Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor

This book is lovingly dedicated

to the memory of Winifred Harper.

Once Upon A Haunted Moor

Harper Fox

That sound – you feel it before you hear it, a kind of low vibration in your bones.

Gideon Frayne came to a halt on the moorland path. The rustle of his own movement ceased, and a damp silence closed in. High above him on
the crag, the rocks of the Cheesewring floated eerily, their impossibly balanced towers stranger than ever in the wreathing mist.

Nothing but silence. Gideon shook himself. No hard-headed Cornwall copper should listen to such nonsense, and he’d ripped a strip off Bill Prowse in the pub last night for spreading it around. The legend of the Beast of Bodmin Moor was all very well in its way, and certainly brought tourist trade to a spot with little else to recommend it. But
the village of Dark was missing a child, and Constable Frayne had a duty to nip all dangerous and superstitious rambling in the bud.

It seemed there was damn-all else he could do. Six-y
ear-old Lorna Kemp had been lost for almost a fortnight now, and all of Gideon’s leads had gone cold. The Truro constabulary had turned out to help him. Volunteers from miles around had combed the moors in a five-mile radius from Dark, and air-sea rescue chief Flynn Summers had brought out the Hawke Lake choppers to search far more widely than that, his grey-and-orange fleet of sky whales thundering low enough over the Cheesewring to make its weird rocks vibrate in their stacks.

And nothing. Gideon resumed his walk. The Cheesewring – how innocuous it sounded, part of the whole Cornish landscape of dairymaids and clotted cream... And in summer, bright with buttery gorse and scrambling tourists, the name fitted well enough. The bleak moors spread out to the west, but from the top of the crags to the east, a jewelled hillscape of villages and fields would draw your vision to the far horizon, and the wind at your back would make you feel ready for flight.

At the burned-out end of October, all was grey. The mist was thickening. Somewhere out on Bodmin’s wasteland reaches, little Lorna Kemp – or, more likely by now, her corpse – was about to meet a thirteenth night alone. It was two days before Halloween. Gideon Frayne, whose trails had all gone cold, who could neither help her nor rest until he had, walked alone. He came out here every night now, as if by doing so he could keep the child company, walked until the dusk had turned to black night, and made his way home by torchlight.

You feel the sound before you hear it.
Gideon stopped again. He was halfway along the hawthorn-lined ridge that formed a sort of ceremonial route to the foot of the crag. To his right was a barbed-wire fence. It had pleased his Victorian ancestors to quarry for granite here, and the fence was a token warning – ignored every summer by children and climbers – to stay clear of the cliffs. Lorna Kemp hadn’t fallen down there. That would have been an easy and dreadful solution, discounted right away by sniffer dogs and Commander Summers’ ground-search team. Gideon steadied himself, holding on to a fence post. His bones were vibrating.

What in God’s name was that noise? It rose up long and low from the moorland behind him. He wanted to turn. He had always faced his enemies head-on – teeth gritted, every muscle in a stubborn defiant knot. But the sound grew louder, closer, and something in its desolation held Gideon still.

The gorse crunched and swayed. Gideon’s attention fixed on a spider’s web, a huge cob of silver concentrics spun between one bush and the next. First its tracery of droplets shivered and fell. Then it exploded into rags. Gideon’s dog, a fat border collie deemed too brainless to herd even the docile local sheep, shot out of the thicket. She raced past her master without a second glance and vanished off into the mist.

The sound abruptly stopped. Then it boiled up again, closer than any beast’s natural movement could account for – a howl, a wail, a shriek like the painful opening up of the earth. Gideon’s useless dog
had abandoned him, but her terror at least had awakened his own. He sucked in one lung-clenching gasp of the fog, and he ran.

***

The Dark police house lay a mile outside the village. The shortest way to it was straight down the track from the Hurlers stone circles, but Gideon hadn’t taken that route, some instinct of evasion sending him plunging across the stretch of broken rocks to the south of the crag. Only a man who’d grown up here could have crossed these barrens in one piece. As it was he was grazed from a fall, soaked to the skin with brackish water from the peat ponds. He was fit, but his breath was scraping harshly in his chest. He took the stile from the moor into the lane in one flying vault.

He’d left a light on in the porch. It shed a yellow gleam across his front garden and the wet slate path. Gideon pounded down the lane, strands of ivy and honeysuckle dumping their accumulation of mist-water onto him from the overhanging walls. His feet slid on the slates. He tore the porch door open. The dog emerged from some hiding place in the garden and charged past him for safety, almost knocking him down. The inner door opened with one wrench of its heavy old lock. Shoving it wide, Gideon darted inside and slammed it after him. There was no point in worrying about the outer door, a flimsy new construction of glass and aluminium. The wood behind him now – he pressed his spine to it, gasping – was solid, made at the same time as his thick-walled house.

His legs were about to give. He had failed to bring home Lorna Kemp, the one missing-child case that had ever come his way. He had just been chased off the moor by his own imagination – the wind in the gorse, probably, or one of Bill Prowse’s brood up to their tricks. To save himself the final shame of landing on his backside on the floor, he made it to the hearthside chair and sat down.

The stove was dark and cold. James had used to get home from work first, and even a year after his departure, Gideon often forgot that he was no longer there to start the fire. He looked around the bare front room. An enthusiastic primary-school teacher, by now James would have strewn it with Halloween rubbish for the benefit of trick-or-treating kids. Pumpkins in the window, strings of ghost-faced fairy lights... The only thing he’d left behind was his bloody awful model of the B
odmin Beast, a big-cat/werewolf hybrid cast in resin and painted to glow in the dark. The phosphorescence had worn off. Gideon, not over-careful about housework this last year, had forgotten about it, left it behind the curtain to gather dust.

The damn thing was glowing now. Gideon sat still, listening. He twitched when his useless do
g squeezed out from under the sideboard. She crept to his feet. Her hackles were raised, her poor distracted eyes vacant. “You’re useless,” he whispered, and in a sudden surge of empathy allowed her to jump into his lap – all four stone of her, smelling of sheep-shit and fear. She didn’t look much happier, but he guessed it was any port in a storm.

He list
ened again. There was nothing to hear. No sounds from the village reached his house, and the mist had dropped a curtain on the blackbirds’ twilight song. A curtain, a thick oppressive blanket, muffling even the beat of his heart...

Silence. And then the long, slow scrape of a claw against wood.

Gideon set the dog down. Rage leapt like fire in him. If this was the Prowse kids out on a prank, God had better put wings on their heels. And if all sense and reason had broken down and a six-foot monster
was
waiting on Gideon’s doorstep, so be it – let it eat him, if it could choke him down. He’d had enough. He strode over to the door and ripped it open.

The mist swirled. Vague shapes moved within it. No kids’ footsteps fled, and no stifled giggles echoed in the lane. Gideon was alone. After a moment he stepped back inside and closed the door.

The Kemps lived in a tiny mid-terrace house on the outskirts of Dark. Gideon had attended there every day since Lorna’s disappearance. For his first few visits, the family had seized upon him like an angel. What he’d become to them now, he had no idea. He was pretty sure he wasn’t helping any more. But he couldn’t stop.

The little street, part of his childhood’s background, was grimly well known to him now. He noted each landmark on his approach – old Mr Trewarren’s box of eggs for sale, the tight-shut curtains of number thirty two, behind which Gideon was fairly sure a crop of good Cornish weed was flourishing. Last night’s fog had dispersed and delicate autumn sunlight was picking out the shapes of pumpkin heads in the windows. Number thirty four, up until two weeks ago an ordinary family home, frost-browned geraniums in pots by the front door...

Gideon knocked tentatively. After a few seconds Joe Kemp appeared behind the frosted glass. Not the child’s father – her uncle, brother to the feckless Alf who’d shipped out a couple of years before, leaving Sarah to cope as best she might with Lorna and the other two kids. A good soul, was Joe. He was Gideon’s oldest mate, the one person he’d ever spoken to – even obliquely – about James. He’d really stepped into the breach. He looked very tired this morning, the waiting and watching beginning to take serious toll. He was one of the few in the village who could still find a smile for the visiting copper, and Gideon returned it gratefully.

“All right, Joe? How is she today?”

“Oh – about the same. Any fresh tidings?”

Always the same exchange. Gideon knew it could only alter now by a miracle, or the news that would end everything. “Nothing yet. I just wanted to tell Sarah that Lorna’s details are online now with the international missing-children’s database.”

“Thanks. International, though? She vanished while she was playing with the Prowse kids on the moor. She didn’t hop on a plane to Marbella.”

“I know, but...” Gideon hesitated. Joe had been fond of his brother for all his faults, and none of the leads to Alf had panned out. He was long gone. “Someone might have taken her out of the country. Anyway, it’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. Look, before you go through... Sarah’s got someone with her.”

“Okay. I can come back later.”

“To be honest with you...” Joe scratched his head. “I’d rather you went in now. Sarah wants to try every avenue, but I’m not too happy – ”

“Who’s with her, Joe?”

“Somebody called Lee Tyack. A psychic. Now, Gid, don’t be angry...”

Gideon wasn’t angry. There was no point in spending out good rage on these sticky bits of fluff who attached themselves to the edges of a crime scene. Cornwall had plenty of them. The
important thing was to detach them, send them blowing off on the breeze, before they could do any damage. Gideon strode through the narrow little passage. Sarah Kemp was sitting at the kitchen table, Lee Tyack opposite her. Yes, a fine example of the type – long skirts, gold bracelets chiming. Probably good-hearted: they usually were, and certainly she was gazing at Sarah with genuine concern. Organised, too. A file was spread out in front of her, and she was wearing unusually sensible shoes. Somebody else was in the background – a young man in jeans and checked shirt, apparently examining the windows. God, was Gideon going to have to warn Sarah about cowboy double-glazing guys, too?

Not right now. He had his priorities. He planted himself by the table. He didn’t often use his presence, his rugby-player bulk, to make an impression, but he wasn’t sorry when the fall
of his shadow made the psychic jump. “Sarah,” he said, gently as he could, unable to keep an ancient Bodmin rumble from his voice. “I know you’re distraught. But I don’t think you’ll help anyone by listening to someone who’s a well-meaning idiot at best and at worst a charlatan.”

Oh, but he
was
angry, wasn’t he? Beneath an aching shell of self-restraint, angry and betrayed that Sarah had chosen this path. The charlatan stared up at him, not visibly insulted. “Oh dear,” she said. “I do seem to have come at an awkward time, Mrs Kemp. I tell you what – I’ll go and make my other calls around the village, and I’ll come back and see you later, eh?” With that she gathered up her folder and made for the kitchen door, nodding pleasantly to Gideon en route.

Sarah Kemp sprang to her feet.
She was soft-skinned and pretty, a famous catch around the villages when Alf Kemp had been courting and somehow landed her. What had made him leave her was a greater mystery still. “What the bloody hell was that for, Gideon Frayne?”

He stared at her. Her eyes were raw from grief and sleeplessness. “I’m sorry. But I’ve got to protect you – ”

“From my social worker? That was Sue Harley, you great plod!”

“Shit. Joe didn’t say she was here.”

“No, she came in the back way while Lee was talking to me, and...”

The young man by the window turned around. His expression was at once amused and mortified. He put out a hand to Gideon. “And Mrs Harley had less time than I did, so... I’m Lee Tyack, registered clairvoyant with the National Association of – ”

“Of charlatans, according to the village bobby here.” Sarah was boiling with fury. She was such a gentle woman – had taken even this most recent hammer-blow to her life so quietly – that Gideon hardly recognised her. “Why shouldn’t I talk to him, Gideon? I didn’t pick his name out of the Cornish Herald, you know – your own HQ in Truro sent him along. And what bloody good have you done, to try and stop me finding help elsewhere? It’s been a fortnight – thirteen nights on that moor for my little girl, if she’s even still alive. You’ve been useless. You’ve done nothing. You’ve – ”

“Mrs Kemp, stop.”

Gideon flinched. He’d forgotten the psychic was there, vortexing down as he was with Sarah into the bottomless pool of her grief. Lee Tyack laid a hand on her arm. “You can’t talk like that,” he went on kindly. “Gideon’s been working night and day on this, just like he’s worked all his life to keep everyone safe in this village.”

Gideon swallowed hard. Did he know this man? Had he somehow missing having a friend who knew all about his endless hours spent on this case – who was ready to defend him in that warm and matter-of-fact tone?

No. He had no such friend. If Tyack looked familiar, it was just because he was part of that widespread Cornish brood who came into the world with olive skins and grey-green eyes that looked silvery pale by contrast. Wiry dark hair going prematurely white at the brow. It was a type, and this example of it thought he had something to gain by buttering up the local police. Gideon drew a breath to tell him how little chance he stood, even if someone at Truro HQ had decided PC Frayne was failing at his job and needed –

The back door flew open. Sarah jumped hard, as she did now at every phone call and tap at the door. Elsie Waite half fell into the room. She kept the little village shop down the road, and clearly Lee Tyack was the most enthralling event to befall her in years. She couldn’t keep her eyes off him. “Mrs Radnor’s had a turn,” she announced breathlessly. “Your landlady, Mr Tyack, the one that keeps the B and B where you was going to stay. They’ve taken her into the hospital.” Finally she paused and noticed Gideon. “Oh, Constable Frayne, are you here? This is Lee Tyack, you kn
ow. Me and my sister went to his show down in Falmouth. He’s ever so good – been on the telly and everything.” Her eyes flew wide. “Oh, I tell you what – if Mr Tyack can’t stay down the road, why don’t he stop with you? You’re rattling around in that big house, aren’t you, since your James...”

She ground to a halt, blushing floridly. “Since my lodger moved out,” Gideon finished for her. As far as the village and the rest of the world had known, there had been nothing more to James than that. “I’m a police officer. Even if I could offer Mr Tyack accommodation, it wouldn’t be appropriate – ”

“Oh, Gideon!” He shut up. Sarah was sitting with her head in her hands. Sobs were tugging at her shoulders. “Don’t be so... bloody pompous. He’s here to help me, not on holiday.”

Gideon ran a hand across his hair. It was cropped short, or he’d have torn a handful out in frustration. A tiny sealed-off part of him wanted to sit down beside her and weep too. “All right,” he said
roughly. “I can’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, Sarah. Don’t give him any money upfront, that’s all, and...” He looked up. Tyack was watching him, his pale gaze impenetrable “And you – Tyack – if you can help her, do it. Just don’t give her any false hopes.”

He let himself back into the hall. His hopes of ducking out unnoticed died as Joe came out to intercept him, arms folded over his chest, brow furrowed in anxiety. Gideon could see the track of restless pacing he’d left on the living-room rug. “What did you think of him?” Joe demanded nervously. “Did you chuck him out?”

“No. Like Sarah says – what right do I have, if I can’t help her myself?”

“Oh. You’ll have to for
give her, Gid. She’s just about out of her mind.”

“It’s fine.
Seems the Truro constabulary sent this guy out anyway. I’ll make sure that’s true, and I’ll call you if there’s any problems.”

“Your people sent him? They don’t think there’s
anything in his sort of nonsense, do they? Do you?”

Joe, last night I was chased home by the Beast of Bodmin. I’m in no position to judge.
Gideon straightened his shoulders. “Well, it’s a strange world, isn’t it? I meant to ask – were you out around twilight last night?”

“I always am. I’ve got sheep to feed.”

Gideon knew that. He hadn’t asked Joe why he’d been out. He wished he hadn’t seen his twitch, and he pushed it as far out of his mind as a good copper could let it go: the fond family uncle was almost too easy a suspect in a missing-child case, and Gideon and the CID team had already checked out his movements around the time of Lorna’s disappearance. Gideon had known the whole Kemp family from his childhood. Anyone in Joe’s situation would be twitching by this time. “I know that,” Gideon said gently. “What I wondered was – you didn’t hear anything unusual, did you? Up on the crags near the Cheesewring?”

Joe smiled wanly. He shook his head. “Don’t
you
go imagining things on us now, Constable. There’s always strange noises up there. It’ll be the wind through the rocks, or one of Bill Prowse’s mangy cattle giving birth.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” Gideon
managed a smile, grateful for Joe’s attempt at humour. “Look, I should go. Tell Sarah I’m liaising with a DNA profiling expert at Scotland Yard. He should be sending one of his team down later this week – just in case Derek Acorah through there doesn’t manage to crack our case for us.”