The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

knowed. What he’d do, way he was… he’d cause trouble, set up dangerous situations just to see what come out of it. Like them Welshies — troublemakers, off their patch, offer of big money. Explosive situation. Mabbe he figured somebody was gonner get killed.’

‘Then there’d have been a death?’

‘I dunno. He weren’t right in the bloody head. Bad…’

‘Bad blood?’

Jeremy’s head went down into his hands.

‘So when Natalie came back…’

‘When her come back…’ He looked up, through his fingers, really sweating now. ‘… Half of me’s the happiest man there ever could be in Kington. Other half’s saying, Make her go away… it’ll all end bad. Paula tried to kill Margery, when they was little. Now Paula’s daughter’s back…’

‘Did you know that he was blackmailing her?’ Merrily put a hand on his arm. ‘And was that why you decided to… take yourself out of the situation. Take away the only reason Brigid had for staying. You were… prepared to sacrifice yourself, in the hope that she’d come through?’

Jeremy looked to either side, back at the lounge door, anywhere but at Merrily. She was profoundly unnerved. It was terrifying how deep all this went. Rural isolation, paranoia. And a curse, like a virus in the blood.

‘And thinking that…’ She coughed, her voice so hoarse that it had nearly gone. ‘Thinking you would be the death?’

‘En’t no way…’ He started shaking his head, talking at the same time. ‘En’t no way out o’ this.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause it goes too far back. It’s built up.’

‘How far?’

‘To the Vaughans,’ Jeremy said. ‘They’re all Vaughans.’

48 Apocryphal

Danny parked the tractor on the square — not that you could see where the road ended and the square began. It had been a close thing whether they’d have enough diesel to make it, the way they’d run the ole tractor getting here.

‘Power’s off everywhere,’ Gomer said, like it needed saying. It had been weird, Danny thought, the way Ledwardine had suddenly just appeared in the headlights, no warning, black and white buildings in a black and white night.

‘That why the vicar couldn’t get through on the phone, you reckon?’

‘Makes no difference to the phones, do it?’

Danny and Gomer stepped down from the tractor into the thick snow. It had stopped falling now, like the sky had worn itself out.

‘Behind there.’ Gomer pointed to a hedge like a white wall, just down from the church.

‘You ever have anything to do with this Dexter Harris, Gomer?’

‘Big feller in the chip shop some nights, but he never got much to say and word’s gone round he’s tight with his chips so, if he’s there, I goes home and makes a sandwich instead.’

‘Makes sense.’ Danny looked up at the windows of the vicarage, all dark except for a small glow far back in one of the upstairs rooms. ‘We putting this off?’

Without lights, what you could see of the rest of the village looked like a photo negative.

‘Don’t feel right, do it?’ Gomer switched on the lambing lamp.

Dr Bell leaned away from the lamplight, his head pitched at an angle, as if he was listening to something that no one else could hear.

‘Aye.’ He nodded, his smile wry. ‘He does urge me to point out that although he and I, at various times, both sought release and relaxation on the grouse moors of Arran, in later life he developed something of a conscience about such pursuits and came to deplore, in particular, foxhunting.’

At the other side of the table, Matthew Hawksley half turned, to acknowledge the factual truth of this for the rest of them, and then faced the doctor again.

‘Joe, did he ever shoot in this area? On the Radnorshire moors, for instance?’

Dr Bell took in two long and reedy breaths, his fingers steepled.

‘He… thinks… not.’

His voice was high and precise, and scalpel-sharp. Posh Scots, Jane thought, was like posh Welsh — explicit in its enunciation and full of this clipped authority. It was clear that Matthew must have worked with him a few times before to get away with calling him Joe.

Jane blinked. What am I thinking? Gripping the Sony 150 — real and modern, hi- tech, digital, third-millennial. Bringing it up and shooting the scene just to do something, avoid getting drawn in, the way she had been at the climax of Ben’s murder-mystery weekend in the lounge next door. This was a similar set piece, played out in the waxy ambience of an oil lamp with a frosted, globular shade — the same one that lit the scene when Sherlock Holmes confronted the Major.

And here, as Matthew had explained in his introduction, was the real Holmes, the prototype, the famous tutor at the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine who had initiated the student, Arthur Conan Doyle, into the basic techniques that Holmes would employ. Dr Joseph Bell, born 1837, consultant surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, life-long advocate of the employment of forensic observation in the diagnosis of disease.

Jane glanced over at Mum: possibly her first experience of trance-mediumship.

It was more than acting, but…

Sometimes it looked as if Alistair Hardy had lost weight — or at least as if his body weight had been rearranged. But it could be explained… If he seemed taller, that was because he was sitting up so straight in his hard-backed chair. If his eyes seemed brighter and shrewder — almost piercing — that was because he’d become fired up by what he was doing… or thought he was doing.

And if his features looked sharper, his nose more like the beak of a bird of prey, that was… well, Merrily was willing to bet it wouldn’t come over on the video.

Transfiguration. It was popular in Victorian times, but you didn’t get much of it now when people were no longer easily fooled by clever lighting and special effects. She was half and half on this — half of her thought he was sincere in the belief that something was happening; half of her thought it was a total con. She wondered how convinced Matthew Hawksley really was.

Matthew said, ‘As you probably realize, Joe, we’re trying to solve a mystery.’

‘In which case…’ Dr Bell’s lips tweaked in amusement ‘… I cannot think why you would come to me.’

Matthew smiled. Apart from this intimate tableau, the room was in shadow. One of Largo’s two static cameras was positioned in front of the altar, the other behind the semicircle of chairs. Largo himself was crouching just a few feet from the table. Alistair Hardy had declined to be filmed going into trance. Maybe he didn’t like the way his left side seemed to drop into spasm, his arm projecting from his body, his fingers curling.

Could be some kind of nervous condition.

‘Would it be possible for you to ask Sir Arthur if he ever came here?’ Matthew said.

‘Here?’ Bell snapped. ‘Where is “here”? Be more specific, man.’

‘Stanner Hall, in the County of Herefordshire, on the Welsh Border. Home of the Chancerys.’

‘Not known to me.’

‘Was it perhaps known to Sir Arthur? Would it be possible to ask him?’

Dr Bell went still. Alistair Hardy’s breathing had altered its rhythm, was going faster, and he was blinking rapidly, like REM during a dream. Merrily saw Bliss sitting in the corner nearest the connecting door to the lounge, Jeremy hunched like a hedgehog nearby. She imagined Brigid Parsons in there, perhaps asleep in a chair, watched