The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  Oh... God. Alice’s breath shuddered back into the night, Lol quivering with relief.

  The vicarage formed in front of them, lightless, just a different texture of night. Beyond it, you ought to have been able to see sporadic lights in the hills, but there was nothing there, nothing to convey space or distance.

  Lol’s hands and Alice connected with the wicket gate into the vicarage garden. He had trouble with the latch, had to put Alice down in the snow. Felt her sinking, but what else could he do? He was so soaked and freezing in his Gomer Parry sweatshirt that he could hardly pick her up again.

  He carried Alice through the gate, across the lawn to the path that circuited the house and then round to the front door which, without a key, he’d left unlocked. He backed into it.

  Completely black in here. Too risky to try and get her upstairs with no lights. Lol carried her into the kitchen, where the old Aga snored but where there was no sofa, not even a big chair. He was feeling for heat with the backs of his hands, holding Alice up. He knew there was a rug on the floor to the side of the stove, before you reached the window.

  He found it with his feet and lowered her, and roughly rolled up his parka and pushed it between her head and the wall. Stood up and felt his way to the refectory table where there were chairs with cushions you could pull out. Collected four and took them back to where Alice lay, a small pile of clothes with a noisy pump inside. He began feeding two cushions behind her head against the wall.

  Alice moaned, and he thought her hands moved.

  ‘Alice?’

  He felt her falling forward. Keep her head up. Don’t let her swallow her tongue.

  Alice said, ‘Whosat?’

  ‘Alice,’ Lol said, ‘if you can hear this, it’s... She wouldn’t know him. ‘I’m getting a doctor, OK? You’re safe.’

  ‘Wangohome.’

  ‘You’re safe.’

  But she was still as crispy-cold as a sack of peas out of the deep-freeze.

  ‘Pummedown. Dexer, pummedown.’

  ‘Alice, I’m going to ring for some help. Just—’

  ‘Dowannago.’ A hand clawing at him, unexpectedly strong. ‘Pummedown, Dexer!’

  ‘He’s not here, Alice. It’s OK. Dexter’s not here.’

  But almost as he spoke, he knew by the drifting odour of sweat and something else that he couldn’t define – a gross swelling in the air – that he was wrong.

  Left alone again, Brigid and Merrily gathered up the crockery from the burn-scarred carpet in front of Ben Foley’s sour, hissing fire of green softwood. Merrily got out her cigarettes. There were only two left in the packet. She placed it on the arm of Brigid’s chair. Brigid’s face was candle-white.

  ‘Why didn’t I... think?’

  ‘Danny’s with him,’ Merrily said. ‘You know Danny – he’ll stay there all night.’

  ‘Can’t stay for the rest of his life.’

  ‘And would you have?’

  ‘Given the chance,’ Brigid said. ‘I thought we were meant, right from the beginning. The one thing I could never forgive my dad for was intercepting Jeremy’s letters. And – even worse – he found some way of stopping my letters to Jeremy getting out. I still don’t know who he persuaded, or how he did it.’

  ‘Because you did what you did soon after coming here?’

  ‘And he found out about Hattie. He didn’t believe... anything. And yet he obviously convinced someone that any correspondence from the area of Stanner would not be healthy.’

  They sat for a while in a pool of quiet. Brigid didn’t touch the cigarettes. The bulb in the standard lamp went dim and then stammered back to life.

  ‘If the power goes, they’ll probably handcuff me to the banisters at the bottom of the stairs.’

  Brigid found a crumpled tissue in her jeans and roughly stabbed at her eyes with it. She stared into the dismal fire, and Merrily thought of the everlasting furnace in Jeremy’s living-room range and was startled when Brigid said, ‘I never changed a thing, you know. He kept on at me to move things around, have brighter colours, impose me on The Nant, but I never touched a single ornament.’

  ‘Did you want to?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘But better it looked as though you’d never been there at all? If you weren’t permitted to stay.’ Merrily took a breath. ‘Why did he do it?’

  ‘It’s not for me to...’ Brigid dug her fingers into her forehead. ‘He thought he was doing it for me. That’s all I want to say.’

  ‘People couldn’t get their heads around it – you and Jeremy.’

  ‘People are crass and stupid and superficial. Educated townies, with weekend cottages, tend to venerate country folk.’

  ‘Touching, isn’t it?’

  ‘Always venerating the wrong ones. Never people like Danny Thomas and that little guy, Gomer. Certainly never Jeremy Berrows. Always the loud bastards, who know everything and nothing.’

  ‘Sebbie Dacre.’

  ‘And the old Mistress of the Hunt.’ Brigid looked up. ‘I can feel her, can you? Over there, where that bookcase is – that’s where the shelves were, where she kept the trophy stones for Robert Davies to look up at and eat his heart out. How do I know? I don’t, actually, but when I picture that scene, this is the room. When the light faded a minute ago, I thought, that’s her.’

  Merrily said. ‘I... I’ve been asked to help see her off the premises.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘I have to keep explaining to people...’ Merrily looked at the cigarette packet, then put it out of her mind. ‘You can exorcize evil in an abstract or spiritual form. With possibly-evil people, we run into problems. You hate the whole idea of Hattie Chancery. You want someone to come along and point a crucifix and send her, screaming, into oblivion.’

  ‘And you can’t?’

  ‘Neither can I put her in a snuff-box, under a stone at the bottom of Hergest Pool.’

  ‘You picked up on all that.’

  ‘I don’t know how relevant it is. It seems faintly daft sitting here, with you in your situation, discussing fairy tales.’

  ‘Maybe you should talk to Beth Pollen,’ Brigid said.

  Frannie Bliss took Merrily into an office behind reception, steered her into the swivel chair at the desk, on the edge of which he sat, so that he was looking down at her. She felt for her cigarettes, realized she’d left them in the lounge.

  ‘You want to know why she killed Dacre.’

  ‘Call me a completist, Merrily, but that would be nice.’

  This seemed to be Ben Foley’s personal desk. It had gold inlaid bits and a small, framed photograph of Amber smiling through the steam rising from two cooking pots.

  ‘OK.’ She knew that what she was about to tell him would, at some stage, take a slow turn away from the truth, whatever the truth was. ‘We did a deal. She wanted two things. I... agreed to both.’

  Bliss looked curious but didn’t ask. She told him how Brigid Parsons had inherited The Nant, although everyone thought that Jeremy Berrows owned it. How the Dacres had been trying to buy it for years. How it had become a focus for Sebbie.

  ‘And at some stage, quite recently, he appears finally to have discovered the true identity of the woman with Jeremy Berrows.’

  ‘Finally?’

  ‘He’d probably had his suspicions for a long time.’

  ‘The printout pinned to the sign?’

  ‘Could’ve been him letting her know that he knew,’ Merrily said. ‘And putting the name Brigid into circulation at Stanner Hall. Causing unease. Perhaps demonstrating how precarious things were for her. It must have gone up yesterday at the earliest, so...’

  ‘So we’re looking at blackmail.’

  Merrily shrugged. It would do.

  ‘Let’s get this right,’ Bliss said. ‘Dacre threatens to expose her, explode her new identity, have the press down here in busloads unless she sells him The Nant.’ He sat down opposite Merrily. ‘Of course, the sensible thing would’ve bee
n to flog him the farm for as much as she could get and then bugger off with the proceeds and change her identity again.’

  ‘You’re forgetting about Jeremy. Welded, body and soul, to The Nant.’

  ‘And they’re really an item, those two?’

  ‘Think Romeo and Juliet twenty years on. In minor key.’

  ‘They could always have gone off together.’

  ‘Maybe half of him would go. Maybe not the half she’d want.’

  ‘Jeez, what is it with this area? Scrubby land, lousy winters...’

  Merrily said, ‘You’ve heard about the shooters going on to Jeremy’s land, coming on heavy? Those guys – from Off, right? Therefore less inhibited. I can’t help wondering if that was less to do with terrorizing Jeremy than indicating to Brigid what life might be like for him if she didn’t cooperate.’

  ‘Clumsy... but very Sebbie, by all accounts. No, you’re right, he wouldn’t get the local shooting club to do some of that, would he? What about the final act?’

  ‘Less forthcoming there, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yeh, well, to my knowledge, she’s never said a word about Mark and Stuart in all these years. The Guardian once ran a story based on an interview with one of their former schoolmates who reckoned Mark tried to rape her. Inference was, Stuart too, but Stuart’s still alive and he’s gorra lawyer. Nice opening for Brigid to make a statement – but not a word.’

  ‘It’s as if...’ Merrily hesitated, tapping Ben Foley’s blue blotter. ‘As if the acts of violence are committed by a different person, and she isn’t qualified to comment on them. You’ve heard all about Hattie Chancery, I suppose.’

  ‘At length, from Mrs Pollen. I’m not allowed to be remotely interested.’

  ‘No.’ Merrily slowly shook her head; she felt very tired. ‘Frannie, what can I say? I know what she did, and I liked her.’

  ‘Merrily, I fancied her. What difference does that make?’

  ‘None at all, I suppose, to you.’ He had a case to build; the law was a pile of rough stones.

  ‘All right, what do you think happened up there?’ Bliss said.

  ‘Well, we can assume she met Dacre at the van – to which she still had a spare key – to discuss the final arrangements in a place where both of them knew they wouldn’t be seen together. Especially on a night like this.’

  ‘And he went? Knowing who she was and what she’d done in the past?’

  ‘Distant past. Plus, you’re talking about a man who’s not known for being afraid of much, certainly not the weather or a woman.’

  Was this convincing? She wasn’t sure it would be, especially if it subsequently came out that Dacre knew who had damaged Nathan, the shooter.

  ‘And gets pushed over when he’s not expecting it?’ Bliss wrinkled his nose.

  ‘Personally, given the conditions,’ Merrily said, ‘I wouldn’t have ruled out it being, to some extent, accidental.’

  ‘Did you ask her?’

  ‘Wouldn’t go into it.’

  ‘What about the van?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We gather she was entertaining a man in there? Was that Sebbie? Might she have wanted to destroy any evidence of that? It’d make it worse for Berrows if he found that out.’

  ‘She’s Dacre’s first cousin.’

  ‘Merrily, if it wasn’t for first cousins, there wouldn’t be any population to speak of between here and Aberystwyth. Anything else?’

  ‘Not really. If you ask her questions aimed vaguely towards those answers, that’s what you should end up with.’

  ‘So why – if you don’t mind me asking – did she want to see you? When you came out of there, she looked bloody awful. She looked, for the very first time, in fact, like somebody who’s about to be charged with murder.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Merrily looked down at the desk photo of Amber through the cooking steam. There had been only one hard and binding agreement between her and Brigid, and that was a mutual silence about Jeremy Berrows’s attempted suicide.

  Had Jeremy known about the blackmail and decided – because he was afraid of what Brigid might otherwise do – to remove himself from an unsolvable equation. To make it so that she would no longer have any reason – or wish – to hold on to The Nant?

  She still didn’t know, and maybe the answer didn’t matter. Merrily saw Jeremy growing old and silent, alone at The Nant, while Brigid spent the rest of her life hardening a new prison skin. It was desperately sad. She wanted to put her head on the desk and weep. And then sleep.

  ‘Come on, what did she want from you?’ Bliss said. ‘It won’t go out of this office.’

  ‘She wanted me to adopt her daughter. More or less.’

  ‘Merrily, you’re kidding.’

  ‘Doesn’t want her in care, and she doesn’t have any suitable relatives. And she doesn’t want to burden Jeremy Berrows or put him in a difficult position.’

  ‘Bloody hell. I mean, you can’t blame her for trying. But... cheeky cow.’ He looked at her suspiciously as she pulled out her mobile. ‘You didn’t? Tell me you really didn’t.’

  She wouldn’t look at him. ‘I’m supposed to be a Christian? What was I supposed to say?’

  Bliss let out a lot of breath in a thin whistle. ‘For God’s sake, Merrily...’

  He didn’t ask what else she’d agreed to.

  As soon as Merrily was out of that office, she rang Lol again. No answer. This was starting to get worrying. She rang Hereford Police and asked for Annie Howe. They put her on hold and then came back and said they couldn’t find Howe, would she like to call back?

  Merrily found a local phone book. Prosser. Would that be a business number or private? Would it come under the name of the shop? She peered at the small print. She needed reading glasses; this had been obvious for a while, but you tried to resist it.

  ‘Problem, vicar?’

  ‘Gomer. Sorry, I was looking for Jim Prosser’s number at the Eight till Late. I need to talk to Lol, that’s all, and the phone’s... not working. I need somebody to go round. I thought maybe Big Jim, as he gets up early to see to the papers.’

  And as he was big.

  ‘Four two one three double six, vicar,’ Gomer said. ‘But he en’t usually up till five, and I knows for a fact they has their machine on all night.’

  ‘Oh.’ She shut the book hard.

  ‘Trouble back home?’

  ‘It’s... possible.’

  ‘Like to help, vicar, but it’s been comin’ down like a bugger out there.’

  ‘I know, Gomer, I wasn’t suggesting anything.’

  ‘Means we’d have to use Danny’s tractor, ’stead of the truck. Take a while, with the ole plough on, mind.’

  Merrily blinked. ‘Is that feasible?’

  ‘Ten minutes to get down to The Nant, pick up the tractor. ’Less, o’ course, Danny comes straight yere. But then there’s Jeremy – can’t really leave the boy.’

  ‘You could... always bring him here. If he’d come.’ Merrily looked over at the two police on the door of the lounge where Brigid Parsons waited. Earlier, the WPC, Alma, had escorted her to the lavatory and back. ‘Gomer, are you sure about this? It’s not been this bad in years.’

  ‘And all them bad years, I was in it, waist-deep.’ Gomer beamed. There seemed to be more light in his glasses than in any of the bulbs around the walls.

  ‘OK.’ Merrily beckoned him towards the porch. ‘I may be worrying unnecessarily, but you need to know what this is about.’

  Merrily stood for a moment, watching the tail lights of Gomer’s truck disappear. When she turned round, Jane was behind her in the porch.

  ‘I saw you go in. Is she OK?’

  ‘Not really. She’s confessed to killing Dacre.’

  The kid’s face was threatening to crumble like biscuit. ‘She’s covering for somebody.’

  ‘I don’t think she is, I really don’t.’

  ‘But like... how could she think she could possibly get away with it?
’

  ‘I’m not sure she even wanted to. She’s a fatalist.’

  ‘But who’d want to go back to... grey walls and bitterness and bitchiness and gay sex? And dope smuggled in to take you out of it. What a terrible, totally heartbreaking waste of...’

  ‘Two lives,’ Merrily said. ‘I didn’t really believe in them at first, but... You said “go back”.’

  ‘I... heard something.’

  ‘From Mrs Pollen?’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Bliss.’

  ‘It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? Bloody devastating.’

  ‘Who else knows, flower?’

  ‘Amber. That’s it. I hope. Where’s Clancy?’

  ‘Still with Danny’s wife. And a policewoman.’

  ‘I’m glad she’s not here. I know it sounds terrible, and I know what she’s been through and what she must be going through now, but Clancy...’

  ‘Yeah, I know, hard going.’ The squares of glass all around them in the porch were glistening and opaque, like frosted ice-trays. ‘I also talked to Matthew Hawksley.’

  ‘I know. I’d already told them that you couldn’t be expected to take that on, without weeks of preparation and back-up.’

  They walked back into the lobby. It was quiet now, and gloomy. Merrily noticed that three of the bulbs in the chandelier had gone out, and it hung there, gleaming faintly like one of the roast-chicken carcasses an old neighbour of her mother’s used to string up for the birds to peck at.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Jane said.

  Merrily fingered her pectoral cross, nodded at the steps to the kitchen.

  ‘Tell them I’ll need another hour at least.’

  Jane backed off. ‘You can’t...’

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘I told them you wouldn’t. I told them you’d need... I told them you’d even have to talk to the Bishop.’

  ‘I probably should, but I don’t see there being time.’

  Jane backed away, staring at her. ‘You look knackered.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘It’s because...’ Merrily took one of Jane’s hands, squeezed it. ‘Because Brigid asked me to do two things for her and this was... maybe the easiest.’