Fic, Falls the Shadow, Part 5, Stephen/Ryan, 18

[fredbassett]

Title : Falls the Shadow, Part 5
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Characters : Ryan, Stephen, Claudia, Cutter, Connor, Lyle
Rating : 18
Disclaimer : Not mine (except Lyle), no money made, don’t sue
Spoilers : None.           
Summary : A connection is made.
A/N : The remainder of this series can be found here

“Fox,” said Lyle, as Ryan entered the kitchen at a run, Greg Thornton hard on his heels.

“You saw it?” the Special Forces captain sounded sceptical.

“Stephen did. It headed off across the yard. He’s gone out with Finn to take a scout round. No point in taking chances.” Lyle bent down and finished his examination of a long rip in the black Labrador’s ear. “Speaking of which, this poor old chap needs stitches.”

Greg sighed. “It isn’t his first run-in with that fox. It took a chunk out of his leg last week. Come on, Harvey, it’s the vets for you again, lad.” He shot a grateful look at Lyle. “Thanks. If your guy with the rifle spots the bugger, ask him to put the damn thing down. It’s caused havoc round here recently.”

No-one spoke until they heard the car doors slam and the crunch of tyres on the gravel drawing away from the house.

“Fox?” Ryan said.

He wasn’t the only one who looked sceptical.

Ten minutes later, Stephen came in through the outside door to the kitchen, running a hand through his wet hair, causing it to stand up in dark spikes. His blue eyes sought out Ryan’s and he was pleasantly surprised to realise that for the first time since entering the house his lover’s eyes hadn’t just slid past him to fix on some undefined point in the middle distance.

“I saw something brown and furry with a bushy tail disappearing into the undergrowth. Looked like a fox.”

“If it looks like a fox and runs like a fox ……….” muttered Cutter.

“…………. it probably is a fox,” finished Stephen, but the vivid blue eyes held unmistakeable traces of doubt. He shrugged and added, “It’s raining pretty hard out there and the mist has dropped big time, but I did see some tracks that I couldn’t identify. I think we need to talk to DCI Richards again. Make sure there’s been nothing going on around here that they haven’t told us.”

Forest of Dean syndrome, as they’d come to think of it.  The seemingly endless capacity of otherwise normal people to either rationalise, or simply ignore even the strangest of events, in the hope of not attracting the wrong sort of attention.

The young Detective Chief Inspector settled himself in a kitchen chair, accepted the coffee Claudia slid over the table to him and looked wary.

Cutter fixed him with a stare that would have had an entire lecture theatre of students hiding under their seats. “You’re holding something back, DCI Richards.”  It was a statement, not a question.

Half an hour later, the DCI looked sheepish. The rest of them looked stunned.

“Why don’t we just put an advert on the tele?” muttered Lyle. “Wanted :  Weird stories. Preferably involving teeth and claws.  Your chance to star in I’m a Palaeontologist, Get Me Out of Here. That’d bring ‘em out of the woodwork.”

And he now knew why Calum Richards had been so quick off the mark with the cover-story he’d thrown at the bird-watcher. Practice. Long practice.

“What is it with you people?” demanded Cutter. “Do you think this sort of thing is normal?”

“Well, it’s hardly a good way to advance your career,” snapped the policeman, defensively. “Please, sir, I think I’ve just seen something that’s meant to have been dead and gone a gazillion years ago. The Chief Constable isn’t known for his interest in science fiction, and the Government doesn’t exactly advertise that it’s got a bunch of dinosaur-busters on call. So we do what we always do out in the countryside: we make the best of a bad job and keep it quiet.”

The kitchen door opened and Connor walked in, carrying his laptop and dripping water all over the tiled floor. “Running out of power,” he remarked. “Have I just missed something interesting, guys?”

“Detective Chief Inspector Richards was just about to start giving us a list of locally known anomaly sites,” said Claudia, brightly. Making a mental note to think about Lyle’s comment later.  Maybe they could come up with something a bit more subtle that might have the same effect.

Connor grinned. “Cool. Give me the details and I’ll enter ‘em onto the database.” He dropped his sopping wet hat on the kitchen table. His nose looked equally damp. “Where shall we start?”

“With dry clothes and a handkerchief?” suggested Claudia, wondering not for the first time what it would take to shake the student’s irrepressible enthusiasm.

*          *          *

Connor flickered his intense dark eyes over to the still-embarrassed policeman and asked, “Any more?”

The DCI shook his head.

Connor grinned.

There were now twelve red dots over-laid on the map on his screen, and for the life of him, he couldn’t see any relationship between them. More data would help, it usually did, but even Connor was now forced to admit that they’d probably dredged everything they could out of Calum Richards’ memory.

The descriptions of the creatures had been vague, but it sounded very much like a motley collection of small herbivores, as well as an alvarezsaurid kept by someone as a pet and passed off as a fancy chicken; a juvenile platecarpus in one of the tarns which had played havoc with the fishing until finally caught and discretely disposed of and a herd of hyracotherium which a group of tourists had mistaken for very small capybaras.

Oh, and according to Calum, one of the local farmer’s daughters had a horse-like creature she was very fond of, but fortunately it was useless over jumps so the local gymkhana had been spared the sight of a merychippus competing for a rosette. Equally fortunately, the farm was one of the most isolated in the area.

“No pattern,” said the student, staring hard at the list. “But the whole area’s as active as a dog with fleas. That’s a good thing, right?”

“Depends if you live round here or not, Con,” said Stephen, casting a wary glance over at Ryan.

The Special Forces captain was looking over Connor’s shoulder at the screen, face impassive, but the hands which gripped the back of the kitchen chair were white-knuckled. “It’s a good thing,” he said, quietly. “It has to be.”

Cutter reached out and rested a hand briefly on Ryan’s arm. “We’ll find her. Hold onto that and don’t let go, man.”

Ryan nodded, but it looked like the movement had been wrenched out of him against his will and his eyes remained bleak.

Nick Cutter fixed the policeman with another hard stare. “I want word put out around here that if anything else happens, we need to know about it immediately. Not next week, next month or never, but immediately. Got that? And if my wife is in the vicinity, I want to talk to her and I really don’t care how you arrange it.”

DCI Richards nodded and reached for his radio.

If the woman was still in the area, they’d have her by the end of the day.

*          *          *

The kitchen of the Thornton’s house was starting to resemble a check-point on a large scale orienteering course in extremely wet weather.

Over the course of the day, the hub of the various activities slowly and almost imperceptibly shifted from the guest cottage to the main house and ended up revolving around Connor and his ever-present lap-top.

In between staring at his database of anomalies and drinking endless cups of coffee, the student had also started keeping track of the activities of both Ryan’s men and the various police officers assigned to them and by lunchtime, it had become the habit of all of them to announce their arrivals and departures for logging.

There were a lot of potential sites to check and they were spread thinly, too thinly in Ryan’s view, but Lester had refused to send more men. The anomaly sites in the Forest of Dean were also reporting high levels of activity and he was keeping Stringer and his team down there, whether Ryan liked it or not. He’d already despatched Abby as back-up for Stringer and the Mitchells and the civil servant had told both Ryan and Cutter, in equally firm terms, to work with what they had and make the best of it.

Connor looked up as a sopping wet Lyle came in through the back door, followed by an equally drenched Ditzy. In response to Connor’s questioning look, the medic shook his head and started peeling off his jacket and tac vest.

The student made the necessary adjustments to his list. “You two taking the next one? It’s up by Kirkstone Pass.”

“Fifteen minutes for a brew, then we’ll go.” Lyle stared down in disgust at his clothes. He was soaked to the skin and none of them had more than one change in the van.

“Fifteen minutes in the tumble-drier will do some good,” said a voice from the doorway. “Strip as much off as you want, Jon, it’s a big drier.”

Lyle looked up sharply, the expression on his face not dissimilar to the one he wore when facing something that had been at the head of the queue when teeth and claws had been handed out.

He shook his head. “Tea’ll warm us up.” The lieutenant glanced hopefully at the kettle on a huge range, filling almost half of one wall of the massive kitchen.

“Modest or just bloody-minded?” said Ryan’s ex-wife as she busied herself with mugs. “If it’s the former, you’ve changed.  If it’s the latter, you haven’t.”

Lyle gave an unwilling laugh and started to remove his black fleece sweater and black shirt, leaving behind an equally wet tee shirt of the same colour. He was treated to a hard stare from a pair of red-rimmed blue eyes that had clearly spent a good proportion of the last day and night crying.

With a sigh, he pulled the tee shirt over his head and handed it over. “You as well, mate,” he muttered to Ditzy.

The medic shrugged and followed suit.

“Pour one for me,” Amanda Thornton instructed, as she grabbed an armful of wet clothes and went through to the utility room. As an after-thought, she added, “I don’t take sugar any more.”

Lyle glanced helplessly at Connor and asked, “Where’s Claudia?”

“Talking to the mothers of the other kids.”

“Media?”

Connor shook his head. “Nope. This lot don’t like outsiders.”

“Shame they don’t put up warning signs, then.” Amanda Thornton’s voice was brittle with bitterness. “This place had been on the market for over two years. I’m now beginning to see why. Where’s my husband?”

Connor’s eyes flickered over his computer screen. “With Ryan on Bampton Common, above Haweswater. Looks like one opened there last year. Another possible pterasaur sighting.”

The expression on Lyle’s face became slightly more intent. “Cutter?”

“Somewhere called Potter Tarn.”

“East of Staveley,” Amanda said, automatically. “Nice walks round there in better weather.”

“Stephen?”

“If we’re playing Twenty Questions, it’s my turn,” Conner grinned.

“Conner!” Lyle’s voice had taken on a parade ground edge and his hazel eyes were suddenly sharp.

“Caiston Glen.”

Ditzy shot Lyle a questioning look and received the briefest of nods. The two soldiers started staring intently at the site list. Connor hit two keys and an area map appeared, each possible anomaly marked with a blood red dot.

“What have you found, Jon?” A spark of hope leapt into Amanda Thornton’s pinched face and for the first time softened the ever present hostility.

“Mines,” breathed Lyle. “They’re all near fucking mining sites. It’s the bloody Forest all over again! I knew Bampton Common rang a bell. Haweswater Mine. I helped to haul a trail hound out of a shaft there ten years ago.” He held his left hand out, displaying a puckered white scar behind the knuckle of his little finger. “Bloody thing bit me.”

Whatever the soldier was about to say next was interrupted by the ringing of his mobile phone from the depth of one of the pockets in his tac vest, thrown over the back of one of the chairs.

“Ryan? Where are you? …………No, we’re back at the house. Are your radios working? …………No, I didn’t think they would be. Get back here, we need to talk. I think we’ve got a link between the sites ………… yeh, a link. Mines. Copper. Lead.  The area’s stiff with the stuff. Call the others and get back here. I need to phone Lester.”

Connor looked up from the screen, his face alive with interest, “You’re right!  This is only the second place we’ve found multiple anomaly sites so close together.” He waved his hand at the screen. “How many of these can you identify for definite?”

“I’m not that big on mines, Con. I’ve only played around underground in this area a few times. I remembered Bampton Common because of the dog. But I need to check I’m not barking up the wrong tree …………..” as he spoke, the soldier was hitting one of the buttons on his phone.

“Sir? …………Screw your meeting, I need to run something past you ……….yeah, whatever, ………… You’ve dived in Copper Mines Valley, haven’t you? How well do you know the rest of the area? …………OK, try these names for size, tell me if you recognise any of them ………..”

Lyle started reeling off the list from Connor’s screen, pausing every now and again to listen. When he’d finished, he nodded, hazel eyes still fixed intently on the screen.  “Right, for what good it does us, we’ve got a connection to ore-bearing rock. Same as the Forest. Thanks.” He listened again and a slow grin spread across his face. “I’ll make it up to you when I get back, sweetie. Give my love to the PM.”

Connor winced. He had a hard job, a very hard job, imagining Lyle with Lester, and whenever he tried, something in his brain went scrambling for the reset button pleading for a re-boot. Now was no exception.

He watched a similar look of surprise flash across Amanda Thornton’s eyes before she demanded, “What does it mean, Jon?”

The soldier sighed, “I wish I knew, Mandy. I wish I fucking knew. I’m guessing it’s something to do with the amount of minerals in the rock attracting, or maybe intensifying, the magnetic fields of the anomalies. Connor, am I making sense?”

The student nodded, slowly. “And whenever we’re near them, the radios always foul up.  It happened in the Forest, and it’s happening here. We always end up using our mobiles. And Lester always snarks about paying the bills. So maybe, just maybe ………….”

Connor’s voice trailed off, his words failing to keep up with his racing thoughts.

A bang on the outer door of the kitchen made all of them jump.

DCI Calum Richards walked in, a look of triumph on his face. “There’s someone out here I need you to take a look at, Lieutenant, I’d just like to make sure I haven’t kidnapped an innocent member of the public.”

A moment later, Lyle and Ditzy were out in the yard, freezing rain falling unnoticed on bare shoulders.

Helen Cutter eyed them both up and down, amusement flickering in her dark eyes, “Don’t tell me I’ve interrupted yet another party. What fun you boys do have  …………”

Amanda Thornton started to close the gap between her and the other woman, anger blazing unchecked, “Where’s my daughter …………..?”

Lyle’s arm shot out and he pulled Ryan’s ex-wife to him, feeling tremors of emotion running through her slim shoulders. “Easy, Mandy, leave her to us. Stick our guest somewhere safe, Calum, and don’t take your bloody eyes off her. I’ll talk to her when I’ve got a few more clothes on. And Mrs Cutter knows exactly what happens when she plays dumb around me, so maybe in the meantime she’ll remember where she’s left her manners.” 

The look the soldier gave Helen was cold and calculating. “Believe me, lady, Ryan’s nowhere near as polite as I am when it comes to asking questions. And he’s on his way back here right now.”