The Man in the Moss

            'I didn't say anything

            'Well, me too, Mr Ashton. I think I must be cracking up.'

            'Gary,' he said. 'And I'd like to help. If I can.'

            'You not got better things to do? One of the lads was saying there's a big police hunt up on the moors.'

            'That's South Yorkshire's,' Ashton said. 'Our manor finishes just this side of the Moss. We'll help if we're asked, but we've not been asked. I'm off-duty anyroad.'

            'Who're they looking for?'

            'Farmer. Don't ask me his name. Went off after some trespassers last night and didn't come back. Had his shotgun with him, that's the worry. Why? You think it might be the same hooligans broke in here?'

            Lottie shook her head again. It wasn't so much a denial, Ashton thought, as an attempt to shake something out.

            'But then,' he said gently, 'there wasn't a break-in here, was there, Mrs Castle?'

            'There had to've been,' Lottie said, quietly insistent. 'There's no other explanation.'

            Ashton sat down on the edge of a dusty old couch next to a black thing that made him think of a dead animal, all skin and bones. He saw Mrs Castle glance at it briefly and recoil slightly.

            'What's this?' Ashton was curious. There was a flute bit sticking out of it, with airholes.

            'That?' Lottie said. 'That's the Pennine Pipes, Mr Ashton. Primitive kind of bagpipe. My husband's instrument. Woke me ...' She hesitated. 'Woke me up, Mr Ashton. About two o'clock this morning.'

            'What did?'

            'Them. The pipes. Somebody down here playing the pipe'. You think I could mistake that noise after living with it twenty-odd years?'

            Ashton experienced a sensation like the tip of a brittle fingernail stroking the nape of his neck.

            He said, 'What did you do?'

            'Well, I didn't go down,' said Lottie. 'That's for sure.'

            'Perhaps somebody wanted to frighten you, Mrs Castle.'

            She said, 'When you got Matt's coffin out, did you ... ?'

            'No,' Ashton said. 'We had no reason and no right to disturb your husband.'

            She said, 'Do you mind if we go outside?'

            'After you,' Ashton said. He pulled the wooden door into place behind them, quite thankful to be out of there himself. Place was like a mausoleum without a tomb.

            Lottie Castle sniffed and one side of her mouth twitched in latent self-contempt. 'You know what it's like when you're alone - Or maybe you don't.'

            'Yes,' he said, 'I do.'

            'Things that would otherwise seem totally crazy go through your head.'

            'True.'

            'And with you lot digging up his grave, I thought... Well, it was as if he was ...'

            Lottie Castle thrust open the kitchen door. Ashton followed her in, quietly shut the door behind them and stood with his back to it.

            'I didn't catch that,' he said. 'As if he was what?'

            'As if you'd let him out,' Lottie Castle said in a parched monotone, looking down at the flags. 'And he'd come back. For his pipes.'

            She turned her back on Gary Ashton and walked over to the stove.

            'Listen,' Ashton said, wondering if he was cracking up. This piping. Was it, like - I'm sorry - any particular tune?'

            'No,' she said. 'No particular tune.' She was silent a moment, then she said, 'When Matt used to get the pipes out, he'd flex the bag a bit, get the air circulating, make all these puffing, wheezing noises and then a few trills up and down the scale. Warming up, you know? Getting started.'

            Lottie placed both palms on the hot-plate covers. 'Matt Castle getting warmed up,' she said. 'That was what I thought heard.'

Hans moistened his lips with his tongue. Cathy got up. 'I'll fetch you a cup of tea.'

            'No ...' Her father moved in his chair, winced. 'No, it's all right. I ...' He looked quietly down at his knees for a while. Then he said, 'They were talking about a plastic one. Back at the hospital, you know. I said to leave it a while. I said I was seeing a very experienced private therapist.'

            Cathy smiled. 'Wasn't working though, was it?'

            'No.' Hans sighed. 'She was talking, the last time I saw her, about something getting in and sapping her powers. Perhaps it was intimations of mortality. That was her way of expressing it - that she was corning to the end of her useful life. And maybe she could see the end, as well, of over a thousand years of tradition. And I'm wondering, too, if this is going to be the end of it.'

            Cathy said nothing.

            Hans said, 'Bit of a rag bag, the Mothers, aren't they? Now? Nobody to really take over. Nobody with Ma's authority. Milly Gill? I don't think so, do you? Nice woman, but too soft

- in the nicest way, of course. And the rest of the village - well, modern times, modern attitudes. General loss of spirituality. I blame the eighties, Mrs Thatcher, all that greed, all that materialism. Some of it had to find its way across the Moss sooner or later.'

            'It's still a good place, Pop, in essence.'

            'Yes ... as long as that essence remains. I'm very much afraid the essence has gone.'

            Cathy thought they'd never come as close as this to discussing it. He'd always been too busy organising things, fudging the issue. The issue being that the parish priest in Bridelow must become partially blind and partially deaf. This also was a tradition.

In the old days - which, in this instance, meant as recently as last year - it wasn't possible to get to Bridelow Brewery without passing the Hall.

            The Hall was built on a slight incline, with heathery rock gardens. Ernie Dawber could remember when the old horse-drawn beer drays used to follow the semi-circular route which took them under the drawing-room window for the children admire. The Horridges were always proud of their shire horses; the stable block had been a very fine building indeed, with a Victorian pagoda roof.

            Now it was decaying amid twisted trees grown from hedges long untrimmed. No horses any more; it was heavy trucks and different entrances, no obvious link between the brewery and the Hall. Liz Horridge, Ernie thought, must be feeling a bit bereft. He shouldn't have left it so long. There was no excuse.

            The Hall itself, to be honest, wasn't looking too good either. Big holes in the rendering, gardens a mess. Arthur Horridge would have a fit. Ernie was merely saddened at another symptom of the Change.

            Gettin' a bit whimsy, Ernie?

            Leave me alone, Ma. Give me a break, eh?

            Fifty yards below the house, the drive went into a fork, the other road leading to the brewery.

            'By 'eck,' Ernie Dawber said, stopping to look.

            For suddenly the brewery was more impressive than the Hall.

            In the past it had always been discreet, concealed by big old trees. But now some of the biggest had been felled to give the Victorian industrial tower block more prominence.