The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

He peered into her face: lopsided, like half of it had collapsed, her eyes closed. The colours of Alice’s face, when you thought about it, had always suggested high blood pressure.

Her’s likely wandered off. What they do, her age, minds start goin’.

Lol began furiously to shovel the snow out of Alice’s lap with cupped hands, then began digging out her lower legs, cold as marble.

The woman in the armchair, the white-coats had been very careful how they moved her. That was in a centrally heated day room.

How long had Alice been here? An hour?

She should be dead.

He bent and put an arm under her shoulders, prising them from the tomb. He unzipped his parka, pulled it off and put it around her shoulders, digging with his other hand to find the crook of her knees, until she came up in his arms, shedding her shroud of snow.

Knowing, all the time, that Dexter Harris had to be watching him from somewhere close.

44 Sanctuary

The easy chair and the sofa had been placed at right angles under the brass-stemmed Victorian standard lamp, an intimate enclosure at the fireplace end of the long lounge. There was a coffee table with two coffees on it, served by the thickset policewoman whom Bliss had called Alma.

‘I thought I could wait just inside the door,’ Alma said to Merrily. ‘It’s a big room — I’m not going to hear anything you don’t want me to. I can sit there and read the paper.’

Merrily took off her coat and folded it over an arm of the sofa. ‘Wouldn’t it be possible for you to leave us completely alone?’

‘I still might have to keep looking in on you. Got my instructions.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Brigid Parsons said from the armchair, ‘what am I gonna do, hold her hostage? Strangle her with her dog collar?’

‘Not wearing one,’ Merrily said. ‘You’d have to garrotte me with the chain of my cross.’

Alma didn’t smile. Someone had thrown a fresh green log on the fire, making smoke and hiss and spiteful yellow flames.

‘Blimey.’ Brigid Parsons stretched out her long legs to the fireplace. ‘You really are Jane’s mother, aren’t you?’

‘If you want anything,’ Alma said, ‘don’t come out. Call me and I’ll come in.’ She glanced over her shoulder before she went out of the lounge door. The fire cracked and let go a fusillade of sparks. Brigid Parsons stood up quickly and stamped on a firefly speck on the carpet.

‘Ben Foley. Tight-arsed in all the wrong directions. I mean, come on — what’s a bag of coal cost?’ She sat down again. She wore tight jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, with two or three buttons open, displaying a silver pendant in the form of what looked like an owl. A grey cardigan hung around her shoulders. She pushed back a strand of dark brown hair from over an eye. ‘Jane finally got you in?’

‘Indirectly. Which is the way it is with Jane. She doesn’t actively work against you, she’s just… indirect.’

‘She’s a good kid. I like Jane. She’s got a lively mind. Unlike poor little Clancy, but whose fault is that?’

Merrily sat down at the end of the sofa, near her coat. ‘Does she know? Clancy?’

‘About me? Yeah. Yeah, she does. I wasn’t going to tell her yet, I was gonna wait till she left school. I mean, I’d always found it surprisingly easy, not telling her — you walk out of prison into single- parent accommodation and a new identity, and that was kind of hard to get used to, so I used to practise on her. Telling her all about the new me before she was even old enough to understand what on earth I was on about. By the time she was two, the old me was history. Sorted.’

‘Why were you going to wait till she left school?’

‘Oh… because… Well, for a start, because Clancy isn’t like Jane, who’d see it as a big challenge. But also, if I waited till she was eighteen she’d have the option to walk away.’

‘From you?’

‘If she wanted to.’

‘Why did you tell her?’ Merrily drank some coffee. It was good. Amber Foley, Stanner Hall’s only asset. ‘Did somebody get on to you — the press?’

‘Nah, nothing like that. I mean, there was some of that, quite a few years ago — media trouble — when Clancy was little, and I had to change the name again — to Craven; when we ended up in Craven Arms, it was like a bad joke. It was a problem, for me, getting used to another surname. Less so for her. I think she thought it was something everybody had to do every few years. Excuse me, but are those cigs sticking out of your coat pocket?’

‘Want one?’ Merrily pulled out her Silk Cut and the Zippo.

‘Thanks. It’s a big thing when you first get out, not having to let one of the screws feel you up just to get yourself a fresh packet.’ She took a cigarette and Merrily lit it for her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being flip. I don’t feel flip. I feel like shit, naturally.’

‘I can imagine.’

Brigid inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out slowly. ‘Reason I told Clancy about Brigid, and the reason, basically, that we came here, was that a kid at school — a boy — was taking the piss out of Clan because she was quite a bit behind the others. We’d moved around a lot, with my jobs, and we’d just come up from Cornwall, and she’d got behind, and this kid was like, “Oh you’re backward, you’re ESN.” Taunting her. I think he fancied her, actually — you know the oblique way they approach things at that age. How was he to know what a raw spot this was? So, anyway, she stuck a Biro in his eye.’

‘Oh.’

‘I mean, like really stuck it in. This wasn’t one of your classroom semi-accidents. Some of the kids from school would go down the chip shop at lunchtime, and she walked up to him in the street while he was eating his chips and she just stuck the flaming pen in his eye. I mean hard. Hard enough that he needed surgery to save his sight in that eye. The police were involved for a while, but there was no charge. But word gets out, obviously, and I had a call from my old minder, Ellie, who was actually the detective who’d arrested me. And Ellie’s like, what you gonna do about this? And she didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know about Hattie. But she saw a dangerous parallel. I’m assuming you know what I mean.’

‘I think so.’ He lost an eye, Stuart, did you know?

‘So we sat down one night last spring, Clan and me, and I told her. We sat there just like this, drinking coffee — only it was a bloody sight warmer, of course. It was after dawn before we went to bed — together, like sisters. And she never went back to that school, and that was when we came down here to live with Jeremy.’

Brigid Parsons sat up and looked around vaguely, then leaned forward and tipped half an inch of ash into the grate. Merrily realized that she’d hardly stopped talking since the policewoman had left them alone.

‘That was a bit of an ice-breaker, wasn’t it?’ Brigid said.

Merrily felt very odd. It had been like two old mates catching up: the so-called woman of God and the woman who, as a teenager, had lured a boy into some derelict industrial building and inflicted upon him… was it forty-seven stab wounds?

‘They haven’t actually arrested me,’ Brigid said. ‘Or do I mean charged? Someone like me, they don’t know how to play it. It’s like asking the Queen if she needs the toilet. The red-haired Scouser said, “We’ve brought you in to ask you some questions, that’s all.” I just said, “I did it.” He’s like, what? And you could tell he’d rather I’d said, “Piss off, copper, you got nothing on me” like he presumably gets from everybody else. He looks at me like he can’t wait to get my clothes off and into a plastic bag.’

‘You told Bliss you killed Dacre?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And did you?’