The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (12 page)

‘The hotel trade looks like a pushover till you’re in it,’ Natalie said soberly. ‘I’ll be surprised if they can afford to heat this place through the winter.’

‘It’s
that
bad?’

Natalie waggled her fingers, suggesting borderline wonky. ‘When you’re full up in summer it feels like the escalator’s never going to stop. In winter, the outgoings mount up. They’ve got three women in Kington on standby for that conference who won’t be happy to stand by in the future.’

Ben ought to listen more to Nat; she had serious qualifications in catering and hotel management. Clancy said her mother had been running a big hotel at Looe, in Cornwall, before suddenly resigning (after a relationship with a man crashed). Then there’d been another admin job, at a motel near Slough, but Clancy had hated the school there and they’d moved on again. When the summer holidays came round, Nat had bought this old camper van and they’d just set off, looking for somewhere that felt right. Being gypsies, Clancy said.

Nat shifted her leather coat from one arm to the other. ‘So this guy’s not interested in
The Hound
at all?’

‘Only as one of Ben’s wild schemes to attract trade, in this
Punching the Clock
series. And that would depend on having famous faces – actors, people like that – come to stay. Like out of pity; that’s how it’ll look, won’t it?’

‘Humiliation’s big,’ Nat said. ‘We love to see people going face-down on the concrete. Especially arrogant bastards from glamour jobs.’

Jane nodded morosely, seeing it all now, like she was viewing the rushes – meaningful cutaway shots of damp patches and peeling flock wallpaper; Stanner Hall looking half-derelict under wintry skies; Ben striding around like some manic Basil Fawlty figure. She’d neither seen nor heard anything of Antony Largo until this weekend and, call her psychic, but she guessed that shafting his old mate wouldn’t leave him feeling over-gutted.

The vacuum cleaner cut out. Jane glanced up the stairs, which had a new red carpet – an important buy, according to Ben: make the punters feel special going up to their rooms.

‘She shouldn’t be doing that.
I
should be doing it.’

Nat eyed the tray. ‘She got you to serve breakfast instead, because she wants to stay in the background. Bloody shame, Jane. A class chef.’

And you’re an experienced hotel manager
, Jane thought.
Yet here you both are.
But she didn’t say anything about that because Ben and Antony Largo had emerged from the dining room, Largo saying, ‘... Oh, right down the shitter, ma friend, no question there. I’m no’ saying you didn’t get out at the right
time
, I just think there might’ve been better ways of—’

He stopped. He’d seen Natalie, and he was looking at her the way male guests tended to. She was standing in a diagonal funnel of sun from the long window on the first landing. She looked typically gorgeous and typically unaware of it.

‘This is Natalie Craven.’ Ben took a step that put him between Nat and Antony. ‘Natalie’s my... house manager.’

Nat raised an eyebrow. Antony put his head on one side. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re no’ an actress by any chance?’ When Nat started to shake her head and he could see she wasn’t smiling, he went on hurriedly, with a thickening of the accent, ‘Wisnae meant to be an insult, Natalie, I just thought Ben might’ve called in some old... favour.’

‘She doesn’t owe me any favours,’ Ben said tightly.

‘Hey!’ Antony put up his hands. ‘No offence, pal.’

‘None taken.’ Ben was looking a little weary now. ‘Nat, if you see Amber anywhere, can you tell her I’m taking Antony to the church to, ah, meet the Vaughans.’

‘Or perhaps you’d like to join us,’ Antony said softly to Nat. ‘Be good to get another perspective. I, er, gather the Vaughans don’t have a lot to say these days.’

Nat smiled at him. ‘I’ve been there before. Also, there are people I need to phone. Bookings to make.’ She looked at Ben. ‘Like all the ones you put off this weekend?’ She threw her coat over the reception desk. ‘Why don’t you take Jane? Jane’s got a perspective on most things.’

Ben shrugged. Jane glanced at Natalie, thinking she ought to be upstairs with Amber, cleaning and redecorating. But maybe Nat wanted to find out how this situation worked out, come back with a report.

Cool.

‘Time for your break, surely,’ Nat said, confirming it. ‘And you’ve never met the Vaughans, have you, Jane?’

Kington Parish Church was alone on the edge of the town. From the road it looked like a country church, walled and raised up against the cold sky. Ben didn’t even glance at it, just drove straight past the entrance in his old blue MGB, with the top down. Antony Largo was beside him, Jane fleeced and huddled into the little seat behind them, her hair blown across her face.

‘That
was
a church, wasn’t it?’ Largo said. ‘The chunky grey thing with the wee spire we just passed?’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’ On the edge of the town centre, Ben had turned right, heading back into the country, raising his voice above the engine’s dirty growl. ‘I’m going to take the story in sequence.’

‘Can we no’ have the damn top up?’

‘It’s jammed, if you must know.’

‘Great.’

‘Do you good, a bit of air.’

‘
I
know what’d do me good, pal, but we left her behind.’ Largo leaned his head back. ‘That’s no offence to you, Jane, but I don’t think your mother would approve of me.’

‘I wasn’t looking for a new dad, anyway,’ Jane said.

‘Hmm,’ Largo mused. ‘Feisty.’

They came out of a shady lane with detached houses in it, and now they were in hilly countryside. Jane had never been down here before; she had no idea where the road led. The sun was pulsing feebly, a blister behind clouds like strips of yellowing bandage.

‘And you can keep your filthy paws off my staff, Largo,’ Ben said mildly. ‘Natalie’s in a relationship, and she’s bloody good at what she does.’

Largo turned to Ben. ‘How would you even know?’

‘What?’

Something fractured then, Largo bawling at Ben, raising himself up in the bucket seat. ‘Come on, what
do
you know about the hotel trade? I mean really? What have you
done
, you maniac? You could’ve found something in the independent sector, no problem, like every other bastard gets dumped by the Beeb. You could’ve gone to Kenny and Zoë Fitzroy. You could’ve come to me, for Christ’s sake! How naive is
this
? Find you can afford some Disneyesque mansion wi’ wee towers for the price of your Dockland penthouse, and you have to grab it like it’s now or never.’

Ben gripped the wheel. ‘I’ve remarried, in case you failed to notice. I have Amber to consider.’

‘Aye, and that—’

The wind made a grab at Antony Largo’s voice and the folded fabric of the car’s roof flapped violently behind Jane. She sank down in the little seat to hear the rest of the stuff he presumably hadn’t felt able to say inside the hotel.

‘—An artist and turned her into a skivvy. You had to prove you didn’t need any of us: “I’m gonnae show these bastards, I’m getting out of London and create a wee paradise and get m’self fit and youthful again and make them all as sick as pigs.” How naive is that? Truth of it is, you
do
need us, you arsehole.’

Ben hung grimly on to the wheel, slowing the car, breathing in deeply, swallowing something. ‘The building on your left,’ he said finally, through his teeth, ‘is Hergest Court.’

Disappointing.

Like, it should have been bigger. Must have been bigger once, seeing it was built on a motte, an obvious castle mound above unkempt grounds and what might have been an old pond, even a moat. It was about fifty yards back from the road, part stone, part timbered. The stone end had a sloping roof, the timbered end just stopped.

‘Like it’s been sawn off,’ Jane said.

‘This is only a fragment of what it used to be.’ Ben had reversed into a track of hard mud and turned the car to face the house.

It looked stark, the way buildings with timber framing rarely did. There ought to be wooded hills rising behind it, but there were only the cold fields and the waxy sky. On the sawn-off side were sporadic trees – a gloomy yew, a bent pine – and then some industrial-looking farm buildings.

‘Rather forlorn now, I admit,’ Ben said. ‘Been let out in recent years by the owners. Lived in usually by tenant farmers, and it was even a rural art gallery for a while. You can tell by the mound it’s built on that it used to be fortified, way back.’

‘How far back?’ Jane asked, interested now – more so than if it had been tarted up inside some mock-Elizabethan knot-garden.

‘Well, thirteenth century at least. That’s recorded.’

‘It’s no’
my
idea of Baskerville Hall,’ Antony Largo said.

Ben switched off the engine, and the atmosphere between him and Largo seemed to tauten, like some invisible sheet of cellophane dividing the front seats. Jane hunched into a corner of the back seat and kept her hands in the pockets of her fleece. No other vehicle had passed since they’d arrived. No smoke was coming out of any of the three visible chimneys of Hergest Court.

‘By the fifteenth century, it had become the house of the Vaughans,’ Ben said. ‘The most important family in the history of Kington.’

Antony stretched his legs. ‘And they’re your prototype Baskervilles?’

‘There
is
a long-established Baskerville family in the area, which accounts for the name. But the Vaughans have the history. The central figure is Thomas Vaughan, who switched from the Lancastrian side to the Yorkists in the Wars of the Roses. Killed at the Battle of Banbury in 1469. He was known as Black Vaughan.’

‘Naturally,’ Antony said.

Ben frowned. ‘Because of his black hair, apparently. To distinguish him from his brother who had red hair.’

‘Maybe you could just not mention that.’

Jane said quickly, ‘It was Hugo Baskerville in the book, wasn’t it? The guy who was supposed to have brought down the curse on the family?’

‘A wild, profane and godless man, according to Conan Doyle’s Baskerville manuscript.’ Ben turned around to face her. ‘Conan Doyle brings
his
legend forward almost exactly two centuries, to the time of the Great Rebellion – the English Civil War. So both the historical background and Doyle’s created one feature civil wars which tore the country apart. Doyle puts Hugo in the seventeenth rather than the fifteenth century. It’s exactly how an author would muddy the waters.’

‘And there was a girl, wasn’t there?’ Jane said.

‘A neighbouring yeoman’s daughter whom Hugo fancies and abducts. He drags her back to Baskerville Hall, but she escapes down the ivy from an upstairs room that night, while he and his cronies are getting pissed – the inference being that, hearing their ribald laughter, she suspects that they’re all going to come up and gang-rape her. When Hugo finds that she’s gone, his night’s pleasure denied him, he offers himself, body and soul, to the Powers of Darkness if he can be allowed to catch up with her again. Then he mounts his horse, orders the hunting pack to be unleashed and rides off furiously across the moor, with his hounds, to hunt her down.’

‘Across the moor,’ Antony looked around. ‘Do I see a moor?’

Ben frowned. ‘For which, if we were shooting the scene, we might substitute Hergest Ridge. Which begins’ – he jerked a thumb at where the land rose steeply behind the car – ‘just there. It’s wild, it has its curious features. And Stanner Rocks are surely as brooding as any Dartmoor tor.’

Antony smiled.

‘What happened to the girl?’ Jane asked. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Hugo’s companions go chasing after him,’ Ben said. ‘They’re scared of what he’ll do if he catches up with her. They encounter a night shepherd on the moor who’s in such a state of terror that he can hardly speak. He tells them he’s seen the hounds pursuing the hapless maiden, followed by Hugo on his black mare. And then, silently following Hugo, the worst thing of all.’

‘
Another hound
.’ Antony Largo laid on this melodramatically spooky Scottish voice, like Private Fraser in those old
Dad’s Army
episodes. ‘Only bigger... and meaner.’

‘They eventually find the girl in a clearing, dead of fatigue or fear,’ Ben said. ‘And then they find Hugo. And, standing over him, a great black beast, bigger than any hound—’

‘—
Ever seen by mortal eyes
,’ Antony Largo said.

Ben finally turned to him. ‘You’ve actually read it, then, Antony.’

‘Of
course
I’ve read it, you tosser, I’m a pro. I do my prep – even for this sh— So, here’s your beastie plucking at Hugo’s throat, and then it finally rips it all away.’ Antony clenched his teeth and growled until his own laughter began to choke him. ‘And it turns on these guys, with its jaws all dripping with blood and flesh and its eyes on fire. And they all shit themselves on the spot and leg it. End of legend.’

Ben didn’t laugh. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Yeah, OK. From then on, if the Hound is heard howling in the night or seen prowling the precincts, then it’s no’ what you’d call a fortunate omen for the Baskervilles.’