“This house feels like theirs, not yours.”
The photos were the room’s sole decor. Pastor Frayne hadn’t been a harsh man – he just hadn’t seen the use of earthly comforts. “It is. I had a place of my own in the village, but... my father got Alzheimer’s a few years ago, and they’re both living in care, so I moved home.” Gideon knocked his scotch back. “My ma says it’s God’s will – the Alzheimer’s.”
“And do you think so too?”
Gideon hesitated. He was bright enough, he knew, but his circumstances hadn’t favoured independent thought. It had taken him a long, hard time to work some things out for himself, and he wasn’t finished. When he considered this, though, he found that he was certain. “No. I think it’s a miserable, pointless disease that needs curing.”
“So... between these godfearing parents of yours, and being part of a police force that’s two decades behind the rest of the country in its attitudes – ”
“Don’t.” Gideon cut him off sharply. “Look – for what it’s worth, you seem like a decent guy. But...”
“But you’re getting tired of having your brains picked, and you reckon it’s only fair that I tell you some stuff in return.”
Gideon repressed a smile at the irony: Lee had fished that thought up so neatly that it might as well be flapping and wet on the hearthrug. “Something like that, maybe.”
“Fair enough. What do you want to know?”
Do you have a boyfriend?Gideon clamped his mouth shut. What the hell was the matter with him? Lee had returned to sit by the fire. He’d wrapped his arms around his knees and his skin was glowing amber in the uncertain light. Clearly he spent at least as much time on the boats as in parlours reading fortunes, and Gideon had had a lonely untouched year of it, but still... “Does it always hurt?” he asked suddenly. “When you have a – a vision, or whatever you call them?”
“I wasn’t sure I’d convinced you I have them at all.”
“Well, I won’t say I don’t wish to God we’d gone up to Wheal Catherine and found Lorna Kemp making daisy chains. But earlier on, when we were at Sarah’s, and you called me Gideon like you’d known me all my life, and you told her how I’d worked, how I’d tried...”
“Ah, that kind of vision doesn’t hurt. That’s just like seeing the good in somebody, as if it was separate from you, something I could touch. In a criminal case, though...” Lee shivered. “Well, something similar happens. Only my mind takes the bad things people have done, and it turns those things into monsters. My job’s to turn them back – re-attach their human faces.”
“How do you do that?”
“I have to look at them hard. Close-up. Sometimes I can’t do it at all, so I know how it feels to have that sense of failure, Gideon, that... panic.” He looked abruptly drained. Gideon had taken him for a younger man than himself, but perhaps he was the same age. Then he brightened. “But to answer your other questions – I’m thirty years old, same as you. I went to Exeter uni. I’ve had a quiet life, other than helping find murderers, and I’m single, as of last March when my boyfriend moved out.”
Gideon blushed. But how could he have been prying? He hadn’t opened his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We were really good mates, but we weren’t the loves of one another’s lives. He left when he found someone who was.”
I thought James was the love of mine. I thought so, I thought so, but how can I be sitting here now filled with such longing, as if...
“It was all as it should be, with Michael and me.” Lee stretched. He got onto his knees and adjusted the stove door so that the flames leapt higher. Then he turned to Gideon, his fine skin flushed with the heat, his warm mouth inviting. “Things sometimes do turn out as they should be.”
Gideon sat up sharply. Here he was, at seven o’clock at night in the minster’s parlour, still in his uniform, the generations of godfearing Fraynes staring down at him from the walls – about to lean down, cup Lee Tyack’s face between his palms and kiss him. Dear Christ – if he’d never had the balls to take James out in public, touch him or so much as hold his hand, he owed his memory better than that... “Sorry,” he grated out. “I was going to put some dinner on for us, wasn’t I?”
Lee sat back on his heels. “You were,” he said demurely, not even a trace of a promised kiss on those lips now. “It was going to be pizza, I believe.”
***
When Gideon returned after his preparations for their meal, he realised he needn’t have worried about how to entertain his guest throughout a long evening. Lee had curled up on the sofa, and was to all appearances fast asleep.
The sofa was a long old leather one, probably more comfortable than the bed in the spare room. Gideon awkwardly touched his shoulder, but he didn’t stir. He watched him for a moment. He’d taken off his boots, and his feet were braced against the sofa’s arm, if he were launching into a dive. Already his eyelids were flickering with dreams. Gideon took a rug off one of the fireside chairs and draped it over him. He hoped there weren’t too many dog hairs on it, but when he looked around for Isolde, she was laid out like an overstuffed cushion under the sofa anyway.
That reminded him. She hadn’t had her evening walk, the outing that had become for Gideon a vigil. He whistled softly to her, but she only flicked one back paw at him in contempt.
So Gideon walked on his own. The mist came down with the dark, but tonight there was no brooding pressure in the air. Gideon’s head cleared. Clusters of rosehips and hawthorn berries gleamed red-black in the light of his torch, and the orange bracken leapt into contorted gestures and light-frozen moments of dance. Messages everywhere for someone like Lee, he supposed, but for Gideon tonight they were simply signs of oncoming winter, familiar and real. He thought of Lorna Kemp, and his prayers for her rose up hotly from his heart.
For the first time, they didn’t blind him. Making his way down his self-created corridor of light, he began to review the day of her disappearance and the time that had passed since then. Yes – he’d been in a fugue of panic. He’d relied on the CID officers to come here and magic the child back for him, while he’d provided the support, names and directions and cups of tea.
But Gideon had something no amount of forensic work and DNA profiling could replace. He had a lifelong knowledge of the people of Dark village. Lorna Kemp had vanished on Bodmin Moor. That was a given in this case, a sacred foundation stone. But Gideon knew her. She was only little, but she was bright, and had spent all her summers scrambling about on the crags and wide open spaces around her home. She was a Kemp, and like the Prowse brood, all the Kemp kids knew the moor. Unless she was dead – and there had been no trace of her body – wouldn’t she have found her way home?
Kemps and Prowses. Those two clans had interbred and feuded for centuries around here. Gideon began to arrange them in his head, quartz and granite chesspieces on a board. He had by no means finished this process when he unlocked his front door.
He set the problem aside for a while. He felt able to: the sense of bottled-up fear was gone from the base of his throat and the place behind his eyes where it had been blocking even such ordinary vision as nature had granted him. He checked in on Lee, who was still sleeping soundly, one hand on Isolde’s oblivious skull. The pizza was ready and he absently ate half of it standing at the kitchen counter, staring out into the night. Then he went into the study where his father had used to write his sermons.
