looking at us. The tall guard is striding towards us, followed by at least two others, even though I’m not afraid, I’m not trying to struggle, I’m not trying to get away. I look hard at Ross, and something in him deflates. His face goes slack, his eyes turn wet and pleading. ‘You can’t leave. You can’t leave me. I didn’t do it, Cat. Please! I didn’t kill her.’

He tugs at my arm, pulls me closer. And until that tall guard and his colleagues get too close, I let him. Everyone is still looking at us. I keep looking only at him. I loved you so much. But I don’t dare think it for more than a moment, because he’s taken enough of me already.

‘I didn’t kill her, Cat!’

I close my eyes. Briefly press my lips against his ear. ‘I know.’

And then I do leave him. Raging and screaming and sobbing in my wake. I don’t look back. I close the door behind me. I leave him hanging on his hook to rot.

Outside, the rain has stopped and the sun, low and blurred, turns glass sparkling and the prison golden. I stand in the middle of the car park with my arms and fingers spread wide, head tipped up to the sky. And then I close my eyes and let the world burn warm and red.

I looked, El, I think. And I didn’t go blind.

CHAPTER 31

April 3rd

Dear Cat,

This is the last letter I’m going to write to you. I should have written it before now, but I didn’t know how. And now I can’t put it off any longer.

I’ve lied to you. More times than I can count. More times than I should have. But you need to know that it was for you: everything I kept from you, every lie I told you, every time I said trust me, this is the truth now – and it never was.

Trust me. This is the truth now.

Here is the why:

Do you remember what upset me the most the day we found that encyclopaedia entry about Captain Henry Morgan? It was that Mum had lied to us, and for so long. I don’t think I ever fully trusted her again. I stopped believing in her. I stopped believing in us. All because of one lie.

Do you remember what upset you the most? It wasn’t that Mum had lied to us, or even that he wasn’t our dad. It was the fact that he liked to torture people by tightening bands around their head until their eyes popped out. Because that wasn’t how a pirate king behaved – a father, a hero, a man. And so you instantly forgot it. You withdraw from what you can’t bear to be true and you believe the lie. And when you stopped talking to me – when you refused to ever talk about that last horrible night in Mirrorland – I withdrew from you, because the truth was allI could see. It felt like a slow-spreading disease, one that I couldn’t bear to pass on to you. I didn’t want you to remember.

But then Ross came back. Long before that day outside the National Gallery. For months, he followed me, harassed me, begged for forgiveness. I hated him. I hated him so much for that night. But he was all that was left of Mirrorland and he knew it. That day outside the gallery? It was to show me that if he couldn’t get to me, he could get to you instead. And that May Day in the Rosemount was him proving it.

So I had to make him believe that he wanted me more. I had to make him think that I needed him more. I faked my suicide attempt – you always knew it, but he didn’t. To him, it was the ultimate proof of loyalty. And maybe it was. Because I’ve tried to tell myself that I did it for you. To protect you from a monster just like you protected me. But I don’t think that was the whole truth. Not then. Because I still loved him.

So maybe our marriage was my punishment. My sentence. I didn’t lie to you about that. One day he’d be raging and cruel, the next so loving it was like agony. I’d get these cards, threatening me, telling me to leave – I guess he did it just to mess with my mind. Like the drugs he put in my food and drink. He hides them in his bedside table. And every day, I wake up craving them so much, I can’t think straight. They’re chains. Just like those ‘freedoms’ that I told you he’s allowed me to have. He succeeded, in the end, in chasing off Mouse after she came back. And when he thought I might be having an affair with my friend Vik, he threatened to find out who he was and kill him. He stopped letting me do any voluntary work. Threatened to stop letting me paint, if I ever contacted either of them again. To take away my boat. He even papered over the door to Mirrorland. And I let him do all of those things. Until I wanted to die for real.

He found me, of course. Made me vomit all the pills back up, made me walk around that fucking house until I could see and hear and cry again. And that was when he told me that he was still in touch with you. That if I ever tried to leave him again, he would do everything to you that he had done to me. And I remembered that encyclopaedia entry about Captain Henry Morgan. I knew that you’d try to survive by pretending what was happening wasn’t happening. By pretending your prison wasn’t a prison and your jailer wasn’t a monster. Until the day that you died. And so, of all the whys, that’s the real one. I’m not noble, I’m not brave. He just finally made a mistake. He gave me no possibility at all of parole.

Here is the how:

I like to plan, remember? Just like Andy Dufresne. So, here is THE PLAN No. 2.

Phase I: It was Vik who unwittingly gave me the idea for using The Redemption. He works for Lothian Marine Insurance, specialising in accident or negligence claims for recreational vessels. He told me all sorts of stories of deliberate sabotage – and how they were discovered. Yesterday evening, I visited him at his huge open-plan office, and while he was making coffee, I went to an empty desk on the other side of the building to call Ross and beg him to come back from London. I’d already made an online query in his name from our home computer, requesting a callback. The call should never be traced back to me through Vik because he’s just a very small cog in a very big wheel; Lothian Marine Insurance employs thousands of people – and anyway, no one other than Ross even knows we’re friends, and he doesn’t know Vik’s name. I have a second phone, a pay-as-you-go that I use to talk to friends without Ross knowing. And I’ve made Vik swear never to go to the police no matter what happens to me. When LMI call back Ross for real, he’ll hang up before they get to the end of their first sentence; he hates cold calling. So he will have no alibi. And a husband speaking to a marine insurance company the day before his wife is lost at sea is perhaps unlucky, but more likely guilty.

I bought a drain plug with cash a few weeks ago. Exactly the same as the one I already have. I bought two hole saws. I’ve drilled some holes with the first in the underside of the cuddy that will hopefully go unnoticed because I need that saw to be forensically traced back to the boat. I’ve left that and the new drain plug in the house, in Bluebeard’s Room, and my kayak in the shed, where I hope the police will eventually find them.

When the time comes, I’ll take the original drain plug out, toss it into the firth. It shouldn’t ever be discovered, because it takes a while for a boat to sink only from the lack of that. I’ll sail to the deepwater channel, take down the mast, disable the EPIRB and GPS. The hole saw is more of a risk. The boat will sink fast after I’ve used it for real, but I’ll just have to throw it overboard as far as I can and hope that The Redemption drifts far enough that the hole saw is never found.

Phase II: One good thing about Ross: he’s predictable. A few weeks before I had anything close to resembling even a Phase I, I found the note he left me all those years ago, setting me up to catch you both in the Rosemount. It was in his wallet, of all places – I guess he still likes his trophies. Finding it was a gift. Because I couldn’t be sure that he’d get the blame for my death, that he’d even be suspected of it. I could be sure that you’d come back. That he’d get to you, try to keep you. Unless I could get to you first. Both of us have to escape – that’s the deal I’ve made with myself. That’s the whole point of THE PLAN No. 2.

For weeks now, I’ve been acting like the abused wife I am, instead of hiding it. It’s surprisingly liberating. And it’s surprising too, how comforting it is to know that friends really are friends, that all they want to do is help. (By the way, if you’ve met her, I’m sorry about Anna, she can be loyal to a fault. But if you need her, she’ll be on your side.)

I know how Ross works. I know the what, the why, the when, the how of everything that he’ll say and do to you. I’ve even given Vik a timetable for the email clues I’ve asked him to send you as Mouse. Please believe me, if I could spare you any of this, I would. But there’s no other way. And I think you’ll work all of it out just like you’re supposed to. I think you’ll remember. I think you’ll stop believing the lie. I think you’ll believe me. I think you’ll be believed. I think you’ll be the one who finds him guilty, and then the world will follow. I think you’d avenge me before you’d ever think of saving yourself. That is my hope. That is my plan. That is what keeps me sane.

Because today I’m going to die. I can say that now, I can think it, and most of the fear has gone. Maybe that’s because I’m more like Red than Andy now: institutionalised, beyond redemption. But I’m not brave enough to drown. It would look worse for Ross if I did, but every time I think of it I see that poison taster, choking on a black and boiling pearl, and I know I can’t do it. I’ve been stockpiling my antidepressants. And there are the pills in Ross’s bedside drawer. I have to hope that they’ll be enough. I have to hope that this time the plan is foolproof; this time we both get out and stay out. Maybe you think suicide is a pretty fucked-up way to do it. I don’t. I might have been faking it last time, but it worked. You escaped. All I want, to paraphrase Stephen King, is for you to get busy living while I get busy dying. Or, if that’s too flip for you, maybe this is better. Think of a snowy day in the pantry. Mum sitting on the windowsill and reading Sydney Carton’s last words before he was taken down to La Place de la Révolution. ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.’ Because it is. It makes me happy, at peace for the first time in years.

There’s just one thing that doesn’t. In doing all this, planning all this, I haven’t given you a choice. We’ve never had many choices. No one ever thought to allow us any. This letter is your choice. It proves what I planned, what I did. You could show it to the police, or Ross’s lawyer – because even if everything has gone to plan, I know he’ll appeal; he’ll never give up.

Maybe you still don’t trust or believe a single word I say. But I hope you’ve remembered the truth anyway. I hope the house, the clues, the treasure hunt, the diary have worked, have forced you to face what really happened that last night of our first life in a way that I couldn’t have by only telling you – that the person who was lying to you was you. Because I want you to choose what happens next. The Black Spot is yours. It’s up to you what you do with it. Don’t think about me. And never think that whatever choice you make is the wrong one.

Maybe I’m not so different from Mum after all. She told me once that a white lie was just a lie that hadn’t got dirty yet, and I guess that’s true – I guess I’m pretty dirty now. But that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except this: once upon a time, you saved my life. Now I’m saving yours. That’s it. That’s all.

Please. Don’t stop believing in me.

All my love,

El xxx

CHAPTER 32

I take El to Lochend Cemetery to visit Mum. Set her down next to the headstone. Her urn is a great ugly thing: stern ceramic curlicues and brown flowers. It’s become my security blanket.

I replace my white roses with a fresh bunch of red ones, look down at the grass, the headstone, the ornate gold writing. GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN. And although I’m trying very hard these days not to forget anything at all, here I make an exception. I don’t look at his name, I don’t think of his face. I don’t think of him lying next to Mum in the dark until they’re both dust and earth and old stories.

I remember thinking that El loved A Tale of Two Cities because of its horror, its cruelty; Madame Defarge and her knitting needles. I remember standing in the sunlight of the back garden and thinking: She’s had my life for years. She’s stolen it. And being furious instead of grateful. Horrified. I don’t deserve any of it. Mum’s sacrifice, El’s sacrifice. All their terrible years of suffering, while I wallowed in self-pity and wilful ignorance; a reflection in a mirror, a shadow on the ground, dark and flat and impermanent.

I hold a memorial. Put a notice in the paper. Plant a tree for El in public gardens close to Granton Harbour and the wide Forth. I make a terrible and stumbling speech mostly to people I don’t know, who afterwards give me a half-arsed clap. I notice Marie standing maybe twenty yards away, but she moves no closer. And when I look again a few minutes later, she’s gone.

Some people come back to the pub, but few stay beyond the complimentary drinks and sandwiches. Within a couple of hours, there’s only Vik and Anna left. We talk about El, and it’s less awkward than I imagined. By unspoken agreement, Vik and I don’t talk about what she had him do. We don’t talk about Ross or the trial. We talk about the El that we knew, the El that we miss. I stick to Diet Coke because I’d just about kill for a vodka. And when Rafiq pushes open the pub door with Logan in tow, I’m relaxed enough to be glad.

‘That was a good speech, Cat,’ Rafiq says.

‘You were there?’

Rafiq smiles. ‘Polis always loiter at the back like a bad smell.’

‘Double scotch, is it, boss?’ Logan mutters. And I realise, with a ridiculous pang, that he’s shaved off his daft hair.

‘Naw,’ she says, giving him the stink eye. ‘Double Talisker.’ She looks at us. ‘Anyone else? He’s paying.’

After Logan stomps off to the bar, Rafiq moves closer to the table, leans against the back of an empty chair.

‘We’ll just be staying for the one,’ she says. ‘If you don’t mind, that is?’

‘You’re more than welcome.’ And I’m surprised to realise that I mean it. I’m surprised to realise that I miss her. Whenever I think of Rafiq now, it’s not as a detective inspector but as the woman who got down on the floor and held me while I cried for my dead sister, rubbed slow warm circles across my back; the woman who never believed Ross and never believed me, and never gave up until she got an answer, an end. She knows there’s more to it – of course she does – and maybe she knows that the answer she has is not even the true one. But I’m pretty certain she believes it’s the right one.

I go to the bar to help Logan, and his smile is contagious, warming my stomach better than vodka.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘You shaved off your hair.’

His smile turns sheepish. ‘Boss said I looked like a centre forward for Chelsea, so …’ He rubs his palm self-consciously against the nape of his neck.

‘It looks good. Suits you.’

‘Yeah?’

I smile again. Am rewarded with a flash of teeth and dimples.

‘So,’ he says. ‘What’s next? Will you be going back to America?’

I look away from him and out at the grey rainy day, the slick cobbles, gothic spires, and sandstone tenements. ‘I don’t know yet.’

Logan stares hard at a point between my neck and shoulder. I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks, but Anna saves us both with a loud tut as she starts thumping the drinks onto a tray.

‘There,’ she says, pushing it towards Logan. ‘Now maybe you can take them over there.’

In the end, the five of us stay until it gets dark, until the pub starts filling up, getting noisy. Rafiq and Logan leave first. Rafiq holds out her hand, squeezes mine hard and quick.

‘Take care of yourself, Cat.’

‘I will. Thank you. For everything you did.’

She gives me one last long look. And then she nods, starts moving towards the door. ‘Logan, I’ll wait in the car. Don’t take half an hour.’

He grins at me. ‘I’ve had better wingmen.’

Someone jostles us closer, and I reach my arms up around his neck to hug him. ‘Goodbye, Logan.’

He squeezes me, presses his face briefly against my neck. ‘Craig.’

‘I kind of prefer Logan,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a bit of a thing for superheroes.’

He draws back, gives a solemn nod. ‘I get that a lot.’

‘Thank you for every—’

‘You don’t have to say that. To either of us. We were just doing our job.’

I smile, kiss him on the cheek. ‘I want to say thank you anyway.’

He holds my gaze just long enough that I wish I’d said something more. ‘You’ve got my number, Cat. You know where I am.’

And then he, too, is gone, leaving me feeling less bereft than wistful. I do, after all, know where he is. Where he will be.

In some ways, saying my goodbyes to Anna and Vik is easier. Anna gives me a quick hard hug, a kiss on each cheek, and a ‘Look after yourself’ that has the tone of an order.

I look at Vik, his smile sad though it still crinkles the skin around his eyes. ‘I’m sorry for—’

‘It doesn’t matter any more.’ And I hug him, squeeze his hand.

‘I loved her so much,’ he says.

‘I know. She knew too, Vik.’

He blinks, looks away. I think not seeing me will be good for him; I know it’s never me he sees.

When I leave the pub, I’m alone. But I’m not afraid when someone steps out of the shadows, blocking my way. Maybe because there’s so little left to be afraid of now. Or because I’ve already guessed who it will be.

‘Hello, Marie.’

An oncoming car flashes gold against her skin, her eyes. ‘How are you, Catriona?’

‘You could have come to the pub, you know.’

‘I didn’t know if I would be welcome.’ Her smile is flat. Fleeting.

She wouldn’t have been, but what’s the point in saying so now? ‘El would have wanted you to be there.’

Her gloved fingers twine together, restless. ‘I didn’t help her, but I helped you, didn’t I?’ She squints against the glare of another car. ‘I saved you. Didn’t I?’

I look at her beautiful scarf, her leather gloves, immaculate make-up. All those terrible scars she thinks are hidden. I move forwards, take both of her hands in mine, and nod. Because in a strange way, she did. She woke me up. She made me remember what it was to be afraid. To be terrorised.

Her smile is brilliant. Her fingers strong as they grip mine back. ‘Be happy, chérie. Vis ta vie. For her.’

She spins on her heels and I smell Chanel. And then she is gone.

I go back to the house alone. I don’t really want to leave El in my crappy bedsit, but she deserves a return to this house even less.

The flat lawns of 36 Westeryk Road are littered with fag butts, empty juice bottles, and Greggs bags. I climb the stone steps up to the big red front door. The house has been locked up for months. When the solicitor first handed over the huge bunch of keys, I sat with them heavy in my lap for a long time, just looking at them, remembering Run!, the darkness and the thunder, my fingers pulling on the night latch again and again. Now I select the deadlock key with steady fingers, listen to its heavy clunk as it turns, the sun warm against the back of my neck. I push open the door, step up into the entrance hall. The smell – old wood and old age – is tempered now with an air of abandonment, neglect, and the relief I feel belies my steadiness. There’s an envelope addressed to me from National Records of Scotland lying on the mat. I pick it up, put it into my pocket.

Arcs of green and gold light crisscross the parquet, the bannister, the grandfather clock. But I don’t look up at the stained-glass window. I don’t go upstairs. The solicitor suggested taking an inventory, but I care about none of it. I’ve instructed him to sell the house and everything in it as soon as he can. I’m pretty sure that Ross will agree. What is the point, after all, in a prison without prisoners?

I’m here for me. For whatever it is I left behind. Because I still can’t move on. I still don’t deserve what El did, what Mum did; I still can’t find a way to live with myself. I know that I need to shake it: this martyred despondency, this fucking ingratitude. I know the longer I don’t, the more I’m letting El down. But it still doesn’t feel right – it feels horribly, horribly wrong – and I don’t know why.

I walk through the staircase’s shadow, pull open the heavy black curtain. Dust makes me sneeze, allows me to reach the other end of the pantry without having to look or linger. I step up into the cupboard, slide back the bolts, turn on my torch, and step down into Mirrorland for the last time.

The sun breaks white through the cracks in the roof. I smell the damp wood and musty air, feel the hairs rise up from my skin and scalp, hear the echoes of our whispers, giggles, screams. At the bottom, I turn left without looking right, keep going until I’m in the washhouse. Someone has cleaned up Ross’s blood; the Satisfaction no longer has a gun deck or rum store. I walk to the main deck and sit, cross my legs, look up at the green ocean and white frills of waves, at the blue sky and white puffs of clouds. The Jolly Roger with its painted skull and crossbones. The hulking spectre of Blackbeard’s ship beyond the empty lantern hook.

I don’t know how long I stay there. Long enough for those cracks of white to dim, leaving me in darkness except for the fading day through the washhouse’s window. I don’t know who or what I think of, but by the time I come back, I’m stiff, sore, lighter.

I get up, massage the feeling back into my legs and arms. Take down the Jolly Roger and fold it into a square. Run my fingers over the chalk and stone of the washhouse walls as I leave. At the bottom of the staircase, I look once more around Mirrorland: its countries and its borders, its bricks and its wood, its cobwebs and its shadows. And then I climb the stairs.

Close the door to Mirrorland. And bolt it shut.

I start a coal fire in Mum’s Kitchener, and when the flames are hot and high, I hold my hands over them until the heat spreads through me. I open the NRS envelope, pull out Mum’s birth certificate, and the four others I requested all those months ago: Jennifer, Mary, two Margarets. Under Father’s name for Mary Finlay, it says Robert John Finlay; Occupation, Fisherman. And under Date of Birth: Third of March, 1962, at 14:32. I look at Mum’s certificate. Nancy Finlay was born on the Third of March, 1962, at 14:54.

I sit down at the kitchen table. Twins. Mum and the Witch had been twins. Not Mirror Twins like El and me. Not even identical twins. Because Mum was as light as the Witch was dark; as small as the Witch was tall. But still twins nonetheless. I think of the hate in the Witch’s eyes – the hate for her own sister – and another wave of shame threatens to dissolve the small amount of peace that saying goodbye to Mirrorland has given me.

I look across at the bell board. And then out the window. Bright sunlight instead of blood-red colours the high garden wall. I will never know if the bells rang or if HE KNOWS really was painted on the wall that last night with Ross. I will never know if El whispered RUN! hot against my skin. But it doesn’t matter. Mirrorland existed because we believed in it. It was real to us. And that’s how it saved us.

I stand up. Go over to the Kitchener. Drop the birth certificates into the grate, one by one. Including the Witch’s. Without Mouse’s father’s name, I can’t trace Mouse through her anyway. I can only hope that one day, no matter how damaged she is, Mouse will come to find me like she came to find El.

I look down at Mum’s birth certificate, rub my thumb over her name. When I first came back to this house, I remember feeling like my life in Venice Beach – its safety and certainty – already felt lost to me, just a glossy photograph of a place I visited a long time ago. But it was never real. Not even its boardwalk of clowns and mystics and magic. I never believed in it. And that’s why it never saved me.

I let go of Mum’s certificate, watch its edges curl gold and black. Watch it disappear. And I think, You can leave now. Because I know she’s still here too. In all these years, none of us have ever really escaped this house. Or that moment of catastrophe, preserved like a body trapped under pumice and ash.

And then I reach into my jeans pocket, take out El’s last letter. Read it through one more time before tossing it and the Jolly Roger into the fire. I make a sound as they catch and go up in flames: the excited, scared yip of a child. And I look across at that naked stretch of garden wall one last time. I hope he knows. I hope he knows that neither El nor I are here any more. That we will never ever come back. Because his Donkshop was never this house’s heart, its engine room. That was always Mirrorland. And now it’s gone.

I put out the fire, close up the grate, and it feels a little like turning off the ventilator of a patient who has already died. In its wake, the house returns to a tomblike silence. I leave it in peace.

I pause again only once I’m standing outside. I glance one last time into the gloom – red and gold, black and white – before reaching up to pull the big front door shut for good.

And maybe as it closes I hear the muted protest of bell clappers inside copper and tin; the impatient shudder of wires and veins inside hollow walls; the whisper of worlds behind doors, inside cupboards, beneath still blue skies and oceans of green.

I don’t care if I do.

And that’s when I know why I came back. Why I had to say goodbye.

So that I would no longer be afraid to fly.

CHAPTER 33

I buy a seat for El on the plane. An indulgence maybe, and one that earns me a few strange looks, but it’s one I can afford after booking a late Christmas Eve flight from Heathrow. Besides, El squirrelled away more money from her art sales than anyone had realised, so it only seemed fair. I didn’t want her to be in the hold or an overhead locker – anywhere but right beside me as we finally flew over the ocean to The Island.

I had to transfer her ashes from the ugly great urn to a cardboard box with pink-painted flowers and a viewing window. Already, I’m dreading the moment I have to literally let go of her, but I’m more afraid about what happens after I have. Carrying her around with me has begun to feel as natural as feeling her pain when she’s not there.

Halfway across the North Atlantic, I finally fall asleep. I dream of The Island – of Captain Henry’s Santa Catalina – its beaches and lagoons and palm trees painted in El’s thick brushstrokes. I dream of Captain Henry finally standing at the wheel of the Satisfaction, and El and I at its bowsprit, as turquoise Caribbean waves bear us ever closer to The Island’s shores. I wake up feeling uneasy, maybe even afraid. Outside my window it’s dark as tar. I can see the white plains and black shadows of my reflection, the dark hollows of my eyes staring back at me.

‘A wise sailor never leaves port on a Friday,’ I whisper.

I hear El’s voice, clear as a bell. It’s Saturday now, you idiot.

And when I look at my watch, I see that she’s right. It’s Christmas Day.

So I look back out the window and I think of a pink dawn sky. El gripping my hand tight as we watch the sea and wait.

And I smile, lay my fingers over the box’s lid. ‘We’re finally doing it, El. We’re finally going.’

I’m feeling less enthusiastic after a nearly ten-hour layover in Bogotá, followed by a two-hour flight to San Andrés, and another to Providencia. It’s night again by the time I manage to escape El Embrujo airport. The taxi driver keeps up a friendly commentary that I’m in no shape to appreciate as he rattles along empty streets, lit only by the lights of cottages and cabanas, the occasional hotel. I can’t see the sea, but I can smell it: far stronger and cleaner than in Leith.

When he finally stops with an abrupt squealing of brakes, I’m so glad to have arrived, I could kiss him. Until he’s pulled my suitcase out of the boot, and both it and I are standing in the middle of another empty road.

‘Where’s the hotel?’

He grins, flashing gappy teeth. ‘On Santa Catalina.’

‘I know that.’

‘Santa Catalina is a different island from Providencia.’

‘Yes, I know that too,’ I say, now very close to panic. ‘But they’re supposed to be joined.’

‘They are,’ he says, pointing over my shoulder.

When I turn to look, I realise that what I thought was a boardwalk lined with benches and bright lanterns is actually a footbridge. A very long footbridge.

The taxi driver takes pity on me, pats my shoulder gently. ‘It’s okay, okay. It’s only one hundred yards, and then you are on Santa Catalina. The hotel is only past the fort, not far. Okay?’

The bridge is beautiful. Painted blue, green, yellow, and orange, it jostles and bobs against floating rafts. Not even in Mirrorland would either of us have imagined we’d ever have to walk to The Island, guided by swinging lanterns. The thought manages to make me smile.

When I finally reach the other side, there is a tree of high wooden signs, and my heart lifts when I read the first two: ‘Morgan’s Fort’, ‘Morgan’s Head’. I walk along the water’s edge towards the only lights. I can hear the sea, see the shadows of boats. The lights coalesce, revealing the hotel in increments, but I’m certain that I’ve arrived only when I see its small recessed entrance lit up gold. Just before I turn off the walkway, I see another wooden sign, faded and warped with age. ‘Welcome to Santa Catalina’, it says. ‘Pirates will be Hanged and Protestants will be Burned’. And I smile again. This time so wide, my lips hurt.

The hotel is basic, clean, wonderful. But after I’ve got into my room, I find that my tiredness has vanished. I don’t want to sleep, to risk dreaming about another place, another time. I want to be here, now.

I leave El on my bedside table and go back out onto the walkway, wander until I see more lights. I stop. The bar they belong to is called the Henry Morgan. Set into its wall is the encyclopaedia’s picture – El’s picture – our pirate king, bearded and long-haired and unsmiling. I go around the entrance, onto staggered tiers of decking and palm trees strung with fairy lights. It’s deserted, so I go down to the bottom deck, sit as close to the water’s edge as I can get. The warm wind smells of seaweed and smoke and cooking fish. A low-hanging line of lanterns swings between my table and the other side of the decking like a golden shield.

A waitress in a T-shirt emblazoned with the same Henry Morgan portrait comes out of the bar with a smile, and hands me the cocktail list. She looks young, maybe still in her teens, her black hair braided short, make-up glittery. I probably look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.

‘I thought it would be busier.’

She shakes her head. ‘Christmas is a time for family.’ And I find that I don’t care if her smile is one of pity or disapproval.

‘I saw a sign for Morgan’s Head back at the bridge. How far is it?’

‘Not far,’ she says. ‘You can walk there. It is very beautiful.’

I smile, glance back down at the menu. ‘Can I have your special rum punch, please?’

After she leaves, a group of tourists arrive, loud and celebratory. A second waitress herds them quickly towards the other, darker side of the deck, and I’m glad. My own sense of well-being still feels too fragile, as if it’s held together only by the promised magic of this place. Captain Henry Morgan’s place.

I turn my face towards the wind, breathe in the smell of the Caribbean. I’m here. We’re here. Inside El’s painting. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up to blues and yellows and greens. A far better resting place than a windy graveyard of lairs or a dark prison of make-believe. This is the place where I will finally be able to let her go.

I see the cocktail long before the waiter carrying it. The thing is huge: a tall glass that is more of a jug, silver straws and umbrellas, and worst of all, fizzing sparklers. I know it has to be my special rum punch; my heart sinks as it gets closer and louder. The tourists cheer its passage, tapering off only when they clock its solitary recipient.

The waiter is grinning when he sets it down. Sparks bounce off the table.

‘Thank you,’ I mutter. ‘It’s a bit …’

‘It’s our special,’ he says, with an apologetic laugh, as finally the sparklers dim and grow silent. I blink in the sudden return to darkness, realise he hasn’t moved. Am I supposed to tip him? I surreptitiously root around in my jeans pocket for change. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t …’

He smiles again. He’s incredibly good-looking, the sort of good-looking that always makes me feel nervous, inadequate. His teeth are very white. I start to wonder if I have some airline food in my own.

‘You are very beautiful.’

‘Oh.’ My face gets hot again. I laugh, take a big sip of the rum punch, and it’s strong enough to make my eyes water. ‘Thank you.’

‘You are only visiting?’

I nod.

‘I came here from Cameroon five years ago,’ he says, with another grin. ‘Also only to visit.’

I’ve never been to Africa. I’ve never truly been anywhere. Now, if I wanted to, I could fly across the world to the Kakadu Jungle. ‘I’ve come from Edinburgh.’ I smile. ‘I’m definitely only here for a week.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘it is very good to meet you. You are very welcome.’

He turns away from my table, and I watch him walk towards the other, busier side of the deck. I’m still smiling, the rum warming my belly, tingling down the length of my legs, as he approaches the loud tourist table, claps one of them on the back. His laugh is deep, booming. I watch the second waitress’s dark swinging rope of hair as she picks up an empty cocktail glass, and when he comes up alongside her, his hand going around her waist, I allow myself one last look back, one last fantasy. If I could, I’d take your place, El, and you could have mine. You could have hers. You could have everything you never thought you deserved.

But then I see the waitress stiffen. And his grip on her waist tighten. Something dark and cold extinguishes the rum’s glow, my new sense of hope. I peer into the shadows between us, but I can’t see her expression, only her stillness, the rigid set of her spine, her shoulders. Is she afraid of him? Does she long to escape? But then she turns towards him, and in the light from that low swinging line of golden lanterns, her smile is wide and dazzling.

I stand up. I feel dizzy, drunk. I start walking across the thick creaking boards of the bar, so much like the deck of a boat that it feels as if I’m on the ocean, riding the swells of a North Atlantic storm. Shouting into the wind, Come about! Heave to! All hands hoay!, even though I know I’m not saying anything at all.

When I start to fall, she doesn’t try to catch me. Instead, she runs forwards and falls with me, wraps her arms around my back as our knees smack loudly against the wood. She squeezes me hard enough that I cry out, though I’m crying already: great paralysing sobs that steal my voice, my sense. She kisses me, strokes my hair, whispers ‘Shhh’ to me as if I’m a child, one who has just woken up from a nightmare.

I remember how much I used to hate always looking into my own eyes, seeing my own smile, my own frown, my own imperfections. Like a mirror I always carried, sharp and heavy under my arm. To always be a reflection; half of a whole. Fused together like sand and limestone into glass.

Now my fingers shake as they touch her face. And my eyes blur with tears.

‘I knew you’d come,’ El says.

CHAPTER 34

I sleep like the dead.

I wake up to bright light and birdsong. Despite a hangover, jet lag, and more emotions than I can process, I know immediately where I am, what has happened, who I’m with. I’m in El’s bedroom. Above me, the ceiling fan turns and hums through slow rotations. I sit up when I realise I’m alone. Last night we slept together, just like we used to in the Kakadu Jungle, on our sides and holding hands.

I get dressed, go into the narrow hallway. The apartment is basic, bright, small. Nothing at all like 36 Westeryk Road. El is in the tiny kitchen, her new dark hair gathered into a loose bun.

‘Samuel bought some food,’ she says. ‘Coconut bread and mangoes.’

‘The guy from the bar?’ It comes out wrong, belligerent. Last night, El and I couldn’t stop grinning at each other. Every so often, one of us would break off just to laugh. Or cry. We were like children, I suppose, for whom the wonder of finding a dearly loved lost thing eclipsed all else. Today, I don’t know what I feel.

‘He’s a friend. There are more good men than bad.’ Her smile is tired. ‘Took me a while to realise that.’

I find that I can’t look at her, which is ridiculous. She touches my shoulder, and when I flinch, she sighs.

‘Go out onto the balcony. I’ll bring us some coffee. And then you can ask me anything you want to.’

The balcony is small, the table and chairs plastic. I sit, look out at all those blues and yellows and greens. No rocky coastline here after all, but a long, sandy bay and a pier surrounded by wooden fishing boats. I can hear the rattle of mooring rings, the creak of straining hawsers, and I fix my gaze on a boat painted red and pastel blue, bobbing low between waves.

When El comes out with the coffee, I do look at her. It’s still so new, so strange to be able to do that, to know that it is her. It’s been so long. Far longer than just these months that she’s been gone. It’s been years. Lifetimes.

She sits down. Sighs. ‘I needed Ross to believe I was dead. I needed you to believe that he’d killed me. I needed him to let you go. And then I needed you to let him go.’ A long pause. ‘So I lied.’

‘But why couldn’t you just tell me? Why didn’t you ever trust me?’ It’s what has hurt the most.

‘God, it wasn’t you I didn’t trust, it was him!’ She takes hold of my hands. ‘I wanted to tell you, of course I did. I wanted to tell you everything. But I had to save your life like you saved mine. And I knew you wouldn’t believe me. Couldn’t believe me.’

Because believing hurts. No one has ever lied or hidden the truth from me better than I have.

‘After the trial,’ I say, ‘why didn’t you get in touch then? Let me know you were alive? What did you think I would do? Tell the police? Choose him over you?’

‘I thought you would forgive him. That’s what you do.’ She looks out to sea, blinks to hide the tears I’ve already seen in her eyes. ‘I’m counting on it.’

But I can’t. ‘You wasted years of your life in an abusive relationship. You wasted years of our lives – our lives, El – because our crazy father chose to choke you first instead of me? You made me think that you were dead!’

‘I’m the eldest, Cat,’ she says, as if it’s the most logical explanation in the world. ‘I’m the poison taster. I’m supposed to look after you.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ I get a sudden flash of Mum: the meanness of her frown, the pinch of her fingers; cold eyes and a sharp, hard voice. And I’m as close as I’ve ever been to admitting that a part of me has always hated her – even now, even knowing what she did for us.

‘I need to know why. I need to know how.’

Her smile is pure El: half-defiant, half-sorrowful. ‘Then ask me.’

‘How did you get here?’

It’s a question with a thousand answers, I realise, but she only nods. ‘After I … scuttled The Redemption, I kayaked to Fisherrow. It’s an old harbour in Musselburgh, mostly disused now. No one saw me.’

‘You were the person in the parka, weren’t you? Seen hanging around the house that day? Coming out of the alleyway?’

She nods again. ‘I dumped the kayak in the shed. And I’d hidden a Survival Pack under the bed in the Clown Café. Just like we used to. It had been there for months. Money, clothes. There was a neighbour, a friend. We both once volunteered at a charity for immigrant families. I told her about Ross, and she gave me a false passport and papers. Before I decided that I couldn’t run.’

Because of me.

‘Marie,’ I say.

El’s surprise makes her look better, lighter. ‘You know her?’

‘Ross didn’t send you those cards,’ I say. ‘It was her. She sent them to me too.’

‘God.’ El’s shoulders slump. ‘Poor Marie.’

I feel angry again, and I don’t know why. El sees it, visibly squares her shoulders.

‘I got the express to Heathrow. I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do, where to go – I just needed to get away. I ended up buying a ticket to Mexico because it was the next flight leaving for another continent. But I was so afraid that Ross was going to find me. I kept thinking, any minute, he’s going to appear, he’s going to walk right through those airport doors. And find me.’ She half laughs, half sobs. ‘And the only thing that kept me sane was wondering if Andy Dufresne had been just as scared. When he was crawling through that tunnel, that pipe, those five hundred yards of shit; when he was so close to being out, to being free, after all those weeks and months and years of being so far.’

Instantly, my anger dilutes, mixed with all that new relief and happiness; the sheer joy of knowing that she’s here. The luxury of being angry with her.

‘I came here maybe a month after Mexico. I’d gone south to Costa Rica because I was still too scared to stop running, and then there it was on a map in a bar. Santa Catalina.’ Her smile is fleeting. ‘And I thought, is that why I bought that ticket to Mexico? So that I could come here? So that I could stop running?’

I close my eyes. I’m aware that I’m doing what I always do – circling around the pain so that I don’t have to feel it. So that I can pretend it doesn’t even exist. And El is doing what she always did – she’s letting me. I think of that pink cardboard box at the hotel, and my heart picks up in a hard and heavy drumbeat that even I can’t ignore. I breathe in, out. Look at that red-and-blue boat. ‘Tell me what happened, El.’

She says nothing until I turn back towards her, meet her gaze.

‘What I told you about my life with Ross was true. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t kill him. I mean, I thought about it …’ She pauses. ‘But if there was even the slightest chance I’d hesitate or fuck it up, what would he do? What would he do to me? What would he do to you?’ She shrugs. ‘I’d given up, I suppose. I just didn’t care any more.’

‘What changed?’

El takes in a long breath. ‘Mouse.’

‘Mouse?’

‘You remember how she always was? Needy.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Vulnerable.’

‘Because of the Witch,’ I say, thinking of her standing in front of the gate onto Westeryk Road, tall and cold like a waxwork. ‘Mum’s twin.’

El looks at me, surprised again. Nods. ‘When Mouse came back into my life, when she just turned up to the house about six months before the Plan, I didn’t recognise her at first. She said the Witch had just died. And so now she was free. Free to come back. I don’t know if she tracked me down to the house, or just expected me to be there. You think our childhoods were bad – the Witch beat Mouse, starved her, hid her away. Her whole life, she made Mouse small until that’s all she was. I used to think I knew what that felt like. But until Ross, I had no idea. Because you and I – through all of it, all of the abuse and the isolation – we had each other. We had Mum. We felt love. We were never alone. So I felt guilty. We were pretty shitty to her too, remember?’

I think of the Witch dragging Mouse along the hallway. No, no! I don’t want to go! The hard, echoless clap of those slaps against her face. The Witch’s smile as we let Mouse go. The way she stood inside that flood of light from the open door: head bowed and trembling like a dog.

‘Ross hated her,’ El says. ‘Hated anyone who might take any part of me away from him. So I let him think that I wanted her gone too – I let him think that she was gone – but I’d still phone her on that second phone. I’d still manage to sneak the odd hour away to meet her while he was at work. And we’d tell each other all about our horrible lives. It didn’t help. In the end, nothing helped. In the end, nothing mattered.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Because I’d just had enough.’

‘You never planned to escape, did you?’ I reach for my anger again, but it’s gone. ‘That last letter wasn’t a lie. You were going to kill yourself. Just like Mum did. That really was the Plan.’

‘I was just so tired, Cat,’ she says with an almost wistful smile. ‘So … sad.’

‘Tell me.’ I look back out at the boat, the pier, the sea.

‘April the third was a beautiful morning.’ Her voice softens, goes faraway. ‘The Forth has its own microclimate, you know. That day, it was like a bright gold corridor between all the dark clouds over the land. Seals followed me out to the shipping lane, gannets were wheeling around the sails and mast like they thought I was a fishing boat. I could see the flat nothing of the North Sea. I was ready.’ She stops. A tear runs into the corner of her lips. ‘But then it all went wrong.’

‘How?’

She swallows. Her smile is anguished. ‘Mouse.’

A familiar dread stirs in my stomach. ‘How—’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, standing abruptly, disappearing into the apartment. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

She comes back in less than a minute, holding two tumblers in one hand, a plastic bottle filled with red-gold liquid in the other.

‘Bushi rum,’ she says, pouring two big measures, handing one to me. Her hand shakes. ‘Local and lethal.’

I drink. It burns all the way down.

‘She phoned me. When I was on The Redemption. She asked me where I was.’ El’s voice is so quiet, I have to strain to hear her. ‘I told her I was out on the boat, and I tried to sound normal, but she could tell something was up. She said if I didn’t talk to her, meet her, she would go to the house, find Ross. I’d already told her too much. About how he was. About what he’d done to me. I shouldn’t have, I should have known how dangerous that was. Mouse wasn’t always small – you must remember how possessive she could be? How impulsive?’

I think of the marshal’s office. Her hands on her hips. The shine of her teeth, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Do you want me to help you?

‘She thought that I was escaping. Running away again, like we did as kids. She was so angry.’ El shakes her head. ‘The Witch wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed away from us for years. Mouse had been angry with us for a long, long time.’

Please, I don’t want to go! I want to go back to Mirrorland! Her hands reaching out to us as the Witch dragged her through the entrance hall, towards the door. I press my fingers against my eyelids. ‘We took Mirrorland away from her.’

‘And we left her alone.’ El sighs, bows her head. ‘I knew Ross had to be back from London. I worried what would happen, what he might do, what she might do, if she went back to the house without me. I was only about an hour out, less than.’ She takes a long swallow of rum from the bottle. ‘I couldn’t abandon her again. No matter what it cost me.’ She looks at me. ‘So. I picked her up from Fisherrow.’

A dreadful certainty beats hard inside my chest now, and I find that I can’t speak.

El lets me off the hook again, takes my hands and gives me a small smile. ‘I told her all of it. All of the Plan: Ross, the pills, the boat. I don’t know why. Maybe because, deep down, I wanted someone to stop me. And I was glad she’d forced my hand. I think the moment I answered that phone, I ran right out of courage.’ Her smile is terrible. ‘I scuttled myself.’

When I still say nothing, El squeezes my hands harder.

‘Even after I told her, I was shaky, panicky. I guess I was still coming down from adrenaline, cortisol, I don’t know, whatever it is your body thinks you need when you’re about to kill yourself.’ She shivers. ‘But I promised her it was over. That I wouldn’t do it, that I’d go back to Ross. I talked and talked at her like she was our cabin girl again. Our skivvy. Our comfort blanket. Like she wasn’t a person. A person who had suffered. A person who only ever wanted to belong, to be needed. To help.’ El shivers again. ‘I didn’t stop. Not until I was done. Not until I’d taken as much comfort and sympathy as she had to give. And then I left her alone in the cuddy. While I went back up top, kept sailing for a bit longer, until I felt ready to go back to the harbour.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I was relieved. That’s the ugly truth of it. Of me. I was relieved. I’d tried. I’d failed. And now I could go back home.

‘It was too quiet when I went back down about an hour later. I knew something was wrong. Mouse was lying on her back on the seats. And she was … she was just grey. She was this awful grey. And I just knew. Even before I saw the bag on the floor. The diazepam and the fluoxetine, Ross’s fucking pills. My suicide kit. I tried bringing her back, but she was already going cold.’ She shakes her head, and when she looks at me again, it’s with that familiar mix of sorrow and defiance. ‘I saw it then. My chance. I could sail back to Granton, face Ross – all the questions and consequences of Mouse being dead, of me being on the boat when I’d begged him to come back from London. Or I really could escape. Him. All of it. Everything at once.’

I think of that body on a stretcher. The white of its skin, the black of the closing stitches at the ends of its collarbone. Its terrible face.

El’s fingers tremble against mine as she swallows hard. ‘I decided to substitute Mouse for me.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ I say. It’s a lie. I want to get up, I want to run. I don’t want to listen. But El won’t let go of my hands, my wrists. ‘I don’t—’

‘There always had to be a body,’ she says, and she’s actively pushing me down now, as if she knows if she lets up for a moment, I’ll escape. ‘If one wasn’t found, I knew Ross would never give up, he’d never stop looking. And maybe he’d never be found guilty. It was why I’d decided I had to kill myself. But as soon as I realised I didn’t have to die, I didn’t want to. I could go back to the house, replace the drain plug and hole saw in Bluebeard’s Room with the real ones, so that the forensics would match without any margin of doubt. I could get my Survival Pack. And I could escape. Really escape.’ She looks at me, suddenly fierce. ‘But I didn’t want it to happen like that. I didn’t want her to die.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I say again, now twisting my wrists so hard, so frantically, that a bone cracks loud enough to make both of us wince. But El doesn’t let go. Instead, she only moves closer until we’re inches apart; until I have no option but to meet her hard gaze.

‘Yes, you do. And you have to face that this time, Cat. You have to know the truth and believe it. Accept it. Even if you don’t want to.’ She lets me go. ‘You have to say it.’

I breathe in. Out. Think of that body on the stretcher again. That DNA isolation test on Rafiq’s phone. ‘She’s our sister.’ I stare down at the purple crescent-shaped welts on my skin. ‘Mouse is our identical sister.’

El takes my face in her hands, smooths cool fingers against my brow, my temples. There are tears in her eyes, but she’s smiling. Nodding. ‘Do you remember how special we were?’ she says. ‘More than one hundred thousand other children had to be born before a mum got to have children as special as us?’

I nod. Close my eyes.

‘The odds of giving birth to Mirror Twins are about one in twelve hundred births. For a fraternal twin like Mum, the odds drop to one in seventy.’ El lets out a long breath. ‘It’s not that rare at all.’

I think of Mouse curled up into a ball behind a lashed-down barrel in the bow of the Satisfaction, her chalk-white face streaked with tears. And my selfish, stupid belief that the envy in her eyes was only to make me feel better – to let me know that I was worth something to someone. Even if that someone wasn’t real. I wish I was like you.

‘The Witch told Mouse just before she died.’ El’s face is so pale. ‘That we were identical triplets. That her grandpa was her father, and our mother was her mother.’

‘But how?’ I think of Mouse’s raw pale skin and cropped dark hair, her bony smallness. I can still feel my denial like a palpable lump under my skin. ‘She didn’t even look like us. She was—’

‘Mouse said the Witch cut off her hair, dyed it black, barely fed her. And remember how often she’d plaster herself in our clown face paints? To try to look like us. Like Belle. To stop looking like herself.’ The glance that El gives me is almost angry, even though tears track down her cheeks. ‘We never saw it because we believed what we were told to believe. Just like we always did. But maybe Mum wanted us to know that we were so much more special than we thought, than she’d told us we were, and so she mixed the truth with fantasy. Just like she always did.’

‘The odds of us being identical triplets,’ I whisper. ‘That was the one in a hundred thousand.’

El nods. ‘Probably less,’ she says, and her voice is small. Her smile smaller. ‘If twins already run in the family, and your grandfather is your father.’

‘But why? Why would Mum just let the Witch take her? Why would the Witch even want—’

‘Mouse said that the Witch would sleepwalk. Would have night terrors. Mouse would wake up, find her outside on her knees, alone in the cold and the dark, begging to be let back in. No one ever wanted the Witch. No one loved her. No one wanted to make her his wife, and then hang her on his hook until she died. She was never picked. She never belonged. When Gran died, Grandpa kicked the Witch out of the house with nothing. Only allowed her to visit in exchange for her silence. Mouse thought the Witch took her because she needed to have something – to take something – from Mum, from Grandpa. She thought that the Witch needed someone else to know what it felt like. To never be loved, to never belong.’

Her long-nailed finger pointing at the trembling, head-bowed Mouse. THIS is what it is to be a good daughter.

An oval locket swinging from her fist, catching the sun in gold sparks. Mum’s smile as cold as ice. You always want what I have. The Witch thrusting the necklace inside the pocket of her long black dress. And sometimes, I get it.

El looks at me. ‘But I think Mouse was wrong. The Witch paid for that big ugly headstone, you know. Paid to have them both buried together.’ Her eyes flash. ‘Her whole life, she just wanted everyone to suffer more than she did.’

I think of those birth certificates. Third of March, 1962, 14:32 and 14:54.

‘The Witch was the eldest,’ I whisper. I’m shaking: minute tremors that make me want to shudder. ‘She should have been the poison taster.’

The enormity of it all hits me then. What Mum must have gone through. Why, every year on the date of Gran’s death, she would shut herself in her bedroom and not come out again until the next day. All that horror and suffering, and the injustice of being the one blamed for suffering it. The lies she must have told herself. I wonder if she even remembered by the end that Mouse had once belonged to her.

‘Mum just wanted us to be safe,’ El says. ‘Maybe she convinced herself Mouse would be safer. Maybe she was.’

It’s a lie. Because Mum never taught Mouse how to survive. How to hide, how to run. How to feel joy in the dark or fearless in a storm. But I can’t think about that. I can’t think about Mouse being all alone, while I couldn’t even bring myself to believe that she was real.

‘Did Ross know?’

El shakes her head. ‘He always thought Mouse was a family friend or a cousin. She still looked the same as when we were kids; nothing at all like us. I didn’t know. Not until that day on the boat. Mouse told me she was our sister after I told her about my plan to frame Ross for my death.’ A pained smile. ‘You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.’

‘Oh, God.’ I stand up. Almost stagger. Warm wind blows against my face. I close my eyes. Remember running along the boardwalk and into the marshal’s office, the Black Spot crushed inside my hand. Mouse’s eyes, big and black and round. Don’t be scared. I’ll help you, Cat. I’ll save you. The happy hope in her wide smile. The old baggy dress painted with clumsy red roses to match the pinafores El and I wore. You can be me. And I’ll be you. ‘She did it for you, didn’t she? Mouse took those pills for you. Because you were going to go back to Ross.’

El covers her face with her hands. ‘I didn’t believe that she was our sister. Not then. Not when she told me.’ She hunches over and starts to sob. ‘She just kept pulling at me, smiling at me, telling me all she wanted to do was help. All she ever wanted was for me to trust her, to love her like a sister. You know, you must remember, how suffocating it was: her need, her desperation. And so I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t.’

I go down on my knees, grip hold of her hands before they can do any more damage. Already there are bloody scratches on her cheeks and chin to match those on my wrists.

‘She left a note,’ she whispers. ‘Just her name. The one Mum gave her.’ El’s whole body is vibrating like a tuning fork. ‘That was when I knew she’d been telling the truth.’

‘What was her name?’

El’s laugh sounds broken. ‘Iona.’

The fairy princess who was stolen from her mother by an evil hag. Who cut off her wings and imprisoned her in a tower so high that no one even knew she was there.

El’s sobs get louder, harder. I can hardly make out her words. ‘I left her alone after she told me. She listened to me while I talked and talked at her like she wasn’t a person, and I never once listened to her. When I went back up on deck, the last thing I said to her was Leave me alone. I want you to leave me alone.’

‘El. El.’ I lean closer. ‘You didn’t know.’

She pushes me away. Staggers back onto her feet. ‘What if I did? What if I did believe her? What if I told her everything, and then left her down there alone with my drugs, knowing that—’

I stand up. ‘You didn’t believe her. Not when you went back up on deck. You were relieved, remember? Relieved that it was all over. It wasn’t your fault.’

When she just goes on shaking her head, I grab her, force her to look at me again. ‘None of it was your fault. What Mum always said about the eldest having to look after the youngest, she was wrong. Just because her elder sister never protected her, you’ve had to sacrifice your whole fucking life for mine.’

‘Wasn’t such a great sacrifice,’ she says, and her smile is terrible, her gaze unfocused. ‘I loved him. I always wanted him, right from the very start. I always used to think I was so good, so brave. But lying and manipulating, planning, it’s like breathing for me now. Maybe I am bad. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Because it was my fault. I should have died and Mouse—’

‘I’m a drunk,’ I say. ‘I’m selfish. I’m disloyal. I’m a coward who has never faced anything. I wanted Ross, and I didn’t care when it hurt you. I hated you, and I never ever suspected that you didn’t hate me. And that night – that last fucking night – I would have kept going. If Ross hadn’t blocked up the hole, I would have left you behind, I would have left you with Grandpa, just like the Witch did to Mum, and I wouldn’t have looked back. I didn’t look back.’

El tugs on my arm. ‘That’s bullshit. You’re nothing like her. You’re nothing like them. None of it was your fault—’ She stops. Her gaze suddenly sharpens, her fingers loosen. She sits back down with a choked laugh. ‘I suppose you think that was clever.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, El.’ And I smile, even though it’s the very last thing I feel like doing. I sit down, move my chair close enough to hers that we can look at each other as if we’re looking in a mirror. Her eyes are red, her skin white. I think of her lying in that hospital bed. I think of all Mum’s stories, all her lessons. Shawshank, A Tale of Two Cities, The Count of Monte Cristo, Papillon, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, all those Agatha Christies. I’d only ever understood escape in them, but El had seen subterfuge. Imitation. Opportunity. Sacrifice. Rescue. That a white lie was just a lie that hadn’t got dirty yet.

And she would have come back. If I hadn’t escaped Ross too, she would have sacrificed her freedom, her new life. I know that absolutely.

I remember that hidden tribe in South America. How they would form a circle so tight around someone that they couldn’t escape. I clasp El’s hands. I make her look at me. And then I tell her about every good thing that she has ever done. Every good thing that she has ever been. Over and over. Until finally she sees me. Hears me. Believes me.

And then – then – I cry for Iona. I cry for the sister that neither of us even had the chance to love. To need. To save. I cry for the moment she sat beside me in Chief Red Cloud’s teepee, eyes big and blue and full of the best kind of sympathy.

It’ll be okay, Cat. I love you.

I cry for that melted, shiny thing on a metal stretcher. A bald rippled scalp, deep eyeless holes, teeth fixed into a lipless grin.

And most of all, I cry for Mouse. The little smiling girl with the chalk-white face and ruby-red lips who once told me, If you’re quiet and small and scared in the dark, no one will ever see you. Because no one ever had.