The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  Danny laid the cans on the back of his armchair, where his head had been, and Greta shoved the cordless at him.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Danny?’

  ‘Ar.’

  ‘They won’t go away.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They won’t listen to me. It’s like I en’t yere. They’re all over the yard, all over the meadow…’

  ‘What you on about? Who?’ Danny had Greta leaning between him and the wood-burner, trying to hear what was coming down the line. He waved at her to get out of his heat.

  ‘Welshies,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the house. I come back in the house, see. En’t no way I can deal with all three of ’em, Danny. I got the kid with me, Clancy.’

  ‘Well, that—’

  ‘Don’t know whatter do. Don’t want no cops yere, they’d just turn it back on me or it’d get in the papers.’

  ‘They threatenin’ you?’

  ‘Danny, I en’t good in these situations, you know that.’

  ‘Lemme get this straight, Jeremy. Welshies. This would be a raiding party come over the bloody border, is it?’

  ‘Could say that.’ Jeremy’s voice had gone faint. ‘I dunno, Danny, basically. I dunno what’s gonner happen.’

  When Jane walked into the kitchen, it was clear that Mum hadn’t been in long — coat over the chair, bag on the table. Jane placed her own overnight bag very carefully by the kitchen door; she’d need to get it upstairs as soon as poss. Tried not to keep looking at it as she helped Mum cobble a meal together.

  ‘It might snow,’ Mum said from the fridge.

  ‘Gomer said that. I bet it’ll all be gone by Christmas, though. I don’t remember a white Christmas.’

  ‘There was one when you were little.’ Mum came over and looked at her with evident suspicion. ‘Did something happen?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘You seem… strangely energized.’

  ‘It’s the wonderful world of work. Invigorating.’ Jane sawed hard at a farmhouse cob, keeping her head down over the bread knife. Hell, was it that obvious?

  ‘Are they… going to want you much over Christmas?’

  ‘Hard to say. I think there’s a conference of some kind coming off. So, um, you got over to Lol then?’

  ‘Er, yeah.’

  ‘Good. T’riffic. Bit of a drag, though, driving all the way over the other side of the county every time you feel like a… proper chat.’

  ‘Actually, we thought there might have been something—’ Mum went to the sink to fill the kettle. ‘Well, Lucy’s old house in Church Street was for sale yet again, and we thought this time… Well, Lol thought he could raise the deposit.’

  Jane dropped the knife, looked up in real delight. ‘Wow! Really? That would be… incredible!’

  Lucy had been Lol’s mentor, had helped turn him around after Alison Kinnersley dumped him. It was what Lucy did: the nature-mystic, the keeper of the village’s soul, touching all their lives when they’d first arrived in Ledwardine. Becoming Jane’s fairy-godmother figure, kind of. Before dying, thrown from her moped on the road near the old Powell orchard.

  ‘Only, it was, erm, sold,’ Mum said. ‘Before the agents could even get a sign up.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘We should’ve seen it earlier in the Hereford Times. You don’t think, do you?’

  ‘Oh God, that would’ve been so totally perfect. Like, for both of you. Is there no chance?’

  Mum shrugged.

  ‘Who’s got it?’

  ‘Looks like a weekend-cottage situation.’

  ‘Bastards!’ Jane snatched up the bread knife. ‘That is so… In a country this overcrowded, there is no excuse for anybody to have more than one home. It’s just like so totally unfair. Why don’t the sodding government bring in some kind of crippling second-home tax?’

  ‘Probably because most of the Cabinet seem to have three or four homes each. I think they’re lawyers, from London, these people. Well, you have to do something with all that money, don’t you?’

  Jane shook her head in sorrow. ‘Mum, I’m so sorry. It would’ve been brilliant. And Lucy — she’d have wanted it, more than anything.’ She forced a smile. ‘Plus, it would’ve been somewhere for you to move into when I’ve left home and you finally come to your senses.’

  ‘A retirement home?’

  ‘Oh, it’s my firm belief,’ Jane said, ‘that you’ll be out of the Church within two years.’

  ‘You wish.’ Mum walked across the kitchen and scooped up the overnight bag. ‘I’d better get this lot in the washer, before—’

  ‘No!’

  Mum turned, with the overnight bag dangling from her hand, Jane frantically aware of the bulge in the side of it. And of Mum’s eyes narrowing. She thought fast.

  ‘Put that down at once! Can’t you ever sit down and relax? I’ll do it in the morning, when… when you’re in church.’

  There was this horrible, tense moment before Mum did her wry smile and dumped the bag.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve had a lousy enough day already,’ Jane said, snatching it up.

  God, how close was that?

  12

  Night Exercise

  Danny remembered the last time he’d had the call-out from Jeremy — a soft summer morning, the air full of warm scents, the brown-haired woman waiting in her caravan, sending out the secret siren calls that only Jeremy would hear.

  Now, under an icy sky slashed by a thin moon, Danny backed Greta’s old Subaru Justy out of the barn. Little grey car, discreet — don’t make no Bank Holiday parade out of this. Greta was opening the galvanized farm gate for him, yowling the whole while.

  ‘You en’t called me in half an hour, I’m phoning the police! You got that, Danny Thomas?’

  ‘Whole bloody valley got it.’ Danny wound his window tight, shoving a random cassette into the player, turning up the sound cautiously, in case it was one of Gret’s Jackie Collins story-book tapes. Danny had his giveaway hair pushed up under his woolly hat: no need for the buggers to know who he was.

  The Welshies: Sebbie Three Farm’s hired guns — here, according to the popular folk-tale put around by Sebbie, to reduce the fox population.

  Which was bullshit, basically, because there was never enough, and never would be enough foxes around for Sebbie Dacre and the Middle Marches Hunt. And also, seeing there was a local gun-club that would be only too grateful to be viewed by somebody as a bit useful, why had Sebbie hired from Off?

  The Subaru sloshed down the track, the tape on the stereo turning out to be the Creedence collection, starting with ‘Susie Q’, which was all right but, if it got as far as ‘Bad Moon Rising’ before he reached The Nant, Danny was gonner take it as an omen.

  Truth was, nobody knew why Sebbie Dacre had hired shooters from South Wales to scrat about pretending to be after foxes. You didn’t go out of your way to fire hard questions at boys from Off with loaded guns. But when these boys was invading what was likely the only farm along the whole border that didn’t have no firearms of any description, that was seriously out of order, Danny’s view of it.

  At the Walton turn-off, he could see all the way to Old Radnor church, jutting up like a castle on a horizon turned jagged by quarrying. Then, just as Creedence were unrolling ‘Proud Mary’, the forestry rose up darker than the night sky, making him feel like some insect crawling into a yard brush.

  What you had to understand first about Jeremy Berrows, see, was that he was an only child. Normal thing was for a farming family to have a spare, but Eddie Berrows was killed outright in a tractor accident when Jeremy was still at school and his mother was pregnant at the time, and her lost it, likely due to the stress. And that was that — Jeremy growing up knowing he had Full Responsibility for The Farm.

  There was still farm labour to be had cheapish in them days, so they got by till the boy was sixteen and could take over official. Meantime, it was like all his ole man’s kn
ow-how had come seeping into him from wherever his ole man was, and now Jeremy was truly part of his land, in the way Danny had felt part of the whole valley that time, way back, when he’d dropped acid in the Four Stones field. Except that with Jeremy, who didn’t even drink, this was a natural chemical thing, an organic thing, ditchwater in his veins. You’d see him standing there like a little thorn tree, bristling with the breeze, Stanner Rocks behind him and the ewes around his legs. If Jeremy had played music, this would have been his album cover, and it was something close to mystical.

  He just wasn’t good with people, that was all. Boy was shy, and if folks thought he was just another thick-as-shit hill-farmer, that was all right with him. Let the other buggers do the talking, let Sebbie do the shouting and go on thinking he ruled the valley. Sebbie Three Farms: master of the hunt and all he surveyed — except for this thriving little holding, right in the middle of Sebbie’s three farms, that belonged to Jeremy Berrows.

  Danny took the Gladestry turn. Always reckoned he knew this area as well as anybody, but he still needed full beams to find the entrance to The Nant. No sign, see. Used to be one, till Jeremy’s mam went into the sheltered bungalow in Kington, but Jeremy didn’t need telling what was his, so when the sign fell off it stayed off, and that was that.

  Full beams was a bit of a giveaway, but the track was narrow and the ditches either side were four feet deep, sure to be. The headlights found some new trees that Jeremy and the woman must have planted, with strong stockades around them and chicken wire to keep the sheep off. How many farmers planted trees without there was some big environmental grant for it?

  Jeremy Berrows: natural green-boy, firm custodian of the land, friend to all of—

  ‘Christ!’

  Danny slammed on, both feet hard down, the Justy’s little tyres spinning and squealing like piglets in the mud.

  The track had curved to the left and this big motor was blocking the whole of it like an outsize bull. No lights. Without his own headlamps, Danny would’ve been up the back of it, no question.

  The Justy slurped and stalled, leaving Danny slumped over the wheel, breathing heavy. Must’ve stayed there about half a minute, getting hisself together, switching his lights off, before pushing his hair back under his woolly hat and climbing shakily out of the Justy. Close? Shit.

  Danny staggered up to the big motor. It was a Discovery, metallic light green, with camouflage effects sprayed on. He hated this paramilitary crap, despised these bastards already. Still, he made good and sure there was nobody inside the Discovery before setting off to walk the last fifty or so yards to the buildings, keeping to the narrow grass verge beside the ditch, aware that he’d left the Justy blocking the way out.

  Too bad. He was still shaking. In the country, the worst accidents happened on farms.

  In his jolted-up state, he’d forgotten to bring a torch with him, but the place looked to be well lit up already. The track ended in the farmyard, with the black and white house to the left and the old stone barn on the right, and one wall of the barn looked floodlit like an old church.

  The big bay doors were shut, but Danny noticed that the small one to the side was ajar and this was where most of the light was, and there were shadows moving, and he stood there on the edge of the yard, screwing up his eyes to try and make out what was there. Then calling out, in a friendly kind of way, ‘Hello there!’

  This was just before the light went out and he heard footsteps coming at him from three directions, making him instinctively start whirling round, clawing at the blackness.

  When the light came back on a few seconds later, it was full in his eyes, and he was near flattened by the violence of it.

  Eirion’s voice, in the phone, said, ‘You total, insufferable bitch. How could you do this to me?’

  Jane carried on unwrapping the package, the mobile wedged between ear and shoulder. She was smiling. She’d dug the big Jiffy bag out of her overnight case and brought it over to the bed. Mustn’t drop it on the floor, an expensive and complex piece of equipment like this.

  ‘Jane, you still—?’

  ‘Sure.’ She’d kept the overnight bag between her knees all the time she and Mum were eating, then said she’d just have to whizz upstairs to the apartment to freshen up and unpack.

  ‘Well?’ Eirion said.

  ‘Look, it’s the way it goes, sunshine. Nobody compelled you to go to the Alps with your creepy stepmother and a few corrupt members of the Welsh Assembly and their bimbos. I think it was John Lennon who said, “Life is what happens to other people while you’re busy shooting the piste with a bunch of inconsequential tossers.” Right, here we are…’

  Jane released the camcorder from the bubblewrap and lay back on her bed with the phone.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ Eirion said. ‘What’s it look like? What sort is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a Sony.’ Jane held the camcorder over her face with one hand. She was going to have to cool this a little, or he wouldn’t play ball. ‘It says one-fifty and some letters. It’s kind of dinky.’

  ‘Sounds like the kind they hand out to people doing these video-diary pieces. The punter sets it up on a tripod in his room and whispers intimate thoughts at it. If it gets broken it doesn’t make a major hole in the budget. Has it got one of those flaps you unfold, like a wing, and you can see the picture?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Jane sat up. ‘Yep, there’s a flap. Can’t see anything in it.’

  ‘That’s probably because it’s not switched on. Sockets for external mike?’

  ‘Could be. Couple of those little pinhole things. In fact, there’s an actual microphone as well, separate. It’s longer than the camera.’

  Eirion moaned.

  ‘Piece of crap, then, is it, Irene?’

  ‘No.’ Eirion sighed. ‘It’s a tidy bit of kit, for the money, and it’ll get very credible results on automatic setting. Jane, I’m gutted.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I truly wish you were going to be there. You’d probably get much better stuff than me.’

  ‘Are you trying to make it worse? What’s he like?’

  ‘Antony? He’s quite funny. Very cynical. At first, you get the feeling he really couldn’t give a toss. But then he latches on to something, and you can see this steely intensity in his eyes. Of course I don’t know these guys like you do, and I didn’t realize he was that famous.’

  ‘He’s not famous, Jane. Pro doco guys are seldom famous. He’s respected, is what counts. Which is what brings the work in. And I mean, why would a guy… why would a guy of his stature allow an evil little bimbo like you to… shoot for television?’

  They had him backed up against the farmhouse wall, battering him with white light.

  ‘… The fuck are you?’

  Danny didn’t respond. Stood there with his head bent away from the raging light, knowing that they had him wedged in. Somebody pulled off his hat and his hair came down over his face, near-wringing with cold sweat.

  ‘Looks like one of them fuckin’ travellers,’ another voice said — higher, younger. Danny placed the accent in the Valleys, somewhere down where there used to be coal mines and jobs. A good fifty miles from local, anyway.

  It was them.

  The light veered away from him, and he looked down and saw the lamp — one of them items you could send for out of the glossy catalogues that dropped out of local papers: ten million kilowatts, guaranteed to throw a beam halfway to Rhayader.

  ‘Assed you a question, mun.’ Hot, soupy breath in his face. ‘Assed you a fuckin’ question!’

  ‘What I am,’ Danny said through his clenched teeth, ‘is a feller got hisself invited yere by the owner. Unlike some bastards.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ He’s just a fuckin’ tenant, is all. Scum, he is.’

  It was blasted into his face along with some spit. The light hit him again like a big white fist, just giving him time, before he had to shut his eyes against it, to see two blokes in army-looking camouflage gear, one with the la
mp, the other with something that was likely a rifle with a telescopic sight.

  ‘Try again,’ the Welshie said.

  ‘I’m a neighbour. Who’re you?’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘You’ll mabbe find out just now,’ Danny said, and cried out as somebody grabbed his hair and hauled his head back, and they shone the light directly into his eyes, and when he shut them the night turned bright orange like the logs in his stove.

  ‘Danny!’ Jeremy. His voice coming from above, probably an open window.

  ‘Call the cops, Jeremy,’ Danny said, surprised how calm he sounded, still held by his hair with his eyes tight shut.

  From behind, another bloke said, ‘OK, he’s on his own.’ Then they let go of Danny’s hair, and he couldn’t feel the heat from the lamp any more, and he risked opening his eyes a fraction.

  The first thing he saw was the gun.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Danny said.

  It wasn’t what he was expecting. It had a shortish single barrel and a skeleton butt, like the end of a crutch.

  ‘Look,’ he said, nervous as hell now, ‘what’s this about?’ If you didn’t know better, you might figure these blokes for the SAS on some night exercise. All the instructions shouted, rasped out, like soldiers and armed police did on TV. A performance, designed to put the shits up you.

  And it was working. No bugger in these parts had a gun like that, not even—

  Danny said, ‘Sebbie Dacre sent you, right?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  ‘Nathan!’ The younger voice, from a few yards away. ‘I can year the bastard movin’ about! Fetch the fuckin’ light!’

  ‘Now, you won’t move, will you, mun?’ the close-up Welshie said. ‘’Cause if we has to come and find you we gonner beat the shit out of you, no arguments.’

  ‘Where’m I gonner move to?’ Danny just hoping Jeremy had got over his suspicions of the police and was on the phone to them right now. Failing that, it was all down to Gret. This wasn’t normal, not by a mile.