The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (59 page)

Brigid Parsons could never call herself that again, in the same way that Mary Bell had had to lose her fresh, clean name – although apparently she was a nice woman now, not the same person as the child who’d killed two little boys and given herself away by asking to see them in their coffins.

Who were you kidding? In some ways, Brigid was worse. For cruelty, substitute plain savagery. The magazine had revealed details that could not be published in the papers at the time, as those were days when family papers didn’t go into details about...

... Mutilation.

Jane sat on her stool, looking down at her fingers, empurpled in the lights, then up at Beth Pollen, who had revealed the unbelievable. And then at Amber, who hadn’t been able to speak for whole minutes, it seemed like, and when she did it was just to say faintly, ‘Does Ben know?’

Jane looked back down at her fingers. The thing was that Natalie was just so... .
cool
.

Amber stood up and went and did a very Amber thing – she stirred the chocolate, although it was probably ruined by now.

Then she came and sat on the stool with her hands in her lap.

‘
Does
Ben know?’

‘I wouldn’t think so,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘Though I suppose everyone will know in a short while, when they either find her or the media find out they’re looking.’

Jane looked up at the high window, almost obscured now by layers of snow that, from down here, looked grey, like concrete. Christ, she thought,
Christ
.

This explained everything about Clancy: why she was so quiet, the tall, gawky kid behind the pile of books, why she’d been to so many different schools.

Why she’d leapt up from her homework in horror when Nat had walked down these steps with blood all over her arms.

The great revelation over, Beth Pollen talked about her and Natalie.

In the drab aftermath of his death, Beth had taken up her husband’s final research project, the previously unchronicled history of a great Victorian house on the very border of Wales and England. She’d thought it might make a small book, locally published, with his name on its cover, a fitting memorial. Sometimes she could sense him at her elbow as she typed, suggesting a better word, rebuking her for attempting to include some picturesque but uncorroborated anecdote.

Although the text would be tinted by her growing interest in spiritualism, the very sense of Stephen had made Beth more assiduous in her research. And that was how she’d met Natalie Craven, who also was awfully interested in the history of Stanner Hall.

‘I suppose I needed a friend. No, that’s wrong... I suppose I needed a different
sort
of friend. She could almost have been my daughter, but that’s not how it was, either. She had this mature awareness of how things worked – how one might turn situations around – I suppose it was years of surviving in the prison system that made her like that, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. She simply fired me, gave me back my energy.’

‘She
can
make things happen,’ Jane said. ‘I think it’s because she doesn’t care whether they happen or not.’

‘And I was intrigued by her relationship with Jeremy Berrows. Absolutely nothing
about
him – or so you thought at first. Only slowly becoming aware of a kind of native spirituality – the kind that you expect to find in farmers whose families have lived close to the land for centuries, but seldom do these days. Oh, I was
very
curious about Jeremy and how those two came to be together.’

‘Especially after all those years apart,’ Jane said.

‘Well, the first ten she could do nothing about. And then, when you realize, approaching middle age, that perhaps you’ve never been able to connect with anybody as fully as the farm boy you met when you were
twelve
– that maybe you really were
two halves
of something – what do you
do
about it? Nothing. You don’t really believe the validity of a memory that old, do you? It’s like a myth.’

Two halves
... Jane thought about Jeremy Berrows walking into his barn with a rope. She said nothing.

Beth Pollen said, ‘We discussed it, after she’d revealed her real... her former identity.’ She glanced at Jane. ‘And if you’re wondering how
that
came about, it was when we were researching Hattie, copying old photographs, and there was one of her as a girl, with her family, and I said, unthinking, “Oh, she looks rather like Clancy.” Could have bitten my tongue off when I saw Natalie’s face, but that’s how it came out.’

‘I think I’ve seen that picture. It’s in her room now – Hattie’s room.’

‘So the next day we were due to go to Kington Church together. She didn’t turn up. But the following day, early in the morning, there she was, awfully pensive. And just told me, quite simply, who she was and what she’d done. No attempt to justify or explain it, and she didn’t swear me to secrecy – I hope she knew she didn’t have to. I certainly haven’t said a word to anyone... until now.’

‘Didn’t knowing about that, you know, alter things?’

‘Threaten the friendship? Why should it? In some ways, it deepened it, because I felt this overwhelming need to understand her. I felt that no one, except perhaps Jeremy, ever had. And I felt that Stephen had brought her to me.’

‘But she was a
murderer
,’ Amber said.

‘And she’d been punished for it.’

‘And she was... that woman’s granddaughter.’

‘I’d be jolly stupid if I said
that
didn’t frighten me. I remember that when I recognized the awful parallel between Hattie and the blood-weary Robert, and Natalie and Jeremy, I was so
scared
for Jeremy. But in the end I realized that this, in some strange way, had only intensified the relationship. They were living on the edge of a chasm. I think, when she met him again, with the knowledge of what had gone before, she knew that if she didn’t take that risk – seize it – then she’d just be... giving in to the past. And that’s not how she is.’

Jane said. ‘Let’s get this out. You think that whatever made Hattie Chancery do what she did was also present in Brigid Parsons?’

‘It’s what
she
needs to know, and it’s why she came back. She realizes there’s a negative energy inside her that she can’t always control. Her mother...’ Beth Pollen took a breath. ‘Natalie doesn’t think, doesn’t
want
to think it’s a mental illness.’

‘You and she think there’s a... psychic connection with Hattie?’

‘This is why I wanted Alistair here. People like you might demean spiritualism, but I think there
is
something to be discovered here, and it’s nothing that we’re going to find written down.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, ‘I can’t believe an intelligent woman like you really thinks that someone like Hardy can deal with something this... enormous. I mean, he... He’s a phoney.’

Jane heard men’s voices and footsteps at the top of the stone stairs. Two men were coming down the steps. Jane was expecting cops, or maybe Hardy and Matthews. She really didn’t care if Hardy had heard her talking about him.

‘He isn’t a phoney, believe me,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘But I didn’t say that I thought he could
deal
with it. A medium is simply what the word says. It’s about communication, rather than solutions.’

Amber turned to Jane. ‘I think she means
that
’s something for your mother.’

‘Oh.’

It was Ben Foley who sprang from the bottom step. ‘Amber, I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but we’ll need another room.’

The man with Ben bestowed on Jane a gracious smile.

‘Jesus, I wouldnae like to do
that
journey again. Thank you, hen, you’ve got a hell of a nose for a developing situation.’

Nothing was ever simple, nothing ever painless.

Danny had been aware of diamond-bright blue-white vehicle lights behind them on the bypass, sticking with them after they turned off at Walton, using their tracks. But with snow fuzzed all over his wing mirror he couldn’t be sure what it was, and by the time they pulled up at his place the lights had vanished.

It was when Jeremy got down to open the farm gate for him that the little black Daihatsu appeared, coming the other way, down from Kinnerton. Danny had the idea it had been waiting in the lay-by, about a hundred yards back, to see who was in the tractor. Now it stopped, hugging the hedge, wedges of snow collapsing onto its roof as someone got out, a woman in a blue waterproof. Then Jeremy was springing back from the gates, and he was locked together with the woman in the tractor’s headlight beams.

And Danny was down from the cab, real fast, and in through the farm gate.

Greta had the door open before he reached it, standing there in a wash of yellow, and just for a moment it was like the first time he’d ever seen her, in a long floaty frock with little golden stars, like a dusty sunbeam.

‘You all right?’ Danny almost sobbing in relief.

Gret said, ‘I couldn’t do nothing, Danny. Had to let them in. Wasn’t nothing I could—’

‘What?’ And then Danny heard another engine up on the road and turned and saw the blue-white lights hard behind the tractor at the gate, heard the jolt of vehicle doors opening.

‘When they told me,’ Greta said, ‘about Sebbie Dacre...’

And then behind her, inside the house, a girl’s voice was screaming out, in real distress, ‘
No! Mum, go away! Don’t come in!
’ And there were sounds of pulling and scuffling, and this long, rending wail of despair.

Greta said, ‘You better—’

A copper came past her then, out of the front door, and Danny recognized his grey moustache: Cliff Morgan, sergeant.

‘Don’t get involved, Danny, eh?’ Cliff said.

But Danny ran back with the coppers to the open gate, where meshing headlights had turned the snow magnolia, and Jeremy and Natalie Craven were boxed in between the tractor and Jeremy’s old black Daihatsu, in the centre of all these beams of hard light, snow coming down on them, cops gathering in a wider circle, blocking the lane.

But they were separated from it. World of their own. Jeremy with his scarf wound around his neck, so she wouldn’t see what he’d done to hisself, holding her hand real tight. ‘Where you been?’ he kept saying. ‘Where you
been
?’

Natalie Craven pulled his head into the crease of her shoulder.

‘It’s all over,’ Natalie said, long hands in his fluffy hair. ‘All done now.’

42

H
E DIDN’T EXPECT
them to find her. That was clear. Dexter wasn’t subtle, and he didn’t expect them to find Alice.

They went up to the top of Old Barn Lane, back into Church Street and down to the Ox with its frosted front windows, a dim yellow glow visible from somewhere back in the pub.

‘They used to drink yere, when Jim was alive,’ Dexter said, as if they might see Alice peering in, thinking it was still 1979.

Dexter was going through the motions.

Lol wiped snow from his glasses with a forefinger. ‘How did she find out about your cousin?’

‘Eh?’

‘You said you thought it was the shock that might’ve made her wander off.’

‘I said that?’ Dexter sniffed and slumped off round the corner, where an alley led to public lavatories. Lol followed him. A tin-hatted lamp on a wrought-iron bracket turned snowflakes into falling sparks.

‘Check out the Women’s, you reckon?’ Dexter said.

‘It’s all locked up.’ Lol could see an iron gate, a chunky padlock.

‘Pity.’ Dexter finished off his lager, tossed the can to the end of the alley. He came over, leaned down into Lol’s face, his arms folded. ‘You really poking that little vicar?’

‘Not right now,’ Lol said.

‘Her go like
Alleluia!
when her comes?’ Dexter burst out laughing. ‘Just thought o’ that.’

‘Must remember to tell her,’ Lol said.

‘
Alleluia
when her comes.’ Dexter laughed up at the sky.

‘What do you reckon happened to him?’ Lol followed Dexter round to the front of the pub, where they stood under its open porch. ‘Just seems odd, a bloke falling in the road.’

‘Pissed, most likely,’ Dexter said.

‘He hadn’t given it up, then?’

‘Uh?’

‘Turning Christian?’

‘Christian.’ Dexter coughed and spat into the snow. ‘He
never
. He just said what he wanted ’em to think – Alice, and fuckin’ daft Dionne. I’ll tell you, he was a weak bastard, always gonner go wrong. Too weak to hold a job down. Not like me, Alice knew that. I was all she got, look. Me as looked out for her. Sisters got their own lives and their families up in Hereford. Laughing their tits off at Alice, all this ole church stuff. I was all she got, daft ole bitch. Couldn’t have no kids, look.’

‘How long you been helping at the chip shop?’

‘Helping? Cheeky
cunt
. When I’m in there, I’m running that place, look, reorganizin’. All these idle assistants, all this chitchat, we don’t need that. Get ’em served and on to the next one, don’t give ’em too many chips neither. Where them customers gonner go, they don’t like it? En’t like there’s competition. I says to ’em, these women, you do what I say, don’t gimme no stress, look, and we’ll get on. Where’s your beer?’