The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

  The Range Rover belonged to a squat, greasy little man who lived in Sheffield and was unemployed. He called himself Asmodeus or something stupid out of The Omen.

  'They're moving on, I think,' Shaw said.

  Asmodeus had a beard so sparse you could count the hairs. He had the seat pushed back and his feet on the dashboard. 'Good,' he said, as if he didn't really care.

  Shaw lowered his binoculars. 'What would you do if they came up here with spades and things?'

  'I'd be very annoyed indeed,' Asmodeus said in his flat, drawly voice. 'I'd be absolutely furious. So would Therese, wouldn't you, darling?'

  Therese was stretched out on the rear seat, painting her fingernails black. Shaw scowled. He didn't like Asmodeus calling her darling. He didn't at all like Asmodeus, who was unemployed and yet could afford a newish Range Rover.

  And yet he was still in awe of him, having seen him by night, this little slob with putrid breath and a pot-belly, not yet out of his twenties and yet able to change things.

  And he was excited.

  'But what would you do?'

  Asmodeus grinned at him through the open window. 'You're a little devil, aren't you, Shaw? What would you do?'

  Shaw said, because Therese was there, 'Kill them.'

  'Whaaay! You hear that, Therese? Shaw thinks he'd kill them.'

  Therese lifted newly painted nails into the light. 'Well,' she said, 'we might need the priest, but I must say that little farmer's beginning to get on my nerves.'

  Shaw tensed.

  'Tell you what, Shaw,' Asmodeus said. 'We'll give you an easier one. How about that?'

  They sat at one end of a refectory table, near an Aga-type kitchen stove, their reflections warped in the shiny sides of its hot-plate covers. Moira kind of jumpy inside, but Lottie pouring tea with steady hands, businesslike, in control.

  And this was less than twenty-four hours after the set-to at Matt's graveside, Lottie laying into Willie and Willie's Ma and the other crones, while the minister was helped away into the vibrating night.

  Over fifteen years since they'd been face to face. Lottie's hair was shorter. Her face was harder, more closed-up. Out on the forecourt, it had been, 'Hello, Moira', very nonchalant, like their meetings were still everyday events - no fuss, no tears, no embrace, no surprise.

  No doubt Dic had told her Moira was around.

  She sipped her tea and said Lottie was looking well, in spite of ...

  'You too,' Lottie said, flat-voiced. 'I always knew you'd become beautiful when you got past thirty. Listen ... thanks.'

  'For what?'

  'For not coming when he wrote to you.'

  'I was tied up.'

  'Sure,' Lottie said. 'But thanks anyway. Things were complicated enough. Better this way.'

  'This way?'

  'His music,' Lottie said. 'His project. His beloved bogman. Now stolen, I believe.'

  'Lottie, maybe I'm stupid, but I'm not with you.'

  'It was on the radio this morning. Thieves broke into the University Field Centre out near Congleton and lifted the Man in the Moss. I find it quite amusing, but Matt would've been devastated. Like somebody kidnapping his father.'

  'Somebody stole the bogman? Just like that?'

  Lottie almost smiled. 'Hardly matters now, though, does it? Listen, I'll take you down in a bit, show you his music room. He left some stuff for you.'

  'For me?'

  'Tapes. Listen, I'm not pushing, Moira, but I think you should do it.'

  'Do it?' She was starting to feel very foolish.

  'Get together with Willie and Eric and Dic and record his bogman music. I don't know if it's any good or not, I haven't heard much of it, but Matt saw it as his personal ... summit? His big thing? Life's work?'

  Moira looked hard at her, this austere, handsome woman, fifty-odd years old. Looked for the old indomitable spark in the eyes. Truth was, she was still indomitable, but the eyes ... the eyes had died a little. This was not the old Lottie, this was a sad and bitter woman playing the part of the old Lottie.

  'Then we'll do it,' Moira said. 'Whatever it's like.'

  'Good. Thank you. But don't decide yet. You see - I'll be frank - if you'd come when he wrote to you ... Well, he was quite ill by then, into the final furlong. He wasn't fit to record. Not properly. And then there was the other problem. And don't say, what other problem ... let's not either of us insult the other's intelligence.'

  'OK.' Moira leaned back and slowly sipped her tea. They sat there in silence, two women with little in common except perceived obligations to one man.

  Mammy, how was he when he died? Can you tell me that?

  This was the woman who could tell her. But Lottie had never had much patience with religion of any sort - organized or ... well, as disorganized as whatever it was Ma Wagstaff was trying to do last night with her patent witch bottle.

  'Lottie,' she said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't know. Well, maybe I knew inside of me, but I was young, too young to understand it. And nothing happened, Lottie, I swear it.'

  Lottie shrugged. 'Better, maybe, if it had. Better for me, I can tell you, if he'd gone off with you. But after sticking with it, through all kinds of ... Well, I wasn't prepared to have him spending his last days ignoring me, eaten up with old lust and regrets. So I'm glad you couldn't come.'

  Lottie took her teacup to the sink, dropped it into a plastic bowl. The sink was a big, old-fashioned porcelain thing, pipes exposed underneath it with bits of rag tied around them. No what Lottie's used to, Moira thought. Lottie is stainless-steel and waste-disposal.

  'You've ... had problems, then.' Christ, everything I say to this woman is just so fucking facile ...

  Lottie turned on the hot tap, held both hands under the frenzied gush until the steam rose and her wrists turned lobster-red. 'You could say that.'

  Eventually, turning off the water, wiping her hands on a blue teatowel, she said, 'I was married for twenty-eight years to a man who collected obsessions. The Pennine Pipes. The Mysteries of Bridelow. The Bogman ...'

  Moira said nothing. She was feeling faint. Her breath locked in her throat. She was getting a strong sense of Matt's presence in the room.

  '... and you,' Lottie said.

  In the lofty, rudimentary kitchen, Moira heard a roaring in her head, saw a flashing image of Matt in his coffin, white T-shirt, white quilted coffin-lining, before it was washed away by the black tide carrying images of a stone toad, dancing lights, the steam from writhing intestines liberated on to a flat stone ...

  'On me night he died ...'

  Moira swallowed tea, but the tea wasn't so hot any more and she was swallowing bile.

  'On the night he died,' Lottie said, 'he sexually assaulted a nurse in the hospital.'

  I'm not hearing this.

  She started to look wildly around the kitchen. High ceiling with pipes along it ... whitewashed walls with crumbling plaster showing through in places ... stone-flagged floor like the church of St Bride ... two narrow windows letting in light so white it was like a sheet taped across the glass.

  And this awful sense of Matt.

  'The nurse had long, dark hair,' Lottie said, almost wistfully. 'He addressed her as Moira.'

  The silence was waxen.

  She felt scourged.

  Lottie said, 'I wanted you to know all this ...'

  Matt was dodging about under the table, behind the pipes, vibrant, shock-haired Matt reduced to a pale, fidgeting thing, hunched in corners, flitting, agitated, from one to another, giving off fear, hurt, confusion.

  '... before you made a firm decision about the music. You see? I'm being open about it. No secrets any more.'

  Moira looked up into the furthest comer, near the back door, and a cobweb inexplicably detached itself from the junction of two pipes and hung there, impaled by a shaft of white light, heavy with glittering flies' corpses.

  'Come with me.' Lottie rolled down the sleeves of her cardigan and strode across the kitchen to the back door, with a long, ga
oler's key.

  Part Six

  mothers

  From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):

  The most widespread and powerful Celtic tribe in Northern Britain were the Brigantes, whose territory - known as Brigantia - included much of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Southern Scotland and had its southern boundary in the lower Pennines.

  The mother goddess of the Brigantes was Brigid, and it is believed that many churches dedicated to 'St Bride' were formerly sites of pagan Celtic worship ...

  CHAPTER I

  The bloody media.

  Over twenty cars parked outside the Field Centre, and men and women pacing the concrete forecourt, most of them turning round when Roger Hall's car pulled in - where the hell was he supposed to park with all these bastards clogging the place? Three cameramen, all swinging round, shooting his Volvo Estate as it manoeuvred about seeking space, as if he might have the bogman himself laid out in the back.

  'No ... no, I'm sorry ...' Ramming his way through jabbing hands holding pocket tape recorders.

  'Dr Hall, have you any idea yet ... ?'

  'Dr Hall, do you know when ...?'

  'Can you just tell us, Dr Hall, how ...?'

  'No!' He held up both hands. 'There'll be an official Press statement later.'

  Bastards. Leeches. One of the double doors opened a few inches and he was hauled in. Chrissie and the other woman, Alice, got the door closed and bolted behind him.

  Inspector Gary Ashton was sitting on Roger's desk. 'Any luck, sir?'

  'Blank wall.' Roger was brushing at his jacket, as if the reporters had left bits of themselves on him. 'However ...'

  'I must say,' Ashton said, 'it seemed a bit of a long shot to me, that a bunch of villagers from Bridelow would go to all this trouble.' He smiled hesitantly. 'Look, I've had a thought. I hardly like to suggest this, sir, but I don't suppose there's a University rag week in the offing?'

  'Don't be ridiculous,' Roger said.

  'Well, I don't honestly think,' Ashton said tautly, 'that it's any more ridiculous than your idea about superstitious villagers. Which sounds a bit like one those old Ealing comedies, if I may say so, sir.'

  Roger said, 'I think you should listen to me without prejudice. I think I know how they've done it.'

  Liz Horridge stood frozen with terror at the edge of the pavement.

  She was sweating hard; there seemed to be a film of it over her eyes, and a blur on the stone buildings around her turning the cottages into squat muscular beasts and the lych-gate into a predatory bird, its wings spread as if it were about to hop and scuttle down the street and overwhelm her, pinning her down and piercing her breast with its cold, stone beak. She was leaning, panting, against the back of a van parked on the corner where the main street joined the old brewery road.

  Oh, and by the way, Mother, the Chairman's hoping to drop by tonight.

  Who?

  The Chairman, Gannon's. Been planning to come for ages, apparently, but, you know, appointments, commitments ...

  Will he come here?

  We'll receive him in the main office, show him around the brewery. Then, yes, I expect I'll bring him back for a drink. A proper drink. Ha!

  Go. Get out. Got to.

  She'd thought that when she got so far the fear would evaporate in the remembered warmth of the village, but the village was cold and empty, and a blind like a black eyelid was down in the window of Gus Bibby's general stores' which always kept long hours and would always be lit by paraffin lamps on gloomy days.

  But it was Saturday afternoon, Gus Bibby did not close on a Saturday afternoon. Saturday had always been firewood day, and there'd be sacks of kindling outside. Always. Always on a Saturday.

  Liz felt panic gushing into her breast. Maybe it wasn't Saturday. Maybe it wasn't afternoon. Maybe it was early morning. Maybe the whole place had closed down, been evacuated, and nobody had told her. Maybe the brewery itself had been shut down for weeks and the village had been abandoned.

  ... Chairman's hoping to drop by tonight ...

  No!

  How could I not have seen it? How could I have sat there, pretending to examine Gannon's proposals and estimates and balance sheets, and not see his name?

  Because it wasn't there ... I swear ...

  Liz Horridge pumped panicky breath into the still, white air. Not far now. Not fifty yards. She could take it step by step, not looking at houses, not looking at windows.

  Someone's door creaked, opened.

  'Ta-ra then, luv, look after yourself ... You what... ?'

  Liz scuttled back into a short alleyway, squeezed herself into the wall. Mustn't let anyone see her.

  'Yeh, don't worry, our Kenneth'll be up to see to it in t'morning. Yeh, you too. Ta-ra.'

  Door closing.

  Footsteps.

  Liz clung to the wall. She wore an old waxed jacket and a headscarf over the matted moorgrass that used to be chestnut curls.

  She emerged from the entry into the empty street, like a rabbit from a hole. Wanting. Needing. Aching.

  To sit again at Ma Wagstaff's fireside, a warm, dry old hand on her sweating brow. If he comes ... scream. Don't matter what time.

  Can't turn back now. If you turn back now you'll surely die. Believe this.

  'How are you, Pop?'

  He was out of bed, that was a good sign, wasn't it? Cathy found him wearing a dull and worthy hospital dressing gown, sitting at his own bedside in a shabby, vinyl-backed hospital chair. He was in the bottom corner of a ward full of old men.

  'Bit tired,' he said. 'They've had me walking about. Physiotherapy. Got to keep moving when you've had a coronary.'

  Cathy clutched at the bed rails. 'They never told me that!'

  'Had to drag it out of them myself. Soon as they get you in hospital you're officially labelled 'moron'.' His features subsided into that lugubrious boxer-dog expression.

  'What's it mean, Pop?'

  'Coronary thrombosis? Means a clot in the coronary artery. Means I was lucky not to christen Matt Castle's grave for him. Means I have to rest: Putting on a pompous doctor-voice. '"We have to get ourselves together, as they say, Mr Gruber." Tell me about Joel. Please tell me he didn't sleep under the church.'

  Cathy said carefully that she hadn't seen him today. Not a word of what she'd heard about him rampaging around the place in his post-funeral fury, ripping down anything that hinted of paganism. Just that she hadn't actually seen him. And that she didn't know where he'd slept.

  'Storm gathering inside that chap,' Hans said. 'Hurricane Joel. Wanted to make sure he was somewhere else when it blew.'

  'Don't you think about it, Pop. Get some rest. Let them do their tests, try and endure the hospital food and don't refuse the sleeping pill at night.'

  'Cathy ...'

  'I know, but it's not your problem.'

  Hans's head lolled back into the hard vinyl chair. 'I keep the peace. It's taken me years to strike the right balance.'

  'Don't worry, they'll sort him out, Ma and the Union. They'll deal with him.'

  'But ...'

  'They sorted you out, didn't they?'

  Cathy smiled for him. Trying to look more optimistic than she felt.

  Hans said bleakly, 'Cathy, Simon Fleming came to see me. They want me to go to the Poplars "for a few weeks" convalescence'.'

  'Where?'

  The Church's nursing home in Shropshire. Ghastly dump. Full of played-out parsons mumbling in the shrubbery. Nobody gets out alive.'

  Cathy felt desperately sorry for him but couldn't help thinking it might be the best answer, for a while. Let the Mothers handle it. Whatever there was to be handled.

  He didn't seem to have heard about the disappearance of the bog body, and she didn't tell him. He had enough to worry about already.

  'Look, all you need,' Roger Hall said, 'is an exhumation order. That's not a problem, is it?'

  Backs to the doors, the Press people assembled on the other side, Chrissie and Alice looked at each o
ther. Roger playing detective. Didn't suit him. Chrissie wondered idly if Inspector Garry Ashton was married or attached. She thought this business was rather showing up Roger for what he was: pompous, arrogant, humourless - despite the nice crinkles around his eyes.

  Ashton said, a little impatiently, 'You were convinced earlier that the body was hidden in Bridelow.'

  'Still am,' Roger said smugly.

  'Go on,' Ashton said, no longer at all polite. 'Let's hear it.'

  Chrissie liked his style. Also the set of his mouth and the way his hair was razor-cut at the sides.

  Roger said, 'I attended a funeral in Bridelow yesterday. Matt Castle, the folk musician.'

  'So I understand,' Ashton said. 'Mr Castle a friend of yours, was he?'

  With a tingle of excitement, Chrissie suddenly knew what Ashton was wondering: did Roger himself have anything to do with the theft? The police must have spoken to the British Museum by now, learned all about Roger's battle to bring the bogman back up North. And why was he so keen to keep pointing the police in other directions?

  Gosh, Chrissie thought ... And Roger's obsessive attitude! The bogman intruding everywhere. And when the bogman was in a state of, er, emasculation, Roger himself was ... unable to function. And complaining of clamminess and peat in the bed and everything. And then suddenly Roger could ... with a vengeance! And the bog body had acquired what appeared to be an appendage of its own.

  Chrissie felt a kind of hysteria welling up. Stop it! I'm going bloody bonkers. Or somebody is.

  Suddenly she didn't want him touching her again.

  'Castle?' Roger said. 'Not what you'd call a friend, no. But he was always very interested in the bog body, as many people were. Kept ringing me up, asking what we'd learned so far. And actually turned up here twice, wanting to see the body, which, of course, was not available for public viewing. Although I did allow it the second time.'

  'Why'd you do that?'