The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:

RELIGION (ii)

That Bridelow was a place of pre-Christian worship is beyond doubt. As has already been noted in this book, there are a number of small stone circles dating back to Neolithic times on the moor less than a mile from the village. The original purpose of these monuments remains a matter for conjecture, although there have been suggestions that some are astronomically-oriented.

As for the village itself, the siting of the church on a presumed prehistoric burial mound is not the only evidence of earlier forms of worship. Indeed ...

CHAPTER II

'Steady Pop, just take it ve... ry steady.'

'No, leave me, please, I'll be fine, if I can just ...'

'God, I never realised. How could you let it get to this and say nothing? How could you?'

Hans hissed, 'Shut up!' with a savagery that shocked her. He pulled away and ducked into the church porch, and Cathy was left staring at Our Sheila who was grinning vacuously, both thumbs jammed into her gaping vagina.

Cathy turned away and saw why her father had been so abrupt: a large man was bearing down on them, weaving skilfully between the gravestones like a seasoned skier on a slalom.

'Catherine!' he roared. 'How wonderful!'

'Joel,' Cathy said wanly.

'So. You've come all this way for Matt Castle's burial. And you're looking well. You're looking ... terrific. Now.' He stepped back, beamed. 'Did I spot your esteemed father ... ?'

'In here, Joel.'

He was slumped on the oak bench inside the porch looking, Cathy thought, absolutely awful, the pain now permanently chiselled into his forehead. Joel Beard didn't appear to notice.

'Hans, I've been approached by two young chaps with guitars who apparently were among Matt Castle's many protégés in Manchester. They say they'd like to do an appropriate song during the service, a tribute. I didn't see any problem about that, but how would the relatives feel, do you think?'

Cathy's father looked up at his curate and managed to nod.

'I'll ... Yes, we must consult Lottie, obviously. Perhaps, Cathy ...'

Cathy said, 'Of course. I'll ring her now. And I'll come and tell you, Joel, OK?' Why couldn't the big jerk just clear off?

But, no, he had to stand around in the porch like some sort of ecclesiastical bouncer, smiling in a useful sort of way, his head almost scraping the door frame.

'Can we expect any Press, do you think? Television?'

Cathy said, 'With all respect to the dead, Joel, I don't think Matt Castle was as famous as all that. Folkies, no matter how distinguished, tend to be little known outside what they call Roots Music circles.'

'Ah.' Joel nodded. 'I see.' With those tight blond curls, Cathy thought, he resembled a kind of macho cherub.

'Staying the night, Catherine?'

'Probably. The roads are going to be quite nasty, I gather. Black ice forecast. In fact,' she added hopefully, 'I wouldn't hang around too long after the funeral if I were you.'

'Not a problem,' Joel said. 'I have accommodation.'

'Oh?' Damn. 'Where?'

'Why ...' Joel Beard spread his long arms expansively. 'Here, of course.'

Hans sat up on the oak bench, eyes burning. 'Joel, I do wish you wouldn't. It's disused. It's filthy. It's ... it's damp.'

'Won't be by tonight. I've asked the good Mr Beckett to supply me with an electric heater.'

'Hell,' Cathy said. 'Not the wine-cellar.' It was a small, square, stone room below the vestry where they stored the communion wine and a few of the church valuables. It was always kept locked.

'Ah, now, Catherine, this is a latter-day misnomer. The records show that it was specifically constructed as emergency overnight accommodation for priests. Did you know, for instance, that in 1835 the snow was so thick that the Bishop himself, on a pastoral visit, was stranded in Bridelow for over two weeks? When he was offered accommodation at the inn he insisted he should remain here because, he said, he might never have a better chance to be as close to God.'

'Sort of thing a bishop would say,' said Cathy.

'Ah, yes, but...'

'And then he'd lock himself in and get quietly pissed on the communion wine.'

Avoiding her father's pain-soaked eyes, but happy to stare blandly into Joel Beard's disapproving ones, Cathy thought, I really don't know why 1 say things like that. It must be you, Joel, God's yobbo; you bring out the sacrilegious in us all.

The digital wall-clock in the admin office at the Field Centre said 14.46.

'Er ...' Alice murmured casually into the filing cabinet 'as it's Friday and Dr Hall's not likely to be back from that funeral and there's not much happening, I thought I might ...'

'No chance,' Chrissie snapped. 'Forget it.'

Alice's head rose ostrich-like from the files. 'Well... !' she said, deeply huffed.

Done it now, Chrissie thought. Well, bollocks, she's had it coming for a long time. 'I'm sorry, Alice,' she said formally, 'but I don't think, for security reasons, that I should be left alone here after dark.'

Alice sniffed. 'Never said that before.'

'All right, I know the college is only a hundred yards away and someone could probably hear me scream, but that's not really the point. There are important papers here and ... and petty cash, too.'

She'd caught one of the research students in here when she returned from lunch. The youth had been messing about in one of the cupboards and was unpleasantly cocky when she

informed him that he was supposed to have permission.

'Nothing to do with him, of course.' Alice smirked. 'Because you're not silly like that, are you?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Him! In there. The one with no ... personal bits.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Chrissie mumbled, head down so that Alice would not see her blush. How stupid she'd been the other night, thinking ...

'It was just a thought,' Alice said. She opened the bottom drawer of the smallest filing cabinet and brought out her make-up bag.

... when obviously it couldn't have been ... what you thought. You were just more frightened than you cared to admit, going in there on your own ...

'Going anywhere tonight?'

... it was just the way the thing was lying, and the projecting ... item was just some sort of probe or peg to hold it together ...

'What? Sorry, Alice ...'

'I said, are you going anywhere tonight?'

'Oh, I thought I'd have a night in,' Chrissie said. 'Watch a bit of telly.'

She didn't move. She was still aching from last night. Roger had taken her to dinner at a small, dark restaurant she'd never noticed before, in Buxton. And then, because his wife was on nights, had accompanied her back to her bungalow.

Roger's eyes had been crinkly - and glittering.

His 'stress', as experienced at the motel, had obviously not been a long-term problem. Gosh, no ...

'I wonder,' Alice said, 'if Mrs Hall will be with him at the funeral.'

'I think he likes to keep different areas of his life separate,' Chrissie said carefully.

Lottie said, shaking out her black gloves, 'To be quite honest, I wish he was being cremated.'

Dic didn't say anything. He'd been looking uncomfortable since the undertakers had arrived with Matt's coffin. For some reason, they'd turned up a clear hour and a quarter before the funeral.

'I don't like graves,' Lottie said, talking for the sake of talking. 'I don't like everybody standing around a hole in the ground, and you all walk away and they discreetly fill in the earth when you've gone. I'd rather close my eyes in a crematorium and when I open them again, it's vanished. And I don't like all the flowers lying out there until they shrivel up and die too or you take them away, and what do you do with them?'

Dic, black-suited, glaring moodily out of the window, his hands in his hip-pockets. Lottie just carried on talking, far too quickly.

'And also, you see, in a normal situation, what happens is the funeral cars arrive, and they all park outside the house, with the hearse in front, and all the relatives pile in and the

procession moves off to the church.'

'Would've been daft,' Dic said, 'when it's not even two minutes' walk.'

'Which means... I mean, in the normal way, it means the coffin doesn't leave the back of the hearse until it reaches the church door. Not like this ... it's quite ridiculous in this day and age.'

The two of them standing alone in the pub's lofty back kitchen.

Alone except for Matt's coffin, dark pine, occupying the full length of the refectory table.

'But I mean, what on earth was I supposed to say to them?' Lottie said. 'You're early - go and drive him around the reservoirs for an hour?'

The relatives would be here soon, some from quite a distance, some with young children.

'I keep thinking,' Dic said, his voice all dried up, 'that I ought to have a last look at him. Pay my respects.'

'You had your chance,' Lottie said, more severely than she meant to. 'When he was in the funeral home. You didn't want to go.'

'I couldn't.'

Her voice softened. 'Well, now's not the time. Don't worry. That's not your dad, that poor shell of a thing in there. That's not how he'd want you to remember him.'

God, she thought, with a bitter smile, but I'm coping well with this.

Of course, half the Mothers' Union had been round, offering to help with the preparations and the tea and the buffet. And she'd said, very politely, No. No, thank you. It's very kind of you, but I can look after my own. And the old dears had shaken their heads. Well, what else could they expect of somebody who'd turn down Ma Wagstaff's patent herbal sedative ...

Yes. She was coping.

Then Dic shattered everything. He said, 'Mum, I've got to know. What happened with that nurse?

Lottie dropped a glove.

'At the hospital. The night he died.'

'Who told you about that?' Picking up the glove, pulling it on, and the other one.

'Oh, Mum, everybody knows about it.'

'No, they don't,' she snapped.

'They might not here, but it was all round the Infirmary.

Jeff's girlfriend knew, who's on Admissions in Casualty.'

'They've got no damn right to gossip about that kind of thing!'

Dic squirmed.

'God, you choose your bloody times, my lad.'

'I'm sorry, Mum.'

'Not as if she was hurt. She had a shock, that was all. He didn't know where he was. He was drugged up to the eyeballs. She was a young nurse, too inexperienced to be on a ward like that, but you know the way hospitals are now.'

'They said he attacked her.'

'He didn't attack her. God almighty, a dying man, a man literally on his last legs ... ?'

Dic said, unwilling to let it go, 'They said he called her, this nurse, they said he called her ... Moira.'

Lottie put her gloved hands on the pine box, about where Matt's head would be, as if she could smooth his hair through the wood, say, Look, it's OK, really, I understand.

'Leave it, will you, Dic,' she said very quietly. 'Just leave it.'

'She's not corning today, is she? The Cairns woman.'

'No,' Lottie said. 'She's not.'

'Good,' said Dic.

Cautious as a field mouse, little Willie Wagstaff peeped around the door, sniffed the air and then tiptoed into the dimness of Ma's parlour.

The curtains were drawn for Matt, as were the curtains in nearly all the houses in Bridelow, but at Ma's this was more of a problem, the place all cluttered up as usual with jars and bottles and big cats called Bob and Jim.

He crept over to the table. In its centre was a large aspirin bottle, the contents a lot more intriguing and colourful than aspirins.

The principal colour was red. In the bottom of the bottle was a single red berry, most likely from the straggly mountain ash tree by the back gate. All the berries had vanished from that bugger weeks and weeks ago, but this one looked as bright and fresh as if it was early September.

Also in the bottle was about a yard of red cotton thread, all scrimped up. One end of the thread had been pulled out of the bottle and then a fat cork shoved in so that about half an inch of thread hung down the outside.

The bottle had been topped up with water that looked suspiciously yellowish, the tangle of red cotton soaked through

'By the 'ell,' Willie said through his teeth. 'Nothin' left to chance, eh?'

'You put that down! Now!'

Willie nearly dropped it. Ma's eyes had appeared in the doorway, followed by Ma. Too dim to see her properly; she was in a very long coat and a hat that looked like a plate of black puddings.

'Bloody hell, Ma, scared the life out of me.'

'Corning in here wi'out knocking. Messing wi' things as don't concern you.'

'Me messing!' He gestured at the bottle. 'I bet that's not spring water, neither.'

'Used to be!' Ma glared indignantly at him. 'Been through me now. That strengthens it.'

'Oh, aye? I thought you were losing your touch.'

Ma stumped across to the table, snatched up the bottle and carried it over to the ramshackle dresser where her handbag lay, the size and shape of an old-fashioned doctor's bag. She was about to stow the bottle away then stopped. 'Who's carrying him, then?'

'Me. Eric. Frank Manifold Senior. Maybe young Dic.'

'That Lottie,' Ma said. 'She's a fool to herself, that girl. If she'd let the Mothers' Union give her a hand, we'd all be sleeping easier.'

'Eh?' He watched Ma passing the aspirin bottle from hand to hand, thoughtfully. 'Oh, now look, Ma . . - just forget it. I am not ... Anyway, there'll be no chance, Lottie'll be watching us like a bloody hawk.'

'Aye, p'raps I'll not ask you,' Ma said, to his relief. The thought of opening Matt's coffin turned his guts to jelly.

'And anyway, why d'you need a thing like that? I thought it were all sorted out.'

'You thought' Ma was contemptuous. 'Who're you to think, Willie Wagstaff?'

'Ma, I'm fifty-four years old!' Willie's fingers had started up a hornpipe on the coins in the hip pocket of his shiny black funeral pants.

'And never grown up,' Ma said.

'This is grown-up?'

Ma bent and put the bottle down on the edge of the hearth. The fire was just smoke, no red, all banked up with slack to keep it in until Ma returned after the funeral.

She straightened up, wincing just a bit - not as sprightly as she was, but what could you expect - and faced him, hands clamped on the coat around where her bony old hips would be.

'It's like damp,' Ma snapped. 'Once you get an inch or two up your wall, you're in trouble. If your wall's a bit weak, or a bit rotted, it'll spread all the faster. It'll feed off ... rot and corruption. And sickness too.'

'Ma ...' Willie didn't want to know this. He never had, she knew that.

Ma picked up his thoughts, like they'd dropped neatly in front of her dustpan and brush. 'Comes a time, Willie Wagstaff, when things can't be avoided no longer. He were a good man, Matt Castle, but dint know what he were messing with. Or who.'

'Probably dint even know he were messing wi' owt.'

'And that wife of his, she were on guard day and night, nobody could get near. He were crying out for help, were Matt, by the end, and nobody could get near. Well ...'

'Matt's dead, Ma,' Willie said warningly.

Ma picked up the aspirin bottle. 'And that,' she said, ramming the bottle deep into the bag, 'is why he needs protection. And not only him, obviously. This is crucially important, our Willie.'

'Oh, bloody hell,' said Willie. It had always been his way, with Ma, to pretend he didn't believe in any of this. Found it expedient, as a rule.

'A time ago, lad, not long after you left school, we had some trouble. D'you remember? Wi' a man?'

'I do and I don't,' Willie said evasively. Meaning he'd always found it best not to get involved in what the village traditionally regarded as woman's work, no matter how close to home.

Ma said, 'He were clever. I'll say that for him. Knew his stuff. Knew what he were after. But he were bad news. Wanted to use us. Had to be repelled.'

Willie did believe, though, at the bottom of him. Most of them did, despite all the jokes.

'What about him?"

Ma's lips tightened, then she said, 'They're allus looking for an opening, and this one stood out a bloody mile. And Matt Castle dint help, chipping away at it, making it bigger.'

'Eh?'

'This musical thing he were working on. T' Bogman.'

'Oh...aye...'

'Another way in, Willie. Weren't doing that on his own, were he?'

Willie went quiet. He knew Matt had been consulting with some writer, but the man never came to Bridelow, Matt always went to the man. Until the final few weeks when he couldn't drive himself any more.

He looked at his mother with her big, daft funeral hat and dared to feel compassion. She didn't need this, her time of life.

'Look, don't get me wrong, Ma ...'

Ma Wagstaff's fearsome eyes flared, but they couldn't hold the fire for very long nowadays.

'... but you've bin at this for a fair few years now ...'

'More than fifty,' Ma said wistfully.

'So, like ... like I were saying to Milly ... don't you ever get to, like .. . retire I mean, is there nobody else can take over?'

Ma straightened her hat. 'There is one,' she said biblically, 'who will come after me.'

'But what 'asn't come yet, like,' Willie said, stepping carefully. You could push it just so far with Ma, and then ...

The eyes switched from dipped to full-beam. 'Now, look, you cheeky little bugger! When I need your advice, that's when they'll be nailing me up an' all.'

Willie held up both hands, backed off towards the door.

'Which is not yet! Got that?'

'Oh, aye,' said Willie.

Outside in the hard, white daylight, he looked across at the church.

'On me way, Matt,' Willie said with a sniff and a sigh, rubbing his hands in the cold. 'I hope they've nailed you down, me old mate. Good and tight.'

CHAPTER III

GLASGOW

Shit, could this be the right place?

Realistically - no.

First off, there was no elevator. The stairway, when he managed to find it, was real narrow, the steps greasy. He didn't even like to think what that smell was, but if he was unfortunate enough to be accommodated in this block he'd surely be kicking somebody's ass to get the goddamn drains checked out.

Hardly seemed likely she'd trust her fortunes to a guy working out of a dump like this. But when he made the third landing, there was the sign on the door, and the gold lettering said,

THE M. W. KAUFMANN AGENCY.

PLEASE KNOCK AND ENTER.

Which he did, and inside it was actually a little better than he'd guessed it would be. Clean, anyhow, with a deep pink carpet and wall-to-wall file-cabinets. Also, one of those ancient knee hole desks up against the window. And the knees in the hole were not, he noticed, in there because they needed to be concealed.

She was about eighteen, with ringlets and big eyes. She swivelled her chair around and looked at him the way, to his eternal gratitude, women always had.

'I ... uh . . He stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, trying to salvage some breath. This guy Kaufmann had to be pretty damn fit, working here.

'Mr Macbeth, is it?'

He nodded dumbly.

'Do excuse the stairs,' she said. 'Mr Kaufmann represents quite a number of singers.'

'Huh?' Doubtless there was some underlying logic here concerning singers and breath-control, but he was too bushed to figure it out. He hung around in the doorway while she went off to consult with M. W. Kaufmann in his inner sanctum.

Thinking, So you did this again, Macbeth. Put on a suit and tie this time, cancelled your lunch appointment, got busted for speeding by a cop with an accent so thick it sounded like he hadn't got around to swallowing his breakfast. You really did all of this. Over a woman. Again. Maybe, he thought, as the kid beckoned him in, maybe this is what they call a mid-life crisis. Sure. Like all the other mid-life crises I been having since I turned twenty-nine.

'Mr Macbeth,' M. W. Kaufmann said. 'I am Malcolm Kaufmann.'

They shook hands, and, waving him to a chair, Kaufmann said, 'This all seems rather, er, irregular.'

'I'm an irregular kind of guy,' Macbeth said winningly.

Malcolm Kaufmann looked less than won. He was a small, foxy-eyed person with stiff hair the unnatural colour of light-tan shoes.

The secretary was hanging around, eyeing up Macbeth without visible embarrassment. 'Thank you, Fiona.' Kaufmann waved her out, eyeing up Macbeth himself but in a more

discriminating fashion.

'So,' he said. 'You're in television, I understand.'

Macbeth confessed he was, planning to build up the image a little. Then he changed his mind and built it up a lot. How he was over here for the international Celtic conference, but also on account of his company was tossing around an idea for a major mini-series ... piece of shlock about this American guy, doesn't know his ass from his sporran, comes over to Scotland to look up his Celtic roots and before he knows it he's besotted with this, uh, mysterious Scottish lady.

'I see,' Kaufmann said.

Yeah, I guess you do at that, Macbeth was thinking. Besotted with a beautiful, mysterious lady who sings like a fallen angel and has wild, black hair all down her back with just one single, long-established strand of grey. Under the spell of an enchantress who can make the earth move, and the walls and the ceiling, and after you meet her you don't sleep too good any more.

He said, 'Did Moira ever act?'

'Ah.' Kaufmann leaned back in his chair, tilting it against the wall, tapping his rather prominent front teeth with a ballpoint pen. 'Well, her first love, naturally, is her music, but I do believe ...' Clearly searching his memory for the time she'd done a walk-on for some local soap.

Macbeth helped him out. 'Certainly has the charisma, don't you think?'

'Indeed, indeed. The same, er, quality, perhaps, as that apparent in ... who shall I ... ? Cher ... ? Does that comparison do her justice, would you say?'

'Spoken like a good agent, Malcolm.'

Kaufmann's eyes narrowed. 'Don't be deceived by the surroundings, Mr Macbeth. I am a good agent. You say ... that you encountered Moira at the Earl's recent Celtic gathering. That would be on the evening when her performance was unaccountably disrupted.'

'Right,' Macbeth said. 'Unaccountably disrupted.'

'By what appears to have been an earth tremor...'

'Which, when it happened, I don't recall having felt.'

'Really.'

'Maybe I'm insensitive that way,' Macbeth said.

'But you don't really think so.'

Macbeth shrugged. 'Like you say, she has charisma.'

They both nodded.

'Of course,' Macbeth said, 'this is early days. See, first off, what I'd really like is to meet with Moira over lunch before I leave here ... discuss things informally.'

'And how long will you be here?'

'Two weeks, at the outside.'

'Well, I shall no doubt be in touch with her very shortly.' Kaufmann smoothed down his unconvincing hair. 'And I shall naturally inform her of your interest. Then perhaps the three of us might ...'

'Yeah, that'd be, uh, that'd be just ... She in town right now?'

'I fear not.'

'See, I thought if she was doing a gig someplace, I'd kind of like to be in the audience.'

Kaufmann smiled. 'This sudden interest in Moira ... this is entirely professional, of course.'

'I'm a very professional kind of guy. However, I've long been a fan. Of the music. But also ... Malcolm, this is kind of sensitive...'

'Which, as you pointed out to me a few moments ago, you are not.'

'Yeah, well, when I, uh, encountered the lady that night, I was a mite overwhelmed, I guess, by the essential, uh, Celtishness, if that's the word, of the occasion and, if I'm being honest, by the experience of Moira herself, and so ... well, I believe I said a few things left her thinking - as you doubtless are thinking right now - what a Grade A dork this person is.'

'Oh, yes,' said Kaufmann. He paused. 'She can certainly be quite disconcerting.'

'Thank you for that. So I'd like to meet with her informally and maybe convince her that, in less inhibiting circumstances ...'

'I see. Well, sadly, Moira is not working tonight. Or in the city at present. She has a personal matter to attend to. And though, as her agent, I am obviously aware at all times of her whereabouts, no, I'm afraid I can't tell you where she is. That really would be irregular.'

'Ah ... right," Macbeth said.

'Perhaps you could leave a number with Fiona, where we can contact you.' The agent's face was blank.

'Right,' Macbeth said gloomily.

CHAPTER IV

Joel Beard had been standing there for a couple of minutes, over by the window in the Rector's study, his mouth slightly open.

Hans,' he said urgently, as if the church was on fire, 'Hans, quickly, who on earth is that?'

The Rector couldn't manage anything quickly any more, but, yes, he too had seen the hooded figure. It had vanished now behind the church tower.

'I'm sorry, Joel?'

'Over there. Didn't you see it?'

'No, I mean ... all kinds of women pass through that gate.'

Joel turned to him, a 'Got you' smile on his large, unlined face. 'I don't think I mentioned the gate, did I, Hans? And I don't think I mentioned a woman.'

'Well, obviously I assumed ...' Hans grimaced and bent to his worse knee, feigning pain for once. Bloody man. Joel had spent three half-days with Hans, being shown around, shaking a few hands. Big, cheerful, amiable character, anxious to learn.

But suddenly ...

'I wouldn't be surprised,' Joel said in his flat, calm Yorkshire voice, 'if there weren't quite a lot of things you haven't noticed, Things that go on, hereabouts.'

'... the hell are you talking about?'

'Hell?' said Joel. 'Yes I think I am talking about hell. For instance, Sam Davis, the young chap who was here morning...'

Hans stared at him. 'How do you know about that?'

'When he came out, his Land Rover wouldn't start.' Joel flashed his teeth. 'I was around. I fixed it. We had a chat.'

'Mechanic too, eh?' the Rector said. 'You're obviously an endlessly useful man to have about the place.'

Joel, deaf to all sarcasm, said, 'I told Sam I'd go along to the farm, talk to his wife. And perhaps... perhaps do what I can to protect them.'

'Joel, if there's any protecting to be done in this parish ...'

God in heaven, this was the man's first full day in Bridelow, and he was taking over!

'Oh, I realised, of course, that you'd be along there yourself if it wasn't for your, er, leg. I explained all this to Sam, of course I did.'

'Made my excuses, did you?'

'Hans ...' Joel Beard wore a hefty gold-plated crucifix on his chest. Joel, the avenging angel. For the first time, Hans was getting an inkling of how disruptive this man could turn out to be.

'Hans, I'm only trying to help,' Joel said, like a social worker addressing some uppity pensioner.

'The problem is, Hans, people sometimes don't realise the amount of sheer legwork involved in ministering to a rural parish. Admit it, now, you've needed help for quite some while, and been too proud to ask for it. Well, naturally, we all admire you for that, but there's a job of work to be done here, you know that.'

The Rector said coldly, 'I really don't know what you're talking about.'

'Perhaps,' Joel said gently, 'that's because you're too close to it. You know what I think? I think these filthy rites on the moors are only the tip of the iceberg.'

He glanced back out of the window to the place where the hooded woman had disappeared. Stay away, Hans pleaded inside his head. Stay out of sight ...for God's sake... whoever you are.

'There's been talk, you know,' Joel said into the glass pane. 'I have to be frank, it's the only way I can be. And I think it's only fair you should know. A good deal of talk. At diocese level.'

Hans sat down suddenly, carelessly, in his armchair - and felt the pain might hurl him at the ceiling. 'Listen,' he gasped, gripping the chair arms, holding himself down. 'Has it ever occurred to you for one blessed moment that perhaps there are things you don't understand? I know you were at St Oswald's. I know the sort of bull-at-a-gate Christianity they go in for ...'

'I only know what's in my heart.' Joel almost chanting, his eyes squeezed to slits, Joel the seer, Joel the prophet. 'I know that God is living in my heart, and therefore what I feel to be right and good must be right and good because it is His Word.'

God save us, Hans thought, from Born Again Christians cunning enough to get into the business proper. And God help me to restrain this man's excesses.

Leave him alone! Can't you see what you're doing to him?

Cathy, in the hall, ear to the study door. Dressed for the funeral, black jumper and skirt, coat over her arm.

Half an hour ago she'd sneaked down to the wine-cellar to discover that Joel had set up a camp bed on the stone flags and a card-table with candles, like a makeshift altar.

A bit eerie. A lot disturbing.

What the hell was this bloke trying to achieve, digging himself in, like a big mole, under the very heart of Bridelow?

'Talk,' Hans said. 'You say there's been talk. What kind of talk?'

Joel walked back to the centre of the room, stood in front of the piano, his hands behind his back, the polished cross flashing from the black of his cassock. Like a cheap medallion, Hans thought from the sour darkness of his pain.

'I'm not a humble man,' Joel said.

Hans, coughing, nearly choked.

'I know this,' Joel said. 'And I pray one day Almighty God will let me come to humility in my own way. But not ...yet.'

His hands whipped round from behind his back. One was an open palm and the other a fist. They came together with a small explosion in the still, fusty air of the Rector's study.

'Not yet.' Joel Beard said softly, turning back to the window. Still, presumably, no sign of the woman in black.

Whichever of them it was, Hans thought, she would do well to depart quickly and discreetly, the way they could when they wanted to.

'It's not the time, you see, for humility.' Joel standing behind Hans's chair now, blocking his light. 'The clergy's been humble and self-effacing for so long that it amounts to downright indolence. It's time, I believe, to remember the other Christ. The one who ejected the traders and the money lenders from the temple. There's worse than that here. Isn't there?'

'Look ...'

Joel spat out, 'It's the Devil's lair!'

'It's ...' Hans tried to get out of his chair, felt suddenly dizzy.

'That's what the talk's about.' Joel's eyes burning in the afternoon gloom. 'Satan walking openly in the street. Satan walking, bold as brass, to the very door of this church, where that filthy whore parades her ... her parts.'

'No.' Hans felt old and ineffectual. 'It's not true.'

'Yes! There's a cult of Satan, making blood sacrifices on the moors, and this is where it's emanating from. God only knows how long it's flourished here.'

Cathy breathed in, hard.

Half an hour ago, Joel had caught her spying. Stood and watched her coming up the steps from the cellar, smiling at her from the vestry doorway. Cathy, red-faced, mumbling, 'Just seeing if there was anything I could do. To, er, to make you a bit more comfortable down there.'

Could have bitten her tongue off. She supposed lots of women would find him awfully attractive, with the tight golden curls, the wide smile - and that physique. Perhaps she really

was gay.

Certainly she hated the man now. How could he say these things?

... that filthy whore parades her parts ...

Our Sheila?

You're insane! She wanted to fling open the study door and scream it at him.

Joel said reasonably, 'We're not asking you to do anything yourself. Obviously, you've had to live with these people for a very long time. Big part of your life. And we all realise you're not well ...'

'And who?' Hans asked wearily, as if he didn't know, 'are we?'

Joel, for once, was silent.

'The Bishop? Our newly appointed archdeacon? Perhaps he fancies you, Joel, have you thought about that?'

Joel Beard turned away in distaste. 'Christ says ...'

'But... but you're not Christ, Joel,' Hans said, horrified at the hollow weakness of his own voice. He slumped back into the chair, into the endless cavern of his pain, his eyes closed. The Rev. Joel Beard laughed agreeably. 'We'll crack this thing together, Rector. You and me and God.'

Hans heard him rubbing his hands. 'Well. Time's getting on. Funeral to conduct. Though I can't think why you left it until so late in the day.'

'Family request,' Hans mumbled, lying. 'Some relatives had ... long way to travel.'

'Hmm. I see. Well, come on, old chap.' Joel's strong Christian hand on his shoulder. 'Soon be over.'

From behind the door, Cathy scurried away, pulling on her coat. He'd caught her once today. He'd never catch her again.

The two of them stood at the bottom end of the churchyard, not far from the lych-gate. There was a monument here on its own, stark and pointed, like an obelisk, one word indented on a dressed-stone plaque.

HORRIDGE

'It was always pretty scary, Shaw said, 'to think that one day I'd be under that too.'

Therese, in her ancient fox-fur coat, walked all round the monument. 'Is it a vault?'

'Something like that. I didn't take too much notice when they stuck my father in there. I'm sure that one of the reasons I was determined to unload the brewery was to avoid being buried here. I mean, I didn't think about it at the time, but it must have been at the back of my mind. To break the family ties with Bridelow, get the hell out of here. For good. I mean ... not have to come to people's funerals who you hardly knew, because you're a Horridge. I reckon the old man would have sold out himself if he'd had half a chance.'

'Where would you like to be buried?'

'Somewhere warm. If it has to be in this country I'd prefer to be cremated.'

'I wouldn't mind.'

'Being cremated?'

'Being buried here,' Therese said. 'I like vaults.' She smiled, her eyes glinted. 'You can get out of them.'

Shaw shuddered, a feeling he was growing to enjoy. She looked very edible today, as ever. However, for the first time, he rather hoped she was not naked under that coat. It was so cold, though, that he didn't really imagine she could be. She'd attached a scarf-thing to it today, with the fox's head on the end. Shaw, who'd ridden to hounds two or three times whilst staying with friends, didn't find this offensive but suspected there were people in Bridelow who would; they appeared to have strong views about killing animals for pleasure.

She said, 'Have you ever seen him, your father?'

He knew her well enough by now to know exactly what she meant by that, but he pretended he didn't. 'Of course I've seen him. He didn't die until I was twenty-five. Come on, let's get a drink before the show starts.'

'It's your family vault, after all,' Therese said. 'You've got rights of access. Why don't we pop in and visit him one ...'

'For God's sake, Tess ...' Not his bloody father, the sanctimonious old sod.

'I've told you before,' she said coldly. 'I don't like to be called Tess.' Then she turned her head and looked up into his face, and the fox's glass eyes were looking at him too. 'We could ask him, you see.'

He felt the chill wind raising his hairline even more, wished he'd worn his stylish new Homburg. She was playing with his mind again. Sometimes it was difficult to sleep.

'We could ask him if you were right. That he really did want to get out of Bridelow. That he would've had no objections at all to Gannons taking over the brewery. Give your mother something to think about.'

'I'd rather not, if you don't mind,' Shaw said. He was thinking about last summer, a warm day in August, when he'd found out about another side of Therese.

Over dinner one night in Manchester, he'd giggled nervously and said to her, 'You know, I'm beginning to think you must be some sort of vampire, only ever corning out at night.'

'Would you like that - if I was a vampire?'

'I don't know. What would it mean?'

'I could make you undead, couldn't I?'

'Er ... haven't you got to be dead before you can be undead?'

She'd put down her glass and looked at him, red wine glistening on her lips, face still and golden in the moving candlelight, like a mask from some Egyptian tomb.

'And what,' she said, 'makes you think you aren't?' And he began to shake with desire, a new kind of desire which began at the bottom of his spine.

But he'd kept on at her in the car - it was a Range Rover this time, belonging, she said, to a friend - as she whizzed them down Deansgate around 1 a.m. What did she do at weekends, in the daytime? Social work, she said.

'Social work?'

And it was true; two days later they were out on the moors. He was following Therese in gloriously tight jeans and there were two friends called Rhona and Rob and a bunch of

people Therese described loosely as 'offenders'.

Rhona, who was quite attractive, despite having a sort of crewcut, was apparently a professional social worker with the local authority. Rob, a lean, hard-looking man, was - amazingly - a policeman, a detective sergeant. You had to admire her cheek, being friends with a copper after all the cars and things she'd stolen.

They'd parked their vehicles in a long lay-by off the Sheffield road and after two hours of hard walking, Shaw's legs were starting to ache.

'Where are we going exactly?'

'Not far now,' Therese assured him. The six 'offenders', who were of both sexes and ranged in age from teens to about sixty, were fairly silent the whole way.

After a further few minutes, Therese stopped. They were on a kind of plateau, offering a magnificent view of miles of sunlit moorland and, more distantly, a huge expanse of darkness which he assumed was the Moss, with the hills behind it reaching up to Kinder Scout.

'Gosh, look,' Shaw said, 'there's the Bridelow road. We've come a hell of a long way round. If we'd just gone through the churchyard and carried on up the moor we'd have been up here in about half an hour.'

'It was better to come this way,' Therese said. 'Don't whinge, Shaw.'

There were stubby stones around where she was standing, arranged in a rough sort of circle, or maybe an egg-shape; it was hard to tell, they were so overgrown.

One of the older offenders was on his knees. He was probably exhausted. He had his arms around one of the bigger stones, a thing about two and a half feet high, and he seemed

to be kissing it.

'What sort of offenders are they?' Shaw whispered.

'Just people who society considers maladjusted,' Therese said. 'It's stupid. They all have special qualities nobody seems to want to recognize.'

Rob said, 'We're helping to rehabilitate them.'

Therese had taken a few objects from her backpack - odd things, photographs in frames, a small pair of trainers, a large penknife - and arranged them around the circle, up against the stones.

They had a rough sort of picnic outside the circle of stones, with a whole cooked chicken, which everybody pulled bits off, and red wine. Afterwards, they all sat around in the springy yellow grass, not talking, the sun going down, Shaw starting to feel a little drunk, a little sleepy.

He was aware that Rob and Rhona had entered the circle and were murmuring to themselves in low voices. They seemed to have taken all their clothes off. They began to touch each other and then to have sex. Shaw was deeply shocked but kept quiet about it. It went on for some time. Until suddenly, dreamily, a plump, spotty, middle-aged woman called Andrea stood up and joined Rob and Rhona in the circle and began to behave as though there were some other people in there too.

'Hello, David,' she said joyfully, the first time she'd spoken all afternoon. 'All right, Kevin?'

She giggled. 'Yes,' she said. 'Me too. Do you like it here? It's nice, isn't it?'

At that stage Rhona and Rob left her and came out and sat with Therese and Shaw. Flies and midges buzzed around Andrea in the dusk. Shaw seemed to fall asleep. When he awoke he saw Andrea on her knees in the circle with her arms around what looked like two dusty shadows.

'Isn't it heart-warming?' Therese was whispering, as if they were watching a weepy from the back stalls. 'She's becoming reconciled to the loss of her brothers.'

'What happened to them?'

'They died,' Therese said. 'A long time ago. She killed them. With a penknife. They were only little. 'Course she was only a child herself. It was such a shame, they put her away for a long time.'

He didn't remember how they got back to the cars except that it was dark by then and it didn't seem to take nearly as long as it had taken them to get to the circle.

In the churchyard, Therese said, 'Is she here - your mother?'

'No, she ... she thinks she's got that Taiwanese flu. I've tendered her apologies.'

'Funny, isn't it, the way she won't come into Bridelow?

'She should leave. She's no connections here.'

'Why won't she leave?'

'I don't know,' Shaw said, but he did. His mother couldn't bear to be supplanted by Therese. His mother did not like Therese. This was understandable. Sometimes he wasn't

sure that the word 'like' precisely conveyed his own feelings.

Her dark hair, swept back today, was mostly inside the collar of the fur coat. She wore a deep purple lipstick.

Nor, he thought, was 'love' appropriate. So why ...

Therese nodded back towards the village. Shaw looked his watch: three minutes to four, and the light was weakening.

... why ...

Therese said, 'It's coming.' Meaning the funeral procession.

Shaw shuddered again, with a cold pleasure that made him afraid of her and of himself.

'You know,' Therese said, 'I think it's time you met father. Properly.'

'Is he dead?' Shaw asked fearfully.

CHAPTER V

Everything that happened, the dreadful inevitability of it all, Ernie Dawber would remember in horribly exquisite detail. Like a series of grim cameos. Or the meticulously etched illustrations in the pre-war picture-book from which he used to tell stories to the youngest children on Friday afternoons, enjoying the measured resonance of his own headmasterly tones and then holding up the book to what was left of the light so they could all see the pictures.

Cosy, back then. Friday afternoons in mid-autumn, with Mr Dawber and The Brothers Grimm. Home to buttered toast for tea.

Now it was another Friday afternoon. But this time the text was being read to Ernie and he could see all the pictures, the pages turning over in a terrible, considered rhythm, until he wanted to leap up from his seat in the back row, crying out, Stop ... stop!

He didn't leap up much any more. Sometimes, lately, he felt unsteady and disconnected in his head. But when he went to the doc's for some pills for it, the doc had made him have tests. Sorry he'd gone now.

No leaping up, anyroad. Nowt he could do except to witness it, for this was all he was now: the observer. The local historian, dry and factual. Not for him to comment or to judge. Nothing that happened on this day would ever be recorded, anyway, in The Book of Bridelow. And so was best forgotten.

As if ever he could.

Cosy, too (the first picture) in the bar at The Man before the funeral, having a whisky for the cold, with his half of Black, his mind charting the changes from that warm evening when Matt Castle had brought them hope.

Although, unknown to him at the time, the Change must have begun on the bright March morning when the roadmen found the bog body.

Hand clenching on his glass of Black, now condemned as gnat's piss by them as knows. The only light in the bar is greenish-blue, from the old gas-mantle Matt Castle reinstated, childishly happy when he found it could still be made to work.

Such small things seemed to delight Matt, painstakingly patching up frail memories of his childhood.

Unaware that he, too, was part of the Change.

Behind the bar, Stan Burrows in a black waistcoat, says passively, 'Tough about Gus Bibby, eh?'

'Why? What's up?'

'You not heard, Ernie? He's closing up the Stores.'

'No!'

'I could see it coming, me. Just not up to it no more. Bent double half the time. I went in for a bucket last week, had to climb up and get it meself. 'Sides which, he's selling nowt. What can you buy in Gus's you can't get in Macclesfield twenty per cent cheaper?'

'It's a matter of principle, Stan. We're glad enough to shop at Gus Bibby's when there's snow or floods and you can't get across the Moss. Anyway, what about his son?'

'How many days a year can't you get across t'Moss since they've built that road up? Nay, it's price of progress, int it?'

'Progress? Ernie nearly choking on his so-so half of Black.

Stan saying, 'Nay, Bibby's'll shut and it'll stay shut. Who's going t'buy that place?'

'What about his son?'

'He'll not come back, will he? Got a good job wi' Gas Board in Stockport. Would you come back?'

'Aye,' said Ernie. 'I would.'

'How many's like you, though, Ernie? Any more. Be honest. How many?'

Second picture.

Halfway up the street, church behind him, looking down towards The Man. From up here, the pub looks as if it's built on the Moss itself.

A bitter wind has blown through Bridelow, snatching the leaves from the trees and bleaching the colour from the faces inside the front porches. The faces hovering, ghostly in the shadows, the bodies invisible in black.

The villagers start to step from their doorways; the coffin's coming.

A fair turn-out, thanks to Matt's folk-music friends from the Manchester circuit and outsiders with an interest in Bridelow like Dr Roger Hall. And the former brewery workers who failed to find employment in Buxton, Macclesfield, Glossop, or even Manchester and Sheffield; they're all here, except for the ones hunched over their fires with their Beecham's Powders and a bad case of Taiwanese flu, the like of which would never have got Across the Moss in the old days.

Ernie fancies he can hear wretched coughing from behind the drawn curtains, as if the virus has spread to the stones themselves.

Turn the page, lad.

Up by the arched lych-gate now, watching people stepping down to the cobbles to join the ragged tail of the procession.

The blinds are down at the Post Office, soon to be the only shop remaining in Bridelow. Ernie hardly recognizes black-clad Milly Gill, who normally looks like a walking botanical garden. Is she in mourning just for Matt Castle, or for Bridelow itself?

The coffin's at a funny angle because of the respective heights of the men carrying it, from little Willie to gangling Frank. Are Willie and Milly Gill back together? Ernie hopes so; they need each other, time like this.

Lottie Castle follows immediately behind and, by 'eck, mourning becomes her, she's never looked as fine, the red hair swept back under a neat, black pillbox hat with a little veil, generous mouth set hard. With her, half a pace behind, is the lad, Dic, a leather case under his arm.

Go on, turn over, you've got to look ...

The coffin on a wooden bier beneath the Autumn Cross, the Rector hunched stiffly before it, his strong hair slumped over his forehead, not quite hiding pearls of sweat, and the lines in his face like an engraving.

Behind the Rector bobs the new curate, curly-haired lad, built like a brick privy. Bit of a firebrand, by all accounts.

He'll be all right. He'll settle down. Won't he?

At the side, by the choir stalls, is Hans's lass, Catherine, who seems all of a sudden to have lost her youth. Anxiety on her firm, plain face; worried about her dad, and with good reason. Needs a long rest, that lad.

Two youngsters with guitars who Ernie doesn't recognize sing a wistful but forgettable ballad, stop and look around afterwards before realising congregations aren't supposed to

applaud, especially at a funeral.

Then the Rector gets down to it.

'Lord, we're here to thank you for the life of Matthew Castle, and to pray that his soul might...'

Ernie, in the centre of the rearmost pew, locates Ma Wagstaff without much difficulty - that's quite a hat Ma's got on, with those big black balls on it. Anyway, it's through Ma that he spots ... the mystery woman. Otherwise he never would have noticed her, all in black like that and in the shadow of the pillar.

Ma turns around just once, with that famous penetrating stare. Thought at first the old girl was looking at him. And then he sees the black, hooded figure to his left, on the little seat wedged up against the stone pillar.

By 'eck. They're not usually as public as this about it, these women.

Pretty place, this church. Norman, was it, those huge archways? And candles here and there, like in a Catholic church.

Warm stained glass with Garden of Eden-type pictures full of flowers and fruit.

And the cross that hung above the carved wooden screen dividing the nave from whatever the altar area was called.

The cross was of green wood. Or at least wood that had been green last summer. Woven boughs, some with shrivelled, dead leaves still hanging from them. A cross from the woods and the hedgerows. Yeah, nice. And strange. One of several strange things in here - like the German Shepherd dog sitting stoically on a pew next to a small boy.

Well, why not?

But still just a wee bit weird.

Jesus, she'd be feeling at home here next. But she still kept the cloak about her; it was pretty damn cold in here and going to be a good deal colder outside, when the darkness came down.

Underneath the cloak, the jeans and jumper she'd travelled down in. No place to change. Wouldn't worry Matt how she looked, but jeans might not be viewed as entirely respectful at a funeral in these parts; keep them covered.

Also ...I don't want this place to know me. Don't want to be identified by Lottie or Willie or Dic or anybody who ever bought a Castle Band album.

Not yet, OK? .

Locking the car, she'd glanced up into the thickening sky, and thought, Before this burial's over, it's going to be fully dark. Matt Castle going out of the dark and into the last black hole, and the peaty soil heaped upon him under cover of the night.

But no bad thing, the dark.

I can't face anybody, she'd thought, standing alone in the muddy parking area behind the church, pulling up the deep hood until her face was lost, traitorous cow, I'll stay at the back, out of sight, I'll pay my respects in my own way. And then I'll get the hell out, and nobody'll be the wiser.

And yet ...

She'd stared up at the church, at its dour, crenellated walls, at its Gothic stained-glass windows showing their dark sides to the sky, taking the light and giving out nothing. At all the pop-eyed stone gargoyles grinning foolishly down on her.

... somehow ...

Followed the walls to the tower and the edge of the churchyard where the moor began in ochre tufts and gorse bushes, and in the distance there was a clump of rocks like a toad, and if you blinked the toad would be quivering, having leapt and landed five yards closer.

... there's something here that knows me already.

No people around at that time, only the sensation of them behind the drawn curtains. Not peering through the cracks at the stranger and the stranger's dusty BMW, nothing so obvious.

'This is a knowing place,' she'd found herself saying aloud.

Then, all too damn conscious of looking very like an extremely witchy woman, she'd passed through a wooden wicket gate under a steep, stone archway, to walk a while among Bridelow's dead.

There, at the top of the churchyard, was the hole awaiting Matt, the area immediately around it covered with bright emerald matting, luridly unconvincing artificial grass. She stood on it, on the very edge of the hole, staring down into the black, rooty soil. And saw again the smoke-choked mouth of the great fireplace at the Earl's castle, the clawing thing her mind had constructed there.

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

Backing away from the open grave, thinking, There are people here who can tell me that. And I can't ask.

Standing several yards from the church doorway now and feeling strongly that someone was watching out for her. But knowing from experience that this feeling of being watched wasn't necessarily a case of someone but something. That the watcher could be something in the air, something that existed purely to watch.

Spooking herself. Down here in England, where she had no heritage and there should be no reverberations.

'Aw, fuck this,' she'd said aloud, turning towards the church doorway, looking up ... directly into the massively exaggerated, gaping pussy of the Sheelagh na gig.

'Shit,' Moira said. 'Was you, wasn't it?'

The Sheelagh. The exhibitionist. The stone effigy of a woman, compressed to the dimensions of a gargoyle. Thrusting out her privates and leering about it. A blatant fertility symbol (or something) almost always found in the stonework of churches, mostly in Ireland.

But rarely as prominent as this.

'Got yourself a prime spot, here, hen,' said Moira. She'd walked under the Sheelagh na gig, through the porch and into the church, feeling better now she knew who'd been watching her. This was OK, this was not the white-haired, white-faced man who'd tried to steal the comb and (maybe ... ) brought the bloody house down. This was something older, more benevolent (maybe... ).

She'd been the first in church. She'd sat here alone inside her own dark shroud, concealed by a pillar, until...

Until Matt arrived.

'... we'll all of us remember the day Matt returned,' the Minister said. 'The gratitude felt by the whole village that its second most important institution was to be saved ...

He's not well, this minister, Moira thought. And he's worried. A real sense of oppression coming off him. And there shouldn't be that in here. This is abnormal.

The old lady knows, the one in the really bizarre hat.

Hans leads them out into the churchyard, the pace all the more funereal because he can hardly walk.

As they near the doors, Ernie Dawber, standing up in his pew, sees the curate, Joel Beard, stride forward to take the Rector's arm. Then there's a rush of footsteps down the aisle and he sees Catherine squeeze past the coffin resting on the shoulders of Willie and Eric, Frank Senior and Young Frank and practically throw herself between the two clergymen, dashing the curate's hand aside and snatching her father's arm, clasping it.

By 'eck. No love lost there and she doesn't care who knows it.

The pews are emptying from front to back, which means Ernie will be the last out, except for the Mystery Woman. He glances behind just once, as he joins the end of the procession, but she's not there.

Sometimes they just disappear, these people.

The next picture is so black at first, because of the sky, that it's almost like a woodcut.

The graveyard packed like a dark fairground. But a circle of space at the top, where the moor looms above the rectangular hole in the soil, which, when the lamplight flares, is like the opening of a shaft.

Alfred Beckett, verger and organist, has lit a metal paraffin lantern which he holds up on a pole, hanging it over the grave as Hans completes the burial rite, his own version, some of it turned about, but all the old lines there.

'Man born of woman hath but a short time ...'

As the phrases fade, like a curlew it begins.

The piping.

Ernie gasps, muffling his mouth with a leather-gloved hand, clutching a Victorian marble cross for support. A hush enclosing the churchyard as the cold and homeless notes roam the air.

He straightens up against the cross, brushing in relief at his overcoat. It's the lad. Dic. Matt's coffin on the ground at the edge of the grave and Dic standing by it, the Pennine Pipes under his arm and the wilderness music swirling up into the cold.

Only the lad. For just a few seconds ...

Ernie moving closer. The lad plays well. His dad'd be proud. Tries to see Lottie's face, but her head's turned away.

Someone weeping behind him.

Can't see the coffin any more. The four bearers lined up on either side of Dic, concealing the grave. Lamplight shows him the fingers of Willie Wagstaff's left hand starting to move against his thigh, a slow beat, in time with the piped lament.

Ernie finds he's standing next to the lamp-bearer, Alf Beckett, when somebody - likely a woman - whispers, 'Put it out, Alf.'

'Eh?'

'Put lamp out.'

Silently, Alf Beckett lowers the pole to the ground, unhooks the lantern, lays it on the grass at his feet, shuffling around to put himself in front of it so that no light is cast into the

grave.

'That do?'

'Fine. Ta, lad.'

Oh, hell.

Quite soon, behind the pipes, there's a scraping and a scuffling on the ground, like mice or rats. Ernie tries to shut it out. He's not supposed to hear this. He looks up, away from it, and the only face he can see clearly is the Rector's, upturned to the sky, to what light remains.

The Rector also knows he is not supposed to hear or to see. He has his eyes tightly closed.

'Get it over with,' Ernie hisses. 'Get it bloody done!'

Raises his eyes above the little graveside scrum but doesn't close them. Sees the black shapes of the sparse trees on the edge of the churchyard, where it meets the moor. The trees trembling. Has this withering, shrivelling sense of something blowing towards them, off the moor, off the Moss.

Irrational. His nerves. Like the night when he was scared the Moss would swallow the sun and it would never come up again.

Come on, settle down, calm yourself, there's nowt you can do except keep your mouth shut and your eyes averted. Nowt here for the Book of Bridelow.

Dic keeps on piping, the same melancholy tune, over and over again, but erratic now, off-key; he's getting tired ... but the noises behind him go on, the scuffling on the ground, and now a jarring creak and an intake of breath.

And then all hell ...

'Stop! Let me through!'

Rough hands thrusting Ernie aside.

'Mr Beckett, where's the lamp? Stand back, will you. Stand back, I said, or somebody ... will ... get ... hurt.'

The lantern snatched up, its gassy-white flame slanting, flaring in the furious eyes of the Rev. Joel Beard, smoke rolling from the funnel.

Hands grab at him to hold him back from the grave, but Joel, snarling, is big and fuelled-up with rage, the metal cross swinging as his cassocked chest swells and his elbows slam back.

The lamp flies up into the night and Joel catches it by its base as it falls, pushing Alf Beckett so that Alf spins sideways into Dic Castle and the Pennine Pipes make a squirming, ruptured noise, subsiding into empty, impotent blowing and wheezing.

The Rev. Joel Beard steps to where the coffin of Matt Castle lies at the grave's edge, and he lifts the lantern high.

CHAPTER VI

She was not among those weeping when the Pennine Pipes began.

It got to her in other ways ...

Hanging back behind the crowd, still as the headstones around her, Moira felt confused, puzzled ... the plucking at something inside her, starting this small, familiar tingle in her lower abdomen.

OK, she would have known anyway that it wasn't Matt she could hear, there wasn't the same lilting, light-as-air technique, the inimitable agility. Would have been no mistaking that.

And yet ...

The Roman numerals on the church clock, lit-up, said 5.30. It would be dark at 5.30 this time of year. But the darkness had the icy, velvet quality of midnight, and whoever had organized this service had known it was going to end like this.

Why?

Sure as hell was the strangest funeral she'd ever been to, the minister and the principal mourners in a distant lamplit huddle, the freezing air over the entire churchyard somehow electric with this almost feverish, dreamlike tension, and the piping going on and on and on, like in a time-loop ... so that you wound up mentally pinching yourself, asking, is this real?

Like, where am I? Did I drive across these unknown hills into some dream dimension?

Needing at last to break through, maybe talk to someone, hear the sound of her own voice, anybody's voice, she moved closer, symbolically tossing back the hood of her cloak ... at the moment the lantern went down.

She saw the big shapes of the trees at the end of the churchyard. Below them, shadows intertwined. The amorphous tableau at the top of the small rise where Matt's grave was to be. From whence came the insistent, never-ending piping but no sounds of a funeral service, no suggestion of anyone leading the proceedings.

Only - under the pipes, as she drew close - a whispering, as if there was more than one person whispering but they weren't listening to each other, the voices rustling together like wind-dried leaves.

And she caught a passing perfume, a sick, sad smell.

Then, to her left, a small commotion. An expulsion of breath from a yard or so away, a dragging on her cloak and she was almost pulled down.

'Stop!' A man's voice, strong, authoritarian. 'Let me through': For just a second everything froze, and then there was this instinctive communal resistance, a tightening of the clutch of bodies around her. The whispering intensified, new urgency in it, the dead leaves really crackling now.

A scrabbling now, by her feet; some guy had been pushed over, rolled on to the cloak. He found his feet, she reclaimed the cloak. Somewhere nearby there was a struggle going on.

She didn't move. The lamp appeared again, bouncing wildly in the air, like some will-o'-the-wisp thing. In the spinning light she got a split-second picture of ... must be Matt's boy, Dic Castle, playing the pipes, the bag trapped in an elbow, his face red with effort, and Willie Wagstaff next to Dic, Willie's eyes flitting anxiously, from side to side, and she could almost feel the rhythm of the little guy's famously impressionable fingers in her head, thud, thud ...

Thud, thud... . And then the oil-lamp went up again, was held steady.

And Moira looked down, oh, Jesus, into Matt Castle's face framed in quilted white.

The smell. The perfume of the dead. The coffin lid off. His hair gone. Grave-dirt spilled on his closed eyes.

The way you never want to see them, the way you can't bear to remember them. And still you can't turn away your head; it won't move.

What have they done ... ?

Moira began to shiver. She closed her eyes, and this was worse, like waking up in the fast lane, her senses lurching out of control, cracked images oscillating in the steamy half-light between perceived reality and illusion, the place where the whispers went.

... vaporous arms reaching from the smoky maw of a great fireplace ...

... the splintering white of a skull-storm ...

... dancing lights on the moor... a rock like an encroaching toad ... pop-eyed gargoyles belching blood ... an eruption of steaming intestine on stone ...

All these reflecting one to another like in the shards of a shattered mirror, while tiny, vicious, chattering voices gnawed at her eardrums and she felt something sucking around her shoes pulling her down, and she knew that if she didn't open her eyes she'd be screaming like a loony.

But when she did it was no better. She blinked in pain.

He lay there in his coffin. Matt Castle, not in a shroud but a plain, white T-shirt. And his grey-white hands, crossed over his chest, were fumbling at it.

Oh, God, oh, Jesus, his damned hands were ...

'How dare you! How dare you!'

The man holding up the lantern, the big cleric she'd seen in the church earlier, this man's face bleached in the lamplight with rage and shock.

Below him, the old lady with the bizarre hat, sleeves pushed up and both arms in the coffin, pressing something into the dead hands of Man Castle, crossed over his breast.

It was her hands moving, not his.

Moira saw a frightened, angry glazing in the eyes of the big man as he bent roughly down with the lamp, forced himself between the old woman and the body in the coffin.

She thought she heard him sob, or it might have been her.

The big minister guy had put his own hand in there ... Holy Christ, is this real ...?... and brought it out, something clutched into a fist.

'Put that back ...' The old woman's eyes flashing green-gold, like a cat's, in the lantern-light.

'This is ... unpardonable ...' Yeah, he was sobbing, the big man; sickened, shattered, furious at what he was doing.

'Joel...' The minister, the Rector, was there, on the other side of the grave, his face all twisted up, the fair-haired girl still holding on to his arm. 'Please. Put it back. I'll explain to you, I promise ...'

'How ... How can ...'

'Turn away, Joel. Please. It isn't what you ... Just turn away.'

The big clergyman lifted his left hand to the lamp. He was holding up a small bottle. Something moved in it, liquid. Moira glimpsed red.

'Joel ...Give it to me ...You don't understand ...'

She saw that Joel was breathing rapidly now, a kind of wild, petulant hysteria there. She saw him rise to his full height, saw his arm pull back.

The Rector screamed, 'No!', shook out of the girl's grip, threw himself across the empty grave, one shoe reaching the phoney nylon grass mat on the other side, inches from the coffin ...

... as Joel, breathing violently, hurled the bottle above all the heads towards the moor beyond the trees. Then he turned, put down the lamp and stumbled back into the crowd, his

hands flailing.

Heard him clumping away, his outraged breathing. His sobs.

'Grab him, somebody, please ...' The girl, and she meant the Rector. People pushing past Moira, reaching out for the minister as the false grass slid from under his shoe and he almost rolled into the open grave.

Several minutes later, the graveyard had quietly emptied, except for the group around the empty coffin, Mostly women and not whispering any more. At the centre was the one with the hat. She was the oldest of them. Two of the others replaced the coffin lid.

Moira had backed beyond the lamplight, was a short distance away, leaning up against this tall cross in the Celtic style. Trying to breathe.

Oh, God. Oh, Holy Jesus. What the fuck am I into here?

One of the women at the graveside was Lottie Castle.

Lottie's voice was very quiet, very controlled, carefully folded up tight. 'I can't believe ... that any of this has happened.'

'Lottie ...'It was Willie, coming up behind her.

'And you ...'

'I know,' Willie said. 'I'm sorry.'

'I'll never forgive you, Willie. Or that ... her.'

'She only wanted ... Oh, Jesus Christ,' Willie wailed.

'This is awful. This is a right bloody mess. I can't tell you. Oh, God, Matt ...Why'd it have to be Matt?'

'Willie,' the old girl in the hat demanded. 'Stop that skrikin' and fetch me that bottle back.'

'Ma, nobody's going to find that bloody bottle tonight. If ever.'

'Then we'll have t'do what we can.' She placed both hands on the coffin. 'Pass us me bag, Joyce, it's down behind that cross.' Moira tensed; at her feet was a thick vinyl shopping bag.

Lottie's leather boot slammed down hard on the coffin between the old woman's hands. 'You,' Lottie said, 'have done about enough for one day.'

The old woman's hat fell off. She looked startled. Like nobody ever spoke to her this way.

'You don't understand, girl.'

Moira sensed an even further drop in the temperature of the night air between them. 'No,' Lottie said. 'You're right. I don't understand any of this. I don't want to. Matt thought he did. He thought he should. Well, what good did it do him? Tell me that. I thought you'd try something. I told Willie to warn you off. It goes against everything I ... everything I don't

believe.'

'Please, lass,' the old woman coaxed. 'Let us get on with it, best we can. Let's try and put things straight before ...'

'No. That's it. Finish. You've blown it, Mrs Wagstaff. You've turned the burial of my husband into a bloody circus. You even ... involved my son in your pathetic, superstitious ... Anyway, that's it. It ends here. Willie, you and Eric and the Franks are going to put that poor man in the ground.'

The old woman looked up at her. 'I beg of you, Mrs Castle ...'

'Ha! The famous Ma Wagstaff begging? Don't make me laugh. Don't make it worse. Just get out of my way, you silly old bag.'

Lottie stood on the fake grass behind the coffin and raised a boot. 'Now. Have I got to push it in myself?'

She stopped. 'Where's Dic?'

Willie said, 'I told him to help them get Rector home. I thought it'd be best. Lad'd 'ad enough.'

One of the other women with Ma Wagstaff said hesitantly, 'Is he all right? Rector?'

'I don't know,' Willie said. 'Lottie, look ... what Ma's on about ... I know how bloody awful it seems. Hate it meself ...'

'Then put my husband in the ground, Willie Wagstaff. And you ...' Lottie stared contemptuously at Ma Wagstaff. 'If I ever see you near this grave again, I swear I'll wring your stringy old neck for you.'

She stood and folded her arms and waited. Moira knew she wouldn't move until the last shovelful was trampled down.

When Ma Wagstaff looked at her she turned her back.

'Right, then.' Willie had a rope. He threw one end across the grave and another man caught it. 'OK, Frank. Where's t'other rope? Let's do this proper. I'm sorry, Ma, she's right. Nowt else you can do now. Let's get it filled in.'

Ma Wagstaff stood up, put on the hat with the black balls, dented now. She said, 'Well, that's it. It's started.'

'What has?'

'There were more of um here. At least one. I could tell. I could feel um. Like black damp.'

'Go home. Ma. Stoke thi' fire up, make a cuppa, eh? I'll be 'round later. See you're all right. Now, don't you look at me like that, I'm not a kid no more, I'm fifty-four ... going on

seventy, after today.'

'Black seed's sown,' Ma Wagstaff said ominously. 'Bury him tight and pray for us all.'

The old woman walked unsteadily away, her back bent. Like she'd been beaten, mugged, Moira thought. Several other women followed her silently down the cemetery path.

The church clock, shining bluish in the sky, said 5.42.

When the women reached the shadow of the cross where Moira stood. Ma Wagstaff stopped, stiffened, stared up at her.

As Moira silently handed her the shopping bag, old embers kindled briefly in Ma's eyes. Neither spoke. Moira didn't know her.

And yet she did.

Hans lay stiffly on the old sofa in the Rectory sitting room. They'd put cushions under his knees, taken off his dog-collar. His eyes were wide open but Ernie Dawber could tell they

wouldn't focus.

Hans kept trying to tell them something, but his mouth wasn't shaping the words.

'Can't fee ... fee ...'

'Pop, stay quiet. Let's put your overcoat over your legs. How's that? Mr Dawber, don't you think we should get the doctor to him?'

'I do. You go and make us some tea, Catherine. Dic, ring for an ambulance.'

When they'd gone, Ernie leaned over Hans. 'Don't try and talk, just nod, all right? Are you trying to say there's bits of you you can't feel? Hey up, you don't have to nod that hard, just tilt your jaw slightly. Is it your arm? Your shoulder?'

Hans pushed an elbow back into the sofa, trying to raise himself. 'Chest. Shoulders.'

'Now, then ...' Ernie raised a warning finger. 'Listen, lad, we've known each other a long time, me and thee. I'll be frank with you. I'm not a doctor, but my feeling is you've had a bit of a heart attack.'

The Rector squirmed in protest.

'Ah, ah! Don't get alarmed, now, I've seen this before. It's nowt to get panicked about. What you are is a classic case of a man who's been pushing himself too far for too long. I know this is not what you'd call an easy one, this parish, for a clergyman, and you've handled things with tremendous skill, Hans, and courage, over the years, anybody here'll agree with that ...'

The Rector's eyes flashed frustration.

'Aye, I know. It's not the best of times to get poorly, what, with ... one thing and another. And that Joel ... by 'eck, he's a rum bugger, that lad. Impetuous? Well... But, Hans, be assured, they'll cope, the Mothers' Union. They will cope. They've had enough practice. Over the years.'

Wished he felt half as confident as he sounded. The trouble with Bridelow was so much had been left unsaid for so long that nobody questioned the way the mechanisms operated any more. It was just how things were done, no fuss, no ceremony, until there was a crisis ... and they found the stand-by machinery was all gunged up through lack of use.

When they heard the warble of the ambulance, Hans grabbed hold of Ernie's wrist and began to talk. 'I've buggered things, Ernie.'

'Don't be daft. Don't worry about Joel. This time next week he'll think it was all a bad dream.'

The Rector's dry face puckered.

'Don't think so? Oh, aye. Folk do, y'know. Things heal quick in Brid'lo. The thing about it ... and I've been thinking about this a lot - and writing it down. Started a book - don't say owt about it, God's sake - Dawber's secret Book of Bridelow. Not for publication, like, Ma Wagstaff'd have a fit ... just to bring all the strands together, reason it out for meself...'

'No, look ...' Hans blinked hard.

'No, the thing about Bridelow ... it's so prosaic. Know what I mean? Not sensational. No dressing up ... or dressing down, for that matter. Nowt to make a picture spread in the News of the World. Joel? Nobody'd believe him, would they? You think about it.'

He patted the Rector's hand. 'No, better still, don't think about it. Get yourself a bit of a rest. I'll handle things. Brid'lo born, Brid'lo bred. Leave it to Uncle Ernie.'

This had been his forte as a headmaster. Getting the kids to trust him. Even when he hadn't the foggiest idea what he was doing.

As the ambulance men crunched up the path, Hans said, 'Shurrup, you old fool and listen. It's Joel.'

'Like I said, we'll handle him.'

'No. You don't understand. Know where he's ... where he's going to spend the night. Do you?'

'Back in Sheffield if he's got any sense.'

'No. He's ... made up a bed. Little cellar under the church. Ernie ... Don't let him. Not now. Not after this.'

'Oh,' said Ernie. 'By 'eck. You spent a night down there once, didn't you?'

CHAPTER VII

GLASGOW

She told him that not only had she never eaten here, she'd never even been inside the joint before. And he, having stayed in better hotels most of his life, felt - as usual - like an over privileged asshole.

She had the grouse, first time for that too. (Didn't Scots eat grouse on a regular basis, like Eskimos and seal meat?) He joined her, a new experience for him also. The grouse wasn't so great, as well as which, it looked like a real bird, which made him feel guilty.

Afterwards, looking up from the sweet trolley, she said, 'I suppose you'll be wanting your pound of flesh, then.'

'Aw, come on, Fiona. I can buy a girl dinner without the question of flesh coming into it.'

'I should be so lucky.' She smiled enticingly. 'I was referring to Moira. You'll want to know about Moira.'

'Well,' he said, 'yeah. But only if this isn't gonna get you into any kind of, uh ...'

'Shit?' said Fiona. 'I don't think so. I see all Mr Kaufmann's receipts, he never comes here. Anyway, it's nice to live dangerously for a change. I bet you live your whole life dangerously.'

'Me?' For one and a half years after leaving college he'd been a trainee assistant director. The very next day he was an executive producer. Mom's company. 'Uh, well, not so's you'd notice.'

'You do look kind of dangerous, Mungo.'

'Looks can be deceptive.' Last thing he planned was to seduce this one.

'Irish,' she said. 'You look Irish, somehow.'

'So people keep telling me.'

'Mungo,' she said. 'Aw, hey, that's really incredible. Mungo Macbeth.'

'Of the Manhattan Macbeths. My Mom's real proud of that.' Giving her the condensed autobiography. 'From being a small kid, I learned how the actual King Macbeth was really a good guy whose name was unjustly blackened by this English hack playwright.'

'That's true, actually,' Fiona said. 'He wisny a bad guy.'

'I'm told they also used to play pipe-band records to me in my cradle,' Macbeth said, screwing up his nose. 'But that made me cry, so they hired this genuine Scottish nanny, used to sing me Gaelic lullabies. That part I remember. That was great. That was how I got into the music'

'My dad used to sing me Tom Jones,' Fiona said glumly.' "The Green Green Grass of Home". Not so great.'

'My dad never got to sing me anything,' Macbeth said. 'He didn't last that long. He was kind of jettisoned by my mother's family before I was born. They are the Macbeths. My dad's name was Smith. I mean, Smith? Forget it. So, anyhow, this trip came up, she said. Go ... go feel the true power of your Celtic heritage.'

'You feeling it?'

'I'm feeling a jerk is what I'm feeling. I won't say she was expecting a delegation from the clan Macbeth to turn out for me at the airport in full Highland costume, but you get the general picture.'

'Out of interest, have you actually seen anybody in a kilt since you got here? Apart from at the Earl's do?'

'Nope.'

'So what'll you tell her when you get home? Hey, would it be OK for me to have the profiteroles?'

'And just a coffee for me,' he said to the waiter. 'Make that two - I'll wait. What do I tell Mom? I'll say I had a peculiarly Celtic experience. I'll say it was too deep and personal to talk about.'

'Oh, wow,' Fiona said, rolling her big eyes. Problem was that tonight she didn't look eighteen any more. She was in a tight red dress - well, some of her was in it. Macbeth thought hard about Moira Cairns to take his mind off this comparatively minor but far from discountable temptation.

'I'll tell her I met a real witch,' he said. 'One of the weird sisters.'

'Aw, she's no' a witch,' Fiona said scornfully.

'No? What is she?'

'She's what my granny used to call fey. OK, maybe a bit more than that. Like, one day she was very annoyed with Mr Kaufmann ... I mean she's usually quite annoyed with him but this was something ... Anyway, here they are, raging away at each other, and she's about to storm out the door and then she just turns round, like she's gonny say something else, only she canny find the words. And then ... one of the damn filing cabinets starts to shake and ... I'm no' kidd'n' here ... all four drawers come shoot'n' out at once. Really incredible. Awesome silence afterwards.'

'Coulda been an earth tremor.'

'That was what Mr Kaufmann said. But he still went all white, y'know? I mean, that filing cabinet was locked, I'm certain it was.'

'I can sympathize.' Macbeth shuddered, his mind making a white skull out of the tureen on an adjacent table. 'Listen, Fiona, I'm a little shaky on Moira's early career. She was at college in Manchester which is where she joined this local band, right?'

'Matt Castle's band. Matt Castle just died.'

'Oh, shit, really?' Remembering something mindlessly insulting he'd said about Matt Castle just after they met. What a shithead. A wonder she spoke to him at all after that.

The waiter brought Fiona's profiteroles. 'Hey, great,' Fiona said. 'So then she was approached about joining this rock band. Offered a lot of money, big money even for the time, to make two albums.'

'The Philosopher's Stone,' Macbeth said. 'But they only made one album.'

'Right. She split before they could get around to the second one. But, see, the word is that the reason they wanted her, apart from her voice, was that ... You remember Max Goff, who owned Epidemic Records?'

'He was murdered, year or so ago. Some psychopath kid with a grudge.'

'Right,' Fiona said.

'I didn't know she was with his outfit. It was CBS put out the album in the States.'

'Well, the word is, Mungo .. .' Fiona leaned conspiratorially across the table, '... that the real reason Max Goff wanted her in the band was he'd heard she was psychic. He was very into all that. Like, he already had a couple of guys signed to Epidemic who were also psychics and he wanted to put them all together in a band, see what happened. Of course Moira didny know this, she thought the guy just liked the way she sang, right?'

'And what happened? I mean, that first album, that was terrific. I wore mine out.'

'Aye, but it all got very heavy, with drugs and stuff, and Moira broke her contract, came back to Scotland, went solo. Signed up with Mr Kaufmann, who's... well, he's no' exactly part of the rock scene.'

'I wondered about that.'

'The other singers on Mr Kaufmann's books are, like, mostly, y'know, nightclub or operatic or kind of Jimmy Shand type of outfits.'

'Who?'

Fiona dug into a profiterole; cream spurted. 'See, Moira made it clear she wisny gonny have anything to do with the rock scene ever again. And that's how it's been. She just does traditional folk concerts and selected cabaret-type dates. Really boring. Hell of a waste.'

'It's very intriguing. What do you think happened?'

Fiona shrugged. 'Most likely she just got in with a bad crowd. I used to think, well, maybe she was doing drugs in a big way. Heroin or something. And realised it was, like, a one- way street, y'know?'

'But you don't think that now?'

She shook her head. 'I know her better now. She's too strong. She widny touch drugs - not the kind that might get any kind of hold on her, anyway. I think it's more likely she just rejected the psychic stuff, the way they were fooling about, Max Goff and these guys. She knows what it can do, right? Like, if one person can shoot all the drawers out of a filing cabinet, what's gonny happen wi' four or five of them ... ?'

'This is fascinating, Fiona.' The kid was smarter than he'd figured. 'You're saying maybe she came back to Scotland to, kind of, put herself in psychic quarantine. Maybe scared of what she could do.'

'I'm only guessing,' Fiona said, 'but how come she'll no play any of the old songs any more? I think she wants to put all that stuff behind her. But can you do that? Being psychic, I mean, it's no' like a jumper you can take back to Marks and Spencer. Drink your coffee, Mungo, 's gonny get cold.'

He drank his coffee, not tasting it. He'd been fooling himself that this thing about Moira was purely ... well, more than physical ... romantic, maybe. She was beautiful and intelligent, and he loved her music from way back. But maybe it went deeper. Maybe this was a woman who he'd instinctively known had been closer to ... what? The meaning of things?

Things that having money and influence and famous friends couldn't let you into?

Time of life, he thought, staring absently into Fiona's cleavage. Or maybe I really do have Celtic roots.

'Mungo,' she said. 'Can I ask you something?'

'Go ahead.' He could guess.

'All this stuff about a miniseries ...'

'Kaufmann told you about that?'

'I keep my ear to the ground.'

Or the door. He grinned. 'Yeah?'

'Was that on the level?'

'You mean, are we gonna go ahead with a film about, uh ...'

'An American guy who comes over here to trace his roots and ...'

'OK, OK ...'

'... falls in love with this beautiful...'

'Aw, hey,' she said. 'I think that's sweet.'

'So maybe you'll help me.'

'How?'

'Tell me where I find her.'

'I don't know,' Fiona said. 'Really.'