Gideon made his way along Falmouth’s Arwenack Street, closed to traffic today to accommodate the parade. He kept to the very middle of the road, his high-vis jacket blazing and fluttering in the sun. One of the kids had chucked a rainbow streamer at him, which had caught around the brim of his cap. Like a good copper, he had squared his chin and pretended not to notice, and now it was drifting out behind him. Well, Lawrence hadn’t let him or any of her other gay officers and their allies wear supportive pin badges, so he had to take what he could get.
Of course he’d failed to persuade her to cancel the Pride march. She wasn’t going to listen to a uniformed sergeant, not when her crack CID troops were telling her everything was fine. There wasn’t meant to be a difference in rank between a sergeant and a DS, but that wasn’t how it played out in reality. The detectives had more poke, and everyone knew it. Gideon had developed a strong ambition to join them, convinced he could get more done that way, and Lawrence had encouraged his advance. His application was in hand.
Just for today, he didn’t care about it. All he really had in hand—and he could hear Lee’s voice, smilingly reminding him—was the moment, and the people he shared it with. Everything else—past, future, ambitions fulfilled—was beyond his grasp, off in the unimaginable bush of a chaos-fuelled quantum world. Holding his beribboned head high, he looked around him.
Such people! He never would have dreamed, growing up in the parish house in Dark, that one day boys and girls like this—like him—would take to the streets in their pride. Falmouth was a sea of rainbow banners and flags. Baiting the po-faced bobby was good sport on such a day as this, and the little sods darted and danced around him. He wished Rufus Pendower had been with him. The kids’ attentions would have been a torment to him, his attempts to look worldly and patient a source of amusement to Gideon on his beat. But Rufus had made the sideways jump a few months ago, and was off with the plainclothes lads in the cafés and the back streets, trying to get—what was Lawrence’s new buzz word?—upstream of any trouble before it began.
A decent plan. But there was more than one way to skin a cat. You could prowl about in the alleyways hoping to catch one, or—such was the high-strung feline nature of the beast—you could scare one out of hiding by arriving, large as life and twice as dangerous, in the right place at the right time.
Gideon’s luck in such matters had always been good. It wasn’t about to fail him now. A pale-faced nothing of a guy, just nobody you’d glance at twice, gave a kind of twitch at the sight of him. The nobody was stationed in the crowd at the far side of Grove Place car park, which had also been cleared of traffic and would serve today as a rallying point for the floats, the bands and the speakers. A bleak modern space, but someone had gone to the trouble of erecting a temporary dais in the middle of it, and tried for a traditional Cornish touch by draping it in granite-grey cloth to look like the base of an old market cross. Gideon’s target had a white sports bag over his shoulder. He didn’t look sporty, but nor did the hundreds of other young men who lounged or lurked about the Falmouth streets in their athletic gear.
Nothing unusual about him at all, apart from that twitch. Gideon detached himself from the moving stream. His first few strides were unhurried. He had time to pick out little Gwylim Kitto making his way back from one of the harbourside food stalls, his arms full of polystyrene boxes, curly fair hair bright in the sunny breeze. And there was his boyfriend—Jem, wasn’t it?—on the far side of the dais, helping wire in equipment for the video display to be projected on the wall of the Maritime Museum. A clever boy, Sarah Kemp had said, with plans to save the world.
You’d never think it to look at him. He was an odd choice for Kitto, who was beautiful as the stars. Then they spotted each other across the car park, and Jem lit up with a more than equal blaze.
Young love. Gideon shook his head. He allowed his easy walk to become a jog, because the chap with the white sports bag was trying to edge away from him through the crowd. Gideon and Lee had faced their own problems, growing up gay in the 1990s Southwest, but he sure as hell wouldn’t like to be doing it now, trapped on a tiny, paranoid island in the shadow of a monstrous US regime. Who knew the rainbow would have ended in such a crock of shit? Anger and tenderness took hold of him. He couldn’t do much in the grand scheme of things, but he’d always been a good copper, and anybody wanting to harm a living soul on his beat had better be wearing running shoes.
Absolutely nothing wrong with carrying a large white sports bag in public. The stop-and-search rules were strict, and Gideon needed reasonable grounds before he could obey his instincts to grab this guy by the scruff. His target was behaving oddly but not criminally, doing his best to keep distance between them, never taking the obvious tack of dodging out of the crowd and into the maze of buildings that lined the marina.
The crowd was important, then. Glancing over his shoulder, Gideon saw that the rag-tag column of marchers and dancers was beginning to stream into the square. Something in the guy’s face changed—became avid, triumphant. “Hoi,” Gideon yelled, his moorland-bobby’s voice carrying clear across the snare drums and the cheering. “You, sir—with the white bag. Stop right where you are!”
That did the trick. The man turned and fled. He shot out of the car park and through the gap between the supermarket and the hairdresser’s, a windy defile that led to the marina plaza. He was wearing running shoes, as it happened, but they didn’t help him one bit: Gideon powered up out of his jog to top gear. Like a shire horse at full gallop, his winded, beaten colleagues had called him. But that was only jealousy, he reckoned, because none of them had ever been able to break his record at the annual charity sports day, before or even after his injury. He gained ground on the running man in great strides. This was going to be easy.
As if the universe had heard the arrogant thought, his prey darted left and made for the steps down to the harbour. Gideon had regained most of his grace along with his health, and he turned on a Cornish dynar to follow. So far, so good: and then he failed to slow up the fraction it would have taken to negotiate the steps in safely.
The flight was long, steep, made of wood. The running man, halfway down, was plainly surprised to see his pursuer sail past him. Gideon had learned how to fall as well as fight in his unarmed-combat training, and he did his best with the half-second granted him—threw out his hands, tucked his head. He still went arse-over-tit at high speed. Smacked down on the last few steps with brutal force. His lumbar vertebrae withstood the impact, healthily locked in their flexible column, though his torch smashed in its kit-belt pouch. Momentum bore him on. He tried for a grab at the hand rail: missed, and finished his fall with a bone-jarring thud on the planks of the harbour walk.
He’d landed on his side, squarely on his damaged thigh. He hauled up straight away, not really concerned if he’d got away with it or not. His quarry had frozen between one step and the next, and was clearly contemplating a dash back to the top. But Jenny Spargo—that excellent sergeant, unfailingly on the spot when she was needed—had appeared against the skyline, and after a moment the man dived on.
Gideon seized him effortlessly. “Sorry, mate,” he said, hooking the sports bag off his shoulder, because after all this, he might have scared the guy out of his wits for a half-ounce of pot. Bright red blossoms of pain were exploding in his leg. He’d be in agony when he had time. “If you take a run like that, though... Let’s have a look in this bag.”
His suspect twisted like a ferret. Laughter and fear contorted his face, but when Gideon tried to get a read on him, it was like trying to pick out one mask from a white-paper row of them in an identity parade. To say he looked ordinary wasn’t enough. He could have been literally anyone. “Stupid bloody copper,” he choked out, trying to recoil against the harbour wall. “Stupid bloody plod. I’ve armed it. It’s armed.”
Gideon shoved him into Jenny Spargo’s grasp. He set the sports bag down—carefully, carefully—and drew back the zip. Inside was a folded-up sweatshirt, and on top of that...
“Oh, shit. Jenny, get him back. Block those stairs.”
“What is it?”
“Device.” He could have said bomb, but a crowd was gathering already. Bomb would have sent them scattering, panicking, treading on one another along the narrow walkway. The thing on the sweatshirt was a nightmare combination of amateur parts and deadly professional intent, wires wrapped around what looked like a core of gelly. Nothing so helpful as a countdown clock, but he had no reason to disbelieve his man when he said it was live. “Right,” he said, zipping up the bag before the little old gentleman sticking his head beneath his arm could get a better look. “Jen, I’m just going to take this... somewhere else.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Wait for the...”
Please don’t say bomb squad. She was cuffing Gideon’s pale, sweating suspect whilst simultaneously manoeuvring him as a human shield to block the steps, but she found a second to meet his eyes. The message passed between them in crisp-edged silence. “Don’t think I can wait,” he said.
She nodded grimly. “Understood.” She shielded her eyes from the sun blazing bright on the water. “A yacht’s just come in by the museum, but beyond that you’re clear. God speed your heels, Sergeant.”
At first he couldn’t even run. Frustration boiled in him, deadly as the waiting force inside the bag he was holding, steady and firm against his chest. The harbour walk was a favourite excursion for groups from the residential-care homes on a day like today, for mums and dads with pushchairs, toddlers weaving back and forth, torn between the boats on one side and the ice-cream vans lined alluringly up on the other. All he could do was project his law-enforcement presence, an invisible plough-head before and around him. Move aside, move aside, please, because a wheelchair wasn’t going to roll any faster for being shouted at. Ice-cream vans singing to his right, and to his left, the boats in the marina in a solid row three deep, extending far beyond the scope of his most vigorous throw. The decks were busy today, everyone and his auntie turning out to sunbathe or creosote the hulls. Move aside, please. Move aside.
Finally, a thinning of the crowd. Here came Gideon’s chance. He could see Jenny’s yacht at the very far end of the marina. Beyond it, the harbour walkway extended out beyond the museum, too breezy for comfortable strolling. He started to run. After a treacly nightmare second when his damnable leg wouldn’t respond, he picked up speed. The planks of the walkway began to fly beneath his feet. They made a good sound, even if each impact of his left sole sent more of the red flower-bolts of pain up through his pelvis and spine. Boom-thud, boom-thud, the percussion of the dance of life.
He was pretty sure no-one was going to die here today. Not even himself, but that was just the blind faith of a flesh-and-nerve-strung beast struggling to contemplate its own extinction. If he did, he had left a hell of a lot undone and unsaid with his husband and his little girl. Would they know? Dear Lee, he wrote on the bright air around him, the sweet fresh salt of a Cornish summer day with its tang of fish and pitch. My dear Lee, my own lad. He couldn’t get any further—not even an imaginary message for Tamsyn. Lee would make her understand, as she grew up, how very completely she’d been loved. He had reached the end of the pier. His leg gave, and he scudded to a halt on his knees, drawing the sports bag up and over his head in a beautiful last-ditch throw.
Not a hairsbreadth fucking millisecond too soon. The bag left his hand, sailed out and away and exploded in midair. Jesus, that was a lot of poke for a home-made bomb: the shockwave knocked Gideon flat, and the mast of a half-rotten hulk beneath the pier snapped in a rain of shards. A handle and a buckle bounced off the planks by his head and skidded away, but they really weren’t his problem anymore. A few screams went up, and then there was a splash and a wonderful silence. Gideon laid his brow to the fragrant, sun-warmed wood and closed his eyes.