As soon as he’d climbed into the unmarked patrol car he now drove instead of his police Rover, his mobile beeped with a text to say that his DI had been delayed en route to work. No need to dash for the meeting now, so despite what he’d said about avoiding Constable Rhys’s toes, Gideon made a detour. He parked the Rover as discreetly as he could at the end of the terrace where Sarah and Wilf lived, and Ross Jones tended his illegal indoor garden.
He tapped on Ross’s door, and allowed his shadow—made louring and long by the low sun—to fall upon the window behind whose curtain so much excellent weed was being allowed to thrive. Ross would never gain a sense of self-preservation: his door swung welcoming wide. “Sergeant Frayne!” he declared, beaming, hitching at his pyjama bottoms. “Oh, man. Long time, no bust.”
He was obviously high. Naked from the waist up, unshaven and too thin. “Not my job anymore,” Gideon said, reaching past him into the hallway to grab a fleece jacket off a hook. “Put that on—it’s cold. I have to say, Ross, it’s tough for a copper to walk by your window when there’s little green hands reaching round the curtains to say hi.”
“Are there?” Ross shouldered into the jacket, then stumbled out barefoot to have a look. “Well, shit. So there are.”
“So there are. Tough for your neighbours to pretend it’s no big deal when their kids can see the leaves. Tough for Constable Rhys to believe it’s for personal use when you’re plainly and obviously dealing, and tough for me to believe—as I tend to—that a bit of good dope never hurt anyone, when I see you in a state like this. What the hell have you been doing?”
Ross stared at him miserably. “Heroin.”
“Oh, shit, Ross.”
“I’m so ashamed, Gid. And I’m so broke and fucked up.”
Tears had sprung into his eyes. Gideon grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him round and bundled him back into the house. The warm green scent of leaves assailed him, making his nostrils prickle and wistful memories of student days drift through his mind. “Go into the kitchen and make me a cup of tea.”
“What... What are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna phone Constable Rhys so he can come here and bust you for this crop. He’ll be pleased, and things will go so much easier for you since you’ve wisely decided to own up of your own accord. Right?”
“Er... right.”
“Then I’m phoning social services. Do you remember Barbara Jenkins?”
“Yeah, sure. She helped Sarah Kemp when Lorna was missing, didn’t she? Nice lady.”
“Very. Great links to drug support, and hard as fucking nails. Once you’re in the system for help, she won’t let go of you, so grit your teeth and prepare to get clean, like it or not. And while you’re working on it, I don’t want you anywhere near Ray Tregear.”
“Cosmic Ray in Kelyndar?”
“Yeah. Also in Dark, going back and forth to your door. He’s got a family now, and a nice little business. Don’t you screw things up for him.”
Ross sank into a chair, the only piece of furniture not subsumed by his fragrant jungle. “You don’t have to worry about Ray,” he said hoarsely. “He has been coming here, yeah. But only to nag the living daylights out of me to get help, now that you’re not around. He does nothing worse than his own herbal teas these days.”
“And that’s the way I want it to stay. Lead him not into temptation, as my brother would say, or I will deliver him from evil with my boot up your arse. Jesus, Ross—heroin, in Dark?” Gideon pulled out his mobile. “Tell me you have not been selling.”
“No, no. Using, but... I wouldn’t. I love Sarah and the kids too much for that.”
He lowered his head and began to sob. Pity went through Gideon like a hot wire. “I’ll make the tea,” he said, laying a hand on Ross’s bowed shoulder. “Everything will be okay, mate. You’ll be all right.”
“I thought... I thought you weren’t our policeman anymore.”
“I’m not. I’m just visiting.”
He waited until Constable Rhys arrived. Rhys would make a good officer one day, if his elders could stay off his turf and out of his face. Once he’d stopped gawping at the splendour of the crop and was not unkindly reading Ross his rights, Gideon faded into the background and let himself out of the house.
He prolonged his visit just a little longer. His route out of Dark led him past Bill Prowse’s house. His timing was good: there was the man himself, slouching his way down the street. He was wearing an oversized leather coat, and everything about him was furtive. Unless he’d never been to bed the night before, Gideon couldn’t think of any reason for him to be up and about at this hour.
He hadn’t seen the patrol car. Gideon waited until he was unlatching his garden gate. Then he flicked the switch for the siren, allowing one sharp whoop to break the morning hush.
Bill jumped as if he’d been shot. He whipped round with a ballet dancer’s grace. Two rabbits and a pheasant fell out from under his coat and hit the pavement. “Morning, Bill,” Gideon said pleasantly, leaning an elbow out of the window. “Good night for poaching, was it?”
“I never! That is, yes, but I never poached nothing. These were leavings from someone else’s trap.”
Gideon could see where Darren got his narrative style from. “Since when do you go out after your own food?”
“Since Tressa left me and took the bloody kids! No missus, no children, no—”
“No benefits. I see.” He did look thinner. A few trips up and down the tors to get his dinners would do him no harm, and no-one would miss the odd rabbit or game bird. Still, Gideon felt sorry for him. There’d been something almost majestic in his occupation of his armchair in front of the TV, Tressa and his children cursing him but waiting on him hand and foot. “Here’s the deal, then. You clear up that mess around your bins out the back, and I never saw you this morning.”
“What business is it of yours, copper?”
“Never saw that pheasant either, property by rights of the Duchy of Cornwall, six months jail time for touching a feather on their little heads.”
“You’re messing with me.”
Gideon was, absolutely. As far as he knew, the Bodmin pheasants were no more the Duke’s property than his own. “Try me and see, Bill. Just try me and see.”
“All right, all right!” Angrily Bill scooped up his haul. “You should be off catching proper criminals, you should. Paedos and burglars and immigrants.”
“I’m sorry, Bill—paedos and burglars and what?”
“You heard me.” He pumped his meaty fist in an ancient gesture of challenge and hate. “Kernow glan, that’s what I say. Kernow glan!”
Gideon ran this pronouncement through his databanks. He’d learned a lot of beautiful Revivalist Cornish from Lee, and this was pidgin at best, something along the lines of... “Clean Cornwall? Sounds like a great idea. You can start with those bins.”
Again came the fist-pump. It didn’t look quite spontaneous. More like something Bill had learned, probably in imitation of a Saturday afternoon wrestling match on TV—three sharp jabs into the air. The gesture was peculiarly hostile. As if the feelings it expressed could carry through the air, Gideon’s headache returned, accompanied by a surge of nausea. He shook himself. Bill had turned away and was stumping off towards his front door. He was an oddly lonely figure, now that he’d managed to drive away his wife, his fellow villagers, even his delinquent son.
He was also a dangerous bully, undeserving of compassion. Gideon didn’t have any for him. He just wished that he could spend his day quietly patrolling the ancient boundaries of Dark until he worked out what the bloody hell was bothering him—or, better still, until he could go back home to Lee, who would sling him into bed and make all the world’s badness go away.
He’d postpone his clients too, and he’d already done that once to fall in with Gideon’s plans. The cold-read sessions had become very important to him. Gideon, who hated to see his talents poured out at the whim of strangers, didn’t really understand why. Still, Lee would have his reasons. Someone in the crowd of the curious and downright idle who made their way through the door would have a genuine problem, a life-or-death question to ask. Gideon put the car into gear and pulled away.
***
“Should I put fifty quid on Morning Star?”
“I’m sorry?”
“This afternoon, in the 3:30 at Wadebridge. Who should I back? Here, I’ve got the paper with me—you can run your finger down the list and see if you get a feeling, or whatever it is you do.”
Lee sat back in his chair. He was glad he’d left the kitchen window open so that the cascading midsummer song of the curlews could reach him. Tamsyn was helpful, too, sitting on her play mat in the corner of the room beneath Isolde’s watchful gaze. Child and dog were like soothing ballast to his mind, warm weights to hold him in reality. None of the three hopeful punters sitting opposite him at the table now could provide a face for the blank-visaged presence in the mirror. He wanted to throw them out so he could get on to the next set.
That wouldn’t have been fair. His current batch had arrived in a nervously giggling troupe, clearly expecting a crystal ball, candles, and an incense-wreathed den. They’d been disappointed to find their psychic in a sunny kitchen, minding his daughter. Rachel, the turf enthusiast, let her hand brush his in her eagerness to unfold the paper. “Fifty quid a week on the horses,” he said musingly, hardly aware that he was speaking. “As much again on scratch cards and the lottery... That must be breaking you. You’re far better off with premium bonds—no huge wins, but the odds are good, and at least you can’t lose out.”
She jerked back as if he’d slapped her. “Fuck you,” she whispered hoarsely. “You don’t know nothing about me.” She got to her feet and ran for the door, one of her friends at her heels.
Something in their flight stimulated Isolde’s unpredictable herding instincts. Lee caught her by the collar as she tried to dash past in pursuit. “Thankless bloody task this is, sometimes,” he said wryly to his remaining client. Isolde sat down panting at his feet, and he reached into the drawer where he kept his supplies of leaflets and cards from a range of useful organisations across the peninsula. “I know she’s pissed off with me, but will you try to give her this? Gambling’s an addiction like anything else. There’s no stigma in it—at least not with these people in Truro. They can help.”
“Aren’t you going to charge her?”
He’d been left with the toughie of the bunch. He regarded her with reluctant sympathy. The product of hard times in a rural community, lean and self-sufficient and bitter as hell. “No. Didn’t come up with her racing tip, did I? Now, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I only came to look after her and Gemma. I think people like you are fakes.”
“Okay. Some of us are.”
“I mean, you must know her, right? It wouldn’t be hard. She’s always knocking round the bookie’s and the games arcades.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to ask me? About yourself, I mean.”
“Well, if Gemma’s not gonna have her appointment...” Her brow furrowed. “Why wouldn’t you charge Rachel? Makes me mad, it does, when people like her get handouts, something for nothing. Worse than the bloody layabouts down our street.”
Reality blinked. Lee made a grab for the edge of the kitchen table, but too late: he was right there, down her street. Standing at the bus stop on a Saturday night with a group of her mates, all of them hopped up on gin and White Lightning, waiting for a bus to take them clubbing in town. The second-hand alcohol high nearly knocked him off his feet, and he fought for self-possession, clutching at a lamp post. “What are you going to do?”
She turned to him, grinning. “What do you mean?”
“You’re all just out for a good time, but there’s something else. You’re so bloody angry.”
“I’m not angry. Chill out, mate—it’s a party.”
“I will if you will.”
She gave him a friendly shove. “What are you on about? Here’s the bus—come on.”
The group surged en masse off the kerb. They were scrambling onto the deck before the bus had come fully to a halt, oblivious to the girl trying to disembark. Lee threw out an arm to shield her. “Hoi, steady on. Let her off first.”
“What, that little bitch? Been on the scrounge all day in Falmouth, she has—I know her. Big Issue, my arse! Some of us have to work for a living.”
The girl tried to dodge past. Lee felt his companion’s surge of rage like an acid burn. It was real and vast, roots down deep in the shitty job that barely paid the rent on a shittier flat, in a darkness of mind unrelieved by love, hope or learning. She grabbed the girl’s hijab scarf and pulled it off. Shook her fist high in the air three times, the scarf like a captured flag. “Kernow Glan!”
Lee snatched the hijab out of her hand. “Here,” he said helplessly, offering it back to the girl, who was hollow-eyed but unintimidated. She threw it round her head and stabbed an upraised middle finger in answer to the fist. “Screw you all,” she snarled, her accent a perfect blend of Eastern Europe and far-west UK. “Better the Big Issue than cheating my benefits like you, Katie Mills. Screw you!”
Oh, Christ, there was going to be a fist-fight in the gutter. The bus driver was staring out of the window, wilfully oblivious. Nothing to do with me. It never was anything to do with anybody, was it? Lee squeezed between Katie and the Big Issue seller. He took the girl’s arm, turned her round, and pushed her as gently as he could off the bus. “Go,” he said urgently. “Please. Just go.” All around him, Katie’s gang of mates had taken up the cry, clenched fists raised and pumping. Kernow Glan! Kernow Glan! Kernow...
“Kernow Glan?!”
He was back in the kitchen. Tamsyn was wailing her head off in the corner, and Isolde, bristling like an overweight porcupine, was skittering back and forth between the table and the play mat. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Lee said, striding over to pick up his daughter. “Tamsyn, hush. Isolde, sit. Kate Mills, Kernow Glan is a crappy attempt to translate Cornish Purity, isn’t it?”
She was staring at him, utterly bewildered. “What’s that got to do with you? How did you... I never gave you my last name.”
“Maybe I know you. Maybe I hang around bus stops as well as the bookie’s and the arcades. What the hell is Cornish Purity meant to be—some kind of Britain First bollocks?”
“What? Nothing like it. We don’t care about Britain—just our own kind. We’re sick of bloody foreigners coming here and taking our jobs.” Her face twisted. “And as for you queers, don’t get me started.”
“Oh, I won’t. Tell me, though—when you put yourself into hospital last month with alcohol poisoning, which job in particular did you and your own kind want—the Asian doctor you threw up on, or the Polish porter who mopped up after you?”
“Oh, my God. Get out of my head, you freak.”
“Gladly. Close the door after you. And that’ll be thirty five quid.”
He waited by the window until Rachel’s car had bumped and slewed out of sight down the lane. Tamsyn, unusually for her, kept up an air-raid siren howl. He jostled her on his hip, hushing her, nervously watching for floating china or knives. Then, as if someone had hit her off-switch, she stopped. She pointed into the garden, smiling. “Ganny.”
Oh, that was all Lee needed—an unscheduled visit from Ma Frayne. He didn’t think he could get his sociable mask on in time. But when he followed the direction of Tamsyn’s outstretched hand, all he could see was a huge brown hare, loping slowly from right to left across the orchard.
She tended to say Gammar, when she meant her grandmother. Maybe she’d been trying for the word bunny. “That’s no bunny,” he told her, carrying her back to the table. “That’s a majestic and magical hare. Turns from a girl into a boy at each full moon, and lays eggs in springtime. Brings luck if it runs sunwise round your house, and if it runs widdershins, foretells... Oh, dear. A disaster. Can you guess who told me all that nonsense?”
She looked him right in the eye. “Ofus.”
“That’s right. And don’t you start laughing about it, because you’d have three dads instead of two if your friend Ofus had his way.”
She put back her head and cackled. Relieved that someone around here was feeling better, Lee sat down with her by the table and settled her comfortably on his lap. As cold-read client sessions went, he supposed that one could have been worse.
He just wasn’t sure how. Rachel had left her copy of the Cornish Herald open on the table in her haste to get away from him. Lee ran a finger down the columns of names in the racing section. He’d gone through a phase, a little while back, of being able to see through the turbulence of unfolding events into the future. The new gift had terrified him. Humans only stayed sane by living on the brink of existence, not forever white-water-rafting off the edge. He’d been relieved when the channels had closed.
But he had to find something better for Gideon than a blank-faced monster and a crippling sense of unease. Time was rushing by like a galloping horse with a skull for a head, and here he was, trying to catch it by the tail. Morning Star or Hothead, Lexie or Rackham’s Hope... No. Nothing. Hothead’s form was best, but other than that he was as much in the dark as Rachel concerning the Wadebridge 3:30.
He wrapped his arms around Tamsyn, who gave a small grunt of surprise then nestled against him, clucking to herself in pleasure. That had been one hell of a flash into Kate Mills’s narrow world. If Gideon had been around, Lee would have gone running to find him, to jump into his arms like a fish into deep, safe waters. He wanted him with sudden, painful urgency. He’d never called to disturb him at work before, but if he did, Gideon would drop everything. Even now, in the cryptic meshes of his CID work, he’d disentangle himself—wouldn’t he?—if Lee said the word.
He shook his head. Absurd of him to put either of them in the position of having to find out. If you had a partner who was good as gold, you didn’t keep biting him to check. Instead he typed out a text, short and businesslike. One of my clients is mixed up with a right-wing group called Kernow Glan, Cornish Purity. Primarily anti-immigration, but LGBT-hostile too. Worth a look? He stared at his mobile screen, wanting to add a kiss, or an offer to fix a batch of fresh casserole for tonight, or a reminder to see the police doctor. But this wasn’t like the days when Gideon worked down the road in the bungalow that served as Dark’s police station.
Tamsyn was falling asleep on his lap. He decided to work around her rather than take her upstairs to her cot. Her warm weight was reassuring. Kate Mills had shakily thrown down forty pounds before slamming out of the room, so he switched on his laptop, called up his accounting spreadsheet and taxed himself on the thirty five, then pushed the fiver into the charity jar which also served as Gideon’s swear box.
The jar was getting pretty full. Smiling, settling Tamsyn against his chest, Lee turned his attention to the script he was working on for the next series of Spirits of Cornwall. If he wanted to lose himself in work, he had plenty of places to go, and Gid could get his kiss and his casserole—plus, if necessary, an earful about missed appointments—when he got home.