Some Lie and Some Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

had deepened to indigo. And the house itself was bathed in livid light, that wan, spectral light that gleams under cloud canopies before a storm. The hornbeams in the avenue, stolid, conical trees, were too stocky to sway much in the rising breeze, but the low broomlike branches of the cedars had begun to sweep and sigh against the turf and, up by the house, the conifers shivered.
    It was a hot wind, though, and when Zeno Vedast walked on to the stage he was still half-naked. He sang the ‘Let-me-believe’ ballad again to a silent crowd made tense by the stifling, thick air.
    Wexford, who had once more wandered a little apart so that he was close by the scaffolding of the stage, found himself standing beside Nell Tate. Vedast was singing unaccompanied this time and she held his mandoline or ocarina or whatever it was. There was nothing exceptional in the fact that her eyes were fixed on the singer. So were seventy or eighty thousand other pairs of eyes. But whereas the rest showed enthusiasm, admiration, critical appreciation, hers were hungrily intense. Her gleaming mulberry-coloured lips were parted and she held her head slightly back in a yearning, swan-like curve. A little bored by the song, Wexford amused himself in watching her and then, suddenly, she turned and looked him full in the face.
    He was shocked. Her expression was tragic, despairing, as if she had been and was for ever to be bitterly deprived of what she most wanted. Misery showed through the plastered biscuit make-up, the rosy blusher, the green and blue eyelid paint, and showed in spite of the absurd twinkling brilliants stuck about her eyes. He wondered why. She was older than he had thought at first but still only about twenty-eight. Was she in love with Vedast and unable to have him? That seemed improbable, for when Vedast had finished his first song he stepped over to the edge of the stage, squatted down and, in taking the stringed thing from Nell’s hand, kissed her impulsively, but slowly and passionately, on the mouth. Vedast began singing again and now Wexford saw that she was looking calmer, the glittering lids closed briefly over her eyes.
    ‘Is that the lot?’ he asked, going back to Burden. ‘I mean, is the concert over?’
    Burden slipped unprotestingly into his role as pop expert, though a less likely or less enthusiastic authority could hardly have been found. ‘Two more songs from The Greatheart,’ hesaid, ‘and then we can all go home. Some are going already. They only waited to hear the Naked Ape.’
    ‘Fighting words, Mike, sacrilege. I thought he was rather good. There goes that pink and orange van. It’s got graffiti all over it—did you see?—and someone’s written on one of the doors “This truck also available in paperback”.’
    The tents were coming down. Gas burners and kettles and tins of instant coffee were being thrust into kit bags, and a barefoot girl wandered vaguely about looking among the heaps of Utter for the shoes she had discarded twenty-four hours before. The future leader of an emerging African state had abandoned polemics for the more prosaic pursuit of rolling up his sleeping bag. Martin Silk strolled among them, smiling with regal benignity at his young guests and rather malicious triumph at Wexford.
    ‘You can’t help feeling sorry for those Greatheart people, singing their guts out to an audience who couldn’t care less. They must know they only stayed for Vedast.’
    Wexford’s words went unheard. ‘There they are,’ said Burden, ‘that girl and her boy friend, the ones we saw last night. Coming straight from the quarry. Well, their little honeymoon’s over. And they’ve had a row by the look of them or been bitten by something. It’s always said there are adders on Sundays land.’
    ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Wexford snapped. ‘That’d be a suitable retribution for doing what comes naturally in the Garden of Eden.’ The girl and the boy showed no sign of having