Festival, page 7
‘It can’t possibly matter,’ said the girl. ‘It’s been in The Musical Echo, anyway, when they wrote about us.’
‘All right. I was born Steve Partridge, but I’m Steve Spider now to anyone who wants to know.’
‘Thank you. I understand that you were playing yesterday when a girl was found unconscious near the tents. She has since died, and we are naturally concerned with finding out what happened to her,’ Piet said. ‘I wonder if you could tell me what you were playing between, say, one o’clock and one thirty yesterday.’
‘Even the pigs can’t really blame us for killing anybody. Yes, we were playing, but we haven’t got any death rays, and our sort of music doesn’t kill,’ Steve Spider said sarcastically.
Piet ignored the offensive ‘pigs’, and replied calmly, ‘I’m not suggesting that it does. I’m concerned with building up a picture of events at the time the girl was found, and your programme may be of some significance. Also, if we know the time at which you were playing certain items it may confirm the presence of people who heard them, or the absence of people who did not hear them.’
‘Yes, we were on at one o’clock,’ the girl, Sue, said. ‘It’s a rotten time, because half the fans have gone off to the pub, but you go on when you can. We’ve a better time today – six o’clock this evening.’
‘How long were you on for yesterday?’
‘From one o’clock to about two thirty.’
‘Have you got your programme?’
‘Well, we don’t have a formal programme – we play more what we feel like. Yesterday we started with “Black Holes In The Sky” and went on with “You’re Born For The Dole”. That’s right, isn’t it, Steve?’
The vocalist began singing
You’re born for the dole
Yet they say you’ve got a soul
What’s that?
Inspector Donaldson wrote the names in his notebook.
‘What are you doing all that writing for?’ asked the guitarist, Bill Hendy, rather aggressively. ‘We ought to have a lawyer, Sue. Go phone up a lawyer, and the pigs can wait till he gets here.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Piet said. ‘You have not been arrested, you are simply being asked some perfectly civil questions about a public performance you gave yesterday. There is no reason at all why you should not answer them.’
‘I don’t like what I say being written down.’
Piet studied the group. They were all in their middle or early twenties, all wearing jeans and T-shirts with Space Orchids printed on them. The girl and the drummer were barefooted, their feet noticeably dirty. The two other young men wore sandals. The guitarist was burly, already running to fat, the drummer a compact little man, with a somewhat baby face and a fleshy lower lip. The vocalist had a sensitive, thin face, with a long curl of almost black hair falling from his forehead. His eyes were bright and alert. Hard eyes? Piet wondered. Or unhappy? Or both? He had what used to be called an educated voice, though the few lines he had sung were produced with a hard, almost grating rasp. It could be an effective voice, Piet thought, in some circumstances slightly hypnotic.
The girl was a flat-chested brunette, and certainly looked hard. But she was quite attractive, and could be much more so if she cleaned herself up. She seemed intelligent, and had her wits about her. ‘I don’t think you need worry, Bill,’ she said to the guitarist. ‘There’s no point in having a row with the police before you have to.’
‘Thank you,’ Piet said. ‘If I may say so, that is a policy both practical and sensible. I don’t know what dealings you may have had with the police in the past, but as far as we are concerned at the moment there are not even the makings of a row. How long would the songs you mentioned take to sing?’
‘Ten minutes each, about. But I think Steve sang them both twice, and there’d be some impromptu playing by the group between them.’
‘Would it be possible to run through them?’
‘No,’ said the vocalist firmly. ‘The bass guitar isn’t here, and it would take too long to fix up the mikes and things.’
‘You can get them on records, anyway,’ Sue said.
‘Have you got the records?’
‘Not to give away, we haven’t. But you can buy them here – there’s a tent selling records and cassettes near the entrance, and I know they’ve got our records.’
‘Then your sales will go up by at least one this afternoon. Are the songs on the records the same arrangements as you performed here yesterday?’
‘Yes, they’re pretty well identical. There are a few interludes that we put in when we were playing yesterday, but they don’t amount to much, and the songs themselves are just the same.’
‘We can time them, then, and that will be a great help. Have any of you any idea of the identity of the girl who was found unconscious?’
All shook their heads. ‘Didn’t even know that anything had happened until yesterday evening,’ the vocalist said. ‘When we finished playing we had to collect our things, and then we came back here for some tea. It was when we went to the pub in the evening that people told us that a girl had been taken to hospital. We couldn’t have seen anything from where we were playing, anyway, and we were thinking of the music. It seems pretty inefficient that you haven’t managed to find out who she is.’
Inspector Donaldson looked as if he wanted to explode, but again Piet ignored the deliberate offensiveness. ‘It isn’t all that easy,’ he said. ‘She appears to have had no handbag with her, and there’s nothing in her pockets to indicate her identity. And so far we haven’t managed to find anybody who knew her. That’s why it’s so important to go into the timing of the events, and why your programme could be helpful.’
‘Well, I don’t know that I want to wish a policeman luck in anything, but I can see that you need to find out about the girl, if only to tell her family, if she had one. And it can’t do much harm to anybody else, so I hope that you do manage to get on with things.’
‘Thank you. At least you didn’t call us pigs this time. We’ll buy your records on the way out.’
IV
The Van Driver
INSPECTOR LOVELL CAME into Piet’s room a few minutes after he got back. ‘I’ve just heard from the laboratory. The hairs do match your daughter’s,’ he said. ‘So it looks as if she was taken in that van.’
‘No one has come near the van, I suppose?’
‘No. It’s still parked where it was. We’ve still got a man watching it, but nobody seems to have taken the least notice of it.’
‘I think we could probably move it now, though it might be safer to leave it where it is for one more night. It belongs to the Finsbury Park greengrocer, and we ought to get it back to him. But I don’t want to let it go yet. Can you phone the local police and ask them to see the man and explain things? I don’t want to do him out of his van; I expect he needs it for his business. I rather feel that I ought to pay privately for him to hire another van while we hang on to the one here.’
‘Well, sir, I can suggest it, but the staff here wouldn’t have it. If there’s going to be any paying they’d insist on a whip round. There’s no need for any paying – the police are wholly entitled to retain possession of a vehicle believed to have been used in the commission of a crime. I’m not a lawyer, but if there’s any loss to the man I should say he could recover it from his insurers.’
‘Possibly, though it would depend on how the van was insured. The thing is that I feel personally responsible here, and kind as you all are to me I can’t dodge what I feel to be a debt of my own. So please pass on my suggestion when you phone the Finsbury Park police.’
‘If you say so, sir. But they’ll think it as mad as I do.’
‘Let’s leave that now, Inspector. Have you got any fingerprints from the wheel and gear lever of the van?’
‘Yes, there are several from the wheel, different sets, rather overlaying one another, as you’d expect. But there are certainly some clear enough to be identified. The gear lever also has smudges of prints, but they’re less good.’
‘A set of prints from that girl who died in hospital at Swindon will be here soon. Can you compare them with those on the wheel of the van? There’s nothing so far to connect the girl who collapsed at Earl’s Down with the woman who may have driven the van, but we’ve got one woman who walked off and disappeared, and another who was found dead, and we ought to see if they could possibly be the same person.’
‘Of course, sir. Everything’s been photographed, and I’ll do it as soon as the Swindon prints come in.’
‘I’m going home now. It will be a nuisance for you, but when you’ve examined the prints could you come out to my house? You can tell me about the prints, but of course you could do that just as well on the phone. Mainly I want to go up and have a look at the van with you. I’m sorry to ask you.’
‘I should be very much hurt if you didn’t, sir.’
The mystery of the dead girl helped a bit. It couldn’t take Piet’s mind off Jo, but it could give him the feeling that he was doing something, though the value of what he could do seemed at the moment pretty futile. He was longing to see Sally, but he was also afraid to go home. He shook himself mentally, and drove home in his own car.
‘Oh, Piet, I’m so thankful to see you,’ Sally said. Bravely, she didn’t ask if there was any news – she knew there was none. Piet did not tell her about the hairs found in the van. He had a word with his mother, and with the man on duty in the Incident room, wondering as he did so how long there was any point in keeping the place manned. Then his mother said, ‘Sally needs a drink, and I’m sure you do. I want to get on with some things in the kitchen.’
*
Piet had inherited from his forbears (or liked to think he had) a taste for Hollands gin, the schnapps of the Netherlands. He got out the bottle now, but before pouring a drink for himself he mixed an ordinary English gin with tonic water for Sally.
‘Dutch courage!’ she said, and was instantly ashamed of herself. ‘Oh, Piet, you know I didn’t mean that.’
‘I know exactly why you said it. My poor darling, you’ve been hurt and hurt all day, and you suddenly wanted to hurt back.’
She huddled into an armchair, and started crying, with slow, bitter sobs. ‘You ought to throw me out,’ she said. ‘I’ve wanted to do nothing but cry all day, and now I’ve tried to hurt you.’
He knelt down, and put his arms round her. ‘But you didn’t. And in any case it was English gin – I hadn’t uncorked the Dutch gin yet.’ That made her laugh a little, and he went on, ‘Have a little now, my darling, not for Dutch or even English courage, but just because it’s a small relief of tension. Do you remember Amsterdam?’
‘You mean when you introduced me to your schnapps?’
‘Yes, and you wrinkled up your nose, but you pretended to like it because you wanted us to enjoy it together. I saw through it at once, and I loved you all the more for it.’
‘Piet, if Jo . . . if Jo never comes back . . . It’s still worth being married, isn’t it?’
‘My dear beloved Sally . . . You are the only companion I ever want in this world.’
‘Piet, we were married in church, and we go to church sometimes. Do you believe there really is a God?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been praying to Him all day. Why hasn’t He let Jo come back?’
‘I’ve been praying, and thinking about this, too. So you see we really are close to each other – perhaps that answers one of your questions, anyway.’
‘But if there is a God, why doesn’t He do anything when we pray desperately to Him?’
Piet stroked her hair gently. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think God does hear our prayers, and answers them, but not necessarily in ways we want, or expect, or even know about. What is prayer? I think I can feel more nearly what it’s not than what it is. Prayer is not craving mercy from a hanging judge. God isn’t a hanging judge, and if we turn to Him only when we’re in a mess and want to be got out of it, I think that isn’t much in the way of prayer. And prayer isn’t asking God to do by magic what we’re not prepared to try to do ourselves by work. Then what is it? I think it’s a kind of sharing, as you and I share our lives and our problems . . . To believe in God is to believe that you can share everything with Him, happiness on a sunny morning as well as sadness. Philosophers have been asking these questions since the beginning of time, and no one has really found the answers. It’s a matter of faith . . . You believe that God gives you the happiness and the sadness, for reasons that you don’t understand, but just accept, when we say, “Thy will be done”.’
‘I’ve shared happiness with God, when I’ve put Jo to bed, or heard you come home. It’s awfully hard to feel that God wants you to share something like Jo being taken away. Oh, Piet, do you think I’m wicked?’
‘No, darling. You’re human, and I love you. We’ll go on sharing our lives with each other, and with God. If God gives Jo back to us, He just will. I don’t know how, but He will. If not . . . we’ve got each other, darling, and we’ve known and loved Jo. We must just go on having faith.’
‘Thank you, Piet. Now I think I will have that drink.’
*
Sally’s small breakdown probably did her more good than the drink, but the drink helped. Piet went back to that first trip of theirs to Amsterdam, and in remembering little things they didn’t forget Jo, but gave each other strength to go on. Piet felt humbly that Sally was braver than he could ever be . . . Jo’s kidnapping was an appalling blow to him, but he couldn’t have the physical bond with her that her mother had. Sally was thinking how infinitely she loved Piet, and how much his calm strength meant to her. They didn’t need to tell each other these things. Sally was actually laughing at a memory of the Amsterdam trip when Inspector Lovell arrived.
*
‘Nice time to join us for a drink,’ Piet said. ‘What shall it be – good honest Hollands, English gin, or what?’
‘I’d really prefer good honest Scotch, sir, if you’ve got any handy.’
‘Sure. And I’m not saying that I don’t agree with you. If I didn’t have an ancestral loyalty to the true Genever, I’d vote for Scotch as the finest drink in the world.’
‘Well, thank you, sir, anyway. I’ve got the information you wanted.’
‘You’ve been very quick about it. Sally, my darling, this mean that I shall have to go out. I haven’t told you about the tragedy at Earl’s Down yet. Perhaps it puts our troubles into some sort of proportion.’ He told her of the mystery of the dead girl, and of their efforts to find out who she was. ‘I don’t know how long I shall be, but you’re used to that, poor love.’
‘But, Piet, when are you going to get any supper?’
‘I’ll have something when I get back. You gave us a good lunch, remember, for all that it had to be in a hurry, so I’m all right for the moment. And I hope the Inspector has had some tea.’
‘Yes, sir, I’m fine. I’m ready to go as soon as you are.’
*
Piet was thankful to be able to talk about the girl rather than of the hunt for Jo. Part of him felt that Sally ought to know of everything as it happened, but telling her about laboratory findings on hairs from Jo’s head was too much for him. He’d have to tell her soon about what was being done in the hunt for Jo, but he could not do that now. He got into Inspector Lovell’s car, and as soon as they were out of the drive the inspector said, ‘Those prints do match, sir. So the dead girl at Earl’s Down had certainly driven the van recently, though of course there’s no evidence that she was the driver when it came up here.’
‘It seems probable,’ Piet said. ‘Let’s have a look at the van.’
For the few minutes that it took to get to the end of the road that ran past his house Piet’s mind was racing. He’d considered the timing before, and it was possible for the dead girl to have walked from the top of the Downs road to where she was found, but what had she done with Jo? Had she carried Jo with her? Jo was a baby, but still she was a weight to carry – could the girl have done it carrying Jo? And if so, again why, why, why?
The Mini van was at the near end of what they loosely called the car park, though it wasn’t really a park, but simply an expanse of flat turf that motorists used for leaving cars when they went for walks on the Downs, or drove up just to look at them. There were two or three other casual cars in the place, and an unmarked car with a plain-clothes policeman in it: if anyone was going to return to the van, they didn’t want him or her put off by the sight of a police vehicle. The officer saw them coming, and got out to meet them. ‘Nobody’s been near the van,’ he said.
‘I think it unlikely that anyone will come now,’ Piet said. ‘I’d like the van taken to the forensic people, and we can withdraw the watch here. Perhaps you’d see to that, Inspector. You’ve been over it so thoroughly that there’s not much more to be done, but it’s helpful to get a picture of it.’
Piet walked slowly round the van. It was a nondescript colour that had once been blue, but it had been repainted in places, and it was a long time since it had had a wash. The tyres were fairly good, with plenty of tread left, and the van was licensed to the end of the year. ‘The greengrocer seems to have looked after the important things. I wonder what the engine’s like? Can you start her up without a key, Inspector? If so, drive forward a few yards – I’d like to have a look at the ground underneath.’
‘It’s all too easy to start cars without keys. As a matter of fact we don’t need to, for I’ve had a mechanic up to look her over, and he got hold of a key to fit. He ran the engine but didn’t move the car. As far as he could tell the engine seems in fair shape. We’ll see how she goes.’
Inspector Lovell got into the van, inserted the ignition key he’d brought, and turned the starter. The motor was a little sluggish, but it started at the third go. He put the van in gear and drove forward about a dozen yards. ‘Everything seems to work,’ he said. ‘Not bad for a small van of this vintage, which has probably been used pretty hard, and knocked about a bit.’
