The Missing Twin: A gripping debut psychological thriller with a killer twist
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Slave driver Vlad was an enigma. His height was average – about 5 foot 10 – and he was dark like most people here, clean-shaven and well-groomed. His brown eyes burned bright in his thin face and seemed to be always scrutinising, judging, appraising; when he smiled, it did not reach them. He was slightly built but wiry – Edie had heard that he’d been a long-distance runner in his youth but that he hadn’t quite lived up to his promise and had only competed locally. Perhaps it was disappointment that lay behind his icy gaze.
Edie had never seen him with a woman and had found out, through not very discreet enquiries of other members of staff, that he was unmarried. What was puzzling – and unusual – was that he hadn’t tried it on with her. It had crossed Edie’s mind to wonder if he were gay. Now that Laura was here, this theory could be put properly to the test, as it was unheard of for any red-blooded male to refuse her sister. She was irresistible.
Although they were identical, with even their closest friends finding it difficult to tell them apart, there were differences between them that came from something intrinsic, primordial. Where Edie was pretty, Laura was beautiful. Edie was slim and attractive but Laura was something more, something harder to define, a heady mixture of sex appeal and mystery mixed with a pinch of dismissive contempt that kept every man she met drooling at her feet and coming back for more, however badly she treated them. Edie was generally considered a looker; her friends had nothing but envy for her appearance and figure and charm. But everything that Edie had, Laura had also, doubled. Laura was a stunner. At least, that’s how Edie saw things.
Their parents had tried hard to make sure that they never showed any favouritism, constantly reassuring Edie that they loved both girls just the same. Edie couldn’t remember the birth of her brother James, who was three years younger, but she was pretty sure that during their growing-up, all three children had enjoyed nothing but fair, equal and unconditional love. They had lived a life of plenty; plenty of money, plenty of space in their five-bedroomed semi-detached house in a leafy Brighton suburb, plenty of support. Edie, Laura and James had never wanted for anything and for sure, Laura had made a career out of getting others – men, namely – to provide for her. Edie, on the other hand, having dallied with university and modelling and travelling, had tired of life and needed to get away from the superficiality of everything that surrounded her. She was fed up of being supported, protected and smothered by her parents, Laura, doctors – all of them making decisions about what was best for her or what she should or would do. She had had to escape. So she had come here and got a solid, honest job and now she was working her socks off on a daily basis and wondering what on earth had possessed her. And yet … and yet she stayed. At three months and counting, it was getting to be the longest she’d ever stuck at anything.
The long afternoon dragged by. A group of lads, young and fit, provided the only entertainment, ordering beer after beer that kept Edie running backwards and forwards to the bar. She flirted with them a bit, out of habit as much as anything else, and also from a feeling she had that she was expected to provide the eye-candy at the beach bar that would keep the customers – the males, at any rate – coming back. She was glad when the group, half-cut and with glazed eyes, retreated to the beach to sleep off the alcohol, lying flat out on towels flung onto the soft sand under the pine trees, oblivious to the flies and the kids scuffling clumsily by and the volleyball game going on only metres away.
Even with the boys gone, there was no let-up from work; just customer after customer ordering meals and drinks and sandwiches. The resort itself wasn’t that big – only two dozen cabanas amongst the olives, all with plunge pools and cleverly situated to have sea views. But it was at full occupancy at the height of the tourist season and, though the accommodation was self-catering, most residents didn’t, and their custom was augmented by that of the constant ebb and flow of visitors, who came from far and wide to enjoy the beach’s clean yellow sand and shallow, crystal clear water. All of these people couldn’t be wrong and indeed it was an idyllic place. It could have been this that had made Edie act totally out of character and hang around so long, without ever intending to do so, and commit to the entire season working with Vlad. But in all honesty, her decision had more to do with Vuk; to being close to him by working with him. Or working on him. And now, working hard to keep Laura and Vuk apart, in all senses of the word.
Because Vuk, Edie realised, could be a problem now that Laura had arrived, the only blot on the rosy horizon of life with her sister. Vuk was devastatingly handsome and tall with it, well over 6 foot, strongly built with well-defined biceps and a six-pack to make a girl weep. His black hair was cut close to his scalp and a five o’clock shadow darkened his face even immediately after he’d shaved. The tan that enhanced his indisputable masculinity was deepening by the day now that the season was in full swing; Vuk was responsible, amongst other things, for running the sailing trips on the resort’s luxurious yacht and so was almost permanently outside. He was the strong, silent type that Edie always fell for and mostly spoke in monosyllables, barked out in his deep, seductive voice. He rarely smiled and when he did it was sensually lopsided, as if only the right side of his mouth could be bothered to make the effort. He was utterly gorgeous and Edie was not only determined to snare him but also not to share him.
Little by little, perhaps not as swiftly as she had hoped, she was reeling bad boy Vuk in. They’d had sex a few times, each time better than the last; Vuk’s hard, strong body the perfect complement to Edie’s willowy, lithe limbs. Even to think about his white teeth on her breasts, his strong tongue probing between her thighs, his thick cock pumping into her, made Edie wet and set her clit throbbing in anticipation. He could circle her wrist with his thumb and forefinger and pull her towards him as if it were no effort whatsoever, could pick her up and throw her onto the bed as if she were nothing, could part her legs and pull them over his shoulders like she was a rag doll with no strength of her own. The power he had to dominate was dangerously attractive. But Edie still wasn’t sure she really had him where she wanted him; namely committed to some kind of a relationship with her.
It would have been good if Vuk had been there to see how those boys had ogled her, to imagine how their dicks swelled in their swimming trunks, to feel the same himself. That would have been a minor triumph. In Edie’s experience, there was nothing better than jealousy to make a man keen. But Vuk was nowhere to be seen, his comings and goings on the resort always erratic, his schedule impossible to pin down.
Edie just had to hope he hadn’t bumped into Laura.
***
Finally, the sun shifted to the far side of the beach and the orders diminished. Edie threw her pad and apron into a heap in the kitchen and, shouting a hasty farewell to Stefan and Milan, set off as fast as she could bear in the still intense heat. As she walked, the sweat gathered on her back and chest and trickled down her spine and between her breasts. It was boiling.
In her room, she saw with relief that Laura was not only still there but still sleeping, face down, one slim, delicate arm flung out of the bed like the boom of an idling sailing ship. No sign she’d encountered Vuk or anyone at all. She looked as if she’d been asleep for ages. Edie sighed with relief. She dug around in the tiny fridge that nestled in one corner and pulled out the vodka she had stashed there. She’d bought cups of ice from the restaurant, and a water bottle filled with fresh lime juice. Mixing the drinks, adding sugar and stirring, she watched as the white crystals slowly dissolved. She slurped a mouthful; delicious. Putting the glasses side by side on the upturned crate that served as a bedside table, she sat down beside her twin. She shook her gently. No response. She tried again, more vigorously, and added in a little tug at her long tresses of brunette hair. Laura muttered something that sounded a bit like ‘fuck off’ but did not open her eyes. Exasperated, Edie stuck her fingers into one of the glasses, retrieved an ice cube and shoved it down the back of Laura’s T-shirt.
‘Christ!’ Laura’s cry was bloodcurdling. ‘Shit! What the fuck ….’
Edie fell onto the floor, clutching her sides and gasping for breath as the laughter spewed out of her.
‘Sleeping beauty, it’s time to get up! There’s fun to be had, drinks to be had, boys to be had. Every moment you’re snoring is a wasted moment.’
Laura rubbed her eyes and wiggled her back, standing up to let what remained of the ice-cube slide out of her T-shirt. She shuddered.
‘Oooh, that was actually quite nice. It’s bloody bugger hot around here, I must say.’
‘Yup. And you being here is just going to make everything even hotter. Drink up.’ Edie handed Laura her vodka and lime. ‘Ziveli.’
They lifted their glasses and drank. Laura exhaled loudly and shook her head. ‘Wow. That’s strong.’
‘That’s just for starters. Now you need to get yourself all tarted up cos we’re going out.’
Edie threw Laura a faded beach towel. ‘The showers are at the end of the block.’ She looked around her, located a bottle of shampoo and chucked it in Laura’s direction.
‘By the way,’ she added, as Laura turned to go. ‘How on earth did you find your way here? I didn’t give you the precise address. And where did you come from, where have you been the last few months?’
‘My very own personal, inbuilt sat-nav, little sis.’ Laura had been born first, by ten minutes or so, and never let Edie forget it. ‘I could track you down anywhere.’ She twirled the shampoo bottle round and round in her elegant hand. ‘But – questions later. Right now, I need to wash. I can smell my own armpits and that’s not even the worst of it.’
Laura glided out of the room and Edie drained her glass, still not quite believing that her twin had appeared as if from nowhere. She pulled a bundle of clothing out of the canvas shelving that was all she had for storage and dumped it onto the bed. By the looks of it, Laura would definitely be needing to borrow clothes – she didn’t seem to have anything with her; her pack couldn’t hold much more than a few pairs of knickers. Make-up, she always helped herself to anyway. Men – the same. Edie stopped short at this thought. Not Vuk. She was not giving up her claim on Vuk. This time, Edie would make sure she kept the big prize for herself.
TWO
Fatima
When the barrel bombs came to their neighbourhood, Fatima and the girls were not there. They had gone to visit friends in another suburb. They heard the explosions as they travelled home but explosions were nothing new so they tried to ignore them. You could never tell exactly where the bombs were falling anyway; sound ricochets and distorts, making distance incalculable. It was better to assume – to hope – that it hadn’t hit your street, your home. Inuring yourself to the violence, the terror, the bloodshed, was the only way. So many times already it had been someone else’s turn to take the brunt of this insane and insatiable war. Fatima gathered the twins protectively to her as the taxi proceeded through the deserted streets. For so long the fighting had taken place elsewhere and perhaps they had all assumed it would continue to be so even whilst knowing that there must surely be a limit to how often they could escape it.
As they neared home, it seemed that that limit had arrived. The taxi driver pulled over abruptly and told them it was finished; he would go no further. As if in a dream, Fatima got out of the car and pulled the children after her. She had had no phone call from Fayed, her husband, or his parents or brother with whom they lived, so she assumed things were all right at their place. But as the three of them stumbled onwards, picking their way through rubble, choking on dust, tripping in potholes, it was clear that their neighbourhood had been the target. And that it was bad. Really bad. She tried to remember what Fayed had said he was doing that afternoon, where, exactly, he would have been. Had he been planning to spend the hours that she and the girls were out at home? No, Fatima was sure he had mentioned popping into the office – his accountancy premises that were in the downtown business area about twenty minutes’ drive away. He would have been far enough away to have avoided danger.
‘Mummy, where are we going? What’s happened?’ asked Marwa, always the bolder of the twins. How to answer such questions? With the truth: ‘I do not know’, or with a platitude, blatantly untrue, ‘Everything’s fine, don’t worry’? However much parents across the land tried to shield their children from the dreadful events that were occurring, it was impossible. They saw the images on the television, heard the news reports, gazed uncomprehendingly, but with full awareness of the horror of it all, at the pictures in the newspapers displayed on stands outside shops. Children, after all, were not stupid.
As Fatima searched for a response, Marwa’s inquisition continued.
‘Why did we come here? What are we doing? This is not where we live.’
And then, when greeted by Fatima’s continued silence, more urgently, ‘Mummy? Answer me.’
Children grow up fast in war. They have no other option. Today would mark a stage in that process for her twins, Fatima realised. There was no point in trying to hide what was plain to see.
‘There’s been a bomb.’ Fatima took a deep breath. She looked around her, at the ruins that lay everywhere. ‘Several bombs. Lots. We need to find out what has happened to our house.’
Maryam began to cry. Fatima gripped the girls’ hands and held them tight as they walked on. Drawing closer to where they lived, she began to lose her bearings. Familiar landmarks were gone, buildings she had walked past a hundred, a thousand times, were no longer there. The main street, where she had drunk coffee with Fayed in happier times, shopped and chatted with friends, pushed the girls up and down in their pram when they were babies, had been badly hit. Some structures were still standing, upright but crooked teeth that only served to emphasise the gaps on either side. But most were wrecked and half-collapsed. The contents of shops and houses were strewn across the road; broken toys, smashed plates, ruined furniture. The carpet shop’s façade was blown away, the handmade silk floor and wall-coverings still hanging forlornly inside, coated in dust that weighed them down and robbed them of texture, pattern and colour.
Both girls were sobbing now, wailing and screaming, not understanding, despite her explanation, why their mother was dragging them through this hinterland of horror. The sluggish surge of fear that had begun when the taxi stopped began to grow in Fatima’s stomach, rising up through her diaphragm and into her throat. She coughed back the bile, shuddering at its bitter taste and caustic burn, trying to avoid the children seeing or sensing her fear. They were at the corner of a block, only five minutes from home. Their house was this way – just down the short side-street ahead, and then right where the fruit seller had his stall, into a wide, tree-lined boulevard that led towards the little park by the river where the children played in the sunshine. The winter her twins had been born it had snowed and she had wished the girls were old enough to build a snowman and join in the snowball fights. There had been no snow the next winter, nor the next. Looking around her now, it was as if the snowfall had come at last, out of season and discoloured, a thick, grey, flattening blanket that stank of staleness, dirt and desiccation and covered everything with the pall of devastation.
Should she walk down the side-street, take the right turn and amble past all the well-tended courtyard houses towards her own? What chance was there that it would still be standing? The trance-like sensation intensified and Fatima felt that she was walking on air, not really touching anything, distant from all that was unfolding around her, as if it were not real. The feeling was intensified by the absence of any other living being. Those who had survived must have fled already, fearful of repeated onslaughts. Or perhaps they were hiding in dark corners, too terrified and traumatised to emerge. Whatever the truth, no friend or neighbour could be seen; not even a cat prowling the pavement.
The dream-state propelled her onwards and, advancing cautiously along the rough stone sidewalk, at first things didn’t seem as bad as all that. The concrete apartment buildings still stood firm and the only obvious signs of damage were broken windowpanes and shattered car windscreens. Even the fruit-seller’s stall was intact, the cartwheels chocked with wooden blocks that were blackened with age rather than any more recent calamity. The carefully constructed piles of fruit, of apples and persimmons, mangoes and guavas, had collapsed into muddled rivers of greens, browns and yellows and the fruit seller himself was nowhere to be seen, but with a little bit of tidying up there’d be no sign that disaster had struck so close. Fatima had to stop herself from a compulsion to pause and right the fallen fruit, to rebuild the neat pyramids, as if somehow repairing this small piece of damage would mend the horror that surrounded her.
Instead, she turned the corner, tugging a twin on each arm, and started down the boulevard. Each step was a step further into Hades. Bombs had fallen here; direct hits that had left craters in the road and taken rugged slices out of buildings as if a drunken giant had tramped down whatever lay in its path. Lazy flames licked around a battered, roofless estate car slung sideways across the road, the tyres on one side flattened so that it was crooked and lopsided like a small child’s drawing. For a terrible, fleeting second Fatima thought it was their car; that Fayed had been coming home as death rained down.
But then she saw that it was the wrong make, and the wrong colour, beneath the grime. The relief was momentary; behind the pitiful vehicle, a building’s steel rods, stripped of concrete and plaster, reached towards a sky leaden with dust and ash and full of the stench of obliteration. Fatima was staring all around her, struggling to make sense of the sights her eyes were relaying to her, when she heard the noise. Involuntarily, her gaze sought to find its source. With a sickening surge of terror she saw that there were people in the estate car, the fire-blackened corpses of a family who had tried to escape but been too late and too unlucky. And that one of them was moving, groaning, dying in excruciating agony and unimaginable fear.
Fatima froze to the spot, quite literally petrified. The feeling of being in a dream evaporated in an instant. This was reality and it was awful. Nothing in her life so far had prepared her for a moment such as this. She should help, do something, call an ambulance. She fumbled in her bag for her phone and drew it out, frenziedly trying to tap in the emergency number, forgetting that there was a shortcut button for this. She had never had reason or cause to use it before.
The children were whimpering in terror, but saying nothing, seeming to have lost the power of speech. She should get them away from this horror but still she hadn’t managed to make the call and she couldn’t leave that person to die like an animal. She stabbed furiously at the keypad again, missing the numbers, her hands trembling too severely to hit them accurately. It was a nightmare, one of those hideous ones where you are trying to run but your legs won’t move and you keep replaying, over and over, your efforts – futile – towards flight.
A blast of intense heat, accompanied by a loud, fizzing hiss and the whoosh of fierce flames, brought her struggles with the phone to an abrupt halt. Nearly knocked off her feet, instinctively she grabbed the girls to her, hugging them close as if just her embrace could save them. The car’s petrol tank had ignited and the vehicle was engulfed in a swirling ball of fire, blue, red and orange. A wretched, animalistic scream ripped out from its innards, rending the smoke-laden air apart. And then stopped. Even the roaring flames could not fill the silence that followed. The world whirled around her. Fatima was struggling to breathe, was drowning in fear. She turned towards the car as if she could help, realised immediately the stupidity of such an idea and tried instead to flee. Running, she tripped and fell, taking Maryam off guard and pulling her down with her. Dizzy and disorientated, all Fatima could think of was getting away from this apocalypse. She stumbled back to her feet, dragging Maryam up with her, not even checking to see if she were hurt.
She had to get home, to find Fayed.
THREE
Edie
‘Ready to paint that town red?’
The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and much vodka had been imbibed by the time Edie pulled the scooter out from the shade of a handy oleander bush, clambered aboard and revved the engine.
Laura giggled, delightedly and drunkenly. She had had more vodka than Edie, and nothing to eat.
‘Sis,’ she announced, whirling her sunglasses in an exultant twirl, ‘I’m so, so ready.’ She jumped onto the scooter behind Edie. ‘By the way, I hope you know how to drive this thing,’ she added, resting her feet on the metal supports.
‘Just call me Jensen Button,’ shouted Edie, already speeding off down the steep track to the exit gate.
‘He drives cars,’ shrieked Laura as Edie increased velocity alarmingly quickly. ‘Extremely fast cars!’
‘Whatever.’ Edie was having fun; she hadn’t had anyone ride pillion since she’d taken possession of the scooter and she wanted to make the most of it before Laura insisted on being the driver. ‘Hold on tight!’
‘I am,’ Laura hollered, ‘believe me.’ She gripped Edie’s waist and attempted to blow a stray hair from her forehead.
At this time of year the heat lingered long after twilight and there was not the slightest breeze to bring respite. Being on the scooter, even at top speed, was like driving through treacle, as if the warm air had to be literally pushed aside to allow them to pass. The vodka, plus the unaccustomed weight on the back, meant that Edie wobbled on the sharpest bends, inducing shrieks of alarmed laughter from Laura. They were still laughing when they arrived at the marina, parked the scooter and used its mirrors to put right their dishevelled hair and make-up, bending low to get the fullest view possible.
The marina was the place to come for the smart set, home of super-yachts and their super-rich owners. Edie had notched up a few successful conquests here – before Vuk, of course. The quays were lined with boats flying flags from around the world, and the people strolling up and down and drinking at the numerous bars were dressed to impress; all designer labels and immaculate hair and smile-free pouts. Heads turned as Edie and Laura promenaded past; a perfectly matched pair in tiny shorts and crop tops. Spotting a table just being vacated at the bar with the best vantage point, Edie seized Laura’s arm and dragged her towards it, ordering double vodkas for them both before they had even sat down.
‘I’m a tad short of cash, Ed,’ said Laura, pulling out the lining of her pockets in illustration. ‘I had a bit of a mishap in Italy, got my rucksack stolen with a whole load of euros in it. I was just lucky my passport didn’t go too.’
‘You idiot!’ Edie shook her head in disbelief. ‘First rule of travelling: never keep all your money in one place.’
‘Okay smart ass, rub it in.’ Laura took a swig of her drink. ‘It wasn’t all my money anyway. Just a fair amount of it. I had enough to get the ferry across the Adriatic, find my elusive sister and beg her to rescue me.’