The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Frannie, would anybody in his right mind attempt to blackmail somebody known to be violent while standing with his back to a cliff edge?’

  ‘Who says he was in his right mind? Have you spoken to anybody thinks he was in his right mind? He was probably in an alcoholic haze. Besides, it didn’t end there. Just pushing the feller off the cliff, see, that wasn’t very Brigid. A bit perfunctory.’ Bliss rubbed his eyes. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, I don’t know why I’m—’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Zelda Morgan? Matrimonial ambitions?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Zelda was at her mother’s seventieth birthday party in Kington, didn’t get back to Sebbie’s till just before we talked to her last night. Checked the answering machine but she didn’t get round to checking the voice-mail on her mobile till an hour or so ago when she woke up in the armchair. Bit of a shock, out comes Sebbie’s voice, being very Sebbie. “Get your” – excuse me, Reverend – “get your fat arse over here. Get the police. Fucking madwoman’s pushed me off the fucking rocks, and I can’t move.” ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The voice of an injured man, possibly, but certainly not the voice of a dying man. Billy Grace was right. The facial injuries were not entirely consistent with a fall. She followed him down and beat him to a pulp. She’s not a pussycat, Merrily.’

  ‘Can I talk to her again?’

  ‘And would you like to tell me why?’

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘About this Vaughan connection, yeh? What’s that mean to you?’

  ‘Frannie, this could take a while.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Bliss said.

  At six-thirty a.m. Merrily went up to Hattie Chancery’s room with a Gideon Bible and the decanter of holy water.

  Pictures of Hattie in the mustardy light. What struck her was how pale the woman had been, skin like white fish-flesh, anaemic.

  There was a picture of her with the Middle Marches Hunt, which presumably provided regular infusions of blood.

  Merrily shivered. Hardy was right: the entire room was a cold spot, the atmosphere thick with something she could only interpret as loathing. It could be Hattie; it could also be Brigid.

  I was lying up in her room, surrounded by creepy old photos of the bitch. The biggest one, I had to clean the glass and I did that by spitting in her face, over and over again.

  Merrily loosened the stopper on the decanter.

  When she came down, Bliss was in the lobby, putting down the phone. There was concern in his eyes when he saw her; she must have looked something like she felt.

  ‘You’ve gorra tell me, Merrily.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  It was up to Ben to tell him about the video, so what she told him, in the end, was about Lol and Dexter. What Dexter had done to Darrin and to Alice, what he’d tried to do to Lol, how it had ended and what lay on the floor of the inner hall of Ledwardine Vicarage.

  Stuck out here in the snowy wastes, Bliss hadn’t caught up with the Hook inquiry. By the time Merrily finished, expressions were shifting around his face like jigsaw pieces in search of a picture. He walked away across the lobby and then back again. He stood in front of Merrily, chewing his lip, and then he turned his head and nodded at the lounge door.

  ‘Yeah, OK. Go in. Tell Alma I said you could have her.’

  ‘Well... thanks.’

  It was time, then. No excuse.

  As the C of E Deliverance manual kept underlining, when you conducted a Requiem Eucharist in an exorcism context, it was advisable to have at least one other priest there and preferably several. This was for a normal service, with full preparation taking place over several days. This was with a congregation of carefully vetted Christians.

  With no back-up, and a congregation including two spiritualists, a trance-medium, a Roman Catholic, a teenage pagan – kind of – and a murderer, you just tossed the book over your shoulder and prayed for survival.

  52

  These Things Happened

  IT WAS BETTER in here now. Clouded with damp mist and shadows, but the candles were glowing brightly on the makeshift altar, unexpected stars in a murky sky, and the murmured amens were rising to join hers, this soft miasma of voices, a fuller response than she’d expected.

  It was as if the ritual itself was controlling the conditions, making rough but perfectly symmetrical interweaving shapes in the void. The living and the dead, and the holy. One small circle of light.

  Or maybe she was delusional through lack of sleep, and this was autopilot.

  Before the others had even come up from the kitchen, she’d done some sprinkling of newly sanctified water, the routine blessing of the room. Haunted-house procedure. Then a short prayer, once they were all inside. And then a repeated blessing after the Dr Bell episode and the Vaughan revelations – all this probably helping her as much as anyone, calming her nerves, setting up a receptive state of mind.

  Careful devotional preparation before the service is recommended for every communicant. And also for the priest, naturally.

  Oh sure...

  There was a white cloth on the altar, a small chalice for the wine, a saucer for the wafers. Beth Pollen had assisted here. Merrily glimpsed Beth sitting next to Jane, staring straight ahead with focus and determination.

  There seemed to be twelve of them now, including Brigid and Bliss and Alma. Antony Largo, wherever he was, had made no attempt to come in and his cameras were gone. The one she knew least was Clancy: school skirt, white school blouse, dark golden hair overhanging her eyes, her mouth sullen – eerily like the young Brigid, whose same picture, from a school photo, had been appearing in the papers for years and years.

  Twelve of them. Twelve and Hattie. More holy water sprinkled in Hattie’s room before leaving. Lord God, our heavenly Father, you neither slumber nor sleep. Bless this bedroom...

  Merrily connected now with that. It was the beginning. She stepped out with her Bible and her service printout.

  ‘ “I am the resurrection and the life,” the Lord says. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die...” ’

  We have all got a sperrit something like a spark inside we, said the old man to Mrs Leather.

  The brown mud in the stained-glass window began to clear in the early dawn, suggestions of colour rising like oil in a puddle.

  ‘So this is a service with Holy Communion to bring peace to Hattie Davies – Hattie Chancery, who died by her own hand before the Second World War. But I’d also like us to remember, in our prayers, Hattie’s daughter, Paula, who was also a suicide, and Paula’s daughter, Brigid who is... with us.’

  With the aid of a car battery provided by Ben, she’d managed to print out the order of service from Common Worship on the C of E Web site. Close to the top of the service – and lest anyone forget what this was about – she’d brought in a serious Confession that she made them repeat after her, line by line.

  We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed.

  There were candles on tables amongst the congregation, establishing that they were part of it, not an audience. Brigid Parsons sat next to one, with Jeremy and Clancy. Brigid’s hair was freshly brushed and some of its long-ago colour was shining through, in strands of fine gold, as if in acknowledgement that she’d soon be able to wash it all away because anonymity wouldn’t matter any more, where she was going. Her face was dark and strained, the wide mouth turned down, with lines either side that looked as if they’d just been pencilled in.

  We do earnestly repent,

  and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;

  the burden of them is intolerable.

  Merrily had tried to talk to Brigid in the lounge, but Brigid, who had slept for a couple of hours on the sofa, had been unresponsive to everything except the idea and purpose of the Requiem. Please, just.
.. take the bitch away.

  ‘This is not about revenge.’ She focused on Brigid now, in the near-white candlelight. ‘It’s not about hitting back, it’s not about laying a ghost... it’s about forgiveness. We’re looking at Hattie and what she did, and, sure, there were a lot of evil elements there... but that does not make Hattie evil in herself. We have to search, in this service, for a depth of forgiveness that we perhaps wouldn’t be able to reach in everyday life. We’re always saying, I can forgive anybody anything but That... Today, we have to say – and mean it – I can forgive anything, including That.’

  In her own mind, she saw the woman in the picture over the bed, a woman with fair hair twisted and coiled like a nest of pale snakes, and eyes like white marbles. She could hear wild laughter, the smack of stone on flesh and bone.

  Whoop, whoop.

  It wasn’t easy, was it?

  ‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘we can count on some help.’

  She opened the New Testament: John, Chapter Twelve. At a later stage, she’d have to say, ‘Let us commend Hattie to the mercy of God.’

  It was clear that nobody was ready yet to consider mercy. Not even Jeremy Berrows, the natural farmer, the quiet farmer, innocent face under hair like dandelion clocks. Giving Brigid an occasional sideways glance, their shoulders touching. Jeremy Berrows, who firmly believed the evil that arose in Brigid had been bequeathed to her by Hattie.

  And maybe it had. Maybe Bella Chancery, led here by a twisted path of deception, had opened the door to... something that Jeremy was now being asked to forgive. Now. Within probably an hour of losing for ever his main reason to go quietly on.

  John 12, verse 27. ‘Now my soul is in turmoil, and what am I to say? Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this that I came to this hour...’

  Canon Jeavons’s point entirely. It’s how we develop within ourselves – by suffering through our failure and trying again and suffering some more. We suffer, Merrilee.

  If Merrily could take on Jeremy’s suffering she’d do it. She felt a low-level tingle in her spine.

  Behind Jeremy was Alistair Hardy, rotund and bland and – a phrase you didn’t hear much these days, but it suited him – clean-shaven.

  The psychic? She didn’t doubt it, but there was a lot to doubt. The Lucy Devenish thing, for a start. Also Dr Bell’s ‘revelation’ about the use of a newborn baby in that dubious ceremony. Because Beth Pollen had almost certainly known of the suggestion that the baby was Hattie, had almost certainly told Hardy.

  Smoke and mirrors.

  ‘ “The crowd standing by said it was thunder, while others said, An angel has spoken to him. Jesus replied, This voice spoke for your sake, not mine. Now is the hour of judgement for this world; now shall the Prince of this world be driven out...” ’

  Driving out evil, it was hard not to personalize it.

  Brigid Parsons... Paula Parsons... Hattie Chancery... Black Vaughan and Ellen Gethin. To what extent could this possibly be said to go all the way back to Black Vaughan? Who seemed to have been only a fall guy, anyway. A story to blacken Vaughan and his tradition – the Welsh tradition in an area becoming rapidly Anglicized.

  She looked at Ben Foley, his sleek head bowed. The original destructive haunting was said to have threatened the whole economy of Kington; Ben had been hoping it would revive his.

  She wondered if she ought to have included Sebbie Dacre in this.

  A Vaughan thing.

  Had Dacre been told that he was a Vaughan? Did that explain his robber-baron mentality, his need to reclaim what was his, to dominate the valley? But the threat Dacre perceived was a threat from within his own family. The worst kind. Look at Dexter Harris.

  Merrily looked around the cold room with its tiny spearpoint flames. Looked around, flickering face to flickering face.

  Where are you, Hattie?

  Of all the things she hadn’t intended to ask...

  ‘Dying, you destroyed our death. Rising, you restored our life.’

  He’s here. Christ. He should be here.

  Here now.

  Everything is all right.

  The tingling in the spine.

  But she felt so utterly tired that the candles blurred and the faces fused. She shook herself very lightly.

  Not everyone took communion. Beth Pollen was first, looking up at the rising cold blue in the stained-glass window. Then Jane, with a wry and slightly apprehensive smile.

  Every time we eat this bread

  and drink this cup,

  we proclaim the Lord’s death

  until He comes.

  Brigid, when her turn came, had her eyes closed.

  ‘The bread of heaven in Jesus Christ.’

  If she’d done this before, it had not been for a long time. Her hands came up, reaching for the chalice, the cuffs of her black shirt unbuttoned, falling back over her wrists so that Merrily could see deep, fresh scratches, the blood barely dry.

  God...

  She was so knocked back by the significance of this that she barely noticed Brigid moving away afterwards and Clancy taking her place.

  Had Ben noticed it? Had Jane? Had she imagined it? Was it an hallucination? In the context of the Eucharist, These Things Happened. Immediately, she began to pray for guidance, for back-up, over Clancy’s dull gold hair.

  Becoming aware at that moment of Jeremy Berrows, sitting back in the front row – Jeremy’s eyes wide, lit from two sides by candles. Jeremy’s eyes widening. Gazing beyond Merrily, upwards, back at Merrily.

  ‘The cup of life in Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Mum,’ Jane said faintly.

  Merrily turned and saw, maybe, what Jeremy saw.

  Its outline might have been conjured from the snowbanks joining the rising hills, and the jagged pine-tops, shadows against the first light. But yes, oh God, she saw it crouching there inside the leaded glass with its black haunches in the blue and its shadowy snout uplifted into the red where the first light was bleeding through. She saw it, and it was poised to bound.

  No!

  A coarse sucking sound sent her spinning back to the altar and the thick, dark blonde hair and the cup of life in Jesus Christ – Clancy’s hands around the chalice, Clancy’s lips...

  She just stood and watched, her mind whirling, as Clancy trembled hard, as if in orgasm, and threw back her head and drank all the wine and smiled horribly up at Merrily with her black-cherry, glistening lips and eyes like small mirrors, a little candle-flame, a spark, a sperrit, in each of them.

  In the very cold silence, Clancy burped and the wine spouted out of her.

  Whoop.

  53

  No Smoke, No Mirrors

  IT WAS LIKE one of those Victorian clockwork-tableau automatons that you wound up and things started happening, everything interconnected: Brigid Parsons pulsing to her feet and Alma, long practised in restraint, preventing her from moving from the spot, as Jeremy and Jane and Bliss converged and one of the altar candles self-snuffed.

  Merrily was putting herself between all of them and Clancy, and shouting, ‘Baptized?’

  Shouting out to Brigid, ‘Has she been baptized?’

  Becoming aware that she hadn’t actually shouted it, just mouthed it, and Brigid was shaking her head.

  ‘That’s OK,’ Merrily said calmly. ‘That’s not a problem. We’ll see to it now.’ She smiled at Clancy and Clancy smiled faintly and vacantly back. ‘Clancy, you up for this?’

  Keeping it casual. Playing down what was going to be something very big and crucial, because if this kid got spooked and took off...

  Clancy didn’t respond, but she didn’t move away, just stood there like she’d been summoned to the head teacher’s office. Stood there in get-this-over mode. Not sullen or antagonistic, just tuned-out.

  Which was dangerous, of course. Merrily lifted up her hands and felt a rush of adrenalin, endorphins, the electricity crackling.

  Don’t get carried away. Concentrate.

  ‘Shush,’ she said soft
ly bringing her palms down, trying to lower the energy level in here because it was becoming negative – too many warring agendas. It was only a hotel dining room, it wasn’t a church, nothing to amplify emotions but no weight of worship to soothe them either. A playground for Hattie Chancery and whatever moved her, but the kitchen would have been worse.

  People were back in their chairs, the clockwork winding down. Some hadn’t reacted, like Alistair Hardy, watching her with his head on one side, one arm apart from his body, the hand twitching, fingers flexing. Did she need him out of here? No, let it go. He wasn’t interfering; she had the sense of a spectator, no agenda.

  Merrily turned to the altar and gathered up the decanter. This was about the essentials. No fuss... stripped down... clean and simple... the basics. It mustn’t be rushed, however. Keep it casual, but get it right, because this... well, this was a medieval baptism. This was the exorcism.

  She was looking into Clancy’s face now – the kid avoiding her stare, which wasn’t hard; she was a good bit taller than Merrily. But this was what Clancy did, she avoided, retreated, did not get involved. The inherited curse of negative celebrity.

  In the name of the Father, the Son, the...

  When Clancy finally knelt, it was like hands were pushing her to her knees. Merrily was aware of Brigid Parsons drawing in a thin ribbon of breath and the placid, unmoving eyes of Jeremy Berrows. When she closed her eyes momentarily, she could see a ring of candles, tiny snail-shells of light.

  She held on to the sense of assurance rising from her abdomen, her solar plexus, as she approached Clancy and the half-perceived form of the woman standing close behind her who was in dark, nondescript clothing, perhaps a two-piece suit, bust like a mantelpiece, close-curled hair, eyes like white marbles.

  Taking the stopper from the bottle. Time passing. If there was a preamble, Merrily wasn’t aware of it.