The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):

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

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

CHAPTER I

The bloody media.

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

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

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

'Dr Hall, do you know when ...?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Don't be ridiculous,' Roger said.

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

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

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

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

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

Who?

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

Will he come here?

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

Go. Get out. Got to.

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

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

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

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

No!

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

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

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

Someone's door creaked, opened.

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

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

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

Door closing.

Footsteps.

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

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

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

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

'How are you, Pop?'

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

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

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

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

'What's it mean, Pop?'

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

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

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

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

'Cathy ...'

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

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

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

'But ...'

'They sorted you out, didn't they?'

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

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

'Where?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Still am,' Roger said smugly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly she didn't want him touching her again.

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

'Why'd you do that?'

'Because ... because he was with someone I judged to be more reliable.'

He didn't elaborate; Ashton didn't push the point either. Chrissie thought of the writer, Stanage.

'So, anyway,' Roger said, 'it was Castle's funeral yesterday, and I thought I ought to show my face. I only went to the church service. Left before they actually put him into the ground. But I very much wish I'd stayed with it now, seen him buried.'

'I might be thick,' said Ashton, 'but I'm not following this.'

'All right, let's approach it from another angle. We've all been assuming that the break-in took place last night, right?'

'Have we, Dr Hall?'

'Ashton, look - can we stop this fencing? I know you're an experienced policeman and all that, but I've been doing my job for over twenty-five years too.' Angrily, Roger drew his chair from under the desk, scraping the Inspector's legs.

'Look. Because of the funeral and one or two other things, I didn't come in here at all yesterday. And you only found out - about the burglary before me because our normally lazy caretaker just happened to try the doors for a change. Correct?'

Ashton came slowly down from the desk, stood looking down at Roger. Interested.

'But if he'd bothered,' Roger said, 'to check the doors the night before - and if he says he did he's probably lying, I know that man - he'd probably have found them forced then. My strong suspicion is the break-in happened the previous night. And that the body wasn't here at all yesterday.'

'And what does that say to you?'

'What it says to me, Inspector - and I might have to spend a bit of time explaining this to you - but what it says to me is that my bog body is buried in St Bride's churchyard.'

'I see,' Ashton said thoughtfully. 'Or do I?'

'The funeral!' Roger raised his hands. 'The grave - it's a double grave! What I'm saying is, dig up Castle's coffin, you'll find our body lying underneath. Trust me.'

... and there it was.

Oh, Lord. Oh, Mother.

Ma Wagstaff could see the thing from the top of the churchyard, the highest vantage-point in Bridelow.

It hadn't been there a week ago, had it? There was a time when she knew this Moss better than anybody. Couldn't claim that now. Getting owd now. Letting it slide.

Ma leaned on her stick and wondered if she could make it all the way out there without some help. She'd have been able to yesterday, but yesterday was a long time ago. Yesterday, though she hadn't realised it at the time, she still had some strength.

She'd thought that sooner or later it would come to her, but instead it had sent her an invitation. Brought by a little lad who for no good reason had decided the dragon - because the dragon was there - was responsible for breaking up his Autumn Cross.

And in a way he was right.

Right about that thing out there; Ma could feel its black challenge. And looking across at it, she could tell why he thought it was a dragon - those little knobbly horns you could make out even from this distance.

Only an owd dead tree, as sometimes came out of the Moss when there was storms and flooding.

Bog oak.

Except there hadn't been a storm.

So it was black growth, like the blackness that grew in Matt Castle, and she had to gauge its strength.

Ma hesitated.

Not one to hesitate, wasn't Ma, but if she went out there she'd be on her own. As well as which, somebody needed her help this side of the Moss; she'd known this for days. Well, aye, people was always needing owd Ma's help, but this was somebody as didn't want to ask, hadn't for some reason been able to overcome a barrier, and until this barrier was overcome there was nowt Ma could do. Now she could feel the struggle going on, and when the plea came she must be there to answer it.

Pulled this way and that, between the flames and the torrent. Oh, Lord. Oh, Mother, which way do I turn? Let it slide for so long, losing me grip.

I'll walk out then.

Walk out there following the river, staying near the water, gathering what power I can. Happen I can deal wi' this quick, nip it in t'bud. Stare it down, give it the hard eye, reshape it, turn it back into wood and only wood.

Leaning heavily on her stick, Ma Wagstaff followed the old, steep narrow path down from the churchyard, meeting the thin river at the bottom of the hill where it went under the path - a little bridge, no more than a culvert - and there was a scrubby field to cross before they reached the Moss.

I can make it. I can. Can I lean on you, Mother?

The last few steps were going to be the hardest, by far.

From two yards away, Ma Wagstaff's front door looked like the golden gates of heaven: unattainable.

Liz Horridge was aware of her mouth being wide open, gulping, a fish out of water, metabolism malfunctioning

Agoraphobia.

Say it!

AGOR ... A ... PHOBIA!!! Common-enough condition, always so hard to imagine, until it came upon you in panic-attacks, convulsions, stomach-cramps.

Yet this ... more like claustrophobia ... not enough air ... lungs bursting.

She'd tried to do it in planned stages, like an invalid learning to walk again. The first stage had been waiting for the postman, whom she hadn't seen face-to-face for months. When the van drew up, she'd be watching from the dining-room window, and if the postman was carrying a parcel she would run to open the front door, leaving it slightly ajar, and by the time he was tossing the parcel on to the mat, Liz had taken cover.

Yesterday, almost sick with apprehension, she'd waited for the post van down by the main gate, rehearsing how she'd handle it. Just taking a walk. Normally go the other way. Yes, it is cold. Bright, though. Bright, yes. Thank you. Good morning.

When the postman didn't come, she was so relieved. It had been foolish. Trembling, she'd returned to the house to make Shaw's breakfast. But Shaw had gone. To be with her. Whenever he went out without saying even vaguely where he was going, it would always be to be with her.

Therese Beaufort had come into the house only once, had been polite but dismissive, had shown a vague interest in everything, except Liz, at whom she'd looked once, with a chilly smile before reappraising the drawing room, as if sizing it up for new furniture. Now she merely parked outside and waited, expressionless, not looking at the house (yes, I've seen your mother now, thank you).

And now there was ...

Look, Liz, why don't we meet up?

And

Chairman's hoping to drop by tonight.

Fear. Despair. She'd walked away, down the drive, down the road, into terror, knowing she could not go home tonight. To the village, to Ma Wagstaff, to plead for sanctuary.

Liz Horridge fell down, tearing her skirt, feeling the small, jutting stones of Ma Wagstaff's front path gashing her knees. She began to crawl towards the door, feeling the emanations of the stone buildings heavy on her back as if they would push her into the little pointed stones beneath her.

The whitened donkeystoned step gleamed like an altar.

Liz rose on her knees, tried to reach the knocker but managed only the letter-box which snapped at her fingers like a gin-trap.

'Mrs Wagstaff: she managed to wail. 'Please, Mrs Wagstaff ... let me in ...'

But nobody came to the door.

'I'm sorry! I couldn't stop it! It wasn't my fault about the brewery. Please ... He's coming back. Please let me in.'

And then the stones came down on her. The weight of the village descended on her shoulders, taking all the breath from her and she couldn't even scream.

CHAPTER II

'Didn't know I was coming back to die ... I mean, that's what people do, isn't it, and animals, go back home to die? But I wouldn't have. If I'd known. Last thing they need here's any deadwood.'

The voice frail, but determined. Going to get this out, if it ...

Killed him. Yeah.

'Just as well, really. That I didn't know.'

All Moira could see through the windscreen was the Moss. The vast peatbog unrolling into the mist like the rotting lino in the hall of her old college lodgings in Manchester, half a life

away.

The BMW was parked in the spot at the edge of the causeway where yesterday she'd sat and listened to the pipes on cassette. Now it was another cassette, the one from the brown envelope inscribed MOIRA.

'Funny thing, lass ... this is the first time I've found it easy to talk to you. Maybe 'cause you're not there. In the flesh. Heh. Did you realise that, how hard it was for me? Lottie knew. No hiding it from a woman like Lottie. Shit, I don't care who knows. I'm dead now.'

Matt laughed. The cawing.

She'd followed Lottie into a yard untidy with beer kegs and crates. Beyond it was a solid, stone building the size of a two-car garage. It looked as old as the pub, had probably once been stables or a barn.

'Matt's music room,' Lottie said.

She'd been almost scared to peer over Lottie's shoulder, into the dimness, into the barnlike space with high-level slit windows and huge, rough beams. Dust floating like the beginnings of snow.

Lottie silent. Moira, hesitant. 'May I?' Lottie nodding.

Moira slipping past her, expecting echoes, but there was carpet and rugs underfoot and more carpet on the walls to flatten the acoustics. She saw a table, papers and stuff strewn across it.

Shelves supported by cement-spattered bricks held books, vinyl records and tapes. Heavy old speaker cabinets squatted like tombstones and there was a big Teac reel-to-reel tape machine. Matt's scarred Martin guitar lay supine on an old settee with its stuffing thrusting out between the cushions.

Hanging over the sides of a stool was something which, from across the room, resembled a torn and gutted, old, black umbrella.

She'd walked hesitantly over and stared down at the Pennine Pipes in pity and horror, like you might contemplate a bird with smashed wings. It was as if he'd simply tossed the pipes on the stool and walked out, forever, and the bag had maybe throbbed and pulsed a little, letting out the last of Matt's breath, and then the pipes had died.

Moira's throat was very dry. She was thinking about Matt's obsessions: the Pennine Pipes, the bogman and ...

'Can't help your feelings, can you? Like, if you're a married man, with a kid, and you meet somebody and you ... and she takes over your life and you can't stop thinking about her. But that's not a sin, is it? Not if you don't ... Anyway, I never realised that you ... I never realised.'

Matt's voice all around her now. Car stereos, so damned intimate.

Lottie had turned away, calling back over her shoulder, 'I'll be in the kitchen. Stay as long as you like. Lock up behind you and bring me the key. The parcel's on the table.'

And was gone, leaving Moira alone in the barn that was like a chapel, with the pipes left to die.

On the table, a thick, brown envelope which had once held a junk-mail catalogue for Honda cars. It had been resealed with Sellotape and

MOIRA

was scrawled across it.

Inside: the tapes, four of them, three of music. And this one, a BASF chrome, marked personal.

'Not a sin ... if you don't do owt about it. But I always found it hard to talk to you. I mean ... just to talk to you. Till it came time to tell you to get out of the band. That was easy. That was a fucking pushover, kid. I'm sorry the way that worked out, with The Philosopher's Stone. Sounded like a big opportunity. Like, for me too - chance to make the supreme sacrifice. But we can't tell, can we? We never can bloody tell, till it's too late.'

Rambling. He'd have been on some kind of medication, wouldn't he? Drugs.

'But when they told me I'd had me chips, I did regret it. Regretted it like hell. I thought most likely you'd just have told me to piss off, but there might have been a ... Anyway, I'd have given anything for just one ... just one time with you. Just one. Anything.'

Christ. Moira stared out of the side window to where half a tree had erupted from the Moss, like bone burst through skin.

'When you wrote back and you said you were too busy, I was shattered. I'd convinced meself you'd come. I just wanted to at least see you. Just one more time.'

Moira bit down on her lower lip.

'I'd tried to write a song. Couldn't do it. It was just a tune without words. Nothing. Best bloody tune I ever wrote, which isn't saying much - play it for you in a minute. Won't be much good, the playing, what d'you expect? Be the last tune I ever play. Gonna play it over and over again until I get it perfect, and then I'm gonna get Lottie to take me out and I'll play it to the fucking Moss. The Man in the Moss. That's what it's about. The Man in the Moss. That'll be me, too. Want to die with this tune in me head. This tune ... and you.'

She felt a chill, like a low, whistling wind.

'It's called Lament for the Man. I want the Moss to take it. A gift. Lament for the Bridelow Bogman. Soon as I read about him, months ago, before it came out about the sacrifice element, I was inspired by him. Direct link with me own past. The Celts. The English Celts. Like he'd come out the Moss to make a statement about the English Celts. And I was the only one could interpret it - sounds arrogant, eh? But I believe it. Like this is what me whole life's been leading up to.'

Man starting to cough. On and on, distorting because the recording level couldn't handle it. The car-speakers rattling, like there was phlegm inside.

'Fuck it,' Man said. 'If I go back and scrub this I'll forget everything I was gonna say. Sorry. Can you handle it? See, this was before they'd completed the tests on the bogman, before it was known about the sacrifice. Even then I was pretty much obsessed. I didn't care if we spent every penny we'd got. Lottie - she's a bloody good woman, Moira, I never deserved Lottie - she went along with it, although she loved that chintzy house in Wilmslow and she hated The Man I'th Moss, soon as she clapped eyes on it. But she went along with it. Sometimes I think, did she know? Did she know before me, that I was gonna snuff it? She says not. I believe her.'

Across the Moss she could see the pub, a huge grey boathouse on the edge of a dark sea, its backyard a landing stage.

'And then, soon after we came, the report came out about the bogman. About what he was. A sacrifice. To appease the gods so they'd keep the enemy at bay, make this community inviolate. Protect these Celts, these refugees from the fertile flat lands, the Cheshire Plain, Lancashire, the Welsh border. Invaders snatching their land, Romans, Saxons. And this, the old high place above the Moss - maybe it was a lake then. Bridelow.'

Man's voice cracked.

'Bridelow. The last refuge. I cried. When I heard, I cried. He went willingly. Almost definitely that was what happened. Almost certain he was the son of the chief, everything to live for - had to be, see, to make a worthwhile sacrifice.'

Voice gone to a whisper.

'Gave himself up. Willingly. That's the point. Can you grasp that, Moira? He let them take him on the Moss and they smashed his head, strangled him and cut his throat, and he knew ... he fucking knew what was gonna happen.'

She stared through the windscreen at the Moss. Thick, low cloud lay tight to the peat, like a bandage on its putrefying, suppurating skin.

'Hard to credit, isn't it? I mean, when you really think about it. When you try and picture it. He let the buggers do it to him. Young guy, fit, full of life and energy and he gives himself up in the most complete sense. Can you understand that? Maybe it affects me more because I've got no youth, no energy, and what life there's left is dribbling away by the minute. But by God ... I realised I wanted a bit of that.'

She thought about the bogman. The sacrifice. She thought about Matt, inspired. Always so contagious, Matt's inspiration. She thought, I can't bear this ...

'Can you get what I'm saying? Like, they took him away, these fucking scientists, with never a second thought about what he meant to Bridelow and what Bridelow, whatever it was called back then, meant to him. So I wanted ... I wanted in. To be part of that. To go in the Moss, too. Lottie tell you that? Lottie thinks it's shit, but it isn't ... '

'No,' Moira whispered. 'It wouldn't be.'

... want some of me out there. With him. He's my hero, that lad ... I'm fifty-seven and I'm on me last legs - nay, not even that any more, me legs won't carry me - and I've found a fucking hero at last.'

Matt starting to laugh and the laughter going into a choke and the choking turning to weeping.

'Me and Ma Wagstaff met one day. One Stormy day. Ma understands, the old bitch. Willie's Ma, you know? Says to me, "We can help you help him. But you must purify yourself."'

Out on the Moss, the dead tree like bone was moving. It had a tangle of thin branches, as if it were still alive, and the branches were waving, whipping against the tree.

'She says. "You have to purify yourself".'

The tree was a bad tree, was about to take its place alongside the encroaching stone toad on the moor, the eruption of guts on an ancient, rough-hewn altar. Bad things forcing themselves into Bridelow.

'And then you came home ...'

Moira's eyes widened.

'I used to think she was ... a substitute. Me own creation. Like, creating you out of her, you know what I mean? An obsession imposes itself on what's available. But I should've known. Should've known you wouldn't leave me to die alone.'

Her senses froze.

'So, as I go into the final round, as they say, I'm drawing strength from the both of you. The bogman ... and you, Moira, Tomorrow's Sunday. I'll be going out on the Moss, to play. Last time, I reckon. I'll need Lottie and Dic, poor lad, to get me there, I'll send them away, then there'll just be the three of us.'

'No,' she said 'What is this?'

'Me and thee and him.'

Matt chuckled eerily.

Hard rain hit the Moss.

'No,' she said.

'Thanks, lass. Thanks for getting me through this. Thanks for your spirit. And your body. It was your body, wasn't it?'

She wrapped her arms around herself, began to shake, feeling soiled.

'Ma said. You've got to purify yourself. But there's a kind of purity in intensity of feeling, isn't that right? Pure black light.'

'I'll play now,' Matt said, and she heard him lifting his pipes onto his knees.

'If you're listening to this, it means you're here in Bridelow. So find Willie, find Eric. And then find me. You'll do that, won't you? Find me.'

The old familiar routine, the wheeze, the treble notes.

'I won't be far away,' Matt said.

And the lament began. At first hoarse and fragmented, but resolving into a thing of piercing beauty and an awful, knowing anticipation.

Out on the black Moss, as if hit by a fierce wind, the dead tree lashed impatiently at its bones with its own sinuous branches, like cords of gut.

Moira thought, There's no wind. No wind to speak of. The Moss in the rain was dull and opaque, like a blotter. She didn't want to look at the tree but a movement drew her eyes. Human movement.

An old woman was hobbling across the peat; she had a stick. A stringy shawl wrapped around her head. She was approaching the tree very deliberately, slow but surefooted.

She seemed to be wearing ordinary shoes, not boots or Wellingtons; she knew the peat, where to walk.

Cathy had said. You're going to have to talk to Ma. If she'll talk to you.

It is her, isn't it?

The dead tree was about a hundred yards away. The old woman was walking around it now, poking experimentally at it with her stick and then backing away like a terrier.

A wavy branch lashed out, wrapped itself around the walking stick. Moira drew breath.

Another movement, quick and sudden, and the shawl was torn away from the woman's shoulders, thrown triumphantly up into the air on the tip of a wavy branch, like a captured enemy flag.

'Holy Christ!' Moira was out of the car, leaving the driver's door hanging open, stepping down from the causeway, hurrying into the Moss.

Where the sinewy, whipcord branches of the old, dead tree were writhing and striking individually at the old woman, Ma Wagstaff, pulsing like vipers. Moira running across the peat, through the rain, desperately trying to keep her footsteps light because she didn't know this Moss. There was no wind. The rain fell vertically. Behind her Matt's music on the car stereo was a dwindling whine.

'Mrs Wagstaff!' she screamed. 'Mrs Wagstaff, get away from it ...!'

In the distance, over the far hills, behind the rain, the sun was a bulge in the white bandage of cloud and the flailing tree of guts and bones was rearing up against it; she was maybe sixty yards away now and the tree was tossing its head.

It had a head.

And its eyes were white; they were only holes in the wood, letting the sky through, but they burned white, and it was not a case of what you knew it to be, old and twisted wood, shrivelled, wind-blasted, contorted by nature into demonic, nightmare shapes this was the old mistake, to waste time and energy rationalizing the irrational.

'Mrs Wagstaff, back off!'

What was the old biddy doing here alone? Where were the Mothers' Union, when she needed back-up?

'Mrs Wag ... Don't ... don't look ...'

Moira stumbled.

'Don't look at it,' she said miserably, for Bridelow Moss had got her left foot. Swallowed it whole, closing around her ankle, like soft lips.

White eyes.

Black, horned head, white eyes.

'It's thee. It were always thee.'

Ma Wagstaff growled, stabbed at it one last time with her stick - the wood was so hard that the metal tip of the stick snapped off.

'Mrs Wag—'

Woman's voice screaming in the distance.

Nowt to do wi' her. Ma's job, this.

She moved away, like an old, experienced cat. Bait it. 'Come on, show thiself.' A dry, old rasp, not much to it, but she got it out. 'What's a tree? What's a bit of owd wood to me, eh? Show thi face. 'Cause this is as near as tha's ever going to get to Bridlo'. We seen to thee once ... and it'll stick.'

Backing away from it, and all the muck coming off it in clouds. She was going to need some help, some strength. It'd take everything she'd got - and some more.

And not long. Not long for it.

All-Hallows soon. The dark curtain thin as muslin.

Dead tree out of the Moss, and made to live, made to thresh its boughs.

Him.

Taunt it.

'You're nowt.' Words coming out like a sick cough. 'You're nowt, Jack. You never was owt!'

Dead tree writhing and slashing itself at her, and though she was well out of range by now, she felt every poisoned sting.

Get it mad.

'Ah ...' Ma turned away. 'Not worth it. Not worth me time. Bit of owd wood.'

But her heart was slamming and rocking like an old washing-machine.

Black horned head, white eyes.

Dead, but living in him.

White eyes.

CHAPTER III

There was a metallic snapping sound followed by a faint and desperate wailing.

'Mrs Wagstaff...'

The voice was familiar. But it didn't matter.

This was a funny little house, bottles and jars on every ledge, even on the edges of individual stairs. Sprigs of this and that hung from the ceilings and circulated musty smells.

The witch's den.

He sat in silence at the top of the stairs. Unperturbed.

'Please, Mrs Wagstaff ... let me in ...'

Then silence. He smiled. As children, they'd clustered by the church gate and whispered about the witch's house, not daring to go too close. See the curtain move ... ? It's her. She's

coming ... '

It hadn't changed; only his perspective on it. The wicked witch. Perspectives changed. Now it was cool to be ... wow, wicked! But Ma Wagstaff wasn't authentically wicked, never had been. Ma Wagstaff, let's face it, wasn't quite up to it and wouldn't be now. She'd conned them, generations of them.

Now I'm really rather wicked, he thought. If there's such a thing. Or at least I'm getting there.

He didn't move. His body didn't move.

The reason it didn't move was he didn't want it to. Suddenly, he had true self-control, and this amazed him. Or rather it amazed him to reflect on what a bag of dancing neuroses he used to be, so untogether he couldn't even regulate the sounds coming out of his own mouth.

Sher-sher-Shaw. Ster- ster-stuttering Shaw.

Amusing to imagine what he'd have been like if he'd been given this present task even a month ago, when he was still unconvinced. When he used to say, It's, you know ... bad, though, isn't it? It might be fun, it might be exhilarating, but it's bad, essentially. Surely.

And were you good before, Shaw? Were you good when you were stuttering and dithering and letting your father dominate you? Is that your idea of what it means to be good? In which case, how does it feel to be bad'

Terminology. Nowadays Bad was cool, like Wicked. A step in the right direction.

How's it feel? Feels good. Alive. Quite simply that. I didn't know before what being alive meant. I said to her, haven't you got to be dead to be undead? And she said, what makes you think you aren't?

So I was dead and now I'm alive. I know that when I pull the handles, turn the switches, press the buttons ... something will happen.

They'd told him he'd seen nothing yet. They'd told him there would be a sign. And now there was. And what a sign. Once again, Shaw couldn't resist it. He allowed his right hand to remove its leather glove and brush its palm across the top of his head.

A delicious prickly sensation.

The first time he'd felt it, he'd wanted to leap up and squeal with joy. But there was no need to do this any more. He could experience that joy deep inside himself, knowing how much more powerful and satisfying the feeling was if he didn't allow it to expend itself through his body, dissipating as he hopped about like a little kid, punching the air.

So Shaw Horridge's body remained seated quietly at the top of the stairs in Ma Wagstaff's house while Shaw Horridge's spirit was in a state of supreme exultation.

His hair was growing again! He was alive and he had made it happen.

Just a fuzz at first, then thicker than a fuzz - almost a stubble. He'd heard of men going to Ma Wagstaff for her patent hair-restorer, some claiming it worked. A bit. But not actually sure whether it had or not.

Not like this. No doubt about this. Where there'd been no hair, now there was hair.

All around him were Ma Wagstaff's bottles full of maybes. Maybe if the wind's in the right direction. If the moon s full. If there's an R in the month. Quite sad, really. A grey little world of hopes and dreams. No certainties.

Hair-loss was natural in some people, his mother said. But it had taken Therese to prove to him that you didn't have to accept something just because it was supposed to be natural. Acceptance was just spiritual sloth.

Being truly alive was about changing things. Changing people, situations. Changing your state of mind. Changing the 'natural'.

Being alive was about breaking rules with impunity. Men's rules. Also the rules men claimed they'd had from God. 'Natural' rules. This was what she'd taught him. Learn how to break the rules - for no other reason than to break them - and you become free.

Thou shalt not kill. But why? We kill animals to eat, we kill people with abandon in wartime. We kill for the Queen, we kill for the oil industry? Where does the taboo begin?

He stretched his arms and yawned. Settled down to wait, aware of his breathing, fully relaxed. How could bad be bad when it felt as good as this.

Eventually, kneeling messily in the rain, Moira pulled her shoe out of the bog.

The shoe was full of water; she shook it out and put it on. By this time the old woman had hobbled to the edge of the Moss, where there was a gate leading into a field, beyond which was the pub and, further up, the hill on which the church sat.

The dead tree was still. It looked hard, heavy, almost stone-like. Too dense to move in the wind, even if there'd been one. But it moved for me, she thought, limping back to the car. And it moved for Ma Wagstaff.

Such things were almost invariably subjective. Like, how often did two people see a ghost, at the same time, together? Ghosts and related phenomena were one-to-one. You saw it and the person with you said, hey, what's wrong with you, what are you staring at, why've you gone so pale?

But the tree moved for Ma Wagstaff. And it moved, no question, for me ...

She climbed behind the wheel and sank into the seat, drained. The cassette tape had ended. She slipped it out of the tape deck.

Ma Wagstaff understands, the old bitch. She says to me, 'We can help you help him. But you must purify yourself ...'

I am not getting this. Matt. What were you into, you and Ma?

And then ... whuppp.

Moira reeled back in the seat as something hit the windscreen. Like a big bird, covering the sky, darkening the car, it flapped there, wriggling and beating at the glass.

'Holy Jesus.'

It was snagged in the wipers, but it wasn't a bird ... only a dark blue woolly shawl. Ma Wagstaff's shawl, snatched from her by the devil-tree. Blown across the Moss. Blown hard, directly at the car, like it had been aimed.

Moira began to pant, closing her eyes tight, squeezing on the steering-wheel until it creaked.

When she opened her eyes the shawl had gone, and the vertical rain showed there was still no wind.

OK. Move.

She switched on the engine; slammed the BMW into reverse, pulled it back on to the causeway, pointing it at Bridelow. The sky was dirty now, but she wondered if it would still be white through the eyeholes in the thing of wood on the Moss.

Ma said. You've got to purify yourself. But there's a kind of purity in intensity of feeling, isn't that right? Pure black light.

Right. Get off my back, Matt. You're sicker than I figured. Just get the hell off my back.

Moira drove erratically into the village street, bumping carelessly along the cobbles and over the kerb. Nobody about. No sign of the old woman. The cottages featureless and damp, in a huddle.

Pure black light.

Black light? White light? What is this shit? Wished she could call the Duchess, but the Duchess wasn't on the phone. The Duchess wants to contact anybody, she doesn't mess with phones.

Moira sat in her car at the bottom of the street, ploughing her fingers through her hair. Exposed. And scared?

Oh, yes.

And maybe half-deranged. Couldn't properly express in words what she was doing here. Like she'd been sucked into the smoking fireplace that night at the Earl's Castle and gone up the chimney and been spit out cold on Bridelow Moss.

Now everything was pointing at Ma Wagstaff, but Ma Wagstaff had run away.

She left the car in the street, squelched to the Post Office, peat water oozing out of her shoes.

'Willie's not in,' she panted at the big, flowery Girl-Guide postmistress. 'Where would I find his mother's place?'

Weak as a kitten, Ma felt. Weak as a day-old kitten, its eyes not open yet. Weak and blind.

Help me, Mother.

Ma followed the river back, gratefully leaving the Moss behind. There was a crack starting in her walking stick where the black tree had snapped off the metal tip. Soon the stick wouldn't support even a skinny, spidery owd thing like her, and what would she do then?

It got her to the churchyard, God alone knew how, and she propped her old bones up against a stone cross. Looked up at the church porch, and it hit her like an elbow in the ribs.

Desecrated!

Oh, Mother. Oh, Jesus!

Over the door ... a mess of crumbling old cement.

That vandal.

The Goths and the Vandals and the Angles and the Saxons and the Romans and the so-called Christians. All them raiders Bridelow had fought off over the long centuries. And the buggers still at the door with their battleaxes.

Inside the church, little Benjie's Autumn Cross all smashed. And the vile thing growing out on the Moss, waving Ma's lost shawl like a banner. And the seeping sickness within that saps health and takes jobs. And now Our Sheila smitten from the wall, thrown away like she was nowt more than one of them dirty magazines.

Grinding, in pain, the few teeth she'd got left to grind, Ma Wagstaff staggered through the graveyard, up to the top end, where Matt Castle lay, the earth still loose on him, covered by wreaths, already bashed about by the weather, petals everywhere.

The witch bottle lay in her coat pocket. Dead.

Moving like an owd crab on a pebble beach, Ma staggered by Matt's grave without stopping. The earth loose around him - not buried proper, not yet. Still air holes in the soil. Poor bugger might as well be lying stretched out on top.

The rain had stopped, but the clouds still bulged like cheeks full of spit. Ma stumbled out on to the moor, through the top wicket gate, between two tattered gorse bushes.

This was not the real moor; this was still Bridelow. Until you got over the rocks.

Below the rocks was the holy well, the spring, water bubbling bright as lemonade into a natural-hewn stone dish. The well they dressed with flowers in the springtime to honour the Mother and the water. Long before she reached it, Ma could hear it singing.

A rock leaned over the spring, like a mantelpiece over a hearth, above it the moor, which was not Bridelow.

Carved out of the stone, a hollow, with a little shelf.

On the shelf a statue.

'Mother,' Ma said breathlessly.

The statue was plaster. She wore a robe once painted blue, now chipped and faded. Her eyes were uplifted to the sky beyond the shelf of rock, her hands turned palms-down to bless the water trickling from the rock below her feet.

'Oh, Mother.' Ma dropped her stick. She'd made it home.

She fell down upon the stone, the edge of her woollen skirt in the rock pool; began to cry, words bubbling out of her like the water from the rock. 'I've brought thee nowt ... Forgive me, Mother. Not properly dressed. Dint know I were coming, see.'

She sat up, crossed herself, closed her eyes, all hot and teary. Cupped her hands into the pool and brought the spring water to her eyes. And when they were touched by the water, she saw at last, through her eyelids, a warm, bright light.

Ma lifted up her hands into the light, and felt them touch the hem of the radiant blue robe of the Mother, the material that felt like a fine and silken rain.

She began to mumble, the old words dropping into place, words in English, words in Latin, words in an olden-day language that was neither Welsh nor Gaelic, words from the Bible, power-words and humble-words. Words to soak up the light and bring it into her blood. Come into me, Mother, give me light and give me strength, give me the holy power to face your enemies and to withstand ...

The shadow fell across her.

The bright blue gauze dissolved. Ma's eyes opened into pain.

The curate stood astride the sacred spring. Big and stupid as a Victorian stone angel.

'So,' he said. 'This is it, is it?'

He kicked a pebble into the pool. 'It's even more tawdry than I expected, Mrs Wagstaff.'

'Go away,' Ma said quietly, looking down into the pool. 'What's it to do wi' you? Go on. Clear off. Come back when you're older.'

'What's it to do with me?' He stood there thick and hard as granite. 'You can ask that? Where did you get this?' With a hand like a spade, he plucked the Mother from her stone hollow. 'One of these Catholic shops, I suppose. Or was it taken from a church? Hmm?'

He held the statue at arm's length. 'Hardly a work of art, Mrs Wagstaff. But hardly deserving of this kind of grubby sacrilege.'

Ma was on her feet, blinding pain ripping through every sinew. 'You put that back! That's sacred, that is! Put it back now! Call yourself a minister of God? You're nobbut a thick bloody vandal wi' no more brains than pig shit!'

'And you,' he said, tucking the statue under an arm, 'are a poor, misguided old woman who ought to be in a Home, where you can be watched over until you die.'

Ma Wagstaff tried to stand with dignity and couldn't.

Joel Beard bent his face to hers. 'You're a throwback, Mrs Wagstaff. A remnant. My inclination as a human being is to feel very sorry for you, but my faith won't allow me to do that.'

Behind his eyes she saw a cold furnace.

'Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!'

The statue hefted above his head like a club. Ma cowered.

'Oh, no ...'He lowered the statue to chest-height. 'Don't cringe, Mrs Wagstaff. I wouldn't hurt you physically. I'm a servant of God. I merely remind you of the strong line the Bible takes on your particular ... sub-species.'

Joel Beard put out a contemptuous hand to help her up. She looked at the hand and its fingers became a bundle of twisted twigs bound roughly together, and the connection was made with the thing on the Moss, two opposing terminals, the black and the white, each as dangerous and Ma stranded in the middle.

'Gerraway from me!' She shrank back, feeling that if she touched his hand she'd be burned alive.

'What are you afraid of, Mrs Wagstaff?'

'I'm afraid of denseness,' Ma said. 'Kind of denseness as rips down a child's offering, smashes it on t'stones ...'

'But ... but it was evil,' he said reasonably. 'Can't you people see that? Primitive. Heathen. It insulted the true Cross.'

Ma Wagstaff shook her head. 'Tha knows nowt. Tha's big and arrogant, and tha knows nowt. Tha's not fit to wipe Hans Gruber's arse.'

Joel Beard raised the statue of the Mother far above his head. His face severe. His golden curls tight as stone.

'All right, then,' he said. 'Be your own salvation, Mrs Wagstaff.'

Ma grabbed at the air, eyes widening in horror. She began to whimper. Joel smashed the Mother down on the rocks and her head broke easily, pounded to plaster-dust

Ma Wagstaff cried out. The cry of the defeated, the gutted, the desolate.

Gone. Nowt left. Gone to dust.

Beating the plaster from his hands and his green hiking jacket, Joel Beard strode away across the dirty-yellow moorgrass. Fragments floated in the centre of the pool until the springwater scattered them, making widening circles over the Mother's headless body.

CHAPTER IV

For the first time since all this had begun, Lottie's hands began to shake, and she pressed them against the hot-plate covers on the stove so that if the policeman had seen it he'd think she was simply cold.

It was a bad dream, switching from one dreadful scene to another until the horror was spinning about her like a merry-go-round of black shadow-horses, and whichever way she turned ...

She turned back to the policeman, who, to give him his due, looked no happier about this than she felt. Steadying her voice, she said, 'You want to dig up my husband.'

'This is ...' Inspector Ashton exhaled down his nose. 'Look, Mrs Castle, if there was any other way ... It's not your husband we want to ... see. It's the grave itself. Normally when there's an exhumation it's at the request of the coroner or the pathologist, to enable further examination of a body. In this case we don't want to touch the body, we don't even want to open the coffin. We ... have reason to believe the grave may have been disturbed before your husband was placed in it.'

Lottie felt her face muscles harden. Somebody had blown the gaff on Ma Wagstaff and her primitive rituals. What the hell else had the old hag been up to?

'We have reason to believe,' Ashton said, 'that certain ... stolen goods may be buried under your husband's coffin.'

'What goods?'

'I'd rather not say at the present time, if you don't mind, Mrs Castle.'

He'd turned up in the bar not long after Moira had left. On his own. Asked if he might have a word. All very casual and quiet.

Lottie thought about the implications. 'And what if I don't agree?'

Ashton sighed, 'it'll just take longer for us to get permission.'

'But you'll get it anyway.'

Ashton nodded. 'Between ourselves, what does bother me is that the person who's made the allegations about this ... these stolen goods ... has intimated that if we don't act on them quickly, he'll make his suspicions known to the media. I don't need to tell you what that would mean in terms of invasion of privacy, unwarranted intrusion into private grief, reporters all over your doorstep ...'

'You mean,' said Lottie, 'that this man's blackmailing you?'

Ashton laughed. 'If only it was that simple. No, I was inclined to disbelieve him at first, but now I agree there's a strong basis for thinking something's down there as shouldn't be. And if we can handle our excavations discreetly, after dark, inconspicuous, no fuss ...'

'Have you spoken to anyone else in the village?'

'No, I certainly haven't, and I'd be very much obliged if you'd keep this to yourself as well. Last thing we want is an audience. 'Course, we'll have to consult with the minister, but that won't be a problem, I shouldn't think.'

Lottie thought about Ma Wagstaff and her Old Ways and Matt's apparent acceptance of all this rubbish as part of the unique West Pennine tradition. Acknowledging, with much bitterness, Matt's part in all this.

'Right.' She pulled her hands from the stove. 'Go ahead. I'll sign whatever you want me to sign.'

'Thank you,' said Ashton ',That's very brave of you, Mrs Castle.'

'Just one thing.'

He'd begun to button his trenchcoat; he stopped.

'Keep me out of it, Inspector. I don't want to know when you do it or what you find. I don't want to be involved.'

Ashton nodded, relieved. 'And you'll keep this to yourself?'

'Oh, I wouldn't want to alert anybody who might have cause to be ... embarrassed.' Lottie smiled grimly, 'I certainly wouldn't.'

Suspicious, at first, as he came up the street. Fingers going on his thighs, nose twitching as if he had whiskers. Then he saw who it was, and she watched the sun come up in his cheeks and knew it was all right.

'Moira!'

More than ten years dissolved in the Pennine air.

'Willie, hey, I was looking for you the whole morning.'

'I were down me workshop. Doin' a bit o' bodgin' an' fettlin'.' He stepped back, put his hands on her shoulders like a dog on its hind legs. 'Eee, lass, I can't tell you ... you're looking bloody grand.' ,

She thought he was going to lick her ears, but he backed off and they stood a couple of yards apart, inspecting each other. He hadn't changed at all: small and wiry, brown hair down to his quick eyes. She didn't know what to say. So damn much to talk about, and none of it superficial.

It started to rain again. 'Once it starts,' Willie said, twitching his nose at the sky, 'it gets to be a bloody habit in Brid'lo.'

He smiled. 'Got time for a cup o' tea, lass?'

Did he think she was just passing through? 'Jesus, Willie,' Moira said, feeling close to collapse. 'I've got time for a whole damn pot.'

She would come in by the back door.

Same way he'd come in. It hadn't been locked, didn't even have a lock on it. He remembered how, as a child, he'd been dared to go in by other kids. Into the witch's den. He'd refused. He was afraid.

This time last year he'd still have been afraid. Even a couple of months ago he would.

He came to his feet and stood behind the balustrade, his hands around the wooden ball on top. It was sticky with layers of brown varnish. The paper on the walls was brown with age. There'd been flowers on it; they just looked like grease patches now.

Late afternoon dimness enclosing him. He'd have been afraid of that too, once. Afraid to open the bedroom doors, afraid of the ghosts within. Afraid of what he might disturb.

Afraid not to be afraid.

But not any more.

Willie had a teapot in a woollen tea-cosy made out of an outsize bobble hat.

'You make it yourself?'

'I have a friend,' Willie said, looking embarrassed about it, the way Willie had always looked embarrassed about women, although it never seemed to get in his way.

'You've a girlfriend here? In Bridelow?'

'More of an arrangement,' said Willie. 'Been on and off for years. What about you?'

'Oh. You know. Livin' alone, as the song says, is all I've ever done well.'

'Your song? Sorry, luv, I've not been keeping track.'

'Nana Griffith. Found an echo. Sometimes other people take the songs right out of your head.'

'Aye,' Willie said. He took a long, assessing look at her as she sprawled in a fat easy-chair with a loud pattern of big yellow marigolds. 'You look good,' Willie said. 'But you look tired.'

'I don't know why. All I've done is wandered around and talked to people. Yeah, I'm knackered. Must be the air.'

'Air's not what it was,' said Willie. 'Fancy a biscuit? Cheese butty?'

'No, thanks.' She closed her eyes, it's nice in here. I could go to sleep in this chair.'

'Feel free:

'No.' She forced her eyes open. 'You've got trouble here, Willie. Your ma. Like, I realise it's not my business, but I think she's got some private war on, you know?'

'Oh, aye, I know that all right. I ...' He hesitated, refilling her teacup. 'How long you been here? I were looking out for you at Matt's funeral.'

'I was being low-profile,' Moira said. 'But I saw the business with the witch bottle, if that's ...'

'Oh ...' Willie sat down and crossed his legs, started up a staccato finger-rhythm on the side of a knee, 'I don't know. Sometimes I think we're living inside a bloody folk museum.'

'It's no' a museum,' Moira said, 'I just watched her out on the Moss. There's kind of a dead tree out there.'

'Bog oak,' Willie said. 'That's what it is.'

'Then why're your fingers drumming up a storm?'

'Shit,' Willie said. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

'Come on.' Moira dragged herself out of the chair. 'Let's go and talk to her.'

Moira's left foot was feeling cold and wet. She stamped it on the cobbles. 'Went out on the Moss with no wellies. Stupid, huh?'

Rainy afternoon in a small village, nobody else about, no distractions, and they were both on edge. The hush before the thunder.

It's in the air. A damp tension.

So quiet.

'Catch my death.' Moira smiled feebly.

Both of Willie's hands drumming. It happened to Willie through his fingers. People said it was nerves. But what were nerves for if not to respond to things you couldn't see?

'Hey, come on,' Moira said softly, 'what's wrong here, Willie?'

'I don't know.' He sounded confused. 'Nowt I can put me finger on.'

They'd hammered on Ma's door. Waited and waited. All dark inside.

Willie started blinking. The only noise in the street was the rapid rhythmic chinking of his fingers on the coins in one hip pocket and something else, maybe keys, in the other. It echoed from the cobbles and the stone walls of the cottages. Willie's fingers knew something that Willie didn't.

'Willie, quick, come on, think, where would she be? Where would she go if she was scared?'

He looked swiftly from side to side, up and down the street.

'Willie ... ?'

Hands wet with the once-holy spring water, white with powdered plaster. Wind blowing through her head. Mind a-crackle with shredded leaves and lashing boughs. No thoughts, only shifting sensations, everything shaken up like medicine gone sour in the bottle. Air full of evil sediment.

Sky white, trees black, church tower black.

Twisted legs and malformed feet crabbing it through the bracken and the headier.

Broken owd woman going back to her useless bottles.

'Let me help you, Mrs Wagstaff, for God's sake.' Long, striding legs, head in the clouds. Wanted to help for appearances' sake; wouldn't look good if he buggered off and owd Ma fell and broke a leg.

'Gerroff me!' she shrieked.

'You've got to turn away from all this! Make your peace with Almighty God. It's not too late ...'

Screeching through the gale in her brain, 'What would you know? It's long too late!'

Wretched gargoyles screaming along with her from the church's blackened walls.

At the churchyard gate, relief for both of them, him going one way, to his church, not looking back; Ma the other, down towards the street. Sky like lead crushing her into the brown ground.

Top of the street, Ma stopped and squinted. Two people. Willie and a woman. The woman from the funeral, the woman from the Moss, the woman with the Gift.

Bugger!

Couldn't be doing with it. Questions. Concern. Sit down, Ma. have a cuppa, put thi' feet up, tell us all about it. Tell me how I can help.

Pah!

Ma turned back up the street, waited at the opening to the brewery road till they'd gone past then took the path round the back of the cottages so nobody else would see the state of her.

'This?'

Water trickled dispiritedly from under the rock and plopped into the pool.

'Used to be a torrent,' Willie remembered.

'This is the holy well?'

The pool looked flat and sullen in the rain.

'There should be a statue,' Willie said.

'Of whom?'

'The ... Mother. On that ledge. She had her hands out, blessing the spring. There's a ceremony, every May Day. Flowers everywhere. You can see it for miles. Then the lads'd come up from t'brewery, fill up a few dozen barrels, roll um down the hill. At one time, all the beer'd be made wi' this water, now it's shared out, so there's a few drops in each cask.'

Willie kicked a pebble into the pool. 'I'm saying 'now'. Gannons'll've stopped it.'

'Aye,' Moira said, 'there's no life here.' She bent down, dipped her hands in the pool. It felt stagnant. If Ma Wagstaff had come up here hoping for some kind of spiritual sustenance, she'd have gone away pretty damn depressed.

'Used to take it all wi' a pinch of salt,' Willie said, 'I mean ... bit of nonsense, really. But we come up here. Every May Day we'd come up here, whole village at one time, all them as could walk. Then back to The Man, couple o' pints ... bite to eat...'

Willie smiled. 'Good days, them, Moira. When you think back on it.'

'Hang on,' Moira said. 'There's something here.'

With both hands, she lifted it out, the spring water dripping from her palms. Dripping like tears from the eyes of the battered plaster head of the Mother of God.

'Oh, hell,' Willie said sorrowfully.

'The Mother?'

Willie nodded. 'There's three of um. Three statues. The young one, the Virgin, she's brought up on Candlemas - St Bride's day, beginning of February. Then the Mother - this one - at Lammas. Then, at All-Hallows, they bring the winter one.'

'The Hag,' Moira said.

Willie nodded.

'The Threefold Goddess,' Moira said. 'Virgin, Mother, Hag.'

'Summat like that. Like I say ... pinch of salt. Women s stuff.'

'Your ma ... she'd never be taking it with a pinch of salt.

'No,' said Willie.

'What about Matt?'

'He were different,' Willie said, 'when he come back. When we was lads it were just the way things were, you know? One of us'd be picked to collect stuff for t'seasonal crosses, collate it like, sort out what were what. We didn't reckon much on it. Bit of fun, like.'

'As it should be,' Moira said, pushing her sodden hair back to stop it dripping down her jacket. 'How else d'you get kids into it if it's no' fun?'

'Matt come back ... wi' a mission. Know what 1 mean? Horridges had sold off brewery to Gannon's and Gannon's didn't want t'pub - it were doing nowt, were it? Local trade and a few ramblers of a Sunday. Perked up a bit when t'bogman were found, but not for long - nine day wonder sorta thing.'

'So Matt returns to buy the pub. Local hero.'

'Exactly. Spot on. Local hero, I tell thi, Moira ... honest to God, he were me mate, but I wish he'd not come. You know what I mean?'

'I do now,' Moira said, hearing the tape in her head. 'He was an emotional man. An impressionable man. An obsessive man.'

Willie snorted. 'Can say that again.'

'But not a bad man,' Moira said.

'Oh no. I don't think so.'

'So somebody - or something was using him. He was a vessel. Willie, this bogman ... ?'

'Oh, bugger.' Willie looked up into the sky, now putting down water with a good bit more enthusiasm than the Holy Spring. The coins in his pocket chinked damply, 'I'm saying nowt. You've gorra talk to Ma.'

He heard her creaking into the hall below. 'Gerrout from under me feet, Bobbie.'

The cat.

Heard her feet on the bottom stairs and slid himself into a room which, as he'd ascertained earlier, was a box room full of rubbish, tea-chests, heaps of old curtaining, a treadle sewing-machine shrouded in dust.

Took her a long time and a lot of laboured breathing to reach the top of the stairs. Heard her in the bathroom, the dribble and the flush and the old metal cistern filling up behind her with a series of coughs and gasps.

He brought a hand to the crown of his head, felt his emergent, urgent bristles one last time, for luck. Luck? You made your own. He put his glove back on. For a moment, a while back, someone hammering on the front door had flung him back to that night last summer in the stolen car. The police! But then he'd concentrated - go away - and the knocking had stopped.

Flexing and clenching his powerful, leathered hands, he moved out onto the landing as the old woman sighed and braced herself to go downstairs.

Not much left of her. Old bones in a frayed cardigan. Hair as dry and neglected as tufts of last summer's sheep wool caught in a wire fence.

Some witch, he thought, rising up behind her.

Quite slowly - although he knew he'd made no sound - she turned around and looked up at him, at his fingers poised above her bony, brittle shoulders. Then at his face.

And he looked at hers.

They'd always said, in the village, how fierce her eyes were. How she could freeze you where you stood with those eyes, turn you to stone, pin you to the wall.

Shaw Horridge grinned. Come on, then.

Wanting her to do that to him. Focus her eyes like lasers. Wanting the challenge, the friction. Wanting something he could smash, like hurling someone else's Saab Turbo into a bus

shelter.

Wanted to do it and feel better.

But her eyes surprised him. They were as soft and harmless as a puppy's.

For a moment, this froze him.

'Come on,' he said, suddenly agitated. 'Come on, witch.'

She stared calmly at him, heels on the very edge of the top stair. Wouldn't take much of a push. That was no good.

He said, 'Where's your magic, eh? Where's your fucking magic now?'

She bit her worn-down bottom lip, but otherwise didn't move. 'Don't you know me?' she said. 'Do you not know me?'

He shook his head. 'You're going to die,' he said. 'Don't you realise that?'

The withered old face crumpled into an apology for a smile. 'I'm dead already, lad,' Ma Wagstaff said, voice trickling away like sand through an egg-timer. 'Dead already. But it's nowt t'do wi' you. You'll be glad of that, one day.'

Her ancient face was as blank as unmarked parchment as she threw up her arms, hands wafting at the air. Her body seemed to rise up at him, making him lurch back into the landing wall, and then she flopped down the stairs, with barely a bounce, like an old, discarded mop.

CHAPTER V

The gypsy guy with the beat-up hat and the Dobermans wasn't too sure about this. Still looked like he'd prefer to feed the stranger to the dogs.

'No,' Macbeth said, 'I don't even know her name.' Had to be easier getting to meet with the goddamn Queen. 'All I know is she isn't called Mrs Cairns.'

The guy's heavy eyebrows came down, suspicious. 'Who is it told you where to come?'

'Uh, Moira's agent. In Glasgow. Listen. I'm not with the police, I'm not a reporter.'

'OK, well, you just stay here, pal,' the gypsy guy said, and to make sure Macbeth didn't move from the gates of the caravan site he left the two dogs behind. Macbeth liked to think he was good with dogs, but the Dobermans declined to acknowledge this; when he put out a friendly hand, one growled and the other dribbled. Macbeth shrugged and waited.

The gypsy was gone several minutes, but when he returned he'd gotten himself a whole new attitude. Unbolting the gates, holding them back for the visitor. 'Wid ye come this way, sir ...' Well, shit, next thing he'd be holding his hat to his chest and bowing. Even the Dobermans had a deferential air. Macbeth grinned, figured maybe the old lady had sussed him psychically, checked out his emanations.

Whatever, in no time at all, here's Mungo Macbeth of the Manhattan Macbeths sitting in a caravan like some over-decorated seaside theme-bar, brass and china all over the walls.

'I'll leave ye then, Duchess ... ?'

'Thank you, Donald.' Lifting a slender hand loaded up with gold bullion.

She was Cleopatra, aboard this huge, gold-braided Victorian-looking chaise longue. She had on an ankle-length robe, edged with silver. Had startling hair, as long as Moira's, only dazzling white.

'Well, uh ...' This was bizarre. This was an essentially tricky situation. Awe was not called for. And yet this place was already answering questions about Moira that he hadn't even been able to frame.

She said, 'Call me Duchess. It's a trifle cheap, but one gets used to these indignities.'

Didn't look to be more than sixty. Younger by several centuries, he thought, than her eyes.

'And you'll come to the point, Mr Macbeth. Life is short.' He blinked. 'OK.' Swallowed. Couldn't believe he'd come here, was doing this. 'Uh ... fact of the matter is ... I spent some time with your daughter, couple nights ago.'

'Really,' the Duchess said dryly.

'No, hey, nothing like ... See, I ...' This was his first meeting with Moira all over again. Couldn't string the words together. 'Can't get her off of my mind,' he said and couldn't say any more.

'You poor man.' The merest shade of a smile in the crease down one check. 'How can I help?'

Acutely aware how embarrassingly novelettish all this was sounding, how like some plastic character in one of his own crummy TV films, he said solemnly, 'See, this never happened to me before.'

The Duchess had a very long neck. Very slowly she bent it towards him, like a curious swan. 'Are you a wealthy man, Mr Macbeth?'

'One day, maybe,' he said. 'So they tell me.' Thinking, if she asks me to cross her fucking palm with silver, I'm out of here.

'The feeling I'm getting from you ...' Those ancient, ancient eyes connecting with his, '... is that, despite your name, you've always been very much an American.'

'That's that the truth,' Macbeth confirmed with a sigh. 'All we've got to do now is convince my mom.'

The Duchess smiled at last. 'I think I like you, Mr Macbeth,' she said. 'We'll have some tea.'

Later she picked up on the theme. 'You're really not what you appear, are you?'

'No?'

The Duchess shook her head. Tiny gold balls revolved in her earrings.

'This worries you. You feel you've been living a lie. You feel that all your life you've tried to be what people expect you to be. But different people want different things, and you feel obliged, perhaps, to live up to their expectation of you. You feel ...' The Duchess scrutinized him, with renewed interest, over her gold-rimmed bone china teacup. 'You feel you are in your present fortunate position because of who you are rather than what you can do.'

Macbeth said nothing. He hadn't come here for this. Had he?

'Sorry to be so blunt,' the Duchess said.

'No problem,' Macbeth said hollowly.

'This is your job perhaps. People think you can open doors?'

'Do they just,' said Macbeth.

'Now you've woken up, and you're thinking, am I to spend my life ... serving up the, er, goods ... ? As a form of restitution? Paying back, even though I might be paying back to people who never gave me anything, or do I go out on my own, chance my arm ... ?'

There were subtle alterations in her voice. Macbeth felt goose-bumps forming.

The Duchess said, 'is there something more out there than piling up money? Even if that money's not all for me, even if it's helping the economy and therefore other people who might need the money more than me? Are there ... more things in heaven and earth than you get to read about in the New York Times?'

Christ. He was listening to himself. By the time she sat back to sip more tea, he'd swear the Duchess had developed a significantly deeper voice and an accent not unlike his own.

Ah, this is just a sophisticated act. This is a classy stage routine.

'No it isn't,' the Duchess said crisply.

He almost dropped his cup. 'What... ?' His hand shook.

'No, it isn't ... going to rain,' the Duchess said sweetly. 'Although it was forecast. But then forecasts are seldom reliable, I've found.'

He guessed she'd never been to college. He guessed she hadn't always talked so refined. He guessed her life-story would make more than one mini-series.

Then he guessed he'd better start keeping a tighter hold on his thoughts until he was someplace else.

'I'm not a fortune-teller, you know,' she said, like some women would say, what do you think I am, a hooker?

'I, uh ... Moira never said you were,' Macbeth said uncomfortably.

'I appear to be able to do it. Sometimes. But I don't make a practice of it.' She poured herself more tea. 'So why did I let you in here?'

Macbeth didn't know.

'Because I'm worried about the child,' she said. 'That's why.'

He said, 'I can understand that.'

'Can you?'

'I'm, uh, a Celt,' he said, and she started to laugh, a sound like the little teaspoon tinkling on the bone china.

'To be Celtic,' she said, 'is more an attitude than a racial thing. Like to be a gypsy is a way of life.'

'What about to be a psychic?'

Her face clouded. 'That,' she said, 'is a cross to bear. She'll tell you that herself. It's to accept there's a huge part of your life that will never be your own. It's to realise there are always going to be obligations to fulfil, directions you have to go in, even though you can't always see the sense of it.'

'That's what she's doing right now?'

The Duchess nodded. 'She has things to work out. Oh, I don't know what she's doing and I wouldn't dream of interfering, she's a mature person. But I am her mother, and mothers are always inclined to worry, so I'm told. I was only thinking - coincidence - just before you arrived, I wish she had someone who cared for her. But she's a loner. We all are, I fear. We learn our lesson. We don't like other people to get hurt.'

'You're saying you think Moira needs someone with her?'

The Duchess shrugged her elegant shoulders. 'Someone looking out for her, maybe. When Donald told me there was a man at the gate asking after Moira, I wondered if perhaps ...'

Then she gave him the kind of smile that was like a consolatory pat on the arm. 'I don't really feel you're the one, Mr Macbeth.'

Sometimes, when he interviewed would-be film-directors, there was one nice, bright-eyed kid he could tell was never going to make it. And trying to let the kid down easy he'd always start out, 'I don't really feel ...'

'Look, Duchess ...' Macbeth felt like he was about to cry. This was absurd. He started to tell her about the night at the Earl's Castle, about Moira singing 'The Comb Song', and how it ended.

'Yes,' the Duchess said impatiently, 'I know about that.'

'So am I right in thinking Moira caused all that, the deer heads and stuff to come crashing down?'

The Duchess looked cross. 'The question is ... pouff! Irrelevant! How can anyone ever really say, I did this, I caused this to happen? Perhaps you are a factor in its happening, perhaps not. I'll tell you something, Mr Macbeth ... nobody who's merely human can ever be entirely sure of the ability to make anything happen. Say, if you're a great healer, sometimes it works ... you're lucky, or you're so good and saintly that you get helped a lot. And sometimes it doesn't work at all. I once knew a woman called Jean Wendle ... but that's another story ...'

She lay back on the chaise and half-closed her eyes, looking at the wall behind him. 'Or, let us say, if you're a bad or a vengeful person, and you want to hurt somebody, you want to curse them ... in the movies, it goes ... zap, like one of those, what d'you call them ... ray guns, lasers.'

He heard a small noise behind him, turned in time to see a plate, one of a row of five with pictures on them, sliding very slowly from the wall.

The plate fell to the floor and smashed. Macbeth nearly passed out.

From a long way away, he heard the Duchess saying, 'Doing damage, harming people is much easier but that's unpredictable too. Sometimes people dabble and create a big black cloud ...' Throwing up her arms theatrically,'... and they can't control where it goes.'

Numbly, Macbeth bent to pick up the pieces of the plate. Maybe he'd dislodged it with the back of his head. The ones still on the wall had pictures of Balmoral Castle, where the Queen spent time, and Glamis Castle, Blair Atholl Castle and the Queen Mother's Castle of Mey.

He held two pieces of the broken plate together and saw, in one of those shattering, timeless moments, that they made up a rough watercolour sketch of the familiar Victorian Gothic facade of the Earl's place.

'Accidents happen,' the Duchess said. 'Leave it on the floor.'

Macbeth's fingers were trembling as he laid the pieces down. He needed a cigarette more urgently than at any time since he quit smoking six years ago.

'I never liked that one anyway,' the Duchess said.

Doubtless psyching out that Macbeth could use more hot tea, and fast, she filled up his cup and added two sugars.

He drank it all. She was offering him an easy way out. She was saying, what just happened - the plate - also, the skulls on the wall ... this is kids' stuff ... this is chickenshit compared to what a person could be letting himself in for if he pursues Moira Cairns.

Mungo Macbeth, maker of mini-series for the masses, thought maybe this was how King Arthur laid it on the line for any mad-assed knight of the Round Table figuring to go after the Holy Grail.

He'd often wondered about those less ambitious knights who listened to the horror stories and thought, Well, fuck this, what do 1 need with a Holy Grail? Maybe I should just stick around and lay me some more damsels, do a little Sunday jousting. How could those knights go on living with themselves, having passed up on the chance of the One Big Thing?

He said, 'Earlier, you said ... about when a guy gets to wondering how much his life has really been worth and if there isn't more stuff in Heaven and Earth than he's reading about in the New York Times ...'

The silent girl who'd brought the tea came back and took away the tray.

After she'd gone, he said, 'Duchess, why? I only met your daughter once, never even ... Why? Can you tell me?'

Instead, the Duchess told him the story of a man who fell in love with the Queen of the Fairies and all the shit that put him into. Macbeth said he knew the songs. Tarn Lin, Thomas The Rymer, all that stuff? But that wasn't the same thing, surely, Moira Cairns was a human being.

'That's quite true,' the Duchess said gravely. 'But remember this. Wherever she goes, that young woman ... she's bound to be touched with madness. Now, who is the white man?'

'White man?'

'I thought perhaps you might be his emissary ... White-skinned man? I don't think I mean race. Just a man exuding a whiteness?'

'Somebody I know?'

'You don't?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I believe you don't. All right. Never mind.'

Macbeth asked, 'Do you know where Moira is?'

'Oh ... the little Jewish person, Kaufmann, tells me she's in the North of England.'

'Bastard wouldn't tell me.'

'You he doesn't trust. Strange, that - I find you quite transparent.'

'Thanks.'

'There was a man called ... Matt?'

'Jesus, you intuited that?'

The Duchess sighed in exasperation. 'She told me.'

'Right,' Macbeth said, relieved. 'Matt, uh ...'

'Castle. She thinks he was her mentor. I rather suspect she was his.'

'Right,' Macbeth said uncertainly.

'He's dead. She'll have gone to try and lay his spirit to rest.'

Macbeth squirmed a little. Was this precisely what was meant by things you couldn't find in the New York Times? Was this what Mom meant about uncovering his roots? He thought not.

The Duchess smiled kindly. 'You can leave now, if you wish, Mr Macbeth. I'll have Donald see you to the gate.'

'No, wait ...' Two trains of thought were about to crash, buckling his usual A to B mental tracks. 'This, uh, white person ...'

'A thin man with white hair and a very white complexion.'

The Castle. The bones. White-faced man with a cut eye.

'Shit, I don't believe this ... you got that outa my head. You pulled it clean outa my head.'

'Mr Macbeth, calm down. Two or three weeks ago, a man of this description came to consult me. As people do ... occasionally. He didn't get in. Donald is my first line of defence, the dogs are the second, and Donald told me the dogs disliked this man quite intensely. On sight. Now ... dogs can't invariably be trusted, they may react badly to - oh - psychic disturbance in a person, or mental instability. But when a man arrives in an expensive car and seems very confident and the dogs hate him on sight...'

Stanhope, Macbeth thought. Stansgate?

'And when Donald conveyed my message that I was unwell, he was apparently quite annoyed. He sent a message back that he had information about my daughter which he thought I would wish to know. I suggested Donald should let the dogs have him.'

'What happened?'

'He left.'

Stanley? Stanmore? 'Duchess, you think this guy meant her harm?'

'Two people arrive within a short period to talk to me about my daughter. One the dogs dislike. How did the dogs take to you, Mr Macbeth?'

'I wasn't invited to play rubber-bone, but I seem to be intact.'

The Duchess nodded, 'I don't know how you found me - no, don't explain, it's not important. I didn't mention the man to Moira, she has enough problems, I think. But if you wanted to help her, you might keep an eye open for him. If there was a problem and you were to deal with it, she need never know, need she?'

Macbeth started thinking about the knights and the Holy Grail.

And this guy ... Stanton? Stansfield?