‘Are you okay?’ she asked. Yesterday he had let his guard down for her, just enough to let her see the true weight of his so-called gift. Being trapped in a flying metal tube with dozens of people and their unstated terrors would be a unique brand of torture. ‘Do you want to try to sleep?’
‘The only way I can sleep on a plane is if I drug myself. There’s no point on a short flight.’
‘Do you mind if I sleep? I’m cream-crackered.’
‘Go ahead.’
Facing three hours in this seat, her body had started complaining like an exhausted toddler. Her stomach was churning and her eyelids felt swollen. She had tossed and turned much of the night, her mind in a spin of confusion about what had already happened and anxiety about what was to come. Harrison’s appearance at her door last night, just as she was sitting down to an early tea, had spooked her badly. He’d been pale as a ghost, sweating like he had a fever and unsteady on his feet.
She had sat him on the sofa and forced a mug of sweet tea between his hands.
‘I hate this, Amy,’ he had said, and crumpled forward, palms pressing into his eyes. Instinctively, she had tried to put her arm around him, but he had pulled away as if her touch had burnt him, saying, ‘Don’t.’
‘Harri, I’m sorry,’ she had said, only half understanding what she was apologising for. The intense loneliness of his existence had finally started to dawn on her, and as she thought back to their meeting on North Bridge, she wondered if maybe she had rescued him rather than the other way around.
After ten minutes he’d recovered enough to get his phone out and make two calls: one to his mate Colin Muir in CID and one to Nessa Walker at LASAR-Net. Then he told Amy the story of the International Luxury Serviced Apartments at Western Harbour, and a sixteen-year-old Syrian girl called Rima.
The airline staff performed their usual safety routine and the plane rolled back from the terminal. Within a couple of minutes, they were juddering into the turbulent winter sky, bouncing away from the cloudy dawn before banking sharply to the left. Amy looked at Harrison. His arms were still crossed, his hands tucked in tightly. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be asleep, but she knew he wasn’t. She made a pillow with her jacket, pressed it between the window and her cheek, and closed her eyes.
When she woke, much later, they were cruising in the blue sky above a layer of billowy white cloud.
‘Good sleep?’ Harrison asked.
‘Was I out long?’
‘Couple of hours.’
Amy checked her watch. ‘So… what’s our plan?’
‘We get into the centre of town and find someplace to stay, then I thought we’d check out this co-operative that Nessa mentioned. It’s possible Tim’s gone back there.’
‘What about Hydra?’
‘I think we may be too late to get the boat there today.’
‘Tomorrow, then?’
‘Probably. Depending what else we turn up.’
Amy looked down, trying to catch a glimpse of land between the broken clouds below. There was a shimmer of golden light rippling over a dark blue sea.
‘I owe you an apology about yesterday,’ he said, without warning. ‘You didn’t need to see me in that state.’
‘I’ve seen a lot of folk in a worse state than that, believe me.’
‘I guess. Well, anyway, I’m sorry. Sometimes it all gets a bit ...’ He finished the sentence with a grimace.
She glanced around to check that none of their fellow passengers were listening in, but they were all distracted by laptops or magazines, their voices lost behind the engine noise. ‘You actually looked like you were in physical pain.’
He nodded. ‘When I connect with someone with so much trauma inside them, it feels like going twelve rounds with a psychopathic kickboxer. I got my black belt in karate at school, but no fight ever hurt as bad as that. Rima was one of the worst I’ve met.’
‘This is why you didn’t want me to touch you.’
‘I’m sorry, Amy. I know it’s a difficult thing to understand. I’m not ... I wasn’t ... trying to reject you.’
‘And I was only being a friend. We’re clear on that point, right?’
‘We are.’
‘You really have a black belt in karate?’
‘I had a black belt once upon a time. I try to keep my skills up. Every once in a while, it comes in handy.’ A sad smile flickered onto his face. ‘Do you want to know the back story?’
‘Only if you want to tell me.’
‘To cut a long story short, my parents split up because of how I was, and my dad walked away and never came home. My mum couldn’t stand to have me around after he left. She sent me off to boarding school, where I got beaten up on a regular basis until I finally took it upon myself to learn to fight back. Hence ... the karate. I was good at it. It helps keep me sane.’
‘I get that.’ This time, for once, she wasn’t teasing. ‘So, your parents didn’t know what to do with you either.’
‘That surprises you?’
‘I thought for sure your folks would be of a more open-minded and tolerant breed than mine.’
‘Only about some things. If I’d been gay, they would have been perfectly fine, but they took this personally. They’re both scientists and sworn atheists, and this thing shook their world view. It was like I’d been handed the power to undermine everything they knew, as well as their authority over me. And when they realised it wasn’t going to go away, they turned on each other. I came away from it all believing neither of them ever really wanted a kid in the first place.’
‘And you have no idea at all where your dad went?’
‘We think he went back to Canada right after he left, but after that it’s like he vanished off the face of the earth.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘I’ve been asking that question for thirty years.’
‘And you never pick up anything from him?’
‘No.’ His blunt tone indicated that this was an unwelcome line of questioning.
‘God.’ She took a deep breath and thought about all he’d said. ‘It’s a weird old life, Indiana.’
‘Are you ever going to stop calling me that?’
‘Just accept it. I only give nicknames to people I like.’ The engine noise changed tone, and the plane tilted into a decline. She looked down at a wrinkled, arid coastline in front of them. ‘Three weeks ago, I hadn’t met you.’
‘A lot can happen in three weeks.’
‘And you can have months on end when nothing happens. Since I split up with Ricky, I’ve been in limbo, waiting for something to happen without knowing what. And now this, and it feels like everything has changed.’
‘In a good way?’
‘Mmm,’ she breathed, considering his question. ‘I’ll answer that if we survive the next couple of days.’
He glanced at her. ‘Are you scared?’
Most likely he could tell exactly what she felt, but she didn’t want to say it. It was the same feeling she had before going on operations: not fear, exactly, but anticipation and the kind of excitement that filled your legs with a fierce heat. Danger was an addiction worse than any drug she knew, and once it was in your blood you never really got rid of it.
‘I’m alright. You?’
‘I am…somewhat anxious.’
She laughed. ‘Relax, Jones. I’ve got your back.’
They took a taxi from the airport to the centre of Athens, a sprawling city under a layer of winter smog. Signs of Greece’s recent economic troubles were visible everywhere: potholed roads, broken pavements, graffiti, people huddled like stray dogs in squares and small parks. Fashionably-dressed people went about their business, barely noticing them. Compassion can only stretch so far, Amy thought silently, as they rolled on through the traffic. Sometimes there were just too many people to help.
As they neared the city centre, the Acropolis rose like a massive stage set above jumbled streets of ordinary apartment blocks, shops and offices.
The bleached stone of the Parthenon shone a pale pink in the filtered light. The taxi left them in front of a Novotel close to Syntagma Square, where, to Amy’s relief, Harrison booked them into two single rooms. They took the lift to their respective rooms and agreed to meet in an hour. She locked the door behind her and looked around the room: it was clean and so generic that you might walk into this room in Athens and walk out of an identical one in Bangkok. Car horns and scooter engines rose from the street, four floors below. She looked out for a couple of minutes, watching the patterns of this new place.
She closed the curtains, peeled off her sweaty clothes and stood in the shower for a long time, leaning against the tiles while the hot water cascaded over her. She closed her eyes and imagined herself holding Lucy Merriweather’s guitar, feeling the curved wood against her belly and the strings pressing into her fingertips. Without the benefit of the Salvia leaves, she pictured herself walking back through the woods, moving out of this beige hotel bathroom, looking for the clearing and the door.
Where are you, she thought. I’m looking for you, Lucy. Where are you?
She was in a room with no windows. Walls of reddish, glossy wood, a bed, a small dressing table. Lucy lay under a white sheet, her hair splayed across the pillows. She was in a state of deep, dreamless sleep. A drugged, unnatural sleep. Amy tried whispering Lucy’s name, but the girl didn’t respond.
Amy needed to see out. She needed to find her way out of the room. She touched the wall and began to move her hands up it. And she climbed, as easily as a spider, up the wall and across the ceiling. Unseen, she slipped out the door and along a narrow corridor. At the far end, there were steep steps leading up. At the top of the steps, a metal door with a round portal. She moved through this, out onto the yacht’s lower deck. For just a moment, she was able to hover above the boat. They were in port. It was night, and the lights of the little town glittered on the water. A man patrolled the deck, walking stiffly forward and aft, then climbed the stairs and went into an upper cabin. Amy moved toward the stern of the boat. She read the name Circe in black letters.
She felt herself falling, and then she was spluttering in icy water. Her eyes popped open and she was crumpled in the tub in the hotel bathroom, legs bent under her. The water had run cold.
‘Ow, shit,’ she muttered, slipping and bumping her elbow as she reached for the tap. She turned it off and dried herself as quickly as she could in the steamy room, repeating the name Circe so that it would not disappear from memory. The little port was Hydra town. She had spent hours studying the place on Google Street View.
Filled with a sense of giddy triumph, she threw on her clothes, ran along the corridor to Harrison’s room and banged the door with her fist. He peered out, then slid the chain to open the door. He was dripping and wearing only a towel around his waist.
‘Amy. You alright? What’s happened?’
‘Oh, God ... sorry. I’m fine, I was just ... Do you ... want to get dressed?’ The towel barely covered him. Trying to keep her eyes above waist height, she discovered a pleasantly-formed chest, lightly covered with damp brown hair, and a belly that was still flat. For a man who liked his food, he was surprisingly fit. He smelled of perfumed hotel soap.
‘Hang on.’ He closed the door and opened it again a few seconds later, still shirtless but with a pair of jeans on. ‘Come in.’
He turned away from her and dug in his backpack. An Andean condor stretched its wings between his shoulder blades, at least twelve inches from tip to tip, outlined in black and decorated with brightly coloured geometric patterns.
‘Oh my God.’
‘What?’
‘That is some tattoo.’
‘I forgot you hadn’t seen it.’
‘I haven’t seen you with your clothes off before.’
‘Right enough. Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. I got it after Tomas died; I guess I wanted something permanent to remind me of him. Do you like it?’
‘It’s ...’ she cleared her throat, caught off guard by his question, ‘a work of art. I didn’t think you were a tattoo kind of person.’ His back itself wasn’t bad either, now that she had the opportunity to study it. It was smooth, tapering down to a neat waist. She fought down the urge to run her hands along the condor’s wings. For a couple of seconds, it almost felt like he wanted her to.
‘I wasn’t, until then. Anyway.’ He pulled a black t-shirt over his head, depriving her of the view. ‘What’s up?’
‘I saw Lucy on the boat. The boat is called Circe. It was in port, in Hydra. I’ll recognise it. I saw it, Harrison, clear as anything.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I was in the shower. I closed my eyes and tried to send myself there.’
‘Right,’ he said slowly. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t ... a dream or ...’
‘How do you tell the difference?’
‘I just know.’
‘Well, I just know too.’
‘Fine. I believe you. What about Lucy? What did you see?’
‘She’s in a cabin with no windows, below decks. She was asleep, but she looked ... drunk, or drugged. I think they’re guarding her.’
‘So, they’re definitely holding her against her will?’
‘I think so.’
‘Was it Kostas? Did you see him?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You were able to move around the boat? In your vision?’
‘Yeah. It was like I could fly.’
‘That’s handy,’ he said, and sounded impressed. ‘So, assuming what you saw is the reality, we aren’t going to be able to sneak on or off without a fight.’
‘I did have that dream about a commando raid ...’
He held up a finger. ‘No way. Don’t even joke about that.’ He rubbed the towel over his wet hair and dug in his rucksack for clean socks. ‘We get the first ferry over there in the morning, scout things out and come up with a plan.’
‘We could just go to the police when we get there.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’
‘You don’t trust them?’
‘Think about it. It’s just a wee island. Somebody knows exactly what’s going on and is choosing to look the other way.’
‘So ... what are you saying? We don’t involve the law?’
He made a noncommittal gesture. ‘We need to be very careful who we trust.’
‘So how do you propose to get her off?’
‘We’re going to have to use what we know against him.’
‘You mean ... Maryam and the Western Harbour? Isn’t that blackmail?’
‘Yep.’
Amy watched him lace up his boots and considered the implications of what he’d just said. ‘Harri, the man is a criminal. You think he’s just going to let you away, knowing what you know?’
‘You remember what Maryam said to you. Kostas has to keep himself clean. He’s not going to do anything to ruin his reputation.’
‘Maybe not, but he can get someone to do it for him.’
‘Then I suggest we watch our backs.’ He stood up, pulled a black woolly hat onto his head, and slipped photographs of Tim and Lucy into the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Are we ready?’
THIRTY
The humanitarian co-operative where Tim and Lucy had volunteered was a twenty-minute walk from the hotel. They wound their way through streets crowded with tourists, passing countless shops selling leather goods, traditional knitwear, jewellery and food. The psychic traffic was also busy. Harrison did his best to tune it out, but he was tired and lightheaded from hunger, which always made him more receptive. After passing five or six shops selling greasy gyros and souvlaki, his stomach started to grumble.
‘I have got to eat something.’
‘Food is quite the priority in your life, isn’t it?’
He glanced down at her. She was honed and wiry, with no spare fat anywhere on her body, or at least on the bits of it that he had seen. She was the kind of person who ate out of necessity rat
her than pleasure, and never more than she needed. ‘It’s kind of important, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but ...’
‘But nothing. If I don’t eat, I can’t concentrate.’ He stopped in front of a takeaway window and said a polite, ‘Kalispera,’ to the man at the counter, and ordered gyros in a pitta. ‘You want something, Amy?’
‘I’ll have the same, I guess.’
He asked the man behind the counter for a second order and paid for the food. They walked along to a bench in a green square on the next block. Amy sat next to him. The bench was small and she sat so close that their elbows touched and he could smell the fruity scent of her shampoo, mingling with the smell of the food. The clouds had broken to allow a gentle warmth through. For a minute or two, he allowed himself to enjoy being here beside her, in a city that was new to them both. She looked like a young traveller, lively and open, a different person completely from the one he’d first met on North Bridge.
As their arms brushed, he could sense excitement running through her like an electric current. The contact seemed to complete a circuit between them, so that it went through him too. It was the thrill of discovery, of new-found power, and of desire. He felt it too, and it was unsettling. He wasn’t supposed to enjoy this.
He took a bite of the salty, delicious meat and said through a mouthful, ‘Oh God, this is good.’
Amy laughed at him and picked the meat out of the pita with her fingers. She gave it an experimental taste. ‘I didn’t know speaking Greek was one of your many talents.’
‘A few words, that’s all.’
‘Everybody here seems to speak English.’
‘And why would I be so arrogant as to assume they should speak my language when I’m in their country?’
‘Did you speak the language when you lived in Bolivia?’
‘My Spanish is good. I learned enough of the indigenous languages to get by. It’s important, you know. You can’t really get inside a place or its people if you don’t understand their language.’
Siren Song (Harrison Jones and Amy Bell Mystery Book 1) Page 19