“We’re near to it, yes.”
“I love how the sky up here always seems to shine. Even when it’s overcast, like it’s packed with opals.”
Opals. Gideon had often wanted a word for the strange light of a wintry Cornish sky, the subtle radiance, colours that seemed to breed out of everywhere and nowhere at once. He wasn’t here for poetry, though. Tyack grinned wryly, as if he’d read the thought. “Okay. I’ll tell you something youdoneed to know. I was in France when this kid disappeared. I was speaking at a conference, so I was seen there by about a thousand people a day.”
“Why would I need to know that?”
“Because if we find her, your first thought will behow.And if you’re a decent, commonsense policemen, your second thought will be to arrest me. So I never act as consultant on a criminal case – ever – unless I’ve got an alibi so watertight you could use it to carry your goldfish.”
I wouldn’t have made that assumption.Gideon wanted to say it. He wasn’t sure it was true. All he had to offer was his decency and common sense, and what else would a good copper do, faced with a man who could only have come to know the things he did in one way? “This has happened to you?”
“Oh, hell, yes.”
Good-natured still, but bitter as frost-touched sloes. “I’m sorry, then,” Gideon said. “That puts a high price on trying to help.”
They drove on in silence for a minute, the towers looming closer. Tyack had turned a little in his seat. He was watching Gideon, not the road ahead. “Thanks,” he said. “You know – if it helps, I think James forgave you. Or he ended up understanding, at least – about your parents, and about being a copper in a county that lives twenty years behind the rest of the world.”
Gideon slewed off the track. He swore and veered back onto it. “Do you know James? Has he been talking to you?” Silence from the seat beside him. Gideon banged a palm off the wheel. “Oh, I get it. Mrs Waite comes barging in and tells you he lived with me. Then you watch me – I don’t know, my body language or whatever, and you feed me a line to see how I react – ”
“That’s right,” Tyack interrupted quietly.“It’s all a cheap parlour trick. Are yousureyour second thought wouldn’t have been to arrest me?”
***
Of course there was no child in Wheal Catherine mine. The sniffer dogs and their handlers quartered the area diligently, and the caving specialist set up his gear for an exploratory look at the shaft. It didn’t take him long. He re-emerged sheepishly ten minutes later. All the mines here had been infilled to within twenty feet of their surface. A single sweep of his torch would have showed him there was no lost kid in there. One of the dogs bayed briefly, but there’d been so much rain over the last few days that all but the strongest traces would have been lost.
Yes. All lost. Gideon could relate to that. He glanced across at Lee Tyack, who was crouched at the lip of the mine shaft, running his fingers over the heath flowers and golden bracken that grew there. The K-9 lads were settling their dogs back into the van. Parked just beyond them were four other vehicles, every one of which Gideon knew well. Dave Polwen, plumber and local odd-job man. Kate and Jenny Salthouse, who ran their bakery and the local council with equal stern efficiency. Two other good neighbours and friends, and none of them with any business here, all having picked up a scent off the wind.
Gideon knew how it would have happened. He’d patched his call in via his assistant at the tiny bungalow that served as a police station in Dark. “Wheal Catherine?” Liz had repeated in surprise, and old Mrs Waite from the shop, who spent as much time in there as she feasibly could, cadging tea and biscuits and gossip, would have sailed forth with the news. So here they all were – Jenny and Dave and the rest, forming a semicircle between the dog van and Gideon’s Rover. Thank God Joe Kemp had an afternoon job: perhaps he hadn’t heard. “Is it true, then?” Dave Polwen called up. “Did you get some new information? Is she here?”
Invillages the size of Dark, the kids were to a certain extent common property. Even feral brats like the Prowse brood staved off neglect and starvation in their neighbours’ kitchens and by their firesides. It was a good thing. But it meant that when a child went on the loose, a village copper faced two dozen sets of parents at once. Gideon came to the edge of the grassed-over spoil heap where he’d been standing. There was no hope of concealment, and so he raised his head and addressed them face on. “No. She isn’t here.”
“Is it true that fella came out with you– that psychic?”
Tyack was no longer by the mine head. Gideon wouldn’t have blamed him for skulking off. But a soft bump at his shoulder made him blink: here he was, close by Gideon’s side, as if ready to face whatever Gideon wanted to dish out. Well, it was a chance, wasn’t it? Police and rescue services listening in, and a good representative portion of the village, who would take home whatever he said and report it.Yes, here’s your psychic. I was fool enough to follow him up here. This is what happens when you put your trust in crackpots and wishful thinking.“No. I had a lead from somewhere else. Mr Tyack here was with me when the call came in, and he offered to come and help us search. That’s all.”
“Is it worth it, then – searching up here?”
“One of the dogs gave a signal, but we don’t think it meant anything. Listen – any time that you can afford to give to searching any part of these moors is worth it to me, Dave. All of you.” He turned to Tyack and asked quietly, “Willyou help us out for a while? Do it the...”The hard way, he’d been about to say, but the marks of strain around those pale eyes testified that nothing about Tyack’s methods was easy. “The conventional way?”
“I’d be happy to. Why’d you let me off the hook?”
“Like you say, you need time to get a feel for a place. Maybe something’ll come to you. And...” He set off towards the waiting group. “I don’t know why you did it, but you tried to let me off poor Sarah Kemp’s hook. So we’re quits.”
***
Gideon called off the search at dusk. Dave and the Salthouses had kids to be getting home to, and Gideon didn’t want any children alone at night if he could help it. He was also reluctant, with a keen anxiety he couldn’t pin down, for anyone, child or adult, to be on the moors after dark. It was Halloween Eve. He shivered, unlocking the Rover. The spirit of the season must be getting to him.
Kye greeted him with her usual burst of hysteria, as if she hadn’t seen him for a week and couldn’t quite remember why she’d wanted to. Gideon didn’t like keeping her locked up, but she couldn’t be trusted not to pick a fight with a sniffer dog or tumble down a mine shaft herself. “Sorry,” he muttered as she transferred her attentions to Tyack, squeezing through the gap between the seats to scramble into his lap. “Kye! Get down.”
“She isn’t called Kye,” Tyack said breathlessly as she wriggled round to face him. She put the end of her nose against his, and Gideon looked at the pair of them curiously: the attractive unknown quantity of a man and the all-too-familiar lump of dog, staring into one another’s eyes. “She says she’s called Isolde, and she’s a descendent of King Arthur’s hunting hounds.”
Gideon shifted nervously. “You can... You cantellthat?”
Tyack broke into laughter. “Of course I bloody can’t.Dogis a lousy name for a dog, that’s all. I’m sure she’d behave better if she had a proper one.”
“You think you’re funny, don’t you?” Gideon thought so too, despite himself: a reluctant chuckle underscored his words. “All right. Isolde it is. Though I’m gonna feel a right prat shouting that down the lanes at midnight, aren’t I?”
“Only if someone shouts backTristan. Look, I should get out of your hair now. I’ve still got to pick up my gear from Mrs Radnor’s B and B – can you drop me off near there, and I’ll catch a bus into Bodmin town?”
