Nate was leaning heavily on Mabel Pascoe’s arm. He looked weary and sick, but his eyes were clear, and when Mabel brought him to a halt by the police tape, he met and held Gideon’s gaze steadily. “Have you found it all out, then? I was so afraid when I saw Jana Ragwen, perched like a raggedy crow on my wardrobe upstairs. But I should’ve known she meant no harm to me. It was Clem’s time to tell his story, that’s all, and she’d brought Lee Tyack to be his voice and his bones.”
Gideon could’ve used a voice to borrow, too. His own felt inclined to crack. To his relief, Lee stepped forward, the scarf in his outstretched hand. “We’ve found out some of it,” he said, “but I only know what Clem could tell—all the things you wanted me to know when you gave me this. If I give it back to you...”
“Could I tell my part?” Nate took the scarf from him. “I don’t know. We’ve been sitting together in the kitchen, me and Mabel, while you were out here, and we haven’t said much to one another in that time, because... we never did really talk to each other.”
“And they’re hard to break—those old habits of silence.”
“Yes. But she says she has something for me too, only she didn’t want to give it me in there. She says it has to be given out here, where all can see. She was particular about that—weren’t you, Mabs? All.”
Mabel didn’t answer. Instead, she let go of Nate’s arm and backed away. Whatever she’d promised, Gideon wondered if delivering on it had proved too frightening: but then saw that she’d only moved to block old man Penyar’s retreat towards the gate. She leaned against it; wrapped one arm around the post. “Speak to them, Nate,” she said. “It’s long past time.”
“I will, then.” He raised his head and looked at each of them—Gideon, Lee, Lawrence and Zeke, and then at the torn-up earth beyond the tape. “He was such a lonely lad, and he didn’t want to live anymore. Just to dance, then lie down with me in the field.”
“And this was Clem Atherton?” Gideon prompted gently. “The man who arrived here at the farm at the beginning of May, in... Do you remember what year it was, Nate? It would help us to know.”
“It was 1955. Yes, his name was Clem. He was my first and my last. It wasn’t something you did in those days, although Jana Ragwen understood—lying down with other men. So I married, in time, and I had what they call a normal life. But I never forgot him. He was such a lonely, lovely lad.”
Over by the gate, Mabel Pascoe suddenly burst into noisy tears. “What they call a normal life?” she choked out. “Didn’t I do any better for you than that?”
“Did I say it were any fault of thine, Mabs? You knew my nature, and you took me anyway.”
“Took you? Did I put that great shotgun of yours to your head and march you into Pastor Frayne’s church to be wed? Did I—”
“Oh, God,” Lee interrupted suddenly. “This is like the couple in that American Gothic painting having a fight. Mrs Pascoe, you do have something to give to Nate, and you’re right—it does have to be shown to us all.”
“I don’t want to leave this gateway, Mr Tyack!”
“No, and I understand why. I’ll come to you, if you’ll let me. I’ll let everyone see.”
She nodded once. Then she put a hand into the front pocket of her apron and took out a piece of paper. Her fingers were trembling: Lee strode over to take it from her before it could fly off on the wind. Carefully he straightened it out. It was curled with age, folded with repeated attempts at concealment. “A photograph,” he said, turning so that everyone assembled by Clem’s grave could see it, most particularly old man Penyar. “It’s faded, but... it’s clear enough. Who took this, Mrs Pascoe?”
“One of the farm lads. He should’ve been minding his work, but they all looked so grand in their May Day finery. I thought they were wicked, but they don’t look it, do they?”
Gideon stepped closer to see. “No, they don’t,” he said. “Here’s the Spinner stone in the background, as if it’s looking after them all. Here’s Granny Ragwen, and I’m guessing this beauty must have been the wench. Nate’s here, sitting on the grass with his arm around... My God, Lee, Clem actually looks a bit like you here.”
“I know. Weird, isn’t it?”
“I love how he’s smiling, though. They all are, even...” He glanced up. Old Penyar had crept as close as he dared to Mabel and the gate, but she was frowning at him like thunder. “Even you, Mr Penyar. You haven’t changed much, I’ll give you that. Still very identifiable. I tell you what, Mrs Pascoe—open the gate and let the poor chicken run.”
“I’m scarcely inclined to, Constable! Even though I’m in no place to judge him.”
“I don’t know. You’ve always steered clear of these wicked witches, haven’t you? Always gave them a wide berth, and did your best to rescue your Nate from their clutches.”
“That I did. Although why that should please you, I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t. I prefer it to rank bloody sneaking and hypocrisy, that’s all. Let him go.”
She swung the gate wide. Old man Penyar crept past her, head low. As soon as he was safely in the lane, he broke into a remarkably sprightly trot and vanished among the thorns.
***
“How did you end up with the picture, Mrs Pascoe?”
She’d come to sit among them, on a pile of drying earth beside the grave. Lee had shrugged out of his jacket and spread out for her. She turned a woebegone face upon him, clutching tight to Nate’s hand where he sat beside her. “I thought you were meant to know everything.”
“Well, I don’t, not by a long chalk.”
“I found it among Nate’s things, then, a few months after I married him. I saw how he was looking at that lad Clem. He never looked at me that way! Oh, I was so bitter jealous. I hid the photo, and I never let on, no matter how much he begged for it. What’s the point in my saying sorry for it now, Nate? You won’t ever forgive me.”
“If I didn’t forgive you, would I be letting you break every bone in my hand with that bread-kneader grasp of yours?”
“Ah, but I haven’t told all. I hated this field, and I hated the witches. And as soon as you got confused enough in your head and I had an excuse, I sold the land.”
“As soon as I got... what?” With an effort, Nate twisted himself around to stare at her. “Confused in my head, you morgawr? I had flu, then a chill in my waterworks, that was all, and you had that quack doctor friend of yours come round and—what, declare me bloody senile? I needed antibiotics, that was all!”
“Well, you’ve been having them, haven’t you? I got scared after Lee Tyack came—scared he could see through me, so I started giving you mine. Why do you think you’re so bright-eyed now, when this afternoon you could barely remember your name? They work fast, those things do.”
“So do you, madam! How did you manage to sell the land out from under me in that time?”
“You’ve got your no-good son the estate agent to thank for that.”
“Well, damn you both,” Nate said wonderingly, pulling his hand free. “I don’t believe I do bloody well forgive you after all.”
“Actually,” DI Lawrence declared, wearily taking a seat on the old man’s other side, “it’s all academic now anyway. Leaving aside the issue of who signed the papers and why, this land’s no good for conversion to a solar farm anyway.”
Mabel gave a twitch. “What? But the company said—”
“The company won’t be aware of a change to the scheduling of the Spinner stones. Because of the extreme likelihood that some kind of processional pathway connects this stone to the others in the fields around, the fields themselves have been granted a measure of protection.”
Gideon raised his eyebrows. “When did this happen?”
“I had a memo through from Jory Penwether at CAMS this morning after you left. It’s on the agenda from the department’s next meet with them and English Heritage.”
“That’s brilliant news.”
“Not for everyone. Mrs Pascoe, you can farm the land, just as you always have, but not build on it. And long may your crops flourish, as I suppose Jana Ragwen would say.”
The wind sent a rush of swallow-song into the ensuing silence. Poor Mabel leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. “I know I’ve been jealous and bad,” she said eventually, her voice muffled. “But I tried to make the best of it—the best of my home, the best of him.” Suddenly she sat up straight. “I was a good wife to you, Nate. I gave you the children you wanted, even if you didn’t want me that way, and I fine time I had of it, I tell you, like tempting a sick cat with a bit of liver on a string! And... And I did think you were sick in your head when I asked Ken to sell the land. I wanted to care for you and keep you at home, give you everything you needed.”
Gideon took Lee by the hand. Together they came to stand in front of the Pascoe’s—just another couple, age and gender aside, in the midst of their lives of work and hard-won love. He and Lee had it so much better, but still he knew that marriages had to stand like the Spinner stones under the sky, taking the weather as it came.. “There’s more than one way of doing that, Mrs Pascoe,” he said. “You could start by giving him back his picture.”
Lee held it out, smiling. After a long moment, the old woman gave a sharp nod.
Nate—Jonathan Pascoe, Clem Atherton’s last love—took it reverently from him. He laid it in his lap, and a tear dropped onto the fading celluloid. “My picture,” he said brokenly, and Mabel put her arm around him. “My picture!”
***
“You know,” Lee said, resting one elbow on the gate that led from the farm onto the main road, “everyone thinks you’re very smart. And you really are.”
“Do they?” Gideon was absurdly wide-open for compliments like this. He’d been admired and praised throughout his policing career for his physical prowess, but he knew he’d never set the Tamar on fire as far as brains were concerned. “Er... am I, I mean?”
“Absolutely. It’s just that... sometimes...” Lee reached up to stroke his brow. “Sometimes you’re standing there, handsome as hell, trying to put two and two together, and you ruck your forehead like a freshly ploughed field, and...”
“I look like a dope.”
“Maybe just a little, yes. What’s up?”
Gideon came to join him in his perusal of the road. Zeke had volunteered to stay with Nate and Mabel for the rest of the afternoon, to ensure that no-one got shot or stuffed head-first into a milk churn. In the layby opposite, Christine Lawrence was talking to a lean, attractive woman she’d once introduced to Gideon as her childminder. There were no kids in the back seat of the car parked there. “Must be on the school run,” he said musingly. “Maybe she swung by the station and came down this way when she didn’t find her at work.”
“Speaking of which, it’s time I went to fetch Tamsyn.”
“Are you okay to drive? I’d have thought you’d be exhausted after that.”
“That’s the weird thing. I was for a while, but not now. Clem wanted me to do one thing, and I did it, and it’s as if he handed all my energy back to me afterwards. That’s not what’s worrying you, though.”
“Well—Lawrence is a bit of a reactionary bitch, to be honest. But why did she say she was a hypocrite?”
Lee grinned. “I can answer that one for you. No psychic powers required. Look.”
Lawrence gave a swift, nervous glance up and down the road. Then she lit up more brightly than a sweep of Cornish sunshine on the Pascoes’ ancient fields, and she took the childminder’s face between her hands and kissed her.
Gideon couldn’t restrain himself. He pumped a joyous fist into the air. “Whoo-hoo!”
Both women whipped round. The childminder only smiled, but Lawrence blushed tomato red to the roots of her hair. Then, reluctantly, she smiled. “Thank you kindly, Sergeant,” she called against the wind, the wind from the wild western shore that had blown in so many changes from the Atlantic today. “That’ll do.”
Gideon and Lee stayed where they were, beaming and waving, while Lawrence and her friend got into the car and drove off. “Do you think that was why she turned up here yesterday?” Gideon asked, when their taillights had disappeared from view. “Was that part of Clem’s message?”
“I don’t know. If he had a message, I’m reading it from the same book anyone else could—from his history, his choices, the way he died. That love is the only and absolute thing, the word that should come with our last breath. That when it’s gone, and life is done—there’s no fear in giving ourselves back to the greater love we all came from.”
“Do you mean... to the earth? Are you gonna call me a hippy again?”
“No, I’m not,” Lee said, reaching up to put his arms around him. “I do mean the earth. The living land of Cornwall, our old Kernow—sacred once, sacred now and forever more.”