Authors: Hilary Bonner
‘That’s great,’ interjected Kelly excitedly. Death notices almost always gave full personal details including at least partial addresses. He loved getting a result like that, wherever it might lead, always had done. ‘Will you read it to me.’
‘Foster, Fusilier Craig Anthony. Aged seventeen. Much loved only son of Phillip and Marcia Foster, of Grange Road, Babbacombe, Torquay. Killed in a military training accident. May 10th. Already greatly missed.’
A local lad and an address as well. Kelly could not have hoped for a better result. He told himself that this was fate, that he was destined to continue with his inquiries, at least until the next stage.
‘Thanks a million, Sal,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you managed to find a death notice. That’s bloody brilliant.’
‘Yes, well, the computer system is actually extremely efficient, as long as the information has been pumped into it, you can always get it out easily enough,’ said Sally. ‘The problem is it can only tell you what somebody has already told it, if you see what I mean.’
‘Ah, but nobody knows how to work the system better than you, Sal,’ responded Kelly.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?’
‘Please do. It was meant as one. Well, very nearly …’
‘If I were you Kelly, I’d quit while you’re ahead.’
‘I will. And thanks again, Sal.’
‘Right. Do you want me to fax you the inquest report and the other story?’
‘Yes, please.’ He gave her his fax number.
‘I owe you one, Sal, I really do,’ he said.
‘One? You owe me one? I’ll send you an invoice, shall I?’
‘Yeah, if you like, but you know better than most what I’m like at paper work …’
She was chuckling as he said a genuinely fond goodbye and ended the call. Sally, and the familiar banter between them, was one of the aspects of newspaper life which Kelly sorely missed. But there were even more which he was extremely glad to see the back of, he reminded himself.
He dialled directory enquiries. He knew, of course, that the service did not give out addresses. It was, however, an easy enough trick to ask for a P. Foster and pick a street number at random. Kelly asked for a P. Foster at number 7 Grange Road.
The reply came automatically, just as Kelly had hoped it would. ‘I have a P. Foster at number 16, sir.’
Another result. Kelly switched off his phone, settled back into his seat, and within minutes was once more asleep.
He arrived back at Newton Abbot at around twenty past five, only a few minutes behind schedule. A miracle, he thought. With a bit of luck he could be at Babbacombe by around six, even in the rush-hour traffic, and he decided to go for it. Indeed, the truth was that he just couldn’t resist.
He had automatically decided on the same surprise approach. It meant going in cold, but as an old Fleet Street hand Kelly knew well enough that the advantages of so doing almost always outweighed the disadvantages.
The traffic was reasonably light, with the bulk of it heading out of Torquay towards him as he made his way along the A380 through Kingskerswell and swung a left by the hospital out towards Babbacombe, which lay on the north side of the town, just a little nearer to Torquay town centre than his own district of St Marychurch.
Grange Road was a neat street of small pre-war semis in the heart of Babbacombe village, set back from the seafront. The whole area was in stark contrast to Belle View. Almost every house had a tidily manicured front garden and fresh paintwork.
It was already dark, and a reproduction Victorian carriage lamp attached to the wall next to the front door of number 16 caused Kelly to blink very rapidly. It shone directly into his eyes as he stood on the doorstep. He glanced over his shoulder. The street was very quiet. Yet again he had that feeling of being an intruder. Yet again he conquered any such misgivings, with the alacrity which came with years of experience as a professional intruder into other people’s lives.
There was no doorbell. Instead, a brass ring doorknocker gleamed in the centre of the white painted door. However, Kelly did not need to use it. The door opened even before he had raised his right hand to the brass ring.
Before him stood a very thin, slightly unwell-looking woman, with unnaturally dark hair, dressed entirely in black from head to foot.
‘Mr Stiles?’ she enquired at once.
‘Uh, no,’ said Kelly hesitantly. He started to introduce himself.
‘I’m—’
‘But you are from Stiles & Merchant?’ she interrupted swiftly.
‘Uh, no,’ Kelly repeated.
‘Oh.’ She looked puzzled.
‘The undertakers,’ she said, as if prompting him. ‘Aren’t you from the undertakers? I’ve been waiting all afternoon …’
It was Kelly’s turn to look puzzled. Craig Foster had died more than six months ago, according to both Gerry Parker-Brown and the death notice in the
Argus
. Kelly didn’t quite know what to say, so he merely shook his head.
‘Oh,’ the woman said again. ‘I was expecting the undertakers …’
Her voice trailed away.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kelly, making a conscious effort to regain both his brain and his voice. ‘I didn’t realise there had been a recent bereavement here. I wouldn’t have come—’
She interrupted him then, staring at him curiously.
‘Who are you, then? And what do you want?’
‘I came about Craig. Your son. I’m so sorry. I’ll come back another day.’
She stared a little longer, looking uncertain at first, and then appeared to make a decision.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t go. Not if it’s anything about Craig. Phillip wouldn’t want that. I know he wouldn’t. Please come in.’
Kelly was even more puzzled.
‘I-I don’t want to intrude,’ he stumbled. He did, of course, but he didn’t want to risk messing up the one and only opportunity he would probably have to get through to this woman.
‘No, we’ve been wanting you to come,’ she said, and opened the door wide for him to enter.
He did so at once. He realised that Mrs Foster must have mistaken him for someone else, but naturally he couldn’t resist the invitation.
She led him into a small tidy kitchen and gestured for him to sit down at a very shiny, new, pine table. A black and white spaniel curled up on the mat by the back door, opened one eye and closed it again. Some house dog, thought Kelly, as he accepted Mrs Foster’s offer of a cup of tea.
She poured from a teapot already on the table. The tea was a deep brown in colour, and Kelly could feel from the temperature of the mug she passed to him that it was only just warm. He reached for the sugar bowl and helped himself to four spoonfuls to be on the safe side, rather than his usual three. But the cool tea still tasted unpleasantly bitter and Kelly had to force himself to drink it.
‘So, what have you come to tell us?’ enquired Mrs Foster, and she sounded quite accusative.
‘I was rather hoping you may have something to tell me,’ responded Kelly.
She looked annoyed then.
‘My husband spent the last six months of his life writing letters. All he wanted was to know exactly what happened to our Craig. That wasn’t much to ask, surely? So far, we’ve not heard a word from the army since the first couple of weeks. And even then we got short shrift. My Phillip didn’t want to make trouble, he wasn’t that sort of man. He just wanted information, that’s all. Somebody to talk to him properly.’ Her voice softened. ‘He worshipped our Craig, honestly, he did.’
Kelly thought quickly. Mrs Foster’s attitude seemed very different to that of Neil Connelly, but, of course, six months later, she would at least have got over the initial shock of her son’s death. He decided that he would almost certainly achieve more from this meeting if he was absolutely honest from the start.
‘Mrs Foster, I’m not from the army,’ he said.
‘Not from the army?’ Now, she looked more than puzzled. She looked alarmed. Kelly felt slightly guilty about even being in her home. But he had no intention of stopping.
‘No, Mrs Foster.’ He appraised the woman sitting opposite him. She looked drawn and worn out, as if life had dealt her one blow too many. Her eyes were dull. Kelly took a deep breath and started talking.
‘Mrs Foster, I came to talk to you about how your son died. Look, I may be bothering you for nothing, and if so I apologise in advance, particularly at what is obviously a distressing time. But there has been another alleged accidental death at Hangridge—’
Kelly was about to tell the whole story, to explain how he had met Alan Connelly and what the young man had told him just minutes before he died. But Mrs Foster interrupted him.
‘Another death?’ she said, and her eyes were suddenly bright. ‘That’s three, then. Three in not much more than seven months, it must be.’
Kelly was completely taken aback.
‘What do you mean, three?’ he queried.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Mrs Foster picked up the mug of tea on the table in front of her and sipped it gingerly, as if it were considerably hotter than Kelly knew it to be.
Kelly shook his head.
‘Oh.’ Mrs Foster took another sip of tea. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but then, in spite of the instant spark of interest she exhibited when Kelly had begun to tell her about Alan Connelly, she didn’t look like a woman who was capable of hurrying any more. Kelly realised that he must not put any pressure on her. He waited.
After a few seconds she started to speak again.
‘Jossy was the first,’ she said. ‘The first we knew of, anyway. Jocelyn Slade, but they always called her Jossy. Craig did, anyway. She was Craig’s girlfriend. Well, they hadn’t known each other long and I’ve really no idea how serious they were about each other …’
‘And she was stationed at Hangridge?’ Kelly was puzzled and unwittingly echoed Karen’s remark to Gerrard Parker-Brown. ‘I didn’t even know there were women in infantry regiments.’
‘There aren’t. Jossy was in the Adjutant General Corps. She was at Hangridge for infantry training before being sent to Northern Ireland with her own regiment. That’s how she met our Craig—’
‘Ah.’ Kelly had interrupted Mrs Foster’s flow and cursed himself. ‘Please go on,’ he encouraged. ‘Will you tell me everything you know about Jossy’s death.’
Mrs Foster nodded. ‘That cut up about it, Craig was. She was eighteen, too, just a couple of months younger than our lad. She was shot. She died of gunshot wounds, just a few weeks before our Craig went. It wasn’t right, you know. Craig always said it wasn’t right. That’s why my Phillip got on to it, you see. He was writing and phoning right up to when he died, wanting to know what happened. Exactly what happened, he said. But you know the army. They
closed ranks on us, really, we never got told anything. That’s what hurt, I think. Our boy dead and nobody even prepared to talk to us properly about it. He never got over it, Phillip, you know. He’d had a dodgy ticker for years, but he coped, did what the doctors told him. He’d learned to live with it, had Phillip. Till Craig went …’
Her voice tailed off. Kelly had a million questions and none of them were about Phillip Foster. But he knew that the moment had not yet come. If Marcia Foster was rambling, then it was because she needed to. Kelly had decades of experience of interviewing bereaved and distressed people. He knew better than to interrupt.
‘… After our Craig died, well, Phil stopped taking care of himself, watching what he ate, taking regular exercise, like he’d been told. Stopped all of that. He began working all the hours God gave, to forget, I suppose, and he even took up smoking again. Eventually his heart just gave out. So there you are. Six months ago I buried my only son, now I’m burying my husband.’
Kelly waited a few seconds before he spoke. ‘Mrs Foster, how exactly did Jocelyn Slade die? Was her death also supposed to be a training accident?’
‘No. She was on sentry duty. Standing outside the camp, by the main gates. They said she took her own life, shot herself. My Craig never believed it, you see. That was the thing. He said from the start that Jocelyn would never have killed herself. Not my Jossy, he used to say, not even after what they did to her. Not suicide. Not Jossy. But we took it all with a pinch of salt, to be honest, everything Craig said, because we knew he was that cut up, and, well, she was his girl. So if he
accepted it was suicide, then he’d have blamed himself, wouldn’t he. In some way. Bound to have done. And we’d never met Jocelyn, you see. But then when our Craig went too, no more than six weeks later, it was, well, you can’t help wondering, can you? Something’s not …’
‘What did Craig think happened to Jossy? Did he think someone killed her? And if so, why?’
‘He used to say Jossy hadn’t committed suicide, that she’d been murdered because of things that had happened to her. We asked him what he meant, what had happened to her? And he just said there were some men in the army who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and were untouchable. But he wouldn’t say any more, and looking back, after he’d gone, we thought he might actually have been scared to say any more. But at the time, well. He liked to spin a bit of a yarn, did Craig, he liked a bit of drama, and we didn’t take much notice at all, to tell the truth. Until he went too, that is. Looking back, Phil and I used to reckon there was something really important he hadn’t told us. He kept going on about Jossy and him knowing things they shouldn’t know. But he never said what, you see.’
Marcia Foster stopped abruptly. ‘Look, who are you? If you’re not army, who are you?’
Kelly did his best to enlighten her. It wasn’t easy. He was a one-time journalist pretending to be a novelist, sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong again. The story of his life, really, and now he no longer even did it for a living. It was actually quite tricky to make it halfway clear to Mrs Foster what he was doing getting involved in these deaths, not least because he wasn’t quite sure himself.
Mrs Foster, however, did not seem to find it as bewildering as he did.
‘Oh, a writer, are you?’ she responded. ‘That would explain it, then.’
‘Yes,’ said Kelly, who wasn’t sure it explained anything, but was extremely pleased that she thought so. He told her then how his interest had been aroused, all about meeting Alan Connelly in the pub and what the boy had told him.