The car park at the foot of the tor looked like a small, eclectic festival site, or the scene for a Tyack-Frayne family-and-friends reunion. Ezekiel’s hearse-like Volvo occupied the middle of the turf circle. Other vehicles were rare along this little-known farm track, but today, Gideon found himself nosing Lee’s Escort between a camper van he recognised and a less familiar Toyota estate.
He parked up, glad to push the door open and feel the rush of the warm moorland wind. “Looks like the Kemp contingent made it after all,” he said, turning to glance at Tamsyn. “Isn’t that a nice surprise?”
“It’s nice,” Lee replied on the little girl’s behalf. He was already out of the car and unfastening the straps of her baby seat. “But I don’t think it’s in any way a surprise—is it, you spooky morgawr? Who else do you think is here?”
Tamsyn blinked at him serenely. “Ofus.”
“Oh, sh-... Er, oh, dear. Is that his Toyota, Gid?”
“Not sure. I’ve only ever seen him in a squad car... Oh, wait. There he is, talking to Sarah and Wilf.” Gideon reached into the back seat to collect Tamsyn’s rucksack and their contribution to the picnic. “He’s all right, love. A bit of a changed man, and far better to work with than I ever thought he’d be.”
“Yeah. I know. I just think we should rescue poor Sarah before he bores her to death.”
Wilf was still putting a good face on it. Now living with his children in the house next door to Sarah and hers, he was a kind and patient soul, excellent with the kids and elders of Dark. He was nodding and smiling in response to Rufus Pendower’s gesticulations. Sarah, on the other hand, was swaying on her feet. “Hoi, Rufus!” Gideon called, waving. “Glad you could make it. You too, Sarah.”
The three came over, Sarah beaming with relief. Rufus greeted Gideon casually, then stammered over a simple hello to Lee, and backed unexpectedly into the Zeke boys’ pushchair. “Good afternoon, Sergeant Pendower,” Zeke said, neatly catching him. “Pleasure to have you here, and Daisy, too.”
“Oh! Thank you. We hoped you wouldn’t mind. Gideon mentioned the Cheesewring, and we couldn’t resist—as you probably know, the legends surrounding the place are marvellous. I was reading that once, long ago, a horseman found a golden cup, rumoured to have some startling properties, and probably representing the cauldron or womb of some local goddess of plenty or prosperity, and...”
Zeke was a lot easier to read these days. Gideon picked up his distress signal easily. “Rufus,” he interrupted. “Tamsie’s been talking about you all day. Would you like to take first carry?”
“Has she?” Rufus turned brick red, reaching to lift her out of Lee’s arms. “I’d love to. Oh, she’s beautiful, isn’t she? Really starting to take after you, Lee—er, I mean your sister. That is...”
Lee took pity on him. “Here. Pop this little hat on her.”
“It’s a bit hot for a woollen one, isn’t it?”
“I know, but just for a minute, until she sees her grandma. Hi, Zeke—good to see you, and a very happy birthday. How are these two monsters of yours?”
“Monstrous,” Zeke said with evident pride. He stepped round the pushchair and gave Lee a short, brusque embrace, and then did the same to Gideon, who recovered from his surprise in time to hug back. “Thank you for the card and the gift. A year’s subscription to Church Architecture—lovely.”
“We’re pleased you like it,” Gideon said. “Eleanor’s with you, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yes. Just helping Mother out of the car—she’s got a twinge of arthritis.”
Gideon side-eyed his daughter. “Really? I feel like I’m getting a twinge of something myself. I’ll go and give them a hand. Rufus, why don’t you bring Tamsyn—she can motivate Ma to do anything.”
In the back of the hearse, Ma Frayne was sitting stiffly upright, Eleanor by her side. They both were dressed for a picnic according to their different lights: Eleanor in prim cottons, like a YMCA youth leader about to conduct a team-building exercise, and Ma in Edwardian frills. Gideon ducked his head through the open door. “Everything all right in here?”
“Oh, thank God—a policeman,” Eleanor unexpectedly said. She was pink with frustration. “I’m just trying to give your mum a hand out of the car. But she won’t let me help her.”
“That’s not strictly true, dear,” Ma chimed in, rubbing at her knee. “I don’t need a hand. I just need a little time. Because you see,” she continued, appealing to Gideon, “if I have to have help getting out of a car, how will I do my Pride march, or climb all the way up to the Cheesewring? And if I can’t do that, how can I spend time with my grandchildren, and celebrate Ezekiel’s birthday, and show him how much I love him, even if I didn’t get it right with him when he was—”
“Ma.” Gideon kept the cut-off as gentle as he could. There was clearly a whole lot riding on this twinge of arthritis. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t changed out of his jeans. “You’ll be fine. Tamsyn picked you something from the garden.”
Ma took the handful of crushed leaves from him. She turned them over wonderingly, then lifted them to her nose. “Willow! Oh, Gideon, that smell. It takes me back to being a girl again, before I ever met the pastor, and I was living with my parents in a cottage near Dozmary Pool.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Very good. We didn’t have much money, you know, but I was so young and strong.” She inhaled deeply, and suddenly turned to Eleanor as if the scent had reached something deeper inside her than her bones. “Nell, dear, I’m sorry I was crotchety. Would you please have another try at getting me out of the car?”
Gideon stood clear. Eleanor was strong and forgiving. Ma burst out into the sunshine like a teenager, and gave a cry of delight at the sight of Tamsyn in Rufus’s arms. She adored all three of her grandchildren, but the little girl had been first, and bore her name. “Oh! She’s wearing the pussyhat I knitted her.”
Eleanor’s mouth dropped open. Rufus turned puce once again. Gideon, who’d managed to keep a straight face about the hat for the last six months or so, burst into laughter. “Oh, Ma.”
“What is it? I know there’s something funny about that hat. I wish somebody would just explain.”
Even now, Rufus couldn’t resist the opportunity of translating a symbol. He glanced nervously at Gideon, who nodded in amusement: be my guest, by all means. “Well, Mrs Frayne, as I understand it, the name of the hat, and the colour, and the ears...”
“A little pink cat. All the girls in Falmouth were wearing them, all the staff at Roselands. They know I love to knit, so they got me making them by the dozen for all their friends. It was a fashion, wasn’t it? And just last month it occurred to me how sweet Tamsyn would look in one, although I started a little bit late. Thank you for putting it on her to show me today, Gideon, but I know it’s too hot for her. I’m sorry, Sergeant—you were explaining.”
Rufus looked as if he bitterly regretted having opened his mouth. “The thing is, all the people who marched in Washington after President Trump’s election were wearing hats like that, as a gesture of defiance against his attitude to women—you know, after his remarks about, um, grabbing them by...”
“The pussy. Yes! I heard about that, young man. I don’t live in a cave, you know. Terrible thing to say. How the Americans could elect him after that, I’ll never know.”
“Well. The fact that the hats are pink, and have little ears, like a—”
“Oh!” She clapped her hands to her mouth. “The pussyhat! Oh, my goodness!”
Tamsyn gave a shriek of delight. Ma’s newfound politics had taken quite a few hits of late, and she was wearing her Orlando rainbow ribbon and several conspicuous, jewel-encrusted safety pins to assure anyone who needed to know that she was a benign person to sit beside on the bus. Leaning out of Rufus’s arms, Tamsyn reached to touch these tokens, one by one. Then she pulled off her little knitted hat and placed it, very carefully, on top of Ma’s white perm.
Gideon eased back out of the laughing group. He couldn’t have explained the chill that had seized him, as if a November cloud had eaten the noonday sun. Instinctively he looked round for his other half, but all was well there: Lee helping Zeke prep the twins for the climb up to the rocks, applying sun cream and arranging the shade over the double buggy. Nothing to worry about at all. He loved the links that had formed between the wildly disparate Frayne and Tyack clans, loved that Zeke had moved from suspicion and resentment of his brother’s gay partner to a kind of protective devotion. And as for Tamsyn and Ma, no blood link at all, but somehow the little nut hadn’t fallen far from the hazel tree...
Everyone was in motion. As ever with the big family outings, chaos had reached a certain point and then resolved into order. Zeke had taken most of the year since the birth of his sons to recover from the shock of their existence, but was now growing used to the military operation of taking them on a day out. He was in capable command of the pushchair, heading up the advance out of the car park and onto the moorland track. And the Kemp kids were a blessing, Lorna so used to dealing with little brothers and sisters that a handful extra made no difference at all. Ma was walking proudly on her own, making light use of her rainbow-striped stick. Eleanor and Rufus followed closely on behind, swinging Tamsyn between them like a baby chimpanzee.
Lee glanced back, as if he too had felt the cloud. Even from distance, Gideon could read the silent flash of his question: you all right back there? He smiled and lifted his hand, and began to climb the hill in the wake of the crowd. He needed a moment to walk on his own, that was all. These moods had swept over him from time to time since his transfer to CID. Nothing he couldn’t cope with. It just felt horribly strange and wrong to him not to be able to talk to Lee. He’d tried and failed to find the lonely strength within him that had kept him functional for all the long years of his career before he’d had a sweet clairvoyant lover by his side, ready to listen to his joys and his sorrows—spoken and unvoiced—until the cows came home...
His mobile buzzed in the back pocket of his jeans. He thought about ignoring it. One of the moor’s many charms was its signal black spots, and if Lee could postpone clients to get a free afternoon, Gideon could pretend to have been off-net. Anxiety tugged at him. What if, by his failure to respond, a stitch was dropped in the tapestry the Bodmin CID squad was attempting to weave around its current suspects? Gideon couldn’t even see the pattern yet—felt as if, most of the time, he was working in the dark—and so he didn’t have the right to decide he was unnecessary, even for the space of a sunny afternoon.
He shielded the screen from the sun. The text was a string of code words and numbers, incomprehensible to anyone but an officer working a particular case. The good news was that he wasn’t required to drop everything and run: the bad, that the security threat surrounding the Kerdrolla Pride march had notched up a level, and he and his team were summoned to an emergency briefing early next day.
He tucked the phone away, the beauty of the moorland fading around him to meaningless colours and shapes. He was going to have to find some way to dissuade Ma from the march. That was just the kind of problem he’d automatically have taken to his husband in the days before CID had gagged him. Can you head her off at the pass, love? Tell her Tamsyn wants babysitting, and no-one but Grandma will do. Or take them both out for the day—she loves a stand-up Cornish tea with you two even more than a fight for equal rights. For a moment he toyed with the idea of throwing all his new restraints to hell and telling Lee anyway. No-one a better repository of secrets than his lover: deeper than the ocean, and a first-rate clam when he wanted to be... But whenever the temptation took hold of Gideon, the voice of his DI would echo at him from his earliest induction session. If your friends and family didn’t know, they couldn’t tell, and their ignorance took them out of the firing line. You didn’t keep your trap shut for your own sake, not at all. You did it for theirs.
“Afternoon, Sergeant.”
Gideon repressed a jump. He couldn’t leap out of his skin at a touch from so old a friend as Sarah Kemp. She’d come quietly to his side and tucked a hand into his arm.
“Hello, Sarah. For heaven’s sake, don’t call me sergeant.”
“Oh, I forgot. Detective Sergeant now, isn’t it?”
“Leave it out. I’m on my day off, that’s all. I’m just Gideon.”
She paced along beside him in the sun. Like all loving parents on the edge of the great moor, she had a wide-ranging stare, a radar sweep. “That’s the thing, though,” she said, after checking off her own brood, Wilf’s two, and even Tamsyn, secure as she was in Rufus Pendower’s arms. Zeke’s twins were safe in their double buggy, Lee and Eleanor laughing as they lifted it over a rough stretch of the track. “You’ll never be just Gideon to us here in Dark. You’ll always be our policeman, even on your day off.”
“Well—thanks, but I was hoping none of you would do anything arrestable today.”
“With this many kids, who knows?” She gave his arm a cheerful squeeze. “Zeke doesn’t mind us tagging along after all, does he?”
“Not at all. Believe it or not, that stone face means he’s delighted.”
“Ah. I thought I saw a glimmer.”
“And Tamsyn asked for you, Wilf and the kids by name.”
“Crikey. She’s getting smart as a whip, isn’t she? Mine hardly knew their own names at that age.”
Gideon smiled. He was blisteringly proud of his daughter’s ordinary achievements. “At least yours didn’t postpone walking until they were practically in their teens.”
“Yes, I know she gave you a scare. Mine are just hyperactive thugs,” she said contentedly, watching Jenny and Bradley hit the turf in a shrieking tangle. “Still, why should Tamsie walk when she can stick a hand out and have anything she wants?”
Gideon stumbled over a rock, and was ashamed at having to use the sturdy grip Sarah tightened on his arm to save him. “Oh. You know about that?”
“Am I not meant to?”
“I don’t know. I... guess I thought she was just doing it for me and Lee.”
“Puzzled the hell out of me when I was babysitting, until I thought about whose kid she was, and—well, I was in Penzance that night when she put on her firework display. That was her, wasn’t it?”
Gideon was in danger of missing her point. “She’s our kid, Sarah,” he said unhappily. “Lee’s and mine.”
Her mouth opened in contrition. “Oh! Christ, I know that.”
Yes, she did. Nobody better—she’d been at Drift as well as Penzance, with a front-row seat for Elowen Tyack’s decision to take her baby back out of Lee and Gideon’s care. “Sorry. Raw nerve.”
“I’m not surprised, after what that psychotic cow put you through. All I meant was, Tamsyn’s a little Tyack. And there’s no shortage of weird gifts on that side of the bed, is there?”
Gideon knew he ought to defend the psychotic cow. He’d made his peace with her, shared the odd family occasion without chaining Tamsyn to her cot. Still, Lee continued to look at his sister as if she might be an unexploded bomb, and his own indifference at hearing her called names told a story, too. “It was nice of you to just... take it in your stride, Sarah. I hope she didn’t break anything.”
“She didn’t. I did, the first time I saw her floating one of her little toys in the air—dropped my cuppa, didn’t I? But she’s gentle as a lamb.” Sarah patted his arm. “Why should I make a fuss about it? There’ll be plenty of fools ready to do that, if she carries on.”
“We thought—we hoped—that she’d stopped.”
“Is that what you’re so worried about?”
Gideon really thought he’d successfully switched masks. Well, it was part of the truth, and Sarah was better off with that than the whole. Life in Cornwall had never been the tourist dream, but how the hell had his world changed so much that kids with rainbow banners had become a target for terrorists in the streets? “You’d be worried if it was one of your lot making the furniture spin.”
“Mine don’t have to be poltergeists to do that. Hoi, Jenny Kemp! You let your brother alone, or I’ll skin you alive!” The radar-gaze made another sweep. It fastened with satisfaction upon Lorna, who was running in to separate her rolling, scrapping siblings. “Look at her, Gid. I sometimes feel like I’m cheating at being a mum, she’s so much help with the little ‘uns—mine and Wilf’s.”
“She’s a good girl.”
“Yeah. Can’t decide at the moment if she wants to join the police or become a psychic investigator when she grows up.” Sarah shot Gideon a sideways glance. “Shame there’s no nice nurses or ballet dancers to be role models for her around here. I don’t often think about that time four years back, you know, but...”
Gideon shook himself out of his abstraction. “It’s all right to talk about it. Trauma like that doesn’t just disappear.”
“I sometimes think that—suppose things had been different, and your Lee had never come here to Dark, and the two of you had never found her. I don’t think you’d ever have stopped searching, would you? You’d never have given her up.”
The scenario was hellish. Gideon tried not to rock beneath the force of it, to keep his eyes on the blessedly ordinary sight of his family and friends climbing the track ahead. None of them would have been there, if not for Lee. Gideon would never have reconciled with his brother, and Ma would have remained a chained-up minister’s wife, not a champion of all gay relationships because she saw that her son was happy in one. Sarah might one day have learned to live with her loss, but the moor would have become a desolation to her, the wilderness that had consumed her eldest child.
And as for himself: no, she was right. He would never have ceased to look. Lorna Kemp had been his first missing-child case. He’d have continued his vigil, his nightly walks across the moor, returning alone to the empty parish house. Lee had even taught him how to light the fire. “It didn’t happen that way,” he said gruffly. “Lorna’s fine, and Lee did come, so...”
“We should seize the day? I will if you will.” She dropped her hand into his, gave it a squeeze and let him go. “I’m just trying to remind you that no matter how much of a detective sergeant you are, you’ll always be our village bobby. Guardian Frayne.”
He shivered deeply. “Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, it’s Old Penglas’s name for you—Ray Tregear’s, I mean. I ran into him and Kitto in Falmouth the other day. You know how that poor boy is—nine-tenths piskey-led, and the other tenth woolgathering.”
“He’s much better now. He has a boyfriend.”
“I know! He was with them. Skinny little lad, but some kind of physics genius, from what Ray said. Gonna build a little version of the sun in a laboratory and save the world with free energy.”
“That’ll be nice. It wants saving.”
She had drawn a little ahead of him on the path, on her way to help Lorna break up the fight. She looked back at him in concern. “It’s all right, Guardian Frayne. Nobody expects you to save it all by your-...”
They’d reached the top of the hill. There was the strange granite ridge guarding its brow, and beyond it, the dream-like piles of rocks, poised in their daily defiance of physics—smallest at the bottom, rising in a stack to great flat wedges, baby whales swimming in air. Such a beautiful place, perfect for a family picnic on a well-seized day like today. All around lay miles of pristine moorland, home only to the thorn trees and wild ponies. This was Tamsyn’s heritage, space enough surely to contain even the weirdest of gifts. Gideon wanted her to see it, to learn to love it as he had.
He’d learned from the safe embrace of his mother’s arms. And there, poised on a rock, dark curls blowing in the wind, was Elowen.