The Man in the Moss (70 page)

           
'Mr ... Mungo. I've located Willie Wagstaff. He doesn't
know where Moira is, but he says he doesn't mind talking to you if you don't
keep him too long. He's at his girlfriend's - that's the Post Office. About a
hundred yards up the street, same side.'

           
'Right. Uh, what did you ... ?'

           
'I told him I thought you were all right. I hope you
are.'

           
Macbeth said, 'Mrs Castle, what's going on here? Just why
is everybody on edge? Who're all these people at the Rectory?'

           
'Ask Willie,' she said. 'And just so you know, he used to
play the drums in Matt's band, so he's known Moira a long time. Do you want to
borrow an umbrella?'

           
'Thanks, I have a slicker in back of the car. What if I'm
late?'

           
'I'll still be up,' Lottie Castle said. 'Whatever time it
is. Just hammer on the door.'

Lottie bolted the door
behind him, top and bottom. Then she went through to the back door and secured
that too.

           
She put on some coffee, partly to combat the rain noise
with the warm pop-pop-pop of the percolator.

           
Earlier she'd pulled through a three-seater sofa from the
living room that never got lived in. There was a duvet rolled up on the sofa.

           
Tonight's bed. Would have been, if she'd been alone in
the pub. She'd put the American in Bedroom Three, the one Dic used when he was
here. Soon as he'd left yesterday she'd
changed the bedding
, aired the room. It was
just across the passage from her own.

           
Were bad dreams somehow stopped at source when you were
no longer alone in the building?

           
That, of course, would depend on whether they
were
dreams
.
         

           
On the refectory table was a local paper with the phone
numbers of two estate agents ringed, the ones that specialised in commercial
properties. Give that a try first, see if anyone was interested in a
loss-making pub, before resorting to the domestic market.

           
Former village inn.
Full of character. Dramatic rural location. Reduced for quick sale.

           
Well, did she have a choice? Was there any kind of
alternative?

           
Lottie poured coffee, strong but with a little cream
which she left unstirred, thin, white circles on the dark surface, because
black coffee was apt to make her think of the Moss.
           
She left the cup steaming on
the table, stood in the centre of the room for a moment with her sleeves pushed
up and her hands on her hips.
           
'Matt,' she said, 'you know I
didn't want to come, but I didn't complain. I supported you. I gave up my
lovely home.'

           
Strange, but all the time he was dying he never once
allowed a discussion to develop about her future. But then, they never actually
talked about him dying; just, occasionally, about him being ill. And he
obviously wasn't afraid; he was just - amazing when you thought about it - too
preoccupied.
           
'You were always a selfish
bastard, Matt,' she said.
           
Standing on the flags, hands
on hips, giving him a lecture.
           
Don't see why I should feel
ashamed, do you?'
           
Feeling not so unhappy,
because there was someone to wait up for.

           
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.

CHAPTER
VI

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.