The Siren (10 page)

She was about to turn away from the window. Afterwards she would wonder whether she had been on the verge of telling the police everything, and whether the outcome would have been better if she
had. But at that moment she spotted a figure staring across the cemetery towards her.

He saw her spot him, and he dropped the hood of his sweatshirt long enough for her to see his face clearly. He made the ‘phone me’ gesture.

She shook her head and stepped back from the glass.

He mouthed two words.

She read them at once, but it was a few more seconds before she understood what they might signify.

And, to be quite certain, she’d spend as long as possible in the bathroom . . . then stall like crazy.

Goodhew had no objection to making the hot drinks but on this occasion knew it translated as ‘get out of my sight’. As a precaution he’d also brewed a pot of
tea
and a
pot of coffee. But such chores often presented opportunity: in this case a chance to look through the kitchen cupboards.

Marks entered in time to see Goodhew dropping a handful of potato peelings back into the composting bin. Goodhew had washed and dried his hands before Marks inquired, ‘Finished?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Find anything useful in there?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You should think about where you direct your energies, Gary. For example, taking Kimberly Guyver to the fire site this morning . . .’

‘I know, sir.’

Marks scowled. ‘You know what? That it was foolhardy? That it’s lucky the repercussions weren’t worse? What exactly were you thinking?’

Goodhew did his best to look contrite, and lowered his voice so PC Gully wouldn’t hear. She might not welcome any favours, but he couldn’t bring himself to drop her in it either.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t think it through. Sorry.’

In response Marks lowered his voice, but managed to sound both louder and angrier. ‘I didn’t have you pegged as someone so easily led astray by the charms of the opposite
sex.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Tell me, how much of that conversation in there did you hear?’

‘All of it.’

‘Thought so.’ Marks had clearly moved on. ‘I’d like you to check out the Jay Andrews story.’

‘I already did. There’s someone of that name who’s resident at Hinton Avenue nursing home. They also confirmed that Kimberly and Riley Guyver are regular visitors.’

‘Someone’s going to need to tell him about his son.’

‘
I
can go.’

‘Did they say anything about his condition?’

‘No, I kept it really brief.’

‘Didn’t want to miss anything from the other room?’ Marks managed a wry smile. ‘So what else have you found?’

‘Two boxes by the back door: personal papers in one, groceries in the other.’

‘No photos?’

‘No, sir, but it looks like something was standing on the mantelpiece until recently, so maybe she removed a photograph for some reason.’

‘That crossed my mind, too.’ Marks tilted his head to one side and frowned as he thought. ‘Let’s see what she brings us,’ he said finally, but he continued to
frown.

‘Everything OK, sir?’

Before he could reply, Gully opened the kitchen door. ‘There’s a woman here to see Kimberly Guyver. Says she’s Anita McVey.’

FOURTEEN

Anita McVey was in her fifties, with a boyish figure dressed in purple and black; more shades of purple than Goodhew knew names for although he definitely spotted magenta,
indigo, mauve and what looked like the colour his mum had once tried on their front door, described on the tin as ‘Racy Rubine’. The hair escaping from her baker’s-boy hat was the
same shade as Kimberly’s, but beyond that he could see no resemblance. Anita’s appearance was one of deliberate chaos: over-accessorized and curly-permed, primary school teacher with a
twist of Marc Bolan.

She looked neither surprised nor fazed by the police presence in the house. ‘Is she upstairs?’ Gully nodded and Anita dropped her rucksack-sized handbag on to the settee, then
plonked herself down next to it. ‘Does she know I’m here?’

Once more Gully nodded. ‘I can call her again.’

‘No, she’ll come down when she’s ready, I’m quite sure.’ Anita looked directly at Marks and seemed to be assessing him in some way. He excused himself and
disappeared back into the kitchen; as if on cue, Gully followed.

Neither Anita nor Goodhew spoke. He was aware that Kimberly had been upstairs for some time, although probably less time than it seemed. On days like this, minutes ran at a different rate. He
decided to go and look.

Goodhew was halfway between floors when he heard the bathroom door unlock. He waited where he was until she reappeared, and she passed him on the stairs without comment, but there was no
mistaking the heaviness as her feet struck each tread, or the exhaustion which blanked her expression. Kimberly stumbled onwards, sagging only as the older woman’s arms wrapped themselves
around her. She buried her face in Anita’s shoulder and they hung on to one another. Kimberly was taller and of stronger build, yet Anita was now the anchor, or maybe the tugboat guiding her
to somewhere calmer.

Anita was the first to speak: ‘Why didn’t you call?’

‘I don’t know.’ Kimberly began to sob. ‘I thought he would turn up. I didn’t want to upset you.’

‘You silly girl.’ Anita closed her eyes momentarily. Goodhew felt like an intruder but not guilty – they were beyond thinking about him. Instead they shared words: small
sentences passing back and forth, sometimes coherent, sometimes cracked apart.

‘They don’t know where he is,’ Kimberly said at last, and Anita stared at him then, and he felt the responsibility of being the face of
They.
‘What if he was in
the fire?’ Kimberly added.

‘And you really don’t know?’

‘They think maybe Stefan . . .’

‘And why would he?’

‘Maybe you know his aggression towards Rachel . . . What if he didn’t know Riley was there? I never guessed . . .’

‘How could you?’

‘I knew he hit her once. She kept it quiet, but I knew.’

Anita shook her head. ‘Riley can’t just vanish.’

‘What if I never see him again?’

‘Oh, Kim, that won’t happen. It won’t.’

Anita pulled her even closer, murmuring quiet words of comfort.

At least she didn’t say the words ‘I promise’. Why did they so often slip out when people were not in a position to use them? To Goodhew’s relief she stopped short of
that; and to his greater relief his mobile rang before he needed to consider whether Anita was taking Kimberly too far down the road of false hope.

It was the fire officer, too exhausted to deliver more than the bare facts. ‘No other bodies . . . Probable arson . . . Awaiting tests.’

Goodhew ended the call. It was ironic that he was probably about to deliver a greater dose of false hope. Kimberly had already caught the positive note in his voice, and now looked at him
expectantly. Relief already swelling inside her.

‘Riley’s not in the house,’ he confirmed and, despite doing his best to keep the news low-key, she now looked as though her son was within touching distance.

‘They’re positive?’ she gasped.

‘Absolutely,’ he replied, and in part he couldn’t help but feel touched by the moment, but that feeling was quickly overtaken and swallowed up. It was too fleeting, too
fragile, and he found it impossible to believe it held any real substance.

He needed to leave the building, get outside, get moving. And keep moving, probably.

This doing nothing always got to him – even if it only felt like doing nothing. He couldn’t stand the way it pressed the air from his lungs, and clawed his muscles up into tight
knots.

Stefan was out there somewhere, and if Riley was with him, he had to be in danger. Even if Riley was elsewhere, he still had to be in danger.

The kitchen door was slightly ajar, and Goodhew pushed it wide. Gully had been watching the front room through the chink. Marks was on the phone.

Goodhew took his own phone out of his pocket, and his call to the station connected almost immediately. He asked to be put through to the local intelligence officer, and had reached the top of
the stairs by the time Sergeant Sheen picked up.

‘Once I heard they’d not found another body, I took a bet I’d be getting a call from you. Regarding Mr Golinski, am I right?’

‘What have you got on him?’

‘Not much, but here we go. Stefan Golinski, born in Birmingham 25th October 1977. Couple of minor offences, then given community service for an assault back in ’95, when he was . .
.’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Yep. Then he moved to Cambridge, where his name pops up two or three times in relation to a spate of drunken brawls, but no charges. Seems like the same culprits were rounded up each
time, and he was one of them. Then nothing . . . grew up, maybe.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Or he got better at not getting caught. Here’s one titbit you might like. Seems that on each occasion the same type of injuries were inflicted, and the only person confirmed as
being present at every incident was Stefan Golinski.’

‘But still no prosecution?’

‘CPS dropped it, because of no witnesses, no CCTV, no forensics.’ Through the open door of Riley’s room, Goodhew spotted a small pair of slippers. He went through and picked
one up, and balanced it on the palm of his hand. ‘What injuries?’

‘Broken ribs and fingers. The fingers crushed, the ribs kicked in.’

Goodhew placed the slipper back alongside its mate. ‘Got to go,’ he said, his thoughts no longer with Sergeant Sheen.

Kimberly was standing in the doorway. She’d frozen as soon as she saw him there, her eyes wide and her lips parted, as though caught in mid-thought. ‘I’ve come to find a
photograph of Riley.’

‘You look better,’ he remarked.

‘I’m doing OK . . . you know, comparatively. What’s the police view at present? Cautiously optimistic, maybe?’ Her tone was bitter.

‘Maybe. You don’t like the police much, do you?’

‘Maybe you’ll give me some reason to . . . but it seems like the world’s packed out with
maybes
, doesn’t it?’

As she opened the wardrobe door, he realized that there were no clothes inside. Instead he was looking at the inside of a compact art gallery.

‘That’s where I’ve seen you.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You sell paintings at the craft market – the Sunday one on Market Hill.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I nearly bought one.’

‘Yeah, you and a hundred others.’ She seemed curious, though. ‘Which one?’ she asked.

‘The girl falling from the punt.’

‘This one?’ She reached into the wardrobe and lifted a canvas out towards the light.

It was bigger than the print he had fancied, and showed a young woman in rolled-up jeans and a short-sleeved red shirt. Her feet were bare, the shirt riding up to expose the bare skin of her
lower back. She clung on to the punting pole, laughing as she tried to keep her balance. She was a redhead but it didn’t disguise the resemblance to Kimberly herself; the same bold features,
large almond eyes, full lips and look of open defiance. She was painted in acrylics, using heady saturated colours. Behind her, in pen and ink, rose the stern facade of St John’s College,
solid, disciplined and unamused at being nothing but a prop.

He could easily have said ‘She’s beautiful’, and it wouldn’t have been anything but a statement of bald fact. But he knew that would be inappropriate, so he just nodded
and said, ‘That’s the one.’

‘Why didn’t you, then?’

‘Why didn’t I what?’

‘Buy it?’

She had a way of making the simplest questions direct and personal. He shrugged, unable to explain why the picture had seemed too bold, too energetic for his wall. He had left the print because,
though it had provided an attractive moment in his day, it was just a bit too frivolous to take home.

‘I don’t think I had anywhere suitable to hang it.’

‘I see.’ She took it from him, put it back in the cupboard. ‘At least you’ve the decency to keep words like ‘juxtapose’ and ‘Vettriano’ to
yourself.’

‘Closer to Al Moore’s pin-up art than to Vettriano, I think.’

She didn’t comment but passed him a small, square canvas. There was the pen-and-ink background again, but glasses suspended by their stems and bottles of wine this time. In the foreground
a woman of about twenty held her glass aloft and smiled, her eyes a little unfocused, perhaps from the effects of her first glass.

Kimberly cleared her throat. ‘Rachel,’ she announced.

‘How long ago?’

‘Four years, give or take.’

Goodhew had developed a small but persistent habit of late. He found himself wondering whether there was anything different to be seen in a person pictured shortly before their untimely death.
Some hint that they subconsciously knew that they were sitting for an image that would soon be part of a police appeal or a news bulletin, or just a page-filler to evoke a sympathetic mutter and a
shake of the head before the reader flipped over to the celebrity gossip printed on the following pages. The idea was illogical, but he still looked.

He now drew no conclusions about Rachel’s personality: it did not jump from the canvas the way it seemed to from Kimberly’s portrait. Who Rachel was – or maybe who Kimberly
thought she was – wasn’t on display. But the moment seemed real enough, not an imaginary scene like the one on the punt.

‘And did you paint this from a photograph?’

‘No, sort of from memory. I started it that same night.’ She could tell that puzzled him. ‘I mean the night we were in that bar. She was drinking but I was sober, so I saw her
at various stages during the evening. There was this moment’ – she tapped the canvas – ‘that moment in fact, when she seemed to be in the perfect place. We shared a flat
then, and I stayed up ’til dawn making sketches. I went into her room and copied her nose and mouth while she was asleep. Those were the bits I couldn’t do properly from
memory.’

She took the canvas from him before he’d finished looking.

‘Was that in Cambridge?’ he asked. ‘I don’t recognize the background.’