The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘But in the book it was a fiery hound,’ Jane said. ‘Which turns out to have been phosphorous paint. Like, when the Hound starts appearing again in modern times — like, Victorian times — it turns out to have been an actual dog that was starved, therefore given a good reason to howl in the night. And painted with luminous paint.’

Ben nodded. ‘In the novel, the fiery hound is a scam.’

‘And in the end Sherlock Holmes just shoots it,’ Jane said. And it was all coming back now. ‘Why did he have to do that? The poor dog’s already been deliberately starved for weeks. I hated him for that.’ She was aware of both men looking at her with curiosity. ‘OK, I was young. I didn’t realize he needed a dramatic finale. I was just sorry for the dog, and that’s all I remembered. And that’s… that’s why I’ve always hated the book. Sorry.’

A Land Rover Discovery came around the bend quite fast, tyres skidding in a patch of icy mud, and Ben slid quickly back into the MG. ‘Jane actually makes an important point there. Why did Doyle give his novel such a prosaic ending? A real dog and a pot of phosphorous paint?’

‘It was a Sherlock Holmes story,’ Antony reminded him. ‘Sherlock Holmes disnae believe in ghosties.’

‘Yes,’ Ben hissed, ‘but Doyle did! This is the whole point: a medical man, a scientist… but, for the last twenty years of his life, also a spiritualist! The most famous proponent of spiritism on the planet! The guy was beyond fanatical — tours of Britain and the States, promoting what he considered to be the absolutely proven scientific fact of life after death. In fact, towards the end, Antony’ — Ben put his face to within six inches of Largo’s — ‘Doyle lived for bloody ghosties.’

Then something caught his eye and he straightened up, looking away, down the lane to where the Discovery had stopped to let two men out.

‘Ah,’ Ben said.

The two men both wore army-type camouflage jackets and baseball caps. One of them pulled open the back door of the vehicle, reached inside and then handed the other something that Jane thought at first was a spade.

‘Them,’ Ben said.

The rear door was slammed shut, and the Discovery moved on, leaving the two men standing in the road. They started walking up the lane towards the MG, heads down like they hadn’t noticed it was there.

Jane thought, Oh Christ.

Two men, one shotgun.

‘How very opportune,’ Ben said through his teeth. He stepped out into the road.

Antony Largo raised an amused eyebrow, half-turning and leaning back against the passenger door for a better view. Did he know the history to this? Probably not.

‘You know, one thing I’ve always admired about Ben,’ Antony said, ‘is his ability to move into a new situation and form instant and lasting friendships.’

He folded his arms, waiting to be entertained. Jane looked at Ben, already all worked-up and dismayed because he was fighting for his and Amber’s life, and everything he’d thrown at Antony had been deflected — Antony in his professional body armour and Ben bare-knuckled.

‘I’m just so much in the right mood for these scum,’ Ben said. He moved into the middle of the lane and stood there with his legs planted apart, rocking slightly.

7 The Healing of the Dead

It was one of those cottages with very small windows and so few of them that it needed lamps on all day in winter. Merrily counted seven of them, on tables and in nooks, all low-wattage, white-shaded and strung out like a chain of beacons so that you navigated through the house from lamp to lamp. There was a dreamlike feel to this.

‘One day, when I’m really old…’ Canon Jeavons was leading her down a cramped passage, like a tugboat on a canal; he was balancing coffee cups and milk and sugar on a tin tray, ‘there gonna be a nice, plain bungalow, with windows so wide you think you living on the lawn.’

His voice was crisp and biscuity, like on high-quality FM radio. A cathedral voice, too big for a farmworker’s cottage that probably had not been much updated since the wattle first met the daub.

He ducked through a doorway. ‘You must be the first person in a long, long time I’ve never had to warn to keep their head low till they sitting down.’

They’d arrived in a room that needed no lamp. It had whitewashed brick walls, a square of white carpet and an uncurtained window, revealing a small, fenced garden, wide fields and a hoary, wooded hill. The room had a sloping ceiling, suggesting that it had begun as a lean-to. A black cast-iron flue pushed through the ceiling at a crooked angle, serving a glass-fronted, pot-bellied stove in which coals glowed agreeably. There was an earthenware coffeepot on the stove. Homely.

‘This place used to be for the family cow,’ Jeavons said, ‘or maybe the pig. Sometimes I see just one big pig snuffling around in here — raised like a member of the family, many tears shed at the parting of the ways. Sometimes I feel the presence of a single cow, but mainly the pig. What do you feel, Merrilee?’

Unrolling her name like ribbon. His accent was a carnival — lazy Caribbean towed by old-fashioned, fruity English clerical. She couldn’t decide how much of it was laid on.

‘Cows are good,’ she said carefully. ‘And, er… pigs are even better.’

‘Indeed!’ Jeavons beamed. ‘Take a seat.’

He scooped a huge grey and white cat from a fat lemon-yellow armchair and sank into it, transferring the cat to his knees. When Merrily took a matching chair on the other side of the stove, she found it was so overstuffed that her feet didn’t reach the floor.

‘Well now…’ Jeavons sat back, his chins on his chest. ‘Ms Deliverance. This is interesting indeed.’

‘It is?’ Merrily looked into the big, squash-nosed, grey-sheened face, wishing she knew more about his personal history. The established facts were that he’d been a canon attached to Worcester Cathedral; the legends told of a seeded tennis player cured of multiple sclerosis and a fire victim whose disfiguring facial scars had vanished within a week.

Canon Jeavons and the big cat both looked placidly back at her. ‘Because you’re still not quite sure how to handle it,’ Jeavons said, ‘are you?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘All of this — the calling, the job. And, most of all, I would imagine, the complexities of Deliverance. It’s a problem of… I was gonna say confidence, but it isn’t that. You have a fear.’

‘Lots.’

Suspicious now. When she’d finally reached him on the phone she’d learned that Sophie Hill had already called on behalf of the Bishop, to make sure that he was still available for consultation. Sophie would have told him a little about her but nothing personal. Sophie didn’t do personal.

‘I’d say you have a horror of being considered’ — he looked at her sleepily through half-closed eyes — ‘pious?’

She thought she must have shaken, physically. ‘What makes you say that, Mr Jeavons?’

‘You must call me Lew,’ he said. ‘Now that I’m retired.’

She didn’t call him anything, she just stared. He wore a linen jacket with wide blue and light-grey stripes, like for punting. Under it was something you always guessed must be available somewhere, but not in any ecclesiastical outfitters: a high-necked black T-shirt with a white dog collar that was part of the design. Maybe he’d got it from a joke shop.

‘See, Merrilee, most of the female clergy of my acquaintance, they all very proud of what they achieved for their sex after all these centuries. They wear the dog collar and the clerical shirt on all possible occasions. Maybe they sleep in a clerical nightdress, I wouldn’t know about that. But always, when they come to see a male priest, that’s when it’s extremely important to them that they be seen as equals. You, by