Guardians Of The Haunted Moor (7 page)

A
short-lived, bone-deep respite. Gideon stayed where he was when
they were both spilled out and done, only withdrawing when they ran
out of breathable air beneath the duvet. They surfaced reluctantly,
clambering into each other’s arms. Gideon traced the lines of Lee’s
face with a fingertip. He caressed the swollen eyelids and mouth.
Lee was crying helplessly and with barely a change of expression.
No crumpling or contortion. Gideon knew the feeling from a distant
childhood memory, the kind of tears that wouldn’t stop because the
lungs had gone shallow and tight, not allowing room for a calming
breath, a chance to catch the reins. “Jesus, sweetheart,” he
rasped. “It’s not too late. I could catch them at the ferry port.
Let me go after them.”

“
No. No.” Lee snatched a tissue out of the box by the bed, his
attempt to pull himself together passing like a blunt knife through
Gideon’s heart. “All we’d end up doing is... fighting a pitched
battle over her cradle.”

Better that than an empty one.
Gideon
bit it back with an effort that nearly choked him. “I’d rather be
fighting. I’d rather be chasing Elowen around bloody Dover with a
police dog than...”

“
Than what?”

“
Than seeing you like this. Please.”

“
No.” Lee handed him the last tissue, waited until he’d blown
his nose, then put both arms around his neck and held on. “You’ve
done enough, big man. Would you really have punched Michel’s lights
out?”

“
Hell, yes. And Ezekiel’s.” He shuddered. “And your bloody
sister’s.”

“
Before or after you’d chucked her off the cliff? Oh God, Zeke
was right. Why didn’t I get the paperwork done?”

“
We both decided that, not just you.”

“
Nope. You suggested it, and I said,
no, she’s my sister—there’s no need
.
It would take a saint not to say—”

Gideon
wasn’t a saint. He put a hand over Lee’s mouth. “Don’t. I haven’t
even thought it. No-one has.”

“
Ah, Gid.” Lee moved the silencing hand, kissed its palm. “Your
whole family is
bristling
with I-told-you-so.”

Gideon
bristled in his turn. “Did one of them say something?”

“
No. They don’t have to. You should know that by
now.”

“
All right,” Gideon said wearily, lying down beside him.
“I
did
tell you
so, you twat.”

Lee gave
a snuffling giggle in spite of himself. “Thank you. Why didn’t you
insist?”

“
I didn’t feel it was my place.”

“
Of course it was. Everything to do with Tamsyn’s just as much
your place as mine. I bet you’d have insisted if we’d been adopting
from a stranger.”

“
Yes, but—”

“
But nothing.” Lee found his breath, got a grip on the runaway
tears. “Listen. Forget the whole genetic thing. Tamsyn was gonna be
our daughter, not my niece.”

“
How would you have felt if I’d put my foot down,
though?”

“
I’d have listened. I trust your feet. You’re my Gideon—my
husband, my other half. The only one who
can
insist on things with
me.”

Gideon
drew him close. Shock and exhaustion were meeting post-coital tides
in his bloodstream. He wasn’t used to crying, not the way he had
back at Drift—it made him feel punched in the face, or as if he was
coming down with a cold. He fought the first tug of sleep. There
were always things to do these days before he closed his eyes.
Nappies, feeds, a final check to see that his cheerful infant
hadn’t taken to suicide by pillow or begun escape work on the bars
of her cot. He twitched violently, and Lee restrained him, kissing
his brow, soothing. “All right,” he rasped, struggling back to
surface. “But the same applies to you. We’ve got to insist with
each other when it’s important, even if we... break each other’s
hearts.”

***

Someone
was hammering at the door. That sound had haunted Gideon’s world
almost since the beginning of his time with Lee. Malevolent ghosts,
the unearthly bang in the seafront Island house that had presaged a
haunting, the temporary dispossession of his lover’s very soul...
Stiffly Gideon got out of bed. Lee was still sleeping deeply.
Gideon could see the flicker of the pulse in his throat: he was
there, alive, safe. At least one half of Jago’s bloody churchyard
prophecy hadn’t come true.

And never would, if Gideon had any say in the matter. The
frantic knocking started again. Lee had once warned him never to
say
come at me, bro
to things from beyond the veil, never to fling wide the door
and say
bring it on, then, if you
remembered to bring it
, but he’d been
denied his punch-up on the clifftop, and whoever had chosen this
moment to disturb what was left of his domestic peace was certainly
asking for trouble.

Or it’s Elowen. Oh God, she’s thought better of this insanity
and brought Tamsyn home.
He fumbled the
latch, almost hit himself in the face with the door as he pulled it
open.

There
was no-one there. A great bronze-gold sun was poised over Minions
Hill, and on the eastern horizon, beyond the quiet village and the
tors, the moon had just risen. A blue moon, Lee had said, because
it was the rare second one in the month, but to Gideon’s
salt-scoured gaze it looked red, as if someone had splashed blood
across the ancient, changeless silver. “Fuck you, then,” Gideon
whispered, whether to sun, moon or ghosts he didn’t really care.
“Just leave us alone.”

“
I can’t. It’s back. It’s back.”

Gideon
had been looking too high. Three steep steps led up to his front
door, and the dry, cracked, goblin voice had come from pavement
level.

From a
child, although he wasn’t sure that Darren Prowse had ever
qualified, with his wizened little old man’s face and jail-bait
view of the world. “I tell you what, mate,” Gideon said
experimentally, just to see if he could keep his temper. “You have
chosen the worst bloody time you could to play any kind of prank on
me.”

“
I know. I know. Sarah Kemp said that cow had taken your Tamsie
away. But it’s
back
.”

“
What’s back, Darren? Think carefully before you answer
me.”

“
The Beast! The fucking Beast of Bodmin Moor!”

Gideon
looked down at him. He was a perfect mix of savagery and hysteria,
tears and snot flying as he tried to fight off the trauma of his
last-but-one Halloween. He was rootless, shiftless, and, since his
mother had finally tired of Bill and moved out, utterly unloved.
“Darren,” he said slowly. “There is no Beast. I know you were
scared half to death by Joe Kemp, but he was just a very bad
man.”

“
I know that! I ain’t scared of any bloody
man
, bad or good. But no man did that
to John Bowe, you stupid bloody plod!”

Gideon
wasn’t sure sometimes whether he was a good man or a bad one, but
he was about to make this brat very scared of him in a minute. Then
he saw the terror peeping out of the poor kid’s reddened eyes, and
instead he put out a hand to him. “Come here.”

To his
surprise, Darren dropped his precocious adulthood on the pavement
and climbed him like a monkey. Or a rat up a drainpipe, he
reflected, automatically rocking him—he was almost fourteen years
old, but still weighed no more than a sack of potatoes. Gideon
didn’t take the attention personally. The boy would have shinned up
a pole if there’d been a convenient one to hand. He was just
escaping from the flood of his own fear. Gideon’s arms had grown
used to holding children, though, and despite the obvious
differences between this little rodent and his own sweet-smelling
bundle, he embraced him. “All right. Nobody can hurt you now. Take
a deep breath and tell me what’s wrong—the truth, if you can manage
it for once.”

“
John Bowe. The farmer up at Carnysen, Bligh and Dev’s
brother.”

“
I know who John Bowe is.” Everyone did. The Bowes were that
modern contradiction in terms, a truly wealthy farming family.
Their land was Dark’s breadbasket, acres of rolling wheatfields
from Minions all the way down through the fertile valley to
Carnysen farm. Gideon could see the edge of the nearest barleyfield
from here, gleaming in a mix of sun and moon. “What about
him?”

“
The Beast. It tore him apart.”

The
wretched brat had something in his pockets. Gideon set him down. He
stood panting, eyes still wide, while Gideon extracted a wire-loop
snare. “What are you doing with this?”

“
Harvest tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“
Right. So you thought you’d set snares for the rabbits running
out of the corn.”

“
Why not? Who cares for ’em? Who cares for me, or my dad, or
our little Jackie or Sam?”

That was
a fair point, really. And Gideon had never heard the child express
concern for anyone other than himself, so he handed the wire back.
“Don’t let anyone see you, then. And that wire’s rusty and blunt.
That’s a cruel way to kill beasts—if you’d come and do some
gardening for me like I asked you to, I could give you the money to
buy some new ones.”

“
I’m never going up there again. Are you not
listening
to me, copper?
John Bowe is lying there. In bits.”

Sometimes surrender was easier. Let Darren get whatever this
was out of his system, prank the village bobby to the fullest
extent, and maybe they’d both feel better. Half an hour’s
distraction wouldn’t hurt, anyway. Leaving the child on the
doorstep, he went inside to collect his mobile. Lee was still
sleeping, with a look of beaten-down exhaustion it hurt Gideon’s
heart to see. He scrawled him a brief note and left it on the
pillow. Took thirty seconds more to pick up the scatter of toys in
the hallway, carry them into the nursery and close the door. Isolde
whined as he shooed her out of the room, but she knew her duties
well these days, and bustled off at his gesture to guard the bed
she still could. “All right,” he said, emerging into the uneasy
sunset light. “Show me. And I warn you, it had better be
good.”

The
route up to Carnysen field was a poignant one. It led along the
back of Sarah Kemp’s house, then the lane behind the terrace where
Bill Prowse kept his little criminal empire. Lorna Kemp—the brand
Gideon had snatched from the burning almost two years ago—was
helping her mum in the kitchen: he experienced the smell of their
dinner cooking and the little girl’s chatter like a warm caress.
Sarah was smiling but watchful, her mind clearly fixed on the
subject of lost children. Bill hadn’t changed the wallpaper in his
spare room. The lurid green-and-blue roses still shone their sickly
light across the garden. Gideon’s duties and promotion to sergeant
had kept him over in Truro a lot recently. A constable had replaced
him, but she lived over in Bodmin town, and it wasn’t her door that
got hammered on when ancient demons reared their heads. He had a
sense of homecoming, as if he’d been away too long and it was
time.

Ancient
demons, or annoying little brats whose lifelong malnutrition had
finally affected their brains. Darren was positively dancing in the
lane ahead, Gideon’s distraction too much to bear. He picked up his
pace a little out of mercy to the boy. Honeysuckle was arching over
the holloway track that climbed the side of the hill. Huge
yellow-headed alexanders were nodding in the verges, their combined
somnolent scent like a drug to his weariness, to the dull grief
that went through him when he recalled that he’d brought Tamsie
here not two days ago, to crawl in the soft grass and get her
Cornish girl’s inheritance of sunshine and fragrance-laden summer
air. He was thinking about that, not dismembered bodies or beasts,
when he climbed the stile into the field.

It was
long and narrow, like all the Bowes’ land curving round in a
scythe-shaped arc that led up to the farmhouse a mile away. In the
low light, the conjoined fields gleamed like a blade, their rich
heavy yield awaiting the threshers. The sky had been clear and fine
for weeks. Like everyone raised in the moorland villages, Gideon
was half farmer by default, and he cast an anxious weather-eye at
the copper-green cast on the western horizon. A lot of livelihoods
depended on the Carnysen grain.

Which
made it all the more annoying that some fool had been out here
trampling it down. Gideon was as intrigued by the crop-circle
phenomenon as the next man, but it had better not start out here at
Dark. The place attracted fringe-dwellers, with the Hurlers and the
Cheesewring and the mysterious tors. Really it needed its own
full-time constable, to keep the lunacy under some kind of control,
and offer education as to why it wasn’t all right for strangers to
come up here, leave the footpaths and tramp into other people’s
wages, rent and grocery funds.

“
There. There. Do you see?”

Gideon
caught hold of Darren’s T-shirt and pulled him back before he could
compound the damage. “I see someone’s been buggering about up here,
yes.”

“
That bit there, where the corn’s flattened down. Do you
see?”