Perfectly Correct Read online

  At midday on the dot, the first of the two vans lumbered up the track from the common, honked at the field gate and then pulled into Andrew’s field and started unloading. Andrew, Miriam and Louise went down to watch. A couple of cars from Wistley village came up the lane and half a dozen people got out and set to work helping unload the big speakers from the vans and spooling out cables. After them came a lorry with scaffolding for a little stage, and planking, and great rolls of tarpaulin. From the track over the common came a lorry with stage lights and gantries and rigging.

  The field was a dry flat meadow two fields distant from the house. Andrew had only just cut the hay and the grass was soft and dry underfoot. The organiser of the rave, in an exquisitely pale purple Armani suit with an earring in his left ear, greeted Andrew as an old friend, and slid an interesting-looking brown envelope containing a large cheque into his hand. A second cheque, as deposit against damages, followed the first. Andrew tucked them carefully in his shirt pocket and winked at Louise.

  ‘This is Dr Louise Case and Ms Miriam Carpenter – Steve Flood.’ He leaned towards Louise. ‘Here’s our honeymoon money,’ he whispered.

  Steve shook hands with a warm dry grip. ‘Pleased to meeetcha,’ he said. His accent was Buxton, Derbyshire, come Brixton, come Bronx, but his smile was authentic. ‘We are going to party!’ He turned to Andrew. ‘Had much trouble locally?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘Nothing to mention,’ he said. ‘Did you get through all right?’

  ‘We followed the map you sent us. We pulled off the road last night and they thought we was camping up. They didn’t bother to watch us through the night so we just went quietly round by the lanes and then up over the common.’

  ‘You drove over the common?’ Louise asked.

  Steve nodded. ‘It was bumpy but it was OK.’

  Louise looked at Andrew. ‘I thought it was only footpaths. Pedestrians only.’

  He smiled. ‘There’s a coffin path,’ he said. ‘A coffin path is one where a coffin has once been taken. That establishes the right of a road to be used for wheeled vehicles and a procession, a funeral procession, not more than once a year. Not a lot of people know that.’

  ‘Because I doubt it’s true,’ Miriam said promptly.

  Andrew’s smile was particularly sweet. ‘Twenty years ago we used to have harness racing on the common,’ he said. ‘The gypsies would come and race their trotting ponies. Fifty years ago they had a big horse-fair after every harvest, people would come from miles around and stay for a week. Two hundred years ago it was common land with common rights for the Wistley villagers and no-one owned it at all – it belonged to the village to use as we wished. I don’t see how it can suddenly become private land where you’re only allowed to walk on a footpath.’

  ‘Power to the people,’ Steve said absently, taking a thread off his Armani suit. ‘Power to the people right now.’

  Andrew chuckled suddenly and turned away. ‘You can run those electric cables into my barn. There’s a row of points up on the wall where I do the shearing. Is there anything else you need?’

  Steve shook his immaculately cropped head. ‘You’re OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll just get this rigged.’ He took off the exquisite jacket and laid it reverently on the seat of the lorry and then strode off across the field to where the crew were laying out scaffolding poles and planking in orderly lines and bolting pieces together.

  ‘I want to turn some hay,’ Andrew said, squinting up at the sky. ‘Will you feed the hens and fetch the eggs, Louise?’

  ‘And the pigs,’ Louise reminded him.

  He quickly caught her to him and kissed her. ‘Don’t ever forget the pigs.’

  The stage and the lights grew and grew until by four o’clock there was a recognisable building, anchored firmly to the ground by wire hawsers and tent pegs. They started to stretch the tarpaulin over the lights and sound equipment. All the time there was a constant stream of traffic coming up the lane, and sometimes entering the farm from the little track which stretched out to the common. Steve Flood had set up two mini ticket offices at the two gates into the field. Louise and Andrew took the collie and with him yapping and snapping at the big animals’ heels, moved the Charolais cows again so that a gate to the common could be safely left open. The first-comers selected the best sites, deafeningly close to the speakers, and the later vans and trucks and little commercial lorries set up in a wide circle around the stage.

  Then the police arrived. Andrew went out to the yard gate to greet them, an inspector flanked by a couple of sergeants with two cars of uniformed officers behind him, and, Andrew imagined, a hundred other officers checking their riot gear at the police headquarters.

  ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’ he asked pleasantly.

  ‘I see you have some trouble here.’

  Andrew glanced behind him to the sunlit yard where a small flock of hens and a couple of squat guinea fowl were scratching over the midden heap. ‘Trouble? No.’

  ‘I meant there.’ The inspector gestured rather irritably to the field where the lighting gantries were experimenting with strobes and lasers and each piercing beam of light was greeted with an ironic cheer from the two hundred or so people who were sitting on the grass or setting up camp.

  ‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘I have no trouble here. Do you have trouble here?’

  ‘I take it you have permission from the relevant authorities? That your papers are in order? That you carry full insurance and that these vehicles are taxed and registered? I take it that there are no illegal drugs or forbidden substances being trafficked on these premises?’

  Andrew blinked doltishly. ‘I just rented them a field,’ he said artlessly. ‘They seemed all right to me. Is there any law which says you can’t rent a field, have a little party?’

  The inspector looked sharply at Andrew’s blank bucolic expression. ‘Mr Miles, you know perfectly well that you are within your rights to rent out your fields. But I assume that you don’t wish to be host to trouble-makers and druggies and hippies. And yes, indeed there are laws, specific laws banning impromptu parties such as this one. Laws which I could invoke.’

  ‘If you want to,’ Andrew said doubtfully. ‘Then you could move them on and they’d be milling all over the county instead of settling down nice and quiet in my hayfield. They’re insured, they’ve paid me. They’re just people wanting a good time. You’re not going to come wading in and causing a lot of stress and tension?’

  ‘There have been complaints about lorries driven across the common.’

  ‘Well, how d’you expect them to get here when you’ve blocked off the roads?’

  ‘And about thefts in Wistley.’

  ‘Would that be Mrs Frome’s nightdress?’

  The inspector looked uncomfortable. ‘Theft is theft,’ he said shortly.

  Andrew nodded. ‘Well, you can’t come in here without a warrant. And a couple of lorries on the common and a missing nightie isn’t worth a warrant.’

  ‘I think you’re making a big mistake,’ the inspector warned ominously.

  ‘Ah, so what?’ Andrew exclaimed with sudden impatience. ‘I can’t go on worrying about Captain Frome’s wife’s nightdress, and the neighbourhood watch wanting us to win the Best Kept Village award.’

  ‘I hope they leave as quickly as they came, that’s all,’ the inspector warned. He was nettled that he had not known about the tracks across the common. His map showed dotted tracks of footpaths and a tracery of little bridleways. He had not realised that the lorry carrying the lighting gantry could quietly cruise up the sandy paths between the sprouting heather. ‘If they’re still here in a month’s time you will be coming to us for help, you will be begging for help.’

  ‘Maybe it depends whether the roads are clear,’ Andrew said. ‘If you block all the roads and move them on from all the sites then they might well want to stay. If they can’t get out then they’ll have to stay.’

  The inspector nodded. ‘Stay in touch, Mr Miles,’ he