Free The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne Page A

me, and then a place where we could take the girls, knowing they’d be looked after by their doting grandparents.
    And my folks really doted. This was partly because the twins were so pretty and adorable – when they weren’t squabbling – and partly because my wastrel younger brother was wandering the world, never likely to settle down: so the twins were IT. The only grandkids they were likely to enjoy.
    My father was, as a result, always eager for us to come down and take another holiday; and my American mother, Amy – shyer, quieter, more reserved – more like me – was almost as fervent.
    So when I got the call, from Dad, and he airily asked: What are you doing this summer? I readily agreed – to another vacation in Instow. It would be our seventh or eighth. We’d had too many to count. But all that free childcare was just so tempting. All those long, delicious sleeps, of adults on holiday, while the twins went off with Granny and Granddad.
    And this was the very first night, of the very last holiday.
    I’d driven down with the kids in the morning. Angus was delayed in London, but due later. Mum and Dad were out for a drink. I was sitting in the kitchen.
    The large airy kitchen was where everything happened in my mum and dad’s house, because it had one of the best views – and a lovely big table. All was quiet. I was reading a book and sipping tea; the evening was long, and beautiful: rosy-blue skies arched over the headlands and the bay. The twins, already sunburned from an afternoon on the beach, were, I thought, playing in the garden. Everything was SAFE.

    And then I heard the scream of one of my daughters.
    That scream which will never go away. Never leave me.
    Ever.
    Here on Rannoch Moor I grip the wheel – accelerating. As if I can overtake the horror of the past and leave it dwindling in the mirror.
    What happened next? Is there some clue, overlooked, that would unlock this awful puzzle?
    For half a moment, sitting in that kitchen, I couldn’t work it out. The girls were meant to be on the lawn, enjoying that languid summer warmth; but this awful scream came from upstairs . So I rushed up the steps in blinding panic, and raced along the landing, and looked for them – not there, not there, not there – and I knew, somehow I knew, and I ran into the spare bedroom – yet another bedroom with a balcony. Twenty feet up.
    The fucking balconies. If there was one thing I hated about Instow, it was the balconies; every window had them. Angus hated them too.
    We always told the twins not to go near them; the iron railings were too low, whether you were adult or child. Yet they were so tempting. Because they all had those blissful views of the river. Mum liked to sit on her balcony, reading Swedish thrillers, drinking supermarket Chardonnay.
    So, as I ran up the stairs, it was the balconies that ripped me open with terrible anticipation, and when I stepped into the bedroom I saw the silhouetted figure of one of my daughters, dressed in white, standing on the balcony, shouting.

    The irony is that she looked so pretty that moment. Her hair was caught by the setting sun: she was coro-naed, gloried, flamingly haloed – she looked like a child of Jesus in a Victorian picture book, even as she was shouting, in icy and curdling terror.
    ‘Mummy Mummy Mummy Lydie-lo, it’s Lydie-lo, she’s falling off, Mummy, help her, MUMMY!’
    For a second I was paralysed. Staring at her.
    Then, choking on my panic, I looked over the railing.
    And, yes, there was my daughter – broken, down there on the decking, blood spooling from her mouth, like a filled-in speech bubble, red and glossy. She looked like an icon of a fallen human, like a swastika shape with her arms and legs splayed. A symbol.
    I knew Lydia was doomed as soon as I saw her body shaped that way, but I rushed downstairs, and cradled her still-warm shoulders, and felt for her slivery pulse. And at that precise moment my mum and dad came back from the pub,