The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (37 page)

Well, that was a long time ago, but seeing what Ben Foley – a man with no known history of violence – had done to the intruder, Nathan, in that same garden had brought the superstitious side of Gomer Parry squirming uncomfortably into the light. Superstition was never far below the surface along this Border: the most rural county in England lying back to back with the most rural county in Wales.

Just if I had a daughter, Vicar, and her was working at Stanner, these is things I’d wanner know
. Gomer had still seemed embarrassed. He’d refused a second cup of tea and gone shuffling back into the snow, pulling on his old tweed cap and leaving her to examine all the features of country-hotel life that Jane had been concealing.

That
bloody
kid. Did nothing ever change?

Merrily leaned against the Aga rail, pondering the options. If she couldn’t reveal either Gomer or Lol as informants, there was at least one person she could shop with impunity.

She would admit to Jane that she’d raided the apartment. She would produce the copy of
Folk-lore of Herefordshire
, with the relevant pages marked. It wasn’t much, but it was a way in. And in the course of the subsequent bitter quarrel the whole truth would, with any luck, come pooling out all over the unforgiving flagstones.

What was good about this weather was that, the way things were looking, Jane would not be returning to Stanner this weekend. Big fires, CDs of Nick Drake, Beth Orton... Lol Robinson, even. Mother–daughter quality time.

All the same, Merrily watched the ceaseless snow with trepidation. They made jokes about the council and the grit lorries, but they were jokes best made over a mug of hot chocolate in front of a blazing fire. This was a part of the county that had often been cut off, lost its electricity and its phone lines, reverting for whole days to a semi-medieval way of life.

When the phone rang, she grabbed the cordless from the wall.

‘Mum.’

‘They let you out?’

‘Erm... they sent for the school buses early.’

‘Because of the snow.’

‘Otherwise about five hundred of us would have been spending all night fighting over the sofa bed in the medical suite.’

‘Understandable. So you’ll be home early, then.’

‘And we don’t
have
to come back tomorrow, if it’s bad.’

‘And then it’s the holidays.’

‘Right.’

‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of the education department. I’ll go and light the fire.’

‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘Do that. It’s just...’

‘Something wrong?’

‘Not exactly
wrong
. It’s... like, the snow’s coming down so hard, they reckon all the minor roads in the north of the county could be... difficult, by tonight. So that would mean I probably wouldn’t be able to get to Stanner at all tomorrow, maybe not even with Gomer.’

‘Can’t be helped, flower.’

‘No.’

‘Act of God. Never mind, I expect the conference will have to be called off as well.’

‘So, like, I thought the best thing to do would be to get on Clancy’s bus.’

‘What?’

‘So, like, that’s what I did. Kind of a spur of the moment... thing.’

Merrily said tightly, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at Stanner,’ Jane said. ‘And it really was for the best. The snow’s
much
worse here.’

24

L
OOKING OUT FROM
her room over, like, Siberia, Jane phoned Eirion on his mobile and was invited to leave voice-mail. ‘We need to talk,’ Jane said menacingly.

She sat down on the bed, cold. Even turned up full, the radiator was like a cheap hot-water bottle the morning after. Stanner needed more money spending on it than Ben and Amber were ever likely to make, this was clear.

It was also clear, when she’d walked in with Clancy an hour or so ago, shaking the snow off her parka, that Ben and Amber had had words. Amber was tense, Ben fizzing with anger. Ben always turned anxiety into anger – according to which equation, desperation became rage. Nathan the shooter had found that out.

Amber had frowned. ‘Jane, this is crazy. You should
not
have come.’

‘You need me,’ Jane had said.

But it had been Ben who’d needed her first, waiting until Amber had gone down to the kitchen before producing a folded sheet of A4 that had obviously been dried out. ‘You undoubtedly know more about the Internet than me. How do I find out where this stuff originates?’

Jane spread the paper out on the bed.
Yuk
. ‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ she’d told Ben, ‘but my boyfriend might be able to find out.’

Ben had found it drawing-pinned to the hotel sign at the bottom of the drive. It didn’t have to be at all relevant to Ben or Stanner; the area had its share of weirdos. But the Stanner board wasn’t exactly a convenient place to pin anything, and if it was a joke it could have been funnier.

‘Might be rubbish, but with a conference on this weekend, if someone’s trying to tell us something, I’d quite like to know what,’ Ben had said when Jane had identified it as a printout from some kind of sad, obsessive Internet chat room or message board.

At the bottom, it said:

Sick, or what?

If anybody could track it down, Eirion could. If he hadn’t left for the
piste
.

Jane went to the window. You could see the forestry across the valley, and Hergest Ridge, mauve against the sky. Yes, you could even see a sky, of sorts. Did this offer some hope that the snow was actually thinning?

Mum, on the phone, had said things like
I see
, calmly conveying an acute sense of betrayal. This morning, over the breakfast, Jane had kept glancing at her, thinking,
I ought to tell you everything. I ought to do it now
. After what Gomer had revealed, it hadn’t been her easiest night’s sleep. But if she’d laid the Hattie thing on her, Mum would have seen to it that she didn’t get here tonight. She might even, on hearing about the explosion in the head, have kept her off school. Which wouldn’t have helped.

Because what could Mum have done about this, anyway? Exorcists worked by invitation only.

Clancy had gone to watch TV in Ben and Amber’s private sitting room, some bland early-evening soap. On the bus, Jane had said, on the subject of the White Company, ‘Doesn’t it interest you
at all
?’ And Clancy had been like, ‘What’s the point of wasting your life imagining you go to some spooky place when you die?’

Huh? They really didn’t have much to say to one another, her and Clancy, did they? Jane sat on the bed and scowled and then dialled the mobile number that Antony had given her.

‘Antony, it’s Jane. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t know what it’s like with you, but it’s fairly bad here... well, not
that
bad. I mean, I managed to get in tonight on the bus, and Ben reckons enough of the key people from the White Company are around for it to go ahead. Alistair Hardy’s staying with Beth Pollen, and she’s going to meet some more of them at Hereford Station in a four-wheel drive tomorrow. So like...
are
you going to make it all right? And if not, what do you want me to do? If you could like let me know. I’ve got some really nice shots of Stanner in the snowstorm. So, like... bye.’

She sat on the bed, huddled inside her fleece. The snow wasn’t thinning at all, was it? Most of the time you just lied to yourself because if you then repeated the lie to someone else it wouldn’t
seem
like a lie.

Why
had
she gone out of her way, in the face of the weather and her mother’s dismay, to come back?

Because she was a working woman and, with a conference on, Amber needed all the help she could get. Because she was retained by Antony Largo, on the promise of
considerably more
money, as a cameraperson. Because if it turned out that the White Company made some historic contact tonight and she’d
missed it
...

Yeah, mainly that.

Why had she
not
wanted to come? Why had she actively
dreaded
being here? Because, on the other side of this unlikely but nonetheless compelling psychic odyssey there was the bloated ghost of Hattie Chancery, her repellent life, her sordid and hideous death.

She gave Eirion another five minutes to call back, then stood up and snapped on the light. No good putting this off any longer. She took off her fleece, pulled her overnight bag from under the bed, found her warmest sweater and put that on, dragging the fleece over the top. She felt a little better, got out the Sony 150 and checked the charge. Then she put out the light and went out onto the top landing, down the second flight of stairs and left at the fire doors.

Had to do this. Had to dispense with it before she could move on. Before she could stop waking up in the morning waiting for the bloody bang.

This morning at the breakfast table, at her most pathetic, she’d nearly cried out to Mum to take it away, to exorcise Hattie Chancery from her subconscious. Like Mum could really do this with a sign of the cross and a pat on the head. Bonkers.

She had to do this – walking down the passage with the Sony held in front of her like an automatic weapon – because it made the difference between being a woman and a child. Because she’d never been in that room with any knowledge of whose room it had been and what she’d done – i.e. the knowledge that Hattie Chancery was the kind of woman, basically, who, in life, Jane would have hated even more than she did as some sick possible
presence
.

And also the knowledge of the stains under the maroon flock wallpaper, the blood dribbling down the windows.

She intended to walk into the room under the witch’s-hat tower, bring the Sony 150 to her shoulder, demanding,
Imprint yourself on that, you brutal bitch
. This was a necessary penance.

‘Couldn’t do it.’ Danny had his head in his hands, a bowl of tomato soup cooling on the table at his elbow. ‘In the end, I couldn’t tell him.’ He looked up at Greta. ‘Pathetic, eh?’

‘Could be it’s for the best,’ Greta said, but he could see she didn’t believe that, not for one second.

‘Suppose he’s mad? Suppose he’s ill? Suppose that what we reckoned all these years was perceptiveness,
knowingness
... suppose that was just signs of his... mental dysfunction.’

‘Big words tonight, Danny.’

‘I en’t thick,’ Danny said. ‘Might’ve lost a few brain cells to acid and metal, since the ole grammar school, but it en’t taken it all away.’

‘Have your soup.’

Danny swallowed some tomato soup. Through the kitchen window, he could see the snow ghosting the farmyard that was foggy-grey with old stone and dusk. No stock out there no more, nothing in the sheds except for his own tractor and Delia, Gomer’s new JCB. Need to have the tractor up and ready tonight, with the snowplough bolted on; this could go on for days.

‘Know what I was scared of back there, suddenly, Gret? That mabbe, if I told him, he’d kill her. Like Geoff James did when his missus—’

‘Danny, this is
Jeremy
.’

‘Can’t just say that n’more.’ Danny put his spoon down. ‘People goes funny. Same disease: isolation, EC form-filling, stock-tagging, signing all your beasts over to the bureaucrats. No independence, no pride, no satisfaction, no money. You reads the bloody papers, you’d think all country folk’s worried about is what the government’s doin’ to bloody huntin’ with hounds – like it’s fundamental to us all in the sticks, ’stead of just a rich man’s expensive pleasure introduced by psychotic Norman barons.
Shit
.’