Kelly didn’t reply.
‘Oh, and, John, you didn’t waste much time getting that exclusive into the nationals, did you? They had a field day this morning with it. You won’t forget who pays your wages every month, will you, old son?’
‘No I won’t,’ replied Kelly evenly, ignoring the ‘old son’, which he knew had been intended to provoke. ‘And you won’t forget that I have an agreement with the editor that I retain my own copyright and get to sell on anything I do for this newspaper on the condition that I make sure the Argus gets to print it first, will you, Kit?’
This time it was Hansford’s turn to make no reply. Kelly waited until the younger man was safely back at the head of the news desk before getting to his feet and setting off across the room for the editor’s office. He could feel Hansford’s eyes on the back of his neck. The news editor was going to dislike him even more now. Kelly was about to do his best to go over his head, and it wouldn’t be the first occasion.
‘Fuck it,’ Kelly muttered to himself as he passed by the desk. ‘No more Mr Nice Guy. There really is no point with that little prick.’
Joe Robertson’s office door was ajar as usual. The big man, minus his jacket, was leaning back in his chair with his feet on his desk. His forehead glistened with sweat even though it was not particularly warm in the Argus office. Joe was a good six foot five tall and from certain angles appeared to be almost as wide. The jacket of his suit, slung over the back of his chair, was charcoal grey; as usual, his tie, in the colours of the beleaguered Torquay United football team, had been loosened, its knot an inch or two below the opened neck of his immaculate white shirt. He wore red braces and smoked an overly large cigar. The editor’s office was the only place in the building where the no-smoking rule was allowed to be broken. The management pretended not to notice. It was probably either that or lose their editor. Joe Robertson was that kind of guy.
Kelly smiled appreciatively as he hovered in the doorway. Joe still looked every inch of the old-fashioned Fleet Street production man he had once been. He and Kelly had worked together in the Street of Shame many years previously when Joe had been the youngest night editor in Fleet Street history and Kelly one of the brightest stars on the road. There had always been tremendous mutual respect between the two men, and it was thanks to Joe Robertson, already editing the Argus when Kelly had somewhat spectacularly fallen from grace, that Kelly had been given the job on the Torquay newspaper that he had so far managed to keep. Kelly studied Joe for a moment. The other man had had very different reasons for ending up in a job way below his talent and ability. Robertson’s wife, whom he adored, suffered from a rare mental disorder which resulted in severe panic attacks. Only in her home town of Torquay, among friends and family stretching back to her childhood, did she manage to hold herself together sufficiently for the couple to share anything like a normal married life and successfully raise their two children. And that to Joe had been far more important than his high-flying career. He had chucked it up without a backward glance and thrown himself wholeheartedly into a provincial editorship that barely touched the edges of his vast talents. He had stuck at it, though, with impressive success. In an age when local papers were folding all over the place, the Argus had gone from strength to strength under Joe’s leadership, which had now lasted almost fifteen years. The various awards the newspaper collected almost annually were scattered around the big man’s room.
Robertson was watching the lunchtime regional news bulletin on TV. When he became aware of Kelly watching him his face broke into a wide grin. His eyes sparkled with excitement. Joe Robertson had printers’ ink running through his veins. Just like Kelly. Or like he had once been, anyway, Kelly thought wryly.
‘Great yarn, John,’ Joe roared. He had always been incapable of speaking at anything like a normal volume, particularly when his blood was up on a story. Joe’s voice, like everything about him including his personality, was big. ‘Well done on the stalker angle. Let’s keep it up, shall we? It’s great to beat the nationals at their own game, isn’t it? This is our patch, after all.’
Kelly’s heart lifted. Joe was playing right into his hands. He had known the editor would think the same way as he. Just about the only time Kelly and Robertson had not seen things the same way had been when the editor of the Argus had appointed Kit Hansford as his news editor just over a year previously. Mind you, Kelly understood well enough. Joe had wanted a solid provincial man to news edit his solid provincial newspaper. The comprehensive coverage Hansford had wittered on about earlier was indeed the backbone of the Argus – its structural frame. Robertson had the flair and the originality to make the Argus special on a good day; he didn’t need his own clone running his news team. Kelly supposed reluctantly that Hansford was perfect for the job, an ideal foil to his boss.
‘I have another lead or two, Joe,’ Kelly lied. It came naturally to him to lie to editors and news editors about the progress he was making – or lack of it. You never let the backroom boys get in the way of the story. That was another of Kelly’s golden rules.
‘Yes?’ Joe responded eagerly, his eyebrows raised in query. Expectant.
‘Well, Angel’s the key to it, but we’re not going to get to her for some time, I reckon. I’d like to have a go at her mother. I have a feeling she might be the way to Angel, too.’
‘And she lives where?’
‘London. Clerkenwell. Moved to Essex once when Angel was big as a kid, the obligatory flash showbizzy gaff, but now she’s back in the house where she brought up Angel. Quite poetic, really.’
‘London?’ queried Joe. ‘You need a special pass for that.’ He was still grinning, though, which Kelly found encouraging. ‘What makes you think she’ll talk to you anyway, John?’ the editor continued. ‘The pack will be camped out there, for sure. I don’t really have the staff to send a man up to town on a wasted journey.’
‘It won’t be wasted, I promise you. I’ve got an in with the old lady.’
Robertson shook his head almost imperceptibly. ‘Have you indeed?’ he murmured. ‘And where’ve I heard that before?’
‘Honestly,’ said Kelly.
Robertson was still grinning. He liked chancers. Kelly knew that. Liked the guys with the extra edge. Even though he promoted machines like Hansford to jobs they should never be given a sniff of in Kelly’s opinion.
‘All right then, off you go. You’ve got a day and a half. I want you back in here at seven a.m. Thursday morning.’
‘Deal,’ said Kelly. ‘And I’ll need a snapper, young Trevor –’
‘Forget it,’ interrupted Robertson. ‘You’ll have to do your own pix. Borrow that digital camera for idiots from the picture desk.’
Kelly shrugged resignedly. He’d already got more of his own way than he’d expected. He turned as if to leave, then hesitated. ‘Just one more thing …’
‘Yes?’
Kelly waved the council minutes which were still in his hand at his editor. ‘I’m supposed to be at County Hall at two p.m., according to Hansford …’
‘You really are a crafty bastard, John, but then you know that, don’t you?’
Kelly didn’t respond.
‘All right, tell Kit you’re off all other duties until I say so. Oh, and don’t score points, John, all right?’
‘Now would I?’ Kelly asked over his shoulder as he opened the door to his editor’s office.
And as he closed it behind him he could still clearly hear Robertson’s bellowed response.
‘Not much!’
At about the same time Karen Meadows was arriving at the chief constable’s office at the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s Exeter HQ. She was furious, although she knew better than to show it.
Her previous evening’s meeting with Harry Tomlinson had been cancelled at the last moment, and she had only received the call on her mobile phone when she was already halfway to Middlemore. Then, while she had been with Angel Silver earlier that morning Karen had once more been summoned to his
presence, and had had to leave her colleagues at Maythorpe Manor.
As far as Karen was concerned the whole thing had already become a monumental waste of valuable time. She had a shrewd idea of what she was in for, too, which didn’t help her mood at all.
‘A very good day to you, Karen.’ The chief constable was a rather short plump man who all too frequently had an air of forced cheerfulness about him. He had a slightly military manner and Karen could easily imagine him as the sort of commander who would lead his men to certain death with a merry quip.
‘Sorry about yesterday. Got tied up with the Home Office, if you know what I mean.’
Karen knew. She had expected the Home Office to get involved.
‘So, right then, you’d better give me a progress report on the Silver case.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Doing her best not to let her frustration show, Karen gave a full and detailed account.
‘It’s quite difficult to get an accurate picture from Angel Silver’s version of the tragedy, and that is all we have, sir,’ she said in conclusion. ‘But she admits that she killed Terry James after he attacked her husband, so it’s primarily a matter of deciding what steps to take next.’
‘Have you talked to the CPS?’
‘Briefly, sir. I plan to give them a more detailed report later today and talk it through with them fully then.’
‘Well, I’ve had the Crown Bench Prosecutor on to me already, and he’s adamant that we have to charge the woman with manslaughter at least. As you well know, everybody’s a victim nowadays, including thugs who attack innocent householders. We have to play this one strictly by the book. He gave me the public interest line, of course. Is that the word you’ve got?’
‘Yes. I don’t think there is any choice. Unless we charge her with murder, of course.’
Karen was being mischievous with her last remark, and she found the chief constable’s reaction highly gratifying.
‘Good Lord no,’ he countered quickly, his earlier avuncular approach no longer evident. ‘There can be absolutely no question of that. There was enough hullabaloo over the Tony Martin case, and he was an unknown farmer who killed an intruder. God knows how the press and the public would react to Angel Silver being convicted of murder when all she was doing was trying to defend herself and her husband. We’re walking a tightrope here, Karen.’
‘Yes, sir, and don’t I know it. If only detectives could just concentrate on detecting the job would be a whole lot easier, wouldn’t it, sir?’
Karen hadn’t meant to say that. She was aware of the chief constable shooting her a rather sharp look, but he made no direct response.
‘So have you talked to her solicitor?’ he asked instead. ‘What will she plead?’
‘Not guilty on the grounds of self-defence, almost certainly.’
Tomlinson sighed. ‘Well, let’s hope we manage to get a jury with some brains for a change. We really can’t afford to send that bloody woman to jail.’
‘No, sir,’ said Karen as expressionlessly as she could manage.
The case was developing in the way she had feared. It was no longer particularly important, it seemed, to try to find out exactly what had happened at Maythorpe Manor that night and to prosecute accordingly. Instead, the emphasis was on ensuring that the due process of law was seen to operate in a way that gave the least possible cause for public outrage in either direction. And neither justice nor truth seemed to have much relevance.
Karen gritted her teeth. Politics all too often seemed to dominate policing nowadays. She was used to it but she’d never get to like it.
Five
Kelly had parked the MG at the far end of the Argus car park where he always did. There was a tall wall there which protected the little motor somewhat both from sunshine and the worst excesses of weather.
He paused to light a cigarette as he approached it, and was vaguely aware of a figure taking off at a run and vaulting over the fence into the main road.
Instinctively Kelly sensed trouble. He quickened his pace slightly. His fears proved justified. Both the tyres on the driver’s side wheels of the MG had been slashed. They were completely destroyed.
Kelly kicked one of them in frustration, unlocked the driver’s door, flung in his lap-top computer and the digital camera duly acquired from the picture desk, both of which he had been carrying over one shoulder, then used his mobile to phone the MG specialist who looked after the car for him. The good news was that Wayne from Torbay Classic Motors had two of the right tyres in stock and would bring them straight over. The bad news was the price: £200. Ouch, thought Kelly. He supposed that he could claim for them on his insurance, but he had a £100 excess. It could have been worse, of course, and Kelly had little doubt that it would have been had he not interrupted whoever had vandalised his car. The MG could have been totally wrecked. Kelly supposed he should report the incident to the police. But for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain he didn’t want to. He had no real idea who might want to vandalise his car but he somehow felt sure it was connected with the Silver story. It occurred to him at once that it could be members of the James family. They wouldn’t be too pleased with him after his stalker story. The interpretation that he had put on what he had learned from his visit to their Fore Street home would not have pleased the family at all. And they were the sort who liked to take the law into their own hands.
On the other hand, of course, the tyre slashing could be just indiscriminate vandalism, but Kelly didn’t think so.
Kelly climbed thoughtfully into the driver’s seat. He preferred to wait there for his new tyres to arrive rather than going back into the Argus office. Hansford would only gloat and Kelly could not really blame him. As Robertson had predicted, Kelly had not been able to resist doing a bit of gloating himself when only a few minutes earlier he had returned those council minutes to Hansford and given him the editor’s message.
Wayne from Classic Motors was as good as his word and arrived less than half an hour later with two replacement wheels.
Within just a few minutes they were fitted and Wayne, a tall angular young man who was one of the best mechanics Kelly had ever encountered, loaded the original pair with their damaged tyres into the back of his van.
When he had finished Kelly asked him if he would just take a look underneath the car and check that nothing else was damaged. Wayne stroked a chin that had never quite recovered from a bad attack of teenage acne and regarded Kelly thoughtfully. But he made no comment, until, after spending several minutes both lying on the ground underneath the little motor and prodding around inside the bonnet he eventually spoke.
‘Looks OK to me, John,’ he said in his squeaky high-pitched voice. ‘Don’t forget you’re overdue for a service, though.’
Kelly nodded. ‘I’ll drop her in as soon as I get back from London.’
He drove back to St Marychurch then to pick up an overnight bag and leave a message for Moira. In the beginning, when they had first met it had been Moira who wouldn’t quite make the commitment of moving in with Kelly. She had, after all, only one major relationship behind her, a marriage to a man who had turned out to be a violent bully, and she told Kelly that after that she had vowed never to make herself vulnerable to any one man ever again. Then later Kelly suspected it had been him who wouldn’t quite make the commitment. They had settled eventually for a slightly disjointed way of life which seemed none the less to suit them well enough. Moira was one of the good ones, and not for the first time Kelly resolved to let her know more how much he valued her. When he got back from London, that was.
The first thing he noticed when he opened his front door was the smell of fresh paint.
As he closed the door behind him a blue-spotted blonde head appeared over the banisters.
‘I thought I’d start on the spare room,’ Moira called, then added with just a small note of anxiety, ‘You did say blue would be OK, didn’t you?’
She didn’t look surprised to see him turn up in the middle of th
e day. But then, she wouldn’t be. Kelly invariably seemed to manage to come and go from everywhere, including his place of work, on his own terms.
‘Sure,’ Kelly replied, peering at her up the stairs. ‘You know I reckon you always get it right. Shouldn’t you be home in bed, though?’
‘I just want to finish the first coat,’ she replied. ‘I’ve still got time for my seven hours.’
Kelly knew that all too often, particularly if she’d had a tough night, Moira felt unable to go straight to bed to sleep after coming off duty. Virtually the whole of Kelly’s house had been revamped that way. Moira enjoyed decorating and rejuvenating a home. And there had certainly been plenty of scope in Kelly’s house which he’d rented when he first came to Torquay and then managed to buy on a mortgage a few years later. She had eagerly taken on the task of giving his home a face-lift, and continued to regard periodic redecoration as a running task. It was a pleasure for her, she told him. It was how she unwound.
Kelly smiled up at her paint-spattered face. Moira was more or less free to come and go as she pleased, but she never took too much for granted. He liked that. And he liked Moira. A lot.
‘The blue suits you, by the way,’ he said.
Grinning, she held up her hands for him to see. They were both blue too. Moira was very good at painting and decorating, but she always seemed to give herself a coat of paint as well.
‘I’ve got to go to London,’ he said. ‘I’ve just popped back for a bag, and I was going to phone your machine and leave a message.’
When Moira was sleeping during the day she set her telephone answering machine to take calls with the ringing tone switched off.
‘Well, you can tell me to my face,’ she told Kelly, trotting down the stairs. She moved very quickly, almost jerkily. Perhaps that was why she got so much paint over herself, Kelly thought obliquely. She had a small pretty face, which matched her build, a fresh complexion, a ready smile and kind eyes, but there was something in them that made you instantly aware that she had suffered pain in her life.
A Moment Of Madness Page 7