Festival, page 6
‘Sounds like an excellent piece of work. I’ll be with you just as soon as I can. I take it the van is being watched?’
‘All the time, sir.’
*
Piet found the inspector having a cup of coffee with Sally. ‘Inspector Lovell has been telling me of how every policeman in the country is looking for Jo,’ Sally said. ‘People are being really wonderfully good.’
‘You’re bearing up pretty well yourself, darling. Look, since the three of us are here and it’s past lunchtime, do you think you could rustle up some food? Inspector Lovell missed lunch altogether yesterday, and I don’t want to make it a habit for him.’
‘Of course I can. There’s a nice pork pie, I’ve got some salad things, and I baked some bread only this morning – your mother said it was best to keep doing things, and she’s right. And it pays off – we can have bread almost straight from the oven! I’ll have lunch on the table in five minutes.’
‘Bless you.’ As soon as Sally had gone off to see to their lunch Piet got out the baby book, removed a few strands of Jo’s hair without spoiling the lock, and put them in an envelope, which he gave to the inspector. ‘We want to get those with your sample to the forensic people as soon as we can, but you must have something to eat first,’ he said.
‘I’d rather get on with the job straight away, sir. Perhaps you could thank Mrs Deventer for me, and say that I’ve just remembered an appointment that I’ve got to keep.’
‘No. Sally will have lunch ready in a minute, and we needn’t spend long over it. I’ve got to get off, too, and we can go together.’ He explained about the dead girl, and the need to start looking for a syringe, and to try to find an explanation for the bruise on her head.
‘Funny, that,’ the inspector said. ‘I wonder if drug addiction makes people bruise specially easily.’
‘I don’t know, though doubtless the pathologist can tell us. The really odd thing is that this girl does not appear to have been an addict.’
*
Piet felt guilty about leaving Sally, but just as work therapy was good for her, so equally it helped him. And the unanswered questions about the girl’s death were urgent, as was the job of comparing the strands of Jo’s hair with those found in the van. Sally did not try to keep him – she understood as much about him as he did about her.
The two policemen left together, but each had his own car, and while the inspector went off to the forensic laboratory Piet went back to Earl’s Down. He was a little surprised to find Victor Norton in the police tent – he had not expected him to return to the festival before late afternoon or early evening.
‘They rang me at home to tell me of that girl’s death, so I thought I’d better come up straightaway,’ Norton explained. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate.’
‘I’m glad to see you, because there are some puzzling things we’ve got to discuss,’ Piet said. ‘I suppose it’s really Inspector Donaldson’s case – we’d better have him along.’
‘He’s next door, having a cup of tea and a bite to eat in our canteen tent. I’ll go and get him.’
When Norton came back with Inspector Donaldson Piet went over the matters that had come to light at the hospital. ‘There was certainly no syringe found by her,’ Inspector Donaldson said. ‘We can have another look, but I doubt finding anything there. I suppose something could have been trodden into the ground, but it’s not rained lately, and the ground is fairly hard.’
‘I’d like to see the place anyway,’ Piet said. ‘We must find out if there was anything she could have hit her head on when she fell.’
The area for the fans who were camping was a couple of hundred yards away, the tents – a triumph for the organising tact of the police – set in quite orderly rows, with good spaces between them. Inspector Donaldson led the way to a tent towards the far end of the encampment, in one of the interior rows, so that there were other tents to both sides of it, as well as in the row it stood in. ‘She was found to one side and a little towards the back of this tent,’ Inspector Donaldson said. ‘It looked as if she had tripped over a guy-rope. That’s what the party who found her thought at first, until they went to help her get up, and found she was unconscious.’
‘She may have tripped all the same,’ Piet said. ‘If she was in a drugged or drowsy state it would explain why she fell at this particular spot. But if she tripped over a rope you’d expect her to fall on her face. Do you know how she was lying when she was found?’
‘She was lying face downwards – one of the party said so, because he explained that they went to lift her to see if they could recognise her. When they found her limp and unconscious they thought they’d better get help before moving her, so a couple of them ran to the ambulance tent. The ambulance men had turned her over when I got here, but she was certainly found face downwards.’
‘Then if she bruised her head when she fell the bruise ought to have been on her forehead, or on her face,’ Piet said. ‘These are steel tent-pegs, and you could understand one of them hurting her face, but that didn’t happen. I saw her face in the mortuary, and it was quite unmarked. We must get hold of the ambulance men and find out if they noticed any bruise.’
*
While the three policemen were standing talking a young man came out of the tent. He was wearing what seemed to be the standard uniform of T-shirt and patched jeans, but he looked clean, and his shoulder-length hair was more or less combed. He was not aggressive, but he was clearly suspicious, and disinclined to be friendly. He spoke in a curiously flat, almost unaccented voice, like a TV voice without the metallic rasp of TV. ‘I heard you talking,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘We are concerned with the case of the girl who was found here yesterday. She has since died in hospital. Were you in the tent when she was found?’
‘I wasn’t, but my wife was. She was giving the kids their dinner. She doesn’t know anything about it.’
‘Could we have a word with her, if it’s not inconvenient?’ Piet asked.
‘Inconvenient . . . You’re a funny sort of copper! Are you going to take us away?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. But I do want to ask your wife if she can recall anything that may help in our investigation.’
‘She doesn’t know anything, I tell you.’
‘Yes, but she may not be aware of the importance of something she may have heard, or noticed. May I go inside your tent?’
‘Well, the kids are asleep.’
‘Could your wife talk to us outside? We won’t go away from the tent.’
‘OK, but I want to be present.’
‘Certainly.’
The young man put his head into the tent and called out, ‘Cil, the coppers want to talk to you. They’re here now.’
‘Well, they’ll have to wait while I put something on.’
What she needed to put on was undisclosed, but whatever it was it didn’t take long, and in a minute or so she joined the group outside the tent. She seemed to Piet almost pathetically young, but her neat, pert young face was free of makeup, and she looked healthy and intelligent, more intelligent than her husband. She also spoke better, using good English with a pleasant touch of personality in her speech. She gave her name as Mrs Cilla Bevan, aged nineteen, with an address in Hammersmith. Her husband was Jim Bevan. She must, Piet reckoned, have been barely seventeen when her first child was born. She did not seem at all nervous.
‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.
‘You will remember a girl being found unconscious outside your tent yesterday. I’m sorry to tell you that she has since died, and we have to inquire into the circumstances of her death,’ Piet said. ‘Your husband tells us that he was not here when the girl was found, but that you were in your tent, giving dinner to your children. Did you hear any sort of conversation outside the tent before the girl was found?’
‘Not conversation, exactly, no. But I heard a man – at least I think it was a man – say something like, “Look back the way you’ve just come”.’
‘You never told me that, Cil,’ complained her husband.
‘You never asked.’
‘And that was all? There was no reply?’ Piet said.
‘If there was I didn’t hear it.’
‘Did you hear anything after the words?’
The woman thought for quite a long time. Then she said, ‘It’s hard to put into words. There was a commotion soon afterwards when people found her, and I heard them asking who she was, and then saying they’d better go and get help. I went out then, and saw the girl lying on the ground. I didn’t know her, and it was no business of mine, and the kids hadn’t finished their dinner, so I went back inside. Now that you ask, I think I heard a funny little noise, like air escaping from a tyre, before the commotion about the girl.’
‘How long before?’
‘I suppose you’re paid to ask questions – do I get paid for answering them?’ She spoke good-humouredly, not expecting to be taken seriously. Her husband, though, jumped in at once. ‘You’ve got a point there, Cil.’ To Piet he said, ‘What’s there in all this for us? You can’t expect people to spend all day answering questions without getting something.’
Piet began to say gently but quite sternly, ‘It is the duty of every citizen . . .’ when the girl cut in, ‘You keep out of this, Jim. You weren’t here, anyway. You could have stayed to help with the kids, but you didn’t. If the coppers want to ask me things, it’s for me to answer or not.’ Having quietened her husband, she went on, ‘About that funny noise. It was certainly before the commotion over the girl, but I can’t say how long before. I wasn’t taking all that notice; I was feeding the kids.’
‘We might get at it if you can remember where their dinner had got to . . . What were you giving them to eat?’
‘Well, I’d made a stew, and Cath, that’s my two-year-old, was having some of that, with mashed potato. She’s a good eater, is Cath, and tucks in without giving any trouble. Sid, the baby, is more choosy. He likes those little tins of baby dinners, and I’d given him one of those.’
‘Had you opened the tin when you heard the air-escaping noise?’
‘Yes, I remember now. I was just opening the tin, and at first I thought the tin-opener was making a funny sound, then I realised that it was coming from outside.’
‘And how far had the baby got with his dinner when you heard the people talking about the girl?’
‘He’d just about finished, I think. I feed him with a spoon, of course, and it must have been about the last spoonful, or I wouldn’t have been able to jump up so quickly to see what was happening outside.’
‘So the time between the funny noise you heard and the commotion of the girl’s being found would be about the time between opening your baby’s dinner tin and finishing it?’
‘Yes, about that, I suppose.’
‘And how long does your baby – Sid, isn’t he? – take to get through one of those little tins?’
‘It depends if he plays up. Yesterday he was quite good, I think – it was a carrot dinner, and he usually likes that. I don’t remember that he gave any trouble. Say five or six minutes.’
‘If it turned out to be important, would you mind if we did an experiment – timed you while you gave Sid a tin of carrot dinner?’
‘Not a bit. But I can’t see how it matters.’
Victor Norton broke in. ‘There’s one point we’re overlooking, and that’s the background noise of the festival,’ he said. ‘There was a group playing at lunch time yesterday, wasn’t there?’
‘Yes, it was Steve Spider and the Space Orchids. They’re not one of the most famous groups, but they’ve done a couple of singles and they’re coming up in the charts. We like them, so Jim went off to listen to them. I wanted to go too, but I couldn’t because the kids had to have their dinner. They won’t eat properly if I give it them too early, and I don’t like to keep them waiting.’
‘How can you be sure of what you heard through the noise of the band?’
The girl considered this. ‘There’s a band playing now, and we can talk all right,’ she said.
Piet listened. The tents were a good two hundred yards from the nearest band-platform, but the amplified sound was still loud. The particular band on at the moment seemed to employ the more or less standard instruments of drums, lead guitar and bass guitar. The loudspeakers reduced everything to a kind of woollen blanket of sound, but some of the vocalists’ words could be made out
‘It’s life itself gets in the way
Today . . . and ev-er-y . . . day . . .’
The background of musical sound was so all-pervading that it could almost be ignored. The girl and her husband had been carrying on a conversation with the police, and no one had been shouting. Piet was satisfied that words spoken close outside the tent could have been heard inside it. The ‘funny noise like air escaping from a tyre’ was another matter. Could that have emanated from the band? They would have to find out.
‘Have you finished with us?’ Jim Bevan asked.
‘I think so. Mrs Bevan has been most helpful. We have your address if we need to get in touch with you again.’
‘Don’t want coppers on the doorstep at home.’
‘If we need to, we’ll come in plain clothes, then,’ Piet said politely.
‘You’ll still look the same. And you ought to pay Cil for all the time you’ve taken up.’
‘Come off it, Jim,’ said Cil Bevan. ‘They’ve got a job to do, same as you have when you’re not taking time off.’
*
Piet wanted to get back to the police tent to see if any news had come in from Inspector Lovell. Nothing had. He stiffened himself inside to endure the agony of waiting, and forced himself to go on thinking about the interview he’d just had with the young Bevan couple. ‘Could we find the leader of that band – the Space Orchids, wasn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to find out what they were playing, to see if it could account for that curious noise Mrs Bevan said she heard.’
‘I can find them easily enough. Shall I bring them here?’ Inspector Donaldson said.
‘No. If you can find out where their tent is, or wherever else they’re living, I think I’ll go to them. I’m sure these people respond better if they feel that we’re deliberately trying not to push them around.’
When Donaldson had gone, Victor Norton, said, ‘I hand it to you, Piet, for a brilliant way of getting at the timing of whatever it was that girl thought she heard, but I still doubt if she actually heard anything above the noise of the band.’
‘She unquestionably heard the people who found the body, because she came out to see what was happening.’
‘Yes, but the body was close to one of the tent ropes, and I daresay someone knocked against it and shook the tent. It’s quite different from hearing a conversation, or what seems to have been a fairly slight noise.’
‘Why should she make it up?’
‘Bored . . . to get attention . . . to be one up on her husband . . . I don’t know. She struck me as a cut above her husband, and she may feel that she’s taking it out of him by showing that she’s the one the police want to talk to.’
‘You may be right, but with so little to go on we can’t neglect anything. Do you want to come when I go and talk to that band?’
‘Well, you know what I feel – that you shouldn’t be doing anything but trying to comfort Sally. I want to take as much off you as I possibly can. But I do understand that at a hellish time like this it helps to have something else to get your teeth into. There’s a pile of things waiting at the office, and I think I’d do better to get back. As I said earlier I’ll probably come out here again this evening to keep an eye on things.’
‘You’re a great help, Victor. Thank you again.’
*
When Victor Norton had gone, Piet contemplated Inspector Donaldson. He had, of course, met all the inspectors in his Force, but he scarcely knew Donaldson, who had been brought in from one of the country stations to help at Earl’s Down. He was a stolid rather than imaginative type of policeman, who would get results by hard work and sticking to routine. The case of the dead girl had come to him by chance, and Piet wasn’t at all sure that he was the right officer to be in charge of it. But that couldn’t be helped, and Piet recognised that in his own thinking he might easily be being unfair to Donaldson. In any event, Victor Norton was closely involved, and so now was Piet himself.
Inspector Donaldson was back sooner than Piet expected. ‘There’s three of them there – the lead guitar, the drummer and the vocalist, who seems to be boss of the outfit,’ he said. ‘They’re ready to see you now, sir, and say they’ll do what they can to help, though they can’t think of anything they can do.’
‘Right, we’ll go along, then,’ Piet said. ‘Where’s their tent?’
‘They’re not in a tent, sir, but a caravan. It’s a good-sized trailer van, with a Land Rover to pull it – looks quite a prosperous outfit.’
When they got to the caravan there was a girl with the three young men. The vocalist was Steve Spider and he introduced the girl as Sue Carson, the guitarist and drummer as Bill Hendy and Bob Allen respectively. ‘Sue is our driver and business manager,’ he said.
‘Spider would be because of the orchids, I suppose,’ Piet said. ‘What is your real name?’
‘What the hell’s it got to do with you? I’m Steve Spider of the Orchids, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Not quite. I’m sorry if you think I’m just being fussy and official, but I should like to know your real name in case we need to get in touch with you again for anything.’
