Some Lie and Some Die Read Online Free

and have their homes broken into by teenage layabouts. Experience ought to have taught me not to expect decency from you people. You’re not even in the thick of it.’ Peveril went back into his garden and banged the gate.
    ‘We ought to have asked him if he’d seen any interlopers,’ said Burden, grinning.
    ‘Everyone’s an interloper to him.’
    Wexford sniffed the air appreciatively. He lived in country air, he was used to it. For years he had never troubled to savour it, but he did now, not being sure how much longer it would last. The night was bringing its humidity, little mists lying low on the turf, wisps of whiteness drifting over the quarry walls. A hare started from a tangle of dog roses, stared at them briefly and fled across the wide silver meadow, gawky legs flying.
    ‘Listen,’ Wexford whispered. ‘The nightingale …’
    But Burden wasn’t listening. He had stopped to glance into the brake from which the hare had come, had looked further down, done a double take, and turned, his face red.
    ‘Look at that! It really is a bit much. Apart from being—well, disgusting, it happens to be against the law. This, after all, is a public place.’
    The couple hadn’t been visible from the Sundays side. They lay in a small declivity on the floor of the quarry where the lawn dipped to form a grassy basin about the size of a double bed. Burden had spoken in his normal voice, some twenty feet above their heads, but the sound hadn’t disturbed the boy and girl, and Wexford recalled how Kinsey had said that in these circumstances a gun could be fired in the vicinity and the report pass unheard.
    They were making love. They were both naked, eighteen or nineteen years old, and of an absolute physical perfection. Across the boy’s long arched back the fern-like leaves of the mountain ash which sheltered them scattered a lightly moving pattern of feathery black shadows. They made no sound at all. They were entirely engrossed in each other. And yet they seemed at the same time to be one with their surroundings, as if this setting had been made for them by some kindly god who had prepared it and waited yearningly for the lovers to come and make it complete.
    The boy’s hair was long, curly and golden, the girl’s black and spread, her face cut crystal in the moonlight. Wexford watched them. He could not take his eyes away. There was nothing of voyeurism in the fascination they had for him and he felt no erotic stimulus. A cold atavistic chill invaded him, a kind of primeval awe. Bathed by the moonlight, enfolded by the violet night, they were Adam and Eve, Venus and Adonis, a man and woman alone at the beginning of the world. Silver flesh entwined, encanopied by an ever-moving, shivering embroidery of leaf shadows, they were so beautiful and their beauty so agonising, that Wexford felt enter into him that true panic, the pressure of procreating, urgent nature, that is the presence of the god.
    He shivered. He whispered to Burden, as if parodying the other’s words, ‘Come away. This is a private place.’
    They wouldn’t have heard him if he had shouted, any more than they heard the sudden throb which thundered from the stage and then the thumping, yelling, screaming tumult as The Verb To Be broke into song.

3

    There had been no trouble. A party of Hell’s Angels had come to Sundays gates and been turned away. The walls were not high enough to keep them out but they kept out their bikes. A tent had caught fire. There was no question of arson. Someone had lit a fire too close to the canvas and Silk had housed the dispossessed owners in one of his spare bedrooms.
    The singing went on most of the night, the keening swell, the thunderous roars, of it audible as far away as Forby, and calls from outraged residents—Peveril among them—came steadily into Kingsmarkham police station. By dawn all was silent and most people asleep. The fires had been stamped out and the arc-lamps switched off as the sun came up to