The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  Jane felt this unearthly tingle.

  ‘Comin’ out of Jeremy Berrows’s ground?’

  ‘Uh.’

  Danny said, ‘Let me get this right, boy. Sebbie Dacre was offering you and your mates seven thousand pound if you brought him the body of a big black dog that been attacking his flocks. Usin’ you on account he didn’t want no local boys involved.’

  Nathan made some kind of grunt you could probably take as affirmation. Danny turned back to Gomer.

  ‘I knew it, see. All that bullshit about demonstratin’ what it’s gonner be like if they bans huntin’ with hounds…’

  ‘The Hound,’ Jane said, breathless. ‘The black—’

  Gomer put a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t get too carried away, Janey. We don’t know the half of it yet.’

  ‘Berrows’s ground,’ Danny whispered. ‘Gwilym Bufton said Sebbie seen it on Berrows’s ground.’

  Jane said, ‘Danny, I think…’

  She was looking at Nathan struggling to sit up. A gout of fresh, bright blood flooded out over his lips. Jane stifled a scream.

  ‘Oh hell,’ Danny said, not too calmly. He turned on the engine.

  Part Three

  It was several years before we discovered there was anything ghostly about it. I’d never believed in ghosts really… not until we experienced it ourselves. About three years ago, walking up the stairs late in the evening, I got to about here… and there was a shadowy figure crossed straight across in front of me… sort of a crouched person, almost like a largish sort of dog… just passed straight in front of me and into the inner hall and… well, I didn’t see any more after that. A prickly feeling went up my back.

  John Williams, farmer, Hergest Court, 1987

  21

  Cwn Annwn

  Turning over the apartment — this wasn’t something you did lightly.

  The attic door opened easily. No alarm went off, though it wouldn’t have come as a big surprise to find one had been secretly installed. Merrily stood on the threshold of Jane’s domain, remembering how important having her own apartment had been to the kid’s acceptance, aged fifteen, of a new life in Ledwardine.

  Just a child then — two years ago, incredibly, she’d been just a child. Now she was a working woman with a provisional driving licence. And in a relationship — was this really the new going out with someone? Sometimes it felt that while Jane and Eirion were in a relationship she and Lol were just going out. Even though they never did.

  Merrily felt her age like a grey blanket around her shoulders. Standing in the doorway, looking up at the walls, an enormous colour chart for emulsion paint. Even on a drab day, the Mondrian Walls — currently, giant slabs of crimson, cobalt blue and chrome yellow — were startling enough to have the Listed Buildings Department chasing an injunction, if they ever found out.

  Merrily went in. This visit was long overdue. It wasn’t that Jane had been particularly secretive or moody or preoccupied, or anything like that. In fact, after her long-dark-night-of-the-soul period during the autumn, she’d been unusually bright and animated.

  Which had seemed to be down to the weekend job — the sense of grown-up independence it would be giving her… and more. Merrily remembered working Saturdays, at sixteen, in a small, indy record shop, putting on her black and purple Goth make-up like a uniform. Getting paid to be cool.

  Then the record shop had closed down, the way they did, and she’d found a back-room job in an old-fashioned department store, where the merest smear of Goth and you were out. Welcome to the world of work.

  What she couldn’t quite understand was what was so long-term cool about washing up and waiting tables in a cold, rundown, under-financed country-house hotel run by a redundant TV executive with no catering experience and a young Delia Smith who should have known better. Naturally, she’d been over to Stanner and met them both — this being Jane’s first weekend job, it was important to check it out — and Amber and Ben Foley had seemed pleasant and well-intentioned. And almost certainly doomed.

  The bed was made, and very neatly. This was the bed to which Jane had brought Eirion last summer — Eirion blurting it out to Merrily the very next day, after she’d accused him of being a nice guy. No, I’m not — I slept with your daughter.

  Merrily smiled: innocents, really, both of them.

  This afternoon, under an hour ago, Lol had rung from Prof’s studio, ominously hesitant.

  The familiar leaden thud of a bag of anxiety landing on the doorstep.

  Lol had been hesitant as long as she’d known him. Much less so with her now, obviously. No taboos between them any more. All right, one taboo. Just the single issue where hesitancy still came into it.

  ‘This is about Jane, isn’t it?’ Merrily had said. ‘This is one of those situations where you have to decide where your loyalties lie.’

  ‘And what’s best,’ Lol said. ‘Ultimately.’ He paused. ‘She phoned.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night. She said it was, you know, absolutely confidential. I was to say nothing to anybody. Well, I realize that “anybody” almost invariably means you, but in this case…’

  Merrily had sunk into the office chair, jagged neon letters spelling out PREGNANCY and ABORTION in her head. Outside, it was attempting to snow again, like it had been all week.

  ‘She’s not pregnant,’ Lol said, ‘as far as I know.’

  ‘How did you—?’

  ‘It’s what you always think of first.’

  ‘You know me that well?’

  ‘Anyway, she wouldn’t tell me a thing like that. The things she tells me about are the things that might offend you professionally.’

  ‘Kid’s always taken a special kind of delight in offending me professionally.’

  ‘You’re not cooperating, Merrily. You know you have to cooperate here, or I can’t go on.’

  ‘All right. Yes. OK. There is no way she’ll ever learn you told me, as God is my—’

  ‘We take that as read,’ Lol said. ‘This is about Lucy’s house.’

  ‘Oh well, Jane knows all about that.’ The relief making her smile. ‘We keep our secrets to an absolute minimum these days. Grown-ups. Mates. All that stuff.’

  ‘Jane says Lucy doesn’t want us to give up on the house.’

  ‘Well, obviously, we—’ Merrily paused, staring out of the window, to where the apple tree branches waved vaguely. ‘Lucy says?’

  ‘The late Lucy Devenish.’

  ‘I see.’ Merrily said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Lucy has appeared to Jane… in a dream?’

  ‘No, through, um, a third party.’

  ‘Oh.’ The smile dissolving, Merrily scrabbling for a cigarette.

  ‘She said she’d thought about it for two or three days before deciding to ring. In the end she’d decided it would be remiss of her not to pass on the message.’

  ‘Lol, what are we talking about here? Clairvoyant, Romany shaman?’

  ‘She kept saying things like, “Well, obviously I’m in two minds about the whole thing and it’s probably bollocks anyway.” After what happened with Layla Riddock, I think she’d be quite cautious.’

  ‘I’d’ve thought that, too.’

  ‘It seems to be a spiritualist medium,’ Lol said.

  ‘She went to a… medium?’

  ‘I don’t think it was that formal, but it was obvious she wasn’t going to tell me the circumstances. So I’m just… I sat around and searched my conscience. And I thought, well, we don’t know who the medium is, and there are mediums and mediums. So I decided I ought to tell you.’

  ‘Thank you, Lol. It’s appreciated.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Lol said. ‘Lucy was a good friend to me.’

  ‘So you rang the agents to see if the buyers had by chance given back word?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The people can’t wait to move in. Although they have two children, they find it delightfully bijou r
ather than small and cramped.’

  Merrily wondered if he’d still have told her about Jane and the medium if it had turned out that the purchasers had suddenly backed out and Lucy’s house was on the market again. She decided he would have, in the end, but maybe not until contracts had been exchanged.

  ‘Typical spirit message, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Sod-all use.’

  Danny wasn’t sorry the job had been called off. It was too cold. The sky was tight as a snare drum, grains of fine snow collecting on the bonnet of the van like battery acid.

  And Gomer was getting on in years, and excavating a wildlife pond for this posh bloke from Off, these were not the best conditions for it. So when the feller’s new wife comes on the scene, going, ‘No, I think it should be over there, don’t you, darling?’, Danny was relieved to hear Gomer suggesting they should both think about it for a few days.

  Back in the van, Danny had asked Gomer how much he was going to charge the people for a wasted trip, and Gomer had shaken his head and said that wasn’t how you kept your clients. Fair enough. Danny had shrugged, still an apprentice in the plant-hire business, and Gomer had dropped him off back at the farm.

  Snow was falling, light and fine as dust motes, when Danny saw the car in front of the galvanized gate and wondered which of Greta’s mouthy friends he’d have to endure before he got any lunch.

  ‘Ah! Now! Talk of the Devil!’ Greta giving it the full Janis Joplin from the living room, soon as he let himself in. ‘Look who’s yere, Danny!’

  Danny pulled off his wellies and padded in, and came face to face with Mary Morson, Jeremy’s ex, in the black business suit her wore as some kind of social services gofer at Powys Council.

  ‘En’t you at work, Mary?’

  ‘Danny!’ Greta blasted.

  ‘Flexitime,’ Mary Morson said, smug. Put on a bit of weight, Danny noticed. Pregnant? Unlikely. Accidents didn’t happen to Mary Morson.

  ‘Listen to this, Danny,’ Greta said. ‘Just listen to this — what did I say about that woman? Tell it him, Mary.’

  ‘I just thought somebody should enlighten a mutual friend of ours.’ Mary looked serious, light brown hair tucked behind her ears, small disapproving lines either side of her mouth. ‘It’s none of my business, really.’

  ‘In which case—’

  ‘Danny!’

  ‘Go on, then.’ Danny sighed and tried to get his bum within a yard or two of the wood-stove, but Mary and Greta both had chairs pulled up to the heat. Jerry Springer or some such earache was on the telly with the sound thankfully down, and he stood in front of that.

  ‘That bitch is cheatin’ on him already,’ Greta said, big smile, and Danny turned briefly, thinking her was on about some bint on Jerry Springer. But it wasn’t Jerry Springer on the box after all, it was some little blonde home-improvement tart.

  ‘Natalie Craven,’ Mary said grimly.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That blue camper van. The one Natalie Craven sold to the survey people at Stanner Rocks…’

  ‘I thought you and the naturalist feller was all washed up,’ Danny said.

  ‘I still have friends there,’ Mary said, voice cold as outside. ‘They were using the van as a site office, and they kept the folding bed as emergency overnight accommodation for volunteers. But one day, there was evidence that it had been… used.’

  ‘Mabbe one of the volunteers fancied a lie-down. It can get weary, watching little bloody plants grow.’

  ‘At night, this was,’ Mary said, ‘when there weren’t any volunteers on site. The van was always kept locked and the keys in a locked drawer at the Nature Trust office in town. Anyway’ — Mary’s little nose twitched in distaste — ‘they found suggestions of sexual activity.’

  ‘Like what?’ Danny raised his eyes to the big central beam. ‘Pair o’ pink knickers with no crot—’

  ‘Danny!’ Greta roared.

  ‘Well, this is bloody daft, Gret. Couple o’ randy naturalists nips in the ole van for a quick shag, and it’s gotter be—’

  ‘Listen, will you!’

  Danny sniffed and scowled, and Mary said, ‘The door hadn’t been forced. It had obviously been unlocked. And if anybody might’ve had a spare key, nobody could think of anybody more likely than the person who sold them the van in the first place. So anyway, one of the team, he left some equipment on the site this night, see, and had to go back. And what should he find parked up there on the edge of the forestry but Jeremy’s four-by-four, and nobody in it. But there was a bit of light coming from the camper van, and when he looked in the window, there she was, with a man, and it certainly wasn’t Jeremy.’

  It had all come out in a rush, and Mary Morson slumped back in her chair, lips tight. For the first time in his life, Danny wanted to physically shake the smile off Greta’s face.

  ‘Natalie?’

  ‘No more’n you’d expect from a woman like that,’ Greta said.

  ‘A woman like what?’

  ‘I need to spell it out?’

  ‘So who was the man?’

  ‘He didn’t recognize the man,’ Mary said. ‘He couldn’t see him very clearly, because he…’ Mary looked away. ‘I expect she was on top of him. But then he doesn’t know many local people, anyway.’

  ‘In which case—’

  ‘But he does know Jeremy! And he knows her.’

  Danny shut his eyes. Shit.

  ‘Somebody ought to tell him,’ Mary said quietly. ‘Somebody who knows him well.’

  ‘When?’ Danny said harshly. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Night before last.’ Mary Morson stood up in front of him. ‘There’s no mistake about this, none at all, Danny. It was her. It was Natalie Craven and a bloke, and they were—’

  ‘All right!’

  ‘We’re just telling you,’ Greta said, ‘because you’re the nearest he’s got to a best friend. None of us wants to see him hurt.’

  ‘Hurt? It’ll kill him! You really expect me to go tell him? Like he don’t got enough on his plate?’

  ‘Who else is going to? You wanner wait till it’s all over Kington?’

  ‘You mean it en’t already? Oh, I forgot, you en’t been shopping yet, did you?’

  ‘That’s unfair!’

  ‘Well…’ Danny turned away. ‘It’s bloody upset me, it has.’

  ‘It’s upset all of us,’ Mary Morson said, shameless.

  Merrily checked out the pine bookcase. Not many changes here: The Hedgewitch Almanac, Green Magic, Britain’s Pagan Places, plus another fifty or so pastel spines confirming that Jane was still a vague supporter of the Old Religion, which, as the kid now admitted, was actually not very old at all.

  The shelves were all full. No room here for the Bible, which had failed to address the issue of the mystical British countryside, but there was still a corner, Merrily noted, for the 17th-century Herefordshire cleric Thomas Traherne, who’d chronicled its God-given glories at length.

  This was all about the need for direct experience, a confirmation of Otherness. And, of course, there was an area of operation where Christianity and New Age paganism came close together.

  It was spiritual healing.

  It was several days now since she’d been to see Alice Meek, suggesting that if there was to be a service of healing it should initially be directed towards the soul of nine-year-old Roland Hook. Telling Alice it all came back to Roland, all the guilt and the grief… and the pain of a young child who had died, very afraid, in the middle of a crime. Maybe the knowledge that Roland’s soul was at peace would bring some kind of harmony to the family.

  ‘Right, then.’ Alice had stood up, stiff-backed, fiery-faced. ‘You leave it with me, vicar. Half of them won’t understand what it’s about, dull buggers, but I’ll talk to my niece in Solihull, her as did the Alpha course. We’ll make this happen, somehow.’

  Not a word since. Sophie, meanwhile, had been compiling a list of ministers in the diocese who had a serious, practical interest in healing, with a view to orga
nizing a preliminary meeting. But it needed someone else to organize it; Merrily wasn’t good at admin.

  She sat on Jane’s bed. Turning over the apartment was beginning to look like a waste of time. Had she really expected to find a ouija board laid out next to the collected works of Doris Stokes? She’d looked briefly in the wardrobe, flicked open dressing-table drawers, glanced under the bed. Not even much dust under there — amazing what changes a few weekends of chambermaiding could bring about.

  Through the window, she could see wooded Cole Hill, with scattered snow up there, like grated cheese. There hadn’t been a serious fall this year; maybe it wouldn’t come this side of Christmas. After Christmas, Lol would go on tour for the first time since… well, since he was hardly older than Jane. Lol finally getting a life: where would that leave them?

  Don’t think about it.

  The only book on the bedside table was a scuffed old favourite: The Folk-lore of Herefordshire, by Ella Mary Leather, dead for three-quarters of a century and still unsurpassed for down-home authenticity. There was an orange Post-it sticker in the book, and Merrily let it fall open.

  Cwn Annwn, or the Dogs of Hell.

  Parry (Hist. Kington 205) gives an account of the superstitious beliefs of many aged persons then (1845) living in the parish.

  It was the opinion of many persons then living in the out-townships that spirits in the shape of black dogs are heard in the air, previous to the dissolution of a wicked person; they were described as being jet black, yet no one pretends to have seen them. But many believed that the king of darkness (say the gossips) sent them to terrify mankind when the soul of a human being was about to quit its earthly tenement.

  Kington: the final frontier, the least known, most hidden, of Herefordshire’s six towns, in appearance more like the Radnorshire towns of Knighton and Rhayader, but with streets more cramped than either. It was even on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke. It was entirely understandable that Kington folk, even in the nineteenth century, should have felt under the dominion of Welsh mythology. And inevitable that Jane, working weekends in the area, would be interested.