The Siren (11 page)

‘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 found 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.

At 5 a.m. every day, Riley would wake up and climb into her bed. He slept again then, with his head on her shoulder and one hand on her stomach. It was peaceful and perfect.

Her own agenda was therefore clear: get Riley safely home, no matter what the cost.

SIXTEEN

The walk from Blossom Street to Parkside Station took him no more than five minutes. Goodhew used every second to inhale fresh air: it enlivened him, it took his thoughts away
from the inertia of that house, from the smothering wait and the distorted clock that was ticking unpleasantly in the corner of Riley Guyver’s life. Wait, hope, wait, hope . . .

He turned on to East Road, where the air was less clean; bursting instead with street fumes, the smell of petrol, a kebab shop, bus diesel and dust.

It smelt great.

His head was full of his various conversations with Kimberly, the things she’d said and the things she hadn’t. He knew far less about her now than he’d thought he’d
already learnt during the few minutes they’d spent watching the blaze.

She had been just one entity then: a mother terrified for her child, a woman fearing the future, a human being in need of help. He knew that there was far more to her than that, like there was
far more to everyone than how they might be perceived in one traumatic moment. But he could not shake the feeling that the woman he’d tried to talk to today was different from the one
yesterday. Walls had appeared, mirrors, shades, and somewhere amongst them he’d lost sight of her. She had reappeared in kaleidoscopic fragments: a moment of distrust, a flash of openness, a
breath of fear and a millisecond of hate. She’d been holding back at the one time no parent could afford to do so. He didn’t yet understand her motivations, didn’t like the
possibilities either, but equally couldn’t erase the memory of the first moment he’d seen her at the fire, nor could he shake the instinct that told him
that
had been the real
face of Kimberly Guyver.

He wanted to keep walking – past the police station and on to wherever Stefan was hiding, there to find Riley and bring him home. He recognized a metaphor as he thought one.

He didn’t relish trading the inside of one building for the inside of another, but he knew that Parkside had to be his next stop, and hoped he could make some independent progress before
Marks caught him and reeled him back in.

Goodhew switched his mobile to silent and slipped in through the main entrance, past the desk sergeant.

The first stop was Sergeant Sheen. Sheen shared his office with two other officers, but neither of the pair would have dared to call it theirs. In fact Goodhew found it difficult to keep tabs on
who was the current incumbent of each of the other chairs. The rule for that room seemed simple: if you weren’t Sheen, you had merely a desk and chair, and no licence for any overspill. If
you were Sheen, however, every other square inch was yours for the taking.

The room was small and crammed with box files and ring binders; it had two card-indexing systems, one that was alphabetical and religiously but grudgingly replicated on to his computer, and a
second one which only Sheen ever touched. ‘My red box,’ Sheen described it in his strong Fen accent. Since it had now spilled over into six overflow boxes of various colours, its loose
title was a fair cautionary hint as to the state of the contents.

Only Sheen ever touched it because only Sheen was half capable of finding or deciphering anything it contained. Mostly it held pages of his own notes: sheets of A4 smothered with the entangled
scrawlings of four different colours of ballpoint pen. Here he wrote down thoughts and ideas and random facts, none of which could be considered admissible evidence, but all of which might have had
a
slight chance
of being crucial at some point.

Goodhew had only to mention the name ‘Nick Lewton’ for Sheen to start flipping through those layers of crinkled paper.

‘Now, I know that name. I can see exactly what the page looks like. I’ll find you the official bits in a mo’, but you’ll be wanting this too . . . once I find
it.’

After nothing appeared from the first three boxes, Goodhew was starting to fidget. ‘If you like, I could start with the information on file . . .’

‘No, no, here she is. Start with this one. It’s got all the vital notes.’ Sheen held it up, but stopped short of letting Goodhew actually take hold of it. ‘Green notes
are mostly cross references, tells me what items might be linked, no matter how tenuous. Here’s your Spanish disappearance.’

The page was written in landscape format, and he tapped the top right corner. ‘There’s young Nick doing his vanishing act.’

Goodhew took the sheet by the opposite corner and, with a combination of earnest interest and firm tug, was successful in extracting it from Sheen’s right hand. He was surprised to
discover that it wasn’t actually dedicated to Nick Lewton’s disappearance; instead it was headed ‘Dougie Lewton and Family’.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of them?’ Sheen had noticed Goodhew’s expression, and grinned. ‘Don’t take offence at this but that’s because
you’ve only been here five minutes. You’re hardly going to know about a family that moved away about the time you were probably doing your GCSEs.’

Goodhew suspected that he was about to learn enough information to pass an exam. He pulled up a chair.

‘The dad, that’s Dougie, he’s a real London boy. He moved out here in the early seventies with enough cash to buy himself into a couple of pubs. Our cousins in the Met told us
he was into booze, bets, boxing and boobs. He described himself as a promoter, which just meant he had fingers in lots of pies. They didn’t have anything on him, claiming he could pull his
finger out of any one of them pies and it’d be clean. He married Trudy – she was the daughter of a boxer named Noel Dowd. Dougie didn’t want to do anything to upset Dowd, so vowed
to keep a low profile with the ladies after that.’

‘And then he had his kids?’

‘Nearly there, nearly, but first he set about making money here in Cambridge. He was smart, built up the pubs, leased them out, bought student accommodation and rented it out, too. He
bought property at the right price and sold it at the right price, and all through this there were rumours – stories of competitors going under and students getting shafted.

‘Then came the kids, two of them, Nick and Tamsin. They were in their teens before I first saw either of them. I was patrolling the centre one night after the student clubs had shut. Nick
was fifteen, and I caught him shagging a girl in the doorway of the chemist’s down King Street. Cocky he was, told me they were queuing for condoms but couldn’t seem to wait for opening
time. I took both their names and told them to clear off. There was something in the way he looked, though, and I thought there’s one to watch.’ Sheen nodded like he was wholeheartedly
agreeing with himself.

The pause offered an opportunity for Goodhew to query another name on the sheet. ‘So who was Rita?’

‘Now you’re going back to the eighties, and it’s not who, but what. Cambridge used to have a club called the Dorothy, so Dougie opened a rival one and christened it the Rita
Club. Then in about ’85 he moved into the Rose and Crown – used to be on Newmarket Road, a real drinkers’ pub, but shut down after the smoking ban came in a couple of years
ago.’