Some Lie and Some Die (5 page)

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.

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 lifted. 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.

Wexford turned from him to speak to a boy who touched
his arm and said, ‘There was a girl in our party who’s disappeared. No one’s seen her since this morning. We thought she’d gone home. She wasn’t enjoying herself much.’

‘How was she dressed?’

The boy considered and said, ‘Jeans, I think, and a green top.’

‘Fair hair? Mauve tights and shoes?’

‘God, no. She’s dark and she wasn’t wearing anything like that.’

‘It isn’t she,’ said Wexford.

The rain was coming. He had a brief nightmarish vision of rain descending in torrents on the encampment, turning the trodden grass into seas of mud, beating on the fragile tents. And all the while, throughout the night certainly, he and every policeman he could get hold of would have to interrogate wet, unhappy and perhaps panicky teenagers.

The photographers had come. He saw their car bumping over the hard turf and stop at the wooden bridge. Once she had been photographed, he could move her and perhaps begin the business of identification. He felt a dash of cold water on his hand as the first drops of rain fell.

‘I’ve been wondering if we could get them all into the house,’ said Silk.

Eighty thousand people into one house? On the other hand, it was a big house …

‘Not possible. Don’t think of it.’

Behind him a girl cleared her throat to attract his attention. Two girls stood there, one of them holding a black velvet coat.

‘Yes?’ he said quickly.

‘We haven’t seen our friend since last night. She left her coat in the tent and just went off. We can’t find her or her boy friend, and I thought—we thought …’

‘That she might be the girl we found? Describe her, please.’

‘She’s eighteen. Very dark hair, very pretty. She’s wearing black jeans. Oh, it isn’t her, is it? She’s called Rosie and her boy friend …’

‘Is Daniel.’ While the girl stared at him, round-eyed, marvelling at this omniscience, he said, ‘Rosie’s all right.’ He pointed. ‘She’s over there, in that tent.’

‘Thanks. God, we were really scared.’

How much more of this was there to be, he wondered, before he had to say yes, yes, it sounds like her? Then he saw Dr Crocker, lean, trim and energetic, stalking towards him. The police doctor wore a white raincoat and carried an umbrella as well as his bag.

‘I’ve been away for the weekend, Reg, taking your people’s advice. I thought I was going to keep clear of all this. What’s it about?’

‘Didn’t they tell you?’

‘No, only that I was wanted.’

‘There’s a dead girl in the quarry.’

‘Is there, by God? One of
them?’
Crocker pointed vaguely into the crowd.

‘I don’t know. Come and see.’

The rain was falling lightly, intermittentiy, the way rain does after a drought and before a deluge, as if each drop was being squeezed painfully out. Three police cars had succeeded in negotiating the rough ground and were parked at the quarry edge. In the quarry itself the photographers had completed their work, the undergrowth had been cut away and a tarpaulin canopy erected to screen the body from view. In spite of this, a crowd of boys and girls squatted or lolled all round the quarry, speculating among themselves, their eyes wide.

‘Get back to your tents, the lot of you,’ Wexford said. ‘You’ll get wet and you won’t see anything.’ Slowly, they began to move. ‘Come on now. Ghoulishness is for ignorant old people. Your generation is supposed to be above this sort of thing.’

That did it. One or two of them groaned sheepishly. By the time Wexford and the doctor had scrambled down on to the little lawn—the harebells trodden to a mush—the sightseers
had dispersed. Crocker knelt by the body and examined it. After about five minutes he got up.

‘She’s been dead at least five days.’

Wexford felt himself relax with relief.

‘She was dead before the festival started,’ said Crocker, ‘and she wasn’t a teenager. I’d say at least twenty-seven, maybe thirty.’

Under the canopy the flies were thick and noisy. Wexford rolled the body on to its side, revealing a large handbag of mauve patent leather which lay beneath it. Handbag, shoes and tights matched each other and clashed with the dark red dress. He opened the bag, spilling the contents on to a sheet of plastic. An envelope addressed to Miss Dawn Stonor, 23 Philimede Gardens, London, S.W.5, fell out. There was a letter inside it addressed from Lower Road, Kingsmarkham:
Dear Dawn, I will be glad to see you Monday but I suppose it will be one of your flying visits and you won’t condescend to stop the night. Granma has had one of her bad turns but is all right again now. I got the mauve slacks and blouse from the cleaners that you left there and you can take it away with you. They charged 65 p. which I will be glad of. See you Monday. Love, Mum
.

He noted the illiteracies, the badly formed writing. Something else in the letter struck a chord in his mind, but he could think about that later. The main thing was that she had been easily and rapidly identified. ‘Have the body removed,’ he said to Sergeant Martin, ‘and then I want the quarry searched.’

There was blood on his hand, fresh blood. How could that have come from a body five days dead? He looked again and saw that it hadn’t. The blood was his own, flowing from a small wound near the base of his thumb.

‘Broken glass everywhere,’ he said wonderingly.

‘Have you only just noticed?’ Crocker gave a harsh, humourless laugh. ‘You needn’t bother to search for a weapon.’
They had come gaily and noisily, erupting from cars and trains and buses, arriving on a summer’s day to hear music and bringing their own music with them. They left downcast, in silence, trudging through the rain. Most of them had had no more than a dozen hours of sleep throughout the weekend. Their faces were shocked and dirty and pale.

No one ran. There was no horseplay. They dismantled their wet tents, shouldered their baggage, leaving behind them greyish-white mountain ranges of rubbish. Moving towards the gates in long ragged files, they looked like refugees leaving a place of disaster. Daniel walked with Rosie, one arm embracing her, the other shouldering a rolled tent which bumped against his khaki pack. Louis Mbowele passed through the gates without looking up from the book he was reading. They chewed sweets, passed wine bottles from hand to hand in silence, indifferent in their saddened freemasonry as to who paid or who drank. Huddled together, they lit cigarettes, sheltering match flames from the downpour.

Lightning split the sky over Stowerton and the thunder rolled, grumbling in the west. From fast-travelling clouds, blue and black and roaring grey, the rain cascaded, sweeping people and their belongings into the avenue like so much debris buffeted by the tide. The cedars lifted their black arms, sleeved in spiky foliage, and slapped them, rattling, up and down on what had been turf. It was turf no longer. Thousand upon thousand of strong young feet had shaved the grass to stubble, to final scorched aridity. The rain fell on to acres of brown desert.

Someone had abandoned a torn tent, a red canvas tent that bounded in the wind like a huge drowning butterfly until it became waterlogged and collapsed against the footings of the stage. The river began to fill, carrying with it as it plunged under the Forby road a bobbing flotsam of paper, cans, transistor batteries and lost shoes.