The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘Well…’ Amber looked uncertain. ‘Ben and I had our marriage blessed in church. I was christened, I was even confirmed at fourteen.’

‘Fine. As the owners of this place, it would be good to have you both here, but you do need to think about where you stand, whether you have faith that this is going to make a difference.’

‘I’d agree with that,’ Antony Largo said. ‘I’d say you need to think very hard indeed about where you stand. For my part, after driving all this way through the white hell, I’m no’ being fucked about any further by the only organization with ratings falling faster than anything on the box. Either I’m in the whole way or I’m outta here.’

‘That’s up to you, Antony,’ Amber said quietly.

‘Well…’ Merrily went back to her chair. ‘We’ve got an hour or two to think about it. I was thinking maybe six-thirty, for seven a.m.? So that, by the time we finish, the sun’s up. Whether we can see it or not.’

50 Free Coward

There was a white linen cloth over his face.

He lay as if he’d fallen backwards down the stairs. Very narrow and secret-looking, these stairs, Danny thought, specially by lamplight, like the steps was creeping quietly up into the bones of the building.

There was this fat black oak beam across, like a great wedge holding the walls apart. This was likely where a small door had once hung to conceal the stairs, keep the cold out. Very old house, see, Ledwardine Vicarage, and this part didn’t look to have changed much since little Tudor fellers, size of Gomer Parry, was busying up and down the steps.

Must’ve had its share of dead bodies over the centuries, and mabbe this was the way they was brought out.

Not like this, mind. God almighty, but Danny felt sick.

This one, it was like he’d been flung back by a sudden angry blast of wind, his head near enough back in the kitchen, his arms thrown out, his hands reaching the walls on either side, with scabs of dried blood on the fingers of the left one.

There was blood, too, underneath the linen towel over his face — blood and other moisture that had sucked the thin cloth around his head, so that you could see the rough form of his features. Like the mould for a death mask, Danny thought, holding the lambing lamp with both hands, realizing that he was doing this because he was shaking.

Dear God, you could only take so much of this in one night.

He was already backing off into the kitchen when he saw Gomer bending down to peel away the cloth from the dead man’s face.

‘No!’ Danny jerking the lamp away in horror, him and the bloke in the darkness of the kitchen shouting out together.

Gomer straightened up, shrugging his shoulders.

‘Police en’t gonner want you to touch nothin’, see.’ Danny felt like he was chewing cardboard.

‘And you don’t want to see that, anyway,’ Lol Robinson said. ‘Take my word for it, Gomer.’

Gomer sloped back into the kitchen, feeling for his ciggy tin.

‘Can we shut that door now?’ Lol Robinson said.

When they were both in the kitchen, he closed the door firmly on the back stairs and the body, and then he led them into another room where the first things Danny saw were the amber eyes of a black cat lying on a desk, washing itself by candlelight.

‘I’ll… make some tea, soon as the kettle boils on the stove,’ Lol Robinson said.

‘That’d be good.’ Danny had a proper look at him for the first time, taking in the glasses with one lens missing, the thin track of blood from the edge of an eye to the point of the chin. Thinking this Robinson was five or six inches shorter than the late Dexter Harris, mabbe three, four stone lighter. Thinking, how? How?

When they’d walked in, Lol Robinson had been shut away in here, on the phone to the doc, checking how this poor woman was, this Alice. Seemed no ambulance could get through on the roads and the air ambulance wasn’t allowed to land at night, snow or no snow. So the doc and the community nurse had taken this Alice to the little clinic at the surgery.

The police hadn’t got through yet, but they was on their way.

‘Them ole beams,’ Gomer said, thoughtful. ‘Harder than steel girders. Older the oak, harder it gets. Walked into one once — just walking, mind, normal pace — next thing, I’m flat out, din’t know what day it was.’ He looked at Lol Robinson. ‘That be it?’

‘He… came in like a mad bull,’ Lol said. ‘Roaring. Pitch black in there, of course. When it happened… not a sound I’m ever going to forget. You know?’

Oh hell. Danny winced. Of course. Jesus.

‘Bugger me,’ he said. ‘Muster near took his head off.’

‘Something like that.’ Lol was holding himself real funny, like there was some physical injury you couldn’t see.

‘He was comin’ for you,’ Gomer said.

Lol nodding. And but for this power cut, Danny thought… Hell, this was the only feller he ever met with reason to be grateful to the power company supplying Herefordshire.

‘Right, listen now, boy.’ Gomer lit a ciggy. ‘Piece of advice yere. I reckon what happened, you was runnin’ away from this feller.’

‘Well, that—’

‘No, listen! Any suggestion of you deliberately goin’ this way in the dark, on account of you knowin’ ’bout the beam, while he en’t been this way before… Know what I’m sayin’?’

Lol smiled faintly, shaking his head.

‘Ah… now! Don’t you bloody look at me like that, boy! You gets some clever buggers in the cops nowadays — university degrees, New Labour. Feller breaks into your house nowadays, you gotter make him a pot o’ tea, order him a minicab. Bottom line: better to be a free coward than a hero behind bars.’

‘Specially as you was wearin’ a Gomer Parry sweatshirt when you done it,’ Danny said.

Then he noticed the way that Lol’s hand was shaking, on the edge of the candlelight, as he tried to stroke the cat.

‘Bastard of a situation to be in, mind,’ Danny said. ‘Real bastard havin’ to wait here for the cops, with… him in the next room.’

‘Reckon I’d’ve covered his face up, too,’ Gomer admitted. ‘Must have a dent in his head you could prop your bike in.’

Lol Robinson laughed a lot at that, leaning back against the desk.

Wasn’t normal laughter, though, even accounting for the physical pain, and Danny didn’t reckon somehow that the dent in the head was the reason Lol had covered up the feller’s face.

It was the right thing. The primary rule, always hammered home with a couple of tragic case histories by Huw Owen in the Brecon Beacons, was this: never leave without doing something. This was more than something.

After half an hour, the lamp was sputtering, its oil level running low, the colour of even the nearest walls changing from magnolia to a dingy nicotine yellow.

And the confirmed congregation for Hattie’s Requiem stood at: Beth Pollen, Jeremy Berrows, Jane — pagan Jane, for heaven’s sake — Amber and Ben Foley and possibly Francis Bliss.

She needed one more, maybe two, specific communicants to make this work.

Bliss was initially helpful. He agreed to put a Range Rover and driver at the disposal of Beth Pollen, who’d offered to go down to St Mary’s Church to borrow the Sacrament. Just when you needed another priest, the vicar of