The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Contacting the dead?’

  Gomer blinked. ‘No, it’s about this Ben Foley beating seven bells out of this feller the other night.’

  ‘What?’

  Gomer nodded slowly. ‘Her never tole you ’bout that, then.’

  Danny turned the Land Rover around and parked him up against some holly trees on the edge of the farmyard at The Nant. By the time he’d unbuckled and climbed down, the windscreen was already thick with snow. It had to come, and he was glad; it was like some of the tension had been released from the drum-skin sky. Just from the sky, though, not from Danny Thomas.

  Jeremy was already at the gate, like he’d been watching out for something. He had on one of those tea-cosy woollen hats — Badly Drawn Boy job.

  ‘Just passin’,’ Danny said. ‘Reckoned you might need a bit o’ help gettin’ the ewes down from the hill.’ He looked up at the teeming sky. ‘Way all this come on — sudden, like.’

  ‘Had ’em down last night.’ The snow was all over Jeremy, confusing the pattern on his blue and black workshirt.

  Well, he would know this was on its way, wouldn’t he? His friends the clouds, and all that.

  ‘Jeremy, we…’ Danny stood and faced him over the gate, pulling his denim jacket together over the baggy old Soft Machine sweatshirt he was wearing over his King Crimson T-shirt: the layered look. ‘I reckon we gotter talk, boy.’

  Jeremy said, ‘We don’t ’ave to.’ He started waggling his hands, embarrassed. ‘What I mean… the way he’s comin’ down you could easy get blocked in back at your place.’

  Danny rested his arms in the soft snow on top of the wooden gate. ‘Do I give a shit, boy? This partic’lar moment, mabbe not.’ He pointed at the farmhouse door. ‘Inside, eh?’ What was strange was that nothing had changed from when Jeremy’s mam was in charge: the same dresser with some of the pots the old girl hadn’t been able to take with her to the sheltered bungalow in Kington, the same flowery wallpaper between the beams, the same dark green picture of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  Blocks of wood were turning into glowing orange husks on the open fire in the cast-iron range. The kettle hissed on the hob. Flag the sheepdog lay on the same old brown and green rag rug that had been here likely thirty-five years. Damn near as old as Jeremy, that rug.

  All of which was odd, when you knew there’d been a new woman here for nigh on six months now, a smart woman who’d be expected to make big changes.

  Danny sank into the old rocking chair and told Jeremy about the Welshie, Nathan, what Ben Foley had done to him and what he’d told them on his way to hospital. Just in case Miz Natalie Craven hadn’t given him the full story.

  ‘No problem at the hospital, in the end,’ Danny said. ‘Gomer knowed the nurse from when his missus died. ’Sides, even if they’d wanted to keep the boy in, they’d’ve had nowhere to put the poor bugger. Seen bigger bloody sheep sheds than that new hospital.’

  Jeremy stood his wellies on the stone hearth at the foot of the range. Jesus Christ looked miserably down from over the fireplace, waiting to get betrayed by a bloke he reckoned was his mate. Danny looked up at Jesus, who seemed to be saying, Make this easy, can’t you?

  ‘See, these fellers from Off, you never knows what baggage they brung with ’em,’ Danny said. ‘That feller Foley — big chip on his shoulder, Greta reckons. Had his nose pushed out down the BBC in London. Lot of anger built up inside him. Coulder killed that boy, see. Goes at him like a bloody maniac. And he was a boy. No more’n twenty-four or — five. Thought he was hard, thought Foley was soft. Bad mistake.’

  Danny leaned back and rocked the chair, which creaked. Reason he was going into this episode, apart from buying time to think, was to find out exactly how much Natalie Craven was telling Jeremy about day-to-day — and night-to-night — life up at Stanner. And if this Foley had some unknown degree of violence in his London past, who knew what other secrets might be there?

  Specifically: what were Foley’s relations with Natalie? If something was on the go, it wouldn’t be easy for Foley and Nat to get it together in the hotel — not with Mrs Foley around and young Jane at weekends. But a nice camper van within easy jogging distance… and Foley did jog, apparently. Well, the question needed asking, that was for sure. Not that Danny would make the suggestion to Jeremy, bloody hell, no. Not directly, anyway.

  ‘So what do, er, Nat’lie think about him?’

  ‘Nat?’ Jeremy scratched his head through his hat. ‘Well, her thinks… thinks mabbe he was provoked. Not the first time the shooters been on his land. Had guests in at the time. See, he’s worried they en’t gonner make a go of it — that’s the top and bottom of it. Desperate situation.’

  ‘Least you won’t see those boys again.’

  ‘Hard to say, ennit?’ Jeremy had sat himself on a wooden stool, away from the fire, like he was determined not to get comfortable, lulled into saying too much. There was a sprig of holly on the mantelpiece but no mistletoe anywhere: old Border lore reckoned it was unlucky to bring in mistletoe before New Year.

  ‘So we had a chat with this Nathan before we took him to the hospital,’ Danny said. ‘Not a chance to be missed. And he was quite forthcoming, that boy, ’bout how Sebbie Dacre was gonner bung ’em seven grand when they proved they shot the beast.’

  Jeremy didn’t react to this.

  ‘So mabbe that was why they was gonner shoot Flag yere. Paint him black all over, with luminous bits and—’

  ‘I know what you’re sayin’—’

  ‘The Hound of Hergest, Jeremy. Sebbie hired the Welshies to shoot some’ing bearing a close resemblance to the famous Hound of Hergest.’

  Jeremy looked down at his light blue socks.

  ‘It make any sense to you, boy?’ Danny said.

  Jeremy didn’t look up. ‘Can’t shoot what en’t there, can you?’

  Danny pondered this, noting how clean the room was, everything polished that needed polishing. Outside the window, the snow fell real quiet and in some quantity. The only sound was the dog’s breathing.

  ‘By en’t there,’ Danny said carefully, ‘do you mean en’t there as in, like, imaginary? Or en’t there as in… en’t there? If you sees what I mean.’

  They were getting close to matters that Jeremy didn’t talk about, not so much because he was suspicious or embarrassed but because they were hard to put into words. He pulled off his Badly Drawn Boy hat and pushed his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Sebbie Dacre, he won’t have it talked about.’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty obvious, Jeremy, else he’d’ve been down the gun club and wouldn’t need to offer them Welsh boys a penny.’

  Jeremy said, ‘Foley, he was supposed to be goin’ round askin’ people if they’d ever seen it. And Dacre said if any of his employees — or anybody workin’ for the hunt or their relations — which I reckon covers most folks in this area — if they said anythin’ to Foley they’d have the sack.’

  ‘Tole you that?’

  ‘Ken, the postman. We was at school together.’

  ‘So who are they, these folks reckons they seen it?’

  ‘Just folks. Over the years.’

  ‘Like?’

  Jeremy looked at Danny, then looked away into the red fire. ‘Me.’

  ‘I see.’ Danny felt his beard bristle. ‘When was this, Jeremy?’

  ‘It en’t what you think.’ Jeremy’s face creased up, mabbe more with sorrow at Danny’s unease. ‘En’t like in the films, all red-eyed. En’t n’more’n a shadow most times. Might be there, just before dark, see, bounding down off the Ridge, corner of your eye. Might be close up, but real faint, a cold patch against your leg. But you knows.’

  The fire was pumping out heat, but there was places it couldn’t reach.

  ‘It is a dog?’

  ‘Kind of thing.’

  ‘Sebbie reckoned he’d had ewes savaged. What en’t there can’t savage ewes.’

  Jeremy said, ‘The beast th
ey was huntin’ round Llangadog year or so back? All over the papers — police marksmen, helicopters, the lot? It killed a dog, a whippet. Tore his throat out. Folks swore they seen a big cat, but when the police done DNA tests on the dog it killed they figured it was another dog did it. Yet you still had folks swore blind they’d seen this big beast, puma, whatever. Nobody ever found a puma, though, dead or alive. Or a big dog.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘Things… happens. Things as en’t meant to be explained. Why try?’

  Danny found Jeremy meeting his stare now. Anybody else, he’d suspect a wind-up, but all he could see in Jeremy’s eyes was sadness and acceptance.

  ‘All right…’ He held on to the chair so it wouldn’t rock, wouldn’t creak. ‘What about Sebbie Three Farms?’

  ‘He believes,’ Jeremy said. ‘He just don’t want nobody thinkin’ he believes. So he makes a big noise. Bigger the noise, scareder he is, I reckon.’

  ‘Why’s he scared?’

  ‘’Cause most folk seen it, it don’t matter… not to them.’

  ‘You mean Sebbie…’ Danny held on to the chair arms, trying to anchor himself down. You hung out with Jeremy you lost hold of reality, felt yourself slipping into Jeremy’s fuzzy world. It was like dropping acid again and, same as he’d told Greta this morning, Danny didn’t see himself going there no more.

  ‘Personal,’ Jeremy said.

  Danny sagged back in the chair. This was getting well out of his ballpark. Wouldn’t be a bad idea, mabbe, to get Gomer to go and have a quiet chat with his lady vicar over in Ledwardine, whose specialist subject appeared to be fellers like Jeremy Berrows.

  We keep our secrets to a minimum now, she’d said to Lol. Grown-ups. Mates.

  So this was the kid’s idea of a minimum.

  Gomer, like Lol, had clearly done a lot of agonizing before shopping Jane. See, when you first told me her was working at Stanner, I din’t make much of it, ’cause things change, places change…

  It seemed that, on the way back from taking a smashed-up man to Hereford hospital, Jane had suggested to Gomer that it would be best not to talk about the incident, not even to Mum, because Ben was in a difficult enough position and if this got out…

  Merrily stood by the window, watching the apple trees becoming stooped and shaggy with snow. The probable truth was that the kid had concealed the incident not out of loyalty to her employer but because of what else she might have to disclose — like, for instance, an alleged predatory beast carrying a £7,000 bounty.

  Which made no sense. Not yet, anyway.

  The clock above the old Aga said two-thirty. Couple of hours before Jane was due home, and in this weather it would probably be longer. Merrily could hear traffic grinding up the hill to the village square, the futile sound of tyres spinning. If Herefordshire Council’s foul-weather rapid-response was as rapid as usual, they wouldn’t see a snow plough or a gritter until around lunchtime tomorrow.

  In the interim, showdown time.

  So there’d been a domestic murder in the garden at Stanner Hall in the year before World War Two.

  Well, that was a long time ago, but seeing what Ben Foley — a man with no known history of violence — had done to the intruder, Nathan, in that same garden had brought the superstitious side of Gomer Parry squirming uncomfortably into the light. Superstition was never far below the surface along this Border: the most rural county in England lying back to back with the most rural county in Wales.

  Just if I had a daughter, Vicar, and her was working at Stanner, these is things I’d wanner know. Gomer had still seemed embarrassed. He’d refused a second cup of tea and gone shuffling back into the snow, pulling on his old tweed cap and leaving her to examine all the features of country-hotel life that Jane had been concealing.

  That bloody kid. Did nothing ever change?

  Merrily leaned against the Aga rail, pondering the options. If she couldn’t reveal either Gomer or Lol as informants, there was at least one person she could shop with impunity.

  She would admit to Jane that she’d raided the apartment. She would produce the copy of Folk-lore of Herefordshire, with the relevant pages marked. It wasn’t much, but it was a way in. And in the course of the subsequent bitter quarrel the whole truth would, with any luck, come pooling out all over the unforgiving flagstones.

  What was good about this weather was that, the way things were looking, Jane would not be returning to Stanner this weekend. Big fires, CDs of Nick Drake, Beth Orton… Lol Robinson, even. Mother — daughter quality time.

  All the same, Merrily watched the ceaseless snow with trepidation. They made jokes about the council and the grit lorries, but they were jokes best made over a mug of hot chocolate in front of a blazing fire. This was a part of the county that had often been cut off, lost its electricity and its phone lines, reverting for whole days to a semi-medieval way of life.

  When the phone rang, she grabbed the cordless from the wall.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘They let you out?’

  ‘Erm… they sent for the school buses early.’

  ‘Because of the snow.’

  ‘Otherwise about five hundred of us would have been spending all night fighting over the sofa bed in the medical suite.’

  ‘Understandable. So you’ll be home early, then.’

  ‘And we don’t have to come back tomorrow, if it’s bad.’

  ‘And then it’s the holidays.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of the education department. I’ll go and light the fire.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘Do that. It’s just…’

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Not exactly wrong. It’s… like, the snow’s coming down so hard, they reckon all the minor roads in the north of the county could be… difficult, by tonight. So that would mean I probably wouldn’t be able to get to Stanner at all tomorrow, maybe not even with Gomer.’

  ‘Can’t be helped, flower.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Act of God. Never mind, I expect the conference will have to be called off as well.’

  ‘So, like, I thought the best thing to do would be to get on Clancy’s bus.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So, like, that’s what I did. Kind of a spur of the moment… thing.’

  Merrily said tightly, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at Stanner,’ Jane said. ‘And it really was for the best. The snow’s much worse here.’

  24

  Necessary Penance

  Looking out from her room over, like, Siberia, Jane phoned Eirion on his mobile and was invited to leave voice-mail. ‘We need to talk,’ Jane said menacingly.

  She sat down on the bed, cold. Even turned up full, the radiator was like a cheap hot-water bottle the morning after. Stanner needed more money spending on it than Ben and Amber were ever likely to make, this was clear.

  It was also clear, when she’d walked in with Clancy an hour or so ago, shaking the snow off her parka, that Ben and Amber had had words. Amber was tense, Ben fizzing with anger. Ben always turned anxiety into anger — according to which equation, desperation became rage. Nathan the shooter had found that out.

  Amber had frowned. ‘Jane, this is crazy. You should not have come.’

  ‘You need me,’ Jane had said.

  But it had been Ben who’d needed her first, waiting until Amber had gone down to the kitchen before producing a folded sheet of A4 that had obviously been dried out. ‘You undoubtedly know more about the Internet than me. How do I find out where this stuff originates?’

  Jane spread the paper out on the bed. Yuk. ‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ she’d told Ben, ‘but my boyfriend might be able to find out.’

  Ben had found it drawing-pinned to the hotel sign at the bottom of the drive. It didn’t have to be at all relevant to Ben or Stanner; the area had its share of weirdos. But the Stanner board wasn’t exactly a convenient place to pin anything, and if it was a joke it coul
d have been funnier.

  i was just a kid about 15 when the case was on. i remember seeing the picture of her in the Mirror in her school uniform and it knocked me out. i had it up in my bedroom but my mother made me take it down so I stuck it up inside my locker dore at school. i have offen wondered what happened to her and what i would do if i met her. does anybody know where she is now. I have never been able to forget her.

  >>CHRIS.

  ‘Might be rubbish, but with a conference on this weekend, if someone’s trying to tell us something, I’d quite like to know what,’ Ben had said when Jane had identified it as a printout from some kind of sad, obsessive Internet chat room or message board.

  I gather Brigid is very popular in Germany. I also read in a Dutch magazine that she was living in the South of France. She is grown up now and is said to be absolutely gorgeous. *Drop dead gorgeous* ha ha. When she came out she spent some time in Italy, where she is supposed to have done two men but the police did not know who she was until she had left the country, and there was no evidence. So it looks like she’s still doing it. They can’t stop. It’s a physical need.

  >>HOWARD

  I think that is all rubbish about Brigid going abroad put around to stop us looking for her. i have it on good authority that she’s here but may have had plastic surgery. I think I would know her whatever she’d had done to her. I have been dreaming about her for about 20 years. she still makes me swet.

  >>GAVIN.

  At the bottom, it said:

  full explicit details: sign in and see what Brigid REALLY did

  Sick, or what?

  If anybody could track it down, Eirion could. If he hadn’t left for the piste.

  Jane went to the window. You could see the forestry across the valley, and Hergest Ridge, mauve against the sky. Yes, you could even see a sky, of sorts. Did this offer some hope that the snow was actually thinning?

  Mum, on the phone, had said things like I see, calmly conveying an acute sense of betrayal. This morning, over the breakfast, Jane had kept glancing at her, thinking, I ought to tell you everything. I ought to do it now. After what Gomer had revealed, it hadn’t been her easiest night’s sleep. But if she’d laid the Hattie thing on her, Mum would have seen to it that she didn’t get here tonight. She might even, on hearing about the explosion in the head, have kept her off school. Which wouldn’t have helped.