To hell with it, he thought dejectedly. His head was throbbing for England.
He made the tea, ladled in the usual three spoonfuls of sugar and then headed for his favourite armchair in the living room, where he sat down and switched on the TV. His head began to ease a little as he drank the tea. An old episode of Columbo was being screened on Plus. Watching anything was better than struggling to sleep; in any case he rather liked the crumpled San Francisco detective, and fervently wished that real-life investigators were able to come up with such neat endings so easily.
The last thing Kelly remembered was that Columbo was about to explain to the villain exactly how and why he was guilty of murder. Then he must have fallen asleep, and so would probably never know the denouement. He woke with a start. The phone was ringing. Immediately, he felt the familiar stab of panic which he had been experiencing for some weeks whenever the phone rang at an antisocial time. Moira. Had something happened to Moira? Then he remembered. Something had happened to Moira, all right. She was dead. That period of his life was over, and so was the constant, nagging anxiety that had recently been the major part of it. His eyes felt sore, but he registered that he no longer had a headache. He had not closed the curtains the previous night, and bright morning light was streaming into the east-facing room. However, that alone had not been enough to wake him. Automatically, he glanced at his watch. It was 7.45 a.m. Why did he seem able, even under the most stressful circumstances, to sleep in a chair when he couldn’t do so in his own bed, he reflected obliquely as he reached for the phone. And, anyway, who the hell could be calling him at this time?
‘Kelly,’ he said abruptly.
‘John, sorry if I’m calling you too early, it’s just that I thought you might be leaving for work and I didn’t want to miss you.’
Kelly didn’t go to work any more, not in the way implied, and he had absolutely no idea who his caller was. It was a woman’s voice – clear, intelligent and somehow rather determined-sounding. There was something vaguely familiar about the voice, but not enough for Kelly to come close to identifying it.
‘It’s Margaret Slade.’
Jesus, thought Kelly, she sounded a bit different to how she had been when he’d visited her in her sad little flat.
‘Oh, hello,’ he said.
‘I just wondered if you’d managed to find out anything more about that other young soldier I told you about. The one called Trevor, the one I was told had also died at Hangridge.’
‘Ah, no, not yet.’ Kelly had made no further inquiries concerning Hangridge since Moira’s death, and wasn’t at all sure when he’d feel able to do so again. He had felt so crass when he had almost started cross-examining Nick the previous day, that it had rather put him off the whole thing. But, naturally, he had no intention of sharing that with Margaret Slade.
‘I’ve been a bit busy,’ he finished lamely.
‘Oh,’ Margaret Slade sounded disappointed. ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I bothered you. I just thought …’
Her voice tailed off. She sounded more than disappointed. She sounded thoroughly let down. He knew exactly what she thought. Kelly had bounced in, full of confidence, appearing to be both capable and informed, and she had thought that he was committed to investigating the death of her daughter and the others. What he probably hadn’t realised, based on that one meeting with her drunk out of her skull, was how much she still cared.
‘No, no. It’s not how it seems. Look …’
He considered for just a split second. He found he did not want to let this woman down, neither did he want to let down her daughter nor any of the other young people whose lives had been lost at Hangridge.
‘Look,’ he said again. ‘My partner died right after I left you last week. It was the funeral yesterday. We’d been expecting it. She was very ill, but even so …’
He stopped and took a very deep breath. Margaret Slade, he thought, would have absolutely no idea what it cost Kelly to confide even as little as that to a total stranger. Somewhat to his surprise, however, he was immediately rather glad that he had done so.
‘I’m so sorry, John,’ said Mrs Slade, and her voice alone told him that she really meant it, even though she barely knew him and had not known Moira at all. But, of course, this was a woman who understood about grief and despair.
‘And I’m so sorry for intruding at this sad time,’ she went on, in a strangely formal sort of way. But then, thought Kelly, it is to the traditional and to the formal that we all cling in our grief. And, again, Margaret Slade would know about that.
‘I’ll call again in a week or two, if that’s all right.’
‘No, don’t go, Margaret.’ It seemed quite natural that they were now on Christian-name terms. ‘Please. I’m fine, honestly.’
‘If you’re sure?’
‘Absolutely sure. It will help me to think about something else.’
‘Yes.’ Only one word, but again Kelly was aware that Margaret Slade understood. ‘It’s just that, well, I’ve been in touch with Marcia Foster, Craig’s mother. I found the letter she wrote after my Jossy died. I kept everything, you know. Put it all in a box. Anyway, we’ve decided we want to do something. We want all the families to get together, to form an organisation. An action group, I think they call it. I was hoping you might give me Alan Connelly’s parents’ address.’
Kelly was surprised and impressed. He thought for a moment. Apart from anything else, it was also a heaven-sent excuse to get in touch with the Connellys again. Neil Connelly hadn’t been very receptive, but Kelly would now be able to tell him about two more deaths. That might change things.
‘I’m not sure that I should do that, Margaret,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll contact them again, tell them all about you and ask them to call you. How’s that?’
‘OK.’ She paused. ‘There’s something else. Marcia Foster and I wondered if you would help us. We’ve no experience of doing anything like this. We wondered if you’d tell us what we should do, who we should write to, that sort of thing.’
‘Well, yes,’ Kelly begun. The journalist in him was beginning to think about what all this would mean in terms of his big story. Selfishly, the problem for him would be that this action group could mean that his exclusive might become public property sooner than he had bargained for. If the families started going straight to the TV and press, and there was little doubt that attracting the attention of the media would be a major part of any campaign, then Kelly’s input would become virtually irrelevant – or, at least, it would be based solely on what he had so far.
‘It’s more than that, really, though,’ Margaret Slade continued. ‘We’d like you to conduct an investigation on our behalf. People hire private detectives for stuff like this, don’t they? Well, we’d like to hire you. You’re a professional investigator, after all, of a kind. And you’ve already told us much more than we knew before.’
‘Well, I don’t know—’
‘We’ll pay you,’ interrupted Margaret Slade. ‘I’d never expect anyone to work for nothing. We’ll pay you the going rate. I don’t have any money, but Marcia has her husband’s life insurance, and she says she knows he wouldn’t be able to think of a better way for her to spend it. We’re going to start a fighting fund, too. I’ve read about that sort of thing. It’s what people do when they’re trying to achieve something, when they have a cause, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes.’ Kelly felt quite humbled. He was, however, still a journalist at heart. It occurred to him almost at once that Margaret Slade’s suggestion could give him the solution to his exclusivity problem.
‘There wouldn’t be any need for you to pay me,’ he said. ‘Look, a big part of any campaign like this is getting the media on board and on your side. You realise that, I’m sure?’
‘Yes, of course. That’s one of the reasons we thought you would be the right person for us to employ.’
‘You did?’ Kelly was surprised. He was pretty sure he hadn
’t mentioned his journalistic past to either of the two women. He hadn’t wanted to frighten them away, not at that stage. And, in any case, even if he had mentioned it to Margaret Slade, he very much doubted that she would have been in any condition to remember.
‘Well, the thing is,’ he continued. ‘If you give me exclusive rights to place any stories and information that we come up with between us, I can make quite enough money directly from the media. You wouldn’t need to pay me anything.’
‘Better still.’
‘Right.’ Kelly paused. ‘You seem to know that I was a journalist. How? I don’t think I told you …’
‘No, you said you were a writer, so I looked you up on the Net,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t find any books, but then all these newspaper stories kept popping up, and I found a biog’ on you when you’d been a speaker at a journalists’ training seminar a few years ago.’
‘Ah.’ Kelly would have to rethink his opinion of Margaret Slade. When sober, she was very different to the image he had conjured up of her in his mind. He now detected a distinctly educated note in her voice, which he had totally missed when he first met her. But then, she had been so drunk it would have been difficult to detect anything. However, her memory of that afternoon seemed to be rather better than he would have considered possible, given the state she was in. None the less, his initial reaction had been to be surprised that she had a computer at all, let alone that she was able to surf the Net so effectively.
‘It’s a very old computer,’ Margaret Slade continued, as if reading his mind. She really did seem to be an unusually perceptive woman. ‘I bought it second-hand for Jossy when she was still at school. Before … before …’
She paused mid-sentence and Kelly was momentarily puzzled. She had already said she bought the computer when Jossy was still at school. She could have been about to say ‘before Jossy died’, but that was obvious. She wouldn’t have bought her a computer afterwards, would she?
‘Before I started drinking again,’ she continued eventually.
‘Ah,’ said Kelly.
‘Yes. Look. I want you to know about my drinking before we go any further.’
‘You sound sober enough, now,’ said Kelly.
‘It is ten to eight in the morning,’ responded Margaret Slade, a light irony in her voice.
She had a sense of humour too, thought Kelly.
‘Fair enough,’ said Kelly. ‘But you don’t sound like someone who was drunk when they went to bed last night.’
‘And you’d know that?’
‘Oh, yes. First-hand knowledge. For many years. And I suspect I was probably much much worse than you’ve ever been.’
‘You must have gone some, then,’ retorted Margaret Slade.
Kelly was beginning to rather enjoy this conversation. ‘I certainly did,’ he replied.
‘Well, it began in the usual way for me, as a young woman. Social drinking, that sort of thing. It was the seventies. Everybody I knew was drinking. About the only thing Jossy’s father and I had in common was the booze. I think it’s why I married him. My parents, well, they were already getting worried about my drinking, and they disapproved of Trevor from the start. Wish I’d listened to them. Then I might not be in this state.
‘Anyway, after Trev left me, I very nearly hit rock bottom. But I managed to pull myself together, reckoned I had to, for the kids. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and somehow or other I kicked the drink. It was never easy for me, but I did it. Then my parents died suddenly one after the other, and they left me some money. We didn’t always live in this crummy flat, you know. I had a nice little house.
‘I wasn’t such a bad mother, either, I don’t think. Not all the time, anyway. I was dry for what – six, seven years. Then when Jossy was, oh, about fourteen, I started again. It was man trouble. Story of my life. I thought I’d found Mr Right, and he turned out to be an even bigger rat than my ex-husband. He conned me out of a lot of money. I took out a mortgage on our little house to invest in an office-cleaning business he was starting, and guess what, it went bust. If it ever bloody existed. And then, when he had milked me virtually dry, he took off. Gone. I was left bitter, twisted and broke. Naturally, I thought that alcohol was my only solace, and that was the final straw.
‘We lost the house, ended up in this dump, and I don’t think I’ve been sober for a day since. Until – until the day after you came calling.’
‘Really?’
‘I went to an AA meeting again that night. That very night. Half canned, still. First time in nearly five years. I thought I’d screwed my Jossy up. I thought I was the reason she was dead, and that made me not care about anything else at all, including myself. Now I know it may have been nothing to do with me. I need to find out the truth, for me and for my girl. She could have been murdered, John, that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’
Kelly spoke carefully.
‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘It has to be possible. But it isn’t going to be an easy ride to find out what really happened. The army will block us all the way, I’m sure of it. They’ve already started doing just that.’
‘I didn’t imagine for one minute that it would be easy, John,’ Margaret Slade responded. ‘That’s why I wanted you on board. I had an uncle who was a Fleet Street reporter. It was years ago and he’s dead now, but I still remember his stories from when I was a kid. If an old tabloid hack can’t find a way through red tape and obstruction, I don’t know who can.’
Kelly found that he was smiling when he put the phone down. The adrenaline was starting to pump. He couldn’t wait to get on the case. He wanted to call Alan Connelly’s father straight away, to try to persuade him that he should be prepared to question the army’s version of events, and that he should get in touch with Margaret Slade.
He looked at his watch again. It was still not quite eight o’clock. He didn’t dare ring the Connelly household yet, not before at least 8.30, he reckoned. He had not exactly been welcomed into their home with open arms, and he suspected that Neil Connelly was not going to be all that pleased to hear from him, let alone if he disturbed the family too early in the morning. Kelly had to persuade the man to listen and to think, and he had to be very careful in his approach.
He mulled all this over as he picked up the mug he had used in the early hours and made his way into the kitchen to make more tea. His right leg was still not functioning properly. He kicked it to and fro as he refilled the kettle, and while he waited for it to boil. Spending half the night in that chair had done him no good at all. He stretched his back and his arms. Everything ached.
He made tea in the same unwashed mug, pouring boiling water over a tea bag, and perched on one of the two stools alongside what Moira had called the breakfast bar. Moira. The service sheet from her funeral lay on the worktop next to the cooker. He hadn’t noticed it in the night. But then, he had been in a kind of sleepless haze.
His mind was buzzing now. First of all there was Hangridge and the possibly immense significance of his conversation with Margaret Slade. Her approach to him presented something of a dream scenario. In his mind’s eye, he could already see the avalanche of major stories with which he would bombard Fleet Street. Not to mention TV and radio. Then there would be the book, the real-life story of Hangridge, just an extension of the investigative journalism he had made a lifelong career of, something he was well qualified for – unlike attempting to be a novelist. And after that, the film …
Yes. There was all of that. But mixed up with it, somehow, were his feelings for Moira, his sense of loss, his compassion for her, and his guilt. He felt genuine compassion, too, for the young Hangridge soldiers who had died, and for their bereaved families.
Predictably enough, however, it was Hangridge that was dominating his thoughts. It wasn’t just that the slowly unfolding drama was becoming so intriguing. He was also aware that his involvement in it would be sure to distract him from his pain. He told himself that Moira would have understood.
He
checked his watch again. Quarter past eight. Still too early. There was a possibility, of course, that Neil Connelly had returned to his job as a postman, in which case he would probably have left his home hours earlier, but Kelly didn’t think so. He reckoned it might be some time yet before Connelly would have recovered sufficiently from the shock of his son’s death to return to work. He wandered into the living room and whiled away the next fifteen minutes watching breakfast TV. At 8.30 promptly he called the Connellys in Glasgow, which turned out to be something of an anticlimax. There was no reply. The family had an answering machine but Kelly did not leave a message. He needed to make a personal approach, and he needed it to be good. He would just have to keep calling until he could speak to Neil Connelly direct. Momentarily, he cursed himself for not phoning earlier, even though he knew really that he had done the right thing. He had no idea if Mrs Connelly still worked or not, but maybe Neil Connelly had returned to his job already, after all. If he had called earlier, he may have caught him. On the other hand, maybe the family were just not answering the phone. Maybe the whole lot of them – Alan Connelly’s mother, father, younger brother and sister – had shut themselves away from the world in their neat little home, an oasis of order on that grim housing estate, isolated by their grief.
Kelly shivered. There was no physical reason for it. The room wasn’t cold and he wasn’t ill. He remembered his mother’s old saying, that somebody had walked over his grave. Maybe they had. Kelly could think of one hell of a lot of folk who might like to.
Just before nine he called Karen Meadows. She was another one he had to use his best persuasion techniques on. He really needed her help. He also suddenly wanted very much to know what progress she had made, if any, during the six days since Moira had died.
‘I didn’t expect to hear from you today,’ she said.
‘No, well, I guess we all just try to carry on,’ responded Kelly. He thought he sounded trite and pathetic at the same time.
‘Yes, I guess we do.’ At least he could rely on Karen Meadows not to be judgemental, thought Kelly. It was perhaps a strange asset for a police officer. Kelly was not sure that he had ever been aware of her passing any kind of personal judgement on anyone.
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