‘That can be fixed. Get your lippy on and meet us at seven at All Bar One. If you don’t turn up, me and Kate and Shona will come to your flat and drag you out by your hair.’
‘I’d like to see you try.’
Lynn laughed: a squawk indicating that she’d already started drinking. ‘Three nurses against you? You don’t have a chance, doll. You promised the next night out, you’d come. Get dressed and get yourself in a taxi. We’ll even pay it for you.’
Amy groaned. Lynn wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and she had promised. She’d been promising for months. The girls were trying as hard as they could to gather Amy into their friendship, and Amy was trying as hard as she could to resist. She had no good reason, other than her obstinate commitment to self-sufficiency.
Is it self-sufficiency or isolation? She could almost hear Caroline asking. Amy wondered what was so wrong with isolation.
‘Okay,’ she relented. Her belly fluttered with worry that had no specific source. If she gave herself permission to listen to it, she would never go anywhere. Leaving the flat was the hardest part; it would be okay once she got out. ‘You win. I’ll meet you up there.’
‘Good girl.’
Five hours and as many glasses of white wine later, she was stumbling along Queen Street, clinging to Lynn’s arm to keep herself upright in the heels she’d never learned to walk in. The curry was sitting heavily in her belly and it wasn’t going to mix well with the wine, but she was also drunk enough not to care. Dinner had been filled with wild stories about things that happened in A&E, unwelcome advances from patients and sometimes doctors, and the endlessly creative means by which the citizens of Edinburgh found themselves blue-lighted to hospital. Amy’s sides hurt from laughing more than she was used to, and she wondered why she had been so resistant to coming out.
They made their wobbly way to a club called The Jam House, which was more adult and less studenty than the other Edinburgh clubs Amy had been to. It was filled with hen parties, office groups, clusters of mums set free for an evening, and heavy-set forty-something dad dancers. Amy had never been a clubber. The thumping music made her head hurt and there was always an underlying odour of sleaze. But the music here was good, a playlist of songs she knew and could sing along with, and it was nice to be in a place where she felt young. She had a vague notion that the ridiculous strappy sandals had torn her feet to shreds, but that would be tomorrow’s problem.
It was after midnight when a hand landed on her shoulder. She spun around on the dance floor and found herself face to face with Ricky. He looked worse than he had the last time she’d seen him: thin and shadowed, fed on a diet of cigarettes and alcohol.
‘Oh my God,’ she spluttered. Her happy high collapsed and she was immediately filled with a familiar dread. This was not the kind of place he would normally frequent, and yet she had known. She had felt it. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Same as you, eh. Trying to get a bag off.’
‘I’m not,’ she said automatically. She shouldn’t have. He wanted her to feel guilty. He wanted her to have to defend herself. ‘Not that it’s any of your business if I am.’
This is why I don’t go out, she reminded herself. It had been fifteen months since she’d asked him to move out, but only nine since he finally stopped calling her and banging on her door in the middle of the night.
‘I don’t care what you do anymore,’ he said, but his tone was too casual to be believable.
She didn’t know what to say to him and didn’t want to encourage him to hang around. Edinburgh was a glorified village; they would have to expect to bump into each other from time to time.
She glanced back at Lynn and said loudly, ‘Lynn, this is Ricky.’
‘Oh aye.’ Lynn stepped up beside Amy and sneered at him like he was a piece of rotten meat. ‘I’m thinking the crowd in this place has gone a bit downhill, Amy. Bit low class, you know what I mean? I say we move on.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Amy gave Ricky one last glance. She’d had junkies in her ambulance who looked better than he did right now. ‘We’re off. Have fun with ...’ she scanned around for any of his mates, ‘whoever you’re with.’
Turning her back on him, she allowed Lynn to pull her off the dance floor.
‘Oh my God, thank you,’ she breathed when they regrouped with Kate and Shona. ‘He was the last person on earth I thought would turn up in here. It’s so not his scene.’
‘He looks like his scene should be down around the docks somewhere. What did you ever see in him, Amy?’
Amy shrugged. It would be impossible to explain in here. ‘Ricky wasn’t always that bad.’ That was as forgiving as she could bring herself to be. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Outside, revellers were out in the streets. People were shouting, laughing, singing, staggering through the winter night in their shirt-sleeves and short dresses. Behind the clouds, there was a full moon, and for some reason, that always made everything wilder. Amy let herself spare a single thought for her colleagues who had drawn the short straw tonight.
‘Where to?’ Shona asked. She was the youngest and freshest of them all. ‘I’m not ready for home yet.’
‘Girls, I’m done. I think I’ll jump in a taxi,’ Amy said. The encounter had defeated her.
‘Oh no way, we’re just getting started.’
‘Don’t let me stop you. I’m knackered.’ Amy rummaged in her handbag for her purse while the others discussed options for continuing their night. She pulled out a twenty-pound note and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans, stowed her purse and looked for a taxi. Hackneys rumbled up and down the street but not a single one had a yellow light showing. She might have to walk some way before she found one.
‘Thanks for asking me. It’s been fun.’
‘You coming to the Christmas night out?’ Lynn asked.
Amy had been avoiding any and all mention of festive nights out.
‘Not sure yet. I’ll see you next week, girls.’ She headed off in the direction of home, striding as powerfully as she could in the hateful shoes.
She got as far as Leith Walk and still couldn’t find a taxi. The straps of her sandals cut across the top of each foot, sending searing pain up her legs. But she was halfway home and there didn’t seem much point in spending money on a fare now.
It was only when she turned into a quieter side-street and left the city centre crowds behind that she realised she was being followed. The footsteps came from rubber-soled shoes and were very slightly syncopated: he walked with a limp. He also breathed heavily and coughed softly every thirty seconds or so. Amy didn’t have to turn around to know it was Ricky.
She forced herself to keep walking without changing her pace. She wouldn’t be able to outrun him in these shoes, even with his bad leg, so she needed to get near enough to home before she confronted him. Because she had to confront him. This could not be allowed to happen again.
He followed her all the way to Easter Road, falling back a little as she turned right onto Albion Road. She ducked into the shadow of a recessed doorway and waited for him to round the corner. When he did, she stepped straight into his path, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and kneed him as hard as she could in the groin. He grunted and doubled over, cursing and struggling for breath.
‘You fucking bitch,’ he blurted.
Amy kicked his injured leg with a spiky heel and he crumpled like a play-acting footballer, clutching his knee. She gave him a shove, placed her foot on his gut, leaned over him and spoke softly. ‘You stay the fuck away from me, Ricky. If I see you in my street again, I’ll see to it you can’t walk away.’ A final kick for emphasis.
‘Awright, darling?’ asked a passing drunk. ‘You needing ma help?’
‘No, I don’t need your help, thank you.’ Amy left Ricky lying there and jogged home, slammed the stair door behind her and ran up the stairs. She pulled off the heels and examined the raw patches and blisters. She rubbed on some Savlon, thinking as
she did so that the original designer of stiletto heels must have been a sexual predator. Ten minutes passed and she had almost started to wonder if Ricky had crawled away back to whatever rock he’d been hiding under these past nine months. She made a cup of tea and the tightness in her chest began to ease.
Then, inevitably, the buzzer. Two, three, four times, echoing angrily up the stairwell. The banging on the door. The shouts from outside. ‘Amy! Open the door, Amy, you fucking Irish whore. You’re mine, bitch. You’re mine.’
She had to ignore him. Letting him see her or hear her would only fuel his fire. She could hear footsteps in the other flats, the noises of neighbours waking up and opening their windows. Paul in the flat below hers shouted down, ‘Get to fuck, Ricky, or I’ll call the polis.’
Amy phoned the police herself, then sat down on the kitchen floor with the light off and waited. Eventually, it went quiet downstairs. Outside it started to sleet, and Ricky must have sidled away to nurse his wounds. By the time the patrol car came around, he would have been long gone.
She crawled into bed in her tracksuit, afraid to get undressed, and lay still, listening to the night. With every little creak or thump from the old pipework, she flinched and felt adrenaline shoot down her legs. Caroline had explained it all to her: the flood of cortisol to the brain, the overwhelming need to protect herself, the fight or flight mechanism, the chronic stress of managing her body’s responses to threats real and perceived.
Ricky was a very real threat.
She dug in the storage box under her bed, pulled out her brother Ian’s old flick knife and lay down with it under her pillow.
NINE
Harrison woke with a prickle of nervous energy running down his spine, as if there had been a lightning strike and spare electricity was still fizzing around the room. The dream had left an impression of the colour green. Intense, cavernous greenery. He imagined that it had been that mountainous jungle again, the place with the river and the rope bridge, but he couldn’t summon any more detail than that. A hazy memory of his father’s face hung in his mind: his father’s face as it had been thirty years ago, not as it would be now. Was his dad out there, in that jungle? And was that jungle actually a place in this world, or was Alastair Jones trying to communicate with him from some verdant green afterlife the way Tomas did from his Andean mountainside?
And if so, why? Why now, after all this time?
‘Just tell me the fucking truth,’ he said aloud into his empty bedroom. Sometimes the grief was as raw as it had ever been. He lay like that for a while, starving for answers that never came, then forced himself out of bed.
It was Saturday morning and the flat was cold. He wanted to pull the duvet over his head and go back to sleep, but his mind was too noisy. He’d been working too many hours, counselling angst-ridden undergraduates, marking and trying to make progress on a paper that apparently didn’t want to be written.
He shouldn’t have taken the Merriweather case. The detective work had been a clever way of funding himself through his PhD. He’d always intended to give it up once he secured a full-time academic position, but somehow new clients kept finding their way to him and he could never bring himself to say no.
Right now, coming up for Christmas, what he really needed was a holiday. Somewhere warm and far away from other people.
But the case intrigued him. They all did. The patchy stories, with their blurry details and blacked-out sections. The quiet mysteries. Something big had been blacked-out of Elizabeth Merriweather’s story, a deliberate omission yawning in front of him. He could sense that, whatever it was, she held it back out of fear and shame. And underpinning that, guilt, which compelled her to try to hide something from a man she knew she couldn’t hide anything from. Harrison was fairly sure she’d brought him in because she wanted the thing to be found out. People often did, despite the repercussions.
It was a distraction from his own life, and it depressed him how badly he needed that.
He turned the heat up, made coffee and watched the news. It was even more surreal than anything that came at him out of the spirit world: Brexit negotiations stalled in quicksand, families torn apart on the US-Mexico border, environmental meltdown. He turned off the television. These days he missed Tomas more than ever. He wished he could ask Tomas what he thought of the world’s darkening trajectory, wished he could absorb some of the optimism that Tomas carried until his dying day. Things will get better, compadre. They will, because we will make them. This too shall pass.
This too shall pass.
But when?
Tomas had faith, Harrison less so.
He went into the spare room, picked a few Salvia leaves and wrapped a wool rug around his shoulders. Normally he didn’t make a habit of journeying in the morning because it had the potential to turn the rest of the day on its head. But right now, he just wanted to see Tomas, seven-foot condor or not.
Images began to come very quickly, but they weren’t of the place he was expecting. Even before his consciousness altered fully, he was aware that he was being taken somewhere different this time. Yet it was somewhere familiar and not so very far from home. He was in Edinburgh, walking down Easter Road, turning along Albion Road toward the towering stands of the Hibs ground, stopping outside a dirty sandstone tenement. A skinny man with short black hair was shouting up at a window on the second floor. Harrison became that man for a moment. He looked down at his body and saw that his chest was a ragged, empty cavity. His heart was dying in a jar inside that window, and he couldn’t reach it.
This wasn’t the person he was looking for. Harrison stripped off the black-haired man’s body, left it like a suit crumpled on the pavement, and went upstairs. Someone was calling out to him, willing him to come. She was hiding inside the flat, afraid to leave or look out the window. Lucy, he thought: hiding in plain view, only a few miles from home.
He knew he was wrong as soon as he stepped inside the flat. The girl sitting on the floor beside the bed wasn’t Lucy Merriweather; it was Amy Bell.
Please come, she said.
He opened his eyes and was back in his flat, but the Salvia was still working through his system. For a few minutes, he could still almost see her, sitting on the floor of her bedroom. Her fear smelled like an old, dusty wool coat. This wasn’t a one-off incident, and the black-haired man wasn’t a stranger.
Harrison wondered about going down there. In normal circumstances, it was too early in the morning to turn up unannounced at the home of a person he’d only met once—or twice, if the bridge incident counted—especially when she hadn’t even given him the address. But these weren’t normal circumstances.
Or, possibly, they were. Maybe this was Amy Bell’s normal. She had called for help before and he’d come, and now she was asking again. She was asking him to prove himself, or maybe she was trying to prove herself.
He got dressed and headed out, taking the car even though he probably should have given the Salvia longer to wear off. He could only hope the streets didn’t deliver any detours into the Andes or the as-yet inexplicable jungle, but as he drove, Edinburgh remained its colourless November self. It was just getting light and the streets were quiet as people nursed their Saturday morning hangovers.
A few minutes later, he turned along Albion Road and drove straight past a tenement that looked exactly as it had in the vision. He parked out of sight around a corner and walked back, watching out for the man he’d seen. He allowed himself to be open to the energies of the street, letting the inside of his head receive the hum of dozens of poorly tuned voices. He picked up arguments, sex, muffled dreams and money worries, but nothing sinister. The man had vanished, if he’d ever been here at all. It was possible that he was only a projection of Amy’s mind: a memory or a nightmare.
He paused outside a door with peeling black paint and looked at the names beside the buzzers. There it was, second floor flat 2: Bell. A shiver ran up his neck. Sometimes his abilities spooked him, even after all these years. Har
rison took a deep breath and pressed the button.
‘Who is it?’ came Amy Bell’s abrupt voice.
‘Harri Jones.’ He hoped shortening his name would make him sound more like a friend.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘You came.’ There was a long pause, and then the door buzzed open. Harrison climbed steps that were worn and indented by a hundred years of weary feet. Amy was waiting at her door, dressed and not at all surprised to see him.
‘So, it’s really true, then, Indiana.’ She stood aside to let him in. Her flat was small and immaculate. She needed order and predictability; things had to be in their place.
‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘Do I even want to know how you found out where I live?’
‘I saw it in a vision.’
‘A vision.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Right.’ She fixed him with a stare, cynical but not entirely disbelieving.
‘Did you ...’ He wasn’t sure of the right word. ‘Did you call me?’
‘Maybe I did.’ She lifted her hands from her sides. ‘Lucky you, you don’t even have to wait for a girl to give you her number.’
‘Is this okay? Me turning up here? It seemed like you were scared of somebody and I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘So, you came.’ She seemed to laugh at herself. ‘You must think I’m pretty helpless.’
‘I’m reasonably sure you’re not helpless, but are you alright?’
‘Yeah, I’m alright. Do you do this often?’
‘Not very often. Sorry, I know it’s a wee bit weird.’
‘A wee bit.’ Amy chuckled at him. She slipped her feet into a pair of sheepskin boots that were lying beside the door and took her coat and scarf down from a hook. ‘Can we go somewhere? I want to get out of here.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t care. Just ... somewhere else.’
He had planned to spend a couple of hours on the Merriweather case and then settle down to some writing, but he had a feeling that Amy Bell would have found a way to overwrite his plans, no matter what he tried to do today. There was a connection between them. She could communicate with him remotely and he could hear her more clearly than almost anyone he’d ever met. That had only ever happened with other psychics.
Siren Song (Harrison Jones and Amy Bell Mystery Book 1) Page 5