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.’
She leaves a silence that I too quickly fall into.
‘Are you trying to suggest I’ve got something to do with this shitstorm?’ And I realise that despite myself, I am standing, the throne wobbling behind me, balancing precariously on its back legs. ‘That El and I had a big fight, and I stropped off to America to plot her death for twelve years?’
‘So you think your sister’s dead?’ Rafiq asks. I don’t miss the quick look she shoots towards Logan.
‘The opposite,’ Ross says, elbowing his way into the room, and then setting a tray down on the table. His smile is tight as he presses down on the cafetière. ‘She thinks El’s engineered the whole thing for attention.’ He looks better for his sleep, but his eyes are still red and swollen. And his voice is raw, stripped too thin. ‘Don’t you?’
I sit back down with a sigh. Obviously, I haven’t hidden my feelings as well as I thought. Logan goes on breathing soft and slow next to me
