But she would know.
He stopped the car, the engine idling. The bus shelter had five glass panels in a concrete frame. The glass would be fortified. He would have to take a run at it, from about sixty yards.
If he didn't she would know.
He remembered the occasions she'd lost her temper with him. He shivered, stabbed at the accelerator with the car in neutral, making it roar, clutching the handbrake, a slippery grip. Too much to lose. Gritting his teeth until his gums hurt.
Too much to lose.
And you'll feel better afterwards.
Took his foot off. Closed his eyes, breathed rapidly, in and out. The road was quiet now, the hedges high on either side, high as a railway embankment.
Shaw backed up twenty or thirty yards, pulled into the middle of the road. Felt his jaw trembling and, to stiffen it, retracted his lips into a vicious snarl.
He threw the Saab into first gear. Realised, as the stolen car spurted under him, that he was screaming aloud.
On the side of the bus shelter, the handsome man leaned over the smiling girl on the sofa, topping up her glass from the bottle. In the instant before the crash, the dark, beautiful girl held out the glass in a toast to Shaw before bringing it to her lips and biting deeply into it, and when she smiled again, her smile was full of blood.
You'll feel... better.
The big lights came on in the bar and were sluiced into the forecourt through the open door where Matt Castle stood grinning broadly, with his tall red-haired wife. Behind them was the boy - big lad now, early twenties, must be. Not one of Ernie's old pupils, however; Dic had been educated in and around Manchester while his dad's band was manhandling its gear around the pubs and clubs.
'Happen he will bring a bit of new life,' Ernie said. 'He's a good man.'
'Goodness in most of us,' Ma Wagstaff said, 'is a fragile thing, as you'll have learned, Ernest.'
Ernie Dawber adjusted his glasses, looked down curiously at Ma. As the mother of Little Willie Wagstaff, long-time percussionist in Matt Castle's Band, the old girl could be expected to be at least a bit enthusiastic about Matt's plans.
Ma said, 'Look at him. See owt about him, Ernest?'
Matt Castle had wandered down the steps and was still shaking hands with people and laughing a lot. He looked, to Ernie, like a very happy man indeed, a man putting substance into a dream.
Lottie Castle had remained on the step, half inside the doorway, half her face in shadow.
'She knows,' Ma Wagstaff said.
'Eh?'
'I doubt as she can see it, but she knows, anyroad.'
'Ma ... ?'
'Look at him. Look hard. Look like you looked at t'street.'
Matt Castle grinning, accepting a pint. Local hero.
I don't understand,1 said Ernie Dawber. He was beginning to think he'd become incapable of understanding. Forty-odd years a teacher and he'd been reduced to little-lad level by an woman who'd most likely left school at fourteen.
Ma Wagstaff said, 'He's got the black glow, Ernest.'
'What?'
On top of everything else she'd come out with tonight, this jolted Ernie Dawber so hard he feared for his heart. It was just the way she said it, like picking out a bad apple at the greengrocer's. A little old woman in a lumpy woollen skirt and shapeless old cardigan.
'What are you on about?' Ernie forcing joviality. Bloody hell, he thought, and it had all started so well. A real old Bridelow night.
'Moira?' Matt Castle was saying. 'Aye, I do think she'll come. If only for old times' sake.' People patting him on the shoulder. He looked fit and he looked happy. He looked like a man who could achieve.
The black glow?' Ernie whispered. 'The black glow?
What had been banished from his mind started to flicker - the images of the piper on the Moss over a period of fifteen, to twenty years. Echoes of the pipes: gentle and plaintive on good days, but sometimes sour and sometimes savage.
Black glow?' his voice sounding miles away.
Ma Wagstaff looked up at him. 'I'm buggered if I'm spelling it for thee.'
Part Three
bog oak
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
Bridelow Moss is a two-miles-wide blanket of black peat. Much of its native vegetation has been eroded and the surface peat made blacker by industrial deposits - although the nearest smut-exuding industries are more than fifteen miles away.
Bisected by two small rivers, The Moss slopes down, more steeply than is apparent, from the foothills of the northern Peak District almost to the edge of the village of Bridelow.
In places, the peat reaches a depth of three metres, and although there are several drainage gullies, conditions can be treacherous, and walkers unfamiliar with the Moss are not recommended to venture upon it in severe weather.
But then, on dull wet, days in Autumn and Winter, the gloomy and desolate appearance of the Moss would deter all but the hardiest rambler ...
CHAPTER I
OCTOBER
With the rain hissing venomously in their faces, they pushed the wheelchair across the cindered track to the peat's edge, and then Dic lost his nerve and stopped.
'Further,' Matt insisted.
'It'll sink, Dad. Look.'
Matt laughed, a cawing.
Dic looked at his mother for back-up. Lottie looked away, through her dripping hair and the swirling grey morning, to where the houses of Bridelow clung to the shivering horizon like bedraggled birds to a telephone wire.
'Mum ... ?'
In the pockets of her sodden raincoat, Lottie made claws out of her fingers. She wouldn't look at Matt, even though she was sure - the reason she'd left her head bare - that you couldn't distinguish tears from rain.
'Right.' Abruptly, Matt pushed the tartan rug aside. 'Looks like I'll have to walk, then.'
'Oh, Christ, Dad . .
Still Lottie didn't look at the lad or the withered man in the wheelchair. Just went on glaring at the village, at the fuzzy outline of the church, coming to a decision. Then she said tonelessly, 'Do as he says, Dic.'
'Mum . .
Lottie whirled at him, water spinning from her hair. 'Will you just bloody well do it?'