The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (30 page)

Amber said, ‘And you have copies of this... documentation?’

‘Mysteriously – or perhaps
not
so mysteriously – when I applied to the committee to draw out the relevant papers to allow me to make some photocopies, they seemed to have... disappeared. I explained all this to your husband earlier.’

‘You’re saying this is something to do with Dr Kennedy?’

‘Dr Kennedy now disputes that the material ever existed, and Dr Kennedy is now in virtual control of The League. Furthermore, he and most of the present committee very much deplore the White Company and all it stands for. They’d rather forget Doyle’s obsession with spiritualism. And I’m not sure they’d go out of their way to preserve an account handwritten by a participant in the Stanner seances for a London magazine,
Cox’s Quarterly
– which, it appears, paid for it in full but never, in fact, published it. Was, in fact, persuaded – we think – not to publish.’

‘And you’re saying this article proved conclusively that Conan Doyle based his novel on the legend of Thomas Vaughan and the Hound of Hergest?’ Amber’s hands were pushing down the bulges in her apron again. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘What
I
read certainly suggested that, after his evening here, Doyle was fully acquainted with the Vaughan story. We’ve since established that the man who wrote it, who was quite elderly at the time, died within a year of submitting it, still waiting for his piece to appear. And the magazine itself went to the wall a short time later. We don’t know how or when the article fell into the hands of The Baker Street League, but I don’t suppose that’s important now.’

Interesting. Jane imagined Ben and Antony in London, doorstepping Neil Kennedy, for the programme:
So, tell us Dr Kennedy, why
did
you suppress documentary evidence that Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel was based not in Devon but on the Welsh Border?

She waited for Amber to ask the other crucial question – what
happened
here? But Amber didn’t. Amber really didn’t want to know.

Sod
that
.

‘Excuse me.’ Jane stood up. ‘You said the writer of this article was a
participant
. Like, participant in what? What did they actually do here, in this room?’

There was a silence.

She never got an answer. In the midst of the hush, she heard chair legs scraping the flags in Clancy’s corner of the kitchen, as Beth Pollen looked at Hardy and Matthew adjusted his glasses and said, ‘Should I attempt to—?’

By then Clancy was on her feet.

‘
Mum!
’

Matthew was frozen into silence. Natalie had arrived at the bottom of the kitchen steps, dark brown hair tumbled over one eye, the sleeves of her black woollen dress pushed up over the elbows. Both men looking at her, because that was what men did.

‘Amber...’ The calmness in Nat’s voice was like this really thin membrane over panic. ‘Do we have a first-aid kit?’

The halogen lights were showing up, around her wrists, these wild, wet swatches of what could only be –
Jesus Christ
– fresh blood.

Amber’s whole body jerked. ‘Where’s Ben?’

Jane sprang up and ran for the steps.

At the bottom of the car park, there was a small wrought-iron gate to an old footpath that Ben had cleared. The path went down through the grounds, curving through tangled woodland, almost to the edge of the bypass, facing Stanner Rocks. This was where Ben went jogging most mornings; you could go along the side of the main road and then join up with the main drive back to the hotel.

Now the gate was open. Footprints in the snow.

Jane went through hesitantly, carrying the rubber-covered torch that Amber had given her; there was no great need for it: the moon was out and the ground was bright with virgin snow.

‘Careful,’ Amber said, the white canvas first-aid bag over her shoulder. ‘For God’s sake. We don’t know—’

‘It’s all right.’ Ben’s voice from some yards away – Ben’s voice like Jane had never heard it before, kind of thin and stringy. ‘It’s all right, Amber. All right, now.’

Just the other side of the gate was a small clearing. Jane stayed on the edge of it and shone the torch towards Ben’s voice. The beam unrolled a white carpet slicked by the marks of skidding footwear. No sign of the shooters, no voices other than the Foleys’.

‘Stay there, Jane.’ Amber put down the first-aid bag and said to Ben, ‘What have you done?’

It was like she’d asked him to stir the soup and he’d let it boil over. It was always easy to underestimate Amber: she worried about intangibles, but only because she was a practical person, controlled. She’d sent Natalie to the ladies’ loo to get cleaned up and then stand by to call an ambulance.

‘I’m sorry.’ Ben let out a long, hollow breath that was more than a half-sob. ‘I’m really
sorry
about this.’

At the same time she saw Ben, Jane heard these liquid snuffling noises, knowing as he turned into the torchlight that he was not making them. Behind him was a fence post with no fence, only shorn-off twists of barbed wire nailed to it. And a hump on the ground.

Ben turned fully towards them, rising, and Jane gasped. His Edwardian jacket hung open, exposing his once-white shirt, emblazoned now with a blotch like a red rose.

‘Lost it,’ Ben said. ‘
I
lost it.’ And then he giggled. He was trembling hard. He stumbled. ‘Oh Jesus.’

‘Hold the torch a bit steadier, can you, Jane?’ Amber looked at Ben. It was like he’d been fighting a duel and staggered back, rapiered through the heart.

‘No, really, I’m all right. Don’t bother about me. I’m really all right. We should see to—’

He gestured vaguely at the hump on the ground. Jane had been afraid to look at the hump. Hoping it was a dead tree. Or something. Something that didn’t snuffle.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ Ben said again.

The man was lying with his shoulders propped against the fence post. He was wearing camouflage trousers, an army jacket. He was holding his head back against the post. You couldn’t see much of his face through all the blood, but his mouth was hanging open, and there was blood in there, too, and all around his lips and nose, bubbling through a film of dirt and snot. Jane recoiled, swallowing bile. It was like he’d been bobbing for apples in a barrel of blood.

‘Called me a nancy boy, you see.’ Ben moved away back, so that Amber could undo the first-aid bag. ‘Nat tried to stop the bleeding. Not very successfully, I’m afraid.’

‘He needs to go to a hospital.’ Amber’s voice was crisp as the snow. ‘You’ve broken his nose, for a start.’

‘Is that really necess—? I mean, can’t you—?’

‘Ben, you’ve smashed his
face
! I can’t believe you could—’

‘It was
dark
, I couldn’t see what I— For God’s sake, Amber, they were destroying it all. Everything was going so— And then these, these bloody shots, shaking all the glass in the windows. These bast— That’s illegal, that’s—’

The man on the ground squirmed, as if he was trying to get up, and then he slid back down the post like he was tied to it. He tried to speak, but his voice was like a thick soup. He started to choke.

Amber said, ‘Jane, leave me the torch and then go back to the house and tell Nat we need an ambulance, will you?’

‘
Naw!
’ The man was prising himself up, his back jammed against the fence post. ‘
No abulath!
’

Ben snatched the torch away from Jane, the way he’d grabbed the video camera, and held it up over his shoulder, the way police held their torches, gripping the lighted end, so they could use the thick stem as a club.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He said no ambulance.’ Jane retched.

Amber said, ‘What are you going to do now, Ben – beat all his teeth out?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Ben shone the torch briefly round the clearing. ‘There’s two more of these bastards somewhere. And a gun. One of them’s got a gun.’

‘He’s...’ Jane backed away. ‘He’s right. They were at Jeremy’s. They were going to shoot Jeremy’s dog.’

‘Then tell Natalie to phone the police as well,’ Amber said. ‘Jane,
go
!’

‘Yes.’

Jane turned away, grateful for an excuse, and ran blindly across the clearing towards the wooden gate. Couldn’t believe what Ben had done. OK, he was furious at the shooters invading his land, and it had been building up for weeks, and he was frustrated and desperate for something to work out. But this was
Ben Foley
– artistic, funny, slightly camp. You thought you knew people. You thought you
knew
—

She was pulling at the gate when the hands came down on her shoulders.

TWENTY

‘S
O HOW DID
you find out, vicar?’ Alice Meek said. Resignation there, but no big surprise. ‘Who told you?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Wouldn’t be fair. But it was more a question of finding out that there was something to find out. You know?’

‘You was guided.’ Alice put a mug of coffee in front of her. ‘See, Dexter, he thought you was just gonner lay your hands on him. He said he wouldn’t mind that. He come back afterwards, he says, that’s it, don’t wanner go n’more. I said, Dexter, I said, nothing comes easy, in this life. You want the Holy Spirit to pay you a visit in all His glory, I said, you gotter play your part, boy.’

Alice had a bungalow in a new close off Old Barn Lane, not a hundred yards from her chip shop. Alice’s kitchen was bright and shiny and full of chrome. Like a chip shop, in fact. It occurred to Merrily that, of all the women who gave up their time to clean the church, Alice was probably the oldest, the busiest and the richest.

And no kids. Dexter could be in for a sizeable bequest. Whatever Alice wanted, Dexter would have to listen.

‘What I was going to suggest, Alice...’ Nervously, Merrily sipped the coffee. It was, as she’d expected, the kind you made if you needed to work all night. ‘I mean, there might be something in this for more than Dexter.’

She hadn’t wanted to waste any time, to dwell too much on this before taking action. She’d walked straight down to Old Barn Lane and gone into the chip shop just as it was opening for the evening. Alice wasn’t working tonight, but the woman there, Sharon, had phoned Alice at home and Alice had told Sharon to send the vicar round directly.

‘En’t never had no kids, vicar, as you know. Used to babysit the others. Oldest sister, no kids, you spends half your nights babysitting – they think they’re doing you a favour.’ Alice sat herself down in a chrome-framed chair at the chrome-legged table. ‘What I’m saying, I knowed all of ’em, vicar, all them kids, better’n their own mothers in some ways, truth was known. Kids talks to the babysitter, see – when they wakes up in the night, when they’re tryin’ to put you off sending ’em to bed, they talks.’

‘So Dexter, Darrin, Roland...’

‘Babysitted all them boys for years. Never hardly had a Saturday night at home. Roland, he wasn’t like the others. Upsets me still to think about that child. He was... like he didn’t belong in that family. They’re – I’m saying this even though it’s my own family, but they’re a rough bunch, vicar, en’t got no social graces. En’t saying there’s no goodness at the heart of ’em, but you gotter dig deep sometimes. ’Cept with Roland. A true innocent, that child. He was that innocent it was like he didn’t belong in this world, which is a daft thing to say—’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Like he never growed a skin, vicar. Sometimes, I wakes up in the night, years him, clear as day, sniffin’ his tears back. “Daddy was drunk”, he’d say. “Daddy’d come in drunk and he smelled bad.” Saturdays, see, Richie, he’d spend the whole afternoon in the pub – come back, trample on the kids’ toys and laugh hisself daft about it. Then they’d go out, him and my sister, Lisa, and I’d come round and babysit and clean up the mess and dry the tears. And talk to Roland. Darrin, he was his dad’s son, didn’t wanner talk, got bored easy. Roland, he wasn’t like neither of them. You think about what happened to him, and you think,
why
? Why was he put on this earth for that short time, for
that
to happen?’

‘
You
learned something from him,’ Merrily said.

‘Yes.’ Alice’s sharp little eyes filled up – a rarity, Merrily guessed.

‘What about Dexter’s family?’

‘That’s the middle sister, Kathleen. Her ex-husband, Mike, least he kept a job longer’n a week when they was together. None of ’em was
bright
, look, no get-up-and-go. You only gotter look at Dexter. I couldn’t look at Dexter for months, mind, after Roland died. I thought – God help me – why couldn’t it be him instead, or Darrin?’

‘Darrin’s... been in trouble?’

‘I never knows whether he’s in or out of prison, vicar, been in that many times. Beyond all redemption now, that boy. His dad,
he
was always destructive, but that was just clumsy and careless, through drink mostly – he never done nothing criminal. Most he ever got done for was urinatin’ in a public place – doorway of the Old House, dead centre of the city, all the shops still open, you imagine anybody that stupid? Thick as a beam-end, Richie. But Darrin – when his ma blamed Dexter for what happened to Roland, Darrin went and did damage on them, and Kath and Mike, they wouldn’t put the police on him ’cause they was ashamed of what Dexter done.’