The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Oh,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘You mean...’

  The word had burst in Jane’s brain before it was uttered. She kept on staring into the blown bulb, like her consciousness was being drawn into its fog, and the broken filament inside the bulb was the size of a dead tree, her hands going numb around it. She felt insubstantial, grey and vague, barely feeling her legs give way.

  ‘You mean a poncho,’ Mrs Pollen said.

  Over the clanking of the van, Gomer said, ‘It don’t sound right to me, boy. Sounds like he was handing you a barrow-load of ole bullshit.’

  ‘He was always full of it,’ Danny admitted.

  ‘ “Bands of brigands roaming by night”?’ Gomer and Danny were both staring through the windscreen at the lightless fields beyond Walton, sloping up to Radnor Forest. They were going to pick up young Jane Watkins at Stanner before Gomer dropped Danny off at home, else she’d think Gomer had forgotten about her.

  ‘That’s what he said. He d’reckon it’s the only way the farmers gonner keep the fox population under control when the Government bans huntin’ with hounds.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Gomer said, ‘I can understand Sebbie comin’ out with that ole wallop when he’s got the MP round his place for cocktails – put the frighteners on the politicians kind of thing. But not to the likes of we.’

  ‘So what was them bloody Welshies doin’ in Jeremy’s yard, then? They had his barn all staked out, Gomer, like they’d got the fox trapped up in there. All it was was Jeremy’s ole sheepdog. They’d’ve bloody shot that dog if the kiddie hadn’t run in. Shot the dog out of sheer spite, I reckon.’

  ‘Should’ve called in the law, boy. Let them sort it out.’

  ‘He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do it, Gomer.’

  ‘Then you oughter be asking why he wouldn’t.’

  ‘That was what Sebbie said. That we oughter be asking why Jeremy didn’t want the cops round. And then the bastard was asking me if I was still doin’ dope. Like as if Jeremy didn’t want no cops round for the same reason I never did.’

  ‘You en’t still—?’

  Danny coughed. ‘Bit of home-grown. Strickly for personal use. And only a bit.’ Giving Gomer a nervous glance on account of, to Gomer’s generation, a twist of wacky baccy could put you on the down-escalator into hell and blacken the name of Gomer Parry Plant Hire for ever. ‘Pigs don’t do you for that n’more, see, long as you en’t dealin’.’ He was being a bit careful, though, since Dacre had dropped the little phrase ‘Drug Squad’. He might be full of bullshit, but he did have contacts.

  Gomer drove on steadily, said nothing. Good ole boy.

  ‘So this woman,’ Danny said. ‘Miz Natalie Craven. Two ways of lookin’ at that, Gomer. On the one hand, blokes is like, Lucky devil, what’s he got we en’t? Whereas women’s sayin’ she’s bewitched him, the slag.’

  ‘And Sebbie Dacre?’ Gomer wondered. ‘What’s Sebbie think about her?’

  ‘Sebbie’s had his share,’ Danny said.

  ‘Zelda Morgan, ennit, now?’

  ‘Zelda, aye. Off the boil a bit, what I yeard. Zelda mabbe fig-urin’ it wasn’t worth the candle – Sebbie’s moods.’

  ‘Or mabbe Sebbie’s thinkin’ he can do better than Zelda,’ Gomer said. ‘Mabbe lookin’ for a woman of means, way he got fleeced by the missus in the divorce court.’

  ‘Have you...’ Danny hesitating, as they rattled out onto the Kington Road. ‘You yeard anythin’ about Sebbie goin’ strange, Gomer?’

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Well... the Welsh shooters. Settin’ ’em on Jeremy. Like he’s got an obsession with Jeremy, now Jeremy’s got hisself a serious woman. Anything, really.’

  ‘You reckon it’s to do with the woman?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  They drove on in silence for a while, then Danny said, ‘Sometimes, it feels like everything’s filled up with some’ing, and it’s only a matter of time ’fore it bursts. I thought it was the snow – you know that feeling you get when there’s snow on the way. But it en’t just snow.’

  Gomer looked at him. ‘Well, if you feel that way, think what it’s like for Jeremy Berrows...’

  Nat had taken Jane down to the kitchen.

  There was an old flowery-patterned sofa under one of the high windows, and they sat there and Jane drank hot, sugary tea. In the opposite corner, Clancy’s homework was spread over a card table; when it was established that Jane was OK, Clancy had gone back to it. She was working quietly, underlining things with a ruler.

  ‘It’s never happened to me before.’ Jane shuffled to the edge of the sofa, glaring into her cup. She felt furious now at having personally created one of those moments for Alistair Hardy. Could imagine the Harry Potter creep relaying the story to his anorak mates, or – worse – keying it into some global spiritualist chat-room: the story of the girl who was determined to slag everything off just keeling over with the shock of the proof.

  ‘It happens,’ Natalie said, next to her.

  ‘It doesn’t happen to me. I never faint.’

  Natalie said nothing. She hadn’t asked the obvious question. Nobody had, not even Alistair Hardy.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘In the bar,’ Nat said. ‘He’s still looking for what he calls a point of contact.’

  ‘Where’s Amber?’

  ‘I don’t know. Amber’s in a state.’

  ‘Wishing she’d never seen this place.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Jane said quickly, ‘When we first moved to Ledwardine, I had a very good friend who ran a shop that was devoted to the history and folklore of the area and the poetry of Thomas Traherne.’

  ‘Look, you don’t have to tell me,’ Natalie said. ‘Your past, above all things, is your own. You’re not obliged—’

  ‘I want to. It’s going to drive me insane otherwise, and I can’t tell Mum for obvious reasons. She was called Lucy Devenish, and she was killed on the road. Knocked off her moped. She was elderly and thin, and she had a face like some old warrior, and she—’ The tears were like spikes behind Jane’s eyes. ‘Every time she went out, Nat, she wore this... bloody poncho.’

  Nat said nothing. There was silence in the vast kitchen, except for a slow bubbling from the stove and the squeak of Clancy’s fibre-tip. Clancy always pressed down too hard, as if the words might fade otherwise.

  Jane clasped her hands together, squeezing tightly. ‘Do you think he took her out of my mind? Stole the memory? You see, I can’t believe that even if she... I can’t believe Lucy would talk to a tosser like that. I feel he’s been into my mind. I feel like he’s extracted her, like some computer hacker can get into your hard disk and pull out some ancient, buried file. It’s like a kind of rape.’

  ‘I doubt that, Jane,’ Nat said.

  ‘That he took it from my mind?’

  Natalie didn’t reply. There were footsteps on the stone stairs, and then Alistair Hardy was standing there with Harry Potter. Hardy had his jacket off. He wore a pair of those archaic expanding armbands around his shirt sleeves. He peered at Jane, his face shiny.

  ‘All right now, are we, my love?’

  ‘We’re fine. Just I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I felt sick earlier. That’s all it was. I feel fine now.’

  ‘Good,’ Hardy said. ‘Mind if we come in?’

  Natalie stood up. ‘Well, I think you ought to—’

  ‘Won’t take a moment. This is the kitchen, is it?’ He blinked. ‘Or servants’ quarters once, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Harry Potter said. ‘I’ve seen the Victorian plans.’

  ‘Where’d you get those?’ Jane stood up. She was half afraid her legs would give way again, but she was OK. Plans? They had plans of the house? Did Ben know about this?

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ Natalie said.

  ‘Oh, he’s gone outside.’ Harry Potter pulled a slick of hair from his concave forehead. ‘We were out near the entrance, and there was some shooting going on in the grounds, and
he said it was coming through on the soundtrack and ruining everything. He was really annoyed. He’s gone out to – you know – remonstrate with them.’

  Hell, the shooters...

  ‘Oh Christ.’ Natalie jumped up, pushed between Alistair Hardy and Potter, almost colliding with someone moving slowly down the stone steps.

  Amber. She stood at the foot of the steps for several seconds after Nat had gone. Jane wanted to go after Nat, but...

  Amber. Those people will not go into my fucking kitchen.

  Jane saw Alistair Hardy walking in his measured, deliberate way across the flags until the island unit the size of Australia was between him and Amber.

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mrs Foley,’ he said.

  19

  Nancy Boy

  AMBER SAID, AND it was almost a wail, ‘This is the kitchen. This is the heart—’

  ‘Of the house. Yes. Precisely.’

  Alistair Hardy was leaning forward over the enormous island unit, his hands splayed on the oiled hardwood: the bank manager at his desk, laying down the options.

  But he and Amber weren’t coming from the same direction at all, Jane knew that much. Amber meant that the kitchen was the heart of her own shrinking world. This woman was probably all that was truly professional and worthwhile about the Stanner Hall Hotel, and this was her refuge, where what remained of her confidence was located, while the rest of the house faded and dripped and crumbled and rotted and soaked up money. This was her place. Whereas Hardy...

  ‘It’s on a lower level than the rest,’ Harry Potter explained. ‘They had to build the foundations into the rock. This part of the house is sunk into some of the oldest stone in the country – over six hundred and fifty million years—’

  ‘So what?’ Amber was arching from the hips in furious incomprehension. ‘I mean, six hundred million, four thousand million – all rock’s pretty bloody old compared with the human race. I don’t see the point of this.’

  She backed off a little, maybe realizing that, she was shouting at the people who would be paying for Christmas.

  ‘Mrs Foley...’ Beth Pollen was stepping down on to the flags. ‘Oh golly, what a mess. All my fault. I assumed you were au fait with everything. If I’d known you were at all worried, I live just a few miles away, I could easily have—’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Amber said.

  For Jane, the vast kitchen had taken on a cavern-like feel: the purply-greyness, the uneven lighting, the high windows like enlarged slits in the stone. Perhaps some of that very ancient stone was in these actual walls – Amber’s kitchen sanctuary formed out of Stanner Rocks. In the corner, Clancy sat watching from her card table, the pen still in her right hand.

  Amber must have touched a switch somewhere because the small bank of halogen lights came on, turning Hardy’s face bright pink.

  He didn’t move. ‘Mrs Foley, I knew as soon as I came down the steps. This is where it happened.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Amber said.

  ‘It’s in the records.’ The Harry Potter guy, Matthew, strolled into the centre of the room. He seemed older now than Jane had first figured, probably even thirtyish, not much younger than Amber. ‘We know that the textile magnate, Walter Chance, who built this house, had a vague interest in spiritualism, as did a lot of people at the end of the nineteenth century. It was fashionable, state of the art – except that to them, of course, it was very much a science, with lots of gadgets. The scientific advances and the technological developments during this comparatively short period were mind-bogg—’

  ‘We know all that,’ Jane said, and was gratified when Matthew looked at her, irritated.

  ‘Who is this girl?’

  ‘Kitchen-maid.’ Jane did a tight smile. ‘With attitude.’

  ‘Let him finish, Jane,’ Amber said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  ‘Walter retired here with his new young wife.’ Matthew looked at Amber. ‘I expect you know all this.’

  It was clear to Jane that Amber didn’t. But had Ben known? Were there aspects of this that he’d hidden? Because if there were, he was going to be in some deep trouble tonight.

  ‘Mrs Bella Chance – or Chancery as they were known by then – was from London,’ Matthew said, ‘and Walter wanted to give her the kind of social life she was used to. He’d throw these big house parties, no expense spared. Hence a kitchen this size – loads of servants. He’d invite minor aristocracy, and some of them even turned up. But Walter Chancery was generally regarded as pretty crass and vulgar, and they were never really accepted either by the local people or by the gentry.’

  Jane thought she could hear raised voices from outside, hoped to God, after what Clancy had told her about the bad attitude of the shooters at Jeremy’s, that Ben wasn’t chancing his arm with them. Especially while she wasn’t there, with her video camera. Christ, what if he still had it with him? What if it got broken?

  Nothing she could do. Couldn’t walk out now. Besides, this was becoming interesting, stuff worth knowing, for a student of the Border. If you could put up with the anorak drone.

  ‘So when Walter discovered that Conan Doyle had friends and relatives nearby and sometimes stayed in the area... You see, we just don’t have authors now as celebrated as Conan Doyle was then. If the Strand was publishing a new Holmes story, there’d be endless queues for copies. Now, Doyle was told about the Hound by his friend Fletcher Robinson – who, despite being a Devonian, was said to have come across the story in a Welsh guidebook. So we assume that Doyle was making inquiries about it in the area. And the Chancerys, when they learned that the great man was staying in the vicinity, well, you can imagine they just had to have him as their house guest.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Amber came into the light. ‘I think this is conjecture. Ben’s been all over the place, trying to find evidence—’

  ‘Mrs Foley...’ Beth Pollen came forward, her cape folded over her arm, looking reassuringly nice and motherly, but you never really knew with these people. ‘The main reason your husband didn’t find out about this was simply because nobody wanted him to. The only remaining family in this area related to the Chancerys are the Dacres, who certainly don’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘I don’t know them.’

  ‘It wouldn’t help you if you did. There’s only one left – Sebastian Dacre, and he’s a difficult man. Ironically, the one place where your husband might have laid hands on useful documentation was in the very extensive records of The Baker Street League in London. Which is where I first happened upon them. Does this begin to make a certain kind of sense?’

  Amber said, ‘And you have copies of this... documentation?’

  ‘Mysteriously – or perhaps not so mysteriously – when I applied to the committee to draw out the relevant papers to allow me to make some photocopies, they seemed to have... disappeared. I explained all this to your husband earlier.’

  ‘You’re saying this is something to do with Dr Kennedy?’

  ‘Dr Kennedy now disputes that the material ever existed, and Dr Kennedy is now in virtual control of The League. Furthermore, he and most of the present committee very much deplore the White Company and all it stands for. They’d rather forget Doyle’s obsession with spiritualism. And I’m not sure they’d go out of their way to preserve an account handwritten by a participant in the Stanner seances for a London magazine, Cox’s Quarterly – which, it appears, paid for it in full but never, in fact, published it. Was, in fact, persuaded – we think – not to publish.’

  ‘And you’re saying this article proved conclusively that Conan Doyle based his novel on the legend of Thomas Vaughan and the Hound of Hergest?’ Amber’s hands were pushing down the bulges in her apron again. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘What I read certainly suggested that, after his evening here, Doyle was fully acquainted with the Vaughan story. We’ve since established that the man who wrote it, who was quite elderly at the time, died within a year
of submitting it, still waiting for his piece to appear. And the magazine itself went to the wall a short time later. We don’t know how or when the article fell into the hands of The Baker Street League, but I don’t suppose that’s important now.’

  Interesting. Jane imagined Ben and Antony in London, doorstepping Neil Kennedy, for the programme: So, tell us Dr Kennedy, why did you suppress documentary evidence that Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel was based not in Devon but on the Welsh Border?

  She waited for Amber to ask the other crucial question – what happened here? But Amber didn’t. Amber really didn’t want to know.

  Sod that.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Jane stood up. ‘You said the writer of this article was a participant. Like, participant in what? What did they actually do here, in this room?’

  There was a silence.

  She never got an answer. In the midst of the hush, she heard chair legs scraping the flags in Clancy’s corner of the kitchen, as Beth Pollen looked at Hardy and Matthew adjusted his glasses and said, ‘Should I attempt to—?’

  By then Clancy was on her feet.

  ‘Mum!’

  Matthew was frozen into silence. Natalie had arrived at the bottom of the kitchen steps, dark brown hair tumbled over one eye, the sleeves of her black woollen dress pushed up over the elbows. Both men looking at her, because that was what men did.

  ‘Amber...’ The calmness in Nat’s voice was like this really thin membrane over panic. ‘Do we have a first-aid kit?’

  The halogen lights were showing up, around her wrists, these wild, wet swatches of what could only be – Jesus Christ – fresh blood.

  Amber’s whole body jerked. ‘Where’s Ben?’

  Jane sprang up and ran for the steps.

  At the bottom of the car park, there was a small wrought-iron gate to an old footpath that Ben had cleared. The path went down through the grounds, curving through tangled woodland, almost to the edge of the bypass, facing Stanner Rocks. This was where Ben went jogging most mornings; you could go along the side of the main road and then join up with the main drive back to the hotel.