by Harper Fox
“Didn’t get round to asking you how things ended up with Rufus. Or the rest of your day.”
“You were busy helping me feed the five thousand.” Gideon shook his head. “Can’t believe Zeke made that crack about the locusts.”
“Or about the loaves and fishes.”
“I know, right? He’s getting more human every day.”
“Oh, he’s entirely human.” Lee slung a weary arm across Gideon’s stomach and held on. “I love Zeke. You would tell him that, wouldn’t you, if ever I couldn’t...”
He fell silent. Gideon listened to the night around them: his own post-orgasmic breathing, which had abruptly caught in his throat, and beneath and above and on every side, the huge living silence of the summer moors. “Tell him yourself,” he said uncomfortably, aware once again of the brink, the chasm. “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”
“Apart from the fact that I can’t imagine the scene... I just mean accidents, you know. Fate. Tripping on Tamsie’s cauldron at the top of the stairs.”
“She has a cauldron?”
“Well, it’s the copper bowl we found here along with your apron when we moved in. She calls it her cauldron.”
“I can’t pick out the most disturbing aspect of this conversation. Tell her not to leave it anywhere dangerous. And as for you, be careful. Accidents and fate don’t get to touch my family.”
“Oh, Gid. They get to touch everyone.”
“You know what I mean. By the way, if you were hoping for any return of favours here, I think you’ve quenched my ardour.”
Lee gave a snorting chuckle. “Never mind. I think I just want to lie here and hold you, and let you talk me to sleep.”
“Oh, ta.” Gideon fastened a large embrace on him, the kind that could catch tired spirits as they plunged into their dreams. “I’ll start with Rufus, shall I?”
“Mm, please.”
“There’s not much more to tell. He’s had some kind of breakdown, and I think he knows on some level it’s not okay to pursue you around your film sets and locations. He wasn’t pleased with me for tidying up, but he said he’d be at home for the welfare officer’s visit. Try not to worry about him, okay? They really will take care of him.”
“Okay. And he didn’t... He wasn’t banging on about anything else, was he? He’s got a few weird ideas in his poor spiky bonce, about the meanings of place names, that kind of thing.”
Tell me about it. But relief had seized Gideon: if Lee already knew that much, maybe no more needed to be said. And weird ideas might be all there was to it. “I’m not sure. I was too busy pissing him off. But I think he forgave me before I left, and we’ll go and see him over the weekend. You still awake?”
“Just about. What about Pendethy? Did you go up to help Jenny Spargo?”
“Oh, yeah. That was a bit strange too, actually. I did get called up, but when I arrived, she had the whole thing in hand. She more or less shooed me away.”
“Really?”
“Mm. You know me and Jen—we’ve always been good mates. The best. But I guess she might well be seeing her fast-track to CID through this case, so I backed off and went to make myself useful elsewhere.”
“Nice of you. Doesn’t sound like Jenny, though.”
“Ah, well.” Gideon settled Lee more comfortably. “Let the mysteries of the day be sufficient thereto. Oh, there was one more thing. Have you seen my silver chain bracelet? I can’t find it anywhere.”
But Lee was sound asleep. He’d gone out with the sudden totality that was new with him, his body unstrung and abandoned against Gid’s, his breathing deep. “Glad my thrilling stories aren’t keeping you up, sunbeam,” Gideon said, for his own benefit only. He hoped the bracelet wasn’t lost. He’d always loved Lee’s neck-chain, and they’d talked about getting him one to match, then decided the chances were too high of his getting grabbed by it and strangled on the streets. Lee had presented him with a close-fitting cuff bracelet instead, made in the same tough, silky-textured links.
It would turn up, he was sure. Anyway it was only a small concern, in the wash of contentment sweeping over him now. Lee’s right, he thought, with the surreal distinctness of oncoming sleep. If this was our last night on earth, what more could either of us want? This bed, this warm heather-laden air. Our witch-daughter dreaming her spells in the room down the corridor. Tamsyn, Tamsyn, weave the web. Draw thy circle fast around the House of Joy. He floated effortlessly out of his body and looked down, at the house and the glimmering circle. Beyond its sacred boundary, a girl was standing, staring yearningly up at Tamsyn’s window.
No, not a girl—a woman, but so frail and slight that she looked young. Frail or not, she had no business so close to his home, and he drew closer to get a better look.
She shifted. The transmuting ripple didn’t scare Gideon: that was normal for a dream. The end of her transformation froze him, trapped him between sky and earth. She was still on two legs, but they bent backwards at the knee, and her face was the face of a wolf, and only then did he know her: Alice Rawle!
Others emerged from the heather, where they’d been hiding all along. All were transformed, but somehow Gideon could recognise them still. First came Rufus Pendower. He was in a state of halfway change, and looked miserable about it, as if trying desperately to cling to his human form. The others rejoiced to have left theirs behind. After Pendower came old man Tregear, and then Morris Hawke, then the Fisherman of Island village, his wheelchair left far behind. Last of all, Joe Kemp, as if this pack had formed along with the deepest roots of Gideon’s love for Lee. No, there was one other—the runt, just as he’d been the fragile afterthought of a family of fine sons, limping and whining and running from shadow to shadow: Dev Bowe.
The pack began to run. They turned to a grey blur and whipped around the circle. Only Pendower held back. He clutched the Chy Lowen gatepost like a spar in a roaring sea, and he looked up at Gideon in love and hate and desperation. The House of the Wolves, he cried, in a broken snarl that still somehow sounded like himself, Sergeant Weird-Shit, neat little officer with his little book of notes. For God’s sake, Gideon! It means the House of the Wolves!
Chapter Nine
Somewhere In Between
Lee was due on deck next morning at ten. He saw Gideon off to work, got himself and Tamsyn ready, dropped Isolde for a day of romps with the Kemp kids, and headed for the labyrinth of summer-green lanes that led to St Wylloe.
He had until one o’clock that afternoon, he reckoned. Until then, he could justify the normal unfolding of his day. Nothing would happen differently in the world around him or inside his head because he went to strip planks on Jory’s boat. After that, the ways diverged. Trelowarren was about an hour’s drive from the village. He could set out, arrive in time for his assessment. He’d made so many friends in the hospital during Gideon’s stays there that he’d no doubt find someone to keep an eye on Tamsyn while he was poked and prodded, and he’d be home in time to get dinner ready—not delicious chef’s-night Szechuan, probably just lasagne and a salad—and think up a way to end the terrifying charade of normality he’d begun the day before. A way to tell Gid he had a fucking brain tumour.
Christ, it was impossible. The second route opened up like a tree-lined avenue planted on both sides with good Cornish dope, opium poppies and Murphy’s ears. The first looked like a desert beside it, a long thin bed of nails. Already running down the avenue, Lee imagined at the end of it the priceless reward of one more normal night at home. He’d pull the plug on the land line. Hell, he could yank out a fuse or two and knock out the booster box so neither of their mobiles worked, and Gid, always unsuspicious, would go into power-cut mode, light candles and the open fire in the living room, call it a romantic evening and enjoy the whole thing. Lee knew there’d been more to the visit with Rufus than his benign schemer of a husband was telling. A few firelit hours and Lee would have it out of him, and life would go on.
It would, surely! He’d lived this long, painlessly, with t
he Bechstein’s Grand or whatever Meredith had said was growing in his brain. It was too much of a bloody coincidence that he’d happened to turn up in radiography on one of the last few days when he could be saved. CT scans could be wrong. Psychic gifts were poorly understood: how many seers and prophets of old might just have been walking around with passengers in their skulls, exerting subtle pressures, not all of them painful or deadly? Maybe some of them helped open up the way.
“Lee?”
He turned to look at his daughter. They were safely parked in the sunny village square outside St Wylloe’s church, and Lee had no idea how they’d got there. He’d negotiated the lanes on absolute autopilot. “Yes, sweetheart,” he said, swallowing down his fright at the lapse. “What is it?”
She was watching him solemnly from her booster. She put out her hands, and he twisted round and leaned towards her through the gap between the front seats, thinking she wanted to get or bestow a kiss. Her days were punctuated by dozens of such small gestures of love. Instead she flattened one palm on his brow: moved him a little way to the left and the right, like an old TV set in want of tuning. The gesture reminded him of Gid’s examination of his razor-cut, already blurring out this morning in new growth. Everything about him was still vigorous, from his beard to his cock. The second path beckoned, petals and leaves waving. “Nothing,” Tamsyn said thoughtfully, and not as an answer to his question. “Boat now?”
Maybe he should get her to talk more. She was mostly silent in his company, and he in hers. Still, their rapport had been endlessly varied, a constant exchange of images and ideas. He thought of her growing up without that. First path, he vowed. Meredith hadn’t written him off. At one o’clock he would set out for his appointment. “That’s right,” he said encouragingly. “We’ll go and work on the boat now, shall we?”
She nodded earnestly. “Yes. We’ll go and work on the boat.”
St Wylloe was perfect today, a dream of a coastal village in the far southwest. The sun beat down on the market cross and the narrow roads around it where a few parking spaces had been marked out, the quartz in the granite dazzling. Gorefen Day was coming up, festival of summer, local arts and flora. Every inch of soil had been planted out with fuchsia; jasmine clambered up trellises on walls. The date palms clattered softly in the breeze. Lee put on his sunglasses to help cut down the Mediterranean glare, and watched in amusement while Tamsyn withdrew her own small blue pair from her satchel and did the same. They set off hand-in-hand towards the church.
Jory’s back garden was more easily accessed from the graveyard than the lane, through a mossy gap in the wall. Like many of the ancient Celtic churches—like Drift, where Lee’s uncle Jago had put paid to the Cornish Panther—Wylloe’s sat on a circular mound. When Lee had explained this to Tamsie, she’d listened attentively, but as often he’d ended up convinced that she already knew. Where else would you build a church, Lee, if you wanted to harness the ancient magic of the land and the circles of stone?
After the square, the graveyard was a sanctuary. Only wayside weeds grew here, tall grasses beneath the overarching sycamores, though Tamsyn had been finding herbs hidden amongst their cool damp roots. Red campion, tricorn leek with their savoury scent and odd triangular stems, little starry chickweeds, and off to the north side, as if in benediction of the lost souls buried there, an old weeping cherry like a huge upturned bowl, leaves trailing the ground, a few rags of its splendid springtime blossom still clinging. Perched on a canopy tombstone in her civvies, elbows resting on her knees, Gid’s favourite colleague and work friend, Jenny Spargo.
Surprising Tamsyn was hard, although she did her best to act the part when opening birthday and Solstice gifts. She ran over to Jenny as if finding her in St Wylloe’s churchyard on a weekday was the most natural event in the world. Jen rumpled her hair, made room for her beside her on the tomb, and raised a pale face to Lee. “Hi. I hoped I’d get to intercept you here.”
“Doesn’t sound too good, coming from a copper. Have Jory’s neighbours complained about all the hammering?”
She took his attempt at a joke for what it was worth, smiling wanly. “Not my beat, is it?”
“A long way from it. What’s up, Jenny? Are you on your day off?”
“Yeah. Got my nephew’s eighteenth birthday party this afternoon, but I wanted to see you first, if I could. On your own, I mean. Without Gid.”
He knew what she meant. The skin of his forearms prickled and chilled. “Okay. I don’t want to pry, but I can feel that you’re terribly upset and scared. Will you let me help?”
“Bless you, Lee. But it’s not my thing to be scared about. It’s yours, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Sometimes just saying it is best.”
She’d been pulling at the moss on the stone. When she rubbed her cheek, she left a green smear. “All right. I found Gideon’s bracelet in Pendethy. In... Inside what was left of Pol Teague’s car.”
Lee was tough to surprise sometimes too. When he traced back through his mind—everything Gid had told him about Pol, his misdemeanours and his sudden death—he couldn’t experience the faintest ripple of shock. Only familiarity, a rightness beyond human justice, a scene that had played out in moonlight and blood. “I see,” he said flatly. “Okay.”
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out an object wrapped in tissue. “Here. Take it.”
And now at last Lee’s heart gave a bump and a squeeze that sent adrenaline spiking through him. Blindly he took the heavy little package from her. “Jesus. What are you doing, Jen? This should be—”
“Bagged up ready for forensics at HQ. Yes. Listen to me for a second, Lee. I love Gideon. And if I could’ve murdered Pol and got away with it, I’d have done it five years ago. The first girl he stalked was my sister. She’s okay now, but she’s still getting therapy and she says she can never come home. So I want you to take this, say you found it somewhere in the house and give it back to him. And I’m gonna... forget I ever saw it, or had this conversation. Is that okay?”
Tamsyn’s satchel was well equipped with tissues. Lee reached for it, but his girl had got there ahead of him and was already offering Jenny her pick of the pack, like a small tarot reader with a deck of cards. Despite herself and the situation, Jenny gave a gurgle of laughter. “You’re a poppet and no mistake, aren’t you? I’m sorry, Lee. I probably shouldn’t have said any of that in front of her.”
“Given everything else you shouldn’t have said and done, I wouldn’t worry.” Lee tucked the bracelet into the pocket of his jacket, where Meredith’s letter rustled a reminder of the desert path. Jenny was getting to her feet: he put out a hand to help her, and she grabbed it and suddenly threw her arms around him. “This is your career,” he whispered hoarsely. “Think about it, for God’s sake.”
“I’ve done nothing but think since I chased him off yesterday. Let him believe I’m being precious about the case. If no other DNA evidence turns up—and there’s nothing so far, nothing human anyway—he’ll be... There’s nothing to connect him...” She gave up on trying to put the impossible into words, squeezed Lee hard then let him go. “Bye, Colin Fry. I am off now to get so drunk with my fam, they’ll have to carry me home in a bucket.”
***
Lee worked solidly until noon. Jory Stark derailed any reactions he might have wanted to indulge by bouncing out of the house on his arrival, leaning on the boat’s hull and launching into a blow-by-blow account of his latest dispute with English Heritage. The battle raged on gaily, Cornwall not being—according to Jory, and in Lee’s view too, when he had time to think about it—part of England at all, and more than capable of looking after its menhirs on its own. Lee made some noises about divisiveness, and the need for unity in the face of the loss of EU funding post-Brexit, and Jory got red in the face and puffed and blew with a force that entirely distracted him, allowing Lee to continue to prise up rotting planks from the deck in a strange kind of peace. Tamsie, not visibly disturbed by her encounter
with Jen, wove a pattern through the gravestones, always staying within Lee’s field of view. He wondered what she’d bring him this time. What did little witches use to close the stable door after the horse had gone?
Just a crown of daisies. He smiled at her in pure love as her odd little face appeared over the rail of the boat. The single bell in the church tower was pealing out its dozen midday notes, vibrant as ravens in the air. “Walk, Lee?” She paused, furrowed her brow and tried again. “Shall we go for a walk?”
As good a way of spending his lunch hour, the hour before the parting of the ways, as any he could think of. He was expected to wear the crown, and so he took it from her and proudly settled it over his new haircut. Where would Meredith’s surgical team begin? A bone saw, he supposed, and he hid a freaked-out shudder. Really the op was the least of his problems. If he got that far, he must have managed to tell Gid, and all he had to do from there on out was survive and make his way back to him, to his life and everything he loved. For now, his only worry was looking like a daisy-wreathed dork on the streets of St Wylloe, but that too was minor: if your little girl made you a crown, you wore it.
He finished the plank he was working on, set his crowbar, hammer and chisel safely aside, and let Tamsyn lead him back through the churchyard. They stopped at the foot of the tower, a favourite place for their lunchtime sandwiches, but she squinted critically up at the pinnacles Gid called ears and drew him on. In the Co-op, the cashier smiled at his headgear but sold him a big bar of orange chocolate without further comment.
The streets were deeply sunk in midday somnolence. Tamsyn headed off apparently at random, running a few feet ahead of him, frequently glancing back. Lee followed, happy to let her set the direction and pace. Even the lamp posts had been painted in preparation for Gorefen, ivy and blossoms wreathing around one, a black red-eyed horse-skull grinning from the next. Fertility and death, forever intertwined in Kernowek consciousness, no lines drawn between, and who was he to compete with that? Existing as he had between the worlds until he’d met Gideon and fallen in love with life, he’d considered his own mortality without fear, and the essentially Pagan world-view of his family and community had always suited him well. He had no need to be afraid.
