The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘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.

  Jane blinked. What am I thinking? Gripping the Sony 150 – real and modern, hi-tech, digital, third-millennial. Bringing it up and shooting the scene just to do something, avoid getting drawn in, the way she had been at the climax of Ben’s murder-mystery weekend in the lounge next door. This was a similar set piece, played out in the waxy ambience of an oil lamp with a frosted, globular shade – the same one that lit the scene when Sherlock Holmes confronted the Major.

  And here, as Matthew had explained in his introduction, was the real Holmes, the prototype, the famous tutor at the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine who had initiated the student, Arthur Conan Doyle, into the basic techniques that Holmes would employ. Dr Joseph Bell, born 1837, consultant surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, life-long advocate of the employment of forensic observation in the diagnosis of disease.

  Jane glanced over at Mum: possibly her first experience of trance-mediumship.

  It was more than acting, but...

  Sometimes it looked as if Alistair Hardy had lost weight – or at least as if his body weight had been rearranged. But it could be explained... If he seemed taller, that was because he was sitting up so straight in his hard-backed chair. If his eyes seemed brighter and shrewder – almost piercing – that was because he’d become fired up by what he was doing... or thought he was doing.

  And if his features looked sharper, his nose more like the beak of a bird of prey, that was... well, Merrily was willing to bet it wouldn’t come over on the video.

  Transfiguration. It was popular in Victorian times, but you didn’t get much of it now when people were no longer easily fooled by clever lighting and special effects. She was half and half on this – half of her thought he was sincere in the belief that something was happening; half of her thought it was a total con. She wondered how convinced Matthew Hawksley really was.

  Matthew said, ‘As you probably realize, Joe, we’re trying to solve a mystery.’

  ‘In which case...’ Dr Bell’s lips tweaked in amusement ‘... I cannot think why you would come to me.’

  Matthew smiled. Apart from this intimate tableau, the room was in shadow. One of Largo’s two static cameras was positioned in front of the altar, the other behind the semicircle of chairs. Largo himself was crouching just a few feet from the table. Alistair Hardy had declined to be filmed going into trance. Maybe he didn’t like the way his left side seemed to drop into spasm, his arm projecting from his body, his fingers curling.

  Could be some kind of nervous condition.

  ‘Would it be possible for you to ask Sir Arthur if he ever came here?’ Matthew said.

  ‘Here?’ Bell snapped. ‘Where is “here”? Be more specific, man.’

  ‘Stanner Hall, in the County of Herefordshire, on the Welsh Border. Home of the Chancerys.’

  ‘Not known to me.’

  ‘Was it perhaps known to Sir Arthur? Would it be possible to ask him?’

  Dr Bell went still. Alistair Hardy’s breathing had altered its rhythm, was going faster, and he was blinking rapidly, like REM during a dream. Merrily saw Bliss sitting in the corner nearest the connecting door to the lounge, Jeremy hunched like a hedgehog nearby. She imagined Brigid Parsons in there, perhaps asleep in a chair, watched over by the police.

  ‘Aye,’ Dr Bell said after a while, ‘I’m informed that it was.’

  ‘Did he have relatives here? Members of his family?’

  There was a longer silence this time, a blurring of Hardy’s face as Matthew pushed his luck, maybe suspecting that he didn’t have
much time left.

  ‘Was he aware of the legend of Black Vaughan and the Hound of Hergest?’

  Dr Bell breathed gassily in and out through his mouth. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as if talking to someone else. ‘Aye. Indeed.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘You touch on a most vexed issue, my friend.’

  ‘In... what way?’

  ‘I will not be...’ Dr Bell sprang up. ‘These people!’ Forefinger pointing, accusatory, around the room. ‘These people are a disgrrrrace!’

  A plastic bottle of water labelled Highland Spring was sent spinning from the table. Merrily held her cross.

  ‘The child.’ Dr Bell’s voice had deepened. It might – if you gave any credence to this – be considered a different voice. ‘The infant. To involve an infant... inexcusable.’

  You might now want to believe that this was the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hardy had his hands behind his back. There was a tremor under his breath. He looked up at the ceiling, and down at the audience. He didn’t seem to see anyone.

  Until his gaze collided with Merrily’s – and it was a collision; she almost felt the jolt. She held the cross and didn’t blink.

  ‘They tarnish us.’ Then Hardy looked away and sat down. ‘They tarnish us.’

  Matthew Hawksley retrieved the bottle of Highland Spring from under a chair and poured out half a glass, as Alistair Hardy coughed himself out of trance.

  Merrily stood up. She didn’t feel very priestly tonight, in her black cowl-neck jumper and jeans.

  ‘Erm... did that suggest anything to anyone?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘I think so.’

  Merrily rather liked what she’d seen of Beth Pollen. A decent woman in search of some kind of spiritual truth. To what extent she was open to deception, however, was anybody’s guess.

  Merrily opened a hand. ‘Please—’

  Mrs Pollen stood up. ‘The Chancerys... tried to build themselves into the fabric of the area. This area has always been overshadowed by the Vaughan legends, which have inspired pretty genuine fear over the years. The Chancerys were unlikely previously to have encountered the level of acceptance of hauntings, omens and curses they found here on the Welsh Border, even among fairly educated people. So they were saying, “Look, we’re the heralds of a new age of enlightenment, we can deal with this. By recreating the circumstances of the exorcism, we’ll summon the spirit of Black Vaughan, and then we’ll talk to him rationally through a medium, and we’ll find out what his problem is.” ’

  ‘But it seems to have been a fairly cobbled-together affair,’ Merrily said. ‘And they certainly didn’t have twelve priests.’

  ‘But, as Sir Arthur correctly remembers, they did have a baby.’

  Twenty years younger than Gomer, but a lot more cautious – he’d always known that – Danny went up the drive first, with the lambing light switched off. He did not like the sound of Dexter Harris.

  He stopped halfway to the vicarage front door, where the bushes on either side had been turned into great white domes. There was enough reflected light to reveal deep footmarks all over the path, as well as scuff-marks, drag-marks. Hell.

  You got a weight of snow, there wasn’t nothing couldn’t happen in these villages. Used to be police stations everywhere, now the dull bastards at the Home Office, never been west of Woking, figured cops could reach anywhere in minutes. But all it took was one big snowfall...

  Danny switched on the light. It told him that the front door was ajar.

  ‘Somebody been in,’ Danny whispered.

  ‘Well, don’t bloody well hang around!’ Gomer grabbed the lamp off Danny, planting his boot on the door, banging it open. ‘Lol! Lol, boy, you in there?’

  ‘Chrissake,’ Danny muttered, Gomer blundering past him into the vicarage. ‘Gomer?’

  ‘Bugger,’ Gomer said, dry-voiced. ‘Oh, bugger.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Better take a look.’

  Danny stepped up into the hall. Could just make out a door on his left, then a staircase, a passage in front of him, and Gomer standing in a doorway to the right. Over Gomer’s shoulder, in the lamp beam, he could see a big kitchen with a Rayburn or something of that order and a long table dragged to one side and, all down one leg of the table, long smears of red, unlikely to be ketchup.

  ‘Blood in yere, Danny.’

  ‘Take it careful, Gomer. I mean it.’

  There was a door slightly ajar at the bottom of the kitchen.

  ‘Lol!’ Gomer shouted. ‘You there, boy?’

  ‘This en’t lookin’ good, Gomer. Don’t touch nothin’.’

  ‘Bugger that.’ Gomer marched across the kitchen to the bottom door, hooked his boot around the side and dragged it open.

  Some kind of short passage, with an oak beam across, a door and a small window on one side, a narrow stairway on the other.

  On the floor, a body.

  Merrily froze.

  There were present, to help lay the spirit, a woman with a new-born baby, whose innocence and purity were perhaps held powerful in exorcism.

  Today, of course, it wouldn’t even be contemplated. The rule book said plainly, See that all children and animals are removed from the premises.

  But that was then. And it was only a story.

  ‘The assumption is,’ she said to Mrs Pollen, ‘that the baby in the story would have been newly baptized, otherwise it wouldn’t be seen as a symbol of purity. In the medieval church, baptism itself was considered a primary exorcism. A baby would be christened as soon as possible because it was considered to be prey to satanic invasion, or even to actual possession by the Devil, until baptism.’

  ‘That’s how I understood it too, Mrs Watkins. A child who died before baptism would not be admitted into heaven. As well as having the sign of the cross marked on its forehead in holy water, its head was wrapped in a white cloth in which it would be buried if it died, as so many did, in infancy. The baby’s immortal soul was then considered to have been formally saved.’

  Merrily nodded. This woman had done her research.

  ‘Well, then,’ Mrs Pollen said, ‘I don’t know which account of the Vaughan exorcism you read, but the one in Mrs Leather’s book does not say that the baby had been baptized.’

  ‘No,’ Merrily conceded, ‘I suppose it doesn’t. However—’

  ‘And I’m certain Hattie Chancery hadn’t been either, when her mother brought her in.’

  ‘Oh.’ Merrily sank down into her chair. She’d missed the obvious.

  ‘For heaven’s sake—’ Ben Foley’s chair legs screeched as he swung round. ‘You’re saying the baby was Hattie? How reliable is this, Beth?’

  ‘Well, it’s not actually documented anywhere, as far as I know,’ Mrs Pollen said. ‘It’s what the original servants said. We tracked down about four children or grandchildren of Stanner Hall staff who’d been involved in the ceremony. Three of them had heard the story, and two of them actually said their parents had been pretty jolly horrified when Bella Chancery proudly walked in with her new baby daughter.’

  ‘And the baby was unbaptized?’ Merrily said. ‘Do we know that?’

  ‘What we do know, from records, is that Hattie Chancery’s baptism was delayed because she became ill. Although we don’t have an exact date for the so-called exorcism, we know it took place in the winter of 1899, and the baptism is on record as having taken place in March 1900. I also know, from oral accounts, that Bella Chancery, during her spiritualist phase, was very dismissive of Church mumbo-jumbo and probably wouldn’t have had Hattie baptized at all if Walter – much older, more set in his ways – hadn’t insisted.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Ben said, ‘why on earth have you been sitting on this?’

  ‘Because of the family.’

  ‘But didn’t Natalie know?’

  ‘Clancy didn’t know,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘I also felt that talking about it... I don’t know what I felt, apart from a dreadful foreboding.’

  ‘But just assuming we’re a
ll taking this on board,’ Ben said, ‘giving credence to... I mean, what are we saying? I can’t even put this into words...’

  ‘OK.’ Merrily moved out towards the table where Matthew and Hardy were sitting. Into the light. ‘When I was training for the Deliverance ministry, the key word was caution. You start with a prayer, build up as necessary. I’ve never done an actual exorcism of a person, and most diocesan exorcists will never do one. It’s sledgehammers and nuts. If you overreact, you can open the way for something far worse, create a situation where there isn’t one.’

  Mrs Pollen was nodding fiercely.

  ‘So,’ Merrily said, ‘someone staging a phoney exorcism, based on a real exorcism – OK, that may be apocryphal, but the techniques ring true – someone recreating that scenario risks inviting something in. Inviting madness, if you want to look at it psychologically. Or evil, if we’re allowed to be spiritual. And evil loves a short cut. Evil takes the easy option.’

  ‘The easy option being the unbaptized baby,’ Mrs Pollen said.

  49

  Requiem

  ‘EXCEPT IT WASN’T intended to be an exorcism, was it?’ Merrily said. ‘Why don’t you tell us about the original owner of Stanner Hall?’

  Beth Pollen hesitated as the connecting door to the lounge opened and Alma’s bulky figure squeezed through. Bliss stood up, Alma whispered something to him.

  ‘Can I interrupt?’ Bliss said. ‘Mr Foley, do you have any more of these nice oil lamps? Or even – dare I suggest it – a generator?’

  Ben stood up. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir. It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Word is that all of Kington’s off.’