Phil Rickman - The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘Did you never think of going to court for special protection?’ Merrily asked. ‘Make it so the media weren’t allowed to identify you, for Clancy’s sake?’

‘I didn’t want special protection. I didn’t deserve special protection. Clancy, maybe.’

Bliss said, ‘Can we talk about Sebbie Dacre?’

‘I’ll only go so far.’

‘He was blackmailing you, right?’

Brigid laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘He wouldn’t have the... I dunno what word I’m looking for, but he wouldn’t have it. I’m sorry. I didn’t want him to die.’

‘You killed him, Brigid.’

‘I wanted...’ Brigid blew out a lot of smoke, turning away. ‘What’s the bloody point?’ The smoke drifted up and mingled with the smoke around the muzzle flash from Sherlock Holmes’s pistol in the picture.

‘Please,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t stop now.’

‘Look – he was out of it, he really was. Hell, there’s enough insanity in my family for that to surprise nobody. Somebody told him about this Web site where all these saddos were drooling over what women had done to men, and he printed stuff off, pinned one to the sign at the bottom of the drive so I’d know that he knew. He was dangerous. He was a risk. Sure. At some stage he was going to tell somebody who’d take him seriously. But he still didn’t know, for certain.’

‘You think he was genuinely mentally ill?’ Merrily said.

‘I think it was the booze, mainly. The toxic combination of booze and being a Chancery.’ Brigid flicked her cigarette towards Bliss. ‘What’s that sound like? I don’t know why I’m bothering – this guy isn’t going to believe the half of it.’

‘Try him. He’s a Catholic.’

‘But I just want to make it clear – again – that I’ve never... I am never gonna blame whatever I’ve done on being a victim – my mother’s daughter, Hattie’s granddaughter. I will live with being a bad and vicious person – a monster – and getting punished for it, rather than take one miserable step down Sebastian’s road. I’ll be an old lag with a filthy mouth. I’ll be an evil monster for Sun readers to wish dead and sick kids to wank over, and that’s it .’

‘And yet you came here to find out about it. You cooperated with Beth Pollen and the White Company...’

‘It was about closing doors, Merrily. And it was about Clancy – I’ve explained all that. It wasn’t about me.’

‘You know,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t think I’m buying that. You understand—’

‘No, listen—’

‘You understand too much about Sebbie’s problems. And he denied it too, didn’t he? I mean, people who talked to him—’

‘If you talked to him, you’d think he didn’t give a toss. “Load of old drivel” – I’ve listened to him in the pub, spouting off – maybe for my benefit, just in case I was who he suspected I might be. Just so I’d know he wasn’t scared of anything, particularly me, and the past.’

‘Why scared of you?’ Merrily said.

‘Not for me to say. Ask Jeremy.’

‘Because your mother tried to kill his mother when they were little? Because Ellen Gethin—’

‘Why did he come to the van last night?’ Bliss said. ‘And why were you there?’

Merrily said, not quite knowing where the question came from, ‘You were trying to help him, weren’t you?’

‘Where did you get that idea?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I was...’ Brigid ground out her cigarette in the metal ashtray. ‘He wasn’t blackmailing me, OK? He was saying to me, “I’ve been expecting you, and you’re... trouble.” Something like that. I was a threat. Jeremy said he’d been seeing the Hound of Hergest, like other drunks see pink elephants. He never said that to me. He said he wanted Brigid Parsons to sell him The Nant, and he’d give a fair price for it, and that would be the end of a long, bad period. He thought I could take Jeremy with me and buy him another farm a bloody long way away. He didn’t actually try to blackmail me... not then. But I didn’t want to go, you see, and Jeremy... nothing was going to get Jeremy out of The Nant, so I... said why didn’t we meet?’

‘Usual venue,’ Bliss said.

‘Look, I honestly didn’t think. How naive was that, for someone like me? See, the thing is, we were never going to like each other, but he wasn’t going anywhere, he owned everything in a big circle around The Nant, and he could make things very difficult if he wanted to – I mean he gave us a taste of that with the hired guns, like this Wild West situation. I still thought there had to be a way we could coexist.’

‘What were you gonna offer him, Brigid?’

‘Not The Nant and not sex. Peace of mind? A way of making peace with the past? On one level, that seemed very naive, but, yeah, it was worth a try.’

‘Good God.’ Merrily sat up. ‘You were going to invite him to the White Company gig.’

‘I did. I told him there were some people who’d like to help him with his... paranoia. I said we should attack it. As a family unit. Bite back.’

Merrily nodded. ‘You and him.’

‘And the White Company. And you, maybe. Deal with it – for Clancy’s sake. And by then, I’d also been made aware that I needed help on a personal level if I was going to survive here.’

‘Nathan?’

‘That was a shock. It happened quicker than I could think.’

Bliss leaned back, arms folded. ‘What exactly happened with Sebbie, Brigid?’

‘In Sebbie’s view of things,’ Merrily said, ‘there would be only one reason for a direct female descendant of Hattie Chancery to invite a man to Stanner Rocks.’

‘I thought we’d got way beyond all that,’ Brigid said. ‘Twenty-first-century Chancerys. I didn’t realize, even then, how far he was sunk into it.’

‘Jeremy said Sebbie was resigned to there being a death in the wind, and he thought it was going to be either him or you.’

‘I don’t believe these hicks,’ Bliss said.

‘We use words like “superstition” in a loose, disparaging way,’ Merrily said, ‘but when superstition meets mental instability it can get way out of hand. And that’s why neither you nor Howe is going to get a motive that makes complete sense. That is, of course, unless—’

‘What?’ Bliss said.

‘Sebbie was drunk when he arrived, right?’

Brigid nodded.

‘Did he attack you?’

‘Not in any... I don’t know. It got stupid, all right? It was never really civilized from the start, but it got... When I said to him that there were these people who were trying to follow the whole curse thing back to Vaughan and wanted to deal with it once and for all, he just... exploded. Went totally berserk. This is in the van, right? How dare these fucking outsiders think they can come in and meddle, take over other people’s lives, other people’s pasts... ? And it’s snowing heavily now, I’m standing in the door of the van, trying to stay upright, and I’m going, “You stupid, drunken pig, we ARE the outsiders who came in and meddled and took over... it’s our fault! ” ’

Brigid closed her eyes.

‘The Chancerys,’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you think he saw what you were proposing as an attempt to destroy his whole... power base, if you like? The Vaughan in him?’

Brigid nodded. ‘All the baggage that history and folklore had inflicted on the Vaughans, including an exorcism, a snuff-box and a big black ghostly dog – he disowned it all, and he loved it all. It was everything. It was who he was. Mr Sebastian Dacre, JP, Master of the Hunt, Sebbie Three Farms. He needed it like Hattie did. If there is a curse, they gave in to it, they clutched it all to their bosoms. Whoop fucking whoop . It’s like hunting – they know some of it’s vile, but it’s part of their... yeah, their power base.’