The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Davies to look up at and eat his heart out. How do I know? I don’t, actually, but when I picture that scene, this is the room. When the light faded a minute ago, I thought, that’s her.’

Merrily said. ‘I… I’ve been asked to help see her off the premises.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I have to keep explaining to people…’ Merrily looked at the cigarette packet, then put it out of her mind. ‘You can exorcize evil in an abstract or spiritual form. With possibly-evil people, we run into problems. You hate the whole idea of Hattie Chancery. You want someone to come along and point a crucifix and send her, screaming, into oblivion.’

‘And you can’t?’

‘Neither can I put her in a snuff-box, under a stone at the bottom of Hergest Pool.’

‘You picked up on all that.’

‘I don’t know how relevant it is. It seems faintly daft sitting here, with you in your situation, discussing fairy tales.’

‘Maybe you should talk to Beth Pollen,’ Brigid said.

Frannie Bliss took Merrily into an office behind reception, steered her into the swivel chair at the desk, on the edge of which he sat, so that he was looking down at her. She felt for her cigarettes, realized she’d left them in the lounge.

‘You want to know why she killed Dacre.’

‘Call me a completist, Merrily, but that would be nice.’

This seemed to be Ben Foley’s personal desk. It had gold inlaid bits and a small, framed photograph of Amber smiling through the steam rising from two cooking pots.

‘OK.’ She knew that what she was about to tell him would, at some stage, take a slow turn away from the truth, whatever the truth was. ‘We did a deal. She wanted two things. I… agreed to both.’

Bliss looked curious but didn’t ask. She told him how Brigid Parsons had inherited The Nant, although everyone thought that Jeremy Berrows owned it. How the Dacres had been trying to buy it for years. How it had become a focus for Sebbie.

‘And at some stage, quite recently, he appears finally to have discovered the true identity of the woman with Jeremy Berrows.’

‘Finally?’

‘He’d probably had his suspicions for a long time.’

‘The printout pinned to the sign?’

‘Could’ve been him letting her know that he knew,’ Merrily said. ‘And putting the name Brigid into circulation at Stanner Hall. Causing unease. Perhaps demonstrating how precarious things were for her. It must have gone up yesterday at the earliest, so…’

‘So we’re looking at blackmail.’

Merrily shrugged. It would do.

‘Let’s get this right,’ Bliss said. ‘Dacre threatens to expose her, explode her new identity, have the press down here in busloads unless she sells him The Nant.’ He sat down opposite Merrily. ‘Of course, the sensible thing would’ve been to flog him the farm for as much as she could get and then bugger off with the proceeds and change her identity again.’

‘You’re forgetting about Jeremy. Welded, body and soul, to The Nant.’

‘And they’re really an item, those two?’

‘Think Romeo and Juliet twenty years on. In minor key.’

‘They could always have gone off together.’

‘Maybe half of him would go. Maybe not the half she’d want.’

‘Jeez, what is it with this area? Scrubby land, lousy winters…’

Merrily said, ‘You’ve heard about the shooters going on to Jeremy’s land, coming on heavy? Those guys — from Off, right? Therefore less inhibited. I can’t help wondering if that was less to do with terrorizing Jeremy than indicating to Brigid what life might be like for him if she didn’t cooperate.’

‘Clumsy… but very Sebbie, by all accounts. No, you’re right, he wouldn’t get the local shooting club to do some of that, would he? What about the final act?’

‘Less forthcoming there, I’m afraid.’

‘Yeh, well, to my knowledge, she’s never said a word about Mark and Stuart in all these years. The Guardian once ran a story based on an interview with one of their former schoolmates who reckoned Mark tried to rape her. Inference was, Stuart too, but Stuart’s still alive and he’s gorra lawyer. Nice opening for Brigid to make a statement — but not a word.’

‘It’s as if…’ Merrily hesitated, tapping Ben Foley’s blue blotter. ‘As if the acts of violence are committed by a different person, and she isn’t qualified to comment on them. You’ve heard all about Hattie Chancery, I suppose.’

‘At length, from Mrs Pollen. I’m not allowed to be remotely interested.’

‘No.’ Merrily slowly shook her head; she felt very tired. ‘Frannie, what can I say? I know what she did, and I liked her.’

‘Merrily, I fancied her. What difference does that make?’

‘None at all, I suppose, to you.’ He had a case to build; the law was a pile of rough stones.

‘All right, what do you think happened up there?’ Bliss said.

‘Well, we can assume she met Dacre at the van — to which she still had a spare key — to discuss the final arrangements in a place where both of them knew they wouldn’t be seen together. Especially on a night like this.’

‘And he went? Knowing who she was and what she’d done in the past?’

‘Distant past. Plus, you’re talking about a man who’s not known for being afraid of much, certainly not the weather or a woman.’

Was this convincing? She wasn’t sure it would be, especially if it subsequently came out that Dacre knew who had damaged Nathan, the shooter.

‘And gets pushed over when he’s not expecting it?’ Bliss wrinkled his nose.

‘Personally, given the conditions,’ Merrily said, ‘I wouldn’t have ruled out it being, to some extent, accidental.’

‘Did you ask her?’

‘Wouldn’t go into it.’

‘What about the van?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We gather she was entertaining a man in there? Was that Sebbie? Might she have wanted to destroy any evidence of that? It’d make it worse for Berrows if he found that out.’

‘She’s Dacre’s first cousin.’

‘Merrily, if it wasn’t for first cousins, there wouldn’t be any population to speak of between here and Aberystwyth. Anything else?’

‘Not really. If you ask her questions aimed vaguely towards those answers, that’s what you should end up with.’

‘So why — if you don’t mind me asking — did she want to see you? When you came out of there, she looked bloody awful. She looked, for the very first time, in fact, like somebody who’s about to be charged with murder.’

‘Mmm.’

Merrily looked down at the desk photo of Amber through the cooking steam. There had been only one hard and binding agreement between her and Brigid, and that was a mutual silence about Jeremy Berrows’s attempted suicide.

Had Jeremy known about the blackmail and decided — because he was afraid of what Brigid might otherwise do — to remove himself from an unsolvable equation. To make it so that she would no longer have any reason — or wish — to hold on to The Nant?

She still didn’t know, and maybe the answer didn’t matter. Merrily saw Jeremy growing old and silent, alone