The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

scared.’

Thinking: magnetic knife rack on this wall, row of kitchen knives in ascending sizes, butter knife to bread knife to carving knife. Edging round the end of the table. Thinking, how could he use a knife, for heaven’s sake?

‘Bit of luck, Dexter, that crash at Allensmore… or what?’

Then Dexter went: ‘Fuuuuuu…!’ Jarring sound of wood scraping stone, jolting pain in both Lol’s thighs as the table was slammed into him, jamming him into the sink.

‘Who needs luck?’ Dexter said.

A wrenching now — the table dragged aside, and where in God’s name was asthma when you needed it?

Lol felt the breeze of Dexter’s massive fist sailing past his head. He swayed — the wrong direction, and the next blind jab was into his left cheek, a knuckle stabbing up into his eye, dislodging his glasses. He slammed his fist into where he thought Dexter’s gut was, hit leather, a metal zip.

Crap at this.

A fleshy hand around his chin, tossing his head back into the wall with a crack and a wild, white shooting pain. His glasses gone, the black air bursting. Torn from the wall, slammed down into the flags, kicked in the chest, in the stomach, the pain explosive, Lol retched. Curling into a ball, rolling and squirming until he came up against a leg of the table, his gut spasming. Christ, it didn’t take long, did it?

‘Best thing, look’ — Dexter’s boot coming in again — ‘is if ‘you just lie still and think of fucking the vicar, or whatever you want. ’Cause I en’t gonner stop, look. I en’t got no choice, you knows that, and I en’t got no time, with Alice to take back to her grave. So you just fuckin’ lie there quiet and peaceful. And you takes it till it’s over, all right, Mister Lol?’

‘Uhhh.’ Boot ripping across his face. Lol lay still — pain, fear, indignity, hopelessness coalescing in the air. He could hear Alice’s hollow breathing. Then a singing in the air — Dexter’s boot going for his head again, missing. He tried to haul himself across the floor, sensed the foot drawn back for the big one, pushed his head back into the flags, licked stone.

An indrawn breath, then a jarring crunch just above his ear, and Dexter grunting. He’d kicked the table leg, sounded like. Lol heard him backing off, boots scraping on the flags, and Lol rolled away, scrambling to his feet, bringing on pulses of pain, like being knifed all over. Fear overcoming agony. Thinking fast. Thinking Dexter would expect him to go for the main door into the hall.

So going the other way. Flattening himself into the far wall, looking hard into nothing. Across the room, the hall door slammed, Dexter cutting off the main exit.

Silence, now, except for Alice and the Aga, and Lol had the sense of Dexter moving very quietly around the room, eyes unseeing, hands poised. Figured if he could get into the scullery he could open the window, slide out into the strip of garden bordering the orchard, into the fresh, cold air and the kiss of snowflakes.

Dexter stumbled and hissed. Lol’s fingers found the scullery door.

Shut. No! The sound of him bending the handle down would bring Dexter back here faster than he could open the door, and then it would all be over very quickly because he didn’t think he could even stand upright.

Worst thing of all, even without his glasses, he could see Dexter’s shape now, blundering towards the Aga like a prowling troll, outlined in the greenish sheen of the smoke alarm light, a little glow around it, and he knew that the alarm bulb, the size of the smallest pea in the tin, would soon be as good as lighting the whole room, and Dexter would have him again. Last time.

‘En’t nowhere to go, boy.’ As if Dexter had seen his thoughts, neon-lit in the blackness.

Lol edged, very slowly, one foot at a time, along the wall to the second door. This one opened into the passage leading to the rear door of the vicarage and the back stairs. The rear door was always locked and the key kept… where? Couldn’t remember. Jane had a key, because this had once been her private front door, the way up to her apartment, until using it got to be too much of a drag.

The second door was not quite shut and Lol rested his shoulder against it, knowing that it nearly always creaked. He could get through all right, but the noise would tell Dexter where he’d gone. If he could get upstairs, into Merrily’s bedroom with its phone… if Dexter would just make some kind of covering noise…

‘When I gets you… gonner make it all hurt real bad… I promise.’

It was enough.

Lol leaned back against the door to the back stairs and, with a creak even he barely heard, he was through. He went directly for the narrow stairs. No point in even trying for the back door. Tripping over the first step and going down on his hands, and then up the stairs that way, his hands finding the next steps, his bruised stomach screaming at him to stop.

He collapsed on the top step and just… just breathed, taking in real air, letting it come out in a rush, lying on his back. Hands out on either side, feeling the rough plaster covering the old wattle and daub.

When he tried to get up, he nearly passed out with the pain. Started to slide back down the stairs.

‘Come on, boy.’

Sod it.

Lol said wearily, ‘You’re stuffed, you know that? They’ll find your DNA all over her.’

‘But mainly yours, boy. And you’ll have gone. You’ll have buggered off. They en’t gonner find you.’

Lol looked back down the steep and malformed back staircase in search of light. This was the throat down which you dropped into the belly of the house. He saw a vague smear of grey, perhaps the small window alongside the back door. He sensed that the door at the end of the passage at the bottom of the stairs was still open to the kitchen.

And Dexter, somewhere very close.

He tried to stand up. A foot skidded off the edge of a stair and he shuffled down three of them.

‘That’s it, boy. Alice is dyin’ to see you.’

Alice.

We needs it now, more than ever — the Holy Spirit, the Holy Eucharist.

Clear challenge there to the remorseless evil represented in Dexter Harris. They were going to drag him into a public place so that the born-again Darrin could publicly denounce him before God. Something in Dexter had sent him out in search of an answer to that.

‘Why the churchyard, Dexter?’ Lol croaked. ‘Why did you take the trouble to bring Alice all the way to the church? Could’ve left her in the orchard, might have been days before she was found. Why the churchyard?’

Ritual behaviour. Dexter wouldn’t understand why he’d done it.

‘Why’d you take Darrin back to the scene of the crash?’

Dexter: one small greasy cog in the huge and complex machinery of evil.

‘Poor Darrin,’ Lol said. ‘He could’ve had everything. The repentant sinner takes all. Including the chip shop.’

The voice roared up, like out of a wind-tunnel. ‘That cunt? Pretend you changed your ways, sorry for what you done? That’s how you gets out of jail quicker. He never found no fuckin’ religion, he —’

‘I think he did, Dexter. But if he was dead, who’d know one way or the other?’

‘Come on, boy.’

‘You can’t get out for the snow, anyway.’

‘I can get out.’ Dexter was back on his high, everything going his way, couldn’t lose. ‘Hey, guess what I found — nice set o’ knives on the wall. You gonner come and have a look? How about I gives Alice a little prod, see if her’s gone yet.’

… Real nasty, look. Stuck his knife in the back of my hand once. Had an airgun, shot a robin in the garden…

‘No, I’m coming down.’

‘Good boy.’

‘Bloody hell, Dexter,’ Lol said, ‘where are you from? You’re a walking curse. You’re the living dark heart of your own family. You’re a big, walking disease.’

Lol took the crooked, swollen steps steadily, a hand on each wall and his aching head way above everything