'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.
