The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘No answer when we rang. She’s probably asleep by now. And we haven’t been out there simply because most of the roads in that area are now closed. Anyway, I thought I’d talk to you first, somehow imagining you’d be able to tell me rather more than you have.’

‘He really was killed?’

‘He was certainly killed. But if you’re asking if he was murdered, let me put it this way: there are some not-terribly-subtle textural differences between snow which has fallen naturally on to a body lying in the road and snow which has been kicked over it in order to conceal it from approaching vehicles.’

‘Somebody… dumped him in a main road? To be run over?’

‘Whether he was already dead, or unconscious, when he was placed in the road, only a PM can establish, so we won’t know until tomorrow.’

Merrily discovered that she was pacing the lobby, loose shadows meshing in her path.

‘Of course, the macabre aspect to this,’ Annie Howe said, ‘as one of our officers pointed out, is that Hook was placed in the road at the spot — or somewhere very close to the spot — where his brother died. Hook lived in a flat at Wormelow. A neighbour who was walking to the Tump Inn saw him leaving the building sometime around mid-evening, on foot. He may have been going to meet his killer and, unless this was a remarkable coincidence, we could assume the killer was someone who not only knew about the accident but also precisely where it took place.’

‘I…’ Merrily went back to the chintz-covered chair and sat down again. ‘His cousin Dexter was driving. Which you know, of course.’

‘Was Harris still close to his cousin?’

‘Apparently not. There’s been a rift in the family since the accident. We… I suggested the situation might be improved by holding a service — a Requiem Eucharist — for Roland, who was killed. Dexter said that Darrin would be dead against it. He suggested several times that Darrin was unstable… violent. He said, more or less, that he’d been scared of Darrin when they were kids. That Darrin liked to hurt people, cause trouble, had a cruel streak. I assumed, because Darrin had a prison record and Dexter didn’t, that this was at least close to the truth.’

There was a silence. The door of the lounge opened and Bliss looked out, saw that Merrily was still on the phone, scowled and went back in.

‘I’ll tell you about Darrin Hook, shall I?’ Annie Howe said. ‘Because I arrested him once, you see, a number of years ago. He’d got into a factory on the Holmer estate, with some mates, lifting some computers that they didn’t, of course, know how to get rid of — these particular models being part of a network system. So, when they tried to flog them to a nice chap who assembles PCs in his garage, we had the whole bunch in no time. Hook, it turned out, was the one who had got them into the factory, past quite an efficient security system. He’s not bright, but he’s remarkably good with his hands. And he does what he’s told. You might say, I want to get into a chemist’s shop, or I want a BMW Series 7, and Darrin will do the technical bits. You could call him an instinctive thief, a natural.’

‘He was the one who broke into the car that night. When he was about twelve.’

‘It’s what he does. What he did. It made him popular with certain people. Won him acceptance.’

‘Dexter indicated he was… you know… hard.’

‘Mrs Watkins, all his convictions relate to basic thieving, never involving violence — not on his part, anyway. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he was converted, in a very short time, to your religion. If he was exposed to someone with sufficient evangelical fervour, in a situation where he couldn’t get away, he’d be a pushover.’

‘Especially if he had something on his conscience?’

‘I don’t doubt that. You people are quite good at targeting someone’s weak points.’

‘You haven’t talked to Dexter, then.’

‘He wasn’t at home, and we haven’t tried to find him. It sounds as though he’s either easily scared or he’s been deliberately giving people the wrong impression about his cousin.’

‘He was doing the late shift at Alice’s fish and chip shop in Ledwardine, but I expect it’ll be closed by now.’

‘Long ago, I should think. Does he stay in the village?’

‘I think he goes back to Hereford. Whether he could get through tonight, though…’

‘We’ll talk to him first thing in the morning, one way or another. He’s not going to know we’re looking for him. Well… thank you, Ms Watkins. We got somewhere in the end, didn’t we?’

‘I’m not sure where we got. If he hadn’t told Alice about his conversion, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have told Dexter.’

‘We’ll see,’ Howe said. ‘Good night.’

Merrily gave the DC his phone back and went out through the porch to avoid Bliss for a while. The implications here were horrific. Tugging up the hood of Jane’s duffel, she walked out onto the forecourt, where the snow was falling hard again, like inside one of those glass things you shook.

I was bigger than Darrin, but he was real nasty, look. Stuck his knife in the back of my hand once. Had an airgun, shot a robin in the garden. Things people thought were nice, he’d wanner destroy.

It didn’t fit. And yet these things must have actually happened, because Dexter Harris wasn’t imaginative. It was just that Darrin hadn’t done them. And if Darrin hadn’t done them, then…

You’re a fuckin’ ole meddler, Alice, nobody assed you to start all this shit… what if everybody don’t want the truth out?

Dexter didn’t want it out.

She pushed back her hood, lifting up her face to the cascading sky, feeling the cold, stinging truth on her skin. Far from rejecting the idea of a Requiem Eucharist, a born-again Christian of the Charismatic persuasion — throwing up his arms and yelling that he’d been saved and praise the Lord — would see it as a sign, a response from God to his need to be cleansed of his sins.

Suppose Dexter was still in contact with Darrin? Suppose he knew about Darrin’s conversion, guessed that, in Darrin’s erratic mental state, it would all come flooding out, what had really happened that day, the things that Darrin had never talked about.

Never talked about because he was afraid of Dexter.

Dexter, the good boy. Not the most pleasant person, to talk to, but he worked hard and he was a martyr to his asthma. And all he did that night, after all, was drive the car.

Merrily walked, with determination, back into Stanner Hall, pulling out her own mobile, ringing Alice again, letting it ring for over two minutes before giving up and ringing Lol.

39 What Brigid Did

All the time she was talking, Lol kept looking at the window. There ought to be curtains; maybe Merrily couldn’t afford curtains on a starvation stipend. The snow was coming down vertically out of a windless sky, as if it had been directed to obliterate the village.

And unless it had been an apparition of the newly dead, that definitely hadn’t been Darrin Hook at the window.

‘So, not a word from Alice?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing. And it’s not likely she’s going to call now, is it?’

‘You do know what’s… implied here,’ Merrily said, fifteen miles away and safe, thank God. ‘You do realize what it suggests — about Dexter?’

‘It suggests that Dexter might not be your problem any more,’ Lol said carefully.

Merrily said, ‘If he is responsible for—’

‘Then you couldn’t have known, you had no reason even to suspect it. You didn’t know Darrin and, if what Howe says is right about his conversion, neither did Alice.’

‘It was my decision. My solution to their problem.’

Jeavons’s solution, Lol thought. He ought to tell her about Jeavons, but he didn’t