The Siren

by Alison Bruce

  ‘That crossed my mind, too.’ Marks tilted his head to one side and frowned as he thought. ‘Let’s see what she brings us,’ he said finally, but he continued to frown.

  ‘Everything OK, sir?’

  Before he could reply, Gully opened the kitchen door. ‘There’s a woman here to see Kimberly Guyver. Says she’s Anita McVey.’

  FOURTEEN

  Anita McVey was in her fifties, with a boyish figure dressed in purple and black; more shades of purple than Goodhew knew names for although he definitely spotted magenta, indigo, mauve and what looked like the colour his mum had once tried on their front door, described on the tin as ‘Racy Rubine’. The hair escaping from her baker’s-boy hat was the same shade as Kimberly’s, but beyond that he could see no resemblance. Anita’s appearance was one of deliberate chaos: over-accessorized and curly-permed, primary school teacher with a twist of Marc Bolan.

  She looked neither surprised nor fazed by the police presence in the house. ‘Is she upstairs?’ Gully nodded and Anita dropped her rucksack-sized handbag on to the settee, then plonked herself down next to it. ‘Does she know I’m here?’

  Once more Gully nodded. ‘I can call her again.’

  ‘No, she’ll come down when she’s ready, I’m quite sure.’ Anita looked directly at Marks and seemed to be assessing him in some way. He excused himself and disappeared back into the kitchen; as if on cue, Gully followed.

  Neither Anita nor Goodhew spoke. He was aware that Kimberly had been upstairs for some time, although probably less time than it seemed. On days like this, minutes ran at a different rate. He decided to go and look.

  Goodhew was halfway between floors when he heard the bathroom door unlock. He waited where he was until she reappeared, and she passed him on the stairs without comment, but there was no mistaking the heaviness as her feet struck each tread, or the exhaustion which blanked her expression. Kimberly stumbled onwards, sagging only as the older woman’s arms wrapped themselves around her. She buried her face in Anita’s shoulder and they hung on to one another. Kimberly was taller and of stronger build, yet Anita was now the anchor, or maybe the tugboat guiding her to somewhere calmer.

  Anita was the first to speak: ‘Why didn’t you call?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kimberly began to sob. ‘I thought he would turn up. I didn’t want to upset you.’

  ‘You silly girl.’ Anita closed her eyes momentarily. Goodhew felt like an intruder but not guilty – they were beyond thinking about him. Instead they shared words: small sentences passing back and forth, sometimes coherent, sometimes cracked apart.

  ‘They don’t know where he is,’ Kimberly said at last, and Anita stared at him then, and he felt the responsibility of being the face of They. ‘What if he was in the fire?’ Kimberly added.

  ‘And you really don’t know?’

  ‘They think maybe Stefan . . .’

  ‘And why would he?’

  ‘Maybe you know his aggression towards Rachel . . . What if he didn’t know Riley was there? I never guessed . . .’

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘I knew he hit her once. She kept it quiet, but I knew.’

  Anita shook her head. ‘Riley can’t just vanish.’

  ‘What if I never see him again?’

  ‘Oh, Kim, that won’t happen. It won’t.’

  Anita pulled her even closer, murmuring quiet words of comfort.

  At least she didn’t say the words ‘I promise’. Why did they so often slip out when people were not in a position to use them? To Goodhew’s relief she stopped short of that; and to his greater relief his mobile rang before he needed to consider whether Anita was taking Kimberly too far down the road of false hope.

  It was the fire officer, too exhausted to deliver more than the bare facts. ‘No other bodies . . . Probable arson . . . Awaiting tests.’

  Goodhew ended the call. It was ironic that he was probably about to deliver a greater dose of false hope. Kimberly had already caught the positive note in his voice, and now looked at him expectantly. Relief already swelling inside her.

  ‘Riley’s not in the house,’ he confirmed and, despite doing his best to keep the news low-key, she now looked as though her son was within touching distance.

  ‘They’re positive?’ she gasped.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he replied, and in part he couldn’t help but feel touched by the moment, but that feeling was quickly overtaken and swallowed up. It was too fleeting, too fragile, and he found it impossible to believe it held any real substance.

  He needed to leave the building, get outside, get moving. And keep moving, probably.

  This doing nothing always got to him – even if it only felt like doing nothing. He couldn’t stand the way it pressed the air from his lungs, and clawed his muscles up into tight knots.

  Stefan was out there somewhere, and if Riley was with him, he had to be in danger. Even if Riley was elsewhere, he still had to be in danger.

  The kitchen door was slightly ajar, and Goodhew pushed it wide. Gully had been watching the front room through the chink. Marks was on the phone.

  Goodhew took his own phone out of his pocket, and his call to the station connected almost immediately. He asked to be put through to the local intelligence officer, and had reached the top of the stairs by the time Sergeant Sheen picked up.

  ‘Once I heard they’d not found another body, I took a bet I’d be getting a call from you. Regarding Mr Golinski, am I right?’

  ‘What have you got on him?’

  ‘Not much, but here we go. Stefan Golinski, born in Birmingham 25th October 1977. Couple of minor offences, then given community service for an assault back in ’95, when he was . . .’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Yep. Then he moved to Cambridge, where his name pops up two or three times in relation to a spate of drunken brawls, but no charges. Seems like the same culprits were rounded up each time, and he was one of them. Then nothing . . . grew up, maybe.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or he got better at not getting caught. Here’s one titbit you might like. Seems that on each occasion the same type of injuries were inflicted, and the only person confirmed as being present at every incident was Stefan Golinski.’

  ‘But still no prosecution?’

  ‘CPS dropped it, because of no witnesses, no CCTV, no forensics.’ Through the open door of Riley’s room, Goodhew spotted a small pair of slippers. He went through and picked one up, and balanced it on the palm of his hand. ‘What injuries?’

  ‘Broken ribs and fingers. The fingers crushed, the ribs kicked in.’

  Goodhew placed the slipper back alongside its mate. ‘Got to go,’ he said, his thoughts no longer with Sergeant Sheen.

  Kimberly was standing in the doorway. She’d frozen as soon as she saw him there, her eyes wide and her lips parted, as though caught in mid-thought. ‘I’ve come to find a photograph of Riley.’

  ‘You look better,’ he remarked.

  ‘I’m doing OK . . . you know, comparatively. What’s the police view at present? Cautiously optimistic, maybe?’ Her tone was bitter.

  ‘Maybe. You don’t like the police much, do you?’

  ‘Maybe you’ll give me some reason to . . . but it seems like the world’s packed out with maybes, doesn’t it?’

  As she opened the wardrobe door, he realized that there were no clothes inside. Instead he was looking at the inside of a compact art gallery.

  ‘That’s where I’ve seen you.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You sell paintings at the craft market – the Sunday one on Market Hill.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I nearly bought one.’

  ‘Yeah, you and a hundred others.’ She seemed curious, though. ‘Which one?’ she asked.

  ‘The girl falling from the punt.’

  ‘This one?’ She reached into the wardrobe and lifted a canvas out towards the light.

  It was bigger than the print he had fancied, and showed a young woman
in rolled-up jeans and a short-sleeved red shirt. Her feet were bare, the shirt riding up to expose the bare skin of her lower back. She clung on to the punting pole, laughing as she tried to keep her balance. She was a redhead but it didn’t disguise the resemblance to Kimberly herself; the same bold features, large almond eyes, full lips and look of open defiance. She was painted in acrylics, using heady saturated colours. Behind her, in pen and ink, rose the stern facade of St John’s College, solid, disciplined and unamused at being nothing but a prop.

  He could easily have said ‘She’s beautiful’, and it wouldn’t have been anything but a statement of bald fact. But he knew that would be inappropriate, so he just nodded and said, ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Why didn’t you, then?’

  ‘Why didn’t I what?’

  ‘Buy it?’

  She had a way of making the simplest questions direct and personal. He shrugged, unable to explain why the picture had seemed too bold, too energetic for his wall. He had left the print because, though it had provided an attractive moment in his day, it was just a bit too frivolous to take home.

  ‘I don’t think I had anywhere suitable to hang it.’

  ‘I see.’ She took it from him, put it back in the cupboard. ‘At least you’ve the decency to keep words like ‘juxtapose’ and ‘Vettriano’ to yourself.’

  ‘Closer to Al Moore’s pin-up art than to Vettriano, I think.’

  She didn’t comment but passed him a small, square canvas. There was the pen-and-ink background again, but glasses suspended by their stems and bottles of wine this time. In the foreground a woman of about twenty held her glass aloft and smiled, her eyes a little unfocused, perhaps from the effects of her first glass.

  Kimberly cleared her throat. ‘Rachel,’ she announced.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Four years, give or take.’

  Goodhew had developed a small but persistent habit of late. He found himself wondering whether there was anything different to be seen in a person pictured shortly before their untimely death. Some hint that they subconsciously knew that they were sitting for an image that would soon be part of a police appeal or a news bulletin, or just a page-filler to evoke a sympathetic mutter and a shake of the head before the reader flipped over to the celebrity gossip printed on the following pages. The idea was illogical, but he still looked.

  He now drew no conclusions about Rachel’s personality: it did not jump from the canvas the way it seemed to from Kimberly’s portrait. Who Rachel was – or maybe who Kimberly thought she was – wasn’t on display. But the moment seemed real enough, not an imaginary scene like the one on the punt.

  ‘And did you paint this from a photograph?’

  ‘No, sort of from memory. I started it that same night.’ She could tell that puzzled him. ‘I mean the night we were in that bar. She was drinking but I was sober, so I saw her at various stages during the evening. There was this moment’ – she tapped the canvas – ‘that moment in fact, when she seemed to be in the perfect place. We shared a flat then, and I stayed up ’til dawn making sketches. I went into her room and copied her nose and mouth while she was asleep. Those were the bits I couldn’t do properly from memory.’

  She took the canvas from him before he’d finished looking.

  ‘Was that in Cambridge?’ he asked. ‘I don’t recognize the background.’

  ‘Artistic licence,’ she replied, and said it quickly and lightly. And immediately he wondered if she was being sarcastic or telling a lie. She obviously heard it in her own voice, too, and corrected herself. ‘We were in Spain for a while.’

  ‘Working?’

  ‘Yeah, it started as a holiday, then we decided to stay on.’ Kimberly paused then put more emphasis on the start of the next sentence. ‘I painted Rachel quite often.’ It seemed a clumsy change of subject.

  Kimberly’s front door was fitted with a bell but no knocker, so the only alternative to ringing was to push the hinged letterbox open and let it spring shut again, with an abrupt snap-snap-snap. That was the sound which now carried up the stairs, providing Kimberly with a more convincing way to avoid discussing Spain.

  Inside the cupboard was a shoebox sitting on a shelf. She pushed the lid to one side. ‘You go and answer the door. I’ll find you that photo.’

  ‘The others are down there.’

  ‘Just PC Gully. Anita’s left and your boss has gone to hurry up the search outside. I thought they would have finished by now.’

  ‘They decided to concentrate on the cemetery and university grounds first.’

  As he said this, he heard the front door being opened. They both tried to listen to the conversation, but could only catch a word or two.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked her.

  ‘I can’t tell,’ Kimberly replied. ‘But it sounds a bit like Tamsin.’

  ‘Who’s Tamsin?’

  ‘Her dad owns the Celeste.’

  ‘And you know her?’

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  Kimberly slid her hand further back into the shoebox and flicked through several more snapshots, finally picking out one which was posed more formally than the rest. She stared at the toddler in the photo and Goodhew could see that the distraction of the previous few minutes was gone. As the little boy grinned at her with a lopsided expression full of unbridled mischief, she touched his face and drew in a long slow breath.

  ‘Just then when we were talking . . .’ she began, but the words wouldn’t come.

  ‘I know – you hadn’t forgotten him.’

  She nodded, then managed to say, ‘Stefan has no reason to hurt him.’ There was no sign that she was going to cry, but that didn’t mean she relished being confronted by an unwanted visitor.

  ‘You can stay here while I find out what she wants?’

  ‘No,’ her grip on the photograph tightened, ‘I’m not going to hide from her.’

  FIFTEEN

  Kimberly had long since chosen to forget the occasions when she’d socialized with Tamsin Lewton. The idea that there’d been anything approaching warmth between them served only to deepen the hostility she felt now.

  She doubted that Tamsin had changed much: still youthful yet mature, blonde but intelligent, tanned but never trashy. She had the look of a woman who planned to do nothing but marry well and age gracefully. To live off family money, yet claim to be her own person.

  Kimberly knew she was being judgemental, a bigot, a bitch even: and for all she repelled the idea of any charitable thoughts towards Tamsin she still knew that only two events had made her shut her heart against her. One betrayal apiece. She couldn’t find enough compassion to care that Tamsin’s eyes were welling with tears, or accept that maybe Rachel’s death might be a blow to both of them.

  Tamsin reached out her hand as if she thought Kimberly would want to embrace her. Kimberly didn’t.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked quietly.

  Tamsin withdrew her hand. ‘Poor Rachel.’

  ‘They haven’t identified her yet.’ It was an illogical thing to say. Who else was it going to be?

  ‘Who else could it be?’ Tamsin echoed the thought.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Kimberly snapped. ‘At the moment I’m not sitting round playing guessing games. Why are you here?’

  ‘It’s about Nick.’

  At any other time, Kimberly would have braced herself for those words. She was expert at controlling her expressions, seeming maybe a little too calm to be natural, but at any other time she would certainly not have gasped or blinked, or floundered for words in the seconds that followed.

  ‘Nick?’ she repeated, and she silently cursed herself for being caught off guard. So fucking off guard. ‘Now is not really the time to be telling me about Nick, is it, Tam?’ She tried to sound genuinely indignant. ‘Do you think I care?’

  Tamsin reddened. ‘He’s dead.’

  This time Kimberly was ready. She shook her head in disbelief. ‘When?’

  ‘The whole time. They fou
nd his car. Divers found his car. There was an accident . . .’

  ‘He crashed?’

  ‘No, someone else had an accident, went off the road into the sea ten miles from Cartagena. Divers went to recover the body, and found Nick’s car.’

  Kimberly imagined the scene: the Merc being winched clear of the water, the police, the body bag, Nick’s parents. She stopped then, unable to think beyond them: Trudy and Dougie. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Trudy?’

  ‘I think you know. Is it Riley that’s missing?’

  Kimberly looked down at the photo still in her hand. At the wonky smile and the innocent eyes. She handed it to Tamsin. ‘The police said they need one.’

  Tamsin studied it, then gave it back. ‘He looks a lot like Jay.’

  ‘Rachel thought he was more like me.’

  Tamsin didn’t stay much longer. Kimberly’s habitual animosity towards her was temporarily displaced by feelings of sympathy, some kind of shared grief perhaps. But she knew it wouldn’t last. At the front door, Tamsin hesitated before stepping outside. ‘By the way, the police are now investigating Nick’s death. We believe he was murdered.’

  Goodhew reached the door before Kimberly had had the chance to close it fully. ‘I just want a word with her,’ he explained, ‘then Marks wants us all back at Parkside.’

  PC Gully was already halfway across the room after him. ‘Marks said you weren’t to run off.’

  Goodhew glanced back. ‘Like I said, I won’t be a minute.’

  He left, and Gully turned to Kimberly. ‘He’ll catch us up.’ Gully looked uncomfortable.

  Kimberly had noticed her blushing earlier, too, each time over very minor incidents. She wondered whether the policewoman could be even younger than she looked. Or maybe out of her depth?

  Kimberly nodded towards the door. ‘I’m ready.’

  The police car was the closest vehicle to the house. Goodhew was further down the street, already too deep in conversation with Tamsin to acknowledge their departure. As Gully drove them out of the road, Kimberly’s last glance backwards registered Goodhew making notes and Tamsin talking, probably far too freely. She knew Tamsin’s agenda – and Anita’s, and maybe even Stefan’s. She wondered about Goodhew’s, though; she found it hard to believe that he really had remembered her and her painting. Why would a police detective have been hanging around the street market? Without opening herself up to paranoia, no viable answer came to her. No, she didn’t understand his agenda, but her own was more straightforward.