by Harper Fox
And yet the qualities that made him a good copper were more at liberty than ever in this pared-back freedom. They were fundamental aspects of his nature. He watched and observed. He didn’t assign weight to what he’d seen until he had facts at his disposal, and so he wasn’t burdened by assumptions. He moved freely through his inner and outer Dark, gathering his own quiet harvest.
He’d been caught out rather last night. The little group in the farmhouse hallway had been distracting, Lee and the inspector and the doctor, and Pendower with his fanboy zeal. Gideon’s good policeman’s brain had continued to record through all the chaos, and he’d seen something, hadn’t he? Something ordinary but out of place.
Lee’s quiet breathing brought down the barriers, telling him to look again. John and Bligh Bowe had kept an orderly household. Like many of the old farming families, they preferred to leave the barnyard outside, and the inside of the house was tidy. The doctor had been scribbling on a notepad by the phone. Everything in the small, crowded space was where you’d expect it to be, except for the crumpled scrap of paper on the floor.
Look a little closer, Gid. Not just crumpled. Torn.
Gideon glanced up in amusement, but Lee was still out cold, his fingertips twitching with dreams. Obediently he returned his attention to the Carnysen farmhouse, and read off the five letters on the discarded scrap. B-A-R-A-G... Only the surname Baragwanath began like that, an unusual one even by Cornish standards. The rest of the note was in pieces, scattered along the skirting board. Not just torn, Lee. Ripped to shreds.
The computer in the living room was up and running. Gideon tapped Bodmin and his handful of letters into the internet hoping for an autofill suggestion, but nothing came up. He stood for a moment, paying attention to his aches and pains from yesterday. He had a few burns on his hands, which Lee had disinfected and bandaged before they’d crawled into bed. He imagined poor Pendower was feeling the results of his exertions too. Smiling at the memory of that electrified brush-cut, he consigned the torn-up note to his own inner search engine, where his subconscious could work away at it. He’d get access to the farmhouse as soon as he could and patch the rest together, but for today at least the place would be locked up. Almost impossible to believe that the family which had thrived there for so long had been cut down to one lost lamb.
Dev, the autumn lamb. He was such a fragile scrap, and yet if he hadn’t been safely locked up in Bodmin psychiatric, Gideon would have arrested him by now. Loved ones were always first on the list of suspects, and Lee’s vision in the cornfield remained vivid—that, and his warning. The lamb hasn’t finished his work...
Gideon wondered if the work was finished now. It would all have to wait. He had to see the coroner for the preliminary report on Bligh’s death, and then begin his interview rounds. He stopped off by the bed. Lee made a sound of sleepy welcome and tried to grab his hand, but he dodged it, chuckling. “Not now, handsome. I’ll see you tonight.”
“You’re all dressed. What time is it?”
“Morning.”
“Which part of it? I should get up too, make a start on my scripts.” Lee pulled his mobile out from under the pillow to check the time, and frowned at what he saw.
Gideon reached to ruffle his hair. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Just... later than I thought.”
“No need for you to leap out of bed, is there? You still look tired.”
“You know what? I am. I slept all night, but my head was noisy. I might take one of my horse pills.”
“Are you sure?” Anxiety prickled at Gideon’s nape. Lee had a prescription of high-dosage sedatives left over from the days when his doctors hadn’t been able to tell his gifts from a brain tumour. He hadn’t needed to touch them in months. “They knock you right out, and I won’t be around to look after you.”
“Isn’t that the one time when I don’t need you to keep me out of mischief?” Lee shot him a scapegrace smile. “Be honest with you, love, I could use a break. Being awake has limited appeal at the moment.”
***
Twelve o’clock found Gideon in Bodmin town, tracking down Sally Polwen on her break from the post office there. Like everyone else he’d spoken to that morning, she was shocked, sympathetic, and utterly unhelpful. Gideon wasn’t quite sure why he was using his day’s best energies on people who could no more kill than fly, but he had a job to do, and he owed it to Lawrence to eliminate the angels before chasing mythical demons and beasts. After he was done, he granted himself twenty minutes for lunch, and on impulse went into the Petroc Library café. It was generally peaceful there, and he wanted a wander through the shelves. After grabbing a coffee and a sandwich, he set out.
He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He was pretty certain he wouldn’t find it among the chicklit and harrowing life stories, though, and he left the brightly lit modern shelves and found his way into the cooler shadows of the building’s heart, where dusty legal and accounting texts served out their time largely untouched. The elder gentlemen of Bodmin, unused to seeing a burly copper in the aisles where they too waited out their days, slipped out of his way like mice, but Gideon wasn’t interested—never had been—in moving them along. He just wanted to look at some old books.
He’d liked it here as a child. The leather-bound volumes had smelled lovely to him, and he’d prowled here, inventing labyrinths and warzones, while Ma Frayne had exchanged her Mills & Boons and chatted to the librarians. He’d liked the names of the old solicitors, printed in fading gold on the spines of their legal texts, which had given him names for his own expanding population of imaginary heroes and villains. Borlase, Godolphin, Rawle.
Baragwanath, Keast & Co, the town’s longest-established law firm, and just about its most obscure. Gideon wasn’t even sure they were in business anymore.
Technically he was allowed an hour for lunch. He seldom took it, but if he did, that would leave him with thirty minutes more before he had to go back to the methodical plod-work. The offices had used to be tucked away down a side street by the chapel, a two-minute walk from here. He gave the Baragwanath book a thoughtful tap, raising a small cloud of dust.
He was on his way out when frantic movement from one of the desks caught his eye. He paused by the doorway. To his surprise, Rufus Pendower was sitting at a table in the reading room, surrounded by piles of volumes as venerable as Gideon’s own. He was beckoning excitedly. Yesterday the sight of him would have annoyed Gideon, but his grim-faced courage in the Carnysen fields had altered things. He hadn’t quite managed to smooth down the lightning-bolt hairdo. Gideon went over to him, forbidding himself a smile. “Afternoon, Pendower. Come to pay your overdues?”
“No, no. I’ve been doing some research. I think I’ve found something interesting.”
Scattered explosions of hushing rang out. There were about ten people in the room, and none of them engaged in the perusal of anything more serious than the local papers, as far as Gideon could see. He and Pendower raked the desks with a well-practised officer’s glare, and the objectors fell silent. “Right,” Gideon said. “I’ve only got a few minutes. Can you tell me fast?”
“Yes, but do sit down. How’s L-... er, Mr Tyack?”
“You can call him Lee.” Reluctantly Gideon pulled out a chair. It was so unlike his tough other half to choose drugged oblivion over reality. “He’s fine,” he said, more to convince himself than Pendower. “He’s working from home today, though. He needs a rest.”
“Yes, I’m sure. The things he said, the things he saw in his visions—they set me thinking. They were ringing all kinds of bells with me from my graduate studies, everything I’ve learned about names and their origins.” He drew a huge leather-bound tome across the table and laid it reverently in front of Gideon. “This is Mellin’s lexicon of the Cornish language, drawn up in 1873. I thought Bligh and Dev were strange first names, so I looked them up, or rather I chased them through what I knew of their etymology. Bligh is a nickname from the Kernowek word blyth, or
wolf. And the word for lamb is deves.”
“No, it’s not.” Gideon knew this because he’d heard Lee singing nursery rhymes in Cornish to the baby. “The word for lamb is on.”
“Well, okay. But deves is the plural form for a ewe, so—”
“So you’re clutching at straws. That’s a big stretch for a connection.”
“Maybe not. Imagine you’re Dev Bowe, and you’re a paranoid schizophrenic who’s just lost his parents. You’re convinced your brothers have got something to do with their deaths, and you’re alone in your room all day, drugged up, with access to an internet connection. If Dev thinks of himself as a lamb—and a ewe lamb, at that, not big and husky like his brothers, dressing up in his mum’s nighties—he might have made these connections too. But that’s not all. Bowe is quite an unusual surname too. It’s usually Bowes, isn’t it? Like the queen mother’s family.”
“I suppose so.” Gideon’s head was spinning a bit with all these suppositions. Pendower was a different man on his own turf, though, joining the dots with a confidence that drew Gideon helplessly along with him. “What’s the significance there?”
“The oldest word for barley or corn in the whole English language is B-E-O-W. It’s a direct anagram, and the pronunciation wouldn’t have been far off. I never thought about checking into John Bowe’s name because John is so ordinary, but...”
“You have to be kidding. John Barleycorn?”
“Exactly. Isn’t that marvellous?”
“If the poor bastard hadn’t been horribly murdered, yes.”
“And to top it all off...” Pendower flipped open another volume at a bookmarked place and tapped the page triumphantly. “Carnysen farm itself—Carn Ysen, the hill of the corn. John Barleycorn of Corn Hill farm. What more do you want, Sergeant Frayne?”
Gideon sat back and folded his arms. “I’d like some evidence, for starters.” He waited until Pendower had turned a pre-explosive shade of puce. “But I’ll admit this is interesting stuff. Do you fancy coming along with me to check out another angle?”
“Well—yes, of course.” Pendower looked mollified, then frowned. “But Lawrence doesn’t want me involved with the real investigation.”
“Who says what you’ve been doing isn’t real? Besides, this isn’t something I’d put before Lawrence, not until I know more about it myself.” Gideon recounted his ideas about the torn scrap of paper, aware as he did so that Pendower’s eyebrows were on the climb. “So I’d like to pop along and see old man Baragwanath, if he’s still running the shop. Just in case.”
Pendower stared at him. “You really are in no position at all to lecture me about tenuous connections, Sergeant Frayne.”
***
Gideon hadn’t taken Pendower along just to give him a breath of fresh air. The sudden arrival of one police officer might be enough to daunt your average guilty soul into a reaction, but lawyers were a different matter. He ushered Pendower ahead of him into the dingy little office and made sure to follow hard on his heels, the pair of them a polite, nicely spoken brick wall. “Good afternoon. I’d like a word with Mr Baragwanath, please.”
The lady behind the desk jumped so hard that her calculator went flying. “You can’t!”
“Is he out of the office?”
“No. I mean, yes, he is. He’s dead.”
Gideon wasn’t in the business of frightening innocent receptionists. He picked up the calculator and handed it back, trusting that the noise and the poor woman’s high-pitched shriek had done their work. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Oh, it wasn’t recent.” She composed herself with an effort. “The firm’s in the hands of his partner now, Mr Keast. But—”
But nothing. Gideon waited. The scrabbling sounds in the office next door, the unmistakeable slamming of metal file-cabinet drawers, eventually stopped. Then the door creaked open.
Oh, dear. This was no bloody use. Gideon sank down on one of the rickety chairs and indicated to Pendower that he should do the same. He vaguely remembered Baragwanath as a stocky, hard-faced old sod, the one you went to for dodgy conveyancing deals or a quick, dirty divorce. Just for once it would be nice if the world’s badness could present itself like that, in an easily readable format. The man who’d just crept out of the office was barely five foot tall, and yellow-faced with fear. Just for once—today, for example, when Gideon was nearing the forty-eight-hour mark without his daughter—it would have been nice to have someone to beat up. “Mr Keast, I presume,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “All hell’s broken loose at Carnysen Farm, as you know. Tell me exactly what this firm’s connection is to the Bowes, and all this will be over. Come on, sir,” he added kindly. “You don’t want to carry this around anymore, do you?”
For a second he thought the man would tough it out. As Baragwanath’s underling, he must have had some practice. Then the receptionist made an unsubtle dash for the door, and to Gideon’s horror, Keast began to cry.
Chapter Nine
“I never wanted to do it. But John Bowe offered him so much, and he said I’d get my share of it when the sale went through. I’ve slaved my whole life in this dump. Baragwanath never even made me a full partner, you know. I was just a name on the letterhead.”
Keast stopped for breath, and to grab a tissue from the box Pendower had handed him. He’d let himself be guided back into his office, and, once seated behind his desk, had regained a little composure. He was still a sorry sight. Gideon was glad of Pendower’s presence, scratching away in his little notebook as usual. He had the feeling he was going to need a witness. “What sale, Mr Keast?”
“Carnysen Farm. You must know that already, or why are you here?” Keast blew his nose. “Shit. I always knew we’d get done. Bloody typical of Baragwanath to up and die just when it all went through. Left me holding the baby. I was starting to think no amount of money could be worth it, and I’m right, aren’t I? You’ve come to finish the game.”
“For the sake of honesty, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not under arrest, so I can’t read you your rights, but I will warn you that the sergeant here will take down every little detail of what you say, and it will be held against you if it’s bad.” Pendower shot him a look that plainly told him he was throwing away his advantage, but Gideon couldn’t keep up a front of bullying vagueness for long. Instead he did what he was best at. He leaned forward, examined Keast’s face. “You’re obviously miserable. You’re not a bad person, are you? Why on earth are you behaving like one?”
For a moment he thought Keast was about to throw himself across the desk and into his arms. The poor bastard buried his face in a tissue, banged the palm of his hand against the cheap woodwork in a surge of grief. “I’m not! I wasn’t, anyway. It was just... so much.”
“All right. So much money for the sale of Carnysen Farm, which I didn’t even know was on the market. Tell me why.”
“Because of the purchasers. The confidentiality agreements they made us sign.” Keast showed signs of recovering himself at the thought of them. “My God, you really don’t know anything, do you? Why am I talking to you?”
“Because people have died. In my village! I won’t have that. And when I make the connection back to you, you’ll wish to God you’d taken the chance to tell me all about it in your own words.”
Keast swallowed audibly. “I don’t know where to start.”
“The purchasers. Who was offering so much money for an old Cornish farm that you and your boss sold yourselves out to get a slice of it?”
“It was him. Baragwanath sold out. He only told me when it got too big for him to manage on his own, and then he offered me... he offered...”
“I don’t need the price of your soul. Just a name. I’ll bear in mind that you volunteered the information.”
“Oh, God. They’re a company called Mitchell Shale Gas.”
“Shale gas,” Gideon echoed. He sat back in his chair. “Wait. Shale gas, as in... For Christ’s sake. Fracking?”
�
��Yes. I hadn’t even heard of it until the old man told me. I swear.”
Pendower snapped his notebook shut. “Bollocks,” he unexpectedly announced. “Gideon, this joker’s wasting our time.”
“I’d love to think so. Er—Mr Keast is offering a voluntary statement, so keep it civil.”
“Yes. Sorry. But there is no natural shale or oil in Cornwall. The geology rules it out. Not to mention that Carnysen’s smack in the middle of the Bodmin AONB. You can’t get permission to build a garden shed, let alone blast holes in the earth for oil.”
Gideon turned back to Keast. His skin was crawling. “Tell me he’s right.”
“It’s an isolated pocket of shale rock, packed with organic matter. Mitchell does surveys for radon gas too, and they found it by accident. It’s a rich one—untold resources, right underneath the farm. Joe and Bligh Bowe still didn’t want to sell up. Mitchell hired us to make them the offer, and...” He chuckled unsteadily. “So much for the old farming family. The next day John Bowe was here in the office with the deeds in his hands.”
“This is still ridiculous. Mitchell would have had to jump through a thousand hoops from the council for planning permission. And even if they’d somehow managed that, there’s the—”
“The Bodmin AONB?” Keast was calming down. Suspects often did, once well launched into a confession, their worst fears realised and their desire to tell their side of the story strong. “You’re a bit naive, aren’t you, Sergeant? If there’s a good side to people, you’ll try and find it. You say council and planning permission like they were magic words.”
