The Missing Twin Read online

  The Missing Twin

  ALEX DAY

  A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  Killer Reads

  An imprint of HarperColl‌insPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperColl‌insPublishers 2017

  Copyright © Alex Day 2017

  Alex Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

  Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 9780008271282

  Version 2017-07-24

  Epigraph

  A little water clears us of this deed.

  Macbeth; William Shakespeare

  It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.

  Great Expectations; Charles Dickens

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Summer, 2015: Edie

  Fatima

  ONE: Edie

  TWO: Fatima

  THREE: Edie

  FOUR: Fatima

  Edie

  FIVE: Fatima

  SIX: Edie

  SEVEN: Fatima

  EIGHT: Edie

  NINE: Fatima

  Edie

  TEN: Fatima

  ELEVEN: Edie

  TWELVE: Fatima

  Edie

  Fatima

  THIRTEEN: Edie

  FOURTEEN: Fatima

  FIFTEEN: Edie

  SIXTEEN: Fatima

  SEVENTEEN: Edie

  EIGHTEEN: Fatima

  NINETEEN: Edie

  TWENTY: Fatima

  Edie

  TWENTY-ONE: Fatima

  TWENTY-TWO: Edie

  Fatima

  TWENTY-THREE: Edie

  Fatima

  Edie

  Fatima

  TWENTY-FOUR: Edie

  TWENTY-FIVE: Fatima

  Edie

  Fatima

  TWENTY-SIX: Fatima

  Edie

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Fatima

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Edie

  Fatima

  TWENTY-NINE: Edie

  THIRTY: Edie

  THIRTY-ONE: Edie

  THIRTY-TWO: Edie

  THIRTY-THREE: Edie

  THIRTY-FOUR: Edie

  THIRTY-FIVE: Edie

  THIRTY-SIX: Edie

  Fatima

  Edie

  THIRTY-SEVEN: Edie

  THIRTY-EIGHT: Fatima

  Edie

  Edie

  Fatima

  Edie

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  SUMMER, 2015

  Edie

  A shaft of bright sunlight found the gap between the misaligned wooden screen and the window frame and lanced across the room. The girl in the bed groaned, shifted onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow. Moments later, she turned back onto her side, clutching her stomach as she fought back the nausea. Tentatively, she opened her eyes, feeling her pupils contract painfully against the light and becoming aware of a dull, persistent pounding in her head and a thumping at her temples.

  Little by little, Edie Marsh woke up enough to sincerely regret the amount she had drunk the night before, and to chastise herself, as she had many times before, for not knowing when to stop. Hauling herself into an upright position, she reached out for the glass on the floor by her bed and drank, finishing it all even as she screwed up her face at the water’s stale taste and tepid temperature. Holding her hands to her head in an attempt to calm the throbbing, she shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. Something was wrong.

  She dropped her hands to her lap and forced her eyes open again, head still drooping down with the effort of it all. Gazing around the room from corner to corner, scouring all pathetic three square metres of it, she did not see what she was expecting to. There was no one there.

  No one but her.

  The door was firmly closed – no sign that anyone had got up early for a swim or gone out in search of hangover-curing coffee and paracetamol. Even so, in case her eyes could not be trusted, Edie got up and investigated a couple of piles of discarded clothes, picking garments up and immediately throwing them back down again. She even looked under the bed. Then she slumped down onto the single plastic chair, the pulsing in her head suddenly overwhelming and uncontrollable. Massaging her eyelids with her thumbs, she searched her memory. What had happened last night? Hazy snapshots drifted through her mind but the details were sunk in alcohol and wouldn’t surface.

  They had planned to sleep squashed into the single bed together, something that they were used to, that they’d grown up doing, of that she was sure. ‘They’ being her and her adored identical twin sister, Laura, whose unexpected arrival at the holiday resort on the shores of the Adriatic sea where Edie was working at midday the day before had filled Edie’s heart with happiness. They’d gone out on the town that evening, for sure. But right at this moment, Edie couldn’t remember how or when they’d got home or anything much of what had gone on at all, during their night out or afterwards.

  And the bed, now that she, Edie, had got out of it, was completely empty.

  Where the hell was Laura?

  Fatima

  The sea looked flat and calm. Benign. Perhaps it always did from the shore, with the lazy ripples of tideless waves lapping the fringes of golden sand that gleamed in the heat. Fatima didn’t know as she’d never been to the seaside before. She wasn’t exactly here for the beach, anyway. Screwing up her eyes against the sun she could see, hazily in the distance, the outline of what she supposed must be the island they would be heading for.

  It wasn’t far. Really not far at all. Just a little water in-between. Compared to the distance she had already travelled it barely registered. You could almost swim there.

  But she had never learnt to swim and neither had her children. She was sure that Ehsan didn’t know, either, nor his son Youssef. Despair threatened to engulf her, together with an utter weariness that suffused her body and made her bones feel liquid, no longer able to support her weight. She sank to the ground, right there on the seafront promenade, crouching into the scanty shade offered by the low beach wall whilst tourists strolled past, all wobbly pink skin and red noses. They
were so well fed and rested, so oblivious. But that was to be expected – they were on their holidays, after all.

  A sudden, searing jealousy made Fatima want to stop them, to tear their expensive clothes from their backs, grab their over-priced ice-creams and throw them into the sea. Look at me, she would say to them. This is what it’s like to have nothing. But the problem was that wasn’t what it was like. Having no property, no income, no possessions, was not the problem.

  The problem was having no hope.

  The sun beat down on her head. She wanted to lie down and rest, regardless of the passers-by, heedless of the noise and bustle. She felt she could sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps if she looked pitiful enough, someone would save her. But she knew they wouldn’t. The more needy you were, the more they ignored you. The more woeful, the more uncomfortable for others. Few, if any, wanted to get involved and who could blame them? There had been kindness amidst the devastation in her home country, people sharing their shelter and what little food they had. But Fatima wasn’t stupid and not ignorant, either. She knew how she and her compatriots were viewed, talked about, written about.

  As ‘swarms’ and ‘floods’ and ‘marauding invaders’. Or, possibly even worse, as piteous and desperate, each pair of pleading eyes or outreached arms diminished by the sheer number of them, dehumanised and depersonalised by being one face amongst so very many.

  In deciding to leave her country – although was it a decision when there seemed to be no other option? – she had taken on inconceivable, unimagined challenges. There was nothing to do but pull herself together and face those challenges. To get on with it. Think about Marwa and Maryam. She closed her hand around the warm, metal object in her pocket and squeezed it tight. It was the key to her house that no longer existed in her city that had been razed to the ground. She should throw it away and would have already done so but for the fact that it was all that was left of her old life, the only thing to remind her.

  Getting up off the pavement and dusting herself down she defiantly tucked in her headscarf where it had come loose. Some women had stopped wearing a scarf so as not to stand out, to avoid being noticed. But Fatima would no more go out with an uncovered head as with uncovered breasts. They had not taken everything away from her yet, not reduced her to being ashamed of her culture, her identity.

  Setting off along the busy promenade, she held her head high and tried to look purposeful. She had a list of things she must buy, but it meant spending money and she needed to protect every cent because there were so many things to be paid for. She must choose wisely and purchase only what was absolutely necessary for the next stage of their odyssey.

  Perhaps the saddest fact of all, the most depressing, she thought as she handed over the precious notes for the life-jackets, the plastic wallets for the mobile phones, water for the journey, was that if it wasn’t her and her fellow citizens fleeing for a better life, it would be other people from other countries. There would always be another war, another catastrophe whether man-made or natural, to cause the human tide to swell and surge. This was a fact that would never change.

  ONE

  Edie

  ‘Service!’

  The cry rang out as it did endlessly during the lunchtime shift. Edie seized the large platter of mixed seafood from the counter and walked to table ten, as quickly as she could without looking too deferential. It might be her job to serve but there was no need to look servile in the process. She passed Milan, one of the other restaurant staff, on the way there.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, grinning cheerily. He was always inexplicably jolly.

  ‘Not bad,’ replied Edie. ‘Ask me again in a few hours’ time when I go off shift and I’ll be even better.’

  Milan chuckled heartily. ‘I will!’ he answered, and twirled the empty silver tray he was carrying on his forefinger, one of his favourite party tricks. ‘Keep smiling, Edie.’

  Edie did, indeed, smile, at the same time as shaking her head in mock despair. There was simply no keeping Milan down; he was irrepressible. She wondered what it was that made her so relentlessly cynical, what trauma or trouble from her childhood had caused it. Perhaps always playing second fiddle to her twin Laura was the root of the problem; the knowledge that Laura would always have the edge in looks, intelligence and charm. In response, Edie had resorted to affecting a generally world-weary and sceptical persona that meant that, whenever she failed – at a spelling test, a netball match or A-level history – and Laura succeeded, she could pretend that she hadn’t tried and didn’t care in the first place.

  Nevertheless, despite their innate competitiveness, Edie thought the world of her sister and missed her like crazy. Not a day went by that she didn’t think about her and wonder what she was doing. Today was no different to any other. Laura was always on her mind.

  ‘Excuse me.’ A customer calling for her attention broke her reverie. Edie deposited the seafood platter with its eager recipients and turned to address the enquiry.

  ‘You didn’t bring us any cutlery,’ declaimed the bottle-blonde, her voice an exaggerated lament.

  You didn’t ask for any, Edie wanted to retort but restrained herself just in time. She was aware of the need to mind her step. You never knew when Vlad, the vulpine resort manager, was watching. Perfectly positioned at the centre of a horseshoe bay of golden sand, the location meant that the beach bar and restaurant was popular with tourists and locals alike. There was a constant stream of customers from opening time at 8 a.m. until they shut up shop at midnight or later. The resort itself was aimed at wealthy Russians and Europeans – French, English, German, Italian – hence Edie’s job there, for Vlad felt that an English girl would understand the requirements of the cosmopolitan clientele better than a local. Edie had been somewhat economical with the truth about her ability to speak French (failed GCSE but he wasn’t to know) and English was her mother tongue. That had been enough for Vlad to take her on, but he could equally get rid of her if her work wasn’t up to standard.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Edie apologised to the customer, who gave a long-suffering sigh in response. ‘I’ll get you some right away.’

  She turned back towards the bar and kitchen, trying hard not to drag her feet. She had cleaned cabanas all morning and then come straight here for the lunchtime shift and she’d now been taking food orders, pulling pints of pale yellow lager, preparing cocktails with coloured parasols and handing over bottles of fizzy pop with bendy straws for the kids for over two hours already. It was the first time in her life she’d had to work so hard, on her feet for hours at a time, her breaks never seeming long, frequent or restful enough.

  Once she’d delivered the cutlery, she sought respite by going round behind the kitchen, ostensibly to fetch a crate of Coke but in reality to get five minutes’ time out from the frenzy. Standing in front of the huge fridge door, Edie sensed a presence, someone near her, an uncanny sensation of being watched. She looked around. She couldn’t see anyone but knew that she was being spied on. A curl of excitement slid through her, that feeling of playing hide-and-seek as a child and knowing that you are about to be found and starting to giggle even as delicious fear slides through your veins.

  She stood quite motionless for a moment. It must be Vuk, playing games with her. Big, bad, incredibly sexy Vuk, deputy manager, Vlad’s right-hand man – and Edie’s latest and most covetable conquest. The slither of fear turned to a frisson of excitement that began in her belly and spread tantalisingly outwards.

  Then came a stifled giggle, audible even above the music and voices and laughter filtering through from the restaurant. Not Vuk then; someone female by the sounds of it. Edie turned rapidly around, took two great strides forward that brought her to the corner of the building where she halted, almost falling over, momentarily blinded by the brightness of the light. Her eyes recovered, she looked up. And came face to face with herself.

  Or rather, with her twin Laura, who was standing there with a teasing, ‘how long does it t
ake to get noticed around here’ look on her face, her perfect, pale pink rosebud lips drawn into a half-mocking, half-delighted smile, a tiny backpack dangling casually from one shoulder. Forgetting everything, her job, her customers, the Coca-Cola that was needed out front, Edie shot straight at her, hugging her vigorously and squealing incoherently in astonishment and excitement.

  ‘How did you get here? Where have you come from? How long are you staying?’ And then, ‘Is that all the stuff you’ve got with you?’ as she took in the minuscule size of Laura’s minimal luggage. Her excited questions poured out of her, leaving little time for her sister to respond.

  But Laura wasn’t giving any answers anyway. She merely stood there, mute and smirking, letting Edie release her excitement unabated.

  ‘I was thinking about you only a few moments ago, I must have sensed you were nearby although I never thought you’d just turn up, I can’t even imagine how you found me, I didn’t exactly give you precise directions …’ Her voice tailed off as she took in Laura’s expression, the smirk having faded away and been replaced by a glassy-eyed stare.