The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

about her in the way she knew of, say Lizzie Borden, a half-mythical figure with a rhythmical, nursery-rhyme name and an underlying pulse of horror.

Brigid Parsons killed some boys.

There were others. There was Mary Bell, whose name you knew because it was such a nice, short, wholesome name, and the killers of little Jamie Bulger, whose names you could never remember.

But this was less horrific, surely, because only one of the boys died. And he was older than Brigid Parsons, so the element of cruelty was missing, or, if it was there, it was different. Different with Brigid Parsons.

Different with Natalie Craven.

You’re asking me what I believe? I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.

This was unreal, and it wasn’t less horrific at all. Jane had an idea of how bad it actually was; she’d once read a colour-supplement feature: Where Is Brigid Parsons? Something like that.

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 The magazine had revealed details that could not be published in the papers at the time, as those were days when family papers didn’t go into details about…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.