The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘I en’t thick,’ Danny said. ‘Might’ve lost a few brain cells to acid and metal, since the ole grammar school, but it en’t taken it all away.’

‘Have your soup.’

Danny swallowed some tomato soup. Through the kitchen window, he could see the snow ghosting the farmyard that was foggy-grey with old stone and dusk. No stock out there no more, nothing in the sheds except for his own tractor and Delia, Gomer’s new JCB. Need to have the tractor up and ready tonight, with the snowplough bolted on; this could go on for days.

‘Know what I was scared of back there, suddenly, Gret? That mabbe, if I told him, he’d kill her. Like Geoff James did when his missus—’

‘Danny, this is Jeremy.’

‘Can’t just say that n’more.’ Danny put his spoon down. ‘People goes funny. Same disease: isolation, EC form-filling, stock-tagging, signing all your beasts over to the bureaucrats. No independence, no pride, no satisfaction, no money. You reads the bloody papers, you’d think all country folk’s worried about is what the government’s doin’ to bloody huntin’ with hounds — like it’s fundamental to us all in the sticks, ’stead of just a rich man’s expensive pleasure introduced by psychotic Norman barons. Shit.’

‘You got out,’ Greta reminded him, that soothing tone again. ‘You’re with Gomer now. You sidelined, you en’t part of it n’more.’

‘Jeremy en’t never gonner get out, though, is he? It’s part of him. Part of him’s in the land. Uproot him, he’s dead.’

‘Why should he be uprooted? He’s got a good, solid farm. He’s respected. He’s got—’

‘A good woman? Ole days, see, there was farming marriages, and they lasted. Now you got partners… temp’ry. All right in cities, mabbe, where it’s all temp’ry and you can move on, swap around. In the country, you don’t have continuity — there’s another big word, see — if you don’t have continuity, you’re fucked. Jesus Christ, did I just say some’ing Conservative?’

‘Look,’ Greta said, ‘he won’t be out of his yard at all for days, if it keeps on like this, so unless somebody rings him and tells him about Natalie, he en’t gonner find out nothin’, is he?’

Danny stared into his soup, a pool of blood. He was thinking about Natalie Craven and her mousy little partner, and Ben Foley and his mousy little wife.

Ben Foley, saviour of Stanner. Incomer with attitude, smooth Londoner widely said to be driven by irrational obsessions. Man who showed up on your doorstep asking if you seen the Hound of Hergest.

‘Sign of death.’

Greta gave him a hard look. ‘What is?’

‘The Hound of Hergest.’

‘Let’s not get silly about this,’ Greta said. ‘Jeremy’s ma used to say he was always seeing things that wasn’t there. It’s the way he is. His condition.’

‘That’s what it’s supposed to be, though, ennit, the Hound: an omen of death.’

‘If your name’s Vaughan.’

‘The Vaughans’ve all gone.’

‘Nothing to worry about, then,’ Greta said.

‘Just be honest,’ Merrily said. ‘Tell me what you think I need to do. Tell me I’m overreacting. Tell me it’s time to let go of the leash, cut some slack, sever the umbilical, make some space, chill out. Tell me, Lol.’

‘You know I can’t do cliches.’ Lol took the mobile out into the passage and went across to the stable door, unbolting the top half and pushing against a crust of snow. The section of door opened with a sound like splintering plywood. Somewhere out there was the Frome Valley, as white and cold and barren as an old psychiatric ward he used to know.

‘Tell me there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Merrily said into his ear, serious now. Snow talk. Unexpectedly severe weather could do this to you. You were no longer in control. Nobody was.

‘I’ll come over,’ Lol said.

‘No. You can’t. Really. It’s just been on the radio: go home and stay home. Stay off the roads unless it’s an emergency, and even then—’

‘It’s not bad here.’ Lol looked for his car, couldn’t see it. It was nearly dark, and the snow was like a wall.

‘I’ve got enough to worry about without the thought of you stuck all night in a snowdrift in an ancient Astra with a heater that hasn’t worked in years.’

Music started up in the studio behind Lol: a slow, growling twelve-bar blues from the album that Prof Levin was mixing for the guitar legend Tom Storey. A relentless, chugging momentum: life going on.

‘It’s Gomer, that’s all,’ Merrily said. She’d already told him about Ben Foley and the violence and the woman called Hattie Chancery. ‘Gomer’s worried; how often does that happen?’

‘You could phone her. She’s got her mobile?’

‘I could do that, yes. I could go on to her very carefully, stepping on eggshells, knowing that at any time she could lose her temper and cut the call and switch off the mobile, and that’s the link gone for the duration. I could do that. Would you do that?’

There was a gas mantle projecting from the wall, just inside the fire doors. During the murder weekend, Ben had propped the doors open so that you could see the mantle from the stairs, and you were back in Hattie Chancery’s young days, enclosed in a hollow glow.

No mention of Hattie Chancery during the murder weekend. There were murder games, with the scent of mystery, and there was real murder, with its sadness and its stink.

The mantle, unlit, was utility-looking, without romance. No doubt it would be working again when the White Company were in residence. The passage, meanwhile, was lit by electric wall lights — dim vertical tubes under amber-tinted glass. The walls, with their recessed doors, were lined with woodchip paper. The lights turned them yellow.

Jane stood at the entrance to the passage, legs apart, and lingered on the shot. Ought to have brought the tripod really, but she guessed that if she’d gone downstairs to look for it she wouldn’t have come back. As it was, she kept wanting to turn back but wouldn’t permit herself to stop or even to hurry, to get it over with.

Oh, don’t worry about young Jane. Far too down-to-earth. Jane’ll be fine.

He really didn’t care, did he, as long as he came out a winner.

Called me a nancy boy.

A winner against the odds. Whatever it took.

But was she really so different? Jane Watkins: research and second camera. Using Eirion, deceiving Mum. Snatching every new experience to further her own ambitions, hoovering up the dirt on Hattie and the tragic Robert, while despising the White Company as naff and sad.

Capricious and contrary, this Jane Watkins, not a nice person.

Still shooting, Jane walked on, with sour determination, along the passage, where the sharp smell of recent painting failed to obscure the odour of damp and quite possibly rot.

She stopped in front of the last door on the right, the image wobbling. Through the lens, with the recording signal aglow, it was both more exciting and less scary because it was less personal — a professional thing.

The door was like all the other doors in the passage except that it didn’t have a number on it. When she opened it — reaching out to the handle, giving it a quick push and then stepping back, with the camera still running — she realized that it was too dark in there to shoot anything. She put the camera on pause and lowered it, recalling that there were a few steps to a second door that was oak and Gothic-pointed.

Jane stopped briefly at the bottom of the steps. She remembered a pot lampshade hanging from the ceiling. There was a switch somewhere, on an old-fashioned pewter box. But when she hand-swept the walls on either side she couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was at the top. She located the first step with the toe of a trainer, went up carefully, one, two, three, four — was that it?

No — she stumbled — five.

Jane remembered how it had seemed so cool at first, having one of the tower rooms, sleeping under the witch’s hat, with views across the Border.