The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (38 page)

‘You got out,’ Greta reminded him, that soothing tone again. ‘You’re with Gomer now. You sidelined, you en’t part of it n’more.’

‘Jeremy en’t never gonner get out, though, is he? It’s part of
him
. Part of him’s in the land. Uproot him, he’s dead.’

‘Why should he be uprooted? He’s got a good, solid farm. He’s respected. He’s got—’

‘A good woman? Ole days, see, there was farming marriages, and they lasted. Now you got
partners
... temp’ry. All right in cities, mabbe, where it’s all temp’ry and you can move on, swap around. In the country, you don’t have
continuity
– there’s another big word, see – if you don’t have continuity, you’re fucked. Jesus Christ, did I just say some’ing
Conservative
?’

‘Look,’ Greta said, ‘he won’t be out of his yard at all for days, if it keeps on like this, so unless somebody rings him and tells him about Natalie, he en’t gonner find out nothin’, is he?’

Danny stared into his soup, a pool of blood. He was thinking about Natalie Craven and her mousy little partner, and Ben Foley and his mousy little wife.

Ben Foley, saviour of Stanner. Incomer with attitude, smooth Londoner widely said to be driven by irrational obsessions. Man who showed up on your doorstep asking if you seen the Hound of Hergest.

‘Sign of death.’

Greta gave him a hard look. ‘What is?’

‘The Hound of Hergest.’

‘Let’s not get silly about this,’ Greta said. ‘Jeremy’s ma used to say he was always seeing things that wasn’t there. It’s the way he is. His condition.’

‘That’s what it’s supposed to be, though, ennit, the Hound: an omen of death.’

‘If your name’s Vaughan.’

‘The Vaughans’ve all gone.’

‘Nothing to worry about, then,’ Greta said.

‘Just be honest,’ Merrily said. ‘Tell me what you think I need to do. Tell me I’m overreacting. Tell me it’s time to let go of the leash, cut some slack, sever the umbilical, make some space, chill out.
Tell me, Lol
.’

‘You know I can’t do clichés.’ Lol took the mobile out into the passage and went across to the stable door, unbolting the top half and pushing against a crust of snow. The section of door opened with a sound like splintering plywood. Somewhere out there was the Frome Valley, as white and cold and barren as an old psychiatric ward he used to know.

‘Tell me there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Merrily said into his ear, serious now. Snow talk. Unexpectedly severe weather could do this to you. You were no longer in control. Nobody was.

‘I’ll come over,’ Lol said.

‘No. You can’t. Really. It’s just been on the radio: go home and stay home. Stay off the roads unless it’s an emergency, and even then—’

‘It’s not bad here.’ Lol looked for his car, couldn’t see it. It was nearly dark, and the snow was like a wall.

‘I’ve got enough to worry about without the thought of you stuck all night in a snowdrift in an ancient Astra with a heater that hasn’t worked in years.’

Music started up in the studio behind Lol: a slow, growling twelve-bar blues from the album that Prof Levin was mixing for the guitar legend Tom Storey. A relentless, chugging momentum: life going on.

‘It’s Gomer, that’s all,’ Merrily said. She’d already told him about Ben Foley and the violence and the woman called Hattie Chancery. ‘Gomer’s worried; how often does that happen?’

‘You could phone her. She’s got her mobile?’

‘I could do that, yes. I could go on to her very carefully, stepping on eggshells, knowing that at any time she could lose her temper and cut the call and switch off the mobile, and that’s the link gone for the duration. I
could
do that. Would
you
do that?’

There was a gas mantle projecting from the wall, just inside the fire doors. During the murder weekend, Ben had propped the doors open so that you could see the mantle from the stairs, and you were back in Hattie Chancery’s young days, enclosed in a hollow glow.

No mention of Hattie Chancery during the murder weekend. There were murder games, with the scent of mystery, and there was real murder, with its sadness and its stink.

The mantle, unlit, was utility-looking, without romance. No doubt it would be working again when the White Company were in residence. The passage, meanwhile, was lit by electric wall lights – dim vertical tubes under amber-tinted glass. The walls, with their recessed doors, were lined with woodchip paper. The lights turned them yellow.

Jane stood at the entrance to the passage, legs apart, and lingered on the shot. Ought to have brought the tripod really, but she guessed that if she’d gone downstairs to look for it she wouldn’t have come back. As it was, she kept wanting to turn back but wouldn’t permit herself to stop or even to hurry, to get it over with.

Oh, don’t worry about young Jane. Far too down-to-earth. Jane’ll be fine
.

He really didn’t care, did he, as long as he came out a winner.

Called me a nancy boy
.

A winner against the odds. Whatever it took.

But was she really so different? Jane Watkins: research and second camera. Using Eirion, deceiving Mum. Snatching every new experience to further her own ambitions, hoovering up the dirt on Hattie and the tragic Robert, while despising the White Company as naff and sad.

Capricious and contrary, this Jane Watkins, not a nice person.

Still shooting, Jane walked on, with sour determination, along the passage, where the sharp smell of recent painting failed to obscure the odour of damp and quite possibly rot.

She stopped in front of the last door on the right, the image wobbling. Through the lens, with the recording signal aglow, it was both more exciting and less scary because it was less personal – a professional thing.

The door was like all the other doors in the passage except that it didn’t have a number on it. When she opened it – reaching out to the handle, giving it a quick push and then stepping back, with the camera still running – she realized that it was too dark in there to shoot anything. She put the camera on pause and lowered it, recalling that there were a few steps to a second door that was oak and Gothic-pointed.

Jane stopped briefly at the bottom of the steps. She remembered a pot lampshade hanging from the ceiling. There was a switch somewhere, on an old-fashioned pewter box. But when she hand-swept the walls on either side she couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was at the top. She located the first step with the toe of a trainer, went up carefully, one, two, three, four – was that it?

No – she stumbled – five.

Jane remembered how it had seemed so cool at first, having one of the tower rooms, sleeping under the witch’s hat, with views across the Border.

A shocking cinematic image flared unconjured in her mind: the heavy old service revolver clunking on the floor as Hattie’s head exploded, blonde hair snaking with blood and wet brains, and a splatting on the walls and—

What was it like to have killed? To have done – publicly, without hope of concealment – the one thing you could never reverse, put right, make recompense for. One way or another, your life was over, wasn’t it?

No more
tally-ho
, no more
whoop-whoop
.

She felt for the handle of the bedroom door, catching an acrid waxy smell. Furniture polish? The cold clawed through her chunky sweater as though it was cheesecloth, and she thought of Robert Davies lying here in a fever, Hattie hauling the bedclothes from his sweating body. What had Hattie felt like as she carried the service revolver up here? How had she known it was loaded, unless she’d loaded it herself? So was this an outcome that had always been at the back of her mind? Because it really wasn’t a woman’s way of suicide, was it, to blow all your beauty to fragments?

Jane’s hand found the doorknob, cast-iron and globular, grasped it angrily, turned it and went into the bedroom, standing there panting out some kind of mixed-up defiance into the darkness.

Only, it wasn’t dark at all. Hattie Chancery’s room was delicately rinsed in ochre light.

Jane’s senses swam.

She saw a mustard-shaded oil lamp standing on a dressing table of polished oak in front of the central window with its floor-length purple velvet curtains. The light lured a dull lustre from the gilt frames of pictures on the flock wallpaper.

The polish-fumes seared her throat. This was wrong; everything was wrong, many years wrong. She reeled back against the door and it closed behind her with a heavy
thunk
and an efficient click. The triple mirrors on the dressing table reflected a high, claw-footed bed, and a woman’s figure rising.

And Jane just screamed, high and piercing, like she never had before, at least not since she was very little, as she saw, in the middle mirror, a broad face, with thick fair hair piled up and twisted and eyes that were small and round and pale like silverskin onions.

25

T
HE
W
HITE
C
OMPANY
was a band of English mercenaries formed by Sir John Hawkwood in the fourteenth century, best known for its campaigns in Italy. It was also a firm supplying bathroom-related fluffy goods through mail order and two fancy-dress historical recreation societies.

Close to the bottom of the first page, Google finally identified
the White Company
as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic historical novel, and Merrily clicked on it.

Motley group of English mercenaries led by Sir Nigel Loring... assiduous attention to historical detail
...

Nothing, however, to suggest that the novel in any way reflected the central obsession of Doyle’s last two decades.

In under an hour, she’d gathered a mass of background on this: Sir Arthur’s tireless tours of Britain and America, promoting his conviction that spiritualism would alter mankind for ever by making life after death a scientific fact. His blind defence of obvious fakery. His insistence that he’d spoken, at a seance, with his son Kingsley, a victim of the Great War, and his brother Innes. His belief that his sister Annette, over thirty years dead, had communed with Jean, Arthur’s wife, through automatic writing. Eventually, Arthur had acquired his own high-level spirit contact, Pheneas, a scribe from the Sumerian city of Ur, dead for over four thousand years.

A kindly, decent, deluded man.

In the snow-padded silence of the scullery, the phone went off like a burglar alarm. Two phone lines had become a necessary extravagance. Merrily plucked it up, wedging it under her chin while tapping on
next
, for Page Two.

‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Vicar?’

‘Alice.’

‘Vicar, will you be in if I comes round later on?’

‘I... yeah, sure. Wear wellies, though, Alice, because I haven’t bothered clearing the drive.’

‘With Dexter,’ Alice said.

‘Oh.’

The digital clock on the desk said 7.18 p.m. The snow had turned the apple trees outside the window into cartoon wraiths. Page Two came up, with its highlighted words:
white, white, white...

‘Sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you,’ Alice said, ‘My sisters, they said yes, they’d like to have the Eucharist. Dexter, he en’t so sure.’

‘He’s with you now?’

‘Does two nights a week in the chip shop.’

In a steamy chip shop? With asthma?

‘I en’t letting him go back to Hereford tonight – what if he got stuck in the snow and he couldn’t breathe? How would they get him to the hospital? Will you talk to him, vicar? Will you make him see some sense?’

‘Well, you know, I’ll... I mean, I can try and explain, but I don’t want to—’

‘’Bout half an hour, then?’ Alice said.

On the screen, near the top of Page Two, it said:

Oh.

‘OK,’ Merrily said, ‘fine.’

Replacing the phone with one hand, she clicked the mouse with the other, watching a bulky figure fading up: sagging white moustache, pinstripe suit, watch chain, watchful eyes. Encircling him, like some tragic Greek chorus, other faces less defined – misty faces blinking on and off, like faulty street lamps, in shades of white and grey. And then:

Walter was this fat and beaming old git, with a moustache that curled. His wife, Bella, might have been his daughter: turned-up nose, big hair gathered on top of her head. And the kid, this flat-faced kid clutching her hand, could have been Walter’s granddaughter.

In fact this was Hattie Chancery, apparently the earliest obtainable photograph of her. It was on the wall next to the door, one of four framed photos in here: Walter and his family in the garden – Walter, formal in wing collar, and his wife Bella in some kind of flouncy crinoline. Also, two scenes of what, presumably, was the Middle Marches Hunt hounding some poor bloody fox into a badger set. And, over the bed, so she might see herself reflected in the mirror when she awoke... the adult Hattie.