I turn back towards the open door into the hallway and the grandfather clock, the telephone table, all those china bird plates. There’s a hollow space inside my stomach. It’s easy, I know, to be tricked – fooled into believing something is real when it’s not. Especially if you want to believe it. But this house is more than old memories. It’s like a museum, a mausoleum. Or a moment of catastrophe, preserved like a body trapped under pumice and ash. Was that why El had needed to buy it, to fill it back up with all that was lost? Did she see that auction notice in the paper, and arrange a viewing out of little more than curiosity, hardly expecting that it would be like stepping back into her childhood? It would have been hard, I suppose, to come and then go, to resist its pull. Although I was always the more sentimental one. El mastered the art of chucking it in the fuck-it bucket before we’d even reached puberty.
I retrieve the dustpan and brush Ross has left on the floor, sweep up all the broken china I can find. As I’m crossing the kitchen to the scullery, I come to an abrupt halt close to the Kitchener. I stare down at the long join between two tiles, its grout cracked, stained dark. My heart skips a beat. I feel suddenly sick, look quickly away. A bell rings – loud and sudden and close. My heart skips another beat and then starts to gallop. I turn around, stomach squeezing, fingers and toes tingling, and my eyes go straight to the wooden bell board just inside the kitchen door:
Dining Rm Drawing Rm Pantry Bath Rm
Bedrooms
1 2 3 4 5
Every spring-mounted copper and tin bell below each room has a star-shaped pendulum hanging from its clapper. And every room in the house apart from the kitchen has a bell pulclass="underline" a brass-and-ceramic lever connected to long copper wires hidden inside the walls, along cornices and behind plaster. Whenever a lever was pulled, those wires tightened around pivots and cranks, shuddering through rooms and floors and corridors until they reached the kitchen, where they would shake the coiled spring of a bell mount, ringing its bell loud and long. I remember that those pendulums would swing for minutes after the ringing had stopped, and so whenever El or I wanted to guess which room’s bell pull had been pulled by the other, we would stand inside the entrance hall instead. A rudimentary telepathy test that convinced no one because each bell also had a distinctive peal. We had swiftly grown bored with the game; only Mum seemed to love it, clapping her hands or giving us one of her rarely delighted smiles every time we got it right.
The ringing comes again, louder, shriller, and I jump. I’m staring at the bell below Bedroom 3 when something whispers very close to my ear:
There’s a monster in this house.
I shiver, bite down on my tongue. None of the bells or pendulums are moving. But it takes far too long for me to realise that the ringing is the doorbell. Christ. I go back into the hallway, take long, slow breaths. It’s just jet lag. That’s all. The glass door is open. The big red door is shut. When I go up on tiptoes to look out through the peephole, all I can see is the path, the gate, the squared-off high hedges. No one is there.
My toes touch against something smooth and cool. An envelope sitting on the hessian doormat. CATRIONA in black block capitals across the front. No stamp or postmark. I’m reluctant to pick it up, but of course I do. My fingers are clumsy as I tear through the envelope, pull out the card inside. It’s a sympathy card: a narrow-neck vase spilling with creamy lilies and tied with a bow. A debossed gold cursive font: Thinking of You.
I go back into the hallway and close the door. Snib the lock. Open the card.
LEAVE
CHAPTER 4
Detective Inspector Rafiq is one of those women you wish you were but are glad you’re not. She’s slim and small, but her voice is a loud and impatient Glaswegian that overrules everyone else with little effort. Her hair is black, her clothes are black, her grip is surprisingly warm.
‘Please, Miss Morgan, take a seat,’ is the first thing she says to me, as if this is her house.
We’re in the Throne Room. I have no idea why. It, too, is frozen in time: gold filigree wallpaper, gold-and-black swirling carpet. The dining table is covered with a linen tablecloth, but the chairs are the same huge and heavy mahogany thrones that christened the room, their backs upright and ornate, carved deep with the same swirls as the carpet. When I sit down and DI Rafiq sits opposite me, I immediately feel like we’re in an interview room. Perhaps that’s why we’re in here.
‘It’s Cat. Short for Catriona.’ I have the sympathy card in my jeans pocket. Having slept on it – or more accurately, tossed and turned on it – I’ve decided that it has to be from El. She’d know that I would come back. And no one else, other than Ross or the police, even knows I’m here.
‘I’m Kate.’ A smile reveals two neat rows of teeth.
Ross is in the kitchen banging cups. Kate Rafiq’s colleague, a young, smiling guy called Logan, sits on my right. I think she introduced him as a DS, and I’ve watched enough crappy cop shows to know that means she’s in charge. He has dark ridiculous hair: floppy and gelled on top, shaved at the sides and back. His stubble is very carefully careless. He looks like an overpaid footballer. And he’s too close; I can hear the soft, slow inhales and exhales of his breath. With him beside me and Rafiq in front, I feel penned in. And resentful, because I also feel like shit, hungover without having earned it, and this is just another ordeal that El is forcing me to go through. I don’t care if the police, like Ross, believe something’s happened to her – believe even that she’s dead. Because she fucking isn’t.
‘The resemblance is uncanny,’ Rafiq says, shaking her head, swinging her sleek ponytail.
‘We’re identical twins,’ I say.
‘Aye, right enough.’ She’s interested in my hostility, leaning forwards, pushing her elbows into the tablecloth. And I suddenly regret the good jeans I’ve put on, the sheer silk blouse. It’s too contrived. Too much not me. Too much, I suddenly realise, like El.
‘You’ve come from LA, that right?’
‘Venice Beach. It’s just south of Santa Monica.’
An arch of her eyebrows. ‘How long have you lived there?’
‘Twelve years.’ I look out the window as a red double-decker groans past, rattling the glass.
‘And what is it that you do, Catriona?’
‘Cat. I’m a freelance writer, magazines mostly, some digital media. Lifestyle articles, opinion pieces. I’ve got a blog, a website, a verified Twitter account with over sixteen thousand followers.’ I stop talking, look down at the table. Even to my ears, I sound ridiculous.
‘LA’s a long way from Leith. You mind me asking what prompted you to leave Scotland in the first place?’
I shift forwards in my seat. ‘What does that – any of that – have to do with El going missing?’
Another flash of neat teeth. ‘I’m just trying to get a picture of El in my head, that’s all. Every wee bit of information helps. And it seems strange to me that identical twins would live so far apart. In the last twelve years, how often have you come back?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Ross says you and El had a falling-out just before you left.’
‘We just stopped being close. People do. And then I left. That’s it.’
‘So, there was no specific reason behind the move? Or the staying away?’ A pause. ‘For twelve years?’
I fight against the urge to stand up; it would give her too many wrong ideas. ‘I got sick of Edinburgh and I left. I stayed sick of it, so I didn’t come back. That’s it.’