The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘I mean, Ben thinks it’s all shit really, but if it makes the White Company feel more inspired…’ Nat rolled over and off the bed, stood up and stretched — just the way she had when Jane had first walked in, rising up alongside the gilt-framed portrait hanging over the high mahogany headboard. She wore tight jeans and a black shirt open to a silver pendant. ‘I’m shattered, Jane. Shifting big furniture takes it out of you.’

Jane went to the bottom of the bed and looked up at the woman in the sepia photo-portrait: the coils of glistening hair, the broad face with unsmiling lips like segments of soft white pear, and those pale, pale eyes gazing over your shoulder as if Hattie was disdainfully contemplating the mess left by her own blood on the wall between the windows.

‘How old was she here, do you think?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Thirty?’

‘And Alistair Hardy actually wants to sleep in here?’ Jane could no longer imagine doing that. And the thought of waking up on a wintry morning to those silverskin eyes…

‘I don’t think he knows about it yet. It’s Ben’s idea. He’s become obsessed with the Chancery woman and this room — Stanner’s haunted room — and he’s thinking televisually. So we have to recreate the room pretty much as she’d remember it. Which, I have to tell you, has taken all day. The dressing table, we pinched from Room Seven — I spent about an hour polishing the foul thing. The bed — we had to bring that down in sections from one of the attics.’

‘This was her actual bed?’

‘God knows. It had enough dust on it.’

‘It bloody scared me, Nat. It’s… just unhealthy.’

‘Your face when you first opened the door, Jane, will live with me for a long time.’

‘It was just a big shell when I was last here.’ She looked around again. ‘Rather Hardy than me.’

In fact, Hardy deserved all he got. Jane was still furious at him for using Lucy Devenish. An affront; Lucy’s spirituality was well in advance of all this.

Natalie walked past her and opened the bedroom door. ‘Well, if we find him dead of a heart attack in the morning, it’s an occupational hazard. I can’t say I like him. Let’s go and have some tea.’

Jane looked at her with something between shock and respect. Dead of a heart attack? It was the sort of thing a kid would say, oblivious of the rules of adult decency that obliged you to airbrush your thoughts before you exposed them. Nat was just so cool. It certainly took some kind of cool — or a complete absence of sensitivity to the numinous — to lie there alone on that bed, under that very eerie picture of Stanner’s murderer.

‘Nat…’

‘Huh?’

‘Does Amber know about this… refurbishing?’

‘Some of it. She’s been very quiet all week. I mean, the idea of them summoning spirits in her kitchen — the only place she can really bear to spend time in…’ Nat glanced outside, down the dark steps to the passage. ‘Sometimes I think she might surprise us all and leave him to it.’

‘Leave Ben?’

‘Leave Stanner and give Ben the big option. Could you blame her?’

‘Nat, it would destroy him. He thinks he’s doing all this for Amber.’

‘Yeah.’ Nat smiled with no humour. ‘Aren’t men dangerously delusional sometimes?’

‘And dangerously aggressive,’ Jane said.

Nat eyed her, a warning look. It was a one-off. We don’t want Ben to get a reputation, do we?

‘Look…’ Jane glanced away from her, determined to get this out. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot…’

‘Well, don’t. It won’t help anybody.’

‘Been finding out about Hattie Chancery.’ Jane glanced warily at Hattie’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘I mean… you do know what she did in here, don’t you?’

Natalie came back into the room. ‘Ben’s still letting Amber think she shot herself outside somewhere. I mean, Christ, they sleep just up the passage. Who told you?’

‘Gomer. And he told me about Hattie and all her men. What she did with them on the top of Stanner Rocks. All the aggression she had inside her. And the booze.’

‘If you believe all that.’

‘I kind of do.’ Jane looked at her. ‘Don’t you?’

‘You’re asking me what I believe?’ Natalie supported her bum against the dressing table, stretched her long legs out, stared at Hattie. ‘I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.’

Jane, her back to the door, looked at the bed. It had a faded old mauve coverlet on it, with a fringe. She said, not looking at Nat, ‘When I was here, for that one night, I came back and found the quilt and the sheets had been pulled off and thrown back against the headboard. No, really, it happened. And I didn’t even know whose room it had been then.’

Nat made no comment.

‘OK.’ Jane turned to Natalie. ‘Maybe Amber or somebody had been about to change the bedding and forgot and went away and left it. There could be a whole bunch of rational explanations, and I hope one of them was the truth. But I also had a really bad dream in here. I mean really bad. And also—’

Nat said quietly, ‘Um, Jane…’

‘I mean, if you consider what happened last weekend… put that together with Hattie — goes up Stanner Rocks, shags some guy, comes back and smashes her sick husband’s head in. With a couple of the rocks she kept as like trophies? And then you think of Ben — OK, volatile, but basically this artistic, nonviolent bloke — who just loses it completely. On maybe the same spot? It was a horrendous attack. If you and Amber hadn’t been here, let’s face it, he might’ve killed that guy. And you know that’s true. He might be on remand now for murder.’

‘Jane, I don’t think this is a particularly—’

‘What got into him? You have to ask. Because if that was the real Ben—’

‘Jane—’

‘—Then maybe it would be a good thing if Amber did leave him. Maybe he’s the wrong kind of person to be here. You know?’ Jane blinked. ‘What’s wrong?’

Natalie was looking over Jane’s shoulder. Apologetically.

Jane stiffened, her shoulders hunching. She shut her eyes for a moment, opening them, in anguish, to a long, unsmiling face in the left-hand mirror of the dressing table.

‘Erm…’ She turned slowly, towards Ben, with her shoulders still up around her ears, forcing what she guessed would be a sick and cringing smile, holding out the camcorder like an offering. ‘Like, I… just came to… to get some, like, atmos shots?’

Inaugurated in 1980, on the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the White Company was originally called The Windlesham Society, after Sir Arthur’s last home in Sussex. The name was changed after the words ‘White Company’ were repeatedly received at spiritist meetings throughout Britain, both clairaudiently and through automatic writing. Finally, Sir Arthur himself conveyed to the eminent channelist, Mr Alistair Hardy, that he would consider it an honour to be patron of a society named after an especial favourite amongst his novels.

The Society now comprises of both committed spiritists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. In 1993, the outline of a planned Holmes story, The Adventure of the White Shadow, was channelled to Mr Hardy and later drafted in full by Mr Mason W. Mower, of Connecticut.

Merrily wrinkled her nose. The idea of a society combining committed spiritualists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts sounded slightly unlikely, if you considered that Holmes was the creation of Conan Doyle’s rational, scientific side.

But, then, wasn’t spiritualism considered to be rational and scientific? Wasn’t that the whole point — that they were proving the fact of life after death without the excess baggage?