‘RUN!’
I do. I grab hold of the bannister and start to climb, hands clammy, heartbeat erratic, the dark and freezing expanse of the alleyway behind me like a chasing monster, a roaring, building wave thick with seaweed and chitinous bones. The stairs are too steep. My knuckles scrape against stone. The hackles on the back of my neck send shudders down my spine, and those slices of daylight through the wooden roof are like cracks of lightning over my head. Deadlights, I think. They’re deadlights.
I miss a step close to the summit and nearly take a header back down to the bottom. And then I’m inside the cupboard, slamming Mirrorland’s door behind me, pulling across its bolts, and stumbling back into the bright of the pantry.
*
I’m not mad. I’m not the deluded, heartless bitch that DI Kate Rafiq probably thinks I am. My instincts, my certainties, are bang on. El is alive. Because she can’t be dead if she’s sending me emails. Burying shoeboxes in the garden and leaving coded warnings taped to ceilings. Churning up our past – a past I’ve chosen never to think of again – like a blunt plough. Playing her power games. That’s fucking madness.
I know how this goes. How it’s always gone.
This is a treasure hunt. She has the map. And I have no other choice but to wait until she gives me the next clue.
CHAPTER 6
The Kakadu Jungle shrieks and squawks into life all around us: owlet-nightjars, California condors, giant ibises, kakapos. The paperbarks and ironwoods and banyans roar with hot wind, the wetlands and rivers and falls roar with fast water. The birds rise with screams up into the canopy, the sky grows dark and squally, forks of lightning cracking through green and brown and gold, tearing through wood and iron and stone. And the shadows of bad men crouch in the darkness, bristling with rage and sharp teeth. Because all men are pirates, Mum says. Even Prince Charming is just like Blackbeard: sly and handsome, never ever to be trusted. We have to save ourselves.
And so El and I run. Our torchlight flinching from yawning mouths of teeth. A towering wave of water and wind and flesh and lanternlight. High and wide and freezing bright. Rolling through the jungle like an explosion, an earthquake. Rolling towards us and our golden bedspread like a landslide of mud and stone and deadlights.
RUN!
It feels like I scream myself awake. Maybe I do, because when I open my eyes, Ross’s face is frozen somewhere between alarm and concern, and his hand is gripping my right arm just above the elbow. I’m lying on the chesterfield in the drawing room. Next to a mahogany lowboy with claw-and-ball feet that Grandpa always swore was a Chippendale. And opposite a yellow brocade rocking chair and a leather recliner that look so exactly like the originals, too, I can almost see Mum and Grandpa sitting facing one another across the bottle-green fireplace. I look away, towards the turquoise-tiled Art Deco bar that Mum used to call the Poirot.
‘You were screaming,’ Ross says with a frown.
‘Jet lag,’ I say. I get up on unsteady legs, try to smile. ‘Think I need some fresh air.’
In the entrance hall, I hesitate at the coat rack, and instead of my anorak, I choose a grey cashmere wrap coat that can only belong to El. I glance at the label before I put it on and belt it tight. Vivienne Westwood. We used to wear the same clothes, I reason, as I unlock the door. Although that’s not really true. The minute we left this house, we abandoned almost everything that we had shared; everything that had forced us to always be the same.
Outside, the air is fresh enough, but it does me little good. As children, El and I also always shared the same dreams, the same nightmares. We dreamed of the Kakadu Jungle most often because we fell asleep every night holding hands under our golden bedspread, surrounded by rainforest wallpaper and the residual echo of those bedtime games spent playing Victorian explorers. I haven’t thought about – never mind dreamed about – the Kakadu Jungle in years. And I haven’t missed it.
I open the front gate, and it squeals loudly. I step out onto the pavement, feeling bizarrely exposed. Why the hell did I put on this coat? And then my sense of anxiety changes, heightens. My skin prickles. When I spin around, I see a figure standing on the corner of the opposite pavement, watching me. A man. He’s wearing a dark coat, and his face is obscured inside its drawstring hood. Deadlights, I suddenly remember, were a pirate’s eyes in the dark. A low-beam torch, or a lantern shuttered dull against the wind. But deadlights were also the eyes of others. Others who looked for you – came for you – in the night. I’m breathing a little too hard, but I take a step towards him nonetheless. My ‘Hey’ sounds more like a gasp. And by the time I manage a better one, he’s turned and disappeared around the corner towards Lochend.
I don’t follow. Instead, I turn in the opposite direction, and almost run to the entrance of Colquhoun’s of Westeryk. The shop is quiet, almost empty. I quickly fill a basket with fusilli, red pesto, and focaccia before heading straight for the booze. My breath is still fast, still shaky. Maybe he’s just a reporter. A nosy neighbour. Or maybe he’s the creep who’s been sending—
‘Oh! Dieu merci! J’y crois pas—’
I rear back from both the voice and the sudden heavy hand on my forearm, knocking my basket against a shelf full of beer. By the time I’ve recovered my balance, the woman’s hand is clapped hard over her mouth instead, and I know immediately what’s happened, amazed that this possibility – this inevitability – has not occurred to me before now. Or at least before I put on the bloody coat. Nor
