The Man in the Moss (10 page)

           
Dic said, 'It would have taken his mind off his
condition, maybe.'

 
Lottie shook her head. 'It's an unhealthy
obsession, this whole bogman business.' They'd never really spoken of this.
She'd have made things worse. She probably knew that.'

           
He said sourly, 'Why? You mean ... because of his other
unhealthy ...'

           
Lottie suddenly sat up in the driving seat and slapped
his face, hard.
'Stop it
. Stop it
now
.'

           
She closed her eyes on him. 'I'm tired.'

           
The pipes spun a pale filigree behind her sad, quivering
eyelids, across the black moss where the rain blew in grey-brown gusts.

           
Take him, she prayed. To God. To the Man. Away.

           
Was this so wrong? Was it wrong, was it sinful, to pray
to the Man?

           
God? The Man? The Fairies? Santa Claus? What did it
matter?

           
A thrust of wind rattled the wound down window, pulling
behind it an organ trail from St Bride's, the final fragment of a hymn. It lay
for a moment in strange harmony upon the eddy of the pipes.

           
No, Lottie decided. It's not wrong.

           
Take him. Please.

           
Anybody.

CHAPTER
II

Three hours.

           
Three hours and he hadn't touched her. Chrissie had heard
of men who paid prostitutes just to sit on the edge of the bed for half the
night and listen to them rambling on about their domestic problems.

           
Maybe she should demand overtime.

           
'The other one,' Roger said, 'the one they found in
Lindow, I mean, they christened him Pete Marsh. They had this instant kind of
affection for the thing.'

           
Chrissie had been Dr Roger Hall's temporary admin
assistant for nearly a fortnight and was a lot more interested in
him
than bog people. She poured coffee,
watching him through the motel mirror. Unfortunately, he looked even more
handsome when he was worried.

           
'Well, I mean, there's no way,' Roger went on, 'that I
feel any kind of
affection
for
this
one. It's about knowledge.'

           
'So why not just let him go? After all, he must be pretty
bloody creepy to have around,' said Chrissie, who shared an office at the Field
Centre with a woman called Alice. She tried to imagine the situation if Alice
was a corpse.

           
'It's not
creepy,
exactly.'
Roger sat up in bed, carefully arranging the sheet over his small paunch.

           
'Spooks
me
,'
Chrissie said, 'to be honest. And I never have to see him, thank God.'

           
'No, it's just ... it's as if he knows how badly I need
him. How much I need to know him, where he's coming from.'
           
'You're getting weird. You
tell your wife stuff like this?'
           
'You're kidding. My wife's a
doctor.'
           
That was a novel twist,
Chrissie thought. My wife doesn't understand me - she's too intelligent.
Chrissie didn't care for the underlying message Roger was sending out here. OK,
he was tall, he had nice crinkles around his
 
eyes, everybody said how dishy he looked on the telly. And OK, she was
seducing him (with a bit of luck). But, in the end, one-to-one was the only
kind of relationship Chrissie was basically interested in.

           
'No need to pout,' he said. 'I wasn't suggesting you were
a bimbo. Just that a corpse is a corpse to Janet, regardless of its history.'

           
She brought him coffee. Outside, coming up to 7 p.m. on
an autumn Sunday evening, traffic was still whizzing up the M6. Roger said he
felt safe here: the one place he could count on people he knew not showing up
was the local motor lodge.
           
Chrissie had booked in; he'd
arrived later, leaving his car on the main service area, away from any lights.

           
He was a very cautious man. He was supposed to be in
London until tomorrow evening, on Bogman business. They were re-examining the
stomach-lining or something equally yucky.

           
'Roger, look ...' Chrissie lit a cigarette. 'I know how
important he's been to you - for your career and everything. And I take your
point about him giving the Field Centre a new lease of life - obvious we were
being wound up, the amount of work we were actually doing ... I mean, I've been
wound up before.'

           
'I bet you have,' Roger said, looking at her tits,
putting down his coffee cup. But he still didn't reach out for her.

           
Chrissie tried to find a smile but she'd run out of them.
'Sunday,' she said sadly.

           
'Didn't know you were religious.'

           
'I'm not.' She'd just suddenly thought, What a way to
spend a Sunday evening, in a motel no more than two miles

from where you live. With a
bogman's minder. 'Do you touch him much?'

           
'You make it sound indecent. Of course I touch him. He
feels a bit like a big leather cricket bag. You should pop in sometime, be an
experience for you.'

           
Chrissie shuddered. „
           
He grinned. 'Not that you'd
get much out of it. He hasn't got one any more.
           
'What, no ...?'

           
'Penis.'

           
Chrissie wrinkled her nose. 'Dissolved or something?'
           
'No, they must have chopped it
off. And his balls. Part of the ritual.'

           
'Oh yucky.' Chrissie wrapped her arms around her breasts
and eased back into bed, bottom first.

           
'What I like best about your body,' Roger said, not moving,
'is that it's so nice and pale. All over.'

           
'Actually, I had quite a deep tan in the summer. Still
there, in places.'

           
'Not as deep as
his
tan, I'll bet. That's what you
call
being tanned. Literally. Tanned and pickled. It's what it does to them. The acids.
I like you. You're pale.'

           
It's not healthy, Chrissie thought, the way he brings
everything back to that ancient thing. It's like 'Love me, love my bogman Oh,
well... 'Roger,' she said hesitantly, looking at the gap between them, probably
just about the size of the bloody bogman. 'Can I ask you something ?'

           
'Sure,' he said tiredly, 'but if you want me to do
anything complicated, you'll have to
 
...'

           
'Don't worry. I just want to know something about you and
...
him
... Just to clear the air.
Then maybe we can relax.. Thing is, there've not been all that many bogmen
found, have there? All right, that Pete Marsh, and before him a bunch of them
in Denmark. But when one's discovered in this country, it's still a major find,
isn't it?'

           
'In archaeological terms, he's worth more than the
average Spanish galleon, yes.'
           
'Hot property.'
           
'Very.'

           
'So what,' said Chrissie very slowly, 'is he really doing
in a little-known university field centre behind a school playing-field in the
North of England? Why did the British Museum experts and all these London
people ... why did they let you bring him back?'

           
Roger's eyes closed in on one another. This is where he
starts lying, Chrissie deduced. The more university degrees a man had, she'd
discovered, the more hopeless he was at concealing untruths.

           
'What I mean is,' she said, airing the bits of knowledge
she'd rapidly absorbed from the Press cuttings file, 'they like to keep these
things, don't they? They go to Harwell and Oxford for this radiocarbon dating,
and then ...'

           
'Well, he's been to Harwell. He's been to Oxford. And
he's been to the British Museum.'

           
'And he's come back,' said Chrissie. 'Why's that?'

           
The Archdeacon poured himself a cognac, offered the
bottle to the Rev. Joel Beard but wasn't entirely surprised when Joel declined.

           
Only we poor mortals have need of this stuff, the
Archdeacon thought. He's above all such vices.
           
Sadly, he thought.

           
Between them on the leather three-seater Chesterfield sat
a shining white dome, like a strange religious artefact.
           
It was Joel's crash-helmet.

           
He's deliberately placed it between us, the Archdeacon
thought. He's heard about me. 'And so you know the place well, I gather,' he
said hoarsely. 'You know Hans. And his family.'

           
'Well, I remember his daughter, Catherine,' Joel said. 'A
wilful girl.'

           
All right, thought the Archdeacon. So you're one hundred
per cent hetero. I can take a hint, damn you.

           
He edged back into his corner of the Chesterfield and
looked into his drink, at the pictures on the wall, out of the window at the
bare front garden, sepia under a Victorian streetlamp. Anywhere but at Golden
Joel, the diocesan Adonis.

           
'Of course,' Joel said, 'he's been in better health.'
           
'Erm ... quite. And it isn't,
you know, that we think he's
failing
in some way. He's been an excellent man. In his time. He's a very ...
tolerant
man. Perhaps that's part of the
problem. Ah ... not that I'm
decrying
his tolerance ...'

           
The Archdeacon snatched a sip of his brandy. Oh dear. Why
did he let Joel Beard do this to him?

           
Joel smiled. Or at least he exposed both rows of teeth.
'Look, perhaps I can clarify some of this, Simon. I don't think tolerance is
such a fundamental virtue any more. I think we've been tolerant for so long
that it looks as if ... I mean, what, increasingly, is the public's idea of a
typical Anglican clergyman?'

           
You dare, you brute, the Archdeacon thought.
 
You
dare
...

           
'A ditherer,' said Joel. 'An ineffectual ditherer.'
           
'Oh.' The Archdeacon relaxed.
'Quite.'
           
'There's a big game going on,
you know, Simon. We - the Church - ought to be out there. But where are we?'
           
'Ah ... where indeed?'

           
'We aren't on the pitch. We aren't even on the
touchline.'
           
'Perhaps not.'

           
'We're in the clubhouse making the bloody tea,' said Joel
Beard.
           
'Well, I ...'

           
'There's real evil about, you know. It's all around us
and it's insidious. A burglary somewhere in Britain every thirty seconds or so.
An assault. A rape. A husband beating his wife, sexually abusing his small
children. We talk of social problems. Or if we use the word evil, it's
social
evil ... We're making excuses for
them and we're excusing ourselves. When I was a gym teacher ...'

           
Oh, please ... The Archdeacon saw beneath the cassock to
the tensed stomach and the awesome golden chest.

           
'...
 
before each
rugby lesson, there'd be the same pathetic collection of little notes.
"Dear Sir, Please excuse my son from games, he has a minor chest
infection." This sort of nonsense. Same ones every other week
  
The wimps. Well I'm afraid that's what
we
look like sometimes. "Dear
People, Please excuse me from confronting Satan this week, but my steeple's
developed stone-fatigue and I have to organize a garden party." This is
what we've come to. We've reached the point where we're ashamed to wield the
weapons forged for us by God.'

           
The Archdeacon refused to allow himself to contemplate
the weapon God had forged for Joel Beard. He took a mouthful of cognac and held
it there while Joel talked of the Church's manifest obligation to confront the
Ancient Enemy again. Lord, but he was a magnificent sight when fired-up - that
profile, hard as bronze, those rigid golden curls ...