Festival Read online

  FESTIVAL

  J.R.L. ANDERSON

  CONTENTS

  IThe Empty Pram

  IIThe Earl’s Down Festival

  IIIThe Dead Girl

  IVThe Van Driver

  VThe Syringe

  VITwo Sisters

  VIIThe Schooner

  VIIIEnlisting Help

  IXA Call on Harriet

  XThe Sergeant’s Night

  XIStorm

  XIIBack to Life

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE J.R.L. ANDERSON COLLECTION

  The Peter Blair Mysteries

  Death on the Rocks

  Death in the Thames

  Death in the North Sea

  Death in the Desert

  Death in the Caribbean

  Death in the City

  Death in the Greenhouse

  Death in a High Latitude

  The Piet Deventer Investigations

  A Sprig of Sea Lavender

  Festival

  Late Delivery

  Other J.R.L. Anderson Mysteries

  Reckoning in Ice

  The Nine-Spoked Wheel

  Redundancy Pay

  For

  Joe Smith

  And

  Christopher Paine

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Neither the North Wessex Constabulary nor the West Cornwall Constabulary exists as a police force, so it should be apparent that none of the officers of either force mentioned in my tale can have any real existence. The Metropolitan Police and New Scotland Yard, of course, exist, but they have passed into the language in such a way that fictitious use of them is, I hope, acceptable. The geographical setting of my story is real, with some slight liberties in physical features taken here and there, and the map will not show some of my place-names. All the human characters are entirely imaginary, and have no relationship of any sort with the real places that provide a background to their activities.

  I

  The Empty Pram

  THE DISTRACTED WOMAN could scarcely get the words over the telephone. ‘They’ve taken . . . they’ve taken away . . . Jo,’ she said. ‘I’ve just run back into the house to tell you.’

  *

  A policeman is used to meeting other people’s sorrows. As he becomes more senior he may tend to meet them more at second hand, but if he remains a good policeman they are none the less real, nor less poignant. At the top of his Force a chief constable has to try to help in many of the personal troubles of his officers, as well as to continue meeting the sorrows of the public. What if he picks up a telephone to hear his own wife saying that their only child has been kidnapped?

  *

  This chief constable felt himself almost physically cut into two people. One wanted only to take his wife in his arms and try to comfort her. The other, as always in cases concerning children, fought down a feeling that he was about to be sick, and reacted with a mixture of humanity and the instincts of long training. ‘Stay at home, darling, and I’ll be with you just as quickly as I possibly can,’ he told his wife before putting down the phone. Then he went to the office of the duty chief inspector of the CID, a few yards along the corridor from his own room. Even in his distress he didn’t forget to give a small polite knock on the door, but he didn’t wait for anyone to say, ‘Come in’. The duty officer jumped up as he entered. ‘My wife has just telephoned to say that our daughter has been kidnapped,’ the chief constable said. ‘I don’t know any more than that. I’m going out to her now, and I’ll ring you as soon as I’ve got the details. Meanwhile, get the nearest patrol car to go to my house, alert all other patrols and all police stations. The little girl is nine months old, called Jo – for Josephine, though that scarcely matters – with a clear skin, blue eyes, and very fair, pale golden hair. She was probably wearing a little blue and white cotton dress. I’m going home in a car with a police driver, and I’ll send him back at once with photographs. You might get another driver to take back my own car for me – I’m certainly going to need it.’

  The duty officer reached for the phone with his left hand, and leaned forward, holding out his right hand to the chief constable. ‘I don’t know what to say, sir, but may God help you.’ The chief constable took his hand. ‘Thank you, Mike,’ he said. ‘We’ve been through all this for other people. Perhaps it’s good for our souls to know what it’s like ourselves.’

  *

  From the headquarters of the North Wessex Constabulary in Marlborough to the chief constable’s home on the outskirts of that pleasant old town was about fifteen minutes by car. As they drove out, Piet Deventer remembered with what delight Sally had found the house, and he felt a stab of pain over the happiness they both took in it. He had been chief constable for just under a year – the youngest chief constable in England. It was a big job, and a remarkable promotion for him, even after a brilliant career in the Metropolitan Police. The Deventers were of Dutch extraction, but a forbear, a fine seventeenth-century clockmaker, had come to England in the service of William of Orange, and the family had lived in England ever since. They never forgot their Dutch origins and maintained the Dutch spelling for Piet’s Christian name. Most of them were artistically gifted, and Piet had wanted to be a painter. He had gone to an art school in London when his father died, leaving his mother far from well off. So Piet made up his mind to get a job, and for reasons that sometimes he thought he understood but at other times didn’t understand at all, he joined the police. A lively imagination coupled with a sharp visual memory, a keen sense of fairness and an ability to get on with all sorts and conditions of men, made him a good policeman; a devout sense of purpose (though he would not have put it like that) made him an excellent one. His knowledge of pictures and of the art world took him to the Fine Art Squad at New Scotland Yard, where he cleared up a number of cases of art robbery and fraud, and earned quick promotion. Returning to more general duties he became Commander (Crime and Public Order), especially concerned with combating racial and political violence. He had put in for the chief constable’s job at the insistence of his wife Sally,* never expecting to get it, because he thought that he would be considered far too young. But he did get the job, and his best testimonial was an unwritten one – his success gave genuine pleasure to subordinates and superiors alike.

  And with promotion had come Jo. Piet and Sally had been married for five years, and although both passionately wanted children, something seemed to be wrong. Sally had two miscarriages. She was pregnant again when she urged Piet to apply for the chief constable’s job, saying how lovely it would be to have their child in the country. It was partly to give her something as well as her baby to hope for that Piet had applied. And then, just after he had moved into the job, Jo had been born – a beautiful, perfectly normal little girl weighing seven and a half pounds. Sally was staying with Piet’s mother while waiting for her baby, and when Jo was still only a few weeks old she accompanied Sally in hunting for a house – Piet became expert in finding convenient stopping-places where Sally could breast-feed Jo.

  They were lucky in their house-hunt, finding an eighteenth-century farmhouse that had belonged to the owner of some racing stables. He had moved to a larger establishment and sold the house, with about an acre of garden and a four-acre paddock alongside. Piet and Sally and Jo had moved in just before Christmas, and now in May they were beginning their first summer at Stable Hill.

  There were two gates to Stable Hill, and a short semi-circular drive to the front door. As they got there Piet was half-pleased, half-sorry to see a police car in the drive – pleased because it was efficient for a patrol to have got to the house so quickly, sorry because he’d rather have been with Sally when the officers came to interview her.

  The door opened into a biggish hall, light, b
ecause there were windows to both sides of the door, and pleasantly panelled in white-painted wood. To one side of the hall, in the front part of the house, was the drawing room, and opposite it Piet’s study. Farther along the hall was the dining room to the right, and opposite that another sitting room, opening through French windows to the garden. Piet and Sally called this ‘The Garden Room’. Beyond the dining room at the end of the hall were the kitchen quarters – a big kitchen with an Aga stove, scullery, and washroom, which had once held a coal-heated copper, but now housed Sally’s washing machine and a number of useful odds and ends.

  The big garden at the back of the house was completely walled with rose-pink old brick, and divided down the middle by a box hedge. On the kitchen side was the vegetable garden, on the other side, leading away from the French windows, a big lawn edged with flower beds. The lawn itself was shaded by a lovely old beech tree. Some of their visitors said that it ought to come down because it took so much from the soil, but Piet and Sally loved it, and since there seemed plenty of room in the garden for other things to grow they had no intention of interfering with it. It was in the shade of this tree that Jo had been asleep in her pram.

  The policemen, a sergeant and a constable, were studying the pram when Piet came from the house. Sally ran to him and put her arms round him. ‘Oh, Piet . . . Piet . . . I’m so thankful you’ve come,’ she whispered. She was dry-eyed and determined not to cry. Piet wished that there was nobody else there, and that Sally would cry, but he accepted that the ordeal had to be gone through and – if that were possible – loved Sally the more for her courage.

  ‘I was just telling the officers,’ Sally said. ‘I’d given Jo her dinner, and then since it was such a lovely sunny day I put her out in her pram, under the cat-net. I could just see the pram from the kitchen, and with the window open of course I could hear her if she cried. When I’d settled her I came back to have my own lunch, and then I tidied up in the kitchen – it couldn’t have been more than half an hour. Then I went out to see if Jo was still asleep and she wasn’t . . . she just wasn’t there . . .’

  ‘Then you rang me?’

  ‘Yes . . . No, it wasn’t quite like that. I think I ran round to the front of the house, to the gate, to see if there was anybody in the road with Jo. There wasn’t, so then I telephoned.’

  ‘Was the gate open?’

  ‘I think so. Yes, we generally leave it open.’

  There were hundreds of questions Piet wanted to ask, but he couldn’t ask them now. The important thing was to get photographs of Jo circulated. And he wanted to get Sally to do something, anything, to cloud, if only momentarily, the dreadful picture of the empty pram. He fell back on an old standby for the relief of tension. ‘I think we could all do with a cup of tea,’ he said. ‘I should make for about seven or eight, please, Sally, because there’ll be more people along at any minute.’

  As soon as Sally had gone into the kitchen Piet slipped into the house by the garden door. He didn’t want Sally to be involved in hunting out pictures of Jo. She was a well-photographed baby, and Piet soon collected half a dozen recent snapshots of her, two in colour, four in black and white. He gave these to the driver of the car that had brought him out. ‘Will you please get these to Detective Chief Inspector Harrison as quickly as you can?’ he asked.

  The man went off, and as the car was turning out of one gate of the drive two other cars came in at the other. One was Piet’s own car, driven by a uniformed constable, the other brought Detective Inspector Jack Lovell and a detective sergeant. The duty chief inspector, Mike Harrison, had wanted to come himself, but it was his job to stay at headquarters to coordinate things.

  ‘Good of you to get here so quickly,’ Piet said. ‘I’ve sent a batch of photographs to Chief Inspector Harrison, and he’ll get them circulated at once. Every police patrol in the area will be on the lookout for people with babies. That’s about all we can do for the moment, I think. The next job is to try to work out what happened. While we think about that, we’ll have a cup of tea. Sally’s just made some for us.’

  Piet led his policemen through the house. ‘I don’t want to go round the side because it’s quite likely that whoever took Jo went that way,’ he said. ‘I know it hasn’t rained for some days, but there may still be some marks, and we don’t want to mix them up with our own footsteps.’

  *

  Sally had laid out cups in the garden room. The men stood round awkwardly. ‘We’d all like to offer you and Mrs Deventer our deepest sympathy,’ Inspector Lovell said.

  ‘Thank you, Inspector, and thank you everybody,’ Piet replied. ‘The fact that this tragedy has happened in the family doesn’t make it any better or worse. We’ll just have to do our best – as we would in any case. Have some tea now, and then we’ll get down to work.’

  Sally poured out tea, and Piet handed round milk and sugar. Probably nobody particularly wanted tea, but the little ceremony helped. Piet turned to the two patrolmen who had been with Sally when he arrived. ‘You got here first,’ he said. ‘What did you do?’

  The sergeant answered. ‘We were on the main road, only about half a mile away, when we got the alarm, sir. I reported that we’d be at your house in a matter of minutes. I rang the bell, and Mrs Deventer came at once. She told us that she had telephoned you, and that you were on your way, so I didn’t try to question her. She took us out to the pram.’

  ‘Did it seem much disturbed?’

  ‘It was as it is now, sir – we didn’t touch it. The cat-net looked as if it may have been pulled away rather roughly where it fitted over the hood, for one corner seemed a bit torn. The pram harness that had secured Jo was missing altogether as if it had been unclipped hurriedly and taken away with her. There was a pillow, but no blanket in the pram.’

  ‘Jo had her light pink shawl. It was so warm that I only put it over her feet,’ Sally said. ‘I remember feeling glad . . . that she’d have something . . . something of her own . . . to comfort her if it got cold . . .’ She began to sway a little.

  Piet went up to her and put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Look, Sally, I think you must go and lie down,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Dr Macdonald to come and see you. There’s nothing you can do here at the moment, and it’s too harrowing for you to stand by and watch us measuring and hear us talking about Jo. I’ll take you up now. Inspector, would you please ring Dr Macdonald and ask him to come out as soon as possible? You’ll find a telephone in my study next door.’

  With his arm still round her Piet gently urged Sally from the room. ‘I reckon he’s a ruddy marvel,’ the sergeant said as he went out.

  *

  When they got upstairs Piet lifted Sally bodily and laid her tenderly on their bed. ‘My poor darling,’ he said.

  ‘Piet . . . Oh, Piet . . . will you get her back soon?’

  Piet longed to say, ‘Of course, we’ll have her back in time for you to put her to bed,’ but he couldn’t give that sort of comfort. All he could say honestly was, ‘I don’t know. On the whole there’s a good record of recovering babies stolen from prams, and the people who take them usually don’t do them any harm. The trouble here is that we don’t know why she was taken.’

  ‘Usually it’s unhappy women, isn’t it, who’ve lost a baby, or for some reason can’t have a baby? I’ve sometimes felt I could have done it myself – before Jo came.’

  ‘Yes, but mostly that’s done on impulse in a crowded street, when a pram is left outside a shop. We haven’t got any near neighbours, and it’s inconceivable that old Colonel Wright or Mrs Baldwin, who are about the nearest, could have taken Jo. How many people could have known that you put her in her pram on the lawn?’

  ‘Any visitors over the past fortnight or so of sunny weather – we’ve had about three lots of people to lunch. And the milkman sometimes comes at lunchtime on Fridays to collect his money, and I suppose other people come sometimes and may have seen Jo in her pram.’

  ‘You don’t suspect anybody we know?’

>   ‘Oh, Piet, I can’t . . . I can’t suspect anybody.’

  ‘Well, my darling, try to give up thinking about it for a bit. I think that’s Dr Macdonald now. I’m going to ask him to give you something to send you off to sleep.’

  ‘But Piet, I want to go out and look for her. I don’t want to go to sleep.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s the best thing for you. But I’ll ask the doctor what he thinks.’

  *

  Gavin Macdonald, the chief police medical officer, was still in his early forties. Of Piet’s senior colleagues he was among the nearest to Piet’s own age, and he had become a friend – he and his wife had come to dinner two or three times at Stable Hill, and Piet and Sally had visited their home. Piet met him on the landing, closing the bedroom door as he went out.

  ‘This is a dreadful thing, Piet. There’s nothing to say except that my heart goes out to you and Sally, and I hope it won’t be long before you get Jo back.’

  ‘I’m worried about Sally. She hasn’t cried, and she’s horribly, horribly tense. I don’t want her to see all the police work we’ve got to do.’

  ‘It might be a good thing for her to feel that she’s taking part in it.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that, and I think it may be, later. But not now. She’s had the most appalling shock. Have a look at her, and see if you don’t think the best thing would be to give her something to make her sleep.’

  Piet went in with the doctor, but walked over to the window and stood looking out so that he could not obviously influence things.

  ‘My poor, poor Sally. You’re being astonishingly brave,’ Dr Macdonald said.

  ‘I’m not being at all brave. It’s no use crying. I just want to try to do something.’

  ‘Piet and his friends are the people to be doing things at the moment. Let me feel your pulse, and I’d like to listen to your heart.’

  As with all good doctors, the mere presence of Gavin Macdonald was comforting. The bedside routine of pulse and stethoscope has an ageless, gently hypnotic value. Dr Macdonald smiled down at her. ‘It won’t do you any harm to have a rest, Sally,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, and you want to be strong for it, whatever it is. I’m going to give you an injection, and when you wake up you should be feeling a scrap more relaxed.’