Guardians Of The Haunted Moor (18 page)

“
All right. I’ll stay with Dev until they take him to
hospital.” Her expression became resentful. “It’s not that I’m not
fond of him, you know. Your Lee must be awful to live
with.”

“
Horrible,” Gideon agreed, putting an arm around him. “I don’t
get away with much. Mind you get a taxi to take you back
home.”

Down in the hallway, the doctor was just hanging up the phone.
“Right,” he said placidly, as if he got called out to murder scenes
every night. “That’s the admission sorted out—I’ve managed to swing
a bed for him in Fletcher Ward.” He politely ignored Sergeant
Pendower’s gasp of delight and the frantic scratching of his pen
across another sheet of notes. Gideon could guess the
gist—
Tyack not only identifies primary
concerns of everyone present in the upstairs room, but correctly
predicts psychiatric facility. Marvellous!
Well, as Lee and Paul Simon had pointed out before, proof was
the bottom line for everyone. “To be honest,” the doctor went on,
“from the look of the lad, he should’ve been in some kind of care
before now. Anything more I can do for you tonight, Detective
Inspector?”

“
No, that’s all. Just have the hospital call me when he’s well
enough to be interviewed.”

“
Not sure when that’ll be, but right you are.”

He
jogged off up the stairs. Lawrence watched him go, then turned back
to Gideon and Lee. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’m sorry to
raise such a painful subject, and I know this probably isn’t the
time, but... you two really did get handed a raw deal with regard
to your baby. I don’t want to say anything definite, but I’m sure
one of our colleagues in France could find a reason to pay the
child’s mother a visit. Just to see if there are any welfare
issues, you know.”

Lee
smiled wearily. He pushed his shoulder against Gideon’s, and the
wave of grief passed between them—strong, unstoppable, bearable
because finally and perfectly shared. “Were you thinking of
frog-marching my sister home?”

“
No, not at all. Just a few routine enquiries.”

“
It’s all right,” Gideon said, taking hold of his hand. “We’ve
decided to leave it for now.”

***

My name is Locryn Tyack-Frayne, and Gideon is with me, and
nothing can dislodge my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death...
Gideon
recollected his wandering thoughts. One manic preacher in the
family was enough. All he needed to pray for was strength to
justify Lee’s faith in him.

He rubbed his eyes in the morning sunlight. It was past time
he was out on the mean streets of Dark, tackling the string of
interviews that would fill his day from this bright dawn until the
late summer dusk. No bad thing, to be kept so busy, and Lee had
said he’d be occupied all day as well, taking up his interrupted
work on the
Spirits of Cornwall
script. Work was best for both of them. Still,
Gideon had let him sleep through their alarm. Given himself five
quiet minutes too, between pulling on his uniform shirt, checking
his duty belt and heading out the door. He just wanted to sit here
in the window of the bedroom where he and Lee had shared so
much—sex, rambling small-hours discussions about everything and
nothing at all, their first morning of waking up alone with Tamsyn
and realising fully at last that they were parents—and watch his
husband sleep.

He did
it with an abandoned grace that showed nothing of the nightmares
that stalked his daily world. He was lying on his stomach, the
quilt tangled up round his hips. The sunlight took the smooth olive
skin of his back and turned it to gold, the colour of the beach at
the foot of his borderland cliffs. His hands were lightly clasped
on the pillow, his breathing deep and regular. When Gideon listened
to that, he lost track of all the evil and sorrow in his own life
and the broader world around him. It was as if Lee stripped away
his outer layers, all the roles he’d taken on, father and brother
and husband and son. He didn’t even feel like a copper anymore—just
a man, sharing a sunlit silence with the other half of his
soul.

And yet
the qualities that made him a good copper were more at liberty than
ever in this pared-back freedom. They were fundamental aspects of
his nature. He watched and observed. He didn’t assign weight to
what he’d seen until he had facts at his disposal, and so he wasn’t
burdened by assumptions. He moved freely through his inner and
outer Dark, gathering his own quiet harvest.

He’d
been caught out rather last night. The little group in the
farmhouse hallway had been distracting, Lee and the inspector and
the doctor, and Pendower with his fanboy zeal. Gideon’s good
policeman’s brain had continued to record through all the chaos,
and he’d seen something, hadn’t he? Something ordinary but out of
place.

Lee’s
quiet breathing brought down the barriers, telling him to look
again. John and Bligh Bowe had kept an orderly household. Like many
of the old farming families, they preferred to leave the barnyard
outside, and the inside of the house was tidy. The doctor had been
scribbling on a notepad by the phone. Everything in the small,
crowded space was where you’d expect it to be, except for the
crumpled scrap of paper on the floor.

Look a little closer, Gid. Not just crumpled.
Torn.

Gideon glanced up in amusement, but Lee was still out cold,
his fingertips twitching with dreams. Obediently he returned his
attention to the Carnysen farmhouse, and read off the five letters
on the discarded scrap. B-A-R-A-G... Only the surname
Baragwanath
began like
that, an unusual one even by Cornish standards. The rest of the
note was in pieces, scattered along the skirting board.
Not just torn, Lee. Ripped to shreds.

The computer in the living room was up and running. Gideon
tapped
Bodmin
and
his handful of letters into the internet hoping for an autofill
suggestion, but nothing came up. He stood for a moment, paying
attention to his aches and pains from yesterday. He had a few burns
on his hands, which Lee had disinfected and bandaged before they’d
crawled into bed. He imagined poor Pendower was feeling the results
of his exertions too. Smiling at the memory of that electrified
brush-cut, he consigned the torn-up note to his own inner search
engine, where his subconscious could work away at it. He’d get
access to the farmhouse as soon as he could and patch the rest
together, but for today at least the place would be locked up.
Almost impossible to believe that the family which had thrived
there for so long had been cut down to one lost lamb.

Dev, the autumn lamb. He was such a fragile scrap, and yet if
he hadn’t been safely locked up in Bodmin psychiatric, Gideon would
have arrested him by now. Loved ones
were
always first on the list of
suspects, and Lee’s vision in the cornfield remained vivid—that,
and his warning.
The lamb hasn’t finished
his work...

Gideon
wondered if the work was finished now. It would all have to wait.
He had to see the coroner for the preliminary report on Bligh’s
death, and then begin his interview rounds. He stopped off by the
bed. Lee made a sound of sleepy welcome and tried to grab his hand,
but he dodged it, chuckling. “Not now, handsome. I’ll see you
tonight.”

“
You’re all dressed. What time is it?”

“
Morning.”

“
Which part of it? I should get up too, make a start on my
scripts.” Lee pulled his mobile out from under the pillow to check
the time, and frowned at what he saw.

Gideon
reached to ruffle his hair. “What’s up?”

“
Nothing. Just... later than I thought.”

“
No need for you to leap out of bed, is there? You still look
tired.”

“
You know what? I am. I slept all night, but my head was noisy.
I might take one of my horse pills.”

“
Are you sure?” Anxiety prickled at Gideon’s nape. Lee had a
prescription of high-dosage sedatives left over from the days when
his doctors hadn’t been able to tell his gifts from a brain tumour.
He hadn’t needed to touch them in months. “They knock you right
out, and I won’t be around to look after you.”

“
Isn’t that the one time when I
don’t
need you to keep me out of
mischief?” Lee shot him a scapegrace smile. “Be honest with you,
love, I could use a break. Being awake has limited appeal at the
moment.”

***

Twelve
o’clock found Gideon in Bodmin town, tracking down Sally Polwen on
her break from the post office there. Like everyone else he’d
spoken to that morning, she was shocked, sympathetic, and utterly
unhelpful. Gideon wasn’t quite sure why he was using his day’s best
energies on people who could no more kill than fly, but he had a
job to do, and he owed it to Lawrence to eliminate the angels
before chasing mythical demons and beasts. After he was done, he
granted himself twenty minutes for lunch, and on impulse went into
the Petroc Library café. It was generally peaceful there, and he
wanted a wander through the shelves. After grabbing a coffee and a
sandwich, he set out.

He
wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He was pretty certain he
wouldn’t find it among the chicklit and harrowing life stories,
though, and he left the brightly lit modern shelves and found his
way into the cooler shadows of the building’s heart, where dusty
legal and accounting texts served out their time largely untouched.
The elder gentlemen of Bodmin, unused to seeing a burly copper in
the aisles where they too waited out their days, slipped out of his
way like mice, but Gideon wasn’t interested—never had been—in
moving them along. He just wanted to look at some old
books.

He’d
liked it here as a child. The leather-bound volumes had smelled
lovely to him, and he’d prowled here, inventing labyrinths and
warzones, while Ma Frayne had exchanged her Mills & Boons and
chatted to the librarians. He’d liked the names of the old
solicitors, printed in fading gold on the spines of their legal
texts, which had given him names for his own expanding population
of imaginary heroes and villains. Borlase, Godolphin,
Rawle.

Baragwanath, Keast & Co, the town’s longest-established
law firm, and just about its most obscure. Gideon wasn’t even sure
they were in business anymore.

Technically he was allowed an hour for lunch. He seldom took
it, but if he did, that would leave him with thirty minutes more
before he had to go back to the methodical plod-work. The offices
had used to be tucked away down a side street by the chapel, a
two-minute walk from here. He gave the Baragwanath book a
thoughtful tap, raising a small cloud of dust.

He was
on his way out when frantic movement from one of the desks caught
his eye. He paused by the doorway. To his surprise, Rufus Pendower
was sitting at a table in the reading room, surrounded by piles of
volumes as venerable as Gideon’s own. He was beckoning excitedly.
Yesterday the sight of him would have annoyed Gideon, but his
grim-faced courage in the Carnysen fields had altered things. He
hadn’t quite managed to smooth down the lightning-bolt hairdo.
Gideon went over to him, forbidding himself a smile. “Afternoon,
Pendower. Come to pay your overdues?”

“
No, no. I’ve been doing some research. I think I’ve found
something interesting.”

Scattered explosions of hushing rang out. There were about
ten people in the room, and none of them engaged in the perusal of
anything more serious than the local papers, as far as Gideon could
see. He and Pendower raked the desks with a well-practised
officer’s glare, and the objectors fell silent. “Right,” Gideon
said. “I’ve only got a few minutes. Can you tell me
fast?”

“
Yes, but do sit down. How’s L-... er, Mr Tyack?”

“
You can call him Lee.” Reluctantly Gideon pulled out a chair.
It was so unlike his tough other half to choose drugged oblivion
over reality. “He’s fine,” he said, more to convince himself than
Pendower. “He’s working from home today, though. He needs a
rest.”

“
Yes, I’m sure. The things he said, the things he saw in his
visions—they set me thinking. They were ringing all kinds of bells
with me from my graduate studies, everything I’ve learned about
names and their origins.” He drew a huge leather-bound tome across
the table and laid it reverently in front of Gideon. “This is
Mellin’s lexicon of the Cornish language, drawn up in 1873. I
thought Bligh and Dev were strange first names, so I looked them
up, or rather I chased them through what I knew of their etymology.
Bligh is a nickname from the Kernowek word
blyth
, or wolf. And the word
for
lamb
is
deves
.”

“
No, it’s not.” Gideon knew this because he’d heard Lee singing
nursery rhymes in Cornish to the baby. “The word for lamb is
on
.”

“
Well, okay. But
deves
is the plural form for a ewe, so—”

“
So you’re clutching at straws. That’s a big stretch for a
connection.”

“
Maybe not. Imagine you’re Dev Bowe, and you’re a paranoid
schizophrenic who’s just lost his parents. You’re convinced your
brothers have got something to do with their deaths, and you’re
alone in your room all day, drugged up, with access to an internet
connection. If Dev thinks of himself as a lamb—and a ewe lamb, at
that, not big and husky like his brothers, dressing up in his mum’s
nighties—he might have made these connections too. But that’s not
all.
Bowe
is quite
an unusual surname too. It’s usually
Bowes
, isn’t it? Like the queen
mother’s family.”