Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

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…'