“It can all just what, Constable Frayne? Blow over?”
Gideon ran a hand across his skull. Now he came to think about it, Mabel could only be a couple of years younger than old man Pascoe and Mr Penyar. They were all of the same generation, dug well into their eighties now, just like the so-called witches of Dark and Lamorna. Mabel didn’t look a day over sixty. She looked as if she’d sucked the milk, blood and bones out of a fat Jersey cow that very morning. Had she actually been crouched among the daisies, listening all this time? “Mrs Pascoe,” he began. “The views I express in a private conversation with—”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? That’s how you are. Find the easy way out, just like you did with my Kenneth.” She folded her arms on the top of the wall. “Oh, I know all about you. My old man might have a soft spot for you, and it worked out all right about Ken, but let me tell you something—he were cock-a-hoop for getting off, and he went round for weeks telling everyone how he’d made a right fool of the poliss. How did he do it, then? Did he slip you a tenner or two? He were never short of cash, most of it nicked from my kitchen drawer.”
Lee gave a low, soft whistle, not without a note of admiration in it. Briefly Gideon met his eyes, and the message flashed between them so clearly that Gid had to swallow laughter: I guess the milking gloves are off now. “Look, ma’am—”
“Don’t you ma’am me. What’s in it for you this time? Have the solar people found a better deal somewhere else, and they’re giving your lot backhanders to get out of their contract with me?”
“Excuse me?”
“I know how it goes. I don’t want this investigation of yours dragging on for months and months, and only a mystery hanging over it all, and a bunch of bloody hippies like.... like...” Her finger swung round like a compass needle and fastened on Lee, resplendent as he was in his favourite Cosmic Ray’s T-shirt. “Like him, swarming over my fields on some kind of pilgrimage! It’s bad enough having ’em tramping around to see the bloody stone. I ought to set the dogs on ’em, I ought.”
Annoyance fell away from Gideon like a heavy, fur-clad skin. He had no idea why. Maybe Lee was right, and the moon had passed into its waning stage, releasing its hold on the beast within, leaving the policeman in charge. “Well,” he said patiently, “they won’t be able to do that for much longer, will they? Not when there’s a sea of panels and a snakesnest of cables here.”
“See? I knew you had reason to try and stop the deal. I want this investigated fair and square, and if that old Ragwen woman’s coven’s responsible, they ought to be made to pay for it, down to the last man alive of them. They always did live to unnatural old ages, that lot!” The compass needle swung in DI Lawrence’s direction. “If you don’t tell your boss over there everything you know, or think you know, I will.”
Gideon shook his head. Zeke was watching him with apprehension. The hold Lee had fastened on the back of his belt, at present only companionable, could become at any second a powerful restraint. There was no need. “You’re quite right, Mrs Pascoe.”
“I am?” She bridled, and colour came and went in her face. “I mean... yes. Too right, I am.”
“Not about Kenneth, and not about any mysterious deal with the solar people. About the body in your fields. He—whoever he is—deserves to have his death investigated with all the resources at our disposal. I’m sorry I let myself think otherwise, even for a minute.” He pulled a wry face at his brother and Lee. “Very sorry indeed. Now, we’ll take you up on that tea, if it’s still on offer—with DI Lawrence, too—and we’ll have a proper talk.”
***
Dark was quiet when they got home, drenched in the mid-afternoon somnolence that fooled visitors into thinking nothing ever happened there. Sarah Kemp had texted to say she and Isolde would pick Tamsyn up from nursery and take her back with her mob for tea. Both child and dog roamed so freely between Chy Lowen and the little house in the village that they considered both to be home. Gideon approved of this. It fostered his daughter’s sense of independence, whilst at the same time soothing his own scars and paranoia. If he looked down through the golden gorse at the front gate of Chy Lowen, he could see the back of Sarah’s terrace. With a little imagination, he could pick out Tamsyn’s voice amongst the faint, far-off seagull cries of children at play.
“She’s all right, you know.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Lee had finished lifting their untouched picnic hamper out of the car and retrieving the blanket Gideon had sincerely hoped would be covered in grass, burrs and traces of come by now. He joined Gideon by the gate, tucked a hand into his elbow. “Let’s go in. We can have our picnic at home.”
“I’m sorry, love. It just didn’t feel right to stay out there trying to have fun, after all that.”
“I know. Did you see me arguing?”
“No. I don’t have to say to you what feels right and wrong, do I? Don’t have to sit at a farmhouse table eating scones while I... sell out a bunch of harmless old cuckoos who used to enjoy a romp in the fields at Beltane.”
“You did the right thing. You’re a good copper, Gid. A good man.”
“Am I?” Gideon asked unhappily. “I don’t feel like one sometimes.”
“Why ever not?”
He considered. Because I want to eat people hardly seemed like a sane reply, and it wasn’t true anyway, not now—his fantasy of turning round snarling upon the likes of old man Penyar and Mabel Pascoe had subsided. “I’m not much of a dad,” he said instead, lamely. “Poor Sarah must be sick to death of babysitting our kid.”
“She told me last week—in confidence, mind—that she likes Tamsie better than any of her own, apart from Lorna. She’d steal her if she could. And this afternoon... I think she just knows we need time. Come on.”
Chy Lowen had a porch, a solid construction of Cornish granite now restored to all its former glory with a pitched slate roof and blue-painted benches on either side. At this time of year it was all but drowned in wisteria, the benches a shady, liminal spot for pulling off boots and enjoying a moment’s retreat from the business of the day. Tamsyn patiently checked its shadows for a concealed parent during games of hide-and-seek, although Gideon suspected she’d long since passed the stage of needing to look.
A good place to hide, if hiding was the game. He stiffened as the overhanging blossoms stirred; instinctively took a half-step to shield Lee. A man was straightening up from one of the benches. He didn’t look like a reporter or a client for Lee, loaded down with lost pens, lies and secrets. He came towards them smiling, one hand extended. “Oh, hell,” Gideon said. “What now?”
“Something good, for a change.” Lee strode to meet the newcomer halfway. “Uncle Dave! What brings you here? I thought you and Jill had retired to Spain.”
“Long story. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. It’s good to see you, Locryn.”
Gideon looked on, puzzled, while the two embraced. He was on some level an inveterate copper: although he liked the look of this stranger, with his frank smile and warm grey eyes, he was out of habit running the man’s face through an inner database of known crooks and villains who might wish to bring harm to his family. Other than Jago, Lee had no uncles, and only a handful of people knew his old Cornish name. Gideon waited, trying to keep mind open and mouth shut until he learned more.
Lee didn’t make him wait long. “Gid,” he said, grinning broadly, proper colour in his face for the first time since early that morning. “This is David Rawle, a very old friend of my dad’s. I was in and out of his house almost as much as Tamsie is at Sarah’s. I feel like a kid, Dave, calling you uncle, but...”
“Oh, I hope you’ll always do that. This must be your husband, the famous policeman. I called in to see Jago at Drift—he couldn’t say enough about this hero of yours.”
“Jago’s too kind.” Gideon stepped forward to shake Rawle’s hand, wryly remembering how his own first encounter with Jago had ended. On that occasion, Lee had arrived just in time to prevent an assault. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, David. Come on in and have some tea.”
***
“I won’t mess around with you, gentlemen. It is a huge pleasure to see Locryn, especially in this beautiful house and obviously so happy and well, but that’s not why I came. It’s about Tamsyn.”
Gideon exchanged a long glance with Lee across the kitchen table. He wished he still felt bloodthirsty, bestial, ready to bite this nice guy’s head off as soon as look at him. How much easier it had been, how much more satisfying, to take on the nature of the wolf! Now he was back in the log cabin again, in the covered wagon, shielding his family while the creatures circled outside. This wolf was Lee’s friend. Mentally he broke down his shotgun and laid it aside—for now. “You’ll have to excuse us,” he said carefully. “We’re really pleased to see you here, and we’ll... talk to you about pretty much anything. But our daughter’s not up for discussion.”
“I completely understand that. Please believe that I wouldn’t have breathed her name if I didn’t think this a matter of the greatest urgency.” Rawle leaned forward. “Locryn, it’s not like you to let someone else speak for you.”
Lee had taken a seat at the end of the table. Now he got up—unhurriedly, just as if on the way to pour a top-up of tea—and pulled out a chair at Gideon’s side. “I don’t,” he said casually, sitting down and pushing a plate of biscuits in Rawle’s direction. “But as far as Tamsyn’s concerned, we only have one voice. And... it probably sounds petty, but most people call me Lee these days, and I do prefer it.”
Petty perhaps, but Gideon observed how neatly it knocked Rawle’s attention away from the issue of their little girl. “Lee?” Rawle echoed in smiling dismay. “Yes, I saw that on one of the TV adverts for your show, but I thought it was just a stage name.”
“Nope. My real one now, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Of course. It just seems a shame, with all the other old local names in your family—Jago, Elowen, and of course my dear old friend Cadan.” Rawle stirred his tea, letting a few moments pass in thoughtful silence. “I’m so sorry. I can see how it hurts you even to hear him mentioned, and I’m sure Gideon’s about to tell me he’s not up for discussion, either. But really it’s because of him that I’m here—because you two are standing exactly where he did twenty five years ago, with a daughter who’d started to throw things around without touching them whenever she was upset.” He made a placating gesture in Gideon’s direction. “I haven’t been spying on you. I’d just stopped off to get some milk and the papers from the shop, and... I saw what happened.”
Gideon didn’t want to sound like a copper. But he didn’t want to call this newcomer by his first name, either. Mr Rawle would have suited him better, and a desk in an interview room instead of his ordinary, sacred kitchen table. “Lee said you’d retired to Spain, David.”
“And it’s a long way to come for a pint of milk? Yes, we had retired. But certain factors meant we had to take up business where we’d left it off. Locryn—er, Lee, do you remember how you and Elowen came to one of our summer camps on our farm near Bowithick?”
Lee grabbed eagerly at the safe new topic. “Yeah, of course. We had a wonderful time. Acres of land to run around on, and other kids who didn’t seem to think we were odd.”
“That’s right,” Rawle said, nodding. “It was both of you by then. You’d put your sister in the shade by pulling the mask off Morris Hawke, and there was all the furore over that. Your mother was terribly ill at the time, and Cadan was at his wits’ end, so the two of you stayed with me for a month. Did you ever wonder who those other children were, and why none of them batted an eyelid at your gifts?”
Not a safe topic at all. Lee leaned forward, meshing his fingers together. “No. I think I was too busy building a treehouse.”
“Well, you only experienced it as a holiday camp, but my farm also functioned—had done for years—as a school and a retreat for gifted children. All fully government certified, of course, but... we didn’t tell the government everything, especially when it came to the nature of our children’s gifts. My wife and I had the most urgent of reasons for starting and running a facility like this. Do you remember our daughter, Alice? She was a lot older than you, but she kept an eye on you, led team games.”
Lee was shivering. His shoulder wasn’t touching Gideon’s, and no-one else would have noticed the fine, electrical tremor running through him. He made another effort at lightness. “Of course. Poor Elowen had a huge crush on her for a while.”
“I think Elowen might have been recognising a kindred spirit. My wife and I taught in ordinary schools for years, as you know, but when Alice started showing... well, unusual talents, and was encountering the usual mix of fear and bullying in the classroom, we decided not only to home-school her but to use our experience to start a facility for others like her.”
“Others like her?” Gideon echoed. “Were there enough of them to justify a school like that?”
“That’s the strange thing. There were, and there are. Lee was unusual, and it seems that Tamsyn’s more extraordinary still—but you’d be surprised at the number of Cornish kids who display telepathic, clairvoyant or telekinetic powers at some point in their development. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s the radiation from the granite, or just growing up surrounded by so much myth and strangeness, but there’s a massive statistical spike. And Jill and I wanted to offer parents the kind of service they couldn’t get...” He paused, long enough to look out through the window towards Dark. “...in a little Cornish village where everybody notices everything, and gossips about everything else. I’d very much hoped that Cadan would consider sending you and Elowen to us permanently, as boarders at the school.”
Lee’s knuckles whitened. “But he didn’t.”
“No. Elowen’s gifts switched off at puberty, as sometimes happens with the girls. And Cadan—well, he was so devoted to you that he couldn’t bear to be without you, especially after your mother died.”
As ghosts from the past went, this one was more trouble than he was worth. Gideon began to push upright, a short, sharp exorcism in mind. But Lee caught his arm. “It’s all right, love,” he said, the tears in his eyes making a liar of him. “I know I didn’t cope well with losing my dad. But I don’t mind hearing about how much he loved me now.”
You don’t need to hear it from this joker. Gideon sat back down. “All right,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Honestly, though, David—if you’ve got some kind of message for us, or a point to make, could you make it and be done?”
“Yes, of course. I do understand. You know, Lee, the kind of love Cadan had for you—it was beautiful, and rare as diamonds. The only trouble with it was that it made your father choose what was right for him, and not necessarily right for you.”
“That’s nonsense. He was a perfect dad.” Lee suddenly tipped his head to one side, like Isolde hearing a far-off warning sound. Gideon felt the shift of his energies, his wild gifts coming into play. “What happened to Alice? Where is she now?”
“Why should anything have happened to her? She’s still with us, helping us with children up there to this day. Nobody understands them like their own kind.”
“But Tamsyn isn’t any type of kind. She’s an ordinary little girl. She likes her dog, her plasticine, and playing with the other village kids. She hasn’t levitated so much as a toy lately, not until—”
“Not until today, when she almost killed someone.”
“Oh, all right,” Gideon declared. He pushed back his chair from the table. Like a good host, he’d taken Rawle’s jacket and hung it up neatly on a coat hook in the hall. Now he went to fetch it. With equal politeness, he held it out to him. “Always nice to meet a friend of Lee’s. But goodbye.”
Rawle didn’t argue. He stood up, took the jacket and folded it over his arm. “I understand why you want me to leave,” he said levelly, “and I will. I do have one more thing I need to say to Lee, though—and if I have to ask your permission to say it, Gideon, then there’s something very wrong in this household.”
Gideon’s eyebrows rose. Lee could wrap him round his little finger. Was he somehow coming across to Rawle as a bullying husband, holding Lee hostage in the House of Joy? Lee himself was wide-eyed with incredulity. Gideon stepped well clear of their guest, holding up both hands in surrender. “Please,” he said. “Knock yourself out. You don’t get thrown out until Lee says so.”
“Thank you. It is important, Lee. You may not be aware of this, but in all likelihood you’ll be acting as an amplifier for your daughter’s powers. She won’t mean to, but she’ll draw on you like a battery. As long as she’s near you, she’ll be dangerous.” He put out a hand to stop Lee’s protest, cast an almost pleading look at Gideon. “Listen, both of you, for one minute more. She’s just a little girl, and none of this is her fault, but she almost killed a man. I saw it, and I saw half the people in this village seeing it too, and deciding—because they love her, and they love their policeman and their friendly neighbourhood clairvoyant—to pretend it was something else. You two are pretending, too. Are you really going to risk something like that happening again?”
Gideon folded his arms. “What does avoiding the risk mean, according to you? Sending her away?”
“My school’s on the north side of the moor, just where it used to be. Half an hour’s drive. Of course she’s not ready yet, but soon... She can come to us as a weekly boarder, spend her weekends at home.”
“Sending her away,” Gideon repeated, not as a question this time. “Right. In that case, David, as far as I’m concerned, Tamsyn can kill whoever she likes. She can work her way through the whole bloody village, starting with—”
“Gideon.” Lee had moved to his side unnoticed. His hand on Gideon’s arm was gentle but absolute. “Leave it.”
“I will, as long as David here understands...”
“I do,” Rawle said. “You’re the kind of father any kid would want. But what if she’s a risk to herself?”
“Please get out.” Gideon stood, barely breathing, until Rawle was in the doorway. “Wait. You said you and your wife had to come out of retirement. Why?”
“I told you there’s always been a disproportionate number of children like Tamsyn in Cornwall. There’s even more of them now. I was called... Alice called us home to help her cope. Whatever’s happening—and I don’t pretend to know what it is—it’s starting to happen faster. We have kids who can read books blindfolded, kids who can lift tables and start fires. But they’re nothing compared with your little girl, Gideon. Tamsyn’s off the charts. Think about what I’ve said, for God’s sake. You’re going to need help.”