Thoughtfully, she continued on to Two Bridges, turned right towards Moretonhampstead, just as Kelly had done two days previously in such very different driving conditions, and then, a couple of miles before Moreton, swung north through the pretty village of Chagford and up on to the remote part of the moor along the narrow winding road, which she knew led to Hangridge. All around her, vaguely purple hills, each topped with a tor, a distinctive irregular pile of granite, jaggedly dissected the skyline. Hangridge was relatively new. It had been built on MoD land in the 1970s. Karen knew almost exactly where the barracks were situated, built on a hillside in a particularly remote and unforgiving part of the moor, not far from Okehampton. But she had never actually been there before. The camp was quite isolated, the last two or three miles reached only by its own specially constructed approach road, so even the most tenacious of tourists exploring the moor would be unlikely to pass it by chance. And, in any case, Karen, who had loved Dartmoor since she was a child, rarely had time any more to play tourist. In addition, with every promotion her job had become more and more that of a manager and less and less what she regarded to be that of a police officer. She was desk-bound far too much of the time. No doubt about that. Karen didn’t think that was healthy for any police officer, whatever their rank and job description. And at least one bonus of this so far unofficial inquiry was that it had already given her the excuse to get out of her office and back on the beat, as it were, even if only fleetingly.
She was mulling over these thoughts as a dip in the hills took her through a ragged patch of dark conifers. The road swung sharply to the right as it rose steeply upwards again and, as she turned the corner, quite suddenly she was confronted for the first time by Hangridge barracks, headquarters of the Devonshire Fusiliers and a crack infantry training depot. Karen was completely taken by surprise.
She didn’t know quite what she had expected, and indeed had been unaware of any particular expectations, but she had not been prepared at all for what lay directly before her, built in such a way that she could see almost the entire layout on the bleakly exposed hillside.
Karen was well aware of Hangridge’s reputation for housing one of the army’s toughest training centres, a place designed to turn out elite fighting forces, or so she had been told, and she supposed that in her imagination she had conjured up a picture of some grim, moorland reincarnation of Colditz. Certainly, she admitted to herself, her extremely limited knowledge of the army was probably stuck in a time warp. Somewhere inside her head lurked an image of squat, black Nissen huts surrounded by unassailably tall walls or fences, topped by tangled rolls of potentially lethal barbed wire.
The reality of Hangridge could not have been more different. A neat cluster of conventionally built buildings, one or two storeys high, lay surrounded by playing fields which had been levelled out of the hillside. A rugby game was in process on one such field and groundsmen were at work on another. Karen realised that this was the kind of glorious moorland day which would even brighten the dark bleakness of Dartmoor Prison at Princetown, about as grim a building as you could get. But there was definitely nothing grim or at all forbidding about Hangridge. There was a perimeter fence, of course, made of wire netting, and even a strand or two of barbed wire here and there, but the whole impression of the place was open and pleasant.
Indeed, thought Karen, the place looked more like a comprehensive school than a barracks. Or her idea of a barracks, anyway. Of course, she reflected, as she drove very slowly towards the gates, Hangridge had been built in the ’70s when new comprehensive schools were popping up all over Britain. Obscurely, she wondered if the same architects had been used by the army.
The gates to Hangridge stood open, and only the presence of two young men on sentry duty, both carrying automatic rifles, detracted from the notion that the camp was as likely to be a centre of education for young civilians as a military establishment.
Karen pulled to a halt at the sentry point and wound down her window. One of the sentries stepped smartly forward. Every inch the soldier. But his dark blue beret, with its distinctive Fusiliers’ red and white feathered hackle, seemed too big for his head and Karen was struck at once by how young he looked. At first sight he could have been an overgrown fourteen-year-old. God, she must be getting old. This was boy-soldier land, but she knew the fresh-faced sentry had to be at least seventeen, probably more.
The young sentry saluted as he approached. He was of mixed race and rather gorgeous. His smooth olive skin gleamed with good health and he had big, beautiful, black eyes. There was something boyishly cheeky about him, and Karen could not help thinking how nice it would be to see him smile. She swiftly dismissed the thought from her mind and made an effort to pull herself together. She began to introduce herself, but it seemed she did not need to.
‘Good afternoon, miss,’ said the boy soldier respectfully, and Karen couldn’t help enjoying the moment. It had been a long time since anyone had called her ‘miss’, let alone an attractive young lad. Unmarried as she remained, she was none the less much more of a ‘madam’ nowadays than a ‘miss’.
‘The CO is expecting you,’ the sentry continued.
‘Thank you very much. Now, where do I go exactly?’
‘Just a minute, miss,’ interrupted the second sentry, who looked equally boyish in spite of the stern expression he had adopted. ‘Your ID, please.’
The first soldier flushed slightly. Karen was reminded that these young men probably still had their L-plates on. They may have been primed by their commanding officers about her visit, but they were still supposed to go through the motions of correct sentry duty.
She produced her warrant card which was duly inspected almost to the point of unnecessary diligence, she thought, by the second sentry. Finally, she was directed to the largest and most centrally positioned of the cluster of buildings where, after she had parked her car in one of several spaces reserved for visitors, a third sentry led her directly to the CO’s office.
Gerrard Parker-Brown was exactly as she had remembered him from their previous brief meeting: warm, affable and almost disturbingly unmilitary.
He rose from his desk as she was shown into his room, and stared at her in undisguised surprise.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise. Terrible with names, always have been. But I remember you now. And I remember thinking when we met at that do, how unlike a police officer you were.’
He stepped forward and enclosed her right hand in both of his.
‘Splendid to see you again, absolutely splendid,’ he went on. ‘Now, coffee, tea? Something stronger?’
He grinned broadly, flashing big strong white teeth. He had sandy hair, cropped short around the sides, and somewhat unruly at the front, where it had been allowed to grow a little longer over a broad, open face heavily sprinkled with freckles. His square-jawed, rather old-fashioned, kind of boy’s comic, good looks could only properly be described as handsome. There were prominent laughter lines around his dark brown eyes, which were framed by unusually long thick eyelashes. Karen couldn’t help registering that they were rather exceptional eyes, more like a woman’s than a man’s, although she didn’t remember noticing that before.
‘Coffee, please,’ she said, and found herself smiling at him involuntarily. He was quite disarming. ‘And I remember thinking how unlike an army officer you were.’
He positively beamed back at her. ‘That’s only because everybody still thinks in clichés,’ he said, gesturing for her to sit in one of the two low armchairs to one side of his desk, and lowering himself into the other. ‘But things have changed, about time too in many respects, but not all for the good, unfortunately. Army officers, police officers, we’re all the same nowadays, aren’t we? Bloody managers. Don’t know about you, it’s the endless paperwork that gets me down.’
‘Absolutely,’ smiled Karen.
She had not expected to meet this kind of kindred spirit in the British army, that was for certain. She stud
ied Parker-Brown carefully for a moment. He was tall and slim, looked extremely fit, and she suspected that his almost excessively casual manner involved more than just a little bit of front. None the less, you couldn’t help responding to him. She had to make a conscious effort to remember that this was an extremely senior military man, commanding officer of a major infantry regiment, and she was a senior police officer with a job to do, which might yet prove to be extremely tricky.
‘So, what exactly can I do for you, Detective Superintendent?’
‘As I indicated to you on the phone, Colonel, I have one or two anxieties concerning the death of Alan Connelly.’
‘But I understood it was perfectly straightforward. A tragedy, of course, but there’s no mystery, is there? Private Connelly had left base without permission and was, unfortunately, extremely drunk. He more or less threw himself in front of an articulated truck, didn’t he, in conditions that made it almost impossible for the driver to have avoided hitting him? That’s what I understood, anyway.’
‘We have no evidence to the contrary, Colonel, but there are one or two so far unexplained aspects of the case, and as I was quite sure you would be as anxious as we are to clear everything up, I decided it might be helpful for you and I to have an informal chat.’
Karen was aware of the colonel studying her quizzically. The corners of his mouth twitched. Had she said something to amuse him? Karen was pretty certain that he had not been entirely taken in by her allegedly informal approach, and probably suspected that she had good reason for being there and that she would have some serious questions to ask. Indeed, she was becoming increasingly more determined to find out everything there was to know about Alan Connelly’s death.
‘Of course,’ he said. And then he waited.
Karen told him about the two men, believed to be soldiers, who had come to find Alan Connelly in the pub, and then more or less disappeared, and about how Connelly had earlier claimed that he was likely to be killed and that his death would not be the first at Hangridge.
‘We have a reliable witness to all of that,’ she concluded, trying not to think too much about Kelly and the trouble he had got himself and her into over the years.
The colonel’s reaction surprised Karen. He burst out laughing. She observed in silence, more than a little thrown. Then he stopped laughing as abruptly as he had begun.
‘I’m so sorry, Detective Superintendent,’ he said. ‘That was absolutely appalling of me. A young man has lost his life in a tragic accident and I really shouldn’t have laughed. It’s just that, well, of course, you didn’t know Alan Connelly …’
He paused and it seemed some sort of response was called for. Karen obliged with a slight shake of her head.
‘No,’ continued Colonel Parker-Brown. ‘Well, to put it short, sharp and sweet, Connelly was a complete Walter Mitty. He damned near lived in a fantasy world. He was always making up stories. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself.’
‘What sort of stories, Colonel?’
The colonel flashed her the quickest of smiles. ‘Gerry, please.’ he said.
She nodded.
‘They varied. Some were quite funny, and the majority pretty harmless, but some were disruptive. Most were absurd, like saying he had a date with Kylie Minogue, and not just mentioning it in passing, you understand, but giving the lads an allegedly detailed account when he came back from a weekend pass. Oh, and he would claim that his father was a millionaire and he’d only joined the army because it was a condition of his inheritance.’
The colonel paused again.
‘No truth in that either, I don’t suppose,’ commented Karen.
‘Indeed not, Detective Superintendent.’ Parker-Brown flashed her yet another of his grins. ‘Or may I call you Karen?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she responded automatically, while reflecting that this meeting was not going quite the way she had planned. One way or another the colonel seemed to be taking control. She supposed he was trained to do just that, and made a mental note to watch him in future. If indeed she ever had cause to meet with him again, she reminded herself.
‘No,’ continued Parker-Brown. ‘Connelly’s father was a shipbuilder in Glasgow, who lost his job some years ago when so many of the shipyards on the Clyde were closed down. He has never worked since and is apparently a manic depressive and an alcoholic, inclined to take out his own disappointment with life on his family. Violently, sometimes, I’m told. No wonder the boy took to fantasy—’
‘You’re extremely well informed,’ interrupted Karen.
‘We operate a major training programme here, with upwards of two hundred young people going through our infantry course at any given time. We take in soldiers from other regiments for specialist infantry training, and some of it is pretty demanding stuff. My staff give me a weekly report in writing on every young man and woman we have here. Our job is to train soldiers, and an intrinsic part of that, I’m afraid, is to weed out those who should not be in the army, or certainly not attached to infantry units. Therefore, all of us in charge need to know about our young people. And that includes as much as possible about their backgrounds, as that can have considerable bearing on their behaviour and progress. I’m the boss. I need to be aware of everything, Karen. Past and present.’
He held out both hands in a gesture that could have been supplication or maybe just resignation. ‘I’m not, of course, but I do my best. And naturally, as soon as I heard about Fusilier Connelly’s death, I not only studied his file thoroughly but also went over everything with his training sergeant.’
‘You said Alan Connelly’s fantasies were sometimes disruptive, Colonel?’ Karen was determined to regain a little of the high ground and quite deliberately avoided addressing the Hangridge commandant by his Christian name as he had requested, even though he was now using hers.
‘Yes. We have young women undergoing infantry training here as well as young men. There are a lot of senior people in the army who still disapprove of mixing the sexes in this way, and I have to say that my tour of duty here has, on occasions, made me think they might sometimes be right.’ He shot her a sideways look. ‘I don’t really mean that, Karen. I do believe in a thoroughly modern integrated army. But, by God, it brings its problems along with it. Particularly when you have a young man like Connelly aboard. He used to invent relationships with the female soldiers—’
‘I didn’t actually realise that you had women in infantry regiments,’ Karen interrupted.
‘We don’t, not as such,’ Parker-Brown replied. ‘But women from other regiments are stationed here for infantry training if they are going into certain situations, in particular in preparation for a posting to Northern Ireland, for example. Anyway, there was one young woman, in particular, whom Alan Connelly focused his attentions on in ways which were quite unacceptable. He referred to her as his girlfriend, even though she patently wasn’t, he plagued her with thoroughly inappropriate love letters and followed her around the place …’
The colonel took a cigarette from a packet on his desk and offered Karen one. She shook her head. Karen had been a heavy smoker for most of her life since her late teens. She had given up for the umpteenth time just a couple of weeks earlier and this time she was determined to stick it out.
Parker-Brown nodded. ‘Filthy habit,’ he muttered, in a manner which left little doubt that the remark itself was also a habit and not something he gave any thought to whatsoever.
‘You have probably gathered, Karen, that Alan Connelly was one of those chaps who was just not going to make it here. Strangely enough, he wasn’t actually bad at the job – I think it was like another fantasy game to him, really, playing soldiers.’
Parker-Brown tapped a file on his desk. ‘It’s all here. I’ve had the computer data printed out and final reports put together by the training staff.
‘Connelly was a fit, athletic young man who was quite organised and able in his work, and certainly extremely willing. But his state of mind gave us a
great deal of concern and there was little doubt that we were going to have to let him go. He had actually been disciplined only a couple of days before his death for pestering the young woman recruit I told you about. He knew his days were numbered here. He’d been warned often enough. To be honest, Karen, I imagine that is why he took off from here and went on such a God-almighty bender.’
‘So your opinion is that when Alan Connelly told our witness that he feared he would be killed, that this was a figment of his imagination?’
‘Most definitely.’ Parker-Brown made the openhanded gesture again. ‘That would have been Connelly all over. He watched too many bad action movies, then made up his own script as he went along.’
‘What about his claim that there had been other deaths at Hangridge? “They killed the others, now they’ll kill me,” he told our witness. Have there been any other deaths here recently?’
Parker-Brown looked thoughtful, as if he was trying desperately to help but didn’t quite know how to.
‘Well, we did have a tragedy earlier in the year, about six months ago it would have been. One of our recruits died in a training accident on the firing range. They happen, I’m afraid. The first thing we try to teach them when we give them guns is elementary safety. And still they manage to shoot themselves.’
‘This soldier shot himself?’
‘Yes. Accidentally, of course. We have our own range about a mile away from the barracks. The recruits were simulating an attack on an enemy position, running forwards, throwing themselves on the ground, that sort of thing, and this young soldier had his gun cocked, fell awkwardly and blew a hole in his chest. Our standard issue automatic, the SA80, is a formidable weapon and the results were not pretty. Got a bit of press coverage, particularly locally, you may have seen it. But these things do happen when you are training military personnel, however hard you try to avoid it.’
No Reason To Die Page 8