The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

17 Detestable to the Lord

When she was about two, maybe three, someone had given Jane this vintage nursery-rhyme book, made out of thick cloth, with serrated edges to the pages. On the front was a watercolour picture of a little girl in an apron who had the saddest face Jane had ever seen. Both the little girl and the book itself used to make her feel deeply upset, and she remembered being convinced it had been owned by a child who had been so unhappy that she’d just died of it.

This was one of her earliest memories, and it faded up when she and Clancy padded into Stanner Hall and saw Amber Foley standing at the top of the kitchen steps, wearing a vinyl apron with a watercolour-type picture on it of a cottage on a hill. Amber hadn’t heard them come in, and she was staring across at the closed door of the residents’ lounge. Her hair was pulled back and her skin looked like thin white eggshell about to crack.

Jane thought of life-threatening misery and a voice on the phone. She swallowed. Amber saw Clan and jumped, then blinked and smiled — weak sun reflected in a stagnant pond.

‘Oh, Clancy… I’ve sorted out a table for you in the kitchen to do your homework. Your mum says—’ Becoming aware of Jane, Amber looked bewildered. Like, if this is Jane it must be Friday.

‘I left some things, Amber, on Saturday. School books.’

‘Oh, Jane, we could’ve got Natalie to send them with Clan—’

Amber looked hard at her, obviously aware that Jane would have known this. One of the wall-lamp bulbs had blown, and unfamiliar shadows made the lobby look dull and brownish and semi-derelict. Good location, crap place to live. How often had Amber stood alone here, wondering how she’d ever got herself into this? And realizing, of course, that she hadn’t; Ben had.

Amber flicked a glance at Clancy, who said, ‘I’d better get on with it. I’ll see you tomorrow, Jane,’ and meekly walked past Amber and down the steps to the kitchen. Doesn’t want to know, Jane thought. If there’s something bad or contentious going down, she just doesn’t want to know about it. We have absolutely nothing in common.

When they could hear the kid’s footsteps on the kitchen flags, Jane nodded at the closed door of the residents’ lounge.

‘The White Company, right?’

‘Ben’s in there with them. And Natalie. He’d be better off married to Nat, don’t you think?’

‘No, that’s ridiculous.’

‘You know what they’re doing, don’t you?’ Amber said.

‘Well, yeah, I… You’ve got a problem with it?’

Amber straightened up and flattened a bulge in her apron. ‘You knew they were coming, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here.’

‘Well, no, actually.’

‘You couldn’t keep away.’

‘No, it—’ Oh hell, no point in letting this fester. ‘OK, if you want the absolute truth, Amber, the real reason I came is because I happened to pick up the phone last night. When you tried to call my mum?’

There was the jittery sound of polite laughter from behind the lounge door.

‘And when you recognized my voice,’ Jane said, ‘you got off the line as quick as you could. Only I’m quite good with voices.’

‘Jane, I—’

‘So if it’s something about me, I’d like to know, OK? Because I haven’t told her anything about all this, and it could get me in a lot of bother.’

Amber’s doll’s cheeks were colouring.

Jane sighed. ‘I suppose Ben told you what she did. Like, apart from being just a vicar?’

Amber nodded, losing what might have been a grateful smile inside a grimace.

‘Only, I didn’t know you were religious,’ Jane said.

‘I’m not. Not really. Just neurotic.’

Jane gestured at the lounge door. ‘About that?’

There was the sound of more merriment, Ben’s peal obvious.

‘None of this worries him in the slightest,’ Amber said. ‘He loves it, for the drama. He doesn’t believe in it for one minute, though obviously he won’t tell them that — he’ll be hamming it up in there for all he’s worth. It’s how guys like him and Antony persuade people to do things on camera that are going to get them ridiculed in thousands of homes. Because they don’t laugh. At the time.’

Jane’s eyebrows went up. ‘They’re not doing it now, are they — trying for Conan Doyle?’

‘I don’t know. I just think people like that are irresponsible, and the point is: it’s not their house, is it? It’s ours, God help us.’ Amber moved away from the vicinity of the lounge towards the reception area. ‘Look, I know it’s money, much needed. I know it’s part of Ben’s Great Scheme. But getting cranks like that involved — that’s the pits.’

‘You rang Mum for, like, support? Did you get through to her in the end?’

Amber swallowed a breath. ‘When Ben told me what your mother did, it seemed a bit too coincidental — like a sign. We neurotics, you know? No, I didn’t try again. Not after you answered the phone.’

‘Well…’ Jane raised her gaze to the flaking frieze around the walls. ‘If you’d wanted support you’d have got it, no problem. Why didn’t you just ask me? I could’ve told you exactly what she’d say. Like, at some point she’d drag out a slab of the Old Testament. “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practises divination or sorcery or witchcraft or pisses about with spells…” blah, blah… “Or who is a medium or spiritist or consults with the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.” ’

‘That seems fairly unequivocal to me,’ Amber said. ‘Of course, I’m only a cook…’

‘Amber, for heaven’s sake, it’s Old Testament. You can find bits of the OT that suggest blokes are entitled to strangle their wives for being unfaithful. It was political — anything paranormal, the priests of Jehovah had to keep it to themselves, or bang goes the power base. But trying to contact poor old Arthur… I mean, come on.’

‘I just—’ Amber folded her arms. ‘Like I said, I’m not particularly religious. And, God knows, I’m certainly not psychic, although I don’t entirely doubt that other people can perceive things that are beyond me.’

‘Well, I have pagan instincts,’ Jane said with relish, ‘and I believe there’s masses in this area to be sensed by anyone with the balls to…’

She let the sentence trail, realizing how smug and insulting it must have sounded.

‘Well—’ An uncharacteristic anger glowed momentarily like filaments in Amber’s eyes. ‘For all your pagan instincts, Jane, you couldn’t get out of that room quick enough, could you?’

‘Room?’

‘The tower room. I didn’t particularly want to put you in that one, because we’d had a couple of people already who— But Ben said, Oh, don’t worry about young Jane. Far too down-to-earth. Jane’ll be fine.’

‘So you… know about that.’ She’d had the impression that Ben had not told Amber, who was negative enough about this place already.

‘And wish I didn’t,’ Amber said. ‘Ben laughs. He says every hotel has a room like that, and some people would even pay extra to sleep in it. If you remember, what you told us at the time was that you weren’t used to sleeping in a big room.’

‘Well, I—’

‘Only I happened to recall you telling me when you first came how you’d turned a huge attic at Ledwardine vicarage into your apartment and painted some big coloured squares on the walls — like some famous abstract artist?’

‘Mondrian.’ Oh God, she couldn’t even keep track of her own lies. ‘All right, I had a bad night. I felt… not very