The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

'Quite professionally done, sir. The rear doors were forced, both sets, but forced by somebody who knew how, if you see what I mean.'

  'It's ... unbelievable.'

  Chrissie heard a clang. Roger's fist hitting the metal table.

  'If you wouldn't mind, sir ... fingerprints.'

  'Sorry. It's just ... if anything, any one thing, had been specifically calculated to fucking ruin me, this ..

  'Ruin you, Dr Hall?'

  'I... We had a lot riding on it. You don't get your hands on one of these very often.'

  'How valuable would you say? I mean, I realise you can't ...'

  'Invaluable. And yet nor valuable at all to most people. You could hardly stick it in your hall like a Rodin. It's beyond me, the whole thing. And yet ...'

  Chrissie's head shot up out of her hands. Never!

  'Well, sir, I expect you have photographs. I'll also need to know what kind of vehicle would be required, assuming it has been removed from immediate area.'

  Bloody hell! Chrissie stood up. She found she was shaking.

  'We'll obviously be searching the grounds pretty thoroughly. But if you wanted to get it away without damaging it ...would it need any special conditions? Refrigeration?

  'It's in peat. Inspector. Peat's a preservative. That's how he survived for two thousand years.'

  'Of course. Sorry. Stupid of me. Anyway ... We're clearly not looking for young tearaways here, so have you any idea, any notion at all, who in the wide world would go to so much trouble to ...'

  'Steal a two-thousand-year-old corpse.'

  'Old as that? Well. Wouldn't be much use for medical research then? So what are we looking for? Bit of a nutter? A rich eccentric collector? I'll be honest, Dr Hall, I've not come across anything quite like this. It's a one-off.'

  'It's unbelievable,' Roger said for about the fifteenth time, and Chrissie heard him pacing the echoing empty lab.

  CHAPTER II

  The girl who opened the Rectory door was sipping red soup off the top of an overflowing mug. She watched both of them cautiously over the rim.

  'Sorry,' Dic said. 'It's an awkward time.'

  She swallowed hot soup, winced. 'No problem. I'm on my own.'

  'That's what I thought. We, er, we needed somewhere to talk ... Sorry ... your dad, is he ... How is he?'

  'They say it's a minor heart attack.' Tomato soup adhering to her lips. 'I'm not allowed to see him until tomorrow, he has to have rest. Ma Wagstaff says not to worry. He'll be OK.'

  She sounded like this was supposed to be a reliable medical opinion. 'This is Moira Cairns,' Dic said.

  'Hello,' Catherine Gruber said limply.

  Moira sensed she was worried sick.

  The porch light was a naked bulb. Above it, the gaping orifice, spread by stone thumbs, was deepened by the hard, unsubtle shadows it threw.

  The Sheelagh na gig, lit for drama, grinning lasciviously at Joel Beard. And he was appalled to think that everyone entering the church to worship God should have to pass beneath this obscenity.

  Tradition, the antiquarians said. Our heritage. Olde Englande.

  Joel Beard saw beyond all this, saw it only as symbolic of the legacy of evil he had been chosen to destroy.

  A few minutes ago, he'd telephoned the Archdeacon from the kiosk in front of the Post Office, giving him a carefully edited summary of the evening's events in Bridelow. Not mentioning the appalling incident at the graveside with the bottle - which the Archdeacon might have judged to be, at this stage, an over-reaction on his part.

  'Well, poor Hans,' the Archdeacon had said easily and insincerely. 'I think he should have a few months off, don't you? Perhaps some sort of semi-retirement. I shall speak to the Bishop. In fact I think I'll go and see him. Meanwhile you must take over, Joel. Do what you feel is necessary.'

  'I have your support?'

  'My support spiritually - and ... and physically, I hope. I shall come to see you. Drop in on you. Very soon. Meanwhile, tread carefully, Joel. Will you live at the Rectory now?'

  'The girl's still there, Simon. Hans's daughter. She'll have to go back to Oxford quite soon, I'd guess. But then there's Hans himself, when he leaves hospital.'

  'Don't worry. We'll find him somewhere to convalesce. Meanwhile ...'

  '... I shall sleep in the church. In the priest's cell.'

  'All alone down there? My God, Joel, you're a brave man.'

  'It's God's House!' Joel had said, even he feeling, with a rare stab of embarrassment, that this was a naive response.

  And was it God's House?

  And which God?

  As he entered the church of St Bride under the spread thighs of the leering Sheelagh, he experienced the unpleasant illusion of being sucked into ...

  No!!

  'Long-haired girls,' Dic Castle said bitterly. 'Always the long, dark hair.'

  Moira said, 'I can't believe this.'

  'No?'

  'No,' she said firmly.

  The minister's daughter had left them alone in the Rectory sitting room. Dic had wanted her to stay, like he needed a chaperone with this Scottish whore, but she wouldn't. They could hear her banging at a piano somewhere, ragtime numbers, with a lot of bum notes. Letting them know she wasn't listening at the door.

  'He never touched me sexually,' Moira said. 'He never came near. On stage, it was always him on one side, me on the other, Eric and Willie in between but a yard or two back. That was how it was on stage. That was how it was in the van. That was how it was.'

  Somewhere, walls away, Catherine Gruber went into the 'Maple Leaf Rag', savaging the ivories, getting something out of her system...

  'And you clearly don't believe me.' Moira was sitting on a cushion by the fireplace. Paper had been laid in it, a lattice of wood and a few pieces of coal.

  Dic said, 'Followed him once. After a charity gig. She was waiting for him in the car park. About twenty-one, twenty-two. About my age. Long, dark hair.'

  'When was this?'

  'Fucking little groupies,' Dic said. He was semi-sprawled across a sofa, clutching a cushion. 'At his age. Er ... 'bout a year ago, just before he ... before it was diagnosed.'

  Dic had a lean face, full lips like Matt. Dark red hair, like Lottie. Still had a few spots. 'And, yeah,' he said, 'I do know she wasn't the first.' Staring at Moira in her jeans and her fluffy white angora sweater, hands clasped around her knees, black hair down to her elbows.

  'Because you still think the first was me. Sure. And you know something ... Gimme a cigarette, will you?'

  He tossed the cushion aside, got out a crumpled pack of Silk Cut and a book of matches. 'Didn't know you smoked.'

  'Tonight,' she said, taking a cigarette, tearing off a match, 'I smoke.'

  The minister's daughter was playing 'The Entertainer', sluggishly.

  Moira said, 'Just answer me this. Earlier tonight, at your dad's funeral, at the graveside ... I mean, how'd you feel about that?'

  His face closed up, hard as stone. 'I just played the pipes. Badly. I didn't see anything.'

  She nodded. 'OK.'

  'So I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'I understand. We'll forget that, then.'

  He lit his own cigarette, said through the smoke, 'Mum said you wouldn't be coming anyway.'

  'She didn't know.'

  'You seen her?'

  'No. And that's not because... Listen, I'm gonna say this. There was a time when I felt bad. Twenty, fifteen years ago. When I felt bad because I never came on to him, not even after a gig in some faraway city when we were pissed. And I felt bad that I was twenty years younger and I was taking off nationally, and he was maybe never going to.'

  'I bet you did.' Dic sneered. 'I bet that really cut you up.'

  She ignored it. 'I was thinking, if we'd slept together, just the once, to kind of get it over, bring down that final barrier ... You got the vaguest idea what I'm saying?'

  He just looked at her through the smoke.

  'Anyway,' Moira said, 'we didn't
. It never happened. Maybe that's another piece of guilt I'm carrying around. I don't know.'

  The piano music stopped. Dic lay back on the sofa, hands clasped behind his head. Outside, the wind was getting up, spraying dead leaves at the windows.

  There was a polite knock on the door and Cathy came in.

  'I'm making some tea, if...'

  'Oh, yeah, thanks.' Dic sitting up, looking sheepish.

  'Be ten minutes,' Cathy said.

  Moira said as the door closed, 'Lottie. Your mother. She know about this?'

  'We never discussed it."

  'But you think she knows, right?"

  Dic shrugged.

  'This girl. This so-called girl of Matt's. You know who she was?'

  'No. I tried to find out from people at the folk club - The Bear, you remember the joint? Nobody seemed to know her.'

  'So how do you know they were ... ?'

  'Because they went straight into this shop doorway. Would've taken a jack to prise them apart.'

  'Right,' Moira said sadly. 'And she looked ... like me?'

  'Yeah. Superficially. Like you used to look.'

  'Thanks a lot.'

  Dic picked up the cushion and hurled it with all his strength at a bare wall. 'I didn't mean it like that, OK? I don't mean a fucking thing I say. I just like insulting people, yeah?'

  'Sure,' Moira said. This wasn't getting either of them anywhere. She wished she'd stuck to her original plan and never agreed to come here with him. So he had problems. They'd made him stand there playing the pipes while they messed with his dad's body in its coffin. She could feel the confusion and the rage billowing out of him.

  'Dic ...' She was going to regret this.

  'Yes?'

  No, she wasn't. She wasn't going to say anything either of them might regret. She gathered up her cloak from the carpet.

  'I'm away, all right?'

  The hissing sound disturbed him. And the occasional popping. And the blue glow.

  It came from the circular wick of the paraffin stove. Intense, slightly hellish, ice-blue needles pricking the dark, the close stone walls shimmering like the inside of a cave lit by a cold and alien sea-glare.

  Joel turned the flame up fully until it was flaccid and yellow, and then he blew it out. The stove was having little or no effect anyway. His original plan had been to bring an electric heater down here, but there was no power point, and the nearest one in the church was too far away for Alfred Beckett's extension lead to reach.

  Joel lit a candle.

  With the stove out, the temperature must be plunging, but at least it didn't look as cold.

  He sat on the side of the camp-bed, with the double duvet wound around him.

  Cold he could live with, anyway, insulated by years of refereeing schoolboy rugby matches. Cold he could almost relish.

  He'd taken off his boots but added an extra pair of rugby socks. When he lay down, his feet - projecting from the bottom of the bed - would touch the stone blocks of the far wall. That was how cramped this cell was.

  But discomfort was good. It was a holy place. Above him the nave of St Bride's, around him its ancient foundations. Rock of Ages. A blessed place, a sanctuary where bishops - well, at least one bishop - had passed the dark, cold hours in sacred solitude.

  If he hadn't been so bone-tired, so sated with righteous rage, Joel might have spent the night in holy vigil, on his knees on the stone floor, like some mediaeval knight. Praying for divine aid in the deliverance of Bridelow from its own dark dragon.

  But his body and his mind were both demanding sleep ... a state often at its most elusive when most needed. He was also rather appalled to find his loins apparently yearning for the comfort of a woman.

  Before his conversion, Joel had exploited his God-given glamour at every opportunity - and there had been many. Now he did not deny himself the yearning, only its habitual, casual assuagement.

  He told himself this unseemly erection in the House of God was merely a side-effect of the cold and the pressure of the duvet.

  His watch told him it was not yet 10 p.m. But tomorrow, he felt, would be a long day. So he would allow his body sleep.

  When he blew out the candle and lay back, the paraffin stench hung over him like a chloroform cloth. He must not sleep in this air. Clutching the duvet around him, he arose into the absolute darkness, followed his nose to the stinking heater and pulled it two yards to the oaken door. Bent almost double, he carried the appliance into the little tunnel which led to the stairway.

  And then, leaving it out there, shuffled back to his cell. Locking the thick and ancient door of his sanctuary against the pagan night. Falling uncomfortably into the rickety bed.

  Tread carefully, Joel.

  What did the Archdeacon mean by that? Joel would tread with the courage and determination of the first Christians to walk these hills. Those who had driven the heathens from their place of worship and built upon it this church.

  And whose holy task, because of the isolation of the place and the inbred superstition of the natives, had yet to be completed. .

  With God's help, Joel Beard would drive out the infidel. For ever.

  Cathy was pouring boiling water out of a big white teapot, down the sink. 'Forgot to put the bloody tea in. I'm a bit impractical.'

  'Well, don't bother for me,' Moira said. 'I have to go.'

  'You're the singer, aren't you?' Cathy filled the kettle, plugged it into an old-fashioned fifteen-amp wall-socket. It was that kind of kitchen, thirty years out of date but would never be antique. Moira said wearily, yes, she was the singer.

  Cathy said, 'Still, I bet you don't play the piano as good as me:

  Moira grinned. 'How long you known Dic?'

  'Years. On and off. He'd come up to Bridelow with his father at weekends. I used to fancy him rotten at one time.'

  'Used to?'

  Cathy shrugged. 'That was when we were the same age,' she said elliptically.

  Moira looked at her. A little overweight; pale, wispy hair pulled back off a face that was too young, yet, to reflect Cathy's cute sense of irony.

  'When we came in, you said you thought your father was knackered. You said it'd do him good to get out of this place for a while.'

  'I said that, did I?'

  Try again. 'You were born here?'

  'So they tell me. I don't live here at present. I'm in Oxford.'

  'Doing what?'

  'Studying,' Cathy said. 'The principal occupation in Oxford, next to watching daytime telly and getting pissed.'

  'What are you studying? Oh, hey, forget it. I'm tired of walking all around things. What I really want to know is what happened at Matt's funeral that fucked your dad up so bad. And who's the other minister, the big guy, and how come you don't like him. Also, who's the crone who fumbles in coffins, and why was your daddy letting it go on. That's for starters.'

  Cathy straightened up at the sink. 'You can't do that.'

  'Huh?'

  'You can't just come into Bridelow and ask questions like that straight out.'

  'Oh. Really. Well, I'll be leaving then.'

  'OK,' Cathy said lightly.

  The avalanche of liquid peat hit him like effluent in a flooded drain and then it was swirling around him and he was like a seabird trapped in an oil-slick, his wings glued to his body. If he struggled it would tear his wings from his shoulders and enter his body and choke him. He could taste it already in his throat and his nose.

  But, even as it filled his dream, he knew that the tide of peat was only a metaphor for the long centuries of accumulated Godless filth in this village.

  He knew also that he did have wings that could carry him far above it.

  For he was an angel.

  And if he remained still and held his light within him the noxious tide could never overwhelm him.

  Joel dreamed on.

  Although the stone room around him was cold, the black peat in the dream was warm. He remained still and the peat settled around him
like cushions.

  Inside his dreaming self, the light kept on burning. Its heat was intense and its flame, like the one inside the paraffin heater, became a tight, blue jet arising from a circle. It heated up the peat too.

  In his dream he was naked and the peat was as warm and sensuous as woman-skin against him.

  Moira waited for her by the Rectory gate.

  It was bitterly cold. She imagined the walls of the village cottages tightening under the frost.

  Cathy came round the side of the house, a coat around her shoulders. 'How'd you know I'd come after you?'

  Moira shrugged.

  'You're like old Ma Wagstaff, you are. You know that?'

  'That's ...'

  'The crone, yes.'

  'I hope not,' Moira said. Well, dammit ... Willie's old mother? And he never said. All those years and he never said a word.

  'I'm trying to understand it all,' Cathy said. 'Somebody has to work it all out before we lose it. Most people here don't bother any more. It's just history. I suppose that's been part of the problem.'

  Moira realised she was just going to have to do some listening, see what came together. The church clock shone out blue-white and cold, as if it was the source of the frost.

  'The old ways,' Moira said. 'Sometimes they don't seem exactly relevant. And people get scared for their kids. Yeh, you're right, they don't want to understand, most of them. But can you blame them?'

  'It's not even as if it's particularly simple. Not like Buddhism or Jehovah's Witness-ism,' Cathy said. 'Not like you can hand out a pamphlet and say, "Here it is, it's all there." I mean, you can spend years and years prising up little stones all over the place trying to detect bits of patterns '

  Cathy fell silent, and Moira found she was listening to the night The night was humming faintly - a tune she knew. People like me, she thought, we travel different roads, responding to the soundless songs and the invisible lights.

  It's all too powerful... the heritage ... maybe you should go away and when you get back your problems will be in perspective ...go somewhere bland ... St Moritz, Tunbridge Wells ...

  Bridelow?

  Ah, Duchess, you old witch.

  She said, 'So what is the history of this place? I mean, the relevant bits.'