The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

over by the police.

‘Aye,’ Dr Bell said after a while, ‘I’m informed that it was.’

‘Did he have relatives here? Members of his family?’

There was a longer silence this time, a blurring of Hardy’s face as Matthew pushed his luck, maybe suspecting that he didn’t have much time left.

‘Was he aware of the legend of Black Vaughan and the Hound of Hergest?’

Dr Bell breathed gassily in and out through his mouth. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as if talking to someone else. ‘Aye. Indeed.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘You touch on a most vexed issue, my friend.’

‘In… what way?’

‘I will not be…’ Dr Bell sprang up. ‘These people!’ Forefinger pointing, accusatory, around the room. ‘These people are a disgrrrrace!’

A plastic bottle of water labelled Highland Spring was sent spinning from the table. Merrily held her cross.

‘The child.’ Dr Bell’s voice had deepened. It might — if you gave any credence to this — be considered a different voice. ‘The infant. To involve an infant… inexcusable.’

You might now want to believe that this was the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hardy had his hands behind his back. There was a tremor under his breath. He looked up at the ceiling, and down at the audience. He didn’t seem to see anyone.

Until his gaze collided with Merrily’s — and it was a collision; she almost felt the jolt. She held the cross and didn’t blink.

‘They tarnish us.’ Then Hardy looked away and sat down. ‘They tarnish us.’

Matthew Hawksley retrieved the bottle of Highland Spring from under a chair and poured out half a glass, as Alistair Hardy coughed himself out of trance.

Merrily stood up. She didn’t feel very priestly tonight, in her black cowl-neck jumper and jeans.

‘Erm… did that suggest anything to anyone?’

‘Oh yes,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘I think so.’

Merrily rather liked what she’d seen of Beth Pollen. A decent woman in search of some kind of spiritual truth. To what extent she was open to deception, however, was anybody’s guess.

Merrily opened a hand. ‘Please—’

Mrs Pollen stood up. ‘The Chancerys… tried to build themselves into the fabric of the area. This area has always been overshadowed by the Vaughan legends, which have inspired pretty genuine fear over the years. The Chancerys were unlikely previously to have encountered the level of acceptance of hauntings, omens and curses they found here on the Welsh Border, even among fairly educated people. So they were saying, “Look, we’re the heralds of a new age of enlightenment, we can deal with this. By recreating the circumstances of the exorcism, we’ll summon the spirit of Black Vaughan, and then we’ll talk to him rationally through a medium, and we’ll find out what his problem is.” ’

‘But it seems to have been a fairly cobbled-together affair,’ Merrily said. ‘And they certainly didn’t have twelve priests.’

‘But, as Sir Arthur correctly remembers, they did have a baby.’

Twenty years younger than Gomer, but a lot more cautious — he’d always known that — Danny went up the drive first, with the lambing light switched off. He did not like the sound of Dexter Harris.

He stopped halfway to the vicarage front door, where the bushes on either side had been turned into great white domes. There was enough reflected light to reveal deep footmarks all over the path, as well as scuff-marks, drag-marks. Hell.

You got a weight of snow, there wasn’t nothing couldn’t happen in these villages. Used to be police stations everywhere, now the dull bastards at the Home Office, never been west of Woking, figured cops could reach anywhere in minutes. But all it took was one big snowfall…

Danny switched on the light. It told him that the front door was ajar.

‘Somebody been in,’ Danny whispered.

‘Well, don’t bloody well hang around!’ Gomer grabbed the lamp off Danny, planting his boot on the door, banging it open. ‘Lol! Lol, boy, you in there?’

‘Chrissake,’ Danny muttered, Gomer blundering past him into the vicarage. ‘Gomer?’

‘Bugger,’ Gomer said, dry-voiced. ‘Oh, bugger.’

‘What?’

‘Better take a look.’

Danny stepped up into the hall. Could just make out a door on his left, then a staircase, a passage in front of him, and Gomer standing in a doorway to the right. Over Gomer’s shoulder, in the lamp beam, he could see a big kitchen with a Rayburn or something of that order and a long table dragged to one side and, all down one leg of the table, long smears of red, unlikely to be ketchup.

‘Blood in yere, Danny.’

‘Take it careful, Gomer. I mean it.’

There was a door slightly ajar at the bottom of the kitchen.

‘Lol!’ Gomer shouted. ‘You there, boy?’

‘This en’t lookin’ good, Gomer. Don’t touch nothin’.’

‘Bugger that.’ Gomer marched across the kitchen to the bottom door, hooked his boot around the side and dragged it open.

Some kind of short passage, with an oak beam across, a door and a small window on one side, a narrow stairway on the other.

On the floor, a body.

Merrily froze.

There were present, to help lay the spirit, a woman with a new-born baby, whose innocence and purity were perhaps held powerful in exorcism.

Today, of course, it wouldn’t even be contemplated. The rule book said plainly, See that all children and animals are removed from the premises.

But that was then. And it was only a story.

‘The assumption is,’ she said to Mrs Pollen, ‘that the baby in the story would have been newly baptized, otherwise it wouldn’t be seen as a symbol of purity. In the medieval church, baptism itself was considered a primary exorcism. A baby would be christened as soon as possible because it was considered to be prey to satanic invasion, or even to actual possession by the Devil, until baptism.’

‘That’s how I understood it too, Mrs Watkins. A child who died before baptism would not be admitted into heaven. As well as having the sign of the cross marked on its forehead in holy water, its head was wrapped in a white cloth in which it would be buried if it died, as so many did, in infancy. The baby’s immortal soul was then considered to have been formally saved.’

Merrily nodded. This woman had done her research.

‘Well, then,’ Mrs Pollen said, ‘I don’t know which account of the Vaughan exorcism you read, but the one in Mrs Leather’s book does not say that the baby had been baptized.’

‘No,’ Merrily conceded, ‘I suppose it doesn’t. However—’

‘And I’m certain Hattie Chancery hadn’t been either, when her mother brought her in.’

‘Oh.’ Merrily sank down into her chair. She’d missed the obvious.

‘For heaven’s sake—’ Ben Foley’s chair legs screeched as he swung round. ‘You’re saying the baby was Hattie? How reliable is this, Beth?’

‘Well, it’s not actually documented anywhere, as far as I know,’ Mrs Pollen said. ‘It’s what the original servants said. We tracked down about four children or grandchildren of Stanner Hall staff who’d been involved in the ceremony. Three of them had heard the story, and two of them actually said their parents had been pretty jolly horrified when Bella Chancery proudly walked in with her new baby daughter.’

‘And the baby was unbaptized?’ Merrily said. ‘Do we know that?’

‘What we do know, from records, is that Hattie Chancery’s baptism was delayed because she became ill. Although we don’t have an exact date for the so-called exorcism, we know it took place in