The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Book of Bridelow.

THE BREWERY

Fine beers have been brewed in the Bridelow area since time immemorial, the most famous being the almost-black Bridelow Bitter.

This, or something similar, was first produced commercially, on an relatively small scale, by Elsie Berry and her sons in the late seventeenth century, using a species of aromatic bog-myrtle as a preservative. The Berry family began by providing ale for the Bridelow pub. The Man I'th Moss, but demand grew swiftly in communities up to fifteen miles away.

The Bridelow Brewery as we know it today was founded in the early nineteenth century by Thomas Horridge, a businessman from Chesterfield who bought out the Berry Family and whose enterprise was to provide employment for many generations of Bridelow folk. He at once began work on the construction of the first proper road across the Moss to facilitate the movement of his brewery wagons.

Descendants of Thomas Horridge continued to develop the industry, and the family became Bridelow's greatest benefactors, building the village hall, enabling major repairs to be carried out to the ancient church and continuing to facilitate new housing as recently as the 1950s.

However ...

CHAPTER VIII

In the bar at The Man I'th Moss, lunchtime, Young Frank Manifold said, in disgust, 'Bloody gnat's piss!'

And angrily pushed his glass away.

'I'll have draught Bass next time,' Young Frank said. Never thought I'd be saying that in this pub. Never.'

'Eh, tha's just bitter, lad.' said Frank Manifold Snr, who preferred Scotch anyway. 'Tha's a right to feel bitter, mind, I'm not saying tha's not... Know what they've done, now, Ernie? Only paid off our drivers and replaced um wi' their own blokes.'

'Ken and Peter?'

'Paid off! Cut down lorries from five to two - bigger uns, like. Needed experienced HGV drivers, they reckoned. Makes you spit.'

Ernie, who also was on whisky, had a sip out of Young Frank's beer glass. 'Lad's right, I'm afraid,' he said. 'It's gone off.'

'Well, thank you!' Young Frank said devoutly. 'Thank you very much, Mr Dawber.'

'Only just don't go shouting it around the place,' Ernie muttered. 'Lottie's got to sell the stuff and she's enough problems.'

'No, she doesn't,' said Young Frank, back-row smart-arse in Ernie's top class fourteen years ago. 'Doesn't have to sell it at all no more. Free house, int it?'

Lottie wasn't here this lunchtime. Stan Burrows, who'd also been made redundant from the brewery, was minding the bar. Stan said, 'I heard as how Gannons was kicking up, claiming they'd been sabotaged, not given proper recipe, like. Threatening legal action, what I heard.'

'Balls,' said Young Frank, glaring at his discarded glass. 'They don't give a shit.'

Ernie Dawber, on his usual stool at the end of the bar, by the telephone, pondered this. The way he saw it, there was no way the Horridge family could have got away with not providing Gannons with the correct recipe. And why should they want to, with Shaw Horridge on the Board?

Yet it was a fact. Since the brewery had been taken over,

the stuff had been slowly shedding its distinctive flavour.

Surprising, because it was well known that Gannons, whose bestselling product was a fizzy lager with a German name produced down Matlock way, had been anxious for some time to acquire their own genuine, old-established Real Ale - and would therefore be expected to treat Bridelow beer with more than a modicum of respect.

Ernie decided he'd better go up to the Hall one night and have a bit of a chat with Shaw Horridge or his mother. Bridelow Black Bitter had a reputation. Even if the brewery was in new hands, even if there'd been this swingeing 'rationalization', which meant firing half the lads, it was still Bridelow beer.

Gnat's piss! By 'eck, he'd never thought to hear that.

When his daughter rang from Oxford, in the early afternoon, the Rector barely made it to the phone in time.

'Were you in the garden?' Catherine asked him suspiciously, and Hans didn't deny it. It had taken him almost a minute to hobble from the kitchen to the study.

Pointless, however, trying to conceal anything from Cathy. 'How's the knee?' she demanded at once and with a certain menace.

'Oh,' Hans said, as airily as he could manage with clenched teeth. 'Could be worse, you know.'

'I've no doubt that it could, Pop. But worse than what is what I'd like to know.'

Hans tried to keep from screaming out loud as he fell into the window chair, pulling the phone on to his knees.

Cathy said, 'I don't suppose you'd even tell me if you'd had to have a Zimmer frame screwed into the back of the pulpit.'

The still-aggressive sun, having gouged chunks out of the church wall, began to attack the study window, and when the Rector twisted away from it, his left knee felt like a slab of volcanic rock with a core of molten lava.

'Well, actually,' he said, abandoning pretence with a sigh, 'it couldn't be a lot worse.'

'That's it,' his daughter said. 'I'm on my way. Pop. Expect me for supper.'

'No, no, no. Your studies ... whatever they are.'

Cathy said crisply, 'In a post-graduate situation, as I keep explaining, you get a fair bit of leeway. I'm coming up.'

'No. Listen. You don't understand.' Raising his voice, trying to shout down the pain as much as her. 'I'm getting a lot of help. The Mothers' Union ... terribly kind, and ... look, when I need you, I promise I'll be in touch. You know I will.'

He swallowed a great slab of breath and bit his tongue, jamming his palm over the mouthpiece just in time. Change the subject. Talk about something else. 'Erm, Matt Castle ... Poor Matt died on Sunday night.'

'Oh, no.'

'It was a mercy, Catherine.'

'Yes, I suppose it would be. Did ... ?'

'Oh, very quick. In the end, he spent no more than a few hours in hospital. Kept signing himself out, you see. Determined to die in Bridelow. He was even out on the Moss yesterday morning, I'm told, with Lottie and the boy. Brave man. Poor Matt.'

'What's going to happen to the pub?'

'She'll stay on, I imagine. For a while. You know what she's like. Terribly independent. Old Mrs Wagstaff sent one of her special potions across, to help her sleep. Lottie bunged it

back at once, with Willie. She's very resistant to all that.'

'When's the funeral?'

'Friday afternoon.' .

'You're going to have difficulty, aren't you? Especially if it gets colder.'

Putting her finger on it, as usual. So Hans had to come out with what, apart from the pain, was on his mind. 'Cathy, they've given me a curate.'

'Oh,' she said, surprised. 'Well, you certainly could do win

the help. But it, er ... that could be a headache, couldn't it?'

'It was only a matter of time,' Hans said, 'parish this size. Suppose I've been holding out. Putting it off. That is, I realise this sort of thing - new chaps - has always taken care of itself in the past. I mean, I myself was not ... well, not, perhaps, the man they would have chosen at the time. But one gets acclimatized. Headache? Hmm ... let's hope not.'

'Anybody I know?'

'Oh, a young fellow, few months out of college. Simon's very keen ... Well, actually not that young. Late twenties, I suppose. Used to be a teacher. Joel Beard, his name. Pleasant enough lad. Slightly earnest, but so many of them are, aren't they?'

Cathy said, 'Jesus Christ.'

Hans didn't say anything. His daughter never blasphemed for effect.

'I was at the high school with him.' Hans could hear her frowning. 'For a year or two. That is, he was four or five years in front of me. He was Head Boy. One of those who takes it seriously. Very authoritative, very proper. Seemed more of a grown-up than some of the teachers, do you know what I mean? Most of the girls were crazy about him. But I was never into Greek gods.'

She stopped. 'Pop, listen, you do know he was at St Oswald's, don't you?'

Yes, he did. He was surprised, though, that she knew the significance of this. 'It's not necessarily a drawback, you know, Cathy.'

He tried to straighten his right leg and, although there was no great pain in this one, the right knee fought him all the way. Both knees now. God save us. Wheelchair job soon. Or one could go into hospital and leave Joel Beard in charge.

'Simon thinks he's a star,' he said. 'Which means, I suppose, that the silly sod's fallen in love with him. He used, apparently ... Joel, this is ... he used to be some sort of Born Again Christian. Before he decided to go straight, as it were.'

You call two years at St Oswald's going straight? The most notoriously fundamentalist theological college in the country?'

'I like to think I'm broadminded,' Hans said.

'Sure, but how broadminded is Ma Wagstaff?'

'Look,' Hans said, 'people adjust. Bridelow adjusts people. I'd rather have a fundamentalist or a charismatic than some bureaucrat with a briefcase and a mobile phone.

Anyway, the Diocese likes him. "He's tough, he's athletic" - this is Simon talking - "and he's bringing God back into the arena." Bit of muscle. They're into that these days. The anti-pansy lobby. Even Simon, ironically. I mean, all right, I could refuse him, I could tell them to take him back, say he doesn't fit it ... but somebody's going to ask, why doesn't he fit? And anyway, who's to say ... ? They might not be ... orthodox here, but they have a strong faith and strong, simple principles. Ma Wagstaff? Very broadminded in some ways.'

'Hmmm,' said Cathy, unconvinced.

'However, rest assured, I won't let him take Matt's funeral. I suspect the ladies have plans.'

'God, no, you mustn't let him do that.'

'So if I have to go out there on a pair of crutches ... or a Zimmer frame.'

'Don't you go talking about Zimmer frames. Pop.'

'You did.'

'That's when I'll come,' Catherine decided. 'I'll come on Wednesday night. I'll get you through the funeral. I won't have you talking about Zimmer frames.'

'Now, look ...'

'I'm not going to argue, my phone bill's getting ridiculous. I'll see you Wednesday night.'

And she hung up on him.

'Thank you,' the Rector said with resignation into the dead phone. 'I suppose.'

The Hall had once been surrounded by parkland, although now it just looked like ordinary fields with a well-ordered assembly of mature trees - beech and sycamore and horse-chestnut.

The trees were higher now, but not yet high enough to obscure the soaring stone walls of the brewery, four storeys high, an early Victorian industrial castle, as proud and firm in its setting as St Bride's Church.

She hated it now.

You could not see the brewery from the drawing room. But with all the trees nearly bare again, Eliza Horridge, from her window seat, could see the village in detail. She supposed she'd always preferred autumn and winter for this very reason: it brought her closer to Bridelow.

The sad irony of this made her ache. On the night the redundancies had been announced, she'd gone - rather bravely, she thought - down to the post office to buy some stamps which she didn't need. She'd just had to get it over, face the hostility.

Except there hadn't been any. Nobody had screamed Judas at her, nobody had ignored her or been short with her.

But nobody had said a word about the jobs either. They didn't blame her personally. But Liz Horridge blamed herself and since that night had never been back into Bridelow.

Self-imposed exile in this warm and shabby-luxurious house with its pictures and memories of Arthur Horridge.

Self imposed; could go out whenever she wanted. Couldn't she?

She snatched up the phone on its second ring to wrench her mind from what it couldn't cope with.

'Yes?' The number was ex-directory. There were too people down there with whom she could no longer bear to speak.

'Yes? Hello? Is that you, Shaw?'

Something told her she was in for a shock, and her eyes clutched at the view of the village for support, following the steep cobbled street past the pub, past the post office, past

the line of tiny stone cottages to the churchyard.

'Liiiiz ...' Mellifluously stretching the word, as he used to, into an embrace. 'Super!' Shattering her.

'Thought I saw you last week, m'girl, in Buxton. Was in a wine bar. Thought you came up the street. No?'

'Couldn't have been,' she scraped out. 'Never go ...'

'Thought you sensed me ... turned your head so sharply.'

'... to Buxton.' Her voice faded.

'And looked at the window of the wine bar, with a sort of sadness in your eyes. Couldn't see me, of course.'

She stared down at the village, but it was like watching a documentary on the television. Or a soap opera, because she could identify most of the people and could map out the paths

of their lives from their movements, between the post office, the pub and the church.

'... perhaps it wasn't you, after all,' he said.

She could even hear their voices when the wind was in the right direction. And yes, it was a lot like the television - a thick glass screen between them, and she was very much alone, and the screen was growing darker.

'Or perhaps it was you as you used to be. Those chestnut curls of yore.'

Her hand went automatically to her hair, as coarse and dry now as the moorland grasses. She grabbed a handful of it to stop the hand shaking.

'One wonders,' he mused. 'Your hair grey now, Liz? Put on weight or angular and gaunt? I'd so much like to see.'

'What do you want?' Liz croaked.

'If you were with me, I suppose you'd keep in trim, dye your hair, have your skin surgically stretched. Probably wouldn't work, but you'd try. If you were with me.'

'How dare you?' Stung at last into anger. 'Where did you get this number?'

He laughed.

She felt alone and cold, terribly exposed, almost ill with it. 'What are you trying to do?'

He said, 'How's dear old Ma these days? Is she well?'

She said nothing.

'Perhaps you don't see her. Or any of them. The word is you've become something of a recluse. All alone in your rotting mansion.'

'What nonsense,' she said breathlessly.

'Also, one hears the Mothers' Union isn't as well supported as it was. Sad, secular times, Liz. What's it all coming to? Silly old bats, eh?'

'They had your measure,' Liz said, with a spurt of spirit. 'They saw you off.'

'Oh, long time ago. Things change. Barriers weaken, old sweetheart, I've been thinking, why don't we meet up?'

'Certainly not!'

'Love to be able to come to Buxton, wouldn't you? Love to be smart and sprightly and well-dressed. Give anything to have those chestnut curls back. Perhaps it was you after all, sitting in your emotional prison and day-dreaming of Buxton. Perhaps that's what I saw. Perhaps you projected yourself. Ever try that, Liz? Should do. Could be a way out - send the spirit, give the body the bottle to go for it. Perhaps I'll drop in on you. Like that, would you?'

'You can't! They won't let you!'

'Times change, m'girl, times change.'

'What do you mean?'

'Will you tell dearest Ma I called?'

She said nothing.

'Of course you won't. Don't see her any more, do you? You don't see any of them. Do you ... Liiiiiiz?'

'Leave me ... !'

She crashed the phone down, and she and the phone sat and trembled.

'Alone,' she said, and began to weep.

'I thought perhaps I might leave early,' Alice said. 'I've got a check-up at the dentist's in Buxton at six and I've got some stuff to pick up at Boots, and I don't like the look of the weather. Is that all right?'

'Suppose so,' Chrissie said, bending over the filing cabinet. Roger had arrived mid-morning, seeming preoccupied, and had not even mentioned their lunch-date, just sloped off to some appointment. Now Chrissie would have to check everything, switch off the lights and lock up.

'You don't mind being alone with ...' Alice giggled. '... him?'

'Couldn't be safer,' Chrissie said. 'Rog ... Dr Hall was telling me he hasn't got one.'

'Hasn't he?' Alice was putting her stuff away in her calfskin sandbag. She flicked a card across the desk at Chrissie. 'See, there's my appointment.'

'What for?'

'The dentist's. Just to show you I'm not making it up.'

'I never thought you were making it up, Alice, OK?'

'Why hasn't he got one?' asked Alice without much interest. She was a good ten years older than Chrissie, had grown-up kids and a big house. Didn't need the job but Chrissie supposed that in Alice's circle it was nice to say you worked for the University, even if it was only as a number two secretary in an overgrown Portacabin outside Congleton.

Chrissie said, 'Part of the ritual, apparently, when he was sacrificed.'

'I suppose that would be quite a sacrifice for a man,' said Alice, pretending to shudder.

'Actually, it's possible they just cut it off after he was dead.'

'I see.' Alice shrugged into her sheepskin coat. Hard luck, Chrissie thought. Now you'll never know how big they were in pre-Christian times.

Alice took her car keys out of her bag, stuck the bag under an arm. 'So it's all right then, if I leave now?'

'Yes,' Chrissie said. Yes, yes, yes! she screamed to herself.

But when Alice had gone, she decided it wasn't all right. Bloody fat-arsed cow got away with too much. Spends most of the day experimenting with this disgusting sea-green nail varnish, then pisses off to sprawl on the sofa and moan to her husband about how overworked she is.

Chrissie picked up the dentist's appointment card which Alice had left behind. It looked authentic enough, if you didn't happen to know Alice's eldest daughter was a dental receptionist.

It was 4.30. A dim grey afternoon, with all the lights on. She couldn't herself go in case somebody (Roger) rang, or one of the research students came in to raid the files.

She stared across the office at a double-locked metal door.

Just me and you, chum, and you've got no dick.' Chrissie laughed.

Under the laughter, there was a soft noise from behind the metal door.

Chrissie breathed in hard. 'Who's that?'

There was silence.

Yes, that was it - just a soft noise. Not a thump, not a clang. She looked around and over her shoulder. The room had three desks, seven filing cabinets and two big metal-framed bookcases. It was garishly lit by fluorescent tubes and the windows had Venetian blinds. Between the blinds she could see the deserted college playing-fields and, beyond, the tops of container-lorries on the motorway.

She was alone in the Field Centre and there was nobody apparent outside. 'Now, look,' Chrissie said, 'this is not on. This is not bloody on.'

It was going dark out there.

The soft noise came again, like a heavy cushion - an old-fashioned one, with brocade - being tossed on to a sofa.

Bravely, Chrissie slipped off her shoes and moved quietly to the metal door.

Should she check this out? Dare she?

Although she'd never been in there alone, she knew where there was a key.

She put her ear to the door.

There was silence.

Shaw's Porsche was coming up the drive, black as a funeral - did it have to be a black one? She could tell by the speed that it wouldn't be stopping at the house but continuing up to the brewery. There was a new link road for the brewery lorries, so they never grumbled past the Hall these days, and no local vehicles, except for Shaw's Mercedes and his Porsche, ever laboured up from Bridelow any more.

So the Hall, sealed off from both the brewery and village, irrelevant now to both, might as well not exist.

'Nor me,' Liz Horridge whispered into the empty, high-ceilinged room with its bland Regency-striped wallpaper and its cold, crystal chandelier. 'I've become irrelevant to everybody.'

Even Shaw - famous mother's boy - had quite casually replaced her in his life. Always away at meetings, in Matlock, Buxton, Sheffield, London even. Or with his girlfriend, the mysterious Therese.

With whom Shaw appeared obsessed. As well he might. The girl was far too beautiful for him - at thirty-one, he was at least ten years older, losing his hair, conspicuously lacking in style despite his costly education. But being seen with Therese (Therese Beaufort, no less) had done wonders for his confidence, and his lifelong stutter had virtually disappeared.

Her delight had turned to a damp dismay. Years of speech therapy, of love and patient coaxing at the fireside. And what was it that finally killed Shaw's stutter?

Sex.

She could weep. Had wept.

And wept and wept.

Last week he'd made her position quite appallingly clear. If I were you, Mother,' he'd said in passing - everything Shaw said to her these days appeared to be in passing - 'If I were you, I'd be off. Out of here. Somewhere warm. The Channel Islands. Malta.'

She clung to the sofa. 'But I don't want a holiday, Shaw.'

'No, not a holiday. I mean, for good. To live. Why not? It's warm, it's civilized. And absolutely everyone would want to come and stay with you.'

'What are you saying?

Shaw had smiled affably and dashed off to his 'meeting'.

Every day since, she'd sat here, by this bay window, and listened to his voice in her head saying so smoothly, without a hint of impediment, Somewhere warm. The Channel Islands, Malta ...

And envisaged Therese Beaufort, in some slinky designer costume, drink in hand, languid in this window, gazing out on her property.

Liz Horridge thought she could see old Mrs Wagstaff waddling up the main street of Bridelow towards the church. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe she just needed to see the old girl.

How's dear old Ma these days? Is she well?

Three decades ago, in the crowded parlour full of bottles, two cats on the hearth, Ma Wagstaff cradling Liz's head. Sleeping in the little bedroom. If he comes to you ... scream. Don't matter what time.

And now, Perhaps I'll drop in. Wouldn't you like that?

You can't. She'll stop you.

Things change. Barriers weaken.

She looked out at the village, willing it closer. She'd give anything to be able to shatter that damned glass screen before it all went black.

Well, look at it this way - there was no way anyone could have got in there without her or Alice knowing about it. Therefore there was no one in there, except for ... well, yes.

The spare key was filed in the third filing cabinet. Under K, for key.

The problem was, suppose something was amiss in there? Suppose a rat or something had got in? Suppose something electrical had malfunctioned, threatening the bogman's welfare? And therefore Roger's. And hers.

Tentatively, she unlocked the third filing cabinet and located the key. It was smoky-coloured steel, about four inches long.

Who would Roger blame if something had gone wrong with the bogman, his future? Who was in charge of the office in Roger's absence?

Filed under B was a second and longer key for the double lock to the inner room, the specimen room, the bogman's bedroom.

She just rather wished, as she pushed in the first key, that she hadn't acquiesced so readily to Alice's 'request' to leave early.

Chrissie slipped on her cardigan. It would be cold in there, wouldn't it? Mustn't get the shivers, that would never do.

The metal door opened with a soft vacuum belch.

'Sorry to intrude,' Chrissie said softly.

Behind the door was a small hallway where two new Portacabins had been pushed together. This was where the white coats were kept, and there were a couple of lavatory cubicles and a washbasin. Then there was another, unlocked door leading to an anteroom with a desk. And then the innermost metal door- with a double lock through which minions like her and Alice were not supposed to venture.

So there couldn't possibly be anybody in there.

Anybody else.

She'd been in there a couple of times, but only with Roger and not for very long. So she knew what he looked like, no problem about that.

The second key turned easily, twice, and Chrissie walked into an almost complete but alarmingly pleasant darkness which hummed faintly.

She didn't move. Apart from the hum, it was very, very quiet. Nothing scurried away. She'd left the door open behind her to allow a little light in there, but the velvety darkness absorbed it all within a yard or two of the opening and she had to fumble about for switches.

It was not cold. This was it. Well, of course, this was why it seemed so pleasant. The temperature was controlled to body heat. Bog body heat. He'd apparently been freeze-dried and then maintained in a controlled environment. She rather hoped he was packed away or at least covered up with something.

... do you touch him much?

Chrissie's hand found a switch, and the lights came on, flickering blue laboratory light, white on white tiles.

Mortuary light. Chrissie tensed, breathed in sharply.

But, of course, she was right. There was absolutely nobody here.

Nobody else.

... of course I touch him. He feels like a big leather cricket bag. You should pop in sometime, be an experience for you.

Actually he was rather smaller than the cricket bags Chrissie had seen when her ex-husband used to play.

He was lying on his table in his heat-regulated bubble, looking like somebody who'd spent far too long in a solarium.

Yes, he had a lovely tan.

Still hard to think of him as an actual corpse. He was too old. But still, ancient as he was, when you thought about it, he was probably in a better state of preservation than Chrissie's late grandad was by now.

Chrissie laughed at her stupid self.

She leaned over the bogman, curled up under his plastic bubble.

'All right then, chuck?'

She wondered what he'd sound like if he could reply, what language he spoke. Welsh, probably. She looked around. There were a couple of wires, naked rubber, emerging from the bottom of the container. Pretty primitive. The British Museum boffins would probably have a fit.

But nothing seemed amiss.

'I'll leave you, then,' Chrissie said. She tried to see his face. His nose was squashed, like a boxer's. There were whiskers around his contorted lips, which were half open, revealing the brown stumps of his teeth.

There was a fold in the side of his neck, a flap, like another lip. She thought, God, that's where they cut his throat, poor little devil.

Beaten over the head, garrotted, throat cut and then they chopped his dick off.

Oh, yuck.

Automatically, she glanced down to where his groin ought to be, where the body was bent.

And then Chrissie made a little involuntary noise at the back of her throat.

She glanced back at his face.

His twisted lips ... leering at her now.

Her eyes flicked rapidly back to his groin, back to his face, back to his groin. She felt her own lips contorting, and she made the little noise again, a high-pitched strangled yelp, and she began to back off towards the door.

But she couldn't stop looking at him.

... what, no ...

... penis ... must have chopped it off. Part of the ritual.

Chrissie's hands began to tingle as they scrabbled frantically behind her back for the door-handle.

Get me out of here.

Far from being emasculated, the bogman, under his bubble, had the most enormous erection she had ever seen.