The Man in the Moss (60 page)

           
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.