The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘The alternative being that he was clobbered before he fell. That’s what you’re saying?’

  ‘I’m not saying. But bear it in mind.’

  ‘Oh, I will, I will.’ Bliss was already heading for the Range Rover, lifting a hand to the pathologist. ‘Nighty-night, Billy. Do a good one.’

  Merrily was ringing Alice Meek on her mobile and not getting an answer.

  It seemed to be some kind of guilt trip. Jeavons seemed to think that, having given Merrily some hasty and unreliable advice on the Harris/Hook issue, he had ground to make up.

  He’d been researching intensively in his library and on the Internet, like it had become his responsibility to dispense wisdom on the Stanner case, details of which he’d gathered greedily from Lol. Family history, tribal traditions, race memories, curses – Jeavons’s primary area of operation. Now he was retired, he said, it gave him a buzz to work all night.

  ‘Does the black dog ever kill sheep?’ Lol asked. ‘Conan Doyle had his Hound ripping a man’s throat out.’

  ‘Seems unlikely, doesn’t it, if the black dog is just a walking portent? And yet livestock are often known to have been attacked in areas supposed to be haunted by them. We may wonder if living canines, from foxes to domestic dogs, might in some way be influenced by the proximity of such entities.’

  ‘Animals becoming possessed?’

  ‘Another difficult word. Perhaps. In a way. I like you, Lol, you don’t make light of such things, nor give the impression that you consider me to be mad and dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, you’re dangerous,’ Lol said. ‘But then, so are psychiatrists and psychotherapists.’

  Jeavons did his haw haw laugh. ‘And we share jargon with these professions – no coincidence. They are the new shamans, the smoke-and-mirror profession. The necklace of skulls under the suits and the white coats.’

  ‘The twelve priests and the snuff-box,’ Lol said. ‘What’s your take on that?’

  ‘Archetypes, too, though less common than the black dog. The twelve priests represent the twelve apostles, and occasionally there may be mention of a thirteenth, the Man himself. This is widespread in folk-lore. And in fact the Vaughan exorcism itself is replicated further up the Welsh Border. At Hyssington, near Montgomery, we have a wicked squire who terrorized the area after his death. Like Vaughan, he appears in the local church as a bull. In this same church, the ubiquitous posse of parsons is waiting, with lighted candles. Like Vaughan, the squire gets reduced to something that can be accommodated in a snuffbox.’

  ‘So what’s that saying about the Welsh Border?’

  ‘Borders are psychic pipelines,’ Jeavons said. ‘What you have here is a river into which streams of belief flow, from both England and Wales. This is a particularly interesting part because of the way Wales and England seem to intermingle. The original boundary was the Dark Age earthwork, Offa’s Dyke, so how come we have an English town – Kington – which, according to my map, is on the Welsh side and a few miles away, a Welsh town – Presteigne – on the English side?’

  ‘Schizophrenic,’ Lol said.

  ‘You have it! The Schizoid Border. Hey, we cookin’ here, son. Consider the symptoms of the condition: delusion, hallucination... loss of identity, the withdrawal into a fantasy world.’

  ‘The landscape of the mind is more important than the outside world and it becomes impossible to distinguish between them.’

  Lol thought about isolated communities caught between two cultures, emotionally, politically and linguistically. Never sure where they stood in big national conflicts – like the Wars of the Roses, in which Thomas Vaughan was involved on both sides at different times.

  The Schizoid Border.

  ‘It’s all bollocks, of course,’ Lol said. ‘You can make anything fit into psychology. It’s why I packed it in and went back to writing little songs.’

  But Jeavons wasn’t letting go.

  ‘Let’s take this a little further. Localization of archetypes, OK? The appearance of the spectral bull up at Hyssington is immediately put into a local context – Oh, it must be the ghost of old so-and-so, he was a bad-tempered guy, he must have turned into a bull when he died. But – hold on here – as recently as the 1980s, a ghostly bull is seen in Kington Church by a woman visiting the area... whose name happens to be Vaughan. An indication that such phenomena can actually become personalized.’

  ‘Yeah, but Thomas Vaughan doesn’t seem to have been evil or tyrannical. So what’s the evil that needs to be dealt with by this apostolic assembly of priests?’

  ‘Can’t tell you. The obvious target might be paganism, which I would guess survived in this area well beyond medieval times. The Christian Church lures the spirit of paganism into a holy place and relentlessly reads the scriptures at it until it becomes exhausted and shrivels into insignificance. It may simply be the spirit of paganism, or something more sinister...’

  ‘Tonight, you could get the feeling of something more sinister.’

  Lol told Jeavons about the discovery of a man’s body at the foot of Stanner Rocks, torn about by some creature.

  ‘Who is this man?’ Jeavons said.

  ‘Unlikely to be a Vaughan. The family died out in that area.’

  The lights dimmed again, with a clicking from somewhere in the hollows of the house, and there was another dragged-out crackling in the phone.

  38

  Big White Bird

  ‘I DO, JEREMY,’ Danny said. ‘I remember.’

  They had mugs of tea, another fat ash log on the fire. Danny was sweating, inside and out.

  Yes, he remembered that summer. Because it was the Oldfield summer, the summer after Hergest Ridge, the album, came out, and the Ridge was world-famous as the tourists arrived to see where the celebrated composer had flown his model gliders. Only by then, Mike Oldfield was either leaving Kington or had already left.

  Bitter-sweet memories. Danny never did get to hang out with Mike in his studio; however, that same year he had managed to persuade the gorgeous Greta Morris to go out with him.

  He sat now, in front of the range, watching Jeremy Berrows fizzing into some kind of paranoid life in the wake of that visit from the police. The bloody hugeness of this. It was gonner light up this valley like SAS flares. Sebbie Dacre. Sebbie Dacre. Dead. Killed.

  Danny had taken the call when the bloke rang for the vicar, to say that her daughter had found a body at the rocks. The idea of it being Sebbie had never even occurred to him, and Danny thought about him and Jeremy trying to look normal when the police had told them. Cops hadn’t been fooled, he could tell.

  And yet they’d gone. They’d looked around The Nant and they’d gone. They were looking for Natalie Craven and the child. He could’ve told them where the child was, but he’d held off. Didn’t want to tell nobody nothing right now.

  Had it occurred to the cops that Jeremy might have killed Sebbie and Natalie, too? Had they thought of that? Because Danny sure bloody had.

  The lie about the track being blocked so the kid couldn’t come home? The hurried note? The hanging, for God’s sake...

  Danny hung on to his mug, letting solid old riffs plash and bang in his head to hold him halfway steady. Let him talk, let it come out.

  ‘We was only little kids that first holiday,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘I remember. Little blonde girl.’

  ‘Playing around the farm, walking down to Kington for ice lollies. We never had a fridge back then, the seventies.’

  Danny looked over at the dresser. ‘That’s you and her, ennit, in that photo? Don’t recall seein’ it before.’

  ‘Always kept it in my bedroom. Kept it in a dark corner, so I couldn’t hardly see it proper, most of the time, but I didn’t want it to fade, see.’

  Danny rubbed his beard. ‘Jeremy, I just never imagined. Mabbe because she was real blonde then, and now her’s dark.’

  ‘Blonde as ever was, underneath. Nobody expects a blonde to dye her hair dark, do they?’

  ‘Funny G
reta don’t know ’bout that. Bloody hairdresser’s, that’s the intelligence centre of the whole valley.’

  ‘Does it herself. It was... the second time, see. The second holiday they had yere – that was when it really happened.’ Jeremy was fondling the dog’s ears, remembering. There was almost a smile on his face, over the ravages of the rope. ‘Brigid’s ole man, he was a nice enough feller. Quiet sorter bloke, but friendly. Wanting to know all about the farm, what this did, what that did. Tried to help with the shearing, made a bugger of it, but we told him he was doing well for a first-timer. Never talked about Paula. Brigid—’

  Jeremy had to stop, tears in his eyes like broken glass. Danny remembered this time well: a damp, forlorn period, heralding the soulless eighties. Mike Oldfield had left the area for ever, and the world had already forgotten about Hergest Ridge.

  ‘We was only about twelve. Too young for – too young to do much about it, anyway, although...’ Jeremy flicked a sideways look at Danny, like, What am I doing, talking like this to a bloke? ‘We was in the ole barn this day, sheltering from the rain. Brigid was... you know how they get sometimes, girls, women: moody. En’t nothin’ in the world that’s right. No pleasin’ ’em, no talkin’ ’em out of it. So I suppose we kind of quarrelled, the way kids do.’

  ‘You... quarrel with somebody?’

  ‘Quarrel was with herself. Me as got hit, mind.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the old barn.’

  ‘No, you fool—’

  ‘Oh. In the eye.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. What could I do? What would I want to do?’

  Danny nodded. Please, God, don’t let him have done this.

  ‘Next thing, her arms is round me and her’s sobbin’ away, up against me, all soft. And then we kissed, real gentle. First kiss, Danny.’ Jeremy looked up, flushed. ‘Her fell asleep in my arms. And then I suppose, eventually, I fell asleep, too. Woke up with a black eye. And in love. You know?’

  Danny smiled.

  ‘Puppy love, my mam said. Be over it in no time at all.’

  ‘They don’t know, do they?’

  ‘When she left, I didn’t wanner live for a good while – you know how that is?’

  Danny nodded. ’Course he knew.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep much, not for months. Used to creep out and spend whole nights, till dawn, out in the meadow with the ewes, then stagger off to school and fall asleep over the desk. Used to go up the church, times when there wasn’t nobody else there, and I’d pray to God to send her back. Pray to God, Danny. Had a special prayer I’d wrote down. Figured if I kept repeating it, every day, real sincere, he’d bring her back.’

  ‘God listen?’

  ‘Not till last summer.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Jeremy, poor ole Mary Morson never had a hope with you, did she?’

  ‘Nice girl, mind.’

  ‘Mary Morson?’

  ‘They all got their ways.’

  ‘Bugger me,’ Danny said faintly.

  ‘I wrote to Brigid, regular, she wrote back. Every week, more or less. The next summer I was thinking, they’ll be back. Lookin’ out for the caravan, you know?’ Jeremy shivered over the fire. ‘I remember, tried to phone her once. Got through to her dad. He said I couldn’t talk to her. Her sounded different – harsh, wound-up. Said never to ring again.’

  ‘And so you didn’t.’

  ‘How’d you know that?’

  Danny sighed. Jeremy sank down in his chair, all the breath whispering out of him. The dog whimpered.

  ‘Some’ing yere I en’t getting,’ Danny said. ‘Why couldn’t you talk to her?’

  ‘Danny...’ Jeremy turned to him, full face, and Danny wasn’t sure which caused the boy the most agony, the twisting of his neck or the thought of what he was saying. ‘Some’ing happened...’

  Danny had the feeling he ought to know, but he didn’t.

  ‘She was Brigid Parsons,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s what happened.’

  Back at Stanner, the cold air dropping around them like a shroud, Bliss said, ‘So how well do you know Natalie Craven?’

  When Merrily had tried to raise the issue in the Range Rover, he’d nodded towards the driver and shaken his head, so she’d gone back to thinking about Alice, wondering if she ought to ring Lol, see if Alice had phoned. However Darrin Hook had died, it was going to damage Alice.

  She followed Bliss into the porch. ‘Don’t know her at all. Jane’s at school with her daughter. Which is how Jane got the job here – Clancy invited her over one weekend, and the Foleys were looking for cheap Saturday labour.’

  ‘But you know who she is,’ Bliss said.

  ‘I know who she is... and I know...’ She cleared her throat, swallowed. ‘This is one of the things I was going to tell you in the Range Rover. We think – Jane and I think – that Natalie Craven may have taken the girl to Danny Thomas’s house for the night, because they thought the track to The Nant could be difficult. Danny’s the guy who was with Jeremy Berrows. He’s... Gomer’s partner.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Frannie. There was no reason to think—’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s a farm. Back off the Kinnerton road from Walton. Not sure what it’s called, I—’

  Bliss had surged into the lobby, leaving the door swinging back on her. Hell.

  When she went in, the tall detective who’d been to The Nant to talk to Jeremy padded across the worn carpet.

  ‘Mrs Watkins, could you phone the chief, please, in Hereford?’

  ‘Annie Howe?’

  ‘Not a happy bunny tonight, the chief.’

  ‘Has she ever been a happy bunny?’

  He grinned. ‘Use my mobile.’ He keyed in the number for her, and she sat down in a chintzy chair near the reception desk.

  Annie Howe answered on the second ring.

  ‘Ms Watkins. The fourth emergency service.’

  Howe was an atheist, younger than Bliss, seriously educated, promoted over his head and on course for the stratosphere. She wore crisp, white shirts and pencil skirts and rimless glasses and smelled, Jane would insist, of Dettol No. 5.

  ‘You wanted to, erm, talk about Darrin Hook?’

  Merrily recalled the last time she and Howe had been together, in a derelict hopyard in the Frome Valley last summer, in circumstances that Howe was likely to have erased like a virus from the hard disk of her consciousness.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you know about the late Darrin Hook.’

  ‘Well, I... I only found out about him in a roundabout way – through his aunt, who lives in the village.’ No harm in going into this; whatever you thought about Annie Howe, she didn’t gossip. ‘She was worried about a rift in the family, stemming from the incident you obviously know about, seventeen years ago, when Darrin Hook’s young brother was killed. The other person in the stolen car, the cousin, Dexter, has suffered health problems ever since. Their aunt wanted me to... pray for him.’

  ‘Pray for him.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to identify with this, Annie, but it’s what we do.’

  ‘After you’ve made a few inquiries, to make sure that God has all the relevant background information necessary to deliberate the possibility of intercession. Even though, as I understand it, omniscience is one of his—’

  ‘Yeah, all right, you think my whole career has been founded on a tissue of myths. Fine. Strangely, I can live with that.’

  ‘It is strange,’ Howe said. ‘But then the most unexpected people can fall prey to superstition. Like Hook himself.’

  ‘I’m not following.’

  ‘Darrin Hook was released from Brompton Heath Prison just under three weeks ago, having served less than half his latest eighteen-month sentence for burglary. The decision was made on the recommendation of, among others, the prison chaplain.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Because Hook appeared to have undergone a conversion to yo
ur... faith.’

  ‘Darrin Hook became a... Christian?’

  ‘You didn’t know that? Somehow, I’d expected that was how you came to be acquainted with him.’

  ‘I’m not acquainted with him. I’ve never met him. And I certainly didn’t know he’d been... When you say a conversion, what do you mean?’

  ‘The usual absurd fanaticism. Bibles appearing in his cell...’

  ‘Sent down from heaven?’

  ‘Brought in by a prison visitor. A relative. Hook began to attend the Sunday services, throwing up his arms and yelling that he’d been saved and praise the Lord and all this tosh. I think even the prison chaplain became bored with him after a while – perhaps why he recommended an early release.’

  Merrily was shaking her head. ‘This is all news to me.’

  The implications were startling. For a start, if this was true, Alice would have no reason to worry about Darrin’s reaction to the idea of a Requiem Eucharist for his brother.

  ‘You got this from the prison?’

  ‘We haven’t been in touch with the prison. The information came from a woman called Dionne Grindle, a cousin of Hook’s living in Solihull. We found her phone number in his wallet. She turned out to be the relative instrumental in his seeing the... light.’

  My niece, the one in Solihull, she did one of them Alpha courses at her church, did I tell you?... Reckoned it d’creep up on you somehow... felt the Holy Spirit was in her heart like a big white bird...

  ‘She obviously didn’t tell the rest of the family,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Apparently, Hook specifically asked her to say nothing to the Hereford side of the family. He said that he wanted to tell them in his own time and in his own way. He also, according to Ms Grindle, had plans to – and this is what interests us, of course – make an entirely new beginning by setting the record straight on a number of dark areas in his past. Now I assumed that, by this, he meant coming clean about previous offences for which he was never caught. And we’d have been, naturally, delighted to help him with the paperwork.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have had to charge him?’