The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne

affair, all those years ago; perhaps the damage was done, by me, to our marriage, and we never quite recovered. But I do not have time for guilt: and so I explain that I have to leave early, to drive to Glasgow, to research an article, because I have a commission from Imogen, and I need the work because we need the money. I tell him Kirstie had another nightmare, so she needs a lot of comfort while I’m gone.

    A nightmare. Just a nightmare.
    The lie is feeble; yet he seems to accept it.
    Then Josh arrives in the boat, scratching the sleep from his eyes, and we steer around Salmadair to Ornsay and I run up the steps of the pier and I jump in the car and I drive madly down to Glasgow – from Kyle to Fort William to the centre of the city, calling in a favour from Imogen as I go. She knows one of Scotland’s best child psychiatrists. Malcolm Kellaway. And I know this because I read some of Imogen’s articles months back, where she’d praised him in a piece about modern motherhood. Now I demand her help.
    ‘Can you get me an appointment? Right now?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Immy. Please.’ I am gazing at the haunted bleakness of Rannoch Moor, simultaneously steering, and phoning. I don’t think there are any police around, to arrest me for careless driving. Little lochs shine dirty silver, in the occasional breaks of sun.
    ‘Please, Immy. I need this.’
    ‘Well. Yes … yes, I could try. He could call you back. But, um, Sarah – are you sure you’re OK?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Sarah – it’s just – you know—’

    ‘Imogen!’
    Like a friend – like the friend who has been with me all the way – she gets the message, and she stops asking questions, and she rings off, to do my bidding. And sure enough: his office calls me as I drive: he has agreed to see me with four hours’ notice.
    Thank you, Imogen.
    And now here I am in Kellaway’s office in George Street. The psychiatrist, Dr Malcolm Kellaway, is sitting on a leather swivel chair behind his slim metal desk. His hands are pressed exactly flat together, as if in the most pious prayer; his twinned fingertips are poised to his chin.
    He asks, for the second time. ‘Do you honestly believe that you might have made a mistake? That evening, in Devon?’
    ‘I don’t know. No. Yes. I don’t know. ’
    Silence resumes.
    The Glasgow sky is already blackening outside, and it is barely two-thirty p.m.
    ‘OK, let’s go over the facts again.’
    And so he goes over the facts, again. The facts of the matter; the case in hand; the death of my daughter; the possible breakdown of my surviving child.
    I listen to his recitation, but really I am staring at those dark swirling clouds outside, beyond the square windows with the sooty granite sills. Glasgow . This is such a Satanic city in the winter – Victorian and dour, exultantly forbidding. Why did I come here?
    Kellaway has more questions of his own.
    ‘How much of this have you discussed with your husband, Mrs Moorcroft?
    ‘Not so much.’
    ‘Why not?’

    ‘Just that – I don’t want to make it any worse than it is, I mean, before I know, for sure .’
    Again the doubts assail me: what am I doing here? What is the point? Malcolm Kellaway is easily middle-aged, yet wears jeans which make him seem unconvincing. He has annoyingly effete gestures, a silly roll-neck jumper, and rimless spectacles with two perfectly round lenses that say oo . What does this man know about my daughter that I don’t? What can he tell me that I can’t tell myself?
    Now he gazes at me, from behind those glasses, and he says,
    ‘Mrs Moorcroft. Perhaps it’s time to move on from what we know, to what we don’t know, or can’t know.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘First things first.’ He sits forward. ‘Following your phone call this morning, I have done some research of my own, and I have consulted with colleagues at the Royal Infirmary. And I’m afraid there is, as I suspected, no reliable way of differentiating between monozygotic twins,