The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

— the attic, the snow-covered stone tiles — up in the teeming night sky. The last time it was like this, he was on stage in The Courtyard in Hereford, finding out that people still wanted to hear his songs after all these years. He was glad he’d done that.

By the time he was close to the bottom of the stairs, he could hear Dexter in the kitchen doorway, panting. It was rage, of course. Dexter had a limited emotional range. It was an encouraging sound, but it wasn’t…

‘Hey,’ Lol said, ‘that wouldn’t be a touch of the old asthma coming on, would it? Can you manage to find your inhaler in this light, or will you have to suck your own—?’

He reached the bottom before he was expecting it and stumbled and twisted, and the agony from somewhere in his abdomen brought him to his knees.

‘You… what are you, Dexter?’ Lol whispered. ‘What are you?’

He climbed back onto the third step and sat down, remembering the white high of just a few hours ago. Sitting barefooted on the rug in the scullery, in the orange glow of the electric fire, thinking about the woman in the kitchen with the lights turned down low. Warm love.

He closed his eyes, heard Dexter coming at him, all meat and malevolence, in the total night, and saw Lucy Devenish alongside him, with her poncho spread like bat wings.

You have to learn to open up, Lucy said. Let the world flow into you again.

47 Losers

On the first landing, Merrily encountered a portly grey-haired man in a well-cut three-piece suit, very neat and compact and self-assured. The kind of man who sauntered. He was leaning on the banisters, gazing down the curve of the stairs, and turned as she came up.

‘Mrs Watkins.’

‘Have we met?’

He pointed at the pectoral cross. ‘Can’t be too many of those around here tonight.’

‘Another eleven and we’d be ready to take on Black Vaughan.’

He laughed. ‘Alistair Hardy.’

‘I guessed. My daughter’s just been telling me how you were in communication with an old friend of ours.’

He tilted his head.

‘In a poncho?’

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Personally, I didn’t think it was Lucy’s style, but there you go.’

‘You’re sceptical about the spirit world?’

‘Hell, no, I’m just sceptical about spiritualists.’ She came to lean on the banisters next to him. The lighting down there was too dim; the walls cried out for huge portraits in ornate gold frames. ‘Sorry, I’m not usually this rude. I think it must be past my bedtime.’

‘Mine, too,’ Hardy said. ‘They even went to the trouble of fitting out a magnificent chamber for me. The one where Mrs Davies shot herself.’

‘Whose idea was that?’

‘I wish I knew. Have you been in there?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you something, Mrs Watkins. I’m not a timid man, as you can imagine, but I have to tell you I could no more sleep in that room than on a bed of nails.’

She looked at him: fleshy, well fed, comparatively unlined. It was disturbing how untroubled some of these people appeared — coasting through life, the greatest fear of all having been removed.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I never think of spiritualists acknowledging the idea of evil. It’s always seemed a bit…’

‘Tame?’

‘Not quite right, but… yeah. You never seem to accept the possibility of… risk.’

Hardy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hmm.’ He smiled and nodded and walked away.

In the centre of the great island unit, there was this small earthenware crucible in which incense was burning.

Fat candles sat in glass bowls placed at the cardinal points on the worktop and all the electric lights in the kitchen had been switched off, so that the ambience of the room was one of, like, shivery motion.

Jane thought of the fire on the rocks, how elemental that had looked, how basic it had turned out to be. Antony Largo had two cameras set up on tripods, both bigger and more technical-looking than the Sony 150 he’d given her.

And which he now gave her again.

‘You’re joking,’ Jane said.

‘Look, don’t give me a hard time, huh, hen?’ Just the two of them down here. Largo cocked his head, peering into her face. ‘I never had you down as a prima donna.’

‘You never had me—?’

‘Look — a crucial set piece like this, I’d usually have three experienced people at the very least. Tonight, well, obviously Ben’s gonna be in the movie — unless we get ourselves a spectral manifestation, he’s gonna be the star, so he’s no help. Therefore, I’m gonna leave this wee implement with you. It’s fully charged. You can choose to shoot stuff or not, but there’ll only be the two of us. Maybe you’ll see things I miss — I can’t be in two places at once.’

Jane felt her hands closing around the Sony like they were betraying all her finer principles. She turned away as the first footsteps sounded on the stone stairs.

‘Not yet!’ Antony strode out, hands aloft. ‘I’ll tell you when.’

Jane held her watch to a candle. It was nearly four a.m. Antony waved her away into the shadows and moved over to the farthest tripod, bending over the camera.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘in five.’

When they came in, even Jane could tell that most of them were rigidly self-conscious, didn’t know where to look. You might have expected some small element of anticipation, but they were kind of shuffling like some ragbag band of medieval lepers in search only of relief.

Beth Pollen first, her white hair pulled back and secured with one of those leather things with a stick through it. Beth Pollen, who lost her husband and fell among spiritualists, but who had been a good friend to Natalie. Then Ben in his Edwardian jacket over a white shirt — not as dangerous as he’d seemed only hours ago, just badly wasted, the old sense of suave long gone. Amber… well, Amber was as normal, her gaze wandering to the big French stove, making sure that nobody had glued candles to her big steel hotplate. Matthew Hawksley was looking crumpled, his white jacket well creased. Alistair Hardy was in his conman’s business suit, with his hands behind his back, looking like he’d come to value the place.

Losers, Jane thought, as they took their places on high wooden stools around the island unit, their faces shimmering in the candlelight. Hardy was at the top of the table. Missing was Natalie Craven, over whom a pile of circumstantial evidence towered like Stanner Rocks.

Nobody spoke. It looked like the set-up for virtually every phoney seance scene that Jane had seen on television, but maybe this was what Largo wanted. This wasn’t a serious documentary, this was cheap, naff reality TV, coming from the same kind of factory as all that airport crap and the bollocks set in hairdressing salons.

True to his word, though, Antony didn’t make them all go out and come in again more realistically. He wasn’t invisible, but he was moving around unobtrusively enough, with another little hand-held Sony. Jane was aware of the tiny red light glowing on the second tripod camera. Long shots from two angles, then, with meaningful close-ups by Antony Largo.

He slid back to the tripod at the top of the room, refocused. Then he lifted a finger and brought it down,