Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'Then we'll do it,' Moira said. 'Whatever it's like.'

'Good. Thank you. But don't decide yet. You see – I'll be frank – if you'd come when he wrote to you… Well, he was quite ill by then, into the final furlong. He wasn't fit to record. Not properly. And then there was the other problem. And don't say, what other problem… let's not either of us insult the other's intelligence.'

'OK.' Moira leaned back and slowly sipped her tea. They sat there in silence, two women with little in common except perceived obligations to one man.

Mammy, how was he when he died? Can you tell me that?

This was the woman who could tell her. But Lottie had never had much patience with religion of any sort – organized or… well, as disorganized as whatever it was Ma Wagstaff was trying to do last night with her patent witch bottle.

'Lottie,' she said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't know. Well, maybe I knew inside of me, but I was young, too young to understand it. And nothing happened, Lottie, I swear it.'

Lottie shrugged. 'Better, maybe, if it had. Better for me, I can tell you, if he'd gone off with you. But after sticking with it, through all kinds of… Well, I wasn't prepared to have him spending his last days ignoring me, eaten up with old lust and regrets. So I'm glad you couldn't come.'

Lottie took her teacup to the sink, dropped it into a plastic bowl. The sink was a big, old-fashioned porcelain thing, pipes exposed underneath it with bits of rag tied around them. No what Lottie's used to, Moira thought. Lottie is stainless-steel and waste-disposal.

'You've… had problems, then.' Christ, everything I say to this woman is just so fucking facile…

Lottie turned on the hot tap, held both hands under the frenzied gush until the steam rose and her wrists turned lobster-red. 'You could say that.'

Eventually, turning off the water, wiping her hands on a blue teatowel, she said, 'I was married for twenty-eight years to a man who collected obsessions. The Pennine Pipes. The Mysteries of Bridelow. The Bogman…'

Moira said nothing. She was feeling faint. Her breath locked in her throat. She was getting a strong sense of Matt's presence in the room.

'… and you,' Lottie said.

In the lofty, rudimentary kitchen, Moira heard a roaring in her head, saw a flashing image of Matt in his coffin, white T-shirt, white quilted coffin-lining, before it was washed away by the black tide carrying images of a stone toad, dancing lights, the steam from writhing intestines liberated on to a flat stone…

'On me night he died…'

Moira swallowed tea, but the tea wasn't so hot any more and she was swallowing bile.

'On the night he died,' Lottie said, 'he sexually assaulted a nurse in the hospital.'

I'm not hearing this.

She started to look wildly around the kitchen. High ceiling with pipes along it… whitewashed walls with crumbling plaster showing through in places… stone-flagged floor like the church of St Bride… two narrow windows letting in light so white it was like a sheet taped across the glass.

And this awful sense of Matt.

'The nurse had long, dark hair,' Lottie said, almost wistfully. 'He addressed her as Moira.'

The silence was waxen.

She felt scourged.

Lottie said, 'I wanted you to know all this…'

Matt was dodging about under the table, behind the pipes, vibrant, shock-haired Matt reduced to a pale, fidgeting thing, hunched in corners, flitting, agitated, from one to another, giving off fear, hurt, confusion.

'… before you made a firm decision about the music. You see? I'm being open about it. No secrets any more.'

Moira looked up into the furthest comer, near the back door, and a cobweb inexplicably detached itself from the junction of two pipes and hung there, impaled by a shaft of white light, heavy with glittering flies' corpses.

'Come with me.' Lottie rolled down the sleeves of her cardigan and strode across the kitchen to the back door, with a long, gaoler's key.

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

The most widespread and powerful Celtic tribe in Northern Britain were the Brigantes, whose territory – known as Brigantia – included much of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Southern Scotland and had its southern boundary in the lower Pennines.

The mother goddess of the Brigantes was Brigid, and it is believed that many churches dedicated to 'St Bride' were formerly sites of pagan Celtic worship…

The bloody media.

Over twenty cars parked outside the Field Centre, and men and women pacing the concrete forecourt, most of them turning round when Roger Hall's car pulled in – where the hell was he supposed to park with all these bastards clogging the place? Three cameramen, all swinging round, shooting his Volvo Estate as it manoeuvred about seeking space, as if he might have the bogman himself laid out in the back.

'No… no, I'm sorry…' Ramming his way through jabbing hands holding pocket tape recorders.

'Dr Hall, have you any idea yet…?'

'Dr Hall, do you know when…?'

'Can you just tell us, Dr Hall, how…?'

'No!' He held up both hands. 'There'll be an official Press statement later.'

Bastards. Leeches. One of the double doors opened a few inches and he was hauled in. Chrissie and the other woman, Alice, got the door closed and bolted behind him.

Inspector Gary Ashton was sitting on Roger's desk. 'Any luck, sir?'

'Blank wall.' Roger was brushing at his jacket, as if the reporters had left bits of themselves on him. 'However…'

'I must say,' Ashton said, 'it seemed a bit of a long shot to me, that a bunch of villagers from Bridelow would go to all this trouble.' He smiled hesitantly. 'Look, I've had a thought. I hardly like to suggest this, sir, but I don't suppose there's a University rag week in the offing?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Roger said.

'Well, I don't honestly think,' Ashton said tautly, 'that it's any more ridiculous than your idea about superstitious villagers. Which sounds a bit like one those old Ealing comedies, if I may say so, sir.'

Roger said, 'I think you should listen to me without prejudice. I think I know how they've done it.' Liz Horridge stood frozen with terror at the edge of the pavement.

She was sweating hard; there seemed to be a film of it over her eyes, and a blur on the stone buildings around her turning the cottages into squat muscular beasts and the lych-gate into a predatory bird, its wings spread as if it were about to hop and scuttle down the street and overwhelm her, pinning her down and piercing her breast with its cold, stone beak. She was leaning, panting, against the back of a van parked on the corner where the main street joined the old brewery road.

Oh, and by the way, Mother, the Chairman's hoping to drop by tonight.

Who?

The Chairman, Gannon's. Been planning to come for ages, apparently, but, you know, appointments, commitments…

Will he come here?

We'll receive him in the main office, show him around the brewery. Then, yes, I expect I'll bring him back for a drink. A proper drink. Ha!

Go. Get out. Got to.

She'd thought that when she got so far the fear would evaporate in the remembered warmth of the village, but the village was cold and empty, and a blind like a black eyelid was down in the window of Gus Bibby's general stores' which always kept long hours and would always be lit by paraffin lamps on gloomy days.

But it was Saturday afternoon, Gus Bibby did not close on a Saturday afternoon. Saturday had always been firewood day, and there'd be sacks of kindling outside. Always. Always on a Saturday.

Liz felt panic gushing into her breast. Maybe it wasn't Saturday. Maybe it wasn't afternoon. Maybe it was early morning. Maybe the whole place had closed down, been evacuated, and nobody had told her. Maybe the brewery itself had been shut down for weeks and the village had been abandoned.