Read Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor for Free Online Page A

like the Prowse brood, all the Kemp kids knew the moor. Unless she was dead – and there had been no trace of her body – wouldn’t she have found her way home?
    Kemps and Prowses. Those two clans had interbred and feuded for centuries around here. Gideon began to arrange them in his head, quartz and granite chesspieces on a board. He had by no means finished this process when he unlocked his front door.
    He set the problem aside for a while. He felt able to: the sense of bottled-up fear was gone from the base of his throat and the place behind his eyes where it had been blocking even such ordinary vision as nature had granted him. He checked in on Lee, who was still sleeping soundly, one hand on Isolde’s oblivious skull. The pizza was ready and he absently ate half of it standing at the kitchen counter, staring out into the night. Then he went into the study where his father had used to write his sermons.
    The room felt wholly different tonight. The blazing stove next door had driven off the chill, and Lee Tyack’s presence had somehow spread through the house like a warm scent, although to the best of Gideon’s knowledge he only smelled of well washed male. Maybe a touch of sweat and mud from his exertions up at Wheal Catherine... Gideon caught himself smiling. He sat down to his long-neglected paperwork. The chess game restarted in his head. He let it unfold, turning his conscious mind to the cares of the day, the stolen quad bikes, Mrs Waite’s shop cash register, which seemed to have sprung a bad leak since she’d hired a stranded Polish crop-picker to help her out over winter...
    And failed to notice Mr Waite’s increased trips to the Bodmin town bookie’s. Gideon had noticed them, but he hadn’t connected the dots.
    He grunted in self-disgust and rested his chin on one palm. Now he thought back, the Polish girl’s eyes had been clear as day. It was so easy to blame an outsider – migrant workers, travellers, even the Beast of bloody Bodmin if you were all out of other ideas and your local bobby was letting the side down.
    Look closer to home , a voice that sounded a lot like Tyack’s whispered in his head. I know you don’t want to. But look closer.

Chapter Six
     
    Gideon woke at three in the morning with a cold vibration dying in his bones. He got out of the narrow bed he’d shared with James. The bed was barely a double.  Moving into Pastor Frayne’s ministerial bedchamber had seemed too much of an enormity. He stood barefooted on the lino, hitching up his pyjama pants. It was the early hours of Halloween. What had he heard? He shrugged into his dressing gown and padded swiftly downstairs, unease prickling between his shoulders.
    Lee was sleeping where he’d left him, the room now filled with blood-bronze light from the dying fire. The dog was still there too, though she’d woken up and her posture was watchful, more focussed and attentive than Gideon had ever seen her. Her eyes were fixed on the door.
    Whatever dive Lee had been preparing to take, he was in deep waters now. He had turned onto his front and was clutching the edge of the sofa for dear life. He was breathing shallowly, his face buried in a cushion. Quickly Gideon crouched beside him and eased it away. “You’ll suffocate, you daft bugger.”
    Lee drew a deep, relieved breath. He opened his eyes. His skin was marked with the weave of the cushion, and a dreadful lostness in his gaze evaporated as he focussed on Gideon. “God. I was dreaming.”
    “Did you call out?”
    “Don’t think so.” He pushed stiffly onto one arm. “Had my face stuffed into your cushions anyway, didn’t I?”
    “And a death-grip on my sofa.” Gideon didn’t know quite how to touch him. Why was he so awkward? He was usually good at comforting strangers, the lost hillwalkers and occasional road-accident victim. He settled for helping Lee prise his clutch off the sofa frame. “I don’t fancy your dreams, if they make you hang on like that. You’re