The Man in the Moss (72 page)

           
'It was very misty,' Lottie said through a crumpled
handkerchief. 'He kept fading and then ... like a bad TV picture in the old
days, remember? As if - I suppose your chap was right - as if he was trying to
hold on to his old gas-mantle, for comfort, and something was trying to pull
him back.'

           
'Back where?'

           
'Into the darkness behind the mirror. He couldn't see me,
I'm sure he couldn't
see
me at all.
Am I going mad, Chrissie?'
           
'No more than any of us. Do
you want me to stay with you tonight? I've nowhere else to go.'

           
Lottie's hands clutched each other, began to vibrate.
She's wringing her hands, Chrissie thought. I've never seen anybody actually
wring their hands before.

           
'The truth is,' Lottie said, 'I hated him by the end.
There was nothing
left
but the
negative side. No enthusiasm, only obsession. He was, when it comes down to it,
a very nasty man.'

           
Lottie stared into her empty coffee cup as if trying to
read a message in the grains. 'But he was also dying, you see, and you aren't
allowed to hate dying people, especially if the nastiness is to some extent out
of character and therefore, you think, must be connected with the dying.'

           
Chrissie lit another cigarette. 'When my mother was
dying, towards the end, I wanted it to be over. For her sake. But, if I'm
honest, partly for my sake too.'

           
'I don't think we're talking about the same thing, luv.
Christ almighty ...' Lottie covered her ears - '... isn't that bloody rain
ever
going to stop?'

           
'Listen to me,' Chrissie said. 'When you thought... when
you saw this ... when he was in the mirror, tonight ... did, you hate him
then?'

           
'No. I felt sorry for him. Don't get me wrong, I was very
frightened, but at the bottom of that there was a pity. It was the gas-mantle.
Putting that together, wiring it up, was about the only innocent, gentle thing
he did here. I was irritated at the time, but when I look back ... It's the only
thing makes me want to cry for rum.'

           
Chrissie stood up. 'I don't know why, but I think we
should put it on. The light, I mean. The gas thing.'

           
'Why?'

           
'Because if that represents the nice, harmless side of
him, perhaps you should show him you recognise that. I don't know, maybe it's
stupid. But perhaps he wants your forgiveness, perhaps he wants to know you
remember that side of him. The good side. So maybe, if you gave him a sign that
you understood, then he ... he'd be ... you know ... at peace. Isn't that what
they say?'
           
'Who?'

           
Chrissie shrugged. 'Old wives, I suppose.'
           
'Old mothers in this village.
OK.' Lottie came wearily to her feet. 'Let's try it.'

           
'Might make you feel better.'
           
'Might, at that.'

           
They went through to the darkened bar and Chrissie lifted
the flap and went round to the customers' side, so they were standing either
side of the brass mantle. In the arrow of light from the kitchen, she could see
it was on a hinged base screwed into the wooden frame of the bar and projecting
about eighteen inches. Behind it, on Lottie's side, was the mirror in a
Victorian mahogany frame. Chrissie made herself gaze into the mirror and saw
only her own dim reflection, looking rather pale and solemn.

           
'Perhaps we could say a prayer, Lottie.'

           
'No, thanks,' Lottie said.

           
'Well, at least think of him as you press the switch.
Think of the good times.'

           
'My memory isn't what it was,' said Lottie. 'No, I'm
sorry. You're doing your best. All right. Matt, listen, if you can hear me …'

           
At the end of the gas-mantle a feeble glow appeared.

           
'Switch it off a second, Lottie. Let's get this right.'
           
'I didn't …' Lottie said, in a
voice which rose in pitch until it cracked. '…switch it on.'

           
'Merciful God,' Chrissie pulled from somewhere in her
past, 'please…'

           
The
small light at once flare to a dazzling
, magnesium white. Huge
shadows reared. Lottie screamed once and backed off into the kitchen.

           
When the bulb exploded, with a crack like snapping bone,
Chrissie found herself at the far end of the bar trying to hug the stone wall.

CHAPTER
VII

'Listen,' Macbeth said,
clutching Milly's plump arm, 'let me call the cops. Maybe it wasn't her car.'
           
'Don't make it worse, lad,'
Willie Wagstaff said, his eyes hollowed out with grief. 'I've already been on
to um. I said me wife were out in a BMW and I were worried sick after hearing
the news. I didn't want to get involved in identification or owt, so in the end
I said the wife's car were red and they said this one was grey -
had
been grey - and give me the
registration, and I went off, sounding relieved. Relieved. Jesus.'

           
'I don't understand.' Macbeth stared desperately around
the room. 'These things don't happen. I just don't fucking
understand.'

           
'They do happen,' Willie said hopelessly.

           
'Especially here.' Milly was looking hard into the fire.
'Especially now.'

           
'Shurrup,' said Willie gruffly. 'How far you come, lad?'

           
'Glasgow.' The One Big Thing, he thought. God damn. And
closed his eyes against the pain.

           
'She was special,' Willie said. 'We all knew that.'

           
'Yeah,' he whispered.

           
'Special like your mother,' Milly said. 'I think we knew
that too. And now they're both dead.'
           
'Leave it, luv. It's
coincidence.'
           
'Is it?'

           
Macbeth opened his eyes. Something badly wrong here, but
did he care? And what could he do anyway? One week. Before that, Moira Cairns
had been a face on an old album cover.

           
One week. A chance meeting, an inexplicable cascade of
bones, a talk on the terrace in the aftermath.

           
There'd be another album now. The Best of Moira Cairns.
In memoriam. Even if he'd never met her, he'd be grieving. In one week, she'd
become the core of his existence - a woman whose last glance at him had said,
fuck off.

           
'There was a guy,' he heard himself saying, 'who meant
her harm.'

           
Donald told me the
dogs disliked this man intensely
.
On
sight.

           
Willie Wagstaff and his girlfriend were both staring at
him.

           
'The Duchess wanted me to look out for her, you know? The
Duchess said wherever she went she'd be ... touched with madness.'

           
'Who's the Duchess?' Willie asked. Macbeth noticed that
the fingers of Willie's left hand had struck up a rhythm on the side of his
knee. He seemed unaware of it.

           
Macbeth said, 'Her mother.'

           
'The gypsy?'

           
Macbeth nodded. He looked out of the window. A big van
with a blue beacon and an illuminated sign had stopped down the Street. The
sign said, Ambulance. 'Is this rain never gonna ease off? Is it normal?'

           
'No,' Milly said, it's not normal. Who was the man? You
said there was a man. Who... meant her harm.'

           
Macbeth's mind slipped out of gear for a moment. He
panicked, clutched at the air.

           
The air in the room, so dense. The rain bombarding the
roof. The Duchess said,
If there was a
problem and you were to deal with it, she need never know, need she?

           
And how badly he'd wanted to deal with it and
wanted
her to know, and now it was too
late to deal with it and, sure, she would never know.

           
'John Peveril Stanage,' he said.

           
And the other two people in the room slowly turned and
looked at each other, and Willie blanched.
           
The fingers of both hands were
slamming into his knees and this time he
was
aware of it but seemed unable to stop it.

When the ambulance arrived
at the chip shop for Maurice Winstanley, both Maurice and his wife, Dee, were
in a state bordering on hysteria.

           
'I knew summat like this'd happen. I never wanted to
open, me,' Dee shrilled, a skinny little woman - how could you work in a chip
shop and be that thin? It fascinated one of the ambulance men for a couple of
seconds until he saw how badly burned Maurice was.

           
They had to treat his arm best they could, but there
wasn't a whole lot they could do on the spot, what with Maurice gawping around
and then kind of giggling with pain, and his wife going on and on like a budgie
on amphetamines.

           
'I says to him. Who's going to come out for chips, night
like this? He says, What about all them young people up at church, they'll be
starving before t'night's through. I says, All right, I says, you want to do
it, you can do it on your own.'

           
The ambulance man had fancied a bag of chips himself,
especially after that drive over the hills and across the Moss: gruesome - he'd
been driving and felt sure he could see the bloody peat rising and sucking; put
one wheel in there you'd have had it.

           
'All right, Mr Winstanley, if we can get you out this way
...'

           
'Where's your stretcher, then?'

           
'He can walk, can't he, Mrs Winstanley? I was going to
say, we need to get him in as quick as we can. He might need to go to the burns
unit.'

           
But chips would never be the same again. How gut-churning
an appetizing smell like that could become when, on top of battered cod and
mushy peas, there was the subtle essence of frazzled flesh, the result of
Maurice Winstanley's right arm blistering and bubbling in the fryer.

           
'Lucky you haven't got a heart attack case, as well,' Dee
said. 'He let out such a shriek.'

           
'I'm not surprised, luv. Any of us'd've gone through the
roof.'

           
'Oh, this were
before
he stuck his arm in t'fat. I says, Now, what's up, I says. And he turns round,
white as a sheet, I says, Whatever have you done? And then he does it. Thirty
years frying and he shoves his arm in. I don't think he knew what he were doing
at all.'

           
In the ambulance, racing back across the Moss, Maurice
shivered and shook a lot, a red blanket round him, his arm in about half a mile
of bandage. 'Never believe me, lad, she never will. I wouldn't believe me.'

           
'Don't matter how long you've been at it, Mr Winstanley,
you can always have an accident.'

           
'No, not that.' Now Maurice
looked
like a chip shop proprietor. Maurice was a fat man.
Maurice's big cheeks had that high-cholesterol glow about them and there were
black, smoky rings around his eyes.

           
'She had to believe that, naturally,' Maurice said. 'She
seen it happen. Fact it were only t'bloody agony of it brought me 'round, see,
and I couldn't even feel that at first. I were looking at it a good two
seconds. I thought, what's that pink thing in t'bloody fat?'

           
'Don't think about it, Mr Winstanley. We'll not be long
now. What d'you reckon to United's chances, then?'

           
'I don't want to talk about
United,
lad! I hate bloody soccer. Listen, no, it weren't
that
she'll not believe, I've allus been
a clumsy bugger. No, see, what it were as caused it in t'first place, I'd just
seen summat as frightened life outer me. Froze me to t'spot, you know? Numb, I
were. Numb.'
           
'Sounds like my
mother-in-law.'