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

by Rebecca McKinney

  ‘Are you okay?’ Amy asked.

  He’d almost forgotten she was there. ‘This was hers.’

  ‘You can tell that just from picking it up?’

  ‘Yes. Here.’ He handed her the guitar.

  ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

  ‘Just hold it. See what happens.’

  She shook her head and gave him a doubtful look, but drew the guitar in close to her body and ran her fingers down the strings. It made a dull, dissonant chord. ‘Am I supposed to feel something?’

  ‘You might not. We’re all different.’

  ‘Bloody private investigators or something,’ said the dreadlocked girl’s voice in the hallway. She came back into the room, followed by a skinny man with a crew cut and Maori facial tattoos that he was too white to wear convincingly.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes. ‘Brit says you’re looking for Lucy Merriweather. Who sent you?’ His accent was from the same part of the world as his body art.

  ‘Her mother.’

  ‘Yeah well, Lucy doesn’t want anything to do with that bitch.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. Can you tell me why?’

  ‘I only know that her parents are the kind of self-absorbed capitalist pigs who are going to be first against the wall.’

  Harrison scratched his beard. ‘Nothing more ... specific than that?’

  ‘Do you need a more specific reason to hate someone?’

  Anger crawled up his neck. He’d indulged in plenty of revolutionary talk in his time, with university mates and especially with Tomas. But Tomas, who had more reason than most to want to line up capitalists against walls, never spoke of it. He spoke of education and healthcare and housing. He spoke of sharing, not killing. This guy on the other hand, was just an idle waster.

  ‘Has anyone else come looking for her?’

  ‘Only her old lady, mate. She came a few times, asking around.’

  ‘The thing is ... Joe, is it? I think Lucy may be in some danger. We just want to make sure she’s safe.’

  ‘What kind of danger?’

  ‘Let’s just say she’s a vulnerable young woman. So, you say she moved out of here about a year and a half ago?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘And do you have any idea where she went?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘Nah, not a clue.’

  At that point, Brit spoke up. ‘She went off with some bloke. Tim, I think his name was.’

  Joe raised his eyebrows, showed a flash of displeasure. ‘Why are you telling them?’

  ‘Tim?’ Harrison pressed. ‘Second name?’

  Brit continued. ‘No idea. He was from somewhere in the Midlands, a bit wet. If it’s any use, he worked for some charity that helped refugees.’

  ‘In Edinburgh?’

  ‘Yeah, Craigmillar or Niddrie, one of those places. He was a singer as well. Nice enough guy. He wouldn’t do anything bad to Lucy. He was properly in love with her.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  She shrugged. ‘He could have been an arsehole, who knows, but he was alright when he was around. Lucy liked him enough to leave here for him.’

  ‘Was she happy here?’

  ‘Everyone’s happy here,’ said Joe. ‘Are you like ... police or something?’

  ‘Do I look like a cop?’ Harrison asked.

  ‘No, but she does.’ He nodded at Amy.

  Amy leaned forward and said in a husky Belfast drawl, ‘I’m no cop.’

  Joe relaxed again. ‘I don’t know any more. Lucy was never going to stay anywhere very long. A year and a half’s a long time, she could be anywhere by now.’

  ‘Okay.’ Harrison stood up. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘That’s all you want to know?’

  ‘If we have any other questions, we’ll get in touch. Oh, this guitar belonged to Lucy, didn’t it?’

  ‘Might have.’

  ‘Can we take it?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To give it back to her when we find it.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ said Brit. Her attention had already moved onto the tobacco pouch Joe had in the front pocket of his shirt.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Harrison muttered. Holding the guitar by its neck, he strode quickly to the front door and jogged down the steps, trying to shake off the acrid haze of the house and its occupants. ‘Bloody hippies.’

  ‘At least now you’re speaking my language.’ Amy hurried alongside him. ‘You look spooked, Indiana, what’s up?’

  He stopped dead and faced her. ‘For Christ’s sake, Amy!’

  ‘What?’ She stood her ground; eyes alight with something he hadn’t seen in her before. She liked teasing him, and the more annoyed he got, the more she’d do it. Amy Bell wouldn’t be the first woman to tell him he took himself too seriously.

  He willed himself to lighten up. It had been a lifelong effort. ‘Nothing. Let’s get a coffee.’

  They put the guitar in the car and walked down to the promenade. Dogs and their walkers breathed clouds of steam into the still air, and a layer of smoke sat low over the horizon: a brownish streak fading to pink and then watery white. They bought drinks from a converted green Citroen van, and sat on the wall, holding the steaming paper cups under their chins.

  Amy blew on hers, took a hesitant sip. ‘The café just along would have been warmer.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Harrison breathed. Hell was an overheated café full of highly-strung gluten-avoiders. Sometimes it was easier not to try to explain himself.

  Amy swung her right leg over the wall and sat astride it, facing him with a catlike expression. ‘Tell me what happened in there?’

  ‘When I picked up the guitar, I saw Lucy. She was in a room somewhere, maybe a bar, and she was singing. She didn’t want to be there.’

  ‘What do you mean she didn’t want to be there?’

  ‘I mean ... she wasn’t there by choice. Someone was making her perform for a bunch of men.’

  ‘When you say you saw Lucy, was it in the past or something that’s happening now?’

  ‘The past. She had the guitar.’

  ‘Maybe a different guitar?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Some objects are powerful.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Anything, as long as it’s important to somebody. We give objects power by investing emotion in them. Musical instruments almost always have stories to tell.’

  ‘And you can pick this up just by touching something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s freaky shit. Okay, so ... what do you think it means?’

  ‘It means she was in trouble before she left here.’

  ‘You think Joe Tattoo knows more than he’s telling us?’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything. He’s just a prick.’

  ‘What’ve you got against hippies?’

  ‘Self-centred, self-righteous, entitled layabouts. Don’t get me started.’

  ‘That’s awfully judgemental of you, Professor.’ She laughed at him as she shook the cooling foam around her cup. ‘I say we need to track down the boyfriend.’

  Harrison nodded. ‘Tim, the wet Brummey.’

  ‘If he works for a refugee charity in Craigmillar, he shouldn’t be that hard to find. I’ll go online and do some checking around if you want.’

  ‘Okay. You might be a natural at this.’

  ‘That’s just logic, it’s not psychic. I didn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary in there.’

  ‘I know. Just because you have a capacity for it doesn’t mean you can switch it on anytime you like. You have to train yourself.’

  ‘Can you help me do that?’

  ‘You need to think seriously about whether you want me to.’

  ‘Harri, what did you see when you held my hand?’

  He wondered how much to say. ‘I saw that other people’s lives are precious to you. Maybe even more precious to you than your own.’

  She looked away and blew a curl of fro
zen breath into the air. ‘Maybe that’s why I want to do this. I don’t like being at the mercy of some weird power I can’t control. I want to be able to use it for something good.’

  ‘The more you use it, the more at its mercy you’ll become. You need to know that.’ He felt a heavy weight, as if he was responsible for bringing her even more deeply into this murky world than she already was.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’m not an idiot, Harrison.’ She paused momentarily, staring at her left foot. It hung a few inches above the pavement and she kicked her heel against the wall like a child. A lock of sandy hair blew across her face. She pushed it behind her ear and said, ‘Listen. I saw my brother Ian die before it happened. I tried to warn him and my parents, but none of them believed me. Afterwards, they thought I had information from the other side and they blamed me.’

  ‘By the other side, I assume you mean the nationalists.’

  She nodded. ‘Ian was involved in things he shouldn’t have been involved in. Not serious paramilitary activity, but petty gang stuff, tit for tat nonsense. One night, coming up for the Twelfth, there were skirmishes running up and down the Ormeau Road. Somebody had a knife ... that was it. It wasn’t a pre-planned killing; it was just stupid lads who used politics and religion to try to justify scrapping on a Saturday night. He was only nineteen.’

  ‘How old were you then?’

  ‘Thirteen. I’d had a few…I don’t know…flashes of things before, but nothing like that. My parents were more shocked by me than they were at losing Ian. I don’t know what was worse, Dad thinking I was some kind of Real IRA double agent or the rest of them practically accusing me of witchcraft.’

  Harrison could feel how raw that betrayal still was for her. ‘Do you ever see your family now?’

  ‘Mum started talking to me again after Dad died. We keep things as superficial as possible: the merits of Strictly Come Dancing over Britain’s Got Talent, that kind of thing. One of my brothers calls me occasionally. The other one avoids me like the plague. I don’t think they’ll ever get their heads around it. It’s fine, I’ve accepted that I can’t change their minds. But if I can help you find this girl? Or if I can help keep someone safe? Maybe it’s all worth it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Harrison said.

  ‘Is that why you still do this, when you don’t need the money?’

  ‘I guess it is.’ He chucked his cup into a bin and stood up, pulling his collar up and sinking his hands into his pockets. ‘I never thought I’d have a partner in this business.’

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Paul, do me a favour. Tell me if you see Ricky around here again.’

  Paul McShane filled the doorway of his flat, holding a can of Tennants. Sunday afternoon was beer time at Paul’s, and he didn’t appear pleased to be interrupted. He was a die-hard Hibernian supporter with a habit of pumping iron to Irish rebel songs, a functioning alcoholic and a man who never laughed except at other people’s expense. But for all that, he was a decent neighbour and he’d come to her assistance more than once before.

  ‘I promise you, Amy, I’ll do more than that if I see him here again. What happened to the restraining order?’

  ‘You think Ricky ever gave a shite about that? He moved onto someone else, that’s all. That seems to be finished now, unsurprisingly.’

  ‘He was limping pretty bad the other night.’

  ‘Aye, because I gave him a kicking with my stiletto heels on.’

  ‘That’s not like you.’

  ‘I’ve given a few kickings in my time.’

  Paul coughed. ‘I meant the stilettos.’

  ‘No, you’re right about that. Not me.’

  ‘You want one of these, hen?’ He swilled his beer can and looked appreciatively at her bare, mud-splattered legs.

  ‘No thanks, Paul.’

  Back in her own flat, the anxiety returned. Every half hour or so, she felt compelled to peer out the window and scan up and down the street. There was no visible sign of Ricky, but she could feel him. It was like the faint scream of a rocket, far off but still incoming. She’d been feeling it for months, shrugging it aside and trying to dismiss it as imagination. At her weekly sessions, Caroline suggested post-traumatic stress and recommended treatments. Amy resisted. She couldn’t tell Caroline that the things she saw coming were more than just projections of past experiences, bloody as they were. A single day with Harrison Jones had taught her more about herself than a year with Caroline.

  She stretched, then immersed herself in the bath. By the time she got out, it was nearly dark, so she filled the flat with soft amber candlelight and focused on Lucy Merriweather. It was almost unbelievable that Harri could pick up the psychic scent of a girl he’d never met, just by touching her guitar. The man was like some kind of undercover superhero: a brainy Clark Kent without the muscles and the underpants over the trousers. Either that or he was the world’s most convincing fraud. Part of her wanted to believe that, but the bigger part knew he was as genuine as they came.

  Amy got nothing from the instrument except the smell of old smoke. Now she stared at the photograph of Lucy that Harri had given her, until the pretty young face dissolved into a fractured blur. She put her fingers on the picture, closed her eyes and tried to filter out the sounds of the building and the city outside. Nothing. She breathed deeply, listened to her breath, and sat until she slipped into a doze. Her head leaned forward and she began to dream.

  She dreamt of a yacht, moored at the far end of a long, stone quay. It was the biggest and blingiest in a display of floating bling. The crowded streets of the town rose up a hill behind the harbour. They were Mediterranean in character: whitewashed walls, red-tiled roofs. In her dream, she was looking for a way onto the yacht at night: swimming through black water and climbing up a small ladder. As she slipped over the gunwale, an unseen man grabbed her. He clamped one hand over her mouth and nose, and wrenched her arms behind her back with the other. She struggled but there was no strength in her limbs. She tried to scream but she was suffocating behind the man’s massive hand. He got her down on her back, knelt on her chest and took his hand away from her mouth only to replace it with the barrel of a pistol.

  The gun roared in her ears and her head snapped upright. Opening her eyes to flickering candlelight, she caught her breath and waited for the residual panic to subside. Nightmares were nothing new, but a yacht on the Med made a change from the usual Afghan dust. Who could tell where it came from? Some late-night Bond film she’d watched once, or old memories of her army training.

  Anyway, it was only a dream.

  Her belly rumbled. She wandered to the kitchen and stared in at the sparse contents of her fridge, frustrated with herself. What good was being psychic if the sight evaded you when you needed it?

  She settled for cheese on toast. With the plate beside her computer, Amy started with the obvious: a social media search for Lucy Merriweather. It was possible Harri had already done that, but he hadn’t mentioned it and he didn’t seem like the natural social media type. Maybe it had so much psychic information gathered in one place that it would fry his nervous system, or maybe he just didn’t need it. Jesus, you could blow Mark Zuckerberg out of the water if you could only patent what Harrison Jones had.

  Lucy had a profile on Facebook, but had security set to block access to everything but her picture. She had over a thousand friends, but Amy couldn’t see the list.

  How could someone with over a thousand friends just disappear?

  She tried Instagram and Twitter next. Nothing. That in itself suggested that Lucy wanted to keep her whereabouts hidden.

  She searched refugee charity, Craigmillar and found a listing for an organisation called Lothian Asylum Seeker and Refugee Network: LASAR-Net for short. The registered address was Niddrie Mains Road. She jotted this down and clicked through the website. It was only a small project, running on a shoestring budget with three part-time employees – none of them named Tim or L
ucy – and a handful of volunteers. She read that their main business was befriending asylum seekers and refugees and helping them settle into life in Edinburgh.

  She clicked back over a couple of years of postings on the website. There were pictures of group meals, celebrations, young people playing football, men and women sitting around a table practising their English. She skimmed over the pictures quickly, half wondering if any of the Afghans she knew might by some fluke have ended up here. Often, she thought of the translators who had worked for them at Bastion, young Hassan and the others. They had made themselves pariahs in their communities and traded their futures for a few meagre pounds. If anyone deserved asylum, they did.

  A photo caught her eye and she stopped clicking. People were sitting around cabaret-style tables in a community hall, and on the stage in front of them was none other than Lucy Merriweather. There was a man with long, mousy hair and a scrappy beard beside her. Their mouths were open and they were smiling at each other across their guitars.

  ‘Hello Tim,’ Amy said aloud to the empty kitchen.

  She scrolled through the rest of the site but could find no other pictures of Tim or Lucy. But now she knew he was a musician and that they played together. She searched Edinburgh musicians Tim Lucy and scrolled past several listings for a singer called Tim Lucy, who appeared to be a regular in the Newcastle country music scene. Then, two pages of results later, she found an old posting for a spoken word night at Summerhall, with live original music from Lucy Merriweather and Tim Cartwright. Bingo.

  Tim Cartwright, Summerhall went into the notebook.

  She searched for Tim Cartwright, Edinburgh singer/songwriter. Half a dozen listings came up, none of them more recent than a year past June. It was as if he and Lucy had dropped off the face of the earth. The question was, why?