The Sea Sisters: Gripping - a twist filled thriller

‘Katie—’ he said, but faltered when he saw her expression.

Her voice came out as cold and flat as the sky. ‘You left her, Finn.’

He closed his eyes and swallowed. She saw that his lashes were damp. Beyond them a car door slammed and an engine started.

Katie was standing with her back to the stone archway at the rear of the church. She thrust her hands deep into her coat pockets. ‘You were supposed to be travelling together. What happened?’

The question seemed painful for him and he looked beyond her as he answered. ‘We had an argument. It should never have happened. Mia didn’t want to be in Australia—’

‘So she went to Bali,’ Katie finished. ‘Why?’

Finn’s left foot, in an unpolished black shoe, jigged up and down. She remembered the gesture; she’d once thought it was a mark of impatience but later understood it to be a sign of nervousness. ‘We’d met people who were going out there.’

‘I just don’t understand any of it.’ Katie’s hands were beginning to tremble in her pockets. She balled them into fists and lifted her chin. ‘Why was she on that cliff top?’

‘I don’t know. We didn’t speak after Australia. She emailed once—’

‘You didn’t think to tell anyone?’ Her voice was growing louder and she was aware of glances being exchanged between Finn’s brothers who were hanging back.

He turned his palms towards the heavy grey sky, helpless under the fire of her questions. ‘I thought Mia would have said—’

‘You should have stopped her!’ A sharp gust whipped Katie’s hair in front of her face. She swiped it aside.

‘She is headstrong,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

‘Was headstrong. Was. She’s dead!’ The last word was the cold truth between them and the power of it pushed Katie on, anger rising like venom in her throat. ‘You promised me you’d look after her.’

‘I know—’

‘She trusted you, Finn. I trusted you!’ She stepped forward, extended her arm and slapped him, once, hard, on the left cheek.

Above, two seagulls screamed.

No one moved. Finn, shocked, held his face. Katie felt a smarting in her fingertips. After a moment it looked as if he was going to say something, but all that came out was a sob. She had never seen him cry before and was shocked at the way his face collapsed, as if the tears dragged all of his features downwards.

She watched, motionless, until she felt the firm pressure of Ed’s hand on her shoulder. He steered her away, moving towards an area near Mia’s grave where tributes had been laid. He didn’t mention what had just happened, but simply buttoned up his dark overcoat, and then began carefully picking up the tributes. One at a time, he read each message aloud.

Katie wasn’t listening. She was still thinking of the red handprint she’d left on Finn’s cheek, as if he’d been branded. She had never hit anyone before. Ed would later tell her that Finn was grieving, too, and she should have allowed him the chance to explain – but what was there to say? Mia was dead. If she didn’t blame Finn, she was only left with herself.

‘This is unusual,’ Ed commented. He was holding a single flower; from its blood-red centre three white petals swept outwards like fans. He passed it to Katie, who lightly fingered the velvet petals. It looked like a type of orchid and she brought it close to her face to smell it. The scent conjured up another place – somewhere sweet and warm, filled with fragrance and light.

When she looked up, Ed was holding the small card that came with the flower. ‘What is it?’ she asked, noticing the change in his expression.

He said nothing, just handed the card to her.

Turning it over, she saw that the sender hadn’t included his or her name. There was only a single word on the card: Sorry.

*

After the funeral there had been drinks at the village pub, where people huddled by the fire, stamping their feet to get the blood moving again. Katie stayed for an hour at most, making sure she thanked everyone who’d journeyed a long way, before quietly slipping out.

As she and Ed crossed the car park, someone called out, ‘You’re leaving?’

They both turned. It was Jess, her best friend, a girl who used to take Katie dancing to a bump-’n’-grind club in a dingy corner of their university town, but who now had a high-flying job as the sales director of a pharmaceutical company.

‘Sorry, I know we’ve hardly talked, but … I…’

‘Katie,’ Jess said, flicking her cigarette to the ground. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Thanks for coming today. It means a lot. And thanks for your messages, too.’ Jess had called every day since Mia’s death, leaving voicemails telling Katie how loved she was and passing on news and condolences from mutual friends. ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch. I keep meaning to ring … but, well …’ Katie stalled, not knowing how to explain. She was grateful to Jess – to all her friends – but she hadn’t felt ready to talk about Mia. Not yet.

‘You’ve lost your sister. I understand.’ Jess stepped forward and wrapped Katie in her arms. ‘No more apologies, okay? Just take your time. We’re all here for you when you’re ready.’

‘Thanks,’ she sighed, breathing in the cigarette smoke that clung to Jess’s hair.

Jess squeezed Katie’s hands and then turned to Ed, wagging her finger. ‘You make sure you look after her, you hear?’

He smiled, putting an arm around Katie’s waist. ‘I intend to.’

It was Jess who’d introduced Katie to Ed at a riverboat party on the Thames. Katie had just come out of a relationship and wasn’t interested in rejoining the dating scene so soon. Yet, Ed, with his handsome face, quick-witted banter and devastating smile, managed to persuade her otherwise. They had slipped free of the party the moment the boat moored and went on to a bar where they shared a bottle of Merlot and talked and laughed until the place closed. Eighteen months later, Ed got down on one knee to offer her a diamond ring and a lifetime together. She found herself grinning and saying yes.

It was a long drive back to London, but Katie couldn’t stay in Cornwall with the sharp sea air and the waves that whispered with memories. In the flat, she unzipped her black dress, which fell to the floor with a swoosh. She stepped from the dark puddle into a fleecy jumper and pair of jogging bottoms belonging to Mia. The hems trailed around her feet as she padded along the hall. She hesitated only a moment before entering Mia’s room.

Her sister’s backpack was propped against the bed. It had been flown back from Bali several days ago, but Katie hadn’t wanted to look through it before. Airport tags curled around its straps and strands of Indian leather were attached to each zip. There was a badge on the front of a woman in a hula skirt, and a picture of a daisy had been doodled on a side pocket in thick black marker. She unbuckled it, loosened the drawstring and reached inside.

Pushing her hand into the belly of the bag she felt her way through various items, pulling out one at a time like a game of lucky dip. She tugged free a burnt-orange beach dress that smelt of jasmine laced with the holiday tang of suncream and salt. She smoothed out the creases and then set it on the bed. Carefully, Katie removed more items: a pair of Havaiana flip-flops with worn-down soles; a travel towel stuffed into a net bag; an iPod in a clear case; two novels by authors Katie hadn’t heard of; a slim torch gritted with sand; and a man’s jumper, with thumb holes in the sleeves. Finn’s?

She continued searching until her hand met something hard. Katie had been told that Mia’s travel journal had been located by the police, who had examined it, but found nothing that could be considered as evidence.

Mia had always kept journals. Katie found it disconcerting that her sister preferred to share her feelings on paper rather than in person. As a teenager the temptation to read one had been irresistible. She had twice searched Mia’s room hoping to uncover information that only her journal would reveal but, for all Mia’s clutter and disorganization, she was fastidious about hiding them.

Carefully, Katie slid the journal free. Glimmering sea-blue fabric was stretched across the cover and it felt heavy in her hands. She traced a finger down the spine and then opened it carefully, as if Mia’s words were butterflies that might flutter free into the air.

She turned the pages slowly, admiring her sister’s elegant handwriting. In some things, Mia was lackadaisical and careless – her wallet was a brick of receipts, and her books were dog-eared with doodles filling the margins – yet the handwriting in her journal was graceful and refined. The entries were crafted around pencil sketches, handwritten notes, corners of maps and fragments of memorabilia from places she’d visited. Each page was a work of art brimming with its own tale.

‘Everything okay?’ Ed was standing in the doorway to Mia’s room.

She nodded.

He glanced at the backpack. ‘You’re going through her things?’

‘I’ve found her travel journal.’

He straightened, surprised. ‘I didn’t realize she kept one.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘Are you going to read it?’

‘I think so. Yes. There’s so much I don’t know about her trip.’ And about her, she thought. They’d barely spoken while Mia was away. She wondered when this distance had grown between them. They used to be close once, but not lately. She sighed. ‘Why did she go, Ed?’

‘Travelling?’

‘Yes. She booked the trip so suddenly. Something must have happened to make her leave.’

‘She was just impulsive. Young. Bored. That’s all.’

‘I shouldn’t have let her go.’

‘Katie,’ he said gently, ‘you’ve had a long day. Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking at her journal tonight. Wait till morning, at least. I was just about to make us a snack. Why don’t you come into the kitchen? Keep me company?’

‘Maybe in a minute.’

When the door closed, she flicked through the pages and picked an entry at random. As she began to read, her gaze jumped from phrase to phrase – ‘cinder desert’, ‘Finn and me’, ‘deep violet sky’, ‘lunar landscape’ – as if each word was too hot for her mind to settle on. She squeezed her eyes shut and then reopened them, trying to focus on a single sentence. But it was hopeless; her gaze roamed over the words, but her mind refused to digest them.

Frustrated, she flicked on. She passed an entry where a sketched bird took flight from the bottom of a page, and another where Mia’s writing spiralled around an invisible coil as if being sucked downwards. Her heartbeat quickened when she realized she was travelling towards the back of the journal, her fingertips skimming the edges of each page as they drew her to Mia’s final entry.

Reaching it, Katie paused. There would be things, she knew already, which she’d rather not learn, but like a passer-by being drawn to the sight of a crash, she was unable to look away.

Staring at the final entry she saw that just one side of the double spread was filled. The adjoining page was missing; it had been ripped out leaving behind a jagged edge near the spine of the journal. Her eyes fixed on the remaining page, which was filled with an intricate pencil drawing of the profile of a female face. Within the face a series of detailed doodles had been drawn: a roaring dark wave, a screaming mouth, falling stars, a hangman with six blank dashes, an empty phone dangling from a wire.

Katie snapped the journal shut and stood.

She shouldn’t have looked; it was too soon. Already new questions were swimming to the surface of her thoughts. What did the illustrations mean? Why had a page been torn out? What had been on it? She pushed the journal back towards the bag as if returning it to the backpack would stop the stream of doubts rushing forwards, but in her hurry the journal fell free of her hands, and as it spilt to the floor, something glided from its pages.

Bending to retrieve it she saw it was the stub of Mia’s first boarding pass: London Heathrow to San Francisco. Her fingers moved across the smooth white card as she thought about Mia arriving in San Francisco full of the anticipation of travelling. She tried picturing the places Mia visited, wondering about the people she had met, imagining what she might have experienced – but Mia’s travels were a mystery, six lost months Katie was desperate to understand. Six months that the journal held the key to.

As she held Mia’s plane ticket between her fingers, an idea began to form.

*

Katie barely slept that night as the idea shaped itself into a purpose. The next morning she rose early and strode into Putney High Street searching for a travel agency. She placed Mia’s itinerary on the desk of a woman who wore coral-pink lipstick on cracked lips. ‘I would like to book the same route.’

She could have done it online, but felt the decision was too important to be made on the click of a button. Perhaps she had anticipated hesitation from the saleswoman, as if someone would tell her this was a foolish, impulsive idea, but instead the lady had taken a sip from her steaming mug of coffee, then simply asked, ‘When would you like to go?’

Now, five days later, she sat on the wooden floorboards in her bedroom trying to pack. The contents of Mia’s backpack fanned around her feet, and her own clothes waited tentatively in half-built piles within a purple suitcase. She was usually a decisive and methodical packer, but she had no clue what to pack for this trip. In a few hours she was due to board a flight to San Francisco, exactly as Mia had done six months earlier.

Her bedroom door opened and Ed entered, carrying two mugs of tea. He passed her one and then lowered himself onto the floor beside her, his suit trousers pulling tight across his knees and revealing half an inch of skin above his socks.

She took a sip of tea. He made it exactly how she liked it: not too strong, a generous splash of milk and half a spoonful of sugar.

He eyed the piles of belongings sceptically. ‘There’s still time to change your mind. Work would have you back, you know.’

She had quit her job as a senior recruitment consultant as she’d walked back from the travel agency. After dedicating herself to the same company since graduation, she had only needed a five-minute phone call to leave. ‘I can’t go back.’ The idea of returning to the office, taking a seat at her corner desk beneath the air-conditioning vent that aggravated her eyes, and pretending that placing candidates was still important to her, seemed utterly ludicrous.

‘Why not wait a few weeks? I am almost certain I’ll be able to juggle holiday. We could go together … not everywhere, but Bali. You can see where—’

‘I need to start this from the beginning.’ Katie’s coping mechanism was structure. After her mother’s death, she had ruthlessly filled her diary with social engagements, taking command of every free hour that might otherwise have been idled away in the folds of self-pity. She attacked her job with equal vigour, working around the clock with such steely focus that, three months later, she got a promotion.

Losing Mia felt different. Work and social distractions were no match for her grief, which was thick and black. Finding Mia’s travel journal seemed like a small glimmer of light in the gloom, so she had made a decision to follow it, entry by entry, country by country, in the hope that retracing Mia’s steps would help her to understand her death. For the first time since the police arrived on her doorstep, Katie felt as if she had a sense of purpose.

‘I know we’ve talked about this,’ Ed said, ‘but I am still struggling to understand your logic.’

‘You know how difficult things were between me and Mia before she left,’ she said, setting aside her tea. ‘And I let her go … I was relieved to see her go.’

‘Mia’s death is not your fault.’

Wasn’t it? She had seen Mia was unhappy when they were living together, but she had let her loose anyway. Mia was her little sister, her responsibility. And Katie had failed her. ‘The journal is all I have left. It’s a link to six months of her life that I missed.’

‘So read it. I’ve already told you I’m happy to do it with you.’

She’d discovered Ed thumbing through the journal the morning after she’d found it, checking that there was nothing that would upset her. She knew he was being kind, but she didn’t want his protection; she wanted his support. Now she’d taken to keeping the journal with her at all times.

‘But once I’ve finished reading it,’ she explained, ‘there’ll be no more new memories of Mia. That’ll be it – she’s gone.’ She imagined flicking through the pages time and time again until the words had become dull and meaningless, like a set of old photographs that have faded with the years. But Katie knew that by reading each entry in the countries where Mia wrote them, and experiencing some of the things she had experienced, then it would feel as if she was with her – that those six months hadn’t been lost. ‘I need to do this, Ed.’

He stood and crossed her bedroom to the window and opened it. Katie caught the heavy bass booming from a car stereo below. He spread his hands on the low windowsill and, for several moments, just stared at the street below.

‘Ed?’

‘I love you,’ he began slowly, turning to face her, ‘but I believe you are making a mistake. What about everything you’re leaving behind? What about our wedding?’

They were due to get married in August. They had booked an intimate country house in Surrey, which they’d planned to take over for the weekend with their closest friends and family. Katie’s evenings had been occupied with searching for a band that would play beyond midnight, deliberating over the choice of cheesecake or profiteroles for dessert, and collecting vintage photo frames to create a display on the cake table. The excitement and anticipation that had only recently consumed her now seemed as if it had been part of a life that was no longer hers.

‘I won’t be away for long. A few months at most.’

‘I know you’re going through hell right now,’ he said, pushing aside a cream lantern to make space to sit. ‘I wish, I really wish, there was something I could do to make this easier for you. But all I can say to you, darling, is that I truly believe it will help if you can begin looking towards the future, rather than the past.’

She nodded. There was some sense in that.

He indicated the spot beside him and she moved across the room and sat. She could smell the residue of his shaving foam, mixed with the fresh tones of aftershave. He looked handsome in his suit; the slate-grey tie had been a present from Katie and she liked to imagine his hand brushing the raw silk in a meeting, his thoughts trailing from the boardroom to her.

‘This isn’t the answer,’ he said, looking at Mia’s journal which she still held. She heard the smile in his voice as he said, ‘Come on, you hate flying! You’ve never been outside of Europe. It is just not safe for you to go backpacking on your own.’ He placed his hand on her thigh, rubbing gently. ‘Let’s work through this together. Here.’

Ed always had a practical way of assessing situations; it was one of the many things she admired about him. Perhaps this was a mistake. Flying to the other side of the world and giving no indication of when she would be back was unfair on Ed, she knew that much. ‘I don’t know what the right decision is any more.’

‘Katie,’ he said quietly, ‘eventually you are going to have to let her go.’

She ran her fingers over the sea-blue cover of the journal, imagining all the times Mia had written in it. She pictured her swinging lazily in a hammock, her tanned legs stretched in front of her, a pen moving lightly over the cream leaves. The journal contained the most intimate details of Mia’s thoughts, and Katie held it in her hands.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not until I know what happened.’

Ed sighed.

She wondered whether he had already decided what had happened. In the time he’d known Mia, he had seen her at her worst – impetuous, wayward and volatile – but he didn’t know the real Mia; the one who swam like a fish in the sea, who kicked off her shoes to dance, who loved catching hailstones in her palms. ‘It wasn’t suicide,’ she said firmly.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t.’

And there it was. The ‘perhaps’.

She stood, picked up Mia’s empty backpack and began carefully replacing items she had taken from it. From her own suitcase she grabbed a pile of clothes, her washbag and her passport, and squeezed them into the backpack, then buckled it shut. She shoved her suitcase in the wardrobe, closing the door with a satisfying smack: what good was a suitcase where she was going?

Ed was on his feet. ‘You’re actually doing this?’

‘I am.’

She could see he was hurt and that he wanted to say something more. There were a thousand reasons why she shouldn’t go: she had never travelled alone before; her career would suffer; she was grieving and would do better with company. They had been through all of these reservations, Ed giving pragmatic advice, just as she would have offered someone else. Only now she felt differently. Now it wasn’t about practicalities, risk assessment or smart decision making. It was about her sister.

4

MIA

California, October Last Year

Mia’s legs rested on the dash of the battered Chevy they’d rented. She pressed her bare toes against the windscreen and then withdrew them, watching the toe-prints of condensation slowly disappear. Beside her, Finn was drumming his thumbs against the steering wheel in time to a blues number playing on the radio.

They were driving south along the famous Highway One, leaving San Francisco in their wake. They’d spent far more time there than intended, having been captivated by the city’s offbeat charm. On their first night they took a room in a cheap motel, dumped their backpacks and went for dinner at a busy Thai restaurant that served incredible sweet chilli prawns. The owner tipped them off about a basement club a couple of blocks away and, in spite of their jet lag, they found themselves drinking and dancing until their feet throbbed. They surfaced, hours later, to find dawn breaking over the city, and stumbled across an early-morning coffee house where they bought cinnamon bagels with fresh coffee and sat on the edge of the bay watching a pale pink sun climb over Alcatraz.

Low-lying fog stalked them down the coast and clung to the sea like a damp cloak obscuring any view of the horizon. Mia wound down the window and stuck her head out, squinting towards the sky. ‘Sun’s coming out.’

‘I’ll stop at the next lay-by.’

A few miles on was a gravel viewpoint on the cliff top. Sure enough, the sun was burning through the fog to unveil a rugged, grassy coastline. Wildflower-strewn cliffs, which she imagined would be spectacular in spring, staggered down to an untamed bay frothing with white-water.

She stepped from the car barefoot, interlocked her fingers above her head and stretched, her stomach pulling taut. The air fizzed with salt and she inhaled, closing her eyes.

Finn leant against the car with his arms folded loosely over his chest. ‘Look at this place.’

‘You want to go down?’

‘Sure.’

They found a narrow footpath that wound down the impressive cliff face, cutting back and forth to steal the incline from the steepest parts. Reaching the bottom, Mia was the first to jog towards the shore and plunge her feet in the sea. ‘Hello, Pacific!’ she bellowed. Then she turned to Finn. ‘Swim?’