The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

when the police done DNA tests on the dog it killed they figured it was another dog did it. Yet you still had folks swore blind they’d seen this big beast, puma, whatever. Nobody ever found a puma, though, dead or alive. Or a big dog.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Things… happens. Things as en’t meant to be explained. Why try?’

Danny found Jeremy meeting his stare now. Anybody else, he’d suspect a wind-up, but all he could see in Jeremy’s eyes was sadness and acceptance.

‘All right…’ He held on to the chair so it wouldn’t rock, wouldn’t creak. ‘What about Sebbie Three Farms?’

‘He believes,’ Jeremy said. ‘He just don’t want nobody thinkin’ he believes. So he makes a big noise. Bigger the noise, scareder he is, I reckon.’

‘Why’s he scared?’

‘’Cause most folk seen it, it don’t matter… not to them.’

‘You mean Sebbie…’ Danny held on to the chair arms, trying to anchor himself down. You hung out with Jeremy you lost hold of reality, felt yourself slipping into Jeremy’s fuzzy world. It was like dropping acid again and, same as he’d told Greta this morning, Danny didn’t see himself going there no more.

‘Personal,’ Jeremy said.

Danny sagged back in the chair. This was getting well out of his ballpark. Wouldn’t be a bad idea, mabbe, to get Gomer to go and have a quiet chat with his lady vicar over in Ledwardine, whose specialist subject appeared to be fellers like Jeremy Berrows.

We keep our secrets to a minimum now, she’d said to Lol. Grown-ups. Mates.

So this was the kid’s idea of a minimum.

Gomer, like Lol, had clearly done a lot of agonizing before shopping Jane. See, when you first told me her was working at Stanner, I din’t make much of it, ’cause things change, places change…

It seemed that, on the way back from taking a smashed-up man to Hereford hospital, Jane had suggested to Gomer that it would be best not to talk about the incident, not even to Mum, because Ben was in a difficult enough position and if this got out…

Merrily stood by the window, watching the apple trees becoming stooped and shaggy with snow. The probable truth was that the kid had concealed the incident not out of loyalty to her employer but because of what else she might have to disclose — like, for instance, an alleged predatory beast carrying a ?7,000 bounty.

Which made no sense. Not yet, anyway.

The clock above the old Aga said two-thirty. Couple of hours before Jane was due home, and in this weather it would probably be longer. Merrily could hear traffic grinding up the hill to the village square, the futile sound of tyres spinning. If Herefordshire Council’s foul-weather rapid-response was as rapid as usual, they wouldn’t see a snow plough or a gritter until around lunchtime tomorrow.

In the interim, showdown time.

So there’d been a domestic murder in the garden at Stanner Hall in the year before World War Two.

Well, that was a long time ago, but seeing what Ben Foley — a man with no known history of violence — had done to the intruder, Nathan, in that same garden had brought the superstitious side of Gomer Parry squirming uncomfortably into the light. Superstition was never far below the surface along this Border: the most rural county in England lying back to back with the most rural county in Wales.

Just if I had a daughter, Vicar, and her was working at Stanner, these is things I’d wanner know. Gomer had still seemed embarrassed. He’d refused a second cup of tea and gone shuffling back into the snow, pulling on his old tweed cap and leaving her to examine all the features of country-hotel life that Jane had been concealing.

That bloody kid. Did nothing ever change?

Merrily leaned against the Aga rail, pondering the options. If she couldn’t reveal either Gomer or Lol as informants, there was at least one person she could shop with impunity.

She would admit to Jane that she’d raided the apartment. She would produce the copy of Folk- lore of Herefordshire, with the relevant pages marked. It wasn’t much, but it was a way in. And in the course of the subsequent bitter quarrel the whole truth would, with any luck, come pooling out all over the unforgiving flagstones.

What was good about this weather was that, the way things were looking, Jane would not be returning to Stanner this weekend. Big fires, CDs of Nick Drake, Beth Orton… Lol Robinson, even. Mother — daughter quality time.

All the same, Merrily watched the ceaseless snow with trepidation. They made jokes about the council and the grit lorries, but they were jokes best made over a mug of hot chocolate in front of a blazing fire. This was a part of the county that had often been cut off, lost its electricity and its phone lines, reverting for whole days to a semi-medieval way of life.

When the phone rang, she grabbed the cordless from the wall.

‘Mum.’

‘They let you out?’

‘Erm… they sent for the school buses early.’

‘Because of the snow.’

‘Otherwise about five hundred of us would have been spending all night fighting over the sofa bed in the medical suite.’

‘Understandable. So you’ll be home early, then.’

‘And we don’t have to come back tomorrow, if it’s bad.’

‘And then it’s the holidays.’

‘Right.’

‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of the education department. I’ll go and light the fire.’

‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘Do that. It’s just…’

‘Something wrong?’

‘Not exactly wrong. It’s… like, the snow’s coming down so hard, they reckon all the minor roads in the north of the county could be… difficult, by tonight. So that would mean I probably wouldn’t be able to get to Stanner at all tomorrow, maybe not even with Gomer.’

‘Can’t be helped, flower.’

‘No.’

‘Act of God. Never mind, I expect the conference will have to be called off as well.’

‘So, like, I thought the best thing to do would be to get on Clancy’s bus.’

‘What?’

‘So, like, that’s what I did. Kind of a spur of the moment… thing.’

Merrily said tightly, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at Stanner,’ Jane said. ‘And it really was for the best. The snow’s much worse here.’

24 Necessary Penance

Looking out from her room over, like, Siberia, Jane phoned Eirion on his mobile and was invited to leave voice-mail. ‘We need to talk,’ Jane said menacingly.

She sat down on the bed, cold. Even turned up full, the radiator was like a cheap hot-water bottle the morning after. Stanner needed more money spending on it than Ben and Amber were ever likely to make, this was clear.