‘Well, if you let me inside, I’d tell you everything,’ Kelly remarked in his ‘I’m a really reasonable and helpful bloke’ voice.
In response Ken James glowered at him with even more hostility. ‘The only reason we’ve got to talk to you lot is for cash, and lots of it,’ he growled.
His mother rounded on her son then. ‘You’ll not make money out of your brother’s death, Ken,’ she said, not loudly but with a force and an authority which surprised Kelly. ‘Not while I’m alive, at any rate.’
Ken James did not reply but bowed his head slightly as if in acknowledgement.
‘You’d better come in,’ said Mrs James to Kelly.
Her son stepped back, albeit with apparent reluctance, removing his arm and allowing the door to swing fully open again. Mrs James was little more than half the size of her son but there wasn’t much doubt about who was in charge in this household.
She beckoned Kelly into the hall. He was struck at once by the extreme cleanliness and order of the place, which came as something of a surprise after the neglected exterior. The floor of the hall was covered in plush dark red carpet which looked freshly vacuumed, the walls washed plain cream and covered in family photographs. Mrs James led him to an unexpectedly large kitchen at the back of the seemingly small terraced house. The kitchen was smart, modern, well equipped and gleaming. Obliquely Kelly found himself wondering where all those shiny new white goods might have come from. A second, younger woman was sitting at the table. She was sobbing gently into a wodge of tissues and barely looked up as Kelly entered. More than likely a sister to Terry and Ken, Kelly guessed. He knew the James lot were a large family. Two small boys, possibly the younger woman’s sons, appeared to be fighting to the death in front of the washing machine. Kelly was aware of the towering figure of Ken James right behind him, literally breathing down his neck. Nobody else in the room seemed to notice the huge commotion the two children were making.
‘Hello,’ he said to the woman at the table, putting on his ‘I’m a nice journalist’ face. ‘John Kelly, Evening Argus. So sorry to intrude at such a sad time.’
‘Like fuck,’ said Ken James loudly.
Kelly ignored Ken. The woman ignored Kelly.
‘May I sit down?’ he enquired, doing so without waiting for anyone to reply. He knew how to get himself established inside somebody’s home well enough.
‘So what are they saying about our Terry?’ asked Mrs James for the second time as she lowered herself into a chair opposite Kelly.
‘They’re saying that Terry broke into Scott Silver’s house, that he was disturbed by the rock star, whom he then stabbed to death in a struggle, and that Scott’s wife, Angel Silver, then killed Terry in self-defence,’ explained Kelly succinctly. He hadn’t been a top tabloid hack for nothing.
‘We fucking know that,’ growled Ken, who appeared to use only one adjective.
‘Yes, but do you believe it?’
‘No we don’t,’ said Mrs James. ‘Not for one minute. My Terry wouldn’t have hurt that Scott Silver. Never.’
‘He never hurt anyone, not Terry, except maybe in the pub or summat,’ interrupted Ken in what for him was presumably a normal sort of voice. ‘Even then the filth never got it right. He only ever fought back when people picked a fight with him, did Terry. There’s a sort who like to show how tough they are after they’ve had a few beers. They like to push big blokes like Terry. I know. I get it too. But Terry never wanted it, never went looking for it. Not like me. I can be an evil bastard, me.’ Ken looked quite pleased with himself at the thought and uttered the last words with considerable pride.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ replied Kelly as pleasantly as he could manage. Very casually he slipped a hand into one of the side pockets of his Barbour and withdrew a small tape recorder and a notebook. He put the recorder on the table and switched it on. Nobody objected, which was a result in itself.
‘But Terry does have a record both for grievous bodily harm and for theft, doesn’t he?’ Kelly continued conversationally.
‘Yeah, but you can always make things sound worse than they really are,’ responded Mrs James. ‘You heard what our Kenny said. When he got done on that grievous bodily harm charge it wasn’t Terry’s fault at all. There was a load of lads down the Pier Arms who decided to take him on and my Terry sorted the lot of ’em out. Then he was the one got done. He wasn’t into violence. He didn’t like it.’
Kelly sighed. ‘So why was he carrying a knife when he broke into Scott Silver’s house, Mrs James?’
‘I don’t believe he was. I’ve never known him carry any kind of weapon, have you, Ken, honestly now?’
‘No,’ said the big man. ‘Definitely not. It weren’t Terry’s style. He must have been fitted up.’
Kelly sighed again. He wasn’t getting very far. Classic denial. Strange how often it was that the seriously dodgy families were the ones who could kid themselves best.
‘Look, your Terry was surprised in the middle of the night while breaking into the Silver home. I understand the police found a suitcase he’d already filled with stuff. I’m not saying he meant to kill Scott Silver, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that he did.’
‘Kill Scott Silver?’ Mrs James produced a hollow mirthless laugh. ‘He’d never have done that. He wouldn’t have stolen from him either.’
Kelly had his notebook on his knee now and a Biro in his right fist, but so far the only mark he had made on the page was an uninspired doodle of something vaguely resembling a cat. Kelly liked cats.
‘Well, what do you think your son was doing in the Silver mansion last night then? He wasn’t exactly an invited guest, was he?’
‘Look, Mr Kelly, Terry was not the brightest of my boys …’
Kelly made a huge effort not to look at Ken. The thought of an even less bright version was a disturbing one.
‘He was a big softy, though. That was my Terry. He had a heart of gold. He didn’t go round hurting people, and that Scott Silver – well, Terry really loved him. Honest he did.’
Terry James loved Scott Silver? What the hell did that mean? Kelly was alert now. He wasn’t sure where Mrs James was leading but this was beginning to get interesting at last.
‘Look, let me show you something,’ the woman continued.
She ushered Kelly out of the kitchen, along the red-carpeted hallway, up the similarly red-carpeted stairs, past more immaculate cream walls dotted with yet more family photographs, and led the way into a small bedroom overlooking the street.
As she opened the door Kelly felt the familiar tingling sensation in his spine that he always got when his journalistic antennae were waggling on overdrive.
The room was a shrine to Scott Silver. Every inch of the walls was covered with posters and photographs of the rock star. If it hadn’t been for bare patches indicating that several photographs had been recently removed, almost certainly by the police, Kelly thought, you wouldn’t have been able to see the mid-blue-painted walls at all. There were old concert tickets drawing-pinned to the front of the wardrobe, piles of Scott Silver LPs in one corner and a neat stack of his CDs next to the state-of-the-art music centre. Even the rug thrown over the bed bore Silver’s picture.
Kelly hadn’t expected this. Neither, he thought, would the police have done. Terry James was known as a petty criminal, not the type who would be expected to be an obsessive fan. The tingling in Kelly’s spine had extended right the way up his back and he was sure the hairs on his neck were starting to stand on end.
Lost in his own imaginings for a moment he could only just hear Mrs James talking to him. ‘You can see what I mean, you can see it, can’t you?’ she said.
Kelly saw all right. He saw a completely different scenario to the one with which he had expected to be confronted. He saw a potential stalker story. It had to be, surely. He no longer saw a petty thief-turned-killer in a blagging that went wrong, but a young man obsessed with his hero – so obsessed that he could be driven to almost anythi
ng. It happened. All the time. It was the curse of the modern celebrity. And it turned an already hot story into something else.
‘Did Terry ever try to get close to Scott Silver?’ he asked, casually checking that his tape recorder, which he had picked up off the table and was carrying in his left hand, was still running.
‘Oh yes, he went all over the country to concerts and stuff. He used to hitchhike, sleep on pavements to get tickets, anything,’ Mrs James told him chattily. ‘Then he’d wait outside the stage door, that sort of thing. He’d got loads of photographs of himself with Silver. Started being interested in him when he was a teenager, you see, and it just went on and on.’
‘Did Terry ever go up to Maythorpe Manor?’ Kelly asked.
‘Oh yes, he was always going up there, couldn’t keep away.’ Mrs James chuckled. She was so determined to portray her son as a misrepresented nice guy she didn’t seem to realise at all the disturbing interpretation which could be put on her words. ‘Sometimes he’d come home and say that Scott had spoken to him, or maybe his wife, that Angel, and he’d be pleased as punch. Then in the last few months he started helping out in the garden a bit, doing odd jobs and that. He was handy like that, was Terry …’
Mrs James’s voice tailed off and fresh tears started to form in her eyes. Kelly waited in patient silence for her to speak again, trying to look deeply sympathetic while he was actually thinking obscurely that Terry hadn’t appeared to be very handy in his own garden. After a minute or so, Mrs James produced a paper tissue from somewhere and blew her nose loudly. Then she continued, albeit a little more shakily.
‘H-he didn’t talk about it a lot – not a great talker, Terry wasn’t. But it was almost like he regarded them as friends. And my Terry was as loyal a man as ever walked this earth. You don’t hurt your friends, not our sort. He’d have died for his friends, Terry would …’ She paused as if at last hearing what she was saying.
Kelly butted in quickly, before she had time to think too much.
‘Maybe that’s exactly what he did, Mrs James,’ he said gravely, realising that the remark made absolutely no sense whatsoever. But Kelly was good at saying what people wanted to hear. And from the look in Mrs James’s eye that’s exactly what he had done.
‘Maybe he did,’ she said. ‘That would have been just like my Terry.’
‘Do you mind if I get a snap taken of this room? I think it says a lot about Terry, don’t you?’
‘Yes I do,’ said Mrs James. ‘It shows what he was really like, and what a big fan he was of Scott Silver. It shows that what I said was true, that he’d never have hurt Scott, never, don’t you think?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kelly ingenuously. ‘It really does. So it’s OK if I call my photographer in, is it? I made him wait outside. Didn’t want to push things.’ He smiled reassuringly. Or at least tried to.
Mrs James just nodded. Kelly used his mobile to call Trevor Jones on his. The photographer responded even more swiftly than Kelly would have considered possible, ringing the doorbell within seconds. He must have been standing by his car on starting blocks, Kelly reckoned. Ken James, looking rather less enthusiastic than his mother about it all, showed Trevor up to the bedroom.
The snapper was all smiles and bouncing ginger curls, the kind of young man surely nobody could ever regard as a threat, which was another reason why Kelly liked working with him.
‘I’ll just rattle off a few frames then,’ said Trevor, doing so speedily before the Jameses had a chance to change their minds.
Kelly watched with one eye as Trevor shot the room from all angles, and then charmed Mrs James into posing for close-ups with some of the memorabilia. He really was turning into a smart operator, thought Kelly admiringly. Trevor failed to persuade Ken to be photographed, though. The big man merely responded with a sulky ‘Fuck off’ and kept himself determinedly out of shot.
‘I don’t suppose you have any of those pictures of Terry with Scott Silver, have you?’ Kelly asked Mrs James.
‘The police took most of them, I think,’ she replied, gesturing at the bare patches on the wall. ‘But there may be one or two in that drawer by the bed …’
She started rummaging around and eventually, under a pile of magazines, came up with a photograph which she studied morosely for a second or two before passing it to Kelly.
The reporter couldn’t believe his luck. In his hand he held a clear colour snap of the two dead men, both smiling for the camera. Scott Silver, whose ragged good looks had made him such an icon, along with his unusual high-pitched singing voice, even had an arm loosely around the neck of Terry James. Terry had been considerably taller and Scott had had to reach up to do so. His body language suggested that he was making a joke of their height difference. Already wearing cowboy boots with small heels, he was standing exaggeratedly on tiptoe. James was beaming from ear to ear. It was a good picture. And to make it absolutely perfect it had been taken outside Maythorpe Manor. The gates of the waterside mansion could be seen quite clearly in the background.
Gold dust, thought Kelly, wondering why the police had not taken this photo too. Maybe they had found and taken away another just like it, or maybe they’d overlooked it. Kelly knew of more than one occasion in the past when specialist police search teams had missed the obvious. Even experts were susceptible to human error. But Kelly didn’t really care what had caused the police to leave this picture behind. He was just so glad to have it.
Mrs James was still talking to him. ‘Yes, my Terry always carried his camera with him when he was going after Scott,’ she remarked.
Going after Scott. The words hit hard. That was how the world would see it – Kelly had realised that from the moment he had been shown Terry James’s bedroom. Now the man’s mother had actually said the words.
Kelly couldn’t wait to get away now. He had work to do. And he had all he needed to make a huge splash not only in the final edition of the Argus today, but also across just about every darned morning newspaper in the country tomorrow.
He extricated himself and Trevor Jones from the James family home as quickly as possible and only just prevented himself from running back to his car.
‘Right, first give the Argus all you’ve got, then send your stuff to Scope, including that pick-up pic,’ Kelly instructed Trevor. Scope was one of the major picture agencies and Kelly had already been on to its boss, Peter Murphy, that morning, just in case.
‘Murphy’s expecting you to wire,’ Kelly went on. ‘And your Desk won’t quibble because they’ll know what you’re doing is down to me. Any flak, send it my way. OK?’
‘Right,’ yelled Trevor as he flung himself into his car and gunned the engine. ‘I’m on it.’
Kelly grinned. Trevor too would earn a few bob out of this, but what the younger man really wanted, more than cash, Kelly knew, was to see his by-line on a major exclusive in a big daily.
He checked his watch for the umpteenth time as he settled into the driver’s seat of his MG: 1.30 p.m. Bags of time. Kelly opened the glove compartment and pulled out the hands-free kit for his phone. He’d start filing on the run. It was second nature to him. First the Argus, in plenty of time for its final deadline, and then the nationals. That small-minded prick of a news editor wouldn’t like it, but that was tough. Kelly would do his duty, give all he had to the Argus first, but he wasn’t going to miss the chance of a major crack at the nationals. No way. Hansford would just have to put up with it. Nobody else would object to him making a few bob for a change. It could be quite a few bob too, he reflected cheerily, for him and young Jones. This story was getting better and better.
Kelly headed into Torquay town centre while he talked into his phone and drove around until he found a convenient parking space as close as possible to the police station on the corner of South Street. When he had finished filing he phoned Karen Meadows to give her a full report on his visit to the Jameses’ house, as promised.
‘And what the fuck do you want now?’ Karen yelled into her mobi
le. It had been a long day already and it was far from over. Karen had been called out at 3 a.m. and had been on the go ever since. Not only that, but she couldn’t quite get her head around the double killing. Angel Silver was still being interviewed by two of Karen’s team, but the rock star’s widow, understandably enough, Karen supposed, seemed unable to tell her story in a lucid way. She remained in shock, of course, and Karen was unsure how much longer she should hold her. Since that darned Human Rights Act had become law the previous year, police officers had to be even more careful than ever how they dealt with suspects – particularly one as high profile as Angel Silver, who also looked so frail you couldn’t help thinking she might fall over at any moment.
This was the kind of case which could turn round and bite you really hard unless you took great care. Scott Silver had been an icon, the circumstances of his death were unusual and highly dramatic to say the least. The eyes of the world were going to be focused on the way the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary handled this one, and Karen knew it.
She was alone in her office at Torquay Police Station, desperately trying to collect all her various thoughts together into a manageable package. At the very least it was vital in a situation like this to stick to correct procedure and ensure that no corners were cut. A senior police officer’s career could be all too easily terminated nowadays by an ill-considered move or lack of attention to detail. And Karen knew how high the stakes could be in an investigation as big as this one. She had been going over and over in her mind every course of action she had so far instigated as SIO, and attempting to assimilate everything she should do next.
Karen was an experienced detective with a reputation for being cool under pressure, but the exhilaration at being handed such a hot potato, which had so far carried her through the day, had temporarily evaporated. She was experiencing that energy slump most high fliers are prone to at some stage following an adrenalin rush. She felt tense and on edge, and the last thing she wanted to do was to talk to a journalist. Even to one she genuinely regarded as a friend.
A Moment Of Madness Page 3