The Siren
Authors: Alison Bruce
THE SIREN
Also by Alison Bruce
Cambridge Blue
Alison Bruce
Constable
·
London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2010
First US edition published by SohoConstable,
an imprint of Soho Press, 2010
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com
Copyright © Alison Bruce, 2010
The right of Alison Bruce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-023-8
US ISBN: 978-1-56947-605-5
US Library of Congress number: 2010012916
Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
To Jacen with love.
No More Blue Moon to Sing
– your lyrics say it all.
This book is dedicated to you.
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
Gammage, 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.