The Man in the Moss E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A PHIL RICKMAN STANDALONE NOVEL A supernatural thriller from the author of the chilling Merrily Watkins Mysteries. Though dead for two millennia, he remains perfectly preserved in black peat. The Man in the Moss is one of the most fascinating finds of the century. But, for the isolated Pennine community of Bridelow, his removal is a sinister sign. A danger to the ancient spiritual tradition maintained, curiously, by the Mothers' Union. In the weeks approaching Samhain - the Celtic feast of the dead - tragedy strikes again in Bridelow. Scottish folk singer Moira Cairns and American film producer Mungo Macbeth discover their Celtic roots are deeper and darker than they imagined. And, as fundamentalist zealots of both Christian and satanic persuasions challenge an older, gentler faith, the village faces a natural disaster unknown since the reign of Henry VIII. Gripping throughout. Powerful, classic stuff. - The Times

Leseprobe

The Man in the Moss

PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

ALSO BY

PHIL RICKMAN

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of Angels

Midwinter of the Spirit

A Crown of Lights

The Cure of Souls

The Lamp of the Wicked

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

The Remains of an Altar

The Fabric of Sin

To Dream of the Dead

The Secrets of Pain

THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

The Bones of Avalon

OTHER TITLES

Candlenight

Curfew

The Man in the Moss

First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

e-book edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Phil Rickman, 1991

The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 697 1 e-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 692 6 Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZwww.corvus-books.co.uk

The Man in the Moss

Contents

then . . . I

then . . . II

PART ONE THE SPRING CROSS

INTRODUCTION

PART TWO BLACK GLOW

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

PART THREE BOG OAK

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

PART FOUR THE BURIAL

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PART FIVE OUR SHEILA

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

PART SIX MOTHERS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

PART SEVEN ANGELS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

PART EIGHT JOHN PEVERIL STANAGE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

PART NINE FEAST OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PART TEN MOSS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

then . . .

I

A cold midwinter fogbank lay on the Moss.

It lay like a quilt on the black mattress of the peat, and nothing moved.

Not even the village schoolteacher standing on the promontory at the end of a ragged alley of graves where the churchyard seemed to overhang the bog’s edge.

Damp January was clamped across the teacher’s mouth and nose like a chloroform pad. He’d only been an hour out of bed, but the cold made him tired and the sight of the Moss only made him feel colder.

It was, as he’d explained to countless generations of pupils, the biggest surviving peatbog in the North of England, a gross product of violent death and centuries of decay . . . vast forests burned and torn down by the barbarian invaders . . . soaring greenery slashed and flattened and transformed by time into flat, black acres bounded by the hills and the moors.

The peat was dead. But, because of its acids, the peat had the power to preserve. Sometimes fragments of the ancient dead were found in there, from iron-hard limbs of trees to the arms and legs of corpses (which were taken away by the villagers and quietly buried).

Inside his long, deeply unfashionable overcoat, the teacher suddenly shivered.

Not at the thought of the corpses, but because he was waiting for the piper.

The piper on the Moss.

The sad, swollen drone, the bleak keening of a lost soul, had reached him on a sudden, spiked breeze during his habitual morning walk before school.

And he’d stopped, disquieted. The air had been still, weighted by the fog; no breeze at all except for this single, quick breath. As if it had been awoken only to carry the message that the piper was on the Moss.

This worried him, for the piping was never heard in winter.

As a rule, it came on summer evenings, when the Moss was firm and springy and the sound would be serene, rippling along the air currents, mingling with bird cries . . . plaintive enough to soften the clouds.

But the piper did not come in winter.

Seeking reassurance, the teacher turned around, looking for the soft blue eye of the Beacon over the village. But the fog had closed the eye; he could not even make out the outline of the Norman church tower.

And, while his back was turned, it began. A distant, drifting miasma of music. Notes which sounded ragged at first but seemed to reassemble somehow in the air and harmonize eerily with the atmosphere.

Cold music, then, with a razor-edge of bitterness.

And more. An anger and a seeping menace . . . a violence, unsuppressed, which thrust and jabbed at the fog, made it swirl and squirm.

Trembling suddenly, the schoolteacher backed away from it; it was as if the fog and the frozen stillness of winter had combined to amplify the sound. And the sound made vibrant, pulsing images in his head.

It was as though the sky had been slashed and the rain bled from the clouds.

As though the cry had been physically torn from the ruptured breast of a bird in flight.

Or the morning itself had been ripped open, exposing the black entrails of another kind of night.

And then the piper himself came out of the fog with the black bladder like a throbbing tumour under one arm, and the sound exploded around him, a sound as dark as the peat under his plodding boots.

A black noise. The piper in a black mood.

‘Why can’t you keep away?’ the teacher whispered. ‘Why do you have to haunt us?’

He pulled his hat over his ears to muffle the piping and hurried away from it, back towards the church until the Beacon’s ghostly disc emerged from the fog and he could see the vacant smile on the face of Our Sheila who fingered and flaunted her sex on the church porch.

He rushed past her and into the church, shutting the great oak door behind him, removing his hat and clamping it to his breast, staring up at the Winter Cross, all jagged branches, blunted thorns, holly and mistletoe.

He couldn’t hear the pipes any more but felt he could taste the noise – that the oozing sound had entered his ears and been filtered down to the back of his throat where it came out tasting sourly of peat.

‘Doesn’t mean owt, does it?’ he called out to the Winter Cross. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we? Nowt’ll change?’

And nothing would change for more than fifteen winters of fog and damp. But fifteen years in the life of a Moss was barely a blink of the eye of God, and when the Moss revealed what it had preserved . . . then the changes would come, too many, too quickly and too horribly.

And the teacher, in retirement, feeling the kiss of the eternal night, would remember the first time the piper had appeared on the Moss in winter.

Meanwhile, later that week, the fog would lift and there would be snow.

then . . .

II

They were all around her at the stage door, like muggers in the night. She could smell the sweat and the beer . . . and a sour scent, like someone’s rancid breath, squirting out of the darkness and straight to the back of her throat.

Coughing. Coughing at nothing. For as long as she could remember, hostility had occasionally come to her like this . . . like a single, piercing puff from a poisoned perfume spray.

But nothing there, really.

There were maybe twenty of them, but it was mostly OK, wasn’t it, mostly warm wishes and appreciation? Just never happened to her before. One of them had his jacket off, eyeing her. He was grinning and mumbling.

‘Sign your what?’ she said.

‘Get used to it, lass.’ Matt Castle grinning too. ‘This is only the start of it. For you.’

Now the guy was rolling up a chequered shirt-sleeve in the sub-zero night, handing her this thick black felt-tip pen.

‘Oh, your arm.’ She tried to smile, printing her name all the way up the soft, hairless underside of his forearm.

Moira Cairns.

Usually, it would be just a handful of enthusiasts, harmless as train-spotters, chattering learnedly about the music and mainly to Matt. Dropping away as they headed for the car park. Shouting, See you again . . . stuff like that, mostly to Matt.

You should be loving this, hen, she told herself. Real fans. Can you believe that? You’re a star.

Willie and Eric were loading the gear into Matt’s old minibus, wanting to be away – more snow on the way, apparently. Two girls in leather jackets held open the back doors for the tea-chest Willie kept his hand-drums in.

She felt it again, back of her throat. Nearly choked on it.

‘Ta,’ Eric said. Moira saw little Willie sizing up the girls for future reference. Tonight, she knew, he was worried he wouldn’t get home Across the Moss, if the snow came down.

Matt got into the driving seat, Eric slammed the back doors and climbed in on the passenger side. One of the girls in leather – buxom piece – opened a rear side door for Willie. Willie rolled his eyes at her, gave her his most seductively innocent grin. ‘See you sometime, eh?’

Moira’s throat was burning up.

The girl said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be around.’ She held on to the open door. ‘Gina,’ she said. The wire-caged light over the back-stage exit threw a grille of shadows on to her pale, puffy cheeks.

Willie, five and a bit feet tall, liked his women big. ‘Gina. Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll remember.’

The first sparse snowflakes hit the wet black asphalt and dissolved. Moira, tucking her long hair down her coat collar, smiled at the girl, put out a foot to climb into the van next to Willie.

And then the moment froze, like life’s big projector had jammed. Moira turned in time to see the girl’s eyes harden, glazing over like a doll’s eyes as she whirled – a big, clumsy dancer – and flung the door. Like the door was a wrecking hammer and Moira was the side of a condemned building.

Snarling, ‘Traitor!’ Discoloured, jagged teeth exposed. ‘Fucking bitch!’

Willie had seen it. With both hands, he had pushed her back. She stumbled, fell over the kerb, the door connecting with a shuddering crunch and this girl Gina snarling, ‘Bitch . . .’, voice as deadly cold as the grinding metal.

And then the door reopened and Willie was hauling her in and snatching it shut behind her, the girl screaming, ‘Go on . . . feather your own nest, fucking cow!’ And beating on the panel into Moira’s ear as Matt started the engine and pulled urgently away into the unheeding, desultory night traffic.

‘Jesus,’ Willie Wagstaff said. ‘Could’ve had your fingers off.’

‘Screw up ma glittering career, huh?’ White face in the street-light and a rasp of Glasgow giving it away that Moira was pretty damn shocked. ‘Couldny play too well wi’ a hook.’

Matt said mildly, ‘Don’t let it bother you. Always one or two. Just jealous.’ The snow heavy enough now for him to get the wipers going.

‘Wasny about envy.’ Moira had her guitar in her arms. ‘I’m no’ exactly popular with your fans any more is the problem.’

‘You’re in good company,’ Matt said. ‘Look how the purists shunned Dylan when he went over to rock and roll.’

‘Called me a traitorous cow.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Matt said. ‘We’ve been over this.’ So damned non-chalant about it. He seemed so determined she shouldn’t feel bad that she felt a sight worse.

Eric, the mournful one who played fiddle and twelve-string, Eric, the mediator, the peacemaker, said, ‘Weren’t a bad gig, though, were it?’

‘Was a grand gig,’ Moira said. Good enough, she thought, heartsick, to be the start of something, not the end.

Least her throat wasn’t hurting so bad. The guitar case was warm in her arms. The snowflakes began to stick and cluster on the side windows as Matt drove first to Eric’s house at Ashton Under Lyne, where Willie had left his Mini van. They switched the drum chest to the back of the little grey van, and Willie said, ‘I won’t mess about. If it’s snowing like this down here it’ll be thick as buggery over t’top.’ He hung his arms around Moira’s neck and gave her a big kiss just wide of the lips. ‘Ta-ra, lass. Don’t lose touch, eh?’

Then Eric kissed her too, mournfully, and by the time she got into the front seat next to Matt she was in tears, both arms wrapped around the guitar case for comfort.

‘This is the worst thing I ever did, you know that, Matt?’

There was silence. Just the two of them now, for the last time. Time for some plain talking.

‘Don’t be so bloody daft.’ Still his tone was curiously mild.

‘She was right, that slag, I should have ma fingers chopped off.’

‘Listen, kid.’ He tapped at the steering-wheel. ‘You made one sacrifice for this band when you threw up your degree course. That’s it. No more. Don’t owe us nowt. It’s been nice – cracking couple of years, wouldn’t’ve missed it. But you’re not even twenty-one. We’re owd men, us.’

‘Aw, Matt . . .’ Could anybody be this selfless?

‘Gone as far as we’re going. Think I want to be trailing me gear around the country when I’m sixty? No way. It’s a good get-out, this, straight up. For all of us. Eric’s got his kids, Willie’s got his . . .’

Matt didn’t finish the sentence, covering up the break by changing down to third, swinging sharp right and taking them through Manchester’s Piccadilly: bright lights, couples scurrying through the snow. Snow was nice in the city, Moira thought. For a while. When it came by night.

Think about the snow. Because Matt’s got to be lying through his teeth.

But the silence got too heavy. ‘OK,’ she said, to change the subject. ‘What do you want to be doing?’

‘Eh?’

‘You said you didny wanna be trailing your gear around when you were sixty. What would you like to be doing?’

Matt didn’t answer for a long time, not until they were out of the city centre.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re all right for money, me and Lottie. Thanks to you.’

‘Matt . . .’ I can’t stand this.

‘All right. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do. But I’ll tell you this much . . . I know where I want to be.’

Moira waited. The snow was heavy now, but they were not too far from Whalley Range, where she lived, and it wouldn’t take Matt long to get to his bit of Cheshire and Lottie.

‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is to be out of these sodding suburbs. Want to go home.’

‘Across the Moss?’ The words feeling strange in Moira’s mouth.

‘Yeah,’ Matt said.

Across the Moss. Willie and Matt would often slip the phrase to each other, surreptitiously, like a joint. Across the Moss was Over the Rainbow. Utopia. The Elysian Fields.

‘Lottie likes it fine where we are. All the shops and the galleries and that. But it’s not me, never was. Don’t belong. No . . . echoes. So. Yeah. I’m going home. Might take a year, might take ten. But that’s where I’m ending up.’

Which didn’t make her feel any better. Twenty years older than her and here he was, talking about ending up. Did this happen to everybody when they turned forty?

‘This is Willie’s village, up in the moors?’

‘Yeah. And Willie stayed. Willie’s got family there. My lot moved to town when I was a lad. You never get rich up there, not even the farmers. But we were happy. We were part of it. Willie’s still part of it. Drops down to town to play a gig or two, get his leg . . . go out with a woman.’

Moira smiled. Matt tended to be kind of proper, like a father, when they were alone.

‘But he keeps going back. And his mother . . . she’s never spent a night away, his ma, the whole of her life.’

‘Some place, huh?’

‘Special place.’ He was staring unblinking through the wind-screen and the snow. ‘It’s quite lonely and primitive in its way. And the Moss – biggest peatbog in the North.’

‘Really?’

‘Vast. And when you get across it – it’s weird – but there’s a different attitude. Different values.’

‘Isn’t that what everybody says about the place they were brought up?’

‘Do you?’

She thought about this.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Maybe not.’

The world outside was a finite place in the thickening snow. Matt was somewhere far inside himself. Across the Moss.

She glanced at him quickly. Thickset guy, coarse-skinned. Nobody’s idea of a musician. Brooding eyes the colour of brown ale. Most times you thought you knew him; sometimes you weren’t so sure. Occasionally you were damn sure you didn’t know him, and couldn’t.

After a while she said, ‘What’s it called? I forget.’

‘Bridelow,’ Matt said in a deliberate way, rounding out all the consonants. ‘Bridelow Across the Moss.’

‘Right,’ she said vaguely.

‘Dramatic place. To look at. Never saw that till I started going back. I take the little lad up there sometimes, of a weekend. When he’s older we’re going to go hiking on Sundays. Over the moors.’

‘Sounds idyllic. Like to see it sometime.’

‘But mostly I go alone.’ Matt pulled up under the streetlamp in front of the Victorian villa where Moira had her apartment. ‘Me and the pipes.’

‘You take the pipes?’

Bagpipes. The Northumbrian pipes, played sitting down, had been Matt’s instrument. Then he’d started experimenting with different kinds of bag, made of skins and things. He called them the Pennine Pipes, claiming they’d been played in these parts since before the Romans came to Britain.

The Pennine Pipes made this eerie, haunting sound, full of a kind of repressed longing.

‘Releases me,’ Matt said.

She didn’t want to ask him what it released him from.

‘Takes it away,’ Matt said.

She didn’t want to ask him what it was that piping took away.

‘On the Moss,’ Matt said. ‘Only on the Moss.’

The tips of her fingers started to feel cold.

‘The Moss takes it away,’ Matt said. ‘The Moss absorbs it.’

He switched off the engine. Snow was settling on the bonnet.

‘But the Moss also preserves it,’ Matt said. ‘That’s the only draw-back. Peat preserves. You give it to the peat, and you’ve got rid of it, but the peat preserves it for ever.’

He turned and looked at her; she saw something swirling in his eyes and the truth exploded in her mind. Oh, Christ, don’t let me taste it. God almighty, don’t let it come. Was the girl, what’s her name, Gina . . . it was the girl, it wasny you, Matt, wasny you . . . please, don’t let it be you . . .

In the silence, the kind which only new snow seemed to make, they looked at each other in the streetlight made brighter by the snow.

‘This is it then,’ Matt said flatly.

‘Think I might cry again.’ But she was lying now. There was the residue of something unpleasant here, something more than sadness swirling in Matt’s eyes.

Matt had his door open. ‘Pass us your guitar.’

‘Huh? Oh. Right. Sorry.’

The street was silent, snow starting to make the three- and four-storey houses look like soft furnishings. Lights shone pastel green, pink and cream behind drawn curtains. Matt took the guitar case, snowflakes making a nest in his denim cap. He pushed it back. He said, just as relaxed, just as mild and just as offhand as he’d been earlier, ‘One thing I’ve always meant to ask. Why do you always take this thing on stage with you?’

‘The guitar?’

‘No, lass. The case. This old and cracked and not very valuable guitar case. You never let the bloody thing out of your sight.’

‘Oh.’ How long had he been noticing this? She looked at him. His eyes were hard. He’d never asked her questions; everything he knew about her was stuff she’d volunteered. Matt was incurious.

And because of that she told him.

‘There’s . . . kind of a wee pocket inside the case, and inside of that there’s, like, something my mother gave me when I was young.’

He didn’t stop looking at her.

‘It’s only a comb. Kind of an antique, you know? Very old. Too heavy to carry around in your pocket. It means a lot to me, I suppose.’

‘That’s your mother, the . . . ?’

‘The gypsy woman. Aye. Ma mother, the gypsy woman.’ She shook snow off her hair. ‘They’re big on good-luck tokens, the gypsies. Throw’m around like beads.’

Matt said roughly, ‘Don’t go making light of it.’

‘Huh?’

‘You’re trying to make it seem of no account. Traditions are important. Sometimes I think they’re all we have that’s worthwhile.’ He propped the instrument in its stiff black case against the wide concrete base of the streetlamp.

Moira said, ‘Look, you’re gonny get soaked.’

He laughed scornfully, like the noise a crow makes.

‘Matt,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you again, yeh?’ And she did want to, she really did. Sure she did.

He smiled. ‘We’ll be on different circuits now, lass. You in a suite at the Holiday Inn, me over the kitchen at the Dog and Duck. Tell you what, I’ll buy all your records. Even if it is rock and roll. How’s that?’

She took a step towards him, hesitant. He was only a wee bit taller than she was.

This was it. The final seconds of the last reel.

Two years in the band, building up her reputation on the back of his. Matt watching her with some pride. A touch supervisory at first, then graciously taking half a pace back until even the wee folk clubs were announcing ‘The Matt Castle Band with Moira Cairns’. And a couple of times, to her embarrassment, Moira Cairns in bigger letters.

And now she was leaving. Off to London for the big money.

Traitorous bitch.

‘Matt . . .’ It was the worst moment. She should kiss him too, but that would seem perfunctory, demeaning and pretty damn cheap.

Also, for the first time, she didn’t want to go that close to him.

He’d pulled down his cap; she tried to peer under the peak, to find out what his eyes were saying.

Nothing. His eyes would show no resentment, no disappointment. She was leaving the band which had changed her life, made her name. Leaving the band just when she was starting to put something back, and Matt felt . . .

He felt nothing. Because . . . Jesus . . .

‘Did you go on the peat today?’ she asked him in a very small voice, the snow falling between them. ‘Did you go on the peat with the pipes? Did you let the damn peat absorb it?’

And then the projector stuttered and stalled again, images shivering on the screen of the night, and she saw him suddenly all in white. Maybe just an illusion of the snow. He was very still and framed in white. It wasn’t nice. The white was frilled around him, like the musty lace handkerchiefs in the top dresser drawer at her gran’s house.

And a whiff of soiled perfume. Death?

For the first time, there was a real menace to him. Too transient to tell whether it was around him or from him. Her throat swelled. She coughed and the tears came, the wrong kind of tears. She felt the snow forming on the top of her own head; it was almost warm. Maybe she looked like that too, shrouded in white.

Matt held out his right hand and she gripped it like a life-line, but the hand was deathly cold. She told herself, Cold hands, warm heart, yeah? And tried to pull him closer – but all the time wanting to keep him away and hating herself for that.

He dropped her hand and then put both of his on her shoulders. His arms were rigid, like girders, but she felt they were trembling, his whole body quivering with some titanic tension, something strong holding out against something potentially stronger, like a steel suspension bridge in a hurricane.

Then he said, ‘Going to show me?’ Voice colder than the snow.

She wanted to squirm away; she made herself remain still, trying to find his eyes. No. Please. Don’t spoil this. I’ll buy it. You’re a selfless, self-sacrificing guy. I don’t want to know any more.

‘This famous comb,’ he said with a smile that was faintly unpleasant.

‘It’s no’ famous,’ she said quickly, almost snapping.

His brown eyes were steady. Hey come on . . . this is Matt Castle. What’s he gonna do, steal it off you, snatch it out your hand and drive away?

Keep it safe. Never take it out for show . . . Never treat it as a trinket or a wee souvenir. You understand, child?

No, see, all it is, right, he’s decided in his own mind that we aren’t going to meet again. He wants there to be no space for future recriminations. But he needs something to hold on to, right? A link.

That’s all it is. He wants a link. A special moment, something between us and no one else.

You owe him. You owe him that.

You owe him nothing.

She stopped searching for his eyes, didn’t want to know what they might have to tell her about Matt Castle, the kindly father figure, that Matt Castle who’d said, Take your chance, grab it while you can, lass. Never mind us. We’re owd men.

Dumbly, Moira laid the guitar case on the pavement in the snow, and – hands shaking with the cold and the nerves – flipped up the chromium catch.

It was like opening someone’s coffin.

Only the guitar lay in state. In a panic, she felt beneath the machine-heads for the velvet pouch which held the ancient metal comb.

I have to. I owe him, Mammy. I’m sorry, but I owe him.

PART ONE

THE SPRING CROSS

From Dawber’s Book of Bridelow:

INTRODUCTION

THIS LITTLE BOOK bids you, the visitor, a cordial welcome to Bridelow Across the Moss, a site of habitation for over two thousand years and the home of the famous Bridelow Black Beer.

Bridelow folk would never be so immodest as to describe their tiny, lonely village as unique. But unique it is, both in situation and character.

Although little more than half an hour’s drive from the cities of Manchester and Sheffield, the village is huddled in isolation between the South Pennine moors and the vast peatbog known as Bridelow Moss. So tucked away, as the local saying goes, ‘It’s a wonder the sun knows where to come of a morning . . .’

A spring morning. A hesitant sun edging over the moor out of a mist pale as milk. Only when it clears the church tower does the sun find a few patches of blue to set it off, give it a bit of confidence.

The sun hovers a while, blinking in and out of the sparse shreds of cloud before making its way down the village street, past the cottage where Ma Wagstaff lives, bluetits breakfasting from the peanuts in two mesh bags dangling from the rowan trees in the little front garden.

The cats, Bob and Jim, sitting together on Ma’s front step – donkey-stoned to a full-moon whiteness – observe the bluetits through narrowed green eyes but resist their instincts because Ma will be about soon.

And, while Ma understands their instincts all too well, she does not appreciate blood on her step.

Milly Gill, shedding her cardigan at the Post Office door, thought the mist this morning was almost like a summer heat-haze, which wasn’t bad for the second week in March.

It made Milly feel excited, somewhere deep inside her majestic bosom. It made her feel so energetic that she wanted to wander off for long walks, to fill up her reservoirs after the winter. And to go and see the little man. See what he had in his reservoir.

And of course it made her feel creative, too. Tonight she’d be pulling out that big sketch pad and the coloured pencils and getting to work on this year’s design to be done in flowers for the dressing of the holy well. It was, she decided, going to reflect everything she could sense about her this morning.

Milly Gill thought, I’m forty-nine and I feel like a little girl.

This was what the promise of spring was supposed to do.

‘Thank you, Mother,’ Milly said aloud, with a big, innocent grin. ‘And you too, sir!’

The Moss, a vast bed, hangs on to its damp duvet as usual until the sun is almost overhead. Behind temporary traffic-lights, about half a mile from the village, a Highways Authority crew is at work, widening the road which crosses the peat, a long-overdue improvement, although not everybody is in favour of improving access to the village.

It’s close to midday before the foreman decides it’s warm enough to strip to the waist.

This is the man who finds the chocolate corpse.

The splendour of the morning dimmed a little for the Rector when, on getting out of bed, he felt a twinge.

It was, as more often than not, in the area of his left knee. ‘We really must get you a plastic one,’ the doctor had said last time. ‘I should think the pain’s pretty awful, isn’t it?’

‘Oh.’ The Rector flexing his creased-up Walter Matthau semi-smile. ‘Could be worse.’ Then the doctor ruefully shaking his head, making a joke about the Rector being determined to join the league of Holy Martyrs.

‘I was thinking of joining the squash club, actually,’ the Rector had said, and they’d both laughed and wondered how he was managing to keep this up.

The answer to this was Ma Wagstaff’s mixture.

Standing by the window of his study, with sunshine strewn all over the carpet, pleasant around his bare feet, the Rector balanced a brimming teaspoonful of Ma’s mixture, and his eyes glazed briefly at the horror of the stuff.

It looked like green frogspawn. He knew it was going to make his throat feel nostalgic for castor oil.

The bottle, as usual, was brown and semi-opaque so he wouldn’t have to see the sinister strands and tendrils waving about in there like weed on the bottom of an aquarium.

But still, it worked.

Not a ‘miracle’ cure, of course. Ma Wagstaff, who promised nothing, would have been shocked at any such suggestion. ‘Might just ease it a bit,’ she’d say gruffly, leaving the bottle on his hall table, by the phone.

Through the study window the Rector saw sun-dappled gravestones and the great Norman tower of St Bride’s.

He rubbed his feet into the sunshiny carpet, raised his eyes to heaven, the spoon to his lips, and swallowed.

Out on the Moss, the foreman stands in the middle of the trench, in front of the JCB, waving his arms until the driver halts the big digger and sticks his head enquiringly round the side of the cab.

‘’Owd on a bit, Jason. I’ve found summat.’

The trench, at this point, is about five feet deep.

‘If it’s money,’ says the JCB driver, ‘just pass it up ’ere and I’ll hide it under t’seat.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Dawber, ‘as it’s such a lovely day, we’d best be thinking about the spring. Now – think back to last year – what does that mean?’

Some of them had the good manners to put their hands up, but two little lads at the back just shouted it out.

‘THE SPRING CROSS!’

Mr Dawber didn’t make an issue of it. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘The Spring Cross.’ And the two troublemakers at the back cheered at that because it would get them out of the classroom, into the wood and on to the moors.

‘So,’ said Mr Dawber. ‘Who can tell me what we’ll be looking for to put in the Spring Cross?’

The hands went up as fast and rigid as old-fashioned railway signals. Ernie Dawber looked around, singled out a little girl. ‘Yes . . . Meryl.’

‘Catkins!’

‘Aye, that’s right, catkins. What else? Sebastian.’

‘Pussy willows!’

‘Ye-es. What else? Benjamin.’

‘Acorns?’

They all had a good cackle at this. Benjamin was the smallest child in the class and had the air of one who found life endlessly confusing. Ernie Dawber sympathized. He’d always reckoned that the day he retired he’d be able to sit back, job well enough done, and start to understand a few basics. But everything had just got hazier.

With them all looking at him, giggling and nudging each other, Benjamin seemed to get even smaller. Mr Dawber had a little deliberation about this while the class was settling down.

‘Now then . . .’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Who can tell me when we find acorns?’

‘AUTUMN!’ four or five of the cleverer ones chorused scornfully.

‘That’s right. So, what I’m going to do – and don’t forget to remind me when the time comes, lad – I’m going to put Benjamin, because he knows all about acorns . . . in charge of making the Autumn Cross.’

The clever ones looked aghast, unable to find any justice in this, and Ernie Dawber smiled to see it. Coming in just a few hours a week, to teach the children about nature, at least gave him more time to consider the psychology of the job.

‘Now then.’ He clapped his hands to change the mood. ‘What else do we need for the Spring Cross? Tom.’

‘Birds’ eggs.’

Mr Dawber’s voice dropped an octave.

‘We most certainly do not take birds’ eggs to put into the Spring Cross, or for any other reason, Thomas Garside. And if it comes to my notice that any of you have disturbed any nests there’s going to be TROUBLE.’

There was silence.

‘And don’t anybody think I won’t find out about it,’ said Mr Dawber.

And they knew he would, because, one way or another, Mr Dawber found out about everything. And if it was important enough he put it in The Book of Bridelow.

The foreman tells the JCB driver to switch his engine off. His voice is shaking.

‘Come down a minute, Jason. Come and take a look at this.’

The driver, a younger man, swings, loose-limbed, to the ground. His boots shudder on the surface of the Moss. ‘What you got?’

‘I’m not sure.’ The foreman seems reluctant to go back in the trench.

The driver grinning, shambling over to the pit and balancing expertly on the rim. Can’t make it out at first. Looks like a giant bar of dark chocolate.

Then, while the foreman is attempting to light a cigarette and nervously scattering matches over the peat, the driver suddenly realizes what he’s staring at, and, when the thought lurches into his head, it’s eerily echoed by the foreman’s fractured croak.

‘Looks like a dead ’un to me, Jason.’

The driver falls over backwards trying not to topple into the trench.

Just Eliza Horridge and Shaw now, and the drawing room at the Hall was too big.

He was taller but slighter than his father, who used to stand, legs apart, in front of the fireplace, lighting his pipe, belching dragon’s breath and making it seem as if the room had been built around him. When Arthur Horridge spoke, the walls had closed in, as if the very fabric of the building was paying attention.

‘The w-w-w-worst thing about all this . . .’ Shaw’s thin voice no more emphatic than the tinkling of the chandelier when a window was open, ‘. . . is that, when der-der-Dad wanted to expand ter-ten years ago, the bank wouldn’t back him, and now . . .’

‘We’ll ride it,’ Liz Horridge told him firmly. ‘We always have. We’ve got twenty-three people depending on us for an income.’

‘Ter-ter-too many,’ said Shaw. ‘Fer-far . . .’

‘No!’ The first time ever that she hadn’t waited politely for him to finish a sentence. ‘That’s not something your father would have said.’

She turned away from him, glaring out of the deep Georgian-style window at the brewery’s grey tower through the bare brown treetrunks. Its stonework badly needed repointing, one more job they couldn’t afford.

‘When sales were sagging,’ Liz said, as she’d said to him several times before, ‘Arthur always blamed himself, and it was our belt – the family’s – that was tightened. I remember when he sold the Jag to—’

‘It was der-different then!’ Shaw almost shrieked, making her look at him. ‘There was no competition to ser-speak of. Wh-what did they need to know about mer-mer-market forces in those days?’

‘And it’s all changed so quickly, has it, in the six months since your father’s death?’

‘It was cher-changing . . . yer-years before. He just couldn’t see it. He didn’t w-want to ser-see it.’

‘He knew what his duty was,’ Liz snapped, and her son began to wring his hands in frustration.

The sun shone through the long window, a cruel light on Shaw, the top of his forehead winking like a feeble flashlight. If baldness was hereditary, people doubtless asked, why had Arthur managed to keep most of his hair until the end, while Shaw’s had begun to fall out before he turned twenty?

Behind the anger, Liz felt the usual sadness for him, while acknowledging that sympathy was a poor substitute for maternal pride.

‘Mother,’ Shaw said determinedly, ‘listen to me. We’ve ger-got to do it. Ser-soon. We’ve got to trim the workforce. Ser-ser-some of them have ger-got to go. Or else . . .’

‘Never,’ said Liz Horridge. But she knew that such certainty was not her prerogative. Shaw was the owner of the Bridelow Brewery now. He glared mutinously at her, thin lips pressed tight together, only too aware of how much authority he lost whenever he opened them.

‘Or else what?’ Liz demanded. ‘What happens if we don’t trim the workforce?’

She looked down at herself, at the baggy jeans she wore, for which she was rather too old and a little too shapeless these days. Realizing why she was wearing the jeans. Spring cleaning. An operation which she would, for the first time, be undertaking alone, because, when Josie had gone into hospital, she hadn’t taken on another cleaner for economic reasons. Thus, trimming her own workforce of one.

‘The ber-ber-brewery’s not a charity, Mother,’ Shaw said pleadingly. ‘Jim Ford says we could be out of ber-business inside a year.’

‘Or else what?’ Liz persisted.

‘Or else we sell it,’ Shaw said simply. Liz laughed. ‘To whom?’

‘Ter-ter-to an outside . . . one of the big firms.’

‘That’s not an option,’ Liz said flatly. ‘You know that. Beer’s been brewed in Bridelow since time immemorial. It’s part of the local heritage.’

‘And still cer-could be! Sell it as a going concern. Why not?’

‘And you could live with that, could you?’

He didn’t answer. Liz Horridge was shaking with astonishment. She faced him like an angry mother cat, narrowing her eyes, penetrating. ‘Who’s responsible for this? Who’s been putting these thoughts in your head?’

‘Ner-nobody.’ But he couldn’t hold her gaze. He was wearing a well-cut beige suit over a button-down shirt and a strange leather tie. He was going out again. He’d been going out a lot lately. He had no interest in the brewery, and he wasn’t even trying to hide this any longer.

‘And what about the pub? Is this fancy buyer going to take that on as well?’

‘Ser-somebody will.’ Shaw shrugged uselessly, backing towards the door. ‘Anyway, we’ll talk about it later, I’ve got to . . .’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I . . . I’m . . .’ He went red and began to splutter. Pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, wiped his lips. For years she’d worried because he didn’t go out enough, because he hadn’t got a girlfriend (although this had hardly been surprising). Now at last, at the age of thirty-one, he was feebly groping for control of his own destiny . . . and floundering about, unbalancing everything.

Liz Horridge turned away from him and walked to the other window, the one with the view of Bridelow, which summer would soon obscure. She could see the humped but still sprightly figure of Mrs Wagstaff in the distance, lugging a shopping basket across the cobbles to Gus Bibby’s General Stores.

Her breast heaved and she felt tears pumping behind her eyes.

Arthur . . . it’s not my fault.

Mrs Wagstaff stopped in the middle of the street and – although it was too far away for Liz to be certain – seemed to stare up through the trees at the Hall . . . at this very window.

As though the old girl had overheard Liz’s thoughts. As though she could feel the agony.

When Liz turned around, wet-eyed, she found she was alone; Shaw had quietly left the room.

Although he’ll be cool enough when the Press and the radio and TV reporters interview him in a few hours’ time, the County Highways foreman is so shaken up right now that he has to be revived with whisky from the JCB driver’s secret flask.

What he’s discovered will come to be known as the Bridelow Bogman. Or the Man in the Moss. Important people are going to travel hundreds of miles to gaze with reverence upon its ancient face.

‘And what was your reaction when you found it?’ asks one of the reporters. ‘What did you think it was?’

‘Thought it were a sack o’ spuds or summat,’ the foreman says, quotably. His moment of glory. But out of his hands soon enough – so old and so exciting to the experts, like one of them Egyptian mummies, that nobody else seems to find it upsetting or horrifying, not like a real body.

But, though he’ll never admit it, the foreman reckons he’s never going to forget that first moment.

‘And what did you think when you realized what it was?’

‘Dunno, really . . . thought it were maybe an owd tramp or summat.’

‘Were you shocked?’

‘Nah. You find all sorts in this job.’

But that night the foreman will dream about it and awake with a whimper, reaching for his warm missus. And then fall asleep and wake again, his sweat all over both of them and his mind bulging with the moment he bent down and found his hand was gripping its cold and twisted face, his thumb between what might have been its teeth.

PART TWO

BLACK GLOW

From Dawber’s Book of Bridelow:

THE FIRST-TIME VISITOR to Bridelow is strongly urged to approach it from the west, from which direction a most dramatic view of the village is attained.

From a distance of a mile or two, Bridelow appears almost as a craggy island when viewed from the narrow road which is virtually a causeway across Bridelow Moss.

A number of legends are attached to the Moss, some of which will be discussed later in this book.

CHAPTER I

In early summer, Bridelow hopefully dolls herself up, puts on a bit of make-up and an obliging smile for the sun. But the sun doesn’t linger. On warm, cloudless evenings like this it saves its final pyrotechnics for the moor.

Sunset lures hues from the moor that you see at no other time – sensual pinks and melodramatic mauves which turn its stiff and spiky surface into velvet.

. . . a delusion, thought Joel Beard, soon to leave theological college. A red light tenderizing the face of an old whore.

He had his back to the sinking sun. To him, it seemed agitated tonight, throwing out its farewell flames in a long, dying scream. As well it might.

Most of the lonely village was below the moor, and the sun’s flailing rays were missing it. The stone houses hanging from the hill were in shadow and so was the body of the church on its summit. Only the spikes of the church tower were dusted with red and gold.

Joel dismounted from his motorbike.

In the centre of the tower was a palely shining disc. Like a rising full moon, it sent sneering signals to the sun: as you fade, it promised gleefully, I’ll grow ever brighter.

Joel glared at the village across the sullen, scabby surface of the Moss. He imagined Bridelow under moonlight, stark and white as crow-picked bones.

Its true self.

The disc at the centre of the tower was actually an illuminated clockface, from which the hands had long ago fallen. Often said to be a friendly face which turned the church into a lighthouse at night, across the black ocean of the Moss.

. . . you see, at one time, Mr Beard, very few people dared cross the Moss . . . except those for whom the Devil lit the way – have you heard that legend?

It was no legend. On a dark night, all you would see of the village would be this silver disc, Bridelow’s own, permanent full moon.

Was this how the Devil lit the path? Was this the Devil’s light, shining from the top of the stairs in God’s house, a false beacon for the weak, the uncertain and the disturbed?

Joel’s black leathers straightened him, like armour, and the hard white collar lifted his eyes above the village to the luminous moor. Its lurid colours too would soon grow dull under the night, like a harlot’s cheap dress.

From the village, across the barren Moss, he heard voices raised, a shriek of laughter.

The village would be alive tonight. A new landlord had installed himself at the decrepit local inn, The Man I’th Moss, thus saving it from closure, a side-effect of the widely condemned sale of the Bridelow Brewery.

Joel waited, astride his motorbike, his charger, until the moor no longer glowed and the illusion of beauty was gone.

Everyone saw shadows in the blackened cities, those obvious pits of filth and fornication, where EVIL was scrawled in neon and the homeless slept with the rats. And yet the source of it was up here, where city-dwellers surged at weekends to stroll through the springy heather, picnic among the gorse . . . young couples, families, children queuing at the roadside ice-cream vans, pensioners in small cars with their flasks of tea.

It’s all around you, Mr Beard . . . once you know what you’re looking for. Look at the church, look at the pub, look at the people . . . you’ll see the signs everywhere.

Beneath him, the bike lurched into life, his strong, gauntleted hands making the engine roar and crackle, spitting holy fire.

He rode away from the village, back into the hills.

‘Shades,’ Ma Wagstaff would say later that night. ‘Them’s what’s kept this place the way it is. Shades of things.’

Of all Ma’s famous sayings, these were the words that would keep coming back at Ernie Dawber during the short, anxious days and the long, chill nights of the declining year.

And when, as local historian, he tried to find the beginning (as in, What exactly started the First World War? What caused the first spark that set off the Great Fire of London?), he’d keep coming back to this particular evening. A vivid evening at the end of May. The evening he’d blithely and thoughtlessly told Ma Wagstaff what he’d learned about the death of the bogman . . . and Ma had made a fateful prediction.

But it started well enough, with a big turn-out for the official reopening of The Man, under its new proprietor. The two bars couldn’t hold all those come to welcome him home. So several dozen folk, including Ernie Dawber – best suit, waistcoat, watch-chain – were out on the cobbled forecourt, having a pint or two and watching the sun go down over the big hills beyond the Moss.

A vivid evening at the end of May. Laughter in the streets. Hope for the future. Most enmities sheathed and worries left at home under the settee cushions.

A real old Bridelow night. That was how it ought to have been enshrined in his memory. All those familiar faces.

A schoolteacher all his working life, Ernie Dawber had known at least three-quarters of this lot since they were five-year-olds at the front of the school hall: eager little faces, timid little faces . . . and a few belligerent ones too – always reckoned he could spot a future troublemaker in its pram.

He remembered Young Frank Manifold in the pram, throttling his panda.

‘Well, well . . .’ Twenty-odd years on, Young Frank strolling up to his boss, all jutting chin and pint mug clenched like a big glass knuckle-duster. ‘It’s Mr Horridge.’

Shaw said nothing.

‘What’s that you’re drinking, Mr Horridge?’ Sneering down at Shaw’s slim glass.

Shaw’s smile faltered. But he won’t reply, Ernie thought, because if he does he’ll start stuttering and he knows it.

There’d been a half-smile on Shaw’s face as he stood alone on the cobbles. A nervous, forced-looking smile but a smile none the less. Ernie had to admire the lad, summoning the nerve to show himself tonight, not a month since Andy Hodgson died.

Especially with more than a few resentful brewery employees about.

‘Looks like vodka,’ Frank observed. ‘That what it is, Mr Horridge? Vodka?’ A few people starting to look warily at Frank and Shaw, a couple of men guiding their wives away.

‘’Course . . . I forgot. Bloody Gannons make vodka on t’side. Gannons’ll make owt as’ll sell. That Gannons vodka? That what it is . . . Mr Horridge?’

Shaw sipped his drink, not looking at Frank. This could be nerves. Or it could be an insult, Shaw pointedly pretending Young Frank was not there.

Whichever, Ernie decided he ought to break this up before it started to spoil the atmosphere. But somebody better equipped than him got there first.

‘Where’s your dad, Frank?’ Milly Gill demanded, putting herself firmly between him and Shaw, like a thick, flowery bush sprouting between two trees.

‘Be around somewhere.’ Frank staring over the postmistress’s head at Shaw, who was staring back now. Frank’s knuckles whitening around the handle of his beermug.

‘I think you’d better find him, Frank,’ Milly said briskly. ‘See he doesn’t drink too much with that diabetes.’

Frank ignored her, too tanked up to know his place. ‘Fancy new car, I see . . . Mr Horridge. Porsche, int it? Andy Hodgson’d just got ’isself a new car, day before he fell. Well, I’m saying “new” – Austin Maestro, don’t even make um no more. He were chuffed wi’ it. Easily pleased, Andy, weren’t he, Milly?’

‘It was an accident,’ Milly said tightly. ‘As you well know.’

‘Aye, sure it were, I’m not accusing Mr Horridge of murder. Only, why don’t you ask him why Andy were suddenly ordered to reconnect a bloody old clapped-out pulley system for winching malt-sacks up to a storeroom right at top of t’building as isn’t even used no more except by owls. You ask this bastard that, Milly.’

‘We’ve had the inquest,’ Milly said. ‘Go and see to your dad.’

‘Inquest? Fucking whitewash. I’ll tell you why Andy were sent up. On account of place were being tarted up to look all quaint and old-fashioned for a visit from t’Gannons directors. Right, Mr Horridge?’

‘Wasn’t c . . . Not quite like that,’ said Shaw quietly.

‘Oh aye. How were it different? Lad dies for a bit of fucking cosmetic. You’re all shit, you. Shit.’

The air between them fizzed. Shaw was silent. He’d been an expert at being silent during the three years Ernie had taught him before the lad was sent to prep school. And still an expert when he came back from University, poor bugger.

‘And this Porsche.’ Young Frank popped out the word with a few beery bubbles. ‘How many jobs Gannons gonna axe to buy you that, eh?’

‘Frank,’ Milly Gill told him very firmly, big floral bosom swelling, ‘I’ll not tell you again!’

Careful, lass, Ernie thought. Don’t do owt.

‘You’re a jammy little twat,’ Frank spat. ‘Don’t give a shit. You never was a proper Horridge.’

A widening circle around them, conversations trailing off.

‘Right.’ Milly’s eyes went still. ‘That’s enough. I’ll not have this occasion spoiled. Am I getting through?’

‘Now, Millicent,’ Ernie said, knowing from experience what might happen if she got riled. But Shaw Horridge startled them all. ‘It’s quite all right, Miss Gill.’

He smiled icily at Young Frank. ‘Yes, it is a per-Porsche.’ Held up his glass. ‘Yes, it is vodka. Yes, it’s mer-made in Sheffield by a s-subsidiary of Gannons Ales.’

He straightened up, taller than Frank now, his voice gaining strength. ‘Gannons Ales. Without whom, yes, I wouldn’t have a Porsche.’

And, stepping around Milly, he poked Young Frank in the chest with a thin but rigid forefinger. ‘And without whom you wouldn’t have a job . . . Mr Manifold.’

Ernie saw several men tense, ready to hold Young Frank back, but Frank didn’t move. His eyes widened and his grip on the tankard slackened. Lad’s as astonished as me, Ernie thought, at Shaw Horridge coming out with half a dozen almost fully coherent sentences one after the other.

The red sun shone into Shaw’s eyes; he didn’t blink.

The selling of the brewery was probably the worst thing that had happened to Bridelow this century. But not, apparently, the worst thing that had happened to Shaw Horridge.

He lowered his forefinger. ‘Just remember that, please,’ he said.

Looking rather commanding, where he used to look shyly hunched. And this remarkable confidence, as though somebody had turned his lights on. Letting them all see him – smiling and relaxed – after perpetrating the sale of the brewery, Bridelow’s crime of the century. And indirectly causing a death.

Took some nerve, this did, from stuttering Shaw.

Arthur’s lad at last. Maybe.

‘Excuse me,’ Shaw said dismissively. ‘I have to meet someone.’

He turned his back on Young Frank Manifold and walked away, no quicker than he needed to, the sun turning the bald spot on the crown of his head into a bright golden coin.

‘By ’eck,’ Ernie Dawber said, but he noticed that Milly Gill was looking worried.

And she wasn’t alone.

‘Now then, Ernest. What’s tha make of that, then?’

He hadn’t noticed her edging up behind him, although he’d known she must be here somewhere. She was a Presence.

Just a little old woman in a pale-blue woollen beret, an old grey cardigan and a lumpy brown woollen skirt.

‘Well,’ Ernie Dawber said, ‘Arthur might have been mortified at what he’s done with the brewery, but I think he’d be quite gratified at the way he stood up for himself there. Don’t you?’

‘Aye,’ said Ma Wagstaff grimly. ‘I’m sure his father’d be right pleased.’

Ernie looked curiously into the rubbery old features. Anybody who thought this was just a little old woman hadn’t been long in Bridelow. He took a modest swallow from his half of Black. ‘What’s wrong then, Ma?’

‘Everything.’ Ma sighed. ‘All coming apart.’

‘Oh?’ said Ernie. ‘Nice night, though. Look at that sun.’

‘Aye,’ said Ma Wagstaff pessimistically. ‘Going down, int it?’

‘Well, yes.’ Ernie straightened his glasses. ‘It usually does this time of night.’

Ma Wagstaff nodded at his glass. ‘What’s that ale like now it’s Gannons?’

‘Nowt wrong with it as I can taste.’ This wasn’t true; it didn’t seem to have quite the same brackish bite – or was that his imagination?

Ma looked up and speared him with her fierce little eyes. ‘Got summat to tell me, Ernest Dawber?’

Ernie coughed. ‘Not as I can think of.’ She was making him uneasy.

‘Anythin’ in the post today?’

‘This and that, Ma, this and that.’

‘Like one of them big squashy envelopes, for instance?’

‘A jiffy-bag, you mean?’

‘Aye,’ said Ma Wagstaff. ‘Wi’ British Museum stamped on it.’ Ernie fumed. You couldn’t keep anything bloody private in this place. ‘Time that Millicent kept her damn nose out!’

‘Never mind that, lad, what’s it say?’

‘Now, look . . .’ Ernie backed away, pulling at his waistcoat. ‘In my capacity as local historian, I was able to provide Dr Hall and the British Museum with a considerable amount of information relating to the Moss, and as a result, following their examination of the body, they’ve kindly given me a preview of their findings, which . . .’

‘Thought that’d be it.’ Ma Wagstaff nodded, satisfied.

‘. . . which will be published in due course. Until which time, I am not allowed . . .’

‘If you know, why shouldn’t we know?’

‘I’m not allowed, Ma. It’s what’s called an embargo.’

‘Oh.’ Ma’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s what it’s called, is it? Means educated fellers like you get to know what’s what and us common folk . . .’

Common folk? Ma Wagstaff? Ernie kept backing off, looking around for friendly faces. ‘Please, Ma . . . don’t push me on this. You’ll find out soon enough.’

But the nearest person was a good ten yards away, and, when his back hit the wall of the pub’s outside lavatory block, he realized she’d got him into a corner in more ways than one.

‘Now then,’ Ma said kindly. ‘How’s that prostate of yours these days?’

‘Nowt wrong with my prostate,’ Ernie replied huffily.

Ma Wagstaff’s eyes glinted. ‘Not yet there int.’

CHAPTER II

This is mer-madness, Shaw said.

No, said Therese, its exciting.