A Moment Of Madness

by Hilary Bonner

  After a few seconds she seemed to relent.

  ‘I don’t even have any time to spend with myself right now, Kelly,’ she said. ‘But maybe soon, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Kelly was thoughtful as he replaced the receiver. He was also slightly taken aback. From everything he had gathered about Terry James, he quite believed, in spite of the family’s protestations, that the man would not only strike out in self-defence, but also use a knife with no compunction at all in order to avoid being caught. Kelly had not swallowed the gentle giant stuff for one second. But he was surprised that the man would have stabbed Scott quite so many times. He had somehow imagined that when Scott had awoken and surprised the intruder, Terry James had hit out instinctively, once, maybe twice, and then stepped back, perhaps frozen by the horror of what he had done, and somehow given Angel a chance to grab the knife from him. It had also not occurred to Kelly, even though Karen Meadows had told him that James had been stabbed several times, that Angel could have launched a frenzied attack on the scale that the Mirror indicated. Rather he had imagined her too lashing out, probably striking James glancing blows with the knife, causing only shallow flesh wounds, before hitting a major artery.

  Kelly concentrated, trying to imagine what had happened next. Angel always looked so fragile. But there was a toughness in her. She was a survivor, no doubt about that. And her mother had indicated to him that she would do anything to defend Scott. But Kelly had actually witnessed a frenzied knife attack once – well, a bayonet attack, to tell the truth – and remembered it all too clearly. It had been in the Falklands. Kelly had been yomping across the island with a British battalion. They had come over a rise straight into a group of Argentinian soldiers. Surprise and fear were a heady mix. The first man to be confronted face to face with an Argentinian had been a very young squaddie. He’d got the first blow in, bayoneting the Argentinian in the throat. Blood gushed out like oil from a geyser, drenching the squaddie and spattering everyone near him, including Kelly, who had shaken for days after the experience. Kelly suspected that the other man had died at once, but the British squaddie didn’t stop, perhaps couldn’t stop. He repeatedly stabbed the Argentinian soldier with his bayonet. It was hard to believe one man could have so much blood in his body. It spurted from every puncture point. Blood pressure. You had to see a human being stabbed, see the sheer power behind the blood which then bursts from the body, before you ever fully appreciated what the phrase meant. Kelly was all too well aware of just how much blood pressure there was within the human frame. The other soldiers had to pull the lad off. And when they did his appearance was ghoulish. He had looked as if he had been bathing in blood.

  Kelly shuddered at the memory. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for Angel. How could she have done anything like that? He wondered if she’d been on coke at the time. Or did she still do smack? She certainly didn’t look like a druggie. She looked wonderful, in spite of her ordeal. But then, apart from that one time when he had done his best to rescue her from herself, she always had looked wonderful.

  Karen Meadows hadn’t mentioned drugs. Neither had anyone else. Kelly knew that during the last year or two of his life Scott Silver had become a born-again Christian of some kind. Maybe that had meant he no longer did drugs, although there had been no doubting his involvement in the drug scene as a younger man. But Angel? Was she clean? Kelly had no idea. If drugs were involved that would affect any prosecution against her. He’d got the impression from Karen Meadows that the police were pretty sympathetic towards her. Drug involvement would change all that.

  Whatever the truth, Kelly wondered what kind of effect having killed someone in such a way would have on Angel. He knew about how sometimes it was the apparently weakest amongst us who became the strongest when under attack, and were capable of acting with a viciousness that would normally be completely out of character. He would always remember seeing for the first time the picture in a newspaper of the man who had broken into former Beatle George Harrison’s home and attacked him. George’s wife, not a big woman, had leaped to her husband’s defence, and given his attacker a real hammering. The picture had shocked Kelly. He’d imagined, as was so easy for him to do, how the man must have spurted blood all over her, and yet she had just gone on hitting him. Some woman, he’d thought at the time.

  What Angel had done was even more extreme. And it had led to a death.

  He would see her face for a long time, pale, beautiful, almost translucent, surprisingly calm, as she’d been loaded into the police car that morning. He could hear her words on the answering machine. Angry. Afraid maybe, too. All of that.

  He switched on his computer terminal and started to type. He wanted to send Angel another letter, to explain, to apologise. He’d done nothing to apologise for. He was a working journalist, after all. But it was important to him that she would realise that he was a friend as well as a hack – at heart always had been a friend to her – that he was on her side, and that she could depend on that.

  It took him several attempts to get the words right, to explain how he felt, and find the right way of convincing her that he honestly believed her mother’s story would win sympathy and support for her. To try to make her believe that he really wanted to help her.

  Finally he again asked for an interview. Well, he couldn’t help himself, could he?

  ‘You’ll have to talk to somebody sooner or later, Angel,’ he’d written. ‘Make it me. Make it somebody you already know is a friend, somebody who won’t let you down. I didn’t before. And I won’t this time.’

  There was an element of moral blackmail there again, of course. Angel was well aware now of exactly who Kelly was and the secret he knew about her. This was the second time he had reminded her, and her mother had almost certainly done so too. Angel must realise that, if he chose, Kelly could write about her days as a prostitute at any time. He had first-hand knowledge. The photographs of her would still be on file at the Despatch. She probably did not know they had ever existed, and he didn’t intend to use them against her, never had. But they were there, none the less, and Kelly could confirm exactly who had been behind those dark glasses. He had a few trump cards in his hand. And he was rather hoping that all he had to do was drop a hint or two. Well, he was still a hack, after all. He knew how to walk that tightrope, how to please editors and those on the other side of the fence. He’d always been good, too, at making people like him if he put his mind to it.

  He printed out the letter, folded it in his pocket, and set off for Maythorpe to play the waiting game. He didn’t intend to risk this latest note getting mixed up with all that fan mail and more than likely opened by somebody other than Angel, like Jimmy Rudge, Scott’s business manager, or even, heaven forbid, the police.

  He would bide his time, wait till he had the opportunity to pass the letter to Angel personally. Then at least he would know that she’d got it.

  He’d been standing outside Maythorpe Manor for almost two hours when Joe Robertson called.

  ‘Fancy a quick one or sixteen?’ he asked.

  Kelly did. He didn’t much enjoy going into pubs any more, now that he no longer drank alcohol, but for Joe he would always make an exception. Kelly liked his editor’s company. Joe was one of the few people with whom he could reminisce about the good old days. Both men were inclined to remember the good moments rather than the bad, yet Joe knew all about the lowest points in Kelly’s past, and that made Kelly feel at ease with him. Even in a bar.

  For just a second or two Kelly wondered about the wisdom of abandoning his stakeout. But he had a gut feeling that there were going to be no developments today. His only real purpose was to await an opportunity to pass Angel his letter, and, realistically, the chances of her walking out through the gates of Maythorpe that night amidst a group of waiting press were about nil.

  It took Kelly less than twenty minutes to drive to the office pub. Joe was already standing by the bar, a slightly flushed Trevor Jones in attendanc
e. Kit Hansford was sitting at a table with the picture editor. Kelly felt the news editor’s eyes boring into him as he walked in. He rather liked that. Hansford resented the closeness Kelly had with his editor, and Kelly had to admit to himself that he quite enjoyed the occasional opportunity to rub it in.

  Joe was full of bonhomie. He also had a large glass of whisky in front of him and Kelly was pretty sure it wasn’t his first.

  ‘Well-timed, dear boy,’ Joe greeted him effusively. ‘Thought I’d better buy you two heroes a few. Pity I couldn’t send Trevor here to London with you, John, but there’s still plenty of mileage for you on this one, young man, I promise you that.’

  Joe clapped Trevor on the back as he bought Kelly his usual Diet Coke. Trevor beamed. Basking in the glow of his editor’s approval he had obviously forgotten his earlier dissatisfaction with the Argus bosses.

  ‘Now, John,’ Joe continued. ‘I was trying to remember your story about the cockroach race. C’mon. You take over. I can’t even remember where it happened.’

  Kelly grinned indulgently. He owed Joe a few good pub yarns. In fact he owed him a hell of a lot more than that.

  ‘Neither can I, not exactly,’ he said. ‘A run-down bar in a run-down town somewhere in Colombian drug-baron land. There were these cockroaches cowering in a corner and I had this bet on which one would dare to be first to scurry across the room to feast on a bit of old sandwich. I had a hundred quid on it and my little bugger won, no doubt about it. Only problem is I’d chosen to bet with two extremely large mercenaries. One of the bastards plonked his bloody great boot on my cockroach and that was the end of it and my winnings.

  ‘“Your ’orse ees dead,” he told me. Well, I know when I’m beaten. I paid up and did a runner. I wasn’t entirely suicidal. Not even then.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ roared Joe.

  Kelly smiled easily enough. The stories sounded good. He knew that. They were of the rollicking hell-raising sort. The reality, of course, became very grim indeed. Kelly had indulged in all the vices. And he had gambled for England. It started with casinos in foreign towns, then he became hooked on horse racing – or rather on betting on horses. He had no interest whatsoever in the finer points of the races themselves or the horses which ran them. Eventually he would bet on anything. Hence the cockroach race. Kelly’s whole life became a kind of vicious circle. He would get drunk, often in some obscure part of the world, pick up a woman, usually in a bar, sometimes more than one, wake up the next morning next to somebody whose name he could probably not even remember, be overcome with remorse and go home to his wife, probably via a betting shop or two, and have a row. Liz half knew about the women, suspecting more than she would admit even to herself, Kelly had reckoned, and she certainly knew about the gambling. Kelly had been earning big money but he was spending even more. Cocaine, horses, women and whisky are an expensive combination. The debts mounted. The fights between Kelly and his wife became more frequent and more vicious. Kelly had vague memories of Nick in the background at these times, usually yelling his head off. As soon as possible after the fighting Kelly would invariably go off to some bar again and drink himself silly. Then he’d pick up a woman. Then he’d do some coke. Then the cycle would begin again.

  Kelly remained mildly surprised by how quickly his downfall came once he started to slide. People think that the reporters of days gone by all spent their time getting drunk. In fact to be incapable of doing your job because of alcohol was a cardinal sin, and drugs were pretty much a no-go area in the Street of Shame, which kept rigidly to its own totally inexplicable code of conduct. After you’d brought in the story of the day, yes, you could get blind drunk if you wished. But not when you were in the middle of one. And if you were unofficial chief fireman like Kelly you always had to be able to pull yourself together because you never knew when the big one was going to break.

  The first time Kelly was actually blind drunk in the office and incapable of putting his story together, a couple of fellow hacks ushered him out of the building, and covered for him. They even wrote his story, filing it under Kelly’s name.

  Kelly doubted he ever thanked them. In fact he wasn’t sure if he even knew it had happened until he was told about it years later.

  Kelly didn’t know how any of it happened really. These were the good old days when Fleet Street employers were about as tolerant and as benevolent as you could get. They checked him into a rehab centre. Not once, but three times. They warned him. Not once but several times. Then suddenly, it was all over.

  One day he was the king, largely regarded as the best on-the-road operator in Fleet Street. He had a house in fashionable Chiswick, a beautiful wife, a baby son, and a flash car. He expected to get and was given the best stories. He ate in the best restaurants. On the rare occasions when he took a holiday it was to top hotels in the Caribbean or the South of France. He assumed now that he had thought that he was unassailable and that his glory days would last for ever, regardless of his increasingly erratic behaviour.

  The next moment he had been sacked. The job that meant everything to him disappeared as quickly as one snort of the white powder he was so fond of. And his wife disappeared too. Not that he blamed her, after all she had put up with, although classically she went home to her mother leaving him to sort out the mortgage problems with the house and all his other debts. He didn’t do any such thing, of course. He failed to deal with any of it. He lost the house and although he had been given a generous pay-off from the Despatch, most of it went towards settling as many as possible of his debts, while at the same time keeping his various habits going until it too disappeared.

  Within less than a year he ended up with no home as well as no income. He stayed with various friends until they wouldn’t put up with him any more. As soon as he got hold of any money he spent it on booze. He could no longer afford cocaine, but in any case coke was an achiever’s drug, designed to kill the need for sleep and keep the brain buzzing long after it would otherwise have slumped into oblivion. Kelly didn’t even want to achieve. It was only oblivion that he sought, and alcohol did that for him well enough. Women didn’t come into it any more. None would come near him. In the end he exhausted all his resources. There were no more friends prepared to pick up the pieces.

  His fall from grace was every bit as spectacular as his rise to it had been. He actually did end up on the street. For several weeks he spent his nights in a cardboard box in the Waterloo underpass and his days begging. He would hang around Fleet Street pubs and offices, waiting for old mates to emerge and begging them for cash. Actually he used to pretend he was only asking for loans – that was the last vestige of his pride. But both sides knew the truth.

  The guys he had worked with, once been at the forefront of, were deeply embarrassed, unwilling always to meet his eye. Which suited him. Kelly had not wanted contact, just their money, which they invariably handed over in order to get him to go away.

  Looking back it remained a mystery to Kelly how he had got himself in that state. It was also a bit of a mystery how he had pulled himself out of it. He remembered that the first step had been to allow himself to be helped by one of the organisations which ministered to the winos of London. He had moved to a hostel which had been a vast improvement on a cardboard box, he had been persuaded to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and one day he had just stopped drinking. Simultaneously he had been able to start rebuilding, first finding himself any casual work going, more often than not in hotel kitchens, and ultimately getting back in touch with the few old friends he had not totally antagonised, in the hope of finding more gainful employment. It was then that Joe Robertson had come up trumps with his offer of a job in Torquay. And once Kelly got his foot back on the bottom rung of the ladder he began to climb it again, albeit just a little way, with less difficulty than he might have anticipated. It seemed he had been one of those people who had to sink to the very bottom of the pile before he could even start to recover.

  The memo
ry of it still shamed Kelly. And it still frightened him. He was aware more than most of the fragility of his own existence. He would never again have anything like the life he had enjoyed in those early Fleet Street days, he knew that. But although he was revelling in this rare treat of a really big story, he wasn’t sure that he would want that back, even if it were possible. The other side of the coin had been just too awful. Kelly had lived on the edge and he hadn’t been able to handle it.

  Now he had a decent home in a gorgeous part of the world, a decent job, a good woman, and a fairly recently honed new relationship with his only son. He was possibly as near to content as he had ever been in his life.

  If ever Kelly was tempted to drink again – and sometimes, watching friends down a gin and tonic at the end of the day or enjoy a bottle of fine claret, he did envy them – he just remembered how close he had come to total destruction. And he knew that he couldn’t take the risk.

  He took a sip of his Diet Coke and heard Trevor Jones’s voice in the background jerking him out of his not-altogether-welcome reverie into the past.

  ‘Tell us about that hotel porter in Africa, Johnno …’

  Kelly interrupted. ‘Not tonight, Trev,’ he said mildly. ‘I promised Moira I’d be home for supper.’

  It was a lie. Moira was on duty. But Kelly was not in the mood for relating any more drunken stories of the good old days. They might make young photographers laugh, and even envy the swashbuckling lifestyle, but all too often they just left John Kelly feeling sad and empty.

  Kelly spent most of the next three days, and half the night, doorstepping Maythorpe Manor. Not just professionally, but also personally, he found Angel Silver’s involvement in the double killing absolutely intriguing. Her account of what actually happened, whenever it could be obtained and printed, would, of course, make compulsive reading. But Kelly was beginning to accept that his fascination for the woman and for what had happened that night went far beyond his instinctive desire to be first with a great story.