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.
One of their own!
Hans turning a blind eye to the lone, black-clad figure in the churchyard before the funeral - the hooded figure clearly exuding not respect, nor monastic piety, but a heathen arrogance.
And Gruber, the quisling, screaming at him, Joel, 'Put it back!' as he snatched the bottle from the coffin.
Joel looked down the street towards Mrs Wagstaff's cottage. Its curtains were drawn, upstairs and down. This was another deliberate insult: I'll come to church for Hans Gruber's services, but I'll not even leave my bed for yours.'
He began to shake with rage. Obviously, after the incident at the well, the harridan had poisoned his name in Bridelow.
The street was deserted. He strode to the telephone kiosk in front of the Post Office. The answer was clear. If, as a Christian, he had been rejected by the resident congregation, then he must summon his own.
Just get me out of here, get me across those hills and you can break down,' she said. 'Or do what the fuck you like.'
She had this sore throat now.
Cathy had been talking about some kind of Taiwanese flu. Whatever the hell that was, it sounded like the BMW had it too.
'I get across these hills,' Moira told the car, 'I'm gonny book you into a garage and me into a hotel that looks sufficiently anonymous, and then I think I'm gonny die quietly.'
Out of the corner of an eye - the BMW making noises like Kenny Savage in the lavatory the morning after - she'd seen the dead tree on the Moss again. It didn't move but it didn't look so obviously dead any more, a white light shining like a gemstone in its dragon's eye.
She'd closed her own eye, the eye which was letting in the image of the tree, and this hurt. It was the side of her face Joel Beard had slapped. Maybe the eye had gone black; she couldn't bring herself to look in the mirror.
I can't believe he got away with that. Normally I'd have torn the bastard's balls off.
The BMW retched, like it was about to throw up its oil or something.
'Maybe you didn't understand me.' She gripped the wheel, shaking it. 'Maybe you only understand German. In which case you'll never know that if you don't get me to that hotel ... I'm gonny trade you in, pal ...'
In the driving-mirror, through the rain coming down like sheet metal now, she could see the spikes of St Bride's Church, maybe two miles back across the Moss.
'... and you'll be bought at auction by some loony, tear-arse seventeen-year-old looking for something fast and sleek to smash up and get killed in, yeah?'
Yelling at the car because she didn't want to hear anything else coming at her through the rain and the engine noise.
Didn't want to touch the radio-cassette machine on account of there was a tape inside with the late Matt Castle on it, Matt coming seriously unspooled.
Her head ached and her hair felt heavy and greasy, just awful. She pushed it away from her eyes. The Moss had gone from the mirror, it was all scrubby moorland with dark, unfinished drystone walls like slippery piles of giant sheep-shit. She came to a signpost and hesitated, then pointed the car at the place that sounded biggest and closest.
Buxton. Some kind of inland resort. With hotels. Listen, hen, what you do is you book into the biggest, plushest hotel they have there - like the Buxton Hilton or whatever - and you take several aspirins and you get a night's sleep and then you do some hard thinking. You can still think, OK, you can still function. The comb is merely an artefact invested with symbolism by you and by your mammy and however many other gypsies have had it in their gold-encrusted fists - but to claim it holds part of your spirit, your essence, your living consciousness is just ridiculous sentiment. Right?
Sure.
The Buxton road doubled back round the Moss to the Bridelow moors in a steep, curving climb, with what seemed like a sheer cliff going up on one side and another sheer cliff coming down on the other with just a low drystone wall between