“To be honest, Sarah, I was coming to say sorry to you. I thought I was just angry about Lee – Mr Tyack – coming here and treading on my toes as a copper, but the truth is... Well, I felt like I’d been letting you down so badly, and part of me was almost scared by the idea that he’d do better.” Gideon had sat down – uninvited for once – on the far side of Sarah’s table. He was almost too startled by his own burst of honesty to notice. “How stupid. What must you think of me?”
But Sarah was regarding him with the first glimmer she’d shown in two weeks. “And you feel better about these psychics, do you – this morning?”
Gideon blushed to the roots of his hair. “Bloody Mrs Trask!”
She actually laughed. “Ah, Gideon – you know this village better than anyone. People are going to whisper and point any time anyone gets into bed with someone new. What did you think – we were gonna run you out of town with pitchforks? You’re our policeman. You look after us, always have done. Everybody knows that.” Gideon couldn’t speak. He settled for staring into the little gas fire. “Anyway,” Sarah went on, “it was daft of me to put any faith in him – your Lee Tyack, I mean. He seems a nice lad. And he was very kind to me. But I heard from Mrs Waite that he had you lot all the way out at Wheal Catherine mine yesterday, looking for my girl.”
“That’s right. We did look, but...”
China clattered in the kitchen. Sarah turned round in her chair. “What’s keeping you with that tea, Joey, love?”
No answer came. Nothing at all, except after a moment the soft closing of the back door.
“Well, where’s he gone off to?” Sarah began to get up, but Gideon gestured her to stay. A deep unease was starting in him, a worm he’d felt turning a few days before but had drowned in scotch, old loyalties and self-doubt.
“Wait here, will you, Sarah? Are Jen and Shaun in school today?”
“Course they are.” She stared at him in confusion as he got to his feet. “Where else would they be? Aren’t you going to stay for your cuppa?”
“Not just now. Don’t you worry about anything, okay? There’s just somebody I’ve got to see.”
He let himself back out into the street. For a moment he stood in the rain. There was a smell of pumpkins in the air, of smoke from the garden fires burning off the endless tons of leaves the sycamores let fall at this time of year. Gideon noticed these things peripherally. He was listening. No engine noise had begun in the lane behind Sarah’s house. Joe had probably walked there. He lived a few miles away near Upton Cross, but when he was working the sheep pastures up near the crags, he left his jeep and quad bike in a shed on the outskirts of the village.
Gideon would go there. Most probably he’d catch up with Joe en route. They’d talk, and the cold worm in Gideon’s gut would quit gnawing him.He was sure of that. Nevertheless he unhooked the radio from its holster on his jersey: thumbed the call button for the station. “Liz? Do me a favour, would you? Put in a call to headteacher Prynne at the kindergarten. Don’t scare her, but tell her not to let the Kemp kids go home with anyone but Sarah Kemp today. Nobody at all.”
***
There was no sign of Joe in the lane that led to the garages and sheds. Not in the street either, and those were the only two thoroughfares in this part of the village. That meant he’d ducked out somewhere, over the hedge or into someone’s house. Or perhaps, by a stretch of the imagination Gideon could no longer make, he’d just nipped out of Sarah’s to pick up a paper and was back there now, finishing his tea.
The idea was so appealing that Gideon turned and began to retrace his steps. He had to at least check.
His route took him down the alley behind Bill Prowse’s street. The rain was thickening to fog now, precursor of a proper Bodmin blanket if the weather stayed calm. The climate here was so mild that late roses were drooping from trellises in some of the gardens and back yards. Uneasily Gideon thought of boats cutting the water, of windows and badly spelled wheels. That was a hell of a way for Lee to do business, wasn’t it, forming such vague symbols into places and names – and both of them wrong, so far as Gideon could make out. Yet the Truro people had said Lee was very good, that he’d given solid leads in cases like this...
It occurred toGideon that in both cases he had himself provided the words to Lee’s pictures.Wheal Catherine, Prowse.Gideon had begun to hope that he’d been helping Lee’s intuitive processes along. Maybe he’d just misguided him, brought him down to earth too soon.
Prowse. Gideon sighed. No roses in that garden. Unlike his neighbours with their autumn chrysanthemums and lavender, Bill seemed to take pride in making his little yard garden as much of a wasteland as possible. The lawn was long dead, the patio slimy with moss. No roses at all, not even blue and green ones, which now Gideon came to think about it were weird colours for a rose, unless...
He took a couple of steps back and looked up. Unless they were wallpaper roses, clearly visible through an upstairs window. Faded but lurid still, the kind of thing a child would register, in a bedroom easily accessed via a wall and the sun-porch roof.The monster in the garden. The monster sees the window – sees the roses, blue and green...
For the first time in his career, Gideon entered a house unannounced. There’d never been any need: even Ross Jones would politely answer his knock and offer tea before Gideon busted him yet again for his dope crop. This time he grabbed the sun-porch door, shoved it open so hard that it bounced off the inside wall, and strode in.
Bill Prowse, his missus and two of their kids were foregathered in the living room. They all jumped violently at Gideon’s entrance. They looked guilty as hell, but that didn’t mean much – with the Prowses, either they’d just stopped doing something underhand or were just about to start. Even the toddler looked shifty. “Right, Bill,” Gideon said, planting himself between the family and the blaring TV. “I know I’ve already asked you about the night Lorna Kemp disappeared. But I want you to tell me again – right now.”
Bill just gaped at him. He was a huge man, once strong but now run to fat on a diet of pasties and chips. He spent most of his days where he was now, sprawled in front of the TV. Mrs P, the sole family breadwinner, stepped in as usual. “Will’m!” she barked, shooting out a hard hand to crack her husband on the ear. “You heard him! Switch that damn TV off and tell him what he wants to know.”
“I’ve already told ’un,” Bill said sullenly, obeying as far as hitting the mute button on his remote. “I were here all night, right in this chair. I watched ’Stenders, Holby City, Nick Knowles on the DIY – ”
“Right,” Gideon interrupted him. “Nick Knowles can’t give you an alibi, can he?” Billhadgone through this before. Now his list of his evening’s viewing sounded odd to Gideon, a bit too carefully rehearsed. “Mrs Prowse, you were at your sister’s?”
“That’s right. I lefthimhere to watch the kids.”
The kids. The little one had glazed over without the TV’s stimulus, but Darren, Bill’s eldest, and at 12 years old as promising a ruffian as anyone could wish, was twitching in the corner. “What’s the matter?” Gideon enquired pleasantly. “You should be in school, shouldn’t you?”
“I’ve got th’earache!” Daz blurted. He did look sick. Gideon should have noticed, but the Prowse kids were perpetually skinny and malnourished. “Anyway, what’s it to you, copper?” Mrs P drew a fiery breath to blast her offspring through the window, but Gideon held out a hand. “I didn’t do nothing, all right? It weren’t even me. What am I meant to do? It were him, all right? And he told me if I didn’t, the Beast of fuckin’ Bodmin would come on Halloween and eat me up!”
Gideon resisted the temptation to feign a backward recoil. Christ, talk about pushing the button – it was enough to knock anyone down. Bill and Mrs P were staring, mouths open wide. “Him?” Gideon echoed, pointing at Bill. He was fairly certain Darren didn’t mean his father, but he had to be sure. “Your dad made you do something?”
“Naw!” the poor kid fairly howled. “It were her own uncle! What were I meant to do?”
