The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:

Bridelow Moss is a two-miles-wide blanket of black peat. Much of its native vegetation has been eroded and the surface peat made blacker by industrial deposits - although the nearest smut-exuding industries are more than fifteen miles away.

Bisected by two small rivers, The Moss slopes down, more steeply than is apparent, from the foothills of the northern Peak District almost to the edge of the village of Bridelow.

In places, the peat reaches a depth of three metres, and although there are several drainage gullies, conditions can be treacherous, and walkers unfamiliar with the Moss are not recommended to venture upon it in severe weather.

But then, on dull wet, days in Autumn and Winter, the gloomy and desolate appearance of the Moss would deter all but the hardiest rambler ...

CHAPTER I

OCTOBER

With the rain hissing venomously in their faces, they pushed the wheelchair across the cindered track to the peat's edge, and then Dic lost his nerve and stopped.

'Further,' Matt insisted.

'It'll sink, Dad. Look.'

Matt laughed, a cawing.

Dic looked at his mother for back-up. Lottie looked away, through her dripping hair and the swirling grey morning, to where the houses of Bridelow clung to the shivering horizon like bedraggled birds to a telephone wire.

'Mum ... ?'

In the pockets of her sodden raincoat, Lottie made claws out of her fingers. She wouldn't look at Matt, even though she was sure - the reason she'd left her head bare - that you couldn't distinguish tears from rain.

'Right.' Abruptly, Matt pushed the tartan rug aside. 'Looks like I'll have to walk, then.'

'Oh, Christ, Dad . .

Still Lottie didn't look at the lad or the withered man in the wheelchair. Just went on glaring at the village, at the fuzzy outline of the church, coming to a decision. Then she said tonelessly, 'Do as he says, Dic.'

'Mum . .

Lottie whirled at him, water spinning from her hair. 'Will you just bloody well do it?'

She stood panting for a moment, then her lips set hard. She thought she heard Dic sob as he heaved the chair into the mire and the dark water bubbled up around the wheels.

The chair didn't sink. It wouldn't sink. It wouldn't be easy to get out, even with only poor, wasted Matt in there, but it wouldn't sink.

Maybe Matt was hoping they wouldn't have to get it out. That he'd be carried away, leaving the chair behind, suspended skeletally in the Moss, slowly corroding into the peat or maybe preserved there for thousands of years, like the Bogman.

'Fine,' Matt said. 'That's ... fine. Thanks.'

The chair was only a foot or so from the path, embedded up to its footplate in Bridelow Moss. Dic stood there, tense, arms spread, ready to snatch at the chair if it moved.

'Go away, lad,' Matt said quietly. He always spoke quietly now. So calm. Never lost his temper, never - as Lottie would have done - railed at the heavens, screaming at the blinding injustice of it.

Stoical Matt. Dying so well.

Sometimes she wished she could hate him.

It was Sunday morning.

As they'd lifted Matt's chair from the van, a scrap of a hymn from the church had been washed up by the wind-powered rain, tossed at them like an empty crisp-packet then blown away again.

They'd moved well out of earshot, Lottie looking around.

Thinking that on a Sunday there were always ramblers, up from Macclesfield and Glossop, Manchester and Sheffield, relishing the dirty weather, the way ramblers did. If it belonged to anybody, Bridelow Moss belonged to the ramblers, and they made sure everybody knew it.

But this morning there were none.

The bog, treacle-black under surface rust, fading to a mouldering green where it joined the mist. And not a glimmer of anorak-orange.

As if, somehow, they knew. As if word had been passed round, silently, like chocolate, before the ramble: avoid the bog, avoid Bridelow Moss.

So it was just the three of them, shadows in the filth of the morning.

'Go on, then,' Matt was saying, trying to pump humour into his voice. 'Bugger off, the pair of you.'

Lottie put out a hand to squeeze his shoulder, then drew back because it would hurt him. Even a peck on the cheek hurt him these days.

It had all happened too quickly, a series of savage punches coming one after the other, faster and faster, until your body was numbed and your mind was concussed.

I don't think I need to tell you, do I, Mrs Castle.

That he's going to die? No. There were signs ... Oh, small signs, but ... I wanted him to come and tell you weeks ... months ago. He wouldn't. He has this ... what can I call it ... ? Fanatical exuberance? If he felt anything himself, he just overrode it. If there's something he wants to do, get out of his system, everything else becomes irrelevant. I did try, doctor, but he wouldn't come.

Please - don't blame yourself. I doubt if we'd have been able to do much, even if we'd found out two or three months before we did. However, this business of refusing medication . . Drugs.

It's not a dirty word, Mrs Castle. If you could persuade him, I think ...

He's angry, doctor. He won't take anything that he thinks will dull his perceptions. He's ... this is not anything you'd understand ... he's reaching out for something.

'Go on,' Matt said. 'Get in the van, in the dry. You'll know when to come back.'

And what did he mean by that?

As they walked away, the son and the widow-in-waiting, she saw him pull something from under the rug and tumble it out into his lap. It looked, in this light, like a big dead crow enfurled in its own limp wings.

The rain plummeted into Mart's blue denim cap, the one he wore on stage.

Dic said, 'He'll catch his dea—'

Stared, suddenly stricken, into his mother's eyes.

'I don't understand any more,' he said, panicked. 'Where he is ... I've lost him. Is that ... I mean, is it any place to be? In his state?'

'Move.' Lottie speaking in harsh monosyllables. 'Go.' The only way she could speak at all. Turning him round and prodding him towards the van.

'Is it the drugs? Mum, is it the drugs responsible for this?'

Lottie climbed into the van, behind the wheel. Slammed the door with both hands. Wound the window down, keeping the rain on her face. She said nothing.

Dic clambered in the other side. He looked more like her than Matt, the way his dark red hair curled, defying the flattening rain. Matt didn't have hair any more, under his blue denim cap.

'Mum?'

'No,' Lottie said. 'There's no drugs. Listen.'

It was beginning.

Faint and fractured, remote and eerie as the call of a marsh bird, familiar but alien - alien, now, to her.

But not, she was sure, to the Moss.

She saw that Dic was crying, helpless, shoulders quaking.

An aggressive thing, like little kids put on: I can't cope with this, I refuse to cope ... take it away, take it off me.

She couldn't. She turned away, stared hard at the scratched metal dashboard, blobbed with rain from the open window.

Because she didn't understand it either. Nor, she was sure, was she meant to. Which hurt. The sound which still pierced her heart, which had been filtered through her husband, like the blood in his veins, for as long as she'd known him and some years before that.

It had begun. For the last time?

Please, God.

She looked out of the window-space, unblinking, cheeks awash.

Fifty yards away, hunched in the peat, bound in cold winding-sheets of rain, the black bag under his arm like a third lung ...

... Matt Castle playing on his pipes.

Eerie as a marsh bird, and all the birds were silent in the rain.

The tune forming on the wind and falling with the water, the notes pure as tears and thin with illness.

Dic rubbed his eyes with his fingers. 'I don't know it,' he said. 'I don't know this tune.' Petulant. As if this was some sort of betrayal.

'He only wrote it ... a week or so ago,' Lottie said. 'When you were away. He said ...' Trying to smile. 'Said it just came to him. Actually, it came hard. He'd been working at it for weeks.'

Lament for the Man, he'd called it. She'd thought at first that that was partly a reference simply to their pub, The Man I'th Moss, adrift on the edge of the village, cut off after all these years from the brewery.

But no. It was another call to him, wherever he was. As if Matt was summoning his spirit home.

Or pleading for the Man to summon him. Matt.

'I can't stand this,' Dic said suddenly. Dic, who could play the pipes too, and lots of other instruments. Who was a natural - in his blood too, his dad more proud than he'd ever admit, but not so proud that he'd encouraged the lad to make a profession of it.

'Christ,' said Dic, 'is this bloody suicide? Is it his way of ...?'

'You know him better than that.' Figuring he just wanted a row, another way of coping with it.

'It's not as if he's got an audience. Only us.'

'Only us,' Lottie said, although she knew that was wrong. Matt believed - why else would he be putting himself through all this? - that there had to be an audience. But, it was true, they were not it.

'All right, what if he dies?' Dic said sullenly, brutally. 'What if he dies out there now?'

Lottie sighed. What a mercy that would be.

'What I mean is ... how would we even start to explain ... ?'

She looked at him coldly until he subsided into the passenger seat.

'Sorry,' he said.

The piping was high on the wind, so high it no longer seemed to be coming from the sunken shape in the wheelchair, from the black lung. She wondered if any people could hear it back in Bridelow. Certainly the ones who mattered wouldn't be able to, the old ones, Ma Wagstaff, Ernie Dawber. They'd be in church. Perhaps Matt had chosen his time well, so they wouldn't hear it, the ones who might understand.

Dic said, 'How long ... ?'

'Until he stops. You think this is easy for me, Dic? You think I believe in any of this flaming stupid ... Oh, my God!'

The piping had suddenly sunk an octave, meeting the drone, the marsh bird diving, or falling, shot out of the sky.

Lottie stopped breathing.

And then, with a subtle flourish of Matt's old panache, the tune was caught in mid-air, picked up and sent soaring towards the horizon. She wanted to scream, either with relief and admiration ... or with the most awful, inexcusable kind of disappointment.

Instead she said, briskly, 'I'm going to call Moira tonight, I've been remiss. I should have told her the situation. He wouldn't.'

Dic said, 'Bitch.'

'That's not fair.' He was twenty, he was impulsive, things were black and white. She leaned her head back over the seat. 'I can understand why she didn't want to get involved. OK, if she'd known about his illness she'd have been down here right away, but at the end of the day I don't think that would have helped. Do you?'

The end of the day. Funny how circumstances could throw such a sad and sinister backlight on an old cliché.

Dic said, 'It would have taken his mind off his condition, maybe.'

Lottie shook her head. 'It's an unhealthy obsession, this whole bogman business.' They'd never really spoken of this. She'd have made things worse. She probably knew that.'

He said sourly, 'Why? You mean ... because of his other unhealthy ...'

Lottie suddenly sat up in the driving seat and slapped his face, hard. 'Stop it. Stop it now.'

She closed her eyes on him. 'I'm tired.'

The pipes spun a pale filigree behind her sad, quivering eyelids, across the black moss where the rain blew in grey-brown gusts.

Take him, she prayed. To God. To the Man. Away.

Was this so wrong? Was it wrong, was it sinful, to pray to the Man?

God? The Man? The Fairies? Santa Claus? What did it matter?

A thrust of wind rattled the wound down window, pulling behind it an organ trail from St Bride's, the final fragment of a hymn. It lay for a moment in strange harmony upon the eddy of the pipes.

No, Lottie decided. It's not wrong.

Take him. Please.

Anybody.

CHAPTER II

Three hours.

Three hours and he hadn't touched her. Chrissie had heard of men who paid prostitutes just to sit on the edge of the bed for half the night and listen to them rambling on about their domestic problems.

Maybe she should demand overtime.

'The other one,' Roger said, 'the one they found in Lindow, I mean, they christened him Pete Marsh. They had this instant kind of affection for the thing.'

Chrissie had been Dr Roger Hall's temporary admin assistant for nearly a fortnight and was a lot more interested in him than bog people. She poured coffee, watching him through the motel mirror. Unfortunately, he looked even more handsome when he was worried.

'Well, I mean, there's no way,' Roger went on, 'that I feel any kind of affection for this one. It's about knowledge.'

'So why not just let him go? After all, he must be pretty bloody creepy to have around,' said Chrissie, who shared an office at the Field Centre with a woman called Alice. She tried to imagine the situation if Alice was a corpse.

'It's not creepy, exactly.' Roger sat up in bed, carefully arranging the sheet over his small paunch.

'Spooks me,' Chrissie said, 'to be honest. And I never have to see him, thank God.'

'No, it's just ... it's as if he knows how badly I need him. How much I need to know him, where he's coming from.'

'You're getting weird. You tell your wife stuff like this?'

'You're kidding. My wife's a doctor.'

That was a novel twist, Chrissie thought. My wife doesn't understand me - she's too intelligent. Chrissie didn't care for the underlying message Roger was sending out here. OK, he was tall, he had nice crinkles around his eyes, everybody said how dishy he looked on the telly. And OK, she was seducing him (with a bit of luck). But, in the end, one-to-one was the only kind of relationship Chrissie was basically interested in.

'No need to pout,' he said. 'I wasn't suggesting you were a bimbo. Just that a corpse is a corpse to Janet, regardless of its history.'

She brought him coffee. Outside, coming up to 7 p.m. on an autumn Sunday evening, traffic was still whizzing up the M6. Roger said he felt safe here: the one place he could count on people he knew not showing up was the local motor lodge.

Chrissie had booked in; he'd arrived later, leaving his car on the main service area, away from any lights.

He was a very cautious man. He was supposed to be in London until tomorrow evening, on Bogman business. They were re-examining the stomach-lining or something equally yucky.

'Roger, look ...' Chrissie lit a cigarette. 'I know how important he's been to you - for your career and everything. And I take your point about him giving the Field Centre a new lease of life - obvious we were being wound up, the amount of work we were actually doing ... I mean, I've been wound up before.'

'I bet you have,' Roger said, looking at her tits, putting down his coffee cup. But he still didn't reach out for her.

Chrissie tried to find a smile but she'd run out of them. 'Sunday,' she said sadly.

'Didn't know you were religious.'

'I'm not.' She'd just suddenly thought, What a way to spend a Sunday evening, in a motel no more than two miles

from where you live. With a bogman's minder. 'Do you touch him much?'

'You make it sound indecent. Of course I touch him. He feels a bit like a big leather cricket bag. You should pop in sometime, be an experience for you.'

Chrissie shuddered. „

He grinned. 'Not that you'd get much out of it. He hasn't got one any more.

'What, no ...?'

'Penis.'

Chrissie wrinkled her nose. 'Dissolved or something?'

'No, they must have chopped it off. And his balls. Part of the ritual.'

'Oh yucky.' Chrissie wrapped her arms around her breasts and eased back into bed, bottom first.

'What I like best about your body,' Roger said, not moving, 'is that it's so nice and pale. All over.'

'Actually, I had quite a deep tan in the summer. Still there, in places.'

'Not as deep as his tan, I'll bet. That's what you call being tanned. Literally. Tanned and pickled. It's what it does to them. The acids. I like you. You're pale.'

It's not healthy, Chrissie thought, the way he brings everything back to that ancient thing. It's like 'Love me, love my bogman Oh, well... 'Roger,' she said hesitantly, looking at the gap between them, probably just about the size of the bloody bogman. 'Can I ask you something ?'

'Sure,' he said tiredly, 'but if you want me to do anything complicated, you'll have to ...'

'Don't worry. I just want to know something about you and ... him ... Just to clear the air. Then maybe we can relax.. Thing is, there've not been all that many bogmen found, have there? All right, that Pete Marsh, and before him a bunch of them in Denmark. But when one's discovered in this country, it's still a major find, isn't it?'

'In archaeological terms, he's worth more than the average Spanish galleon, yes.'

'Hot property.'

'Very.'

'So what,' said Chrissie very slowly, 'is he really doing in a little-known university field centre behind a school playing-field in the North of England? Why did the British Museum experts and all these London people ... why did they let you bring him back?'

Roger's eyes closed in on one another. This is where he starts lying, Chrissie deduced. The more university degrees a man had, she'd discovered, the more hopeless he was at concealing untruths.

'What I mean is,' she said, airing the bits of knowledge she'd rapidly absorbed from the Press cuttings file, 'they like to keep these things, don't they? They go to Harwell and Oxford for this radiocarbon dating, and then ...'

'Well, he's been to Harwell. He's been to Oxford. And he's been to the British Museum.'

'And he's come back,' said Chrissie. 'Why's that?'

The Archdeacon poured himself a cognac, offered the bottle to the Rev. Joel Beard but wasn't entirely surprised when Joel declined.

Only we poor mortals have need of this stuff, the Archdeacon thought. He's above all such vices.

Sadly, he thought.

Between them on the leather three-seater Chesterfield sat a shining white dome, like a strange religious artefact.

It was Joel's crash-helmet.

He's deliberately placed it between us, the Archdeacon thought. He's heard about me. 'And so you know the place well, I gather,' he said hoarsely. 'You know Hans. And his family.'

'Well, I remember his daughter, Catherine,' Joel said. 'A wilful girl.'

All right, thought the Archdeacon. So you're one hundred per cent hetero. I can take a hint, damn you.

He edged back into his corner of the Chesterfield and looked into his drink, at the pictures on the wall, out of the window at the bare front garden, sepia under a Victorian streetlamp. Anywhere but at Golden Joel, the diocesan Adonis.

'Of course,' Joel said, 'he's been in better health.'

'Erm ... quite. And it isn't, you know, that we think he's failing in some way. He's been an excellent man. In his time. He's a very ... tolerant man. Perhaps that's part of the problem. Ah ... not that I'm decrying his tolerance ...'

The Archdeacon snatched a sip of his brandy. Oh dear. Why did he let Joel Beard do this to him?

Joel smiled. Or at least he exposed both rows of teeth. 'Look, perhaps I can clarify some of this, Simon. I don't think tolerance is such a fundamental virtue any more. I think we've been tolerant for so long that it looks as if ... I mean, what, increasingly, is the public's idea of a typical Anglican clergyman?'

You dare, you brute, the Archdeacon thought. You dare ...

'A ditherer,' said Joel. 'An ineffectual ditherer.'

'Oh.' The Archdeacon relaxed. 'Quite.'

'There's a big game going on, you know, Simon. We - the Church - ought to be out there. But where are we?'

'Ah ... where indeed?'

'We aren't on the pitch. We aren't even on the touchline.'

'Perhaps not.'

'We're in the clubhouse making the bloody tea,' said Joel Beard.

'Well, I ...'

'There's real evil about, you know. It's all around us and it's insidious. A burglary somewhere in Britain every thirty seconds or so. An assault. A rape. A husband beating his wife, sexually abusing his small children. We talk of social problems. Or if we use the word evil, it's social evil ... We're making excuses for them and we're excusing ourselves. When I was a gym teacher ...'

Oh, please ... The Archdeacon saw beneath the cassock to the tensed stomach and the awesome golden chest.

'... before each rugby lesson, there'd be the same pathetic collection of little notes. "Dear Sir, Please excuse my son from games, he has a minor chest infection." This sort of nonsense. Same ones every other week The wimps. Well I'm afraid that's what we look like sometimes. "Dear People, Please excuse me from confronting Satan this week, but my steeple's developed stone-fatigue and I have to organize a garden party." This is what we've come to. We've reached the point where we're ashamed to wield the weapons forged for us by God.'

The Archdeacon refused to allow himself to contemplate the weapon God had forged for Joel Beard. He took a mouthful of cognac and held it there while Joel talked of the Church's manifest obligation to confront the Ancient Enemy again. Lord, but he was a magnificent sight when fired-up - that profile, hard as bronze, those rigid golden curls ...

Upstairs, in his files', the Archdeacon kept seven photocopies of the famous picture of Joel in the Sheffield Star - the one of him brandishing his outsize pectoral cross. At the time this dramatic pose had only reinforced the Diocesan consternation expressed when Joel, still at college, had been on local radio threatening physical disruption of certain Hallowe'en festivities planned by the university students' union.

The Archdeacon had managed to placate the Bishop, who'd been suggesting immediate efforts ought to be made to interest this turbulent mature student in a period of foreign missionary work - the Colombian jungles or somewhere equally dangerous.

Known his type before, the Bishop fumed. More trouble than they're worth, these self-publicists. Nonsense, said the Archdeacon. With respect, men like Beard must be considered the Church's Future ... if the Church is to have one.

During these discussions about his future, Joel had apparently received a series of telephone calls alerting him to inbred evil in a small village in the Southern Pennines. Anonymous, of course. But weren't they always? And wasn't the Archdeacon himself becoming just a little tired of Hans Gruber, the old-fashioned rural priest treading his own sheep-tracks, totally immersed in his parish, oblivious to the Diocese?

'... mustn't be afraid to get physical.' Joel thumped the back of the Chesterfield, and the Archdeacon almost fainted.

Or, indeed, metaphysical ...'

'Well, then ...' The Archdeacon's hand was shaking so much he had to put down his glass. 'If you're determined to face this thing head-on, we'll delay no longer. There's just this

question of accommodation in Bridelow. Not had a curate for so long we let the house go.'

'I understand,' said Joel, 'that there's accommodation in the church itself.'

'In the ch ... ? You don't mean this ... priest's hole sort of place under the floor? You're not serious.'

'Well,' said Joel. 'Short-term, I see no reason why not. It was originally intended as emergency accommodation for visiting clergy, I gather. And how often does a priest get the opportunity to experience a night in the House of God?'

'Quite,' said the Archdeacon. 'Quite.' He was remembering the old story about an itinerant Bishop of Sheffield a century or so ago, who'd spent a night under the church at Bridelow and was supposed to have gone potty. Silly story. But still, was it wise for Joel to sleep down there? Alone?

The Archdeacon tingled.

Finally Chrissie said, 'Admit it, you're getting a bit obsessed.'

'That's ridiculous.' Not much conviction there. 'I'm just ... stressed, that's all. I'm not good at deception.'

'No, you're not.'

'I meant with Janet. Look, would you mind putting that thing out.' He reached over her, took the cigarette from between her fingers and dropped it in an ashtray on the bedside ledge.

Well!

'Honestly, it's not an obsession,' he said. 'Not the way you think. Look, I'll tell you, OK. But you've got to keep it to yourself. Not a word, OK? Thing is, I've ... I've had approaches.'

'Lucky you.' When, a few minutes ago, he'd put a hand experimentally on her thigh, it had felt like a lukewarm, wet sponge.

He said, 'When you were young ...'

'Thank you very much, Roger.'

'No, no ... I mean, when you were a child ... Did you ever read Stanage's books?'

'Sta ... Oh, John Peveril Stanage.' She felt a mild stirring of interest; not his usual type of stultifying archaeological tome.

'Well, who didn't?'

'He wanted to see me,' Roger said. 'Or rather he wanted me to go and see him.'

'Good God, is he still alive?'

'Very much so. Not yet sixty, I'd guess. 'Course, he's been a published writer since his early twenties, which makes him ...'

'Very rich, I suppose,' Chrissie said.

'You wouldn't know it to see where he lives - end of one of those run-down Georgian terraces in Buxton. Sort of seedy - palatial inside, but I'm assured he's loaded. You remember much about his stuff?'

'I wasn't much of a reader,' Chrissie admitted. 'But you didn't need to be much of a reader to get into his books. Really exciting ... and interesting, you know? Because they were usually about places we knew. King Arthur in Manchester, I remember that one - Castle Fields, it was called. I think. That right?'

'That's right.'

'And The Bridestones'.' Chrissie sat up in bed. 'Gosh, yes. And Blue John ... Blue John's Way? God, I remember when I was ...'

'Yes, thank you, Chrissie. Anyway, turns out Stanage is quite a serious antiquarian, in an amateur sort of way. Obsessed for a long time with the Celtic history of the North-West - albeit in a fanciful, mystical fashion.' Roger sniffed. 'So naturally he's quite excited about our friend from the peat.'

God, Chrissie thought. Another one. What is it with this corpse?

'... and he's talking about establishing some son of foundation ... through the University ... to set up an official Celtic museum ... Keep this under your hat, won't you, Chrissie?'

I'm not wearing a bloody hat, she thought. I'm not wearing anything, in case you haven't noticed.

'... with the bog body as a centrepiece.'

'Oh.' She was starting to see. 'Money?'

'Big money,' said Roger. 'And Stanage's foundation would also support continued research, which would ...'

'Keep us all in work.'

'To say the least. So, naturally, I'm keeping him to myself. We're going to work out the logistics of it between us and then present a complete package, an arrangement nobody - not the University, nor the British Museum - can afford to turn down.'

'And what does he get out of it? Stanage? I mean, what does the great man get out of dealing exclusively with you and keeping it all under wraps until you're ready to turn it to your advantage?

'Er ... He just likes being in on it, I think,' Roger said, trying to look as if this aspect hadn't occurred to him before. 'He gets access to the bogman pretty much whenever he wants.'

Which explained why Roger had been so keen to bring the body back to the Field Centre. Chrissie gave him a wry look he didn't appear to notice.

'So I'm having to keep all these balls in the air ... juggle Stanage, the University, the British Museum ... and now those sodding Bridelow people, who want the bloody thing put back.'

'Sorry?' Chrissie had been thinking ruefully about balls in the air. 'Who wants it back?'

Roger snorted. 'They're superstitious. We know that our friend ... him ...that he was sacrificed for some reason. Maybe to persuade the gods to keep the Romans at bay, after the Celts were driven out of the fertile lowlands of Cheshire and Clwyd and into the hills.'

'Barbaric times,' Chrissie said, thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger in skins and a headband.

'So, incredible as it may seem that serious archaeological research in this day and age should still be complicated by this kind of crap - it appears some people in Bridelow feel that by taking the thing away we'll bring bad luck down on the village. As simple and as primitive as that.'

'Sort of like Tutankhamen's tomb?'

'If you like.'

Chrissie wanted to laugh. It was pre-Schwarzenegger. More like one of those old Hammer films, Peter Cushing as Roger Hall.

'Keep getting pestered by this man Dawber. Who, admittedly, was quite useful at first. Used to be head teacher at the local school. Sort of... amateur historian.'

Roger said the words 'amateur historian' like other people would say 'dog turd'.

'Oh, of course, I know him,' Chrissie said. 'Mr Dawber. Tubby little chap. Rather cute. I suppose you think he's an eccentric, whereas Stanage ...'

'Stanage knows," Roger said strangely. He seemed to remember his coffee. It was cold. He put the cup down.

Looked uncomfortable. 'Dawber's trouble. He says we should - get this - now we've done all our tests and found out everything we can, we should put the thing back in Bridelow Moss, in a secret location of their choosing - this is the bloody villagers - on the scientific basis that if the peat has preserved him for two thousand years it's probably the best way of keeping him in good nick for another two thousand ...'

He laughed bitterly. 'The crackpot elements you have to deal with when you unearth something that catches the public imagination.'

Oh, you'll deal with crackpots, Roger, Chrissie thought. You'll deal with crackpots if there's something in it for you.

After about half an hour, Roger tried again.

Disastrously.

Stress, he explained. The stress of keeping your balls in the air.

They lay in the dark and talked some more. Talked about her ex-husband, who drank. Talked about his wife, who was brilliant and capable and seemed to power an entire hospital on an average of twenty-eight hours' sleep per week.

Talked about him, Roger ... and him, him.

'Look ... what I said about Stanage ... forget it, will you? Forget I even mentioned Stanage.'

'All right,' Chrissie said.

forehead, Roger said to the ceiling, 'Sometimes ... when Janet's on nights at the General ... I wake up in the early hours, feeling really sort of cold and clammy.'

Which didn't exactly augur well, Chrissie thought, for the next few hours.

'And you know ... I can almost feel it in the bed with me. Lumps of it.'

Jesus. She said, 'Lumps?'

'Peat. Lumps of peat.' Roger slid a damp and hopeless hand along her left thigh. 'That's stress for you.'

CHAPTER III

CENTRAL SCOTLAND

The Earl's place was nineteenth-century Gothic, a phoney Dracula's Castle with a lofty Great Hall that stank, the American thought, of aristocratic bullshit, domination and death.

He could tell the woman hated it too. Especially the skulls. Or maybe she had something else on her mind. She was worried; he could tell that much. Still, he wasn't about to miss this opportunity.

He kept glancing at her over dinner at the long baronial table, a couple of hours ago. All that wonderful long black hair, with the single streak of grey. He'd never seen her before, not in concert, not even on the TV, but he knew the face from the album covers, and he'd know the voice.

She was standing alone by the doorway, frowning at the gruesome trophies on the walls. Not talking to anyone, although there were people all around her, expensively dressed people, crystal glasses hanging from their fingers like extra jewellery.

He supposed she'd be a couple of years older than he was, which only added to that mysterious lustrous glamour. Pretty soon she'd pick up her guitar, and take her place on the central dais to sing for them all. Which didn't give him much time.

What he needed was a neat, elegant opening line. Kind of imagining - her general aura being so magical - that one would come naturally.

He carried his glass across, stood alongside her, following her gaze around the overloaded walls.

He said, 'Uh ...'

And followed up with something so dumb he could only hope to attribute it to the impact of fifteen-year-old malt on an uncultured brain.

'Impressive, huh?' he said.

She looked at him. Coldly. Looked at him like she was thinking. Yeah, well you would have to be impressed by this kind of Victorian shit. Where you come from, pal, this most likely is what passes for ancient, right?

'After its fashion,' she said mildly.

From the middle of a cluster of people, the Earl was watching them. Or rather, watching him, because he was American and therefore could maybe buy this place and everything else of its kind between here and Pitlochry many times over.

The Earl was a sleek man, English all the way down to the tip of his sporran. But the Earl wanted to be a real Celt and no doubt was counting on the American wanting that too, all the way down to the deepest part of his wallet.

A discreet buff-coloured card, handed to him several weeks ago by his mother - who also, unfortunately, was his boss - had said:

THE CELTIC BOND: A major conference of politicians and

poets, writers, broadcasters and business people, to establish

an international support mechanism for the regeneration of a

submerged European culture. Hosted, at his Scottish family

seat, by ...

'Shit,' he'd said in some dismay. 'You're kidding, aren't you?'

She wasn't. Since she lost the use of her legs, the single most important element in his mother's life had become her Scottish ancestry. 'We are Celts, Mungo,' she'd say. 'Above all, never forget that.' By which she meant her side of the

family; hence he bore her family name rather than that of his long-gone, long-forgotten father.

'If I can say this,' he said now, politely, trying to recover some credibility, 'you don't seem too relaxed.'

'No?' She wore a long, black dress, very plain. He could sense no perfume.

'I mean I can't imagine you'd be nervous about performing.'

She wasn't looking at him. She was still looking at the heads. Huge sets of antlers protruding from bleached fragments of skull, all over three walls, from just above head-height to within a couple of feet of the lavishly moulded ceiling.

'And I guess you aren't the nervous kind, anyway,' he said. 'So ...'

Wherever you sat, the remains of three or four dozen butchered stags were always in view. On the central wooden dais, where she'd sit to sing, she'd probably feel herself constricted by some grisly necklace of bone.

Gross.

'I was just wondering,' she said at last, 'when it must have been clear he wasn't going to go away, 'why people should be proud of being a Celt. Killing things for fun and showing off about it.'

A good work popped up in the American's head, like somebody had flashed him a prompt-card.

'Pantheistic,' he said. 'The old Celts were highly pantheistic. So I'm told.'

'That means they had respect for animals,' she said scornfully. She had a soft Scottish voice but not too much of an accent. 'A bit like your Red Indians.'

'Native Americans.' He smiled. 'To be politically and ethnically correct.' The smile was supposed to say, I may be devilishly attractive, with my untamed curly black hair, this cool white tuxedo, thistle in the buttonhole. But you can trust me. I'm a sincere guy. 'Can I get you another drink?'

'No,' she said. 'No, thank you.'

'I ... ah ...' He hesitated. 'I have a couple of your albums.'

'Oh?' She didn't seem too interested. 'Which ones?'

'Well, uh, my favourite, I guess, is still the one you did with The Philosopher's Stone. That'd be quite some years ago.'

'Oh.' She glanced away, as if looking for someplace else to put herself.

'Uh, I also have your first solo album,' he said quickly. 'How I recognized you. From the sleeve. You haven't changed.'

'Oh, I've changed, believe me. Look, I ...'

'You never did cut your hair, though,' he said, urbanely displaying his knowledge of the album's prime cut.

'What?'

'"Never let them cut your hair,'" he quoted, '"or tell you where ..." Listen, I ... I just wanted to say it's real good to meet you ... Moira. No one said you'd be here. Makes me glad I came after all.'

She said, 'I'm a last-minute replacement. For Rory McBain. He's sick. We have the same agent.'

A flunkey needed to come past with a tray of drinks, and he took the opportunity to manoeuvre her into a corner, unfortunately under two pairs of huge yellowing antlers. He said, 'Listen, that album - with the Stone - it had some magic.'

'He has bronchitis,' Moira said.

'Huh?'

'Rory McBain.'

He smiled. 'See, when I hear you sing, it always sounds to me like...'

'That album,' she said with an air of finality, 'was a mistake. I was too young, too stupid, and I never should have left Matt Castle's band.'

'Huh?'

She shook her head, wide-eyed, like she was waking up.

'Matt Castle?' He had his elbow resting on a wooden ledge below another damned antlered skull.

'He was ... He was just the guy who taught me about traditional music when I was a wee girl. Look, I don't know why I said that, I ...'

Her poise wavered. She looked suddenly confused and vulnerable. Something inside of him melted with pure longing while something else - something less admirable but more instinctive - tensed like a big cat ready to spring. The album cover hadn't lied. Even after all these years, she was sensational.

'Traditional music,' he said, looking into her brown eyes. 'That's interesting, because that's all you do these days, right? You used to write all your own songs, and now you're just performing these traditional folksongs, like you're feeling there's something that old stuff can teach you. Is that this, uh, Matt Castle? His influence?'

'No ... No, Matt was a long time ago, when I was in Manchester. He ... Look, if you don't mind ...'

He was losing her. He couldn't bear it. He tried to hold her eyes, babbling. 'Manchester? That's the North of England? See, why I find that interesting, this guy was telling us at the conference this afternoon, how the English are the least significant people - culturally that is - in these islands. Unlike the Scottish, the Welsh, the Irish, the English are mongrels with no basic ethnic tradition...'

She smiled faintly. 'Look, I'm sorry, I ---'

'See this guy, this Irish professor - McGann, McGuane? - he said there was nothing the English could give us. Best they could do is return what they took, but it's soiled goods. At which point this other guy, this writer .... No, first off it was this Cornish bard, but he didn't make much sense ... then, this writer - Stanton, Stanhope? - he's on his feet, and is he mad ...This guy's face is white. I thought he was gonna charge across the room and bust the first guy, the professor, right in the mouth. He's going, Listen, where I come from we got a more pure, undiluted strain of, uh, heritage, tradition ...than you'll find anywhere in Western Europe. And the guy, this Stanfield, he's from the North ...'

Moira Cairns said, 'I'm sorry, I really do have to make a phone call.'

And she turned and glided out of the doorway, like the girl in the Irish folksong who went away from this guy and mov'd through the fair.

' ...the North of England,' the American said to the stag's head.

This wasn't a new experience for him, but it was certainly rare. You blew it, he told himself, surprised.

She could feel him watching her through the doorway, all the way down the passage.

Was he the one?

She took a breath of cool air. The man was a fanatic. Probably one of those rich New Yorkers bankrolling the IRA. Surely there was some other unattached female he could find to sleep with tonight. Why were fanatics always promiscuous?

And was he the one whose examination she could feel all over her skin, like she was being touched up by hands in clinical rubber gloves?

'Phone?' she said to a butler-type person in the marble-tiled hallway.

'Next to the drawing room, madam, I'll take you.'

'Don't bother yourself, I'll find it.'

Dong.

She'd found herself, for no obvious reason, while this smoothie American was trying to come on to her, hearing the name Matt Castle, then saying it out aloud apropos of nothing ... and then ...

Dong.

This was the dong. The hollow chime. Not the link, not the ping.

Aw, hey, no, please ...

The phone turned out to be in the room where she'd left her guitar, where it would be safe - the black case lying in state, like a coffin, across two Jacobean chairs. Safe here, she'd thought, surely. This is a castle. But she'd take it with her when she'd made her call.

She stood in front of the phone, picked it up and put it back a couple of times. She didn't know who to ring.

Malcolm. If in doubt, call Malcolm. She was planning, anyway, to strangle the bastard for tonight. 'You'll enjoy it,' he'd insisted. 'You'll find it absolutely fascinating. Rory's mortified.'

She rang him at home in Dumbarton. 'Malcolm,' she said, 'I may never convince myself to forgive you for this. I may even cast about in the shark-infested waters you inhabit for a new agent.

He didn't say a word. Had he heard all this before from her? More than once? Was she becoming querulous? Creeping middle age? She felt tired, woozy. She shook herself, straightened her back, raised her voice.

'Listen, there are so-called Celts here not only from Ireland and Wales and Brittany, but from Switzerland and Italy - with Mafia connections, no doubt - and America and some wee place nudging up to Turkey. And they are, to a man, Malcolm - they are a bunch of pretentious, elitist, possibly racist wankers.'

'Racism?' Malcolm said. 'I thought it was about money. EC grants. Cultural exchanges. More EC grants ...'

'Aye, well ...'

'Is it not a good fee for you?'

'Is it the same fee as Rory's fee would have been?'

'Oh, Moira, come now ...'

'Forget it. Listen, the real reason I disturbed you on the sabbath ...'

'Not my sabbath, as it happens.'

' ... is my answering machine is on the blink and I suspect someone's trying to get hold of me, and it's no' my daddy because I called him.'

'Nothing urgent that I'm aware of, Moira, don't you worry your head."

'No messages?'

'None at all.' He paused. 'You aren't feeling unwell again, you?'

'I'm fine.' Her left hand found the guitar case, clutched at it. She had that feeling again, of being touched. She shivered. She felt cold and isolated but also crowded in, under detailed examination. Too many impressions: the hollow chime, the eyes, the touch - impersonal, like a doctor's. Too much, too close. She had to get out of here.

'It's none of my business, of course,' said Malcolm, who believed in the Agent's Right to Know, 'but what was it exactly that made you think someone wanted to contact you?'

'Just a feeling.'

'Just a feeling?'

'Aye,' she said wearily. There was nothing touching her now. The room was static and heavy, no atmosphere. The furniture lumpen, without style. A museum. Nothing here.

Nothing ... right?

He said, 'You are a strange, witchy woman, Moira.'

'Malcolm,' Moira said. 'Go fuck yourself, huh?'