The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Pissed, most likely,’ Dexter said.

  ‘He hadn’t given it up, then?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Turning Christian?’

  ‘Christian.’ Dexter coughed and spat into the snow. ‘He never. He just said what he wanted ’em to think — Alice, and fuckin’ daft Dionne. I’ll tell you, he was a weak bastard, always gonner go wrong. Too weak to hold a job down. Not like me, Alice knew that. I was all she got, look. Me as looked out for her. Sisters got their own lives and their families up in Hereford. Laughing their tits off at Alice, all this ole church stuff. I was all she got, daft ole bitch. Couldn’t have no kids, look.’

  ‘How long you been helping at the chip shop?’

  ‘Helping? Cheeky cunt. When I’m in there, I’m running that place, look, reorganizin’. All these idle assistants, all this chitchat, we don’t need that. Get ’em served and on to the next one, don’t give ’em too many chips neither. Where them customers gonner go, they don’t like it? En’t like there’s competition. I says to ’em, these women, you do what I say, don’t gimme no stress, look, and we’ll get on. Where’s your beer?’

  ‘Must’ve left it on the table.’

  ‘No fuckin’ use there, is it, boy? Where you wanner go now?’

  ‘Ring the police?’

  ‘Waste o’ time. Cops is shit round yere. They en’t gonner look for an ole woman in this. What we’ll do, we’ll go round the ole bowling green and back up the square, see how it looks then. What’s your name, I ask you that?’

  ‘Lol.’

  ‘Kind o’ name’s that?’

  ‘A short one.’

  ‘Got a job, Lol?’

  ‘Bit of singing. Write songs.’

  ‘That a proper job?’

  ‘It is, actually.’

  ‘All right, what we’ll do, we’ll go round the bowling green, but we’ll come out by the Swan. That’s what we’ll do.’

  Somebody who expected never to be contradicted or refused, due to being asthmatic and not looking for stress.

  Lol remembered how, when he was working with Dick Lydon, the Hereford psychotherapist, Dick had this disabled client with the same attitude. You had to humour them to begin with, Dick used to say, and then, after a while, make it obvious that you were humouring them so they’d see a reflection of themselves.

  That could take all night with Dexter. It could take all night, and it still wouldn’t work. Whatever Dexter had done tonight, he was proud of himself. He kicked a lump of snow, hands punching out the pockets of his leather jacket, killing time looking for someone he knew they wouldn’t find.

  ‘What you waitin’ for?’

  ‘I’m just thinking,’ Lol said. ‘Where is Alice likely to have gone?’

  ‘Coulder gone back home by now, for all I knows.’

  ‘We’d have seen her. Unless she… We haven’t checked out the orchards at the back of the bungalow, have we? There’s a path through the orchards. Where people walk their dogs?’

  ‘Alice didn’t have no dog, never went for no walks.’

  Past tense. Always past tense.

  ‘No,’ Lol said, ‘but—’

  ‘I said her never went for no fuckin’ walks.’

  Lol tightened up inside. Dexter didn’t want him checking out that footpath.

  ‘It’s, er… also a short cut to the church, isn’t it? And she was a church cleaner. The head cleaner. Be the quickest way for her to go.’

  ‘Not at bloody night.’

  ‘As head cleaner, she’d probably have keys. If she was very cut up about what happened, she might’ve got it into her head to go and… offer up a prayer?’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘Like you said, they do strange things, old people, don’t they?’

  The squeak of fists clenching in leather gloves.

  Lol turned into the tracks they’d made, back up towards the square. ‘Tell you what, if you go and check round the old bowling green, like you said, and I’ll have a walk up to the church… Then I’ll follow the footpath back the other way. You won’t need the torch, will you?’

  He wiped the new snow off his glasses and walked off.

  After a few seconds, he was aware of Dexter following him. Not altogether a pleasant sensation.

  ‘Mrs Watkins.’ Merrily had been looking for Jane and he’d come down the main stairs, a man with a laptop and black-framed glasses. ‘Matthew Hawksley. I suspect we may have exchanged e-mails.’

  ‘Yes. I believe we did. Sorry about that. I just wanted to know what my daughter was getting into.’

  ‘She isn’t getting into anything. We try not to involve anybody under the age of twenty-one.’

  ‘Well, that’s… good.’

  ‘Anyway, we’re glad to have you with us,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Now that sounds ominous.’

  ‘This place is ominous,’ Matthew said. ‘What’s been happening tonight only underlines it.’

  ‘A murder can make a children’s playground seem ominous.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘do they know it’s murder?’

  ‘It’s a lot of manpower for a suicide, Matthew.’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I know how the clergy, in general, feel about spiritism, so I won’t bend your ear on that, but — have you got a couple of minutes?’

  ‘Maybe hours. I don’t think I’m going to get home tonight.’

  ‘You’re probably right. Poor you. Look, I’d hate to say this in front of Ben Foley, but my feeling is that this place — this house, this hotel — should never have been built.’

  ‘No, best not to say that in front of Ben.’

  ‘Not built here, is what I mean. Not as if it was erected on the site of a former dwelling; there never was a house here.’

  ‘On Stanner Rocks?’

  ‘I’d probably argue that this site has a degree of psychic instability.’

  ‘Jane would say pagan magic, and she’d put it down to the Border. Would that be in line with your thinking?’

  Matthew grimaced. ‘What you had was an obscenely rich family moving to a generally poor area. Perhaps they were warned, perhaps not. They were, after all, bringing wealth and employment.’

  ‘And modern science to an area riddled with primitive superstition?’

  ‘Spiritism.’ Matthew smiled ruefully. ‘I wish we had a better word for it. I’d be the first to agree that very few of the claims made by people like Conan Doyle have been substantiated. In fact we’re no further forward now than we were then — except that we’re less susceptible to frauds.’

  ‘Wouldn’t say that necessarily.’

  ‘All right’ — he put up his hands — ‘let’s not go down that road. Let’s get back to geophysics. I mean, look around… Even on a simple structural level, it doesn’t feel right — damp coming through everywhere, woodwork rotting. I suspect the heating will never be adequate. Standing here, now, it’s almost as if we’re standing on the bare rock. Am I telling you things you already know?’

  ‘You mean people didn’t live here until we had an urban, industrialized society that believed man was destined to have full dominion over the natural world — i.e. the Victorians?’

  ‘Bottom line is, Conan Doyle notwithstanding, Foley’s going to go bankrupt here in no time at all, and he knows it. When I first heard that somebody had taken a dive off Stanner Rocks, I half thought it was going to be him. Hello—’

  Merrily turned to follow his gaze. DS Mumford had come in from the car park and was standing just inside the entrance, bulky as a lagged cistern in one of those long, dark overcoats on which snow appeared to evaporate. Bliss appeared in the doorway of his incident room. Mumford nodded.

  Matthew said, ‘I don’t know much about your side of things, but Beth Pollen tells me there’s something you can do called an Exorcism of Place. Cleanses a place of bad vibes, the residue of unfortunate acts. Makes it a more amenable place to live and work.’

  ‘It’s not feng shui, Matthew.’

 
‘I didn’t—’

  ‘Has anyone asked you to mention this?’

  ‘I’m… just sounding you out, Reverend. But I think my colleagues — Beth, anyway — are getting a little nervous. The TV producer’s arrived and he and Foley are intent on filming something tonight, as originally planned.’

  ‘With all this?’

  ‘With the police action as background. Sexy telly.’

  Two uniformed police were opening up both swing doors to the porch and the tall detective who’d connected Merrily with Annie Howe moved to a vantage point near the unlit Christmas tree.

  ‘Are they bringing something in?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘Someone, I’d guess.’

  She heard doors opening behind her, sensed more people standing there. The electric current passing through the lobby could have relit the tree and doubled the candlepower of the chandelier. Everyone tensed for that first glimpse of Brigid Parsons. Even, presumably, the people who already knew her as Natalie Craven.

  ‘Given what’s happening, Beth now feels apprehensive about what we’d originally planned,’ Matthew said. ‘I think she’d be happier if there was a spiritual dimension to it.’

  ‘Making it even sexier telly, right?’

  Headlamps speared through the porch and then veered away — a vehicle stopping directly outside the doors. The two policemen moved to either side of the entrance. Mumford and a stocky policewoman in a dark blue jersey waited by the reception desk.

  Presently, five people came in through the porch: two uniforms, two detectives, one woman.

  ‘We appreciate you can’t just exorcise a place willy-nilly. You’d need a focus,’ Matthew said.

  For just a moment, from about ten feet away, the gaze of the killer, Brigid Parsons, met Merrily’s. The eyes were brown and candid. What had she expected — cold, bleak, washed clean of humanity? Brigid was wearing a fleece-lined light-blue waterproof jacket hanging open over a dark shirt and jeans. Her head was held high, the dense dark brown hair falling back. As if she was finally ready to shed the years of dyes and deception.

  Matthew said, ‘We were thinking that the late Hattie Chancery might fit the agenda.’

  43

  Tough Ole Bat

  Merrily found Gomer in his truck, parked on the edge of the forecourt where the snow was churned up like cold custard. She’d climbed in next to him just as he finished talking to Danny on his old car-phone.

  ‘How’s Jeremy taking it?’

  Gomer got out his ciggy tin, squinted at it, then put it back in a pocket of his scarred old bomber jacket.

  ‘When things is bad, Jeremy just closes down, like he’s been unplugged.’

  ‘Where are they now, Gomer?’

  ‘Back at The Nant.’

  Through the windscreen, Merrily watched a policeman come out of the porch and look up at the flaking sky. The snow had become sporadic again, as if the weather was playing with them. One of the witch’s-hat towers was wreathed in a pinkish vapour.

  ‘And Clancy?’

  ‘Still at Greta’s, with a woman cop. Cliff Morgan, he reckoned they’d likely bring her yere tomorrow, give ’em some time together, ’fore her mam’s taken to Hereford. Don’t look like that’s gonner happen till it gets light and they clears the roads. Any chance her’ll walk away from this, vicar? Light sentence? If her had good reason? Not a nice feller, Sebbie.’

  Merrily shivered inside Jane’s worn duffel coat, tightened her scarf. Clearly Gomer didn’t yet know that this was Brigid Parsons and the chances of her getting out of prison ever this time were remote.

  ‘Cops know her’s Hattie’s granddaughter, vicar?’

  ‘I think they’d regard that as a closed case.’

  The curtains in the hotel lounge had been drawn now, for the interrogation of the prime suspect. A shadow rose against them: Bliss throwing up his arms in probable frustration, but it looked like he was dancing.

  ‘Nothin’ happens round yere’s ever closed. You knows that,’ Gomer said.

  The church’s main door was locked, and there was nothing in the stone porch apart from the side benches, the parish notice-board and a rack of leaflets.

  ‘Satisfied?’ Dexter said.

  Lol couldn’t see Dexter, but the density of him made the stone porch feel claustrophobic. He bounced the torch beam around one last time.

  ‘You’re a funny bugger, Lol. What’s she to you?’

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Less it gets you brownie points with the vicar. Gets you into her, whatsit, cassock.’

  ‘That must be it, then,’ Lol said tightly.

  He wanted to smash the torch into Dexter’s face. Instead, he switched it off so that Dexter couldn’t see him thinking. When Dexter had appeared at the scullery window, he’d come across the lawn from the orchard, and then gone back the same way, which would have brought him into the churchyard. Dexter had been this way before.

  Lol looked out, down the churchyard path and found that he couldn’t see the lychgate. Normally it would be outlined in gold, from the lantern on the perimeter wall.

  The lantern had gone out. Lol bent and peered through where the gate would be. Usually, you would see the lamps on the square and the partly floodlit profile of the Black Swan.

  ‘Power’s gone.’

  ‘Big surprise,’ Dexter said.

  He was right; it was bound to happen. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes, but more often three or four hours. And occasionally, in weather like this, two or three days.

  Lol switched on the torch. ‘Just hope the phone line’s still up. You want to check that footpath, through the orchard, or call the police now?’

  ‘En’t your problem. You might as well go home. I’ll call ’em from the bungalow, look.’

  ‘OK.’ Lol would call them, as soon as he got back to the vicarage. ‘Well… I hope she’s all right.’

  ‘Tough ole bat,’ Dexter said. ‘Hey—’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Give the vicar one for me.’ Dexter sniggered.

  ‘’Night, Dexter.’ Lol walked back into the churchyard. The snow had slowed again, or maybe the loss of light just made it seem that way.

  ‘Hold on — wrong way, boy.’

  ‘I’ll go through the orchard, into the vicarage garden.’

  ‘Don’t wanner do that this time o’ night. Bloody dangerous, look, all this—’

  ‘Done it loads of times. And I can check the other door, side of the church, on the way. You never know, do you?’

  And now he did. He moved as quickly as he could through the untrodden snow, listening for the sound of Dexter crunching after him, like before, but it didn’t come.

  He adjusted the head of the torch to issue a wide beam, and the graves appeared out of the snow, like the stumps of a shorn forest, all the unsightly bits — the borders and the gravel beds, the pots of long-dead flowers — submerged.

  The path, too, had vanished, and he had to guess his way through the wider gaps between graves and tombs overhung by the snow-bent branches of elderly apple trees.

  He stopped when he heard the breathing.

  Coming from somewhere in front of him, and it was very loud, theatrically loud and eerie — vampire breathing. Something alive among the graves.

  Dexter. Dexter had done a circuit of the church and was waiting for him and letting him know. He’d lied to Dexter — been this way no more than once or twice, in high summer. He turned, and his foot stabbed into a squat gravestone, mostly buried. He pulled back in pain, shining the torch directly ahead of him, the beam hitting a wall of white, an impassable snowbank. Swinging the torch to the right he found one of the old toppled tombs, its cracks and cavities compacted with snow.

  And what looked like a collapsed, eroded stone angel, breathing.

  Antony Largo was in his denims and he looked invigorated and younger than Jane remembered him, and more cheerful. Pacing the kitchen, sizing things up. The stubble on his face was almost a beard now, and made his gri
n seem bigger and whiter.

  ‘And how were you received, Matt?’

  Matthew Hawksley considered. ‘She was polite, courteous… but I’m not holding my breath.’

  ‘She won’t go near it,’ Jane said. ‘Even a minor exorcism takes a lot of preparation — days, sometimes. They don’t go into it without long discussions with like everybody. In this case, she’d need the green light from the Bishop.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Antony said philosophically. ‘If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen.’

  But Jane knew that he wouldn’t give up after all the trouble he’d taken to get here. After talking to her on the phone, he’d called up a guy who ran a film-unit resources business — called him up at home in the middle of the night and pestered him for something heavy and all-terrain within the hour. Whatever kind of money Antony had been waving around had brought him this monster Shogun, and then he’d done the journey the hard way, blasting up from London, through Gloucester and down to Ross. White-hellraiser.

  ‘Extremely nasty in places, but I just plugged on. Miles tae go before I sleep.’ He’d grinned. ‘Sleep? When I fetched up here, it was like I was already there — very dreamlike. Damn cops wouldnae even let me in at first.’

  ‘They thought you were a journalist,’ Ben had said, glancing at Amber, who was back at the stove, making soup and resenting all these people in her kitchen. ‘I think we’ll have to play all this by ear.’

  Seeing Natalie brought in for questioning had unnerved Ben. Jane and Amber had agreed not to discuss what they’d learned from Beth Pollen, if only because Antony was back. OK, Women of the Midnight was TV history now, but if he found out Natalie’s real identity, nothing would stand in his way, like nothing.

  The contemporary dynamic. The now drama.

  ‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ Ben said, ‘but I’m just hoping this is some awful, awful mistake.’

  ‘Well,’ Antony said, ‘whoever the hell this Sebastian Dacre was, he’s given us a buzz we cannot ignore.’

  ‘Antony, everybody’s knackered, everybody’s fractious, everybody’s upset…’