A Moment Of Madness

by Hilary Bonner

Manslaughter. So with the right judge she would probably end up with a suspended sentence, or even a conditional discharge, even if she pleaded guilty or was found guilty. But with the wrong judge, she could still end up with a custodial sentence. Angel Silver in jail. Now that would be a story.

  Kelly reckoned Karen Meadows would probably prove to be right: that Angel would plead not guilty on grounds of self-defence and that almost any British jury would find in her favour. A woman who had watched her husband brutally killed by the man she had then attacked would be bound to get the sympathy vote, after all. Either way, Kelly’s antennae were waggling. Whatever happened it would make a decent change from parish council meetings and magistrates’ court. Kelly had been through the mill, God knows, but he’d never lost the nose for a good yarn. Nor the taste for it.

  ‘Where are they taking Angel?’ he asked.

  ‘Torquay Police Station. Where d’ya think? Oh, and I shouldn’t bother. You’ll not get near her. I’ll see to that.’

  Kelly chuckled. He was starting to enjoy himself. Karen and he went back a long way.

  Back to what for him would always be the good old days. They’d been close, very close. Kelly’s chuckle stretched into a fond smile at that memory. But it was more than that. Karen Meadows owed him. He’d probably saved her career at what might then have been the expense of his own, and she’d never forgotten it, bless her, unlike most of ’em. Hence the tip-off, hence the instant access to her through her mobile. She also understood him, of course, knew his driving force, knew what made him tick, and knew how to play the game too. Kelly wanted this one, and he suddenly became quite determined to get it. It was nice to feel as if he were back in the big time again. And what he wanted more than anything else was to get to Angel Silver. Karen had twigged that at once. Of course. She’d always been exceptionally bright and an astute judge of character. Except once, and that had nearly brought her down. Nearly, but not quite, thanks to Kelly. They’d been friends ever since, and it was a friendship Kelly valued as much as almost anything in his life – and that included his partner, Moira, his son, Nick, and even the job he still loved in spite of everything.

  ‘I’ll just have to wait then, won’t I?’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t suppose there’s anything else you can tell me?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I need something back.’

  ‘Whatever it is, you’ve got it,’ he replied glibly.

  ‘The intruder was one Terry James, 24 Fore Street, Paignton. Big boy, late twenties, but he still lived with his mum. Funny how often they do, his type, particularly from that sort of family. You may know ’em; we certainly do.’

  Kelly thought hard. He was pretty sure he did know the James family. They were in and out of magistrates’ court on a regular basis, if he’d got the right bunch. Pub punch-ups and petty theft, that was their mark. And if Kelly had the right man in mind he had indeed been a big boy, well over six feet, and built like a stevedore.

  ‘I think I do, Karen,’ he said.

  ‘Got one conviction for GBH and several for minor thieving,’ Karen went on, echoing the thoughts running through Kelly’s head. ‘Be surprised if you hadn’t seen him in court.’

  ‘Reckon I may have.’

  ‘Well, anyway, our lads recognised him at once, but he’s yet to be formally identified. His brother’s on the way to the morgue as we speak, and the SOCOs are at the Jameses’ home, doing a search. Been there since the early hours. The place is still sealed, so if by any chance you’re planning to bowl over there give it a couple of hours, will you? I can’t keep a search team there any longer than that in any case, not with the resources we’ve got left after that last round of cuts. I need them at Maythorpe.’

  ‘OK,’ said Kelly, grinning at the phone. If by any chance, he thought. She knew darned well he’d be off to Paignton like a shot. ‘And what is it you want from me then?’

  ‘I want to know exactly what the family say to you. If you know the James lot you’ll also know they won’t give us houseroom. Look, this case seems clear enough, but I don’t want any mistakes. It’s too high profile. So just report back, John, every spit and fart, not just from the James family but anything else you come up with, you devious bastard. It might mean more to us than you.’

  ‘For you, Karen, anything.’

  Kelly pushed the end button on his phone and punched the air gleefully with his free hand. Not only was he working on a potentially huge story but he already had a big lead. Life was looking up. Suddenly he didn’t feel cold any more.

  He checked his watch: 11 a.m. on the dot. The only problem was that he really didn’t want to wait a couple of hours before heading off to Paignton. The days when provincial evening papers produced a last edition in the late afternoon were long gone, and, in any case, Kelly never liked holding back on a story. An overdeveloped sense of urgency was programmed into him and all of his kind. But when you had someone like Karen Meadows on your side you didn’t mess it up. If you made a deal you kept it. Well, more or less.

  He would, he decided, compromise slightly and give it an hour and a half. The Argus’ final deadline was 2.30 p.m., which was actually a hell of a lot later than many evening papers. If the James family were halfway amenable he should still make it, and he’d certainly have no problem filling in the time. He had already filed an early story to the Argus, but there were also several nationals he wanted to send stuff to. He had the edge because some of them had not even managed to get staff men to the scene yet. It was not only the provincials that were run by cost cutters in suits nowadays. In Kelly’s day all the nationals had had a network of staff area men all over the country. That was no longer the case. Jerry Morris, a real survivor, was one of the last remaining. So Kelly reckoned it was time he cashed in on the inadequacies of modern newspaper management and started making the kind of money off this story that he had already promised himself he would.

  He walked back down the hill, favouring his right foot, which was throbbing unpleasantly thanks to that TV cameraman, and through the pretty little thatched village of Maidencombe to the car park just up from the beach. The old MG gleamed wetly, raindrops from the earlier downfall still visible on its flat surfaces. Kelly kept the twenty-five-year-old car immaculately. It was his pride and joy. He had always loved MGs, and it was nice to have a car that went up in value if you looked after it, rather than down.

  He unlocked the driver’s door and climbed in. He had learned the art of filing copy off the top of his head over the phone many years previously, and it didn’t take him long, sitting there in the car park, to send all that he had so far to the copy-takers of several London newspapers.

  ‘The widow of rock star Scott Silver, killed at his home in the early hours of yesterday morning, was last night at the centre of a bizarre double murder drama …’ he recited over the airwaves. And he knew it must be gripping stuff by the rapt attention of the copy-takers, who were generally far more cynical than any journalist.

  Kelly still remembered during his early days in Fleet Street the copy-taker on his newspaper who invariably interrupted his stories with a muttered ‘Much more of this?’

  Perhaps he was improving at last, he thought, as he finished filing his final story and then called Trevor Jones, mobile to mobile.

  ‘Twenty-four Fore Street, twelve-thirty,’ he told the snapper. ‘And if you get there before me, park down the road and don’t even move out of that tip of a car of yours until I get there.’

  ‘You got it,’ yelled Trevor over the airwaves. Kelly moved his phone a few inches further away from his ear. Trevor continued to bellow at him.

  ‘What’ve you got, Johnno?’ he asked excitedly. ‘Who lives there then?’

  ‘I’ll share that with you when I see you – and tell your desk you’re going off chasing fire engines or something. OK, mate?’

  Kelly ended the call before Trevor could question him any more. Kelly had been weaned into Fleet Street by an old-fashioned news editor who had operated u
nder such a strict policy of secrecy that it had driven his staff mad. None the less, Kelly had learned the lesson well enough that if you wanted to keep an exclusive you told nobody, not even your bosses, until the last possible minute. Don’t talk about it, write it, was the creed that had been drummed into him.

  He started up the MG, enjoying as ever the unique throaty noise that it made, and motored back through Torquay, choosing to take the slower seafront road to Paignton rather than the ring road. He wasn’t in a hurry, after all. Along the way he stopped at one of the few seaside caffs that stayed open all year round, bought a cup of tea in a paper cup, and propped himself against the sea wall. A gusty breeze had blown up. Kelly balanced his cup on the wall and clapped his arms against his sides to warm himself up. He really must buy some proper cold weather gear, he told himself for the umpteenth time. But it was worth the chill in his bones just to stand there and watch the ocean that day. It was quite spectacular, an unusually big sea for South Devon. Huge waves roared up the beach, crashing into the wall against which Kelly was leaning. A particularly massive one sent a shower of salty spray on to the pavement, and Kelly beat a hasty retreat, just managing both to rescue his tea and get out of the way without a soaking. He found that he was smiling. There was, he thought, nothing more exhilarating than an English seascape on a day like this. The clouds were moving fast and a sudden break in them revealed a brilliant shaft of pale winter sunshine. Like the beam of a giant cinematic light it illuminated a big circular patch of water, changing the colour momentarily from dark grey to aquamarine, and reflecting off the white tips of the waves so that they turned into gleaming silver. Cecil B. de Mille could not have managed it better, thought Kelly. He felt his heart do a little flip. If there was greater beauty in the world than in this wild and wondrous scene, he really didn’t know what it was. There were some compensations to a backwater job on a backwater newspaper in a backwater town, he thought.

  He checked his watch once more: 12.21 p.m. Fore Street was just a few minutes’ drive away. He reckoned he had given the police and the James family plenty of time, and he could feel his heart thumping in anticipation as he drove into Paignton along Esplanade Road and swung a right towards the railway station. But when he reached Fore Street there was a police squad car parked outside number 24. Kelly battled to keep his natural impatience under control. He’d have to wait again. He could not expect to get any result except a rocket from Karen Meadows if he knocked on the door while there was still a police presence.

  Kelly drove slowly past the house. At the far end of the street he spotted Trevor Jones’s battered green VW Golf already parked there. The photographer raised a hand to him as he passed. Where Fore Street met the main drag Kelly manoeuvred a swift U-turn and pulled in against the kerb behind Trevor. Trying to look as casual as possible, Kelly clambered out of his own car and made his way to the passenger side of the old Golf. Trevor pushed the door open for him. Between them the two men shifted a pile of old newspapers, chip papers, chocolate wrappers and discarded film packets into the back of the vehicle so that Kelly could clamber in, his feet instantly becoming buried in even more debris.

  Kelly passed no comment. He was used to the state of Trevor’s car. Instead, he quickly gave the younger man a précised version of what he had learned from Karen Meadows.

  ‘As soon as the bogies have gone I’m in,’ he said. ‘I don’t want ’em frightened by cameras so you wait here until I call you. Got it?’

  Trevor Jones nodded, albeit a little reluctantly. Photographers were a nervous breed. They didn’t like waiting outside closed doors while reporters had access.

  ‘And you snatch anyone, anyone at all, going in or out,’ Kelly continued.

  Trevor shot him a slightly reproachful look. The young snapper was already sitting with a camera ready, its 500-mil lens balanced on the dashboard and no doubt already focused on the door to number 24. Kelly smiled.

  ‘OK, OK, I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Trevor might be relatively new to the game but he had been a quick learner from the start, and already didn’t miss too many tricks, even without coaching.

  Kelly settled into the passenger seat. The assorted rubble on the floor made crackling noises as he shifted his feet a little. Suddenly there was a bang almost like a pistol going off. Kelly nearly jumped out of his seat, instinctively jerking his legs up so that his knees almost touched his chest, and covering his face with his hands.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he heard Trevor say. ‘I knew I’d lost a flashbulb in here somewhere.’

  Kelly removed his hands from his face, shaking his head in mild disbelief.

  ‘You pillock,’ he said. ‘Apart from putting the fear of God into me, we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile here. You really are going to have to get this tip fumigated.’

  Trevor mumbled something apologetic. Kelly glanced along the street in all directions. There was nobody about. If anyone, including the police, had heard the bang as the flashbulb had exploded they had apparently not thought it worth investigating. Very tentatively Kelly stretched out his legs again, once more checking his watch. If they were forced to wait for long they’d never make that deadline, he thought. But little more than ten minutes later a young uniformed policeman emerged from the James house accompanied by a man in a suit, who Kelly assumed was CID, and an older woman wearing grey trousers and a cream linen jacket whom he recognised as a detective sergeant he knew vaguely. She seemed to glance in the direction of the Golf. Kelly hunkered down in his seat and gestured to Trevor, who had already knocked off a few frames, to do the same. Kelly didn’t want to have to explain himself to Devon and Cornwall’s finest, and he had deliberately slotted the distinctive MG in behind Trevor’s car where it could not easily be seen from number 24. There were a lot of people around who would recognise Kelly’s MG straight away.

  Kelly stayed in the half-crouch until he heard the engine of the squad car burst into life. He peeped cautiously through the side window as the police vehicle motored slowly away, fortunately proceeding in the direction it had been facing, which meant that it would not pass the two watching journalists and their cars. He waited another couple of minutes to be sure the coast was clear. Then he was in like Flynn, moving fast in spite of his bruised right foot, which was still causing him to limp slightly, out of the car, along the pavement, up the steps, through the patch of rubble which passed for a garden, and knocking on the door with its peeling blue paint.

  A young man, equally as tall as Kelly remembered Terry James, eventually opened the door and looked him up and down with some distaste. From his vague memory of the dead man this could almost have been Terry James, although even more thickset and maybe a few years older.

  ‘If you’re looking for your lot they’ve just gone,’ growled the man, aggression oozing from his every pore.

  ‘I’m not police,’ said Kelly quickly.

  ‘What the fuck are you then? The Sally Army?’

  Kelly smiled. ‘No, not exactly –’ he began.

  ‘I’ve got it, you’re a fucking vulture.’

  ‘I’m press, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got nothing to say to yer. My brother’s just been murdered. Our Terry’s dead. Haven’t you got no respect?’

  ‘I just thought –’

  This time Kelly was interrupted by the arrival at the door of a small dark woman, face tear-stained, hair dishevelled.

  ‘Who is it, Kenny?’

  ‘Some toerag reporter, Mam. Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of him.’

  ‘Mrs James,’ said Kelly quickly, taking an educated guess, ‘I’m so sorry about your son. I just want to find out what happened to him, every bit as much as you do, really. Things aren’t always what they seem, are they?’

  ‘No, they’re not,’ said Mrs James.

  ‘Well, I’d like to get the family’s side to things now, find out what really happened, put the record straight on your behalf,’ Kelly offered, coming out with the oldest
line in the business. Nobody had been charged with anything yet; there was even a possibility that nobody would be. Terry James was dead, after all, so he couldn’t face trial, and who could tell how Angel Silver would ultimately be dealt with? None the less Kelly wanted a swift result while he still didn’t have to worry about sub judice.

  ‘Come on, Mam, let’s leave it,’ said Ken James, moving between the woman and Kelly and at the same time pushing the door with his shoulder in order to shut the reporter outside.

  Kelly put his good foot in the door jamb and as he did so wondered if he might be making an extremely dangerous mistake. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever actually put his foot in a door before, and he wouldn’t have done so then if he hadn’t sensed that he could get through to Mrs James, that she wanted to talk. He certainly didn’t want to take her son on. But it seemed that he had. Kelly could feel the full weight of Ken James as the big man leaned heavily against the door, pushing it against the reporter’s now trapped foot and looking down on him menacingly.

  ‘Do you know what they’re saying about Terry, Mrs James?’ asked Kelly desperately, pushing his face against the now painfully narrow opening in the doorway.

  Even Ken James hesitated. To Kelly’s immense relief the pressure on his trapped foot, encased in its flimsy shoe, eased. Kelly had banked on both Ken and his mother wanting to know what was being said. They weren’t the sort of people who had much trust in the police, after all. Karen had told him that, as if he had needed telling.

  ‘What are they saying?’ asked Mrs James, and Ken opened the door a few inches, freeing Kelly’s foot altogether. The reporter removed it swiftly. There was a limit. The way things were going in the foot department that day he was likely to end up unable to walk at all if he didn’t watch it.

  He could see Mrs James quite clearly beneath her son’s arm, which Ken had stretched across the gap in the doorway, just in case Kelly was mad enough to attempt to barge in – which, in spite of a fairly cavalier track record, he most certainly was not. The woman’s glance was almost pleading.