Ruth Rendell - Some Lie and Some Die (An Inspector Wexford Mystery)

In memory of my cousin, Michael Richards, who wrote the song Let-Me-Believe.

Some Lie And Some Die

Ruth Rendell

1973

Let-me-believe

I dont miss her smile or the flowers,

I dont eclipse distance or hours,

I dont kiss the wind of the showers,

I miss her, cant kiss her with lips that were ours.

So come by, come nigh, come try and tell why some sigh, some cry, some lie and some die.

Remember me and my life-without-life,

Come once more to be my wife,

Come today before I grieve.

Enter the web of let-me-believe.

So come by, come nigh, etc.

The house will be as if it were ours,

Shell fill the void with love-scented flowers,

Shell sit with me in the fast-fading light,

Then my dream will sift into night.

So come by, come nigh, etc.

Now shes gone in the harsh light of day,

When shell return the night would not say,

And I am left to vision the time

When once more shell come and be mine.

So come by, come nigh, come try and tell why some sigh, some cry,

some lie and some die.

(Zeno Vedasts song from the Let-me-believe L.P. and the Sundays Album, issued by Galaphone Ltd and obtainable from good record shops everywhere.)

To my son, Simon Rendell, who goes to festivals, and my cousin, Michael Richards, who wrote the song, this book is dedicated with love and gratitude.

But why here? Why do they have to come here? There must be thousands of places all over this country where they could go without doing anyone any harm. The Highlands for instance. I dont see why they have to come here.

Detective Inspector Michael Burden had made these remarks, or remarks very much like them, every day for the past month. But this time his voice held a note which had not been there before, a note of bitter bewilderment. The prospect had been bad enough. The reality was now unreeling itself some thirty feet below him in Kingsmarkham High Street and he opened the window to get a betteror a more devastating look.

There must be thousands of them, all coming up from Station Road. And this is only a small percentage when you consider how many more will be using other means of transport. Its an invasion. God, theres a dirty-looking great big one coming now. You know what it reminds of? That poem my Pat was doing at school. Something about a pied piper. If pied means what I think it does, that customers pied all right. You should see his coat.

The only other occupant of the room had so far made no reply to this tirade. He was a big, heavy man, the inspectors senior by two decades, being at that time of life when people hesitated to describe him as middle-aged and considered elderly as the more apt epithet. His face had never been handsome.

Age and a very nearly total loss of hair had not improved its pouchy outlines, but an expression that was not so much easy-going as tolerant of everything but intolerence, redeemed it and made it almost attractive. He was sitting at his rosewood desk, trying to compose a directive on crime prevention, and now, giving an impatient shake of his head, he threw down his pen.

Anyone not in the know, said Chief Inspector Wexford, would think you were talking about rats. He pushed back his chair and got up. A plague of rats, he said. Why cant you expand your mind a bit? Theyre only a bunch of kids come to enjoy themselves.

Youll tell a different tale when we get car burning and shop-lifting and decent citizens beaten up andand Hells Angels.

Maybe. Wait till the time comes. Here, let me have a look.

Burden shifted grudgingly from his point of vantage and allowed Wexford a few inches of window. It was early afternoon of a perfect summers day, June the tenth. The High Street was busy as it always was on a Friday, cars pulling into and out of parking places, women pushing prams.

Striped shop awnings were down to protect shoppers from an almost Mediterranean sun, and outside the Dragon workmen sat on benches drinking beer. But it was not these people who had attracted Burdens attention. They watched the influx as avidly as he and in some cases with as much hostility.

They were pouring across the road towards the bus stop by the Baptist church, a stream of boys and girls with packs on their backs and transistors swinging from their hands.

Cars, which had pulled up at the zebra crossing to let them pass, hooted in protest, but they were as ineffectual as the waves of the Red Sea against the Children of Israel. On they came not thousands perhaps, but a couple of hundred, laughing and jostling each other, singing. One of them, a boy in a tee-shirt printed with the face of Che Guevara, poked out his tongue at an angry motorist and raised two fingers.

Mostly they wore jeans. Not long since they had been at schoolsome still wereand they had protested hotly at the enforced wearing of uniforms. And yet now they had their own, voluntarily assumed, the uniform of denims and shirts, long hair and, in some cases, bare feet. But there were those among them making a total bid for freedom from conventional clothes, the girl in red bikini top and dirty ankle-length satin skirt, her companion sweating but happy in black leather. Towering above the rest walked the boy Burden had particularly singled out. He was a magnificent tall Negro whose hair was a burnished black bush and who had covered his bronze body from neck to ankles in a black and white pony-skin coat.

And thats only the beginning, sir, said Burden when he thought Wexford had had time enough to take it all in.

Theyll be coming all night and all tomorrow. Why are you looking like that? As if youdwell, lost something?

I have. My youth. Id like to be one of them. Id like to be swinging along out there, off to the pop festival. Wouldnt you?

No, frankly, I wouldnt. Im sure I never would have.

Those young people are going to cause a lot of trouble, make a hell of a noise and ruin the weekend for all those unfortunate citizens who live on the Sundays estate. Heaven help them, thats all I can say. Like most people who make that remark. Burden had a lot more to say and said it, My parents brought me up to be considerate of the feelings of others and Im very glad they did. A trip to the local hop on a Saturday night, maybe, and a few drinks, but to take over God knows how many acres of parkland just to indulge my tastes at the expense of others! I wouldnt have wanted it.

Id have thought I hadnt achieved enough to deserve it.

Wexford made the noise the Victorians wrote as Pshaw!

Just because youre so bloody virtuous it doesnt mean there arent going to be any more cakes and ale. I suppose youll stop that boy of yours going up there?

Ive told him he can go to Sundays tomorrow evening for two hours just to hear this Zeno Vedast, but hes got to be in by eleven. Im not having him camp there. Hes only just fifteen. Zeno Vedast! Thats not the name his godfathers and godmothers gave him at his baptism, you can bet your life. Jim Bloggs, more like. He comes from round here, they say. Thank God he didnt stay. I dont understand this craze for Pop music. Why cant John play classical records?

Like his dad, eh? Sit at home getting a kick out of Mahler? Oh, come off it, Mike.

Burden said sulkily, Well, I admit pop musics not my style. None of this is.

Your scene, Mike, your scene. Lets get the jargon right. Were pigs and fuzz as it is. We dont have to be square as well. Anyway, Im sick of being an onlooker. Shall we get up there?

What, now? Well have to be there tomorrow when the fighting and the burning starts.

Im going now. You do as you like. Just one thing, Mike. Remember the words of another PuritanBethink ye, bethink ye, in the bowels of Christ, that ye may be mistaken.

Where the Regency mansion now stands a house called Sundays has stood since the Norman Conquest. Why Sundays?