The Siren

by Alison Bruce

  Most of all it was the way he anchored her: the way one tiny five-pound baby had possessed the strength to end her desire for self-destruction with his very first breath. In fleeting moments, she still saw that baby. The toddler that had replaced him had continued to keep her moving forward even when such progress frightened her.

  She understood her role; to walk alongside him along the road to his independence, to know when to hold his hand, and when to hold back, and when to eventually stop and let him go ahead. She wasn’t ready to let go of Riley. Not now. Only one day when he was ready. When the baby, and the toddler and the child would exist only in her memories, and the young man was ready to glance over his shoulder and wave her goodbye.

  The tears flooded her eyes and she stumbled on to the pavement outside the Celeste.

  She pulled the hairband out of her hair and hung her head, protecting her face from curious onlookers by covering much of it with one hand positioned like a visor. She could no longer run now; the resolve had left her muscles, they wanted nothing but to fold.

  The path beneath her feet seemed blurred. Only the diffused lights from the bright shopfronts marked her route.

  She walked on, blinded by crying, her anguish fuelled by the realization that she was sinking, that the tears filling her eyes were no different from seeing through the eyes of a drowning man.

  She normally shut most people out, yet those she trusted she trusted absolutely. But they could be counted on one hand, and, of those few, Rachel was dead and Jay was only just clinging on. Which left three, including Riley. Now she needed to protect them, not the other way around; she’d swum too far out of her depth and she was in danger of taking everyone down with her.

  Somehow she needed help; asking Craig for assistance had been hard enough, and it had done nothing to assuage her fears. She guessed the Lewtons would never forgive her, and maybe they were the only ones able to contain Stefan.

  There were a few people nearby: she could hear their footsteps as they overtook her or passed in another direction. It took her the length of Sidney Street, and half of St Andrew’s Street, to realize there was someone walking in the same direction and at pretty much the same pace. Someone who was walking just a few steps behind her.

  She wondered where Stefan was, and what he was doing. And who or what was driving him. And, in an irrational moment, she wondered whether it was he who was following her. And in the next moment she knew: who else would it be but a reporter? Some piece of shit, no doubt, a no-conscience hack just looking for an opportunity to screw her over. Or, worse still, a grimy little photographer with his finger on the trigger ready to shoot holes in her life. She felt her strength return. She knew what they would do: just push and push until she cracked, then use this as proof that she was an animal, a social group F piece of trash, and not a fit mother for the innocent little boy. She also knew what she should do: keep her eyes cast to the ground and remain tear-stained and dignified.

  She slowed.

  Well, fuck it. She wasn’t some reality-show asset ready to be wheeled out at every photo op. Or a criminal. Or even a victim.

  She swiped her hair away from her face. She’d slap the fucking camera out of his hand before he had a chance to fire off the first shot. It wasn’t exactly a plan, more a thought and action so closely coupled that the first wasn’t complete when the second was initiated. She spun round and lunged at him, her arms flailing as they sought out the non-existent equipment. From close range, she shouted something into his face, spitting the words at him – at that moment feeling like she was capable of killing.

  He was fast, though, and caught her hand as she swung at his face. ‘No,’ he said, that was all, just the one simple word but it was enough to make her look at him properly. She hesitated, then shrank back, but he still hadn’t let go. ‘Walk with me,’ he said and, the entire time, his voice remained calm and even.

  She found herself turning back towards home and he fell into step beside her. ‘We can go the long way back,’ he suggested. ‘Then we can talk.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Good for both of us?’

  She nodded and knew she’d gone beyond the point of battling with him. ‘Do you prefer Goodhew or Gary or Detective?’

  ‘Whatever suits you.’

  ‘Is this an official conversation?’

  He gave a sheepish smile. ‘No, and I’m not supposed to be here either.’

  ‘I see,’ she said and they spent the next few minutes in silence.

  ‘I can tell you’re not a great fan of the police,’ he said finally. ‘Since I was about eleven it’s all I wanted to do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know, actually. Maybe it started before that, but my grandparents lived across from Parkside Police Station, and I just remember staring out of the window one day and deciding.’

  ‘And you stuck with it?’

  ‘Stubbornness; it’s a character flaw.’

  ‘And now, in return, you want me to tell you why I started hating the police?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want to.’

  A scowl flashed across her face: this conversation was already feeling cathartic, and that alone should have made her question her own judgement. But her mouth was carrying on, with no intervention from her brain, and she decided to let it go. ‘Who likes the police, anyhow?’

  He didn’t comment.

  She pressed him. ‘Aren’t you going to ask what I was doing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ll sneak round behind my back and try to find out anyway?’

  ‘Of course, I want to know what’s going on, we all do, and the number-one priority is finding Riley.’ His gaze was steady. ‘But I was there at the fire with you. I don’t doubt you for a second.’

  She stopped herself from making some sceptical reply like ‘Oh, really?’ or ‘So you say’. All along, there’d remained an edge to her voice, but now she didn’t want to kill the conversation.

  And so they continued: a volley of sentences, silence, then words again. Somewhere along the way, the conversation’s self-consciousness dissolved, her preconceptions were forgotten, and they were just two people.

  ‘Tell me about Jay,’ he said.

  ‘You met Anita? She was my foster mum. Bet you knew that already?’ She didn’t wait for a reply, it didn’t matter. ‘She was my third foster home, because I couldn’t settle at the others, and I didn’t want anything to do with her either. Not at first. I was twelve when I went to her, and I think it’s a vulnerable age . . . maybe every age is, but for me it was like I had one foot in childhood and one in adolescence, and I seemed to step forward with the wrong one every time. She understood, she always does.’

  Hearing her use of the present tense jarred but Goodhew didn’t question it.

  ‘Sometimes I think you meet people you can’t help but like. D’you know that feeling?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘And I don’t know why but they’re usually the ones that turn out to be really good for you – or really bad.’

  ‘Because, once you know you like them, you can’t stay dispassionate like you could at the start of any other relationship?’

  ‘Or maybe it’s the other way around, and you’re drawn to them because instincts tell you that they have the ability to evoke emotion?’

  ‘I see, so you’re one of those people that looks for the alternative answer?’

  ‘I know it’s never good to jump to conclusions, if that’s what you mean.’

  Her throat tightened, so she nodded and took several deep breaths until she felt it was safe to speak again. ‘I was telling you about Jay.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Anita fostered him, too. He left before I arrived, then came back again when I was fifteen. When Anita and I spent time together she expected respect and decent manners, but she didn’t ever get that from me. Even so she was always there to go back to whenever I needed her. She believes in all this hippy stuff, you know, free the spirit and it will r
eturn to you. And I was angry when she got charge of me, and I stayed angry, and did all the things angry teenagers do. Were you like that?’

  ‘No, I was sent away to school . . .’

  ‘Boarding or Borstal?’

  ‘Boarding, thanks, and I hated it. I didn’t fit in. I suppose I could have got angry, instead . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘You must know. Sex? Drugs?’

  He gave a funny half-smile and shrugged. ‘Old films, actually. Black-and-white ones. Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart. And Veronica Lake. I was in love with Veronica Lake.’

  There was no answer to that. ‘Anita’s love is unconditional, she’s just there for you, and I woke one day and saw that, if only I stopped tilting the wrong way, my life wasn’t really so bad. And when I saw that, I also saw Jay like it was the first time. We were together for eighteen months.’ Kimberly paused. She saw the flaw in telling the story, chapters she wasn’t prepared to share. She jumped forward: ‘After Jay and I split up, Rachel and I decided to go to Spain, just like I told your boss . . .’

  ‘And Jay came to Spain and was injured somehow?’

  ‘In a bar fight.’

  ‘Was he the fighting type?’

  ‘No.’ The first time she’d ever heard that type of question, it had stung. Jay had never provoked anything in his life. ‘No,’ she repeated, ‘he was stronger than that.’

  She knew Goodhew didn’t know Jay, so she was the only one who could have detected that there were similarities between the two men. Goodhew’s eyes, too, held the kind of expression that was built on truth. Only Jay had ever looked at her like that: simple honesty, no agenda.

  It shouldn’t be so rare in life, she concluded. They were close to the cemetery already, and she wondered at how most of the journey home had just vanished. ‘Jay can’t remember the attack. Or at least he’s never told me about it.’

  ‘He spoke?’

  ‘He has something called Cerebromedullospinal Disconnection.’

  ‘Locked-in syndrome?’

  ‘That’s right, so he can’t talk but he can move his eyes. We learnt Morse code together: we dot with the right and dash with the left. We’re quicker now, though it was funny the first few weeks we tried it – my co-ordination’s not all that. He said I had a Morse code impediment.’

  ‘He can hear you, right? So why don’t you just talk to him?’

  ‘I do but it was good to learn something together. I suppose it’s our thing now, and we can have private conversations. He can express emotion with words, before it was just yes, no, yes, no. Now he can ask me proper questions and I can tell him everything that’s been happening. We’ve always talked a lot, and he’s just the same person, people can’t get their heads round it.’

  She thought Goodhew was about to say something.

  ‘What?’ she asked, noticing a strange look in his eyes. She wondered who or what he could see when he stared at her.

  ‘Are you going back in through your bedroom window?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘We have to walk our own path, don’t we?’

  That’s when she knew she could ask. ‘If I needed it, would you help me?’

  He nodded. ‘In any way I can.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was just after 9 p.m. and Gully was alone in Kimberly’s sitting room. Kimberly had gone to bed and there was one other PC on duty but he was posted out on the doorstep.

  She didn’t want to put on the TV; it would be too tempting to become mesmerized by the ‘breaking news’ banner scrolling along the bottom of the screen. In theory it wasn’t going to tell her anything vital that she wouldn’t find out first via phone or a visit, but there was always the chance that an apparently unrelated item would turn out to be linked: Man commits suicide, two dead after fatal crash, man holds child hostage, child’s body found in the Cam.

  Even though she told herself that the idea was far-fetched, that she was merely the victim of her own overblown imagination, she knew that if she switched the TV on she wouldn’t be able to resist flicking back and forth between the news and whatever programme she might kid herself she was really watching.

  Luckily she’d had enough foresight to raid her own small collection of books. It was split roughly into two categories, cookery books and crime novels, neither of which would do now. That left only one candidate, a battered copy of Jane Eyre which she’d started once but never completed. In fact she’d only read the first few pages. She didn’t remember actually disliking it, so maybe it was the inevitable conclusion she couldn’t face: downtrodden woman saved by dashing hero, feeble female falling into macho arms, forever thankful at fulfilling her life’s ambition of becoming a wife.

  Gully reopened the novel despite feeling sure that her relationship with the ‘heroine’ was going to descend through many degrees of increasing distaste. She frowned as she read it, and she’d finished almost twenty pages when there was a knock at the door.

  It was Kincaide with a carton of tea bags, two pints of milk and a packet of digestive biscuits. Gully wasn’t a big fan of men bearing gifts but this offering was more practical than flattering.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Kincaide asked her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You look pissed off. Is she hard work?’

  ‘No, she’s gone to lie down. I think the last couple of days must be catching up with her. She’s been prescribed some sedatives, too. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was hoping to catch Gary, as he said he might finish off here. And, as I was coming anyway I thought you might need these.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m not expecting him.’

  Kincaide tipped his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘I think he’s got a thing for her.’

  ‘No, that’s rubbish.’

  ‘Come on, you know Gary . . .’

  All she knew about Gary Goodhew was that he’d warned her about taking Kimberly to the fire scene one minute, then dropped her in it with Marks the next. The point that was even more evident was that she didn’t really know anyone at Parkside. Marks had told her to avoid being ‘too accommodating’ with the detectives, and she had no idea whether that was a standard warning dished out to all new PCs, or just the female ones. And she certainly wasn’t about to ask. ‘Phone his mobile. I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘I tried. Don’t worry about it. I won’t wait around for him.’ Kincaide flipped the packet of biscuits over in a half somersault, ‘Where do you want these?’

  She took them into the kitchen. He followed her through and she guessed she wouldn’t be getting the whole packet to herself. ‘Tea?’ she offered.

  ‘I won’t say no.’

  By the time she’d boiled the kettle she’d relaxed a little, and realized that this was an opportunity to find out a little more about Kincaide and maybe also find out how she might integrate herself into the department a little more quickly. They took their second mug of tea back into the sitting room, where Kincaide moved her book aside so he could sit down.

  ‘My wife’s into all these, too. Something to do with Colin Firth and a wet shirt apparently.’

  That made her smile; she liked a man who could poke fun at himself. ‘This is the first proper conversation I’ve had with a colleague since I started.’

  ‘It always takes a few weeks to break the ice.’

  ‘I know, but I’ve already had a slap on the wrist from Marks.’

  ‘About taking the princess to the fire?’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Mel told me.’

  ‘Mel?’ How the hell did she know? ‘Great, that means everyone knows.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Well, I never told her. She doesn’t even speak to me unless she has to.’

  Kincaide took a fresh biscuit and snapped it in two. ‘Did she know you’d gone down there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you saw Goodhew down there, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We
ll, there you go.’ Kincaide looked at her as though he’d just spelt it out in words of one syllable. Which, when she thought about it, he had, but it still wasn’t clear enough. Kincaide raised an eyebrow. ‘Mel and Gary?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ll be straight with you. Gary and I often work together, but we don’t totally see eye to eye. Sometimes it’s OK, but sometimes we grate. I’m married, a bit older, more settled. I’m not judging him . . . well, I try not to.’

  Gully didn’t know whether she wanted Kincaide to say any more, but he continued.

  ‘I don’t want to bad-mouth anyone I work with but, now the subject’s come up, maybe it would be fairer for you to know the background.’ He passed her the digestives. ‘Or would you prefer it if I didn’t?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she replied.

  ‘They split up a few weeks ago. The problem is Gary doesn’t keep his affairs out of the work place. Mel was gutted and kept trailing after him; now it’s impossible to work out whether they’re back together or if he’s moved on to someone else.’ Kincaide shook his head. ‘At some point Marks will probably warn you off him – he’s already got a file on Gary in his office. It’s about this thick.’ Kincaide made a gap of about ten centimetres between his palms. ‘Maybe I’m a bit straight-laced, but I’d hate you to be caught out.’ He gave her an easy smile populated with beautifully straight white teeth. ‘On the other hand, a quick fling with Gary will give you plenty in common with quite a few ladies at Parkside.’

  Gully wasn’t sure what to think, but this explained quite a few points, like Marks’ comments and Mel’s cheerleading, and Goodhew’s attentiveness to herself and Kimberly that morning at the fire.

  They shared one more cup of tea. ‘Looks like Gary’s not coming.’

  ‘He does have a habit of getting sidetracked, but I ought to get home anyway.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘My wife’s been away on a course, and I’d like to be in when she arrives back.’