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

by Rebecca McKinney

  Her voice broke and she swiped tears with her palms. ‘I thought I could help him. To see him now, it’s ...’ She took a deep breath, unable to finish the sentence. Sometimes she wondered if would have been better for Ricky if he’d died in that explosion.

  ‘You helped him tonight, when he has no right to expect you to.’

  ‘Thanks for coming with me. You didn’t need to.’

  ‘I wanted to.’

  She stared at him. ‘Why?’

  Harrison didn’t answer.

  ‘To protect me?’

  ‘Maybe. Was I wrong to do that?’

  ‘I don’t need protection against him.’

  ‘I know you don’t,’ he said, and it sounded like a lie.

  Amy mopped her nose with the sleeve of her parka as they turned into her street, wondering if he was this protective of all his friends or if she was a special case. ‘Well, thank you anyway.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  This really was getting too big for him now. He had never seen it as his job to dole out justice, and his cases rarely involved the police. With resources so thin on the ground and new forms of threat materialising every few months, the police were less concerned all the time about reopening stone-cold missing persons cases. But occasionally he had reason to call them in, and even more occasionally, they had reason to call him.

  He pulled up the number of the one cop who he knew wouldn’t automatically write him off as a quack. Detective Inspector Colin Muir was a psychic in denial, a man whose hunches were legendary and who regularly seemed to know things he shouldn’t. He refused to acknowledge any special capacity in himself but he had quietly brought Harrison in to crack several dead-end cases. It had been more than a year since they’d last spoken.

  He was almost surprised when Colin answered. His voice was ragged. ‘Harrison Jones, the wandering shaman. Does normal timekeeping not apply to you?’

  Harrison glanced at the clock. It was nearly eleven. He had fallen asleep on the sofa after dropping Amy off, and now suspected he was going to be up half the night. He cringed. ‘Sorry, Colin. Listen, can you spare an hour tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Aye, what’s it about?’

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about something I’m working on.’

  ‘And that’s meant to be news?’

  ‘Worse than usual.’

  ‘Right. Meet me at the usual place, ten o’clock. If something comes up and I can’t make it, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thanks. Apologies for waking you.’

  ‘Ach, never mind. The list of things keeping me up nights is getting longer by the minute.’ Colin never told him the details of his life outside of work, but Harrison had picked up enough to know they weren’t the happiest. Par for the course.

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Colin. Hopefully see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Aye. Go to bed, Jones.’

  Colin Muir had gained weight and lost hair. He was in his mid-fifties but looked well older, and he had pouches under his eyes where he appeared to store all the bad things he’d seen during a career in the force. He emerged from the door of St Leonard’s Police Station with an e-cigarette already sticking out of his mouth. It released a puff of candy-sweet vapour into the dank air.

  ‘Jones.’ He shook Harrison’s hand and took the measure of him. ‘Not you and all.’

  ‘What?’

  Colin rubbed his chin. ‘Every man and his dog want a damn beard these days. My laddie’s been growing his for six months and still looks like he’s got ginger pubes stuck to his face. Filthy things, beards, if you ask me.’

  Harrison instinctively raked his fingers through his, hoping there were no crumbs left over from his breakfast. ‘It’s my winter insulation.’

  ‘As if you needed it, up there in your ivory tower.’ Colin scrutinised the ceiling of cloud and haar, hanging somewhere between the top of the crags and the summit of Arthur’s Seat. ‘We might get half an hour before it starts pissing down again. We walking?’

  ‘Aye.’ They headed up St Leonard’s, toward the steps that would lead them down into Holyrood Park. ‘You well, Colin?’

  Colin blew a wry breath of laughter through his nose and sent out a ripple of jaded anticipation. ‘You don’t really need to ask, do you, Harrison? So, what’s on your mind?’

  ‘You familiar with a guy called Quentin Merriweather?’

  ‘Merriweather? Christ.’ Colin’s laugh turned into a wheezy cough. ‘He’s your typical crooked developer, though if you asked him, he’d say he was the property king of Edinburgh. Famous for wining and dining the politicians and the planning officials. Backhanders for consents that should never be granted, building reg violations left right and centre, you name it.’

  ‘You never pinned him though?’

  Colin shrugged. ‘White-collar crime isn’t really my department. Shit doesn’t stick to guys like him; you know that. It’s always somebody else’s fault. What’s he to you, anyway?’

  ‘His wife hired me. Soon to be ex-wife, I should say. Their daughter Lucy’s missing.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Well, I say missing ... She’s taken herself off somewhere and cut herself off from her parents. I am pretty sure she’s out of the country, most likely in Greece.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she’s hooked up with a Greek hotel tycoon called Kostas Gianopoulos. That name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Nada.’

  ‘I was hoping you might check him out. He’s got his fingers in things over here and has connections with Quentin Merriweather. I think he may be involved in some pretty heavy stuff, Colin.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as human trafficking. The sex trade. He was sniffing around a refugee charity here in town last year, picking out young women. An Iraqi girl I met there yesterday named him.’

  ‘That’s a serious allegation.’

  ‘Too right it is. I want to know if it’s just him or if Merriweather has some hand in it.’

  Colin walked silently for a moment, vaping like a cherry-flavoured steam engine. ‘I’m going to need something more to go on than the word of a refugee girl.’

  ‘Why, because her word isn’t as legitimate as anyone else’s?’

  ‘Ach, don’t go all bleeding-heart precious on me, Jones. I doubt this girl’s going to want to go public with an accusation and all that entails.’

  ‘I doubt it too.’ He took the small, wooden icon out of his coat pocket and handed it to the detective. ‘She said Gianopoulos gave her this. If you look closely, you’ll see there’s a number on the back. He told her to call it if she was looking for work.’

  ‘And you know it’s that kind of work.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not for sure.’

  ‘Did you call it?’

  Harrison laughed. ‘I’m not the cop here. I’ll leave that to you.’

  Colin inspected the icon and turned it over, squinting at the tiny pencilled numbers. ‘How long ago did he give her this?’

  ‘A year and a half ago, roughly.’

  ‘It’s unlikely the number’s even still live, but I’ll check it out.’

  ‘Anything you can get me on Kostas Gianopoulos would be a help. Addresses, connections to the Merriweathers, anything. There’s one other thing. Lucy had a boyfriend called Tim Cartwright, from Coventry. His mother has reported him missing in Athens. She’s called Louise Cartwright.’

  ‘And you know that through your ... own sources?’ Colin glanced at Harrison.

  ‘No, my partner dug that off the internet.’

  ‘You have a partner? You mean to say there’s another guy like you out there?’

  ‘Woman. She’s called Amy.’

  ‘Oh aye.’ Colin raised an eyebrow. ‘She got a beard and all?’

  ‘No.’

  They walked for a couple of minutes beneath the crags, carrying their thoughts silently like satchels of stones. Gulls cried into the winter sky and tyres hissed on the wet t
armac. Colin screwed his face against the weather and inhaled deeply, then started coughing, a sustained fit that doubled him over and turned his face a vicious shade of purple.

  ‘You alright, Colin?’

  Colin shook his head and waited for the coughing to subside. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘I think I’m fucking dying here.’

  ‘I’d know if you were dying.’

  Colin responded with a grunt of a laugh. ‘I’m due to retire next year,’ he said, making it sound like a terminal diagnosis.

  ‘That’s not a good thing?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea how me and the wife are going to tolerate each other when I’m not working all the hours.’ He shook his head. ‘But you didn’t come out in this shite weather to hear about my domestic malfunctions. We’ve got a Merriweather, Gianopoulos and a Cartwright. I’ll check them out.’

  ‘There’s a bit more to it. Elizabeth Merriweather claims Quentin abused both her and Lucy.’

  ‘There’s not a lot we can do about that unless she reports it to us and wants to press charges. Getting a conviction ...’ His words disappeared into a stifled cough.

  ‘A conviction would be highly unlikely, I know.’

  Colin flapped his hands in defeat. ‘We heading back?’

  They turned around and walked back in the direction of the station. Harrison shortened his stride, drove his hands deeper into his pockets and tried to tune out Colin’s discordant psychic drone. A life spent following criminal trails had taken its toll: in Colin’s personal universe, all roads led to hell. Half an hour in it was more than enough.

  They shook hands at the door of St Leonard’s and Harrison walked back to George Square. He taught his afternoon seminar on autopilot, legs twitching beneath the table as his students debated the existence of the supernatural. He maintained the pretence of listening while he thought about Colin Muir, and why a man would secretly convince himself that dying young was preferable to facing retirement with his wife. He thought about Ricky, who had been broken by other people’s battles. And he thought about Amy.

  He thought about Amy a lot.

  Harrison wished more of his students and colleagues approached their work the way Amy did. He thought about how his colleagues would judge her if they met her. They’d judge her by her accent and by the directness of her questions and by the fact that she’d never read Levi-Strauss or Foucault. Yet Amy Bell understood other people better than the whole of the social anthropology department, with all of their theoretical weaponry, put together.

  What she wanted to know – what Harrison still couldn’t explain to her – was why.

  Coming up the stairwell to his office, he bumped into Lara and Jonathan Weaver. They were clattering down the steps in a hurry and laughing richly at something.

  ‘Oh, hullo Harri,’ Jonathan muttered.

  Harrison would have preferred to let them go past without a conversation, but Lara paused. Her cheeks flushed. Embarrassment swelled in her and overflowed from her mouth. ‘Hey,’ she muttered.

  Jonathan cleared his throat. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

  ‘I’ll be two minutes,’ she said, waving him away before turning back to Harrison. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ he replied. His voice sounded colder than he had intended it to, but she had an awful way of prizing him open by any crack she could find. ‘How’s the book coming on?’

  ‘Slowly but surely. Listen, I hope this isn’t awful for you, seeing us together. It isn’t my intention to hurt you, or ...’

  ‘People move on, Lara.’

  ‘Have you moved on?’

  He smiled. ‘I’m not pining for you, if that’s what you want to know. I have other things in my life at the moment.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and for a couple of seconds, her mind was absolutely open to him. She wanted to know what those other things were, and who they involved. She wanted to know if he still had feelings for her, and she wanted to tell him that Jonathan was only a rebound romance and that she already knew it wasn’t for the long-term.

  Harrison broke eye contact and looked down at the scuffed green linoleum beneath his feet, trying to close her out. ‘You still have some stuff at my house. You might want it back.’

  ‘I can pop by.’

  ‘I’ll put it in a bag and bring it into your office next week.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ She deflated like a balloon. ‘Harri, Jonny and I are ... it’s nothing serious.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain anything to me.’

  ‘So, I don’t have to explain that being with you feels like being naked all the time? It takes some getting used to.’

  ‘So, it wasn’t about meat after all.’

  ‘You know it wasn’t.’

  He lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘That’s life, Lara. That’s me. I can’t help it. Don’t leave poor Jonathan waiting down there too long, eh?’

  ‘Right,’ she said slowly. Then she nodded. ‘Okay. I’m sorry. Listen, you take care.’ She patted his arm.

  ‘You too.’ He side-stepped her and continued up the stairs.

  Reaching the safety of his office, he locked the door and sat down. Two-dozen new emails flickered into his inbox. He scanned their headings and turned away from the screen without reading further. Aziza Maalouf would be turning up for her supervision session soon, and he needed a clear mind for that. He took off his glasses and let himself drift a little. He wanted to go back to that rope bridge in the jungle, but hadn’t been able to since he met Amy and the Lucy Merriweather case kicked off. There was a sense of someone waiting for him just on the other side of that bridge, and it frustrated him that he couldn’t see who it was. The tiny beacon of hope he tended for his dad flared whenever he thought about it.

  He was juggling too many balls and soon they were going to come crashing down around him. Lucy Merriweather was taking too much of his energy. She would have to be his last case. He would bring her home and then he would draw a line under it, for real this time.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Elizabeth poured her second large whisky of the night and drew her pashmina closer around her neck. The sea was thunderous tonight, and the trees were creaking and tossing themselves about like frenzied dancers. With Simba gone, she was truly alone in the house for the first time in her life. It had become a cold, frightening place, full of dark corners and unexplained noises. She couldn’t settle with a book, and she was afraid that if she turned on the television or the radio, she might not hear the sound of someone coming up the drive or trying to break in. She moved through the rooms, touching things the way Harrison Jones had done, trying to pick up some echo of Lucy. Some distant whisper of her voice, or the tiniest flush of warmth. From Lucy’s bedroom window, she looked out over the back lawn, watching the patterns of moonlight stretching and disappearing as the clouds tumbled across the sky. With every shadowy motion, she thought she saw a figure sneaking toward the house. There was no-one except the phantoms projected by her mind.

  They would come for her, eventually: Quentin’s phantoms, Lucy’s phantoms, or her own. They would punish her for her complicity in crimes she barely had words for.

  Jones knew more than he was letting on, she was sure of that. But what did he know? There was so much more she should have told him, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak it. He would think she was as guilty as Quentin, and she wanted him to think well of her. And not just for the purposes of bringing Lucy home. Beyond the psychic abilities which intrigued her, Harrison Jones was exceedingly intelligent and not unattractive.

  It was pathetic, allowing herself to think of him that way. She’d hired him for a job, that was all, and he would be, no doubt, far too ethical to dally with a client. She was too quick to fall for any man who spoke kindly to her; this had always been her biggest problem. Quentin had been kind to her too, in the beginning.

  Elizabeth looked around the room, her breath bottled up somewhere between her lungs and her throat and a sickening pressure building up behind
it. She sat on Lucy’s bed and squeezed the pillow against her chest. It smelled a little dusty, but there was nothing left of her girl. Her beautiful baby girl.

  A child who was forced to become a woman too soon, if only on the outside. Lucy might have been nine or ten the first time they asked her to sing at one of their gatherings, although her voice was already mature and clear. Elizabeth couldn’t remember whose idea it was, that first time. It would be easy now to blame Quentin, but perhaps she’d thought of it first. It didn’t matter; it had been innocent then. They stood her in front of a light, so that it illuminated her halo of golden curls and made her look like she’d been painted by Michelangelo. She had such an effect on people; it was almost magic, the way she drew them in and rendered them helpless. That night, Quentin secured the financial backing he needed to build an office complex on greenbelt land to the south of the city. Lucy had been a lucky charm. Was it wrong that time? Or the times after that?

  Elizabeth remembered all the dresses she had bought Lucy, all the times she had done her makeup and told her how to walk, how to talk, how to flirt. Was it wrong then? She was not the first mother in history to teach her daughter how to use her assets. It had never been her intention for Lucy to sleep with these men.

  Maybe it had only crossed the hazy line between showing off a talented daughter and exploitation when Lucy began to resist. Quentin was the one who wanted her to keep singing, and once Quentin had an idea there was no turning him from it. His anger was sickening to witness. He didn’t just shout at Lucy, he bellowed and blew like a bull in a ring. He called her names that no girl should hear, and he threatened her with worse. He threatened to turn her out into the street. Elizabeth had only dared to intervene once, and that night in their bedroom he had strangled her to the brink of passing out. After that, she let Lucy fight her own battles.