Festival, page 3
*
Piet had a look at Sally, who was still asleep, and then lay down, dressed, on the settee in his study. He didn’t think that there was any hope of sleep, but he did drop off for a bit between one o’clock and four. He would have been awakened at once if anything important had come in, and he went to the Incident room at four with a heavy heart. There had been more reports of babies looking like Jo from Manchester, Shrewsbury, and Plymouth. ‘There’ll be a wider field of search after the pictures in the morning papers. We can hope that something useful may come in then, sir,’ Detective Sergeant Roberts tried to comfort him. Piet was not much comforted.
Just before the doctor came at six o’clock Sally woke. She had been stirring fitfully, and Piet was in the room with her. She seemed to throw off the drug and regain full consciousness in one bound. ‘Has Jo come home?’ she asked.
Piet shook his head. ‘My poor darling. She’d be with you if she had.’ He looked so haggard that Sally thought for a moment only about him. ‘You must have had a dreadful night while I’ve just been sleeping,’ she said.
She tried to be nice to the doctor when he arrived. ‘But I’m not ill,’ she kept saying. Piet did his best to persuade her to have breakfast in bed, but she argued decisively, ‘I shall be much better getting breakfast for you and your mother than just lying here thinking.’ The doctor left some tranquilliser tablets with the suggestion that she might try them during the day, but Piet knew that she wouldn’t touch them.
* See A Sprig of Sea Lavender.
II
The Earl’s Down Festival
THE MORNING PAPERS all splashed pictures of Jo, and the story, ‘Police Chief’s Daughter Kidnapped’, made big headlines, but there was no other news. Sergeant Roberts was relieved in the Incident room by Detective Sergeant Hill, who brought a constable with him. ‘The superintendent thought that he ought to have two men on duty, at any rate during the day,’ he explained to Piet. Piet felt that they could barely spare the men, but he didn’t try to argue. The control of operations remained at headquarters, and the purpose of the Incident room was to have someone on the spot for any urgent local action that might be needed. HQ rang the duty officer every half hour to report anything that had come in, and of course could get in touch with him at any other time if necessary. Probably it was wise to have another man available, so that the phone should never be left unmanned.
There had already been several calls from newspapers. Piet asked Sally and his mother not to answer the phone, and to leave it to the officers in the house. ‘If I want to talk to either of you I’ll ask the officer to get you,’ he said. He asked the men on duty to deal with all press calls. ‘There’ll probably be a hellish lot of them, but the chaps at the other end are only doing what they conceive to be their job,’ he said. ‘Be as polite as you can, but say that neither I nor Mrs Deventer is available, and you don’t know when we will be. We may have to organise a press conference later, but for the moment all you can say is that police inquiries are continuing.’
*
Piet’s Force, already undermanned, was stretched to the limit by the assembly of a so-called Free Pop Festival at a disused army camp at Earl’s Down, between Marlborough and Devizes. It had gathered over the bank holiday weekend, and was due to disperse at the end of the week. Today was Wednesday, so there were two clear days to go, and probably stragglers would remain until they could be persuaded to move off. Nobody, except the pop fans and the business interests which make money out of them, wanted the festival, but the Government felt committed to providing somewhere for what could be construed as a festival of popular art. It had not provided much. In the 1930s the site had been an infantry training camp, and later it was used to house prisoners of war. After the war it had been abandoned. As it was still Government property it might seem reasonable for the Government to give permission for its use, but the place was totally unsuitable for the accommodation of large crowds. Piet had been out to inspect as soon as the Government plan was announced, and he had been horrified by what he found. The site was isolated, with only two hamlets within several miles. They were Wick Earl’s and Wick Episcopi, names that distinguished feudal holdings once belonging to the medieval earldom of Hampshire and the Bishop of Winchester. Over the centuries the bishop’s lot seemed to have done rather better than the earl’s, for Wick Earl’s had descended to being no more than a farm and a couple of cottages. Wick Episcopi, however, though it had neither shop nor post office, did have a pub. It was small, originally a cottage beerhouse, but it now had a full licence, and the enterprising young couple who ran it had built up a fair trade with summer visitors to the Downs, serving bar meals as well as drink. They had been granted a provisional licence for a big marquee in a field opposite the pub to cater for people from the festival.
The old camp, which lay between the two hamlets, was served by two minor roads – very minor, rutted and slippery with wet chalk after rain. These roads, tracks rather, turned off the main road from Marlborough to Salisbury, which ran about two miles away. Facilities were rudimentary. Once there had been some brick buildings supplemented by a large collection of wooden huts: now the huts were mostly rotted away, the roofs of the brick buildings leaked everywhere, and the floors were gone, having disappeared either as firewood or as a source of free planking. Of sanitary arrangements there were none at all: the latrine pits once used by the Army had been filled in, and the screens that gave a primitive privacy were long gone. There had been water on the site but the standpipes had frozen and burst years ago, and the water had been turned off.
The chairman of the County Council, Sir Gervase Warrinder, had led an all-party deputation to ask the Government to think again about Earl’s Down, but had got nowhere. The trouble was that the Government’s thinking was already somewhat oblique. There had been trouble over such festivals in the past, and if the Government did not offer a site there was the horrible possibility of the fans invading the grounds of Sandringham, Balmoral or some other famous place, and then having to be ejected with the maximum publicity against the Government as spoilsport. Earl’s Down had the merit of being Government property, and it couldn’t be damaged more than it was. It was not so far from London, Birmingham, Bristol and other large centres of population that the Government could be accused of offering a site to which no fans could get, and in itself it was satisfactorily remote from urban surroundings of any sort. Although the County Council’s deputation had no success in getting the Government’s plans for the use of the site withdrawn, they did achieve one or two concessions. The Government agreed to see that water was restored to the place, and to contribute toward the cost of putting up chemical closets. When Sir Gervase and his colleagues pointed out forcefully that it was most unfair that the whole cost of policing the festival, refuse collection, disposal of sewage, and all the other services likely to be needed should fall on the county’s ratepayers, the Government undertook to provide a grant-in-aid when the total cost was known. The county council wanted the whole cost underwritten, but had to be content with the rather vague undertaking given. It was clear that whoever paid in the end, the actual work would have to be done by the Council’s services.
*
Piet forced himself to think of these things as he drove to his office that Wednesday morning: his personal tragedy did not lessen his responsibility. He remembered a direct question put to him by Sir Gervase Warrinder at one of the many conferences called to discuss the festival – ‘Do you, as chief constable, consider that your Force can control the behaviour of crowds such as we are likely to get at the Earl’s Down festival?’
And he recalled his reply – ‘Yes, sir. Short of war, my Force can control any situation that is likely to arise in the area for which we are responsible – a police force wouldn’t be worth having if it couldn’t. But that is not to say that control is easy, or cheap, or that nobody is going to get hurt. I must deploy a substantial force at Earl’s Down, and I must have adequate reserves to deal with emergencies of any kind that may arise. To assemble the force we need we shall have to draw men and women from all over the constabulary, which will mean wasteful travelling time, and in some cases the payment of overnight allowances. Moreover, as you know, we are already undermanned, and the assembly of an adequate taskforce for Earl’s Down will mean asking officers to work on rest days, and to put in other forms of overtime. Our job is to obey orders, and we shall do whatever has to be done, but it will be a heavy burden.’
Now they had the burden of Jo’s kidnapping on top of everything else. Well, no one would rest in the hunt for Jo, but the other work had to go on just the same. There seemed little that he could do personally to help in finding Jo, and it might hurt the feelings of loyal colleagues if he gave the impression of wanting to do everything himself. He decided that he would use the day, or part of it, for a visit to Earl’s Down.
*
As an act of deliberate policy he had asked the deputy chief constable, Victor Norton, to take charge of the Earl’s Down task force. That was a way of showing confidence in him, and since it was a job that would get a good deal of local publicity it would help (or so Piet hoped) Norton’s self-esteem if he still had any private feelings about not getting the chief constableship.
*
People’s solicitude when he got to headquarters made Piet want to weep. Victor Norton, looking tired and strained, came to Piet’s room as soon as he got in. ‘I stayed on here all night,’ Victor said. ‘As it turned out there was nothing I could do, but I felt happier for being around, and I’m sure the staff felt it was right.’
‘It was extremely kind of you,’ Piet said. ‘But you really must try to have some rest – if anything goes wrong with me we can’t have you out of action from sheer exhaustion! I don’t like the reason, but I’m glad to see you so early, because I wanted to ask you about yesterday. I was too overwrought to ask you last night. How did things go?’
The meeting addressed by Victor Norton had been tactfully arranged by Piet. It was in the village hall at Wick Episcopi; anyone who wanted to come was invited, and the idea was to give people an opportunity of questioning the police about the festival, and of voicing any particular fears they might have. The festival had been going then for two days – two and a half, really, for although it didn’t get going fully on the Saturday evening, a good deal went on as more and more people turned up.
‘I think it was a thoroughly useful meeting, though it took a horrible amount of time,’ Victor said. ‘Most of the village seemed to be there, and there were also a lot of fans from the festival. The villagers were still worried about vandalism – with some reason, for two cottages had stones thrown at their windows, and the coin box of the one public telephone in the place had been smashed, and the phone put out of order. I count that as a mark against me, I’m afraid, for I ought to have done something about the box, though just what I don’t know.’
‘You’re being too hard on yourself. Short of having a man on duty twenty-four hours a day, it’s difficult to see what you can do. You can’t lock a public phone box – that puts it out of action just as effectively as vandals.’
‘Well, I used our influence with the Post Office to get the phone mended last night, so that should count in our favour. Actually, most of the village people seem fairly pleased with us. I’ve had a police-car and a strong patrol on duty in the village during licensing hours at the pub and the marquee opposite, and although there’s been a certain amount of rowdiness things might have been a lot worse.’
‘What did the pop fans have to say?’
‘They were impressed, I think, at being given a chance to put their views to us. There were a few complaints of alleged harassment when we’ve had to search for drugs, and one or two articles reported stolen, but what you might call public opinion among the fans didn’t seem on the complainer’s side. Two of their bands want to be permitted to play louder. They seem to me to make an outrageous noise as it is, and the farmer at Wick Earl’s, who’s nearer the music end than the Wick Episcopi folk, has complained bitterly. I’ve asked Inspector Donaldson to see if he can get the band-platform moved farther away from the farm.’
‘You said that you had to send your own car to take an unconscious girl to hospital. What happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. The hospital says that she is suffering from an overdose of some drug belonging to the morphine family – possibly heroin. She is very ill. It’s a bad business – she was found collapsed outside a tent. Donaldson is going into it, with Sergeant Cruikshank. They hadn’t got anywhere by last night – not even sure who the girl is. A lot of the fans are camping, and we’ve managed to get the tents put up in fairly orderly rows. The girl – looks about eighteen to twenty – was found lying at the back of one of the tents, actually lying across one of the guy-ropes. There’s a family in the tent – father, mother, both young, can’t be more than twenty-two or so, and maybe younger, and two kids, child just under two and a baby of six months. They say they heard nothing, and have never seen the girl. Inquiries produced one young man who said he’d met her at the festival and had a drink with her, and that he thought she was called Stella. No companion has turned up so far – looks as if she may have come on her own. No handbag – just dressed in shirt and jeans.’
‘Who found her?’
‘A bunch of fans who’d intended going to the pub at Wick Episcopi, and walked past the tent on their way, more or less stumbled over her. Not knowing how she might be injured they had the sense to leave her lying there – some of them stayed with her, while the others went to the First Aid tent. The ambulance men on duty said she’d have to go to hospital at once.’
‘Wasn’t there a duty ambulance?’
‘Yes, but there’s such a run on ambulances for the ordinary hospital services that there’s only one available for the festival, and that had already gone off with a suspected case of pneumonia, and another young man with a broken arm. The ambulance men are volunteers. They got the girl in my car, and my driver took her to hospital. One of the ambulance men went with her.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Well, I’d brought some sandwiches and a flask of coffee for my lunch, and I was sitting in my car thinking of having lunch when a constable came up and told me about the girl. Of course I said they could have the car at once. The village hall meeting was at two o’clock, and I had to get to that. Donaldson and Cruikshank were dealing with the case, and I didn’t want to interfere. So I haven’t had more than a fairly sketchy report. I’d left my lunch rather late, and I was wondering if I’d have time to eat my sandwiches before going to the meeting – I wanted to get to the hall ten minutes or so before the public meeting started. So it must have been getting on for one thirty. After the incident I didn’t feel like eating – I just had one sandwich and I walked over the Down to Wick Episcopi. It’s about a mile on foot, otherwise you have to go back to the main road to the Wick Episcopi turning. The walk did me good, and I got there just about the right time. I hope to have more details about the girl during today.’
‘Your immediate job, Victor, is to get some sleep. I was going to ask you – as you know, I’ve left the policing of the thing largely to you, and I haven’t been out since the trip we made together on Saturday. But I want to have another look at the place. Would you feel it was getting in your hair if I went out today?’
‘Of course not! You’ll have to go, anyway, because you’ll have to make a report on the whole thing, or at least sign the report I make. But with all this dreadful business on your plate . . .’
‘It will do me good to think of something else.’
‘I feel it’s deserting you, but I could do with some sleep. If you can get out to Earl’s Down during today, I’ll go over again this evening. But if anything crops up and you want me, I’ll come at once.’
‘I know you will. Thanks again for everything.’
*
Kate Rimmell was Piet’s secretary. He had inherited her from his predecessor, and she was a valuable legacy –competent, with several years’ experience of police administration, and a tactful link between him and the rest of the office staff. She was a widow with two children, a boy of fourteen and a girl of twelve, and she lived with her mother so that she was able to carry on with her job through the school holidays. She had liked Piet’s predecessor and had got used to working for him, and on Piet’s appointment she had seriously considered giving up her job and trying something else. Now she was thankful that she had decided against it. She found Piet an even nicer boss than the former chief constable, with an imaginative consideration for other people’s difficulties that she had never met in office work before. She, too, had been up most of the night, sick with pity and anxiety for Piet and his wife, waiting on at the office in a desperate hope for news. She had gone home in the small hours, and, to her surprise, had managed to get some sleep.
One of her small traditions was to maintain a small china bowl of fresh flowers on the chief constable’s desk – it seemed to her to add a touch of humanity to a room in which interviews often had to be painful. Shyly, when Piet took over, she had asked whether he minded the flowers. He replied that he had noticed them at his first meeting with his predecessor, and thought them beautiful. He had noticed, too, that the china bowl was Delft – and he told her of his own Dutch ancestry. So she had been delighted to keep up her tradition, and this morning she had gone out early to get a bunch of primulas from her garden. It was typical of Piet that he noticed them when he came in, and thanked her for having brought them. On his deputy’s departure, he asked her to warn his own driver, Constable Farrow, to be ready to start for Earl’s Down in about ten minutes. Then he looked into the CID office. Inspector Lovell was there. ‘I was just making out a report for you, sir, about cars at the top of your road,’ he said. ‘I’m going up again this morning.’
