The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘Bit of singing. Write songs.’

‘That a proper job?’

‘It is, actually.’

‘All right, what we’ll do, we’ll go round the bowling green, but we’ll come out by the Swan. That’s what we’ll do.’

Somebody who expected never to be contradicted or refused, due to being asthmatic and not looking for stress.

Lol remembered how, when he was working with Dick Lydon, the Hereford psychotherapist, Dick had this disabled client with the same attitude. You had to humour them to begin with, Dick used to say, and then, after a while, make it obvious that you were humouring them so they’d see a reflection of themselves.

That could take all night with Dexter. It could take all night, and it still wouldn’t work. Whatever Dexter had done tonight, he was proud of himself. He kicked a lump of snow, hands punching out the pockets of his leather jacket, killing time looking for someone he knew they wouldn’t find.

‘What you waitin’ for?’

‘I’m just thinking,’ Lol said. ‘Where is Alice likely to have gone?’

‘Coulder gone back home by now, for all I knows.’

‘We’d have seen her. Unless she… We haven’t checked out the orchards at the back of the bungalow, have we? There’s a path through the orchards. Where people walk their dogs?’

‘Alice didn’t have no dog, never went for no walks.’

Past tense. Always past tense.

‘No,’ Lol said, ‘but—’

‘I said her never went for no fuckin’ walks.’

Lol tightened up inside. Dexter didn’t want him checking out that footpath.

‘It’s, er… also a short cut to the church, isn’t it? And she was a church cleaner. The head cleaner. Be the quickest way for her to go.’

‘Not at bloody night.’

‘As head cleaner, she’d probably have keys. If she was very cut up about what happened, she might’ve got it into her head to go and… offer up a prayer?’

‘At night?’

‘Like you said, they do strange things, old people, don’t they?’

The squeak of fists clenching in leather gloves.

Lol turned into the tracks they’d made, back up towards the square. ‘Tell you what, if you go and check round the old bowling green, like you said, and I’ll have a walk up to the church… Then I’ll follow the footpath back the other way. You won’t need the torch, will you?’

He wiped the new snow off his glasses and walked off.

After a few seconds, he was aware of Dexter following him. Not altogether a pleasant sensation.

‘Mrs Watkins.’ Merrily had been looking for Jane and he’d come down the main stairs, a man with a laptop and black-framed glasses. ‘Matthew Hawksley. I suspect we may have exchanged e-mails.’

‘Yes. I believe we did. Sorry about that. I just wanted to know what my daughter was getting into.’

‘She isn’t getting into anything. We try not to involve anybody under the age of twenty-one.’

‘Well, that’s… good.’

‘Anyway, we’re glad to have you with us,’ Matthew said.

‘Now that sounds ominous.’

‘This place is ominous,’ Matthew said. ‘What’s been happening tonight only underlines it.’

‘A murder can make a children’s playground seem ominous.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘do they know it’s murder?’

‘It’s a lot of manpower for a suicide, Matthew.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I know how the clergy, in general, feel about spiritism, so I won’t bend your ear on that, but — have you got a couple of minutes?’

‘Maybe hours. I don’t think I’m going to get home tonight.’

‘You’re probably right. Poor you. Look, I’d hate to say this in front of Ben Foley, but my feeling is that this place — this house, this hotel — should never have been built.’

‘No, best not to say that in front of Ben.’

‘Not built here, is what I mean. Not as if it was erected on the site of a former dwelling; there never was a house here.’

‘On Stanner Rocks?’

‘I’d probably argue that this site has a degree of psychic instability.’

‘Jane would say pagan magic, and she’d put it down to the Border. Would that be in line with your thinking?’

Matthew grimaced. ‘What you had was an obscenely rich family moving to a generally poor area. Perhaps they were warned, perhaps not. They were, after all, bringing wealth and employment.’

‘And modern science to an area riddled with primitive superstition?’

‘Spiritism.’ Matthew smiled ruefully. ‘I wish we had a better word for it. I’d be the first to agree that very few of the claims made by people like Conan Doyle have been substantiated. In fact we’re no further forward now than we were then — except that we’re less susceptible to frauds.’

‘Wouldn’t say that necessarily.’

‘All right’ — he put up his hands — ‘let’s not go down that road. Let’s get back to geophysics. I mean, look around… Even on a simple structural level, it doesn’t feel right — damp coming through everywhere, woodwork rotting. I suspect the heating will never be adequate. Standing here, now, it’s almost as if we’re standing on the bare rock. Am I telling you things you already know?’

‘You mean people didn’t live here until we had an urban, industrialized society that believed man was destined to have full dominion over the natural world — i.e. the Victorians?’

‘Bottom line is, Conan Doyle notwithstanding, Foley’s going to go bankrupt here in no time at all, and he knows it. When I first heard that somebody had taken a dive off Stanner Rocks, I half thought it was going to be him. Hello—’

Merrily turned to follow his gaze. DS Mumford had come in from the car park and was standing just inside the entrance, bulky as a lagged cistern in one of those long, dark overcoats on which snow appeared to evaporate. Bliss appeared in the doorway of his incident room. Mumford nodded.

Matthew said, ‘I don’t know much about your side of things, but Beth Pollen tells me there’s something you can do called an Exorcism of Place. Cleanses a place of bad vibes, the residue of unfortunate acts. Makes it a more amenable place to live and work.’

‘It’s not feng shui, Matthew.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Has anyone asked you to mention this?’

‘I’m… just sounding you out, Reverend. But I think my colleagues — Beth, anyway — are getting a little nervous. The TV producer’s arrived and he and Foley are intent on filming something tonight, as originally planned.’

‘With all this?’

‘With the police action as background. Sexy telly.’

Two uniformed police were opening up both swing doors to the porch and the tall detective who’d connected Merrily with Annie Howe moved to a vantage point near the unlit Christmas tree.

‘Are they bringing something in?’ Matthew asked.

‘Someone, I’d guess.’

She heard doors opening behind her, sensed more people standing there. The electric current passing through the lobby could have relit the tree and doubled the candlepower of the chandelier. Everyone tensed for that first glimpse of Brigid Parsons. Even, presumably, the people who already knew her as Natalie Craven.

‘Given what’s happening, Beth now feels apprehensive about what we’d originally planned,’ Matthew said. ‘I think she’d be happier if there was a spiritual dimension to it.’