The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I work here, I wouldn’t—’

  ‘I know. I said you wouldn’t.’

  Jane unslung the camera, very much mistrusting it now, and placed it on the island unit, backing away from it. ‘Why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me now?’ Trying to stay calm, work out the extent of Ben’s duplicity, but aware of breathing faster.

  ‘I was going to call you tonight,’ Amber said, ‘and warn you that all the roads would be blocked so don’t even think of coming tomorrow. But with your youthful enthusiasm and your obvious desire not to miss anything interesting, you bloody well turned up tonight. That’s why I’m telling you.’

  ‘But, like, why would you... why would you not want me here? I’m shooting the video. And if Antony doesn’t make it—’

  ‘He may very well not get through, that’s true,’ Amber agreed. ‘Which would be leaving the lunatic in charge of the asylum.’

  ‘Ben?’

  I’m a drama man. It’s about using real people and real places...

  ‘I don’t know whether Antony not being here will make him more sensible or even more irrational. All I know is, he’s been busily shooting material all week – interviewing Hardy and Mrs Pollen and a man in Kington who used to work—’

  ‘Hang on.’ Jane stiffened. ‘You’re saying he’s got a video camera? Ben?’

  Amber sighed.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Jane, you—’ Amber’s face crumpled with this terrifyingly maternal kind of sympathy. ‘You didn’t really think they’d leave it all to you, did you?’

  Jane stepped back and stared at the camcorder on the island unit like it was contaminated with anthrax.

  ‘Well, I...’ She felt this acute burning behind her eyes.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Amber said. ‘I should’ve told you days ago.’

  Jane swallowed hard. No wonder Matthew had been laughing at her. They were all laughing at her. All of them laughing up their sleeves at the smart-arse schoolkid prancing round with her professional video camera. All of them: Ben, Antony... the White Company... Ben... Antony...

  Don’t worry, it’s gonnae be fine. It’s gonnae be riveting, Jane.

  ‘Antony set me up?’

  You’re my number one girl.

  ‘Jane, it’s— He really wouldn’t see it like that. These little Sonys are so comparatively cheap, they can scatter them around like throwaway pens. And if you thought you were the only person with a camera, you’d try all the harder to get good material. You’d start seeing your name in lights. Obviously, he’ll use some of what you’ve done, of course he will...’

  ‘He set me up!’

  ‘He also set Ben up. And Ben set Antony up. And you and I, between us, were supposed to set your mother up. Television, Jane – everybody at some time gets set up, the end invariably justifying the means. When it’s all over, Ben and Antony’ll watch the results together and get pissed, and that’ll be that. Television.’

  ‘It’s despicable.’

  ‘No, Jane.’ Amber did this brittle little laugh. ‘It’s art.’

  ‘And what do we do now? Just go along with it?’ Jane snatched up the camera with no reverence.

  Amber said, ‘If you were thinking of hurling that thing to the flags in rage, please don’t. There’s been too much rage.’

  Jane shook her head, letting the camera dangle from her hands on its strap. ‘What should I do?’

  ‘I think you should do what you were supposed to do in the first place. Tell your mother. Everything.’

  ‘And what’s she going to do?’

  Amber said, ‘Look, I’m only a cook, but—’

  ‘Christ, Amber, if you say that again— I mean, I’m only a schoolkid, and if I can see it—’

  ‘See what?

  ‘That if Conan Doyle, the John the Baptist of Spiritualism, kept quiet about what happened here – even if it was evidence of survival after death – then there must have been something fairly unpleasant.’

  ‘Though obviously not unpleasant enough to prevent you grabbing the chance to film something similar, if you got the chance.’

  Jane put the camcorder back on the island unit.

  ‘I’m not a very nice person, am I?’

  ‘You’re a young person, that’s all.’

  ‘OK, I’ll phone Mum. What then?’

  Amber folded her arms, staring at the flags. ‘Realistically, I think your mother ought to talk to the only one of them I’ve had much to do with. Mrs Pollen.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Earlier today. She came looking for me. Would hate to cause offence, et cetera. Old-fashioned country woman – Women’s Institute, cakes for the fête, jolly dinner parties, two golden labradors. And she’s the only one of them who got into this through personal loss. And she was a churchgoer.’

  ‘All the reward you get for suffering Victorian hymns and dismal sermons,’ Jane said. ‘He pinches your husband before his time.’

  ‘You must have stimulating discussions, you and your mother,’ Amber said.

  ‘Keeps her on her toes.’

  ‘Mrs Pollen now thinks that she was somehow directed here by her husband.’ Amber shrugged, looking uncommitted either way. ‘My feeling is that she believes that if they can get through, she’ll be... rewarded.’

  ‘Get some contact with him? That really doesn’t happen.’ Jane looked up at the high window, through which, by daylight, you could see the top of Stanner Rocks. ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘On the surface, she’s very breezy and sort of earthy about it, but underneath she’s mixed up. In a way, it’s rekindled her faith, but she’s aware that the Church thinks it’s wrong, and there’s clearly some guilt about that. Anyway, I think she’d like to talk to your mother, and that wouldn’t do any of us any harm at this stage.’

  ‘Except possibly Ben.’

  ‘Not my problem,’ Amber said, and Jane looked at her, recalling what Nat had said about her calling it quits, moving out.

  Amber said, ‘They call it the Stanner Project, Ben calls it the Hook. The contemporary events from which they can hang a century of conjecture. As far as he’s concerned whatever kind of answer they get, if any, is entirely irrelevant. What’s important is that the question gets posed, on television. Did The Hound of the Baskervilles begin here? Any extra spooky bits would be a nice bonus, but the programme doesn’t depend on that, now he knows what happened when Conan Doyle was here.’

  ‘He does?’ For a moment, Jane almost forgot her own humiliation. ‘You mean someone finally traced the missing document?’

  ‘Oh, Ben did better than that.’ Amber’s smile was twisted. ‘He traced someone who was working here. Well, not then, obviously, not at the time. But someone who worked here sixty-odd years ago and so talked to people who were here at the time.’

  ‘Wow – who?’

  Amber said the contact had come through the guy who played the Major in the murder thing, Frank Sampson. When Dacre was trying to stop people talking to Ben, it had worked in reverse in some cases, and Frank had phoned on Tuesday to say an old man called Leonard Parsonage, who used to be the butler here, would be happy to talk to Ben.

  ‘Seems Dacre’s father got him sacked years ago,’ Amber said. ‘You know what it’s like around here for old feuds.’

  ‘Leonard.’ Jane was remembering Gomer’s account of the death of Hattie Chancery. Took a while ’fore one of ’em was up to going up them stairs. Ole Leonard, the butler, it was, my mam said.

  ‘He lives in a sheltered bungalow now, in Kington. He’s over ninety, which still means he must have been in his twenties when he was here.’

  ‘Amber, he was the person who found Hattie’s body. He’s talked about all that?’

  ‘Better than that, he’s talked on videotape.’ Amber bent and opened a cupboard in the base of the island unit. ‘Do you want to go and watch it? You can tell your mother all about it.’

  ‘You’ve got it here?�
��

  Amber rose, clutching a Maxell VHS videotape in a light blue case with a gold stripe. ‘This is a copy that Ben ran off for Antony to look at. I pinched it from his desk. You can take it up to our bedroom, there’s a video machine in there.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘You know which our bedroom is, don’t you, Jane?’

  Jane accepted the tape. ‘You sure you want me to see it?’

  ‘Jane, you’re gagging to see it.’

  Lol came back into the scullery with Gomer Parry, cap in his hands, squeezing it like a sponge as he fought for breath, ignoring the chair Merrily was offering.

  ‘Know you en’t gonner mind, vicar. I got the truck out front. Had a call from Danny Thomas, see. You recalls Danny Thomas, of Kinnerton?’

  She stared at him, puzzled, assembling the image of a bearded man with grey hair over his shoulders, a flat cap on top. ‘You mean the one who’s also your partner now?’

  Gomer’s glasses had clouded. He snatched them off, wiped them savagely on his sleeve.

  ‘Gomer, let me get you some tea—’

  ‘No! No, thank you.’ He rammed his glasses back on. ‘Bloody stupid. ’Course you knows the boy.’ He stared at her defiantly. ‘En’t lost no marbles, vicar, I just—’

  ‘I know. You went dashing out into the cold and then back into the warm. It gets to us all.’ She took his cap gently, unrolled it and hung it on the waste-paper bin near the electric fire. ‘He’s OK, isn’t he? Danny?’

  ‘He’s all right. Juss called me up. Just he got this pal, see.’ Gomer sat down at last, bringing out his ciggy tin like it was part of the same cycle of movements. ‘Ta.’

  ‘Take it slowly, Gomer.’

  ‘Bit of a loner, that’s all. Hell, a lot of a loner.’ Gomer shook his head, annoyed, stared in disgust at his ciggy tin. ‘I en’t thinkin’ straight at all... You knows full well who I’m talkin’ about. Boy’s girlfriend’s daughter, her’s Jane’s... you know, that kiddie?’

  ‘Clancy? You’re talking about Jeremy... ?’

  ‘Berrows. Exac’ly. Jeremy Berrows. Me and Danny been talkin’ a lot about Jeremy Berrows, the situation he’s got ’isself into. And a lot of other stuff. And I been thinkin’ for a long time – Danny, too – we needs to ask the little vicar to take a look. And you know how it is, you lets things slide and then it all come down on you. And now Jeremy...’

  Gomer took off his glasses, pinched his nose.

  ‘What’s he done, Gomer?’

  ‘Boy’s hanged ’isself,’ Gomer said.

  30

  The Huntress

  ‘WHERE DO YOU want me to start, Mr Foley?’ Leonard Parsonage asked.

  He was a very thin old man. All really old people tended to be thin, Jane thought, making themselves less of a target for all the things that could take you down.

  ‘I’d just like to get the levels right before we start.’ Ben’s voice came through fainter, from one side. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you’ve been doing since you left Stanner? Have you been in Kington ever since?’

  The old guy got as far as saying he’d returned to Kent, where he was born, to get married, then come back to Kington to buy an ironmonger’s business. Then Ben must have cut the recording. When it came back, Ben was saying, on that same background level, ‘Tell me what she was really like, Leonard. Tell me what Hattie was like – Mrs Davies.’

  ‘Mrs Chancery.’ Leonard had a tiny black personal microphone clipped to the mustard-coloured tie jutting out from the neck of his v-neck pullover. The mike looked like a stag beetle climbing up it. ‘We hadn’t to call her Mrs Davies. Mrs Chancery, it was, or Mrs Hattie.’ He stopped talking and looked directly into the lens.

  ‘No, at me, Leonard. Let’s start again, OK? And remember, talk to me, not the camera. Forget about the camera.’

  It looked to Jane like this had been hard going, but all Ben’s questions and prompts could be edited out, and he could overlay the edits with other pictures, like the photos of Hattie and Stanner – Jane had learned all this from Eirion. For all the use it was now.

  Wrenching back her anger, she looked around the Foleys’ bedroom while Leonard rearranged himself. It was at the front of the house, with a bay window overlooking the car park, and it was very unfussy, with a plain wardrobe and a double divan. No dressing table, no mirror. Very Amber.

  ‘Well, it had to be “Mrs Chancery”,’ Leonard said, ‘because Stanner was the House of the Chancerys, you see. Robert Davies, he was just the stallion brought to the mare, that’s what they used to say. Looked less of a stallion, mind you, when I first saw him than he had before the First War, according to Mrs Betts – she was the cook. Mrs Betts said they all used to fancy Mr Robert, although in later years they all felt very sorry for him, naturally, because of... because of the way she would treat him.’

  Leonard wore false teeth which clicked sometimes, but he talked quite fluently, in the way of a man who was used to dealing with people. Ben had positioned him in front of a picture window with a view across some kind of car park to Kington market place with its red-brick clock tower.

  ‘What was she like, Leonard? Physically. Describe her – what she looked like. Take your time.’

  ‘She was... Oh, my Lord, she was like a goddess to us. Diana the Huntress – somebody called her that, I think it was the minister at the church. Diana the Huntress, yes. Because she was, you see – she used to go hunting every day of the week, it seemed like, in the season. Well, not that many women did, in those days. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she was all woman. All woman. Too much woman, some might’ve said.’

  Leonard smiled in what struck Jane as a surprisingly lascivious way, and there was a shiny bit of drool in the corner of his mouth. He had a thin white moustache, kind of dandyish. Jane wondered, just wondered...

  ‘OK, tell me about the hunting,’ Ben said. ‘How did that start?’

  ‘Oh well, old Walter, he encouraged her. That was what I was told. Walter couldn’t ride and he was too old to start, but that was what you did in those days, the gentry, and so he had his daughter on a horse from a very early age, and that was how she got in with the hunt. If you rode, you hunted – pretty much the way it is today. But I would say the hunting was always more important than the riding for Mrs Hattie. Anyway, that was about when the Middle Marches Hunt was first started, and it was mainly young people back then.’

  ‘This was before the First World War?’

  ‘It would’ve been, yes. She was just a girl, but quite large, even then – you could see that from the photos, I expect. Yes, the hunt, I believe they kept that on through most of the War, although some of the young men had gone off to fight. Afterwards, after the War, it went from strength to strength. They had these hounds from France that were bred down in Glamorgan – nothing but the best for the Middle Marches. The Chancerys, they supported the Hunt in the early years – financially, that is, when they had money to spare – and they also founded a hunt supporters’ club to raise more money, so it would always be buoyant. But Mrs Hattie lived for it, oh my Lord, yes. If there was bad snow or disease or some reason the hunt had to be called off, then she was in a very black mood indeed.’

  ‘This is in your day, Leonard?’

  ‘Oh yes. I came there in thirty-four, which was the year after the old fellow died. I was soon Mrs Hattie’s right-hand man – that was what she used to say. Or “my squire”. She talked about herself like a knight on horseback. “My squire”, yes. I was her squire.’

  ‘Black moods?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You said she’d be in a black mood when the hunting was off. What was that like?’

  ‘Black moods... black hound.’ Leonard bit down on his lower lip and stared into the distance. He had pale blue eyes, watery.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ Ben said.

  ‘Used to say she ran with the black hound. One of her sayings. She’d come back, and the groom would take her horse, all covered with sweat, and I’d be ther
e, and she’d say, “Bring me a bloody drink, Leonard, the black hound was in the pack today.” ’

  ‘What did she mean by that?’

  ‘Well, it was one of her sayings.’

  ‘But did she mean there was an actual—?’

  ‘It meant, as far as I could fathom, that she’d been riding hard and fierce that day, Mr Foley. And if there’d been no kill, she wouldn’t be in the best of moods.’

  A silence, then, that went on for a long time. The television and video were in the corner of the bedroom, near the window. Jane was sitting on a bedding box at the foot of the bed, and old Leonard seemed to be looking over her shoulder. She glanced behind, uncomfortable, as if Hattie might be there with her onion eyes. The bed was unmade, as though Ben had just rolled out of it. Or as if someone had pulled all the—

  ‘And Mr Robert would soon know about it,’ Leonard said.

  Jane turned back to the TV in time to catch another silence.

  Ben said eventually, ‘What did she do to Mr Robert, Leonard?’

  ‘He...’ Leonard licked his lips. ‘Next day, Mr Robert might have a black eye, or a big lip. Or scratch marks down his cheek. Or all of them. That was the wounds you could see.’

  ‘She might have done damage you couldn’t see?’

  Leonard nodded very slightly. ‘Sometimes he’d be limping.’

  ‘And this happened after she ran with the black hound,’ Ben said, with a lot of emphasis.

  Leonard said nothing.

  ‘Where did they go, Leonard? Did they hunt on the Ridge?’

  ‘Oh, everywhere. For the local farmers, it didn’t do not to let the hunt cross your land.’

  ‘The...’ Ben broke off, struggling to form a question. ‘Leonard, when she said “black hound”, did you have any reason to believe she might have been making some connection with the legend of the Hound of Hergest?’

  Leonard smiled.

  ‘You do know of the legend?’