'Of course. We must arrange a time.'
'Like, now.'
'Oh, dear,' said Kaufmann. 'This sounds serious. What can the fair Moira have been up to?'
Macbeth walked right up to him. There was a cab idling not ten yards away, and he was taking no chances. 'We need to talk about a man,' he said, 'name of John Peveril Stanage.' Ashton thought he should tell her himself, maybe test the water a bit. Also, he liked a pint around Sunday lunch when he got the time – unable, despite his divorce, to shake himself out of the feeling that Sunday lunchtime was special.
And he couldn't deny he was becoming quite fascinated by this place, a bit of old England only twenty miles from factories and warehouses, muck and grime and petty crime.
He drove Across the Moss in his own vehicle, the Japanese sports car which was his first independent purchase with the bit of money left over after paying off his wife. A gesture.
Ashton realised now that Gillian was probably right, it was bloody pathetic to buy a car like this at his age. Lump of flash tat, and he could never even remember what bloody make it was.
'Oh,' she said, looking up to serve him. it's you.'
No curiosity, he noticed But then, if they had recovered anything from that grave, be all over the village, wouldn't it?
'Just thought I should officially inform you, Mrs Castle,' he said confidentially, across the bar, 'that we didn't find what we were looking for. I'm sorry we had to put you through this.'
There were no more than a dozen customers in The Man. Some had looked up when he came in. Made a change; most pubs, they could smell a copper the same way he could scent illegal odours amidst tobacco smoke. Always somebody in a pub with something to hide, whether they'd been flogging nicked videos or their MOT was overdue.
'You have your job to do,' Lottie Castle said. She seemed weary, strained, nervy. Still looking good, though, he'd not been wrong about that. Tragedy suited some women. Something about recent widows, murder victims' wives especially; stripped of all need for pretend-glamour, they acquired this harsh unadorned quality, the real woman showing through.
Sometimes this excited him.
Must be getting warped, price of thirty years in the job.
'I had the feeling yesterday,' he said, 'that you thought we might have found something.'
She said, 'Wouldn't have surprised me either way. The bog body, wasn't it?'
'Somebody told you.' He wondered why she should make him think of murder victims' wives.
'Call it intuition,' Lottie said. 'What you having?'
'Pint of Black?'
'You'll be the only one,' she said.
When he raised an inquiring eyebrow she told him another bunch of jobs had gone, working men replaced by men in white coats brought in from Across the Moss. Rumours that Gannons might even close the brewery altogether, transferring all production of Bridelow Black to their new plant outside Matlock.
'Never,' said Ashton. 'How can you brew Bridelow Black in Matlock?'
'How can you brew German lager in Bradford?' said Lottie.
'People don't care any more. They've got the name, that's all that matters.'
'Thought the lads here were looking a bit cheesed.' Ashton nodded at the customers.
Lottie said, 'Gannons have apparently got tests showing the local spring water doesn't meet European standards of purity. Cost a substantial amount to decontaminate it. Added to which the equipment's antiquated. Where's the business sense in preserving some scruffy little dead-end village brewery on the wrong side of a bog?'
'Bloody tragic,' Ashton said, and meant it. 'Just about finish Bridelow, I reckon.'
'People've got to have work,' Lottie said. They'll move out. School'll shut. Church'll be operating every fourth Sunday. Still want this?
'Better make it a bottle of Newcastle,' Ashton said. 'I wouldn't like to cause an incident.'
'The rot's already set in, I'm afraid,' Lottie said, pulling a bottle from under the bar. 'General store closed last week. Chip shop's on its last legs. How long the Post Office'll keep a sub-office here is anybody's guess.'
'Not good for you either. Dozen customers on a Sunday?
'Be a few hikers in later,' Lottie said listlessly.
'I was told,' Ashton said smoothly, raising his voice a little, that some folk reckon all the bad luck that's befallen this village is due to that bogman being removed from the bog.'
Behind him, conversation slowed to a trickle.
'That's stupid,' Lottie said.
'You see, that's why we thought somebody might've had the idea of bringing it back to Bridelow. And where better to put it than at the bottom of an existing grave? Done it before, apparently, according to my source.'
'And who might that be?' asked Frank Manifold Snr from behind his half of draught Bass.
Ashton didn't turn round. 'Surprising as it may seem, Mrs Castle, I can understand it, the way people might be feeling. Problem is, we're talking about a prize specimen here. Experts from all over the world made plans to come and see it. It's almost unique. Invaluable. And so, you see, the police are under quite enormous pressure to get it back.'
There was no reaction from Lottie Castle. He was pretty sure now that she knew nothing.
'Well…' Ashton sucked some of the creamy froth from his Brown Ale. 'I suspect we're going to have to disrupt people's lives something terrible if we don't find it soon.'
By this time, the silence behind him sounded thick enough to sit on.
'Of course,' he said, 'if the bogman was in Bridelow or, say, back in the Moss… and somebody was to tell us, anonymously, precisely where… Then, personally, I can't see us taking it any further.'
Ashton felt that if he fell off his stool the silence would probably support him.
'Now, another piece of information that's come my way, Mrs Castle,' he went on, 'is that a certain gentleman has agreed to provide sufficient money to create a permanent exhibition centre for the bogman. And that this centre might well be established here in Bridelow, thus ensuring that the bogman remains in his old home. And that the hundreds of tourists who come to see him will spend a few bob in the village and perhaps have a drink or two in this very pub. Perfect solution, you ask me. What's your own feeling, Mrs Castle?'
'My feeling?' Lottie began to breathe hard. She started to straighten glasses. To steady her hands he thought.
'Yes,' he said. 'Your feeling.'
Lottie didn't look at Ashton, nor past him at the other customers, just at the glasses.
'I hope you never find it,' she said in a voice like cardboard.
He said nothing.
'Caused enough upset.' She started to set up a line of upturned glasses on the bar top. 'And, you know… I don't really think I care what happens to this village. I'll tell you… Mr Ashton… Anybody wants this pub, they can have it. For a song. You fancy a pub? Supplement your police pension? Bit of country air?'
He could see tears in her eyes, hard as contact lenses.
'Views?' she said. 'Lovely views?'
'Mrs Castle,' he said. 'Please. I'm sorry.'
'Peat?' she shrieked, slicing a hand through the line of glasses so that the last two instantly smashed against the beer- pumps. 'You want peat? Peat, peat and more fucking peat?' Cassock wind-whipped around his ankles, Joel stood looking down the village street, his back to the church notice board, his face soaked by rain and by sweat. The sweat of rage and humiliation.
He shouldn't have struck her. It was unpremeditated, but it was wrong. And yet, because the woman was an incarnation of evil, it was also rather unsatisfactory.
… shall not suffer a witch to live. Until the arrival of the sound-drenching rain and wind, he'd contemplated delivering his sermon from the middle of the street, denouncing the denizens of Bridelow to their own front doors.
What a damning indictment of Hans Gruber this was. Hans who packed the church at least twice on Sundays, a stranger who had been accepted by the villagers as one of their own.
