Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
When John Docherty’s widowed mother suffers a massive stroke he’s forced to sell the family home to pay for her care. As he trawls the personal possessions of both parents he comes across a photo of himself as a toddler in the company of an older boy, one so alike that he could be a brother. But John has only a younger sibling, Chris, and their parents have never mentioned a third. Then a birth certificate comes to light for a boy called Tom, ”the only child” of John’s parents, and newspaper clippings involving his disappearance, aged fourteen, and the subsequent unsuccessful search.
John, a teacher: introverted and clever, is obsessed by a compulsion to know the explanation for his parents’ silence on this momentous subject. On the other hand Chris is lukewarm; he is more concerned with living the high life with his rich American girl friend and has little time for his mother.
It’s Mrs Docherty who can surely explain why the younger brothers were never told of Tom’s existence but she is in no condition to answer questions on such a delicate subject so John turns to the other obvious source of information, the police. Dad was a cop and although the boy Tom went missing thirty years ago, there are surely retired former colleagues who can remember both the event and a father who was one of themselves?
John runs them to ground: old, sick, and seemingly unhelpful but there is a mention of “the Shows” – the annual fun fair that was in town at the time Tom disappeared. It doesn’t take long before John, helped by Chris, a former journalist, uncovers other disappearances of teen-aged boys, always when the fair was in town.
Rather too soon it would appear that the mystery is to be solved: abduction, people trafficking, and paedophilia. We have been here before. But John’s nightmares, his increasing reliance on the bottle, quarrels with his partner, confrontation with the headmaster, all arouse a suspicion in the reader that this story is less about the mystery of Tom than the enigma of John himself, the story teller. This is an angry man who has learned to repress violence, a man who loves no one but who inspires affection. Chris, his brother, loves him; his friends, his lover, his parents, even his headmaster, all evince deep affection for him so why is he so angry?
Malone has adapted a classical theme and planted it in the fecund soil of small town Scotland with a cast of small town people. The Greeks and Shakespeare did it superlatively but, shorn of royal purple or grand orators, even a classic theme can do nothing more for this novel than fulfil the blurb’s promise of domestic noir. As such it makes the grade.
