The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  ‘OK.’ Antony stepped out. ‘For anyone in doubt, here’s the situation. The police tell me that someone is likely to be charged with murder sometime today. The whole thing then becomes no-screen until after the trial. If I’m any judge of anything, I would see this going out at the earliest possible opportunity after sentencing. In other words, you can all say what the hell you like.’

  Beth Pollen said, ‘And how do the police feel about us doing this now?’

  Antony grinned, kind of piratical in the candlelight. ‘If I may quote the Senior Investigating Officer: “Anything that keeps these weirdo bastards out of my hair for a couple of hours is perfectly fine by me.” ’

  Nobody laughed.

  ‘As long we understand where we are,’ Ben said. ‘I, um, was also given the impression that Mrs Watkins would be joining us. Is that—?’

  ‘I’m here, Mr Foley.’

  Mum was sitting on the steps like some sort of elf. Jane hadn’t even noticed her. Instinctively, she switched on her camera.

  ‘Super.’ Matthew Hawksley stood up, pulling out another stool.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Mum said. ‘I’m not staying. I mean, very pretty and everything, but I’m sorry, I really wouldn’t feel too happy about conducting a religious ceremony in, erm’ — she waved a hand at the candles — ‘Titania’s boudoir?’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ Beth Pollen said, ‘but we were very firmly given the impression—’

  ‘I’m not backing out,’ Mum said. ‘I’m just not doing it down here.’

  Jane noticed Alistair Hardy straightening up on his stool, looking disturbed.

  Mum smiled. ‘Nor in Hattie Chancery’s room. I, erm… I thought we might use the dining room. If that’s OK. It’s a bit cold, but…’

  ‘Mrs Watkins…’ Antony abandoned his camera. ‘Not only is it, as you so perceptively noted, a bit too cold, but it has absolutely no bloody atmosphere either.’

  ‘It’s got a stained-glass window.’

  ‘Which, like all stained-glass windows, doesnae function as intended at night.’

  Mum stood up, shrugging. ‘I’m sorry, that… that’s really not my problem.’

  Antony Largo looked furious. Deep in the shadows, and in spite of Natalie and Jeremy and the whole depressing situation, Jane momentarily grinned.

  ‘Carry on here, by all means,’ Mum said, ‘but if you want to join me… say, twenty minutes?’

  Had this been an authentic castle or even a manor house, there would have been a chapel. The dining room, with its secular stained glass, was no substitute; the stained-glass window was thick as a boarded barn door, and the air felt milky and astringent. Worst of all, when Merrily knelt on the thin carpet and prayed, it was like tossing stones down a bottomless well.

  But at least it was empty and it was dark.

  She said the Lord’s Prayer and St Patrick’s Breastplate. She prayed for Lol, having tried the number again and found it continuously engaged and then, when it started ringing again, had no answer. Another bottomless well.

  Blank minutes passed. She stood up, half-relieved, when the door opened and Jane slid in and waited there in silhouette, hands behind her back, ten years old again.

  ‘You offended Antony.’

  ‘I suppose that’s going to screw us for getting DIY SOS into the vicarage,’ Merrily said wearily.

  ‘This is Channel Four.’

  ‘I know. And I don’t think I want to be on TV again.’

  ‘You could say a flat no to Antony.’

  ‘I don’t think we’d have time for the row that would cause.’

  ‘Time?’

  The time is nearly up.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Jane asked.

  ‘To be honest, flower, I don’t really want you here at all, but if you’ve got to stay, sure, carry on with the camerawork.’

  ‘I mean, do you want me to do anything?’

  ‘Well, you could see if you could find me a jar, preferably one that hasn’t had alcohol in it, and fill it with water.’

  ‘You’re going to bless it?’

  ‘Uh-huh. But first, if you could give me a hand with these tables…’

  They put on the lights and pushed two of the dining tables together under the stained-glass window. With the ceiling lights on, the glass was the colour of dried mud.

  ‘Why here?’ Jane asked. ‘Why this room?’

  ‘Oh, well, it’s kind of neutral, isn’t it? It’s a big open space, no crannies, no cupboards. Unlike the kitchen. Also, the kitchen’s too close to Stanner Rocks. I haven’t seen it in daylight, but I get the feeling the kitchen’s dominated by the rocks.’

  ‘Isn’t that the point?’

  ‘Erm…’

  ‘Mum, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Listen, I rang this guy who… knows something about the history of this place.’

  ‘At this time in the morning?’

  ‘I apologized. Basically, he told me that what the Chancerys did — when they invited Conan Doyle — might not have been a simple re-enactment of the Vaughan exorcism. They… well, obviously, they had this medium there, so they might have been trying to communicate with Vaughan… in the spirit of the new — you know — secular science of spiritualism. Like, after all, there was nothing to suggest Thomas Vaughan was a bad guy. I mean, did he even need exorcising in the first place?’

  ‘But why do it here? This is not Hergest Court, is it? Vaughan was never here.’

  ‘He said ask Beth Pollen.’

  Merrily thought of Brigid. ‘Everybody says that.’

  Frannie Bliss slipped in through the connecting door from the lounge. He stood there, taking in the rearrangement: the two candlesticks on the dining table, the holy water in a new decanter.

  ‘Catholics allowed?’

  ‘How do Catholics feel about spiritualism, Frannie?’

  Bliss waggled a hand, conveying this way, that way.

  ‘You believe in it?’

  ‘Not when I’m on duty. Merrily, I accept that this is a private establishment that’s been good enough to accommodate the police and we’re in no position to question whatever else might be taking place here as long as it’s legal… but your selection of this particular room…’

  ‘Too close?’

  ‘Frankly, I wondered if the proximity of our… guest might in some way have conditioned your choice of venue.’

  ‘If you can find a room in this place that looks more like a church—’

  ‘All right. Just… we’re not talking about an actual exorcism, are we?’

  ‘It’s a word that functions on several levels.’

  ‘Aw, shit, Merrily, you know what I’m asking. Looking at it from the angle that the law will not — to Brigid’s advantage, I should emphasize — allow me to look at it, we have a number of close parallels here with the grandmother of the suspect. Now if, during the course of your activities here, my prisoner’s eyes happen to turn blood red…’

  ‘If only we had Annie Howe in charge,’ Merrily said. ‘Annie Howe simply would not believe that could happen.’

  ‘So what is going to happen?’

  Merrily perched on the edge of one of the dining tables, now pushed back against the walls, while the chairs had been arranged in a semicircle around the makeshift altar. A little like Sunday nights in Ledwardine Church.

  ‘Well… the original plan by the White Company and Ben Foley appeared to be to try and contact whatever remains of Conan Doyle to find out if he really did get the inspiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles from the Welsh Border, rather than from Dartmoor. I wouldn’t mind starting with that.’

  ‘You’re attending a seance?’

  ‘It’ll be an experience.’

  ‘I don’t like this. Spiritually, you’ve always been… conservative?’

  ‘Lack of confidence, Frannie. As a teenager, I used to wear Goth frocks and black lipstick.’

  ‘You’re worried about something. You’re nervous. W
hen you’re flip, you’re nervous, I’ve noticed it before.’

  ‘Detectives,’ Merrily said. ‘Always got to throw it in your face.’

  When she walked back into the lobby, Jeremy Berrows was sitting in the chair by reception, with his scarf around his neck, staring at the lounge door like a dog outside his master’s wake.

  Was anyone better placed to hold up a small candle into the heart of the darkness? When Merrily had talked to him, at The Nant, Jeremy had obviously been guarded, fearing the worst. But now the worst had happened.

  Nothing to lose.

  Cheap phrase, never more true.

  ‘The thing is, Jeremy, we’re all from Off.’ She’d pulled up a chair next to his. ‘It’s none of our business, really, and yet all the problems seem to have been caused by incomers who couldn’t leave anything alone.’

  ‘Incomers moved out, wouldn’t be nobody left at all,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Except you.’

  Jeremy smiled probably the bleakest smile that Merrily had ever seen on anyone living. It was as if his suicide had been, in essence, a success. She had a stark image of him one day, years hence, being found dead by the postman or the feed dealer, half-mummified beside the ashes of his fire. A shell, a husk; it looked as if the process had already begun.

  The image arrived so suddenly that it was as if he’d passed it to her. She was suddenly desperate to help him, to pull at least one person from the mire of myth and madness.

  ‘Jeremy, they want me to try and… deal with whatever came through Hattie Chancery. To Paula, to Brigid…’

  He looked at her. ‘They knows?’

  ‘Not all of them. Do you believe it came from Hattie Chancery?’

  ‘Come through her, mabbe.’

  ‘So where does it come from? How far back does it go?’

  ‘Where’s all evil come from?’

  ‘For instance — have you ever seen the Hound?’

  He glanced back at the lounge door. ‘Just a shadow. A few folk seen him, time to time. It don’t mean nothin’ — no death, no disaster.’

  ‘But if you were a Vaughan, in the old days…’

  ‘So they reckoned.’

  ‘What about now? Is there someone it still means something to? Who, if they saw it, would feel there was reason to be afraid?’

  Jeremy swallowed. ‘Dacre. The Chancerys.’

  ‘It came to mean the same to the Chancerys, the Dacres, as it did to the Vaughans?’

  Jeremy loosened his scarf a little. ‘Sebbie Dacre’s ole lady — Margery, her once come over to our place, hell of a state — my mam told me this, I was n’more’n a babby at the time. Margery reckoned her seen it, twice. Next thing, Paula’s died.’

  ‘Margery connected that with the Hound?’

  ‘Sure to. Her… said better all round if the child died, too.’

  ‘She was scared of something being passed on?’

  Jeremy nodded, swallowed.

  ‘But it didn’t affect Margery… did it?’

  ‘Her never hurt nobody far’s I know. But Paula was the oldest, see.’

  ‘But Margery believed she’d seen the Hound. And Sebbie…?’

  ‘Rumours. Zelda Morgan, one of his… lady friends, reckoned he seen some’ing made him real upset. And then he hires these boys from down Wales.’

  ‘He didn’t really think they’d bring him the Hound — dead, like in the novel?’

  ‘Don’t reckon he seen hisself partin’ with seven grand, that’s what you means.’

  ‘But he kept sending the shooters up to Stanner… and across your land. And down to The Nant, of course. Because of—’

  ‘Them’s the two places Nat’lie was.’

  ‘He connected the Hound with her? He knew who she was?’

  ‘I don’t reckon he knowed for sure. But… what was a woman that lovely doing with the likes of me? He wasn’t daft. He was mad, but he wasn’t daft. And I reckon he knowed the time was nearly up.’

  ‘The lease.’

  ‘Sure t’be.’

  ‘And he wanted the ground. The idea of someone else occupying a farm right in the middle of his… this offended him. So possibly this was some kind of crude threat, maybe aimed at Brigid. Though you’d have thought it would have made him the very last person she’d want to sell to.’

  ‘Well…’ A sheen of sweat on Jeremy’s forehead now. ‘I think he reckoned it was coming off The Nant, see. Paula’s land.’

  ‘The Hound?’

  ‘Whether he was really seein’ some’ing out there, or he seen some’ing that wasn’t outside of his mind…’

  ‘Either way, part of him would believe a death was coming.’

  ‘Likely.’

  ‘His own?’

  Jeremy looked down at the table. ‘Or hers. It was him or her, I reckon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thing is, see,’ Jeremy said, ‘he always figured he was out on the edge anyway, so he’d go around creatin’… situations. Trouble. And he’d get away with it — magistrate, Country Landowners. All this Countryside Alliance protest stuff — war in the fields and the woods, and the ole gentry right there in the middle of it, defendin’ what’s theirs. If there was anybody exac’ly like Hattie Chancery, my mam used to say, it was Sebbie — the huntin’, the booze… he din’t care. Never got nicked for drink-drivin’ — cops liked him, their kind of magistrate: no mercy, no sob-stories, send ’em down, put ’em away. Robber baron, Danny calls him.’

  ‘But when Brigid—’

  ‘When Big Weale, the lawyer, died and Sebbie found out who really owned The Nant, that was when he got real paranoid. And the time was nearly up, he knowed that, but he couldn’t say he knowed. What he’d do, way he was… he’d cause trouble, set up dangerous situations just to see what come out of it. Like them Welshies — troublemakers, off their patch, offer of big money. Explosive situation. Mabbe he figured somebody was gonner get killed.’

  ‘Then there’d have been a death?’

  ‘I dunno. He weren’t right in the bloody head. Bad…’

  ‘Bad blood?’

  Jeremy’s head went down into his hands.

  ‘So when Natalie came back…’

  ‘When her come back…’ He looked up, through his fingers, really sweating now. ‘… Half of me’s the happiest man there ever could be in Kington. Other half’s saying, Make her go away… it’ll all end bad. Paula tried to kill Margery, when they was little. Now Paula’s daughter’s back…’

  ‘Did you know that he was blackmailing her?’ Merrily put a hand on his arm. ‘And was that why you decided to… take yourself out of the situation. Take away the only reason Brigid had for staying. You were… prepared to sacrifice yourself, in the hope that she’d come through?’

  Jeremy looked to either side, back at the lounge door, anywhere but at Merrily. She was profoundly unnerved. It was terrifying how deep all this went. Rural isolation, paranoia. And a curse, like a virus in the blood.

  ‘And thinking that…’ She coughed, her voice so hoarse that it had nearly gone. ‘Thinking you would be the death?’

  ‘En’t no way…’ He started shaking his head, talking at the same time. ‘En’t no way out o’ this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause it goes too far back. It’s built up.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘To the Vaughans,’ Jeremy said. ‘They’re all Vaughans.’

  48

  Apocryphal

  Danny parked the tractor on the square — not that you could see where the road ended and the square began. It had been a close thing whether they’d have enough diesel to make it, the way they’d run the ole tractor getting here.

  ‘Power’s off everywhere,’ Gomer said, like it needed saying. It had been weird, Danny thought, the way Ledwardine had suddenly just appeared in the headlights, no warning, black and white buildings in a black and white night.

  ‘That why the vicar couldn’t get through on the phone, you reckon?’

  ‘Makes
no difference to the phones, do it?’

  Danny and Gomer stepped down from the tractor into the thick snow. It had stopped falling now, like the sky had worn itself out.

  ‘Behind there.’ Gomer pointed to a hedge like a white wall, just down from the church.

  ‘You ever have anything to do with this Dexter Harris, Gomer?’

  ‘Big feller in the chip shop some nights, but he never got much to say and word’s gone round he’s tight with his chips so, if he’s there, I goes home and makes a sandwich instead.’

  ‘Makes sense.’ Danny looked up at the windows of the vicarage, all dark except for a small glow far back in one of the upstairs rooms. ‘We putting this off?’

  Without lights, what you could see of the rest of the village looked like a photo negative.

  ‘Don’t feel right, do it?’ Gomer switched on the lambing lamp.

  Dr Bell leaned away from the lamplight, his head pitched at an angle, as if he was listening to something that no one else could hear.

  ‘Aye.’ He nodded, his smile wry. ‘He does urge me to point out that although he and I, at various times, both sought release and relaxation on the grouse moors of Arran, in later life he developed something of a conscience about such pursuits and came to deplore, in particular, foxhunting.’

  At the other side of the table, Matthew Hawksley half turned, to acknowledge the factual truth of this for the rest of them, and then faced the doctor again.

  ‘Joe, did he ever shoot in this area? On the Radnorshire moors, for instance?’

  Dr Bell took in two long and reedy breaths, his fingers steepled.

  ‘He… thinks… not.’

  His voice was high and precise, and scalpel-sharp. Posh Scots, Jane thought, was like posh Welsh — explicit in its enunciation and full of this clipped authority. It was clear that Matthew must have worked with him a few times before to get away with calling him Joe.