Upstream. Gideon waited, watching the waters. From here in the backstreets of Kerdrolla town, they looked pretty innocent and clear: just the Tuesday shoal, going about its business. He and Rufus Pendower were watching a couple of Jim Cardew’s fish, and Gideon was determined to do it to the absolute best of his gifts. He’d been given a clean bill of health. All kinds of fears had begun to rattle around inside him with the threat to his mobility. Not only that, but he’d started to communicate those fears to Lee. Most probably his vision of John Tregear had been just that: a vision, and as Lawrence had said, how could he be certain of the identity of a masked man? His head was clear this morning. It was time to get to grips with his new role, and if that meant taking hints from younger, sharper officers, so be it.
If only he could shake the knifing sense of wrongness inside him. He felt as if he’d missed a turn in a familiar landscape, got onto a track which ran parallel to his own but indescribably far from it. He’d left Lee smiling on the front step, Tamsyn in his arms, about to get her ready for a day out with her gran. They would all three be fine—his husband, his baby, his mother—and Constable Rhys had given him a ride to work, tired after his double shift but still enthralled to have made a city-sized drugs bust in the tiny village of Dark. Lawrence had offered to renew the watch on the house, and although Gideon was touched that she’d taken his paranoia so to heart, he’d declined. Everyone would be fine.
He made a hundredth uneasy scan of the café Cardew had identified as a likely haunt of troublemakers during today’s parade. Pendower was a few tables away, making an unexpectedly good job of blending in with the lunchtime crowd. Clearly embarrassed by his outburst yesterday, he was working extra hard to be normal with Gideon, who wished he could reassure him. All right, you’ve got a crush on Lee. Who in their right mind wouldn’t? I know you don’t think I deserve him, and you’re probably right, but I mean to spend the rest of my life trying, and he takes me as I am.
Cardew was probably on the right lines with regard to this caff. This was the tough end of town, not many rainbow banners making their way past the windows to the centre, but the few that went by were eliciting predictable remarks from the tables around him. Poofs and queers and in my day, dated rhetoric from the seventies. Not nice, but grumbling was all it was, most of the clientele in their sixties and above. So far the worst accusation he could level against the establishment was serving a really shit pot of coffee. Briefly he met Pendower’s eyes as he raised his cup, a copper-to-copper judgement on the brew.
Nothing was going to happen here today. Gideon folded his newspaper. He knew that was the point: that he and his kind were meant to keep watch on places where events were prepared, not where they played out. He stiffened against a return of the flu-like symptoms that had plagued him over the past few days, the noisy caff becoming unbearably stuffy and warm around him. His head throbbed. He was in the wrong damn place, so far upstream that he’d left all meaningful currents behind him and was lost in the desert, dry-mouthed and sick at heart.
He stood up, and a massive ache seized his thigh, so keen that he glanced down for blood. The one thing the wound would never do was tear apart at surface, he’d been assured—all the damage was deep inside, where the blade had twisted in his artery. But there was nothing wrong with him. The pain and all his other problems therefore had to be psychosomatic.
Great, a nervous breakdown, just when he’d settled in a cash-eating new home with his infant child. Had the universe decided to show him how the other half grafted, those without the benefit of a dual income and benign lunatics like Dev Bowe to sell them a house at knockdown prices? Deciding that, if he was going to fall apart, he’d rather do it outside, he made his way through the maze of tables to the door.
A dull boom rattled the windows in their frames. The background chatter stopped as if switched off, only the radio continuing its burble over the scene. Gideon pulled the door wide. He stood frozen, listening. After a moment he became aware that Rufus Pendower had ducked under his arm and was standing beside him on the kerb. “Pendower,” Gideon said, letting the door fall shut. “Something’s happened. We’ve got to go.”
Pendower turned to him, white-faced. “DI Lawrence put us on duty up here.”
“I can hear sirens. I can hear children screaming. If I have to stay here, I’m in the wrong bloody job.”
Pendower’s chin firmed. New lights of rebellion came into his eyes. “Me too,” he said, and actually gave Gideon a shove in the direction of the new and dreadful sounds. “Come on.”
***
The centre of the town was in chaos. Gideon dodged through the outer edge of it, an asteroid belt of disoriented teenagers and kids in fancy dress and old men and women who would hide in their homes from a harmless Pride parade but turn out in their dozens to see a disaster. Pendower was at his side, keeping grim pace. “Through there,” Gideon said, picking out the core from which all these ripples were spreading.
He leapt the remains of a huge rainbow banner getting trampled into the dust. There, right in the centre of the town square, the ancient market cross on its granite blocks, the focus of all the parades, the rallying point for the singers and dancers and floats. A few uniformed officers were on scene, but not nearly enough: he flashed his badge and grabbed one end of the barricade tape they were struggling to deploy. Good beat-bobby’s law: get damage-limitation into gear first of all, make sure that no-one else tumbled into whatever trench of hell had just opened up. He took a moment to read the thrust of the crowd, identified a good spot to plant a road cone and secure the tape’s end, up to the left of the granite plinth, to divert incomers without impeding the exiting rush. Wheeling round, he found Jenny Spargo—that excellent sergeant with the uncanny knack of being where she was most needed at any given time—and pushed the cone and tape into her grasp. Without missing a beat, she began directing the exodus, and he ran on.
The first familiar face he saw was Gwylim Kitto’s. As usual the lad was in a little world of his own, not unduly disturbed by the chaos erupting around him. He was wearing a Hawaiian garland made of coloured paper hoops, and evidently was on his way back from a food stall, his arms full of cardboard cups and polystyrene boxes. His tanned feet were shoved into flipflops, his cut-off vest barely covering his nipples. He was the pure essence of sweet summer hippydom, the eternal Cornish surf-bunny whose innocence—intact somehow despite the torments inflicted upon him by John Tregear—Gideon was sworn to protect. Kitto beamed at the sight of him. “Hello, Sergeant Frayne.”
The boy had no memory of anything prior to his rescue from the cellar of the Kelyndar house. Gideon was just Sergeant Frayne to him, a kindly officer who’d helped find him and who had taken an interest in his welfare ever since. Gideon returned the greeting as calmly as he could. “Hello, Kitto. I tell you what, son—why don’t you take your things and head over there for me?”
“Oh, I can’t. I’ve just bought lunch for Ray and Jem.” He paused, trying to get a better grip on his purchases. His smile widened. “Jem’s my boyfriend, you know.”
“Yes, I know.” On the far side of the market cross, Rufus Pendower was emerging from a whirlwind of smoke. Whatever he’d seen at the eye of the storm had put twenty miserable years on him. He had a skinny body in his arms.
A cardboard cup hit the ground. The rest of Kitto’s goods followed after, a brief avalanche. His wide blue gaze had fastened beyond Gideon, his scattered attention brought to a single point. “Jem,” he said hoarsely. “Oh, Jem!”
Gideon stepped into his way. The boy was lithe and fast but he caught him, and when he struggled, simply hoisted him up bodily and bore him away. To his relief he saw Cosmic Ray barrelling his way down the hill from the town centre, dreadlocks flying, bellowing the name of the odd little stepbrother he’d taken under his wing. “Kitto! Kitto! Holy fucking Christ, Gideon,” he gasped, scrambling to a halt. “What’s happened here?”
Gideon dumped the boy into his arms. “Take him away. Take care of him, and don’t let him come back.”
“All right. But Jem—”
“Ray. Make your way to Trelowarren hospital, and they’ll tell you there. Just go.”
“The solstice gate swings wide for the Frayne brood.”
“What?!”
“I’ll stay here if I can do any good.”
“You can’t. You can’t. Only by looking after him.” Gideon couldn’t spare them another second. He turned and ran into the smoke.