The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (72 page)

‘And you think this was what sent Dacre up Stanner Rocks in a snowstorm? Confirmation that this was Brigid Parsons and she hadn’t changed?’

‘We’ll be looking at Sebbie’s mobile, to see who he rang last night, who he might’ve made an appointment with. Unfortunately, the thing was smashed on the rocks, so it’ll have to go to the boffins. But, yeh, you’re right, I reckon. Puts paid to any doubts he might’ve had that the lovely Natalie was indeed his little cousin Brigid. And it gives him more leverage. Being arrested for GBH, if you happen to be Brigid Parsons, it’s not gonna be a smack on the wrist, is it? Also, think of the publicity. Sebbie gives her an ultimatum, re sale of farm... she sends him on his last journey.’

‘Frannie, would anybody in his right mind attempt to blackmail somebody known to be violent while standing with his back to a cliff edge?’

‘Who says he was in his right mind? Have
you
spoken to anybody thinks he was in his right mind? He was probably in an alcoholic haze. Besides, it didn’t end there. Just pushing the feller off the cliff, see, that wasn’t very Brigid. A bit perfunctory.’ Bliss rubbed his eyes. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, I don’t know why I’m—’

‘Go on.’

‘Zelda Morgan? Matrimonial ambitions?’

‘I remember.’

‘Zelda was at her mother’s seventieth birthday party in Kington, didn’t get back to Sebbie’s till just before we talked to her last night. Checked the answering machine but she didn’t get round to checking the voice-mail on her mobile till an hour or so ago when she woke up in the armchair. Bit of a shock, out comes Sebbie’s voice, being very Sebbie. “Get your” – excuse me, Reverend – “get your fat arse over here. Get the police. Fucking madwoman’s pushed me off the fucking rocks, and I can’t move.” ’

‘What?’

‘The voice of an injured man, possibly, but certainly not the voice of a dying man. Billy Grace was right. The facial injuries were not entirely consistent with a fall. She followed him down and beat him to a pulp. She’s not a pussycat, Merrily.’

‘Can I talk to her again?’

‘And would you like to tell me why?’

‘I don’t
know
why.’

‘About this Vaughan connection, yeh? What’s that mean to you?’

‘Frannie, this could take a while.’

‘Never mind,’ Bliss said.

At six-thirty a.m. Merrily went up to Hattie Chancery’s room with a Gideon Bible and the decanter of holy water.

Pictures of Hattie in the mustardy light. What struck her was how pale the woman had been, skin like white fish-flesh, anaemic.

There was a picture of her with the Middle Marches Hunt, which presumably provided regular infusions of blood.

Merrily shivered. Hardy was right: the entire room was a cold spot, the atmosphere thick with something she could only interpret as loathing. It could be Hattie; it could also be Brigid.

I was lying up in her room, surrounded by creepy old photos of the bitch. The biggest one, I had to clean the glass and I did that by spitting in her face, over and over again.

Merrily loosened the stopper on the decanter.

When she came down, Bliss was in the lobby, putting down the phone. There was concern in his eyes when he saw her; she must have looked something like she felt.

‘You’ve gorra tell me, Merrily.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, come
on
.’

It was up to Ben to tell him about the video, so what she told him, in the end, was about Lol and Dexter. What Dexter had done to Darrin and to Alice, what he’d tried to do to Lol, how it had ended and what lay on the floor of the inner hall of Ledwardine Vicarage.

Stuck out here in the snowy wastes, Bliss hadn’t caught up with the Hook inquiry. By the time Merrily finished, expressions were shifting around his face like jigsaw pieces in search of a picture. He walked away across the lobby and then back again. He stood in front of Merrily, chewing his lip, and then he turned his head and nodded at the lounge door.

‘Yeah, OK. Go in. Tell Alma I said you could have her.’

‘Well... thanks.’

It was time, then. No excuse.

As the C of E Deliverance manual kept underlining, when you conducted a Requiem Eucharist in an exorcism context, it was advisable to have at least one other priest there and preferably several. This was for a normal service, with full preparation taking place over several days. This was with a congregation of carefully vetted Christians.

With no back-up, and a congregation including two spiritualists, a trance-medium, a Roman Catholic, a teenage pagan – kind of – and a murderer, you just tossed the book over your shoulder and prayed for survival.

52

I
T WAS BETTER
in here now. Clouded with damp mist and shadows, but the candles were glowing brightly on the makeshift altar, unexpected stars in a murky sky, and the murmured
amens
were rising to join hers, this soft miasma of voices, a fuller response than she’d expected.

It was as if the ritual itself was controlling the conditions, making rough but perfectly symmetrical interweaving shapes in the void. The living and the dead, and the holy. One small circle of light.

Or maybe she was delusional through lack of sleep, and this was autopilot.

Before the others had even come up from the kitchen, she’d done some sprinkling of newly sanctified water, the routine blessing of the room. Haunted-house procedure. Then a short prayer, once they were all inside. And then a repeated blessing after the Dr Bell episode and the Vaughan revelations – all this probably helping
her
as much as anyone, calming her nerves, setting up a receptive state of mind.

Careful devotional preparation before the service is recommended for every communicant
. And also for the priest, naturally.

Oh sure...

There was a white cloth on the altar, a small chalice for the wine, a saucer for the wafers. Beth Pollen had assisted here. Merrily glimpsed Beth sitting next to Jane, staring straight ahead with focus and determination.

There seemed to be twelve of them now, including Brigid and Bliss and Alma. Antony Largo, wherever he was, had made no attempt to come in and his cameras were gone. The one she knew least was Clancy: school skirt, white school blouse, dark golden hair overhanging her eyes, her mouth sullen – eerily like the young Brigid, whose same picture, from a school photo, had been appearing in the papers for years and years.

Twelve of them. Twelve and Hattie. More holy water sprinkled in Hattie’s room before leaving.
Lord God, our heavenly Father, you neither slumber nor sleep. Bless this bedroom...

Merrily connected now with that. It was the beginning. She stepped out with her Bible and her service printout.

‘ “I am the resurrection and the life,” the Lord says. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die...” ’

We have all got a sperrit something like a spark inside we
, said the old man to Mrs Leather.

The brown mud in the stained-glass window began to clear in the early dawn, suggestions of colour rising like oil in a puddle.

‘So this is a service with Holy Communion to bring peace to Hattie Davies – Hattie Chancery, who died by her own hand before the Second World War. But I’d also like us to remember, in our prayers, Hattie’s daughter, Paula, who was also a suicide, and Paula’s daughter, Brigid who is... with us.’

With the aid of a car battery provided by Ben, she’d managed to print out the order of service from Common Worship on the C of E Web site. Close to the top of the service – and lest anyone forget what this was about – she’d brought in a serious Confession that she made them repeat after her, line by line.

There were candles on tables amongst the congregation, establishing that they were part of it, not an audience. Brigid Parsons sat next to one, with Jeremy and Clancy. Brigid’s hair was freshly brushed and some of its long-ago colour was shining through, in strands of fine gold, as if in acknowledgement that she’d soon be able to wash it all away because anonymity wouldn’t matter any more, where she was going. Her face was dark and strained, the wide mouth turned down, with lines either side that looked as if they’d just been pencilled in.

Merrily had tried to talk to Brigid in the lounge, but Brigid, who had slept for a couple of hours on the sofa, had been unresponsive to everything except the idea and purpose of the Requiem.
Please, just... take the bitch away.

‘This is not about revenge.’ She focused on Brigid now, in the near-white candlelight. ‘It’s not about hitting back, it’s not about
laying a ghost
... it’s about forgiveness. We’re looking at Hattie and what she did, and, sure, there were a lot of evil elements there...
but that does not make Hattie evil in herself
. We have to search, in this service, for a depth of forgiveness that we perhaps wouldn’t be able to reach in everyday life. We’re always saying, I can forgive anybody anything but
That
... Today, we have to say – and mean it – I can forgive anything,
including
That.’

In her own mind, she saw the woman in the picture over the bed, a woman with fair hair twisted and coiled like a nest of pale snakes, and eyes like white marbles. She could hear wild laughter, the smack of stone on flesh and bone.

Whoop, whoop
.

It wasn’t easy, was it?

‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘we can count on some help.’

She opened the New Testament: John, Chapter Twelve. At a later stage, she’d have to say, ‘Let us commend Hattie to the mercy of God.’

It was clear that nobody was ready yet to consider mercy. Not even Jeremy Berrows, the natural farmer, the quiet farmer, innocent face under hair like dandelion clocks. Giving Brigid an occasional sideways glance, their shoulders touching. Jeremy Berrows, who firmly believed the evil that arose in Brigid had been bequeathed to her by Hattie.

And maybe it had. Maybe Bella Chancery, led here by a twisted path of deception, had opened the door to... something that Jeremy was now being asked to forgive. Now. Within probably an hour of losing for ever his main reason to go quietly on.

John 12, verse 27. ‘Now my soul is in turmoil, and what am I to say? Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this that I came to this hour...’

Canon Jeavons’s point entirely.
It’s how we develop within ourselves – by suffering through our failure and trying again and suffering some more. We suffer, Merrilee.

If Merrily could take on Jeremy’s suffering she’d do it. She felt a low-level tingle in her spine.

Behind Jeremy was Alistair Hardy, rotund and bland and – a phrase you didn’t hear much these days, but it suited him – clean-shaven.

The psychic? She didn’t doubt it, but there
was
a lot to doubt. The Lucy Devenish thing, for a start. Also Dr Bell’s ‘revelation’ about the use of a newborn baby in that dubious ceremony. Because Beth Pollen had almost certainly known of the suggestion that the baby was Hattie, had almost certainly told Hardy.

Smoke and mirrors.

‘ “The crowd standing by said it was thunder, while others said, An angel has spoken to him. Jesus replied, This voice spoke for your sake, not mine. Now is the hour of judgement for this world; now shall the Prince of this world be driven out...” ’

Driving out evil, it was hard not to personalize it.

Brigid Parsons... Paula Parsons... Hattie Chancery... Black Vaughan and Ellen Gethin. To what extent could this possibly be said to go all the way back to Black Vaughan? Who seemed to have been only a fall guy, anyway. A story to blacken Vaughan and his tradition – the Welsh tradition in an area becoming rapidly Anglicized.

She looked at Ben Foley, his sleek head bowed. The original destructive haunting was said to have threatened the whole economy of Kington; Ben had been hoping it would revive his.

She wondered if she ought to have included Sebbie Dacre in this.

A Vaughan thing.

Had Dacre been told that he was a Vaughan? Did that explain his robber-baron mentality, his need to reclaim what was his, to dominate the valley? But the threat Dacre perceived was a threat from within his own family. The worst kind. Look at Dexter Harris.

Merrily looked around the cold room with its tiny spearpoint flames. Looked around, flickering face to flickering face.

Where are you, Hattie?

Of all the things she hadn’t intended to ask...

‘Dying, you destroyed our death. Rising, you restored our life.’

He’s here.
Christ
. He should be here.