The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘No... look...’ Merrily stood up. ‘I’m really, really happy for her and for you, and it does seem like a miracle. But the body’s a wonderful thing, and sometimes... I’d just be really glad if you didn’t say too much about that aspect of it, for the moment. For the time being. Until—’

  Until when, exactly?

  ‘We’ll go now,’ Jim said.

  ‘You haven’t had your tea. I’m sorry...’

  ‘We never wanted to embarrass you, Merrily,’ Brenda said.

  Most weeks, Lol would pull the property section out of Prof’s Hereford Times and toss it on the pile of papers they kept for lighting the stoves.

  Wood-burners in a recording studio? Prof had been unsure about this, but the punters liked it. When the sound of a log collapsing into ash had filtered like a sigh into the mix of the final acoustic song that the guitar legend Tom Storey had recorded here last week, Tom had refused to lose it. Tom, who’d left yesterday, was superstitious about these things.

  Tonight, Prof would be working in here, tinkering with Tom’s music perhaps until dawn. About eight p.m., Lol went out to the wood-shelter and packed a pile of blocks into a big basket, brought the basket into the stable that now housed the studio and bent to build a fire in the second stove.

  Sometimes his work here amounted to little more than domestic chores and working on his own material. Prof didn’t seem to mind that, but Lol did.

  He was crumpling the property pages to take the kindling when he noticed a small photograph of a tiny, tilting house with a white door. He stood up and carried the paper to the light over the mixing desk.

  LEDWARDINE

  Church Street – exquisite small, terraced

  house, Grade Two listed, close to the centre

  of this sought-after village. Beamed

  living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and

  bathroom. Open green area and orchards

  to rear. Must be viewed.

  He stood for a while by the mixing desk, then he tore out the page, folded it and pushed it into a back pocket of his jeans. While he was packing the rest of the property section into the stove and adding twigs, he saw himself walking in through that white door. Draped over the post at the foot of the stairs was an old woollen poncho, then you went through into the low-beamed parlour. You sat down at Lucy’s desk in the window overlooking Church Street, with two lamps switched on. You heard a movement, looked over your shoulder and saw Jane Watkins, fifteen, standing in the doorway, and Jane said, desolately, I thought she would be here. I really didn’t think she’d left us for ever.

  Lucy Devenish: honorary aunt to Jane, mentor to Lol. Lucy had introduced him to the inspirational seventeenth-century Herefordshire poet, Thomas Traherne, and, indirectly, to Jane’s mother, the Rev. Watkins.

  Lucy in her poncho, face like an old Red Indian, voice like a duchess: You have to learn to open up. Let the world flow into you again.

  He could still see Jane standing in the doorway that night at Lucy’s – Lucy not yet buried after dying in the road, hit and run. Jane standing in the doorway, confused, and a pink moon hanging outside. Jane talking about her mother: She does like you. I can tell. I think, the way things turned out, you probably did the best thing not actually sleeping with her. It will stand you in good stead.

  Getting to sleep with Merrily had taken more than a year. A year in which Lol had turned away from music, taken a course in psychotherapy and then turned away in disgust from psychotherapy and gone back to the music.

  But neither he nor Merrily was all that young any more. They lived over half an hour apart and their lives were very different, but every day when he didn’t see her seemed like a wasted day, and there was nothing like the music business for teaching you about passing time.

  Lol struck a match and put it to the paper. Ledwardine. He’d been living there when they’d first met, but circumstances had moved him away. Now he wanted to go back. He wanted that house and everything it once had promised.

  When the Prossers had gone, Merrily lit a cigarette, feeling leaden and ungracious. She was thinking, miserably, about healing.

  Thinking about the corrupted Bible Belt evangelism of the former Radnor Valley minister, Father Nick Ellis. About an event called the Big Bible Fest she’d attended with a crowd of other students at theological college, where there’d been speaking in tongues and calls to the disabled to have faith and rise up out of those wheelchairs. And if they didn’t rise up then their faith wasn’t strong enough. Tough.

  She thought about a girl called Heather Redfern – seventeen, Jane’s age – who, despite prayers in at least six churches, had died of leukaemia less than a month after leading a twenty-mile sponsored walk around the black and white villages of North Herefordshire to raise money for Macmillan nurses.

  And she thought about Ann-Marie Herdman – dizzy, superficial, often seen swaying across the square at one a.m., towing some bloke up to the flat over the Eight till Late. Some bloke who, in the morning, she probably wouldn’t even recognize. Ann-Marie: a woman for whom the church gate was just a convenient place to wait for your lift into Hereford.

  Healing was like the bloody National Lottery; the good guys rarely hit the jackpot.

  Merrily stood up and went, without thinking, into the scullery. Because what you did now, you phoned your spiritual director.

  Or you would do that, if your spiritual director wasn’t wrestling with his own crisis in a place far away where no mobile phones were permitted – a primitive monastic community, not in the mid-Wales wilderness but on a concrete estate south of Manchester, where the police would raid flats and find guns, a place Huw Owen described as like an open wound turning septic. More suited to his condition, he said, than bare hills safe and sanitized by wind and rain.

  Huw was running hard from his all-too-human emotions. He’d lost a woman, the love of his mid-life, because of a man of unfathomable evil, and the all-too-human part of Huw had sought closure through revenge. And, although – maybe because – this man was dead, it hadn’t happened; there had been no closure, and Huw was terrified that his faith wasn’t sufficient to take him beyond that.

  Merrily sat down at the desk, glimpsing a dispiriting image of her own faith as a small, nutlike core inside a protective shell: too small, too shrivelled, to absorb the concept of miracles.

  Jane rang from the hotel, just before ten. The same Jane who should have been home by now.

  ‘Erm, I told Gomer I wouldn’t need a lift back tonight, OK?’

  ‘I see,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Don’t be like that. There’s no problem about going straight to school from here in the morning. As it happens, I’ve got the clobber in my case.’

  ‘How prescient of you, flower.’

  ‘It’s as well to be prepared, you’re always saying that. It looked like snow earlier. It comes down heavily up here, when it starts.’

  ‘Being at least seven miles closer to the Arctic Circle.’

  Jane’s weekend job had altered the format of both their lives. It was good that she had a job, not so good that it involved overnights on Saturdays, because all they had left, then, was Sunday, Merrily’s Working Day. Which left Sunday night, and now that was gone, too.

  And it was the fact that Jane was working in a hotel and spending nights there. This was really stupid, but Merrily kept thinking about Donna Furlowe, daughter of the woman Huw Owen had loved. At Jane’s age, maybe a little older, Donna had been working at a hotel – holiday job – and had gone missing and been found murdered, possibly one of the Cromwell Street killings. Of course that was in Gloucestershire and this was on the edge of Herefordshire, where it hardened into Wales. It wasn’t even a coincidence, just paranoia.

  ‘You all right, Mum?’

  ‘Why do you want to stay there?’ It came out sharper than she’d intended. ‘Sorry. Do they want you to stay?’

  ‘They could use the extra help, yeah.’

  ‘Mmm.’ It was wise, in this kind of situatio
n, not to ask too many questions, to convey the illusion of trust.

  ‘Of course, if you’re lonely,’ Jane said insouciantly, ‘you could always give Lol a ring.’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘Oh no, it’s Sunday, isn’t it? Mustn’t risk having a man seen sneaking into the vicarage... on a Sunday. And not leaving until – wooooh – Monday.’

  Merrily said nothing.

  ‘When are you two going to, like, grow up?’ Jane said.

  2

  Game Afoot

  ‘AND LEFT HER there... her lifeblood oozing into the rug.’

  Pausing for a moment, lean and elegant in his black suit, he stared right through the faces watching him out of the shadows. The table lamp with the frosted globe put shards of ice into his eyes. ‘Oh my God,’ a woman whispered.

  Jane was thinking, Grown people.

  Now he was spinning back, sighting down his nose at the man in the wing-backed, brocaded chair. And the man was shifting uncomfortably. And the stiff white cuffs were chafing Jane’s wrists.

  ‘... And then you crept up to your room and waited until the entire household was silent. What time would that have been? Midnight? A quarter-past? Yes, let us say a quarter-past – twelve-seventeen being the precise time of the full moon... which I suspect would appeal to your sense of drama.’

  With the log fire down to embers, the globe-shaded oil lamp was the only light in the drawing room, more shiveringly alive than electricity, spraying complex shadows up the oak panels. Jane dropped her resistance. She was part of the whole scam now, anyway.

  ‘Piffle,’ said the man in the wing-backed chair.

  ‘Oh, I think not, Major. I think that, barely half an hour after the murder, you crept back down the stairs and into the study, where you began to overturn chairs and pull out drawers, making as much noise as you possibly could. Finally, with the handle of your stick, you smashed not one, but two windows, in swift succession, so that the sound might be mistaken for a single impact.’

  ‘Sir, your imagination is, I would suggest, even more hysterical than your abominable fiddle-playing.’

  A thin hand disdainfully flicked away the insult. ‘And then you moved silently, up the back stairs this time, and immediately re-emerged onto the main landing, dragging on your dressing gown, shouting and spluttering.’

  Jane remembered it well. It had been seriously startling. She must have been in bed about twenty minutes and was half asleep when this huge roar went up. Who’s there? Who’s making all that damn noise? What the hell’s going on?

  When she’d grabbed at the switch of the bedside lamp, it hadn’t come on. And then, when she got out of bed, she’d found that the ceiling light wouldn’t work either. She’d gone to open the door but remembered, just in time: Never be seen outside your room in your normal clothes, no matter what happens. Anyhow, her jeans and stuff were in the case under the bed, so she’d thrown on the awful, stiff black dress – Edwardian maid’s standard issue – before venturing out into the cold and musty darkness of the upper landing, flicking switches to find that none of the electric lights was functioning. Feeling her way to the top of the stairs under this eerie green glow from the smoke alarm, peering down to see most of the guests stumbling onto the main landing which was dim and full of shadows but a little brighter than upstairs because it was lit by – wow, cool – an incandescent thimble on a bracket. She’d noticed several of these gas mantles around the place but never imagined that they might actually work. This was like totally disorientating, a time-shift, a sliding century. She recalled a woman saying faintly, Is this real?

  ‘You roused the entire household, Major.’ A raised forefinger. The Major tried to rise but fell back into the wings of the chair. ‘But you made very sure that you would be the first one to re-enter the study – this sombre room of death where poor Lady Hartland lay cooling in her own congealing blood. And you had to be the first one to enter. Is that not so?’

  ‘Fairy-tale nonsense, sir.’ But the Major’s voice was slurred with guilt. Was he really a major? He’d been chatting in the bar an hour or so ago, explaining that he’d been based at Brecon until his retirement. Was that all made up?

  The lamplight wavered. Jane felt bemused. It was working.

  Last night, when they’d all come staggering down, the Major had been standing at the foot of the stairs, his back to the door of the study which all yesterday had been kept locked. Oh Lord, something terrible appears to have happened! Please, madam, you’d best not look. At this point, the study door had swung ajar behind him and you could see the bare lower legs of the corpse, pale as altar candles, receding into shadow. That had worked, too. Christ, Jane had thought, for that one crucial moment.

  ‘So.’ The man in black cleared his throat. ‘We know why you murdered her, and now we know how. There remains only—’

  ‘The question of proof. Of which you have none.’ The Major waved a dismissive hand and turned away, gazing towards the long window. Headlamps flashed on it, tongues of creamy light distorting in the rainy panes. It was probably the Cravens, reversing out to go home. Oh, hell, Jane thought, I was supposed to have drawn the curtains. At least Ben had his back to the window, so he wouldn’t have noticed. Jane put up a hand to her white, frilly headband, making sure it hadn’t slid off again.

  ‘Proof, Major?’ A faint sneer, a languid hand reaching down by the side of the chair. ‘If we’re looking for proof—’

  ‘Leave that alone! How dare you, sir!’

  ‘—Then we need hardly look very far.’

  The man in black had found a walking stick, ebony, with a brass handle in the shape of a cobra’s head. As he weighed it in his hands, you could hear the distant visceral scraping of a solo violin. Should have sounded naff, but it was somehow exactly right, timed to underscore the tension as the stick was proffered to the man in the chair.

  ‘If you please, Major... or shall I?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Then we shall waste no more time!’ Snatching back the stick and holding it over the table, next to the oil lamp, so that everyone could see him twist the cobra’s head.

  No! The Major sat up. ‘That—’

  The snake head came off, the hollow shaft of the walking stick was very gently shaken. The man in black was somehow manipulating the light so that everyone’s attention was on his hands, and on the stick... and on this big red stone that rolled out and lay there glowing on the very edge of the table.

  ‘Hmm. The Fontaine Ruby, I imagine.’

  The Major half rose from his chair, as though he was about to make a break for it. Several spontaneous gasps wafted out of the shadows, from people who had spent most of the afternoon searching for this paste ruby – with the walking stick conspicuously propped up in the hallstand the whole time.

  The man in black didn’t even glance at it. Gems, in themselves, clearly held no big fascination for him; even his interest in the Major was waning now that guilt was proved. They both glanced towards the door, which had opened to reveal this guy bulked out by a huge tweed overcoat. The Major slumped back.

  ‘I think this is all the evidence we require,’ the man in black said mildly. ‘You may arrest him now, Lestrade.’

  Silence. And then the electric lights came up and the applause kicked in: genuine appreciation, a couple of actual cheers. A triumph. You couldn’t fault it.

  When the lights came fully on, everything seemed duller and shabbier, the country-house drawing room reverting to hotel lounge, the oil lamp dimming into history. And Sherlock Holmes was Ben Foley again, closing his eyes in relief.

  Afterwards, when the bar was closed, Jane went down to the kitchen to collect mugs of bedtime hot chocolate to serve to the twelve guests. Earlier, she’d heard Ben saying that twelve was barely enough to make the weekend pay for itself, and they were all too old, and the whole thing was an embarrassment.

  The kitchen had flagged floors and high windows and room for a whole bunch of serva
nts, but it was dominated by the new island unit that Ben had assembled from the debris of a bankrupt butcher’s shop in Leominster. If most domestic island units were the Isle of Wight this was Australia. Amber, who didn’t have any staff to speak of, was on her own, bending over a corner of the unit, adding something herbal and aromatic to the cauldron of hot chocolate. She looked up.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Basking in adulation.’

  ‘Yes, he’s quite good at that,’ Amber said. No sarcasm there; Amber didn’t do sarcasm.

  Last night, all wound-up before the guests came down for dinner, Ben had snarled that yeah, he might have done live theatre before, but that was over twenty years ago, and back then he didn’t have to work with school pantomime props and a bunch of crappy amateurs.

  ‘He was brilliant, Amber. Genuine massive applause – well, as massive as you can get from— Anyway, you’d have thought there was a lot more of them, to hear it.’

  Amber was wearily rubbing her eyes, shoulder-length ash-blonde hair tinted pink by the halogen lights. She was probably about fifteen years younger than Ben, maybe mid-thirties, but more... well, more mature. She was wearing a big pink sweater and an apron with a cartoon cat on it.

  ‘Must’ve taken for ever to plan,’ Jane said. ‘Like the gas mantles – I didn’t even know they worked.’

  Amber looked worried. ‘Some kind of bottled gas. I don’t like to think of the safety regulations he’s broken. Plus messing with the trip switches last night to make sure the normal lights didn’t work – I mean, what if one of those old women had fallen down the stairs?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t. It was brilliant.’ Jane liked Amber moaning to her; you only moaned to people you could trust. ‘Oh yeah – good news – only one of the punters correctly identified both the murderer and the motive, so that’s just the one bottle of champagne to give away.’

  Amber blinked. ‘You did phone your mother, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did phone my mother. And there wasn’t a problem about staying over.’