Chapter One
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 onthe 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. Butthe 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-year-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 doghad 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 Bodmin 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 dog 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 listened 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 monsterwaswaiting 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.
Chapter Two
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?”
