The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (56 page)

‘So, not a word from Alice?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing. And it’s not likely she’s going to call now, is it?’

‘You do know what’s... implied here,’ Merrily said, fifteen miles away and safe, thank God. ‘You do realize what it suggests – about Dexter?’

‘It suggests that Dexter might not be your problem any more,’ Lol said carefully.

Merrily said, ‘If he
is
responsible for—’

‘Then you couldn’t have known, you had no reason even to suspect it. You didn’t know Darrin and, if what Howe says is right about his conversion, neither did Alice.’

‘It was my decision. My solution to their problem.’

Jeavons’s solution
, Lol thought. He ought to tell her about Jeavons, but he didn’t think she’d take it in.

‘You gave them an option,’ he said.

‘The kind of option that someone like Alice was never going to refuse. When you think about it—’

‘
Don’t
think about it. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a police matter, out of your hands. Your only problem now is going to be Alice, and if you start blaming yourself, that isn’t going to help. How’s Jane?’

‘Confused. Lol, why wasn’t Alice answering her phone?’

‘Probably because she hasn’t got one in her bedroom. I’ll go round and see if she’s OK, if you like.’

‘
No
... don’t do that. If she hasn’t been round and she hasn’t rung, I suppose that means she doesn’t know. If she’s asleep, let her sleep. I’ll call her in the morning, when she’s better able to handle it, before the police can make a move on her. Damn – Bliss is making signals. What’s it like there, now?’

He looked away from the window. ‘Don’t try and get back tonight, you won’t make it. Not even in Gomer’s truck. Is there somewhere you can sleep?’

‘It’s a hotel. But nobody’s sleeping.’

‘Call me back when you can, there’s a couple of things—’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I love you,’ Merrily said, ‘so don’t—’

‘Eirion rang, too. He’s worried about Jane, and he—’

‘I’m going to have to go.’

Lol sat staring at the hypnotic sleep-light on the monitor. He’d promised to call Jeavons back after he’d spoken to Merrily, but all that had been superseded now. He glanced at the window. He couldn’t have told Merrily about Dexter looking in. He couldn’t have done that.

Because it meant that Dexter had still been here an hour ago. Here in the vicarage garden. Out there looking in.

The fish and chip shop must have been long shut, but the chances of Dexter being able to get a vehicle out of Ledwardine had, for a long time, been remote. Therefore, the chances were that Dexter was still here.

At Alice’s? Obviously. Where else could he have gone? Lol picked up the phone. Maybe he should ring Annie Howe himself, let her know about this. Tell her that Dexter Harris, whom she would presumably like to question in relation to the possible murder of his cousin, was here in Ledwardine.

But then, it wasn’t certain. Nothing about this was certain.

Ethel the black cat sat on the sermon book and watched Lol, as though sensing his indecision. Ethel had a red collar with a small round bell. The first time he’d been in this ancient house was when he’d arrived with Ethel, kicked and injured. And Merrily Watkins – ‘one of my uncles used to be a vet, in Cheltenham’ – had wrapped her in an old quilted body-warmer and laid her on the kitchen table examining her for internal injuries, removing bits of broken tooth. Lol often wondered if he’d fallen in love that night, when Merrily had said something like, ‘God, these lights are crap,’ explaining her belief that oaths were OK because they kept the holy names in circulation.

Without this cat...

‘You’re right.’ Lol stood up and went to find his wellies.

Bliss led Merrily back into the lounge – his incident room – where a brass-stemmed standard lamp lit the scratched wood panels with a light that was thin rather than soft.

Over the fireplace, Sir Arthur’s blue-tinted face gazed into places where Bliss wouldn’t want to go. Bliss sat down in the easy chair near the flaking fire, one leg hooked over the arm, and motioned her to the sofa opposite.

‘None of this goes out of this room, all right? And if it subsequently proves irrelevant to this case, it doesn’t get spoken of again. Even Andy doesn’t have clearance yet.’

Merrily sat down and closed her eyes. You could learn too much in one night. She’d shown him the chat-room printout that Jane had given her, told him where it had been found. She wondered where Jane was, but at least Gomer had been with her.

‘Best take off that sad old coat and have a coffee,’ Bliss said. ‘This could take a while.’

Jane looked up from making cheese toasties for the cops, watching Amber adding the herbs to her chocolate. Couldn’t believe either of them was doing this. Keeping busy, knowing it was all coming to an end – shadows lengthening, ghosts emerging, moss and mildew reclaiming the walls of Stanner. Like being in the band on the
Titanic
.

‘How can you just... go on?’

‘It’s what I do. I’m—’

‘A cook, yeah.’

‘Better than a conference, Jane,’ Amber said bitterly, ‘and without any dirty bedclothes. We’ll even get paid.’

After a while, Amber said, ‘She seemed such a godsend. A woman with all the management skills and diplomas and years of experience – a personable woman who was happy to work for a pittance and never minded scrubbing floors.’

Jane stopped grating cheese. ‘Do you know where she is?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think...?’ How could she ask what she wanted to ask? ‘Do you think Dacre was killed because of her?’

Amber stopped stirring. ‘
Because
of her?’

Jeremy wouldn’t come back and sit down. He walked into the little kitchen, with the dog at his heels, flinging open the back door, staring out across the yard, as if there was likely to be some personal message for him, scored out in the snow. When he turned round, back into the room, Danny saw pain passing across his face fast as a train over a level crossing.

‘You thought it was me had him, din’t you?’

‘Jeremy, till them cops come, I didn’t even know it was Sebbie dead.’

Danny pushed his fingers into his hair. It still wouldn’t penetrate his brain that Natalie Craven was
the
Brigid Parsons, one of those names that nobody who’d read a paper or seen the TV news over the last twenty-five years would ever totally forget.

‘How come we never knowed? How come nobody round yere knowed Paula’s daughter was Brigid Parsons? Tell me that.’

‘Nobody knew ’bout Paula, neither. They kept it quiet.’ Jeremy came away from the door and went and stood by the paraffin lamp, looking down at the glass. ‘Paula killed herself.’

‘
When?
’

‘Not long after giving birth. It was... pretty bloody horrible, Danny. Nobody talks about it. Nat’lie never learned about it till her dad was dyin’. Poor bugger blamed hisself, but it weren’t his fault. It was in her.’

‘So her mother killed herself, grandmother killed herself, and... It don’t bear thinkin’ about, Jeremy. None of it.’

‘Brigid growed up thinkin’ her mother died in childbirth. Which is true, in a way. Her dad, Norman, he had things to find out, too. Thought Paula was an orphan – which was true, like, but it was only when they come down yere he found out the truth about Hattie and Robert. The Nant was his now, see, but he felt it oughter be held on to for Brigid.’

‘That’d been me, I’d have wanted to get rid, fast. Specially after...’

‘He’d signed the lease by then.’

‘But
you
knew. About Brigid and what she done. I mean you muster knowed, when it was all in the papers. You and Sebbie.’

‘We never said nothin’. The two sisters never met. The Dacres knew what nearly happened when they was little, swore her’d never get another chance. And were they gonner spread it round they got
two
killers in the family now?’

Danny didn’t even like to think how Jeremy would have taken it. The girl he loved, the girl he’d prayed to God to send back. Jeremy in love with the memory of the monster who lured a boy of fourteen into an old railway shed with the promise of sex, and stabbed him and cut him and tore him to pieces with a little Kitchen Devil and her own nails. And the next night, while the police and the neighbours were still looking for the missing boy, did the same thing to his mate.
TEEN FIEND
, the
Mirror
said, when Brigid was convicted. This was the girl Jeremy had prayed to God to send back to him, and it didn’t bear thinking about, none of it.

‘I wrote to her,’ Jeremy said. ‘I wrote to her five, six times. Never had no reply. Figured mabbe her’d been moved and they never forwarded the letters. Turned out her dad wasn’t passing them on.’

Poor little sod. Was some folk born unlucky or what?

‘Wasn’t until he was dyin’, end of last year, that Norman sends for Brigid. Tells her the truth about who she was and where she come from. Tells her about Hattie.’

‘And what good did that do?’

‘Good?’ In the lamplight, Jeremy, for once, looked his age and then some, his face full of dips and hollows.

‘Must’ve seemed good for you,’ Danny said, and then he thought about it. ‘Bugger me, no wonder you rung me to come over when they turned up in that camper van. You was scared to death. You knew who it was gonner be all along. You just din’t know if her was gonner have two heads and bloody claws.’

He turned and walked back into the living room, where the fire was burning low, tossing uncertain shadows on to the walls. Danny saw a dark and tragic tapestry forming.

‘How long before Sebbie found out who the new woman was?’

‘Dunno, Danny.’

‘He ever ask?’

‘Never asked
me
.’

‘Just sent his Welsh shooters round to cause trouble. Put the wind up you. Let you know he was on the case. Cause a reaction. Was that it?’

‘Mabbe he seen the Hound.’

Danny snorted, turning to face the boy who was standing in the doorway now, his face mottled by the fire.

‘What he seen, Jeremy, was the curse of Chancerys comin’ back to the Stanner Valley.’

Jeremy cried out, so sharp and sudden that the dog whimpered and cowered away from him.

‘Why’d you take a rope into the barn?’ Danny said.

And couldn’t bear to hear the answer. He went and sat down by the fire, wishing to God he was at home with the cans on and The Queens of the Stone Age a satisfyingly numbing wooden mallet in his head.

‘I begged her to go,’ Jeremy said, like from a long way away. ‘I begged her to leave. I
prayed
for her to leave, same as I’d prayed for her to come back. Now I’m praying for her to get out before it... I could feel it coming.’

‘What?’

‘The shadow Hound. Death.’

‘Bollocks!’ Danny roared. And yet remembered when he seen the two of them in the Eagle, thinking how soon romance died.

‘And
you
seen the signs, Danny. Signs even you couldn’t miss. And yet you did.’

Danny let his hands fall from his ears. ‘What?’

‘The night this Nathan got beat up.’ Jeremy came to kneel down, side of Danny’s chair, like a dog. ‘You was there just before it happened, right? Think back, Danny – what was they saying?’

‘I don’t bloody know.’

‘Yes, you do. You tole me.’

‘They was... Like Foley said afterwards, Nathan called him a wimp. Then
splat, splat
.’

‘No, words? What did he actually say? What did Nathan say?’

‘Jeremy, for—’

‘What’d he
say
?’

‘Foley’s telling him to get the hell off his land or else, and Nat... Brigid... her’s like,
Better do what he says
. And then Nathan goes,
What you gonna do about it, you and that fuckin’ little...
’

Danny stopped, the words booming in his head louder than The Queens of the Stone Age and The Foo Fighters live on stage, together. And a big part of the black tapestry got itself blocked in.

‘...
That fuckin’ little English wimp
.’ The words shrank in Danny’s mouth.

Quarrel was with herself
, Jeremy had said earlier.
Me as got hit, mind
.

‘Jesus Christ, Jeremy, he din’t mean Foley was a fuckin’ little English wimp, he meant... he meant
you
.’

He stood up, looked down at Jeremy by the chair, the boy’s eyes full of a knowledge that he wished he didn’t have.

‘Foley never lifted a finger against Nathan, did he?’ Danny said.

40

O
N THE SQUARE
, the Christmas tree lights had gone off at midnight, and now the tree was shapeless with snow and joined at the hip to the market hall. The falling snow was so dense that it was like passing through lace curtains, the few lights still burning in Ledwardine peering out at Lol like suspicious, muffled eyes.