Rudge started to speak again, this time in a more normal tone of voice.
‘Angel would also like to thank the ladies and gentlemen of the press for your interest and for the kind things you have written about Scott …’
Half true, thought Kelly. The obituaries of the rock star, already in almost all of the papers that morning, had without exception spoken of his immense talent and charisma, and they could do no other. Scott Silver had been a legend on legs. But Kelly couldn’t believe Angel really wanted what Rudge had somewhat euphemistically described as ‘the interest’ of the press in her present situation. He rightly guessed what was coming next.
‘… But as for legal reasons she is unable to co-operate with you in any way, and indeed her shock and distress is such that she would in any event not be capable of doing so, she would really appreciate it if you would respect her privacy at this terrible time.’ Rudge looked around appealingly. ‘So please, guys, go home, go back to your offices,’ he pleaded. ‘There really is no point in hanging around here, there honestly isn’t.’
Kelly had been half looking over Rudge’s shoulder as he talked, studying the big house behind the business manager. Suddenly he saw a curtain twitch in the same window from which he believed Angel had been looking out the night before.
She was there again. He could feel those eyes, he really could.
On an impulse he stretched out an arm and shook a rather surprised Jimmy Rudge by the hand.
‘Of course, Mr Rudge, I quite understand, as I’m sure do my colleagues,’ he said. ‘I’m John Kelly of the Evening Argus and I will gladly co-operate with you and leave Mrs Silver alone until she wishes to make some kind of public statement.’
‘Thank you very much, Mr Kelly,’ replied Rudge, but, being a man not unfamiliar with dealing with the press, he did regard Kelly with some astonishment. Not nearly as much, however, as the other newsmen and women gathered outside Maythorpe Manor. Most of them knew Kelly – he’d been around a long time in all sorts of different guises – and were completely bewildered by this display of obedient cooperation that was quite out of character.
Kelly didn’t give them time to start questioning him. Leaving them looking uncertain and muttering to each other, he merely turned on his heel and began to stride purposefully back down the hill. With his back safely turned his face broke into a broad grin.
Kelly knew all about giving the right impression. He had planned to leave the house by eleven anyway. It was already twenty minutes to, and it suited his purposes well to be able to create the impression of being one of the good guys.
But while he knew the gates to Maythorpe were still in sight, Kelly turned around for one last look. Rudge had already retreated into the grounds. Swiftly Kelly produced his binoculars and lifted them to his eyes in order to study the grand old manor house for a final time while he still had the chance. He focused on that window. Yes, he could just make out a figure standing there. And he was almost certain that it was Angel Silver. He was also pretty sure that she was studying the scene outside her home through a pair of binoculars.
Did suddenly bereaved women who had been involved in an horrifically violent crime in which they had almost certainly killed a man, albeit in self-defence, usually behave like that? Kelly had no idea. But he had the feeling that Angel Silver was a uniquely cool customer.
Four
Kelly was thoughtful as he drove back towards Torquay and the industrial estate near the hospital which housed the offices of the Evening Argus. Coincidentally his first job as a boy reporter thirty-odd years ago, before he graduated to Fleet Street, had been on the Torquay Times, a weekly newspaper with offices right in the centre of town. Those had been the days, he reflected a little sorrowfully. Nowadays virtually all newspapers, from most of the nationals down to the few non-freebie weeklies that still existed, had been relegated to bunkers somewhere soulless.
The Torquay Times had gloried in the address of Upper Fleet Street, and the town’s evening newspaper back then had been right next door. Kelly had no idea whether the term Upper Fleet Street had been an invention, not to mention an affectation, of the two newspapers. Certainly the grandly named piece of road, a suspended terrace just off and above the town’s main shopping street of Fleet Street, was really just the bottom bit of Braddons Hill Road. Now the Times’s rather splendid old building had become the curiously named Bondi Beach Bar, and the only glory that remained was apparently represented by a load of surfers painted on its once-proud façade. The Torquay Times itself was long gone too – as was the glorious career Kelly had once seemed destined for.
He opened his car window and lit a cigarette. He kept trying to give up, and, indeed, had not smoked for several days again, but a man had to have some vices. The idea of a completely viceless John Kelly was rather awful, he considered. He’d given up the drinking – out of necessity, of course, not choice. They’d told him he’d die if he carried on. Not maybe. Or within a few years. But inevitably. And soon. So he’d knocked it on the head. And he’d quit gambling too. Well, almost. He allowed himself a few quid on the horses on Saturdays only, and limited the stakes to what he could afford to lose. Which was not much, that was for certain, and therefore deeply tedious, because it also meant that what he won was barely worth winning.
He had given up the women too. Apart from Moira. For many years after he and his wife had parted company Kelly had lurched from one short-lived relationship to another, sometimes managing to keep more than one going at a time and fit in the odd one-night stand as well. He had, of course, in those days been drinking for England and gambling constantly. No wonder his career and his marriage had both hit the skids. But now at least he had regular employment again, doing the job he had always wanted to do, albeit at a comparatively low level, but in a lovely part of the world.
And then there was Moira. She was his rock, and Kelly was well aware of the stability she had given him and the state he might still be in, were it not for her. He loved Moira. In a way. In his way. But without that edge of danger which came with high passion, which he had last experienced so long ago he could barely remember it. The trouble was that although Kelly knew well enough that he would still be falling about in a gutter somewhere had he failed to get his life back on an even keel – with not a little help from Moira, whom he had met just a year after joining the staff of the Argus thirteen years previously – he was still an adventurer at heart. Still a chancer inside his head. It was what, once a very long time ago, had made him such a good reporter. Good reporters, the really great ones, were not often anything but chancers. They had a boldness about them, a belief in their own immortality, their own omnipotence. But when that belief was shaken it was often hard for them to hold themselves together. Kelly was the sort who had hung on to his own particular brand of greatness by little more than a single thread. When that thread had broken, so had Kelly. And he had long ago accepted that he would never be that man again.
As he swung the MG into the Argus car park and pulled to a halt, Kelly struggled to snap out of the morose mood he had slumped into. He was aware that he had acquired a tendency towards self-pity. He’d have to watch that. He disliked it in others and even more in himself. At least he had a really good story to bury himself in. It was a long time since he’d worked on anything as big as this.
Stepping out of the car he took a last couple of puffs from his cigarette and inhaled deeply, before tossing the fag end casually on to the ground. The offices of the Argus were, of course, non-smoking. God, how Kelly hated the health-conscious, squeaky-clean, political correctness of modern life. He strode briskly through the big swing doors into the streamlined modern reception area that could have been the entrance to any factory or office block. Nothing indicated press at all. As ever, Kelly allowed himself a brief moment of nostalgia. He was, after all, old school, local-paper-trained, Fleet Street-honed. Hot metal was in his blood and he longed for the noise and the dirt and the sheer exuberance that had once been so much a pa
rt of newspaper life.
He made his way unenthusiastically through the ground-floor advertising department and climbed the stairs to the editorial offices above. The journalists produced their newspaper out of one big anonymous grey room. Pale grey walls framed a highly regulated working area in which mid-grey computers sat on lines of dark grey desks. Everything about the Argus newsroom was grey – including the atmosphere, Kelly always thought. There was the usual soft mechanical buzz, which was just about the only buzz you ever got from the place, he reckoned. Reporters sat quietly at their terminals with their heads down. The subeditors had tired eyes, too few of them dealing with too much copy, much of it supplied by reporters who weren’t really worthy of the job description, in Kelly’s opinion.
On his way to his own grey desk Kelly passed the photographers’ room. He almost bumped into Trevor Jones, who came hurrying out, camera bag over his shoulder.
‘Back to normal for me today,’ muttered the younger man glumly. ‘I’m off to cover the opening of that new supermarket. I don’t think they like it when you get an exclusive on this bloody newspaper.’
Kelly smiled sympathetically. Kit Hansford certainly gave that impression sometimes. And Kelly was under no illusions about the young news editor’s opinion of him.
He switched on his computer, logged in, and began to put together a final piece for the midday edition. When he had finished he went on-line to check recent material about Scott and Angel Silver. Having avoided the office the previous day and had no time to use his own computer at home, this was his first chance. On the Net, predictably enough, the principal stuff was fan-based. He plumbed in to the archives of all the national newspapers he could access. The trouble with the Net was that you could only get out what somebody else had put in. Kelly was well aware of the value of the Internet but was wary about the high level of misinformation it contained. He trolled through anything relevant that he could find, and then checked the archives of his own newspaper. The Silvers had lived in Maidencombe for almost ten years, and the Argus had given their various exploits considerable coverage.
But Kelly learned little that was new to him. He had a computer for a brain when it came to storing tabloid-style trivia in his head, although he needed sometimes to remind himself of precise details.
There was something in particular he had been looking for, although he wasn’t sure what use he would be allowed to make of it. The name jumped off the screen at him. Mrs Rachel Hobbs. A spread in the News of the World’s colour supplement featured a half-page picture of a small bejewelled woman with big platinum-blonde hair and an even bigger smile perched on the edge of a large sunken bath, the central feature in the pink satin bedroom of her Essex home. At least most of it seemed to be made of pink satin. Including the wallpaper. No, surely not. Kelly peered more closely at the photograph. Well, it looked like pink satin to him.
Rachel Hobbs. Angel’s mother. There was also a mother-and-daughter picture featuring Angel as a truly angelic-looking teenager. It was an old story, dated 12 August 1979. Kelly remembered vaguely how the Hobbs family, enriched by Angel’s earnings as a child star, had moved into that big flash house. Then when Angel’s bubble had burst, only two or three years after that article had been printed, they had moved back to the same little terraced house in Clerkenwell where Angel had been born and brought up, which, for whatever reasons, the family had never sold. Angel was thirty-nine now. She would have been sixteen then, her mother forty-eight, according to the News of the World report. The various archives were full of material on Angel, including a number of stories concerning her disastrous first marriage to James Carey, a Hollywood actor thirty years her senior. There was even a photograph of her wedding to Carey showing Angel standing alongside her mother, smiling broadly again, and her embarrassed-looking father, Bill, who being a year or so younger than his wife had apparently been exactly the same age as the bridegroom. There were many others tracing Angel’s life since her marriage to Scott but no more at all featuring her mother, except a brief item recording the death of Bill Hobbs, which carried only an old picture of him and his wife. Kelly remembered Rachel Hobbs as having been the archetype showbiz mum, but she seemed to have dropped totally out of sight.
He had been to the Clerkenwell house once many years ago. He wondered if Mrs Hobbs would remember. He suspected she would. It had, after all, been a pretty memorable visit. Suddenly Kelly wanted nothing more than to bowl up to London and talk to Rachel Hobbs. About what it was like to be the wife of a Billingsgate fish porter with a daughter like Angel and then a son-in-law like Scott. About the double killing at Maythorpe Manor, which must surely have turned her world upside down almost as much as it had her daughter’s. He had a strong feeling that Rachel Hobbs could somehow lead him to her Angel.
He phoned one of the few old mates he had left in The Street, a reporter on the Sun, who he was sure would be able to confirm for him whether or not Rachel Hobbs still lived at the Clerkenwell address. He could, and she did. None the less, the odds were against Kelly going anywhere except on his own patch. That was how life was in provincial journalism. To travel outside the Argus’ meagre circulation area was a rare thing indeed.
Kelly looked across at his news editor. Kit Hansford was twenty-five years old, little more than half Kelly’s age. A career provincial man, had it written all over him already. There was a good life to be had in the provinces now if that was the type of journalist you were. The remains of Fleet Street was tougher, more competitive, more cut-throat, more in a hurry than ever before, while in the provinces a man with application and not a lot more could become a big fish in a little pond pretty swiftly.
Hansford was cut out for that. Hand-tailored. Absolutely. Sickening though he found the prospect, Kelly would happily have bet a month’s salary that Hansford would be editor-in-chief of the Argus group within ten years. And on the board, of course. Then maybe he’d go into politics, local councillor, mayor, even stand for MP. Kelly wasn’t sure about the last, though. That might lead to a big pond, which wouldn’t suit Hansford at all. Kelly couldn’t imagine the mentality of a talented young man who could ever be content with anything except at least attempting to break into the biggest time going. But then, he was still inclined to think about talent, which almost certainly ruled Hansford out. And even if it didn’t, Kelly had to admit that he himself was no great advertisement for the so-called big time. He’d been among the best, but look at him now.
The familiar self-pity, which he tried so hard to defy, surged through him in an unwelcome burst.
Hansford looked up from the screen he had been scrutinising. His eyes caught Kelly’s. The older man strove to make his face expressionless. Kelly knew better than to make enemies at his time of life, but it was hard to disguise the lack of respect bordering on contempt that he felt for the young news editor.
Hansford wore round metal-rimmed spectacles. Behind their inadequate disguise he blinked a lot. His fairish hair, already thinner than Kelly’s, was shorn in a trendy crop, but the rather plump face wasn’t strong enough to carry off the look, nor was the head a good enough shape. Hansford’s cheeks and jowls were fleshy, but his lips were narrow, a curious mix. He had pale creamy skin and looked as if he barely needed to shave. In some ways he could be even younger than his twenty-five years. But his body was lean and spare as if he spent every spare moment in the gym training hard, which Kelly knew that he did. Hansford was image-conscious and they were living in the age of the body. It wasn’t just the gay guys and the sporty types who were intent on the body beautiful nowadays.
Kelly leaned back in his chair and gave his present situation some thought. He was still arrogant enough to believe that he was the only man on the Argus who really knew how to handle the Silver story. Did he care enough to push it all the way? He wasn’t sure.
While he was thinking, Hansford stood up abruptly and began to walk across the office towards Kelly. Now what? thought Kelly. It wouldn’t be anything sensible, that was for sure.
‘Are you clear, John?’ Hansford asked.
Kelly suspected that he was about to be baited and determined not to rise to it.
‘Did you like yesterday’s Scott Silver exclusive?’ he asked none the less.
‘Oh yeah, good stuff,’ muttered Hansford, looking vaguely embarrassed. News editors were never inclined to issue many compliments, as Kelly well knew, but with Hansford there always seemed to be this lurking resentment of Kelly, which the older man only half understood. After all, Hansford had it all in front of him. Kelly had left his best days well behind. He had come to terms with that long ago but it still rankled on a bad day.
‘I’ve nothing more to file for tonight, if that’s what you mean,’ he replied edgily. ‘Not yet anyway. But as this is the biggest story there’s been on this patch since they found Bruce Reynolds living next to a house full of so-called trainee journalists just above the old offices of this very newspaper, I thought you might like me to carry on working on it. We are having a newspaper tomorrow as well, aren’t we?’
Kelly was aware of the note of sarcasm in his voice becoming more and more apparent as he continued talking. He really hadn’t meant to rise to Hansford, but he found it so hard not to.
The news editor merely stared at him levelly and handed him a sheaf of papers. Kelly barely glanced at them. He knew what they were and he could hardly believe it. Council minutes.
‘There’s a meeting of the planning committee at two o’clock. I want you there,’ Hansford said. ‘We’re expecting a crucial decision re that proposed new shopping mall there’s been so much hullabaloo about. This is a solid provincial evening newspaper which maintains an extremely high circulation through wide and comprehensive coverage of local news. And I’m employed to keep things that way. The Scott Silver murder will be dealt with appropriately and given the right amount of coverage and no more. There are other stories. We’re not a red-top Fleet Street tabloid, John.’
A Moment Of Madness Page 6