The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘Hard to say. I think there’s a conference of some kind coming off. So, um, you got over to Lol then?’

‘Er, yeah.’

‘Good. T’riffic. Bit of a drag, though, driving all the way over the other side of the county every time you feel like a… proper chat.’

‘Actually, we thought there might have been something—’ Mum went to the sink to fill the kettle. ‘Well, Lucy’s old house in Church Street was for sale yet again, and we thought this time… Well, Lol thought he could raise the deposit.’

Jane dropped the knife, looked up in real delight. ‘Wow! Really? That would be… incredible!’

Lucy had been Lol’s mentor, had helped turn him around after Alison Kinnersley dumped him. It was what Lucy did: the nature-mystic, the keeper of the village’s soul, touching all their lives when they’d first arrived in Ledwardine. Becoming Jane’s fairy-godmother figure, kind of. Before dying, thrown from her moped on the road near the old Powell orchard.

‘Only, it was, erm, sold,’ Mum said. ‘Before the agents could even get a sign up.’

‘No!’

‘We should’ve seen it earlier in the Hereford Times. You don’t think, do you?’

‘Oh God, that would’ve been so totally perfect. Like, for both of you. Is there no chance?’

Mum shrugged.

‘Who’s got it?’

‘Looks like a weekend-cottage situation.’

‘Bastards!’ Jane snatched up the bread knife. ‘That is so… In a country this overcrowded, there is no excuse for anybody to have more than one home. It’s just like so totally unfair. Why don’t the sodding government bring in some kind of crippling second-home tax?’

‘Probably because most of the Cabinet seem to have three or four homes each. I think they’re lawyers, from London, these people. Well, you have to do something with all that money, don’t you?’

Jane shook her head in sorrow. ‘Mum, I’m so sorry. It would’ve been brilliant. And Lucy — she’d have wanted it, more than anything.’ She forced a smile. ‘Plus, it would’ve been somewhere for you to move into when I’ve left home and you finally come to your senses.’

‘A retirement home?’

‘Oh, it’s my firm belief,’ Jane said, ‘that you’ll be out of the Church within two years.’

‘You wish.’ Mum walked across the kitchen and scooped up the overnight bag. ‘I’d better get this lot in the washer, before—’

‘No!’

Mum turned, with the overnight bag dangling from her hand, Jane frantically aware of the bulge in the side of it. And of Mum’s eyes narrowing. She thought fast.

‘Put that down at once! Can’t you ever sit down and relax? I’ll do it in the morning, when… when you’re in church.’

There was this horrible, tense moment before Mum did her wry smile and dumped the bag.

‘Sounds like you’ve had a lousy enough day already,’ Jane said, snatching it up.

God, how close was that?

12 Night Exercise

Danny remembered the last time he’d had the call-out from Jeremy — a soft summer morning, the air full of warm scents, the brown-haired woman waiting in her caravan, sending out the secret siren calls that only Jeremy would hear.

Now, under an icy sky slashed by a thin moon, Danny backed Greta’s old Subaru Justy out of the barn. Little grey car, discreet — don’t make no Bank Holiday parade out of this. Greta was opening the galvanized farm gate for him, yowling the whole while.

‘You en’t called me in half an hour, I’m phoning the police! You got that, Danny Thomas?’

‘Whole bloody valley got it.’ Danny wound his window tight, shoving a random cassette into the player, turning up the sound cautiously, in case it was one of Gret’s Jackie Collins story-book tapes. Danny had his giveaway hair pushed up under his woolly hat: no need for the buggers to know who he was.

The Welshies: Sebbie Three Farm’s hired guns — here, according to the popular folk-tale put around by Sebbie, to reduce the fox population.

Which was bullshit, basically, because there was never enough, and never would be enough foxes around for Sebbie Dacre and the Middle Marches Hunt. And also, seeing there was a local gun-club that would be only too grateful to be viewed by somebody as a bit useful, why had Sebbie hired from Off?

The Subaru sloshed down the track, the tape on the stereo turning out to be the Creedence collection, starting with ‘Susie Q’, which was all right but, if it got as far as ‘Bad Moon Rising’ before he reached The Nant, Danny was gonner take it as an omen.

Truth was, nobody knew why Sebbie Dacre had hired shooters from South Wales to scrat about pretending to be after foxes. You didn’t go out of your way to fire hard questions at boys from Off with loaded guns. But when these boys was invading what was likely the only farm along the whole border that didn’t have no firearms of any description, that was seriously out of order, Danny’s view of it.

At the Walton turn-off, he could see all the way to Old Radnor church, jutting up like a castle on a horizon turned jagged by quarrying. Then, just as Creedence were unrolling ‘Proud Mary’, the forestry rose up darker than the night sky, making him feel like some insect crawling into a yard brush.

What you had to understand first about Jeremy Berrows, see, was that he was an only child. Normal thing was for a farming family to have a spare, but Eddie Berrows was killed outright in a tractor accident when Jeremy was still at school and his mother was pregnant at the time, and her lost it, likely due to the stress. And that was that — Jeremy growing up knowing he had Full Responsibility for The Farm.

There was still farm labour to be had cheapish in them days, so they got by till the boy was sixteen and could take over official. Meantime, it was like all his ole man’s know-how had come seeping into him from wherever his ole man was, and now Jeremy was truly part of his land, in the way Danny had felt part of the whole valley that time, way back, when he’d dropped acid in the Four Stones field. Except that with Jeremy, who didn’t even drink, this was a natural chemical thing, an organic thing, ditchwater in his veins. You’d see him standing there like a little thorn tree, bristling with the breeze, Stanner Rocks behind him and the ewes around his legs. If Jeremy had played music, this would have been his album cover, and it was something close to mystical.

He just wasn’t good with people, that was all. Boy was shy, and if folks thought he was just another thick- as-shit hill-farmer, that was all right with him. Let the other buggers do the talking, let Sebbie do the shouting and go on thinking he ruled the valley. Sebbie Three Farms: master of the hunt and all he surveyed — except for this thriving little holding, right in the middle of Sebbie’s three farms, that belonged to Jeremy Berrows.

Danny took the Gladestry turn. Always reckoned he knew this area as well as anybody, but he still needed full beams to find the entrance to The Nant. No sign, see. Used to be one, till Jeremy’s mam went into the sheltered bungalow in Kington, but Jeremy didn’t need telling what was his, so when the sign fell off it stayed off, and that was that.

Full beams was a bit of a giveaway, but the track was narrow and the ditches either side were four feet deep, sure to be. The headlights found some new trees that Jeremy and the woman must have planted, with strong stockades around them and chicken wire to keep the sheep off. How many farmers planted trees without there was some big environmental grant for it?

Jeremy Berrows: natural green-boy, firm custodian of the land, friend to all of—

‘Christ!’

Danny slammed on, both feet hard down, the Justy’s little tyres spinning and squealing like piglets in the