Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor (3 page)

It was dark by the time they reached the house, and Gideon was beginning to regret his impulse of hospitality. It wasn’t that Tyack had said or done anything to annoy him on the way back –
in fact he’d sat silently, eyes fixed on the road ahead – but what was Gideon meant to do with him all night? He could hardly run him into Bodmin to see a film or sit cosily with him in the village’s one excuse for a restaurant. The house, when he pulled open the stiff old door, didn’t help any – simply exhaled at him its air of chilly neglect. He supposed he was ashamed: his home wasn’t fit for a visitor, and nor was he...

“What the bloody hell did this?”

Gideon stopped in the hall. Tyack was motionless in the doorway, one finger pressed to the paintwork. It had still been dark when Gideon had left that morning. Either because of that or because he hadn’t wanted to, he hadn’t seen the mark. It was a deep scratch. It ran from the lintel to within two feet of the ground. It gave Gideon the coldest, most miserable sensation he’d ever experienced, as if some vile fairy story he’d been told as a child had turned out to be true. He couldn’t bear to think about it. “Kids. Twigs. I don’t know.” He stamped off into the living room. “I’m sorry the place is so perishing cold. The stove’s awkward, and if I’m not around to – ”

“My one at home is like this. I’ll have a go at it.”

“Er... right. I’ll fix us a drink if you like. And I’ll stick a pizza in the oven.”

“Ta.”

Gideon left him crouched in front of the stove. Halfway to the kitchen he remembered that he’d never called the Truro HQ to check Tyack’s credentials, and he quietly let himself into the study and unhooked the landline phone.

When he emerged, his visitor was sitting on the granite hearth, and the room was full of dancing firelight. “Wow. What did you do?”

“Some damp moss was blocking the flue. I got it down.” Tyack looked up at him mildly. The dog had taken up position on the far side of the stove, and between them they looked like a pair of guardian deities in a Roman temple. “I’m not here to step on your toes, Gideon. The Truro police just honestly thought it might be worth a shot to send me here. I’ve had a bit of luck in cases like this before.”

There was no way Tyack could have heard his phone conversation from here, or even from outside the thick study door. Gideon wanted to snarl at him.
You’ve had damn-all luck so far, haven’t you, unless you count wasting three hours of police time up a godforsaken hill...
But that was a mote in his neighbour’s eye, and the beam in his own was killing him. He made his way blindly to a hearthside chair and sat down. “I’ve been screwing this up. I’m just a village copper, Mr Tyack – pub brawls and lost sheep.”

“It’s Lee. And – they’ve sent CID men out here, haven’t they? Search-and-rescue specialists. They haven’t found her either.”

Gideon propped his elbows on his knees. He wanted the comfort of this thought, but he couldn’t allow it to himself. “I’ve been good at my job until now. But I’ve started buggering up ordinary things. Paperwork, letting Ross Jones get away with his marijuana crop. I’ve...
panicked
, I suppose. What if this never ends? What if they never find her?”

Tyack’s hand closed on his shoulder. “Sometimes they aren’t found.”

“Christ. I don’t think I could bear that.” Gideon kept his head down. For Tyack –
Lee,
his mind easily corrected him, just as he’d substituted Isolde for Kye – for Lee to be touching him like this, he must be kneeling close. Right at Gideon’s feet. “Why am I telling you all this?”

“People do tell me things. Shall I get those drinks?”

“Okay. They’re in the ...”

“Sideboard, second cupboard on the left. That’s not a psychic thing – you left the door open.”

“Oh, God.” Gideon tried to rub away the remembered feel of Lee’s grasp. “I hardly touch the stuff, except...”

“Except this last week or so. And that’s not a Gideon thing, is it?”

Gideon wanted to argue. Nobody but James had had any right to know what his
things
were, and James had declined the pleasure. But the fact was that he’d started to combat the long nights of Lorna Kemp’s absence with a tumbler or three of scotch. He watched while Lee took out a pair of shot glasses instead, and poured them a measure each. The drink looked civilised like that somehow, companionable and sufficient. Lee handed him his glass in silence and began to look around the room, as if giving Gideon time to compose himself. He stopped in front of a photograph. “These are the Methodist parents?”

“Grandparents, actually. We come from a long line. That’s my mum and dad in the picture to t
he left, the one with Dark Old Chapel in the background.

“This house feels like theirs, not yours.”

The photos were the room’s sole decor. Pastor Frayne hadn’t been a harsh man – he just hadn’t seen the use of earthly comforts. “It is. I had a place of my own in the village, but... my father got Alzheimer’s a few years ago, and they’re both living in care, so I moved home.” Gideon knocked his scotch back. “My ma says it’s God’s will – the Alzheimer’s.”

“And do you think so too?”

Gideon hesitated. He was bright enough, he knew, but his circumstances hadn’t favoured independent thought. It had taken him a long, hard time to work some things out for himself, and he wasn’t finished. When he considered this, though, he found that he was certain. “No. I think it’s a miserable, pointless disease that needs curing.”

“So... between these godfearing parents of yours, and being part of a police force that’s two decades behind the rest of the country in its attitudes – ”

“Don’t.” Gideon cut him off sharply. “Look – for what it’s worth, you seem like a decent guy. But...”

“But you’re getting tired of having your brains picked, and you reckon it’s only fair that I tell you some stuff in return.”

Gideon repressed a smile at the irony: Lee had fished that thought up so neatly that it might as well be flapping and wet on the hearthrug. “Something like that, maybe.”

“Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

Do you have a boyfriend?
Gideon clamped his mouth shut. What the hell was the matter with him? Lee had returned to sit by the fire. He’d wrapped his arms around his knees and his skin was glowing amber in the uncertain light. Clearly he spent at least as much time on the boats as in parlours reading fortunes, and Gideon had had a lonely untouched year of it, but still... “Does it always hurt?” he asked suddenly. “When you have a – a vision, or whatever you call them?”

“I wasn’t sure I’d convinced you I have them at all.”

“Well, I won’t say I don’t wish to God we’d gone up to Wheal Catherine and found Lorna Kemp making daisy chains. But earlier on, when we were at Sarah’s, and you called me Gideon like you’d known me all my life, and you told her how I’d worked, how I’d tried...”

“Ah, that kind of vision doesn’t hurt. That’s just like seeing the good in somebody, as if it was separate from you, something I could touch. In a criminal case, though...” Lee shivered. “Well, something similar happens. Only my mind takes the bad things people have done, and it turns those things into monsters. My job’s to turn them back – re-attach their human faces.”

“How do you do that?”

“I have to look at them hard. Close-up. Sometimes I can’t do it at all, so I know how it feels to have that sense of failure, Gideon, that... panic.” He looked abruptly drained. Gideon had taken him for a younger man than himself, but perhaps he was the same age. Then he brightened. “But to answer your other questions – I’m thirty years old, same as you. I went to Exeter uni. I’ve had a quiet life, other than helping find murderers, and I’m single, as of last March when my boyfriend moved out.”

Gideon blushed. But how could he have been prying? He hadn’t opened his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We were really good mates, but we weren’t the loves of one another’s lives. He left when he found someone who was.”

I thought James was the love of mine. I thought so, I thought so, but how can I be sitting here now filled with such longing, as if...

“It was all as it should be, with Michael and me.” Lee stretched. He got onto his knees and adjusted the stove door so that the flames leapt higher. Then he turned to Gideon, his fine skin flushed with the heat, his warm mouth inviting. “Things sometimes do turn out as they should be.”

Gideon sat up sharply. Here he was, at seven o’clock at night in the minster’s parlour, still in his uniform, the generations of godfearing Fraynes staring down at him from the walls – about to lean down, cup Lee Tyack’s face between his palms and kiss him. Dear Christ – if he’d never had the balls to take James out in public, touch him or so much as hold his hand, he owed his memory better than that... “Sorry,” he grated out. “I was going to put some dinner on for us, wasn’t I?”

Lee sat back on his heels. “You were,” he said demurely, not even a trace of a promised kiss on those lips now. “It was going to be pizza, I believe.”

***

When Gideon returned after his preparations for their meal, he realised he needn’t have worried about how to entertain his guest throughout a long evening. Lee had curled up on the sofa, and was to all appearances fast asleep.

The sofa was a long old leather one, probably more comfortable than the bed in the spare room. Gideon awkwardly touched his shoulder, but he didn’t stir. He watched him for a moment. He’d taken off his boots, and his feet were braced against the sofa’s arm, if he were launching into a dive. Already his eyelids were flickering with dreams. Gideon took a rug off one of the fireside chairs and draped it over him. He hoped there weren’t too many dog hairs on it, but when he looked around for Isolde, she was laid out like an overstuffed cushion under the sofa anyway.

That reminded him. She hadn’t had her evening walk, the outing that had become for Gideon a vigil. He whistled softly to her, but she only flicked one back paw at him in contempt.

So Gideon walked on his own. The mist came down with the dark, but tonight there was no brooding pressure in the air. Gideon’s head cleared. Clusters of rosehips and hawthorn berries gleamed red-black in the light of his torch, and the orange bracken leapt into contorted gestures and light-frozen moments of dance. Messages everywhere for someone like Lee, he supposed, but for Gideon tonight they were simply signs of oncoming winter, familiar and real. He thought of Lorna Kemp, and his prayers for her rose up hotly from his heart.

For the first time, they didn’t blind him. Making his way down his self-created corridor of li
ght, he began to review the day of her disappearance and the time that had passed since then. Yes – he’d been in a fugue of panic. He’d relied on the CID officers to come here and magic the child back for him, while he’d provided the support, names and directions and cups of tea.

But Gideon had something no amount of forensic work and DNA profiling could replace. He had a lifelong knowl
edge of the people of Dark village. Lorna Kemp had vanished on Bodmin Moor. That was a given in this case, a sacred foundation stone. But Gideon knew her. She was only little, but she was bright, and had spent all her summers scrambling about on the crags and wide open spaces around her home. She was a Kemp, and like the Prowse brood, all the Kemp kids knew the moor. Unless she was dead – and there had been no trace of her body – wouldn’t she have found her way home?

Kemps and Prowses. Those two clans had interbred and feuded for centuries around here. Gideon began to arrange them in his head, quartz and granite chesspieces on a board. He had by no means finished this process when he unlocked his front door.

He set the problem aside for a while. He felt able to: the sense of bottled-up fear was gone from the base of his throat and the place behind his eyes where it had been blocking even such ordinary vision as nature had granted him. He checked in on Lee, who was still sleeping soundly, one hand on Isolde’s oblivious skull. The pizza was ready and he absently ate half of it standing at the kitchen counter, staring out into the night. Then he went into the study where his father had used to write his sermons.

The room felt wholly different tonight. The blazing stove next door had driven off the chill, and Lee Tyack’s presence had somehow spread through the house like a warm scent, although to the best of Gideon’s knowledge he only smelled of well washed male. Maybe a touch of sweat and mud from his
exertions up at Wheal Catherine... Gideon caught himself smiling. He sat down to his long-neglected paperwork. The chess game restarted in his head. He let it unfold, turning his conscious mind to the cares of the day, the stolen quad bikes, Mrs Waite’s shop cash register, which seemed to have sprung a bad leak since she’d hired a stranded Polish crop-picker to help her out over winter...

And
failed to notice Mr Waite’s increased trips to the Bodmin town bookie’s. Gideon
had
noticed them, but he hadn’t connected the dots.

He
grunted in self-disgust and rested his chin on one palm. Now he thought back, the Polish girl’s eyes had been clear as day. It was so easy to blame an outsider – migrant workers, travellers, even the Beast of bloody Bodmin if you were all out of other ideas and your local bobby was letting the side down.