The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

It was also clear, when she’d walked in with Clancy an hour or so ago, shaking the snow off her parka, that Ben and Amber had had words. Amber was tense, Ben fizzing with anger. Ben always turned anxiety into anger — according to which equation, desperation became rage. Nathan the shooter had found that out.

Amber had frowned. ‘Jane, this is crazy. You should not have come.’

‘You need me,’ Jane had said.

But it had been Ben who’d needed her first, waiting until Amber had gone down to the kitchen before producing a folded sheet of A4 that had obviously been dried out. ‘You undoubtedly know more about the Internet than me. How do I find out where this stuff originates?’

Jane spread the paper out on the bed. Yuk. ‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ she’d told Ben, ‘but my boyfriend might be able to find out.’

Ben had found it drawing-pinned to the hotel sign at the bottom of the drive. It didn’t have to be at all relevant to Ben or Stanner; the area had its share of weirdos. But the Stanner board wasn’t exactly a convenient place to pin anything, and if it was a joke it could have been funnier.

i was just a kid about 15 when the case was on. i remember seeing the picture of her in the Mirror in her school uniform and it knocked me out. i had it up in my bedroom but my mother made me take it down so I stuck it up inside my locker dore at school. i have offen wondered what happened to her and what i would do if i met her. does anybody know where she is now. I have never been able to forget her.

>>CHRIS.

‘Might be rubbish, but with a conference on this weekend, if someone’s trying to tell us something, I’d quite like to know what,’ Ben had said when Jane had identified it as a printout from some kind of sad, obsessive Internet chat room or message board.

I gather Brigid is very popular in Germany. I also read in a Dutch magazine that she was living in the South of France. She is grown up now and is said to be absolutely gorgeous. *Drop dead gorgeous* ha ha. When she came out she spent some time in Italy, where she is supposed to have done two men but the police did not know who she was until she had left the country, and there was no evidence. So it looks like she’s still doing it. They can’t stop. It’s a physical need.

>>HOWARD

I think that is all rubbish about Brigid going abroad put around to stop us looking for her. i have it on good authority that she’s here but may have had plastic surgery. I think I would know her whatever she’d had done to her. I have been dreaming about her for about 20 years. she still makes me swet.

>>GAVIN.

At the bottom, it said:

full explicit details: sign in and see what Brigid REALLY did

Sick, or what?

If anybody could track it down, Eirion could. If he hadn’t left for the piste.

Jane went to the window. You could see the forestry across the valley, and Hergest Ridge, mauve against the sky. Yes, you could even see a sky, of sorts. Did this offer some hope that the snow was actually thinning?

Mum, on the phone, had said things like I see, calmly conveying an acute sense of betrayal. This morning, over the breakfast, Jane had kept glancing at her, thinking, I ought to tell you everything. I ought to do it now. After what Gomer had revealed, it hadn’t been her easiest night’s sleep. But if she’d laid the Hattie thing on her, Mum would have seen to it that she didn’t get here tonight. She might even, on hearing about the explosion in the head, have kept her off school. Which wouldn’t have helped.

Because what could Mum have done about this, anyway? Exorcists worked by invitation only.

Clancy had gone to watch TV in Ben and Amber’s private sitting room, some bland early-evening soap. On the bus, Jane had said, on the subject of the White Company, ‘Doesn’t it interest you at all?’ And Clancy had been like, ‘What’s the point of wasting your life imagining you go to some spooky place when you die?’

Huh? They really didn’t have much to say to one another, her and Clancy, did they? Jane sat on the bed and scowled and then dialled the mobile number that Antony had given her.

‘Antony, it’s Jane. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t know what it’s like with you, but it’s fairly bad here… well, not that bad. I mean, I managed to get in tonight on the bus, and Ben reckons enough of the key people from the White Company are around for it to go ahead. Alistair Hardy’s staying with Beth Pollen, and she’s going to meet some more of them at Hereford Station in a four-wheel drive tomorrow. So like… are you going to make it all right? And if not, what do you want me to do? If you could like let me know. I’ve got some really nice shots of Stanner in the snowstorm. So, like… bye.’

She sat on the bed, huddled inside her fleece. The snow wasn’t thinning at all, was it? Most of the time you just lied to yourself because if you then repeated the lie to someone else it wouldn’t seem like a lie.

Why had she gone out of her way, in the face of the weather and her mother’s dismay, to come back?

Because she was a working woman and, with a conference on, Amber needed all the help she could get. Because she was retained by Antony Largo, on the promise of considerably more money, as a cameraperson. Because if it turned out that the White Company made some historic contact tonight and she’d missed it…

Yeah, mainly that.

Why had she not wanted to come? Why had she actively dreaded being here? Because, on the other side of this unlikely but nonetheless compelling psychic odyssey there was the bloated ghost of Hattie Chancery, her repellent life, her sordid and hideous death.

She gave Eirion another five minutes to call back, then stood up and snapped on the light. No good putting this off any longer. She took off her fleece, pulled her overnight bag from under the bed, found her warmest sweater and put that on, dragging the fleece over the top. She felt a little better, got out the Sony 150 and checked the charge. Then she put out the light and went out onto the top landing, down the second flight of stairs and left at the fire doors.

Had to do this. Had to dispense with it before she could move on. Before she could stop waking up in the morning waiting for the bloody bang.

This morning at the breakfast table, at her most pathetic, she’d nearly cried out to Mum to take it away, to exorcise Hattie Chancery from her subconscious. Like Mum could really do this with a sign of the cross and a pat on the head. Bonkers.

She had to do this — walking down the passage with the Sony held in front of her like an automatic weapon — because it made the difference between being a woman and a child. Because she’d never been in that room with any knowledge of whose room it had been and what she’d done — i.e. the knowledge that Hattie Chancery was the kind of woman, basically, who, in life, Jane would have hated even more than she did as some sick possible presence.

And also the knowledge of the stains under the maroon flock wallpaper, the blood dribbling down the windows.

She intended to walk into the room under the witch’s-hat tower, bring the Sony 150 to her shoulder, demanding, Imprint yourself on that, you brutal bitch. This was a necessary penance.

‘Couldn’t do it.’ Danny had his head in his hands, a bowl of tomato soup cooling on the table at his elbow. ‘In the end, I couldn’t tell him.’ He looked up at Greta. ‘Pathetic, eh?’

‘Could be it’s for the best,’ Greta said, but he could see she didn’t believe that, not for one second.

‘Suppose he’s mad? Suppose he’s ill? Suppose that what we reckoned all these years was perceptiveness, knowingness… suppose that was just signs of his… mental dysfunction.’

‘Big words tonight, Danny.’