Siren Song (Harrison Jones and Amy Bell Mystery Book 1)

by Rebecca McKinney

  ‘I don’t understand that. How can time be a shape?’

  ‘Ah!’ He laughed. ‘See, you do get it. We tend to treat time as a two-dimensional arrow, travelling in one direction only. That’s because our culture tells us to see it that way. If we accept that it isn’t a shape at all, if all times exist simultaneously, then our notions of past, present and future change quite profoundly.’

  ‘So you know what you said to me in your office? That you could prove it to me but you don’t find it that pleasant? Why is that?’

  ‘Because if emotions are energy, then they each trigger their own reaction in me. It’s a physical reaction, it hurts.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘If a person is angry or frightened or sad ... yeah, it hurts.’ He cut himself off abruptly and cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, you’re right, it’s all too mind-bending for this hour on a Saturday morning. Pancakes. You mind throwing another log on there?’

  The fire was well established now, so she placed a fat log on top of it. Harrison ladled circles of pancake batter onto the griddle. Her stomach growled as soon as the warm, buttery smell rose toward her. When the first two pancakes were ready, he put them onto a plate and passed them across to her, with a bottle of real maple syrup. ‘Canadian comfort food.’

  ‘So, you’re Canadian? I keep thinking I hear little hints of Irish in there.’

  He nodded, smiling. ‘I thought my Newfie accent was long gone.’

  ‘Newfie? Newfoundland? That’s where you’re from?’

  ‘Originally. I was born there and we lived in St. John’s until I was six. Then we moved to Scotland and stayed through the west, in Argyll. I’ve lived a lot of different places since then. Dad was Canadian, Mum’s Scottish.’

  ‘Your dad was Canadian? He’s dead?’

  He paused, the spatula hovering above the pan. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  He acknowledged this with a token nod, then directed his attention back toward the pancakes.

  Amy chewed slowly, keeping her questions to herself, not wanting to overstep the mark. ‘This is good.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He ate the next two pancakes, standing up across from her while he cooked more.

  ‘Can I ask something else?’

  He glanced up from his food. ‘What?’

  ‘Do you tell people? The people you work with and ... you know, girlfriends?’

  ‘Only when I’m sure I can trust them. Most of my colleagues at the university don’t know, and I spend most of my time covering it up. It’s not always the easiest thing to live with.’

  ‘You make it sound like a disease.’

  ‘I’ve sometimes thought about it that way.’

  ‘Great.’ All her life, she’d been separated from the people around her by an invisible barrier that she could never define and never break. There was a place in her, an inner sanctum that no other person could be allowed to enter. Perhaps now she had the beginnings of an explanation, although there was little comfort in it. It sounded like a life sentence.

  Her eyes felt raw and swollen and, now that the keen edge of hunger had been dulled, she began to realise how tired she was. ‘Do you have any good news this morning, Professor? I’ve had a really long night, and I’m a bit hungover.’

  ‘The good news is you’re not alone anymore.’

  This brought on a whole new line of questions. What did he mean by that? What if he was getting the wrong idea? She began to feel slightly panicky. Not that he was bad looking. Far from it. But he had to be quite a lot older than she was, and he wasn’t even close to being her type. A horrifying image of trying to make conversation as his date at some academic dinner party flashed inside her mind. That was definitely not going to be a premonition, she would make sure of that.

  ‘Can we be straight about one thing? I’m not going to hop into bed with you just because we have some kind of freaky psychic thing going on.’

  To her surprise, he laughed. ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to thank you or be insulted.’

  ‘Don’t be insulted. I’ve just come out of my latest ill-fated relationship and I’m not looking for another one anytime soon.’

  ‘You’re pretty alone too, aren’t you?’

  He poured more coffee but didn’t answer her question. He didn’t need to.

  She pushed her plate away. ‘I’m stuffed. And I’m bloody knackered. I didn’t sleep much at all last night.’

  ‘Do you want me to take you home?’

  ‘I can get the bus if ...’ She didn’t want to go home, but couldn’t tell him that.

  ‘There’s a settee in my study,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s pretty comfy for sleeping on.’

  Gratitude made her eyelids even heavier. ‘Thank you. If you have to go out anywhere, just go. Do whatever you need to do.’

  ‘Come on,’ he motioned for her to follow him. Across the hall, there was a book-filled study, with a desk and a worn-out brown sofa. ‘I’ll get you a quilt.’

  He left her sitting there, embarrassed and chilled with exhaustion. This whole thing was ridiculous beyond belief. Sleep was all she needed. Two or three hours and she’d be herself again, and she could go home. Ricky wouldn’t come back; she didn’t know why she was so worried about him.

  He came back again with a thick quilt and a pillow. ‘Here you go. I’ll be in the kitchen. I’ve got some work to do.’

  She hugged the bedding against her chest and felt like an orphan. ‘Thank you, Harri. This is all a bit strange, huh?’

  ‘Like I said, strange is an occupational hazard.’

  ‘I’ll be out of your way soon.’

  ‘You’re not in my way, Amy,’ he said quietly, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  TWELVE

  The fact that Amy Bell was sleeping in his study was enough to distract Harrison from settling down to any meaningful work. He hoped she was sleeping and not prowling around his study, digging into the details of his life. She could be, he supposed. Not that he had much left to hide from her except credit card numbers. He’d spent so many years disguising himself, like the phantom of the bloody opera, and it was a relief to take the mask off.

  He touched the back of the chair she’d sat on at breakfast and closed his eyes. A gnawing sensation gripped his stomach. Her need for knowledge had compelled her to seek him out, but he hoped he hadn’t overwhelmed her. He’d prattled so much this morning and hadn’t left her much time to talk. The teacher in him loved an audience.

  She had left an echo of memory in the room. From it, he could picture a quiet girl with a scatter of freckles across her nose and a thousand-yard stare. A curious, introspective child who tended wounded birds, picked scabs to watch how the blood ran and clotted, and who had seen violence at an early age. She carried the sound of breaking glass in her ears, as though it was the first thing she could remember hearing. There was a deep rift right inside her.

  He crept around as quietly as possible, folding his dry laundry so he wouldn’t have to catch her eyes drifting up to his boxer shorts on the pulley, and washing up the breakfast dishes. When the kitchen was clean, he opened the file he’d made up for Lucy Merriweather and forced himself to concentrate. He mapped out what he knew of Lucy’s story, or at least Elizabeth’s version of it.

  Lucy was a healthy, vibrant young girl who was good at everything she did: she loved to ride, loved to dance, loved to travel, loved to help people. Most of all she loved to sing, and she had the kind of angelic high, pure voice that made grown men weep. She had close friends and was always popular. When Elizabeth and Quentin argued, Lucy retreated to her treehouse at the far end of the garden, and Elizabeth believed she had been spared from the bloodiest details.

  Things began to change when Lucy came to the end of primary school. She wanted to go to North Berwick High School with most of her friends, but Quentin insisted on sending her up to Loretto. That was when all of the troubles started. In hindsight, Elizabeth wished
she’d fought Lucy’s corner on the school front, but she’d had her own snobberies. After all, if they weren’t going to buy their daughter a fine education, what was the point of Quentin working so many hours and being away so often?

  Lucy started getting into trouble. At thirteen, she was coming home drunk. At fourteen she was sexually active. At seventeen, just before she was due to sit her exams, she told her mother she was pregnant. In the face of relentless questioning, she steadfastly refused to name the father. Elizabeth rushed her in and they dealt with the pregnancy early, before anyone else found out about it. Needless to say, the exam results were not what they should have been.

  All the while, Elizabeth and Quentin’s relationship was disintegrating. Quentin hit out, with his tongue and sometimes with his hands. He slapped Elizabeth, bruised her arms, put his fingers around her neck and threatened to crush the life from her. He stopped bothering to hide the fact that he saw other women and Elizabeth stopped pretending to care.

  Lucy stopped hiding her disgust with both of her parents. She raged against them, told them she hated them, called them names that Elizabeth couldn’t bring herself to repeat. Instead of going to university, Lucy took a low paid job with a charity, working on the streets among homeless people and drug addicts. She busked on the Royal Mile for spare change and tried to get gigs in small bars and clubs around town. The last time Elizabeth saw Lucy, she was living in a shabby communal house in Portobello with a dozen other people, men and women, not all of them young or reputable. She had moved on from there about eighteen months ago and from there the trail had gone cold. It was a starting point, at least.

  There were holes in the story – big ones – for example, the nature of Quentin’s abuse of Lucy and why Elizabeth had never done anything about it. She made out that it had all started when Lucy began to rebel in secondary school, but Harrison had the feeling that it went back a lot further. Lucy hadn’t been the happy child her mother made her out to be, although she might have learned to pretend.

  He changed clothes and went for a run, headphones in to keep the rest of the world out. Running was barely tolerable when he was in his twenties and hadn’t got any more enjoyable, but the toll of a sedentary job was worse. He’d watched too many of his colleagues in the department become pallid, with bad backs and creaky hips. Through running, and allowing himself to be thrown around by younger, meaner guys at the martial arts gym twice a week, he was determined to avoid the slide into middle-aged complacency as long as possible.

  He pushed himself twice around the Meadows at as fast a pace as he could sustain. When he got home, he found Amy awake and sitting at the kitchen table. She was skimming the pages of Spirits of the Mountain, the book he had written about Tomas and the other miners in Potosí.

  ‘Good sleep?’

  She gave him a sheepish smile and closed the book. ‘Yes, thank you. You’ve been running?’

  ‘For my sins.’

  ‘I love running.’

  ‘I hate it. You like the book?’

  Instead of answering, she asked, ‘Do you use all those big words deliberately so the people you write about can’t understand what you’re saying about them?’

  He laughed softly. It was the question every anthropologist dreaded most.

  ‘I think we write that way to make ourselves sound clever to other academics, and that’s it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Most of the people in that book speak Quechua or Aymara. Not all of them can read. My friend Tomas spoke four languages fluently, including English. He’d have understood the book.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  Harrison paused and decided not to explain the ongoing connection. It would only make him sound crazier than he already did. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I saw the pictures of you with him. What happened to him?’

  ‘Mining accident.’

  Amy winced. ‘Can I ask you another question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Who is Lucy Merriweather?’

  ‘Ah ...’

  ‘You left the papers sitting there. I didn’t mean to snoop.’

  Harrison filled a pint glass of water and gulped it down. ‘I do some detective work on the side. I find people.’

  ‘You find people? What, like, missing people? The same way you found me?’

  ‘Yeah, more or less.’

  ‘So, you’re a psychic detective?’ She sounded genuinely impressed for the first time. ‘That’s pretty cool, Indiana.’

  Harrison sighed. ‘Do you have to call me that?’

  ‘You’re stuck with it now. How come you do that? Don’t tell me you need the money.’

  ‘I started it because I needed the money. Now I do it mostly for the pleasure of seeing people reunited. I don’t take that many cases on, and I keep saying I’m going to stop. I’m starting to think I should have turned this one down.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘My clients’ details are confidential. I shouldn’t be discussing this with you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anybody. Is Lucy Merriweather the missing person?’

  ‘Yes. How much did you read?’

  ‘Nothing. Just the name.’

  ‘It’s probably best if we leave it at that.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Just a girl.’ He didn’t want to talk about Lucy Merriweather, but Amy was probing him so deeply it felt like she could see straight into his head. She had opened him up and was pulling out pieces of knowledge, like toys out of a box. It was uncomfortable. This was what it was like for Lara, he realised. And Sophie before her. This was what happened to anyone who got too close to him.

  ‘Nobody’s just a girl,’ Amy said. ‘Something bad’s happened to her, hasn’t it?’

  He pushed damp hair back from his forehead. ‘I think so. I think something very bad has happened to her.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘Maybe I could help you look for her.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Why not? You can teach me how to use this ... thing ... I have, rather than just being battered around by it all the time.’

  He slouched down on the chair across from her, conscious of his sweaty shirt and moist hair. His glasses were smudged and sticky, so he took them off. Without them, one Amy became two. Sometimes he wondered whether his vision was really that bad or his brain perceived a different reality. Maybe the glasses were tricking him into seeing a clarity that wasn’t there.

  ‘Give me your hand.’

  ‘Why?’

  Harrison reached across the table. ‘Just give me your hand.’

  She hesitated for a moment, then laid her hand over his. He squeezed it gently and closed his eyes. Sounds filled his ears: gunfire, artillery, the shouts of men. She was on her knees in the dust, leaning over a soldier, pressing her hands down over a bloody hole in his abdomen.

  He opened his eyes and slipped his hand away. Then, purely on impulse, he said, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay what?’

  ‘Okay, you can help me look for Lucy Merriweather. But just to warn you, not everybody is alive when I find them.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘So how does it work? What do we do?’

  He stood up. ‘We need to go see some people in Portobello. Let me get a shower.’

  The Portobello house was big and old, but shabby. There were half a dozen bicycles stacked against the wall, recycling bins overflowing with bottles under the front windows, weeds coming through the steps. Green mould crept around splintering sash window frames.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Amy asked when Harrison rang the bell.

  ‘Just take it in. See what you can pick up. We’re not the police, we’re not here to interrogate anybody, but listen to your instincts.’

  She nodded silently as the door creaked open and they were faced by a young woman with yellow dreadlocks and rings in her nose.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.


  ‘Hi.’ Harrison mimicked her tone. She was young and lacked any obvious natural suspicion. He opted for a direct approach. ‘I’m hoping you can help me. We’re trying to find a girl who used to live here. Lucy Merriweather? Do you know her?’

  ‘Yeah, but I haven’t seen her for like a year and a half or something,’ she said openly. Her accent was English and slightly dopy. ‘Sorry, who are you anyway?’

  ‘I’m Harri Jones and this is Amy. We’ve been asked by Lucy’s family to see if we can find her. They haven’t had any contact with her for some time and they’re worried about her, obviously.’

  ‘What are you, like ... private investigators or something?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She gave a little snort of laughter. ‘Okay. Do you want to come in or anything? Joe’s here, he knows Lucy as well.’

  ‘Thanks. We won’t take much of your time.’

  They followed her inside. The inside of the house matched the outside: strewn with empties and leftovers, infused with smells of old food and cannabis. Harrison picked up the wafty, paranoid vibrations of people who were permanently stoned. A door creaked open, and a couple of expressionless faces peered out and then disappeared. Harrison could also feel Amy bristling behind him.

  The girl showed them into a lounge and indicated for them to sit on a sofa draped with faded Indian cotton throws. ‘I’ll get Joe.’

  As soon as she left, Harrison stood up again and explored the room, running his hands over the dusty shelves and chairs, picking up old books and candle holders. He could tell that Lucy had been here, but not recently. A guitar leaning in a corner behind a lamp drew his attention. He picked it up and placed his fingers over the frets. The strings were dead with dust and old sweat. A woman’s voice sang in his mind, fragile beauty layered over something hard and dark. Briefly, he saw her face, half-hidden behind a veil of pale gold hair. There were people watching her, mostly older men. They were transfixed by her voice but they wanted more than that. They wanted her body. They wanted her. They would put their hands deep into their pockets to have her. She was performing for them like a bear in a circus, and she wasn’t happy about it. He took a deep breath.