The Siren Read online

  Dedication

  To Jacen with love.

  No More Blue Moon to Sing

  –your lyrics say it all.

  This book is dedicated to you.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  The Soundtrack for The Siren

  About the Author

  Also by Alison Bruce

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgements

  This is the moment when I can show appreciation to the people who have helped me. Top of the list are Broo Doherty and Krystyna Green who have been wonderfully supportive throughout the writing of The Siren.

  Thank you to Peter Lavery for his enthusiasm and thoroughness and to Richard Reynolds, Rob Nichols and Georgie Askew for their expertise.

  For helping me research interesting injuries to live bodies I’d like to thank Dr TV Liew and for help with equally interesting dead bodies, thank you Dr William Holstein.

  To Lisa Williams, Cher Simmons and Kat from Cherry Bomb Rock Photography – cheers, I had a great time.

  And for both personal and creative reasons I’d like to publicly say a big thank you to the following:

  Kimberly Jackson, Martin, Sam and Emily Jerram, Eve Seymour, Kelly Kelday, Claire and Chris, Stewart and Rosie Evans, Elaine McBride, Julia Hartley-Hawes, Dominique and Simon, Stella and David, Martin and Lesley, Tim and Diane, Laura, Laura and Charlotte, Genevieve Pease, Michelle White, Jo and James, Brett and Renee, Nicky and Alex, Neil Constable, Rob and Elaine, Gillian Hall, Shaun ammage, Rob and Jo, Gloria and Martin, Barbara Martino and Alison Hilborne.

  And last, but certainly not least, my totally brilliant step-daughter Natalie Bainbridge.

  ONE

  It was the red of the match heads that caught her eye.

  Staring into the kitchen drawer, Kimberly Guyver had no doubt that the matchbook had been there since the day she moved in, and she didn’t see how she could have overlooked it.

  Its cover was bent back, so she picked it up and folded it shut. Its once familiar design consisted of nothing more than two words printed in gold on black, in a font that she happened to know was called Harquil.

  It said: Rita Club.

  She folded both hands around the matchbook, cupping it out of sight. She could feel the high-gloss card smooth against her palms. It reminded her how long it had been since her hands had been that silky, her nails as polished. It reminded her of Calvin Klein perfume. Of impractical shoes. Of sweat and vodka shots. And the pounding bass that had drowned out any attempt to reflect on the mess she was currently in.

  Maybe the matchbook hadn’t been hiding, because maybe she hadn’t been ready to notice it until now.

  She leant an elbow on the draining board, then plucked a match from one end of the row. It lit at the second attempt. She held it to the corner nearest the ‘R’ for ‘Rita’. The card curled before succumbing to a lazy green flame. She wondered if it was toxic, and realized the irony if it was. It burnt slowly until the flame reached the match heads, which then ignited with a sharp bright burst.

  She dropped the remnants of the matchbook into the sink, and kept watching it, determined to witness the moment when it finally burnt itself to nothing. It was down to merely ash and a thin plume of smoke when the voice from the doorway startled her.

  ‘Mummy.’

  She took a moment to wipe her face and hands – long enough for him to speak to her again. This time his voice was slightly more insistent. ‘Mummy.’ He looked at her with a gaze that implied he knew far more than he was capable of knowing at two and a half, and she immediately felt guilty.

  ‘Riley,’ she answered, using the same urgent intonation. She held out her hand. ‘Come and watch Thomas while I take a shower.’

  She paused by the window, noting the afternoon sun was now low over Cambridge’s Mill Road Cemetery, its glow picking out the wording on the south- and west-facing headstones, casting the others in deep shadow. It was hot for June, and any areas where the ankle-high grass grew without shade had already taken on the appearance of a hay meadow.

  The burial ground was shared between thirteen parishes. She knew this because she knew the cemetery better than anywhere else, better than any other part of town, better than any of the many places she had briefly called home, even the one that had lasted for six years, or this current one where she’d lived for three. She knew the curve of each footpath, and she had favourite headstones. Plenty marked with ‘wife of the above’, but none, she noticed, marked ‘husband of the below’. Lots, too, who ‘fell asleep’. And if marriage carried kudos, so did age: in some cases a mark of achievement and in others a measure of loss.

  She loved some stones for their ornate craftsmanship, others for their humble simplicity. She taught herself to draw by copying their geometry and scripts and fallen angels. The school claimed she had a natural aptitude for art but she knew it was the cemetery that taught her balance and perspective, light and shade and the importance of solitude.

  In isolated moments, when her feelings of abandonment became all but overwhelming, she’d return to certain memorials that had stayed in her awareness after her previous visits. Like that of Alicia Anne Campion, one of the many who had fallen asleep. She’d gone in 1876 at the age of 51, and had been given a low sandstone grave topped with white marble, shaped like a roof with a gable at each end and one off-centre. The elaborate carving was still unweathered. Kimberly knew how to find it at night-time and had often sat there in the dark, with her back against this grave and the pattern close to her cheek, her fingers tracing the crisp lines that the stonemason had chiselled.

  Mill Road Cemetery was also the place she’d hidden when, at fourteen, she’d tried her first cigarette, and where, at fifteen, she’d lost her virginity to a boy called Mitch. She never found out whether Mitch was part of his first name or his last, or no part of his real name at all. He’d smoked a joint afterwards, and she tried it for the first and only time. He then told her to fuck off. The smoke made her feel queasy and giddy, so she stumbled and caught her knuckle on the sharp edge of a broken stone urn, and went home with blood smears on her hands and a new anger ignited in her heart.


  But no bad choice was going to come between her and the way she felt for that place, and she later exorcized the memory of it with a succession of equally forgettable boys, until nothing but Mitch’s name and a vague recollection of smoking pot stayed in her head.

  People walked through all the time, taking shortcuts, taking lunch. People actually tending graves were few, and she guessed that the number of people who knew the place as well as she did was even less. Most visitors didn’t know about the thirteen parishes; even fewer knew that the curved paths and apparently shambolic layout of trees and graves formed a perfect guitar shape. She’d sketched a plan of it one day, then in disbelief double-checked a map and, sure enough, found this huge guitar hidden in the centre of the city.

  The guitar’s neck belonged to the parish of St Andrew the Less and, although level with the rest of the cemetery, it stood a storey higher than the houses backing on to its west side. They were Victorian terraces, originally two-up, two-down workers’ houses, but almost all of them had since been extended.

  One of these was Kimberly’s. It had a single-storey extension that stretched to within a few feet of the cemetery’s perimeter wall. When she first moved in, she’d seen that as providing a good fire escape: an easy climb through her sash window, then across the flat roof to safety. But, almost as soon as he had been big enough to stand, she’d realized Riley’s fascination with the large open space that lay just over their garden wall.

  For now, though, Thomas the Tank Engine was enough to hold his interest, so she left him sitting on one of her pillows, hypnotized by the TV at the foot of her bed. Just this one time, she hoped he would leave her to shower in peace, enjoying the water close to scalding and the jets needling her skin.

  She reached for a towel, realizing that she’d stayed in the shower for much longer than she had planned to. She could hear the Fat Controller having a few issues with one of the less useful engines, and knew the DVD had been on for over half an hour.

  ‘Riley?’ she called. With no response, she guessed he was probably just too engrossed to hear her, and she called him again.

  She took another towel and wrapped her wet hair in it, then returned to the bedroom just as the theme song began. Thomas the Tank Engine was chuffing along the track with the credits flying up the screen, but Riley had climbed under the covers and was sleeping too deeply to care. Kimberly curled up beside him, wrapping her arms around him, and he shifted a little, resettling with his head closer to hers. His hair tickled her cheek. He smelt of baby wipes and jacket potato, and his proximity soothed her more than any amount of showering could have done.

  It was a tranquil moment, broken only by the main-menu loop on the DVD, then a few seconds of cheery music that had already been repeated too many times. Kimberly stretched herself towards the remote, aiming to scoop it near enough to reach the mute button. She touched one of the channel buttons instead, and the image that flickered on to the screen seemed as familiar as Thomas the Tank Engine.

  She recognized that skyline, the rocky outcrop, the barren coastline. But she took a second or two to understand this was no DVD, no fictional footage. It was the news.

  A fragment of her life was appearing on the television and, as sure as the carving on Alicia Campion’s grave, its details were now set in stone.

  She felt realization burn through her chest, dropping like a molten leaden weight into the pit of her stomach. She saw the winch, and the wreck of Nick’s car that now hung from its hook. The car that she’d last seen when that same stretch of the Mediterranean sea had swallowed it.

  The reporter’s voice began to penetrate her shock. ‘The vehicle was recovered last week after some divers reported that it appeared to contain human remains. It wasn’t until today that the Spanish authorities have been able to confirm the identity of the occupant. The victim is named as former Cambridge man Nicholas Lewton, who had been living and working in Cartagena until his disappearance almost three years ago. Police are now appealing for information, and a spokesman has confirmed that this death is being treated as suspicious.’

  The phone sat on the bedside table nearest to the window. It rang just as she was reaching for it. She looked out across the cemetery, towards the rear of another row of houses. Because they were built on higher ground, her bedroom directly faced the rear windows of their ground floors. One of them had been sandblasted, leaving its brickwork paler than that of its neighbours. Trees rose in-between, but she could see its upper floor catch the last of the sunshine and glow a fireball orange.

  The ground floor of the same house was partly obscured in summer, but Kimberly knew that her caller was standing just inside its patio door. Probably squinting into the sun, staring over at Kimberly’s house, waiting for her to answer the phone.

  Kimberly pressed the ‘answer’ button. ‘I saw it,’ she said. ‘Let me get dressed. I’ll meet you outside.’

  TWO

  Kimberly grabbed some clean knickers and a bra from her chest of drawers, then pulled a dress from her wardrobe. Tugging them on quickly, she scooped up Riley, draping him over her shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t stir, then managed to transfer him into his pushchair without waking him. She left her house by the front door, and hurried to the nearest entrance leading into the cemetery, a narrow gateway at the top of the guitar’s neck. The path ran in an arc that curved like a broken string towards the other side of the green enclosure. She and Rachel always met at the midpoint, a circle that had once been the site of the chapel of St Mary the Less.

  Kimberly arrived first. There were four benches, spaced around the outside of the circle, and she chose the one which would give her the best view of Rachel’s approach.

  It was a few minutes later before she saw Rachel’s figure appear briefly, then disappear, between the trees and shrubs further along.

  She could easily have cut across and made it in half the time, since Rachel knew her way round here almost as well as Kimberly did. This was a good sign, Kimberly decided: a sign that Rachel didn’t feel the same panic as she herself felt.

  She watched Rachel reappear from behind a yew tree and disappear behind an overgrown buddleia, noticing that her friend’s stride, though brisk, was not rushed. Measured, that was the word. Rachel was always the calm one, weighing up the options, measuring her response. It was a joke between them: Kimberly gets them both into trouble, Rachel gets them out.

  The sun was at the back of her neck, reaching its still warm fingers around on to one cheek. It was a slow, burning heat that made her feel impatient to get out of it.

  When Rachel emerged into view again, she was still about a hundred feet away, but Kimberly sensed there had been a change in her friend. In the few seconds she’d been out of sight, she’d been overtaken by a shadow. There was now a slowing of her usually lively stride, a new gravity dragging at her limbs, like hesitancy and indecision were both pulling at her hem. There was maybe eighty feet between them now, and Rachel’s features appeared as nothing more than shadows and indistinct shapes, but they were composed differently today.

  Riley moved one arm out into the sun, and Kimberly used this movement as a reason to turn her attention to him and fold it back inside the shade of the canopy. She knew she was kidding herself; in truth she felt like she’d been staring at Rachel, in some kind of bad way. She waited until Rachel was about twenty feet away before looking up at her again, hoping to find comfort there.

  Rachel’s toe caught in a small ruck in the grass and, momentarily, she stumbled. It was nothing, just a tiny break in her stride, but it seemed to be a further sign of the way her previously graceful gait had become self-conscious and unsure. She stopped ten feet off, and managed a small smile: one that flickered on to her face and was gone in the next instant. Kimberly had painted Rachel’s portrait many times, but never like this. Not ever. Something fragile but significant had deserted her friend.

  Kimberly felt her stomach lurch.

  She glanced around her, taking in everything a
s if it was the first time they’d come back to this spot in ten years. If the grass that lay between them looked the same as it ever had, it was the only thing that did. The graves were older, some had crumbled, others had toppled. The surrounding houses were filled with new families. The drugs were harder, and year on year the rain fell ever heavier. And neither of them were children anymore.

  Kimberly stood up and stepped a little closer.

  Rachel frowned. ‘I was as quick as possible,’ she said. And spoke as if answering a question. Making a defence.

  ‘I know. It’s OK.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Shit, Rach, it’s got to be.’ Kimberly heard the tautness in her own voice.

  In response, Rachel closed her eyes and pressed her hands over her ears. Kimberly had never noticed the frown lines on Rachel’s forehead until now.

  ‘Rach, what is it?’

  ‘We should go.’

  Kimberly glanced around.

  ‘No, Kim, I mean go go,’ Rachel corrected her, ‘leave the area until it’s sorted.’

  ‘We already did that, remember?’ Kimberly’s thoughts were suddenly overtaken by the idea that she’d seen some fundamental part of the picture through the wrong lens, or from the wrong angle. She couldn’t decide what exactly, just that her view had somehow become distorted.

  Rachel shook her head and turned away, but not before Kimberly had spotted the tears welling in her friend’s eyes.

  She found herself at Rachel’s side, wrapping her arm around her shoulder. ‘This isn’t like you at all. I’m relying on you to bail me out.’ Kimberly gently turned Rachel’s face towards her. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

  Kimberly guessed she knew Rachel better than anyone, and she could only remember Rachel crying twice before, once at her mother’s funeral and once at school on the day they’d met. Kimberly was the emotional, volatile one, while Rachel was the thinker, the planner. Never the crying type.

  Rachel blinked and tears fell from both eyes, making identical trails down each side of her symmetrical face. She didn’t meet Kimberly’s gaze, but instead stared past her and into the pushchair. She tried to speak but the sentence churned into a sob. There was definitely something odd about the way Rachel stared at Riley, and the unease twisted tighter in Kimberly’s gut.