So pleasure had won the day, but even the taste for pleasure changes and fairs are limited in the ways they can keep up with these changes. Also, though in the past this had traditionally been the city's holiday fortnight, and many people still stuck to the habit, many more objected to being told when they should or should not go on holiday. Another decade, thought Pascoe, and the High Fair could well be another casualty in the war for individual rights.

But at the moment it still covered a great deal of ground. Quiet now, though there was plenty of movement in the caravan park, his mind peopled it with the milling crowds of a hot summer's night. After ten-thirty when the pubs closed, there would have been a new influx of noisy and not very perceptive pleasure-seekers. Easy for one girl, or one couple, to pass unnoticed here. But how had Brenda Sorby got here in the first place?

Pascoe walked slowly over the fairground, deep in thought. One possibility was that the girl had met someone she knew on the way home last Thursday night and accepted an invitation to go to the fair. But it was after eleven P.M., so he would have needed to be very persuasive. Perhaps she had simply been offered a lift home and it wasn't till the car was moving that the Fair had been mentioned. By the time they got here, the storm would have broken, the crowds be heading for home. But that still left the fair people who would be clearing up, mopping up, counting up for another hour or so. So had she just sat in the car for that time? Perhaps she was already dead or unconscious? Perhaps…

He was walking past a fortune-teller's tent and the sight of it made him think of Sergeant Wield's experience the previous day. He had recounted it jokingly to Ellie when he got home but she had not been amused. It strikes me you can do with all the help you can get, she had said. She seemed to be taking these murders very personally. Perhaps an emotional side effect of her condition? He had had more sense than to say so!