Back at the house, Gideon made a call to the Roads Policing sergeant in Bodmin town. Sam was a friend of his, and listened attentively to his account of the crash, which appeared to tally—somehow—with the eyewitness statements his lads had taken at the scene. Jim Teague, possibly DUI and definitely speeding, had flipped his car on the outskirts of the village. Sam didn’t seem concerned, any more than his officers, that the flip had taken place on the straight stretch of road, not the sharp curve before it. He advised Gideon to forget it and enjoy his day off.
There was nothing Gid wanted more. He hung up the phone and padded into the kitchen, where Lee was slicing bread with nervous precision and verve. “All right?” he enquired cautiously, careful to stay out of range of the blade.
Lee set out the bread in a neat array. He went to the fridge, extracted the butter, a packet of cheddar and the Marmite jar. He placed these things on the countertop, each with a small, eloquent thud. Then he turned to his husband, hands spread. “Are we not gonna talk about this?”
“We did. We have. Okay, Tamsyn might’ve done something, but equally she might not. And nobody saw anything—not our neighbours or any of the people down there. Jim Teague crashed his car, that’s all.”
“And... your guys from Bodmin station are happy with that?”
“As happy as we should be, maybe. Jim had it coming.”
“All right.” Lee rubbed his brow. “No argument from me. What I can’t buy is that no-one saw. They did, and you know it. They were transfixed.”
“Look, you were bound to think that. Yeah, I thought so too. But she’s like a bloody fire alarm on the rare times when she does go off, and maybe...” Gideon paused, a sense of shifting sands underfoot. “Maybe that’s all that got their attention.”
Folding his arms, Lee released a long, shaky breath. “You really think so?”
Living with Lee, Gideon knew—no-one better—the seductive power of telling people what they wanted to hear. He knew how hard Lee worked to avoid it, even when the truth would cut like a hot wire. The relief in those green eyes was pretty damn tempting, though. “Based on the evidence so far—yeah, I do. I mean, nobody’s banging on our door demanding to have her exorcised, or wanting to borrow her to shift furniture, are they?”
A faint smile lit Lee’s face. “No. I suppose not.”
Promptly a car door slammed in the lane. Gideon paused long enough to raise one disbelieving eyebrow at Lee. Then he strode to the window. He was one of those rare human beings destined never to get away with anything. Knowing this, he’d never tried: had joined the police, where his inability to lie, scheme, pull the wool over anyone else’s eyes or his own had been treated as job skills, not painful liabilities. “Shit,” he said, pressing his hands to the sill. This time the repercussions had landed hard and fast. “Reporters.”
“Seriously?” Lee went to join him, a warm push against his shoulder. “Oh, shit. Maybe they’ve come to interview you about your fabulous Maypole dance.”
“Yeah, or maybe one of our less devoted neighbours has told them our kid can flip cars. Either way...” Gideon grabbed Lee’s arm and pulled him aside. “Either way, let’s not be in.”
“Where are we gonna hide? Every room on this floor has more glass than sense.”
“Not the larder. Come on.”
Keeping to the wall, Gid towed Lee towards the rear of the kitchen, where the scullery opened out into a generous eighteenth-century walk-in cupboard, windowless and flagged in slate. They still used it in preference to the fridge for some kinds of wine and cheese, its shadowed space remaining cool even in the hottest summers. Gideon’s trouble with it was the sense of sweet enclosure, the intriguing layered-up scents of meat. The place was pristine clean, of course, but still he could somehow detect them, memory-whispers of farm-killed beef, fresh haunches being laid on white tile, blood still warm... “Hoi,” Lee whispered, closing the door behind them and pushing him back. “We don’t have time for that kind of malarkey, you randy great sod.”
“I guess not.” Reluctantly Gideon let him go. “I wonder who grassed us up? I’d automatically have said Bill Prowse, if he hadn’t done us all the favour of being dead.”
Lee’s gaze became distant. “He wouldn’t have done it anyway,” he said absently. “Not Bill.”
“Really?”
“Oh, you know him. Anti-establishment, anti-police, antisocial. He’d never go with the crowd.”
“Or, as you and nobody else on this earth could possibly know, there were tiny bits of goodness in him.” Gideon examined him closely. “Are the dead bothering you very much at the moment?”
“Yes, but not him.” Silver lights overwhelmed the green, and the next words came from him involuntarily. “Clem Atherton, the guy in the field at Pascoe’s Farm. I dreamed about him, that’s all.”
“Perfectly natural, after I told you about him under the hawthorns on a full-moon Beltane night. Except that I never happened to mention his name.”
Lee pulled a face. “You must have.”
“Nope, because I didn’t know it. Nobody does.”
The sudden blare of a car horn made them both jump. “Sounds like Sarah’s Beetle,” Lee said, clearly grabbing at the distraction. “The reporters must’ve blocked the track.”
“Sarah never drives up here.” Another horn—deeper this time, and then the slamming of more doors. Raised voices rang out across the peaceful May morning. “Nor does anyone else, for that matter. We’d better take a look.”
They left the fragrant refuge of the larder. Gideon pulled open the scullery door and jogged across the driveway to the corner of the house, Lee close on his heels. Lee had been right about the Beetle—there it was, not trapped behind the Cornish Herald van but parked at a ferocious angle across its front end. To Gideon’s surprise, the deeper horn had come from Julie Quentin’s absurd Suzuki truck, which she used to transport herself and her tiny baby along some of Cornwall’s best-kept roads. She’d stopped the massive vehicle two inches shy of the van’s rear bumper, and was planted squarely in the middle of the Chy Lowen track, hands on her hips, the baby staring in wonder from the cosy pod slung across her chest. “Gideon!” she yelled, catching sight of him as he emerged into the front garden. She was developing a proper moorland parent’s boom, in readiness for the time when she’d have to call in her daughter from games in the distant gorse. “We tried to block the buggers before they came up here, but they got past us.”
The Herald’s cameraman was out in the lane, glancing nervously between Julie and Sarah, who was comfortably propped against the Beetle’s wing, arms folded. His colleague had wisely remained in the van. “Here,” he called nervously through the open window. “Are you Sergeant Frayne?”
“Sergeant Tyack-Frayne,” Gideon corrected, offering an amiable smile and going to lean on the gate. “Can I help you gentlemen at all?”
“Well, we know about you down at the Herald, don’t we. At least... we’ve run stories about Lee Tyack, the clairvoyant who lives up here with you.”
Gideon made room for Lee to lean beside him. “Lee Tyack-Frayne,” Lee corrected in his turn, smiling too. “Sergeant Tyack-Frayne’s husband, that would be.”
“Right. Well, we’ve had reports about you in the past, and this morning we heard there’d been an accident in the village. A car crash. And—well, our caller said your little girl might’ve had something to do with it.”
Sarah Kemp burst into raucous laughter. “What, our little Tamsie? What fools you two must be to come all the way up here, chasing a story like that! Yes, there was a car crash. Another bloody fool came speeding down our road, and he hit a wet patch and got what he deserved.”
“A wet patch?” the reporter echoed. “There hasn’t been a drop of rain for weeks, Mrs... What did you say your name was?”
“Sarah. And you spell that with an off at the end. And an F-U-C-K at the front.”
Lee gave a hopeless snort. He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, my God, Gideon.”
“I know. You stay here, all right? I’d better go and sort this out.”
“Hang on, love. It’s worse than you think.”
“What?” Gideon shaded his eyes and followed Lee’s gesture away down the track towards the village. Other cars were pulling up behind the Suzuki, their Dark friends and neighbours emerging through the clouds of dust kicked up by the tyres. As the reporter had said, there hadn’t been a drop of rain for weeks, but Gid was willing to bet that every one of the new arrivals would claim the same cause for Jimmy Teague’s accident. “Oh, bloody hell. You’d better come with me after all—I’m gonna need you. Pitchforks at dawn!”
***
“Not that I’m really bothered—it’s just nice to be out for the day—but do you have any clue where we’re going?”
Gideon surfaced with a strange deep thump in his chest, as if Lee had startled him out of a dream. Quickly he scanned the view ahead and behind, the four lanes of the A30, where no-one at this minute was speeding, undertaking or doing anything else to wake up the copper inside the zoned-out day-tripper he’d apparently become. They’d just sailed through the Chybucca junction. “Well,” he said, unaware that he’d been entertaining the idea, “I’d forgotten how beautiful Lamorna is until I was driving around there last night. The hawthorn blossom’s like snowdrifts, piled up on both sides of the lanes. There’s lots of green fields where we can have our sarnies.”
“Mm. And then you can eat me all up.
Gideon grabbed the wheel. “Sorry?”
“Er... I mean we can do the child-free things we planned, that’s all. The ones you were trying to get away with in the larder.”
“Well, you’re always on my menu. I dunno about eating you up, but I will suck you off until you hear the angels sing.”
“Oh, man. Stop it.”
“Too unromantic?”
“Are you kidding? It’ll be a lot less romantic if you have to do it in the Camborne layby, that’s all.”
Gideon snorted and tried to keep his eyes and his mind on the road. They’d got this far in safety after all, and he’d had his work cut out to persuade Lee to abandon his station in Dark. Lee was rattled to the bone by their morning’s events, even though the reporters had crept off quietly in face of the village deputation. If their van had possessed a tail, it would’ve been tucked between the back wheels. And the crowd had dispersed straight away afterwards. Julie, an unexpected spokesperson, had paused only long enough to announce that she was a mother now, and wouldn’t want the tabloid press running after her little Cecilia. And nor would the other village parents, so they’d decided to help out, just as their Chy Lowen friends had always helped them. Sarah Kemp had followed up with a promise to keep a hawk-eyed watch on the nursery, which was just around the corner from her house.
Then she and Julie had added their opinion to Sergeant Sam’s that Gid and Lee should enjoy their day out. Everyone seemed very clear on that, as if the day and their destination mattered more than Gideon knew. He wasn’t about to argue. He’d helped Lee pack up the rest of their picnic and steered him firmly out to the car. And once on the road, the silky rush of tyres on tarmac had soothed them both into a kind of worn-out trance. So much they had to talk about, some of it as thorny as the twigs beneath the ramping, gleaming, heaped-up Beltane beauty of the may...
It would wait. Gideon laid his foot to the pedal for the last dual-carriageway dash before Hayle, where the mudflats and the narrow neck of land between the Towans and Marazion guarded a different world, the semi-island kingdom of Penwith, Lamorna, Zennor and Drift. Such ancient magic in the very names! He wound down the window and whispered them to himself, tasting their sweetness in the salt wind from the flats.