by Ruth Rendell
3
There had been no trouble. A party of Hell’s Angels had come to Sundays gates and been turned away. The walls were not high enough to keep them out but they kept out their bikes. A tent had caught fire. There was no question of arson. Someone had lit a fire too close to the canvas and Silk had housed the dispossessed owners in one of his spare bedrooms.
The singing went on most of the night, the keening swell, the thunderous roars, of it audible as far away as Forby, and calls from outraged residents—Peveril among them—came steadily into Kingsmarkham police station. By dawn all was silent and most people asleep. The fires had been stamped out and the arc-lamps switched off as the sun came up to shine on Sundays through a golden haze.
The day promised to be less hot, but it was still very warm, warm enough for the campers to bathe in the Kingsbrook and queue up afterwards for ice-cream. By noon the vendors of food and drink and souvenirs had parked their vans all the way up the avenue. The canned music and the music made by little amateur groups ceased and Emmanuel Ellerman opened the second day of the concert with his hit song, ‘High Tide’. The mist which had lain close to the ground at dawn had risen to lie as a blanket of cloud through which the sun gleamed palely. It was sultry and the atmosphere made people breathless.
Burden’s son John had been allowed to return and hear Zeno Vedast sing for the last time. He kept out of his father’s way, embarrassed in this society to have a policeman for a parent. Burden sniffed the air suspiciously as he and Wexford walked about the encampment.
‘That smell is pot.’
‘We’ve got enough to think about here without indulging in drug swoops,’ said Wexford. ‘The Chief Constable says to turn a blind eye unless we see anyone actually high and whooping about or jumping over the quarry because he’s full of acid. I wish I could appreciate the noise those musicians are making but it’s no good, I can’t. I’m too bloody old. They’ve finished. I wonder who’s next?’
‘They all sound the same to me.’ Burden kept looking for his son, fearing perhaps that he was being corrupted into taking drugs, making love or growing his hair. ‘And they all look the same.’
‘Do stop fretting about that boy of yours. That’s not him you’re looking at, anyway. I saw him go off to the hamburger stall just now. Hear that noise? That’ll be Betti Ho’s helicopter come to fetch her away.’
The bright yellow helicopter, like a gigantic insect in a horror film, hovered and spun and finally plopped into the field behind the house. The two policemen watched it come down and then joined the stream of people passing through the gate into the field. The Chinese singer wore a yellow dress—to match her aircraft?—and her black hair in a pigtail.
‘What money she must get,’ said Burden. ‘I won’t say earn.’
‘She makes people think. She does a lot of good. I’d rather she had it than some of these politicians. There’s your John, come to see the take-off. Now, don’t go to him. Leave him alone. He’s enjoying himself.’
‘I wasn’t going to. I’m not so daft I don’t realise he doesn’t want to know me here. There’s Vedast. God, it’s like the end of a state visit.’
Wexford didn’t think it was much like that. A thousand or so of the fans had massed round the helicopter while Betti Ho stood in the midst of a circle of others, talking to Vedast who wore black jeans and whose chest was still bare. There was another girl with them and Vedast had his arm round her waist. Wexford moved closer to get a better look at her, for of all the striking, bizarre and strangely dressed people he had seen since Friday, she was the most fantastic.
She was nearly as tall as Vedast and good-looking in the flashy, highly coloured fashion of a beauty queen. It seemed to Wexford impossible that anyone could naturally possess so much hair, a frothy, bouffant mane of ice-blonde hair that bubbled all over her head and flowed nearly to her waist. Her figure was perfect. He told himself that it would need to be not to look ridiculous in skin-tight vest and hot pants of knitted string, principal-boy boots, thigh-high in gilt leather. From where he stood, twenty yards from her, he could see her eyelashes and see too that she wore tiny rainbow brilliants studded on to her eyelids.
‘I wonder who that is?’ he said to Burden.
‘She’s called Nell Tate,’ said Burden surprisingly. ‘Married to Vedast’s road manager.’
‘Looks as if she ought to be married to Vedast. How do you know, anyway?’
‘How d’you think, sir? John told me. Sometimes I wish pop was an O Level subject, I can tell you.’
Wexford laughed. He could hardly take his eyes off the girl, and this was not because she attracted him or even because he admired her looks—he didn’t. What intrigued him was contemplating for a moment the life her appearance advertised, a life and way of life utterly remote, he imagined, from anything he had ever known or, come to that, anything the majority of these fans had ever known. It was said that Vedast was a local boy made good. Where did she come from? What strange ladder had she climbed to find herself here and now the cynosure of so many eyes, embraced in public by the darling of the ‘scene’?
Vedast withdrew his arm and kissed Betti Ho on both cheeks. It was the continental statesman’s salute that has become the ‘in’ thing for a certain élite. Betti turned to Nell Tate and they too kissed. Then the Chinese girl climbed into her helicopter and the doors were closed.
‘Things’ll break up soon,’ said Burden. ‘What time is it?’
‘Half four. The air’s very heavy. Going to be a storm.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be in that thing in a storm.’
The aircraft buzzed and whirred and rose. Betti Ho leaned out and waved a yellow silk arm. The fans began to drift back towards Sundays park, drawn by the sound of amplified guitars. The Greatheart, a three-man group, had taken the stage. Burden, listening to them, began to show his first signs of approval since the beginning of the concert. The Greatheart made a specialty of singing parodies of wartime hits, but Burden didn’t yet know they were parodies and a half-sentimental, half-suspicious smile twitched his lips.
Martin Silk was sitting on a camp-stool by the ashes of a dead fire talking to the boy in the magpie coat. It was too warm and humid to wear a jacket, let alone a fur coat, but the boy hadn’t taken it off, as far as Wexford had noticed, since his arrival. Perhaps his dark bronze skin was accustomed to more tropical skies.
‘Not a spot of trouble, you see,’ said Silk, looking up.
‘I wouldn’t quite say that. There was that fire. Someone’s reported a stolen bike and the bloke selling tee-shirts has had a hell of a lot pinched.’
‘It’s quite O.K. to nick things from entrepreneurs,’ said the magpie boy in a mild, soft voice.
‘In your philosophy, maybe. If and when it ever becomes the law of the land I’ll go along with you.’
‘It will, man, it will. Come the revolution.’
Wexford hadn’t actually heard anyone speak seriously of the promised revolution as a foreseeable thing since he was himself a teenager in the early thirties. Apparently they were still on the same old kick. ‘But then,’ he said, ‘there won’t be any entrepreneurs, will there?’
The magpie boy made no reply but merely smiled very kindly. ‘Louis,’ said Silk proudly, ‘is reading philosophy at the University of the South. He has a remarkable political theory of his own. He is quite prepared to go to prison for his beliefs.’
‘Well, he won’t for his beliefs,’ said Wexford. ‘Not, that is, unless he breaches the peace with them.’
‘Louis is the eldest son of a paramount chief. One day Louis Mbowele will be a name to be reckoned with in the emerging African states.’
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Wexford sincerely. In his mind’s eye he could see future headlines, blood, disaster, tyranny, and all well meant. ‘Philosophy doctorate, political theory, British prison—he’ll soon have all the qualifications. Good luck. Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.’
‘Peace be with
you,’ said the African gravely.
Burden was standing with Superintendent Letts of the uniformed branch.
‘Nearly all over, Reg,’ said Letts.
‘Yes. I don’t want to be mean, but I’d like it soon to be over. All done and trouble-free.’
‘Before the storm comes too. It’ll be hell getting this lot off the park in a downpour.’
Above the roof of Sundays house the sky had deepened to indigo. And the house itself was bathed in livid light, that wan, spectral light that gleams under cloud canopies before a storm. The hornbeams in the avenue, stolid, conical trees, were too stocky to sway much in the rising breeze, but the low broomlike branches of the cedars had begun to sweep and sigh against the turf and, up by the house, the conifers shivered.
It was a hot wind, though, and when Zeno Vedast walked on to the stage he was still half-naked. He sang the ‘Let-me-believe’ ballad again to a silent crowd made tense by the stifling, thick air.
Wexford, who had once more wandered a little apart so that he was close by the scaffolding of the stage, found himself standing beside Nell Tate. Vedast was singing unaccompanied this time and she held his mandoline or ocarina or whatever it was. There was nothing exceptional in the fact that her eyes were fixed on the singer. So were seventy or eighty thousand other pairs of eyes. But whereas the rest showed enthusiasm, admiration, critical appreciation, hers were hungrily intense. Her gleaming mulberry-coloured lips were parted and she held her head slightly back in a yearning, swan-like curve. A little bored by the song, Wexford amused himself in watching her and then, suddenly, she turned and looked him full in the face.
He was shocked. Her expression was tragic, despairing, as if she had been and was for ever to be bitterly deprived of what she most wanted. Misery showed through the plastered biscuit make-up, the rosy blusher, the green and blue eyelid paint, and showed in spite of the absurd twinkling brilliants stuck about her eyes. He wondered why. She was older than he had thought at first but still only about twenty-eight. Was she in love with Vedast and unable to have him? That seemed improbable, for when Vedast had finished his first song he stepped over to the edge of the stage, squatted down and, in taking the stringed thing from Nell’s hand, kissed her impulsively, but slowly and passionately, on the mouth. Vedast began singing again and now Wexford saw that she was looking calmer, the glittering lids closed briefly over her eyes.
‘Is that the lot?’ he asked, going back to Burden. ‘I mean, is the concert over?’
Burden slipped unprotestingly into his role as pop expert, though a less likely or less enthusiastic authority could hardly have been found. ‘Two more songs from The Greatheart,’ he said, ‘and then we can all go home. Some are going already. They only waited to hear the Naked Ape.’
‘Fighting words, Mike, sacrilege. I thought he was rather good. There goes that pink and orange van. It’s got graffiti all over it—did you see?—and someone’s written on one of the doors “This truck also available in paperback”.’
The tents were coming down. Gas burners and kettles and tins of instant coffee were being thrust into kit bags, and a barefoot girl wandered vaguely about looking among the heaps of Utter for the shoes she had discarded twenty-four hours before. The future leader of an emerging African state had abandoned polemics for the more prosaic pursuit of rolling up his sleeping bag. Martin Silk strolled among them, smiling with regal benignity at his young guests and rather malicious triumph at Wexford.
‘You can’t help feeling sorry for those Greatheart people, singing their guts out to an audience who couldn’t care less. They must know they only stayed for Vedast.’
Wexford’s words went unheard. ‘There they are,’ said Burden, ‘that girl and her boy friend, the ones we saw last night. Coming straight from the quarry. Well, their little honeymoon’s over. And they’ve had a row by the look of them or been bitten by something. It’s always said there are adders on Sundays land.’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Wexford snapped. ‘That’d be a suitable retribution for doing what comes naturally in the Garden of Eden.’ The girl and the boy showed no sign of having quarrelled, nor did either of them seem disabled. They were holding hands and running like Olympic sprinters. In a dirty and tattered version of the tee-shirt-jeans uniform, their long hair wind-blown, they had lost their primeval beauty of the night before. The magic and the wonder was all gone. They were just an ordinary young couple running, breathless and—frightened. Wexford took a step in their direction, suddenly concerned.
They stopped dead in front of him. The girl’s face was white, her breath laboured and choked. ‘You’re police, aren’t you?’ the boy said before Wexford could speak. ‘Could you come, please? Come and see what …’
‘In the quarry,’ the girl said throatily. ‘Oh, please. It was such a shock. There’s a girl lying in the quarry and she’s—she’s dead. Ever so dead. Her face is—blood—horrible … Oh God!’ She threw herself into the boy’s arms and sobbed.
4
She was screaming hysterically.
‘You tell me,’ Wexford said to the boy.
‘We went to the quarry about ten minutes ago.’ He talked jerkily, stammering. ‘I—we—I’m with a party and Rosie’s with a party and—and we shan’t see each other again for a month. We wanted to be private but it’s still daylight and we looked for somewhere we wouldn’t be seen. Oh, Rosie, don’t. Stop crying. Can’t you do something?’
A crowd had gathered around them. Wexford spoke to a capable-looking girl. ‘Take her into one of the tents and make some tea. Make it hot and strong. One of you others, find Mr Silk and see if he’s got any brandy. Come along now. She’ll tell you all about it. She’ll want to.’
Rose let forth a shriek. The other girl, justifying Wexford’s faith in her, slapped one of the wet white cheeks. Rosie gagged and stared.
‘That’s better,’ said Wexford. ‘Into the tent with you. You’ll be all right when you’ve had a hot drink.’ He went back to the boy. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Daniel. Daniel Somers.’
‘You found a girl’s body in the quarry?’ Suddenly The Greatheart burst into song. ‘God, I wish we could have a bit of hush. Where did you find it?’
‘Under some bushes—well, sort of trees—on the side where the wire is.’ Daniel shuddered, opening his eyes wide. ‘There were—flies,’ he said. ‘Her face was all over blood and it was sort of dried and there were flies—crawling.’
‘Come and show me.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘It won’t take long,’ Wexford said gently. ‘You don’t have to look at her again, only show us where she is.’
By now a fear that something had gone badly wrong had flurried the encampment on the side where they were standing, rumour ‘stuffing the ears of men with false reports’. People came out of tents to stare, others raised themselves on one elbow from the ground, briefly deaf to The Greatheart. A low buzz of conversation broke out as boys and girls asked each other if this was the beginning of a drug swoop.
Daniel Somers, his face as white, his eyes as aghast as his girl friend’s, seemed anxious now to get the whole thing over. He scrambled down the chalk slope and the policemen followed him in less gainly fashion. As yet there was nothing to see, nothing alarming. Under the louring grey sky, thick, purplish, not a blue rift showing, the quarry grass seemed a brighter, more livid green. Light, obliquely and strangely filtered under cloud rims, gave a vivid glow to the white faces of the wild roses and the silver undersides of birch leaves, lifting and shivering in the wind. On the little lawn the harebells shook like real bells ringing without sound.
Daniel hesitated a few feet from where a young birch grew out of a dense, man-high tangle of honeysuckle and dogwood. He shivered, himself near to hysteria.
‘In there.’ He pointed. ‘I didn’t touch her.’
Wexford nodded.
‘You get back to Rosie now.’
The bushes had no thorns and were easily lift
ed. They surrounded the root of the tree like the fabric of a tent belling about its pole. Under them, half-curled around the root, lay the girl’s body. It was somewhat in the position of a foetus, knees bent, arms folded so that the hands met under the chin.
Even Wexford’s strong stomach lurched when he saw the face or what had been a face. It was a broken mass, encrusted with black blood and blacker flies which swarmed and buzzed sluggishly as the leafy covering was disturbed. Blood was in the hair too, streaking the yellow, fibrous mass, matting it in places into hard knots. And blood was probably on the dark red dress, but its material, the colour of coagulated blood, had absorbed and negatived it.
The Greatheart were still performing.
‘A girl’s been murdered,’ Wexford said to Silk. ‘You must get this lot off the stage. Let me have a microphone.’
The crowd murmured angrily as the musicians broke off in the middle of a song and retreated. The murmur grew more menacing when Wexford appeared in their place. He held up one hand. It had no effect.
‘Quiet, please. I must have quiet.’
‘Off, off, off!’ they shouted.
All right. They could have it straight and see if that silenced them. ‘A girl has been murdered,’ he said, pitching his voice loud. ‘Her body is in the quarry.’ The voices died and he got the silence he wanted. ‘Thank you. We don’t yet know who she is. No one is to leave Sundays until I give permission. Understood?’ They said nothing. He felt a deep pity for them, their festival spoiled, their eager young faces now cold and shocked. ‘If anyone has missed a member of their party, a blonde girl in a red dress, will he or she please inform me?’
Silk behaved rather as if Wexford himself had killed the girl and put her in his quarry. ‘Everything was going so well,’ he moaned. ‘Why did this have to happen? You’ll see, it’ll be another lever in the hands of the fuddy-duddies who want to suppress all free activity and gag young people. You see if I’m not right.’ He gazed distractedly skywards at the grey massy clouds which had rolled out of the west.
