by Harper Fox
Not Daisy’s style at all. She liked boundaries, set breakfast and dinner times, especially since the birth of her little boy. Curtain ties, potted plants, manicured lawns. Gideon pushed open the Rover’s door and cautiously got out, examining the building’s facade. A chunk of render was missing from under the eaves, and someone or something had cracked a small pane of glass in the bedroom window. On instinct he avoided the front door, raising the latch on the side gate instead to let himself into the yard.
He found Rufus sitting in one of the two striped deckchairs set out in the afternoon shade. At first glance he appeared perfectly content. One of his huge folklore texts was open on his lap, and he was leaning on one elbow, as if to share the book’s contents with an invisible companion in the other chair. He looked up at Gideon tranquilly. He was thin and unshaven, but for long moments he seemed much younger than his years, as if revisiting happier times. “Hello, Gideon,” he said, a bright smile dawning. “You should’ve knocked.”
“You wouldn’t have answered. Would you?”
The effort of telling the truth chased the fantasy away. Gideon could almost see it go: the empty chair, the sense of vanished affection. “No,” Rufus said, face clouding. “I’m taking some leave. I’m not well.”
More than Gideon’s life was worth to settle in the deckchair beside him. He perched uncomfortably on the low wall surrounding the wheelie bins. “Not what I hear from my mate in Plymouth. He says you’ve been AWOL. It’s not too late if you pull it together now, sort yourself out and turn up for duty tomorrow with your hair brushed and your boots nice and shiny. I came to see if you’d like some help with that.”
“Would you polish them yourself? Brush my hair?”
Gideon considered the tone of this question. There was yearning in it as well as a bite of sarcasm. “If you like,” he said levelly. “Everyone needs to be taken care of sometimes.”
“Do you do those things for Locryn?”
“No. Lee’s pretty much on top of his personal hygiene.” Anger flared in Gideon, a heat he’d been suppressing for too long. “I meant to approach this nicely, but since you’ve dumped us both into the middle of it, Lee doesn’t need you hanging about his sets and locations like a stalker. You need to back off.”
Well, there it was. Rufus gaped. Gideon rubbed his eyes: he really had come here intending to be gentle, not to slap down the still-beating heart of his problems with Pendower on the cracked cement paving of the yard. “Shit,” he said remorsefully. “I didn’t mean to say that, believe it or not—not yet, anyway. I do want to help you. Where the hell’s Daisy?”
“She took the baby and left.”
“Oh, Christ. When?”
“It was after that day in Launceston. I came home, and I couldn’t stop myself from talking about him—what he said, how ill he’d been, how insane it was that he’d been arrested for doing nothing but try to help and tell the truth. I couldn’t shut up, even though Stevie was cutting a tooth and wailing, and Daisy needed me to take him off her hands. She was exhausted, and she asked me if I loved her, and...”
“Please tell me you didn’t say no.”
“I did. And I told her we were quits, because she didn’t love me either. I had proof, because I’d seen how she looked when she was in love by then, so I could tell the difference.”
“Don’t be absurd. That girl never so much as glanced at anyone but you.”
“Oh, not like that. I mean in the maternity ward, when they put the baby into her arms.”
Gideon sighed explosively. “Women have all kinds of love. She’s not gonna look at you like her precious firstborn son, no, but—”
“Are you seriously about to lecture me on the subject of women?”
“Oh, right. I’m gay, so I wouldn’t have a clue? I work with women, Pendower. I’ve got a mother, a sister-in-law and a little girl, not to mention the dozens of victim-support groups I’ve worked with over the years, the battered wives and the rape victims. If you think my sexuality excludes me from any of that, you’re as bad as the knuckleheaded Kernow Glan brutes I’ve been grilling all morning.”
Rufus doubled over in his chair. He fastened his hands together at the back of his skull. Running out of breath and scorching words, Gideon didn’t blame him. What the hell was he doing? Why did this poor bastard, deserted and clearly half out of his mind, bring all his own sore spots to the surface? “Sorry. Sorry. Look, for God’s sake don’t sit like that. Look at me, and I’ll start over, if you’ll let me.”
Not a flicker from the hunched-up figure in the chair. Surrendering, Gideon got to his feet. He strode past Rufus, briefly dropping one hand to his shoulder, and let himself into the house through the back door.
The kitchen was a sordid mess. There but for the grace of God went Gideon himself, if he’d never met Lee—the bachelor habits and self-neglect, discarded food packets, half-eaten ready meals for one. Oh, he’d have tried, but loneliness would’ve dragged him down in the end. Nature hadn’t built him to be solitary and unloved. He took a long, assessing glance around him, and then he went to work.
Quarter of an hour later, the surfaces were clean, the sink disinfected, dishwasher chuntering over a full load, cardboard and tins set aside for recycling, a few unspeakable horrors exorcised from the fridge. Normally he found such tasks tiring, far more of a pull on his energies than a chase around the streets after villains. Horses for courses, he’d always thought, but maybe he’d just been making heavy weather of his half of the domestic routine. He had bundles of energy now. A glance into the living room revealed extensive wreckage there too. He could bet that the bed was unmade, and the bathroom didn’t bear thinking about.
Action was better than thought in such cases. He blazed in. He felt like cleansing fire, the kind that certain trees and heathers needed to make them sprout afresh. He didn’t stop to consider the intimacy of turfing another man’s underwear out of the wash basket and into the machine, of rinsing traces of his toothpaste and whiskers off the sink. Like any other messy job, it was best done fast and well. Once finished, he bounded downstairs, half convinced he could take the same arm’s-length, merciless approach to his colleague’s state of mind. He snapped the kettle on, rattled tea mugs out of the cupboard. “Get your arse in here, mate,” he called cheerfully through the door, not looking out. “Tea’s up, and your kitchen’s no longer a biohazard. The land of the living awaits.”
No response. At last he went to lean in the doorway. Rufus was sitting exactly as he’d left him, hands still clenched at the back of his skull.
His unchanged stillness made Gideon’s sense of reality skitter and slide. Perhaps there were two worlds: one full of action and benefit inside the house, and another out here, where time had slowed to treacle, and no-one gave a damn anymore. As often when uncomfortable with his own decisions, he compared his last forty minutes with how Lee might have spent them if he’d been there. What that quiet, gold-hearted soul might have done.
Probably he’d have pulled over that crate from the corner of the yard, put it in front of Rufus and sat down. He’d have allowed his one-off brand of receptive silence to expand around him, filling the dreary little space until curiosity or the need to speak overcame Rufus and he unfolded, rejoining the human race because he wanted to, not because some overbearing lump of a copper had ordered him to be cured.
Well, maybe it wasn’t too late for a little Tyack magic. Gideon grabbed the crate, dragged it over and sat down. He put his head on one side, tried for the receptive silence.
Somehow it turned the air around him to crackling static, and Rufus looked up with anything but mollified curiosity in his eyes. “Why are you still here?”
“I... don’t know, really. I tidied up for you a bit inside, chucked some stuff out of your fridge.”
“Did I ask you to do any of that?”
“No. But I remember, when Tamsyn’s mother changed her mind about letting us adopt her and took her away, Lee cleaned our flat. I came back from work and f
ound it all done. It didn’t make anything less dreadful. It was just easier to feel rotten somewhere clean.”
The grim face softened slightly. “That was when I first met him. Elowen had taken Tamsyn the day before, and he was being so brave, out in Farmer Bowe’s fields trying to do his work. Of course I didn’t know what he was going through, not until you explained. I’d got such a shock when you’d said you were married to him, too. When I look back on the way I reacted, I’m ashamed. I must have seemed so ignorant.”
“No, never that. A bit naive, maybe.”
“I’d worked with gay officers before. Just not married ones who called each other husband the way you two did.”
“Well, for me and Lee at that point it was go big or go home, you know? Other coppers might need to be more discreet. I was lucky—I had family to support me, an understanding boss. But we’re talking about me here, or Lee at any rate, and...” Gideon spread his hands. “And I think it needs to be about you. Have you been seeing Amber again?”
Rufus nodded, not visibly fazed by the subject change. “Yes, almost all the time. She was here when you arrived. We were reading my book together, though I never was interested in any of that stuff until after she died. If she could come back, you see—if she could talk to me and seem so real, maybe all the things I’d dismissed as paranormal garbage could be true as well. So I began to study it all, to try and understand, which is why I ended up in John Bowe’s barley field with you.”
Sergeant Weird-Shit. Gideon had coined the name to make Lee smile on a dark day, but now it seemed trite, for a man who’d acquired his expertise in such a way. For such a reason. “I’m so sorry that you lost her.”
“Well, these days I don’t feel as if I have. You distracted me from her for a while, which is why I was angry. But she came back.” He cast a smiling glance at the deckchair beside him. “I must sound insane, talking like this.”
No, you don’t. I saw her too, on the clifftops at Drift, and I still can’t explain how, except that I was within Lee’s nimbus of vision, and he was holding open the gates between the worlds. She was wearing a dress you bought her with tulips on, her favourite. “Living with Lee,” he said awkwardly, “I’ve learned not to have too many boundaries, about what’s real and sane and what’s not.”
“You’re so lucky. To live with him, I mean. You could never deserve him.”
When Zeke said something like that—made the caustic observation that Lee was worth a hundred of him—Gideon could accept it. There was even a weird pride in it for him, knowing that Lee loved him despite his unworthiness, knowing that he meant to spend his life redressing the balance. From Rufus, it was a red flag. “Pendower,” he rumbled. “You’ve got feelings for Lee, and I don’t blame you. He’s not about to return them, though, and it seems to me you’ve chucked away the love you did have for the sake of some dream that can never come true. You do get that, don’t you? Never.”
That last word had been a verbal punch. Gideon was sorry as soon as it was out: there’d been no need. He saw retaliation gathering in Pendower’s eyes. Well, he had it coming, and better to let the poor bastard get a good one in. “All right,” he said resignedly, when the hush that had gathered in the little yard was threatening to drown them both. “You’ve got something to say to me, go ahead.”
“He’d break his heart and die for you.”
Pain passed through Gideon’s chest, a dull pang, as if the breakage had already begun. “We’d die for each other. But his heart’s in my keeping. I’d never abuse that trust.”
“You damn well abused it in Kerdrolla.” Rufus knotted his hands together. His eyes fixed on a point behind Gideon’s shoulder, as if some spirit had emerged from the brickwork to reproach him—not Daisy this time, Gideon was sure. “I’m not breaking my promise. I’m not! I only promised about Dev Bowe.”
Gideon couldn’t keep up with this. “What has Dev got to do with anything?”
“He couldn’t have killed John Tregear. You know he couldn’t.”
“I think about that often. I believe you’re probably right. But if you know anything, and you’ve been holding back—”
“Oh, God, Gideon. Don’t lean on me to find out the last thing in the world you want to know.”
“You’ve lost me. As for Kerdrolla...” The word fell heavily into the stifling air. “I dreamed about a place with that name when I had flu a couple of years back. Lee said it meant... Story Town, or something like that. Did he talk to you about it?”
“No. I was... That is, I remember...”
Again that frightened glance beyond Gideon’s shoulder. Was some angel with a fiery sword standing there? Whatever Pendower was seeing, it stopped his tongue, or altered whatever had been about to come burning off it. “He must have spoken to me about it, yes. He knows how much I like place names and their origins—maybe he thought I’d be interested to hear what your brain had come up with when you had a fever. I’m sorry, all right? I wasn’t going to tell.”
“Rufus, who are you talking to?”
Pendower made a massive grab for normality. “You, of course. Who else?”
“Yes, mostly. That last part, though, and when you said you weren’t breaking your promise—who else do you think is here?”
“Nobody. Nobody. But listen to me, Gideon, and I’ll try to tell you as much of the truth as I can, not because I’m jealous or angry but because I’m afraid for you both. I’m not stupid. I know you’re joined at the hip for life, and it’s not your fault if I’ve got a stupid schoolboy crush. The only things that can hurt you are the secrets you keep from one another.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t keep anything from him.”
Frowning, Rufus focussed on him, his gaze suddenly forensic. “You really don’t, do you? You really don’t know.”
Abruptly Gideon had had enough. He couldn’t believe he’d engaged with Rufus to this extent. Like arguing with a drunk or a crackhead, except that his colleague’s incapacity was mental illness and he therefore deserved all the sympathy and help Gideon could provide. He felt like a storm in Rufus’s teacup, the yard and the house tiny, painfully restrictive. “Okay,” he said, pushing to his feet with a force that sent the crate clattering over behind him. “That leaves Lee keeping secrets from me. You know, for someone who claims to love him, you don’t know anything about him at all.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Jesus, was Rufus trying to pacify him? A bit bloody late for that, but Gideon summoned all his patience and professionalism, ignoring the need to jump over the wall of the yard and run and run until he found wide moorlands and clean air. “No, I’m sorry. I’ve been chewing your arse off here, and you’re not well. I tell you what I’m going to do. I picked up a bit of shopping on the way over here, and I doubled up on milk and bread and some other basic stuff just in case you were running low. So I’m gonna go and fetch that, and then I’ll phone the welfare office. Look, it happens to us all from time to time, and they helped me a lot when I was out of action.” Remembering Beth Squires and his own complete refusal of that worthy officer’s services, Gideon made a face. “Well, they would’ve if I’d let them, and you will. Don’t worry, it’s not Squires anymore. They’ve got a psychologist called Treece now—I hear she’s really good.”
He didn’t wait for Rufus’s reaction to any of this. Whatever Rufus thought was irrelevant now. He’d proved himself unfit for duty, and the rotting food in his kitchen had told a wider story: maybe the poor sod needed to be in care. He strode off to the truck, letting the gate bang behind him. Thirty seconds sufficed for him to pick out the duplicate groceries and sling them into a bag. Rufus watched him serenely enough as he swept back through the yard and into the kitchen, much as he might have watched a wave break over Sennen sands, or any other unstoppable force of nature.
Briskly Gideon unpacked. A crumpled scrap of paper on the counter top caught his eye, and he flattened it out: an invoice from a local firewood company, three bags
of kiln-dried, stove-ready birch, payment overdue. Household finances had been Daisy’s remit, Gideon recalled from one of the interminable dinner parties, Lee good-naturedly manufacturing conversation by comparing his domestic arrangements with hers. The bill was only for thirty quid. Gideon had that much left over from his grocery run. He fished his wallet out of his pocket, peeled off a twenty and a ten and secured these, along with the invoice, to the front of the fridge with a magnet. Briefly it occurred to him that he and Lee had enough bills of their own to pay, but he felt lordly. Bountiful, brimming over with beneficent power.
He made a quick call to the Tollgate Road welfare office. Finding Squires’ replacement at her desk, he explained that although Sergeant Pendower was on secondment in Devon, he was better known at the Cornwall HQ, where his courageous actions were a matter of local legend. Smiling to himself, Gideon recalled them: his dash around the barleyfields on the night of Guldize, collecting stray children until a lightning bolt had struck him, forever destroying the smooth, neat lie of his hair. His extraordinary tackle-run to knock Gideon out of the way of a gas-leak blast in Dark. His fearless arrival at the burning church, bringing Tamsyn in his arms...
Wait. Where the fuck had that last one come from? Keeping the mobile clamped to his ear, Gideon leaned his elbows on the counter. That had been part of his dream, hadn’t it—the Kerdrolla dream, where Story Town had exploded and Zeke’s chapel had burned to ashes in the glowing heart of a midsummer night. He rubbed his brow with his free hand, and gradually became aware of the welfare officer repeating his name down the line.
He pulled himself together. Pendower had been under pressure, he continued, and was showing signs of depression. He was a good officer and a friend. Treece made empathetic noises at him, promised a personal visit later that afternoon. Could Gideon stay with Pendower until she arrived?
