Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Bloody peat. In the mornings she'd draw back the bedroom curtains and the first thing she'd see would be black peat and on to the scene her mind would superimpose Matt in his wheelchair, sinking into the Moss and fighting it all the way, and every bloody marsh-bird banking overhead would be imitating the Pennine Pipes of blessed memory.

All I want is Bridelow Moss behind me. To be able to draw back the curtains on to other people's gardens, parked cars, the postman, the milkman, no hills in view over the tops of the laburnums. (In other words, the view from the bedroom window in Wilmslow which Matt had despised and which she carried in her mind like a talisman of sanity.)

With the bedside light on, she gazed unblinking at the ceiling, a single hefty black beam bisecting it diagonally so that half the ceiling was light, half shadow.

'Ma…'

'… aye, gone.'

'… agstaff… dead…you didn't know?'

'… God, no..:

If walls could record voices and mood and atmosphere, The Man's ancient stones would have been crumbling tonight under the dead weight of suppressed emotion. The death of Ma Wagstaff: the underlying theme below all the trivial tap-room chat about Manchester United and the sodding Government, and the more meaningful analyses of working conditions under Gannons.

Lottie saying nothing, playing barmaid, pulling Bridelow Black for those committed to preserving the brewery and lager and draught Bass for those who'd been made redundant.

So Ma Wagstaff had gone.

Well, she was old, she was half-baked, she'd clung to her own loopy ideas of religion; let them be buried with her.

Not that anything stayed buried round here. The bogman rising again after who could say how many centuries, to cause torment and to haunt Matt's latter days. And now poor Matt himself rising again to help the police with their inquiries.

Which – jaw tightened, both hands clenching on the sheet for a moment – was none of her business, and none of Ma Wagstaff's any more. Just let it be all over. Just let them have found what they wanted and put Matt back m his grave and stamped down the soil.

What they wanted. She knew, of course, that it had to be the bogman. How honoured Matt would have been to know he'd be sharing his grave with his illustrious ancestor.

Most likely, she conceded, he did know. Matt always could keep a secret. Even from his wife.

Especially from his wife.

And that does it, Lottie thought. I'll talk to estate agents first thing Monday morning.

She put out the lamp and shut her eyes.

She was not lonely.

She was relieved at last of the horror and the pity of Matt and his illness and his all-consuming passions.

And relieved, too – now that Moira had been here, now that she'd received his taped begging letter – of the responsibility of overseeing the completion of Matt's magnum opus, his Bogman Suite. Moira's responsibility now. Poetic justice: one obsession taking care of another.

Not that Moira, presumably, had ever wanted to be Matt's obsession.

Lottie opened her eyes and stared searchingly into the darkness.

Or perhaps, obscurely, perversely, Moira had. She kept her ego under wraps, but it was there; it existed.

Maybe it is poetic justice.

You've been relieved. You're free to go. The lino was as cold as flagstones under Ernie's bare feet, and although his bedroom slippers were under the bed, he didn't fetch them out; the cold was better.

I don't want comfort. I want the truth. An answer. What must I do? What is there left I can do?

Through the window, he could see the churchyard, gravestones wet with rain and blue under the Beacon of the Moss. Be one for me, happen, this time next year.

He couldn't, from here, see Matt Castle's grave, but he'd heard about all that from Alfred Beckett, who'd come pounding on his door while the dregs of the Mothers' Union sat dispiritedly drinking tea in his study. What can we do, Mr Dawber? Who's going to explain?

Me, he'd stated firmly. I'll explain, if necessary.

He'd never seen the Mothers in such a state and never imagined he would. Old Sarah Winstanley, with no teeth, just about said it all. No Ma. No teeth. No hope.

Not for me now, neither, with Ma gone.

'Everything's changing,' Millicent had said. 'Hardening. And now we've lost the Man, for good and all. They'll take him back to London this time, no question about that. Bad luck on this scale, Mr Dawber – it's not natural. Mary Lane died, did you hear? Pneumonia. Fifty-three, God forbid.'

Shades, Ma had said. Them's what's kept this place the way it is. They started talking about shades again, and it was not really his province. He'd promised Ma Wagstaff that he'd get the Man back, and now it was all falling through, and it was his responsibility. What was there left, in the time he had?

And then Milly had told them about Liz Horridge.

'I forgot all about it, wi' Ma being found not long after. I found her up Ma's front path. First time she's been seen in t'village for months. Well… she were in a shocking state, banging her fists on Ma's door – "please, please", like this, whimpering, you know? I put me hand on her shoulder and she nearly had hysterics. "I want Ma, I want Ma." I says, "Ma's not here, luv. Come and have a cuppa tea," I says. She just looks at me like she doesn't know who I am, and then she pushes me aside and she's off like a rabbit. I rang the Hall to tell somebody, but Shaw's never there, is he?'

And Moira Cairns staying with young Cathy, in the Rectory, at the very heart of the village.

He looked down at the graves. Why had she come so secretively? And why hadn't she gone away again? He'd seen her walking down from the church this morning. Strikingly good-looking lass. Probably in her late thirties, looking it, because of that white strand in her hair, like the light through a crack in the door of a darkened room.

But what did they know about her?

'Nowt,' Ernie said aloud to the silent graves.

Should he say owt to the Mothers? He wasn't a stirrer, he wasn't a gossip, he'd always known more than he passed on, just as Dawber's Book of Bridelow was only ever a fraction of what the Dawbers knew about Bridelow.

Who'd take over the Book from him? No more Dawbers left in Bridelow. Happen it really was the end of an era. Happen the Bridelow to come wouldn't have the distinction that warranted a book of its own. Ernest Dawber, last of the village scribes. Chronicler of the Fall.

Alf Beckett's arrival had saved him. If Alf hadn't turned up, one of them, or all of them, would surely have sensed he had worries and sorrows of his own.

By 'eck, he'd been scared, had Alf Beckett. So scared, as he'd told them, that he could hardly keep his spade level when the time came to shovel the soil back on Matt Castle's coffin.

After finding no trace of the bogman.

'They didn't find it?' Milly Gill up on her feet in a flash, for all her weight. Alf shaking his head dumbly.

'What's it mean, Milly?' Frank's wife, Ethel, dazed.

'I don't know.' Milly's voice hoarse, 'I don't understand.'

'But it's good, isn't it?' the youngest of them, Susan, said. 'We dint want um to find it.'

'Of course it's not good,' Milly said. 'You don't suddenly get a miracle like that in the middle of a lot of bad. It's not the way of things. What frightens me: if he's not there, where in God's name is he?'

She broke off for a sip of tea. 'I'm sorry, Mr Dawber. I should've told you earlier. It were finding Ma. Knocked me back. Strange, though, isn't it? Everything's so terribly strange all of a sudden.'

When they'd gone, Ernie had telephoned the Hall himself. No answer. He'd go up there tomorrow, a visit long overdue.

'It must be deliberate, you know, all this,' Milly had said. 'An attack. Village is under attack.'