Her expression was in shadow. ‘You’re crying.’
And I realised that I hadn’t stopped. The realisation made my tears come faster; made the pain bigger, scarier. I gripped her wrist. ‘Please don’t tell!’
‘Stop it!’ El hissed. ‘Let me go.’
‘You’ll say you found me.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Yes, you will.’
‘No, I won’t, dummy. You’re my sister. Why would I want you out of Mirrorland?’
So you can have it – and Ross – all to yourself, was what I thought and didn’t dare say.
‘We will not leave each other,’ she whispered. ‘Come on! Say it.’
I swallowed. Let go of her wrist. ‘We will not leave each other.’
She nodded. ‘Never so long as we live.’
Every pirate code was in code. And ours meant Trust me. Trust me and no one else.
‘It’s just fifteen more minutes,’ she said.
And then she closed the lid, leaving me in darkness.
It wasn’t fifteen minutes. Endless leg cramps fed my panic, my claustrophobia, my uncertainty. When the lid was finally opened again, I no longer cared about consequences or banishment or being alone in a cold, grey, empty, frightening world.
I got up on legs that were numb and prickling, the Black Spot still crushed inside my palm. El stood inside the saloon, and everyone else stood behind her. She didn’t look relieved so much as triumphant. ‘You did really great. We’ve all agreed that you’re forgiven.’
I never thought the Black Spot was Ross’s idea. I never blamed him at all. Maybe El’s diary was wrong. Maybe her version of that day is no truer than mine. Because a memory, after all, just like a belief, can still be a lie.
But she was right about me being jealous. Of course she was, because who wouldn’t be? She and Ross conspired to exclude me in the only way children can: with looks and laughs and whispered conversations that ceased whenever I got within earshot. They were both cruel, there’s no denying that. I can still remember that feeling, and far too readily: the heart-breaking agony of being discarded by both of them. The endless worrying about what I had done wrong, what I was doing wrong, and never knowing it was nothing at all. Is that what I’m supposed to be understanding from these email clues, these diary extracts, these unwelcome reminders of our past seeping back in like damp through a badly proofed wall? That Ross was always hers, even in the beginning? Or that she always kept secrets from me – that, pirate code or no, she had never trusted me? Or does she just want me to know that I’m wrong? That something else I believe in doesn’t exist? That she won’t ever be coming back?
Ross has gone out. I’m both relieved and worried. And embarrassed. This time he hasn’t left me a note. I sit at the kitchen table, google ‘how to track the original location of an email’, and trawl through the results until I find one that doesn’t make me want to frisbee the laptop across the kitchen. My first attempt turns up Private IP Address – No Info. My second, the address of the Google mail server in Kansas. Two coffees later, I’ve managed to install a mail tracker add-on, but if I want it to trace an address, I need to send El a new email.
After typing ‘EL’ in the subject line followed by ten minutes of staring at the screen, I take DS Logan’s card out of my wallet and pick up my phone.
‘DS Logan.’
‘Hi, this is Cat. Catriona Morgan. Em, Ellice MacAuley’s—’
‘Cat. Hi.’ His voice changes, and I immediately want to hang up. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yes, it’s fine. I mean, I – I just wanted to ask you a question.’
‘Sure. Fire away.’
‘I was just wondering … did you ever suspect that El was sending herself those cards?’
For a moment, he doesn’t reply, and I realise that I’m holding my breath, without actually knowing what I want him to say. When I find my gaze wandering to those tiles in front of the Kitchener again, I screw my eyes shut.
‘No,’ is what he does say. ‘We never did.’
When I end the call and start typing, I realise that my hands are shaking. They won’t stop.
If you’re in trouble, please just tell me. Please.
I’ll believe you.
And then I wait.
CHAPTER 9
It’s not until I’m halfway across the grassy Links that I realise where I’m going. The afternoon is cold and dry, but the clouds on the horizon are slate grey and growing darker. I walk briskly through the parkland, looking around at the old sycamores and elms pushed and pulled by the wind. Remembering how much bigger, denser, more threatening their spectres had been inside that silent, grey-pink dawn.
The ruined plague kiln squats on the ground like a stone turret cut down from its castle, and I can’t help thinking of all the bodies buried on top of one another underneath this grass more than four hundred years ago. Or of their swollen black and tormented ghosts, eternally searching the Links for their burned possessions. Grandpa’s stories were always very different from Mum’s: deliciously gruesome and lacking in any kind of lesson or moral at all. The back of my neck prickles, and I swing around, thrust out my hands as if to stop what – or who – I’m suddenly certain is behind me. But there is no one. The few other inhabitants of the park are nowhere near me, nor are they looking my way. Stop.
I leave the Links, walk along street after street – some cobbled, some tarmacked – old Georgian terraces opposite modern glass-walled, metal-framed apartment blocks; cosy bistros alongside grubby newsagents with window bars. The air is heavy with fried food, cigarette smoke, the exhausts of slow-moving school buses. But what I see are old gothic houses where the murderers of children live and lurk and haunt; what I smell is the sharp brine of the sea, of safety, of escape.
The ten-storey apartment blocks on the corner of Lochinvar Drive are new. They hide the firth from view for just that little bit longer, and I pass them slowly, heading down the drive and past a weather-beaten sign: ‘WELCOME TO GRANTON HARBOUR’. Halfway along the drive, the heavens finally open, and I pull up the hood of my anorak, yank its drawstring tight. I left El’s cashmere coat at home, partly because of the weather, and mostly because this is one of the last places anyone reported seeing her. It feels strange to be here, makes me feel oddly self-conscious, as if I’m doing something wrong. I could well be. Nothing, I suppose, has the potential to fuck up a missing-person investigation like an identical twin wandering about unchecked.
The Royal Forth Yacht Club is a low brown building with small windows. I can hear the yachts before I get close enough to the water to see them: that familiar jostle and rattle of wind, water, and metal. The harbour pontoon is busy, packed full of boats attached to bobbing buoys.
The wind and rain have woven together a grey-white shifting mist that has obscured visibility in the west nearly entirely, but to the north, I can just about make out the volcanic rise of the Binn and the rocky coastline of Kinghorn. The low stone slip that I remember so well is still here beyond the harbour wall, still mostly submerged. Now, where the warehouse stood, there is only a car park and boatyard, full of forlorn-looking sailboats sitting up on blocks.
Too many years in LA have stripped me of any immunity against relentless wind and rain, and so I stop to take a breather, squint along the harbour wall and out to the wild and dark firth. It feels like El is still here. Why here? That’s what I can’t work out. Because it can’t – it can’t – be a coincidence that the place we ran to all those years ago is the place El has disappeared from now. That here, where our second life began, is where everyone believes El’s has ended. I feel a ghost of that silvery, shivery dread. That unravelling coil of what if?