The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Danny had the feeling he ought to know, but he didn’t.

‘She was Brigid Parsons,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s what happened.’

Back at Stanner, the cold air dropping around them like a shroud, Bliss said, ‘So how well do you know Natalie Craven?’

When Merrily had tried to raise the issue in the Range Rover, he’d nodded towards the driver and shaken his head, so she’d gone back to thinking about Alice, wondering if she ought to ring Lol, see if Alice had phoned. However Darrin Hook had died, it was going to damage Alice.

She followed Bliss into the porch. ‘Don’t know her at all. Jane’s at school with her daughter. Which is how Jane got the job here — Clancy invited her over one weekend, and the Foleys were looking for cheap Saturday labour.’

‘But you know who she is,’ Bliss said.

‘I know who she is… and I know…’ She cleared her throat, swallowed. ‘This is one of the things I was going to tell you in the Range Rover. We think — Jane and I think — that Natalie Craven may have taken the girl to Danny Thomas’s house for the night, because they thought the track to The Nant could be difficult. Danny’s the guy who was with Jeremy Berrows. He’s… Gomer’s partner.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry, Frannie. There was no reason to think—’

‘Where?’

‘It’s a farm. Back off the Kinnerton road from Walton. Not sure what it’s called, I—’

Bliss had surged into the lobby, leaving the door swinging back on her. Hell.

When she went in, the tall detective who’d been to The Nant to talk to Jeremy padded across the worn carpet.

‘Mrs Watkins, could you phone the chief, please, in Hereford?’

‘Annie Howe?’

‘Not a happy bunny tonight, the chief.’

‘Has she ever been a happy bunny?’

He grinned. ‘Use my mobile.’ He keyed in the number for her, and she sat down in a chintzy chair near the reception desk.

Annie Howe answered on the second ring.

‘Ms Watkins. The fourth emergency service.’

Howe was an atheist, younger than Bliss, seriously educated, promoted over his head and on course for the stratosphere. She wore crisp, white shirts and pencil skirts and rimless glasses and smelled, Jane would insist, of Dettol No. 5.

‘You wanted to, erm, talk about Darrin Hook?’

Merrily recalled the last time she and Howe had been together, in a derelict hopyard in the Frome Valley last summer, in circumstances that Howe was likely to have erased like a virus from the hard disk of her consciousness.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you know about the late Darrin Hook.’

‘Well, I… I only found out about him in a roundabout way — through his aunt, who lives in the village.’ No harm in going into this; whatever you thought about Annie Howe, she didn’t gossip. ‘She was worried about a rift in the family, stemming from the incident you obviously know about, seventeen years ago, when Darrin Hook’s young brother was killed. The other person in the stolen car, the cousin, Dexter, has suffered health problems ever since. Their aunt wanted me to… pray for him.’

‘Pray for him.’

‘I don’t expect you to identify with this, Annie, but it’s what we do.’

‘After you’ve made a few inquiries, to make sure that God has all the relevant background information necessary to deliberate the possibility of intercession. Even though, as I understand it, omniscience is one of his —’

‘Yeah, all right, you think my whole career has been founded on a tissue of myths. Fine. Strangely, I can live with that.’

‘It is strange,’ Howe said. ‘But then the most unexpected people can fall prey to superstition. Like Hook himself.’

‘I’m not following.’

‘Darrin Hook was released from Brompton Heath Prison just under three weeks ago, having served less than half his latest eighteen-month sentence for burglary. The decision was made on the recommendation of, among others, the prison chaplain.’

‘Oh?’

‘Because Hook appeared to have undergone a conversion to your… faith.’

‘Darrin Hook became a… Christian?’

‘You didn’t know that? Somehow, I’d expected that was how you came to be acquainted with him.’

‘I’m not acquainted with him. I’ve never met him. And I certainly didn’t know he’d been… When you say a conversion, what do you mean?’

‘The usual absurd fanaticism. Bibles appearing in his cell…’

‘Sent down from heaven?’

‘Brought in by a prison visitor. A relative. Hook began to attend the Sunday services, throwing up his arms and yelling that he’d been saved and praise the Lord and all this tosh. I think even the prison chaplain became bored with him after a while — perhaps why he recommended an early release.’

Merrily was shaking her head. ‘This is all news to me.’

The implications were startling. For a start, if this was true, Alice would have no reason to worry about Darrin’s reaction to the idea of a Requiem Eucharist for his brother.

‘You got this from the prison?’

‘We haven’t been in touch with the prison. The information came from a woman called Dionne Grindle, a cousin of Hook’s living in Solihull. We found her phone number in his wallet. She turned out to be the relative instrumental in his seeing the… light.’

My niece, the one in Solihull, she did one of them Alpha courses at her church, did I tell you?… Reckoned it d’creep up on you somehow… felt the Holy Spirit was in her heart like a big white bird…

‘She obviously didn’t tell the rest of the family,’ Merrily said.

‘Apparently, Hook specifically asked her to say nothing to the Hereford side of the family. He said that he wanted to tell them in his own time and in his own way. He also, according to Ms Grindle, had plans to — and this is what interests us, of course — make an entirely new beginning by setting the record straight on a number of dark areas in his past. Now I assumed that, by this, he meant coming clean about previous offences for which he was never caught. And we’d have been, naturally, delighted to help him with the paperwork.’

‘Wouldn’t you have had to charge him?’

‘Depends how serious they were. We can be fairly discreet, especially if it leads us to other offenders. And this, of course, is the point. If Hook had talked about his conversion and its implications, it might have been viewed as a rather worrying development by some of his former associates in this city’s criminal underclass. Especially if he was indicating to all and sundry that he might be ready to put the record straight on certain matters — come clean, as it were.’

‘You think he’d be a marked man?’

‘It does rather sound as if he was bent on martyrdom.’

‘Have you talked to his other relatives?’

‘Only his mother, who lives in the city and knew nothing of any conversion. She thought the most likely person for him to tell would be the aunt, who—’

‘So you did know about Alice.’

Howe didn’t reply.

‘Have you talked to her?’