The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (55 page)

‘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?’

‘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

A
LL 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
.