The Ice Twins. S. K. Tremayne

      ‘The same one?’

      ‘Yes.’ A further wifely silence. ‘The one with the room; she is stuck in that white room, with the faces staring at her, staring down. It’s nearly always the same nightmare. She gets that one, always – why is that?’

      ‘I don’t know, Sarah, but I know it will stop. And soon. Remember what they said at the Anna Freud Centre? That’s one reason we’re moving. New place, new dreams. New beginning. No memories.’

      ‘All right, yes, of course. Let’s talk tomorrow?’

      ‘Yes. Love you.’

      ‘Love you.’

      Angus frowned, at his own words, and ended the call. Slipping his phone in his pocket, he hoisted his heavy rucksack – feeling like a mountaineer attempting a summit. He could hear the clink of a heavy wine bottle inside, knocking against something hard. Maybe his Swiss Army knife.

      Picking his way through, he edged along rocks and sand, trying to find the safest route. The air was redolent with the heady smell of rotting seaweed. Seagulls wheeled above, calling and heckling. Haranguing him for something he hadn’t done.

      The tide was way out, exposing old grey metal chains, slacked in the mud, linked to plastic buoys. Whitewashed cottages regarded him, indifferently, from the curving wooded shoreline of mainland Skye, to his right. On the left, Salmadair was a dome of rock and grass, encircled by sombre firs; he could just see the top of that big unoccupied house, on Salmadair, owned by the billionaire, the Swedish guy.

      Josh had told Angus all about Karlssen: how he only came here for a few weeks in the summer, for the shooting and the sailing, and the famous views over the Sound: to the waters of Loch Hourn and Loch Nevis, and between them the vast massif of Knoydart, with its snow-iced hills.

      As Angus trudged along, hunched under the weight of his rucksack, he occasionally lifted his head to look at these same brooding hills. The great summits of Knoydart, the last true wilderness in western Europe. Angus realized, as he surveyed the view, that he could still distinctly remember the names of Knoydart’s enigmatic peaks. His granny had taught him so many times: Sgurr an Fhuarain, Sgurr Mor, Fraoch Bheinn.

      It was a poem. Angus was not a fan of poetry, yet this place was a poem.

       Sgurr an Fhuarain, Sgurr Mor, Fraoch Bheinn.

      He walked on.

      The silence was piercing. A kingdom of quietness. No boats out fishing, no people walking, no engine noise.

      Angus walked, and sweated, and nearly slipped. He wondered at the windless tranquillity of the afternoon, a day so still and clear he could see the last ferry, in the blue distance, crossing from Armadale to Mallaig.

      Many houses, hidden in the firs and rowans, were totally shuttered for the winter. That accounted for much of the quiet: for this sense of desolation. In a way, this sheltered, stunning, southern peninsula of Skye was increasingly like one of the richest quarters of London: emptied by its own desirability, used by the wealthy for a few days a year. An investment opportunity. A place to store money. Other, less alluring parts of the Hebrides paradoxically had more life, because the houses were cheaper.

      This place was cursed by its own loveliness.

      But it was still lovely. And it was also getting dark.

      The walk took him fifty difficult minutes, because the dark grey mud sucked at his boots, slowing him down, and because at one point he went wrong: climbing up onto Salmadair proper, heading unconsciously for the billionaire’s house with the huge, glass-walled living room, which suddenly reared in front of him, in the gathering gloom, protected by its rusty twines of barbed wire.

      He’d taken the wrong path left. Instead of skirting Salmadair’s shingled beach.

      Angus remembered Josh’s warnings about the mudflats at night. You could die out there. People die.

      But how many really died? One a year? One a decade? It was still much safer than crossing a London road. This place was crime-free; the air was clean and good. It was much safer for kids. Safer for Kirstie.

      Pressing between gorse bushes, slowly negotiating the beaten path, Angus scrambled over some very slippery rocks – gnarled with old barnacles, which scraped his fingers. His hands were bleeding a little. He was scratched and weary. The north wind was perfumed with seagull shit and bladderwrack, maybe the scent of newly chopped pine-wood, carried all the way from Scoraig and Assynt.

      He was nearly there. In the dregs of the afternoon light he could see the exposed tidal causeway of rocks and grey shingle, littered with smashed crabshells. A slender green pipe snaked across the Torran causeway, burying itself in and out of the sands. He recognized the waterpipe, just as he recognized this part of the route. He remembered walking it as a boy, and as a very young man. And here he was again.

      The lighthouse, the cottage, lay beyond, in the last of the cold, slanted sunlight. In just two minutes he would press the doorway, into his new home. Where his family would live: as best they could.

      Reflexively, he looked at his phone. No signal. Of course. What did he expect? The island was entire and of itself: alone and isolated, and as remote as you could get in Britain.

      As he ascended the final rise, to the lighthouse-keeper’s cottage, Angus turned and looked back at the mudflats.

      Yes. Remote as possible. That was good. He was glad that he had coaxed his wife into making the decision to move here: he was glad he had persuaded her into believing, moreover, that it was her choice. He’d wanted them far away from everything for months, and now they had achieved it. On Torran they would be safe at last. No one would ask questions. No interfering neighbours. No friends and relatives. No police.

       5

      Kirstie.

      Glancing up, I see Kirstie’s face, impassive, unsmiling, in the rear-view mirror.

      ‘Nearly there, darling!’

      This is what I have been saying since driving out of Glasgow; and, in truth, when I reached Glasgow I thought we were ‘nearly there’, it looked so close on Google Maps, we were halfway through Scotland, weren’t we? Look, it can’t take much longer. Just two more inches.

      But instead, like a terrible endless story, told by a chuntering bore, the road has gone on, and on. And now we’re lost amid the ghastliness of Rannoch Moor.

      I have to remind myself why we’re here.

      Two days ago Angus offered money we didn’t have, to fly us to Inverness, where he would pick us up, and leave all the moving to the men we’d hired.

      But doing it this way seemed, somehow, a cheat – something in me wanted to drive the whole distance, with Kirstie and Beany; and someone had to bring the car, whether now or later. So I’d insisted Kirstie and I would make the entire journey, from the bottom corner to the very top of Britain, to meet Angus in the Selkie car park, in Ornsay, with the celebrated view of Torran.

      Now I have regrets.

      It is all so vast, and so bleak. Rannoch Moor is a bowl of green and dismal greyness, glacial in origin, presumably. Dirty, peat-brown streams divide the acid turfs; in places it looks as if the peat turf has been ripped apart then sewn back together.

      I glance at Kirstie, in the mirror, then I glance at myself.

      I truly don’t want to, but I have to do this: I have to go over it all, yet again. I must work out what is happening with Kirstie, and whether it stems from the accident itself. From that terrible fracture in our lives.

      And so.

      It