The Festival Murders

by Mark McCrum

  ‘Francis!’ shouted Ranjit. ‘And Priya. What are you two doing here?’

  ‘Not allowed in, I’m afraid,’ said Francis.

  ‘That effing copper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Silly arse. I’ll come down.’

  A minute later he was striding towards them in a full-length purple coat. ‘I can’t think what he’s so worried about,’ he said. ‘Most people have left now anyway.’

  ‘Back to London?’

  ‘’Fraid so. The whole thing’s been altogether too traumatic. We’re down to a hard core of eight, and not for much longer.’

  ‘And where are they? Inside?’

  ‘They’ve all gone into town. I don’t blame them, really. It’s a bit spooky out here. And Rory wanted to see that SAS guy that was wounded in Afghanistan.’

  ‘Marvin Blake? He was actually a Marine.’

  ‘Same difference. I was about to call a taxi. Thought I might join them. I don’t suppose …’

  ‘We’re driving back in? Yes, we are. We’re going to the same talk.’

  ‘Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?’ Ranjit said. ‘The soldier and the ghostwriter. What kind of relationship is that, I wonder?’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  As the rain drummed down outside, Priya and Francis sat squashed up round a table in the noisy back bar of the Barrow and Turnip with Ranjit and his friends: tall, cadaverous Rory, in his trademark black velvet jacket; spiky-haired, bespectacled Neville; and American Eva, today in a voluminous flowery dress. Francis had hooked up with them as they came out of Marv and Anna’s talk and suggested hitting the pub. Once ensconced, a lively discussion had ensued. Eva had found Marvin’s testimony scary. ‘Like, all that stuff about “slotting the Taliban” and “getting good kills”. I mean, what expressions! I was amazed he was so open about it all.’

  ‘That’s what soldiers are like,’ said Rory. ‘Bottom line, they’re killing machines.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Ranjit. ‘They’re doing a necessary job. Anyway, I liked his honesty. Particularly the way he talked about the shock of being wounded, how you never expect it to happen to you …’

  ‘That was moving,’ said Eva. ‘And PTSD. He really got that across, didn’t he? Terrifying, what he’s had to deal with …’

  ‘He was cool,’ said Neville. ‘I really liked the fact that he hates to be called a hero. And he wants everyone to know he uses a ghostwriter.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eva agreed. ‘That was cool. And Anna was great, wasn’t she? So modest and understated.’

  ‘And sexy,’ said Neville.

  ‘Did you think so?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It had been a powerful interview, no doubt about that. Chair Dan Dickson had done well drawing the pair of them out; at moments it seemed like a soldier’s discipline was all that was holding Marv together, for all the blokey banter on the surface.

  But now Francis had this gang together, he didn’t want to waste his opportunity. After a couple more minutes, he steered the conversation away from the intriguing relationship of Anna and Marv and on to Grace. ‘So who was the last person to see her alive?’ he asked. ‘I mean, were any of you guys out at Wyveridge when she got back there yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘No,’ said Rory. ‘We came into Mold around lunchtime, didn’t we?’ He fixed Eva with a look that seemed to carry a load of extra meaning.

  ‘So what time’s lunchtime,’ Francis asked, ‘in your schedule?’

  ‘I don’t know, one-ish, something like that.’

  ‘And you didn’t see Grace when you got into town?’

  ‘No,’ said Rory.

  ‘And then you were here for the rest of the day?’

  ‘Yeah. Later we went to Joe Sacco’s talk about Israel/Palestine. Where we ran into you, Priya.’

  ‘I can vouch for that,’ said Priya.

  ‘Then we all went on to the poetry slam together. And after that the pub, where we were having a great time until Ranjit turned up and broke the news to us …’

  ‘May I ask what you were doing between one thirty and five,’ Francis asked, ‘when the Sacco talk began?’

  The three of them looked at each other, their faces suddenly a picture of uncertainty.

  ‘You weren’t at my talk, I don’t think?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or Virginia Westcott’s?’

  ‘Who’s she?’ asked Neville.

  ‘A doyenne of romance, who was speaking at the same time as me.’

  ‘No,’ said Rory. ‘We weren’t.’

  ‘That’s quite a long time,’ said Francis, ‘to be hanging around a festival site.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Rory. ‘But I guess that’s the point of going to a festival – to hang out. What were we doing, Eva? I can’t really remember. Drinking coffee, chilling in the Relaxation Zone …’

  ‘I’m sorry to be pernickety,’ said Francis, ‘but the Wyveridge housekeeper, Mrs Mac, told me you were still having breakfast when she knocked off at two o’clock.’

  Rory didn’t miss a beat. ‘Christ,’ he said angrily. ‘I can’t remember precisely when we left for town. One o’clock, two o’clock, who’s counting? Anyway, what’s it to you? You’re not the police.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ said Francis. ‘All I was trying to find out was when Grace got back to Wyveridge and whether she was alone when she did. It’s an important question, because the poor girl died in a horrible way that may well not have been an accident. I don’t for one moment think any of you were involved in her death but I am trying to establish the facts. If she was alone, we need to confirm that. If she was with someone, even if it was a friend of yours, we need to know that too. So if any of you want to answer my question truthfully, that would be a real help.’

  The trio were silenced by this. The chatter and clatter from the rest of the pub sounded loud in Francis’s ears. ‘I’ve gotta say this, given the circs,’ said Eva, eventually. ‘In confidence, Grace did come back before we left.’

  ‘I see,’ said Francis. ‘And when was that?’

  ‘Middle of the afternoon. We didn’t go into town straight after our breakfast, because we went for a walk first. By the time we’d got back and had, like, tea, it was probably getting on for four, because we arrived in Mold with just enough time for a coffee before the Sacco talk, which as you said was at five.’

  ‘Was Grace alone?’ Francis asked.

  ‘I think so, yeah. She popped her head round the door. She was in a rush to get some work done, she said.’

  ‘Thanks Eva, that’s very helpful.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks Eva,’ said Rory. ‘I’ve already given the police my statement. Saying we left at half one. I thought we’d discussed this.’

  ‘Do stop obsessing about yourself, Rory. Someone’s died here. As you said, Francis isn’t the police.’

  ‘If any of this turns out to be relevant, d’you imagine for one moment that he won’t go to the police?’

  ‘It’s more important that he knows about it than not.’

  ‘Why? Who is he? Sherlock Holmes? I signed a statement this morning. I think you forget I’m training to be a lawyer. If I’m done for perverting the course of justice that’s the end of my career. It’s lucky Francis isn’t the police, because you’ve basically just stitched me up, Eva. So perhaps it’s my turn to do a bit of stitching myself and point out the reason why I fibbed about the time in the first place. The reason, Francis, we went for our walk was to look for mushrooms – of the magic variety. Surprisingly, it still being July, we found quite a few, and you, Eva, being the world freaking expert, found more than most. Then, when we got back to the house we made some shroom tea, which Eva offered to Grace. Maybe that will be relevant to the inquiry.’

  Eva was shaking her head. ‘Rory,’ she said. ‘There was no need for that.’ Then to Francis. ‘She didn’t even want it.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ said Rory, ‘as Eva says, Grace refused our funny tea.’

  �
�But she knew what it was?’ Francis asked.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Rory. ‘Eva was trying to talk her into forgetting her work, getting high and coming into the festival with us. I wonder why that was.’

  ‘Rory,’ said Eva, with a clear note of warning.

  ‘Did she say what this work was?’ Francis asked.

  ‘Something to do with the diary column she contributed to on the Sentinel,’ said Eva. ‘She thought she had a scoop.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you what it was about?’

  ‘She said it wouldn’t be a scoop if she did. Then she ran off upstairs to write it.’

  ‘And you’re sure nobody was with her?’

  ‘We didn’t see anybody else, did we?’ said Eva.

  ‘No,’ Neville agreed.

  ‘So did you finish off this shroom tea?’ Francis asked.

  ‘Hey, good question, Sherlock,’ said Rory. ‘No, we didn’t. We had a cup each, but there was a good two inches left in the pot.’

  ‘Which was still there when you came back?’

  ‘If you must know, the pot was empty.’

  ‘Washed up? In the machine?’

  ‘No. Where we’d left it, on the table.’

  ‘Completely empty, or with the remains of the mushrooms in the bottom?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, what is this?’

  ‘These details could be important, Rory.’

  ‘OK, with the mushrooms at the bottom. It was like someone had drained the liquid in the pot, but no, it hadn’t been washed up.’

  ‘So what was this?’ Francis asked. ‘An ordinary teapot?’

  ‘No, it was like a glass coffee pot thingy. From the filter machine.’

  ‘And the police hadn’t found it?’

  ‘They were all busy up the other end of the house. When I saw it was still there, I got rid of it immediately. Just flushed the dregs down the bog. Psilocybins are illegal. Class As, in fact, since –’

  ‘July 2005.’

  ‘Correct.’ For a moment Rory looked almost impressed with his inquisitor.

  ‘So you washed it up,’ said Francis. ‘Was there anything else there to do?’

  ‘Just a couple of cups and saucers, plates, that kind of thing.’

  ‘So: two cups and two saucers and two plates?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It very well might do. Was there anything on the plates?’

  ‘I really can’t remember.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I don’t know. Some crumbs, maybe, from, like, a cake.’

  ‘From a cake? How did you know that?’

  ‘Because they looked like cake crumbs, doh. And also, since you ask, half of it was still in the larder. It was a fruit cake the girls brought with them from London.’

  ‘“The girls” being Grace and Fleur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So this little washing-up session must have been quite late, Rory. By the time you got back to Wyveridge from town?’

  ‘It was, yeah.’

  ‘And what kind of a state were you in by then?’

  ‘Pretty shitfaced. Upset, too, for obvious reasons. But not so far gone that I can’t remember what I did.’

  Francis turned to Ranjit, who had been listening quietly to this exchange, sipping thoughtfully on a pint of Abbot’s Finger. ‘You didn’t treat yourself to tea and cake, Ranjit? When you came back with Carly?’

  ‘We didn’t even go to the kitchen. We let ourselves into the house, went to the drawing room, looked out and saw Grace on the gravel. As soon as we realised what had happened, we phoned the police and went straight upstairs.’

  ‘So how long does it take, Eva,’ Francis asked, ‘for this funny tea to take effect?’

  The American shrugged. ‘Depends on the individual. You usually start to feel something after ten minutes or so. Then it builds.’

  ‘Lasting in total?’

  ‘A few hours, maybe. Though sometimes it can seem longer. It’s weird. It starts to feel like time itself is distorted.’

  ‘How else does it affect you?’

  ‘It hits different people different ways. For me, it’s always amazing. I get this, like, spiritual vibe. Like everything is more vivid, more real somehow. You see these trails of warmth coming off people, then sometimes you see sounds as colours. Like birdsong becomes a dappling of colour, which is pretty wild.’

  ‘And a bad trip?’

  ‘I never had one. On shrooms. But yeah, some people can get a bit paranoid, I think.’

  ‘Is it possible,’ Francis asked, ‘that you could get into such a crazed or unhappy state, in forty-five minutes, that you might want to jump off a roof?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘Though there was that guy in America,’ said Neville, with a sudden mad cackle, ‘who cut his friend’s heart out while on shrooms. Thought he was the devil incarnate or something.’

  ‘That’s really helpful, Neville,’ said Rory.

  The group was joined at that moment by Carly and Adam, who had come fresh from a seven o’clock session on ‘Reinventing British History’ with Lucy Worsley and Tristram Hunt.

  ‘OK,’ Francis went on, when more drinks had been bought and the new arrivals had squeezed in round the table. ‘So if this account of yours finally is the truth, it sounds as if Grace was only alone at the house between four o’clock, when you three left for town, and shortly after the end of my talk, when you, Ranjit, told me you returned with Carly and found her dead on the gravel. What time was that exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ranjit. ‘Your talk finished when?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘So we came out, had a coffee, didn’t we, Carl, then drove back. So maybe five, five thirty by the time we walked through the door.’

  ‘Doesn’t leave an awful lot of time for Grace to get high on your shroom tea, does it?’ said Francis, ‘even assuming she finished filing her piece and decided to change her mind, go against the habits of a lifetime and help herself to your leftovers.’

  ‘Doesn’t leave an awful lot of time for a murderer to chuck her off the battlements, either,’ said Rory, looking pointedly at his watch. ‘Now d’you mind if we leave you to it? We were planning to catch the Boomtown Rats gig. Which starts in five minutes.’

  ‘Charming fellow,’ said Francis, when he’d gone, taking Neville and Eva with him. ‘Doesn’t like being put on the spot, does he?’

  ‘He’s always been like that,’ said Ranjit. ‘“Angry man”, we used to call him at college. But he’s got a lovely side, too. Very loyal to his friends. He’s just got a problem with authority.’

  ‘Francis is hardly authority,’ said Priya. ‘He’s just trying to find out what happened.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Ranjit, ‘but the bottom line is that Rory’s terrified of getting a drugs conviction. It would totally mess up his career.’

  ‘Perhaps he should stop taking drugs then,’ said Francis.

  Priya laughed, but she was on her own.

  ‘I do understand where he’s coming from,’ Francis continued. ‘One moment he’s at a festival, with a load of friends, in a place where you’d be unlucky to run into an off-duty Community Service Officer. The next he’s at the centre of a police enquiry. But in a situation like this he’s his own worst enemy. If he behaves with the police like he just behaved with me he’s going to get himself into trouble. It’s classic guilty suspect stuff. Which is unnecessary …’

  ‘Unless there’s something he’s not telling us,’ said Priya.

  ‘Meaning what?’ asked Francis.

  ‘I don’t know. Grace turned down their funny tea. Is it possible Rory offered her something else?’

  ‘Such as?’

  Priya shrugged. ‘I don’t want to dump him in it, but when I left Wyveridge early on Sunday morning, it was with a seriously upset Australian woman. Birgit was her name. She told me she’d been nearly raped at knifepoint by Rory. More to the point, that this was after she’d refused a tab of aci
d.’

  ‘OK,’ said Francis, slowly. ‘Is that likely, Ranjit?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Rory’s a law unto himself.’

  ‘Why would she make it up?’ said Priya.

  ‘Drama queen,’ said Carly, dismissively. ‘She turned in quite a performance that morning.’

  ‘Hardly surprisingly,’ said Priya, widening her eyes. ‘Like, er, attempted rape, excuse me? I believed her anyway. She described to me exactly what Rory’s tabs looked like. Postage stamps with strawberries on. It’s not the kind of detail you invent.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Carly. ‘Everyone knows what a tab of acid looks like.’

  ‘Ranjit,’ said Francis, ‘level with me. D’you think it’s possible that Rory was offering people LSD?’

  The dreadlocked host shrugged. ‘Anything’s possible. With Rory. But if Grace turned down Eva’s funny tea, why on earth would she have taken acid from Rory? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe he slipped it to her,’ said Priya. ‘In a cup of ordinary tea. Or a piece of that cake you were talking about.’

  ‘Why on earth would he do that?’ said Carly.

  ‘Why d’you think?’ said Priya. ‘Having tried and failed with Birgit …’

  ‘Oh come off it!’ said Carly. ‘He’s not that desperate.’

  ‘Ranjit?’ asked Francis.

  ‘As I said, with Rory …’

  ‘Some friend you are,’ said Carly.

  ‘It would certainly explain why he’s so jumpy,’ said Priya. ‘And why he felt he needed to lie about when the three of them went into Mold.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  The rain continued unrelentingly, splashing off rooftops, bubbling along gutters and into drainpipes, running in streams down the steep hill to the river. An hour and a half later Francis and Priya met up again in the Old Bakery.

  ‘Any joy?’ Francis asked, as he ran his fingers through his wet hair, then sat down opposite her at a table by the wall.

  Priya grinned. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I got through to the Sentinel and managed to speak to Grace’s boss on Muckraker. Matthew Ashcombe.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s in a state. Wondering if he shouldn’t talk to the police himself. Basically, Grace phoned in yesterday afternoon at about quarter past three to say she had a scoop.’