by Harper Fox
The vicar sized Zeke up, then clearly deciding that even a Low Church ally was better than none, held out his hand. “Reverend Charles Sawyer.”
“And I happen to know those ladies over there, too. They’re friends of mine. Nobody’s going to hurt you or your church. Mrs C? Elowen? It might be a good idea for you and the vicar here to go outside and get to a safe distance.”
The old woman looked at him serenely. She had an arm around Elowen, who was hunched up with her face buried in her hands. “That’s just the thing, Constable. The girl and I don’t feel as though we can go anywhere at the moment. It’s very strange. I haven’t felt so much power in years.”
For God’s sake. Gideon didn’t have time for any esoteric nonsense from his daughter’s self-appointed babysitter. He should check Mrs C’s credentials. He’d done so before, of course, but when he tried to think of where and when, there was a blurred patch in his memory. And who else had called him constable, in that cracked, laughing old voice, long after his promotion...? “You can’t leave? Are you saying that the Reverend Sawyer here is preventing you?”
Yes, there was the familiar cackle. “What, that whey-faced sprig? That mushroom of yesterday’s growth, that...”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, vicar—she’s a little eccentric.” He cast an appealing look at Zeke. “If no-one’s in immediate danger, I’ll leave Ezekiel to look after you for a minute while I check this out. Elowen, please don’t cry.”
“I’m trying not to. But I want my life back.”
I want my child back. That was what Gideon heard. He made a superhuman effort to set aside the static of old fears in his head; played her words through again. “Your life back? What do you mean?”
“My life. My own proper, real, true life, with Michel and my little Cadan.”
She must be having a breakdown. Well, Gideon didn’t have to like or trust her to be kind. He thought about the times when he’d failed, and he was ashamed. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll hop you into the truck and take you back to them, okay? Siren and blue lights.”
“You... You’d do that for me?”
“Of course I would. Of course.”
She got her head up. She looked sick with fear, but as if some hope might be dawning. “When I took Tamsyn away from you, it wasn’t really her I wanted. It was part of my childhood, the part where I realised my father loved Locryn best. I wanted it back so I could change it. I’m so, so sorry for all the pain I caused.”
“Oh, Elowen.” With a painful inner shift, Gideon understood the difference between true forgiveness and the grudging half-measure he’d doled out to her since she’d brought Tamsyn home. He held out his arms. She made a strange wriggling movement in her chair, as if fighting out of a too-tight sweater, and she ran to him. He let her in—all the way, not the stiff embrace of their usual meetings, deep enough that she could gasp out her fears against his shoulder. “There,” he said, rocking her. “I’m sorry too, for what it’s worth. About your dad, and for being such a dick to you myself, okay?”
She sobbed and choked, and gave the exact same bark of laughter Lee would emit when caught between joy and tears. “Okay.”
“Good. Now, what’s all this about you not being able to move?”
“I can. You freed me.”
“What about you, Mrs Coulter?”
The old lady shook her head. “Oh, not me, dear. You haven’t got anything I want enough to set me free. I’m surprised, you know.”
“What about?”
“That there’s any greater power. It’s Alice, you see. And she’s giving it her all.”
Ice formed out of the warm summer air and dropped down Gideon’s spine. Gently he pushed Elowen back. He took a shielding step in front of her. “Alice Rawle? Listen, Mrs Coulter—Alice Rawle is in custody, but if you know anything about her, or you think you’ve seen her here...”
“Who else? Who else could be...” Mrs C’s gaze, normally cataract-cloudy blue, sparkled and focussed on the archway above Gideon’s head. “Who else could be doing that?”
There was nothing to be seen. Nothing but plaster-dust in the air, catching colours from the sun and the stained glass... As he watched, the blocks seemed to shimmer, to slacken in their mortar like old teeth. A rumble filled Gideon’s skull, a gigantic version of Tamsyn’s innocent poltergeist percussions. “Shit,” he whispered, backing up. “Zeke, get Elowen and the vicar out. I’ll deal with Mrs C.”
Sawyer had been looking frantically back and forth between Gideon and the old lady. “What?” he demanded shrilly. “No! I won’t abandon my church. Do your job, Constable, and arrest that... person up there in the tower, that yob or—or immigrant, or whoever it is. They just need discipline. Discipline!”
“All right. Whatever. Just go.”
“I... I can’t.”
The keystone at the top of the archway gave a weird jump and cracked in two. The pieces began their fall. Gideon shoved Zeke and Elowen out of range, but the impact, the crunch of granite on slate, never came. When he looked again, the fragments remained poised seven feet or so in the air, spinning gently. “Reverend Sawyer,” he said, “I would truly appreciate it if you’d help my brother get these women outside.”
“I can’t. It’s got hold of me too. I can’t move.”
Gideon lost patience. He strode through the trembling archway and planted himself solidly at the foot of the stairs. He raised his voice to reach the unseen presence above him. “Right. I don’t know who you are, but I’m a police officer, and I’ve seen my little two-year-old girl float a rock the size of a dolphin over Bodmin moor. Show yourself, and maybe we can talk.”
The shadows coalesced. Gideon tried to wipe his eyes clear of dust, but still they stung and ached with the effort of looking at the skinny figure at the top of the steps. Mrs C had been wrong, the vicar bizarrely right. A woman in a long abaya dress and hijab, her eyes black and terrible with despair.
All right. Gideon understood this. Maybe not the floating masonry and the ongoing whine in the air, or how these things were connected to the frail creature staring down at him, but he knew the context, the reasons. He’d had to arrest a woman called Katie Mills last year, as part of the Kernow Glan mop-up, for her merciless bullying of a Muslim Big Issue seller. Times were changing in rural Cornwall, and not for the better, never for the better anymore. Gideon barely recognised his brave new world, that had such people in it. “Okay,” he said gently, extending a hand, palm-up. “Things have been rough lately, right? You’ve lived here all your life, I should think. Born and bred, and then suddenly there’s people shouting at you in the street, yanking your scarf off on the bus. Is that it?”
The woman bobbed her head. She grabbed at the stone balustrade as if to steady herself. That was good. It meant that Gideon was getting through to her, an easier task than he’d anticipated. A small warmth of pride began in him, that he could read a situation so easily and well. “I get it,” he went on. “Did you come here on a visit today? Look, this place is the backwoods even by Cornish standards. They’re good people, most of ’em, but they don’t see many brown faces. They might have stared at you. Did somebody give you a hard time, and you came in here to hide?”
He might be getting through, but the strange vibe was increasing, the bell emitting an unstruck moan of response. Still, the woman began a hesitant track down the steps towards him. If he could get her within arm’s reach, offer her the shelter she’d come here to find...
Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside. Gideon swung towards the sound, keeping his outstretched hand in place, the move a practised copper’s one. You stay right where you are while I deal with this fresh piece of hell.
No. Gideon’s own piece of heaven. The church door flew wide, probably with more force and less ceremony than at any time in its centuries of quiet guardianship. Lee half-fell in through the doorway. Bizarrely for a man who’d arrived in such a life-and-death rush, he was wearing a daisy crown. He righted himself, focussed on Gideon. �
��Oh, thank Christ!”
Gideon had to bite back laughter. That was his own style of crime, wasn’t it—to let rip with one blasphemy or another, usually in the presence of his godly brother? “Same to you,” he said, relief putting a rasp into his voice. “I was worried. Where’s Tamsie?”
“I locked her in the car. She’s got the wind up about something happening here, Gid. She says it’s Alice Rawle.”
Gideon’s scalp tightened. Could a short-back-and-sides stand on end? He hoped not, or he’d look like a fucking hedgehog under his cap. “It’s not. It’s just some poor woman who’s been getting bashed by the Kernow Glan mob, or Ukippers, or Britain First, or...”
“It’s not,” a cold voice said, right by his ear. “It’s me.”
He jerked back to face her. She was two inches off his shoulder, and her hijab was a fall of tangled pale hair, and her skin was as white as his own. “Shit,” he breathed, having to clench his bladder in a spasm of pure fear. “What are you—some kind of shapeshifter?”
She cracked into raw laughter. “You can talk!”
***
The church was ready to fall. Gideon understood that. He understood that stone had been lifted from stone, the mortar between them transformed to vibrant soup, the whole structure dismantled but held in stasis for now by the thin girl beside him. There his understanding stopped. She wasn’t wearing an abaya, just a T-shirt and jeans. Holding on to the thin blue line of his duty, which had pulled him through so many times when all else failed, he set aside fear and wonder in favour of getting the job done. Gunmen and suicides, hostage-takers and lost kids, the first rule was always the same: keep them talking. Establish a bond. “I feel like a bit of an idiot,” he said, pleasantly as he could, “going on at you about UKIP and brown faces. I saw you as somebody you weren’t. Did you make me see that? Because if you did, it was good. I’m impressed.”
He’d talked a knife-wielding nutcase into submission outside the Bodmin Aldi by chatting to him for half an hour about what a great knife it was, what a smart consumer choice. But Alice Rawle had passed beyond vanity’s reach God only knew how long ago. Her face was pinched with pain. Only the eyes were as Gid had first seen them, lightless and black. She was implacable. She knew his weaknesses, just as she knew the contact points between stone and stone in this church. “I did it for you,” she said, not unkindly. “A glamour for Gideon Frayne. You all think a glamour’s for beauty, but it’s not—it’s just to make you different.”
“Okay. You were very different. Why was that just for me?”
“Because of the way you think. You hate what’s happening so much—Brexit, the way every right-wing prick from Land’s End to the Tamar took it to mean we want foreigners out, and everyone different too—that you’ve gone too far.”
“Have I? That’s extremely possible.” No point in asking her how she knew. “What have I done?”
“You forget. You let yourself forget that a brown face can be a bad one. That sometimes there is a few pounds of semtex under a burka. That queers can be villains just as much as a privileged straight white male. I was Rima Malik up there, the Muslim girl Katie Mills and her feral gang used to bait. If you hadn’t risen to that, I’d have made her a lesbian too.”
Gideon struggled not to laugh. She’d bull’s-eyed the flaw in his nature, if it was one. The lesbian thing would have definitely worked. “You’re talking about positive discrimination,” he said. “I don’t disagree with that, although you’ve got a fair point that I might have let it blind me. I can’t speak for people of colour—the experience isn’t mine—but I reckon we could offer favours and leg-ups and breaks for the next few hundred years, and not make a dent in the debt white cultures owe to the rest of the world. Not a dent.” He let a smile flicker. “As for... queers, as you put it—there I can speak. All most of us want is to be treated like the rest of you. Heroes, villains, the usual mash-up of ordinary sods in between.”
She was listening. Was he creating a rapport? The whine in his ears was louder if anything, his consciousness of the rafters and thick stone roof tiles overhead more intense. The red splash in the periphery of his vision was Lee, nose bleeding profusely in this high-frequency hell. “Sweetheart,” he said, not looking at him, not caring who heard. “Can you get out of here? Ezekiel, can you take him out?”
They couldn’t. Gideon knew this because he was rooted too now. Somewhere in the background, the poor shattered vicar was still ranting about discipline, yobs and immigrants: what did he see, when he looked at Alice Rawle? Zeke was doing what he could, though, everything Gid could have wished bar hauling Lee back into the sweet sunny world a few yards away and as distant as stars. He’d drawn Lee to his side and put an arm around him. He was holding Elowen’s hand. And Lee said, with a faint lost scrape that cut Gid to the heart, “Katie Mills?”
“That’s right,” Alice returned conversationally. “The price of justice, you might call her—the kind your Gideon likes to mete out, Locryn Tyack. Got hold of some nylon tights and strung herself up in her cell a fortnight ago. She was a lost cause, wasn’t she? Thick as a brick. Gambling debts, and a meth-head when she could afford it. No loss.”
No loss, no loss. Gideon fought to believe it. He fought to hold on to his first, sane reaction: that Alice Rawle was just a clever psychopath, dipping into whatever she’d learned about him, picking out weapons. About Lee, too. “Lee,” he said roughly. “Did you know Katie Mills?”
“Yeah. I gave her a cold-read two years ago. I got some kind of flash from her about Kernow Glan, and I sent you a text about it.”
“I remember. That was the first we knew about them.” Yes, the beginning—the opening of a tale that had ended at the Pride march in Falmouth, when Gideon had stopped a bomb and saved the day. Not in Kerdrolla, Story Town. “I pulled her in for assault on a Big Issue vendor, her and some of her mates.”
“Right. So you just remember that, Gid. She was feral, a monster. It made me sick to be inside her head, even for five minutes.”
Still.
The word hung between them in silence. Still. Gideon couldn’t get inside the heads of the people he’d arrested, but he’d been inside HMP Eastwood Park. He imagined the four walls of Katie’s cell. A pair of nylons smuggled in or, knowing her, nicked from some other woman heading out on probation. How had she done it? Fiercely he stopped himself: he didn’t even know for sure that she had. “I’ve made mistakes,” he told Alice harshly. “Overcompensated, maybe. Is that what you want me to say?”
She shrugged. The bony tips of her shoulders moved beneath her T-shirt like claws. “Not really. Rima was just my way in with you. The vicar kneejerks for foreigners as well, though not the way you do. And he’s scared of big boys, largely because he thinks they might be the little ones he dicked around with in his last parish, grown up and coming to get him. So I did both for him—a hooligan and the girl. The hooligan knocked a pinnacle off his precious tower. I’m getting ready to pull down the rest.”
“I know.” Gideon couldn’t understand why it hadn’t happened already. His own nose was bleeding now, and his eyes and ears wanted to start. He made a huge effort and spoke through the shuddering air. “What do you want, Alice? I only ever saw you once—in Dark, last May. I think you wanted to hurt me then, so if that’s the point of all this, go ahead and get it over with. Let these others go.”
“Who stopped me?”
The question was a terrible one, so close to Gideon’s heart and marrow and bone that he deflected it, pushing the answer away. “Who stopped you from what?”
“Hurting you. Who stopped me? Everyone else is here, aren’t they?” She jabbed a finger in Zeke’s direction, then Lee’s, then finally back at Gideon. “Preacher, prophet, beast. Just like outside the preacher’s burning church in Dark, in the time you keep telling yourself you don’t remember. There’s the old woman and Elowen, the mother and the crone. Where’s the—”
Maiden. Preacher, prophet, beast—maiden, mother, crone. The maid
en was Gideon’s daughter, his own baby girl. He wouldn’t let the word past Alice’s lips. He grabbed her and spun her away from him, clamping one hand across her mouth. “You’re a nutcase,” he informed her savagely. “I don’t know how you slipped your leash, but I’d better not find a trail of bodies between here and the Dartmoor Levels high-security wing. I do remember the fire, if that’s so important to you. My brother’s here, and Lee, but mind out who you’re calling beast.” He shook her, trying to remember that he was human. “As for your crone—you mean Jana Ragwen, don’t you? She was there too. But that’s not her. That’s just... That’s just...”
The air went still. The tortured vibe dropped out of it like bats leaving a cave. Mortar turned from soup to substance once more, and the ancient building’s foundations received her. The old lady sitting by the font—unimpeded now, neat and innocuous in the Marks and Spencer fashions of five years ago—stood up and brushed herself down, and she and the others watched in silence as the hovering stones in the air came to rest in a heap on the floor. “I’m sorry, dear,” she said, turning a wry gaze on Gideon. “Alice is right—about one thing, anyway. A glamour doesn’t necessarily make you beautiful—just different.”
Gideon could breathe again. Properly, down to the depth of his lungs. The inrush of oxygen felt like a high, and Lee was mopping up his nosebleed with Zeke’s big white pastoral handkerchief, and there was just a chance that all was well. Setting the weirdness aside, he was on balance glad to see old Jana Ragwen again. “Granny,” he said, with an unguarded break of laughter in his voice. “I must have known it was you, or I’d never have left you with Tamsyn. What are you playing at, though? Did you stop all this?”
“Ah, no. No, not me, although you can let go of that poor skinny child now, Constable—I think she’ll do as I say. Put your hands behind your back, Alice, dear, so the policeman can cuff you.”
Shame touched Gideon, that he’d kept his hand where it was. Alice was passive in his grasp, a bomb disarmed, a suddenly neutralised threat. He had no need to use excessive force, or any force at all. Tamely she put her hands behind her, and he unhitched the cuffs from his utility belt and fastened them, careful not to hurt the raw, starved-looking bones. “Was it you, then, Lee?” he said, puzzled at the undiminished fear in his husband’s eyes. “Everything’s all right now. Let Zeke take you outside.”
