Or pleading for the Man to summon him. Matt.
'I can't stand this,' Dic said suddenly. Dic, who could play the pipes too, and lots of other instruments. Who was a natural - in his blood too, his dad more proud than he'd ever admit, but not so proud that he'd encouraged the lad to make a profession of it.
'Christ,' said Dic, 'is this bloody suicide? Is it his way of ...?'
'You know him better than that.' Figuring he just wanted a row, another way of coping with it.
'It's not as if he's got an audience. Only us.'
'Only us,' Lottie said, although she knew that was wrong. Matt believed - why else would he be putting himself through all this? - that there had to be an audience. But, it was true, they were not it.
'All right, what if he dies?' Dic said sullenly, brutally. 'What if he dies out there now?'
Lottie sighed. What a mercy that would be.
'What I mean is ... how would we even start to explain ... ?'
She looked at him coldly until he subsided into the passenger seat.
'Sorry,' he said.
The piping was high on the wind, so high it no longer seemed to be coming from the sunken shape in the wheelchair, from the black lung. She wondered if any people could hear it back in Bridelow. Certainly the ones who mattered wouldn't be able to, the old ones, Ma Wagstaff, Ernie Dawber. They'd be in church. Perhaps Matt had chosen his time well, so they wouldn't hear it, the ones who might understand.
Dic said, 'How long ... ?'
'Until he stops. You think this is easy for me, Dic? You think I believe in any of this flaming stupid ... Oh, my God!'
The piping had suddenly sunk an octave, meeting the drone, the marsh bird diving, or falling, shot out of the sky.
Lottie stopped breathing.
And then, with a subtle flourish of Matt's old panache, the tune was caught in mid-air, picked up and sent soaring towards the horizon. She wanted to scream, either with relief and admiration ... or with the most awful, inexcusable kind of disappointment.
Instead she said, briskly, 'I'm going to call Moira tonight, I've been remiss. I should have told her the situation. He wouldn't.'
Dic said, 'Bitch.'
'That's not fair.' He was twenty, he was impulsive, things were black and white. She leaned her head back over the seat. 'I can understand why she didn't want to get involved. OK, if she'd known about his illness she'd have been down here right away, but at the end of the day I don't think that would have helped. Do you?'
The end of the day. Funny how circumstances could throw such a sad and sinister backlight on an old cliché.
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.'