The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

21 Cwn Annwn

TURNING OVER THE apartment – this wasn’t something you did lightly.

The attic door opened easily. No alarm went off, though it wouldn’t have come as a big surprise to find one had been secretly installed. Merrily stood on the threshold of Jane’s domain, remembering how important having her own apartment had been to the kid’s acceptance, aged fifteen, of a new life in Ledwardine.

Just a child then – two years ago, incredibly, she’d been just a child. Now she was a working woman with a provisional driving licence. And in a relationship – was this really the new going out with someone? Sometimes it felt that while Jane and Eirion were in a relationship she and Lol were just going out. Even though they never did.

Merrily felt her age like a grey blanket around her shoulders. Standing in the doorway, looking up at the walls, an enormous colour chart for emulsion paint. Even on a drab day, the Mondrian Walls – currently, giant slabs of crimson, cobalt blue and chrome yellow – were startling enough to have the Listed Buildings Department chasing an injunction, if they ever found out.

Merrily went in. This visit was long overdue. It wasn’t that Jane had been particularly secretive or moody or preoccupied, or anything like that. In fact, after her long-dark-night-of-the-soul period during the autumn, she’d been unusually bright and animated.

Which had seemed to be down to the weekend job – the sense of grown-up independence it would be giving her... and more. Merrily remembered working Saturdays, at sixteen, in a small, indy record shop, putting on her black and purple Goth make-up like a uniform. Getting paid to be cool.

Then the record shop had closed down, the way they did, and she’d found a back-room job in an old-fashioned department store, where the merest smear of Goth and you were out. Welcome to the world of work.

What she couldn’t quite understand was what was so long-term cool about washing up and waiting tables in a cold, rundown, under-financed country-house hotel run by a redundant TV executive with no catering experience and a young Delia Smith who should have known better. Naturally, she’d been over to Stanner and met them both – this being Jane’s first weekend job, it was important to check it out – and Amber and Ben Foley had seemed pleasant and well-intentioned. And almost certainly doomed.

The bed was made, and very neatly. This was the bed to which Jane had brought Eirion last summer – Eirion blurting it out to Merrily the very next day, after she’d accused him of being a nice guy. No, I’m not – I slept with your daughter.

Merrily smiled: innocents, really, both of them.

This afternoon, under an hour ago, Lol had rung from Prof’s studio, ominously hesitant.

The familiar leaden thud of a bag of anxiety landing on the doorstep.

Lol had been hesitant as long as she’d known him. Much less so with her now, obviously. No taboos between them any more. All right, one taboo. Just the single issue where hesitancy still came into it.

‘This is about Jane, isn’t it?’ Merrily had said. ‘This is one of those situations where you have to decide where your loyalties lie.’

‘And what’s best,’ Lol said. ‘Ultimately.’ He paused. ‘She phoned.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. She said it was, you know, absolutely confidential. I was to say nothing to anybody. Well, I realize that “anybody” almost invariably means you, but in this case...’

Merrily had sunk into the office chair, jagged neon letters spelling out PREGNANCY and ABORTION in her head. Outside, it was attempting to snow again, like it had been all week.

‘She’s not pregnant,’ Lol said, ‘as far as I know.’

‘How did you—?’

‘It’s what you always think of first.’

‘You know me that well?’

‘Anyway, she wouldn’t tell me a thing like that. The things she tells me about are the things that might offend you professionally.’

‘Kid’s always taken a special kind of delight in offending me professionally.’

‘You’re not cooperating, Merrily. You know you have to cooperate here, or I can’t go on.’

‘All right. Yes. OK. There is no way she’ll ever learn you told me, as God is my—’

‘We take that as read,’ Lol said. ‘This is about Lucy’s house.’

‘Oh well, Jane knows all about that.’ The relief making her smile. ‘We keep our secrets to an absolute minimum these days. Grown-ups. Mates. All that stuff.’

‘Jane says Lucy doesn’t want us to give up on the house.’

‘Well, obviously, we—’ Merrily paused, staring out of the window, to where the apple tree branches waved vaguely. ‘Lucy says?’

‘The late Lucy Devenish.’

‘I see.’ Merrily said.

‘You do?’

‘Lucy has appeared to Jane... in a dream?’

‘No, through, um, a third party.’

‘Oh.’ The smile dissolving, Merrily scrabbling for a cigarette.

‘She said she’d thought about it for two or three days before deciding to ring. In the end she’d decided it would be remiss of her not to pass on the message.’

‘Lol, what are we talking about here? Clairvoyant, Romany shaman?’

‘She kept saying things like, “Well, obviously I’m in two minds about the whole thing and it’s probably bollocks anyway.” After what happened with Layla Riddock, I think she’d be quite cautious.’

‘I’d’ve thought that, too.’

‘It seems to be a spiritualist medium,’ Lol said.

‘She went to a... medium?’

‘I don’t think it was that formal, but it was obvious she wasn’t going to tell me the circumstances. So I’m just... I sat around and searched my conscience. And I thought, well, we don’t know who the medium is, and there are mediums and mediums. So I decided I ought to tell you.’

‘Thank you, Lol. It’s appreciated.’

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Lol said. ‘Lucy was a good friend to me.’

‘So you rang the agents to see if the buyers had by chance given back word?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And?’

‘The people can’t wait to move in. Although they have two children, they find it delightfully bijou rather than small and cramped.’

Merrily wondered if he’d still have told her about Jane and the medium if it had turned out that the purchasers had suddenly backed out and Lucy’s house was on the market again. She decided he would have, in the end, but maybe not until contracts had been exchanged.

‘Typical spirit message, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Sod-all use.’

Danny wasn’t sorry the job had been called off. It was too cold. The sky was tight as a snare drum, grains of fine snow collecting on the bonnet of the van like battery acid.

And Gomer was getting on in years, and excavating a wildlife pond for this posh bloke from Off, these were not the best conditions for it. So when the feller’s new wife comes on the scene, going, ‘No, I think it should be over there, don’t you, darling?’, Danny was relieved to hear Gomer suggesting they should both think about it for a few days.

Back in the van, Danny had asked Gomer how much he was going to charge the people for a wasted trip, and Gomer had shaken his head and said that wasn’t how you kept your clients. Fair enough. Danny had shrugged, still an apprentice in the plant-hire business, and Gomer had dropped him off back at the farm.

Snow was falling, light and fine as dust motes, when Danny saw the car in front of the galvanized gate and wondered which of Greta’s mouthy friends he’d have to endure before he got any lunch.

‘Ah! Now! Talk of the Devil!’ Greta giving it the full Janis Joplin from the living room, soon as he let himself in. ‘Look who’s yere, Danny!’

Danny pulled off his wellies and padded in, and came face to face with Mary Morson, Jeremy’s ex, in the black business suit her wore as some kind of social services gofer at Powys Council.

‘En’t you at work, Mary?’

‘Danny!’ Greta blasted.

‘Flexitime,’ Mary Morson said, smug. Put on a bit of weight, Danny noticed. Pregnant? Unlikely. Accidents didn’t happen to Mary Morson.

‘Listen to this, Danny,’ Greta said. ‘Just listen to this – what did I say about that woman? Tell it him, Mary.’

‘I just thought somebody should enlighten a mutual friend of ours.’ Mary looked serious, light brown hair tucked behind her ears, small disapproving lines either side of her mouth. ‘It’s none of my business, really.’

‘In which case—’

‘Danny!’

‘Go on, then.’ Danny sighed and tried to get his bum within a yard or two of the wood-stove, but Mary and Greta both had chairs pulled up to the heat. Jerry Springer or some such earache was on the telly with the sound thankfully down, and he stood in front of that.

‘That bitch is cheatin’ on him already,’ Greta said, big smile, and Danny turned briefly, thinking her was on about some bint on Jerry Springer. But it wasn’t Jerry Springer on the box after all, it was some little blonde home-improvement tart.

‘Natalie Craven,’ Mary said grimly.

‘Eh?’

‘That blue camper van. The one Natalie Craven sold to the survey people at Stanner Rocks...’

‘I thought you and the naturalist feller was all washed up,’ Danny said.

‘I still have friends there,’ Mary said, voice cold as outside. ‘They were using the van as a site office, and they kept the folding bed as emergency overnight accommodation for volunteers. But one day, there was evidence that it had been... used.’

‘Mabbe one of the volunteers fancied a lie-down. It can get weary, watching little bloody plants grow.’

‘At night, this was,’ Mary said, ‘when there weren’t any volunteers on site. The van was always kept locked and the keys in a locked drawer at the Nature Trust office in town. Anyway’ – Mary’s little nose twitched in distaste – ‘they found suggestions of sexual activity.’

‘Like what?’ Danny raised his eyes to the big central beam. ‘Pair o’ pink knickers with no crot—’

‘Danny!’ Greta roared.

‘Well, this is bloody daft, Gret. Couple o’ randy naturalists nips in the ole van for a quick shag, and it’s gotter be—’

‘Listen, will you!’

Danny sniffed and scowled, and Mary said, ‘The door hadn’t been forced. It had obviously been unlocked. And if anybody might’ve had a spare key, nobody could think of anybody more likely than the person who sold them the van in the first place. So anyway, one of the team, he left some equipment on the site this night, see, and had to go back. And what should he find parked up there on the edge of the forestry but Jeremy’s four-by-four, and nobody in it. But there was a bit of light coming from the camper van, and when he looked in the window, there she was, with a man, and it certainly wasn’t Jeremy.’

It had all come out in a rush, and Mary Morson slumped back in her chair, lips tight. For the first time in his life, Danny wanted to physically shake the smile off Greta’s face.

‘Natalie?’

‘No more’n you’d expect from a woman like that,’ Greta said.

‘A woman like what?’

‘I need to spell it out?’

‘So who was the man?’

‘He didn’t recognize the man,’ Mary said. ‘He couldn’t see him very clearly, because he...’ Mary looked away. ‘I expect she was on top of him. But then he doesn’t know many local people, anyway.’

‘In which case—’

‘But he does know Jeremy! And he knows her.’

Danny shut his eyes. Shit.

‘Somebody ought to tell him,’ Mary said quietly. ‘Somebody who knows him well.’

‘When?’ Danny said harshly. ‘When was this?’

‘Night before last.’ Mary Morson stood up in front of him. ‘There’s no mistake about this, none at all, Danny. It was her. It was Natalie Craven and a bloke, and they were—’

‘All right!’

‘We’re just telling you,’ Greta said, ‘because you’re the nearest he’s got to a best friend. None of us wants to see him hurt.’

‘Hurt? It’ll kill him! You really expect me to go tell him? Like he don’t got enough on his plate?’

‘Who else is going to? You wanner wait till it’s all over Kington?’

‘You mean it en’t already? Oh, I forgot, you en’t been shopping yet, did you?’

‘That’s unfair!’

‘Well...’ Danny turned away. ‘It’s bloody upset me, it has.’

‘It’s upset all of us,’ Mary Morson said, shameless.

Merrily checked out the pine bookcase. Not many changes here: The Hedgewitch Almanac, Green Magic, Britain’s Pagan Places, plus another fifty or so pastel spines confirming that Jane was still a vague supporter of the Old Religion, which, as the kid now admitted, was actually not very old at all.

The shelves were all full. No room here for the Bible, which had failed to address the issue of the mystical British countryside, but there was still a corner, Merrily noted, for the 17th-century Herefordshire cleric Thomas Traherne, who’d chronicled its God-given glories at length.

This was all about the need for direct experience, a confirmation of Otherness. And, of course, there was an area of operation where Christianity and New Age paganism came close together.

It was spiritual healing.

It was several days now since she’d been to see Alice Meek, suggesting that if there was to be a service of healing it should initially be directed towards the soul of nine-year-old Roland Hook. Telling Alice it all came back to Roland, all the guilt and the grief... and the pain of a young child who had died, very afraid, in the middle of a crime. Maybe the knowledge that Roland’s soul was at peace would bring some kind of harmony to the family.

‘Right, then.’ Alice had stood up, stiff-backed, fiery-faced. ‘You leave it with me, vicar. Half of them won’t understand what it’s about, dull buggers, but I’ll talk to my niece in Solihull, her as did the Alpha course. We’ll make this happen, somehow.’

Not a word since. Sophie, meanwhile, had been compiling a list of ministers in the diocese who had a serious, practical interest in healing, with a view to organizing a preliminary meeting. But it needed someone else to organize it; Merrily wasn’t good at admin.

She sat on Jane’s bed. Turning over the apartment was beginning to look like a waste of time. Had she really expected to find a ouija board laid out next to the collected works of Doris Stokes? She’d looked briefly in the wardrobe, flicked open dressing-table drawers, glanced under the bed. Not even much dust under there – amazing what changes a few weekends of chambermaiding could bring about.

Through the window, she could see wooded Cole Hill, with scattered snow up there, like grated cheese. There hadn’t been a serious fall this year; maybe it wouldn’t come this side of Christmas. After Christmas, Lol would go on tour for the first time since... well, since he was hardly older than Jane. Lol finally getting a life: where would that leave them?

Don’t think about it.

The only book on the bedside table was a scuffed old favourite: The Folk-lore of Herefordshire, by Ella Mary Leather, dead for three-quarters of a century and still unsurpassed for down-home authenticity. There was an orange Post-it sticker in the book, and Merrily let it fall open.

Cwn Annwn, or the Dogs of Hell.

Parry (Hist. Kington 205) gives an account of the superstitious beliefs of many aged persons then (1845) living in the parish.

It was the opinion of many persons then living in the out-townships that spirits in the shape of black dogs are heard in the air, previous to the dissolution of a wicked person; they were described as being jet black, yet no one pretends to have seen them. But many believed that the king of darkness (say the gossips) sent them to terrify mankind when the soul of a human being was about to quit its earthly tenement.

Kington: the final frontier, the least known, most hidden, of Herefordshire’s six towns, in appearance more like the Radnorshire towns of Knighton and Rhayader, but with streets more cramped than either. It was even on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke. It was entirely understandable that Kington folk, even in the nineteenth century, should have felt under the dominion of Welsh mythology. And inevitable that Jane, working weekends in the area, would be interested.

Mrs Leather added:

Hergest Court was, or perhaps still is, haunted by a demon dog, said to have belonged to Black Vaughan and to have accompanied him during his life. It is seen before a death in the Vaughan family. A native of Kington writes: ‘In my young days I knew the people who lived at Hergest Court well, and they used to tell me strange things of the animal. How he inhabited a room at the top of the house, which no one ever ventured to enter; how he was heard there at night, clanking his chain; how at other times he was seen wandering about (minus the chain!) His favourite haunt was a pond, the “watering place” on the high road from Kington. The spot was much dreaded, and if possible avoided, by late travellers. I knew many who said they had seen the black dog of Hergest.’

Right. This was the legend alleged to be the source of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Ben Foley hosted murder weekends at Stanner, appearing as Sherlock Holmes, on the basis – unproven – that Arthur Conan Doyle used to stay there.

This would be Jane helping out with background research.

Of course, despite being a doctor, a man of science, Conan Doyle had been very deeply into spiritualism and psychic matters in general. Merrily recalled reading how he was convinced that the escapologist, Harry Houdini, was using psychic powers to dematerialize, which Houdini denied to the end. Doyle had also championed the Cottingley Fairies photographs – fakes.

Hmm.

Merrily shut the book and arranged it carefully on the bedside table, the way she’d found it. She went back to the bookcase, crouched down and re-inspected the titles, one by one this time. Definitely nothing here suggestive of a new interest in spiritualism.

When you thought about it, the only place Jane could realistically have encountered a medium – the only place, apart from school, she’d been to in weeks, in fact – was Stanner Hall.

Was, or perhaps still is, haunted by a demon dog.

But that was Hergest Court, not Stanner. Stanner wasn’t old enough to be haunted by a demon dog. A ‘demon dog’, anyway, was probably no more than an imprint, or a projection. Nothing demonic about dogs.

Merrily checked out the little room which, due to cash flow, was still only halfway to becoming Jane’s private bathroom. Found herself lifting the lid of the toilet cistern.

Nothing but brownish water. Feeling stupid and treacherous, Merrily replaced the cistern lid. As she left the apartment she looked around the upper landing, full of shadows even in the early afternoon, and a few trailing cobwebs she ought to get around to removing. She cleared her throat.

‘We’re all right, you know. We can manage, Lol and me. And you must have things to get on with, Lucy. A woman like you.’

She went downstairs, shaking her head. Madness. All priests were prey to madness.

And then, on reaching the bottom, she immediately turned and went back up and said a small prayer outside Jane’s door. Paranoia.

That night it all came back, like something she’d eaten, when the kid said, ‘Would it be OK if I spent all next weekend at Stanner? Friday till Sunday?’

Merrily went still, hands in the washing up bowl. She didn’t turn round.

‘Weather doesn’t look too promising, flower.’

‘Well, I can always cadge a lift with Gomer in the truck if it looks bad. The thing is, they really need me – there’s a conference on.’

‘An actual conference.’

‘Don’t be like that. They’re doing their best.’

‘What kind of conference?’

‘Oh... . something called the White Company. It’s the title of an historical novel by Conan Doyle so I expect they’re into, like, the non-Holmes side of it. Which sounds boring, but Ben thinks it’s great. Like, anything at all to do with Conan Doyle, he’s up for it. And the money, naturally.’

‘Interesting man,’ Merrily said, ‘Conan Doyle.’

‘Er... yeah.’

‘Progressive thinker. Although he lost a lot of credibility towards the end of his life through his support of spiritualism.’

‘Well, he would wouldn’t he?’

‘Would he?’

‘It was all bollocks.’

‘Ben Foley’s not interested in that side of him, then?’

‘Ben’s got his credibility to think about.’ Jane stood up. ‘Tell you what... just to make sure it’s OK for the weekend, how about I walk down to Gomer’s and ask him if he’ll be around Kington, with Danny. And the truck.’

‘Why don’t you just give him a ring?’

‘I’ve tried. Always leaves his answering machine on at night. Look, if you light the fire, I’ll be back in no time.’

Through the half-open kitchen door, Merrily watched Jane throwing on her fleece and slipping out the front way.

Oh, there was something.

22 Whoop, Whoop

‘COMES A TIME,’ Gomer said, ‘when you gotter decide whether seven grand’s worth gettin’ your face stove in for. Naw, they en’t been back, them Welshies, ’course they en’t.’

Gomer’s kitchen was still like a monument to Minnie, who had died on him: very clean and bright with shiny pots and cake tins, lurid curtains with big red tulips on them and a tea cosy in the shape of a marmalade cat. Nothing added, nothing taken away; maybe a shrine or maybe Gomer just wasn’t interested in kitchens.

‘I did try to phone you a few times.’ Jane took off her fleece. ‘I rang Danny last night, but I got Greta so I had to pretend it was a wrong number. Anything I can do while I’m here?’

Gomer gave her a sharp look. ‘I en’t an ole pensioner yet, girl.’

‘I know that. It’s just that when you’re a weekend maid it’s the way you think.’ She sat down at the kitchen table. ‘It’s a lot of money, Gomer.’

‘Oh hell, aye. Even for Sebbie Three Farms, now. Lost a fair bit five year or so back. Wife divorced him. Had to do a bit o’ jugglin’ to hold on to all his ground.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Sebbie? Standard ole Border gentry. Certain kind seems to thrive yereabouts – talk posh but rough as a sow’s hide underneath. Can’t say I likes the feller, but can’t say I dislikes him as much as some of ’em. En’t figured it out, mind, why he brung in shooters from Off.’

‘Because he didn’t want local people gossiping.’

‘But if he’s got a beast at his flocks, why en’t he out there ’isself? Been around guns all his life. Why en’t Sebbie out there ’isself takin’ a pop? Tea, Janey?’

‘No, thanks, I can’t stay long.’

‘Well, I’m gonner have one.’

Gomer went to put the kettle on. Jane looked at the crack of night between the drawn curtains. For three nights, she’d lain in bed dwelling, with no pleasurable frissons, upon the beast, the participants in the event in the kitchens at Stanner. And sometimes feeling Lucy Devenish watching her from the corner by the bookcase – this solemn, hawk-nosed figure in a poncho, rebuking her for her lies, deceit and despicable selfishness.

‘Gomer...’ She hesitated. Gomer plugged in the kettle and turned and looked at her. ‘The Hound of Hergest,’ she said.

Gomer came and sat down. His smile was sceptical. ‘I won’t say I en’t never yeard of folk supposed to’ve seen him, Janey. But the ole Hound of Hergest – do he kill ewes, this is the question?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yere’s the situation. Dogs kills sheep. Sheepdogs kills sheep – one o’ your big myths is that stock with their throats ripped out, that’s all down to Mr Fox. Truth is, whole load of lambs gets savaged every year by sheepdogs. Thin line between snappin’ at sheep to round ’em up and picking one off. Point I’m makin’, Janey, if you got a mystery beast preyin’ on ewes, chances are it’s a big sheepdog – mabbe two – that’s got the taste for blood.’

‘So why’s this Sebbie Dacre so scared of going out there himself with a gun?’

‘I say scared?’ Gomer squinted at her.

Also, at night, she’d thought of Nathan. What if he’d died? What if he’d died there in Danny’s van, leaving Ben facing a manslaughter charge, at the very least, and Gomer and Danny and her as accessories?

What if he’d died after they’d got him to the hospital? What if he was dead now?

‘I wouldn’t know why Sebbie’s scared,’ Gomer said. ‘Man like Sebbie, he don’t confide to the likes of we. Don’t confide to nobody, that family. He also don’t scare that easy.’

‘They were related to the Chancerys of Stanner, weren’t they?’

‘Who you year that from, Janey?’

‘Woman who’s booking a conference at Stanner. Mrs Pollen.’

‘From Pembridge?’ Gomer nodded. ‘Me and Nev put her a septic tank in once. Husband used to be County Harchivist for Powys.’

‘So Dacre is related to the Chancerys?’

‘Small world, girl, terrible inbred. Sebbie’s ma was Margery Davies, second daughter of Robert and Hattie Davies – Hattie Chancery as was. After Stanner was sold, Margie ’herited most of the ground on the Welsh side and some money, and her married Richard Dacre, who was the son of a farmer on the English side. So, overnight, like, they become the biggest landowners yereabouts. And they had just the one son and that was Sebbie, and a younger daughter. So when Richard died, Sebbie got the main farms and all the ground and a fair bit of cash. And then he bought up Emrys Morgan’s farm across the valley, when Emrys died, and so that’s why they calls him Sebbie Three Farms. See?’

‘So Dacre is Hattie Chancery’s grandson. And great-grandson of Walter Chance, who built Stanner Hall.’

‘Correct. Hattie, her had two daughters, but Paula, the oldest, got sent away, and Paula was left the Stanner home farm, The Nant, which was leased long-term to Eddie Berrows, Jeremy’s dad, who was Hattie’s farm manager’s son.’

‘So Jeremy’s farm was originally part of the Stanner estate, too.’

‘Not much wasn’t. Now Paula, after what happened with Hattie and Robert, her was brung up by Robert’s sister up in Cheshire. Growed up and married a feller up there and just took the income from the lease. But her died youngish, see, and Richard Dacre, he kept trying to buy The Nant off Paula’s husband, but Paula, her had a soft spot for the Berrows from when her was little, and her husband knew the Berrowses didn’t want the Dacres as their landlords, ’cause the Dacres’d likely have ’em out on their arses first possible opportunity. So he signs another lease with Eddie Berrows – under Richard’s nose, so to speak. And the Dacres was blind bloody furious. So that split the family good and proper. Plus, it explains why Sebbie Dacre got no love for Jeremy.’

‘It’s not short of feuds, is it, this area? You need an up-to-date feud-map just to find your way around.’ Jane was imagining a large-scale plan of the Welsh Border hills, with arteries of hatred linking farms and estates, pockets of old resentment, dotted lines marking tunnels of lingering suspicion.

‘’Course, quite a lot of folk don’t think too highly of Sebbie,’ Gomer said. ‘Do he care? Do he f— No, he don’t, Janey. He don’t care.’

‘So, what happened – I mean I really think I ought to know this, working at Stanner – what exactly happened with Hattie Chancery? Or is that something people don’t talk about?’

‘They don’t talk about it,’ Gomer said, ‘on account there en’t that many folk left round yere remembers it.’

‘What about you?’

‘I was just a boy then. Just a kiddie at the little school.’

‘So you’re saying you don’t remember it either?’

Gomer dug into a pocket of his baggy jeans and slapped his ciggy tin on the kitchen table. ‘’Course I remembers it. All everybody bloody jabbered about for weeks.’

Jane beamed at him. ‘Maybe I will have a cup of tea after all, if that’s all right.’

And she sat quietly and watched Gomer making it. Could tell by the way he was nodding to himself, lips moving, that he was replaying his memories like a videotape, and maybe editing them, too.

While the tea was brewing, Gomer brought down Minnie’s bone-china cups and saucers, and it was touching to watch him laying them out with hands that looked like heavy-duty gardening gloves. Jane waited. If she was going to be of any use to Antony Largo, she needed more background information. This wasn’t simply curiosity, it was need-to-know.

Last night, from the apartment, she’d rung Natalie to ask how things were going, like with Ben. Nat hadn’t been all that forthcoming. ‘He’s all right.’

Jane had pressed on anyway. ‘But is he? That guy thought Ben was going to kill him. He was terrified, he— It’s like... it’s a side of Ben I’ve never seen.’

‘He’s a man,’ Nat had said, offhand. ‘Men can’t be seen to back down. I really don’t think he meant to do that much damage.’

‘Nat, was he—?’

‘It happened very quickly, Jane. I didn’t really see anything.’

‘Well, obviously, that’s what you’d tell the police.’

‘Police?’

‘I mean if the police were involved. If that guy’s injuries—’

‘Jane...’ Nat’s voice had gone low. ‘That really isn’t going to happen. So I think it’s best we all forget about this incident. It was a one-off, and if it gets round... you know what this area’s like. We don’t want Ben to get a reputation. Best if we don’t talk about it any more. All right?’

Nat had sounded nervy. Not herself at all.

And Jane was still hearing, Thick, barbaric yobs. No subtlety... Where I come from, we have real hard bastards.’

Time to investigate Ben’s history. This morning, Jane had got up early, gone down to the scullery, switched on the computer and fed Ben Foley into Google. Hard to remember what life had been like without the Net. Now everybody was a private eye.

The results had been disappointing. All she’d found were references to the various TV series Ben had been involved with, no personal stuff at all. It had been mildly amusing to discover a Web site for The Missing Casebook, his series about what had really happened to Sherlock Holmes post-Reichenbach. It had become a very small cult, the Web site set up by a hard core of fans furious that it hadn’t run to a second series. But the site didn’t seem to have been updated for a while.

Jane also looked up Antony Largo. Most of the references were to his documentary Women of the Midnight. The words most often applied to Antony were committed and tenacious. To understand what drove women to kill without mercy, without pity, inverting their need to nurture, he was said to have spent weeks in Holloway prison and had corresponded with Myra Hindley, the moors murderess. After Women of the Midnight, Antony never seemed to have been out of work, but he didn’t seem to have done anything since that had been quite as massively acclaimed.

It was becoming clear that Ben had known exactly what he was doing – connecting with old triumphs – when he’d introduced Antony to Hattie Chancery.

‘Hattie Chancery,’ Gomer said, lighting up. ‘Her was as big as a cow. Her could skin a rabbit with her teeth. Her could ride all day and drink strong men under the table.’

‘Really?’

‘Prob’ly not, but it’s what we was told as kids. “Eat up your sprouts, boy, else Hattie Chancery’ll come for you in the night and put you under her arm and take you away.” You woke up in the night, bit of a creak, it’d be Hattie Chancery on the stairs.’

‘This was while she was still alive?’

‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer nodded. ‘Master of the Middle Marches, see, for years. The hunt, Janey. Used to year ’em galloping up Woolmer’s pitch of a Saturday, hounds yowlin’ away, but the loudest of all’d be Hattie Chancery. Like a whoop, whoop in the air, urgin’ on the fellers. Hattie Chancery: whoop, whoop.’

Gomer leaned back in his chair, into the smoke from his ciggy and the clouds of his childhood.

‘Was that unusual,’ Jane asked him, ‘having a female hunt master in those days?’

‘Was round yere. But Hattie, her was a dynamite horse-woman, and had this authority about her. Big woman, see. Weighed a fair bit, in later years. Drank beer. Pints. Big thirst on her.’

Jane knew girls at school who drank pints, but that was more about sexual politics than big thirst.

‘You still gets huntswomen like that now, mind,’ Gomer said. ‘Loud. I remember folks used to jump in the ditch if they yeard Hattie’s car comin’ round the bend from the pub at Gladestry. That was a fact – into the bloody ditch, no messin’, and they’d year her laughing like a maniac as her come beltin’ past, well tanked-up, all the windows down. No big drink-driving thing in them days, see. Least, not for the likes of Hattie Chancery.’

Jane was surprised that Gomer could remember so far back, but she supposed you did when you got older; it was just the more recent events that became a haze.

‘What about the husband?’

‘Robert? Kept well out of it, Janey. Never hunted. Couldn’t ride, for one thing – they reckoned he had an injury from the Great War, but I also yeard it said he had a bit of a distaste for all that. For blood. Bad time, they reckoned, in France, and he come back a changed man: quiet, thoughtful, never talked about what he’d seen. Son of a doctor in Kington, Robert was. Good-lookin’ feller, caught Hattie’s eye, and that was that. Her was young, eighteen or so, when her married Robert. Hattie’s ole man had died by then, and so Robert come to Stanner. Hattie wouldn’t never leave Stanner. Brought Robert back like a bride. That’s what they used to say. Like a bride.’

Jane sipped her tea, forming this picture of Robert as some kind of poetic Wilfred Owen type, sickened by the horrors of the trenches. Maybe even a Lol type.

‘Serious mismatch,’ Gomer said. ‘Went wrong early, got worse.’

‘You ever see him?’

‘Mostly, he stayed round the house and the grounds, but I seen him once or twice. Every now and seldom he’d go for a walk on his own, along Hergest Ridge, with a knapsack. And I was with my ole man this day – I’d be about seven – and we seen Mr Robert, and he give me an apple. And I remember my ole man watching him walk off, head down into the wind, and the ole man sayin’, “Poor bugger.” Always remember that. Poor bugger.’

‘So how long was that before...’

‘Oh, mabbe a year or two. ’Course, there was a lot o’ gossip ’fore that, about Hattie and her men.’

‘She had other men?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Any number, you believed the stories. Any number. Good-lookin’ woman, see. Golden-haired and statuesque, like. There was tales...’ Gomer looked into his cup, cleared his throat. ‘Like, you’ll’ve yeard how a new huntsman gets blooded, from his first kill. They reckoned the Middle Marches had its own... test. For a new boy. See if he was up to it, like.’

‘What – up to Hattie?’

‘Her was said to be... I suppose today you’d have a name for it.’

‘Generous?’

‘Nympho,’ Gomer said. ‘Appetites like a feller, my mam used to say – not to me, like, but I overyeard her and Mrs Probert from the Cwm once. Well, naturally, after her done what her done, they all had their theories. More like a feller. Used to get in fights in the pub. Smash an ole pint glass, shove it at you.’

‘She glassed people?’

‘All kinds of stories went round after her killed Robert. Stories I wouldn’t rush to repeat.’ Gomer sniffed, stirring his tea, ciggy in his lips. ‘Not to a young woman.’

‘Oh, Gomer.’

‘Janey, it was gossip. We was kids. Young boys. ’Sides, it was five or six years after her was dead I yeard this. Durin’ the War. Young lads talkin’, the way young lads talks at that age.’

Jane had an image of Gomer in adolescence: thin as a straw, hair like a yardbrush.

‘Gomer, I’m like... seventeen, now? You know?’

Gomer stirred the dregs of the tea in the pot and filled his cup with it – tea like sump oil. ‘It was Stanner Rocks,’ he said. ‘Used to take ’em up Stanner.’

‘Men?’

‘Funny place, see. Scientists now, they reckons it’s down to what they calls a Standing Wave. Meteological stuff. Gives it a rare climate up there, like in Italy and them places. Nowhere like it, ’specially not on the edge of Wales.’

‘Mediterranean.’ Jane nodded. Ben had gone on about it, bemoaning the fact that the rocks, with their odd climatic conditions and their rare plants, didn’t belong to the hotel. A national nature reserve now, so you had to have special permission to go up there, which meant Ben couldn’t even build it up as a tourist attraction.

‘They din’t know the scientific stuff then,’ Gomer said, ‘but everybody said it was a funny place, what with the Devil’s Garden where nothing grew – just thin soil, more like, but they always called it the Devil’s Garden. Soil’s that thin on them ole rocks that in a good summer you’ll have a drought up there as kills off half the trees and the bushes. See, what—’

‘And she used to take men up there?’

Gomer sucked the ciggy to the end, carefully extracted the remains. ‘Boys’ talk. No matter what the weather was like, see, you’d always find a warm spot on top o’ Stanner.’

‘Like for sex?’

‘Bloody hell, Janey! Can’t get to it fast enough, can you?’

‘Sorry.’

Gomer drank his tea. ‘Her’d make ’em go right to the edge. Right to the edge of the rocks. The cliff edge. Hundred-foot drop or more, onto stones. And her’d have ’em right on the edge, more ways than one. Whoop whoop.’

‘Oh.’

‘Boys’ talk, Janey. Stories, that’s all.’

‘So like, did you know anybody who... ?’

Gomer stared into his teacup; it was empty.

‘Gomer!’

‘Pal o’ mine – his older brother. He was one.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Men wasn’t experienced back then, Janey, not quite the same way they are now. Her gets him... overwrought.’ Gomer’s face went dark red. ‘And then, when he can’t think proper, her’s got him hanging half over the edge. Thought he was gonner go over the top and he... he din’t care, see. Din’t care if he went over or not.’

‘Bloody hell, Gomer.’

‘Boys’ talk,’ Gomer said. ‘They used to say her liked ’em to be real scared. This was the thing for Hattie. Take the boys to the edge, show ’em who was boss.’

‘Domination? Like, she got off on it?’

‘Mabbe.’

‘So it wasn’t just boys’ talk at all, was it?’ Jane said softly.

Gomer coughed. ‘Mabbe not all of it.’ He started rolling another ciggy, then stopped and shut the tin and looked past Jane into a corner of the kitchen as if he thought Minnie might be there, watching him with disapproval. ‘Afterwards, her’d make ’em bring a rock back for her. A stone. Mabbe the size of half a brick.’

‘What for?’

‘Kept the stones on the mantelpiece. In a line.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Trophies,’ Gomer said. ‘Every time her had a different feller up the top he’d have to fetch a new rock back. All laid out on the mantelpiece in the big drawing room, all in a line, where poor Robert could see ’em – watch the line of stones gettin’ longer. He wasn’t a well man by then. Chest. Spent a lot o’ time in the lounge in front of the fire. Under this line of stones, gettin’ longer.’

‘What a total bitch.’

‘We had all the gossip from the servants, see – local people. Her used to scream at him that he was weak – a malingerer. He was ill, was what it was, but Hattie din’t wanner know ’bout that. Not her idea of what a countryman should be – a countryman was healthy. When her was out huntin’, he’d go to bed, try to build up his strength, mabbe fall asleep and then her’d come back and find him... rip all the bedclothes off him, leave him shiverin’. Always made her angry, the drink. Some folks gets merry, some— What’s wrong, Janey?’

‘She pulled the bedclothes off him?’

Jane moistened her lips. In her head, a memory of being in the doorway of her first bedroom at Stanner, looking in at all the duvet pulled off, its cover gathered in a heap like a flaccid parachute.

‘If he was still up,’ Gomer said, ‘there’d likely be a fight – a real fight: bruises, split lips. His lips. That was talked about, oh hell, aye. Can’t cover up a split lip, can you? Can’t pass it off as how you fell over the grate.’

‘How could he stand it?’

‘Her house, her money. Where’s he gonner go? Pitiful, Janey.’

‘Yes.’

‘And that was how it come to the end. Night of the day of the hunt. Hattie real fired up, as usual. Her’d ride like the devil, and if they ever come back without a kill... not a happy woman.’

‘You make her sound like...’

‘Ar?’

‘Doesn’t matter, go on.’

‘This night – round about now on the calendar, night of the Middle Marches Hunt Ball... See, Robert, he wouldn’t go to the Hunt Ball, couldn’t get on with these country sports types. Hattie goes alone. Comes back alone around two or three in the mornin’, but whether her was alone between leavin’ the ball and gettin’ back to Stanner, that’s anybody’s guess.’

‘Slag.’

‘Ar. So he’s still up when her gets in, mabbe asleep in the chair. Then, all this noise, shoutin’ and screamin’. Servants yeard it, but they was used to it, see. It was only when it carried on out in the garden – and then it all goes quiet – that a couple of ’em comes out, the servants. Found Robert out in the garden, down near this ole seat where he used to sit and stare out at the hills. They reckoned he’d tried to crawl up onto the seat, but he’d just fallen back, down on the grass. And Hattie – her was just standin’ there, a few yards away, like a marble statue, arms down by her sides. A rock in each hand. From the mantelpiece.’

‘Jesus.’ Jane wondered how much of this Ben had told Amber. How much Ben himself knew. If he knew anything when he was planning his cute little murder-mystery weekend.

‘Then Hattie, her drops the rocks and walks calmly past ’em, up the path and into the house. Servants carries Robert in, lays him out on the long sofa. One of ’em rings for the doctor, though they knows it’s too late. Hattie’s movin’ around upstairs, but nobody’s brave enough to go up there. And then one of ’em notices the desk drawer’s hangin’ open. This is where Robert kept his service revolver, locked away.’

‘Oh hell, Gomer.’

‘No sooner they seen the drawer’s open than it’s too late. Echoes through the whole house like...’

Oh. Oh G—

‘... thunder. Took a while ’fore one of ’em was up to goin’ up them stairs. Ole Leonard, the butler, it was. Had a bit of a job getting the bedroom door open on account of Hattie was on the floor behind it. Big woman, see, like I say.’

Jane heard her own voice saying, ‘Was she dead?’ Like from a distance, like it was someone else speaking, because she didn’t think she could move her lips.

‘Her’d put the end of the ole revolver in her mouth, Janey.’

She wanted to scream aloud. She wanted to leap up and go screaming down the lane. Anything to take her out of her own head, where an explosion had happened in the early hours.

‘Not the nicest way to go,’ Gomer said. ‘But I s’pose it’s what you’d expect, kind of woman her was. No nonsense. You chews on the barrel, en’t nothing gonner go wrong. Hexpedient. How much them kids saw, nobody knows – mabbe it’s what messed Paula up in the head.’

‘She doesn—’ Jane’s lips were rubbery. ‘Doesn’t seem like a woman who would kill herself.’

‘What’s the alternative, Janey? Even if her didn’t get hanged, her’d’ve gone to jail for life. Go to jail? Leave Stanner? Lose it all for a few moments of black madness? Naw, her took the man’s way out – that’s what they used to say. And took Stanner Hall with her. You inherited Stanner, would you wanner live there after that? Not like it was ancestral – two generations? Never was a house again. Commercial premises from then on. Grounds all overgrown. Us kids tellin’ stories of Hattie’s big ghost, gliding through the tangled ole gardens with a rock in each hand.’

Gomer gathered the teacups and the pot on a tray and took them to the sink.

‘Goin’ Whoop, whoop,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Whoop, whoop.’

23 Showdown Time

DANNY HAD AWOKEN in the dark with this sense of something closing around him like a fist. Like during the Foot and Mouth – filthy smoke from distant pyres of flesh and hide, mostly unnecessary, an uninvestigated crime perpetrated by the wankers of Westminster, and all you could do was turn away and weep.

In the end he’d got up, leaving Greta rumbling warmly, happy as an old Rayburn. Half-past three in the morning, and he’d gone downstairs and shoved a block into the stove, putting on his cans and letting in the soaring fury of The Queens of the Stone Age. There were times when only heavy music could blank out the foundry of your thoughts.

Even though he’d resisted rolling a joint, he awoke before seven with a mouth like the deck of a New Age traveller’s bus, and Greta bending over him, lifting off the cans, closing his hands around a mug of tea.

‘You en’t got to, Danny.’

Danny sat up, spilling the tea.

‘Like you said, it en’t really your business,’ Greta said.

‘But... ?’

‘But nothing.’

‘But you think I should tell him. Don’t you?’

‘You can tell me. If you want to.’ Greta sat down next to him, in her old pink towelling robe. Danny remembered a seventeen-year-old rock chick in a kimono, and how he used to picture her with him in a beach house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, knowing – totally bloody knowing – that one day that was where they’d be, him and Gret. And here they still were, after thirty years, and it was too cold for kimonos and always would be now.

‘Tell you what?’

‘The rest of it,’ Greta said. ‘There’s more to it, en’t there?’ Mabbe years since her’d spoken to him like this – this quiet.

‘Dunno what you mean.’

‘Look at me,’ Greta said.

He did. Always looked good with her hair down, but it was only ever down in the mornings. Danny felt a sense of loss and sadness.

‘He’s different is what it is, Gret. You know that. Different from the rest of ’em, different even from me. But at least I can see it.’

‘Different how?’ Greta said, holding his gaze with her big brown eyes. You, my brown-eyed girl. The young Van Morrison. How long ago? God.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry what I said about you gossipin’. I was distraught.’

‘You don’t tell me things n’more, Danny. Think I’m gonner spread everything round Kington market. It’s like Gomer’s your wife now.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ And yet he knew this was partly right. There was things that Gomer understood, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him with his ciggy jammed in and his glasses alight. You’d think Gomer was a bit touched. But mabbe that was it – you needed to be a bit touched to understand some things. Greta and him, folks used to say they was both touched, back in the wild ole days.

‘You were right about one thing,’ Greta said. ‘Mary Morson was never the one for Jeremy. No sensitiveness there at all.’

‘No.’

‘Jeremy’s mother used to say he had the Sight.’

‘Even his mother did? You never told me that before.’

‘Din’t wanner set you off. Visions and stuff.’

‘That was acid. I wouldn’t do that now.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

Danny smiled. Greta continued to sit there. Bugger, Danny thought, it’s too early for this.

‘Never loses a lamb, do he?’ Greta said. ‘Never loses a lamb to the fox. It’s like he’s come to an agreement with the foxes. His mother used to say that, too. When he was real little, he’d creep out at night and they’d find him sitting with the sheep. Catch his death, his mother used to say.’

Funny phrase that, Danny thought. Catch his death. Funny how a familiar saying could sound new and full of meaning, if it caught you in the right mood. Aye, if death was coming, Jeremy would see it, mabbe have a chance to catch it in both hands, his eyes wide open.

‘He’s part of that farm,’ Danny told Greta. ‘The land, the stock, Jeremy. A whole organism, see, and he’s the part as thinks. And he keeps it all balanced, and in that way I always feel the boy’s good for this whole area. Balance – don’t ask me to explain it. It’s the way he works, goes quietly on... if they’d leave him alone.’

‘People?’

‘He just en’t good with people. They don’t get to know him easy, and he don’t know them. Hard to go quietly, nowadays.’

‘Mary Morson made all the running,’ Greta said.

‘Her’d have to.’

‘He was a catch. A good, sound farm.’

‘Mary Morson’s a cold-hearted little bloody gold-digger.’

‘And this Natalie?’ Greta said. ‘Where’s the difference there? Got it made now. Single parent in need of a home. Where’s the difference?’

Danny drained his mug. ‘There is a difference. All I can tell you is, the first time they met, it was in the air. Like some’ing he’d been waiting for all his life. I can’t explain it. It didn’t seem right, but then it did – later. I don’t know why.’

‘She’s beautiful, Danny, how else would he be?’

Danny bowed his head. ‘This is gonner kill him, Gret.’

‘It’ll kill him if he gets it from somebody else.’

‘Mary.’ Danny sighed. ‘Aye, Mary’ll spread it.’

‘Only thinks of herself.’

‘Shit.’ He stared at the light on the stereo, a little red planet. ‘See, the rest of it... I can’t figure it out, but some’ing’s gone unstable. Sebbie Dacre feels it, I’m sure of that. Sebbie feels threatened – big farmer, big magistrate, Master of the fucking Hunt, and he feels threatened. By Jeremy? How’s that possible? Lived side by side with Sebbie all his life, no trouble – no pally-pally either, but that’s a class thing. Yet here’s Sebbie sending his Welshie shooters to terrorize the boy. Why?’

Greta put a hand on Danny’s thigh. ‘You got a job today, with Gomer?’

‘Nope.’

‘Then you better go talk to him, en’t you? You go this morning. Get it over.’

‘Aye.’ Danny put his mug on the floor and then he put his arms around her, his eyes full of tears that he couldn’t have fully explained.

Around mid-morning, it finally started to snow. Real snow, the kind you knew wouldn’t stop. Flakes the size of two-pound coins, and it was already an inch deep on the vicarage drive when Merrily opened the front door to Gomer Parry.

‘Vicar.’ The end of Gomer’s ciggy was the only warmth out there. He had his old cap on and his muffler. When you looked up, the snow was almost black against the sky.

‘You must’ve heard the kettle.’

‘Ah,’ Gomer said, ‘that’s what it was.’

He sat down at the kitchen table, with his cap, his muffler and his ciggy tin in a little mound by his elbow, and she made him tea and put out chocolate digestives for him to dunk. When the phone rang, she let the machine take it.

‘You talked to Jane last night?’ She switched on the lamp on the dresser.

‘Difficult,’ Gomer said.

‘Goes without saying.’

‘Don’t wanner break no confidence.’

‘You’re not the first to say that, in relation to Jane.’ Merrily came and sat down opposite him. ‘Vicars aren’t good for much these days, but we’re good at keeping confidences. Take it all with us to the grave.’

‘I know that, vicar. ’Sides, this prob’ly en’t confidential.’ He glanced around. ‘Her’s at school?’

Merrily nodded. ‘Last day of term tomorrow. If it carries on snowing like this, she may not even make it tomorrow.’

‘So this...’

‘This could be our last chance to talk about her behind her back, yes.’

‘See this—’ Gomer broke a chocolate digestive in half. ‘Her’s likely told you about it already, but if her en’t...’ He stared up at the snowy window.

Merrily said, ‘It isn’t about spiritualism, is it?’

‘Eh?’

‘Contacting the dead?’

Gomer blinked. ‘No, it’s about this Ben Foley beating seven bells out of this feller the other night.’

‘What?’

Gomer nodded slowly. ‘Her never tole you ’bout that, then.’

Danny turned the Land Rover around and parked him up against some holly trees on the edge of the farmyard at The Nant. By the time he’d unbuckled and climbed down, the windscreen was already thick with snow. It had to come, and he was glad; it was like some of the tension had been released from the drum-skin sky. Just from the sky, though, not from Danny Thomas.

Jeremy was already at the gate, like he’d been watching out for something. He had on one of those tea-cosy woollen hats – Badly Drawn Boy job.

‘Just passin’,’ Danny said. ‘Reckoned you might need a bit o’ help gettin’ the ewes down from the hill.’ He looked up at the teeming sky. ‘Way all this come on – sudden, like.’

‘Had ’em down last night.’ The snow was all over Jeremy, confusing the pattern on his blue and black workshirt.

Well, he would know this was on its way, wouldn’t he? His friends the clouds, and all that.

‘Jeremy, we...’ Danny stood and faced him over the gate, pulling his denim jacket together over the baggy old Soft Machine sweatshirt he was wearing over his King Crimson T-shirt: the layered look. ‘I reckon we gotter talk, boy.’

Jeremy said, ‘We don’t ’ave to.’ He started waggling his hands, embarrassed. ‘What I mean... the way he’s comin’ down you could easy get blocked in back at your place.’

Danny rested his arms in the soft snow on top of the wooden gate. ‘Do I give a shit, boy? This partic’lar moment, mabbe not.’ He pointed at the farmhouse door. ‘Inside, eh?’ What was strange was that nothing had changed from when Jeremy’s mam was in charge: the same dresser with some of the pots the old girl hadn’t been able to take with her to the sheltered bungalow in Kington, the same flowery wallpaper between the beams, the same dark green picture of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Blocks of wood were turning into glowing orange husks on the open fire in the cast-iron range. The kettle hissed on the hob. Flag the sheepdog lay on the same old brown and green rag rug that had been here likely thirty-five years. Damn near as old as Jeremy, that rug.

All of which was odd, when you knew there’d been a new woman here for nigh on six months now, a smart woman who’d be expected to make big changes.

Danny sank into the old rocking chair and told Jeremy about the Welshie, Nathan, what Ben Foley had done to him and what he’d told them on his way to hospital. Just in case Miz Natalie Craven hadn’t given him the full story.

‘No problem at the hospital, in the end,’ Danny said. ‘Gomer knowed the nurse from when his missus died. ’Sides, even if they’d wanted to keep the boy in, they’d’ve had nowhere to put the poor bugger. Seen bigger bloody sheep sheds than that new hospital.’

Jeremy stood his wellies on the stone hearth at the foot of the range. Jesus Christ looked miserably down from over the fireplace, waiting to get betrayed by a bloke he reckoned was his mate. Danny looked up at Jesus, who seemed to be saying, Make this easy, can’t you?

‘See, these fellers from Off, you never knows what baggage they brung with ’em,’ Danny said. ‘That feller Foley – big chip on his shoulder, Greta reckons. Had his nose pushed out down the BBC in London. Lot of anger built up inside him. Coulder killed that boy, see. Goes at him like a bloody maniac. And he was a boy. No more’n twenty-four or -five. Thought he was hard, thought Foley was soft. Bad mistake.’

Danny leaned back and rocked the chair, which creaked. Reason he was going into this episode, apart from buying time to think, was to find out exactly how much Natalie Craven was telling Jeremy about day-to-day – and night-to-night – life up at Stanner. And if this Foley had some unknown degree of violence in his London past, who knew what other secrets might be there?

Specifically: what were Foley’s relations with Natalie? If something was on the go, it wouldn’t be easy for Foley and Nat to get it together in the hotel – not with Mrs Foley around and young Jane at weekends. But a nice camper van within easy jogging distance... and Foley did jog, apparently. Well, the question needed asking, that was for sure. Not that Danny would make the suggestion to Jeremy, bloody hell, no. Not directly, anyway.

‘So what do, er, Nat’lie think about him?’

‘Nat?’ Jeremy scratched his head through his hat. ‘Well, her thinks... thinks mabbe he was provoked. Not the first time the shooters been on his land. Had guests in at the time. See, he’s worried they en’t gonner make a go of it – that’s the top and bottom of it. Desperate situation.’

‘Least you won’t see those boys again.’

‘Hard to say, ennit?’ Jeremy had sat himself on a wooden stool, away from the fire, like he was determined not to get comfortable, lulled into saying too much. There was a sprig of holly on the mantelpiece but no mistletoe anywhere: old Border lore reckoned it was unlucky to bring in mistletoe before New Year.

‘So we had a chat with this Nathan before we took him to the hospital,’ Danny said. ‘Not a chance to be missed. And he was quite forthcoming, that boy, ’bout how Sebbie Dacre was gonner bung ’em seven grand when they proved they shot the beast.’

Jeremy didn’t react to this.

‘So mabbe that was why they was gonner shoot Flag yere. Paint him black all over, with luminous bits and—’

‘I know what you’re sayin’—’

‘The Hound of Hergest, Jeremy. Sebbie hired the Welshies to shoot some’ing bearing a close resemblance to the famous Hound of Hergest.’

Jeremy looked down at his light blue socks.

‘It make any sense to you, boy?’ Danny said.

Jeremy didn’t look up. ‘Can’t shoot what en’t there, can you?’

Danny pondered this, noting how clean the room was, everything polished that needed polishing. Outside the window, the snow fell real quiet and in some quantity. The only sound was the dog’s breathing.

‘By en’t there,’ Danny said carefully, ‘do you mean en’t there as in, like, imaginary? Or en’t there as in... en’t there? If you sees what I mean.’

They were getting close to matters that Jeremy didn’t talk about, not so much because he was suspicious or embarrassed but because they were hard to put into words. He pulled off his Badly Drawn Boy hat and pushed his fingers through his hair.

‘Sebbie Dacre, he won’t have it talked about.’

‘Well, that’s pretty obvious, Jeremy, else he’d’ve been down the gun club and wouldn’t need to offer them Welsh boys a penny.’

Jeremy said, ‘Foley, he was supposed to be goin’ round askin’ people if they’d ever seen it. And Dacre said if any of his employees – or anybody workin’ for the hunt or their relations – which I reckon covers most folks in this area – if they said anythin’ to Foley they’d have the sack.’

‘Tole you that?’

‘Ken, the postman. We was at school together.’

‘So who are they, these folks reckons they seen it?’

‘Just folks. Over the years.’

‘Like?’

Jeremy looked at Danny, then looked away into the red fire. ‘Me.’

‘I see.’ Danny felt his beard bristle. ‘When was this, Jeremy?’

‘It en’t what you think.’ Jeremy’s face creased up, mabbe more with sorrow at Danny’s unease. ‘En’t like in the films, all red-eyed. En’t n’more’n a shadow most times. Might be there, just before dark, see, bounding down off the Ridge, corner of your eye. Might be close up, but real faint, a cold patch against your leg. But you knows.’

The fire was pumping out heat, but there was places it couldn’t reach.

‘It is a dog?’

‘Kind of thing.’

‘Sebbie reckoned he’d had ewes savaged. What en’t there can’t savage ewes.’

Jeremy said, ‘The beast they was huntin’ round Llangadog year or so back? All over the papers – police marksmen, helicopters, the lot? It killed a dog, a whippet. Tore his throat out. Folks swore they seen a big cat, but when the police done DNA tests on the dog it killed they figured it was another dog did it. Yet you still had folks swore blind they’d seen this big beast, puma, whatever. Nobody ever found a puma, though, dead or alive. Or a big dog.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Things... happens. Things as en’t meant to be explained. Why try?’

Danny found Jeremy meeting his stare now. Anybody else, he’d suspect a wind-up, but all he could see in Jeremy’s eyes was sadness and acceptance.

‘All right...’ He held on to the chair so it wouldn’t rock, wouldn’t creak. ‘What about Sebbie Three Farms?’

‘He believes,’ Jeremy said. ‘He just don’t want nobody thinkin’ he believes. So he makes a big noise. Bigger the noise, scareder he is, I reckon.’

‘Why’s he scared?’

‘’Cause most folk seen it, it don’t matter... not to them.’

‘You mean Sebbie...’ Danny held on to the chair arms, trying to anchor himself down. You hung out with Jeremy you lost hold of reality, felt yourself slipping into Jeremy’s fuzzy world. It was like dropping acid again and, same as he’d told Greta this morning, Danny didn’t see himself going there no more.

‘Personal,’ Jeremy said.

Danny sagged back in the chair. This was getting well out of his ballpark. Wouldn’t be a bad idea, mabbe, to get Gomer to go and have a quiet chat with his lady vicar over in Ledwardine, whose specialist subject appeared to be fellers like Jeremy Berrows.

We keep our secrets to a minimum now, she’d said to Lol. Grown-ups. Mates.

So this was the kid’s idea of a minimum.

Gomer, like Lol, had clearly done a lot of agonizing before shopping Jane. See, when you first told me her was working at Stanner, I din’t make much of it, ’cause things change, places change...

It seemed that, on the way back from taking a smashed-up man to Hereford hospital, Jane had suggested to Gomer that it would be best not to talk about the incident, not even to Mum, because Ben was in a difficult enough position and if this got out...

Merrily stood by the window, watching the apple trees becoming stooped and shaggy with snow. The probable truth was that the kid had concealed the incident not out of loyalty to her employer but because of what else she might have to disclose – like, for instance, an alleged predatory beast carrying a £7,000 bounty.

Which made no sense. Not yet, anyway.

The clock above the old Aga said two-thirty. Couple of hours before Jane was due home, and in this weather it would probably be longer. Merrily could hear traffic grinding up the hill to the village square, the futile sound of tyres spinning. If Herefordshire Council’s foul-weather rapid-response was as rapid as usual, they wouldn’t see a snow plough or a gritter until around lunchtime tomorrow.

In the interim, showdown time.

So there’d been a domestic murder in the garden at Stanner Hall in the year before World War Two.

Well, that was a long time ago, but seeing what Ben Foley – a man with no known history of violence – had done to the intruder, Nathan, in that same garden had brought the superstitious side of Gomer Parry squirming uncomfortably into the light. Superstition was never far below the surface along this Border: the most rural county in England lying back to back with the most rural county in Wales.

Just if I had a daughter, Vicar, and her was working at Stanner, these is things I’d wanner know. Gomer had still seemed embarrassed. He’d refused a second cup of tea and gone shuffling back into the snow, pulling on his old tweed cap and leaving her to examine all the features of country-hotel life that Jane had been concealing.

That bloody kid. Did nothing ever change?

Merrily leaned against the Aga rail, pondering the options. If she couldn’t reveal either Gomer or Lol as informants, there was at least one person she could shop with impunity.

She would admit to Jane that she’d raided the apartment. She would produce the copy of Folk-lore of Herefordshire, with the relevant pages marked. It wasn’t much, but it was a way in. And in the course of the subsequent bitter quarrel the whole truth would, with any luck, come pooling out all over the unforgiving flagstones.

What was good about this weather was that, the way things were looking, Jane would not be returning to Stanner this weekend. Big fires, CDs of Nick Drake, Beth Orton... Lol Robinson, even. Mother–daughter quality time.

All the same, Merrily watched the ceaseless snow with trepidation. They made jokes about the council and the grit lorries, but they were jokes best made over a mug of hot chocolate in front of a blazing fire. This was a part of the county that had often been cut off, lost its electricity and its phone lines, reverting for whole days to a semi-medieval way of life.

When the phone rang, she grabbed the cordless from the wall.

‘Mum.’

‘They let you out?’

‘Erm... they sent for the school buses early.’

‘Because of the snow.’

‘Otherwise about five hundred of us would have been spending all night fighting over the sofa bed in the medical suite.’

‘Understandable. So you’ll be home early, then.’

‘And we don’t have to come back tomorrow, if it’s bad.’

‘And then it’s the holidays.’

‘Right.’

‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of the education department. I’ll go and light the fire.’

‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘Do that. It’s just...’

‘Something wrong?’

‘Not exactly wrong. It’s... like, the snow’s coming down so hard, they reckon all the minor roads in the north of the county could be... difficult, by tonight. So that would mean I probably wouldn’t be able to get to Stanner at all tomorrow, maybe not even with Gomer.’

‘Can’t be helped, flower.’

‘No.’

‘Act of God. Never mind, I expect the conference will have to be called off as well.’

‘So, like, I thought the best thing to do would be to get on Clancy’s bus.’

‘What?’

‘So, like, that’s what I did. Kind of a spur of the moment... thing.’

Merrily said tightly, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at Stanner,’ Jane said. ‘And it really was for the best. The snow’s much worse here.’

24 Necessary Penance

LOOKING OUT FROM her room over, like, Siberia, Jane phoned Eirion on his mobile and was invited to leave voice-mail. ‘We need to talk,’ Jane said menacingly.

She sat down on the bed, cold. Even turned up full, the radiator was like a cheap hot-water bottle the morning after. Stanner needed more money spending on it than Ben and Amber were ever likely to make, this was clear.

It was also clear, when she’d walked in with Clancy an hour or so ago, shaking the snow off her parka, that Ben and Amber had had words. Amber was tense, Ben fizzing with anger. Ben always turned anxiety into anger – according to which equation, desperation became rage. Nathan the shooter had found that out.

Amber had frowned. ‘Jane, this is crazy. You should not have come.’

‘You need me,’ Jane had said.

But it had been Ben who’d needed her first, waiting until Amber had gone down to the kitchen before producing a folded sheet of A4 that had obviously been dried out. ‘You undoubtedly know more about the Internet than me. How do I find out where this stuff originates?’

Jane spread the paper out on the bed. Yuk. ‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ she’d told Ben, ‘but my boyfriend might be able to find out.’

Ben had found it drawing-pinned to the hotel sign at the bottom of the drive. It didn’t have to be at all relevant to Ben or Stanner; the area had its share of weirdos. But the Stanner board wasn’t exactly a convenient place to pin anything, and if it was a joke it could have been funnier.

i was just a kid about 15 when the case was on. i remember seeing the picture of her in the Mirror in her school uniform and it knocked me out. i had it up in my bedroom but my mother made me take it down so I stuck it up inside my locker dore at school. i have offen wondered what happened to her and what i would do if i met her. does anybody know where she is now. I have never been able to forget her.

>>CHRIS.

‘Might be rubbish, but with a conference on this weekend, if someone’s trying to tell us something, I’d quite like to know what,’ Ben had said when Jane had identified it as a printout from some kind of sad, obsessive Internet chat room or message board.

I gather Brigid is very popular in Germany. I also read in a Dutch magazine that she was living in the South of France. She is grown up now and is said to be absolutely gorgeous. *Drop dead gorgeous* ha ha. When she came out she spent some time in Italy, where she is supposed to have done two men but the police did not know who she was until she had left the country, and there was no evidence. So it looks like she’s still doing it. They can’t stop. It’s a physical need.

>>HOWARD

I think that is all rubbish about Brigid going abroad put around to stop us looking for her. i have it on good authority that she’s here but may have had plastic surgery. I think I would know her whatever she’d had done to her. I have been dreaming about her for about 20 years. she still makes me swet.

>>GAVIN.

At the bottom, it said:

full explicit details: sign in and see what Brigid REALLY did

Sick, or what?

If anybody could track it down, Eirion could. If he hadn’t left for the piste.

Jane went to the window. You could see the forestry across the valley, and Hergest Ridge, mauve against the sky. Yes, you could even see a sky, of sorts. Did this offer some hope that the snow was actually thinning?

Mum, on the phone, had said things like I see, calmly conveying an acute sense of betrayal. This morning, over the breakfast, Jane had kept glancing at her, thinking, I ought to tell you everything. I ought to do it now. After what Gomer had revealed, it hadn’t been her easiest night’s sleep. But if she’d laid the Hattie thing on her, Mum would have seen to it that she didn’t get here tonight. She might even, on hearing about the explosion in the head, have kept her off school. Which wouldn’t have helped.

Because what could Mum have done about this, anyway? Exorcists worked by invitation only.

Clancy had gone to watch TV in Ben and Amber’s private sitting room, some bland early-evening soap. On the bus, Jane had said, on the subject of the White Company, ‘Doesn’t it interest you at all?’ And Clancy had been like, ‘What’s the point of wasting your life imagining you go to some spooky place when you die?’

Huh? They really didn’t have much to say to one another, her and Clancy, did they? Jane sat on the bed and scowled and then dialled the mobile number that Antony had given her.

‘Antony, it’s Jane. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t know what it’s like with you, but it’s fairly bad here... well, not that bad. I mean, I managed to get in tonight on the bus, and Ben reckons enough of the key people from the White Company are around for it to go ahead. Alistair Hardy’s staying with Beth Pollen, and she’s going to meet some more of them at Hereford Station in a four-wheel drive tomorrow. So like... are you going to make it all right? And if not, what do you want me to do? If you could like let me know. I’ve got some really nice shots of Stanner in the snowstorm. So, like... bye.’

She sat on the bed, huddled inside her fleece. The snow wasn’t thinning at all, was it? Most of the time you just lied to yourself because if you then repeated the lie to someone else it wouldn’t seem like a lie.

Why had she gone out of her way, in the face of the weather and her mother’s dismay, to come back?

Because she was a working woman and, with a conference on, Amber needed all the help she could get. Because she was retained by Antony Largo, on the promise of considerably more money, as a cameraperson. Because if it turned out that the White Company made some historic contact tonight and she’d missed it...

Yeah, mainly that.

Why had she not wanted to come? Why had she actively dreaded being here? Because, on the other side of this unlikely but nonetheless compelling psychic odyssey there was the bloated ghost of Hattie Chancery, her repellent life, her sordid and hideous death.

She gave Eirion another five minutes to call back, then stood up and snapped on the light. No good putting this off any longer. She took off her fleece, pulled her overnight bag from under the bed, found her warmest sweater and put that on, dragging the fleece over the top. She felt a little better, got out the Sony 150 and checked the charge. Then she put out the light and went out onto the top landing, down the second flight of stairs and left at the fire doors.

Had to do this. Had to dispense with it before she could move on. Before she could stop waking up in the morning waiting for the bloody bang.

This morning at the breakfast table, at her most pathetic, she’d nearly cried out to Mum to take it away, to exorcise Hattie Chancery from her subconscious. Like Mum could really do this with a sign of the cross and a pat on the head. Bonkers.

She had to do this – walking down the passage with the Sony held in front of her like an automatic weapon – because it made the difference between being a woman and a child. Because she’d never been in that room with any knowledge of whose room it had been and what she’d done – i.e. the knowledge that Hattie Chancery was the kind of woman, basically, who, in life, Jane would have hated even more than she did as some sick possible presence.

And also the knowledge of the stains under the maroon flock wallpaper, the blood dribbling down the windows.

She intended to walk into the room under the witch’s-hat tower, bring the Sony 150 to her shoulder, demanding, Imprint yourself on that, you brutal bitch. This was a necessary penance.

‘Couldn’t do it.’ Danny had his head in his hands, a bowl of tomato soup cooling on the table at his elbow. ‘In the end, I couldn’t tell him.’ He looked up at Greta. ‘Pathetic, eh?’

‘Could be it’s for the best,’ Greta said, but he could see she didn’t believe that, not for one second.

‘Suppose he’s mad? Suppose he’s ill? Suppose that what we reckoned all these years was perceptiveness, knowingness... suppose that was just signs of his... mental dysfunction.’

‘Big words tonight, Danny.’

‘I en’t thick,’ Danny said. ‘Might’ve lost a few brain cells to acid and metal, since the ole grammar school, but it en’t taken it all away.’

‘Have your soup.’

Danny swallowed some tomato soup. Through the kitchen window, he could see the snow ghosting the farmyard that was foggy-grey with old stone and dusk. No stock out there no more, nothing in the sheds except for his own tractor and Delia, Gomer’s new JCB. Need to have the tractor up and ready tonight, with the snowplough bolted on; this could go on for days.

‘Know what I was scared of back there, suddenly, Gret? That mabbe, if I told him, he’d kill her. Like Geoff James did when his missus—’

‘Danny, this is Jeremy.’

‘Can’t just say that n’more.’ Danny put his spoon down. ‘People goes funny. Same disease: isolation, EC form-filling, stock-tagging, signing all your beasts over to the bureaucrats. No independence, no pride, no satisfaction, no money. You reads the bloody papers, you’d think all country folk’s worried about is what the government’s doin’ to bloody huntin’ with hounds – like it’s fundamental to us all in the sticks, ’stead of just a rich man’s expensive pleasure introduced by psychotic Norman barons. Shit.’

‘You got out,’ Greta reminded him, that soothing tone again. ‘You’re with Gomer now. You sidelined, you en’t part of it n’more.’

‘Jeremy en’t never gonner get out, though, is he? It’s part of him. Part of him’s in the land. Uproot him, he’s dead.’

‘Why should he be uprooted? He’s got a good, solid farm. He’s respected. He’s got—’

‘A good woman? Ole days, see, there was farming marriages, and they lasted. Now you got partners... temp’ry. All right in cities, mabbe, where it’s all temp’ry and you can move on, swap around. In the country, you don’t have continuity – there’s another big word, see – if you don’t have continuity, you’re fucked. Jesus Christ, did I just say some’ing Conservative?’

‘Look,’ Greta said, ‘he won’t be out of his yard at all for days, if it keeps on like this, so unless somebody rings him and tells him about Natalie, he en’t gonner find out nothin’, is he?’

Danny stared into his soup, a pool of blood. He was thinking about Natalie Craven and her mousy little partner, and Ben Foley and his mousy little wife.

Ben Foley, saviour of Stanner. Incomer with attitude, smooth Londoner widely said to be driven by irrational obsessions. Man who showed up on your doorstep asking if you seen the Hound of Hergest.

‘Sign of death.’

Greta gave him a hard look. ‘What is?’

‘The Hound of Hergest.’

‘Let’s not get silly about this,’ Greta said. ‘Jeremy’s ma used to say he was always seeing things that wasn’t there. It’s the way he is. His condition.’

‘That’s what it’s supposed to be, though, ennit, the Hound: an omen of death.’

‘If your name’s Vaughan.’

‘The Vaughans’ve all gone.’

‘Nothing to worry about, then,’ Greta said.

‘Just be honest,’ Merrily said. ‘Tell me what you think I need to do. Tell me I’m overreacting. Tell me it’s time to let go of the leash, cut some slack, sever the umbilical, make some space, chill out. Tell me, Lol.’

‘You know I can’t do clichés.’ Lol took the mobile out into the passage and went across to the stable door, unbolting the top half and pushing against a crust of snow. The section of door opened with a sound like splintering plywood. Somewhere out there was the Frome Valley, as white and cold and barren as an old psychiatric ward he used to know.

‘Tell me there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Merrily said into his ear, serious now. Snow talk. Unexpectedly severe weather could do this to you. You were no longer in control. Nobody was.

‘I’ll come over,’ Lol said.

‘No. You can’t. Really. It’s just been on the radio: go home and stay home. Stay off the roads unless it’s an emergency, and even then—’

‘It’s not bad here.’ Lol looked for his car, couldn’t see it. It was nearly dark, and the snow was like a wall.

‘I’ve got enough to worry about without the thought of you stuck all night in a snowdrift in an ancient Astra with a heater that hasn’t worked in years.’

Music started up in the studio behind Lol: a slow, growling twelve-bar blues from the album that Prof Levin was mixing for the guitar legend Tom Storey. A relentless, chugging momentum: life going on.

‘It’s Gomer, that’s all,’ Merrily said. She’d already told him about Ben Foley and the violence and the woman called Hattie Chancery. ‘Gomer’s worried; how often does that happen?’

‘You could phone her. She’s got her mobile?’

‘I could do that, yes. I could go on to her very carefully, stepping on eggshells, knowing that at any time she could lose her temper and cut the call and switch off the mobile, and that’s the link gone for the duration. I could do that. Would you do that?’

There was a gas mantle projecting from the wall, just inside the fire doors. During the murder weekend, Ben had propped the doors open so that you could see the mantle from the stairs, and you were back in Hattie Chancery’s young days, enclosed in a hollow glow.

No mention of Hattie Chancery during the murder weekend. There were murder games, with the scent of mystery, and there was real murder, with its sadness and its stink.

The mantle, unlit, was utility-looking, without romance. No doubt it would be working again when the White Company were in residence. The passage, meanwhile, was lit by electric wall lights – dim vertical tubes under amber-tinted glass. The walls, with their recessed doors, were lined with woodchip paper. The lights turned them yellow.

Jane stood at the entrance to the passage, legs apart, and lingered on the shot. Ought to have brought the tripod really, but she guessed that if she’d gone downstairs to look for it she wouldn’t have come back. As it was, she kept wanting to turn back but wouldn’t permit herself to stop or even to hurry, to get it over with.

Oh, don’t worry about young Jane. Far too down-to-earth. Jane’ll be fine.

He really didn’t care, did he, as long as he came out a winner.

Called me a nancy boy.

A winner against the odds. Whatever it took.

But was she really so different? Jane Watkins: research and second camera. Using Eirion, deceiving Mum. Snatching every new experience to further her own ambitions, hoovering up the dirt on Hattie and the tragic Robert, while despising the White Company as naff and sad.

Capricious and contrary, this Jane Watkins, not a nice person.

Still shooting, Jane walked on, with sour determination, along the passage, where the sharp smell of recent painting failed to obscure the odour of damp and quite possibly rot.

She stopped in front of the last door on the right, the image wobbling. Through the lens, with the recording signal aglow, it was both more exciting and less scary because it was less personal – a professional thing.

The door was like all the other doors in the passage except that it didn’t have a number on it. When she opened it – reaching out to the handle, giving it a quick push and then stepping back, with the camera still running – she realized that it was too dark in there to shoot anything. She put the camera on pause and lowered it, recalling that there were a few steps to a second door that was oak and Gothic-pointed.

Jane stopped briefly at the bottom of the steps. She remembered a pot lampshade hanging from the ceiling. There was a switch somewhere, on an old-fashioned pewter box. But when she hand-swept the walls on either side she couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was at the top. She located the first step with the toe of a trainer, went up carefully, one, two, three, four – was that it?

No – she stumbled – five.

Jane remembered how it had seemed so cool at first, having one of the tower rooms, sleeping under the witch’s hat, with views across the Border.

A shocking cinematic image flared unconjured in her mind: the heavy old service revolver clunking on the floor as Hattie’s head exploded, blonde hair snaking with blood and wet brains, and a splatting on the walls and—

What was it like to have killed? To have done – publicly, without hope of concealment – the one thing you could never reverse, put right, make recompense for. One way or another, your life was over, wasn’t it?

No more tally-ho, no more whoop-whoop.

She felt for the handle of the bedroom door, catching an acrid waxy smell. Furniture polish? The cold clawed through her chunky sweater as though it was cheesecloth, and she thought of Robert Davies lying here in a fever, Hattie hauling the bedclothes from his sweating body. What had Hattie felt like as she carried the service revolver up here? How had she known it was loaded, unless she’d loaded it herself? So was this an outcome that had always been at the back of her mind? Because it really wasn’t a woman’s way of suicide, was it, to blow all your beauty to fragments?

Jane’s hand found the doorknob, cast-iron and globular, grasped it angrily, turned it and went into the bedroom, standing there panting out some kind of mixed-up defiance into the darkness.

Only, it wasn’t dark at all. Hattie Chancery’s room was delicately rinsed in ochre light.

Jane’s senses swam.

She saw a mustard-shaded oil lamp standing on a dressing table of polished oak in front of the central window with its floor-length purple velvet curtains. The light lured a dull lustre from the gilt frames of pictures on the flock wallpaper.

The polish-fumes seared her throat. This was wrong; everything was wrong, many years wrong. She reeled back against the door and it closed behind her with a heavy thunk and an efficient click. The triple mirrors on the dressing table reflected a high, claw-footed bed, and a woman’s figure rising.

And Jane just screamed, high and piercing, like she never had before, at least not since she was very little, as she saw, in the middle mirror, a broad face, with thick fair hair piled up and twisted and eyes that were small and round and pale like silverskin onions.

25 Shifting Big Furniture

THE WHITE COMPANY was a band of English mercenaries formed by Sir John Hawkwood in the fourteenth century, best known for its campaigns in Italy. It was also a firm supplying bathroom-related fluffy goods through mail order and two fancy-dress historical recreation societies.

Close to the bottom of the first page, Google finally identified the White Company as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic historical novel, and Merrily clicked on it.

Motley group of English mercenaries led by Sir Nigel Loring... assiduous attention to historical detail...

Nothing, however, to suggest that the novel in any way reflected the central obsession of Doyle’s last two decades.

In under an hour, she’d gathered a mass of background on this: Sir Arthur’s tireless tours of Britain and America, promoting his conviction that spiritualism would alter mankind for ever by making life after death a scientific fact. His blind defence of obvious fakery. His insistence that he’d spoken, at a seance, with his son Kingsley, a victim of the Great War, and his brother Innes. His belief that his sister Annette, over thirty years dead, had communed with Jean, Arthur’s wife, through automatic writing. Eventually, Arthur had acquired his own high-level spirit contact, Pheneas, a scribe from the Sumerian city of Ur, dead for over four thousand years.

A kindly, decent, deluded man.

In the snow-padded silence of the scullery, the phone went off like a burglar alarm. Two phone lines had become a necessary extravagance. Merrily plucked it up, wedging it under her chin while tapping on next, for Page Two.

‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Vicar?’

‘Alice.’

‘Vicar, will you be in if I comes round later on?’

‘I... yeah, sure. Wear wellies, though, Alice, because I haven’t bothered clearing the drive.’

‘With Dexter,’ Alice said.

‘Oh.’

The digital clock on the desk said 7.18 p.m. The snow had turned the apple trees outside the window into cartoon wraiths. Page Two came up, with its highlighted words: white, white, white...

‘Sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you,’ Alice said, ‘My sisters, they said yes, they’d like to have the Eucharist. Dexter, he en’t so sure.’

‘He’s with you now?’

‘Does two nights a week in the chip shop.’

In a steamy chip shop? With asthma?

‘I en’t letting him go back to Hereford tonight – what if he got stuck in the snow and he couldn’t breathe? How would they get him to the hospital? Will you talk to him, vicar? Will you make him see some sense?’

‘Well, you know, I’ll... I mean, I can try and explain, but I don’t want to—’

‘’Bout half an hour, then?’ Alice said.

On the screen, near the top of Page Two, it said:

The White Company. Established to further the mission of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.

Oh.

‘OK,’ Merrily said, ‘fine.’

Replacing the phone with one hand, she clicked the mouse with the other, watching a bulky figure fading up: sagging white moustache, pinstripe suit, watch chain, watchful eyes. Encircling him, like some tragic Greek chorus, other faces less defined – misty faces blinking on and off, like faulty street lamps, in shades of white and grey. And then:

The White Company

welcomes you

Walter was this fat and beaming old git, with a moustache that curled. His wife, Bella, might have been his daughter: turned-up nose, big hair gathered on top of her head. And the kid, this flat-faced kid clutching her hand, could have been Walter’s granddaughter.

In fact this was Hattie Chancery, apparently the earliest obtainable photograph of her. It was on the wall next to the door, one of four framed photos in here: Walter and his family in the garden – Walter, formal in wing collar, and his wife Bella in some kind of flouncy crinoline. Also, two scenes of what, presumably, was the Middle Marches Hunt hounding some poor bloody fox into a badger set. And, over the bed, so she might see herself reflected in the mirror when she awoke... the adult Hattie.

‘Where did they get them?’ Jane’s voice was still unsteady. Shock, it seemed, could carry on pulsing through your body for whole minutes afterwards. Already she was despising herself, but that didn’t take it away.

‘On loan from the museum at Kington.’ Natalie lay on her back on the claw-footed bed, smoking a cigarette. ‘A deal. Ben found a really old washtub and stuff like that in one of the outhouses and donated it all. The pictures can go back after this – we’ll get them all copied when the snow goes. But Ben thought the originals might give off the strongest vibrations.’

‘For Hardy?’

‘I mean, Ben thinks it’s all shit really, but if it makes the White Company feel more inspired...’ Nat rolled over and off the bed, stood up and stretched – just the way she had when Jane had first walked in, rising up alongside the gilt-framed portrait hanging over the high mahogany headboard. She wore tight jeans and a black shirt open to a silver pendant. ‘I’m shattered, Jane. Shifting big furniture takes it out of you.’

Jane went to the bottom of the bed and looked up at the woman in the sepia photo-portrait: the coils of glistening hair, the broad face with unsmiling lips like segments of soft white pear, and those pale, pale eyes gazing over your shoulder as if Hattie was disdainfully contemplating the mess left by her own blood on the wall between the windows.

‘How old was she here, do you think?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Thirty?’

‘And Alistair Hardy actually wants to sleep in here?’ Jane could no longer imagine doing that. And the thought of waking up on a wintry morning to those silverskin eyes...

‘I don’t think he knows about it yet. It’s Ben’s idea. He’s become obsessed with the Chancery woman and this room – Stanner’s haunted room – and he’s thinking televisually. So we have to recreate the room pretty much as she’d remember it. Which, I have to tell you, has taken all day. The dressing table, we pinched from Room Seven – I spent about an hour polishing the foul thing. The bed – we had to bring that down in sections from one of the attics.’

‘This was her actual bed?’

‘God knows. It had enough dust on it.’

‘It bloody scared me, Nat. It’s... just unhealthy.’

‘Your face when you first opened the door, Jane, will live with me for a long time.’

‘It was just a big shell when I was last here.’ She looked around again. ‘Rather Hardy than me.’

In fact, Hardy deserved all he got. Jane was still furious at him for using Lucy Devenish. An affront; Lucy’s spirituality was well in advance of all this.

Natalie walked past her and opened the bedroom door. ‘Well, if we find him dead of a heart attack in the morning, it’s an occupational hazard. I can’t say I like him. Let’s go and have some tea.’

Jane looked at her with something between shock and respect. Dead of a heart attack? It was the sort of thing a kid would say, oblivious of the rules of adult decency that obliged you to airbrush your thoughts before you exposed them. Nat was just so cool. It certainly took some kind of cool – or a complete absence of sensitivity to the numinous – to lie there alone on that bed, under that very eerie picture of Stanner’s murderer.

‘Nat...’

‘Huh?’

‘Does Amber know about this... refurbishing?’

‘Some of it. She’s been very quiet all week. I mean, the idea of them summoning spirits in her kitchen – the only place she can really bear to spend time in...’ Nat glanced outside, down the dark steps to the passage. ‘Sometimes I think she might surprise us all and leave him to it.’

‘Leave Ben?’

‘Leave Stanner and give Ben the big option. Could you blame her?’

‘Nat, it would destroy him. He thinks he’s doing all this for Amber.’

‘Yeah.’ Nat smiled with no humour. ‘Aren’t men dangerously delusional sometimes?’

‘And dangerously aggressive,’ Jane said.

Nat eyed her, a warning look. It was a one-off. We don’t want Ben to get a reputation, do we?

‘Look...’ Jane glanced away from her, determined to get this out. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot...’

‘Well, don’t. It won’t help anybody.’

‘Been finding out about Hattie Chancery.’ Jane glanced warily at Hattie’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘I mean... you do know what she did in here, don’t you?’

Natalie came back into the room. ‘Ben’s still letting Amber think she shot herself outside somewhere. I mean, Christ, they sleep just up the passage. Who told you?’

‘Gomer. And he told me about Hattie and all her men. What she did with them on the top of Stanner Rocks. All the aggression she had inside her. And the booze.’

‘If you believe all that.’

‘I kind of do.’ Jane looked at her. ‘Don’t you?’

‘You’re asking me what I believe?’ Natalie supported her bum against the dressing table, stretched her long legs out, stared at Hattie. ‘I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.’

Jane, her back to the door, looked at the bed. It had a faded old mauve coverlet on it, with a fringe. She said, not looking at Nat, ‘When I was here, for that one night, I came back and found the quilt and the sheets had been pulled off and thrown back against the headboard. No, really, it happened. And I didn’t even know whose room it had been then.’

Nat made no comment.

‘OK.’ Jane turned to Natalie. ‘Maybe Amber or somebody had been about to change the bedding and forgot and went away and left it. There could be a whole bunch of rational explanations, and I hope one of them was the truth. But I also had a really bad dream in here. I mean really bad. And also—’

Nat said quietly, ‘Um, Jane...’

‘I mean, if you consider what happened last weekend... put that together with Hattie – goes up Stanner Rocks, shags some guy, comes back and smashes her sick husband’s head in. With a couple of the rocks she kept as like trophies? And then you think of Ben – OK, volatile, but basically this artistic, nonviolent bloke – who just loses it completely. On maybe the same spot? It was a horrendous attack. If you and Amber hadn’t been here, let’s face it, he might’ve killed that guy. And you know that’s true. He might be on remand now for murder.’

‘Jane, I don’t think this is a particularly—’

‘What got into him? You have to ask. Because if that was the real Ben—’

‘Jane—’

‘—Then maybe it would be a good thing if Amber did leave him. Maybe he’s the wrong kind of person to be here. You know?’ Jane blinked. ‘What’s wrong?’

Natalie was looking over Jane’s shoulder. Apologetically.

Jane stiffened, her shoulders hunching. She shut her eyes for a moment, opening them, in anguish, to a long, unsmiling face in the left-hand mirror of the dressing table.

‘Erm...’ She turned slowly, towards Ben, with her shoulders still up around her ears, forcing what she guessed would be a sick and cringing smile, holding out the camcorder like an offering. ‘Like, I... just came to... to get some, like, atmos shots?’

Inaugurated in 1980, on the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the White Company was originally called The Windlesham Society, after Sir Arthur’s last home in Sussex. The name was changed after the words ‘White Company’ were repeatedly received at spiritist meetings throughout Britain, both clairaudiently and through automatic writing. Finally, Sir Arthur himself conveyed to the eminent channelist, Mr Alistair Hardy, that he would consider it an honour to be patron of a society named after an especial favourite amongst his novels.

The Society now comprises of both committed spiritists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. In 1993, the outline of a planned Holmes story, The Adventure of the White Shadow, was channelled to Mr Hardy and later drafted in full by Mr Mason W. Mower, of Connecticut.

Merrily wrinkled her nose. The idea of a society combining committed spiritualists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts sounded slightly unlikely, if you considered that Holmes was the creation of Conan Doyle’s rational, scientific side.

But, then, wasn’t spiritualism considered to be rational and scientific? Wasn’t that the whole point – that they were proving the fact of life after death without the excess baggage?

Meaning religion. Merrily fingered her small pectoral cross on its chain.

It was easy to say that the Church was just jealous because these guys were offering direct experience. There were many people no longer scared of death because their departed loved ones were saying, We’re here for you. And even if it was faked, was that all bad? The main spiritualist wave had come after the First World War – all those grieving families who didn’t know how their sons and husbands had died, had no bodies to bury. A means of bringing closure.

The doorbell rang. Merrily groaned. The thought of an hour with Dexter Harris was not enticing.

She stood up, pulling on one of Jane’s old fleeces over her cowl-neck sweater. Half her wardrobe these days consisted of the kid’s cast-offs. No fire in the sitting room, so she’d have to keep Alice and Dexter in the kitchen, and it wasn’t too warm in there either, despite the Aga. She went through to the hall, meeting the eyes of the jaded Jesus hanging on to his lantern of hope in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, Uncle Ted’s house-warming present.

To prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.

Slipping the catch, tugging the front door out of its frozen frame, she thought what a disappointment it must be to Conan Doyle, if he was still watching, that the great spiritual revolution had crumbled so quickly into the ruins of Crank City. The front door shuddered and the white night came in from the open porch in tingling crystals of cold.

For a moment, it was surreal. The front garden of the vicarage was like some kind of fairy-tale bedchamber, the lawn a lumpy white mattress, bushes squashed into piles of pillows, a night light glimmering from the village square through the bare trees.

Very much a part of this tableau, he unwound his scarf and a frieze of snow.

‘Um, I wondered if I might sing a carol.’

‘God!’ She laughed in delight, looking down the drive towards the snowbound square. ‘How did you—? Where’s your car?’

‘How would you feel about “Ding Dong M—?’

‘You’re insane!’

‘And there are medical records to prove it,’ Lol said.

26 White High

LOL SAT BAREFOOTED on the rug in the scullery, defrosting his toes by two bars of the electric fire. The lights were out, but the door to the kitchen was ajar a couple of inches. His frayed blue jeans were somehow soaked despite his wellies, and there were wet patches on the dark green sweatshirt with white stencilled lettering. He sat there alone, watching the snow widening the window ledge outside, and he felt wildly happy.

The lettering on the sweatshirt said Gomer Parry Plant Hire, commemorating the days he’d spent as an unskilled labourer in the wake of Gomer’s disastrous fire. Another small breakthrough: if it makes you a little anxious, do it. A chance to shovel tons of earth with your bare hands before playing live on stage for the first time since your teens. An impossible polar expedition in a clapped-out, sixteen-year-old Vauxhall Astra, to be with the person you love? Do it.

The old Astra had slithered over snow-blinded hills, hugging a council grit-lorry down to Leominster. Tunnelling through the suffocated lanes, Lol had passed two abandoned cars, snow-bloated, and gone chugging on impossibly until the old girl finally gave up, rolling away into the cascading night.

But she only gave up – there was a God – on the hill that was already evolving into Church Street, Ledwardine, vainly spinning her wheels before sinking back, exhausted, into the Community Hall car park. Lol had climbed out like he was emerging from a trance state, and bent to kiss her cold grille thanks and goodnight before walking up to the vicarage on a white high.

On the deserted square, a Christmas tree stood in front of the squat-pillared market hall, the whole scene loaded with snow, the fairy lights reduced to gauzy smudges of colour like ice lollies in a deep-freeze. Lol had looked back for a sign – a For Sale sign on Lucy’s old house – as if the sudden enchantment of the night might have tossed it back onto the market.

No sign there, no lights. Maybe there was a forbidding, black-lettered sign somewhere that said he didn’t belong here, but right now he didn’t care. He sat in the glow of two faintly zinging orange bars and half-listened to Merrily in the kitchen, dealing with some people who had arrived soon after him. Best they didn’t see him; it would have been all over the village by morning. The way things had turned out, even his car wasn’t here. Snow was good at secrets.

From the kitchen, he heard about arrangements for what seemed to be a memorial service. There was an elderly woman with a croaky voice that he recognized at once. Salt and vinegar with that, is it? And a guy called Dexter who managed to be both gruff and whiny. Sounded like routine parish stuff.

At first, idly browsing the Cwn Annwn passages from Mrs Leather, Lol wasn’t aware of what Merrily was saying, just the soft and muted colours of her voice. Luxuriating in the proximity of her, recalling an old Van Morrison song from Tupelo Honey, about a woman in the kitchen with the lights turned down low.

It was quite a while before raised voices began to suggest that there was unpleasantness here.

‘No, what’s she’s saying,’ Alice from the chippy said, ‘is that we needs a proper funeral for the boy. With the full rites.’

Merrily said, ‘Well, not—’

‘That’s fucking creepy!’

‘Dexter!’

‘Funeral for a kid that’s already been in his grave for near twenty year?’

‘It’s not—’

‘You’re telling me that en’t creepy?’

‘It’s not a funeral,’ Merrily said, ‘and I honestly don’t think you’d find it creepy. However, it’s only an idea, a possibility.’

‘You got no right. Should never’ve gone round askin’ questions, rakin’ it all up. It’s in the past.’

‘It’s in you!’ Alice shrieked. ‘Don’t you see that?’ Her voice steadied. ‘Been like this all night, he has, vicar. I don’t know what’s the matter with him.’

Merrily said, ‘Dexter, first of all, we don’t have to do this, not if you don’t want to. And we don’t even have to do it in a church.’

‘Then where’s the bloody point?’

‘All I’m trying to say is that the Eucharist – communion – is a very powerful way of tackling these things, in which... we believe that Jesus himself is personally involved. And it can sometimes draw a line under things, create order and calm, where there’s been long-term unrest, ill feeling, distress... conflict.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘this is what we want.’

‘Alice asked me if there was any way I could help, and I’m sorry if it isn’t what either of you were expecting. If you don’t think it’s the right thing, you don’t have to have anything to do with it.’

‘But,’ Alice said, with menace, ‘you’ll be letting your family down if you don’t.’

‘No!’ An ache in Dexter’s voice. From the scullery, Lol could feel him wanting to beat his head on the table.

Alice said, ‘En’t no reason the rest of us can’t go ahead without him, is there, vicar?’

‘Well, we could, but that wouldn’t—’

‘What about Darrin?’ Dexter said. ‘He gonner be there?’

‘It might also help Darrin a lot,’ Merrily said. ‘It would be good if everyone was there, from both sides of the family. It can bring things out. In my experience.’

‘Bring out the truth?’

‘Well, it... it can bring peace.’

‘And what if everybody don’t want the truth out?’

Merrily didn’t reply. Alice shouted, ‘We all wants the truth!’

‘Well, mabbe Darrin don’t! Mabbe the truth en’t what Darrin wants at all, look.’

Nobody spoke for a while. Chairs creaked, small movements of unrest. Then Dexter started mumbling. Lol couldn’t make out any of it. Then Alice said, raw-voiced, ‘What’s this? You never—’ And Dexter mumbled some more, and Alice said faintly, ‘No. Dear God.’

Dexter’s voice came in again, no longer gruff, raised up in panic.

‘He’s like, “Get your fuckin’ foot down, you big useless—” ’

‘Dexter!’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Go on. Please.’

‘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. So like, when we gets into the Fiesta, there’s a kiddy’s picture book on the seat, and he picks it up and rips it in half, throws the bits out of the window. Roland, he starts crying, Darrin’s leanin’ over him and pinchin’ him, telling him we’re going to London. We en’t stopping till we gets to London, and we en’t never comin’ back. Never see his mam and dad again.’

‘Oh God in heaven, Vicar, stop him!’

‘Weren’t no stoppin’ him, Alice. More the kid’s screechin’, more he’s gettin’ off on it. Excited! Gettin’ more excited the further we goes. I’m like, “Don’t you wanner go back now? How we gonner get back if we goes too far?” Darrin’s goin’, “Keep your fuckin’ foot down, you fat wanker, we’re goin’ on the motorway, we’re goin’ to London.” ’

Alice was moaning, ‘Oh, dear God, no, oh dear God.’ Lol sensing a rhythm, as if she was rocking backwards and forwards, doubled up in anguish.

‘So Roland, he’s gettin’ real hysterical, starts pulling at the door handle, and Darrin’s goin’, “You get away from that door or I’ll give you a smacking.” So like Roland waits till Darrin turns round again and I can year him fiddling with the handle, and then Darrin whips round, sudden-like, and whangs him in the face, bang! Cops is behind us by then, look, blue lights going and that, and Roland’s sobbin’ away, and that’s when I decides I’m gonner go across the road and up this little turning, then the cops’ll be able to get us. And that... that’s how it was.’

Silence, except for creaking chairs, small sounds of unrest. Then Alice started to weep. Routine parochial issue. Lol tugged his wet wellies onto his bare feet.

Merrily said, ‘You didn’t tell the police about... any of this. Did you?’

‘How could I? But you see why Darrin en’t gonner want none of it out.’

‘Or your parents? You tell your parents anything?’

‘They know what Darrin’s like. Alice knows.’

Another silence.

Then a jagged wail.

‘Oh my God, that poor little child... his own brother...’ Like Alice’s voice was bleeding. ‘Oh my God, and then he died! He— My God, I never knew none of this.’

‘’Course you never knew,’ Dexter snapped. ‘Darrin en’t never gonner tell you, was he?’

‘Gets worse, gets worse all the time.’

‘You made me, Alice, I didn’t wanner—’

‘How’m I gonner tell my sisters?’

‘Can’t, can you?’ Dexter said flatly. ‘No way.’

A chair creaking, someone standing up, footsteps going nowhere on the kitchen flags.

Then Alice said, ‘We surely needs it now.’

‘Eh?’

‘I can’t live with this. Knowing that child’s out there.’

‘He en’t out there, Alice, he’s f— He’s gone.’

‘We needs it now, more than ever – the Holy Spirit, the holy Eucharist.’

‘No way!’

‘Like a big white bird.’

‘This is an end to it!’

‘How do we organize it, vicar? How soon can we do it?’

‘Well, you know, that’s up to—’

‘No!’ Sound of a big fist smashing into the table; Lol leapt up. ‘I don’t wannit!’ Dexter roared. ‘I don’t wannit to happen, you understand me? Why you gotter—? You’re a fuckin’ ole meddler, Alice, nobody assed you to start all this shit. I only told you to fuckin’ stop you, for fuck’s sake!’

Putting his right eye to the crack in the door, Lol saw a bulky guy with a petulant lower lip and a shaven head, standing in the middle of the kitchen. He looked marginally nearer to tears than to violence, but his fists were bunched, and he was breathing through his mouth. He unclenched a fist and started feeling in a pocket of his leather coat. Lol put a hand on the door, ready to wrench it open.

Dexter brought his hand up to his mouth. There was a vacuum gasp.

‘You’re stressin’ me out. Leave it. Fuck it! All right?’

Dexter walked out, banging the kitchen door hard enough to make pans rattle on shelves.

‘Alice,’ Merrily said, from out of Lol’s view. ‘Let him walk it off in the cold air.’

Now she was hunched in the office chair, hands limp between her knees. She looked bloodless. Lol’s white high had evaporated. It was a powerful reminder, this episode, of how vulnerable the clergy were, feeling they had to be there, for everybody, whether it was wanted or not.

Including the dead? Even the dead?

‘I don’t even know how bad he is, you see,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know enough about asthma. What if he’s out there on the square and he can’t get his breath?’

‘Does Alice live far away?’

‘Three minutes’ walk.’

‘Not a problem, then.’

‘Let’s hope not.’ She stood up and came and sank down beside him on the rug. They sat there in front of the electric fire, with their backs to the wall, their shoulders not quite touching, and she told him about the death of the kid called Roland Hook and seventeen years of corrosive bitterness inside a family.

‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said. ‘In a way I can understand Dexter’s problem with this. Is it normal, to have some kind of belated funeral service, in the hope that it’s going to make everything all right?’

‘Jeavons,’ Merrily said.

‘The loose canon.’

‘It’s not just Jeavons. There’s a movement inside Healing and Deliverance which argues that some illness, particularly chronic illness, can be the result of something unresolved in the family’s past. Or the victim being in the grip of some aberrant ancestor.’

‘Your ancestors are haunting you and you don’t know it?’

‘It makes a certain kind of sense, but that’s the trouble, isn’t it? We’re finding hauntings where there are no actual phenomena... other than an illness, or an emotional crisis. We – the Church of England.’

‘So, by calming the spirit of this poor kid, who died in a state of terror, you can, in theory—’

‘I can’t.’

‘Sorry, forgot the protocol. By organizing this Requiem for the dead kid, you can, in theory, open the way for God to cure not only Dexter’s asthma, but also to heal the rift in his wider family?’

‘Er... yeah.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Lol said, dismayed. ‘You go along with this, you could be spending every day of the rest of your life doing complicated Eucharistic services for people laying all their problems on their ancestors. Sure, let’s all blame the dead.’

Merrily shrugged.

‘The Church of England authorizes this? And healing?’

Merrily said, “When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to Him, and He drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick.”

‘What’s that?’

‘Matthew’s Gospel, linking healing and deliverance.’

‘You’re not Jesus Christ,’ Lol said. ‘Healing could make you ill.’

‘Do I look ill?’

‘You look tired.’

‘I’m fine. Really.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’m awfully glad you’re here.’

Their shoulders touched. Lol took a long breath.

She laid her head wearily on his shoulder. ‘I’m all mixed up. Rumours – just rumours – of healing, and I’m getting the size of congregation I always dreamed of. And it makes me sweat. A hint of miracle cures, and suddenly you’re on the way to becoming someone with a big voice and disciples.’

‘Scary.’

Yes, it was. It was the very place he would hate for her to go, because of his parents, the born-again Pentecostalists, who used to attend Bible Belt-type healing services conducted by some crazy pastor who shook people till the sickness dropped out of them. But even the pastor, as far as Lol knew, hadn’t sought to heal the living through the dead.

Merrily said, ‘I mean, I really, really want it to happen for people... for the sick. I just don’t want it to be me who’s seen as the significant channel. It’s too early. It’s somehow too early for the women’s ministry. Certainly too early for me. How selfish is that? How cowardly is that?’

Lol felt the wetness on her cheeks and put an arm around her and held her, as chastely as he could bear. He tried to think of something he could say that didn’t sound soothing or patronizing or argumentative. On one level, he simply empathized. The idea of being a Major Artist still scared him, and the thought that he would soon be too old to scale the lowest available peak was almost comforting. But there was a big difference between a career and a calling, where you had to keep asking not what you or the audience needed, but how God wanted you to play it.

It was a lousy, thankless job. Jane would sometimes tell Lol how much she hoped that her mum would one day see the light and, slamming the church door behind her, start running.

Merrily said, ‘Lew Jeavons said this was a very interesting case, and he’s distressingly right. More right than he could know. And it’s all valid, even on a psychological level. I mean, some priests believe that if, say, your great-grandfather was a Satanist or a heretic or even a Freemason a century ago, it could be affecting your health today. Well, yeah, sure... But this case – even if the Requiem is no more than symbolic, it still might help. I mean, look at what it’s brought out tonight.’

‘It’s certainly ruined any chance of Alice getting to sleep.’

‘Reach out, Jeavons said. Embrace.’ Merrily sighed.

‘I really wouldn’t like to think of you embracing Darrin Hook,’ Lol said.

27 Five Barrels

JANE FOLLOWED BEN down the red-carpeted stairs, aware of dragging her feet. Ben was silent the whole way. He wore a black fleece zipped all the way up and black jeans. He was like his own shadow.

As they came into the lobby Jane saw the build-up of snow on the window ledges and thought, He can fire me, but he can’t send me home in this.

The office behind the reception desk was used mainly by Natalie to monitor incomings and outgoings and to deal with wages for occasional cleaners and waitresses. It had originally been some kind of cloak and boot room. There were still a dozen coat hooks on walls that were cracked, white and windowless. The desk was ebony-coloured, with gold-leaf bits and had come from Ben and Amber’s London flat.

Ben sat behind the desk in a leather swivel chair and nodded at the typist’s chair opposite. A strip light made his thin face white and taut. Jane sat, too. Headmaster’s-study situation.

‘Look, Ben, all I meant—’

He waved her into silence. Above his head was a framed print of one of the etchings from the Strand Magazine. It was almost entirely black, except for a white spurt of flame from a pistol. Beneath the drawing, it said: Holmes had emptied five barrels of his revolver into the creature’s flank.

Ben said, ‘This business of strange forces, curses, hauntings, the mystical powers of the Border, the retentive power of ancient rocks... It’s absolute rubbish, isn’t it?’ He leaned back, his hands clasped on his chest, swivelling a little. ‘Jane, I’m a drama man, always will be, and that’s about using real people and real places to create an illusion.’

Jane nodded.

‘When you’re putting a TV production together,’ Ben said, ‘you have this great tangle of egos – actors, writers, money men. You have time limits, locations, weather conditions. And you have to contain the lot inside a budget that never seems adequate to the task. And then, when it’s all over, you’re competing for just ninety minutes of someone’s attention. Which is fine; it obliges me to’ – Ben unclasped his hands and brought them slowly together in the air – ‘condense.’

‘Make it... controllable?’

Ben smiled.

‘But what are you – I’m sorry – what are you talking about exactly? The documentary or...?’

‘The whole thing. The big picture. Stanner, the enterprise. This place appealed to me as soon as I saw it because it’s pure artifice, built to look like a Gothic manor house, on a lavish scale. A production. And then, thanks to Conan Doyle, it became Baskerville Hall, another creation.’

Jane thought about this. ‘But if The Hound of the Baskervilles was based on an actual legend – a real legend – then there is a kind of reality here, surely.’

‘A real legend?’ Ben looked pained. ‘How real is a legend? What’s the so-called Hound of Hergest now but a half-forgotten local folk tale? Who’s even heard about that outside this immediate area? Whereas the Hound of the Baskervilles – the creation, the artifice – is world-famous, immortal... a hugely powerful image. That’s the power I’m harnessing – I mean, stuff the Hound of Hergest. Its part was over as soon as Doyle’s book was written.’

Typical. Jane’s mouth tightened.

‘What?’ Ben said. ‘Come on, spit it out.’

‘Well, it’s... you know it’s been seen.’

‘What has?’

‘The Hound. Or something. Something that’s killing sheep. The shooters... that’s what they were after.’

Ben nodded slowly.

Jane blinked at him. ‘You knew that?’

‘About Dacre and his pathetic bounty? Of course I knew. Known about it for a while. And naturally, I love the idea of something out there. And I love the idea of people believing in it, and I want to hear their stories. As long as the bastard stays out there... something unknown.’

Ben laughed. Over his head, Sherlock Holmes pumped round after round into the flank of the poor hound, its head and muzzle outlined in white lines of phosphorus.

‘Only Dacre – who I’ve never met, by the way, and have no particular wish to – rather shot himself in the foot. When he heard I was making inquiries about sightings of the Hound, he instructed his tenants, his employees at the farm and the hunt kennels – anybody, in fact, he felt he had authority over – to keep shtum.’ Ben smiled, tongue prodding at the inside of a cheek. ‘Fortunately, in this day and age the feudal flame burns rather lower than it used to.’

‘You actually knew the shooters were working for him?’

‘Well, not at first. I’d heard rumours of what they were after, but I only started putting it together after you and I and Antony encountered them in the lane at Hergest Court. Ended up meeting a very interesting old guy in Kington – no friend of Dacre’s and more than willing to talk to me about a number of things, as it happens. Yes, of course I knew who they were working for.’

‘So when you found that guy Nathan...’

‘When I lost it completely, you mean, Jane? When I risked facing a murder charge?’

Jane squirmed. She looked away from Ben’s taunting eyes, inevitably up at the etching. And then it was like Holmes’s pistol had gone off in her head in a spurt of light. Something began, shockingly, to make sense.

Ben looked up as Natalie’s head came round the door.

‘Ben, Alistair Hardy’s just arrived, with that guy Matthew. I’ve shown them up to the Chancery room. I have to take Clancy to a neighbour’s for the night, OK? The drive’s totally blocked at The Nant – I’ll be back later.’

‘Nat – do be careful. We need you enormously this weekend.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’ll try not to get stuck,’ Natalie said, and Ben raised a hand.

For a moment, as the door closed on Natalie, the instability of the Border seemed to vibrate through the room, making everything glow, but with a cheap and garish light. Jane took a breath and came right out with it.

‘The truth is that the very last thing you wanted was for those guys to come out of the pines with a dead puma. That would’ve blown it, right?’

‘Blown it?’

‘The mystique.’ Jane gripped the sides of her chair. ‘A whole century’s worth. Like, you don’t believe the story of the spectral hound, but you don’t want it disproved either. You didn’t want those guys coming up with anything real that they’d shot. Certainly not anywhere near Stanner. Like... Oh, we’ve shot the Hound. And it gets in all the papers. You really didn’t want that.’

‘Would’ve been a touch prosaic,’ Ben agreed.

‘And that was really... that was why?’

She heard him shouting at the shooters on the last night of the murder weekend. I warned you, not on my land! This time you’re fucking dog meat!

You thought you knew about people. She’d had this nice, safe image of Ben: clever, charming, theatrical, faintly camp.

Ben shrugged. Jane almost cringed from him.

The snow was piled like mashed potato out by the entrance of Danny’s place, and Danny had his tractor out, with the snow-plough attachment and the spotlights. If he got it cleared now and he was up again by five tomorrow, likely he could keep on top of it.

He climbed down and stood by the gate, looking out. The Queens of the Stone Age were giving it some welly from the stereo back in the cab, singing, as it happened, about the sky falling. If this went on, there’d be some contract work for him and Gomer, from the county highways, sure to be. Plant hire, like Gomer kept saying, never slept.

Normally he’d be excited: snow was a challenge, folk needed help. But tonight he felt weary. Biggest problem was the lane outside – passable now, with four-wheel drive, but tomorrow was another day. Danny was knackered now, and the snow was oppressive.

Back at the house, he saw a tongue of yellow light – the back door opening – and Greta shouted, ‘Is it clear?’

‘Clear as I can get it without two tons of grit.’ Danny left the music on and trudged back up the path.

‘Only Jeremy rang, see. Wanted to know if we could take the child tonight on account his track’s blocked solid.’

Danny kept on walking till he reached the back door. ‘Gimme that again, Gret.’

‘The child. Clancy? That woman— Her mother... is gonner bring her down from the hotel. Drop her off yere.’

‘Wants us to have her?’

‘I said I’d make up the spare bed.’

Danny stood just short of the step, trying to figure it. This Natalie and the kiddie, here they were at a great big hotel full of empty bedrooms... and they wanted the spare bed in the box-room where he kept all his albums. But even that wasn’t the most unlikely aspect of it.

‘Nothing strike you as funny, Gret?’ Danny breathed in stinging air through his teeth. ‘Jeremy’s track? When is Jeremy’s track ever blocked?’

‘You gonner come in or not, ’fore we loses every bit of heat in the house?’ Greta backed away from the cold, arms folded.

Danny stepped inside. ‘If anybody knowed the big snow was on the way... When I was up The Nant earlier on, he’d got a trailerload of grit all ready. Had his ewes down last night, all tucked up. And now you tell me—’

Danny’s brain froze.

‘Well, what you want me to say?’ Greta demanded. ‘I accuse him of lying, say we en’t having the girl—? What’s wrong?’

‘He don’t want the kiddie there. Why don’t he want the kiddie there?’

Her stared at him, not getting it.

‘Greta, how’d he sound? What d’he sound like, in hisself?’

‘Sounded like he always does, to me. Half-baked. What’s the—?’

‘When was this? When’d he ring?’

‘Half an hour ago, mabbe. You was busy out there, I didn’t wanner bother you with—’

‘Holy shit, Greta...’ The jolt to Danny’s senses kicked him back outside. He shut his eyes and he threw his head back, feeling the fat snowflakes coming down on his upturned face and his beard and his gritted teeth. He snapped back upright. ‘Call him.’ Wiping his eyes hard with the heel of his hand. ‘If he don’t answer, call again. And again.’

‘What do I say to him?’

‘Talk about the weather, talk about any damn thing.’ Danny stumbled away through the snow to his tractor. ‘But keep him talking.’

Jane ran upstairs and tossed the camcorder on her bed in fury. Picked up her phone and saw there was a message on the voice-mail: Antony’s number.

Sod that. She dropped the phone on the bed and sat quietly for a while with the light out, watching the snow drifting past the window, wishing she’d caught the usual bus, gone home to Mum. Someone you could count on to behave like... decently.

What was worst about this was that Ben didn’t even seem to see anything vaguely wrong in meeting violence with violence. And all to sustain his hugely powerful image.

She felt sick. She wanted out of here.

With no enthusiasm, she picked up the phone, keyed in the message.

‘Jane. Listen, hen, I have a problem. We’re talking white hell here. Those guys at the Highways Agency, they’re never prepared for cruel and unusual weather, and it looks like they’re about to close the Severn Bridge. I’m doing ma best here, but it may be tomorrow night or later before I can get over there. Looks like it’s down to you, the big one. Don’t worry about it, you screw up it’s no’ the end of the world, we can reconstruct. Just weld the wee thing to your hands and get what you can: lots of Ben, lots of the weirdos, keep in tight, don’t zoom. And don’t be put off; they get used to the lens, the punters and the victims both. Good luck.’

‘Sod off,’ Jane said sourly. If they thought she wanted to be part of the artifice, they could both sod off.

It seemed likely now that they were all in this – the White Company too. Was Alistair Hardy really going to tell the viewers that he couldn’t actually get Conan Doyle on the line? Was he going to tell Ben that Conan Doyle had confirmed to him that the Hound was purely a Devon myth? Not if he had any psychic sense of what Ben was about – Ben, who suddenly was no longer endearingly eccentric, but more than a little unstable.

Maybe it was simply mid-life crisis, hormonal: Ben well into his fifties now, racing the clock. Ready to hurl the clock to the ground, it seemed, and hack at it with his heel in rage. Ready to damage anybody threatening the now drama.

Reluctantly, Jane called Antony back. At least he was younger and therefore probably less desperate. When he answered, she could hear a car engine.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were driving.’

‘Jane, is that you? Trying to get myself home, here, through the white hell, which has arrived in the soft South, and the novelty’s already wearing thin. Wait a sec, let me pull into the verge.’

‘OK. Sorry.’ The cynical languor in his voice had a calming effect on Jane. She waited for the handbrake’s ratchet. ‘Antony, can I talk to you confidentially?’

‘Aye, I’ll switch off the recording machine.’

‘Huh?’

‘Joke. Go on.’

‘I’m worried. About things. Well, about Ben.’

‘Well, I never.’

‘This is serious. You’re his mate, or I wouldn’t tell you – in fact, I didn’t tell you, OK?’

‘Jane, this conversation will dissipate in the ether.’

And so, in the face of his levity, and because there was no one else she could tell, she told Antony the shocking truth about Nathan and what Ben had done to him. Told him in considerable detail.

And then she told him why Ben had done it.

‘Oh boy,’ Antony said.

She told him how Ben, on another occasion, after screaming at the shooters, had said that where he came from there were real hard bastards.

‘Knightsbridge?’

‘Jesus Christ, Antony!’

‘OK. Joke. Ben’s from Reading and not what you’d call the most salubrious side. As I understand it, his old man was a builder’s labourer, something like that. Well, fine. Not then, though – Ben came into television at a time when a good and educated background, a nice accent, was still very much an advantage, and he gave them what they felt most comfortable with, and now he’s stuck with it. So, yeah, I guess he knows how to handle himself. However, next time he tears someone’s face off, it would be awfully nice to have it on camera. Is the wee Sony in your other hand, as we speak?’

‘Antony, I don’t—’

‘Jane, don’t worry about it. He’s no’ gonnae do anything to spoil the programme, believe it. I know this guy, I promise you.’

What did she expect, common sense? God, were they all the same?

She said, slightly desperately, ‘It’s just... that it’s getting weirder. It’s getting out of hand. Like Hattie Chancery?’

‘Who?’

‘The daughter of the man who built Stanner. She killed her—’

‘Oh yeah, he told me.’

‘But what’s she have to do with Doyle and the Hound of Hergest? She probably wasn’t even born when Doyle was here. It’s just like, Oh, she’s spooky, let’s throw her into the pot. I just think it’s getting out of hand.’

‘So?’

‘Well, that...’ What was she supposed to say to this guy? Antony, I want to believe. I want to believe in the mystical Borderland, and if the Hound’s part of that, I wanted to believe in the Hound. I need this. I don’t want it turned into... artifice.

‘Jane, listen. Don’t worry, it’s gonnae be fine. We can sort all this out later. You’re my number one girl out there, and only one rule. If it’s sexy, shoot it.’

‘Cool,’ Jane said sadly.

After Walton, the forestry came up on both sides of the tractor, this hostile army of giants in new white armour. Danny’s face felt hot with anger and anxiety. He’d even switched off his music – mabbe feel more like playing it on the way back, instead of replaying over and over in his head what Greta had said.

Sounded like he always does. Half-baked. Like he en’t yere.

Danny leaned on the wheel and the tractor battered on into England. Like he’d figured, no Hereford gritters or ploughs had made it this far, and by the time he reached the turning to The Nant, the road looked like it would soon be impassable for ordinary vehicles.

However...

On Jeremy’s ground, the snow was packed tight on either side, and there was a well-cleared channel down the middle, and the tractor rolled sweetly down this long, grey alleyway to the edge of the farmyard.

Dear God.

Danny climbed down from the cab, hissing as the night wrapped its frozen arms around him. He looked around: no lights in the farmhouse, no security lights outside. Power off already? Snow brought the lines down?

Danny hoped it was only the power that was off.

He stood there and looked at The Nant for long seconds, snow accumulating on the vinyl shoulders of his donkey jacket and already inches thick, dense as Christmas-cake icing, on the farmhouse roof.

And then, before he’d realized it, he was bawling out into the white night, like Greta doing the full Janis, ‘Jeremy! Jeremy, where are you, boy? JEREMY!’

When he filled his lungs again, the bitter air stung his throat and he started to cough, doubled up by the gate. He leaned on the gate, tears in his eyes, panting, letting the silence re-form around him as the snow fell, all pretty and pitiless. Come out, Jeremy, please.

But when he pictured Jeremy, the boy wasn’t coming towards him but walking softly away through the cushiony fields, off into the hollows of the deep forestry where there was peace.

Danny raised his head and thought he saw a glow behind one of the windows in the farmhouse. And it was then that it started up.

At first it was like it was coming up from the ground, from some sunken prison cell, down where there was no light and no hope. It was coming up through the snow like tongues of cold fire. It was as old as the hills, as old as the Ridge, and bone-cold, the coldest sound in the world.

28 The Jane Police

SO MUCH BIGGER than asthma now.

This was what Alice said when Merrily rang her, as Lol had known she would, before the night was out.

Alice was a force of nature. If Dexter thought that by finally coming out with the untold story he was going to make her drop it, he’d got her badly wrong. She’d discovered this powerfully mystical aspect of Christianity she’d never imagined existed. And also – as the oldest sister in a dysfunctional family – she saw it as her responsibility to sort everything out.

Even from across the scullery, Lol had heard everything coming out of the phone, Alice’s voice crackling like an old radio. She and Dexter had had a row and Dexter had stomped off in a rage, although he was supposed to come back to do the last two hours in the chip shop – Alice saying he wasn’t having his own way this time, asthma or no asthma, nothing was going to stop the Eucharist. Telling Dexter she’d find Darrin herself, make sure he was there. At the Eucharist.

‘She’s fallen in love with the word,’ Merrily said. ‘Sounds powerful and kind of technical. Prayer’s comforting, but Eucharist suggests big guns.’

The computer was booting up, this row of icons extending along the bottom of the screen, Lol realizing that he didn’t know what any of them meant: another religion he didn’t understand.

‘So where’s Darrin now?’

‘Well, he was in prison. One way or another, Alice will find him. Which is not what Dexter wants. But Dexter’s clearly still scared of Darrin. Whereas Alice is scared of nobody.’

A face with a heavy moustache was on the screen, the expression solemn and dignified but the eyes bright with just the possibility of madness.

Illuminating Merrily’s other problem.

‘If the White Company are simply harmless, misguided, terribly British eccentrics’ – she was standing next to the computer, holding her pectoral cross between her fingers – ‘then why didn’t Jane tell me about them?’

‘Because she knows you’d have to disapprove,’ Lol said. ‘And she’d be embarrassed if she had to say, “I’m sorry I can’t work this weekend because my mum doesn’t want me exposed to evil forces.” ’

‘You think I’m overreacting.’

‘She’s grown up quite a lot in the past year. I mean... have you actually had experience of a medium letting evil into the world, or is this received wisdom?’

‘In as much as it’s received from the same source we get all our—’ Merrily sank into the chair, hair mussed. ‘It’s all received wisdom, isn’t it? It’s why they call us The Church. And if she’s grown up that much, why did you feel you had to tell me about Lucy?’

He looked up at her from the rug. ‘Because, in the Jane Police, I’m just a junior officer.’

She laughed. There was something that might have been a tear stain like a birthmark alongside her nose. He wanted to go over and lick it off.

‘I’m trying not to get screwed up or sanctimonious about this,’ Merrily said. ‘There are even one or two Deliverance ministers who actually work with mediums and don’t seem to have come to any—’

‘Look, you won’t rest till you find out what they’re doing. Why don’t you ask them?’

‘What do I do – send them a spirit message?’

‘Or even go back to the homepage and click on Contacts.’

‘Oh.’ She flipped back a page. ‘Contact Us.’

To apply for membership or to obtain any of our leaflets, contact Matthew Hawksley on otherside@asc.com

Merrily clicked on it. An e-mail option came up. ‘Should I?’

‘What’s your own e-mail address? No reference to Deliverance in it?’

‘Are you kidding? Jane uses it. It just says Watkins.’

‘Why don’t you say you’re a Conan Doyle enthusiast and you’ve heard there’s a conference at Stanner Hall this weekend. And is it still on, despite the weather? Mention the cwn annwn – that’ll sound knowledgeable.’

‘OK.’ Merrily began typing.

Good evening, Mr Hawksley,

Word has reached me of your gathering at the Stanner Hall Hotel, near Kington, in Herefordshire, this weekend. As a Conan Doyle enthusiast living not far away, I should be most interested to learn more details. In fact, given the weather conditions, will the conference still be taking place? As my own researches into the links between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Hound of Hergest, the cwn annwn, etc. have shown, this is a fascinating area of inquiry. If you could supply me with more details ASAP, I would be most grateful.

Yours sincerely,

M. Watkins.

‘Perfect,’ Lol said.

‘What if they are at Stanner, and one of them shows this to Jane?’

‘They’re unlikely to make the connection,’ Lol said. ‘But if they do, you’ll get a call from Jane. And she’ll have to tell you all about it, in a lot of detail, and there won’t be a mystery any more, and we can get out of this cell and go and light a fire and watch the snow build a big white wall between us and the world.’

Merrily put on a wry smile that didn’t quite work.

Jane was pacing the shabby lobby with the camera hanging from her shoulder like a school bag – the camera and all it represented a burden now; it had come to this. Time to talk seriously to Nat – soon as she got back.

When the porch door slammed, it wasn’t Nat but Matthew, the Harry Potter clone, carrying a laptop in a leather case. Just for the sake of it, Jane brought up the Sony 150 and shot him by the side of the Christmas tree in front of the reception desk.

Matthew half turned and stuck his tongue out. Behind him, the white lights on the tree were unevenly spread, and it looked spindly and skeletal, like a frosted pylon. Ben had brought the tree in himself last weekend, probably nicked it out of the forestry. Jane didn’t approve of young trees hacked off above the roots and brought indoors to die slowly, so that by Twelfth Night – Happy New Year – you had a stiffened corpse. She lowered the camera, nodding at the laptop.

‘You get e-mails from the Other Side on that?’

Matthew inspected her through his black-framed glasses. ‘I realize you’re much too cool to be mixed up with spiritists and channellers, and I suppose I was much the same at your age.’

‘What changed?’ To Jane, adulthood seemed an arid place tonight.

‘You don’t want to know. Stick to your filming.’

‘No, I do,’ Jane said.

Matthew stared into her eyes, and she stared back and realized he could be as old as Mum. Glasses with big frames sometimes made people look a lot younger, like with beards and double chins.

‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘what changed me was losing a mate. Beth’s husband, Steve Pollen, who was my boss at Powys Council. In the Archive department. Steve died very unexpectedly.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Only, it didn’t stop him coming into work. You’d find something interesting – say, some missing estate records – and you’d say automatically, “Here, look at this, Steve,” and then you’d think, Hang on, he’s dead, and then you’d realize you’d just caught a glimpse of him at the files. People who die without some degree of foreknowledge often don’t realize they’ve passed.’

Two of the lights on the tree had gone out. Jane thought of Ledwardine, remembered the dead branches she’d collected in the orchard and brought into the vicarage to be sprayed silver and gold for Christmas, she and Mum planning to decorate them this weekend. She felt a stab of loneliness.

‘Actually, I think I saw a woman once. Like, when she was dead? I didn’t know she was dead until later, so it wasn’t scary. I mean I was pretty sure I saw her, but... you know?’

Matthew nodded. ‘Most of the spirits we see are complete strangers, so we don’t realize they’re not there. It’s only when we spot someone in a situation where nobody could possibly be at a particular time, like in a deserted theatre or a church that’s been locked up, that we think, Uh-oh...’

Jane frowned; this conversation was getting too pally.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I still think spiritualism’s naff. It’s a big issue, life after death, but you see these mediums working an audience, and all they ever get is like, “Remember your dad’s blue suit in the wardrobe – well, it’s OK to send it to the Oxfam shop.” ’

Matthew looked exasperated at last. ‘People who are bereaved don’t want a lecture on metaphysics, they just want some evidence of survival – some small thing that sounds trivial and naff to an intellectual like you, but is conclusive proof that someone they thought had gone for ever is still around.’

So now she was just young and heartless.

‘Does he... still come into the office?’

‘Steve? No, he’s gone on now. We decided, Beth and I, that we ought to try and help him. Which is how we got into the network. You help them to accept their state. They hang around people they used to know and get confused. But if it’s explained to them, they’ll just turn around and see the light – literally. And they’ll see people – usually their relatives who’ve already passed – waiting to welcome them. Which is wonderful. And you’ve got that look again.’

The guy was clearly sincere. ‘Just seems too easy.’

‘It’s not easy, but it’s normal. What was interesting in this case, however, on a more basic level, was that when Steve died he was putting together a file of newly discovered records relating to Hergest and Stanner, and I was able to finish the work for him, with Beth. Which was how I learned about the Windlesham group and the White Company. Sometimes you’re led to things.’

Jane said, ‘You found out about Walter Chancery and everything – from these records?’

‘It connected up.’

The phone on reception started to ring.

‘So what did they do the night Conan Doyle came here?’

‘Hadn’t you better get that?’ Matthew said.

‘Look, I know all about Hattie Chancery...’

Matthew smiled, shaking his head, and walked off. Jane snatched up the phone.

‘Stanner Hall.’

‘Where’s your mobile?’

‘Irene!’

‘You wanna talk, talk,’ Eirion said.

‘Jane...’ Amber came round the corner from the kitchen steps. ‘Oh, sorry...’

Jane held up two fingers, appealing for a couple of minutes, and fished the Brigid Document from her jeans.

‘You do realize we leave in the morning,’ Eirion said when she’d finished reading it out. ‘I kind of thought you were ringing to wish me bon voyage.’

‘Oh hell, I’d forgotten.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘We’re leaving early because of the snow.’

‘Oh well, never mind this, then, I’ll—’

‘I’ll give it half an hour, OK?’

‘You’re awfully obliging, for a Welshman.’

‘Make that fifteen minutes,’ Eirion said.

Amber was nowhere in sight when Jane came off the phone, but Matthew was halfway up the stairs, in conversation with Alistair Hardy.

These guys – it was all so cosy. Forced-cosy, like a nursing home. Did death reduce the intellect to mush? Going to work, wondering why nobody would talk to you, till one day someone like Hardy turned you round, and there were all your dead relatives lined up like for some awful retirement party. Surprise, surprise: all your dead relatives in paper hats, with vacant, dead smiles and party poppers.

‘Jane!’ Amber was standing by the eerie tree, wearing her vinyl apron. Her voice was too light and thin for this place; in Stanner, unless you projected, your words were carried off like dust. ‘Come and help me, would you?’

‘OK.’

But as soon as they reached the kitchen steps, it was, ‘Jane, did you tell your mother what’s happening here?’

‘Well, no, I told you what she’d say.’

‘I said you wouldn’t tell her,’ Amber said with resignation. ‘Ben thought you would, but then he—’

‘Ben? Ben knows you rang my mum?’

‘It was actually Ben’s idea, Jane.’ This time Amber’s words resounded like a smoke alarm. ‘It was Ben who suggested I rang her.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’d better come down to the kitchen.’ Amber looked over her shoulder and then back at Jane and down at the camera in her hands. ‘Deception’s not my forte, Jane, I’m just a cook.’

The back-porch door was unlocked. Normal enough. Danny went through, with his lambing lamp switched on. The usual stuff in here: shovels, rubber leggings on a peg, hard hat and face guard for the chainsaw.

He banged on the back door. ‘Jeremy!’

The howling stopped. Danny rattled the handle; it turned and the door opened. Not normal, not at night. Danny shone the lamp into the kitchen: old-fashioned, green-painted kitchenette, exposed sink, old brown Rayburn.

‘Jeremy?’

The Rayburn chunnered to itself. A tap dripped. No one here. He went through into the living room, where the lambing lamp found Jesus half in shadow, his face tinted by the olive light of the Garden of Gethsemane. Below the mantelpiece, behind a fireguard, little orange flames were curling quietly out of a tamped-down mix of woodblocks and coal-slack in the range.

Below that, the dog sat on the brown and green rag rug. The dog wasn’t howling no more, only panting slightly, his flanks heaving, his stare on Danny but not moving from the rug that had been here all his life and all Jeremy’s life. This was a good dog, Border Collie crossed with something else. Something that howled.

‘Where’s the boss, Flag?’

The dog didn’t come to him, didn’t howl, didn’t growl, didn’t whimper, just sat. Danny shone the light around, over the pink-flowered wallpaper that Jeremy’s mam had pasted up long, long ago. Over the dresser was a picture plate of what might have been Hereford Cathedral, with a crack through the tower.

On the top of the drawer section of the dresser was a small white envelope.

On the envelope, it said Mr Danny Thomas.

Danny said, ‘Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.’

The envelope wasn’t sealed. Danny took out the single sheet of folded paper inside and held it under the lambing light.

Danny, I’ve never been one for formality. You been a good friend to me, always. Please take the dog, he knows you. Please deal with the sale of my stock, and see they go to the right kind of place or keep everything yourself for nothing. Natalie will

Danny let the paper fall. Something like a sob came out of him. When he looked up, the face of Jesus had gone into full shadow.

He ran out, through the kitchen, through the porch and into the white yard. Opposite him, the big barn door was shut. The little door in the bottom right-hand corner was not quite closed.

Danny saw a glimmering of light in there.

He stopped outside the door, very afraid. Behind him, the dog was howling again, making the coldest, loneliest sound in all the bloody world. The snow was coming down harder, but he couldn’t feel it. It didn’t feel cold no more; its flakes might have been rose petals.

29 Twist

YOU FORGOT HOW isolating snow could be. At the highest point of the village, the church and the vicarage had become an island of ancient stones and crooked timbers rising out of an arctic sea into a falling sky. Merrily and Lol made a brief exploratory foray into the upholstered softness: no vehicles moving on the square, the little market hall squatting like a white-capped mushroom, lighted windows in the Black Swan reduced to shining slits by high sills of snow. The Swan was a local pub again, its car trade in retreat.

Merrily and Lol came back in, and she shut the front door and stood eye to eye with the lamp-bearing Christ, lord of weary acceptance.

‘Wouldn’t even get to the main road, would we?’

She brushed down Jane’s fleece, kicked off her wellingtons, sending shards of snow skating across the mat and the flagstones. Lol followed her through to the scullery, where Ethel the cat dozed in front of the electric fire. He sat down in front of the computer, snow melting into his hair.

‘There you go.’

She leaned against him. ‘What?’

Thank you for your inquiry. To be conversant with the Stanner Project, it is clear you must have contacts in the Psychic World, although I have not heard of you. Accordingly, I attach our fact sheet.

The involvement of Sir Arthur himself in the events of 1899, combined with the subsequent history makes this, for us, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we very much hope to go ahead this weekend. However, the state of the weather means that we may be fewer in number than was originally anticipated and so, if you are a genuine person residing sufficiently close to Stanner Hall as to be able to journey here, we would be interested to hear more from you. We make no secret of our work, but it is essential that only sympathetic and like-minded people are involved as I am sure you appreciate. Please e-mail me again if you are interested. I shall be communicating with several other individuals throughout the evening and therefore shall be available should you wish to know more.

All good wishes,

Matthew

Lol looked up at her through his brass-rimmed glasses.

‘Confirmation.’ Merrily moved to the window, looked out at the ghosts of apple trees. ‘It looks like they’re there already. I... I’m just... Well, I’m not well disposed towards my daughter.’ Turning and throwing up her hands in frustration. ‘The Stanner Project? Project! How long’s that been going on? “We make no secret of our work”. How long’s the bloody kid known about all this?’

The electric fire put a blush on the white wall under the window – a poor defence, Merrily thought, against the winged spirits of the night, the cwn annwn chasing souls. While electricity had helped to kill off superstition, everyone in the countryside knew it was most prone to failure when you most needed it.

‘Might as well find out the rest.’ Lol clicked on the attachment.

THE STANNER PROJECT

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seemed, in his later years, to be in a permanent state of excitement and anticipation, always believing that his field of study would eventually change everyone’s life, removing all fear and uncertainty about the nature of death, dispelling centuries of superstition and removing the residual control still exercised over the less-sophisticated by the Church.

The White Company has come to believe that ACD’s own certainty stemmed, in part, from an experience that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, when he was already a successful author and a wealthy man, at a time when he was re-evaluating his life and searching for a new purpose. A ‘mid-life crisis’, if you like.

We believe that his initial baptism – a ‘baptism of fire’ – occurred at Stanner Hall, on the border of Herefordshire, England, and Powys, Wales, when he took part in what had originally been devised as little more than a party game for his amusement but which turned into something profoundly disturbing – so disturbing, in fact, that ACD, with his, at the time, limited knowledge was only able to deal with it by fictionalizing it in a way that would eliminate all paranormal implications.

We suspect it was many years before he was able to understand the true psychic and psychological implications of the Stanner experience, if indeed he reached a full understanding prior to his passing in 1930.

The Stanner Project, involving Mr Alistair Hardy and others, will attempt to re-examine the Experience in the light of more recent developments in psychical and psychological thinking and perhaps point the way to the breakthrough anticipated by ACD. The implications of this are quite awesome and any information, particularly with regard to the anomaly, which might further our inquiries even at this late stage would be gratefully received.

‘Certainly explains why Jane kept it to herself.’ Merrily gave the document to the printer. ‘ “Something profoundly disturbing”. That’s comforting, isn’t it? I’ll be able to sleep now.’

‘And the breakthrough... would be what?’

‘Always the same one with these people: final, undeniable proof of life after death. Kept Conan Doyle in transatlantic lecture tours for over twenty years.’

‘Matthew implies that the real reason the Church is opposed to spiritualism is not, as you might say, because people might let in something dangerous, but because it would undermine your power base. I mean... don’t you ever wonder?’

She stood there with Jane’s fleece hanging open and her pectoral cross swinging free. Of course she wondered.

Lol said, ‘Like, if these people were, suddenly, out of the blue to happen upon absolute, undeniable evidence of an afterlife?’

‘The atheists and the physicists would still deny it.’

‘What about the Christians?’

‘Ah well, even if we had to accept it as fact, it would still only be the beginning for us. However far it went, it would be the beginning. But look, they won’t, will they? They won’t find it. Because apart from anything, I don’t believe truth is ever going to come out of terror. Portents of death, the Hounds of Annwn?’

Bang, bang, bang. Front door. Ethel springing up on the desk.

Merrily flinched. ‘If this turns out to be Dexter and Alice again, I don’t think I can face it.’

Lol stood up. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘No, best if—’

She watched his face fall. Another test failed. Dammit, they had to get over this stupid concealment of the obvious.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you would.’

The kitchen was empty, every surface clean, as if the house was being vacated for a while. Amber stood next to the stove, which was something French and steely grey. The smell of rich chocolate seemed inappropriate tonight. The lights in here made Amber look ill.

‘As soon as they found out what your mother actually did, they thought it would be a good... friction point.’ The size and the emptiness of the kitchen made her voice sound forced and full of fissures, like a student teacher on day one.

Jane still wasn’t getting it. ‘Friction?’

‘If the Diocesan Exorcist jumped in with some dire warning about the risks of messing with spirits, they thought that would be a nice touch. Then they’d try and get her to express decent Christian reservations on video. And even if she wouldn’t play, it would still be a nice twist. Friction, you see, Jane. Friction’s sexy.’

‘Amber, I’m not— They?’

‘Ben. And Antony.’

If it’s sexy, shoot it.

‘They wanted to—’

‘Ben knew I wasn’t happy about the spiritualism angle from the start. He suggested I give your mother a ring and ask her advice. Pretend I was doing it behind his back. And if she reacted badly and tried to stop you coming here as a result, that would make another good twist. Twists are important. Conflict and friction and twists.’

Jane sagged. ‘They’d have used us... as a twist?’

‘Jane, love, don’t get this wrong – they never think of it as any kind of betrayal. It’s just television. It’s feeding the monster. TV’s this awful, voracious predator; if you get too near, you inevitably get eaten. I’m not saying I totally didn’t want to ring your mother – it would’ve been nice to get some objective advice from someone with expertise. And if she managed to step in and stop you coming, well, I suppose that was something else I didn’t have to worry about. Ben’s going, “Oh, don’t worry, Jane will have told her by now, we can expect another visit.” ’

‘But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I work here, I wouldn’t—’

‘I know. I said you wouldn’t.’

Jane unslung the camera, very much mistrusting it now, and placed it on the island unit, backing away from it. ‘Why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me now?’ Trying to stay calm, work out the extent of Ben’s duplicity, but aware of breathing faster.

‘I was going to call you tonight,’ Amber said, ‘and warn you that all the roads would be blocked so don’t even think of coming tomorrow. But with your youthful enthusiasm and your obvious desire not to miss anything interesting, you bloody well turned up tonight. That’s why I’m telling you.’

‘But, like, why would you... why would you not want me here? I’m shooting the video. And if Antony doesn’t make it—’

‘He may very well not get through, that’s true,’ Amber agreed. ‘Which would be leaving the lunatic in charge of the asylum.’

‘Ben?’

I’m a drama man. It’s about using real people and real places...

‘I don’t know whether Antony not being here will make him more sensible or even more irrational. All I know is, he’s been busily shooting material all week – interviewing Hardy and Mrs Pollen and a man in Kington who used to work—’

‘Hang on.’ Jane stiffened. ‘You’re saying he’s got a video camera? Ben?’

Amber sighed.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Jane, you—’ Amber’s face crumpled with this terrifyingly maternal kind of sympathy. ‘You didn’t really think they’d leave it all to you, did you?’

Jane stepped back and stared at the camcorder on the island unit like it was contaminated with anthrax.

‘Well, I...’ She felt this acute burning behind her eyes.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Amber said. ‘I should’ve told you days ago.’

Jane swallowed hard. No wonder Matthew had been laughing at her. They were all laughing at her. All of them laughing up their sleeves at the smart-arse schoolkid prancing round with her professional video camera. All of them: Ben, Antony... the White Company... Ben... Antony...

Don’t worry, it’s gonnae be fine. It’s gonnae be riveting, Jane.

‘Antony set me up?’

You’re my number one girl.

‘Jane, it’s— He really wouldn’t see it like that. These little Sonys are so comparatively cheap, they can scatter them around like throwaway pens. And if you thought you were the only person with a camera, you’d try all the harder to get good material. You’d start seeing your name in lights. Obviously, he’ll use some of what you’ve done, of course he will...’

‘He set me up!’

‘He also set Ben up. And Ben set Antony up. And you and I, between us, were supposed to set your mother up. Television, Jane – everybody at some time gets set up, the end invariably justifying the means. When it’s all over, Ben and Antony’ll watch the results together and get pissed, and that’ll be that. Television.’

‘It’s despicable.’

‘No, Jane.’ Amber did this brittle little laugh. ‘It’s art.’

‘And what do we do now? Just go along with it?’ Jane snatched up the camera with no reverence.

Amber said, ‘If you were thinking of hurling that thing to the flags in rage, please don’t. There’s been too much rage.’

Jane shook her head, letting the camera dangle from her hands on its strap. ‘What should I do?’

‘I think you should do what you were supposed to do in the first place. Tell your mother. Everything.’

‘And what’s she going to do?’

Amber said, ‘Look, I’m only a cook, but—’

‘Christ, Amber, if you say that again— I mean, I’m only a schoolkid, and if I can see it—’

‘See what?

‘That if Conan Doyle, the John the Baptist of Spiritualism, kept quiet about what happened here – even if it was evidence of survival after death – then there must have been something fairly unpleasant.’

‘Though obviously not unpleasant enough to prevent you grabbing the chance to film something similar, if you got the chance.’

Jane put the camcorder back on the island unit.

‘I’m not a very nice person, am I?’

‘You’re a young person, that’s all.’

‘OK, I’ll phone Mum. What then?’

Amber folded her arms, staring at the flags. ‘Realistically, I think your mother ought to talk to the only one of them I’ve had much to do with. Mrs Pollen.’

‘When was that?’

‘Earlier today. She came looking for me. Would hate to cause offence, et cetera. Old-fashioned country woman – Women’s Institute, cakes for the fête, jolly dinner parties, two golden labradors. And she’s the only one of them who got into this through personal loss. And she was a churchgoer.’

‘All the reward you get for suffering Victorian hymns and dismal sermons,’ Jane said. ‘He pinches your husband before his time.’

‘You must have stimulating discussions, you and your mother,’ Amber said.

‘Keeps her on her toes.’

‘Mrs Pollen now thinks that she was somehow directed here by her husband.’ Amber shrugged, looking uncommitted either way. ‘My feeling is that she believes that if they can get through, she’ll be... rewarded.’

‘Get some contact with him? That really doesn’t happen.’ Jane looked up at the high window, through which, by daylight, you could see the top of Stanner Rocks. ‘That’s so sad.’

‘On the surface, she’s very breezy and sort of earthy about it, but underneath she’s mixed up. In a way, it’s rekindled her faith, but she’s aware that the Church thinks it’s wrong, and there’s clearly some guilt about that. Anyway, I think she’d like to talk to your mother, and that wouldn’t do any of us any harm at this stage.’

‘Except possibly Ben.’

‘Not my problem,’ Amber said, and Jane looked at her, recalling what Nat had said about her calling it quits, moving out.

Amber said, ‘They call it the Stanner Project, Ben calls it the Hook. The contemporary events from which they can hang a century of conjecture. As far as he’s concerned whatever kind of answer they get, if any, is entirely irrelevant. What’s important is that the question gets posed, on television. Did The Hound of the Baskervilles begin here? Any extra spooky bits would be a nice bonus, but the programme doesn’t depend on that, now he knows what happened when Conan Doyle was here.’

‘He does?’ For a moment, Jane almost forgot her own humiliation. ‘You mean someone finally traced the missing document?’

‘Oh, Ben did better than that.’ Amber’s smile was twisted. ‘He traced someone who was working here. Well, not then, obviously, not at the time. But someone who worked here sixty-odd years ago and so talked to people who were here at the time.’

‘Wow – who?’

Amber said the contact had come through the guy who played the Major in the murder thing, Frank Sampson. When Dacre was trying to stop people talking to Ben, it had worked in reverse in some cases, and Frank had phoned on Tuesday to say an old man called Leonard Parsonage, who used to be the butler here, would be happy to talk to Ben.

‘Seems Dacre’s father got him sacked years ago,’ Amber said. ‘You know what it’s like around here for old feuds.’

‘Leonard.’ Jane was remembering Gomer’s account of the death of Hattie Chancery. Took a while ’fore one of ’em was up to going up them stairs. Ole Leonard, the butler, it was, my mam said.

‘He lives in a sheltered bungalow now, in Kington. He’s over ninety, which still means he must have been in his twenties when he was here.’

‘Amber, he was the person who found Hattie’s body. He’s talked about all that?’

‘Better than that, he’s talked on videotape.’ Amber bent and opened a cupboard in the base of the island unit. ‘Do you want to go and watch it? You can tell your mother all about it.’

‘You’ve got it here?’

Amber rose, clutching a Maxell VHS videotape in a light blue case with a gold stripe. ‘This is a copy that Ben ran off for Antony to look at. I pinched it from his desk. You can take it up to our bedroom, there’s a video machine in there.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘You know which our bedroom is, don’t you, Jane?’

Jane accepted the tape. ‘You sure you want me to see it?’

‘Jane, you’re gagging to see it.’

Lol came back into the scullery with Gomer Parry, cap in his hands, squeezing it like a sponge as he fought for breath, ignoring the chair Merrily was offering.

‘Know you en’t gonner mind, vicar. I got the truck out front. Had a call from Danny Thomas, see. You recalls Danny Thomas, of Kinnerton?’

She stared at him, puzzled, assembling the image of a bearded man with grey hair over his shoulders, a flat cap on top. ‘You mean the one who’s also your partner now?’

Gomer’s glasses had clouded. He snatched them off, wiped them savagely on his sleeve.

‘Gomer, let me get you some tea—’

‘No! No, thank you.’ He rammed his glasses back on. ‘Bloody stupid. ’Course you knows the boy.’ He stared at her defiantly. ‘En’t lost no marbles, vicar, I just—’

‘I know. You went dashing out into the cold and then back into the warm. It gets to us all.’ She took his cap gently, unrolled it and hung it on the waste-paper bin near the electric fire. ‘He’s OK, isn’t he? Danny?’

‘He’s all right. Juss called me up. Just he got this pal, see.’ Gomer sat down at last, bringing out his ciggy tin like it was part of the same cycle of movements. ‘Ta.’

‘Take it slowly, Gomer.’

‘Bit of a loner, that’s all. Hell, a lot of a loner.’ Gomer shook his head, annoyed, stared in disgust at his ciggy tin. ‘I en’t thinkin’ straight at all... You knows full well who I’m talkin’ about. Boy’s girlfriend’s daughter, her’s Jane’s... you know, that kiddie?’

‘Clancy? You’re talking about Jeremy... ?’

‘Berrows. Exac’ly. Jeremy Berrows. Me and Danny been talkin’ a lot about Jeremy Berrows, the situation he’s got ’isself into. And a lot of other stuff. And I been thinkin’ for a long time – Danny, too – we needs to ask the little vicar to take a look. And you know how it is, you lets things slide and then it all come down on you. And now Jeremy...’

Gomer took off his glasses, pinched his nose.

‘What’s he done, Gomer?’

‘Boy’s hanged ’isself,’ Gomer said.

30 The Huntress

‘WHERE DO YOU want me to start, Mr Foley?’ Leonard Parsonage asked.

He was a very thin old man. All really old people tended to be thin, Jane thought, making themselves less of a target for all the things that could take you down.

‘I’d just like to get the levels right before we start.’ Ben’s voice came through fainter, from one side. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you’ve been doing since you left Stanner? Have you been in Kington ever since?’

The old guy got as far as saying he’d returned to Kent, where he was born, to get married, then come back to Kington to buy an ironmonger’s business. Then Ben must have cut the recording. When it came back, Ben was saying, on that same background level, ‘Tell me what she was really like, Leonard. Tell me what Hattie was like – Mrs Davies.’

‘Mrs Chancery.’ Leonard had a tiny black personal microphone clipped to the mustard-coloured tie jutting out from the neck of his v-neck pullover. The mike looked like a stag beetle climbing up it. ‘We hadn’t to call her Mrs Davies. Mrs Chancery, it was, or Mrs Hattie.’ He stopped talking and looked directly into the lens.

‘No, at me, Leonard. Let’s start again, OK? And remember, talk to me, not the camera. Forget about the camera.’

It looked to Jane like this had been hard going, but all Ben’s questions and prompts could be edited out, and he could overlay the edits with other pictures, like the photos of Hattie and Stanner – Jane had learned all this from Eirion. For all the use it was now.

Wrenching back her anger, she looked around the Foleys’ bedroom while Leonard rearranged himself. It was at the front of the house, with a bay window overlooking the car park, and it was very unfussy, with a plain wardrobe and a double divan. No dressing table, no mirror. Very Amber.

‘Well, it had to be “Mrs Chancery”,’ Leonard said, ‘because Stanner was the House of the Chancerys, you see. Robert Davies, he was just the stallion brought to the mare, that’s what they used to say. Looked less of a stallion, mind you, when I first saw him than he had before the First War, according to Mrs Betts – she was the cook. Mrs Betts said they all used to fancy Mr Robert, although in later years they all felt very sorry for him, naturally, because of... because of the way she would treat him.’

Leonard wore false teeth which clicked sometimes, but he talked quite fluently, in the way of a man who was used to dealing with people. Ben had positioned him in front of a picture window with a view across some kind of car park to Kington market place with its red-brick clock tower.

‘What was she like, Leonard? Physically. Describe her – what she looked like. Take your time.’

‘She was... Oh, my Lord, she was like a goddess to us. Diana the Huntress – somebody called her that, I think it was the minister at the church. Diana the Huntress, yes. Because she was, you see – she used to go hunting every day of the week, it seemed like, in the season. Well, not that many women did, in those days. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she was all woman. All woman. Too much woman, some might’ve said.’

Leonard smiled in what struck Jane as a surprisingly lascivious way, and there was a shiny bit of drool in the corner of his mouth. He had a thin white moustache, kind of dandyish. Jane wondered, just wondered...

‘OK, tell me about the hunting,’ Ben said. ‘How did that start?’

‘Oh well, old Walter, he encouraged her. That was what I was told. Walter couldn’t ride and he was too old to start, but that was what you did in those days, the gentry, and so he had his daughter on a horse from a very early age, and that was how she got in with the hunt. If you rode, you hunted – pretty much the way it is today. But I would say the hunting was always more important than the riding for Mrs Hattie. Anyway, that was about when the Middle Marches Hunt was first started, and it was mainly young people back then.’

‘This was before the First World War?’

‘It would’ve been, yes. She was just a girl, but quite large, even then – you could see that from the photos, I expect. Yes, the hunt, I believe they kept that on through most of the War, although some of the young men had gone off to fight. Afterwards, after the War, it went from strength to strength. They had these hounds from France that were bred down in Glamorgan – nothing but the best for the Middle Marches. The Chancerys, they supported the Hunt in the early years – financially, that is, when they had money to spare – and they also founded a hunt supporters’ club to raise more money, so it would always be buoyant. But Mrs Hattie lived for it, oh my Lord, yes. If there was bad snow or disease or some reason the hunt had to be called off, then she was in a very black mood indeed.’

‘This is in your day, Leonard?’

‘Oh yes. I came there in thirty-four, which was the year after the old fellow died. I was soon Mrs Hattie’s right-hand man – that was what she used to say. Or “my squire”. She talked about herself like a knight on horseback. “My squire”, yes. I was her squire.’

‘Black moods?’

‘Eh?’

‘You said she’d be in a black mood when the hunting was off. What was that like?’

‘Black moods... black hound.’ Leonard bit down on his lower lip and stared into the distance. He had pale blue eyes, watery.

‘What’s that mean?’ Ben said.

‘Used to say she ran with the black hound. One of her sayings. She’d come back, and the groom would take her horse, all covered with sweat, and I’d be there, and she’d say, “Bring me a bloody drink, Leonard, the black hound was in the pack today.” ’

‘What did she mean by that?’

‘Well, it was one of her sayings.’

‘But did she mean there was an actual—?’

‘It meant, as far as I could fathom, that she’d been riding hard and fierce that day, Mr Foley. And if there’d been no kill, she wouldn’t be in the best of moods.’

A silence, then, that went on for a long time. The television and video were in the corner of the bedroom, near the window. Jane was sitting on a bedding box at the foot of the bed, and old Leonard seemed to be looking over her shoulder. She glanced behind, uncomfortable, as if Hattie might be there with her onion eyes. The bed was unmade, as though Ben had just rolled out of it. Or as if someone had pulled all the—

‘And Mr Robert would soon know about it,’ Leonard said.

Jane turned back to the TV in time to catch another silence.

Ben said eventually, ‘What did she do to Mr Robert, Leonard?’

‘He...’ Leonard licked his lips. ‘Next day, Mr Robert might have a black eye, or a big lip. Or scratch marks down his cheek. Or all of them. That was the wounds you could see.’

‘She might have done damage you couldn’t see?’

Leonard nodded very slightly. ‘Sometimes he’d be limping.’

‘And this happened after she ran with the black hound,’ Ben said, with a lot of emphasis.

Leonard said nothing.

‘Where did they go, Leonard? Did they hunt on the Ridge?’

‘Oh, everywhere. For the local farmers, it didn’t do not to let the hunt cross your land.’

‘The...’ Ben broke off, struggling to form a question. ‘Leonard, when she said “black hound”, did you have any reason to believe she might have been making some connection with the legend of the Hound of Hergest?’

Leonard smiled.

‘You do know of the legend?’

‘’Course I do.’ He looked stern again. ‘And all that damn silliness.’

Ben let the silence hang for twenty, thirty seconds.

‘Silliness,’ Leonard said again.

‘What do you mean exactly?’

‘There was a bit of silliness when she... when they died.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh...’ Leonard looked cross. ‘One of the maids said she’d seen a shadow of a big black dog go across the lawn.’

‘When Hattie died?’ Ben keeping the excitement out of his voice. ‘Robert?’

‘Oh, before. Before any of it. The night before, around dusk, before it was dark. And the night before that, too. Or so she said. Just silliness, Mr Foley. Things get repeated and exaggerated, specially in country places. You don’t want that on your programme, do you?’

‘And Hattie – she knew about the legends.’

‘Aaah.’ Leonard’s face twisted in exasperation. ‘She’d no time for legends. History, now, she was interested in history. She always said this was her place, and her roots were here – even though they weren’t, of course, because Stanner was still a new house then, even if it looked old. But she’d never known anywhere else, she was born at Stanner, so I suppose that was true in a way. And she used to go to the church and look at the graves.’

‘Why?’

‘I was never with her, Mr Foley, I was only the butler. Never been much of a churchgoer, anyway. Lost my two older brothers in the First War, and never saw much point to it after that. Got themselves killed before they were twenty-one, and here’s me, ninety-three. It’s all a lottery, Mr Foley, no God in this, I’m afraid. Or if there is, you can’t rely on him.’

‘What about Mrs Chancery? Did she go to church?’

‘Well... she went to the church. Not to the services much, unless it was something to do with the hunt – a funeral, a wedding. When a member of the hunt got married, they’d all form an arch outside the church, whichever church it was, with their riding crops and they’d—’

‘Leonard, why did she go to the church, if not to services?’

‘To look at the graves, like I say. The big ones inside the church. I never go there, but aren’t there some big ones inside?’

Silence.

Ben said, ‘You mean... the tombs?’

‘Ah. Sorry. Yes, the tombs.’

‘Thomas Vaughan.’

‘Him, yes. Black Vaughan. And the woman.’

‘Ellen Gethin. The Terrible.’

‘The Terrible, yes. Mrs Hattie, she used to say, that’s my ancestor, there in the church.’

Jane said, ‘Shit.’

‘You’re saying she described Ellen Gethin as her ancestor? This... take your time, Leonard, this is interesting. She said that this Ellen Gethin – the Terrible – was her ancestor?’

‘I think she meant they were alike,’ Leonard said. ‘Or she liked to think they were. Did this Ellen hunt? I suppose she would’ve done.’

‘What else?’

‘Eh?’

‘Did they have anything else in common?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘Leonard, if I remind you that Ellen Gethin killed a man in cold blood...’

‘Did she?’

‘You don’t know about that?’

Leonard didn’t look particularly interested. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I expect I must’ve heard about it once, a long time ago perhaps, but I’ve never bothered much with history.’

‘You mean medieval history. Old history.’

‘Knights and things.’

‘But more recent history... Walter Chancery’s time.’

Leonard smiled. ‘That’s not history to me.’

‘Good,’ Ben said. ‘But first, can we... talk in some detail about the night when Hattie killed Robert?’

‘I’d really rather not, if you don’t mind, Mr Foley,’ Leonard said. ‘That wasn’t what Frank said you wanted to talk about.’

‘It upset you?’

‘It upsets me still, Mr Foley. No point in upsetting yourself any more when you get to my age. It’s all over, it’s all done, it was a very tragic business, and it didn’t do me any good at all in the long run. The children were too young, and it turned out there were huge debts. Mr Walter Chancery’s younger brother came to sort things out, and I think he just wanted rid, and my services were the first to be dispensed with, thanks to... someone I could mention but won’t. Anyway, Mrs Hattie, she always valued my services. Oh my Lord, yes. And I cried when I found her. I was in tears. I knew it was all over for all of us.’

The water in Leonard’s eyes had become pools, and he turned his head away.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.

‘Switch that thing off, would you?’

The tape cut out and the TV screen went blue.

Jane just sat there, watching it, relieved in a way, because there was an awful lot to think about. There was a link between Hattie and the Hound, and the link was Ellen Gethin: Ellen in her long, girdled gown, the small cap on her head. Comely wench, Antony Largo had said irreverently. Nice body. And then Ben had said, Me and Thomas and Ellen. I feel, in a strange sort of way, that we’re kind of a team now.

The TV screen flickered, and Leonard was back. It must have been some time later because his eyes were dry and calm now, and it was a different camera angle – Leonard’s chair pushed closer into the window. A shirt-sleeved arm came into view, with a mug of tea or coffee on the end.

‘There you are, Leonard.’ Vaguely familiar voice.

‘Thank you, Frank.’ Leonard’s hands wrapped themselves around the mug. ‘You don’t mind this, do you, Mr Foley?’

Frank Sampson, Jane thought, Arrow Valley Amateur Dramatics.

Ben said something inaudible.

‘Yes,’ Leonard said. ‘That’s all right. I’ll talk about that. I wasn’t there, though, you understand that. I’m old, but I’m not that old.’

‘You don’t look a day over sixty, Leonard,’ Ben said heartily, and Leonard giggled shrilly, and Ben started to ask him questions about Walter Chancery and his crass attempts to become a society host in his castle by the rocks. Leonard kept stopping to remind Ben that this was only what he’d heard from Mrs Betts, the cook, and a few others of the staff who’d been there many years, and Ben kept saying, don’t worry about that, just keep it coming.

Leonard said it wasn’t quite right about the Chancerys building the house from scratch. In fact, they’d taken it over from a business associate of Walter’s, who was an architect and had done some industrial design for Walter. He’d built the house for himself, lovingly, over many years and had been killed when some masonry collapsed.

‘Here?’ Ben asked.

‘No, no. On a site over in the Midlands. But he’d invited Walter and Bella to see his house, and Bella had fallen in love with it. And after this chap died, she urged Walter to buy it. They’d just found out Bella was pregnant and, of course, this made Walter more amenable to the idea of a new family home.’

Leonard then told a long story about how Walter had had all these stags’ heads with huge antlers brought down from Scotland, and a suit of armour from a place in Gloucestershire. There was a duke came to stay once, Leonard said, or it might have been an earl.

‘And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?’ Ben said nonchalantly at one point. ‘Didn’t they say Sir Arthur was there?’

Leonard looked thoughtful, then he smiled. Outside the window, a woman with a black labrador walked across the car park to a silver Ford Focus.

‘Oh my Lord, yes,’ Leonard said. ‘No doubt about that.’

Jane thought she heard Ben’s sigh, and if she hadn’t heard it she’d sensed it.

But Leonard’s eyes narrowed, and his hands came up, a forefinger quivering.

‘But he never came back, you know,’ Leonard said. ‘That’s why it’s been forgotten. He came here the once, but he never came back, and you can quite understand that. When you know what they did.’

31 Noise and Blood

THE HEDGEROWS WERE swollen on both sides into vast white bales, the lanes squeezed down to one vehicle width. The snow was still falling, but in a desultory way, like a handful of pebbles after an avalanche.

The cab of Gomer’s truck smelled of oil and sawdust and the suspension hung down on the left, as if the truck had a hernia.

‘No, she hasn’t really talked much about the mother,’ Merrily said over the heater’s phlegmy cough. She had on Jane’s duffel coat, woollen gloves, a white woolly hat from the WI Christmas Fair, and Lol’s scarf. And she was still cold. And chilled, which was different.

‘We always knowed there was some’ing we din’t know, vicar,’ Gomer said, ‘that’s the point. First the boy was gonner marry Mary Morson, then her’s gone off with this naturalist feller from the Rocks. Next thing, this Nat’lie’s turned up with her camper van and the kiddie, and they’ve moved into The Nant inside the week, and the ole van gone to Stanner Rocks. Burning her boats kind of thing.’

They passed a barn in a field, cloaked in snow, one of the few isolated barns in this particular area not yet turned into luxury dwellings, and therefore still available for farmer-suicides. It was nearly always the barn, the engine room of the farm. Barns had fully exposed hanging beams and trusses and bales of hay you could build up, steps to the gallows. Dozens of farmers in this area had gone out this way in the past twenty years. Something ritualistic about it: a dying breed speeding up the inevitable.

‘Love at first sight?’ Merrily thought of Lol, back at the vicarage: Go – pushing her mobile phone into her hands – This situation gets you over there, with a good reason. Two birds, one stone. I’ll keep talking to Matthew. Keep it switched on.’

‘Seemed that way.’ Gomer dipping his lights as they made it round a bend. Ahead of them, a small dead tree poked out of a field like a stiffened hand from under a shroud.

Merrily said, ‘But?’

The truck started to skid; Gomer casually spun the wheels into it; the truck rocked and steadied and shaved a few inches from the left-hand snow wall. Gomer bit down on his thin ciggy.

‘Other day, see, what happens is Danny comes home, finds Mary Morson there. Says this Natalie’s been seen in her ole camper van up on Stanner. With a feller. Gettin’ up to things.’

‘Oh.’

‘Well, Mary Morson, her figured they could get back together, her and Jeremy, if it all broke up – that’s Greta’s view of it. Likely on Mary’s terms. Her’d wanner crush him first, then pick up the bits, ennit?’

‘Likeable girl, then.’

‘All heart. So Greta, her says to Danny, He’s your mate, you better go tell him. Mary Morson, her en’t gonner sit on this potato for too long. Well, Danny, his renowned diplomat skills don’t extend to tellin’ his mate his woman’s playin’ away.’

‘Difficult.’

‘Near impossible, for a Radnorshire farmer.’

‘Who was the man she was with, Gomer?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Danny didn’t tell him about it, but you think someone else did?’

‘Mary Morson, mabbe her rung to break the news to him as he wasn’t the only fish in Natalie’s stream.’ Gomer went silent for maybe eight swings of the wipers. ‘Well, see, the thing is, you didn’t always have to tell Jeremy things. He’d know. Wouldn’t let on, mabbe, but he’d know.’

‘Oh?’

‘No big deal, vicar. Well, mabbe now it is, but it din’t used to be when farm life rolled along with no distractions, no form-fillin’, no ministry inspectors on your back.’

‘You’re saying—?’

‘Boy’s what we used to call a natural farmer. In the ole sense. A quiet farmer. Goin’ quietly on.’

Gomer turned left, and the many-tiered lights of a transcontinental lorry came into view, like a remote cocktail bar. Merrily pulled out her cigarettes and lighter.

‘My ole mam,’ Gomer said, ‘her’d never leave part of an onion in the house. Use the lot, else throw the rest away, or put him on the fire. First new moon in May, my ole feller used to set about the nettles. You done it then, the ole nettles’d stay down. And they wasn’t that superstitious, see. Just that most folk, they’d have one or two things they’d stick by.’

‘Mmm. I count magpies, I’m afraid.’

‘Jeremy’s family, they knowed the lot. Why you never watches a funeral through glass. Why it en’t right for a woman to come in first on Christmas Day, ’less her slept there the night before, and definitely not if her’s wearing new shoes. Boy growed up with all that. All of it. Most youngsters, it gets to the stage when they rebels against the ole ways, only Jeremy’s dad died when he was young, and he took over the farm when he was n’more’n a child. Took on the farm, took on the traditions. Small world, no distractions. Found he had a... haptitude. You followin’ me, vicar?’

‘Go on.’ Remembering her Herefordshire grandad, his relationship with apple trees.

‘Danny d’reckon it was like it was all talkin’ to him: the ground, the trees... the stock. He sees stuff some of us mabbe don’t notice, and it tells him things. Sounds like ole wallop, don’t it?’

‘A touch pagan, maybe.’

‘Oh hell, no. Big churchgoers, all their lives, the Berrows. That’s why Danny said could you come, take care of things now.’

‘I see.’

‘He...’ Gomer hesitated. ‘He never was good with people, see, Jeremy. Church services scared him. But he’d go on his own, see, when the church was empty, take bits of stuff for Harvest Festival when nobody was about. Time of the Foot-and-Mouth, he’d be there every morning and every night, on his own – not for long, mind, just slipping in quietly. And the Foot-and-Mouth stayed well away from The Nant. The Berrows ground, see, always been in good heart, never no chemicals.’ Gomer gave Merrily a quick glance. ‘I en’t specifically implying nothin’ by this, vicar. Boy went quietly on, that was all.’

‘You said he... knew things, without having to be told.’

Again, Gomer didn’t offer a direct answer.

‘Danny was over there earlier. Boy’d already brought his sheep down, cleared his track. So when he phones to ask if Greta can take this kiddie, Clancy, for the night, Danny knowed straight off some’ing was wrong. The woman always took the kiddie back to the farm at night. Then her went back to Stanner herself if her had to work late, like doing the bar.’

‘So she’d stay the night, but she wouldn’t have her daughter stay there.’

When Merrily had asked Jane if Clancy worked at the hotel too, at weekends, Jane had said Natalie wouldn’t allow it because the kid was so far behind at school. Natalie was very strict about homework and early nights. Odd really, Jane had said, because she certainly wasn’t the Victorian-parent type.

‘But, Gomer, Jeremy must have known that Danny would be suspicious and go rushing up there. And that Danny would have the means to get through the snow.’

‘Likely the boy wanted to be sure it was Danny found him, ennit?’

‘Oh.’

Gomer switched off the wipers, and Merrily saw that the snow had almost stopped. You could see low cloud now, shifting like smoke, the pale suggestion of a moon behind it. They crested a hill, and there was Kington: a snug medieval snow-fantasy tucked under the white wings of the border hills. With its brave twinkling of Christmas lights, the town looked small and cosy; the hills didn’t.

There were no visible lights in the Welsh hills. Sometimes, from outside, Wales loomed like a threat. It all relaxed once you were across the border, down in the pale, quilted pastures of the Radnor Valley. All the threat was in the space between.

‘It’s a... strange kind of place, isn’t it? This valley. Hergest... Stanner... the, erm, Hound.’

‘They don’t talk about it, none of it, you know that. Not the local people.’

‘No.’

Not even whimsy for tourists, she knew that much. Hergest Court, long since relinquished by whatever remained of the Vaughan family, was apparently tenanted most of the time, but never promoted as a visitor attraction. When you thought about it, very little of anything here was for the tourists.

‘Temptin’ fate, see,’ Gomer said. ‘You asks people, they’ll give you, Ah, load of ole wallop. But they en’t gonner tempt fate, all the same.’

‘But, if the Vaughan family’s long gone...’

‘Temptin’ fate,’ Gomer mumbled, almost angrily. ‘You don’t do that.’

‘Gomer, tell me one thing: you see any basic connection between the legend of the Hound of Hergest and the stuff you were telling me about the other night – whatever’s been killing this guy Dacre’s sheep?’

Gomer grunted. ‘Has it?’

‘Has it what?’

‘Been killin’ sheep. I en’t yeard of any, save for Dacre’s. And Sebbie...’ Gomer paused, chopping down to second gear. ‘Sebbie’s losin’ it, big-time. Fact.’

They came to the traffic island on the edge of town: an iced cake, uncut. Chances were nobody would get in or out of town tonight. The truck creaked around the island and on to the bypass via a shallow gully down the middle.

‘Losing it how?’ Needing a firmer handle on this before she went into the Berrows farm.

‘On the booze. Givin’ out daft sentences on the Bench. Makin’ a spectacle of ’isself in the pubs. Family thing, I reckon. Mabbe it all comes down to wassername... genetic. Only, you feels it’s in the ground, too, weighing it down like clay. Two attitudes to the ground, see, vicar: either you goes quietly on, tendin’ and healin’, like Jeremy Berrows, or you goes roarin’ over it, like with the hunt. Whoop, whoop.’

‘Domination.’

‘Makes you feel like you’re in charge, I s’pose. I wouldn’t know. Mabbe it’s just about noise and blood. All I know is, there’s what feels like a terrible rage buried somewhere in this valley. You take the tale of ole Black Vaughan – mad as hell, turnin’ over market carts. The Hound in the night, the bull in the church. Blood and noise all around. Yere’s Sebbie Dacre, Master of the Middle Marches: blood and noise. Like his granny. And in the middle of it all, this little farmer goin’ quietly on, little island of calm. Can’t be easy. Mabbe Jeremy, mabbe he was yearin’ all the noise and blood poundin’ in his head, gettin’ closer and closer, until he couldn’t take it n’more.’

‘Maybe someone should’ve...’

‘Sorry, vicar?’

Rural stress came in many forms, most of them unrecorded, unrecognized by psychiatry.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily tightened Lol’s long scarf. ‘Are we nearly there?’

With the lights of Kington behind them, they’d followed the bypass into a harder, lightless landscape, ranks of snow-caked conifers forming on the hazy edges of the headlight beams.

‘What have they been shooting at, Gomer? Do you know?’

She’d been here many times, and she knew that when you turned the corner and cruised down into the Radnor Valley, the landscape and your spirits usually lightened. Only tonight they wouldn’t be turning the corner.

‘Likely shadows,’ Gomer said. ‘Shootin’ at shadows.’

At first, Jane had thought like, Wow, the enterprise, the bravado, the spectacle.

Realizing in seconds that nothing else the Chancerys might have done could have been more blatantly insane. And in that situation today they would have known it – between them, they would have seen, for heaven’s sake, a dozen crazy horror movies with the same simplistic message: don’t meddle. A pulp cliché now.

They’d been mature people, people of wealth and status, and they’d behaved like irresponsible kids.

But, of course, they were Victorians – at the decadent end, verging on the Edwardian. Jane had done her social history and, at this particular period, in the heat and smoke of technological revolution, superstition belonged to the more primitive corners of the Empire. The Chancerys would have felt some kind of immunity, by virtue of being Victorians.

Jane sat down on the edge of her bed, looking at the window, a blackboard dusted with chalk, and still seeing the ill-fitting dentures of Leonard Parsonage working their way around the word exshorshism. The beetle-like personal mike distorting it, too close to his mouth because of the way his tie bulged out of his pullover.

Jane shuddered. Sitting there in the dark, with three inches of snow on the window sill, she finally called home.

Not thinking too hard about what she was going to say. Fairly confident, now, that she could turn this around with Mum. Because it was a fact that if she hadn’t kept quiet, stuck around, picking up pertinent information here and there, ear to the ground... well, no outsider would know the full extent of it, and that—

‘Knight’s Frome— sorry, Ledwardine Vicarage.’

Jane stiffened for a moment, not expecting this.

‘Lol? Is that you?’

‘Jane!’

‘What are you doing there?’ Mum and Lol: a secret love-tryst. The things that went on when your back was turned.

‘Not enough,’ Lol said. He didn’t sound happy.

‘Are you snowed in?’

‘Kind of.’

‘You and Mum?’

‘I wish,’ Lol said.

As soon as Merrily walked into the living room at The Nant, her gaze connected with the eyes of Jesus whose face wore a bleak smile of acceptance, his halo dull with weariness. Kind of, Just get this over. The picture wasn’t as famous as The Light of the World, but it wasn’t any more guaranteed to engender hope.

The half-mile track hadn’t been blocked. Gomer had been able to drive up to the wall around the farmhouse, where Danny’s tractor was wedged.

She stood near the living-room doorway, spotting the dog next: a sheepdog, more black than white. The dog’s head was pointing upwards, between the knees of the man sitting on a wooden stool. The man was looking down at the floor. Behind him, a fire roared in the range, gilding perhaps everything in the room except the picture of Jesus.

Gomer prodded her gently into the room, and Danny Thomas stood up from somewhere.

‘Mrs Watkins... Good of you.’

Now she was here she didn’t know what to say, how to go about this. It was like the strangeness of the whole area was concentrated in this square, fire-lit room. And when Danny spoke, that was also surreal, initially.

‘I, er... I had this album once, see. In my folky days.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Fairport Convention,’ Danny said. His hair hung over his face like wet seaweed over a rock. ‘Babbacombe Lee. Period when Dave Swarbrick was writin’ the songs? Before your time, I ’spect.’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I... I remember it.’

She stared at Danny, in his bottle-green farmer’s overalls. The dog began to whimper. A log shifted on the fire.

‘Oh God,’ Merrily whispered. ‘John Babbacombe Lee, the man they couldn’t—’

Danny Thomas looked at her helplessly, his eyes wide with anguish. Danny had been crying. ‘Hang,’ he said. ‘The man they couldn’t hang.’ He pointed at the man on the stool in front of the fire. ‘And that... that’s Jeremy Berrows, the man couldn’t hang hisself. Stupid little bastard.’

32 Party Game

‘BUT HE’S ALL right?’ Jane was sounding lost, disconnected, groping for certainties. ‘He won’t die?’

‘Not if he stays away from rope,’ Lol said.

Hanged. A weighty word, full of ancient resonance and with only one definition: execution.

‘Lol... why? Why would he?’

Jeremy Berrows. A harmless, benign little guy, Merrily had said, when she’d called to tell him it could be a long night. There were things, she’d said, that didn’t add up. Things that even Gomer couldn’t put together.

‘Was it like a cry-for-help thing, or what?’

‘I... wouldn’t think it’s what you do when you’re hoping someone’s going to discover you in time,’ Lol said. ‘Meanwhile, keep this to yourself, OK?’

The lemon-yellow sleep light on the front of the computer was swelling and fading, swelling and fading. Here in the vicar’s study, where madness collected like dust. Flaky fantasies in the phone lines, images of the irrational only clicks away.

‘Why’s Mum gone to The Nant? Why did Gomer want her to go? I need to talk to her.’

‘If you do, it might be wisest to assume that she knows too much already for you to get away with... concealing anything.’

‘Like what?’

‘The White Company?’

‘Oh my God, who’s been talking? She knows about the documentary?’

Lol said nothing.

‘Lol, look, all it was – I swear it – Ben and this guy Antony are shooting a TV thing about Conan Doyle and spiritualism, and Antony gave me a video camera. He wanted me to shoot stuff, when he wasn’t there. So, like, I wasn’t going to blow it, just because there were spiritualists involved. I mean, was I?’

‘No, you wouldn’t do that.’

‘Only a lot of it was total bullshit. I was very naive. I was stitched up. I’m an extremely gullible person, and I wish I’d never come here, all right?’

‘I’d like to make some time to cry for you,’ Lol said, ‘but could you tell me about the Stanner Project first?’

She was quiet for so long, he was beginning to think they’d lost the signal.

‘Oh God, you really do know everything,’ Jane said.

Merrily followed Danny Thomas back into the kitchen, shut the door.

‘What about a doctor?’

Danny dropped a scornful hiss. ‘What’s a doctor gonner do for his condition?’

He went and half-sat on the edge of the kitchen table, hair matted on his face. When she’d put on the electric light, he’d switched it off again, as if there was something here that had to be contained in near-darkness to stop it spreading. A tongue of flame wavered on the wick of a small hurricane lamp on the draining board. This was the lamp that had been on a ledge in the barn when Danny had crashed in. When he’d seen something that he said was like out of a black acid-flashback.

‘Thought I was too late. All the beasts in there moaning.’

And Jeremy Berrows in the meagre lamplight, stoically dangling.

Danny roaring in agony and rage.

Jeremy, seeing Danny in the entrance there, had started twitching and jerking, half-spinning on the rope, staring in terror at Danny out of his bulging eyes. Trying, for fuck’s sake, to finish it.

‘Sorry,’ Danny said, meaning his language. Merrily waved it away, and Danny said he must’ve gone temporarily insane hisself at that point, fumbling out his clasp-knife, clawing his way to the top of the scaffold of bales, slashing like a mad bastard at the oily rope.

Lucky that Jeremy was old-fashioned about rope: none of your nylon for this boy.

‘Stretched under his weight, see. So his feet’s reaching the topmost bales, and he don’t even know it. Only wondering why it’s takin’ so long.’

‘Has he said anything?’

Danny shook his head. He’d caught Jeremy as he fell, laying him out on the hay, the boy making this cawing noise like a stricken crow, wearing the mark of the rope like a red collar, bruises coming up under it. Long minutes passing before Jeremy would let Danny help him up and into the house.

‘Can he even speak?’

‘Can’t hardly move his head.’ Danny was intertwining his hands, like he was washing them slowly under a tap. ‘I can’t do n’more for him, vicar.’ He looked hard at her. ‘Can I?’

‘Is there a medicine chest? First-aid box?’

‘En’t that kind o’ first aid he needs.’

‘Would help if he was able to talk, though. Has someone gone for Natalie?’

‘We don’t know where she is. En’t at Stanner.’ Danny stood up. ‘Ah, damn. My idea we gets you yere, now I don’t know what to tell you. I still don’t know what brought him to this. Things about this boy we en’t never fathomed.’

‘Gomer thought maybe he’d just found out about’ – she glanced at the door, brought her voice down – ‘about Natalie? In the van?’

‘Couldn’t tell him, see, vicar. Had the perfect opportunity, couldn’t do it. Can’t hardly ask him now, can I?’ Danny hung his head, a slow smile shuffling into his beard. ‘You could, though, mabbe.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And then ask him who she is.’

‘Natalie?’

‘Ask him who she is, really,’ Danny said. ‘This is what we wanner know, see.’

Sounding as if there was something here that he half-suspected but didn’t dare approach.

‘It’s hard to believe how crazy they were, the Chancerys,’ Jane said to Lol. ‘You know about Thomas Vaughan. Black Vaughan?’

‘A bit.’

‘According to the legend, he was terrorizing Kington. After his death. The full poltergeist thing. The whole economy of the town under threat because people didn’t want to go there.’

‘This was when?’

‘Fifteenth, sixteenth century? If it happened at all. Folklore seems to work to its own calendar, doesn’t it? So they call in the Church. You know about that? Twelve priests confine the spirit in a snuff-box. Which might’ve been a metaphor – a way of explaining it to humble countryfolk who knew sod-all about states of consciousness but had a vague idea of what a snuff-box looked like.’

‘Did it work?’

‘To an extent. No more actual violence, just vague manifestations, like the Hound. Like warnings that it was only dormant. Maybe... hang on a mo, I’m just putting the phone down.’

Lol heard Jane moving about. There was the sound of a door opening and then closing before she was back at her mobile.

‘Thought there might’ve been somebody around. This place is suddenly full of totally unbalanced people.’

‘Where are you?’ The Jane he knew would relish being around totally unbalanced people.

‘In my room. If the door had a lock I’d lock it. Jeremy... I don’t believe it.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m just not sure who I can trust. Lol, if you talk to Mum, tell her we... would appreciate some help. But tell her to ring me first, not just show up.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Amber. And me. Everybody else seems to have a finger in the pie.’

Lol guessed he was about to hear things that Jane would never have passed on if she hadn’t been shafted over the video.

‘This is what Ben finally got from old Leonard. Walter Chancery got hold of the Vaughan story. Or rather, his wife did – Bella – who was well into this new fad for spirit-contact. See, what strikes me about all this is that it was probably the first time in recorded history when people weren’t terrified by the supernatural. Like the birth of New Age.’

‘Convinced the mystery of death was being unveiled to them.’

‘Totally. So when Bella hears the tale of Black Vaughan, she’s like, OK, let’s look at all this in the light of – wooh! – modern science! Meaning spiritualism. There’d been some sightings locally, mainly the dog – but when was that dog not seen around? So Bella Chancery’s like, Hey, let’s do something for the community. Lady Bountiful. These crass incomers, money coming out of their ears, but what they wanted was status – like in Society and also locally. They wanted to be lord and lady of the manor, that was how Leonard put it. They had a celebrated medium there by the name of Erasmus Cookson, who Bella shipped up from London. And because they were into spectacle and stuff, they all dressed up. They used the kitchen, because it had stone walls and it looked like you were inside a castle. The kitchen’s quite big, and they arranged it like the great hall of a castle, with candles everywhere.’

‘Why would they dress up?’

‘For the exorcism. They recreated the exorcism of Black Vaughan. If you look in Mrs Leather you’ll see there’s quite a lot to go on. The dialogue between Vaughan and the priests? Total pantomime, but that wouldn’t worry them.’

‘Where did they get twelve priests?’

‘Well, they didn’t, obviously. Just got friends in – house guests, people down from London, and dressed them up like monks or something. And servants to make up the numbers. And this Erasmus Cookson, who was like some kind of showbiz spiritualist and who may have been a charlatan, for all I know.’

‘And Arthur Conan Doyle?’

‘And Conan Doyle. Absolutely. Doyle was in the area with relatives, right? In fact, one theory is that it was nothing to do with helping the community, they just – this is the kind of people they were – staged the whole thing for the benefit of this big celeb.’

‘And what happened?’

‘And they even had an actual snuff-box? You imagine that? They were probably going to tie a brick to it and toss it in the sodding pond.’

‘Hang on, Jane.’ Lol awoke the computer, brought up Matthew’s last message.

We believe that his initial baptism – a ‘baptism of fire’ – occurred at Stanner Hall... little more than a party game for his amusement... turned into something profoundly disturbing

‘So what happened that disturbed Conan Doyle enough to send him into complete denial and turn the Hound into a detective story with a weak ending?’

‘This is what Ben’s asking. He videoed Leonard talking about it, and Leonard’s telling Ben what I’ve just told you, and Ben’s like, “What happened?” in his calm interviewer’s voice, like he really couldn’t give a toss. And Leonard’s sitting there with this thin little smile on his lips, and Ben’s going, “Leonard, what happened?” You can feel him just longing to walk into shot and shake the old guy – I wanted to. And Leonard’s just shaking his head sadly. “Stupid stories, Mr Foley, to frighten the children, I’m not going to pass on stupid stories.” And that’s where the video ends, with this shot of Leonard sitting there shaking his head, with a bit of dribble at the corner of his mouth.’

‘So after Ben showed you the video—’

‘He didn’t. He doesn’t know I’ve seen it. Amber gave it me to watch.’

‘So you don’t know if he found out any more after he’d stopped recording – if this guy told him the rest, off the record.’

‘No.’

‘You’re not going to do anything, are you?’ Lol said. Because Jane, slighted, was an unexploded device.

‘Look, if they’re planning to recreate the recreation of the exorcism of Black Vaughan – yeah, I know, where do you get twelve priests in a snowstorm? – but whatever they have in mind, it’s got to be spiritually offensive, hasn’t it? So I’ve said I’d go along with Amber, who thinks it’s time to talk to Mum.’

‘You want her to raid the joint in the name of the Church?’

‘She could talk to people. She’s the Diocesan Exorcist, that must count for... Lol...’ He could almost feel the heat of her breath in his ear, as if she was cupping her hands around the receiver. ‘You don’t think they want that?’

He saw where she was going. ‘Jane, let’s not—’

‘According to Amber, Ben’s original idea was that Mum would be part of the documentary – like formally protesting on behalf of the Church? But suppose what he really wanted was that she should be involved as an exorcist. If you were doing it now – putting Vaughan to bed – who else would you use? Lol, they—’

‘Jane—’

Jane’s voice was hoarse. ‘Suppose they want her to take on Vaughan?’

‘That’s crap.’

‘It’s so not crap, Lol. It’s the sort of thing Foley would think of as soon as he found out what my mother was.’

‘Jane.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t do anything. Think of all the times you’ve been wrong and the damage it’s caused.’

‘Only maybe this time I’m not wrong,’ Jane said.

Pocketing her phone, holding the videotape inside her fleece, she went out onto the upper landing and down the stairs that came out near the fire doors concealing the passage that led to Hattie Chancery’s room.

She imagined Alistair Hardy lying in Hattie’s bed, in the dark. Silverskin eyes watching him from a corner of the room. And then, as he was close to sleep, a hissing, and something cold writhing all over him: whoop, whoop.

Jane smirked. He’d probably enjoy it.

At least she now had an idea why Ben wanted Hardy in that room. With Hattie Chancery identifying herself with Ellen Gethin, and all that black hound in the pack stuff, there could be quite a strong link here...

Suppose Lol was right, and Ben had managed to get more information out of Leonard, even if it wasn’t on camera. Well, she couldn’t ask Ben outright without causing a row over Amber letting her watch the tape, but...

... but she could ask Frank Sampson, who’d been there holding Leonard’s hand. It was a bit late but, if they were going to try and involve Mum in this, it was very much legit to give him a ring.

Right, then.

As she walked down the red stair-carpet, the videotape tumbled out of her fleece and went bumping down the final steps ahead of her. She grabbed the box, fumbled it back under her fleece, firing glances around the reception area.

Nobody about, not even Amber.

Whom, of course, she could no longer trust either. Amber might be planning to walk out on Ben, but she was just as dependent on this crazy investment as he was. She, too, had everything to lose.

And where was Natalie? Why hadn’t she come back? Did she know about Jeremy?

This was a nightmare.

The phone started ringing behind the reception desk, Jane instinctively moving to answer it, then stopping. She stood by the desk, in the shadow-flecked light from the too-small chandelier, waiting to see if anyone else would respond. Nobody showed. Not even a demented old woman, some years dead, leaning on the ghost of a Zimmer frame.

Jane ignored the phone, ran down the steps to the kitchen to put the tape back. The snow-glare from the high windows showed her where everything was; she didn’t bother to put on lights as she walked across the echoey stone flags to the island unit, stretching away like a mortician’s slab. Something was on top of the unit: the video camera that was supposed to be welded to her hands.

Stuff you, Antony, with your Glasgow hard-boy chic. Jane bent to the cupboard from which Amber had pulled the videotape, opened it up and slid the tape out from under her fleece, stowing it on an empty shelf. As she came to her feet, she noticed that the light in the room was changing colour, like someone had shone a torch in here.

She stood up, backing away to the nearest wall. The light didn’t go out, it swelled yellow and orange, a reflection from somewhere igniting like a match in the lens of the camera on the island unit. She looked up, and saw that it was all concentrated in the nearest high window: a billowing light around an intense core, like a gas jet.

She didn’t understand. If this was the window facing Stanner Rocks, then the rocks were on fire.

33 Time Nearly Up

MERRILY HAD HER coat off: no dog collar, but the pectoral cross on display.

‘Jeremy, would it be all right if I were to pray with you?’

Wearing a white T-shirt with holes in it, he was hunched forward in the rocking chair, what seemed like permanent tears, hard as plastic bubbles, on the edges of his eyes.

‘You don’t wanner bother ’bout me.’ His voice was high and gritty, as if there was sharp sand in his throat. He turned away and winced. ‘Waste of space, I am.’

Merrily put both her hands over his. ‘Don’t move your head, if it hurts.’ On her knees, she shuffled out of his line of sight, kneeling on the rag rug next to Flag, the sheepdog, in the furnace light from the range. Danny and Gomer had gone into the kitchen, leaving her to it, just her and the dog. The heat was intense, the dog was panting, Jeremy’s seared throat looked like roast ham in the firelight.

Merrily closed her eyes.

‘Oh God, only you know why Jeremy was driven to try to take his own life. Bring him from this suffocating place. Calm his emotions and his fears, strengthen him, give him the help he needs to...’

Couldn’t go on. This was trite and meaningless. She was disgusted with herself and opened her eyes because she knew that he was looking at her. His eyes were blue-grey and flecked with uncertainty like the skies in March.

‘Jeremy,’ she said. ‘Why?’

Jane tracked Ben out of the lobby into the porch, shooting him as he bent to lace up his hiking boots.

‘Jane, what the hell are you doing?’

She didn’t reply, but took care to stay well back so he couldn’t snatch the Sony 150 from her again. She didn’t even know if the battery was still active; it was the gesture that counted. Independent working woman with a video.

Beth Pollen came briskly through, dragging on her sheepskin coat, shaking out her headscarf. ‘Anyone called the fire brigade? Now I think about it, I’m sure I heard an explosion about twenty minutes ago. It’s hard to tell in snow.’

Ben looked up. ‘Amber’s seeing to it. Though I can’t imagine how they could get up there in these conditions. I don’t even understand how a fire’s even possible on snow-covered bare rocks.’

‘I was involved with a Nature Trust survey some years ago,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘Awfully weird place. The rocks retain heat, apparently.’

‘In thick snow?’

‘Strange times, Ben. Doesn’t look like a threat to the hotel, but you never know. I’ll come with you, if you like. If you don’t know the paths fairly well, it can be jolly dangerous.’

Ben snapped, ‘For God’s sake, Jane, switch that thing off!’

‘Just obeying instructions.’ Jane didn’t lower the camera. There was a clear image of Ben’s face, twisted with annoyance. ‘Antony says it’s supposed to be welded to my hands.’

‘Well, I’m telling you to take the thing away, and I’m the one who’s paying you, in case you—’

Jane ignored him, pushing open the swing doors with her bum and backing out into the car park, still recording. She had on her boots and her nylon parka, which was a pain because it was fairly new and still crackled when she walked, doubtless getting onto the soundtrack. But at least she was equipped for the conditions, unlike Alistair Hardy and Matthew, who were hanging around the porch door now, looking up at the smoking rocks like they were being deprived of some profound spiritual experience.

Outside, ankle-deep in snow, Jane put the camera on pause while she took up a position about ten yards away, shooting Ben and Beth Pollen as they came out and then risking a pan up towards the sky, ambered now and spark-flecked, though the flames were low, as if the gas jet had been turned down. She had no idea what this was about, but neither did Ben, and he was unnerved for once, and that made her feel empowered.

‘Jane!’ Ben was standing in the middle of the car park, at the end of a channel of light from the porch. He had on a black Gore-Tex jacket and a black baseball cap with a reflective yellow stripe. ‘You’re staying here, you understand? You are not coming up there with us.’

‘If I fall, I promise I won’t sue Stanner Hall.’

‘If you want to keep your job’ – and he wasn’t smiling – ‘you’ll go back.’

Oh.

Jane didn’t move, carried on shooting him. It felt warmer, as though the fire on the rocks had conditioned the ambient temperature. Speaking down the side of the camera, right under the mike, she said casually, ‘You sacking me, Ben?’

‘Not if you go back at once.’

Although it had stopped snowing now, Jane felt the night still swirling around her: dark energy, shifting destiny.

‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘Let’s not complicate things. I quit.’

Lol was leaning over Ella Mary Leather under the Anglepoise. The cover of the big paperback had this warm-coloured Merrie England watercolour street-scene, with a drummer and a dancing woman in a white dress. Post-it markers projected from the top edge of the book, like little coloured flags, part of the scene.

Herefordshire, 1912, the most rural county in England, with the unknowable horrors of the Great War still two years away. An area still loosely held in a harness of medieval customs, an eerie carnival always flickering on the periphery.

Vaughan... was a very wicked man, so after his death he could not rest and came back ‘stronger and stronger all the while...’ He sometimes took the form of a fly in order to ‘torment the horses’. Finally, he came into the church itself in the form of a bull. It was decided that something must be done.

Ethel strolled over the open book, sat down on the lamp-base and began to wash her paws – Ethel who used to be Lol’s cat, back when he was living in Ledwardine. Who was now the official vicarage cat, while Lol was still just an occasional visitor, trying to help out.

‘Something must be done,’ Lol said to the cat.

‘So they got twelve parsons, with twelve candles, to wait in the church to try and read him down into a silver snuff-box. For,’ the old man who told me the story explained, ‘we have all got a sperrit something like a spark inside we, and a sperrit can go large or small, or down, down, quite small, even into a snuff-box.’ There were present, to help lay the spirit, a woman with a new-born baby, whose innocence and purity were perhaps held powerful in exorcism.

‘Well, they read, but it was no use...’

Read what? Something from the Bible? The full text of the Roman Catholic Rite of Exorcism?

... They were all afraid... and all their candles went out but one. The parson as held that candle had a stout heart, and he feared no man nor sperrit. He called out ‘Vaughan, why art thou so fierce?’ ‘I was fierce when I was a man, but fiercer now, for I am a devil!’ was the answer. But nothing could dismay the stout-hearted parson, though, to tell the truth, he was nearly blind, and not a pertickler sober man.’

The detail suggesting an actual local character. But no names, no dates.

‘He read and read and read, and when Vaughan felt himself going down, and down, and down, till the snuff-box was nearly shut, he asked, “Vaughan, where wilt thou be laid?” The spirit answered, “Anywhere, anywhere but not in the Red Sea!” So they shut the box and took him and buried him for a thousand years in the bottom of Hergest pool, in the wood, with a big stone on top of him. But the time is nearly up!’

The time is nearly up.

Lol leaned back. ‘How nearly is nearly, Ethel?’ A thousand years would take the story back pre-Norman Conquest. And yet Black Vaughan was said to have been mortally wounded at the Battle of Banbury, during the Wars of the Roses, in 1469. And furthermore, according to Mrs Leather:

He and his ancestors were brave and honourable men, and history in no way corroborates the popular traditions concerning them. Still they... were probably regarded with more awe and fear than love by the folk among whom they lived.

But a devil? And when did the Hound fade into the picture? No suggestions of a big black dog accompanying Black Vaughan’s ghost, pre-exorcism.

Lol flipped to the second index sticker.

Hergest Court was, or perhaps still is, haunted by a demon dog, said to have belonged to Black Vaughan.

Said by whom? Lol went through to the kitchen, overlaid with Aga-throb, and into the passage to the narrow back stairs, ducking his head for the low oak beam at the bottom, although he was short enough, just, to walk underneath it. He felt uncomfortable here without Merrily. He didn’t belong, and the vicarage knew it. He switched on the upstairs lights and went up to the first landing: crooked walls patched with old doors.

One of them to Merrily’s bedroom. Sleep there if I’m not back. Kissing him in front of Gomer, which had been reassuring. But he’d still come creeping up by the back stairs, because he wasn’t worthy, and the vicarage knew.

‘Only, time’s nearly up,’ Jeremy Berrows said.

His face was haloed by the fire, like a monk’s face in an illuminated manuscript. Like a martyr’s face.

Time nearly up. Merrily wondered where she’d heard that phrase recently.

Jeremy let out a deep sigh, as though a decision had been made for him.

‘Farm’s on a lease, see.’

‘This farm? I thought you owned it.’

‘Folk do.’ Jeremy fingered his throat. ‘Me too, when my dad was alive.’

He’d started to talk to her, in a half-apologetic way, as though ashamed at the ungraciousness of his early responses. Danny had rescued him from himself, therefore Danny was owed, and Danny had brought in this woman to help. Perhaps a concession was needed.

And so Jeremy had conceded that the time was nearly up.

The lease was nearly up? Was his suicide attempt linked to a fear – a fear he’d felt unable to share, even with his best friend – that he was about to lose his beloved home? Farmers had hanged themselves for far less.

Merrily glanced at the Welsh dresser, with its mugs and picture plates and a gilt-framed, faded photo of two children, a boy and a girl, both fair-haired, like brother and sister. It looked as if little or nothing had altered in here in thirty or forty years. What would Jeremy do when goin’ quietly on was no longer an option?

‘I... heard that Mr Dacre might have been putting it around that he... has some rights to The Nant.’

Jeremy shook his head just far enough for it to hurt.

‘No?’

‘Always reckoned it should be his, on account of he owns the rest of the valley.’

‘It’s said he’s been behaving in a threatening way. Hiring men with guns, Gomer says.’

‘He’s scared.’

‘What’s he scared of?’

‘He’s scared of what they took on. His family. What was give to ’em.’

‘The Chancerys? Your family were tenants of the Chancerys, right?’

He nodded, and then – evidently relieved that he could at least do this without pain, that it didn’t hurt to be positive – he nodded again. Merrily wondered if Gomer and Danny were following this from the other side of the closed door.

‘What did the Chancerys think had been given to them?’

Jeremy looked at her, like, Do I have to go into this?

She thought she knew, anyway: a tradition, roots. Gomer had told her how the Chancerys had sought to buy into the Welsh Border heritage. Not the most stable foundation on which to build a new dynasty.

Jeremy said, ‘Don’t suppose you seen Nat’lie?’

‘We came straight from Ledwardine. I haven’t been up to Stanner yet.’

‘Her won’t be there.’

‘Where will she be?’

He didn’t answer. He looked down at his knees, between which Flag had wedged his head. Jeremy placed his hands either side of the sheepdog’s head, as if in benediction. Merrily let the silence hang for maybe half a minute before trying to catch his gaze and failing and then feeling her way back into the mystery of Natalie Craven.

‘People talk. People like to gossip when somebody new turns up.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘They’re only curious. They don’t realize what damage it can cause when things get twisted around.’

‘No.’ Jeremy lifted his hands and placed a palm either side of his face, as if to stop his head from shaking.

‘And if your friends don’t know the truth either, they can’t help you. They can’t put a stop to it.’

‘No.’

‘Who exactly is she, Jeremy?’

Jeremy shifted to grip the dog’s fur. The silence from the other side of the door was like a balloon blown up to bursting point.

‘Her’s my landlord,’ Jeremy said.

The door handle rattled slightly as if somebody had just let go of it.

‘She owns The Nant? Natalie?’

He nodded. ‘Her name’s not Nat’lie... din’t use to be.’

‘So that would make her...’

‘Paula’s daughter. Brigid. Paula inherited The Nant from her mother.’

‘Hattie.’

Jeremy nodded.

‘So, is Paula dead now?’

‘Aye. Long time.’

‘So Natalie came back to... claim her inheritance?’

‘And mabbe find out some... things.’

Merrily thought of what Gomer and Jane had both said about Jeremy and Natalie: such an ill-matched couple. Perhaps they weren’t a couple at all. Was one of them a kind of... lodger?

‘Paula...’ Jeremy looked at Merrily. ‘... Not many folks know this, but Paula was sick, see. Her growed up sick. In the head. When Hattie and Robert died, her was still young, eight or nine, and Margery was only three. Things wasn’t too good between the kids, so Hattie’s uncle who come down to sort things out, he decided it was best if—’

‘How do you mean, things weren’t good?’

‘Oh. Well, they reckoned Paula was always jealous of Margery and when they... Well, there was a bit of an incident when... I think Paula tried to drown her in the bath one time – they was only little.’

‘God.’

‘Well, see, Robert had a sister up north, and they took her in. They had to sell Stanner on account of the debts, so Paula got the only house left, which was The Nant, as was rented then to my ole man. Paula had the rent. In trust. But Paula... her wasn’t right. Got took into homes, early on. They figured her wasn’t safe. Set fire to the house once.’

‘Oh.’ This did not sound good.

‘Margery, the Dacres adopted her, and she got left a couple hundred acres of land and some money, and her growed up and married the Dacre boy, Richard. Keepin’ it all in the family, kind of thing.’

‘These things happened...’

‘And they had Sebbie ten year before Paula was even married, even though Paula was five years older. Met a feller in hospital. Male nurse. Paula was real good-lookin’, he... fell in love, I s’pose. ’Ventually, he convinces the authorities to let her out. Short stretches at first, and he looked after her, and there was no problems. Then Paula was discharged and they got wed. Her’d be well into her thirties by then. But her... wasn’t right, see. Should never’ve been let out, they reckoned.’

‘She had a baby...’

‘Then... died. Brigid growed up with her dad. They’d come yere on holiday, on the quiet – never wanted nobody to know about Paula, how she’d turned out. One stage, see, they offered to sell The Nant to my ole man, but he didn’t have the money, nowhere near. So they negotiated another lease, for twenty-five years. So like, both sides agreed it be better if they let it get round they’d sold us the farm. Keep Richard and Sebbie off dad’s back.’

‘But now, you think Sebbie perhaps... knows the truth?’

Jeremy looked at Merrily at last. ‘It’s possible. Deal was done at the time through Big Weale, the solicitor, in Kington. And when he... when he died, sudden, leavin’ his whole business in a big tangle, this other firm come in to sort it all out. ’Course, Sebbie’s a magistrate, knows all the lawyers for miles around. Things gets mislaid. Documents. Can’t always trust lawyers, can you?’

‘And the lease...’

‘Lease is nearly up.’

‘Dacre thinks he has a chance of getting you out and buying The Nant?’

‘Can’t say what he thinks. Dacre’s in a funny state. Things he done lately en’t been that rational.’

This from a man who’d just tried to hang himself. But Merrily’s understanding of that was hardening up in the light of what she was learning about Jeremy’s weakening grip on everything he held dear.

‘So the future...’ She didn’t know how to put it.

‘No.’ Jeremy shook his head so hard that Merrily winced. ‘It en’t about that.’ The agony of it made his eyes water and come out like marbles. ‘En’t about money, nor ground. I love The Nant, course I do, every square inch of it, only...’

Merrily looked up at him. Her knees were starting to ache.

‘When we was kids, see – twelve, thirteen – her come to stay with her dad. They had a posh caravan. Me and her, we like... we got fond. Wrote to each other for years. All them years, I’m dreaming mabbe... mabbe her’ll come back. And praying, I s’pose. Prayed a lot, truth be told. Prayers she’d come back.’

‘And then she did come back... twenty-five years later?’

‘Aye.’

‘All that time—’

‘Things happened, see. In her life.’

Merrily reached out and took one of his hands, squeezed it gently.

‘I seen the van parked... where they used to put the caravan. I was scared. I seen Clancy at first in the lower field in the early morning – it was like seein’ Brigid, like her’d come back near enough the same as when I last seen her. I was scared... couldn’t go there. I called up Danny, and he come down. Then we seen this woman... and her hair was dark – thought it wasn’t her, after all, see. And then...’

Tears rolled down Jeremy’s face. Tears coming without any change of expression, like a crying doll’s.

Merrily thought, But she stayed. She moved in, with her daughter. She put her daughter into a local school, got a job at the hotel, the house her family used to own...

There were big gaps in this story. Big issues that he wasn’t telling her about. She thought about the note that Danny had shown her when she arrived, Jeremy’s prosaic farmer’s farewell.

Please deal with the sale of my stock, and see they go to the right kind of place or keep everything yourself for nothing. Natalie will understand.

‘He could’ve took the farm,’ Jeremy said. ‘Took The Nant. Took the lot.’

‘Dacre?’

Merrily thought of what Gomer had said: Mary Morson, mabbe her rung to break the news to him as he wasn’t the only fish in Natalie’s stream.

Other fish. Worst-case scenario.

She looked over to the photo on the dresser: two light-haired children in T-shirts and shorts, screwing up their eyes against the sun. Standing side by side, not touching. The girl, even then, a bit taller than the boy.

She thought, in dismay, Dacre?

Dacre and his cousin in the back of a camper van on the top of Stanner Rocks?

‘Could’ve had the lot if he’d left her.’

Jeremy looked away, back into the fire.

34 The Butcher’s Counter

JANE STAYED WHERE she was; no backing off now. Ben took an impulsive step towards her and then abruptly turned away and caught up with Beth Pollen at the little gate at the bottom of the car park. He threw open the gate and followed Mrs Pollen into the darkness of the clearing beyond, the place where he’d pulped Nathan, the shooter.

Bastard. Jane stood for a moment, feeling the cold on her face like a contemptuous slap, and then, breathing hard, she followed them.

I quit. That simple. Perhaps part of her had known this was coming, was unavoidable after what Amber had told her about the good friction point, the proposed use of Mum as a twist.

Twist. Hook. Contemporary dynamic. She didn’t have to listen to this bullshit any more and, if he wanted some now drama, he could have it.

She was almost at the gate when she became aware of him standing just on the other side, by the fence post where Nathan had lain. He was alone; Beth Pollen must have gone on a little way; Jane could see a torch beam bobbing.

She stopped, keeping some space between her and Ben, clasping the camera to her chest. Maybe she’d have to hit him with it.

‘Jane...’ If he was speaking quietly that was probably only because he didn’t want Beth Pollen to hear. ‘Jane, whatever you just said, let’s pretend either you didn’t say it or I didn’t hear it. And while—’

‘I said I qu—’

Ben raised a hand. ‘While I realize you were the first one to spot the flames, I have to stress that I know this track, and how dangerous it can be. Also, I think I can smell petrol, so obviously someone started that fire. All I want to do is make sure nobody’s in any danger.’

‘You think someone’s up there?’

‘You’re not going to be missing anything. It’s irrelevant. It’s probably kids.’

‘So why’s it OK for Mrs Pollen to go up?’

‘She’s not going up. She’s making sure I take the right path and waiting at the bottom of it with the mobile phone. I wouldn’t trust you to wait anywhere.’

‘I think you know what this is about, don’t you?’ Jane said. ‘I think you know what’s happening up there...’

‘Don’t try to be clever, Jane.’

‘... Why the rocks are on fire.’

‘And don’t—’ She could almost see his patience snap like a frozen twig in the air above his head. ‘Don’t mess with me, all right?’

‘Or what – you’ll beat—?’ She almost felt him go rigid, knew she’d gone too far, but it was too late to stop now. ‘And aren’t we in the perfect place for it? Where you worked Nathan over? Where Hattie Chancery smashed her husband’s head in, with the trophy stones?’

She heard the squeaking of his leather gloves as his fists tightened, and she felt a tug of fear, remembering the state of Nathan. She looked around for Beth Pollen’s torch: no sign now. She was backing up against the gate and feeling behind her for the fastener, jiggling it urgently when Ben moved.

She bit off a scream.

But all he did was turn, without a word, and walk off again, only faster this time, half-jogging, his hiking boots going phwat, phwat, phwat in the tight fresh snow. By the time Jane was through the wicket gate, he’d disappeared into the pines.

She knew that she ought to get out of there, go back to the hotel. But it wasn’t in her to back down, not tonight. She found his tracks and followed them. The independent, unemployed woman on the Border.

The moment Lol entered Merrily’s bedroom, the phone beside the bed began to shrill, and he felt momentarily guilty, as though someone had discovered him prying. Snowlight grey-washed the room. He glanced quickly back at the door, impelled to go rushing out of it and down the stairs to take the call in the office.

Instead, he switched on the bedside lamp. The bed was turned down. There was a nightdress case like a black and white cat curled up on one of the pillows. A white towelling bathrobe hung behind the door. A cross of dark wood was positioned in the centre of the wall opposite the bed.

The caller had a voice like a rich, organic mulch. ‘I’m phoning for Mrs Watkins. I do realize it’s late.’

‘She’s out.’ Lol sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Guess I’d be sorry, too, I was in her house and she wasn’t.’ The caller chuckled. ‘Well now, you must be the musician who would like to spend more time with the lovely Merrilee, but the situation, alas, forbids it. A concise name that rolls off the... Lon?’

‘Canon Jeavons?’ Lol said.

‘But you should call me Lew. We just two guys with short names. You think we shorten our names in the belief it gonna streamline our lives? Ah, wait... Lol. Not Lon, it’s Lol, correct? You know, I sometimes wonder, if I reverted to all three syllables of my own given name, whether perhaps it would slow me down enough that I didn’t give half-assed advice.’

Lol looked around Merrily’s bedroom. Its white walls were uneven, bolted together with twisted ribs of ancient oak. It had a pine wardrobe, no dressing table, no mirrors.

‘You mean like Reach out?’ he said. ‘Embrace?’

‘Good,’ Canon Jeavons said. ‘She talks to you. Yes, I guess that’s what I mean. On reflection, what I should’ve said was, Be reticent, go careful. That would be a slightly different approach, wouldn’t it?’

‘That would be exactly the opposite approach,’ Lol said.

In between the wardrobe and the window, the bedside light was reflected from polished wood, and he spotted his oldest Washburn guitar, the one he’d left here at the end of the summer when he was working on the final songs for the new album.

‘Lol,’ Canon Jeavons said, ‘you don’t have to tell me where she’s gone, but you could reassure me it’s nowhere in connection with a small boy who died in a car wreck.’

Lol saw that the Washburn was shining with new polish and had been stood reverently on a cushion. The cushion was pale blue, velvet. He was touched.

‘No, it isn’t anything to do with that,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ Jeavons said solemnly. ‘Can I ask – are you a religious man yourself, Lol? No forget that. Intrusive. Only, when I said on reflection, I mean that this phone call came out of prayer. Which, I concede, the secular might define as a conversation with the inner self in the hope of inspiration. In any event, I sit down and we going over it all between us. And the message comes to me: better to tell her to take advice before proceeding any further in this matter.’

‘She did take advice,’ Lol said. ‘She took advice from you.’

A pause.

‘Yes,’ Jeavons said heavily. ‘However—’

‘Let me get this right – God suggested you might call back. Because He wasn’t impressed with the advice you gave?’

‘Lol—’

‘She told you about the brother?’

‘The bad guy.’ Jeavons sighed. ‘Yes. The, ah, acts of violence carried out by the brother against the other half of the family, that did not bode well. Six years in New York, and I didn’t pick up on that. Must be getting old.’

‘As it happens,’ Lol said, ‘what we now know of him makes him seem even less of a teddy bear.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. It...’ Jeavons hesitated ‘... must be hard for you, Lol.’

‘It can get a bit perplexing.’

‘I like a man who understates. Come on, it blows your head off! For instance, where is she now, on this terrible night?’

Lol watched the light shimmer from the guitar, recalling the last song he’d composed on it and its key lines: The camera lies/she might vaporize.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope she’s having a quiet one-to-one with a mild-mannered farmer who tried to take his own life. I hope she not standing in for twelve priests at the exorcism of a medieval devil and a hound of hell.’

A stony place, quilted with snow.

The path was here somewhere, but Jane couldn’t find it. She’d gone blundering after Ben into the white areas between the trees, looking for his tracks, until she wound up, panting, at the fork in the main drive. This was where one track sloped down to the Kington bypass, while the other, much narrower, crawled to the top of Stanner Rocks.

She’d been up there just once, when the weather was still OK. Great views. The track wasn’t too steep, and you could get a vehicle up when the ground was firm, but it went very close to the edge, where the old quarry had been, and you wouldn’t be happy doing it at night, not even in the best of conditions, not even with somebody like Gomer Parry at the wheel.

She saw the stems of the pines lighting up maybe fifty yards ahead of her, like organ pipes – Ben switching on a torch? Only it seemed to be in the wrong place. Too low. So easy to get disorientated in the white hell. She headed for the beam, anyway, and—

‘Aaah!’ A thin branch whipped her cheek, pulled the camera away, and she stumbled, and the camera fell into the snow.

Not too clever. She snatched up the Sony 150 and dusted it off. Moved on more slowly, holding it in both hands. Now she could neither see nor hear Ben or Beth Pollen, and the torch beam had vanished, and if it wasn’t for the snow and a lemon-wedge of moon she could be in trouble here.

Jane stopped, realizing in dismay that this actually wasn’t being very adult. Being adult was about standing back and rethinking your position in the light of changing circumstances. Like, circumstances were saying that Ben Foley didn’t want her here – basically, she guessed, because he didn’t want any of this preserved on video. Taking on Ben, getting into his face, was probably unwise. But once you were launched on the path of being awkward, it was a matter of basic pride that you didn’t turn away. It was like when you were a little kid, running faster and faster, giddy with it, knowing that the fall was inevitable.

Jane stubbed her toe on something very hard and stumbled and went down with her hands in the snow, throwing up a fine flurry like a cloud of frozen midges, as she pulled them out with a sucking sound.

Looking up she saw, in a moment of cold awe, the white-spattered face of Stanner Rocks, sheared off where the quarrying had been before the rocks were recognized as ancient and precious. The wall was glowering over her like a decaying cathedral, holes in its masonry pointed with snow. No flames up there now, no amber halo, only the milky mixture of snowlight and thin moonlight. And on the ground, that wet sucking sound.

Only the sucking was nothing to do with her.

The shock of this came at Jane like a sudden wild gust from nowhere, as she crouched, exposed, in the snow. It came at her along with something else – something close up, loping, something that came with a loose, heavy panting, with a pulsing of muscle and with a piercingly thin, raw, feral smell that ripped at your senses like barbed wire.

Jane tightened up, shrinking into a hedgehog ball. Somewhere far inside her – beneath the parka and the fleece, beneath the skin – there was a rolling orb of cold that felt no bigger than a pea and no smaller than a planet, coming to rest in her stomach and weighting her to the rock. And although she couldn’t seem to move, she could still scream, with no shame, like an animal.

And cower, biting down on a second scream – also, agonizingly, on her tongue – as the ground lit up around her.

‘For goodness’ sake!’ A gloved hand came out of the light. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Oh God.’ Jane was shaking, kept falling back down.

‘Are you hurt?’ Beth Pollen was bulked out by the sheepskin coat, throwing off some wholesome, matronly perfume, her voice mature and strong and unafraid.

‘Didn’t you hear it?’

‘I certainly heard you.’

‘Didn’t you feel it?’

‘I really don’t know how your mother puts up with you,’ Beth Pollen said crossly.

Jane stood up, careful to stay within the torch beam, aware of holding on to Mrs Pollen’s tough, sheepskin sleeve and not, under any circumstances, wanting to let go.

‘Where’th...’ The tip of her tongue swelling where she’d bitten it. ‘Where’s Ben?’

‘Gone down to the main road to wait for the fire brigade. In the end, he didn’t need to go all the way up the track to see what had happened. It was pretty obvious.’

‘What was?’

‘It was that old camper van, used by all kinds of people for all kinds of purposes – some idiot had contrived to set it alight, and the petrol tank blew up. Ben doesn’t think anybody was in there, but if they were— Come on, we may as well go and join him; there’s nothing we can do here.’

‘No...’

‘Jane, it’s very cold and I’m—’

‘You didn’t hear it, then?’

Beth Pollen peered at her. ‘What are we talking about?’

Jane was holding on to Mrs Pollen’s arm with both hands, just couldn’t seem to let go. The torch beam was dragged away over the uneven ground. They were on the floor of what had been a quarry, between the snowbound bypass and the sheerest face of Stanner Rocks, going up maybe a hundred feet then some more in jagged stages, before the summit sloped back into the forestry behind.

There was a distant warbling: fire engines. The real world. Jane sagged, relieved for maybe the first time in her life to be slipping back into a place where the arrival of fire engines could make everything all right.

She let go of Beth Pollen’s arm. It occurred to her that this was the first time she and this woman had been alone together, one-to-one. On every other occasion, others had been there – Ben or the White Company, of whom Mrs Pollen was the most... normal.

‘You... know my mother?’

‘I know of your mother,’ Mrs Pollen said.

‘Only Amber said you might want to talk to her.’

‘Did she?’

‘Before you— What’s that?’ Jane grabbed at Mrs Pollen’s arm again.

‘It sounds like the fire brigade at last, thank God. What is the matter with you?’

‘No...’ Steering the torch towards the rocks. ‘That.’

Pointing to an area about ten yards away, an area of white but a different kind of white: the splodgy, pink-spattered white of the butcher’s counter.

‘You really are a tiresome girl,’ Beth Pollen said.

And then she said, ‘Oh my God... Oh my God.’