The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):

THE HISTORY OF BEER

Beer, of course, was brewed in Bridelow long before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ale was the original sacred drink, made from the water of the holy spring and the blessed barley and preserved with the richly-aromatic bog myrtle from the Moss.

Nigel Pennick writes, in his book Practical Magic in the Northern Tradition:

'Cakes or bread and ale are the sacrament of country tradition. The runic word for ale - ALU - is composed of the three runes As, Lagu and Ur. The first rune has the meaning of the gods or divine power; the second water and flow, and the third primal strength. The eating of bread and drinking of ale is the mystery of the transmutation of the energy in the grain into a form where it is reborn in our physical bodies.'

It follows, therefore, that, to some local people, the sale of the Bridelow brewery and the detachment of the beer-making process from its ancient origins, would seem to be a serious sapping of the village's inherent strength, perhaps even a symbolic draining away of its lifeblood.

CHAPTER I

'She's got to be in. I can hear the kettle boiling.'

And boiling and boiling. Whistling through the house. The kettle having hysterics.

'I've got a key,' Willie said, bringing out the whole bunch of them.

A dark, damp dread was settling around Moira. She took a step back on the short path leading to Ma Wagstaff's front door. Held on to a gatepost, biting a lip.

'What the f—' The door opening a few inches, then jamming and Willie putting his shoulder to it. 'Summat caught behind here ...'

'Hey, stop, Willie ... Jesus.'

Through the crack in the door, she'd seen a foot, black-shod and pointing upwards. She drew Willie gently back and showed him.

'Oh, Christ,' Willie said drably.

He didn't approach the door again. He said quietly, 'Moira, do us a favour. Nip across to t'Post Office. Fetch Milly.'

'What about a doctor?'

'She wouldn't thank you for a doctor. Just get Milly. Milly Gill.'

Moira didn't need to say a word. Milly Gill looked at her and lost her smile, shooed out two customers and shut up the post office. Ran ahead of Moira across the street, big floral bosom heaving.

When they got to the house, Willie had the front door wide open and tears of horror in his eyes. Milly Gill moved past him to where the old woman lay in a small, neat bundle at the bottom of the stairs, eyes like glass buttons, open mouth a breathless void, one leg crooked under her brown woollen skirt.

The body looked as weightless as a sparrow. Moira doubted she'd ever seen anything from which life was so conspicuously absent. A life which, obviously, had been so much more than the usual random mesh of electrical impulses. Even when it was moving, the little body had been the least of Ma Wagstaff.

This was a big death.

Willie Wagstaff stood in the front garden looking at his shoes, drawing long breaths. His hands hung by his sides, fingers motionless. The kettle's wild whistling ended with a gasp, and then Milly Gill came out and joined them. 'You'll need a doctor, Willie, luv.'

His head came up, eyes briefly bright, but the spark of hope fading in an instant.

'Death certificate,' Milly said softly. She took his arm. 'Come on. Post Office. I'll make us some tea.'

The street was silent, but doors were being opened, curtains tweaked aside. Shadowed faces; nobody came out - everybody sensing the death mood in the dusky air.

Moira thought bleakly, They don't die like this, people like Ma Wagstaff. Not at a time of crisis. They don't have accidents and sudden heart attacks. They know when it's over, and they go quietly and usually in their own time.

At the Post Office doorway, Milly Gill called out to the street at large, 'it's Ma Wagstaff. Nothing anybody can do.' She turned to Willie, 'No point in keeping it a secret, is there, luv?'

Moira heard Willie saying, 'I was only with her this morning.' The way people talked, facing the mindless robbery of a sudden death.

And I saw her less than an hour ago, and she was in some state, Willie ... she was in some state.

'I'd guess it couldn't have been quicker,' Milly Gill said unconvincingly, leading them through the Post Office into a flowery little sitting room behind. 'She's still warm, poor old luv. Maybe she had a seizure or something, going downstairs. Sit yourselves down, I'll put kettle on and phone for t'doctor.'

'This is Moira Cairns,' said Willie.

'How d'you do. Plug that fire in, Willie, it's freezing.'

Scrabbling down by the hearth, Willie looked up at Moira through his mousy fringe, fishing out a weak smile that was almost apologetic.

'I should go,' Moira said. 'Last thing you need is me.'

Willie got to his feet, nervously straightening his pullover, 'I wouldn't say that. No.'

She thought, Poor Willie. Who's he got left? No mother, no Matt, no job maybe, no direction. Only fingers drumming at the air.

'Is there only you ... No brothers, sisters ... ?'

'Two sisters,' Willie said. 'There's always more girls. By tradition, like.'

Moira sat on the end of a settee with bright, floral loose-covers. The carpet had a bluebell design and there were paintings and sketches of wild flowers on the walls.

'Ah,' Willie said, 'she had to go sometime. She were eighty ... I forget. Getting on, though. Least she dint suffer, that's the main thing '

Oh, but she did, Willie ... She couldn't look at him, her worried eyes following a single black beam across the ceiling.

Two bunches of sage were hanging from it, the soft, musty scent favouring the atmosphere. Homely.

'No hurry,' Milly Gill was saying in another room, on the phone to the doctor. 'If there's sick people in t'surgery, you see to them first. See to the living.'

When she came back into the sitting room, there were two cats around her ankles.

'Bob and Jim.' Willie's eyes were damp. 'Little buggers. Didn't see um come.'

Moira said, 'Your ma's cats?'

Willie smiled. 'Not any more. Cats'll always find a home. These buggers knew where to come. They'll not be the only ones.'

'This lady's with the Mothers' Union, right?'

Willie said, 'You know about that, eh?'

'I knew about this one when she first come in,' said Milly Gill. 'We'll have to have a talk sometime, luv.'

Her watchful, grey eyes said she also knew that women like Ma Wagstaff did not fall downstairs after having unexpected strokes or heart attacks. Willie's fingers had known that too, had felt it coming, whatever it was.

'Soon, huh?' Moira said.

Joel Beard said, 'Here? In my ... in the churchyard?'

He and the policeman were standing in the church porch, the wet afternoon draining into an early dusk.

'It's a possibility, vicar,' Ashton said, it's something we have to check out, and the sooner we do it the less likely we are to attract attention. You haven't had any Press here, I take it?'

Joel Beard shook his curls. 'Why would they come here?'

'They would if they knew what we were proposing to do, sir, and these things have a habit of leaking out. So ... I don't know if you've had experience of an exhumation before, but what it involves is screening off the immediate area and confining it to as few people as are absolutely necessary. You can be there yourself if you like, but I assure you we'll be very tidy. Now, the lights ...'

'Lights? You mean you want to do it tonight? I thought these things took ...'

'Not much more than a phone call involved these days, sir. We're under quite a lot of pressure to find this thing, as you can imagine.'

Joel said, 'It all seems so unlikely.'

It didn't, though. It connected all too plausibly. 'Inspector, how do you suppose that this was actually done? Without anything being seen?'

'This was what I was planning to ask you. Country churchyard, even at night somebody sees something, don't they? Perhaps they saw and they kept quiet, mmm? When was the grave dug?'

'I don't know,' Joel said, 'I imagine the day before. The Rector was in charge then, but he ... he's in hospital. He's had a heart attack.'

'That's unfortunate,' Ashton said. 'No, you see, what's been suggested to us is that the grave was dug deeper than is normal and then the body was brought here and covered with earth and then the funeral went ahead as normal, with Mr Castle's coffin laid on top of the bog body.'

'That's preposterous,' Joel said.

It wasn't, though. Somehow there was a link here with the old woman and the bottle she'd been attempting to secrete into Castle's coffin.

'You see, our information is that there was a request from some people here for the body to be returned to the bog. And when it seemed unlikely that was going to happen, somebody decided to pinch it. Would you know anything about that, Mr Beard?'

'Good Lord,' Joel said. 'No, I certainly wouldn't. You know, I think, on the whole, that I should like to be there when you ... do it.'

'I thought you might,' said Ashton.

Moira felt weary and ineffectual, and she had a headache. Walking, head down, into the Rectory drive, she was speared by lights.

Cathy parked her father's VW Golf crookedly in front of the garage.

'How is he?'

'He's OK,' Cathy said quickly, unlocking the front door. 'I'm sorry, I didn't leave you a key, did I? I'm hopelessly inefficient.'

About her father - Moira saw she was playing this down.

Cathy unloaded plastic carrier bags and her long university scarf on to the kitchen worktops, all stark, white butcher's-shop tiling. 'I went into Manchester afterwards. Had to get away somewhere crowded, to think. Got loads of cold things from Marks and Sparks. You don't mind, do you? Pop sees to the cooking as a rule. I'm a disaster in the kitchen. Did you get to see Ma Wagstaff?'

'Yes,' said Moira.

'Did she talk to you?'

'No,' Moira said. 'I'm afraid not.'

Then Cathy discovered the sugar bowl was empty and went into the pantry, the little room under the stairs, for a new bag.

'Oh,' she said. "The little scumbags.'

'Huh?'

Moira peered over her shoulder. Cathy was holding a brick. There was a small window in the pantry and the brick had clearly been used to smash it.

'Little bastards,' Cathy said. 'You know, this never used to happen. I know people say that all the time ... "Oh, things were different when I was a kid and you could get in the cinema for sixpence. None of this vandalism in those days, kids had respect." But it's true. Even - what? - six months ago it was true in Bridelow. They did have respect.'

Cathy put the brick down on the floor. Now there's graffiti in the toilets at the parish hall. A week or two ago somebody had a ... defecated on the seat inside the lych-gate. Can you believe that? In Bridelow?'

'You better check the house,' Moira said.

Cathy had a cursory look around the downstairs rooms. Everything seemed to be in order. 'Little sods. Everybody knows Pop's in hospital.' She looked at Moira. 'Oh. Yes. That's another thing. They're sending him to a convalescent home.'

'I thought it wasn't too serious.'

'Coronary,' Cathy said despondently. 'That's serious. They're sending him - committing him is how he sees it - to this Church nursing home down in Shropshire. At least a month. Which means Joel's got to move in here.'

'With you?'

'You're joking,' Cathy said. 'Even if I could bear to have him in the house, he's much too proper to countenance it. No, I'll go back to Oxford. Come up at weekends and see Pop. I mean, I expect you'll be wanting to be off, won't you?'

Moira said. 'Look, you got any cardboard in the garage or somewhere? We can block up this window.'

'Never mind, Alf Becket'll fix it tomorrow.'

Moira said, 'Cathy ... um ... something bad's happened.'

Because of the Post Office's strict security regulations, Milly Gill's front door had two steel bolts and a fancy double lock, which she'd always thought was damn stupid in a place like Bridelow. Tonight, though, first time ever, Milly was glad to turn the key twice over and slide the big bolts. Even though she knew there were some things no locks could keep out.

The urgent banging on the door shook her. Willie Wagstaff never used the knocker. Willie would beat out his own personal tattoo with his fingers.

'Oh, Mother,' Milly Gill said, clutching her arms over her breast. 'I'm not going to be up to this.'

It was an hour since the doctor'd had Ma taken away, Across the Moss. He'd said there might have to be a post-mortem, probably no more than a formality, it was most likely natural causes. But if there was reason to think she might have fallen accidentally, there'd have to be a public inquest.

Pity Bridelow didn't have a resident doctor any more; this was an Asian gentleman from Across the Moss who couldn't be expected to understand. Milly had pleaded with him not to let them cut Ma up if there was any way it could be avoided. It was important that all of Ma's bits should be returned to Bridelow for burial, not tissue and stuff left in some hospital waste bin.

More crashing at the from door.

'Who is it?' Milly shouted. Didn't recognize her own voice, it sounded that feeble.

'It's me. Alf.'

Milly tut-tutted at her cowardice. Why she should think there might be something abroad because something that happened to hundreds of pensioners every week had happened to Ma Wagstaff ...

She undid the bolts and turned the key twice. 'I'm sorry, Alf. Not like me to be nervy.'

But, if anything, Alf Beckett looked worse than she felt. There was a streetlamp outside the door, a converted gas lamp with an ice-blue bulb. Its light made Alf look quite ill, eyes like keyholes.

'Milly,' he said. 'We're in t'shit.'

'Come in, luv,' Milly said. Her responsibility now, this sort of problem, keeping up community morale. She sat Alf down on the floral settee. He was ashen.

'Now then, come on,' Milly said, it's all right. We'll get over this. We've had bad patches before.'

'No ...' Alf shook his head. 'Listen ...'

'It's my fault,' Milly said. 'We always left too much to poor old Ma. We thought she were immortal. Thought we could sit back, everybody getting on with their lives, foreign holidays, videos. Didn't seem to matter like it used to. And then when Ma started getting gloomy, we all thought it were just her age. Even me, daft cow. And now everything's happened at once, and it's shaken us. But we'll be all right, honest, luv.'

She got up to put the kettle on. 'I've sent Willie to t'Man for a pint. Life's got to go on, Alf. Just means we'll have to have a bit of a get-together. Soon as possible. Sort this lad Joel Beard out for a start. Then we'll see what else we've got to tackle. Mrs Horridge, that's another thing ...'

'Milly!' Alf Beckett's hearth brush moustache looked bent and spiky. 'Police've come.'

'Eh? Because of Ma? Have they found summat?'

'No, no listen to me, woman, for Christ's sake.' Alf sat up on the couch, hands clasped so tightly together that his knuckles were whiter than his cheeks, it's t'grave. They're coming to dig Matt's grave up.'

In the narrow doorway to the back kitchen, Milly froze, filling it.

Alf said, 'Some bugger's told t'coppers as t'bogman's in theer.'

Milly felt sick. All churned up inside. Ma gone, the Rector in hospital. And her at the wrong time of life to cope with it all. She covered up her face with her hands and looked at him through her fingers.

'Lord,' she whispered. 'What've we done, Alf? What've we done in Brid'lo to deserve this?'

Cathy said to Moira, 'If Pop hears about this, he's going to do something stupid.'

She'd told Cathy only about Ma's death. Not about seeing the old woman out on the Moss fighting a dead tree.

She said, 'Like what?'

'Like discharge himself,' Cathy said glumly. 'Moira, I don't know what to do. They ran this place between them, Pop and Ma Wagstaff. They hardly ever met, but they had an understanding, you know?'

They were in the sitting room. Cathy had lit the fire. She was sitting on the sofa where Dic Castle had sprawled. She'd taken off her shoes and her thick woollen socks were planted on an old rag hearthrug dark with scorchmarks from stray coals.

'He doesn't talk much about it, but it was obviously really tough for Pop when he first came here. He was pretty young - younger than Joel. And a Southerner. With a funny German name. Hell of a culture shock. Series of shocks, I suppose.'

'Like, when he finds out they're all heathens?'

'Is that what we are?'

Moira smiled, 'It's no' that simple, is it? I was up on the moor with Willie Wagstaff earlier. We saw the holy well. Who's that dedicated to? The goddess Brigid? St Bride? The Mother Goddess? Or the Holy Mother of God?'

'Gets confusing, doesn't it?' Cathy said.

'And the cross that was in the church, made out of twigs and stuff.'

'The Autumn Cross.'

'And there's a Winter Cross - yeh? - made of holly and mistletoe and stuff, and then a Spring Cross, made of ...'

'You've got it.'

Moira said, putting it all together finally, 'They can't make up their minds what they are, can they?'

Cathy folded her legs on to the sofa. 'Like I said, you need to talk to Mr Dawber, he can put it into an historical context. But the first Church in Britain was the Celtic Church, and by the time they came along I like to think Celtic paganism was pretty refined, with this give-and-take attitude to nature and animals and things.'

'In parts of Scotland,' said Moira, 'particularly some of the Western Isles, it's not been so much a takeover as a merger. Like, nobody could say the teachings of Christ were anything less than a hell of a good framework for, say, human behaviour, the way we treat each other. But ...'

'... in isolated areas, there were aspects of life it didn't quite cover,' said Cathy. 'Maybe still doesn't. And this area was always very isolated. Cut off. Self-sufficient. Immune from outside influences. We got electricity later than everybody else. Piped water was a long time coming. Television signals are still so lousy that most people haven't got one yet.'

'Yeh, but look ...'

'... now it's a brick through your window and "Sheffield United are shit" on the walls, and somebody has one on a public seat - that's outside influences for you. Be a rape next.'

'Cathy, this bogman ...'

'Oh, he's all right.'

'No, he's not. Matt Castle was besotted with him. The Man in the Moss. Matt was seeing him in Biblical terms - sacrificial saviour of the English Celts.'

'He died to save us all,' Cathy said. 'Gosh. Isn't that a terrible piece of blasphemy? Can you imagine the sleepless nights Pop had over this? The bogman: was he some sort of Pennine Jesus?'

'Or the anti-Christ, huh?'

Moira thought of the black, snaking branches of the tree on the Moss. Her head throbbed, as if the thing were lashing at her brain.

'OK,' she said hurriedly. 'Let's leave that be for a while. When they built the first Christian church here, they put it on the old sacred site and it's dedicated to Brigid, or Brigantia, now known as St Bride. And the ministers here have always had a kind of agreement with the priestess and her attendants who, in time, become known as the Mothers' Union, right?'

'All the Anglican Churches have Mothers' Unions. Young Wives' groups too.'

'Yeah, but most of them, presumably, don't recognize the symbolism: the mothers and the hags. The hags being the ones over the menopause.'

'When you're over the Change,' Cathy said, 'you go on to a new level of responsibility. Well ... so I'm told. How do you know all this?'

'I read a lot of books. Now, OK, the bogman turns up again. The willing sacrifice. The pagan Jesus-figure who supposedly went to his death to save his people. That's one powerful symbol, Cathy. Regardless of what else it might be, it's a heavy symbol. It churns things up.'

'I've told you, he's all right.'

'What d'you mean he's all right? Somebody's stolen him. I'm telling you there are people around who will do things with a relic as powerful as that.'

'Look, it's OK, that's sorted out.'

'Sorted out?' She had to stand up, walk away from the fire, although she was shivering and it hurt when she swallowed.

'Moira, come on, sit down. I promise you, it's OK.'

'Why?' Moira demanded. 'Why is it OK, Cathy?'

'Because,' said Cathy simply, 'the bogman's had a full Christian burial.'

CHAPTER II

By now the sky was the colour of police trousers, Ashton thought prosaically, and damn near as thick. 'Tent would've been better,' he said as the rain started up again, steel needles in the arc lamp. 'Does it matter if he gets wet?'

'Depends what state he's in.' Roger Hall was struggling with his umbrella.

'Glad to see you're still sure he's down there.'

'Count on it,' Hall said.

Ashton's lads had erected a grey canvas screen, about seven feet high, around the grave; still just a mound of soil, no headstone yet, that saved a bit of hassle.

'Anyway, you've brought your own coffin, have you?'

'I wouldn't call it that,' Hall said. 'My assistant has it, over there.' Pointing at Chrissie White, shivering in fake fur, a plywood box at her feet.

'What's that white stuff inside then, Dr Hall?'

'Polystyrene chips. Shut that lid properly, Chrissie, we don't want them wet. We've also brought a few rolls of Clingfilm, Inspector. We wrap him in that first, so we don't lose anything.'

'Like a frozen turkey,' Ashton said. 'Anyway, it's good to see we haven't pulled a crowd. Yet. Let's just hope we can get this sorted before anybody knows we're here. Now, where's that gravedigger bloke?'

The big, curly-haired clergyman came over. Wearing his full funeral kit, Ashton noticed. Long cassock and a short cape like coppers used to have on point-duty in the good old days.

He looked nervous. Might he know something?

'This is Mr Beckett, Inspector. Our verger.'

Little pensioner with a big, stainless-steel spade.

'You dig this grave first time around, Mr Beckett?'

'Aye, what about it?'

'Usual depth?'

'Six feet, give or take a few inches. No need to measure it, sithee, when tha's done t'job a few score times.'

'And when Mr Castle was buried, did you notice if the earth had been disturbed?'

'It were bloody dark by then,' said Mr Beckett uncompromisingly, patting his chest, as if he'd got indigestion.

But actually smoothing the bulge in his donkey jacket.

For, in its inside pocket, shrouded in household tissue, lay a little brown bottle.

Be his job, this time, to get the bloody bottle into Matt Castle's coffin, which they'd have to get out of the way before they could get at the bogman.

This was a new bottle. Alf had gone with Milly Gill to Ma Wagstaff's house, and he'd stood guard while Milly made it up, all of a dither, poor lass, "I'm not doing it right, Alf, I'm

sure I'm not doing it right.'

'It's thought as counts,' Alf had said, not knowing what the hell he was on about. 'Ma always said that.' Standing at the parlour door, watching Milly messing about with red thread and stuff by candlelight.

'Alf.'

'What?'

'Go in t'kitchen, fetch us a mixing bowl.'

'What sort?'

'Any sort. Big un, I'm nervous. Come on, hurry up.'

Alf handing her a white Pyrex bowl, standing around in the doorway as Milly put the bowl on the parlour floor, feeling about under her skirts. 'Well, don't just stand there, Alf. Bugger off.'

The door closed, only streetlight washing in through the landing window, ugly shadows thrown into the little hall, the bannisters dancing. Milly's muffled muttering. And then the unavoidable sound of her peeing into the Pyrex.

Alf, trying not to listen, standing where Ma's body must have landed. Looking up the stairs into a strange, forbidding coldness. Him, who'd patrolled the empty church on wild and windy nights and never felt other than welcome.

'Hurry up, lass. Giving me t'creeps.'

'This is Ma's house.' The sound slowing to a trickle. 'There's not a nicer atmosphere anywhere.'

Alf deliberately turning his back on the stairs.

'Aye. But that were when Ma were alive.'

This time Moira went off to make the tea. Gave her time to think.

She'd asked Cathy who was left in the Mothers' Union, apart from Milly Gill. Cathy had looked gloomy and said, don't ask.

Moira lifted the teapot lid and watched the leaves settle. Seemed the Mothers' Union wasn't what it used to be. Ma Wagstaff used to say they'd let things slide a bit, Cathy said.

Moira put the teapot on a tray with a couple of mugs. Some dead leaves hit the window. From the doorway behind her, Cathy said, 'Ma thought there was something out there trying to get in. She said the air was different.'

'How do you know all this, Cathy? Do you have to be a mother to be in the Mothers' Union?'

Cathy grinned. There were bags under her eyes and her hair looked dull in the hard kitchen light. 'They'll even take virgins these days.'

'Are you?'

'A virgin?'

'A mother.'

'Pop's an enlightened clergyman,' Cathy said, 'but not that enlightened.'

Two young coppers helped Alf with the spadework, which was a good bit easier - just when you didn't bloody need it - than he'd have expected under normal circumstances.

He was ashamed of this grave, the soil all piled in loose, big lumps, nothing tamped down. But he'd rushed the job, as rattled as anybody by that ugly scene between Ma Wagstaff and Joel Beard, and then Lottie Castle screaming at them to get her husband planted quick.

Three feet into the grave, getting there faster than he wanted to, he could see Joel peering down at them. Unlikely the lad'd know yet about Ma Wagstaff's death, nobody rushing to tell him after the way he'd been carrying on.

Thing was, Joel probably had no idea what he was up against. Just a bunch of cracked owd women.

Which, Alf conceded, wasn't a bad thing for him to think just now; at least he didn't suspect Alf, and he wouldn't be watching him too closely.

'The problem is,' Cathy said, 'that it's become more of a way of life than a religion.'

'Is that no' a good thing?'

'Well, yeah, it is for ordinary people, getting on with their lives. This sort of natural harmony, the feeling of belonging to something. It's great. Until things start to go wrong. And your brewery gets taken over and most of the workforce is fired. And your village shop shuts down. And your local celeb arrives to save your pub from almost certain closure and he's dead inside six months. And your placid, undemanding Rector develops quite a rapid worsening of his arthritis, which Ma's always been able to keep in check. Except Ma's losing it, and she doesn't know why.'

Cathy looked at Moira's cigarettes on the chair-arm. 'How long's it take to learn to smoke?' She waved an exasperated hand. 'Forget it. Oh, this place is no fun any more. Atmosphere's not the same. People not as content. I've been home twice since the summer and it's struck me right away. Maybe that's the same all over Britain, with this Government and everything. But Bridelow was always ...'

'Protected?'

'Yeah. And now it's not. I mean, somebody like Joel would never have got away with what he's done - ripping down that kid's cross. And Our Sheila ... I mean, we've had these religious firebrands before, maybe even my old man was a bit that way when he first arrived, but... something calms them down. Ma Wagstaff used to say it was in the air. Shades. Pastel shades. You know what I mean?'

The old Celtic air,' Moira said. 'Everything misty and nebulous. No extremes. Everything blending in. You can sense it on some of the Scottish islands. Scotch mist. Parts of Ireland too. Maybe it was preserved here, like the bogman, in the peat.'

Cathy said, 'You're not going to rest until I tell you, are you?'

'And I do need to get to bed, Cathy. I feel terrible.'

Cathy sighed. 'OK. They stole the bogman back. They buried him in Matt Castle's grave before Matt went in.'

'Jesus,' said Moira. 'Who?'

'We're not supposed to know. But ... everybody, I suppose. They're all in it. They've done it before. A few bits of bodies have turned up in the Moss over the years, and that's what they do with them. Save them up until somebody dies. And curiously, somebody always does - even if it's only an arm or a foot turns up - somebody conveniently snuffs it so the bits can have a Christian burial. Well ... inasmuch as anything round here is one hundred per cent Christian. But this body ... well, it's the first time there's been a whole one.'

'And the council discovered it, didn't they? So no way they could keep this one to themselves.'

'And then the scientific tests, revealing that this had been a very special sacrifice.'

'The triple death.'

'Mmm.'

'So Ma Wagstaff and Milly Gill and co. and ... Willie? Is Willie in this?'

'Willie used to be a carpenter.'

'He did too.'

'And he's good with doors and locks. And then there's that mate of his, the other chap in the band ...'

'Eric.'

'He works for a security firm now, in Manchester. The same firm, as it happens, that was hired to keep an eye on the Field Centre.'

'Bloody hell.' Moira slumped back in her chair, it's beyond belief. It's like one of those old films, where everybody's conspiring. Whisky Galore or something. So the body's back home, in Bridelow soil.'

'It didn't go completely right. Milly says that right at the last minute Ma started getting funny feelings about it going in Matt Castle's grave.'

'I'm no' surprised.'

You've got to purify yourself. Of course.

'So she made up this witch bottle to go in Matt's coffin. It's got rowan berries in it, and red cotton and ... the person making up the bottle has to pee in it.'

Moira said, 'Rowan tree, red thread / Holds the witches all in dread.'

'What?'

'It's a song,' Moira said.

'Well, it's the wrong way round. Mostly it was the witches themselves who use the bottles, to keep bad spirits at bay. The spirits are supposed to go after the red berries or something and get entangled in the thread. It's all symbolic.'

'So she wanted to save Man from evil spirits?'

Or maybe she wanted to save the bogman from something in Matt.

'I don't know,' Cathy said. 'I'm the Rector's daughter. I'm not supposed to know anything. We turn a blind eye.'

'But the bottle never got in the coffin, did it?'

'I don't know.'

'The supposed contaminant remains.'

'I don't know, Moira.'

He stood at the edge of the grave looking down. Forcing himself to look down.

Sometimes when he prayed he thought he heard a voice, and the voice said. You have a task, Joel. You must ... not ... turn ... away.

Sometimes the voice called him Mr Beard, like the voice on the telephone, a calm, knowing voice, obviously someone inside the village disgusted by what went on here.

One day, Joel hoped, he would meet his informant. When he encountered people in the street or in the Post Office, he would look into their eyes for a sign. But the women would smile kindly at him and the men would mumble something laconic, like 'All right, then, lad?' and continue on their way.

He stepped back in distaste as a shovelful of grave-soil was heaved out of the hole and over his shoes. Surely they had to be six feet down by now. He wondered whether, if they kept on digging, they would reach peat - the Moss slowly sliding in, underneath the village.

Insidious.

He looked over his shoulder and up, above the heads and umbrellas of the silent circle of watchers, at the frosty disc of the church clock, the Beacon of the Moss.

The false light. The devil's moon.

Perhaps that had to go too, like the pagan well and the cross and the monstrosity above the church door, before the village could be cleansed.

'More light, please.'

One of the policemen in the grave.

'You there yet?' The Inspector, Ashton. 'Swing that light 'round a bit. Ken, let's have a look.'

'Deeper than we expected, sir. Maybe it's sunk.'

'That likely, Mr Beckett?' The light swept across the verger's face.

'Aye. Happen that's what ... happened.' Alfred Beckett's voice like crushed eggshell.

Ashton said, 'Right, let's have this one out, see what's underneath.'

Ernie Dawber had returned after dark from his weekly mission to the supermarket in Macclesfield, bringing back with him a copy of the Manchester Evening News, a paper that rarely made it Across the Moss until the following day.

The front-page lead headline said.

MASSIVE HUNT FOR BOGMAN

A major police hunt was underway today for the Bridelow bog body - snatched in a daring raid on a university lab. And a prominent archaeological trust has offered a £5000 reward for information leading to the safe recovery of The Man in the Moss.

'We are taking this very seriously indeed,' said ...

'Oh, dear me,' Ernie Dawber said to himself, the paper spread out on the table where he was finishing his tea - toasted Lancashire cheese. 'What a tangled web, eh?'

Trying to keep his mind off what the doctor'd had to say. Well, what right had he to complain about that? Least he'd got a doctor of the old school who didn't bugger about - while there's life there's hope, medical science moving ahead at a tremendous rate; none of that old nonsense, thank the Lord.

Might just drop in and see Ma Wagstaff about it. Nowt lost in that, is there?

The doorbell rang.

Ernie didn't rush. He folded up the Manchester Evening News very neatly, preserving its crease. If it was Dr Hall, he didn't know what he'd say. As an historian he was glad the experts had got their hands on this particular body, been able, with their modern scientific tests, to clarify a few points. But equally Ma Wagstaff, with her instincts and her natural wisdom, had been right about putting the thing back.

Thank God, he thought, pulling at his front door, for instinct. All too aware that this was not something he himself possessed. Bit of psychological insight perhaps, now and then, but that wasn't the same thing.

So it had to be done, putting the bogman back in Bridelow earth. Commitment fulfilled.

All's well that ends well.

Except it hasn't, Ernie thought, getting the door open. It hasn't ended and it's not well. Lord knows why.

'By 'eck,' he said, surprised. 'And to what do I owe this honour?'

On his doorstep, in the rain, stood four women in dark clothing - old-fashioned, ankle-length, navy duffle coats with the hoods up or dark woollen shawls over their heads. A posse from the Bridelow Mothers' Union, in full ritual dress. Could be quite disconcerting when you saw them trooping across the churchyard against a wintry sunset. But always a bit, well, comical, at close range.

'Can we talk to you, Mr Dawber?' Milly Gill said from somewhere inside whatever she had on.

Ernie identified the others in a second: Frank's wife, Ethel, Young Frank's wife, Susan. And Old Sarah Winstanley, with no teeth in. Probably the only remaining members of the Union fit enough to go out after dark this time of year.

He felt a warm wave of affection for the curious quartet.

'Now, then,' he said cheerfully. 'Where's Ma?'

No instinct, that was his problem.

'Thought you knew everything,' Milly Gill said in a voice as cold and dispiriting as the rain.

'I've been out,' Ernie said, on edge now.

Milly said quietly, 'Ma's died on us, and the churchyard's full of policemen digging up Matt's grave. Can we come in, Mr Dawber?'

Matt Castle's coffin came up hard.

It was like a big old decaying barge stuck in a sandbank; it didn't want to come, it wanted to stay in the dark and rot and feed the worms. They had to tear it out of the earth, with a slurping and a squelching of sodden soil and clay.

'Hell fire, you'd think it'd been in here years,' one of the coppers muttered, sliding a rope under one end, groping for one of the coffin handles.

Alf Beckett stayed on top, hands flat on the lid, knowing it hadn't been nailed down, knowing that if it slipped they could drop the corpse into the mud. Thinking, get it over, get it over...get the bloody thing found and have done with it.

And wondering then if by any chance he was standing on the squashed brown face of the bog body. Oh, what a mess, what a bloody mess.

'All right,' the Inspector said as two men on the surface took the strain. 'Take it easy. Come out now, please, and keep to the sides.'

Alf scrambled out after the coffin. He was covered in mud.

'Lay it over there, please, don't damage it. Now, Roger ... Dr Hall... time for you to take over, I reckon.'

'Right!' Dr Roger Hall strode into the lights, beads of water glinting in his beard. 'Now we'll see.'

Without ceremony, they dumped the coffin behind the piles of excavated earth, up against the canvas screen, well out of the light. Matt Castle: just something to be got out of the way, while everybody crowded round to gaze into the grave.

Except for Alf Beckett who shuffled behind the others, squatted down on the wet grass by the coffin, put a muddy hand inside his donkey jacket and brought out the witch bottle.

Whispering, 'Forgive this intrusion, lad,' as he felt along the muddy rim of the oil-slimy casket, hands moving up to its shoulders, thumbs prising at the lid, bracing himself for the stench, a sickening blast of gasses.

Some bloke barking, 'No ... no. Not like that. Look, let me come down.'

Alf breathing hard, snatching at the lid as it suddenly sprang away. 'God help us.' Could he do this? Could he put his hands in there?

'Mind yourself, Dr Hall, bloody slippy down there.'

'...'s all right. Get that bloody lamp out of my eyes. Give me a light, give me a torch. Thanks.'

Alf thought it was worse that there was no light. He might not be able to see the body, but he'd have to touch it. Feel for the cold, rubbery hands ... would they be rubbery or would they be slippery or flaking with decay? He didn't know, but he'd find out, prising the fingers apart to get them to hold the bottle.

Voice raised, muffled. Voice out of the grave.

'... Got to be ... Chrissie, the trowel ... pass me the trowel!'

'Take your time, Dr Hall, you won't get another chance.'

Hand inside, Alf could feel the quilted stuff and the stiff, lacy stuff, the lining. Felt more like nylon than silk. Sweat bubbling up on his forehead to meet the rain, his moustache dripping.

The smell from inside the box was dank and rotten. Alf wrenched his head aside, looked away from the blackened hump of the coffin towards the people gathered round the open grave, Joel Beard singing out contemptuously, 'You see ... nothing. Are you really surprised?'

Alf propping himself on his right arm, the hand splayed into the grass.

'Ashton, it has to be. I refuse to ...'

It hit Alf Beckett, in a sudden burst of bewilderment. The bogman. They can't find it... why can't they find it?

And then his stomach lurched, hot vomit roared into his throat. His supporting arm collapsed, the nerves gone, and his mouth stretched into a scream so wide it seemed it'd rip his lips apart.

The scream was choked by the vomit.

His left hand, the one inside Matt Castle's coffin, had slipped, all five fingers dropping into a soft, cold and glutinous mess. A thin and viscid slithering thing was pulsing between them.

CHAPTER III

'This time,' Sam Davis said, 'you won't stop me.'

He'd already dressed by the time Esther awoke.

'Lights?' she said. 'Lights again?'

Sam nodded. Cradled in his arms was his dad's old twelve-bore shotgun.

'Get that out!' Esther shouted. 'I'll not have that thing in my bedroom.'

'Fair enough,' Sam said, patting the pockets of his old combat jacket.

'I will stop you,' Esther said, sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes, if you go out with that gun I'll've called the police before you get to the end of the yard.'

'Please yourself.' Sam broke the gun. 'Man's got to look after his own.' He pulled a handful of cartridges from his jacket pocket and shoved a couple into the breach.

Esther started to cry. 'Don't waste um, luv,' Sam said. 'We tried your way. Big wanker. "Oh, Satan, get thee gone, I'm giving thee notice to quit."' Sam snorted. 'Now I'm giving um notice to quit. Wi' this. And they'll listen.'

'You're a bloody fool, Sam Davis,' Esther wept. 'You're a fool to yourself. Where will I be wi' you in jail for manslaughter? Where will your children be?'

'Shurrup, eh?' Sam said. 'You'll wake um. I'll be back in half an hour. Or less. Don't worry.'

'Don't worry ... ?'

'I'll show it um. Happen I'll fire it over their heads. That's all it'll take.'

Sam Davis moved quietly out of the bedroom, and his wife followed him downstairs. 'I've warned you. I'll ring for t'police.'

'Aye.' Leaving the lights off, Sam undid the bolts on the back door. It was raining out, and cold enough for sleet.

When he'd gone, Esther, shivering in her nightie, said, 'Right,' and went to the phone.

The phone was dead. He'd ripped out the wire and pulled off the little plastic plug. Esther ran to the back door and screeched, 'Sam ... Sam!' into the unresponsive night.

The nights were the worst times, but in a way they were the best because they hardened Lottie's intent to get out. By day - local customers drifting in around lunchtime, nice people - she got to thinking the pub was an important local service and there weren't many of those left in Bridelow and if she didn't keep it on, who would? And Matt. Matt would be so disappointed with her.

But at night, alone in the pine-framed bed which kept reminding her of her husband's coffin, enclosed by the still strange, hard, whitewashed walls, she felt his stubborn obsessiveness in the air like a lingering, humid odour. And she knew she'd paid back all she owed to Matt, long since.

If indeed he'd ever given her anything, apart from headaches and Dic.

She lay down the middle of the bed, head on a single white pillow; for the first time entirely alone. Dic had gone off - relieved, she knew - to his bedsit in Stockport; back on Monday to the supply-teaching he was doing in lieu of a real job. Dic looking perpetually bewildered all day, saying little, mooching about rubbing his chin. Offering, in a half-hearted way, to stay here until Sunday night, but Lottie briskly waving him out - fed up with you under my feet, moping around, time I had some space for myself.

To do what, though?

Well ... to try and find a buyer for the pub, for a start. That would be a picnic. Best she could hope for was to flog it to some rich Cheshire businessman with romantic yearnings, for conversion into a luxury home with an exclusive view of peat, peat, peat.

Bloody peat. In the mornings she'd draw back the bedroom curtains and the first thing she'd see would be black peat and on to the scene her mind would superimpose Matt in his wheelchair, sinking into the Moss and fighting it all the way, and every bloody marsh-bird banking overhead would be imitating the Pennine Pipes of blessed memory.

All I want is Bridelow Moss behind me. To be able to draw back the curtains on to other people's gardens, parked cars, the postman, the milkman, no hills in view over the tops of the laburnums. (In other words, the view from the bedroom window in Wilmslow which Matt had despised and which she carried in her mind like a talisman of sanity.)

With the bedside light on, she gazed unblinking at the ceiling, a single hefty black beam bisecting it diagonally so that half the ceiling was light, half shadow.

'Ma ...'

'... aye, gone.'

'... agstaff... dead...you didn't know?'

'... God, no. . :

If walls could record voices and mood and atmosphere, The Man's ancient stones would have been crumbling tonight under the dead weight of suppressed emotion. The death of Ma Wagstaff: the underlying theme below all the trivial tap-room chat about Manchester United and the sodding Government, and the more meaningful analyses of working conditions under Gannons.

Lottie saying nothing, playing barmaid, pulling Bridelow Black for those committed to preserving the brewery and lager and draught Bass for those who'd been made redundant.

So Ma Wagstaff had gone.

Well, she was old, she was half-baked, she'd clung to her own loopy ideas of religion; let them be buried with her.

Not that anything stayed buried round here. The bogman rising again after who could say how many centuries, to cause torment and to haunt Matt's latter days. And now poor Matt himself rising again to help the police with their inquiries.

Which - jaw tightened, both hands clenching on the sheet for a moment - was none of her business, and none of Ma Wagstaff's any more. Just let it be all over. Just let them have found what they wanted and put Matt back m his grave and stamped down the soil.

What they wanted. She knew, of course, that it had to be the bogman. How honoured Matt would have been to know he'd be sharing his grave with his illustrious ancestor.

Most likely, she conceded, he did know. Matt always could keep a secret. Even from his wife.

Especially from his wife.

And that does it, Lottie thought. I'll talk to estate agents first thing Monday morning.

She put out the lamp and shut her eyes.

She was not lonely.

She was relieved at last of the horror and the pity of Matt and his illness and his all-consuming passions.

And relieved, too - now that Moira had been here, now that she'd received his taped begging letter - of the responsibility of overseeing the completion of Matt's magnum opus, his Bogman Suite. Moira's responsibility now. Poetic justice: one obsession taking care of another.

Not that Moira, presumably, had ever wanted to be Matt's obsession.

Lottie opened her eyes and stared searchingly into the darkness.

Or perhaps, obscurely, perversely, Moira had. She kept her ego under wraps, but it was there; it existed.

Maybe it is poetic justice.

You've been relieved. You're free to go.

The lino was as cold as flagstones under Ernie's bare feet, and although his bedroom slippers were under the bed, he didn't fetch them out; the cold was better.

I don't want comfort. I want the truth. An answer. What must I do? What is there left I can do?

Through the window, he could see the churchyard, gravestones wet with rain and blue under the Beacon of the Moss. Be one for me, happen, this time next year.

He couldn't, from here, see Matt Castle's grave, but he'd heard about all that from Alfred Beckett, who'd come pounding on his door while the dregs of the Mothers' Union sat dispiritedly drinking tea in his study. What can we do, Mr Dawber? Who's going to explain?

Me, he'd stated firmly. I'll explain, if necessary.

He'd never seen the Mothers in such a state and never imagined he would. Old Sarah Winstanley, with no teeth, just about said it all. No Ma. No teeth. No hope.

Not for me now, neither, with Ma gone.

'Everything's changing,' Millicent had said. 'Hardening. And now we've lost the Man, for good and all. They'll take him back to London this time, no question about that. Bad luck on this scale, Mr Dawber - it's not natural. Mary Lane died, did you hear? Pneumonia. Fifty-three, God forbid.'

Shades, Ma had said. Them's what's kept this place the way it

is. They started talking about shades again, and it was not really his province. He'd promised Ma Wagstaff that he'd get the Man back, and now it was all falling through, and it was his responsibility. What was there left, in the time he had?

And then Milly had told them about Liz Horridge.

'I forgot all about it, wi' Ma being found not long after. I found her up Ma's front path. First time she's been seen in t'village for months. Well ... she were in a shocking state, banging her fists on Ma's door - "please, please", like this, whimpering, you know? I put me hand on her shoulder and she nearly had hysterics. "I want Ma, I want Ma." I says, "Ma's not here, luv. Come and have a cuppa tea," I says. She just looks at me like she doesn't know who I am, and then she pushes me aside and she's off like a rabbit. I rang the Hall to tell somebody, but Shaw's never there, is he?'

And Moira Cairns staying with young Cathy, in the Rectory, at the very heart of the village.

He looked down at the graves. Why had she come so secretively? And why hadn't she gone away again? He'd seen her walking down from the church this morning. Strikingly good-looking lass. Probably in her late thirties, looking it, because of that white strand in her hair, like the light through a crack in the door of a darkened room.

But what did they know about her?

'Nowt,' Ernie said aloud to the silent graves.

Should he say owt to the Mothers? He wasn't a stirrer, he wasn't a gossip, he'd always known more than he passed on, just as Dawber's Book of Bridelow was only ever a fraction of what the Dawbers knew about Bridelow.

Who'd take over the Book from him? No more Dawbers left in Bridelow. Happen it really was the end of an era. Happen the Bridelow to come wouldn't have the distinction that warranted a book of its own. Ernest Dawber, last of the village scribes. Chronicler of the Fall.

Alf Beckett's arrival had saved him. If Alf hadn't turned up, one of them, or all of them, would surely have sensed he had worries and sorrows of his own.

By 'eck, he'd been scared, had Alf Beckett. So scared, as he'd told them, that he could hardly keep his spade level when the time came to shovel the soil back on Matt Castle's coffin.

After finding no trace of the bogman.

'They didn't find it?' Milly Gill up on her feet in a flash, for all her weight. Alf shaking his head dumbly.

'What's it mean, Milly?' Frank's wife, Ethel, dazed.

'I don't know.' Milly's voice hoarse, 'I don't understand.'

'But it's good, isn't it?' the youngest of them, Susan, said. 'We dint want um to find it.'

'Of course it's not good,' Milly said. 'You don't suddenly get a miracle like that in the middle of a lot of bad. It's not the way of things. What frightens me: if he's not there, where in God's name is he?'

She broke off for a sip of tea. 'I'm sorry, Mr Dawber. I should've told you earlier. It were finding Ma. Knocked me back. Strange, though, isn't it? Everything's so terribly strange all of a sudden.'

When they'd gone, Ernie had telephoned the Hall himself. No answer. He'd go up there tomorrow, a visit long overdue.

'It must be deliberate, you know, all this,' Milly had said. 'An attack. Village is under attack.'

'Eh?'

'Like I said, things go in waves, Mr Dawber. Good times, bad times. We're used to that.'

'Aye ...'

Ma had said, What this is ... it's a balancing act.

'But this is an attack,' Milly said.

Ernie had been flummoxed for a minute. 'You mean the curate? Joel Beard?'

'Well, he's part of it. We let them disturb the Man in the Moss. We didn't do right by him. Now we've no protection. All sorts are coming in. Unsuitable people. Aye - people like

him.'

'All my sources tell me,' Ernie said, 'that Joel's ambitions are being fuelled by the new Archdeacon, who fancies him summat rotten.'

'Joel Beard's gay?'

'Not as I know of, but the Archdeacon certainly is.' Ernie noticed old Sarah looking mystified. 'No, Joel Beard's incorruptible, I'm afraid. Whatever he's doing, he thinks he's doing it for the good of mankind.'

'They'll all be coming in soon,' Milly said despondently. 'Look at all them strangers at the brewery. Three of ours sacked, one of theirs brought in. Rationalization, they call it. We don't see it till it's happened. Sometimes I think all we see is ...'

'Shades of things. Aye.' Then Ernie had fallen silent, thinking of a woman in a black cloak at Matt's funeral. Moira Cairns, former singer with Matt Castle's Band.

Alf said, 'That bloke, Hall, he wouldn't accept it at first. Said he were convinced it were theer and if he had to dig all night he'd get it out.'

'Aye,' Milly said grimly. 'Happen somebody told him. Somebody wanted that grave dug up so we'd know there was nowt down there, apart from Matt. Oh, Christ. Oh, Mother, I don't like this.'

Alf sat down on the footstool Ernie would rest his feet on while thinking. 'This Hall, he even wanted to open Matt's coffin. Thought happen bogman were in theer.'

'God in heaven,' said Ernie.

'Joel Beard - he started kickin' up then. Wouldn't let um go near. Said they 'ad no permission except for t'take coffin out, like.'

'Quite right too,' Ernie said.

'Alf,' Milly said anxiously. 'The bottle. You did get the bottle in?'

'No.'

Milly Gill closed her eyes and clasped her hands together in anguish.

'Couldn't do it,' Alf said. 'Seemed no point.'

Milly said angrily, 'Did you even try?'

'Oh, aye.' Alf's hands had been dangling between his legs as he squatted on the stool. Ernie saw that both hands were shaking. 'I got lid off, no problem. Nobody were watching, thank Christ.'

They were all looking at him now. Alf Beckett, soaked to the skin, moustache gone limp, eyes so far back in his head that they weren't catching any light from Ernie's green-shaded desk lamp.

'Weren't theer!' Alf suddenly squealed. 'Matt weren't theer! Nowt in t'coffin but bloody soil!'

There'd been a silence you could've shovelled into buckets.

Ernie could still hear it now, as he stood looking over the graveyard, glittering with rain and the blue light of the Beacon of the Moss.

'And worms,' Alf had said finally, shaking on the little wooden footstool, staring at the floor. 'Handfuls of big, long worms.'

At the window, Ernie Dawber sighed very deeply.

Moira awoke with this awful sense of doom set around her like a block of ice.

She was hot and she was cold. She was sweating.

And she was whimpering, 'Mammy. Oh, mammy, please ... don't let them.'

She'd dreamed a version of the truth. She was a little girl again, living with her daddy and her gran in the almost posh Glasgow suburb, catching the bus to school. Gran's warning shrilling in her ears, '... and you just be sure and keep away from the old railway, you hear?'

On account of the gypsies were back. The gypsies who still came every autumn to the old railway, caravans in a circle like covered wagons in a Western when the Indians were hostile.

Corning home from school, getting off the bus, the two dark skinned gypsy boys hanging round. 'Hey, you ... Moira, is it? The Duchess wants tae see ye ...'

'You leave me alone ... Get lost, huh.'

'We're no gonny hurt ye . .

'You deaf? I said get lost.'

'Ye gonny come quietly, ye wee besom, or ...'

Dissolve to interior. A treasure cave, with china and brass and gold. And the most beautiful, exotic woman you ever saw.

'My, you're quite a pretty child ... Now, I have something ... Think of it as a family heirloom ... Tell no one until you're grown ... Guard it with your life now!' This rich, glowing thing (which would be dull and grey to most people) heavy in your hand.

'You must remember this day, always. You will remember it, for you'll never be a wee girl again.'

And that night she had her first period.

Guard it with your life.

Moira sprang from her bed, snapped on the light. The guitar case stood where she'd left it, propped between a mahogany wardrobe and the wall. She dragged it out, lay it flat on the worn carpet, the strings making wild discordant protest as she threw back the lid, feeling for the felt-lined pocket, where might be stored such things as spare strings, plectrums, harmonicas.

And combs.

The door was tentatively opened, and Cathy appeared in rumpled pyjamas. 'What's wrong?'

Moira was shivering in a long T-shirt with Sylvester the Cat down the front.

'Moira, what's wrong?'

Moira's voice low and catarrhal, growly-rough, 'The broken window. Wasny just vandals.'

'You're cold.'

'Damn right I'm cold.'

'Come downstairs. I'll make some tea.'

Thrusting her hand again and again into the harmonica pocket. Nothing. She pulled out the guitar, laid it on the bed.

Turned the case upside down. Picked up the guitar and shook it violently, and listened to nothing rattling inside.

When, slowly, she straightened up, her back was hurting.

She felt arid, derelict. She felt old but inexperienced, incompetent. She felt like an old child.

Numbly, she reached behind the bedroom door for her cloak, to cover her thin, goosebumpy arms.

The cloak was not there. They'd taken that too.

Sam stumbled no more than twice. He knew his ground. Didn't need no fight, although he had the powerful police torch wedged in his jacket pocket, case he needed to blind anybody.

It was pissing down. Sam wore his old fishing hat, pulled down, head into the rain.

Never been raining when these buggers'd been up here before. They wouldn't like that. Be an advantage for him, two years windblasted, rained on, snowed on.

There was a moon up there, somewhere buried in clouds, so the sky wasn't all that black. When his eyes had adjusted he could see the outline of the hill, and when he got halfway up it he could make out a couple of faint lights down on the edge of Bridelow.

But no lights above him now.

Moving round so he'd come to the circle from the bit of a hump behind it, he climbed higher, a lone blue-white disc floating into view, vague through the rain and mist. Beacon of the Moss.

Bloody church. Bugger all use they'd been, pair of um.

When he came to the bracken, Sam stopped, stayed very still, listening. Thought by now he'd have seen their lights, heard some of the chanting, whatever they did.

Sam went down on his haunches, the rain spattering the bracken. Quietly as he could, he snapped shut the breech of the gun, jammed the butt under his elbow and crouched there, waiting.

The rain corning down hard and cold, muffling the moor, seeping through his jacket. Might've brought his waterproof, except the thing would have squeaked when he moved. Have a hot bath when he got in, slug or two of whisky.

Sam hefted the twelve-bore. His mouth felt dry.

They were here. He could feel it. They were close.

Bastards. Stay aggressive. Aggression generated heat and aggression was better than fear.

Right. Sam moved in closer. He reckoned he was no more than twenty yards from the circle; couldn't see it yet. Just over this rise.

They were there; no question. But were they lying low, expecting him? Had they somehow heard him coming?

Sam pulled in a deep breath, drawing in rainwater and nearly choking. He stuck his finger under the trigger guard and went over the rise like a commando, stopping just the other

side, legs splayed.

'All right, you fuckers!' he bawled. 'Nobody move!'

And nobody moved. Nothing. Not even a rabbit in the grass. Only the sound of the rain battering the bracken.

Holding the gun under his right arm, Sam fumbled for his torch, clicked it on, swirled the beam around, finding one, two, three, four, five stubby stones, a circle of thumbs jabbing out of the moor.

'Where are you? Fucking come out! I'll give you your bloody Satan!'

Not frightened now. Bloody mad. 'Come on!'

He thought about firing a shot into the bracken, case they were flattened out in there. But it wasn't likely, was it?

No, they'd gone. He switched off the torch, pushed it back in his pocket and did a 180-degree crouching turn, with the gun levelled.

Behind him, up on the moor, he glimpsed a fleeting white light. Didn't pause to think. Right. They're on the run. Move it.

Half-aware that he was departing from his own useless piece of moorland, Sam set off under a thickly clouded night sky with little light in it but an endless supply of black water; his jacket heavy with it and his faithful fishing hat, which once had been waterproof, now dripping round his ears like a mop rag.

He thought of his bed, and he thought of his kids and his wife, who he supposed he loved really, and he thought this was the stupidest bloody thing he'd do this year and maybe next, but...

... but them bastards were not going to get away with it, and that was that.

He tracked the light. Just one light, hazy, so probably a fair distance away. Heather under his boots now, waterlogged but better than the bracken, and the light was getting bigger; he was closing in, definitely, no question.

Two, three hundred yards distant, hard to be sure at night but the way the rain was coming down, crackling in the heather, there was no need to creep.

Sam strode vengefully onward.

Maybe it was due to forging on with his head down and his eyes slitted to keep the water out... maybe this was why Sam didn't realise for a few seconds that the light was actually coming, much more quickly, towards him.

A shapeless light. Bleary and steaming and coming at him through the rain ... faster than a man could run.

'Hey ... !' Sam stopped, gasping, then backed away, bewildered. His index finger tightened involuntarily and the gun went off, both barrels, and Sam stumbled, dropping it.

Something squelched and snagged around his ankle like a trap. He went down, caught hold of it - curved and hard - and realised, sickened, that he must have put his foot through the

ribcage of a dead sheep.

Pulling at the foot, dragging the bones up with it, he saw the light was rising from the moor in front of him, misty and shimmering in the downpour.

And it seemed to him - soaked through, foot stuck in a sheep - that the light had a face, features forming and pulsing, a face veiled by a thin muslin curtain, the fabric sucked into a gaping mouth.

Sam's mouth was open too, now; he was screaming furiously into the rain, wrenching the torch from his pocket, thumbing numbly at its switch, until it spurted light, a brilliantly harsh directional beam making a white tunnel in the rain and mist, straight up into the face.

Where the tunnel of light ended suddenly. A beam designed to light up an object eighty yards away, and it shone as far as the rearing figure of light, a matter of four, five feet away. Where it died. In the beam, the figure of light turned into a shadow, a figure of darkness and cold.

'No ...' Sam Davis wanted chanting townies in robes and masks. He wanted sick, stupid people. Wanted to see them dancing, getting pissed wet through. Wanted to hear them praying to the fucking Devil, with their fire hissing and smouldering in the rain. Didn't want this. Didn't want it. No.

When the shadow stretched and the torch beam began to shrivel, as if all the light had been sucked out, leaving only a thinly shining disc at the end of the torch, Sam felt his bowels give way.

All the rage and aggression slithered out of him like the guts of a slaughtered pig, and the void they left behind was filled with a cold, immobilizing fear.

Lottie Castle came awake in swirling darkness.

Awakened by the cold air on her own body, exposed to the night, the sheets and blankets thrust away, her nightdress shed.

Her body was rolling about on the bed, drenched in sweat, arms and legs and stomach jerking and twitching with electricity, nipples rigid and hurting.

What's happening, what's happening?

She was ill. Her nervous system had finally rebelled against the months of agony and tension. She was sick, she was stricken. She needed help, she needed care. She should be taken away and cared for. She should not be alone like this, not here in this great shambling mausoleum.

Lottie began to pant with panic, feeling the twisted pillow sweat-soaked under her neck as it arched and swayed. She couldn't see anything, not her body, not the walls, nor even the outline of the window behind the thin curtains.

It couldn't be darker. But it wasn't silent.

And fright formed a layer of frost around Lottie's heart as she became aware that every muscle in her body was throbbing to the shrill, sick whinny of the Pennine Pipes, high on the

night.

CHAPTER IV

At 8 a.m., the Sunday sky hung low and glistened like the underside of a huge aircraft.

It didn't menace Joel Beard, God's warrior, skimming across the causeway, hands warm in his gauntlets, deep and holy thoughts protected inside his helmet, his leathers unzipped to expose the cross.

Nourished by little more than three hours' sleep at Chris and Chantal's place in Sheffield, he felt ... well, reborn. Talked and prayed and cried and agonized until 2 a.m. Old chums, Chris and Chantal. Born Again brethren, still with the Church of the Angels of the New Advent. Still strong in their faith.

'I sometimes wish I'd never left.' Joel reaching out for reassurance.

'Why? It was your great mission, Joel - we all knew that, it's terrific - to carry our commitment, all our certainty, into the straight Church.'

'But it's just so ... lonely, Chantal. I didn't realise how ... or how corrupt. That there were places where the Church allowed the evil to remain - real evil - for a quiet life. A quiet life - is that what it's come to? I mean, tonight, going back to the church, after this fiasco with the grave, it was there for anyone to see. The ghastly light from the clock that isn't really a clock, and all the sneering gargoyles and the place over the door where this revolting Sheelagh na gig thing used to be ... And you realise ... it's everywhere. How many country churches have these pagan carvings, the Green Man, all kinds of devil-figures? Demons. Twisted demon faces, everywhere, grinning at you - it's our Church!'

Yes ... yes ... yes ... the pieces of so-called character clinging to old churches like barnacles to a wreck, the very aspects of ancient churches that tourists found so picturesque ... 'Oh, yes, I've always been fond of old churches.' As if this was some sanctified form of tourism, when really they were soaking up the satanic.

'What it means is that the Church has been sheltering this filth, pressed to its own bosom, for centuries. What everyone finds so appealing about these old parish churches are the things that should not be there. Am I the only one to see this?'

They'd brought him food and coffee. Made up a bed for him in the sitting room. Sat up half the night with him. Prayed with him in his agony.

'I've had visions. Dreams. I've been tested. All the time I'm there I'm tested. It tries to twist me. How can I handle this? I'm only one man.'

'No. You're not only one man, Joel. We're here. We're in this together. Tens of thousands of us. Listen, you were our emissary. You've seen and you've come back. We hear you, Joel. We hear you!'

Yes.

He slowed for the cobbles, bumping up the street towards the church, its stonework black with age and evil.

'Say the word, Joel. Just say the word. We're with you.'

'I'm tired. I've only been there a couple of days, and I'm exhausted.'

'You'll sleep tonight, Joel. We'll cover you with our prayers. You'll sleep well.'

And he had. Even if it was only for a few hours. He'd awoken refreshed and ready for his first morning worship at St Bride's, no prepared sermon in his pocket, no script, no text. He would stride into that pagan place and cleanse it with the strength of his faith. His sermon would be unrehearsed; it would almost be like ... speaking in tongues.

Cathy said, 'You look really awful.',

'Thanks.'

'I've been trying to understand it,' Cathy said.

'Don't. It won't do you any good.'

Cathy pushed the fingers of both hands through her hair, 'I mean, they broke in here, in this really obvious, unsubtle way and they didn't take the telly or the video, or even your guitar ... just this comb. Does it look valuable?'

Moira broke the end off a piece of toast and tried to eat it. 'Looks like one of those metal combs you buy for grooming dogs, only not so expensive and kind of corroded. Like a lot of stuff over a thousand years old, it looks like junk.'

'Look,' Cathy said reasonably, is it not possible it just sort of slipped out when you were bringing your stuff in? Should I search the garden?'

Moira shook her head, gave up on the toast.

'Should we call the police?'

'No ... No, this is ... Only guy I ever took the thing out for was ... Matt Castle, and I never wanted to. Look, I'm sorry. Your father's had a coronary, you've got this Joel Beard moving into your house and I'm rambling on about a damn comb. What time are you leaving?'

'This afternoon - sooner if I can.' Cathy said she'd wait for the cleaner, to tell her to put Joel Beard in the room Moira had slept in and to get Alf Beckett to fix the pantry window. Then she'd pack a couple of suitcases for her father and drop them off at The Poplars, this home for clapped-out clergy. And then think about going back to Oxford.

'What are you studying at Oxford?'

'This and that,' Cathy said. 'Where will you go? Home?'

Moira didn't answer. Where was home anyway? Glasgow? The folk circuit? She felt motiveless. The white-tiled rectory kitchen looked scuffed but sterile, like a derelict operating theatre. Getting to her feet was an effort. The view from the window, of graves, was depressing. The sky was like a crumpled undersheet, slightly soiled.

'I don't know what to do,' Moira said, and the words tasted like chewed-out gum. 'When something dreadful's going down and you don't know what it is or how you connect ...'

'Why do you have to connect? You just came to a friend's funeral. You can go home.'

'Can I?'

'Just take it easy, that's all. You can't drive all the way to Scotland without sleep, you'll have an accident. Why don't you book in somewhere for a night?'

'I look that bad?'

'You look like somebody walked off with your soul,' Cathy said with this shockingly accurate perception.

Holy Communion, by tradition, was at 9, but by 9.15 nobody had arrived.

Joel went to pick up a stray twig in the aisle, a piece of the Autumn Cross the cleaners had missed. He took it outside, through the churchyard, and dropped it on the cobbles outside the lych-gate. Depositing it safely on secular ground.

On his return he glanced above the doorway, where the Sheelagh na gig had hung, half afraid the thing would have left some murky impression of itself on the stonework beneath, but there was only dust. He'd sent the vile plaque to be locked away in the school cellars until such time as a museum might be persuaded to take it.

He waited, in full vestments, in the vestry doorway, looking over the backs of empty pews towards the altar. Yesterday evening he'd had Beckett bring the wine up from the cellar room and then had the room locked, and he'd taken the key and hurled it away Across the Moss.

The church clock gave a single chime for 9.30. When nobody came to Holy Communion. It didn't really surprise him. How could anyone here kneel at the altar, accepting the blood and body of Christ - knowing what they knew?

Knowing that stipends and student grants added up to bugger-all, she tried to give Cathy some money for the two nights' accommodation.

Cathy laughed. 'After you were burgled?'

Moira didn't think she looked too convinced, about the comb. Understandably, perhaps.

They were standing by the front gate of the Rectory. She felt weak and washed out and cold without her cloak. The raw air hurt her cheeks and made her eyes water.

Cathy said, 'You look like you're coming down with something. Hope it's not this Taiwanese flu.'

Moira looked down the hill towards The Man I'th Moss.

Either side of the cobbled street, the cottages looked rough and random, like rocks left by a landslide. She said goodbye to Cathy, kissed her on the check. Cathy's cheek felt hot and flushed, Moira's lips felt cracked, like a hag's. She was remembering the day the Duchess had given her the comb. How she'd stood before her wardrobe mirror and the old comb had stroked fluidly through her short hair, like an oar from a boat sailing with the tide, and the hair had seemed suddenly so lustrous and longing to be liberated, and that was when it began, the five-year war with her gran, who thought children should be seen and not heard and not even seen without their hair was neatly trimmed.

'… if that's what you were thinking,' Cathy was saying in a low voice.

'Huh?'

'I said ...' raising her voice,'... it wasn't Dic.'

'What wasn't?'

'Whoever broke in. You've been indicating it was a personal thing. I mean, how many people would know about that comb anyway?'

'I didn't say anything.'

'You didn't have to. You thought it was Dic. Well, he wouldn't do a thing like that and anyway he ... he's away teaching.'

'Where's he teach?'

'I'm not telling you,' Cathy said. Her pale eyes were glassy with tears. 'Please, Moira, it wasn't him. It wasn't.'

Moira thought, What's happening to her? What's happening to me? When she picked up her fancy, lightweight suitcase and her guitar case they both felt like they were full of bricks, and her hair felt lank and heavy, suffocating, like an iron mask, as she made her way over the cobbles to the church car park.

In the room directly over the Post Office, Milly Gill brought Willie Wagstaff tea in bed.

'Shouldn't've bothered,' Willie grumbled.

Milly said, 'I'm your mother now.'

'Don't say that.'

Balancing her own cup and saucer in one hand - the Mothers were supposed to be good at balancing things - she got gracefully back into bed with him. She was wearing an ankle-length floral nightdress tied over the breasts with an enormous pink bow. She looked like a giant cuddly rabbit, Willie thought, never more grateful for her than he had been this past night.

'I'm everybody's mother now,' Milly said miserably. 'Who else is there? Old Sarah?'

'Shit,' said Willie, 'I don't want it to be you.'

Milly shrugged her big shoulders and still kept the cup balanced on the saucer, 'I've lived opposite Ma for twenty years. I've studied her ways, best I can. I've been ... well.. . almost a daughter-in-law.'

'I was always led to believe,' Willie said, 'that Ma was supposed to announce her successor. "There's one as'll come after me." And it weren't you, luv, I'm sure of that.'

'No,' said Milly. 'But Ma thought she'd be around for another ten years yet. I know that for a fact. Ma thought she'd see in the Millennium.'

'Who can say owt like that? Who the hell knows how long they've got?'

'Ma knew.'

'Aye. But she were bloody wrong, though, weren't she?'

Milly squeezed her lips tight.

'Makes you wonder,' Willie said bitterly, 'if it's not a load of old garbage, all of it, the whole caboodle. Makes you bloody wonder.'

'I'll not have that from you, Little Man,' Milly chided, 'even if you are in grief. That's part of the problem. That sort of talk's like decay.'

'Realism, more like,' Willie said, his fingers waking up, stretching themselves, then batting the side of his teacup in a soft chinking rhythm.

'Drink your tea. You're upset. We all are. I just wish I could get some insight about the Man.'

'Aye,' Willie said. 'And where's bloody Matt? Don't bear thinking about, this lot. Makes me think I'll happen have Ma cremated.'

'You never will!' Milly sat up so suddenly she actually spilled some tea.

'Nowt as goes in yon churchyard ever bloody stays down,' Willie protested. 'Aye, all right. I mean, no, I'll not have her cremated, settle down. Will you talk to Moira?'

'I don't know,' Milly said. 'Wasn't there talk of her getting into bad magic some while back?'

'Aye, and she got out again,' Willie said. 'You met her last night. How did she seem to you?'

'All right, I suppose,' Milly said grudgingly. 'But you can't tell. I should be able to tell, I know, but ... Oh, Willie ...'

Her shoulders started to shake and she collapsed against him.

'I'm out of mc depth. Why did she have to die like that? Why did she leave us?'

'Because she had no choice,' said Willie, almost managing to get his arm all the way around her. 'It's no good us keep getting worked up about it. What's done is done.'

But his fingers didn't accept it; they set up a wild, uncontrollable rhythm on Milly's arm, just below the shoulder. Ma was killed... Ma was killed... Ma was... .

'Stop it!' Milly sobbed, 'I know. I bloody know! But what can we do?'

'Talk to Moira,' Willie said.

The church clock chimed, for 10 a.m.

'Be late for church,' Willie said.

'Not going,' Milly said. 'Means nowt to me now, that place. He's destroyed it. In one day.'

'Aye,' Willie said. 'And the well.'

'You what?

'Him or somebody. I never told you, did I? I forgot - what with Ma and everything. Me and Moira went up there looking for Ma, and the well had been wrecked. Statue smashed, right bloody mess.'

Milly rolled away from him, mashing her face into her pillow in anguish.

'I'm sorry, lass,' Willie said, 'I just forgot.'

Sunday morning and the whole village was unaccountably silent. Moira walked to the church car park and loaded everything into the BMW.

It was coming up to 10.45, which probably explained the silence. This would be the time of the Sunday morning worship.

She walked across to the public notice board next to the lych-gate.

SUNDAY:

HOLY COMMUNION 9.0.

MORNING SERVICE 10.30

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTIFIED

Life will go on. Unless otherwise notified.

She no longer felt observed. She wasn't worth it any more: a thin, bewildered Scottish woman coming up to middle age and her hair turning white.

Everything was unreal. The clouds were like stone. Her head felt as if it was set in concrete. She needed to get away, to sleep and think and sleep.

And then, maybe, to find Dic, track the little shit down, deal with this thing.

She'd see Willie and then leave. She didn't feel like talking to him - or to anybody. But Willie was the other link; there were things Willie could tell her.

And he was a churchgoer, or always used to be. She was probably going to have to wait until they all came out.

She slipped through the lych-gate. It began to rain, quite powerfully. The gargoyles glared down at her. She moved quietly into the church porch, but there was no feeling of sanctuary here now. The sense of walking into the womb had gone with the Sheelagh na gig. It was merely shelter now, from the rain and nothing else.

Moira stopped, hearing a voice, a preacher's lilt, from the body of the church.

'... Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moves us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness, and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them before the face of Almighty God...'

It was cold in the porch, colder than outside. She hugged herself.

And there was something wrong with that voice.

… Wherefore I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present, to accompany me with a pure heart and humble voice, unto the throne of the heavenly grace, saying after me ...'

The door to the church was closed. She would wait for a hymn and then go in.

'Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed

from thy ways like lost sheep ...

'We have offended against thy holy laws . ..

... and there is no health in us. .

Cathy had been right. She was coming down with something, a cold, flu. Wasn't just shock. She was shivering again.

Should go back to the car, turn up the heater.

And then it came to her, what was wrong.

There should be responses. All these lines the minister was intoning were supposed to be repeated by the congregation. He was leaving the spaces.

'To the glory of thy holy name … '

But nobody was filling them. Not one person in this congregation was participating.

'Amen.'

Nobody repeated amen. He might have been talking to himself.

Holy Jesus.

'We shall sing ... Hymn number six hundred and three. "Round The Sacred City Gather."'

She waited for the organ or the harmonium or whatever.

That sound they always made, like they were drawing breath for the first chord.

There was silence. Only that hollow gasping ambience these places had. And then the singing began.

'Round the sacred city gather

Egypt, Edam, Babylon.

All the warring hosts of error.

Sworn against her, move as one.'

A strong and strident tenor. One voice.

This guy was singing on his own.

And that was very seriously eerie. Moira began to feel scared.

'Get thee, watchman, to thy rampart,

Gird thee, warrior, with thy sword … '

Trembling, she pushed gently at the swing-door, opening it just an inch, just enough to peer in ... and let out the voice, louder.

'Watch to prayer lest while ye slumber.

Stealthy foemen enter in …'

She almost screamed. Let go of the door, letting it swing back into place with an audible thunk that seemed to echo from the rafters.

I'm away. I'm out of here.

As she ran out of the porch, into the bleakly battering rain, she could still see him, fully robed, statuesque but crazy-eyed, arms filing out, balanced there on the steps before the altar place, singing to all those empty pews. All those completely empty pews.

She walked back along the cobbles, to where she could see down the street as far as The Man I'th Moss.

Not a soul.

But the silence was more sorrowful than sinister, hung down like her confidence, somewhere around the soles of her shoes.

She looked along the blank windows of the cottages. The only sign of presence was some chimney smoking cheerlessly.

Maybe all this had something to do with the sudden death of Ma Wagstaff. A big death.

And the stealing of the Sheelagh, the removal of the candles, the toppling of the Autumn Cross. Like they didn't feel welcome in the church any more, these bewildered people who no longer knew where they stood in relation to their God or their Goddess.

She turned into the alley which led to Willie's house and she hammered on his door, her body flattened against it. Come on, Willie, come on.

Deserted. She tried, a little nervously, a couple of raps on the front door of the curtained cottage at the top of the street where Ma Wagstaff had lived and died. Finally, she found an old envelope in the car and wrote a careful note, walking back down the hill to push it into Willie's letter-box.

Willie, I suppose we need to talk sometime about what we're going to do about Mao's music on the bog body. I don't suppose you feel any more like it than me at the moment, so I'll get in touch in a few weeks' time. I have to go home now ...

Home. Where the hell was home?

Home is where the heart is, and I haven't got a heart, I haven't got a soul.

I have been burgled.

She stood in the street and looked from window to window, up and down, in search of life, and did not find it. But then, what the hell business was it of hers if the people of Bridelow wanted to lie low and boycott St Bride's and its unsympathetic new minister?

And turning on her heel, summoning energy from God knew where, she walked crisply, with determination, clop, clop, bloody clop on the cobbles, back up to the lych-gate and

the car.

Almost falling into the arms of the Angel bloody Gabriel in white as he strode through the gate, his desperate solo service abandoned.

'I'm sorry,' he snapped. And then, with his hands still on her shoulders to separate their bodies, he began to stare at her.

Seeing what she figured must be this sad, sluttish face, no make-up, hair awry, maybe a low and useless anger burning fitfully in the eyes.

His hands dropped away from her. His fists clenched. He began to tremble. He said, 'Who are you?' Golden curls tight to his head, Van Helsing-size cross looming out at her as his white linen chest swelled.

'Who are you?'

'Doesn't matter,' Moira said tonelessly. 'I'm leaving now.'

He blocked her path to the car, legs apart, this real big bastard in full Sunday vestments, humiliated in the sight of his God. Profile like Michelangelo's 'David' or something, a good head taller than she was and bellowing out, 'In the name of God ... WHO ARE YOU, WOMAN?'

'Look, would you please get outa my way,' she said tiredly.

Like she didn't have enough problems of her own.

'It's Sunday morning.' He was snarling now, through gritted teeth, rage choking him. 'And my church is empty. There is no congregation. No sidesmen. No organist.'

'Maybe it's just your sermons are crap,' Moira said. 'Look ...'

He said, in a kind of wonder, backing off, his surplice billowing like a sail, 'You're taunting me'

'Please ...'

'I know who you are.' He was screaming it at the village, 'I know what you are!'

'Yeah, I'm sure you do, but would you please just get the hell out of my way?'

And knew, as she was saying it, that she shouldn't have used the word hell.

His face glowed red, bulging with blood.

She saw it corning but she didn't move. She took it from his massive open hand across the side of her face, from forehead to lower jaw. It would have hurt her less if she'd fallen, but she wouldn't do that. She stayed on her feet and she stared into his incandescent eyes.

Abruptly he spun away and strode back through the gate; she heard his footsteps crunching the gravel and then, hitting the path. Finally she heard the church door crashing into place with an echo that didn't seem to fade but went on smashing from one side of her skull to the other as she moved unsteadily to her car.

CHAPTER V

Being Sunday, he could park in the street right outside and wait for some movement.

It was a dull, cold day in Glasgow, and a light gleamed out of the second floor of Kaufmann's scuffed tenement, which indicated Fiona had got it right. 'See, he often works on a Sunday, catching up with his VAT and stuff. But, Mungo, you tell him where you got this from I'm out the door; long as you realise that...'

Lucky he'd kept Fiona's home number. He owed the kid another dinner.

This Sunday morning convinced Macbeth that being a private investigator had to be about the most tedious occupation you could have outside of accountancy. The first hour, the car radio kept him amused with some bizarre soap-style drama about country folks in which nobody got killed, nobody seemed to be balling anyone else's spouse but two guys nearly came to blows in an argument about milk quotas. Only in Britain.

The second hour Macbeth fell to contemplating the futility of his life so far, the hopelessness of his quest, etc.

And then, just after 1 p.m., Malcolm Kaufmann came out of the building and spent some time locking the door behind him.

Kaufmann bad on a long black overcoat over a pink polo shirt. Macbeth followed him to a crowded, chromium pub where Kaufmann ordered chicken sandwiches and, to Macbeth's dismay, sat down to eat them with two other guys he obviously knew.

Macbeth said shit a few times under his breath, ordered up a sandwich and a beer, sat as far away from Kaufmann as he could while still keeping him in view, and began to eat very slowly.

There were many women in the bar. Macbeth passed some time debating which one he'd make a move on if he hadn't been an investigator on a case. There was one in a dark blue velvet top who had to be wasted on the guy she was with; he was drinking too much and talking to other guys, she was on Diet Coke and probably only here to drive him home.

She had long, dark hair. Which, of course, was nothing at all to do with Macbeth picking her out, no way.

He was getting to thinking he would make a move, if only to make the woman's lunchtime more memorable, when Malcolm Kaufmann came swiftly to his feet, said a rapid goodbye to his pals and made an exit, weaving through the crowd with such practised agility that Macbeth almost lost him.

Couldn't be sure Kaufmann wouldn't get into a car or taxi and head off home, so he called after him in the street, and Kaufmann turned at the edge of the sidewalk and raised an

eyebrow.

'Mr Macbeth. How very strange to see you.'

'We have to talk, Malcolm,' Macbeth said, trying to sound tough.

'Of course. We must arrange a time.'

'Like, now.'

'Oh, dear,' said Kaufmann. 'This sounds serious. What can the fair Moira have been up to?'

Macbeth walked right up to him. There was a cab idling not ten yards away, and he was taking no chances. 'We need to talk about a man,' he said, 'name of John Peveril Stanage.'

Ashton thought he should tell her himself, maybe test the water a bit. Also, he liked a pint around Sunday lunch when he got the time - unable, despite his divorce, to shake himself out of the feeling that Sunday lunchtime was special.

And he couldn't deny he was becoming quite fascinated by this place, a bit of old England only twenty miles from factories and warehouses, muck and grime and petty crime.

He drove Across the Moss in his own vehicle, the Japanese sports car which was his first independent purchase with the bit of money left over after paying off his wife. A gesture.

Ashton realised now that Gillian was probably right, it was bloody pathetic to buy a car like this at his age. Lump of flash tat, and he could never even remember what bloody make it was.

'Oh,' she said, looking up to serve him. it's you.'

No curiosity, he noticed But then, if they had recovered anything from that grave, be all over the village, wouldn't it?

'Just thought I should officially inform you, Mrs Castle,' he said confidentially, across the bar, 'that we didn't find what we were looking for. I'm sorry we had to put you through this.'

There were no more than a dozen customers in The Man. Some had looked up when he came in. Made a change; most pubs, they could smell a copper the same way he could scent illegal odours amidst tobacco smoke. Always somebody in a pub with something to hide, whether they'd been flogging nicked videos or their MOT was overdue.

'You have your job to do,' Lottie Castle said. She seemed weary, strained, nervy. Still looking good, though, he'd not been wrong about that. Tragedy suited some women. Something about recent widows, murder victims' wives especially; stripped of all need for pretend-glamour, they acquired this harsh unadorned quality, the real woman showing through.

Sometimes this excited him.

Must be getting warped, price of thirty years in the job.

'I had the feeling yesterday,' he said, 'that you thought we might have found something.'

She said, 'Wouldn't have surprised me either way. The bog body, wasn't it?'

'Somebody told you.' He wondered why she should make him think of murder victims' wives.

'Call it intuition,' Lottie said. 'What you having?'

'Pint of Black?'

'You'll be the only one,' she said.

When he raised an inquiring eyebrow she told him another bunch of jobs had gone, working men replaced by men in white coats brought in from Across the Moss. Rumours that Gannons might even close the brewery altogether, transferring all production of Bridelow Black to their new plant outside Matlock.

'Never,' said Ashton. 'How can you brew Bridelow Black in Matlock?'

'How can you brew German lager in Bradford?' said Lottie.

'People don't care any more. They've got the name, that's all that matters.'

'Thought the lads here were looking a bit cheesed.' Ashton nodded at the customers.

Lottie said, 'Gannons have apparently got tests showing the local spring water doesn't meet European standards of purity. Cost a substantial amount to decontaminate it. Added to which the equipment's antiquated. Where's the business sense in preserving some scruffy little dead-end village brewery on the wrong side of a bog?'

'Bloody tragic,' Ashton said, and meant it. 'Just about finish Bridelow, I reckon.'

'People've got to have work,' Lottie said. They'll move out. School'll shut. Church'll be operating every fourth Sunday. Still want this?

'Better make it a bottle of Newcastle,' Ashton said. 'I wouldn't like to cause an incident.'

'The rot's already set in, I'm afraid,' Lottie said, pulling a bottle from under the bar. 'General store closed last week. Chip shop's on its last legs. How long the Post Office'll keep a sub-office here is anybody's guess.'

'Not good for you either. Dozen customers on a Sunday?

'Be a few hikers in later,' Lottie said listlessly.

'I was told,' Ashton said smoothly, raising his voice a little, that some folk reckon all the bad luck that's befallen this village is due to that bogman being removed from the bog.'

Behind him, conversation slowed to a trickle.

'That's stupid,' Lottie said.

'You see, that's why we thought somebody might've had the idea of bringing it back to Bridelow. And where better to put it than at the bottom of an existing grave? Done it before, apparently, according to my source.'

'And who might that be?' asked Frank Manifold Snr from behind his half of draught Bass.

Ashton didn't turn round. 'Surprising as it may seem, Mrs Castle, I can understand it, the way people might be feeling. Problem is, we're talking about a prize specimen here. Experts from all over the world made plans to come and see it. It's almost unique. Invaluable. And so, you see, the police are under quite enormous pressure to get it back.'

There was no reaction from Lottie Castle. He was pretty sure now that she knew nothing.

'Well ...' Ashton sucked some of the creamy froth from his Brown Ale. 'I suspect we're going to have to disrupt people's lives something terrible if we don't find it soon.'

By this time, the silence behind him sounded thick enough to sit on.

'Of course,' he said, 'if the bogman was in Bridelow or, say, back in the Moss ... and somebody was to tell us, anonymously, precisely where ... Then, personally, I can't see us taking it any further.'

Ashton felt that if he fell off his stool the silence would probably support him.

'Now, another piece of information that's come my way, Mrs Castle,' he went on, 'is that a certain gentleman has agreed to provide sufficient money to create a permanent exhibition centre for the bogman. And that this centre might well be established here in Bridelow, thus ensuring that the bogman remains in his old home. And that the hundreds of tourists who come to see him will spend a few bob in the village and perhaps have a drink or two in this very pub. Perfect solution, you ask me. What's your own feeling, Mrs Castle?'

'My feeling?' Lottie began to breathe hard. She started to straighten glasses. To steady her hands he thought.

'Yes,' he said. 'Your feeling.'

Lottie didn't look at Ashton, nor past him at the other customers, just at the glasses.

'I hope you never find it,' she said in a voice like cardboard.

He said nothing.

'Caused enough upset.' She started to set up a line of upturned glasses on the bar top. 'And, you know ... I don't really think I care what happens to this village. I'll tell you ... Mr Ashton ... Anybody wants this pub, they can have it. For a song. You fancy a pub? Supplement your police pension? Bit of country air?'

He could see tears in her eyes, hard as contact lenses.

'Views?' she said. 'Lovely views?'

'Mrs Castle,' he said. 'Please. I'm sorry.'

'Peat?' she shrieked, slicing a hand through the line of glasses so that the last two instantly smashed against the beer- pumps. 'You want peat? Peat, peat and more fucking peat?'

Cassock wind-whipped around his ankles, Joel stood looking down the village street, his back to the church notice board, his face soaked by rain and by sweat. The sweat of rage and humiliation.

He shouldn't have struck her. It was unpremeditated, but it was wrong. And yet, because the woman was an incarnation of evil, it was also rather unsatisfactory.

... shall not suffer a witch to live. Until the arrival of the sound-drenching rain and wind, he'd contemplated delivering his sermon from the middle of the street, denouncing the denizens of Bridelow to their own front doors.

What a damning indictment of Hans Gruber this was. Hans who packed the church at least twice on Sundays, a stranger who had been accepted by the villagers as one of their own.

One of their own!

Hans turning a blind eye to the lone, black-clad figure in the churchyard before the funeral - the hooded figure clearly exuding not respect, nor monastic piety, but a heathen arrogance.

And Gruber, the quisling, screaming at him, Joel, 'Put it back!' as he snatched the bottle from the coffin.

Joel looked down the street towards Mrs Wagstaff's cottage. Its curtains were drawn, upstairs and down. This was another deliberate insult: I'll come to church for Hans Gruber's services, but I'll not even leave my bed for yours.'

He began to shake with rage. Obviously, after the incident at the well, the harridan had poisoned his name in Bridelow.

The street was deserted. He strode to the telephone kiosk in front of the Post Office. The answer was clear. If, as a Christian, he had been rejected by the resident congregation, then he must summon his own.

Just get me out of here, get me across those hills and you can break down,' she said. 'Or do what the fuck you like.'

She had this sore throat now.

Cathy had been talking about some kind of Taiwanese flu. Whatever the hell that was, it sounded like the BMW had it too.

'I get across these hills,' Moira told the car, 'I'm gonny book you into a garage and me into a hotel that looks sufficiently anonymous, and then I think I'm gonny die quietly.'

Out of the corner of an eye - the BMW making noises like Kenny Savage in the lavatory the morning after - she'd seen the dead tree on the Moss again. It didn't move but it didn't look so obviously dead any more, a white light shining like a gemstone in its dragon's eye.

She'd closed her own eye, the eye which was letting in the image of the tree, and this hurt. It was the side of her face Joel Beard had slapped. Maybe the eye had gone black; she couldn't bring herself to look in the mirror.

I can't believe he got away with that. Normally I'd have torn the bastard's balls off.

The BMW retched, like it was about to throw up its oil or something.

'Maybe you didn't understand me.' She gripped the wheel, shaking it. 'Maybe you only understand German. In which case you'll never know that if you don't get me to that hotel ... I'm gonny trade you in, pal ...'

In the driving-mirror, through the rain coming down like sheet metal now, she could see the spikes of St Bride's Church, maybe two miles back across the Moss.

'... and you'll be bought at auction by some loony, tear-arse seventeen-year-old looking for something fast and sleek to smash up and get killed in, yeah?'

Yelling at the car because she didn't want to hear anything else coming at her through the rain and the engine noise.

Didn't want to touch the radio-cassette machine on account of there was a tape inside with the late Matt Castle on it, Matt coming seriously unspooled.

Her head ached and her hair felt heavy and greasy, just awful. She pushed it away from her eyes. The Moss had gone from the mirror, it was all scrubby moorland with dark, unfinished drystone walls like slippery piles of giant sheep-shit. She came to a signpost and hesitated, then pointed the car at the place that sounded biggest and closest.

Buxton. Some kind of inland resort. With hotels. Listen, hen, what you do is you book into the biggest, plushest hotel they have there - like the Buxton Hilton or whatever - and you take several aspirins and you get a night's sleep and then you do some hard thinking. You can still think, OK, you can still function. The comb is merely an artefact invested with symbolism by you and by your mammy and however many other gypsies have had it in their gold-encrusted fists - but to claim it holds part of your spirit, your essence, your living consciousness is just ridiculous sentiment. Right?

Sure.

The Buxton road doubled back round the Moss to the Bridelow moors in a steep, curving climb, with what seemed like a sheer cliff going up on one side and another sheer cliff coming down on the other with just a low drystone wall between

Ms Moira Cairns and a long, long drop into what, being largely invisible through this sheeting rain, might just possibly be Hell.

Come on, come ... on.

The BMW was faltering, its engine straining, like the big rubber band that powered it was down to its last strand.

Sweating, she flung the damn thing into third gear and then into second, revving like crazy.

Except the engine didn't.

It stalled.

In the middle of a twisting, narrow road, barely halfway up a hill that looked about three times as steep now the BMW wasn't actually ascending it any more, this bastard stalled.

'Oh, shit' - hauling on the handbrake - 'I'm really screwed this time.' First time any car had broken down on her for maybe ten years.

Also, coincidentally, the first time she'd had flu or whatever the hell it was in maybe five. And worst of all ...

Worst of all the handbrake couldn't hold it.

Now, look - treading hard on the foot brake - it isn't that the cable's snapped or somebody's been messing with it, it's just stretched too far. Garage'll have it fixed in ten minutes.

What you have to do now, assuming you get to the bottom of this hill OK, you have to shove this car into the nearest grass verge then get out and walk through the filthy rain - without, OK, the benefit of a mac or an umbrella - until you come to a phone box or somebody's house.

Malcolm was always on at her to install a car phone. No way, she'd said. Malcolm said, When you want to be incommunicado you can just switch it off. She said. Incommunicado

is my middle name, Malcolm, so where's the point in paying out fifty quid a month? But it's tax-deductible, Moira ...

She wanted to scream with the terminal frustration of it: if she managed by some miracle piece of driving to deposit this magnificent piece of Kraut technology at the bottom of this bottomless hill, that was when her real problems would begin.

She didn't scream; her throat was hurting too much already.

Gently, oh, so bloody gently, she let out the brake and allowed the car to slip backwards down the hill, which now seemed almost fucking vertical ... twisting her neck round over her shoulder to try and track the curves in the streaming wet road. Not much to see anyway but rain and more rain. She was no damn good at this; never been able to master that mirror-image coordination you needed for reversing.

Thing is to stay well into the left, hard against the sheer cliff - OK, steepish hill, that's all it is - the one going up.

And, God, if I can make it to the bottom in one piece I will walk through this filthy, blinding rain for ten miles, hear me?

This roaring in her ears, it had to be the blood, flushed up there by concentration and the flu.

Letting out the brake, going backwards in short bursts, then jamming on, feeling the wheels lock and slide on the rain-filmed road. OK ... easy ... you're OK ...

Just as long as nothing's coming up behind you!

Then, alarmingly, she was going backwards in a sudden spurt, and when she jammed on the brakes it made hardly any difference, and the breath locked in her swollen throat.

Staring, helpless, as the car's rear end suddenly slid out into the middle of the narrow carriageway, skimming over the central white line, the tail end skidding off, aiming itself at the crumbling stones, no more than two feet high, set up between the road and Hell.

'Oh, my... Christ!'

Scared now … like really scared, Moira tried to jam both feet on to the footbrake, straightening her legs out hard, heaving her back into the seat until it creaked, the pressure forcing her head back and around until she was staring out of the front windscreen, the car slipping back all the while.

It was like going up the down escalator in one of those panicking nightmares, only with the thing on at triple speed and a wall on one side and an endless, open liftshaft on the other.

And the brakes were definitely full on ... and gripping while the car was sliding backwards on the rain-slashed road, and Moira's cars were full of this dark turbulence, turning her vision black.

Black, black, black.

Black, it said.

BRIDELOW BLACK

... across the cab of the massive, dripping truck powering down on the BMW like some roaring prehistoric beast.

Oh...

... Christ...

... Get it into first gear ... !

She was starting to scream out loud, plunging the clutch down, grinding the gearstick. But there was nowhere to go, the windscreen full of black, the truck's engine bellowing then scornfully clearing its throat as, with no great effort, it prodded the little car and Moira Cairns through the disintegrating drystone wall and the shimmering curtain of rain and over the road's edge into the endless mist beyond.

CHAPTER VI

The old clergyman across the lounge was deeply asleep in his chair, head back, mouth open,

'Lifetime of begging, you see,' Hans Gruber explained to his daughter. 'He's turned into an offertory box. You go over there, drop a pound coin in his trap and it'll suddenly snap shut. Clack! Another quid for the steeple fund.'

Hans smiled.

Cathy said, 'You're feeling better, then.'

'Until I stand up. And a stroll to the loo is like the London marathon. But it's always better when you get out of hospital. Even coming here.'

The Poplars was a Georgian house with a modern, single-storey extension set amid flat, tidy, rain-daubed fields where Cheshire turned imperceptibly into Shropshire. There were all kinds of trees in the grounds except, Cathy had noted, actual poplars.

'Nearly as exciting as Leighton Buzzard,' Hans said. 'Makes me realise how much I love Bridelow. Its hardness, its drama.'

Cathy said nothing. Right now Bridelow had more drama than Beirut could handle.

Hans leaned forward in the chair, lowered his voice - even though, apart from the Rev. Offertory Box, they were alone in the lounge. 'I'm finished, aren't I, Cathy? I'm out.'

'Bollocks,' Cathy said, with less conviction than the choice of word implied.

Hans shook his head. 'Really wouldn't mind so much if it was going to be anybody but Joel. Thinks he's a New Christian, but he's actually more set in his ways than that poor old sod.'

Cathy squeezed his hand. 'You'll be back in no time.'

'No. I won't. Joel, you see ... he's like one of those chaps in the old Westerns. Come to clean up Bridelow. Vocation. And Simon Fleming sees Joel as his vocation, and as long as he's archdeacon ...'

'Joel might have bitten off more than he can chew, Pop. He put on his first Sunday service this morning, and nobody came.'

'You're not serious.' Cathy watched her father's mouth briefly wrestling with a most unchristian, spontaneous delight.

'Honest to God, Pop. A totally unorganised boycott. You know what Bridelow's like. Sort of communal consciousness. Apparently a few people started to drift along, got as far as the churchyard, realised the usual merry throng was not gathering as usual - and toddled off home. Does your heart good, doesn't it?'

'Certainly not,' said Hans, recovering his gravitas. 'It's actually quite stupid. Just get his back up, and then he'll do something silly. I don't mean go crying to Simon or the bishop or anyone, he's too arrogant. He'll want to sort it out himself. Damn.' Hans looked gloomy. 'That was really quite stupid of them. I can't believe Ma Wagstaff allowed it.'

'Ah.' Cathy lowered her eyes. Hans was wearing tartan bedroom slippers; somebody must have had a battle to get him into those.

'What's wrong?'

'I'm sorry, Pop,' Cathy swallowed. 'Something I haven't told you.'

Hans went very still.

The customers didn't stay long after Lottie had her flare-up. Led by tactful Frank Manifold Snr, they drank up smartish.

'What about you, pal?' Frank said to Inspector Ashton as he deposited his empty glass on the bar top. 'Haven't you got some traffic to direct or summat?'

Lottie said, it's OK, Frank. It's me. I'm overwrought.'

She turned to Ashton. 'Have another. On the house.'

'No, this chap's right,' Ashton said. 'You've enough problems without me.'

'No,' Lottie said, 'I want your advice. I've had ... intruders.'

Then Joel arrived to take up residence at Bridelow Rectory, and found Alfred Beckett replacing a broken window in the pantry.

He stood over the little man. Perhaps, he ventured sarcastically, some explanation was due.

'Well.' Mr Beckett thumbed a line of putty into the window-frame. 'I would have been theer, like. Never missed a morning service in thirty year. Except in an emergency.'

Like this problem here. Which, as Mr Beard could see, he was at this moment putting right before it started raining again causing everything in the pantry to be soaked through and ruined.

'Mr Beckett,' Joel snarled. 'You are the organist.'

'Aye,' said Mr Beckett uncomfortably. 'That's true, like, but ...'

'But nothing! You knew there would be no congregation. You knew no one would come.'

'Nay,' said Mr Beckett. 'Nobody come? Well, bugger me.'

Joel felt a red haze developing behind his eyes. He wondered briefly if the hypocritical little rat hadn't smashed the Rectory window himself as a lame excuse for his non-appearance.

'Bloody vandals,' Mr Beckett said, expertly sliding in the new pane of glass. 'Never used to get no vandalism in this village, and that's a fact, Mr Beard.'

Joel stared at him.

You're nobbut a thick bloody vandal wi' no more brains than pig shit.

Joel snatched the ball of putty from the window-ledge and sent it with a splat to the pantry floor.

'Mrs Wagstaff,' he said icily. 'Mrs Wagstaff is behind all this.'

'Nay,' said Mr Beckett.

'Why can't any of you people tell the truth?' This devious little man was the only villager who derived a small income from the Church and doubtless could not afford to lose it. 'When I came past her cottage not half an hour ago, Mrs Wagstaff had not yet deigned to draw back her curtains. What, pray, is your interpretation of that?'

Mr Beckett scraped up his ball of putty.

'Cause she's bloody dead,' he said. 'Why d'you think?'

Feeling his holy rage congealing into a hideous mess, Joel walked numbly through the kitchen, down the hall and into Hans Gruber's study.

Had the old woman spoken to neighbours of her encounter yesterday by the pagan shrine? He remembered, with no pleasure now, the gratification he'd allowed himself to feel as he left her in the churchyard and watched her stumping angrily away. The feeling that he finally had her on the run.

Had she run hard enough to bring on a stroke? To give her a heart attack?

Was there a general feeling that he, Joel, was responsible for her death? And for Hans's collapse at the graveside? Was that what this was all about?

Joel sat bowed across Hans's desk, his fingers splayed over his eyes. Was this to be his reward for following his Christian instincts, reacting fiercely and publicly as God's blunt instrument?

Was it?

Joel lowered his hands and saw a tower of books before him on the desk. Amidst the acceptable, routine theology, he saw inflammatory titles as The Celtic Way ... The Virgin and

the Goddess ... Pagan Celtic Britain ... The Celtic Creed ... The Tenets of Witchcraft. Evidence of Hans's attempts to rationalise this evil, the way one might seek to explain crime in era of social deprivation.

When it came to basics, Joel had no great illusions about himself. He was not a scholarly man. His strength was ... well, literally that. His strength.

He wasn't going to be able to work in this study. He'd lock the door on Hans's collection of pornography, just as he'd locked the dungeon door behind him. Ante-rooms to hell, both of them.

With a sweep of his arm which sent the books in the pile spinning to the four corners of the room, he experienced again the sublime grace of movement he'd felt as he leaned from the ladder and slashed the cord which bound the Autumn Cross.

Bound to be casualties. But he would go on. He must.

She led him out of the back door to an old barn of a place only a few yards from the main building. Unlocked the door.

'How did they get in?' Ashton asked,

'I don't know.'

'No windows forced?'

Lottie shook her head, bewildered.

'What's been taken?'

Lottie still shaking her head. 'Nothing. Nothing I can see.'

Ashton looked hard at her and let her see that he was looking. Was this a wind-up? Or was there a mental problem?

He didn't think so. She was standing in the middle of the barn, hands on hips, the sleeves of a bulky Scandinavian-type cardigan pushed up to the elbows.

She had firm, strong arms.

'Mrs Castle ...'

'I know. You think I'm off my head.'

'I didn't say anything

'Well, me too, Mr Ashton. I think I must be cracking up.'

'Gary,' he said. 'And I'd like to help. If I can.'

'You not got better things to do? One of the lads was saying there's a big police hunt up on the moors.'

'That's South Yorkshire's,' Ashton said. 'Our manor finishes just this side of the Moss. We'll help if we're asked, but we've not been asked. I'm off-duty anyroad.'

'Who're they looking for?'

'Farmer. Don't ask me his name. Went off after some trespassers last night and didn't come back. Had his shotgun with him, that's the worry. Why? You think it might be the same hooligans broke in here?'

Lottie shook her head again. It wasn't so much a denial, Ashton thought, as an attempt to shake something out.

'But then,' he said gently, 'there wasn't a break-in here, was there, Mrs Castle?'

'There had to've been,' Lottie said, quietly insistent. 'There's no other explanation.'

Ashton sat down on the edge of a dusty old couch next to a black thing that made him think of a dead animal, all skin and bones. He saw Mrs Castle glance at it briefly and recoil slightly.

'What's this?' Ashton was curious. There was a flute bit sticking out of it, with airholes.

'That?' Lottie said. 'That's the Pennine Pipes, Mr Ashton. Primitive kind of bagpipe. My husband's instrument. Woke me ...' She hesitated. 'Woke me up, Mr Ashton. About two o'clock this morning.'

'What did?'

'Them. The pipes. Somebody down here playing the pipe'. You think I could mistake that noise after living with it twenty-odd years?'

Ashton experienced a sensation like the tip of a brittle fingernail stroking the nape of his neck.

He said, 'What did you do?'

'Well, I didn't go down,' said Lottie. 'That's for sure.'

'Perhaps somebody wanted to frighten you, Mrs Castle.'

She said, 'When you got Matt's coffin out, did you ... ?'

'No,' Ashton said. 'We had no reason and no right to disturb your husband.'

She said, 'Do you mind if we go outside?'

'After you,' Ashton said. He pulled the wooden door into place behind them, quite thankful to be out of there himself. Place was like a mausoleum without a tomb.

Lottie Castle sniffed and one side of her mouth twitched in latent self-contempt. 'You know what it's like when you're alone - Or maybe you don't.'

'Yes,' he said, 'I do.'

'Things that would otherwise seem totally crazy go through your head.'

'True.'

'And with you lot digging up his grave, I thought... Well, it was as if he was ...'

Lottie Castle thrust open the kitchen door. Ashton followed her in, quietly shut the door behind them and stood with his back to it.

'I didn't catch that,' he said. 'As if he was what?'

'As if you'd let him out,' Lottie Castle said in a parched monotone, looking down at the flags. 'And he'd come back. For his pipes.'

She turned her back on Gary Ashton and walked over to the stove.

'Listen,' Ashton said, wondering if he was cracking up. This piping. Was it, like - I'm sorry - any particular tune?'

'No,' she said. 'No particular tune.' She was silent a moment, then she said, 'When Matt used to get the pipes out, he'd flex the bag a bit, get the air circulating, make all these puffing, wheezing noises and then a few trills up and down the scale. Warming up, you know? Getting started.'

Lottie placed both palms on the hot-plate covers. 'Matt Castle getting warmed up,' she said. 'That was what I thought heard.'

Hans moistened his lips with his tongue. Cathy got up. 'I'll fetch you a cup of tea.'

'No ...' Her father moved in his chair, winced. 'No, it's all right. I ...' He looked quietly down at his knees for a while. Then he said, 'They were talking about a plastic one. Back at the hospital, you know. I said to leave it a while. I said I was seeing a very experienced private therapist.'

Cathy smiled. 'Wasn't working though, was it?'

'No.' Hans sighed. 'She was talking, the last time I saw her, about something getting in and sapping her powers. Perhaps it was intimations of mortality. That was her way of expressing it - that she was corning to the end of her useful life. And maybe she could see the end, as well, of over a thousand years of tradition. And I'm wondering, too, if this is going to be the end of it.'

Cathy said nothing.

Hans said, 'Bit of a rag bag, the Mothers, aren't they? Now? Nobody to really take over. Nobody with Ma's authority. Milly Gill? I don't think so, do you? Nice woman, but too soft

- in the nicest way, of course. And the rest of the village - well, modern times, modern attitudes. General loss of spirituality. I blame the eighties, Mrs Thatcher, all that greed, all that materialism. Some of it had to find its way across the Moss sooner or later.'

'It's still a good place, Pop, in essence.'

'Yes ... as long as that essence remains. I'm very much afraid the essence has gone.'

Cathy thought they'd never come as close as this to discussing it. He'd always been too busy organising things, fudging the issue. The issue being that the parish priest in Bridelow must become partially blind and partially deaf. This also was a tradition.

In the old days - which, in this instance, meant as recently as last year - it wasn't possible to get to Bridelow Brewery without passing the Hall.

The Hall was built on a slight incline, with heathery rock gardens. Ernie Dawber could remember when the old horse-drawn beer drays used to follow the semi-circular route which took them under the drawing-room window for the children admire. The Horridges were always proud of their shire horses; the stable block had been a very fine building indeed, with a Victorian pagoda roof.

Now it was decaying amid twisted trees grown from hedges long untrimmed. No horses any more; it was heavy trucks and different entrances, no obvious link between the brewery and the Hall. Liz Horridge, Ernie thought, must be feeling a bit bereft. He shouldn't have left it so long. There was no excuse.

The Hall itself, to be honest, wasn't looking too good either. Big holes in the rendering, gardens a mess. Arthur Horridge would have a fit. Ernie was merely saddened at another symptom of the Change.

Gettin' a bit whimsy, Ernie?

Leave me alone, Ma. Give me a break, eh?

Fifty yards below the house, the drive went into a fork, the other road leading to the brewery.

'By 'eck,' Ernie Dawber said, stopping to look.

For suddenly the brewery was more impressive than the Hall.

In the past it had always been discreet, concealed by big old trees. But now some of the biggest had been felled to give the Victorian industrial tower block more prominence.

Gannons's doing? Had they made out a case for the brewery as an historic building and got a Government grant to tart it up?

Bloody ironic, eh? They sack half the workforce, talk about shifting the operation to Matlock, but if there's any money going for restoration they'll have it. Happen turn it into a museum.

They'd even finished off repairing the old pulley system for the malt store, briefly abandoned last ... May, was it? How soon we forget ... when a rope had snapped and Andy Hodgson had fallen to his death. Accidental death - official coroner's verdict. No blame attached.

Don't want to put a damper on things, Ernest, but summat's not right.

Go away, Ma.

He had to stop this. Snatches of Ma Wagstaff had been bobbing up and down in his brain ever since he'd awakened, like an old tune that'd come from nowhere but you couldn't get rid of it. Reminding him of his commitment. Get him back.

And if I don't? If I fail? What then?

He could only think of one answer to that. One he'd thought of before, and it had made him laugh, and now it didn't.

Well. Nagged from beyond the grave. You wouldn't credit it. Ernie straightened his hat, girded up his gaberdine, turned his back on the brewery, which suddenly offended him, and hurried up to the Hall.

He pressed the bell-push and heard the chimes echo, as if from room to room within the house.

Even as he pressed again, he knew there was nobody inside.

So she doesn't come down to the village any more ... Well, she's always been a bit aloof. Not a local woman. Only to be expected with this bad feeling about the brewery. She supposed to subject herself to that when it wasn't her fault?

But you, Ernest... Nowt to stop you going to see her.

Ma ...

... She were in a shocking state, banging her fists on Ma's door - 'please, please', like this ...

'Please, Liz.' Ernie, sheltering under the overhanging porch as the rain came harder. 'Answer the door, eh?'

He remembered attending her wedding back in ... 1957, would it be? This high-born, high-breasted Cheshire beauty, niece of Lord Benfold, on the arm of a grinning Arthur Horridge, boisterous with pride - free ale all round that night in The Man. 'Sturdy lass,' Ma Wagstaff had observed (they were already calling her Ma back in the 'fifties). 'Never pegged her own washing out, I'll bet.'

Ma talking then as if Eliza Horridge were nowt to do with her. As if there was no secret between them.

It was years before Ernie had put two and two together.

... put me hand on her shoulder and she nearly had hysterics, I want Ma, I want Ma ...'

Oh, Lord, Liz. Answer the bloody door. Please.

Hans said, 'I realised a long time ago where the essence was. That' a real centre of spirituality was what was important - that what kind of spirituality it was was, to a large extent, irrelevant.'

'You say you realised ...' Cathy said slowly. 'Did that come in a blinding flash, or were you ... tutored, perhaps?'

'Both. They started work on your mother to begin with, through the well-dressing. She was always interested in flowers.' Hans laughed painfully. 'Can you imagine? Doing it through something as utterly innocuous as flower arranging? Millicent Gill it was taught her - only a kid at the time, but she'd been born into it. Flowers. Petal pictures. Pretty.'

'Yes,' Cathy said.

'Then flowers in the church. Nothing strange about that. But in this kind of quantity? Used to look like Kew Gardens in August.'

'I remember.'

'And the candles. Coloured candles. And the statues. I remembered commenting to the bishop - old Tom Warrender in those days, canny old devil - about the unexpected Anglo- Catholic flavour. "But they still turn up in force on a Sunday, don't they, Hans?" he said. And then he patted me on the shoulder, as if to say, don't knock it when you're winning. Of course, even then I knew we weren't talking about Anglo-Catholicism - not in the normal sense, anyway. And then, when we'd been here a few years, your mother went into hospital to have you and Barney …'

'Which reminds me, Pop, Barney called from Brussels - he'll be over to see you before the end of the week.'

'No need. Tell him ...'

'There's no telling him anything, you know that. Go on. When Mum was in hospital ...'

'I was approached by Alf Beckett, Frank Manifold and Willie Wagstaff. They said the house was no place to bring families into, far too dismal and shabby. Give them a couple of

hours and they and a few of the other lads would redecorate the place top to bottom. Be a nice surprise for your mother - welcome-home present from the village.'

'I didn't know about that.'

'Of course you didn't. Anyway, I said it was very good of them and everything, but the mess ... Don't you worry about that, Vicar, they said. You won't even have to see it until it's done. We've arranged accommodation for you.'

'Ah,' said Cathy.

'They'd installed a bed in the little cellar under the church,' said Hans. 'The place had been aired. Chemical toilet in the passage. Washbowl, kettle, all mod cons. Of course, I knew I was being set up, but what could I do?'

Hans paused, 'I spent... two nights down there.'

'And?' Cathy discovered she was leaning forward, gripping the leatherette arms of her chair.

'And what? Don't expect me to tell you what happened. I came out, to put it mildly, a rather more thoughtful sort of chap than when I went in. Can't explain it. I think it was a test. I think I passed. I hope I passed.'

'But you didn't want Joel sleeping down there?'

'God, no. The difference being that I'd been there a few years by then - I was halfway to accepting certain aspects of Bridelow. They knew that. Somebody took a decision. That the vicar should be ... presented. To Her. I think ... I think if I hadn't been ready, if I hadn't been considered sufficiently ... what? Tolerant, I suppose. Open-minded ... then probably nothing would have happened. Probably nothing would have happened with Joel. But I didn't want him down there. I don't want to sound superior or anything, but that boy could spend fifty years in Bridelow and still not be ready.'

Cathy said, realising this wasn't going to do much for her father's recovery, 'Suppose ... suppose he did spend a night down there. And he was already worked up after that business at the funeral. And he stirred something up. Brought something on. Suppose he was tested - and failed?'

'Well,' Hans said. 'There's an old story Ernie Dawber once told me. About what really happened when that bishop spent a night down there in eighteen whenever. They say he went totally bloody bonkers.'

Hans patted Cathy's hand. 'But then,' he said, 'wouldn't have been much of a story at all if he hadn't, would it?'

There was a loud, urgent rapping on Willie's front door, which could only be Milly.

Who knew the door was hardly ever locked - certainly not when Willie was at home - but who'd knock anyway, for emphasis, when it was something important.

Willie had been re-reading Moira's note. It had been a relief at first; didn't think he could really apply himself to Matt's bogman music, not right now, not the way he was feeling.

But what did she mean, I have to go home? Why did she have to go so quickly she couldn't wait to say ta'ra?

'Aye,' he shouted. 'Come in, lass.'

'Willie.' She stood panting in the doorway, her flowery frock dark-spotted with rain.

'I were just going to make some toast for me tea. You want some?'

'Willie,' she said. 'Come and see this.'

"s up?'

'You've got to see it,' Milly gasped,

'It's pissing down. I'll need me mac'

'Never mind that!' She pulled him out of the door, dragged him up the entry and into the street. 'Look.'

'It's a bus,' said Willie.

A big green single-decker was jammed into the top of the street outside the Post Office. Thin rivers of rain were running down the cobbles around its back wheels. On the back of the bus it said, Hattersley's Travel, Sheffield.

'Coach tour?' Willie said, puzzled. Coaches would come to Bridelow quite often in the old days. In summer, admittedly, not on a wet Sunday at the end of October.

'Look,' Milly said.

About forty people had alighted from the coach, mostly young people in jeans and bright anoraks. A small circle had gathered around the unmistakable, golden-topped figure of Joel Beard. They stepped forward in turn, men and women, to hug him.

'Praise God!' Willie heard. As he and Milly moved further up the street, he heard the phrase repeated several times.

Willie looked at Milly through the lashing rain. 'What the bloody hell's this?'

Milly nodded towards two young men unwrapping a long, white banner. Gothic golden lettering explained everything - to Milly, anyway.

'Who the bloody hell,' said Willie, 'are the Angels of the New Advent?'

'They've got a church in Sheffield. Me cousin's daughter nearly became one about a year ago. They're fundamentalist Born Again Christians, Willie. They see the world as one big battleground, God versus Satan.'

'Like the World Cup?'

'It's not funny, Willie.'

'This is what you've dragged me out to see? A bloody Bible-punchers' outing?'

'You're not getting this, are you, Willie luv?' Milly's greying hair was streaming; her dress was soaked through.

Willie noticed with a quick stirring of untimely excitement that she wasn't wearing a bra.

'What I'm saying, if you'll listen,' Milly hissed, 'is that they're God. And we're Satan.'

A short time later, Milly heard a small commotion and looked out of the Post Office window to see a group of people assembled in the centre of the street between the lych-gate and the Rectory.

One of them was Joel Beard. Someone held up the trumpet end of a loud-hailer and handed a plastic microphone to Joel.

'GOD IS HERE,' he blasted. 'GOD IS HERE IN BRIDELOW. YOU ARE ALL INVITED TO A SPECIAL SERVICE AT EIGHT P.M. TO REDEDICATE THE CHURCH IN HIS NAME.'

Milly felt a terrible trepidation. Obviously none of the villagers would turn up. But what effect was it going to have, all these no doubt well-meaning but dangerously misguided people stirring up the atmosphere?

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. BRIDELOW HAS TONIGHT BEEN FORMALLY REPOSSESSED BY THE LORD.'

'Heathens out!' someone yelled.

'HEATHENS OUT!'