The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

nails. And the next night, while the police and the neighbours were still looking for the missing boy, did the same thing to his mate. TEEN FIEND, the Mirror said, when Brigid was convicted. This was the girl Jeremy had prayed to God to send back to him, and it didn’t bear thinking about, none of it.

‘I wrote to her,’ Jeremy said. ‘I wrote to her five, six times. Never had no reply. Figured mabbe her’d been moved and they never forwarded the letters. Turned out her dad wasn’t passing them on.’

Poor little sod. Was some folk born unlucky or what?

‘Wasn’t until he was dyin’, end of last year, that Norman sends for Brigid. Tells her the truth about who she was and where she come from. Tells her about Hattie.’

‘And what good did that do?’

‘Good?’ In the lamplight, Jeremy, for once, looked his age and then some, his face full of dips and hollows.

‘Must’ve seemed good for you,’ Danny said, and then he thought about it. ‘Bugger me, no wonder you rung me to come over when they turned up in that camper van. You was scared to death. You knew who it was gonner be all along. You just din’t know if her was gonner have two heads and bloody claws.’

He turned and walked back into the living room, where the fire was burning low, tossing uncertain shadows on to the walls. Danny saw a dark and tragic tapestry forming.

‘How long before Sebbie found out who the new woman was?’

‘Dunno, Danny.’

‘He ever ask?’

‘Never asked me.’

‘Just sent his Welsh shooters round to cause trouble. Put the wind up you. Let you know he was on the case. Cause a reaction. Was that it?’

‘Mabbe he seen the Hound.’

Danny snorted, turning to face the boy who was standing in the doorway now, his face mottled by the fire.

‘What he seen, Jeremy, was the curse of Chancerys comin’ back to the Stanner Valley.’

Jeremy cried out, so sharp and sudden that the dog whimpered and cowered away from him.

‘Why’d you take a rope into the barn?’ Danny said.

And couldn’t bear to hear the answer. He went and sat down by the fire, wishing to God he was at home with the cans on and The Queens of the Stone Age a satisfyingly numbing wooden mallet in his head.

‘I begged her to go,’ Jeremy said, like from a long way away. ‘I begged her to leave. I prayed for her to leave, same as I’d prayed for her to come back. Now I’m praying for her to get out before it… I could feel it coming.’

‘What?’

‘The shadow Hound. Death.’

‘Bollocks!’ Danny roared. And yet remembered when he seen the two of them in the Eagle, thinking how soon romance died.

‘And you seen the signs, Danny. Signs even you couldn’t miss. And yet you did.’

Danny let his hands fall from his ears. ‘What?’

‘The night this Nathan got beat up.’ Jeremy came to kneel down, side of Danny’s chair, like a dog. ‘You was there just before it happened, right? Think back, Danny — what was they saying?’

‘I don’t bloody know.’

‘Yes, you do. You tole me.’

‘They was… Like Foley said afterwards, Nathan called him a wimp. Then splat, splat.’

‘No, words? What did he actually say? What did Nathan say?’

‘Jeremy, for—’

‘What’d he say?’

‘Foley’s telling him to get the hell off his land or else, and Nat… Brigid… her’s like, Better do what he says. And then Nathan goes, What you gonna do about it, you and that fuckin’ little…’

Danny stopped, the words booming in his head louder than The Queens of the Stone Age and The Foo Fighters live on stage, together. And a big part of the black tapestry got itself blocked in.

‘… That fuckin’ little English wimp.’ The words shrank in Danny’s mouth.

Quarrel was with herself, Jeremy had said earlier. Me as got hit, mind.

‘Jesus Christ, Jeremy, he din’t mean Foley was a fuckin’ little English wimp, he meant… he meant you.’

He stood up, looked down at Jeremy by the chair, the boy’s eyes full of a knowledge that he wished he didn’t have.

‘Foley never lifted a finger against Nathan, did he?’ Danny said.

40 Extreme

On the square, the Christmas tree lights had gone off at midnight, and now the tree was shapeless with snow and joined at the hip to the market hall. The falling snow was so dense that it was like passing through lace curtains, the few lights still burning in Ledwardine peering out at Lol like suspicious, muffled eyes.

Crossing into Church Street where the roadway and the pavements had become one, he passed the timber- framed terrace that included Lucy’s house, its windows black, snow piled up on the step like a whole month of mail.

It was as if he was alone in the village. Everywhere, this white and quilted silence, like a chapel of rest.

A short way down the hill, the turning into Old Barn Lane was just another snow-flow now. But with hunched and crooked buildings either side, it was more sheltered here, the snow shallower, and Lol was able to hurry — as much as anyone could, moving like a wader in a congealing river.

In the months before he’d first met Merrily, when he was living in this village with Alison Kinnersley, he would sometimes walk down here for chips. Alice had lived over the shop then, and he vaguely remembered her moving out, into the first new home to be finished in Old Barn Close. Alice, it seemed, had always wanted a bungalow.

The shop was near the bottom of the lane before it fell away into fields. Blinds were down, no light shining through the gaps, and no street lamps to identify the entrance to the Close, about fifty yards further on. He’d been holding the vicarage’s black Maglite torch out in front of him, as if it was pulling him along. Now, passing the chip shop, its fatty miasma still in the air, he finally switched the torch on.

The Close was a so-called executive development of nine or ten houses and bungalows, architect-designed and well spaced between existing trees. Alice’s home was at the end, backing onto the old orchard chain that curved around most of the village, ending up back at the church.

OK, then. If there was a meaningful light on in the bungalow, he was going to knock on the door. If Dexter Harris answered it, he’d say he was sorry to show up so late, but he was bringing a message for Alice from the vicar who was stuck over in Kington, had tried to phone and couldn’t get a reply. It wasn’t brilliant, but it wouldn’t sound too suspicious on a night like this. If Dexter said that Alice was in bed, he wouldn’t argue, he’d just go back to the vicarage and try to get through to Annie Howe.

If Alice was there, however, he’d have to play it by ear. His conversations with her, in the old days, had never got much beyond salt and vinegar, but he thought she’d remember him, and he guessed that, like probably everyone else in this village, she’d know about him and the vicar. Whether he told Alice about Darrin, if she didn’t already know he was dead, would depend not least on whether Dexter was here or likely to return.