The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Realizing in seconds that nothing else the Chancerys might have done could have been more blatantly insane. And in that situation today they would have known it — between them, they would have seen, for heaven’s sake, a dozen crazy horror movies with the same simplistic message: don’t meddle. A pulp cliche now.

They’d been mature people, people of wealth and status, and they’d behaved like irresponsible kids.

But, of course, they were Victorians — at the decadent end, verging on the Edwardian. Jane had done her social history and, at this particular period, in the heat and smoke of technological revolution, superstition belonged to the more primitive corners of the Empire. The Chancerys would have felt some kind of immunity, by virtue of being Victorians.

Jane sat down on the edge of her bed, looking at the window, a blackboard dusted with chalk, and still seeing the ill-fitting dentures of Leonard Parsonage working their way around the word exshorshism. The beetle-like personal mike distorting it, too close to his mouth because of the way his tie bulged out of his pullover.

Jane shuddered. Sitting there in the dark, with three inches of snow on the window sill, she finally called home.

Not thinking too hard about what she was going to say. Fairly confident, now, that she could turn this around with Mum. Because it was a fact that if she hadn’t kept quiet, stuck around, picking up pertinent information here and there, ear to the ground… well, no outsider would know the full extent of it, and that—

‘Knight’s Frome— sorry, Ledwardine Vicarage.’

Jane stiffened for a moment, not expecting this.

‘Lol? Is that you?’

‘Jane!’

‘What are you doing there?’ Mum and Lol: a secret love-tryst. The things that went on when your back was turned.

‘Not enough,’ Lol said. He didn’t sound happy.

‘Are you snowed in?’

‘Kind of.’

‘You and Mum?’

‘I wish,’ Lol said.

As soon as Merrily walked into the living room at The Nant, her gaze connected with the eyes of Jesus whose face wore a bleak smile of acceptance, his halo dull with weariness. Kind of, Just get this over. The picture wasn’t as famous as The Light of the World, but it wasn’t any more guaranteed to engender hope.

The half-mile track hadn’t been blocked. Gomer had been able to drive up to the wall around the farmhouse, where Danny’s tractor was wedged.

She stood near the living-room doorway, spotting the dog next: a sheepdog, more black than white. The dog’s head was pointing upwards, between the knees of the man sitting on a wooden stool. The man was looking down at the floor. Behind him, a fire roared in the range, gilding perhaps everything in the room except the picture of Jesus.

Gomer prodded her gently into the room, and Danny Thomas stood up from somewhere.

‘Mrs Watkins… Good of you.’

Now she was here she didn’t know what to say, how to go about this. It was like the strangeness of the whole area was concentrated in this square, fire-lit room. And when Danny spoke, that was also surreal, initially.

‘I, er… I had this album once, see. In my folky days.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Fairport Convention,’ Danny said. His hair hung over his face like wet seaweed over a rock. ‘Babbacombe Lee. Period when Dave Swarbrick was writin’ the songs? Before your time, I ’spect.’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I… I remember it.’

She stared at Danny, in his bottle-green farmer’s overalls. The dog began to whimper. A log shifted on the fire.

‘Oh God,’ Merrily whispered. ‘John Babbacombe Lee, the man they couldn’t—’

Danny Thomas looked at her helplessly, his eyes wide with anguish. Danny had been crying. ‘Hang,’ he said. ‘The man they couldn’t hang.’ He pointed at the man on the stool in front of the fire. ‘And that… that’s Jeremy Berrows, the man couldn’t hang hisself. Stupid little bastard.’

32 Party Game

‘But he’s all right?’ Jane was sounding lost, disconnected, groping for certainties. ‘He won’t die?’

‘Not if he stays away from rope,’ Lol said.

Hanged. A weighty word, full of ancient resonance and with only one definition: execution.

‘Lol… why? Why would he?’

Jeremy Berrows. A harmless, benign little guy, Merrily had said, when she’d called to tell him it could be a long night. There were things, she’d said, that didn’t add up. Things that even Gomer couldn’t put together.

‘Was it like a cry-for-help thing, or what?’

‘I… wouldn’t think it’s what you do when you’re hoping someone’s going to discover you in time,’ Lol said. ‘Meanwhile, keep this to yourself, OK?’

The lemon-yellow sleep light on the front of the computer was swelling and fading, swelling and fading. Here in the vicar’s study, where madness collected like dust. Flaky fantasies in the phone lines, images of the irrational only clicks away.

‘Why’s Mum gone to The Nant? Why did Gomer want her to go? I need to talk to her.’

‘If you do, it might be wisest to assume that she knows too much already for you to get away with… concealing anything.’

‘Like what?’

‘The White Company?’

‘Oh my God, who’s been talking? She knows about the documentary?’

Lol said nothing.

‘Lol, look, all it was — I swear it — Ben and this guy Antony are shooting a TV thing about Conan Doyle and spiritualism, and Antony gave me a video camera. He wanted me to shoot stuff, when he wasn’t there. So, like, I wasn’t going to blow it, just because there were spiritualists involved. I mean, was I?’

‘No, you wouldn’t do that.’

‘Only a lot of it was total bullshit. I was very naive. I was stitched up. I’m an extremely gullible person, and I wish I’d never come here, all right?’

‘I’d like to make some time to cry for you,’ Lol said, ‘but could you tell me about the Stanner Project first?’

She was quiet for so long, he was beginning to think they’d lost the signal.

‘Oh God, you really do know everything,’ Jane said.

Merrily followed Danny Thomas back into the kitchen, shut the door.

‘What about a doctor?’

Danny dropped a scornful hiss. ‘What’s a doctor gonner do for his condition?’

He went and half-sat on the edge of the kitchen table, hair matted on his face. When she’d put on the electric light, he’d switched it off again, as if there was something here that had to be contained in near-darkness to