Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor (2 page)

Gideon spent the rest of t
he morning talking to Dark’s rich collection of gossips, attention-hungry time wasters whose story mutated with every telling, and the kindly, solid foundation souls of his community, who knew nothing at all but felt so much pain for Sarah Kemp that they waylaid Gideon with tales of every shadow they’d seen move that night, every shift in the wind – anything rather than admit to themselves that they were helpless. Gideon listened carefully, took notes. It only took one gleam of gold in all this mud to light up a vein somewhere else.

When he’d listened till his pen and his patience were both scraping dry, he went to give his routine road-safety
class to the kids at Dark Primary. Normally this was an ordeal, the glove-puppets and jingling rhymes a special kind of torment to him, the little monsters whose hides he was meant to be preserving sensing his embarrassment and running rings around him. Today in the warm classroom, surrounded by the debris of Halloween craft sessions, for once he enjoyed his half-hour – even little Morwenna, who, having made a truly repulsive zombie mask, was determined to wear it for all educational purposes. Gideon didn’t argue. He let her be the victim of Tommy Poldue’s go-kart speeding accident, but restrained her when she lurched back to life demanding to eat the poor lad’s brains. She was a wicked little devil though: as Gideon was packing up, she came to stand three feet away from him and demanded, loudly as she could, “Is it true, then? Did the Beast get Lorna Kemp? Did he eat her all up?”

Gideon sighed. Jenny, the youngest Kemp child, burst into terrified howls. Gideon held out an arm for her. He wasn’t great with kids, but they knew when to make to him for safety, a place of higher ground. She darted over to him and he scooped her up, good little teaching aid that she was. “Do you see this child?” he asked, his tone stern enough to stop the pack in its scramble for the door. He waited until he had their full attention. “This child is crying. Somebody said a b
ad thing to her. Why was it bad? Morwenna?”

“Because Jenny’s sister is missing,” the
shameless brat said promptly. “And the Bodmin Beast is just a – a...”

Hands were shooting up. Gideon nodded encouragingly, and the replies came all at once.
A story, Mr Constable! A legend!
Somebody managed
mythological
, and he tipped his cap at that young scholar in respect. “Right,” he said, hushing them. “Now, I know how it is. You’re all growing up in this village, and your parents tell you stories, and maybe your aunts and uncles sell models of this beast of ours to silly tourists – what do we call those, Jen?”

The child in his arms, quite enjoying her central role by now, gave a tremendous sniff. “Emmets.”

“Right, silly emmets, though not to their faces, or they won’t buy our stuff. So I know how hard it is for all you kids to remember our beast is just as much a story as...” He paused. What the hell were kids watching on TV these days? “As Spongebob Squarepants, although I reckon if he was chasing me about on the moors, I’d be proper scared.” Jen Kemp snorted wetly into his face. “So we should mind our thoughts, and mind what we’re saying, just like Pastor Jeffrey says.”

He set his armful down, gave her a little shove and watched her tumble off with the others towards the lunch room. The school was a modern one, sealing off its occupants in bright, safe boxes. Every time
he went past it or into it, all Gideon could think of was its one empty seat – at assembly, at lessons, at meals. And for all his rage at self-proclaimed psychics and those who believed in them, Gideon had only one real source of anger and pain – a child was gone, and it had happened on his watch.

***

Gideon fixed himself a perfunctory lunch, then took his dog for a walk. This was her favourite time of the day, though for Gideon it could become an ordeal. She was only not dangerous to sheep, goats and rabbits because she’d forget halfway through her pursuit why she’d started it. She barrelled along at Gideon’s side, shooting him occasional looks of devotion. “It’s all very well,” Gideon told her. “Where are you when there’s a bloody monster on my heels, you shiftless lump of fur?”

She beamed up at him, tongue lolling out so far that the tip of it was flapping in her ear. Then her head jerked round. Gideon got ready to fasten her onto her leash. She took a while to shift mental gears when she’d seen something new, and she generally gave him a moment.

Not this time. “Kye!” he yelled, as she sprang out from under his hands. What the hell had she fixed on now? She’d used to chase cars, a habit Gideon had painstakingly broken her of. She was heading full-throttle for the road, though, the junction between the lane and the main street. There wasn’t much traffic, but it would be just her luck... “Kye! Kye, stop!”

Someone stepped out from the kerb. That was enough to divert her, and she changed course like a poorly guided missile. Gideon began to run. She was harmless to humans except by force of her momentum...

But the man at the junction crouched down to meet her. He took her impact gracefully, only putting out one arm to brace against the wall behind him. With his free hand he ruffled her scruff in a way guaranteed to send her into witless ecstasies, and she duly dropped onto her side, legs flailing wildly at the air.

“Sorry,” Gideon gasped, catching up. “She’s got no more brains than a... Oh. It’s you.”

Lee Tyack straightened up unhurriedly. He brushed grit and moss off the knees of his jeans. The dog, now lost in her own private world of delight, wriggled herself round to lie on his feet. “She’s a nice beast,” he said. “What do you call her?”

“Kye,” Gideon said helplessly, though it was no business of Tyack’s, and he wasn’t half tempted to ask why he didn’t already know. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re still doing here?”

Tyack didn’t look as if he minded anything. His gaze was far-off and very serene on Gideon’s, as if he’d been watching a fine sea view, not a grumpy and suspicious local bobby. He wore a silver chain around his neck, just a very plain one, but it picked up the lights in his eyes. “Well, I finished talking to Mrs Kemp. And before I left, I had something I wanted to say to you.” He didn’t wait for Gideon to prompt him or show interest: continued calmly, “I do charge money for the shows I do down in Falmouth and places like that. I have to make a living – apart from that, I work at the marina in the summer. I have a winter pub job too. I never charge a penny for any of the work I do for the police or anyone I see privately, like Mrs Kemp. I know what she’s going through.”

“I don’t really see how you can,” Gideon retorted. “I’m glad you don’t take payment, but I still don’t think it’s right for anyone to...”

He paused. It was difficult for him to rip a strip off anyone watching him so kindly, all the while scrubbing his dog’s round, grizzled belly with his foot. “Kye,” Lee said thoughtfully, into Gideon’s silence. “Isn’t that just the old Cornish word for...”

“For
dog
. Yes. She isn’t really mine.”

“She looks as if she thinks she is.”

Gideon shook his head. Kye was anyone’s for a belly-rub, and would have gone with Tyack now without a backward glance. “She used to belong to a farmer at Rilla, but he fired her. Dogs like this tend to be super-intelligent or dumb as gravel. He stopped feeding her.”

“Jesus.”

“Well, they’ve got to earn their keep, you know? I opened my door one night and she was just... there.”

“Doesn’t she have to earn her keep with you?”

Gideon frowned. He wasn’t sure how he’d ended up chatting about his dog with this unwanted stranger, and he felt as if an admission that Kye did nothing but eat and fart by his fireside would mean more than it should. “Did you find somewhere to stay?” he asked gruffly, pushing his hands into his pockets.

“Not yet. Everywhere’s booked up for Halloween parties, I think.”

“How long are you planning to be here?”

“Just a day or so. Until I get a feel for the place.”

“Is that what you were doing at Sarah Kemp’s windows – getting a feel?”

The sea-grey eyes darkened. Gideon wasn’t surprised. He might as well have accused the man of casing the joint. Had he always been so hostile? No – with James around to mitigate him, tease him out of his bouts of hereditary gloom, he’d had friends, a social life of sorts.

Well, he’d blown all of that, hadn’t he? “I’m sorry. That came out worse than I meant it.”

“You’re a copper. You’re meant to protect your people from con men and burglars. Just so you know – I check out the obvious first, just like you do. One couple called me in to find their kid and hadn’t noticed a trail of footsteps to their slurry tank, you know? But it wasn’t just that. I think windows are significant in this case.”

“Windows? You’re barking up the wrong tree there. The kid disappeared on the moor, not from her home.”

“I know. I read the newspapers.” He sighed. “Look, I’d better get going, if you could get your dog off my foot.”

“Oh. Right.” Gideon had to lift her bodily: her eyes were closed, her thick club of a tail sweeping slowly back and forth in the dust. “There’s a bus at two o’clock from the main road. It goes through Bodmin town – you might find somewhere to stay there.”

To Gideon’s embarrassment, he had to carry the dog away. She dive-bombed people because herding instincts were still firing in her poor twilit brains, but she’d seemed devoid of attachments otherwise. Now, though, she leaned her chin on Gideon’s shoulder, emitting faint sounds of yearning back the way they’d come. For all their unemotional relationship, Gideon supposed he must have become attuned to her on some level: he wanted to turn around too. Well, there was no harm in it – just to see that this intruder, with his raincloud eyes and charming, diffident smile was going in the right direction, out of Gideon’s town.

Lee Tyack was sitting on the grass verge. He looked as if something had knocked him onto his backside there – something much bigger than Kye. Something he couldn’t foresee or brace against... He was pressing his palms to his brow. Gideon set the dog down and ran. Before he could get near, Tyack jerked his head up. His warm olive colours had drained to chalk. “Catherine,” he called out, trying to scramble to his feet. “Is there someone called Catherine?”

“A few billion, I should think.” Automatically Gideon began to help him up. Tyack had looked frail for a moment down there on the verge, but he wasn’t: he was warmly packed with muscle, and Gideon could well believe that he worked on the boats to make ends meet. “Where would you like us to start?”

“Not a person. A place. Is there a watermill, or a... I’m seeing wheels.” His grip closed tight on Gideon’s arms, sending a weird hot surge through him. “Wheels. Not images – letters, and they’re not even spelled right... Fuck!” He thumped his head against Gideon’s shoulder, as if he’d known him for years, hung on to him in frustration all the time. “I’m losing it. It’s fading.”

Wheels, not even spelled right.
Gideon was a north-country Cornishman. Tyack sounded as though he might be from Falmouth, or one of the other southwest-coast towns where fishing, not mining, had been the population’s mainstay.
Wheal
, the old Kernowek word for a mine. Their founders had named them for their wives or daughters, or the fortunes they hoped they might get from them. Wheal Jane, Wheal Abundant... “Wheal Catherine,” he said, half to himself, his mind caught up in the warm scent of Tyack’s hair. “Can’t be. It’s too far.”

Tyack looked up, eyes wide. “Wheal Catherine? What is it – an old mine shaft?”

“Yes, but it’s been covered over for years. And it’s miles away from here, way further than the kid could have got by herself.”

“She wasn’t by herself. The monster took her out of the
window and put her down the mine. Oh, God...” Tyack shoved Gideon away and recoiled against the wall. “Not monsters. No. Tell me something, quickly.”

“
What the devil’s wrong with you?”

“Talk to me.” Tyack looked ready to faint
or to run for his life. “Anything. Your name. Why the bloody hell are you called Gideon, in this day and age?”

“Never mind that. Did you see something about Lorna?” Gideon couldn’t believe he was asking. “Lorna and a monster?”

“Help me make him into a man. Your name – please!”

“Okay. My father was a Methodist minister, that’s all. My brother’s called Ezekiel. I...”

Tyack gave a strangled laugh. “You think you got off lightly? No, you didn’t, Gideon – not other than the name. He was cold to you, your father, cold. Wheal Catherine mine shaft...” Tyack pushed his fingertips hard against his brow, as if in response to an intolerable pressure. “We have to go there. Now.”

The village
’s one police Land Rover bumped up the track towards the mine. The settlement there had died along with the tin industry, and only three old towers remained to mark its existence, strange desolate epitaphs like dozens of others on these moors. Once they had housed the engines for the pits. Now only stonecrop and thrift flowers colonised the tumbledown remains. The ravens preferred the crags, and even the unfussy jackdaws and magpies seemed to give the place a wide berth. Gideon usually did the same. He gripped the steering wheel as the last of the tarmac petered out to turf and rutted mud.

He glanced uneasily into the rearview mirror. At first all he could see was Kye’s thick head, as she stared out the back window in her usual uneasy two-legged stance. What use was a dog that cared more about where it had just been than where it was meant to be going? Then he made out another four-by-four jouncing along in his wake. He’d been glad when two dog-handler officers from Bodmin had been able to respond to his call. They hadn’t asked any questions – just assumed fresh information, a new lead.
Behind them was a pickup truck sometimes used by the North Moors cave-rescue outfit. The team was out on an exercise, but their supervisor had offered his services straight away.

All this was good. Gideon was honoured that his lightest word would merit such a response. Lee Tyack had been right about that much, back in Sarah’s kitchen – Gideon had worked all his days to protect and assist the people of the moors. Nothing spectacular: just loyalty and hard-earned trust. What was he supposed to say in his report, or to the K-9 guys or the rescue expert, when they asked him why they’d all been hauled out to Wheal Catherine, sure
ly one of the bleakest corners of creation, even by the standards of a Methodist God?

It all depended on results, he supposed. If he found Lorna Kemp, no-one would give a damn
why he’d come here in the first place. He shot a glance at Lee Tyack, who had scrambled uninvited into the Rover’s passenger seat and appeared to fall asleep there straight away. He was wide awake now. “This is the place, isn’t it?”

“We’re near to it, yes.”

“I love how the sky up here always seems to shine. Even when it’s overcast, like it’s packed with opals.”

Opals. Gideon had often wanted a word for the strange light of a wintry Cornish sky, the subtle radiance, colours that seemed to breed out of everywhere and nowhere at once. He wasn’t here for poetry, though. Tyack grinned wryly, as if he’d read the thought. “Okay. I’ll tell you something you
do
need to know. I was in France when this kid disappeared. I was speaking at a conference, so I was seen there by about a thousand people a day.”

“Why would I need to know that?”

“Because if we find her, your first thought will be
how.
And if you’re a decent, commonsense policemen, your second thought will be to arrest me. So I never act as consultant on a criminal case – ever – unless I’ve got an alibi so watertight you could use it to carry your goldfish.”

I wouldn’t have made that assumption.
Gideon wanted to say it. He wasn’t sure it was true. All he had to offer was his decency and common sense, and what else would a good copper do, faced with a man who could only have come to know the things he did in one way? “This has happened to you?”

“Oh, hell, yes.”

Good-natured still, but bitter as frost-touched sloes. “I’m sorry, then,” Gideon said. “That puts a high price on trying to help.”

They drove on in silence for a minute, the towers looming closer. Tyack had turned a little in his seat. He was watching Gideon, not the road ahead. “Thanks,” he said. “You know – if it helps, I think James forgave you. Or he ended up understanding, at least – about your parents, and about being a copper in a county that lives twenty years behind the rest of the world.”

Gideon slewed off the track. He swore and veered back onto it. “Do you know James? Has he been talking to you?” Silence from the seat beside him. Gideon banged a palm off the wheel. “Oh, I get it. Mrs Waite comes barging in and tells you he lived with me. Then you watch me – I don’t know, my body language or whatever, and you feed me a line to see how I react – ”

“That’s right,” Tyack interrupted quietly.
“It’s all a cheap parlour trick. Are you
sure
your second thought wouldn’t have been to arrest me?”

***

Of course there was no child in Wheal Catherine mine. The sniffer dogs and their handlers quartered the area diligently, and the caving specialist set up his gear for an exploratory look at the shaft. It didn’t take him long. He re-emerged sheepishly ten minutes later. All the mines here had been infilled to within twenty feet of their surface. A single sweep of his torch would have showed him there was no lost kid in there. One of the dogs bayed briefly, but there’d been so much rain over the last few days that all but the strongest traces would have been lost.

Yes. All lost. Gideon could relate to that. He glanced across at Lee Tyack, who was crouched at the lip of the mine shaft, running his fingers over the heath flowers and golden bracken that grew there. The K-9 lads were settling their dogs back into the van. Parked just beyond them were four other vehicles, every one of which Gideon knew well. Dave Polwen, plumber and local odd-job man. Kate and Jenny Salthouse, who ran their bakery and the local council with equal stern efficiency. Two other good neighbours and friends, and none of them with any business here, all having picked up a scent off the wind.

Gideon knew how it would have happened. He’d patched his call in via his assistant at the tiny bungalow that served as a police station in Dark. “Wheal Catherine?” Liz had repeated in surprise, and old Mrs Waite from the shop, who spent as much time in there as she feasibly could, cadging tea and biscuits and gossip, would have sailed forth with the news. So here they all were – Jenny and Dave and the rest, forming a semicircle between the dog van and Gideon’s Rover. Thank God Joe Kemp had an afternoon job: perhaps he hadn’t heard. “Is it true, then?” Dave Polwen called up. “Did you get some new information? Is she here?”

In
villages the size of Dark, the kids were to a certain extent common property. Even feral brats like the Prowse brood staved off neglect and starvation in their neighbours’ kitchens and by their firesides. It was a good thing. But it meant that when a child went on the loose, a village copper faced two dozen sets of parents at once. Gideon came to the edge of the grassed-over spoil heap where he’d been standing. There was no hope of concealment, and so he raised his head and addressed them face on. “No. She isn’t here.”

“Is it true that fella came out with you
– that psychic?”

Tyack was no longer by the mine head. Gideon wouldn’t have blamed him for skulking off. But a soft bump at his shoulder made him blink: here he was, close by Gideon’s side, as if ready to face whatever Gideon wanted to dish out. Well, it was a chance, wasn’t it? Police and rescue services listening in, and a good representative portion of the village, who would take home whatever he said and report it.
Yes, here’s your psychic. I was fool enough to follow him up here. This is what happens when you put your trust in crackpots and wishful thinking.
“No. I had a lead from somewhere else. Mr Tyack here was with me when the call came in, and he offered to come and help us search. That’s all.”

“Is it worth it, then – searching up here?”

“One of the dogs gave a signal, but we don’t think it meant anything. Listen – any time that you can afford to give to searching any part of these moors is worth it to me, Dave. All of you.” He turned to Tyack and asked quietly, “
Will
you help us out for a while? Do it the...”
The hard way
, he’d been about to say, but the marks of strain around those pale eyes testified that nothing about Tyack’s methods was easy. “The conventional way?”

“I’d be happy to. Why’d you let me off the hook?”

“Like you say, you need time to get a feel for a place. Maybe something’ll come to you. And...” He set off towards the waiting group. “I don’t know why you did it, but you tried to let me off poor Sarah Kemp’s hook. So we’re quits.”

***

Gideon called off the search at dusk. Dave and the Salthouses had kids to be getting home to, and Gideon didn’t want any children alone at night if he could help it. He was also reluctant, with a keen anxiety he couldn’t pin down, for anyone, child or adult, to be on the moors after dark. It was Halloween Eve. He shivered, unlocking the Rover. The spirit of the season must be getting to him.

Kye greeted him with her usual burst of hysteria, as if sh
e hadn’t seen him for a week and couldn’t quite remember why she’d wanted to. Gideon didn’t like keeping her locked up, but she couldn’t be trusted not to pick a fight with a sniffer dog or tumble down a mine shaft herself. “Sorry,” he muttered as she transferred her attentions to Tyack, squeezing through the gap between the seats to scramble into his lap. “Kye! Get down.”

“She isn’t called Kye,” Tyack said breathlessly as she wriggled round to face him. She put the end of her nose against his, and Gideon looked at the pair of them curiously: the attractive unknown quantity of a man and the all-too-familiar lump of dog, staring into one another’s eyes. “She says she’s called Isolde, and she’s a descend
ent of King Arthur’s hunting hounds.”

Gideon shifted nervously. “You can... You can
tell
that?”

Tyack broke into laughter. “Of course I bloody can’t.
Dog
is a lousy name for a dog, that’s all. I’m sure she’d behave better if she had a proper one.”

“You think you’re funny, don’t you?” Gideon thought so too, despite himself: a reluctant chuckle underscored his words. “All right. Isolde it is. Though I’m gonna feel a right prat shouting that down the lanes at midnight, aren’t I?”

“Only if someone shouts back
Tristan
. Look, I should get out of your hair now. I’ve still got to pick up my gear from Mrs Radnor’s B and B – can you drop me off near there, and I’ll catch a bus into Bodmin town?”

“You’ll be lucky to get one now. Don’t you drive?”

Tyack shivered. “No. And if you knew what passes through the mind of the average Cornish motorist, nor would you.”

“Is that for real? Or just to wind up the copper?”

“Real. They’re lunatics.”

Gideon watched the taillights of the other cars beginning to vanish ahead of them. “Well, it’ll be dark soon. I’ll take you by Mrs Radnor’s to get your things, and then you can stay over with me if you want.”

“Isn’t it... inappropriate any more?”

“Possibly. But I owe you for helping out today, and it’s not a police house as such – we don’t run to one of those. It’s just a house with a policeman living in it. Mrs Waite was right. I do rattle around.”

Tyack regarded him calmly. “Thank you,” he said. A tension seemed to go out of him, and he leaned back in the passenger seat as Gideon started the engine. Kye – Isolde – got off his lap and for the first time in her life settled obediently on the floor, resting her chin on Tyack’s knee. He ruffled her ears. “That’s right, old girl. You’ll be all right now. You’ll be okay.”