The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘If you can find a room in this place that looks more like a church—’

‘All right. Just… we’re not talking about an actual exorcism, are we?’

‘It’s a word that functions on several levels.’

‘Aw, shit, Merrily, you know what I’m asking. Looking at it from the angle that the law will not — to Brigid’s advantage, I should emphasize — allow me to look at it, we have a number of close parallels here with the grandmother of the suspect. Now if, during the course of your activities here, my prisoner’s eyes happen to turn blood red…’

‘If only we had Annie Howe in charge,’ Merrily said. ‘Annie Howe simply would not believe that could happen.’

‘So what is going to happen?’

Merrily perched on the edge of one of the dining tables, now pushed back against the walls, while the chairs had been arranged in a semicircle around the makeshift altar. A little like Sunday nights in Ledwardine Church.

‘Well… the original plan by the White Company and Ben Foley appeared to be to try and contact whatever remains of Conan Doyle to find out if he really did get the inspiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles from the Welsh Border, rather than from Dartmoor. I wouldn’t mind starting with that.’

‘You’re attending a seance?’

‘It’ll be an experience.’

‘I don’t like this. Spiritually, you’ve always been… conservative?’

‘Lack of confidence, Frannie. As a teenager, I used to wear Goth frocks and black lipstick.’

‘You’re worried about something. You’re nervous. When you’re flip, you’re nervous, I’ve noticed it before.’

‘Detectives,’ Merrily said. ‘Always got to throw it in your face.’

When she walked back into the lobby, Jeremy Berrows was sitting in the chair by reception, with his scarf around his neck, staring at the lounge door like a dog outside his master’s wake.

Was anyone better placed to hold up a small candle into the heart of the darkness? When Merrily had talked to him, at The Nant, Jeremy had obviously been guarded, fearing the worst. But now the worst had happened.

Nothing to lose.

Cheap phrase, never more true.

‘The thing is, Jeremy, we’re all from Off.’ She’d pulled up a chair next to his. ‘It’s none of our business, really, and yet all the problems seem to have been caused by incomers who couldn’t leave anything alone.’

‘Incomers moved out, wouldn’t be nobody left at all,’ Jeremy said.

‘Except you.’

Jeremy smiled probably the bleakest smile that Merrily had ever seen on anyone living. It was as if his suicide had been, in essence, a success. She had a stark image of him one day, years hence, being found dead by the postman or the feed dealer, half-mummified beside the ashes of his fire. A shell, a husk; it looked as if the process had already begun.

The image arrived so suddenly that it was as if he’d passed it to her. She was suddenly desperate to help him, to pull at least one person from the mire of myth and madness.

‘Jeremy, they want me to try and… deal with whatever came through Hattie Chancery. To Paula, to Brigid…’

He looked at her. ‘They knows?’

‘Not all of them. Do you believe it came from Hattie Chancery?’

‘Come through her, mabbe.’

‘So where does it come from? How far back does it go?’

‘Where’s all evil come from?’

‘For instance — have you ever seen the Hound?’

He glanced back at the lounge door. ‘Just a shadow. A few folk seen him, time to time. It don’t mean nothin’ — no death, no disaster.’

‘But if you were a Vaughan, in the old days…’

‘So they reckoned.’

‘What about now? Is there someone it still means something to? Who, if they saw it, would feel there was reason to be afraid?’

Jeremy swallowed. ‘Dacre. The Chancerys.’

‘It came to mean the same to the Chancerys, the Dacres, as it did to the Vaughans?’

Jeremy loosened his scarf a little. ‘Sebbie Dacre’s ole lady — Margery, her once come over to our place, hell of a state — my mam told me this, I was n’more’n a babby at the time. Margery reckoned her seen it, twice. Next thing, Paula’s died.’

‘Margery connected that with the Hound?’

‘Sure to. Her… said better all round if the child died, too.’

‘She was scared of something being passed on?’

Jeremy nodded, swallowed.

‘But it didn’t affect Margery… did it?’

‘Her never hurt nobody far’s I know. But Paula was the oldest, see.’

‘But Margery believed she’d seen the Hound. And Sebbie…?’

‘Rumours. Zelda Morgan, one of his… lady friends, reckoned he seen some’ing made him real upset. And then he hires these boys from down Wales.’

‘He didn’t really think they’d bring him the Hound — dead, like in the novel?’

‘Don’t reckon he seen hisself partin’ with seven grand, that’s what you means.’

‘But he kept sending the shooters up to Stanner… and across your land. And down to The Nant, of course. Because of—’

‘Them’s the two places Nat’lie was.’

‘He connected the Hound with her? He knew who she was?’

‘I don’t reckon he knowed for sure. But… what was a woman that lovely doing with the likes of me? He wasn’t daft. He was mad, but he wasn’t daft. And I reckon he knowed the time was nearly up.’

‘The lease.’

‘Sure t’be.’

‘And he wanted the ground. The idea of someone else occupying a farm right in the middle of his… this offended him. So possibly this was some kind of crude threat, maybe aimed at Brigid. Though you’d have thought it would have made him the very last person she’d want to sell to.’

‘Well…’ A sheen of sweat on Jeremy’s forehead now. ‘I think he reckoned it was coming off The Nant, see. Paula’s land.’

‘The Hound?’

‘Whether he was really seein’ some’ing out there, or he seen some’ing that wasn’t outside of his mind…’

‘Either way, part of him would believe a death was coming.’

‘Likely.’

‘His own?’

Jeremy looked down at the table. ‘Or hers. It was him or her, I reckon.’

‘What?’

‘Thing is, see,’ Jeremy said, ‘he always figured he was out on the edge anyway, so he’d go around creatin’… situations. Trouble. And he’d get away with it — magistrate, Country Landowners. All this Countryside Alliance protest stuff — war in the fields and the woods, and the ole gentry right there in the middle of it, defendin’ what’s theirs. If there was anybody exac’ly like Hattie Chancery, my mam used to say, it was Sebbie — the huntin’, the booze… he din’t care. Never got nicked for drink-drivin’ — cops liked him, their kind of magistrate: no mercy, no sob-stories, send ’em down, put ’em away. Robber baron, Danny calls him.’

‘But when Brigid—’

‘When Big Weale, the lawyer, died and Sebbie found out who really owned The Nant, that was when he got real paranoid. And the time was nearly up, he knowed that, but he couldn’t say he