The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

from the central white lines. In these conditions, with all the warnings and diversions, traffic was sparse, even on a main road.

Darrin had been sharing a rented flat with another bloke in a big former hotel near Wormelow, a few miles from where he was found dead. He might have been walking home or attempting to hitch-hike. There had been a half-empty bottle of Scotch in Darrin’s jacket pocket, and the body smelled strongly of alcohol.

‘Merrily, he was a scrote,’ Bliss had said in the Range Rover. ‘A toe-rag. A hopeless case. He got pissed, and disorientated. He fell into the road. Fellers like that, it happens to them all too frequently.’

‘At exactly the same spot his brother died?’

‘Life, Merrily, is full of accidental irony.’

‘He killed himself, didn’t he? He drank a lot of whisky and then he lay down in the road and waited for a lorry at exactly the same spot—’

‘As he doesn’t seem to have left a note, we may never know. But he’d been known to us for many years and appeared to have had connections with what we grandly refer to as the Hereford drug trade. So the Ice Maiden’s looking at this more closely and wondering if you might know of any reason why Darrin might have been the victim of an intentional hit-and-run — on the basis that the carpet-van driver was not the first to squash his innards. That’s the trouble with Melvyn — on a long night in the custody suite, he’ll talk to strange women.’

‘She’s ruling out suicide?’

‘Your theory’s unlikely to have occurred to her. Perhaps you should talk to her. Sorry about that.’

On the edge of the disused quarry, Merrily turned her face up to the spattering sky. Darrin Hook was dead, and the location of his death linked it firmly to another death, seventeen years ago. And the chances were that Darrin, whatever kind of human detritus he’d been, would still be alive if some meddling priest had not suggested digging the whole thing up again by holding a Requiem Eucharist for Roland Hook in a — get this — an attempt to cure his cousin Dexter’s asthma.

Healing and Deliverance: a creeping neo-medieval madness inside the collapsing ruins of the Church of England. She was feeling almost sick with self-disgust.

She wondered if Alice knew yet.

‘Give me that again,’ Bliss said to the pathologist.

‘I’m not saying it’s a fact,’ Dr Grace told him, ‘I’m saying it’s worth looking at. Won’t know a thing for certain till I get this chap back to the slab.’

‘But it’s probable, right?’

‘It’s possible.’ Grace looked up at the face of Stanner Rocks. ‘It’s a substantial drop, but it’s not exactly Beachy Head, is it? And he did fall into thickish snow. Now — and I believe one of your more athletic people has some of this on video from the top of the rocks — there were signs of disturbance. As if our friend tried desperately to clutch at outcrops and projections on his way down. Which would have slowed his descent considerably. Therefore — bottom line — broken bones likely, death far from inevitable. Could be he was awfully unlucky and his bonce bounced off a sharp rock at the bottom — you’ll have a better idea of that when we move him and they can have a good sift around. But it very well may not be. Extensive facial injuries, even allowing for scavengers. That’s as far I’m prepared to go.’

‘The alternative being that he was clobbered before he fell. That’s what you’re saying?’

‘I’m not saying. But bear it in mind.’

‘Oh, I will, I will.’ Bliss was already heading for the Range Rover, lifting a hand to the pathologist. ‘Nighty- night, Billy. Do a good one.’

Merrily was ringing Alice Meek on her mobile and not getting an answer.

It seemed to be some kind of guilt trip. Jeavons seemed to think that, having given Merrily some hasty and unreliable advice on the Harris/Hook issue, he had ground to make up.

He’d been researching intensively in his library and on the Internet, like it had become his responsibility to dispense wisdom on the Stanner case, details of which he’d gathered greedily from Lol. Family history, tribal traditions, race memories, curses — Jeavons’s primary area of operation. Now he was retired, he said, it gave him a buzz to work all night.

‘Does the black dog ever kill sheep?’ Lol asked. ‘Conan Doyle had his Hound ripping a man’s throat out.’

‘Seems unlikely, doesn’t it, if the black dog is just a walking portent? And yet livestock are often known to have been attacked in areas supposed to be haunted by them. We may wonder if living canines, from foxes to domestic dogs, might in some way be influenced by the proximity of such entities.’

‘Animals becoming possessed?’

‘Another difficult word. Perhaps. In a way. I like you, Lol, you don’t make light of such things, nor give the impression that you consider me to be mad and dangerous.’

‘Oh, you’re dangerous,’ Lol said. ‘But then, so are psychiatrists and psychotherapists.’

Jeavons did his haw haw laugh. ‘And we share jargon with these professions — no coincidence. They are the new shamans, the smoke-and-mirror profession. The necklace of skulls under the suits and the white coats.’

‘The twelve priests and the snuff-box,’ Lol said. ‘What’s your take on that?’

‘Archetypes, too, though less common than the black dog. The twelve priests represent the twelve apostles, and occasionally there may be mention of a thirteenth, the Man himself. This is widespread in folk-lore. And in fact the Vaughan exorcism itself is replicated further up the Welsh Border. At Hyssington, near Montgomery, we have a wicked squire who terrorized the area after his death. Like Vaughan, he appears in the local church as a bull. In this same church, the ubiquitous posse of parsons is waiting, with lighted candles. Like Vaughan, the squire gets reduced to something that can be accommodated in a snuffbox.’

‘So what’s that saying about the Welsh Border?’

‘Borders are psychic pipelines,’ Jeavons said. ‘What you have here is a river into which streams of belief flow, from both England and Wales. This is a particularly interesting part because of the way Wales and England seem to intermingle. The original boundary was the Dark Age earthwork, Offa’s Dyke, so how come we have an English town — Kington — which, according to my map, is on the Welsh side and a few miles away, a Welsh town — Presteigne — on the English side?’

‘Schizophrenic,’ Lol said.

‘You have it! The Schizoid Border. Hey, we cookin’ here, son. Consider the symptoms of the condition: delusion, hallucination… loss of identity, the withdrawal into a fantasy world.’

‘The landscape of the mind is more important than the outside world and it becomes impossible to distinguish between them.’

Lol thought about isolated communities caught between two cultures, emotionally, politically and linguistically. Never sure where they stood in big national conflicts — like the Wars of the Roses, in which Thomas Vaughan was involved on both sides at different times.

The Schizoid Border.

‘It’s all bollocks, of course,’ Lol said. ‘You can make anything fit into psychology. It’s why I packed it in and went back to writing little songs.’

But Jeavons wasn’t letting go.

‘Let’s take this a little further. Localization of archetypes, OK? The appearance of the spectral bull up at Hyssington is immediately put into a local context — Oh, it must be the ghost of old so-and-so, he was a bad- tempered guy, he must have turned into a bull when he died. But — hold on here — as recently as the 1980s, a ghostly bull is seen in Kington Church by a woman visiting the area… whose name happens to be Vaughan. An indication that such phenomena can actually become personalized.’

‘Yeah, but Thomas Vaughan doesn’t seem to have been evil or tyrannical. So what’s the evil that needs to be dealt with by this apostolic assembly of priests?’

‘Can’t tell you. The obvious target might be paganism, which I would guess survived in this area well beyond medieval times. The Christian Church lures the spirit of paganism into a holy place and relentlessly reads the scriptures at it until it becomes exhausted and shrivels into insignificance. It may simply be the spirit of paganism, or something more sinister…’

‘Tonight, you could get the feeling of something more sinister.’