Authors: Hilary Bonner
The train eventually turned up at around 2.30 p.m., almost exactly an hour before Kelly should have been arriving in Glasgow. It drew to a halt with a kind
of breathless weariness which may just have been Kelly’s imagination – although, as he fought his way aboard along with all the other refugees from the earlier train, he began to think it wasn’t his imagination at all. This new train had a definite aura of weariness about it. Every carriage seemed already to be packed. Younger, nimbler folk than him won the race for the few remaining seats. Kelly ended up leaning against a toilet door in the corridor. He was now convinced that his journey was pure unmitigated folly.
After, with extreme difficulty among the people and bags piled up in the corridor, moving away from the toilet for about the third time for passengers who wished to use it, Kelly had had enough.
‘To hell with it,’ he muttered. He slung his bag over his shoulder and began to push his way through the masses. He was moving into first class. After all, he still had a credit card that worked. Just.
Almost as soon as he sat down, the new train’s manager was at his side waiting to check his ticket. Why was it, Kelly thought not for the first time, that the only thing which seemed to continually work well on Britain’s beleaguered railway system was the checking of tickets? Particularly if he didn’t happen to have the right one.
He handed over his credit card and tried not to wince as he signed a slip for more than a hundred pounds extra. He thought it was a disgrace that you couldn’t have a decent journey across Britain, in reasonable comfort, without paying out that sort of money for first class, and was on the brink of telling the train manager so in no uncertain terms. After all, he had only moved into first class and been forced to
fork out the extra dosh because of yet another breakdown in the rail system. He restrained himself, though, partly because he knew it would be a waste of time and partly because all he wanted to do was to shut himself off from the world for the rest of his journey. Naturally, he vowed to write to Richard Branson about it all when he got home. And, naturally, he knew that he’d never get around to doing it.
He settled back into his seat and closed his eyes. He had no desire to sleep. He just wanted to think. And he told himself that he really could not hope to arrive in Glasgow in any fit state to have even the remotest chance of succeeding in his mission, had he still been leaning against a toilet door.
It had not been difficult for Kelly to find out Alan Connelly’s address. Karen Meadows was not his only police contact, which was just as well, because the way their last conversation had ended it had not seemed a good idea to ask her for any further information.
Instead Kelly had phoned George Salt, the retired policeman, now a civilian clerk at Torquay, who had been helping him out for years for a small consideration. Not cash, of course, that would have been open bribery and George Salt, in common with many of Kelly’s contacts in all sorts of walks of life, would never have gone down that road, but was more than happy to take the odd pair of tickets to a hot soccer game or a voucher for a weekend away in a luxurious hotel.
Kelly sighed. The only problem was that when he had been in full employment as a journalist those sort of perks came his way from time to time and he had
been quite content to pass them on in order to cultivate a contact. These days he had to dip into his own pocket.
And, with what had started off as very nearly an eight-hour journey now lengthened by at least three hours, Kelly had good reason to wonder whether or not the tickets to a hot boy-band concert in Exeter, acquired for George’s eleven-year-old granddaughter – teenage started early nowadays, apparently – had been even a halfway worthwhile investment.
The train seemed to make the correct progress through the North of England into Scotland, but then there was a twenty-minute wait outside Glasgow Central, caused, as the guard so helpfully explained, by being delayed in the first place which meant there was no platform available.
Ultimately, Kelly arrived just before 8 p.m., almost four and a half hours behind schedule.
It was raining heavily in Glasgow. Anxious not to arrive at the Connelly home too late in the evening, Kelly hurried to the taxi rank. There was a long queue, due partly to the bad weather, Kelly suspected, and to his immense frustration another fifteen minutes or so passed before he was able to climb into the back of a cab. The driver did not seem particularly enthusiastic when Kelly recited the address he had been given for Alan Connelly, and when, after twenty-five minutes or so, they approached the Belle View estate, Kelly could understand why.
Belle View was an extremely inappropriate name for one of the grimmest council estates Kelly had ever seen. The sprawling grey complex, a mix of rows of unappealing houses and tenement blocks, was spread over a surprisingly large area. Kelly guessed it had
been built in the late sixties, a period of housing development all involved preferred to forget. The houses had small front gardens, almost all of which were totally uncared for, and the tenement blocks stood in rectangles of grass. Or what had once been grass. Broken bedsteads, old tyres and the twisted remains of abandoned bicycles were more in evidence than trees or flowers, and what grass there was had either grown tall and wild in ragged clumps, or more frequently had been worn to a powdery brownish sward. Connelly’s family’s address was 23 Primrose Close. As the taxi progressed further into the estate, Kelly noticed that every street seemed to be named after a flower. There was a Bluebell Close, a Gardenia Way and a Camellia Crescent, and the ill kept road which appeared to be the main drag through Belle View was called Cherry Blossom Avenue. Idly, Kelly wondered if cherry trees had originally been planted here. No sign of them survived, that was for certain.
Yet again Kelly questioned why he had even bothered to come to Glasgow. No wonder young Alan Connelly was a Walter Mitty. Anyone could be forgiven for developing an overactive imagination if this was what they came home to. Colonel Parker-Brown’s description to Karen of a young man living out crazy fantasies, so much so that he could not be expected to succeed in the army, or anywhere else in life probably, began to make more sense with every second the cab passed through Belle View.
The driver slowed to a crawl as he entered Primrose Close. Number 23 was on the corner at the far end. Its garden was surrounded by a tall, neatly trimmed privet hedge, which stood out, spruce and vividly green in Belle View, where few householders
had even attempted to bother with such niceties.
Kelly was able at once to ascertain that there was someone in. The lights were on both upstairs and down, an upstairs window was open, and as he opened the taxi door he could just make out the sound of voices – although it could have been a television – inside the house. Wondering if he would regret it, he paid the driver off, crossed the pavement, opened the freshly painted white gate ahead of him and walked up the short garden path. Primrose Close was at least reasonably well lit and the lights from inside the house also illuminated the garden. Kelly could see clearly a square of tidy grass to either side of him, edged by a colourful border of winter bedding plants, mostly pansies, and a sprinkling of autumn crocuses.
He rang the shiny brass doorbell on the dark-stained front door. He seemed to wait a long time then, but eventually a boy of about fourteen or fifteen answered the door. Kelly guessed that this was probably Alan Connelly’s younger brother. The boy was red-eyed, his hair dishevelled, his skin blotchy. He looked as if he had been crying.
Kelly felt like an intruder. It did not stop him. He was an old Fleet Street hand. He was used to intruding.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are either your dad or mum in?’
The boy nodded. He didn’t even look interested. ‘Dad, it’s for you,’ he called over his shoulder.
A small man, probably in his mid to late forties, came quickly to the door. He was slimly built and looked fit. He also looked remarkably like Alan Connelly.
‘Hi,’ said Kelly again. ‘My name is John Kelly, I’ve come up from Devon. It’s about Alan.’
The other man eyed him up and down, with only marginally more interest than had the boy who’d answered the door. And, like him, he looked as if he had recently been crying.
‘Are ye from the army?’ he asked eventually, in a voice with a heavy Glasgow accent.
Kelly dodged the question. ‘I was with your son,’ he said. ‘I was with Alan the night he died.’
Connelly looked at him suspiciously.
‘He was on his own. They told us he’d gone off on his own.’
Kelly nodded. ‘Yes. That’s right. He had. But I happened to meet him in a pub. We talked, and there were things that he said which still worry me.’
Kelly could see the curiosity flit across the man’s face. I’ve cracked it, he thought. I’ve cracked it.
‘You’d better come in.’
Kelly stepped into the hallway and pushed the door shut behind him. He already had something to think about. Colonel Parker-Brown had told Karen that Alan’s father was a drunk, yet not only was Mr Connelly totally sober, neither did he have the look of a drinker about him. And that was something Kelly knew about.
Connelly led the way into a living room which was both tastefully decorated and well furnished. A fair-haired woman, whom Kelly took to be Mrs Connelly, was sitting on the sofa. She was pretty, but there were dark shadows beneath her eyes and she looked pale to the point of illness. A girl of seven or eight sat on her lap, cuddling close. Kelly expressed his deepest sympathy for the loss of their son and succeeded in learning the Connellys’ Christian names. They were Mary and Neil.
‘All right, then, Mr Kelly,’ said Neil Connelly, still formal, as he sat down on the sofa next to his wife and gestured for Kelly to take one of the room’s two big easy chairs. ‘What exactly have ye come all this way to tell us?’
Kelly went through it all then. Everything that had happened in The Wild Dog the night Alan had died, everything Alan had said to him, and how afraid the young man had seemed. Mary Connelly did not respond at all. It was almost as if she had not heard a word Kelly had said, so immersed was she in her own private grief. Neil Connelly seemed merely mildly puzzled.
‘I wondered if your son had ever said anything like this to you,’ continued Kelly. ‘I wondered if, perhaps, what he had to say might mean any more to you than it would to me or to anyone else?’
‘No,’ said Neil Connelly, after a short pause. ‘No. I do na understand it at all. Ma boy was very happy in the army, I’m sure of it. He was a good soldier. He liked the life. He was na unhappy. If he had been, he would have told us. We’ve always been a close family, Mr Kelly.’
‘You hear about bullying in the army, Mr Connelly. Do you think Alan could have been the victim of bullying?’
‘Ma boy could look after himself.’
‘Of course. It’s just that he seemed so frightened, and I think it might be important to find out why. He didn’t seem like a young man who was happy in his life, not at all.’
Neil Connelly shrugged. ‘He was drunk, wasn’t he? They told me he was very drunk. And he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Our Al was na a drinker.
He was only seventeen for Christ’s sake. My wife and I have tried to bring our children up properly.’
‘I’m sure you have, Neil.’
The other man frowned. ‘Look, what are you? Army welfare? We’ve had someone from welfare here already—’
‘I’m the man who’s trying to find out exactly what happened to your son, Neil,’ Kelly interrupted, dodging the question again. He looked around the room once more. Family photographs lined the wall. A picture of Alan, looking proud, in his army uniform, staring straight ahead from beneath his Fusiliers’ blue beret with its distinctive red and white hackle, took pride of place. Next to it was a photograph of a second young man in similar uniform. They could have been twins.
‘Another brother, I presume,’ remarked Kelly casually.
Neil Connelly smiled for the first time. It was a weak smile but it lit up his face.
‘No, that’s me twenty years ago,’ he said. ‘We had a lot in common, my boy and me. I did fifteen years in the army, in the same regiment, the Devonshire Fusiliers, and they were some of the best years of my life.’
‘Why the Devonshire Fusiliers?’ Kelly asked. ‘A regiment so far away from Scotland.’
‘Ah, well, there’s a bit of history in that,’ Neil Connelly explained, coming to life a bit as he did so. ‘My grandfather was a Devonian, from Plymouth, and he was called up to the Devonshires during the Second World War. Then, after the war, he stayed on as a regular. But my grandmother was a Scots lass, and when my grandfather retired from the army they
moved up to Scotland. None the less, when my father decided to become a soldier, he wanted to join the same regiment as his da’, even though it was based at the other end of the country. As for me, all I wanted was to be a Devonshire Fusilier from when I was just a scrap of a lad. Ma boy was just the same. We’re a family of Fusiliers, Mr Kelly.’
Kelly studied the other man carefully. Neil Connelly, the way he described his family and the ordered, comfortable home in which they lived were not at all what he had been led to expect. Indeed, Connelly did not seem a bit like the picture of a bitter man, unemployed and probably unemployable, that Colonel Parker-Brown had painted to Karen.
‘So, what’ve you been doing since you left the army?’ Kelly asked conversationally.
‘I came out to a good job, in the shipyard. I wanted to see my children grow up. I’d have stayed a fusilier till they kicked me out, but for that. It all went wrong in the end, of course, when they announced they were closing down my yard. We were just about to buy our own house, move out of this place. Then I was made redundant. Me and hundreds of others. We managed, though. Mary went back to nursing. She’s an SRN and a good one.’ He glanced at his wife, who still gave no indication that she was even listening to what was going on, with obvious pride. ‘And I stayed at home to look after the kids for a bit.’
‘So have you been out of work since then?’