Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor (6 page)

No time for shock, for the sickness of friendship betrayed, of a wolf in the fold for so long. No time for wonder, either, at what could have brought Joe to harm the family he’d adored since Alf Kemp left. During his short run to the
police station, Gideon allowed himself only the businesslike reflection that Joe had done it well, set things up so that the search would start in the wrong place, and then, as more of the truth came out, blame would be cast on Bill Prowse. Bill was a good scapegoat – universally disliked, and a glance through the living-room window would have told Joe he was out for the count that night.

Gideon took the steps up to the station door in one. “Liz!” he barked, making her jump and drop her
biscuit into her tea. “Get me the number for Detective Inspector Kinver at Truro, the CID guy. Quick! And did you make that call to the school?”

“Yes, soon as you told me. What’s going on, Gid?”

“Never mind. Just get me... Is that it? Great. Ta.”

Gideon sat down. He made his call. This time he felt no alarm, no hesitation at bringing such big guns to bear on his little village case: Joe Kemp knew where the child was, and
he had to be found. The Truro inspector didn’t ask what had brought Gideon to this conclusion. Gideon was grateful, but not in the startled way of the day before when the search and K-9 men had come at his bidding. He’d served this community well. He was a reliable officer, and his word had been taken at its proper value. Reinforcements would be sent to him. A county-wide lookout alert would be set up at once for Joe. Dog handlers and a forensics team would be dispatched to the Prowse house.

Prows, windows, blue and green roses... There wasn’t time now to tell the inspector where the credit lay, but Gideon would rectify that as soon as he could. He asked for some men to be sent back to Wheal Catherine: nothing had been found there, but now Gideon couldn’t afford to leave any part of Lee’s vision untended.

Lee. Gideon hung up, absently taking the coffee Liz handed him. Lee had been right about everything so far. Gideon needed him here. He dialled his home number, stray memories of the odd call to James, their stilted conversations, bouncing off him and flying away. There was no answer. Maybe Lee was out with Isolde, or was hesitant to pick up the landline in his host’s home. That was the only contact Gideon had. He’d never foreseen that a day would come when he’d end up sharing body fluids with a man before exchanging mobile numbers, but there it was. “Liz,” he said, jumping to his feet. “I have to go get Lee Tyack. I’ll take the Rover after that and check Joe’s fields up by the crags. Radio me as soon as any of the guys from Truro arrive here, okay?”

***

The house was still and quiet. Gideon, breathless from his run up the lane, pushed open the living-room door. “Lee? You here?”

The dog trotted through to greet him. Normally she hurled herself at his knees with knock-down force, but there were lights in her eyes he’d never seen before, a new focus. He crouched down to her. “Is it your
fancy name, then, Isolde?” He rumpled her ears. “Where’s Lee?”

The kitchen was tidy. Their breakfast things had been washed and set to dry in the rack. Isolde had been taken for a good walk, to judge from her serenity and the pair of borrowed wellingtons by the back door, mud-stained and with extra socks inside them to make them fit. Gideon grinned. He did meet the traditional copper’s requirement
of having great big feet. Isolde’s leash had been neatly hung on its hook. Briefly Gideon indulged a fantasy where Lee had heard him coming down the lane and run back upstairs to bed, where he was now waiting seductively.

He was a forthright soul, but Gideon didn’t think that was quite his style. He went up to have a look anyway. The stupid thing was that he’d have had to turn him down. He couldn’t believe that, after so many uneventful years, he had a lover to deal with on the same day as a child abductor. He looked around the bedroom. “Lee?”

The chair where Lee had set down his holdall was vacant. The pile of his clothes was gone. In the bathroom, only Gideon’s own spartan kit of washing and shaving gear stared back at him. The house was empty.

Gideon went back downstairs. He checked that Isolde had fresh water, then he shrugged into his uniform waterproof and locked up the house behind him. Bowing his head against the rain, he went to get the Rover from her car port round the side of the house. He’d been headed out to
Joe Kemp’s pastures, and that was where he had to go.

Nothing had changed. Something very ordinary had happened, that was all – a sweet but impulsive man had spent an hour or so alone, cooling off on a rainy morning after. He’d kindly washed up and walked the dog, but then he’d packed
up his things and left. He would know that Gideon could track him down through the Truro police, but he’d conveyed his plea to be left alone by not leaving a note. All this was normal, far more the way of the world than passion and companionship out of nowhere, a magical end to being alone. In fact Gideon’s night with Lee Tyack now felt far more like a fairytale than the idea of the Bodmin Beast. Gideon sat in the damp silence, the scents of his waterproof and the Rover’s upholstery – vinyl, strong hint of dog – catching at the edges of his attention. Given his treatment of James, his long failure to stand up for his lover, for himself and his life, he supposed this was pretty much what he deserved. Yes, everything as right and grim as Bodmin rain, except...

Except for Lee. Gideon had only known him for twenty four hours, but he couldn’t fit this exit, this quiet, neat departure, with what he’d seen of the man. It was too...

Too tidy. The wet windscreen dissolved, and suddenly Gideon was back in Sarah Kemp’s house two years before. He was looking around the bedroom she’d occupied with Alf. She hadn’t been heartbroken by his departure – a bit relieved, maybe. She’d turned to Gideon with a tired, resigned smile.
Well, that’s him gone, I suppose. At least he left everything tidy. Not like him at all.

It
was
like Lee. Gideon thought about the shoes he’d politely taken off before curling up on the sofa, the wellingtons left on a sheet of newspaper in the porch. No incongruity there. What was odd was the state of the bed. Lee hadn’t touched it, not even pulled the duvet back to air. It had still looked as though orangutans had wrestled away a night there.

Incongruity, a thing that didn’t fit. Mute messages – a tidy room left by an untidy man, and a rumpled bed left by...

Gideon leaned forward, clenching one hand on the wheel. “Oh, God, Joe. No!”

***

He radioed Liz and asked her to call the local taxi firm, as well as the inveterately nosy Mrs Poldue, whose house overlooked the bus stop – also to find any numbers listed on Lee Tyack’s website and call those. By the time he had driven back to the station, Liz was on the steps to meet him, hands spread wide. “No, Gideon. He’s not answering. And nobody’s seen him – nobody at all.”

Up the street, cars were pulling to a halt. Two were unmarked but a third had all lights blazing, livery glowing bright in th
e rain. The Truro detective inspector emerged from it, fastening up his coat. He held out a hand. “Hear you’ve had a breakthrough in the Lorna Kemp case, PC Frayne.”

“I believe so, sir.” The man Gideon had been two days ago would have hesitated, afraid of his own convictions. “And I want to report the clairvoyant Lee Tyack as missing, too. We have to track down Joe Kemp.”

At seven o’clock, black night had come down, and Gideon was alone. He stopped by the barbed-wire fence and turned off his torch.

This was the one night in the year when the village defied its name. Better than Bonfire Night, better even than Christmas, the people of Dark liked their Halloween and pulled out all the stops for it. From high up on the moor, Gideon co
uld see that almost every house had its pumpkin lantern. The streets were being threaded by torchlight as parents and older siblings steered toddlers through an orgy of sweeties and annoying their elderly neighbours. In the old manor house, the witches were reclaiming their Samhain night, setting out milk and honey for their ancestral dead, sealing each window with a holy-water star.
Seal the gate. We have to seal the gate...

Gideon shuddered and switched his torch on
again. The village was a handful of jewelled fire on an infinite black velvet backcloth. He belonged down there, making sure no tricks got out of hand – simply walking the streets, off duty, out of uniform, a familiar face. Soon he would go.

The trouble was that Lorna Kemp, although not a cold case yet
, was cooling off. The Prowse kid – under who knew what duress from Bill – had refused to tell his story again, and the lab results from the forensics team who’d worked in the house all day would take some time to return. As for Lee Tyack, he was an adult. So his absence only meant that he had hitched a ride and gone off on business of his own. Forty eight hours before a grown man could be listed as missing: no-one knew that better than Gideon.

Nevertheless DI
Kinver had taken Gideon’s fears seriously, brought to bear all his resources of men and tracker dogs in the hunt for Joe. Guided and directed by Gideon, the teams had spent all day following up every sniff and trace of him, while poor Sarah Kemp, finally overcome by this latest development, lay sedated in her bed. But at dusk, Kinver had caught Gideon’s arm. A night search was dangerous and hard to organise, and this wasn’t a good time for it. Halloween could get rowdy in the towns, and his men would be stretched thin. They would resume tomorrow. Gideon should remember, though, that Joe Kemp might have had other reasons for leaving Dark. He had no criminal record. He’d been a good uncle to the child. Gideon had done all he could: he should try and get some rest now.

And so here Gideon was, just as he had been, as if the last forty eight hours had been swallowed up into the night.
A good uncle
, Kinver had said, as if that were an end to the matter, an answer in itself. For the most part Gideon was glad he lived in a corner of the world where such labels still had value and weight.
A good shepherd
, the villagers had called Pastor Frayne, and they’d told Gideon how fortunate he was to be such a man’s son, and he had believed them.

Joe Kemp had been a good shepherd in the most prosaic sense. He’d come flying down to the village on his quad
bike one day, in a panic because one of his best ewes was caught among some rocks up near the Cheesewring crag. Gideon had hopped on the back of the bike – such was the life of a village bobby – and together they’d freed the beast, Joe sweating all the time and telling Gideon to mind where he put his big feet, because...

Because legend had it
there were gaps beneath those rocks. Caverns and tunnels, some of them as deep as the earth.

Gideon pushed the thought away. He had had a long fortnight of hopes raised and dashed, of following marshlights in his own mind. The ports and airports were on alert for Joe Kemp, who probably had gone to see a girlfriend on the sly in Truro. Alf Kemp was likely sleeping on the beaches in Ibiza. Lee Tyack, jade eyes shadowed, was probably putting his feet up on his sofa at home and wondering what on earth had possessed him the night before.

No. Gideon knew that last part wasn’t true, with as much conviction as had ever seized Lee during one of his visions. Gideon had never had a psychic flash in his life. He just knew men, and Lee would have left him a note. No matter what his regrets, he’d have found an honest way of saying goodbye.

Gideon had never got out to Joe’s pastures earlier on that day. He’d gone rushing back to the station, and the tracker dogs had taken him and the search crew off in another direction. He should at
the very least go up there and check on the sheep. The gap in the hillside meant nothing to him. He’d never even be able to find it again, in the mist-shrouded giant’s playground of rocks. “Isolde!” he called, and nobody called back
Tristan
, but to his surprise his dog emerged right away from the gorse and sat at his feet. She looked up him. For the first time, her presence was a comfort.

The climb around the side of the crag to the pastures was one of the loneliest of Gideon’s life. For a while he could follow the hawthorn-edged track, the ceremonial way with its odd feel of safety, as if it led over shark-filled water. Leaving it, he had a sense of leaving human territory behind, of entering into the realm of...

Of what? He forced himself to analyse his fears. They were gut reactions, instincts, just the endocrinal surge of a primate cut off from his group and all alone in the dark. No entity, no Beast held sway here. If a human of Gideon’s village had begun to commit bestial acts, that was bad enough, more than enough for him to concern himself about.

It was just that no human presence could account for the crawling dread hampering his every breath and step. He held the torch steady before him and scrambled over the rocks that lay strewn across the hillside. The thick mist reflected and scattered the beam of his torch so that he moved in a globe of light. Maybe the batteries were dying. For every few yards of ground he covered, it seemed that the globe grew smaller, the weight of the night pressing in.

He wasn’t wanted here. Emerging onto the field of rough turf where Joe’s sheep grazed, Gideon came to a halt. He didn’t believe in God. He had no cross around his neck to clutch. What did he have, to ward off whatever the hell was haunting this moor? He closed his eyes. That was an act of faith in itself, and in his own darkness – not the dead black of the night – he could see. He was back in his kitchen in the world below. Lee Tyack straddled his lap: smiled at him, kissed him.
I can’t believe you thought this might have been only for one night.

That moment – even more than the sex they’d shared – was sacred to Gideon. He held on fast to it. The air was shaking.
You feel the sound before you hear it, a low vibration in your bones...
Gideon had absorbed his folklore and fairytales as a child, no matter how Pastor Frayne disapproved them. He knew the magical power of three. Three bears, three Cinderella sisters, three billygoats Gruff and the troll that lived under the bridge...

The third howl on the moor. Gideon straightened up. Too far to run for home now. He opened his eyes, and when the hellish sound arose from the subsonic and began to spiral around him, he let it. He stood still. The cry died away. Its echoes broke like waves against the crags. A wet scald on his cold upper lip made him lift a hand: his nose was bleeding, his blood lurid crimson in the torchlight.

There was something on the turf in front of him – a kind of black heap. “Isolde?” he said uncertainly. A head lifted from the lump of fur. Yes, it was his dog. She was crouched down so low that she looked legless. Her eyes were white-rimmed with fear, and her face was contorted into a hideous mask of a snarl, but she was there, for all the world as if she’d been trying to guard him. “Good girl. That’s a good girl, now – come here.”

But then she seemed to revert to type. She rushed Gideon’s ankles, nearly knocking him down.
Then she began to weave one of her frantic circling patterns around him. Her nose was to the ground, her breath huffing as she sniffed the turf. She raised her head, looked at her master as if sizing him up – rushed him again, this time from behind. Her teeth closed sharply in the flesh of his thigh, an inch short of his backside. He jerked away. “Ouch! You sod, Isolde – did you just
bite
me?” She didn’t deny it. She had gone into an odd crouch, her rump in the air, front legs flat, looking up at him expectantly. Gideon rubbed his arse. No, not a bite. More of a nip. He’d barely have felt it if he’d been a sheep. They weren’t much use as tracker dogs, these collies, but... “Dog – are you trying to herd me?”

She shot away into the dark. Three seconds later she was back, slingshotting round him, this time stopping short of a bite. Gideon got the idea.
He set off in the direction she was showing him. He began to run.