Some Lie and Some Die (4 page)

The boy’s hair was long, curly and golden, the girl’s black and spread, her face cut crystal in the moonlight. Wexford watched them. He could not take his eyes away. There was nothing of voyeurism in the fascination they had for him and he felt no erotic stimulus. A cold atavistic chill invaded him, a kind of primeval awe. Bathed by the moonlight, enfolded by the violet night, they were Adam and Eve, Venus and Adonis, a man and woman alone at the beginning of the world. Silver flesh entwined, encanopied by an ever-moving, shivering embroidery of leaf shadows, they were so beautiful and their beauty so agonising, that Wexford felt enter into him that true panic, the pressure of procreating, urgent nature, that is the presence of the god.

He shivered. He whispered to Burden, as if parodying the other’s words, ‘Come away. This is a private place.’

They wouldn’t have heard him if he had shouted, any more than they heard the sudden throb which thundered from the stage and then the thumping, yelling, screaming tumult as The Verb To Be broke into song.

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.