The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (5 page)

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Then we shall waste no more time!’ Snatching back the stick and holding it over the table, next to the oil lamp, so that everyone could see him twist the cobra’s head.

No!
The Major sat up. ‘That—’

The snake head came off, the hollow shaft of the walking stick was very gently shaken. The man in black was somehow manipulating the light so that everyone’s attention was on his hands, and on the stick... and on this big red stone that rolled out and lay there glowing on the very edge of the table.

‘Hmm. The Fontaine Ruby, I imagine.’

The Major half rose from his chair, as though he was about to make a break for it. Several spontaneous gasps wafted out of the shadows, from people who had spent most of the afternoon searching for this paste ruby – with the walking stick conspicuously propped up in the hallstand the whole time.

The man in black didn’t even glance at it. Gems, in themselves, clearly held no big fascination for him; even his interest in the Major was waning now that guilt was proved. They both glanced towards the door, which had opened to reveal this guy bulked out by a huge tweed overcoat. The Major slumped back.

‘I think this is all the evidence we require,’ the man in black said mildly. ‘You may arrest him now, Lestrade.’

Silence. And then the electric lights came up and the applause kicked in: genuine appreciation, a couple of actual cheers. A triumph. You couldn’t fault it.

When the lights came fully on, everything seemed duller and shabbier, the country-house drawing room reverting to hotel lounge, the oil lamp dimming into history. And Sherlock Holmes was Ben Foley again, closing his eyes in relief.

Afterwards, when the bar was closed, Jane went down to the kitchen to collect mugs of bedtime hot chocolate to serve to the twelve guests. Earlier, she’d heard Ben saying that twelve was barely enough to make the weekend pay for itself, and they were all too old, and the whole thing was an embarrassment.

The kitchen had flagged floors and high windows and room for a whole bunch of servants, but it was dominated by the new island unit that Ben had assembled from the debris of a bankrupt butcher’s shop in Leominster. If most domestic island units were the Isle of Wight this was Australia. Amber, who didn’t have any staff to speak of, was on her own, bending over a corner of the unit, adding something herbal and aromatic to the cauldron of hot chocolate. She looked up.

‘Is he all right?’

‘Basking in adulation.’

‘Yes, he’s quite good at that,’ Amber said. No sarcasm there; Amber didn’t do sarcasm.

Last night, all wound-up before the guests came down for dinner, Ben had snarled that yeah, he might have done live theatre before, but that was over twenty years ago, and back then he didn’t have to work with school pantomime props and a bunch of crappy amateurs.

‘He was brilliant, Amber. Genuine massive applause – well, as massive as you can get from— Anyway, you’d have thought there was a lot more of them, to hear it.’

Amber was wearily rubbing her eyes, shoulder-length ash-blonde hair tinted pink by the halogen lights. She was probably about fifteen years younger than Ben, maybe mid-thirties, but more... well, more mature. She was wearing a big pink sweater and an apron with a cartoon cat on it.

‘Must’ve taken for ever to plan,’ Jane said. ‘Like the gas mantles – I didn’t even know they worked.’

Amber looked worried. ‘Some kind of bottled gas. I don’t like to think of the safety regulations he’s broken. Plus messing with the trip switches last night to make sure the normal lights didn’t work – I mean, what if one of those old women had fallen down the stairs?’

‘Well, they didn’t. It was brilliant.’ Jane liked Amber moaning to her; you only moaned to people you could trust. ‘Oh yeah – good news – only one of the punters correctly identified both the murderer and the motive, so that’s just the one bottle of champagne to give away.’

Amber blinked. ‘You did phone your mother, didn’t you?’

‘I did phone my mother. And there wasn’t a problem about staying over.’

‘Because I’d hate—’

‘There was no problem.’

‘It’s very good of you, Jane,’ Amber said. ‘The girl we had before wouldn’t do Saturday nights. They don’t seem to want weekend jobs any more.’

‘Jesus, Amber,’ Jane said, ‘this isn’t a
job
.’

A holiday, more like. A regular weekend break, and they gave you money at the end of it. Well, usually.

At first, Jane had thought Amber was a bit like Mum, but now she saw a clear difference. Amber’s modesty came out of this essential self-belief; she’d handled the food end of two significant London restaurants fronted by flash gits who treated customers like morons, knowing that she was the reason they could afford the arrogance. Flash gits faded fast, but Amber was never going to be out of work, Ben had remarked, talking about it to guests in the bar, naming names.
I like to think I rescued her from that little scumbag. Can you
bear
to watch his crappy TV show?

To Ben, virtually everything on the box, including the news and weather, had become crap from the day he finally negotiated his severance deal with BBC Drama. A couple of weeks ago, a Face from
Casualty
or
EastEnders
– someone vaguely familiar from something Jane wouldn’t have watched if the alternative was the Open University – had come to stay overnight at the hotel, accompanied by a gorgeous-looking woman who sat propping up her smile while the Face and Ben got rat-arsed and ranted on for hours about the bunch of totally talentless twats who ran the Corporation these days.

‘So who
was
the winner, Jane?’ Amber started setting out empty mugs on the wooden trolley.

‘Oh – guy with white hair? Like Steve Martin without the humour?’

‘Dr Kennedy. He’s the serious expert. The others are just here for fun. Kennedy’s written books on Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. He knows a lot.’

‘I thought Ben knew a lot.’

‘Ben? All Ben’s ever done is produce
The Missing Casebook
for the BBC. You’re probably too young—’

‘No, I think I saw a couple.’

‘I’m sure you’re too young to remember the fuss.’

Apparently
The Missing Casebook
had not been adapted from the Conan Doyle stories. It was this semi-serious spoof, supposed to be about what Holmes was
really
doing after everyone thought he’d died at the Reichenbach Falls. The joke being – possibly for copyright reasons – that the central character in
The Missing Casebook
was incognito. He looked like Sherlock Holmes, he spoke like Sherlock Holmes, he played his violin in the night and shot himself up with cocaine, and everyone knew who he was
really
, but he was always called something else, a different name in every episode.

‘I don’t actually remember that,’ Jane admitted.

‘The second series was cancelled. The first one didn’t go down well, particularly in Holmes circles. The orthodox version’s sacrosanct to those people. They want the same stories done over and over again, as if it’s history, not fiction. And they don’t like people taking the piss.’

‘He wasn’t taking the piss this weekend, though, was he? OK, the story was invented, but you can’t have a murder weekend where everybody already knows who’s done it, can you?’

‘Murder weekends.’ Amber sighed.

‘No, but it worked, Amber. I was trying to be cynical, because, you know... But it was all beautifully done, given the—’

‘Tiny budget,’ Amber said.

‘I mean, he really dominated it. He
was
Holmes.’

‘Gave up acting when he was twenty-six,’ Amber said. ‘He didn’t think he was good enough to be one of the greats. It’s the way he is.’

‘He needs to be great?’

‘He needs to... succeed against the odds, I suppose.’ Amber dipped a wooden spoon into the chocolate and tasted it. ‘Anyway, the most important guest this weekend is Dr Kennedy, because he’s the Secretary of The Baker Street League, and we need their conference. They’re not the biggest or the oldest of the Holmes societies, but Ben knows a few members already, and obviously it would help for us to be linked with a group like that.’

Jane sniffed at the hot chocolate. You could pass out with longing.

‘Amber...’

‘What?’

‘Do you
really
need this Holmes connection to make the hotel work?’

Amber blew out her cheeks, the closest she ever came to scowling. Jane knew that Ben had spotted this place in a copy of
Country Life
at the dentist’s, making an impulse call and discovering that it was still on the market after five months. So there was Ben with what seemed like a decent amount of money to invest in a future out of TV... Ben who didn’t want to go crawling to any more witless tossers who couldn’t see further than cops and hospitals. Who didn’t want to have to watch any more projects crash after months of hassle. Who wanted something he was
completely in control of
. He kept saying that.

And here it was, in a beautiful, atmospheric and unspoiled area less than half a day from central London. A structurally sound country house – kind of – with the possibility of twenty bedrooms if you developed outbuildings. A house with a history that, although not extensive, included a literary connection of curious significance to Ben Foley. Surely this was some kind of—

‘I mean, I know he said it was an
omen
...’ Jane said.

‘Now he’s finding out that the concept of total independence is a myth, especially with limited funds, and he’s still having to crawl to people like Kennedy. And put on murder weekends, which he claims he does for fun, but which really are all we’ve got. Which isn’t good, is it, Jane?’

‘But this Conan Doyle thing...’ Jane looked around the vast kitchen, imagining a grandfatherly figure with a heavy moustache waiting politely for his mug of chocolate. The face she saw was very distinct. It was the face from a blown-up photograph framed above the fireplace in the lounge.

‘We don’t actually
know
if he stayed here regularly – or even once. But rumour and legend have always been enough for Ben. What he doesn’t know he’ll invent. Life’s like television – if it’s on the screen it must have happened. And that’s enough to build a business image around.’

‘Maybe he was just afraid you wouldn’t come if you thought he had an agenda.’

‘No,’ Amber said sadly, ‘I always go along with things.’ She began to pour the chocolate into a big earthenware jug. ‘I just wish it wasn’t so...
Victorian
. There’s something cold and... ungiving about Victorian houses. Everything’s bigger than it needs to be. Too many passageways.’

‘Mmm,’ Jane said. Ben had shown her the ‘secret passage’ under the stairs, where Lady Hartland, played by Natalie Craven, had waited to die.

‘Not so bad in the summer, but now I realize I don’t like the forestry, and those gnarled old rocks. The way they seem to be watching you. Watching everything crumbling around you, while they’ve been here for ever.’

‘Mmm,’ Jane said again, in two minds. As a weird person, she really liked Stanner Rocks, naturally. But this seemed like a good opportunity to bring up the thing that had been bothering her a little. ‘Er, while we’re on the subject of everything being bigger than it needs to be, my room certainly is.’

‘Sorry, Jane?’

‘The tower room – I mean it’s fantastic to have a room that size, but I feel a bit... Like, I’m not used to a room that big, that’s all.’

‘Oh, we thought—’

‘And I keep waking up in the night. Stupid, really. So like, I... just wondered if I could have my old room back.’

Jane felt deceitful and a bit ashamed. She’d been switched around twice over the past couple of weekends, as the Foleys continued their winter programme of refurbishing the bedrooms one by one. Amber looked at her thoughtfully.

‘Just... too big?’

‘Stupid, really,’ Jane said.

‘Well, if you don’t like that room, Jane—’

‘It’s not that I don’t
like
it—’

‘Then you can move your stuff back to the old one tonight if you like.’

Jane nodded, trying not to show her relief, which was kind of despicable, frankly. ‘Thanks, Amber.’

Back in the lounge, Ben helped her serve the chocolate. ‘Thanks, sweetheart, you’ve been terrific.’ His hair was wisping out of the Holmes grease-slick, the curls re-forming. He bent down to her ear and whispered, ‘Some of these old guys, seeing a little maid around the place in a starchy uniform, it gives them a delicious little
frisson
, you know?’

‘I don’t do
frissons
,’ Jane said primly, and Ben laughed and went to play Holmes again for two elderly ladies, the kind that it was nice to think still existed outside of old Agatha Christie films. A few of the people here were regulars at murder weekends all over the country. There was a network of them now.

The Major came over for his chocolate. ‘Terribly sorry, my dear, but I’ve been assuming you were Ben’s daughter.’

‘Just paid help... Major.’ It felt – this was stupid – a little weird talking to a guy who’d just been exposed as having beaten a woman’s brains out. It was surprising how the scenario crawled into some area of your mind and lodged there. Maybe something to do with the house. She shook herself. The maid’s headband fell off, and she caught it and laughed. ‘Are you
really
a major?’