The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  He put an ear to the closed doors before slowly opening each of them. Two were bedrooms, with that room-freshener smell that told you they weren’t in everyday use.

  There was no sound, either, from the third bedroom. Lol went in, switching on the light. He saw a white dressing table, a built-in wardrobe. The bed was turned down and the room felt warm. There was a small en suite bathroom and toilet.

  Alice’s room. Nobody here.

  The final room had evidently been intended for a study; it had built-in shelves and cupboards. There were cardboard boxes on the floor. On the wall opposite the door, by the window, was a framed local newspaper cutting showing a middle-aged man in an apron, holding out two bags of chips, a younger Alice looking on. The headline read: Frying Start – Sizzling New Venture for Farmer Jim.

  Alice and Jim had been struggling for years on a small farm, not much more than a smallholding. Lol remembered someone saying that, by the time Jim died, the fish and chip shop in Old Barn Lane – the first chippie in an expanding Ledwardine – had proved to be the most lucrative business in this village, by a big margin, and that included the Black Swan.

  A very worthwhile inheritance for somebody.

  When Lol got back to the kitchen, Dexter Harris was sitting at the table, nibbling a chocolate biscuit. He barely looked up. The huge, solid greyness of him was reflected out of a chromium freezer door, a kettle, a Dualit toaster.

  ‘Whatever you took, boy,’ Dexter said, friendly enough, ‘let’s have it on this table yere. Else mabbe I’ll make a start by breakin’ your arm, see where we goes from there.’

  41

  Living on the Edge of a Chasm

  NEITHER JANE NOR Amber noticed Beth Pollen until she was almost at the bottom of the kitchen steps.

  ‘Would this be a convenient time to talk?’

  Amber picked up the earthenware jug for the chocolate, defensive. ‘Jane or me?’

  ‘I think both.’ Mrs Pollen looked tired, a bit frazzled. She said to Jane, ‘And I do want to talk to your mother.’

  ‘She’s around.’ Jane was embarrassed now about the way she’d clung to Beth Pollen at the rocks when the fox or the badger had run past.

  ‘But I want to clear the air on some things first. Everything, in fact.’

  Jane put down the cheese-grater and stared at Mrs Pollen, still in her sheepskin coat, open over a pale blue jumper and jeans, as she came down the final step into the kitchen.

  ‘To begin with...’ Mrs Pollen turned to Amber. ‘When The Baker Street League cancelled their conference, that was entirely my doing. Neil Kennedy was actually quite amused, at first, by the idea of your husband trying to build a business around the dubious legend of Conan Doyle and the Hound of Hergest. And they were quite gratified with the terms he was offering – and the idea, if I may say so, of a weekend of your renowned cooking.’

  Amber put the earthenware jug back on the French stove. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I had a long discussion with Neil Kennedy during the murder-mystery weekend. I told him Ben Foley believed he had conclusive proof that Doyle had been here, which he believed would finally discredit the Cabell legend, in Devon, as the source of the Hound. I said I understood Mr Foley, as a former television producer, hoped to use The Baker Street League to help him front a large-scale media campaign, particularly in America. And I told him... other things. Dr Kennedy was not terribly amused. As I’m sure you found out.’

  Amber turned down the heat under the chocolate. ‘You’d better sit down.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Beth Pollen took a wooden stool next to the island unit, and Amber dragged over two more, and put on the halogen lights. Jane stared into Mrs Pollen’s weathered, guileless face.

  ‘You deliberately screwed it up for Ben?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Amber said, ‘I don’t understand. Both Kennedy and you already knew there was proof that Doyle had been at Stanner. The document you mentioned... in the files of The Baker Street League?’

  ‘That doesn’t exist, Mrs Foley. I invented it. No article was written, as far as I know, for Cox’s Quarterly or any other defunct magazine. There is no proof, to my knowledge, that Conan Doyle ever stayed at Stanner or came to this area. He may have – all the indications are there, the coincidence of names – but we’ll probably never know. And if you remember, I said the other night that if anyone asked Kennedy about a handwritten document, he would deny all knowledge of it. Quite legitimately, as it happens.’

  Jane felt like her head was filling up with a grey fog. She let Amber ask the question.

  ‘Why? Why did you want to do this to us?’

  Beth Pollen sighed. ‘Because if Stanner had become, as Mr Foley had planned, a regular conference venue for The Baker Street League, the White Company would never have been allowed to set foot in the building. What I didn’t lie about was the enmity between the two organizations, which, as a member of both, I’ve been able to observe, over the years, in all its incredible peevishness. I realize the League is far more prestigious, prosperous and influential, and I’m sorry, but I wanted us in here. I wanted Alistair Hardy here. He has a remarkable ability.’

  ‘We don’t understand,’ Jane said.

  Mrs Pollen sighed, her face coloured mauve by the halogen lights. ‘We had to mislead the White Company as well. Doubt I’d have been able to persuade them if I hadn’t been able to show there was evidence that Conan Doyle had been here at the critical moment. Alistair Hardy’s fees are... sizeable. He’s doing this for nothing because of the TV coverage.’

  Jane felt herself exploding. ‘Get me out of here! Everybody who sets foot in this place just lies.’

  Amber said, ‘Mrs Pollen, you said “we”?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘The other person.’

  The other person. The phrase seemed to bounce off the stones in the wall.

  Natalie. It all added up, didn’t it? When Ben had lost The Baker Street League conference, it was Nat who came up with an instant replacement and rescued the whole situation. OK, just a bunch of loony spiritualists, but better than nothing. The way Beth Pollen had turned up at the church, at just the right moment to impress Antony Largo. A set-up.

  ‘I was going to get round to that,’ Mrs Pollen said.

  ‘Brigid?’ Jane said.

  ‘So you do know,’ Mrs Pollen said.

  Dexter had taken off his expensive biker’s jacket, uncovering a grey denim shirt with epaulettes and a badge on the breast pocket with twin exhaust pipes on it. He stood in the middle of the floor, his hands half-curled, like ring-spanners.

  ‘So you en’t took nothin’.’

  It was likely he’d recognized Lol now as the guy he’d seen through the scullery window. But he wouldn’t know whether Lol had seen him, so he wasn’t letting on. Hence the catching-a-burglar routine.

  It gave Lol some leeway. He told Dexter his story about the vicar getting worried when Alice had twice failed to answer the phone. Lol walking over here to see if everything was all right, finding all the lights on in the empty bungalow, with the back door unlocked. No more than the truth.

  ‘Sorry I came in like this, but anything could’ve happened.’

  ‘Like what?’ Dexter said.

  ‘I mean... where is she?’

  ‘How should I know? I come back from closin’ up the chip shop, hour or so ago, she en’t yere. Telly on and everything, no Alice. I been out lookin’ for her. No sign. Dunno where she gone. Neighbour’s, mabbe.’

  ‘They all seem to be in bed.’

  Dexter shrugged.

  ‘You called the police?’

  ‘Not yet. Her’d go through the bloody roof. ’Sides which, how’s the police gonner get through with all the bloody roads blocked for miles around? Nah, her’s likely wandered off. Her’ll be back.’

  Lol considered. He’d been honest so far, no call to deviate from that.

  ‘She’s had a shock. The vicar told me.’

  Discovering that he was playin
g the Christian aide, the clergy groupie, the little guy in glasses who fluttered vaguely around the vicarage, a moth lured by the incandescence of its incumbent.

  ‘Tole you what?’

  ‘About your cousin.’

  ‘Yeah. Tough.’

  ‘You weren’t that close?’

  Dexter shook his head. ‘Waste of fuckin’ space, you want the truth. Never kept a job, always in trouble with the law. Brought the whole family into disrepute.’ He leaned towards Lol, a bubble of moisture like an ornamental stud in the cleft of his lower lip. ‘So what’s with you and the vicar?’

  ‘Friends. I’m staying the weekend with her. She was called out to talk to someone who attempted suicide.’

  ‘Local?’

  ‘Kington.’

  ‘En’t gonner get back from there in a hurry.’

  ‘So I’ve got to ring her back about Alice. She’s worried.’

  Dexter stared at him blankly, like, What do you want me to do about it? He went to the chrome-fronted fridge/freezer. ‘You wanner lager?’

  ‘No, it’s... Yeah, OK. Thanks.’

  Dexter got out two cans of Stella Artois, tossed one to Lol. ‘Wanner help me take a look around, is it?’

  ‘That’s a good idea.’

  ‘Right, then.’ Dexter put on a grim, knowing smile, snapping the ring-pull on his beer can. A smugness there, Lol thought, a satisfaction.

  ‘Which way do you think she might’ve gone?’

  ‘Put it this way, if you gets to Leominster, turn back.’ Dexter had a swig of lager, took his leather jacket from the back of a chair, pulling a pair of black driving gloves out of one of the pockets. ‘Never mind, boy, be a cold bed for you tonight, anyway, look.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Don’t gimme that “friends” shite.’

  Dexter clapped Lol on the back. It was as if he was on a roll and nothing could go wrong for him tonight.

  Yes, Jane had heard of her. Although of course it had all happened long before she was born. She knew about her in the way she knew of, say Lizzie Borden, a half-mythical figure with a rhythmical, nursery-rhyme name and an underlying pulse of horror.

  Brigid Parsons killed some boys.

  There were others. There was Mary Bell, whose name you knew because it was such a nice, short, wholesome name, and the killers of little Jamie Bulger, whose names you could never remember.

  But this was less horrific, surely, because only one of the boys died. And he was older than Brigid Parsons, so the element of cruelty was missing, or, if it was there, it was different. Different with Brigid Parsons.

  Different with Natalie Craven.

  You’re asking me what I believe? I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.

  This was unreal, and it wasn’t less horrific at all. Jane had an idea of how bad it actually was; she’d once read a colour-supplement feature: Where Is Brigid Parsons? Something like that.

  Brigid Parsons could never call herself that again, in the same way that Mary Bell had had to lose her fresh, clean name – although apparently she was a nice woman now, not the same person as the child who’d killed two little boys and given herself away by asking to see them in their coffins.

  Who were you kidding? In some ways, Brigid was worse. For cruelty, substitute plain savagery. The magazine had revealed details that could not be published in the papers at the time, as those were days when family papers didn’t go into details about...

  ... Mutilation.

  Jane sat on her stool, looking down at her fingers, empurpled in the lights, then up at Beth Pollen, who had revealed the unbelievable. And then at Amber, who hadn’t been able to speak for whole minutes, it seemed like, and when she did it was just to say faintly, ‘Does Ben know?’

  Jane looked back down at her fingers. The thing was that Natalie was just so... . cool.

  Amber stood up and went and did a very Amber thing – she stirred the chocolate, although it was probably ruined by now.

  Then she came and sat on the stool with her hands in her lap.

  ‘Does Ben know?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘Though I suppose everyone will know in a short while, when they either find her or the media find out they’re looking.’

  Jane looked up at the high window, almost obscured now by layers of snow that, from down here, looked grey, like concrete. Christ, she thought, Christ.

  This explained everything about Clancy: why she was so quiet, the tall, gawky kid behind the pile of books, why she’d been to so many different schools.

  Why she’d leapt up from her homework in horror when Nat had walked down these steps with blood all over her arms.

  The great revelation over, Beth Pollen talked about her and Natalie.

  In the drab aftermath of his death, Beth had taken up her husband’s final research project, the previously unchronicled history of a great Victorian house on the very border of Wales and England. She’d thought it might make a small book, locally published, with his name on its cover, a fitting memorial. Sometimes she could sense him at her elbow as she typed, suggesting a better word, rebuking her for attempting to include some picturesque but uncorroborated anecdote.

  Although the text would be tinted by her growing interest in spiritualism, the very sense of Stephen had made Beth more assiduous in her research. And that was how she’d met Natalie Craven, who also was awfully interested in the history of Stanner Hall.

  ‘I suppose I needed a friend. No, that’s wrong... I suppose I needed a different sort of friend. She could almost have been my daughter, but that’s not how it was, either. She had this mature awareness of how things worked – how one might turn situations around – I suppose it was years of surviving in the prison system that made her like that, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. She simply fired me, gave me back my energy.’

  ‘She can make things happen,’ Jane said. ‘I think it’s because she doesn’t care whether they happen or not.’

  ‘And I was intrigued by her relationship with Jeremy Berrows. Absolutely nothing about him – or so you thought at first. Only slowly becoming aware of a kind of native spirituality – the kind that you expect to find in farmers whose families have lived close to the land for centuries, but seldom do these days. Oh, I was very curious about Jeremy and how those two came to be together.’

  ‘Especially after all those years apart,’ Jane said.

  ‘Well, the first ten she could do nothing about. And then, when you realize, approaching middle age, that perhaps you’ve never been able to connect with anybody as fully as the farm boy you met when you were twelve – that maybe you really were two halves of something – what do you do about it? Nothing. You don’t really believe the validity of a memory that old, do you? It’s like a myth.’

  Two halves... Jane thought about Jeremy Berrows walking into his barn with a rope. She said nothing.

  Beth Pollen said, ‘We discussed it, after she’d revealed her real... her former identity.’ She glanced at Jane. ‘And if you’re wondering how that came about, it was when we were researching Hattie, copying old photographs, and there was one of her as a girl, with her family, and I said, unthinking, “Oh, she looks rather like Clancy.” Could have bitten my tongue off when I saw Natalie’s face, but that’s how it came out.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen that picture. It’s in her room now – Hattie’s room.’

  ‘So the next day we were due to go to Kington Church together. She didn’t turn up. But the following day, early in the morning, there she was, awfully pensive. And just told me, quite simply, who she was and what she’d done. No attempt to justify or explain it, and she didn’t swear me to secrecy – I hope she knew she didn’t have to. I certainly haven’t said a word to anyone... until now.’

  ‘Didn’t knowing about that, you know, alter things?’

  ‘Threaten the friendship? Why should it? In some ways, it deepened it, because I felt this overwhelming need to understa
nd her. I felt that no one, except perhaps Jeremy, ever had. And I felt that Stephen had brought her to me.’

  ‘But she was a murderer,’ Amber said.

  ‘And she’d been punished for it.’

  ‘And she was... that woman’s granddaughter.’

  ‘I’d be jolly stupid if I said that didn’t frighten me. I remember that when I recognized the awful parallel between Hattie and the blood-weary Robert, and Natalie and Jeremy, I was so scared for Jeremy. But in the end I realized that this, in some strange way, had only intensified the relationship. They were living on the edge of a chasm. I think, when she met him again, with the knowledge of what had gone before, she knew that if she didn’t take that risk – seize it – then she’d just be... giving in to the past. And that’s not how she is.’

  Jane said. ‘Let’s get this out. You think that whatever made Hattie Chancery do what she did was also present in Brigid Parsons?’

  ‘It’s what she needs to know, and it’s why she came back. She realizes there’s a negative energy inside her that she can’t always control. Her mother...’ Beth Pollen took a breath. ‘Natalie doesn’t think, doesn’t want to think it’s a mental illness.’

  ‘You and she think there’s a... psychic connection with Hattie?’

  ‘This is why I wanted Alistair here. People like you might demean spiritualism, but I think there is something to be discovered here, and it’s nothing that we’re going to find written down.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, ‘I can’t believe an intelligent woman like you really thinks that someone like Hardy can deal with something this... enormous. I mean, he... He’s a phoney.’

  Jane heard men’s voices and footsteps at the top of the stone stairs. Two men were coming down the steps. Jane was expecting cops, or maybe Hardy and Matthews. She really didn’t care if Hardy had heard her talking about him.

  ‘He isn’t a phoney, believe me,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘But I didn’t say that I thought he could deal with it. A medium is simply what the word says. It’s about communication, rather than solutions.’