The plump woman in the village Post Office looked like a chief Girl Guide, whatever they called them now. Also, although she wore no wedding ring, she struck Moira as a member of the Mothers' Union.
'I wonder, um, could you help me? I'm looking for Willie Wagstaff.' She'd forgotten to ask Cathy where Willie lived, and Cathy had set out to drive fifteen miles to the hospital to visit her dad.
'Willie? Have you been to his house?'
Moira smiled. 'Well, no, that s…'
'Sorry, luv, I'm not very bright this morning.' The postmistress rolled her eyes. 'Go across street, turn left and after about thirty yards you'll come to an entry. Go in there, and you'll see a cottage either side of you and it's the one on the left.'
Moira bought ten postage stamps and two packets of Arrowmint chewing gum in case she ran into Alfred Beckett again.
There was no answer at Willie's house, a narrow little cottage backing on to other people's yards. Moira wondered if he lived alone. She squashed her nose to the front window. There was a bowl of flowers in it, with ferns. A woman's touch. Females had always been drawn to Willie, born to be mothered. In the old days, it used to be said that otherwise worldly mature ladies would turn to blancmange when little Mr Wagstaff smiled coyly and let them put him to bed.
Moira was not that mature, yet. The reason she needed Willie was to talk about Matt, and also to meet his mother. She came out of the entry, unsure what to do next. There was no one else in the place she knew, except…
At the bottom of the village street, Moira found herself facing the pub, the last building, apart from a couple of wooden sheds, before the street widened into the causeway across the peatbog.
This was the difficult one.
Against the white morning, the pub looked hulking and sinister, like a gaol or a workhouse. Stonework so murky that in places it might have been stained by the peat. Outside on the forecourt, a man in an apron was cleaning windows.
A red-haired woman appeared in the porch, handed the man a steaming mug of tea or coffee, stopped and stared across the forecourt. Waited in the doorway, watching Moira.
You ready for this, hen? 'They're not Ancient Monuments, these circles. Ancient, possibly. Monuments… well, hardly.'
Joel Beard kicked at a stubby stone.
'No signs pointing um out, anyroad,' said Sam Davis. 'Not even proper tracks.'
'That's because they're not in the care of any Government or local authority department. Unlike, say, Stonehenge, where you have high-security fences and tunnel-access. Which is why these places are so open to abuse.'
The Reverend Beard, in his dark green Goretex jacket and his hiking boots, striding through the waist-high bracken. Action priest, Sam thought cynically.
'Lights, you say?'
Although they were less than a hundred yards from the first circle, it wasn't even visible yet. This was the most direct route from Sam's farmhouse, but he reckoned that mob last night must have come in from behind. over the hill.
'Cocky bastards,' Sam said, breathing harder, keeping pace with difficulty, due to shorter legs. 'Bold as brass. If wife hadn't kicked up, I'd've been up theer last night.'
Sam bunched his fingers into fists. 'I'd give um bloody devil worship.'
'I know how you feel,' the minister said, 'but you did the right thing in coming to me. This is my job. This is what I'm trained for.'
Sam Davis watched the big blond man flexing his lips, baring his teeth, steaming at the mouth in the cold air. It was all Esther's fault, this, making him drag the Church into it.
'Look, Mr Beard…'
'Joel…'
'Aye. Thing is, I don't want to turn this into some big bloody crusade. All I want is these buggers off me property. Know what I mean?'
The Reverend Beard stopped in his tracks. 'Sam, have you ever had foot-and-mouth disease on your land?'
'God. Be all I need.'
'Swine fever? Fowl pest? Sheep scab?'
'Give us a chance, I've only been farming two year.'
'The point I'm making,' Joel Beard said patiently, moving on, as the bracken came to an end and the ground levelled out, 'is that when a farmer's land is infected by a contagious disease, it's not simply a question of getting rid of the afflicted livestock. There are well-established procedures. For the purpose of, shall we say, decontamination.'
'Aye, but… let's get down to some basic facts, Joel. Who exactly are these fellers? Your mate, the Vicar… now he reckoned it's just kids, right?'
… could probably tuck a couple under each arm…
'Kids?' said Joel Beard.
'For kicks,' Sam said. 'Like drink. Drugs. Shoplifting. Kicks.'
'Hans Gruber said that?'
Sam shrugged. 'Summat like that. Right, this is it.'
'I beg your pardon…'
'The main circle. You're in t'middle of it, Joel. Told you it weren't much.'
Around them, sunk into tufts of dry, yellow grace, were these seven small stones, stained with mosses and lichens, none more than a couple of feet high, in a circle about fifteen feet in diameter. Sam found it hard to credit them being here, in this formation, for about four thousand years.
'Don't know much about these things meself,' Sam said. 'Some folk reckon they was primitive astronomical observatories. You could stand in um and see where t'sun were risin'. Or summat.'
Personally, he didn't give a shit. By his left boot were two flat stone slabs, pushed together. The ground had clearly been disturbed. There were blackened twigs and ashes on the slabs.
'… but what that's got to do wi' bloody sacrifices is…'
'Sam!'
The Reverend Joel Beard shot up, like a charge of electricity had gone through him, and then, yelling 'Get back!', seized Sam Davis by the shoulders and shoved him out of the circle.
'What the…?' Sam struggled out of Joel's grip, stumbled back into the bracken.
Joel was still in the circle, swaying like a drunk, swallowing big, hollow breaths through his mouth. His body bent into a fighting stance, hands clawed, eyes blinking.
Sam Davis stared at him. He was going to kill Esther for landing him with this big tosser.
'There's evil here,' Joel said.
Stupid sod looked ready for war. All that bothered Sam was how close the battlefield was to his kids. Down below, half a mile away, his farmhouse and its barns and buildings looked rickety and pathetic, like matchstick models he could kick over with the tip of his welly.
Joel Beard had closed his eyes. The sun, shuffling about behind weak clouds, had actually given him a faint halo.
For getting on ten minutes, Joel didn't move, except, at one point, to lift up both hands, on outstretched arms, as if he was waiting, Sam thought, for somebody to pass him a sack of coal. Then he spoke.
'I give you notice, Satan,' Joel said in a powerful voice, 'to depart from this place.' He'd unzipped his jacket to reveal a metal cross you could have used to shoe a horse.
Then he raised his hands so that they were parallel to his body and began to push at the air like this mime artist Sam had once seen on telly, pretending he was behind a pane of plate glass.
'Bloody Nora,' Sam muttered to himself, crouching down among the ferns, unnerved by the whole thing but determined not to show it, even to himself. 'Got a right fuckin' nutter 'ere.' Shaw Horridge watched them through binoculars from the Range Rover. It was parked on a moorland plateau about half a mile away. The binoculars, being Shaw's own, were very good ones.
The Range Rover belonged to a squat, greasy little man who lived in Sheffield and was unemployed. He called himself Asmodeus or something stupid out of The Omen.
'They're moving on, I think,' Shaw said.
Asmodeus had a beard so sparse you could count the hairs. He had the seat pushed back and his feet on the dashboard. 'Good,' he said, as if he didn't really care.
Shaw lowered his binoculars. 'What would you do if they came up here with spades and things?'
'I'd be very annoyed indeed,' Asmodeus said in his flat, drawly voice. 'I'd be absolutely furious. So would Therese, wouldn't you, darling?'
Therese was stretched out on the rear seat, painting her fingernails black. Shaw scowled. He didn't like Asmodeus calling her darling. He didn't at all like Asmodeus, who was unemployed and yet could afford a newish Range Rover.
And yet he was still in awe of him, having seen him by night, this little slob with putrid breath and a pot-belly, not yet out of his twenties and yet able to change things.
And he was excited.
'But what would you do?'
Asmodeus grinned at him through the open window. 'You're a little devil, aren't you, Shaw? What would you do?'
Shaw said, because Therese was there, 'Kill them.'
'Whaaay! You hear that, Therese? Shaw thinks he'd kill them.'
Therese lifted newly painted nails into the light. 'Well,' she said, 'we might need the priest, but I must say that little farmer's beginning to get on my nerves.'
Shaw tensed.
'Tell you what, Shaw,' Asmodeus said. 'We'll give you an easier one. How about that?' They sat at one end of a refectory table, near an Aga-type kitchen stove, their reflections warped in the shiny sides of its hot-plate covers. Moira kind of jumpy inside, but Lottie pouring tea with steady hands, businesslike, in control.
And this was less than twenty-four hours after the set-to at Matt's graveside, Lottie laying into Willie and Willie's Ma and the other crones, while the minister was helped away into the vibrating night.
Over fifteen years since they'd been face to face. Lottie's hair was shorter. Her face was harder, more closed-up. Out on the forecourt, it had been, 'Hello, Moira', very nonchalant, like their meetings were still everyday events – no fuss, no tears, no embrace, no surprise.
No doubt Dic had told her Moira was around.
She sipped her tea and said Lottie was looking well, in spite of…
'You too,' Lottie said, flat-voiced. 'I always knew you'd become beautiful when you got past thirty. Listen… thanks.'
'For what?'
'For not coming when he wrote to you.'
'I was tied up.'
'Sure,' Lottie said. 'But thanks anyway. Things were complicated enough. Better this way.'
'This way?'
'His music,' Lottie said. 'His project. His beloved bogman. Now stolen, I believe.'
'Lottie, maybe I'm stupid, but I'm not with you.'
'It was on the radio this morning. Thieves broke into the University Field Centre out near Congleton and lifted the Man in the Moss. I find it quite amusing, but Matt would've been devastated. Like somebody kidnapping his father.'
'Somebody stole the bogman? Just like that?'
Lottie almost smiled. 'Hardly matters now, though, does it? Listen, I'll take you down in a bit, show you his music room. He left some stuff for you.'
'For me?'
'Tapes. Listen, I'm not pushing, Moira, but I think you should do it.'
'Do it?' She was starting to feel very foolish.
'Get together with Willie and Eric and Dic and record his bogman music. I don't know if it's any good or not, I haven't heard much of it, but Matt saw it as his personal… summit? His big thing? Life's work?'
Moira looked hard at her, this austere, handsome woman, fifty-odd years old. Looked for the old indomitable spark in the eyes. Truth was, she was still indomitable, but the eyes… the eyes had died a little. This was not the old Lottie, this was a sad and bitter woman playing the part of the old Lottie.
'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.