Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

She left on a wall-lamp in the kitchen, went through to the bar, leaving the door ajar. Switched the lights off one by one at the panel beside the mirror, leaving until last the disused brass gas-mantle which Matt had electrified.

The porch-light would stay on all night, gilding the rippling rain on the window. Lottie moved out into the darkened, stone-walled bar, collecting the ashtrays for emptying.

Wondering what Willie would make of the American with the silly name who'd driven down from Glasgow on the wettest Sunday of the year to find Moira Cairns.

Matt would have done that. Matt would have killed for Moira, and there was a time when she would have killed Moira because of it, but it didn't seem to matter any more.

When the gaslight came back on behind the bar, Lottie dropped all the ashtrays with a clatter of tin.

The gas mantle was fitted with on electric bulb under the little gauzy knob thing and it looked fairly realistic. Or so she'd thought because she'd never seen the original gas.

Until now.

Oh, yes. This was gas, being softer, more diffused; she almost felt she could hear a hiss. Did they hiss? Or was that Matt?

Matt, whose face shone from the mirror behind the bar, enshrouded in gaslight.

Lottie stood with her back to the far stone wall. Her hands found her hips. Against which, untypically, they trembled.

She said, very quietly, 'Oh, no.' Ernie Dawber knew that if he allowed himself to think about this, he would at once realise the fundamental insanity of the whole business.

He would see 'sense'.

But Bridelow folk had traditionally answered to laws unperceived elsewhere. Therefore it was not insane, and it required another kind of sense which could never be called 'common'.

So he simply didn't think about it at all, but did the usual things he would do at this time of night: cleaned his shoes, tidied his desk – leaving certain papers, however, in quite a prominent position.

Love letters, they were, from a woman magistrate in Glossop with whom Ernie had dallied a while during a bad patch in his marriage some thirty years ago. He'd decided not to burn them. After all, his wife had known and the woman was dead now; why not make one little bequest to the village gossips?

In the letter he was leaving for Hans, he'd written: 'Let the vultures in, why not? Let them pick over my bones – but discreetly. Let it be so that nothing of me exists except a name on the cover of The Book of Bridelow:

Suddenly, he felt absurdly happy. He was going on holiday,

He made himself a cup of tea and set out a plate of biscuits, wondering what archaeologists two thousand years hence might have made of this:

The stomach yielded the digested remains of a compressed fruit not indigenous to the area but which may have constituted the filling for what nutritional documents of the period tell us were called 'fig rolls'.

He chuckled, ate two biscuits, drank his tea and sat back in his study chair, both feet on his footstool. He did not allow himself to contemplate the kind of knife which might be used to cut his throat or the type of cord employed for the garrotting or whether the blow to the back of his head would be delivered with a carpenter's mallet or a pickaxe handle.

But feeling that he should at least be aware of what had happened on this particular day in the world he was leaving he switched on the radio for the ten o'clock news.

Not such a bad time to be leaving. Chaos behind what used to be the Iron Curtain, more hatred between European nations than there'd been since the war. A psychopath killing little girls the West Country.

But then, at the end of the national news, this:

Police who earlier today found the body of a man after a nine-hour search of the South Pennine moors say they've now discovered a woman's body, less than a mile away, in the burned-out wreckage of a car.

However, they say there appears to be no link between the two deaths. The first body, found in a quarry, has now been formally identified as a 27 year-old farmer, Peter Samuel Davis.

The woman's body, not yet identified, was badly burned after the car, a BMW saloon, apparently left the road in wet conditions, plunged over a hundred feet into a valley bottom and burst into flames.

Ernie switched off the radio, his fingers numb, picked up his telephone and rang the Post Office.

Perhaps, before I return, something'll have happened this night to make you see the sense of it.

Sense, he thought, feeling cold all of a sudden. It's all gone beyond sense.

Chrissie shrieked, 'Come on, come on, come on!' and beat with both fists on the door until it shook.

She was wearing a short mac said to be showerproof, but that depended what you meant by shower and she'd taken no more than two minutes to run like hell down the street and she was panting and absolutely bloody soaked.

When the door opened, Chrissie practically fell inside. 'God!' Shaking water out of her hair.

Expecting glasses chinking, laughter, maybe the clunk-ding of a one-armed bandit. Certainly not silence and dimness and a red-haired woman with lips drawn tautly back and pain-filled, frozen eyes.

'I'm sorry… I mean, this is a pub, isn't it? You're still open aren't you? I mean if you're not, I only want to use the phone. To call a taxi.'

'Box,' the woman said in a strangled whisper, as if she had a throat infection. 'Up the street.'

'Yes, I know, but I've no change, I… excuse me, but are you all right?'

'Really don't know. Better come in.'

'Thanks. God, what a night.'

'Car…' The woman cleared her throat. 'Excuse me. Your car broke down?'

'Actually, I had a row with my boss… boyfriend. Well, not either after tonight. I just got out of his car and walked off. Well, ran off, with this weather, I mean, isn't it awful? I'm making a puddle on your floor. Sorry.'

When she'd rubbed the rain out of her eyes, Chrissie saw she was indeed it what seemed to be a public bar. Nobody here, apart from her and the woman. 'Hey, I'm sorry. I really thought you were open and the door had just jammed or something and… You're really not well, are you?'

The woman had her back to the bar which was dark, only the shapes of bottles gleaming. 'Can you…' She gripped the edge of a table as if to steady her voice. 'Excuse me, but can you see a light-fitting, like an old gas-mantle, side of the bar?'

'Er,… yes. Yes, I think so.'

'Is at on?'

'Well, no.' Could she be blind?

Then the woman just son of folded in on herself as if afflicted by some awful stomach cramp or period pain, and Chrissie' s brain dried out quickly. The Man I'th Moss. This was Matt Castle's wife. 'Hey,' she said, 'come on, sit yourself down. You on your own?'

Mrs Castle nodded and Chrissie led her to a corner seat opposite the bar and bent down to her. 'Make you a cuppa tea?'

She shook her head. 'I've got coffee. I'm OK. Honestly, Just a shock. I've had a shock.'

'Can I send for anybody? Relatives? A doctor?'

'Please,' Mrs Castle said. 'Just don't go, that's all. Come through. Phone's in the kitchen.' She got up and walked to the bar, and when she reached it a tremor seemed to pass through her and she pushed quickly through a door in the back wall.

Chrissie followed her into a big farmhouse-type kitchen, taking off her sodden mac and tossing it into a corner, useless thing. Underneath, she was wearing her navy-blue suit over a light blue silk blouse and pearls. Classy and understated for John Peveril Stanage's soiree, she thought with a sardonic shudder.

'Just keep talking." Mrs Castle said. 'I'll be all right in a minute.' She was wearing a big, sloppy Icelandic-type sweater, but she still looked almost blue with cold and she hunched herself over the stove. Chrissie went and stood next to her and folded her arms.