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

  Contents

  Siren Song

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Siren Song

  Rebecca McKinney

  Rebecca McKinney is a writer, therapist and community development practitioner, based near Edinburgh. Her previous novels, as RL McKinney, include The Angel in the Stone (Sandstone Press, 2017), and Blast Radius (Sandstone Press, 2015). Siren Song is her first foray into the world of crime fiction.

  Copyright © Rebecca McKinney 2020

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction and any characters that bear a resemblance to anyone living or dead is a coincidence. The events are imagined by the author and bear no similarities to actual events.

  Cover design, editing and formatting by letsgetbooked.com

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5272-6616-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-5272-6561-5

  PROLOGUE

  Before dawn, in the coldest hour of the morning, two men launched their inflatable dinghy out of a remote, rocky cove. There was no village here, no fishing boat, only a rutted dirt track and a stony, inhospitable beach. The two men breathed hot vapours into the air and rowed for an hour without speaking, pulling hard against the tide, keeping their strokes as smooth and quiet as possible. If either of them had qualms about the nature of their task, they harboured them in solitude.

  Far from shore, they started the outboard motor. The lights of the land faded and a swell began to rise around them. Half an hour later, they cut the motor, searched the night for other boats and listened hard for any signs that they were not alone. They saw only faint starlight reflecting from the rolling hills of water and heard only the slap of waves against the boat.

  Their inert passenger lay in the bottom of the boat, clothed in an anonymous grey tracksuit. The two men manhandled the body overboard and watched it slip into a trough between waves. There were so many bodies drifting about in this sea now, one more made no odds. The whole Mediterranean had become a mass grave, a purgatory for thousands of nameless, unidentifiable refugees. This one wasn’t nameless or a refugee, but who would know the difference? The hair had been cut off and the water would disfigure the features and discolour the skin. Possibly the fish or the birds would feast on the flesh before it became too putrid.

  The younger of the two men wasn’t religious but he prayed for the body to float out to sea and for the soul to float up to heaven, and he prayed that this evil business would not blow back at him later. When he’d finished praying, he spat into the water and picked up his oars. The body rose high on the shoulder of a wave and sank again. Within a couple of minutes, it was gone.

  ONE

  By the time Harrison Jones got to Sandy Bell’s Bar, he realised he didn't want to be there. He was tired and crowds could be overwhelming. More than once, he had stumbled out of a busy pub with other peoples’ emotions threatening to split his head wide open. Nevertheless, he had promised to meet his friends, and at the time it had seemed preferable to another long evening by himself.

  Harrison was, as his grandmother used to say, sensitive in a very particular way. It ran in the family, she told him before she died, although that didn’t make the condition any easier to bear. It was worse when he spent too much time on his own. He was less able to close out other people’s thoughts, other people’s conflicts, other people’s pain. People who didn’t have to live with it described it as a gift, but most of the time Harrison wished he could switch it off. His inner life was complicated enough without the constant interference from other people, most of whom were strangers.

  Before going inside, he closed his eyes, breathed in and out deeply and brought himself as firmly as he could into the physical present. He turned his face up into the rain.

  It had taken him a long time to learn how to close it all out, and his techniques weren’t always fool proof. Background music helped, especially the wordless, repetitive jigs and reels on offer in Bell’s. He pushed into the warm, steamy pub, swept his hair back from his face, took off his glasses, dried them on his jumper and put them back on again. They steamed up immediately so he repeated the performance, wishing he could trade his sixth sense for better eyesight.

  Louis Isaac and Karl Sigmundsson were ensconced at the window table to the right of the bar, locked into another round of one ongoing debate or another. They were part of a group of academics Harrison sometimes drank with: Louis a politics researcher from New York and Karl a sociologist from Iceland. Their minds were so preoccupied by theory that their company didn’t trouble him. The less personal stuff the better, as far as he was concerned. They didn’t know about his gift, of course. Very few people in his university circle did.

  Harrison Jones moved in two worlds and liked to keep them separate.

  He bought himself a pint of Belhaven Best, sidled between the damp bodies that filled the narrow room, and eased onto the bench beside Karl.

  ‘I’m glad to see you escaped from the circle of hell that is marking,’ Karl said.

  ‘A temporary furlough only. I’ve ten or fifteen left to get through tomorrow.’

  They murmured their commiserations and returned to their argument. Harrison’s mind wandered, from semi-literate undergraduate ramblings to missing people. One missing person in particular. It had been thirty years now. Thirty years of nothing but speculation and heartbreak.

  ‘What do you think, Harri?’

  He forced himself back to the present. The bar was filled with a sociable racket, voices raised in debate, the fiddle and whistle just audible beyond it.

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I was just saying,’ Karl repeated, ‘that what we are witnessing in the Scottish independence movement is materially different from the rise of populism in England and Trump’s America. It is the rebirth of a progressive civic identity that is not based on exclusionary ideology ... ’

  ‘You can’t call any form of nationalism progressive,’ Louis countered. ‘A rhetoric that places the concept of nation at the heart of the discourse is by definition exclusionary.’

  ‘Perhaps, in that case, we must label the Scottish independence movement as something other than nationalism.’

  Louis spread his hands wide. ‘What should we call it, then? Let’s ask the only Scot at the table. Harrison, wade in here anytime, buddy. What do you say?’

  The only Scot at the table had heard enough academic jargon for one day. ‘Fuck Trump and fuck the Tories, that’s what I say.’

  Karl laughed heartily. Louis tried to press him for a more satisfactory response.

  To avoid speaking, Harrison downed the remainder of his pint. ‘
You know what? I’m shattered. Think I’ll head off.’

  ‘You just got here,’ Karl protested.

  ‘Aye, sorry.’ He slid toward the edge of the bench. ‘Not in the mood for setting the world to rights just now. I’ll leave you guys to it.’

  They whispered behind his back as he departed, but he was used to that. An Arctic wind had blown away the mist and brought the keen smell of winter. Stars were showing now through the thinning cloud. He was tired but not yet ready to go home to wallow in his thoughts. He turned left and headed up George IV Bridge.

  There were still a few heavily-swaddled tourists in the vicinity of the Royal Mile but otherwise, the streets were quiet enough to stride out. Harrison hadn’t quite made his father’s height, but he had long legs and a stride that always had to be a little clipped when the streets were busy. Now he was able to move along at his natural pace, covering ground fast enough that he couldn’t pick up the vibrations.

  He walked down the Mound, along Princes Street and turned up North Bridge. Midway along the bridge, he saw a girl facing out over the wall, staring down at the glass roof panels of Waverley Station below. Her feelings radiated from her like shockwaves: failure, guilt and profound loneliness. They hit him square in the chest from twenty feet away. She was thinking about jumping. He could read it clear as a searchlight flashing out into the dark. Harrison slowed his pace and approached her cautiously.

  She raised her eyes and stared out over the city, pretending to take in the view.

  He came alongside her, allowing an arm’s length between them, and said softly, ‘This isn’t what you want to do.’

  She stared at him, mouth half-open. ‘What did you just say?’

  He jutted his chin toward the glass panels. ‘It would be a pretty spectacular way to go, right enough, but you don’t really want to. You just want help.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know what I want?’ Her accent was Irish. Northern. Hard-edged.

  ‘Because you’d have gone by now if you wanted to. What’s your name?’

  She raised her eyebrows and didn’t tell him her name.

  ‘I’m Harrison Jones.’

  ‘Harrison Jones?’ she giggled. At least he’d managed to distract her. ‘A heroic type, right? Should I call you Indiana?’

  ‘You know you’re not the first person who’s ever asked me that. Can I take you somewhere? Do you want to go somewhere and talk?’

  ‘Congratulations, that’s the best chat-up line I’ve ever heard.’ Her voice dripped suspicion but her mind was relieved.

  ‘Thank you, but I’m not trying to chat you up. Do you think you need to go to the hospital?’

  ‘Eh ... no. I don’t think so.’

  ‘So, you’ll be okay?’

  ‘Well, seeing as you’re so concerned, I promise you I won’t jump tonight.’ Beneath her bluster, he picked up humiliation and shame about her melodramatic impulses. Behind that, an echo of violence committed in the past, in another place. This girl had a history.

  ‘Okay then.’ He pointed his finger at her. ‘Stay alive.’

  He left her standing there and walked home.

  When he got back to his flat, he stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, waiting for the crowd inside his head to disperse. He needed to sleep, but more than that he needed guidance. At the end of the hall, there was a small, spare room where he kept his Salvia divinorum plants. Their leaves were his ticket to worlds beyond his own.

  To make the journey, he plucked leaves from one of his Salvia plants and chewed them while he lit candles and let the room fill with incense. He sat cross-legged on the rug, closed his eyes and imagined himself walking a familiar path through a forest. After a while, he saw light through the trees and followed it out into the high, bare Andean plateau. He felt the unfiltered sun across his face and breathed the dusty, bone-dry air. From the shadows at the edge of his vision, people stepped into view. They were quiet and hesitant, waiting for him to make his choice.

  He chose Tomas. Except the Tomas in this particular world came in the body of a condor: black and magnificent, with a snow-white ruff around his neck. He stood seven feet tall and spoke with the voice of a thunderstorm.

  Harrison and Tomas walked around the edge of a shallow salt lake. As they walked, the condor changed back into the man that Harrison had known and loved: a black-haired, coiled spring of muscle and idealism. Salt crystals bloomed pink and orange under their feet. ‘Rosa and the kids are okay. I spoke to her last week.’

  Tomas nodded. ‘I know. But you are not, I think.’

  ‘It’s thirty years today since my dad left.’

  ‘The blink of an eye,’ said Tomas.

  ‘A lifetime for me.’

  ‘You must learn to stop questioning and accept.’

  ‘Accept what?’

  Tomas just kept walking. Harrison waited impatiently for a couple of minutes.

  ‘Tomas?’

  Tomas stood still and looked into the sky. ‘Accept that some answers will only come to you when you are ready to receive them. Your life will change soon. You will find someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  Tomas only smiled. ‘You have already found someone.’

  ‘Who have I found, Tomas?’

  Tomas stepped away from Harrison. His fingers became long, black feathers and the great condor spread his wings wide and lifted off the ground. Harrison watched him soar toward the sun and disappear into the blinding light.

  Then came the feeling of falling from a height, jolting back onto the rug in the spare room in his flat, returning to the ordinary world. For a few seconds, he lay with his eyes closed and the memory of the Andean sun still blazing on his skin. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. The effect of the Salvia leaves had mostly passed, leaving only the familiar sense of dissociation that always hung around for a while afterwards.

  His belly rumbled and he picked himself up off the floor. The flat was cold, and the thump of two sets of little feet on the floorboards upstairs only succeeded in making him feel lonelier. He checked his phone, found a missed call from an unknown number, and switched the phone onto silent. Then he toasted stale bread, ate it with cheese and Spanish ham and still felt empty. Digging into the cupboard, he had to shove aside the jars and packets that Lara had left when she moved out: organic muesli, seeds, almond-butter, and a collection of other expensive and tasteless vegan ingredients. She had tried her well-intentioned best to convert him, but in the end, broke up with him over his insistence upon eating things with faces. To him, it felt petty but she said it was a dealbreaker. Harrison thought it was a handy excuse. He was the real problem. How he was. How he was always going to be.

  That was three months ago and her food was still here, going off. He couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. Lara might still change her mind.

  Lara wasn’t going to change her mind. She had taken up with Jonathan Weaver, one of Harrison’s colleagues in the anthropology department. Jonathan wasn’t a vegan either. If anything, he was even more bloodthirsty than Harrison was. Well, good luck to them. Lara was never going to be the love of his life. It was just nice to have someone around the house, and he was, by necessity, selective about who he could let in.

  He replayed Tomas’s words. You have already found someone.

  It wasn’t like Tomas to be so cryptic. Harrison had found a lot of people, but none of them had changed his life in any meaningful way. Then the girl from North Bridge came into his mind. Was it her? It had been a passing encounter, albeit an unusual one, and he had assumed he would never see her again. Now he wondered if he might.

  TWO

  Lucy Merriweather lay on the bed and waited. There was a life outside of this room, but it was so far away from her now that it had become meaningless. The future was something other people could imagine, even hope for, but now she knew hope was the worst kind of torture there was. So, she waited, and she remembered. At least nobody could take her memories from her. Memories of the summer just past repl
ayed in high definition detail.

  The first time she entered Kostas’s house, on a hillside south of Athens, she knew she had found her place.

  She stood in front of the window. Kostas had personally shown her to a large bedroom with white plastered walls, a terracotta-tiled floor and an uninterrupted view down to the sea. Pink evening sunlight flooded in, warming her skin. From elsewhere in the house, she could hear laughter and the sounds of people arriving for the party. Nerves fluttered in her tummy as she glanced at her guitar case on the bed. This wasn’t like any gig she’d played before. These people were here specially to hear her sing. There were people here who could make her or break her.

  She hoped Tim was making himself presentable in the smaller bedroom next door. It was strange that Kostas had given them separate rooms, but now that she thought about it, she appreciated having the space to herself. She and Tim had shared the intense comradeship of travelling for six months, time enough for her to learn about his dark turns. Perhaps she would get away with sleeping in this big bed on her own tonight.

  Tim didn’t want to come here at all. They had argued about it, and as usual, when he didn’t get his way, he became sullen and resentful. He couldn’t understand why she would want to renew her acquaintance with her father’s business associate, when she wouldn’t speak to her father. He hadn’t liked Kostas the first time they’d met, in Edinburgh, and didn’t like him now.

  It was easy to see why. Kostas was handsome, rich and cheerful. Tim was not. She had loved Tim for his political fire and commitment, but over these past few months, he had proven himself to be less inspiring in other departments. His depressive earnestness was beginning to bore her. So were his habits. He was blowing too much of what little money they earned on hash. Kostas made her laugh. More than that, he made her feel like she was glowing from the inside out.

  She towelled her wet hair, worked a brush through it and left it to dry in its natural ringlets, then looked at herself naked in the mirror. Sometimes when she was able to step out of her mind and look at herself objectively, she saw beauty. Her body was still sleek and toned, although she was twenty now and not as willowy as she had once been. The pregnancy had changed her too, even though she had only allowed it to go a few months. Something about her body had been changed by it, although she knew she was the only one who could see it. She let her long, pale hair fall around her breasts and looked at herself from every angle: shy, seductive, rebellious, strong. No matter which of these she presented, there would always be men who wanted her.