The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘That’s right.’

‘Dead,’ Bliss said.

‘What?’ Full-beam headlights blasted the window. An engine was revving on the car park.

‘First snow casualty of the night. Run over by a van.’

‘Where?’

‘Ah,’ Bliss said, as Mumford came in.

‘Dr Grace, boss. Would like to see you.’

‘Send him in. Excuse me a minute, would you, Merrily, been waiting for this.’

Merrily was half out of her chair when Mumford said, ‘On site, boss.’

‘Bugger.’ Bliss stood up. ‘All right, tell him I’ll be there in five mins.’ He nodded at the lights outside the window. ‘For me?’

‘When you’re ready.’

Merrily put herself between Bliss and the door. ‘What is this, Frannie? What happened to Darrin Hook?’

‘Look, Merrily, I’ve just gorra— Can you—? All right, do you want to come with me? We can talk on the way.’

‘Well… OK.’ She stepped back and, pulling on her coat, followed him out into the lobby, where he was stopped by a lanky detective in red Gore-Tex.

‘This bloke Berrows, boss.’

‘You’ve talked to him?’

‘Not happy about him at all. Let us go through the house, no problem, but he’d got another guy there with him — Thomas — old hippy type, said he was on all-night snow-clearing. Said he’d been clearing Berrows’s track. Tractor outside, fair enough, but something didn’t feel right. Would’ve liked to bring him in, really…’

‘Not yet. Not while there’s a chance she might come home. You sure you checked all the buildings?’

‘I’m satisfied she’s not there, boss, but Mal and Ewan are watching the entrance, in case.’

‘As long as the bastards don’t fall asleep.’

‘They fall asleep in this, boss, they’ll never wake up.’

‘They’ll certainly wish they hadn’t,’ Bliss said. ‘Come along, Merrily.’

Outside, new snow was falling in a careless, disdainful way, like the contents of God’s shredder. The back door of a police Range Rover was hanging open. ‘After you,’ Bliss said.

She didn’t move, both boots in a cake of brown slush. ‘What happened to Darrin Hook?’

‘All right.’ He sighed. ‘What’s more interesting is where it happened. He was found on the A465 Hereford to Abergavenny road, halfway down the hill towards Allensmore.’ He glanced at her. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry—?’

‘The proximity of a bus shelter leads Melvyn to think we may be looking at the exact spot where Darrin’s little brother died. You coming?’

37 The Schizoid Border

The lights flickered again, the third time, and there was a crackle on the phone. In this area it was always the same with sudden heavy snow or any kind of extreme weather, including heat. The power lines and the phone lines were badly maintained, compared with the cities, and at some point they would go down and the centuries would drop away.

‘Black shuck, skriker, barguest, trash,’ Canon Jeavons said. It was like an incantation.

‘Regional names for the phantom black dog,’ Lol guessed.

‘You dealing with archetypes. Heavy tribal stuff. The twelve priests, the snuff-box… and, of course, the black dog… The black dog is known all over these islands, and he’s linked strongly to the landscape. He’s out there.’

The lights dipped again, the reduced wattage reducing colours, giving the scullery the appearance of an engraving. Static cackled in the phone. Lol looked across at the window, convinced that he could still see the smeary impression of a man’s face on the glass.

He was recalling Nick Drake’s song ‘Black-Eyed Dog’, about the personalized depression at the door that had haunted him to death.

‘Let’s talk about the black dog,’ Jeavons said. ‘What is he? The shadow of fate? And why a dog?’

‘Because a dog follows you?’

‘Haw! Correct. The black dog that follows a family through the generations. And is always out there.’

Nick Drake had sung of the black-eyed dog that knew his name. ‘Only, this one’s described as demonic,’ Lol said.

‘A word open to many interpretations. I would say they are… representative of a layer of existence that it would be unwise to trust. I believe these images exist, I believe we should accept that but never attempt to relate to them. For there can be no productive relationship.’

‘Unless you’re interested in knowing about the imminence of death,’ Lol said.

Bliss said to Merrily, ‘You don’t have to look.’

Sebbie Dacre’s body was in a canvas shelter isolated on an island of white in a choppy sea of slush. There was industrial noise, industrial light and exhaust fumes coming from three sides. Nothing was silent, except for Sebbie Dacre in his shelter and the ruched and fissured rock face behind it, feathered and tufted with fresh snow.

And she did have to look. Because Jane had. Because Jane had been the first, after the foxes and the badgers, to discover this. She had to know what Jane had seen.

Two arc lights lit the area, powered by a small, chattering generator. Bliss lifted the canvas flap.

‘Don’t throw up here.’

The dead man’s head sat on the corded collar of a withered old Barbour. His face, upturned to the ceiling of the shelter, was like the inside of a sliced tomato. The canvas also covered an ugly archipelago of blotchy things in the snow.

Enough. She turned away. Bliss let the flap fall.

‘From the second ring of tape up to the hedge, it’s all but useless,’ one of the Durex suits said. ‘Obviously, the fire brigade didn’t help, trampling all over the perimeter, dragging bloody hoses. That whole area, up to the hedge, that’s a complete write-off.’

‘You’ll get there, Jacko.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘This is Jacko the Soco.’

‘He just likes saying that,’ Jacko said. ‘Francis, I’ve sent the first set of stills and the video down to the hotel. You have got a laptop over there? Hey up, here he is.’

A man with a beard came over, scraping back the hood of his coverall. ‘Francis, you little turd! Had a glorious long weekend planned, starting with me and my nursie tucked up by the fire with balloon glasses of Remy and a DVD of The Blair Witch Project.’

‘It’s a let-down, Billy,’ Bliss said. ‘You were spared a lot of disappointment. Go on, surprise me — give me a time of death to within two weeks.’

The pathologist unzipped his coverall and pulled out a Mars Bar. ‘Blood sugar comes first this time of night, matey.’

Merrily slid into the shadows. It was how they handled it — almost everything that didn’t involve young children. Like wartime, she supposed. Frannie Bliss and Dr Grace lived in a permanent war zone, littered with hard jokes and Mars wrappers.

There would be a similar scene at Allensmore, if more subdued.

It was a big van carrying carpets, Bliss had said, that ran over Darrin Hook. The driver said he hadn’t seen him. Which was understandable, as Darrin was already lying in the road amidst a lot of snow, his head two feet