by Harper Fox
Lee nodded. He was pale, the marks of grief still fresh on him, his cock rising hard in his jeans. “Yes. Moved in together way too soon...”
“Got married five minutes later.”
“Started our family five minutes after that. Yes.”
“But none of it was too soon, was it? It was all bloody perfect.” Gideon went to kneel over him, and he went down flat on the bed in passionate surrender. “We made it perfect. We can make anything good, love—even this.”
“That’s right. We can just be together by ourselves again. Can we get under the duvet, Gid? I know it’s hot, but...”
“Yes.” Gideon didn’t want to see daylight either. Wanted to burrow and hide. “We didn’t get Tamsie because our lives were empty. They were full to overflowing, and she just came along. Oh God, Lee, I feel like I’m dying.”
“I know. Get in here and fuck me. Bury yourself in me.”
Gideon dragged the quilt up over both of them. Lee struggled over onto his side, snatched the lube out of the bedside drawer and passed it back. He pushed his jeans down with an impatient movement that would have turned Gideon on at a funeral. “Don’t undress,” he whispered. “Just unzip and do it.”
“I should shower. I even smell pissed off and miserable.”
“You smell like home.” Lee buried his face in the pillow. A silent sob racked him, and all Gideon could do was obey—untangle himself from jeans and underwear, coat his cock quickly with lube and thrust up and in. Lee gave a shattered moan and tried to draw his knees to his chest, Gideon reaching quickly to aid the movement, the impulse to curl and disappear. He could help with that: be his lover’s refuge, his cave, just as Lee was offering him this last-ditch comfort of the flesh. They rocked together in the hot dark. They tried to make it last but the pang of this collision was too bittersweet. Gideon’s movements became fast and urgent. He fought a terrible fear of pitching too soon and bailing out—cried out in relief as Lee shuddered in the grip of a hammer-blow climax, releasing him.
A short-lived, bone-deep respite. Gideon stayed where he was when they were both spilled out and done, only withdrawing when they ran out of breathable air beneath the duvet. They surfaced reluctantly, clambering into each other’s arms. Gideon traced the lines of Lee’s face with a fingertip. He caressed the swollen eyelids and mouth. Lee was crying helplessly and with barely a change of expression. No crumpling or contortion. Gideon knew the feeling from a distant childhood memory, the kind of tears that wouldn’t stop because the lungs had gone shallow and tight, not allowing room for a calming breath, a chance to catch the reins. “Jesus, sweetheart,” he rasped. “It’s not too late. I could catch them at the ferry port. Let me go after them.”
“No. No.” Lee snatched a tissue out of the box by the bed, his attempt to pull himself together passing like a blunt knife through Gideon’s heart. “All we’d end up doing is... fighting a pitched battle over her cradle.”
Better that than an empty one. Gideon bit it back with an effort that nearly choked him. “I’d rather be fighting. I’d rather be chasing Elowen around bloody Dover with a police dog than...”
“Than what?”
“Than seeing you like this. Please.”
“No.” Lee handed him the last tissue, waited until he’d blown his nose, then put both arms around his neck and held on. “You’ve done enough, big man. Would you really have punched Michel’s lights out?”
“Hell, yes. And Ezekiel’s.” He shuddered. “And your bloody sister’s.”
“Before or after you’d chucked her off the cliff? Oh God, Zeke was right. Why didn’t I get the paperwork done?”
“We both decided that, not just you.”
“Nope. You suggested it, and I said, no, she’s my sister—there’s no need. It would take a saint not to say—”
Gideon wasn’t a saint. He put a hand over Lee’s mouth. “Don’t. I haven’t even thought it. No-one has.”
“Ah, Gid.” Lee moved the silencing hand, kissed its palm. “Your whole family is bristling with I-told-you-so.”
Gideon bristled in his turn. “Did one of them say something?”
“No. They don’t have to. You should know that by now.”
“All right,” Gideon said wearily, lying down beside him. “I did tell you so, you twat.”
Lee gave a snuffling giggle in spite of himself. “Thank you. Why didn’t you insist?”
“I didn’t feel it was my place.”
“Of course it was. Everything to do with Tamsyn’s just as much your place as mine. I bet you’d have insisted if we’d been adopting from a stranger.”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing.” Lee found his breath, got a grip on the runaway tears. “Listen. Forget the whole genetic thing. Tamsyn was gonna be our daughter, not my niece.”
“How would you have felt if I’d put my foot down, though?”
“I’d have listened. I trust your feet. You’re my Gideon—my husband, my other half. The only one who can insist on things with me.”
Gideon drew him close. Shock and exhaustion were meeting post-coital tides in his bloodstream. He wasn’t used to crying, not the way he had back at Drift—it made him feel punched in the face, or as if he was coming down with a cold. He fought the first tug of sleep. There were always things to do these days before he closed his eyes. Nappies, feeds, a final check to see that his cheerful infant hadn’t taken to suicide by pillow or begun escape work on the bars of her cot. He twitched violently, and Lee restrained him, kissing his brow, soothing. “All right,” he rasped, struggling back to surface. “But the same applies to you. We’ve got to insist with each other when it’s important, even if we... break each other’s hearts.”
***
Someone was hammering at the door. That sound had haunted Gideon’s world almost since the beginning of his time with Lee. Malevolent ghosts, the unearthly bang in the seafront Island house that had presaged a haunting, the temporary dispossession of his lover’s very soul... Stiffly Gideon got out of bed. Lee was still sleeping deeply. Gideon could see the flicker of the pulse in his throat: he was there, alive, safe. At least one half of Jago’s bloody churchyard prophecy hadn’t come true.
And never would, if Gideon had any say in the matter. The frantic knocking started again. Lee had once warned him never to say come at me, bro to things from beyond the veil, never to fling wide the door and say bring it on, then, if you remembered to bring it, but he’d been denied his punch-up on the clifftop, and whoever had chosen this moment to disturb what was left of his domestic peace was certainly asking for trouble.
Or it’s Elowen. Oh God, she’s thought better of this insanity and brought Tamsyn home. He fumbled the latch, almost hit himself in the face with the door as he pulled it open.
There was no-one there. A great bronze-gold sun was poised over Minions Hill, and on the eastern horizon, beyond the quiet village and the tors, the moon had just risen. A blue moon, Lee had said, because it was the rare second one in the month, but to Gideon’s salt-scoured gaze it looked red, as if someone had splashed blood across the ancient, changeless silver. “Fuck you, then,” Gideon whispered, whether to sun, moon or ghosts he didn’t really care. “Just leave us alone.”
“I can’t. It’s back. It’s back.”
Gideon had been looking too high. Three steep steps led up to his front door, and the dry, cracked, goblin voice had come from pavement level.
From a child, although he wasn’t sure that Darren Prowse had ever qualified, with his wizened little old man’s face and jail-bait view of the world. “I tell you what, mate,” Gideon said experimentally, just to see if he could keep his temper. “You have chosen the worst bloody time you could to play any kind of prank on me.”
“I know. I know. Sarah Kemp said that cow had taken your Tamsie away. But it’s back.”
“What’s back, Darren? Think carefully before you answer me.”
“The Beast! The fucking Beast of Bodmin Moor!”
Gide
on looked down at him. He was a perfect mix of savagery and hysteria, tears and snot flying as he tried to fight off the trauma of his last-but-one Halloween. He was rootless, shiftless, and, since his mother had finally tired of Bill and moved out, utterly unloved. “Darren,” he said slowly. “There is no Beast. I know you were scared half to death by Joe Kemp, but he was just a very bad man.”
“I know that! I ain’t scared of any bloody man, bad or good. But no man did that to John Bowe, you stupid bloody plod!”
Gideon wasn’t sure sometimes whether he was a good man or a bad one, but he was about to make this brat very scared of him in a minute. Then he saw the terror peeping out of the poor kid’s reddened eyes, and instead he put out a hand to him. “Come here.”
To his surprise, Darren dropped his precocious adulthood on the pavement and climbed him like a monkey. Or a rat up a drainpipe, he reflected, automatically rocking him—he was almost fourteen years old, but still weighed no more than a sack of potatoes. Gideon didn’t take the attention personally. The boy would have shinned up a pole if there’d been a convenient one to hand. He was just escaping from the flood of his own fear. Gideon’s arms had grown used to holding children, though, and despite the obvious differences between this little rodent and his own sweet-smelling bundle, he embraced him. “All right. Nobody can hurt you now. Take a deep breath and tell me what’s wrong—the truth, if you can manage it for once.”
“John Bowe. The farmer up at Carnysen, Bligh and Dev’s brother.”
“I know who John Bowe is.” Everyone did. The Bowes were that modern contradiction in terms, a truly wealthy farming family. Their land was Dark’s breadbasket, acres of rolling wheatfields from Minions all the way down through the fertile valley to Carnysen farm. Gideon could see the edge of the nearest barleyfield from here, gleaming in a mix of sun and moon. “What about him?”
“The Beast. It tore him apart.”
The wretched brat had something in his pockets. Gideon set him down. He stood panting, eyes still wide, while Gideon extracted a wire-loop snare. “What are you doing with this?”
“Harvest tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“Right. So you thought you’d set snares for the rabbits running out of the corn.”
“Why not? Who cares for ’em? Who cares for me, or my dad, or our little Jackie or Sam?”
That was a fair point, really. And Gideon had never heard the child express concern for anyone other than himself, so he handed the wire back. “Don’t let anyone see you, then. And that wire’s rusty and blunt. That’s a cruel way to kill beasts—if you’d come and do some gardening for me like I asked you to, I could give you the money to buy some new ones.”
“I’m never going up there again. Are you not listening to me, copper? John Bowe is lying there. In bits.”
Sometimes surrender was easier. Let Darren get whatever this was out of his system, prank the village bobby to the fullest extent, and maybe they’d both feel better. Half an hour’s distraction wouldn’t hurt, anyway. Leaving the child on the doorstep, he went inside to collect his mobile. Lee was still sleeping, with a look of beaten-down exhaustion it hurt Gideon’s heart to see. He scrawled him a brief note and left it on the pillow. Took thirty seconds more to pick up the scatter of toys in the hallway, carry them into the nursery and close the door. Isolde whined as he shooed her out of the room, but she knew her duties well these days, and bustled off at his gesture to guard the bed she still could. “All right,” he said, emerging into the uneasy sunset light. “Show me. And I warn you, it had better be good.”
The route up to Carnysen field was a poignant one. It led along the back of Sarah Kemp’s house, then the lane behind the terrace where Bill Prowse kept his little criminal empire. Lorna Kemp—the brand Gideon had snatched from the burning almost two years ago—was helping her mum in the kitchen: he experienced the smell of their dinner cooking and the little girl’s chatter like a warm caress. Sarah was smiling but watchful, her mind clearly fixed on the subject of lost children. Bill hadn’t changed the wallpaper in his spare room. The lurid green-and-blue roses still shone their sickly light across the garden. Gideon’s duties and promotion to sergeant had kept him over in Truro a lot recently. A constable had replaced him, but she lived over in Bodmin town, and it wasn’t her door that got hammered on when ancient demons reared their heads. He had a sense of homecoming, as if he’d been away too long and it was time.
Ancient demons, or annoying little brats whose lifelong malnutrition had finally affected their brains. Darren was positively dancing in the lane ahead, Gideon’s distraction too much to bear. He picked up his pace a little out of mercy to the boy. Honeysuckle was arching over the holloway track that climbed the side of the hill. Huge yellow-headed alexanders were nodding in the verges, their combined somnolent scent like a drug to his weariness, to the dull grief that went through him when he recalled that he’d brought Tamsie here not two days ago, to crawl in the soft grass and get her Cornish girl’s inheritance of sunshine and fragrance-laden summer air. He was thinking about that, not dismembered bodies or beasts, when he climbed the stile into the field.
It was long and narrow, like all the Bowes’ land curving round in a scythe-shaped arc that led up to the farmhouse a mile away. In the low light, the conjoined fields gleamed like a blade, their rich heavy yield awaiting the threshers. The sky had been clear and fine for weeks. Like everyone raised in the moorland villages, Gideon was half farmer by default, and he cast an anxious weather-eye at the copper-green cast on the western horizon. A lot of livelihoods depended on the Carnysen grain.
Which made it all the more annoying that some fool had been out here trampling it down. Gideon was as intrigued by the crop-circle phenomenon as the next man, but it had better not start out here at Dark. The place attracted fringe-dwellers, with the Hurlers and the Cheesewring and the mysterious tors. Really it needed its own full-time constable, to keep the lunacy under some kind of control, and offer education as to why it wasn’t all right for strangers to come up here, leave the footpaths and tramp into other people’s wages, rent and grocery funds.
“There. There. Do you see?”
Gideon caught hold of Darren’s T-shirt and pulled him back before he could compound the damage. “I see someone’s been buggering about up here, yes.”
“That bit there, where the corn’s flattened down. Do you see?”
It was only a small patch. “What are you talking about, Darren? That’s just a dead hare, or a...” He took a few steps into the field, careful not to harm any more of the grain. Then he stopped, looking down. “Oh, Jesus.”
“I told you. I told you. And that patch there, and there, and—”
He was tipping back into hysterics. Gideon turned him sharply round and shoved him towards the stile. A strange huffing sound from the track caught his attention. Leaning through the hawthorns, he saw Bill Prowse lumbering up the hill towards them, bright red in the face and as incongruous in this landscape as a hot-dog stand. Gideon had never in his life thought he’d be pleased to see him. God only knew what had gone through Bill’s mind on seeing his eldest pass by the house in company with the village bobby, what grassings-up he’d imagined. “Bill,” he yelled, hoisting Darren bodily over the wall. “Take him home. Do it now, and for once in your life look after him.”
“What’s happened? What’s he been telling you?”
“Nothing. I just want you to...” Gideon had to stop to take a deep breath. He’d seen quite a lot in his time as a copper, but he’d never encountered one of his neighbours as nothing more than an arm in a chequered sleeve, expensive wristwatch still attached. Motive not robbery, then... “I want you to get out of here, and Darren, you keep your mouth shut.” That was a hopeless request, but Gideon had to try, or he’d have the whole village up here gawping. “Do you both hear me? Go!”
Chapter Three
At half past six in the morning, Gideon made his way back home. Behind him on the peaceful hillside, as much of John Bowe’s cor
nfield as practicable had been marked out with crime-scene tape. He could still hear it fluttering in the early breeze, a festive sound for a Lammas dawn. First of August, he thought distractedly. Lughnasadh. The beginning of the Guldize festival that would continue here in Dark across the barley and wheat harvests and on to Allantide. The day was going to be a scorcher—he need not have worried about the sulphurous cast to the sunset after all. The honeysuckle swayed, and he inhaled its untainted freshness. Once the morning wind from the moorlands died, the village would roast on its harvest-time anvil.
Ezekiel’s car was parked outside the flat. That didn’t seem odd, by comparison with everything else Gideon had seen over the last few hours, and he entered quietly, closing the door behind him.
Voices were coming from the kitchen. He identified his mother’s. Rubbing his eyes, he walked into the sunny room, where Zeke and the old lady were seated at the little breakfast bar, and Lee—pale, almost translucent in the brilliant light—was handing round toast and tea. He took one look at Gideon. “Morning, love,” he said, came up and kissed him on the cheek. “Your breakfast’s ready. Or would you like to go and have a shower first?”
Gideon was covered in soil-dust and bits of corn. He’d spent all night under arc lights, picking his way up and down Farmer Bowe’s furrows along with the forensic and SOCO team. “No, I’d love some breakfast. But you don’t look as if you should be on your feet.”
“I’m fine.” Lee pulled out a stool opposite Ma Frayne and Zeke. “Here, sit down.”
“Do you see?” the old lady said wonderingly. The question was aimed at Zeke, who was as unshaven and dishevelled this morning as the world was ever likely to see him. He turned to look at her.
“See what, Mother?”
“This is what marriage is. Men with women, men with men, women with women—anything. The people live together, love each other, care for each other.”
