The Ice Twins (37 page)

Authors: S. K. Tremayne

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Suspense

BOOK: The Ice Twins

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Beany’s toy is in my jacket pocket. Together Kirstie and I walk out of the cottage, closing the damp kitchen door. It strikes me that one day soon I will close this same door for good – when we sell the island.

I am satisfied with this.

I will always revere Torran, I will always gaze in admiration at its daunting beauty from the seats outside the Selkie. But I am content to keep it at a distance. Torran has defeated us, with its winds and vermin, with its thunders booming down the Sound from Ardvasar.

I hold Kirstie’s hand, very tight, as we walk down to the lighthouse beach. As if the island may try to stop her going.

‘OK then, Kirstie-koo. Let’s get home.’

‘Don’t call me that, call me Kirstie!’

The ropes untied, we climb into the boat. With a couple of tugs I get the outboard whirring.

Kirstie is sitting in the back of the boat, she’s humming her favourite tune. A pop song, I think. I sigh with barely concealed relief as we steer away from the island. Silence absorbs us. Then a grey seal rises a few yards upstream.

My daughter looks at the seal, and she smiles, and it is very definitely Kirstie’s smile: pert, mischievous, alive. She is definitely getting better. Therapy has helped her recover. She no longer feels that Lydie’s fall was her fault, we’ve convinced her of that. But that still leaves my appalling error. I blurred her identity; I made that mistake. One day I will have to forgive
myself
.

The seal has disappeared. Kirstie turns away. And now her face clouds with some further, darker emotion.

‘What is it sweetheart?’

Kirstie stares beyond me, at Torran.

Slowly, she says:

‘Lydia came back, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she did. Just for a bit.’

‘But she’s gone now, and I’m Kirstie again. Aren’t I?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That is who you are. And you always were.’

Kirstie is quiet. The outboard motor churns the clear water. Then she says:

‘I miss Mummy. And Lydie.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘So do I, darling.’

And it’s true. I do. I miss them every day. But we have what we have, and we have each other.

And we still have little secrets, that might never be revealed. Kirstie’s secret is the night of the storm, she has never told me exactly what happened, and what was said in the house, that last night; I have long stopped asking, for fear of upsetting her. Why go back? Why dig it all up?

Equally, I have never told Kirstie the entire truth about her mother.

When I found Kirstie, huddled in the cottage, she apparently had no idea where her mother was. So I searched the house, looking for clues. And finally, as morning paled the mainland skies, Josh and Gordon came over in Gordon’s skiff, and rescued us from Torran: ferrying us back to warmth and safety at Josh’s house.

And then we heard about Sarah, before the search parties had properly started.

Her body was spotted by a fisherman, floating by the beach at Camuscross. Immediately after that, the police took over Torran. I left them to it, shielding myself and Kirstie from the journalists and the detectives. We hid ourselves in Josh’s house, staring at the shivering rowans beyond the big windows.

Within a week the police reached their conclusion: Sarah had quit the cottage, for whatever reason – perhaps in some strange attempt to get help; but she had fallen in the mud and the darkness, and drowned. It was so easily done. Too easily done. It was an accident.

But was it, truly? I am haunted by that phrase I heard at the Freedlands’:
All love is a form of suicide
. Maybe Sarah wanted to join her dead daughter. Or maybe she was deranged with guilt, by what she read in the bottom drawer of the kist. I found the letter from her doctor, scattered on the floor of the bedroom, that same night I found Kirstie. I destroyed it.

The questions will plague me, always: would she really leave her daughter behind in the cottage? Did I really see one or two figures, through the mist, as I made my own way to Torran?

There will never be an answer. Though there were clues, and these are the clues I will not reveal to Kirstie. Not as long as I live.

When they found Sarah’s solitary body, floating in the tide, they found her holding Lydia’s pink coat, by the sleeve.

And when the forensic scientists conducted the post mortem, they discovered sad, wet strands of fine blonde hair, clutched in Sarah’s fingers, as if she had been grasping desperately at someone in those final minutes: trying to save her child from drowning.

Kirstie is looking south, to Mallaig; I have my back to Torran island.

It is a fine, calm day in early June; the skies are mirrored in the silent sea lochs. And yet a cold wind still whips off those beautiful hills.

Sgurr an Fhuarain, Sgurr Mor, Fraoch Bheinn.

About the Author

S. K. Tremayne is a bestselling novelist and award-winning travel writer, and a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines around the world. Born in Devon, the author now lives in London.

S. K. Tremayne has two daughters.

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