Let sleeping bodies lie
At first, she appeared to be a remnant of the Festival: a beautiful girl with a painted cornflower blooming on her cheek, sleeping off the excess of the night before. It's the summer of 1969, but it seems not all the revellers had peace and love on their minds.
Four decades on, Chief Inspector Banks is called from his dinner to a far bloodier scene. A stranger has been murdered in a remote village, and before Banks can begin to uncover the motive he must first identify the body. Nothing is straightforward in this case, and soon he is on a path of discovery that leads back into the past: to a murder in the summer of 1969 that everyone had though long-since solved...
Monday, 8 September 1969
To an observer looking down from the peak of Brimleigh Beacon early that Monday morning, the scene below might have resembled the aftermath of a battle. It had rained briefly during the night, and the pale sun coaxed tendrils of mist from the damp earth. They swirled over fields dotted with motionless shapes, mingling here and there with the darker smoke of smouldering embers. Human scavengers picked their way through the carnage if collecting discarded weapons, occasionally bending to extract an object of value from a dead man's pocket. Others appeared to be shovelling soil or quicklime into large open graves. The light wind carried a whiff of rotting flesh.
And over the whole scene a terrible stillness reigned.
But to Dave Sampson, down on the field, there had been no battle, only a peaceful gathering, and Dave had the worm's-eyes view. It was just after eight a.m., and he had been up half the night along with everyone else, listening to Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. Now the crowd had gone home, and he was moving among the motionless shapes-litter left by the vanished hordes - helping to clean up after the very first Brimleigh festival. Here he was, bent over, back aching like hell, eyes burning with tiredness, plodding across the muddy field picking up rubbish. The eerie sounds of Jimmy Page playing his electric guitar with a violin bow still echoed in his mind as he shoved Cellophane wrappers and half-eaten Mars bars into his plastic bag.
Ant and beetles crawled over the remains of sand-wiches and half-empty tins of baked beans. Flies buzzed around the faces and wasps hovered about the necks of empty pop bottles. More than once, Dave had to manoeuvre sharply to avoid being stung. He couldn't believe some of the stuff people left behind. Food wrappers, soggy newspapers and magazines, used Durex, tampons, cigarette ends, knickers, empty used Durex, tampons, cigarette ends, knickers, empty beer cans and roaches you'd expect, but what on earth had the person who left the Underwood typewriter been thinking of? Or the wooden crutch? Had a cripple, suddenly healed by the music, ru off and left it behind?
There were other things, too, things best avoided. The marketshift toilets set over the open cess-pit had been uninviting, as well as few and far between, and the queues had been long, encouraging more than one desperate person to find a quiet spot elswhere in the field. Dave glanced towards the craters and felt glad that he wasn't one of the volunteers assigned to fill them with earth.
In an otherwise isolated spot at the southern edge of the field, where the land rose gently towards the fringes of Brimleigh Woods, Dave noticed an abandoned sleeping-bag. The closer he got, the more it looked to be occupied. Had someone passed out or simply gone to sleep? More likely, Dave thought, it was drugs. All night the medical tent had been open to people suffering hallucinations from bad acid, and there had been enough Mandrax and opiated hash around to knock out an army.
Dave prodded the bag with his foot. It felt soft and heavy. He prodded it again, harder this time. Still nothing. It definitely felt as if someone was inside. Finally, he bent and pilled the zip, and when he saw what was there, he wished he hadn't
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