Some Lie and Some Die Read Online Free Page A

shine on Sundays through a golden haze.
    The day promised to be less hot, but it was still very warm, warm enough for the campers to bathe in the Kingsbrook and queue up afterwards for ice-cream. By noon the vendors of food and drink and souvenirs had parked their vans all the way up the avenue. The canned music and the music made by little amateur groups ceased and Emmanuel Ellerman opened the second day of the concert with his hit song, ‘High Tide’. The mist which had lain close to the ground at dawn had risen to lie as a blanket of cloud through which the sungleamed palely. It was sultry and the atmosphere made people breathless.
    Burden’s son John had been allowed to return and hear Zeno Vedast sing for the last time. He kept out of his father’s way, embarrassed in this society to have a policeman for a parent. Burden sniffed the air suspiciously as he and Wexford walked about the encampment.
    ‘That smell is pot.’
    ‘We’ve got enough to think about here without indulging in drug swoops,’ said Wexford. ‘The Chief Constable says to turn a blind eye unless we see anyone actually high and whooping about or jumping over the quarry because he’s full of acid. I wish I could appreciate the noise those musicians are making but it’s no good, I can’t. I’m too bloody old. They’ve finished. I wonder who’s next?’
    ‘They all sound the same to me.’ Burden kept looking for his son, fearing perhaps that he was being corrupted into taking drugs, making love or growing his hair. ‘And they all look the same.’
    ‘Do stop fretting about that boy of yours. That’s not him you’re looking at, anyway. I saw him go off to the hamburger stall just now. Hear that noise? That’ll be Betti Ho’s helicopter come to fetch her away.’
    The bright yellow helicopter, like a gigantic insect in a horror film, hovered and spun and finally plopped into the field behind the house. The two policemen watched it come down and then joined the stream of people passing through the gate into the field. The Chinese singer wore a yellow dress—to match her aircraft?—and her black hair in a pigtail.
    ‘What money she must get,’ said Burden. ‘I won’t say
earn.’
    ‘She makes people think. She does a lot of good. I’d rather she had it than some of these politicians. There’s your John, come to see the take-off. Now, don’t go to him. Leave him alone. He’s enjoying himself.’
    ‘I wasn’t going to. I’m not so daft I don’t realise he doesn’twant to know me here. There’s Vedast. God, it’s like the end of a state visit.’
    Wexford didn’t think it was much like that. A thousand or so of the fans had massed round the helicopter while Betti Ho stood in the midst of a circle of others, talking to Vedast who wore black jeans and whose chest was still bare. There was another girl with them and Vedast had his arm round her waist. Wexford moved closer to get a better look at her, for of all the striking, bizarre and strangely dressed people he had seen since Friday, she was the most fantastic.
    She was nearly as tall as Vedast and good-looking in the flashy, highly coloured fashion of a beauty queen. It seemed to Wexford impossible that anyone could naturally possess so much hair, a frothy, bouffant mane of ice-blonde hair that bubbled all over her head and flowed nearly to her waist. Her figure was perfect. He told himself that it would need to be not to look ridiculous in skin-tight vest and hot pants of knitted string, principal-boy boots, thigh-high in gilt leather. From where he stood, twenty yards from her, he could see her eyelashes and see too that she wore tiny rainbow brilliants studded on to her eyelids.
    ‘I wonder who that is?’ he said to Burden.
    ‘She’s called Nell Tate,’ said Burden surprisingly. ‘Married to Vedast’s road manager.’
    ‘Looks as if she ought to be married to Vedast. How do
you
know, anyway?’
    ‘How d’you think, sir? John told me. Sometimes I wish pop was an