Mirrorland by Carole Johnstone (books for 6 year olds to read themselves txt) 📕

‘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?

I hear the startled ‘Shit!’ before I see the owner of it: a young man, hunkered down against the pier wall. He’s looking at me, one hand clutching at the lapel of his very obviously not waterproof jacket. His second ‘Shit’ lacks the shock of the first, and of course, I realise what’s happened. Again.

‘I’m not—’

‘I know.’ He gets up with a grimace that suggests he’s been there for a while. ‘You’re Cat, El’s twin sister. I’m Sathvik Brijesh. Vik.’

He’s younger than I first thought. Not handsome, not in the conventional sense that Ross is anyway. His face is kind rather than arresting. He clears his throat and nods once, stares at me in a way that should be unnerving but isn’t. I know it’s only because he’s seeing El. His shoulders sag. ‘I’m an artist. El and I met at a portrait exhibition that was showing our work: “Blank Masks, Hidden Faces”.’

When he smiles, I realise that he is handsome after all. The skin around his eyes crinkles. ‘By day, I’m a lot less interesting: an underwriter for LMI. I share an open-plan office with ninety-nine other people. It won an award.’ He makes quote marks with his fingers. ‘“Most efficient use of people-space”.