The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

killed those two boys — thirteen?’

‘Killed one boy,’ Bliss said. ‘Mark Andrew Goodison. Stuart Petit survived, just. She thought she’d killed him, almost certainly intended to, but he survived to finger her. If he hadn’t, I doubt she’d ever’ve been even questioned. The extreme savagery of it, nobody was looking for a girl. He lost an eye, Stuart, did you know?’

‘I’d forgotten.’

‘Most people just remember what happened to Mark — the bits of it the press felt able to print at the time. But whatever the shrinks say, I think there’s a good chance that the child who did that — hasn’t exactly gone away. Don’t you?’

‘I’ve never met her.’

‘Stick around,’ Bliss said.

They took the tractor, Danny and Jeremy — Danny realizing how much worse the conditions had got since he’d left home. But not being able to get back there, that was not an option.

Danny Thomas versus the worst winter for many a damn year, Danny Thomas versus God. No contest tonight.

When he got the engine going and the music started up, and this time it really was ‘Bad Moon Rising’, he got rid of it so fast he nearly broke the damn switch. And when Jeremy Berrows, hunched up in the other side of the cab, said, ‘It’s gonner be all right, I swear it’ll be all right,’ Danny couldn’t find it in him to make any kind of reply.

Ahead of him, he saw the lights up on Stanner Rocks, National Nature Reserve and crime scene. He saw the heads in the rocks like some primitive, pagan Mount Rushmore in miniature, rimed with snow and secrecy, and he wanted to blow the whole enigma into the endless night.

‘Danny, I know what it looks like to you, and that was why—’

‘Why you never said a word?’ Danny lurched in his seat, grinding the tractor onto the snowbound bypass, scraping his hair from over his eyes. ‘I can’t believe you never told me none of this, boy, I cannot believe it. I can’t believe you let that woman leave that kid with Greta.’

‘Danny, it—’

‘I can’t believe you’d do this.’

‘Danny, I’ve known her for over twenty-five years. I know all her problems, I know why she done what she done, and I know the things she won’t do.’

‘You’ve known she was a bloody murderer for twenty-odd years, and you still wanted her. You brought her into the valley, and you never said a word. You knowed what she done to Nathan, and still said nothin’. You know it en’t bloody changed, boy. That woman kills, and you let my Greta get involved in it, and you never said a word, and I thought you was my friend, and whatever happens I en’t never gonner forgive that.’

In the clean, shiny, chromium kitchen, Lol saw things that bothered him, like a single cup on the kitchen table, half full of cold tea. Like a tin of assorted biscuits with the top off.

These things bothered him because everything else in here was immaculately tidy.

He didn’t like to go further than the kitchen. He stood just inside the doorway, called out tentatively, ‘Mrs Meek?’

On the wall by the door was a calendar of Peter Manders scraperboard etchings of Herefordshire scenes. Above it, two framed photographs, one of four grinning blokes, including Dexter Harris, hefting between them what looked like a tractor wheel. The other was a formula studio portrait of a small boy with close-cropped hair. Roland?

Roland and Dexter, only Darrin missing. The bad boy, the black sheep.

In fact, the weak boy, the easily led boy who could have used some support from a strong, self-sufficient auntie, if she’d ever been told the truth.

A door across from Lol was open to the dimness of perhaps a hallway, but through another door, opposite, he saw a stuttering light.

‘Alice?’

A wide hall ending in an arched front door. From here, it was clear that the flickering was from a TV set in a lounge or living room. Lol went in.

‘Alice?’ In case she’d fallen asleep in front of the TV.

Leaving the back door unlocked, well after midnight?

On the widescreen TV, a black and white movie of Gaslight vintage was showing with the sound down: a woman in a doorway holding a lantern high.

This was a long room with a picture window overlooking the orchard, spectacularly snow-clad. The only light apart from the TV came from perfect red and yellow designer flames curling almost realistically from real coals on a gas fire in the bottom wall. The carpet was cream, the four-piece suite huge and expensive and vacant.

Lol went back into the hall. Doors on both sides, three of them slightly open. Bathroom: empty. Utility room with washing machine and dryer: empty. Toilet and shower room: empty.

He put an ear to the closed doors before slowly opening each of them. Two were bedrooms, with that room- freshener smell that told you they weren’t in everyday use.

There was no sound, either, from the third bedroom. Lol went in, switching on the light. He saw a white dressing table, a built-in wardrobe. The bed was turned down and the room felt warm. There was a small en suite bathroom and toilet.

Alice’s room. Nobody here.

The final room had evidently been intended for a study; it had built-in shelves and cupboards. There were cardboard boxes on the floor. On the wall opposite the door, by the window, was a framed local newspaper cutting showing a middle-aged man in an apron, holding out two bags of chips, a younger Alice looking on. The headline read: Frying Start — Sizzling New Venture for Farmer Jim.

Alice and Jim had been struggling for years on a small farm, not much more than a smallholding. Lol remembered someone saying that, by the time Jim died, the fish and chip shop in Old Barn Lane — the first chippie in an expanding Ledwardine — had proved to be the most lucrative business in this village, by a big margin, and that included the Black Swan.

A very worthwhile inheritance for somebody.

When Lol got back to the kitchen, Dexter Harris was sitting at the table, nibbling a chocolate biscuit. He barely looked up. The huge, solid greyness of him was reflected out of a chromium freezer door, a kettle, a Dualit toaster.

‘Whatever you took, boy,’ Dexter said, friendly enough, ‘let’s have it on this table yere. Else mabbe I’ll make a start by breakin’ your arm, see where we goes from there.’

41 Living on the Edge of a Chasm

Neither Jane nor Amber noticed Beth Pollen until she was almost at the bottom of the kitchen steps.

‘Would this be a convenient time to talk?’

Amber picked up the earthenware jug for the chocolate, defensive. ‘Jane or me?’

‘I think both.’ Mrs Pollen looked tired, a bit frazzled. She said to Jane, ‘And I do want to talk to your mother.’

‘She’s around.’ Jane was embarrassed now about the way she’d clung to Beth Pollen at the rocks when the fox or the badger had run past.

‘But I want to clear the air on some things first. Everything, in fact.’

Jane put down the cheese-grater and stared at Mrs Pollen, still in her sheepskin coat, open over a pale blue jumper and jeans, as she came down the final step into the kitchen.

‘To begin with…’ Mrs Pollen turned to Amber. ‘When The Baker Street League cancelled their conference, that was entirely my doing. Neil Kennedy was actually quite amused, at first, by the idea of your husband trying to