Kelly raised his throbbing head and leaned back in the chair. The ceiling was going round and round.
‘Oh shit,’ he said rather more loudly than he intended.
Fifteen
Kelly was well aware of the damage that his relationship with Angel was causing to people he cared about. He strongly disliked so much of the effect it was having on him, his life, and those around him. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, least of all Moira. And, although he kidded himself it was different now, he knew, as Karen Meadows did, that, for him with his track record, dabbling with drugs was like playing with fire. Yet none of that made any difference. He couldn’t keep away from Angel, couldn’t stop himself from being with her at every opportunity and doing anything and everything that she asked.
Most nights that they were together they videod themselves having sex and afterwards watched the tape. Kelly continued to be aroused by this, which actually disturbed him considerably. He also had other anxieties.
‘I hope you’re careful with those tapes, Angel,’ he remarked one day, as casually as he could.
‘I sell them to this porn shop behind King’s Cross station,’ she replied, smiling at him mockingly. And just for a fleeting moment he half believed her. Well, she was crazy enough to do almost anything, was Angel. Then her smile widened, she threw back her head and laughed at him, something she did quite frequently. He wished she wouldn’t. It wasn’t laughing with him at all, but at him. He found that humiliating and on occasions even wondered if it was her intention to humiliate him.
‘I don’t even keep them, you idiot. I just tape over the same one.’
He was reassured, at least momentarily. But, as ever, he didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Certainly he decided to do a little checking. Surreptitiously he searched the bedroom, the big wardrobe which housed the video camera and the widescreen TV, the other built-in furniture in the room, the bedside cabinets, even under the bed. He didn’t find any tapes at all in the bedroom, except one unused one still wrapped in its original cellophane, which was encouraging. Maybe she was telling the truth. That was all he wanted to prove really, in every way.
He also checked the living room. One cabinet was filled with video tapes, all meticulously labelled. Some were movies, but most seemed to be of Scott and his band in concert through the years. Once, when Angel was having a bath, Kelly picked a tape at random and played it. It was Scott at Wembley Stadium in 1984. Just as it said on the label. Kelly cursed himself for being so suspicious.
Then one night he arrived unexpectedly. He had done it before and Angel hadn’t seemed to mind. He had the code now to open the electronic gates, and was unsurprised to find the front door to the house unlocked. One thing about which Angel was undoubtedly telling the truth was her cavalier attitude to security, which, extraordinarily, had remained much the same even after the shocking events of the previous year, even though her husband might well still be alive had Terry James not been able to enter both the grounds and the house so easily.
Kelly could hear an at first unidentifiable noise coming from Angel’s bedroom. Then the sounds became clearer. He feared he knew exactly what he was listening to. It was the sound that Angel made when she cried out during sex, and he could also pick out a low male grunting.
He ran up the stairs, two at a time, not giving himself any opportunity to think through what he was doing, nor even considering how scathing she was likely to be of him, whatever was going on in her bedroom. He was out of breath by the time he thrust open the bedroom door, and stood there panting, looking anxiously in.
Angel was lying naked on the bed. But she was alone. One hand lay languidly between her legs. There was, as usual, a packet of the familiar white powder on the bedside table. Next to it was a rolled-up ten-pound note. She was staring at the TV set as Kelly burst in, her lower body moving in its own rhythm of arousal. Her gaze switched instantly to him. At first her eyes were full of alarm, but as soon as she saw who it was the alarm disappeared to be replaced with what could only be described as cold anger.
The noises were coming from the TV. Kelly swung round to look at it and just caught a glimpse of writhing limbs and a close-up of Angel’s own face, screwed into that intense expression, which could be either ecstasy or pain, that he had become so familiar with. Then the screen went blank.
He looked back at Angel. She had the remote control in one hand. She must have switched the set off.
‘Who the hell invited you?’ she snapped at him, her violet eyes flashing with fury.
‘I – I’m sorry,’ he said, confused for a moment. At first he had merely been relieved that she was not with anybody else. Then he thought about what he had seen on the TV screen. It had just been a glimpse, but there had been more writhing limbs on that screen than could belong to any two people, he thought. Not that he was either surprised or shocked by that. He had little doubt that Angel’s taste in sex would run to orgies, if she thought she could get away with it – in fact no doubt at all.
One thing he had never really believed was her protestation of fidelity to Scott. Maybe he had half kidded himself, but Kelly supposed he had always known better really. He suspected that monogamy just didn’t go with the territory as far as Angel Silver was concerned.
He became vaguely aware of her scrabbling at the bedclothes. She was pushing a load of black video tapes under the sheets, he realised. He pretended not to notice.
‘Are you spying on me or something?’ she enquired, still furious.
‘No,’ he answered truthfully, still taking in the possible significance of what he had seen. Not yet, he thought to himself. Did she have a secret library of home-made blue videos, featuring herself, her husband, him, and God knows who else? And if so, where on earth did she keep them? He had seen no sign of them. And neither, he wouldn’t mind betting, had the police. They hadn’t found any drugs either, when they’d searched the place, and Kelly couldn’t believe there wasn’t always at least a little coke and a few grams of dope somewhere in Maythorpe.
‘I just came to see you.’ He grinned, which was the last thing he felt like doing, took a step or two forward and touched the hand lying loosely in her crotch. ‘Thought you might like some of the real thing,’ he continued huskily.
Her arousal was obvious and seemed to take her over then, as it so often did. Her hunger for sex was extraordinary. She was insatiable. Sometimes he wondered how much real satisfaction she ever got, certainly with him. She never seemed to get enough, that was for certain.
Predictably she didn’t bother to speak, but just took his hand and guided his fingers into her.
‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘I need to go to the bathroom first.’
He retreated into the en-suite, leaving the door very slightly ajar. Almost at once he was aware of her moving around. The bed squeaked. A floorboard creaked. Very carefully Kelly opened the bathroom door and followed her out through the bedroom on to the landing. As he passed the bed he noticed that the duvet had been flung back and there was no sign of the video tapes he had noticed earlier. He waited until she reached the hallway down below and disappeared into the library, with its rows of designer books which had always looked to him as if they’d never been read, before he ventured on to the stairs, treading with immense caution, and wincing each time there was a creak from the ancient wood.
When he got to the hallway he saw that she had left the library door just ajar. Very gingerly he peered round it. There was no sign of her. Puzzled, he took a cautious step into the room. Then he realised that part of the book-lined wall opposite him was closer to him than it should be. He peered at it closely. It had moved out of the way, revealing some kind of opening behind him.
‘Jesus,’ he muttered to himself, remembering both his schoolboy history and similar sights he had been shown in old houses. ‘It’s a priest’s hole.’
He could hear sounds from within. What was she doing, he wondered. Stowing those tapes back where they belonged, more than likely. He wondered h
ow the priest’s hole opened. He would really like to know what the mechanism was.
Suddenly she appeared from behind the books. Kelly was standing fully exposed in the doorway, but thankfully managed to step back behind the door’s protection before she noticed him. He paused, breathing heavily for a moment or two, then decided to take a risk. He’d got this far, but there would probably be little point unless he could see how she closed the bookcase wall. He put his head round the door, moving very slowly and carefully. She had her back to him. With her left hand she was pushing the bookcase, with her right she was fiddling in a gap in the books at the edge of the third shelf from the top. He could see the missing books on the floor, but was unable quite to decipher which ones they were.
The movable wall began to slide back into place. Angel bent down and started to replace the books which had been removed. She wouldn’t be long now. Kelly took off up the stairs as fast as he could. He had no time to waste and could not take the care he would have liked to be quiet. The creaking of the stairs sounded loud as gunshots to him. He even feared that Angel might be able to hear the jangling of his nerves, which were rattling for England. Inside her bedroom he removed his shirt and lay down on the bed in one disjointed movement, trying to control his heavy breathing. He really was out of condition.
But if Angel noticed anything amiss when she came in she gave no sign. Instead she came straight to him and put one hand on his chest.
‘You took me by surprise,’ she said. And that was about as near as you would ever get to an apology for anything from Angel Silver, he thought.
‘Where’ve you been, anyway?’ he asked as casually as he could, quite certain that she would have a glib answer. She did.
‘I got the munchies,’ she said. He noticed then that she was holding a packet of chocolate biscuits in her free hand. She didn’t miss a trick, he thought admiringly.
Angel put the biscuits down and began to attack his flies with both hands.
‘God, I feel randy,’ she said.
He responded as lightly as he could. ‘I’m not surprised, what were you watching?’
‘None of your fucking business,’ she replied.
And then, quite quickly, they both became too busy to talk any more.
Only when it was over, and he was lying sated and sore, with that vague feeling of unease which for him so often seemed to be part of sex with Angel, did he wonder at his own behaviour as well as hers. Without a moment’s compunction he had deliberately spied on Angel. This was the woman he could not leave alone, the woman he was obsessed with, and yet it had come so easily to him to sneak after her and watch her.
What did it all mean and where was it all leading? If he distrusted Angel so much, then what was he doing with her? And what exactly did it say about him?
There was one idea in particular that Kelly could not get out of his head. He was almost certain now that Angel kept a library of her own personal porn movies. He knew he would not be able to rest until he confirmed that he was right, and found out just what kind of stuff they featured.
The problem was that Kelly had not been able to stop his imagination taking an unwelcome quantum leap, almost from the moment he had discovered the existence of the priest’s hole and what it might contain.
Angel liked to video sex. So, it seemed, had her husband. Born-again Christian or not, Kelly thought wryly, everything that Angel indicated to him about Scott Silver suggested a liking for sex every bit as bizarre as her own.
Kelly’s train of thought progressed swiftly. What if Angel and Scott Silver had not been asleep when Terry James had entered their bedroom. What if they had been making love? Scott had at that time apparently been professing undying love to Bridget Summers and even promising to leave Angel, but Angel consistently maintained that their sexual relationship had remained unchanged. And Kelly somehow thought that in that regard at least she was probably telling the truth. Both Angel and Scott Silver would have been well able to dissociate their sexual urges from their emotions, he suspected.
It was, he felt, quite possible that Angel and Scott had been having sex when they had found themselves confronted by Terry James. If that was the case then it was also a possibility that their video camera had been running. And the million-dollar question, a question fuelled by his suspicions of what might be hidden in the priest’s hole, a question which Kelly could not get out of his head, was whether or not that tape still existed. Angel was seriously into sexual excess. There were many aspects of that side of her which disturbed Kelly greatly, and he was inclined to be even more disturbed by the alacrity with which he himself joined in. But would even Angel Silver keep a video which possibly showed two men being killed, one of them the husband she had allegedly loved so much, the other his assailant whom she had killed herself? Would she really keep a real-life snuff movie featuring that?
Kelly just didn’t know.
Angel kept a spare set of keys to Maythorpe Manor in a drawer in the kitchen. Kelly had seen them there once when he’d been looking for matches.
At the first opportunity Kelly removed the keys and stowed them carefully in a zip pocket of his leather jacket. Angel was not an orderly methodical person, except possibly when it came to labelling and filing her smutty video tapes, he thought wryly. He was fairly confident that even if she looked for the spare keys in the drawer she would just think that she’d mislaid them somehow.
The next time she told him she was going to London for a couple of days, something she did at frequent intervals, he was ready. Previously he had always wished she might ask him to accompany her. He had no idea what she got up to when she went away, or even where she stayed, and she never discussed it with him. He didn’t like to think about it too much and in the past had resented her brief trips away from him. But this time he was glad when she told him she was off to London the following day.
He had watched her set the burglar alarm often enough. Since his plan had come into his head he had watched carefully, making a note afterwards of the code she punched in. It hadn’t been difficult. Angel made no attempt to conceal anything from him. That made Kelly feel fleetingly guilty. She obviously trusted him rather more than he did her.
None the less he was determined. On the appointed day, as far as Kelly knew, Angel left for London as planned early in the afternoon. But Kelly waited until almost midnight before setting off for Maythorpe. He was being careful. Angel was unpredictable and he certainly didn’t want to confront Mrs Nott during the day.
He drove straight up to the gates and, as he had done so many times now, tapped in the security code Angel had supplied him with. The gates opened in their usual smoothly magical fashion. At the front door he rang the door bell pull, just in case. There was no response. He did so a second time, to make sure. Then he inserted his stolen key in the lock. It turned easily. Once inside he dealt with the burglar alarm, then called Angel’s name, just to make doubly sure. You really never knew what she was up to. She could have changed her mind, not gone to London at all and failed to bother to tell him, and he wouldn’t have liked to have been forced to explain his acquisition of the door key to her or to anybody. But there was no response to his call.
When he was as sure as he possibly could be that he was alone in the big house, he headed straight for the library. He’d noted the shape, size and position of the books which Angel had removed when she’d opened the entrance to the priest’s hole. They turned out to be a leather-bound edition of Mark Twain. Neat, pristine, and you could tell when you handled them that, as he had always suspected, they had probably never been opened, let alone read, Kelly noted as he lifted several of them off their shelf and piled them neatly on the floor. The wood-panelled wall behind them seemed quite smooth. There was no obvious recess or knob that might be used to open up the priest’s hole in the way Kelly had seen. He ran his right hand slowly over the panelling, using his fingers to push and prod. Eventually he found it. A small section of panelling, which had looked no different at all
to the rest, popped open on hinges at his touch. Kelly was momentarily elated, but he just hoped he’d be able to repeat the procedure in reverse, because he wasn’t sure exactly what he had done to move the section of wood, thus revealing a small hollow in the wall and a handle within. Kelly turned the handle. The mechanism seemed well oiled. The section of wall, shelves of books still attached, which Kelly had seen move when Angel had gone into the priest’s hole, slid smoothly out of the way.
With his heart beating considerably faster than usual Kelly stepped forward and peered inside. He could see nothing. Just blackness. He guessed there must be a light switch somewhere, there almost certainly was if he had guessed correctly and the priest’s hole was in constant use as a secret hideaway storeroom. He reached a hand inside the opening and felt all around it. His hunch was correct, he found a switch, flipped it down, and the priest’s hole was flooded with light.
Kelly gave an involuntary gasp. What he saw exceeded even his wildest expectations. The light revealed an irregularly shaped little room, probably six feet by three feet, and barely tall enough to stand in, every inch of its wall space lined with shelves on which were stacked video tapes. Right by the door was a wooden box. Kelly looked in the box first. It contained a largish bag of white powder. He didn’t bother to taste it, but guessed that it was coke, and around four ounces or so of it. That was quite a supply, even for a heavy user, and would have a street value of more than £5,000. No wonder Angel never seemed to run out. There were also three or four ounces of cannabis resin in the box, and a small bag of grass.
Kelly resisted the temptation to help himself to a little. Apart from anything else, he had already told himself that as long as he only smoked dope or snorted coke when he was with Angel he’d be able to control it and not do himself any lasting harm. He didn’t really even want to think that he might be becoming drug dependent again. Instead he turned his attention to the tapes. They seemed to be quite meticulously labelled and in order. In spite of Angel’s perpetual disorder in other areas, Kelly was not surprised by that. Angel and Scott’s music collection was much the same. They were people whose lives together had centred around the media, in more ways than one, thought Kelly. There must have been four or five hundred videos on the closely stacked shelves within the priest’s hole. He was familiar enough with Angel’s vigorous appetite for sex, but could these really all be blue home movies? He began to study the labels. It was extraordinary. Each one was neatly labelled with a date and a number, nothing else, and they were stored chronologically – which was almost too good to be true.
A Moment Of Madness Page 25