Martin Tait had suffered, during the past two days. He had hated living in the discomfort of a pup tent that one of the police cadets had lent him. He had forced himself to be useful and friendly, fetching and carrying and knocking in nails and helping to hoist a maypole, eating curious stews, drinking home-brewed beer from home-made mugs, and listening to half-baked philosophy. But the longer he stayed, the more the ethos of the fair irritated him.
Most of the participants were about his own age – he’d recognized a couple of contemporaries from his schooldays at Framlingham – but he found it impossible to identify with them. The only son of a strong-minded, ambitious widow, he had nothing in common with people who wanted to reject the values of contemporary society. The idea of being poor by choice, of spending his time growing vegetables or playing a flute or doing leatherwork appalled him. He deplored the fact that the skills and hard work he had seen going into the creation of the fair were not put to regular, socially acceptable use.
‘And since the fairground is rather like a town,’ he continued, raising his voice above the muttered disenchantment of the assembled police officers, ‘that’s how I suggest we treat it. I’ve made a map of the site—’ he passed round photostat copies ‘– not guaranteed accurate, but near enough. And I’ve divided it into beats, so that each of us can concentrate on getting to know the resident population of our area. Without, of course, letting them know that we’re their friendly neighbourhood coppers. Most of them like to think they’re anti-fuzz, though they’ll scream for us soon enough if they’re in any trouble.’
The policemen cheered up at the thought of having something definite to work on, and began to study their maps. Quantrill left Tait to finish the briefing and went outside. The fair was not yet officially open, but the site already looked crowded and the traffic police were working their arms as busily as bookmakers at a race meeting.
Cars were converging on Oxlip from all over the region. The fields beyond the site had been designated as official car-parks, at 25p a time, but as usual a good many motorists, intent on being medieval and simplistically equating that with individual freedom, preferred to try to avoid paying by parking on the roadside verges. The road that ran past the site had already been reduced to half its width, and a police motorcyclist reported a tail-back as far as Bungay.
As soon as the cars stopped, their drivers and passengers tried to abandon the twentieth century. Nearly all of them got out wearing home-made costumes of some kind: tights dyed to make men’s hose, hessian jerkins, unisex surtouts in various colours and materials. Some men were dressed as monks or friars, beggars or Robin Hoods. Many of the girls were in long dresses, and pointed hats of the kind recommended for wear by fifteenth-century damsels imprisoned in castle turrets.
Quantrill felt uncomfortably conspicuous as he stood watching the visitors enter the site. He had dressed casually, in an old pair of tweed trousers and his fishing sweater, but he knew that his hair was too neatly cut and his chin too closely shaven. He was conscious of looking both unacceptably orthodox and, at forty-six, older than almost anyone else on the site apart from one or two other coppers. The majority of men were about Gilbert Smith’s age. Nearly all of them were bearded, and half the beards in sight were as thin and medium brown as Tait had described Gilbert Smith’s.
‘Trouble with these buggers is, they all look the same.’ PC Ronald Timms, trying to be inconspicuous in dark-grey flannel trousers and navy-blue anorak, but every inch a policeman behind his lugubrious moustache, had come up behind the Chief Inspector.
Quantrill agreed, and began to move on. Together, he and Ron Timms were a dead giveaway. ‘Hope you’ve got a good beat, Ron,’ he said pointedly.
Unexpectedly, PC Timms chuckled. ‘I hear it includes the beer tent …’ He gave his moustache an anticipatory wipe with the knuckle of his forefinger.
‘I’ll know where to come at lunch-time, then,’ Quantrill told him. He walked away, climbing a grassy hill to view the site from the highest point.
The fifteen-acre meadow where the fair was held was too small now for the numbers involved, but otherwise ideal. It was glebe land, and a footpath ran across it from the village to the church, which provided an appropriately medieval backdrop. The church was small, fourteenth century without any later external additions, and built of flint with a characteristically East Anglian round tower and a thatched roof. The rough grass of the surrounding churchyard was bright with primroses and daffodils that had sprung up among the leaning, lichened gravestones like a renewed promise of resurrection.
Part of the meadow, between the village and the churchyard, was level but the rest of the site undulated, rising to the hillock on which Quantrill was standing. Trees and bushes grew here and there in the meadow and a chestnut crowned the top of the hill, thrusting its pale fuzzy opening leaves into the clear blue of the sky. All round the meadow were hedges, some white with blackthorn blossom, some purple with trailing brambles, some yellow with willow, some bursting into green.
But the colours of spring, lit palely by the sun, were eclipsed by the colours of the fair. Spuriously medieval or not, Oxlip Fair had a look of joy and gaiety. Poles had been hoisted aloft, and from them streamed ribbons and flags and banners contrived from old sheets and army surplus parachute silk dyed in brilliant colours. In the centre of the meadow was a great maypole, nearly seventy feet tall, garlanded with blossoms and greenery. Giant kites, birdshaped, flew towards the sun.
And then there was the sound of music, coming nearer as a costumed procession entered the meadow led by a drum and a fiddle and a tambourine. Someone read a proclamation at the foot of the maypole. A wicker basket was thrown open and a flock of pigeons exploded into the air, vying for height with the banners, the maypole, the church tower, the chestnut tree, the kites and eventually the skylarks before setting course for their lofts. Oxlip Fair had begun.
There was colour and movement everywhere, but not the mechanical movement and neon-lit garishness of a modern fairground. Informal entertainment was provided by clowns and tumblers, by jugglers and minstrels and an early music consort, by puppeteers and morris dancers and anyone else who felt sufficiently extrovert to have a go. Stages had been set up in different parts of the meadow for drama and music, and fir poles planted beside each stage were lively with banners. Silken dragons flapped over one, a castle painted on tarpaulin towered behind another, a third was sited in the gaping mouth of a bamboo dragon whose cardboard scales were held together by orange baler twine.
‘All very jolly,’ said Quantrill to his sergeant, who had climbed the hill to join him. It was the first time they had met since Wednesday, when they had found that there were no traces of blood in Paul Pardoe’s car, and that they could get no further information from either Jonathan Elliott or George Hussey. Digging operations at Yeoman’s had uncovered nothing, but the scene-of-crime team was still searching the house and grounds. In the absence of any new leads, Quantrill had since been making enquiries about Jasmine Woods in her previous home at Thaxted, while Tait had come to set up the Oxlip operation.
‘Or it would be jolly,’ Quantrill amended, ‘if we weren’t on a murder investigation. That was a good briefing you did, Martin. I like your idea of treating the place as a town. Trying to spot one man among 100,000 would be hopeless otherwise.’
‘Let’s hope it works,’ said Tait.
‘It had better. We’ve got to find Smith.’
‘Did you get any useful information about him from Alison, sir?’
Quantrill chewed his lower lip. Then, ‘I haven’t seen her,’ he said abruptly. ‘We haven’t heard anything more since that telephone call on Tuesday.’
‘What? But I thought—’
‘I know. That’s what I thought, that she’d be home within a couple of days – or at least that she’d ring again. It’s not just fatherly concern, though there’s that too, God knows, but we need her. We need her evidence. I haven’t so far found anything significant about Jasmine Woods
at Thaxted, and Patsy Hopkins hasn’t yet been able to get anything coherent out of the ex-secretary, Anne Downing – so we must talk to Alison. And we want to know in detail what she saw when she went into the room where the woman was murdered, so that we can compare it with what we found ourselves. We know that Smith took at least two netsuke, but we don’t know whether that was on the night of the murder or the next morning, after Alison found the body. So her evidence is going to be vital – and Smith knows that as well as we do.’
‘There may be a perfectly simple explanation,’ said Tait. ‘Perhaps she just wanted to stay on with her friends over the holiday weekend.’ He thought about it. ‘Would she be likely to come here, to Oxlip?’
Quantrill shook his head impatiently. ‘No. Alison isn’t interested in this kind of caper, she’s a sensible girl. That’s why I can’t understand why we’ve heard nothing more from her. I know she was upset over the murder, it stands to reason. But she must have got over the shock by now. And she’s alert, she reads the papers and watches the television news, so she’ll know we want information about Smith. She’s usually very considerate. I’m sure she wouldn’t go on keeping us in suspense, not of her own free will …’
The phrase lingered on the air as Quantrill and Tait avoided each other’s eyes, conscious of its corollary.
Chapter Thirty
Alison had begun to grow more accustomed to life at Mill Farm. Despite occasional tensions the atmosphere was friendly; she would have found it relaxing if it were not for the physical contact in which the family indulged. Everyone touched and hugged and kissed everyone else with casual affection, and Alison found it alien and embarrassing. She tightened up instinctively when any adult members of the family came anywhere near her. It was not easy for her to identify with any of the other women, since she was not into yoga or vegetarianism or spinning, but she was glad to spend the time helping with the children and the animals.
When her conscience had nagged her to walk up to the village on Tuesday and telephone her mother, she had fully intended to ring home again in a couple of days; but the days drifted by and she let them go. The thought of home, and of the inevitable questioning that awaited her, brought so much stress that, having done her duty, she deliberately tried to put home out of her mind. She pulled a shutter down over it, as she had pulled a shutter over her discovery of the murder.
But although she refused to think of that morning when she had found Jasmine’s body, she could not forget the fact of her friend’s death. It was too recent, too raw. There would be occasions when it slipped from her memory and she could feel, for a few moments, almost happy; but then it would come back, hitting her like a physical blow, stopping her in the middle of what she was doing while her body clenched with pain. At other times the misery would creep up on her slowly, like cold dark water rising in a lock. She would carry on mechanically with her tasks, but she would be unable to stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks while she worked. And all the time, in Quantrill family tradition, she kept her emotions to herself.
It was one of the children who began the process of breaking down her habitual reticence. ‘Alison’s crying again,’ he reported to Polly, who was in the studio she had converted from a cowshed, generously slapping oil paint on to canvas.
‘Is she? Well, that’s good, isn’t it? We all need to cry sometimes.’ She shooed the child away and went in search of Alison. ‘No, don’t stop crying,’ she told her. ‘It’s therapeutic. Only don’t keep your sorrows to yourself – it really does help if you share them.’
And so Alison had begun, haltingly, to tell Polly what she had told Roz. But whereas Roz’s reaction had been practical and intellectual, her sister’s was characteristically physical and emotional. Appalled by Alison’s story, Polly swept the girl into her motherly arms. ‘Oh, my poor sweet child – you poor lamb …’
Alison felt so weakened that after a moment’s hesitation she clung to her and gave way to a long slow flood of grief. Securely held as she had not been held since she was a child, she felt able to abandon herself to emotion and tell Polly everything.
When the tears eventually began to lessen Polly spoke, her cheek pressed warmly against the girl’s. ‘I never met Jasmine, but I heard about her from Roz. Of course you’re shattered – no don’t move. It’s all right, relax … Go on holding me, we all need other people to hold on to. And not just in times of grief – we ought to show warmth and affection, too. Our families and friends are precious, and they should be told so. That’s the way we live here at Mill Farm, and that’s how we’re bringing up the children.’
It was not a way of life that Alison felt tempted to adopt, but Polly had been both comforting and enlightening. Alison hoped to be able to pass on some of that comfort to Gilbert Smith when she saw him, because she knew how grieved he must be over Jasmine’s death. She began to look forward to the weekend, and to the probability of meeting him at Oxlip fair.
The Mill Farm family talked of little else but the fair while she was with them. An advance party went off on Good Friday to set up the stall and the camp site, travelling in a farm cart drawn by the family horse. On Saturday morning everyone else was up early, and Polly provided a ferry service to Oxlip in her old car, taking Alison and the older children last.
The fair was well under way by the time they arrived, and the children shrieked with pleasure at the sight. The air was filled with the sound of excitement, of guitars and flutes and folk songs. From a group of food stalls came the sizzle of cooking and appetizing smells of curry, kebabs and fried chicken. Woodsmoke drifted everywhere, faint but pervasive, a genuine breath of pre-industrial living.
Polly was cheerfully irreverent as they wandered through the fairground, pointing out with relish all the anachronisms. One Robin Hood smelled of aftershave. A family group with a very rough encampment, dressed in grubby sacking and looking decidedly Early English, was trying to sell orange squash from a plastic container. A monk was cooking corn on the cob, and serving it with butter from Danish foil packs; and a man frying chicken quarters on a barbecue, wearing a very short jerkin over his hose, had prudently protected himself from the hot fat with a PVC apron advertising Colman’s mustard.
They made their way through the higgledy-piggledy rows of stalls that formed the streets of the temporary town, exchanging the smells of cooking for those of leather and incense. It was supposed to be an Oxlip rule that nothing offered for sale should be commercially mass-produced. As a consequence, there was nothing offered for sale that anyone actually needed. But the visitors were determined to join in, and so they bought pendants and candles and nettle shampoos and corn dollies and Papal indulgences and joss sticks and Oxlip Fair T-shirts and tarot cards and medieval love potions (‘Satisfaction guaranteed’called the manufacturer, ‘or your money back next year!’).
Alison enjoyed it, catching the gaiety of Polly who wandered round with a grin on her face. She felt so happy that for a short time she forgot that only five days ago she had found her friend and employer lying murdered. She lingered beside one of the stalls, watching a woman at work on a loom while Polly took the children to an adventure playground among the trees on the side of the hill. And then she saw Gilbert Smith.
A large number of plain-clothes policemen discovered, at about 12.30, that the beer tent was on their beat. Real ale was being served from casks set up along the back wall of the marquee, and there were so many clamouring customers that the barman found it simplest to tap the beer into plastic watering cans and fill the mugs from those.
The mugs were plastic too. It would spoil the taste of the Adnams, thought Quantrill, but with such a heaving press of customers it would be unreasonable to hope for glasses. He nodded amiably to a group of policemen as he pushed past them to down his drink in the open air. They had nothing significant to report, but the fair at least provided them with some entertainment: ‘… and this feller, cheeky bastard, is carrying a placard reading “We’re following the drug squad, follow us.” Th
ere’s a couple of dozen people trailing after him, and Lenny Rundle, in uniform of course, tagging along behind red in the face with his notebook out …’ ‘There’s this stall, more of a home-made tent really, with a notice on it saying “Medieval Massage”. “How much?” I asked the girl. “That depends what you want,” she says, perfectly serious, “it’s hands, 45p, feet 60p, and 90p for the body” …’
Quantrill stood with his drink watching a crowd gathering to watch a circle of costumed adults dancing round the maypole. Among the crowd was a girl he thought he knew; so pregnant that he rapidly identified her as one of the students he had met at the Old Rectory at Thirling. She was with a girl of her own age, and two men. All of them wore costumes and appeared to be enjoying themselves thoroughly. They were accompanied by two children, a small curly-haired boy carrying a painted cardboard shield and a wooden sword, and a girl of about ten in a long yellow robe.
Quantrill recognized the children as the two youngest Elliotts, Vanessa and Toby. Neither of them seemed happy. Toby was being advanced upon by an adult dragon-headed figure with red hose; he looked apprehensive, as though not knowing whether to hit it with his sword or run. Vanessa, prim and neat, appeared to be trying to disassociate herself from the proceedings. ‘Personally,’ Quantrill heard her say in her high, clear voice, ‘I think the whole thing is stupid.’
The Chief Inspector joined Tait who was soberly drinking bitter lemon from a bottle. ‘It’s going to be more difficult than I thought, Martin,’ Quantrill said. ‘I didn’t realize that all the stalls and shelters were home-made. I thought they’d be proper market stalls and tents, not hovels botched up out of wood and tarpaulin and sacking. You can’t possibly see what’s going on inside them, or how many people are quietly sleeping off booze or pot. If Smith keeps his head down, he could stay here all weekend without being spotted.’
‘But he’s got to come out sometime,’ said Tait practically. He pointed to the urinal, a system of troughing protected from public view by a long canvas banner painted with male torsos in medieval garb. Strategically sited in an open part of the meadow near the beer tent, it formed part of the general entertainment; a woman was happily taking a photograph of the banner, with visiting heads and shoulders projecting above it and knees and feet below. ‘If the beat coppers are doing their job, they’ll catch Smith when he comes down here.’
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