Free The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne

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 was a summer evening in Instow.
    My father and mother retired to the little town of Instow, on the north Devon coast, almost ten years ago. They’d ended up with just enough money, salvaged from my dad’s gently failed career, to buy a biggish house, overlooking the wide slothful river, at the point where it became an estuary.
    The house was tall, with three storeys, and balconies, to make the most of the view. There was a proper garden, with a further, rabbity slope of meadow at the back. From the top floor there were glimpses of the sea between the green headlands. You could watch red-sailed boats heading for the Bristol Channel, as you sat on the loo.
    From the start I liked my parents’ choice, of Instow. It was a nice house, in a nice little town. The local pubs were full of sailors, and yachtsmen, yet they were without pretensions. The climate was kindly, for England: solaced by southwestern breezes. You could go crabbing on the quayside, with bacon and string.

    Inevitably and immediately, Instow became our default holiday home. A pretty, cheap, convenient bolthole for Angus and