Some Lie and Some Die Read Free

sombre tints of sapphire and smoke. And their hair was silvered, not by time but by night and the natural light of night-time. The calor-gas stoves had been extinguished, but some people had lit fires and from these arose slender spires, threads of blue melting into the deeper blue of the upper air. The whole encampment was blue-coloured, azure, jade where the parkland met the sky, tinted here and there like the plumage of a kingfisher, and the recumbentbodies of the
aficionados
were numberless dark blue shadows.
    ‘How many, d’you reckon?’ Wexford asked.
    ‘Seventy or eighty thousand. They’re not making much noise.’
    ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms
    And murmuring of innumerable bees,’
    quoted Wexford.
    ‘Yes, maybe I shouldn’t have thought of them as rats. They’re more like bees, a swarm of bees.’
    The soft buzz of conversation had broken out after Betti Ho had left the stage. Wexford couldn’t sort out a single word from it, but from the concentrated intense atmosphere, the sense of total accord and quietly impassioned indignation, he knew they were speaking of the songs they had just heard and were agreeing with their sentiments.
    The little Chinese girl, as pretty and delicate and clean as a flower, had sung of tides of filth, of poison, of encroaching doom. It had been strange to hear such things from such lips, strange in the clear purity of this night, and yet he knew, as they all knew, that the tides were there and the poison, the ugliness of waste and the squalor of indifference. She had been called back to sing once more their favourite, the ballad of the disappearing butterflies, and she had sung it through the blue plumes of their woodsmoke while the Kingsbrook chattered a soft accompaniment.
    During the songs Burden had been seen to nod in vehement endorsement, but now he was darting quick glances here and there among the prone, murmuring crowd. At last he spotted his son with a group of other schoolboys, and he relaxed. But it was Wexford who noted the small additions John and his friends had made to their dress, the little tent they had put up, so that they would appear to conformwith the crowd and not be stamped as mere local tyros, day boys and not experienced boarders.
    Burden swatted at a gnat which had alighted on his wrist and at the same time caught sight of his watch.
    ‘Vedast ought to be on soon,’ he said. ‘As soon as he’s finished I’m going to collar John and send him straight home.’
    ‘Spoilsport.’
    The inspector was about to make a retort to this when the buzzing of the crowd suddenly increased in volume, rising to a roar of excited approval. People got up, stood, or moved nearer to the stage. The atmosphere seemed to grow tense.
    ‘Here he comes,’ said Wexford.
    Zeno Vedast was announced by the disc jockey who was compèring the festival as one who needed no introduction, and when he advanced out of the shadows on to the platform the noise from the audience became one concentrated yell of joy. Rather different, Wexford thought wryly, from the chorus of ‘Off, off, off …!’ which had been their response to his own well-thought-out speech. He had been proud of that speech, tolerant and accommodating as it was, just a few words to assure them there would be no interference with their liberty, provided they behaved with restraint.
    The police didn’t want to spoil the festival, he had said, inserting a light joke; all they wanted was for the fans to be happy, to co-operate and not to annoy each other or the residents of Kingsmarkham. But it hadn’t gone down at all well. He was a policeman and that was enough. ‘Off, off, off,’ they had shouted and ‘Out, fuzz, out.’ He hadn’t been at all nervous but he had wondered what next. There hadn’t been any next. Happily, law-abidingly, they were doing their own thing, listening to their own music in the blue and opalescent night.
    Now they were roaring for Vedast and at him. The sound of their