Authors: Hilary Bonner
Kelly was surprised and impressed. He thought for a moment. Apart from anything else, it was also a heaven-sent excuse to get in touch with the Connellys again. Neil Connelly hadn’t been very receptive, but Kelly would now be able to tell him about two more deaths. That might change things.
‘I’m not sure that I should do that, Margaret,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll contact them again, tell them all about you and ask them to call you. How’s that?’
‘OK.’ She paused. ‘There’s something else. Marcia Foster and I wondered if you would help us. We’ve no experience of doing anything like this. We wondered if you’d tell us what we should do, who we should write to, that sort of thing.’
‘Well, yes,’ Kelly begun. The journalist in him was beginning to think about what all this would mean in terms of his big story. Selfishly, the problem for him would be that this action group could mean that his exclusive might become public property sooner than he had bargained for. If the families started going
straight to the TV and press, and there was little doubt that attracting the attention of the media would be a major part of any campaign, then Kelly’s input would become virtually irrelevant – or, at least, it would be based solely on what he had so far.
‘It’s more than that, really, though,’ Margaret Slade continued. ‘We’d like you to conduct an investigation on our behalf. People hire private detectives for stuff like this, don’t they? Well, we’d like to hire you. You’re a professional investigator, after all, of a kind. And you’ve already told us much more than we knew before.’
‘Well, I don’t know—’
‘We’ll pay you,’ interrupted Margaret Slade. ‘I’d never expect anyone to work for nothing. We’ll pay you the going rate. I don’t have any money, but Marcia has her husband’s life insurance, and she says she knows he wouldn’t be able to think of a better way for her to spend it. We’re going to start a fighting fund, too. I’ve read about that sort of thing. It’s what people do when they’re trying to achieve something, when they have a cause, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes.’ Kelly felt quite humbled. He was, however, still a journalist at heart. It occurred to him almost at once that Margaret Slade’s suggestion could give him the solution to his exclusivity problem.
‘There wouldn’t be any need for you to pay me,’ he said. ‘Look, a big part of any campaign like this is getting the media on board and on your side. You realise that, I’m sure?’
‘Yes, of course. That’s one of the reasons we thought you would be the right person for us to employ.’
‘You did?’ Kelly was surprised. He was pretty sure he hadn’t mentioned his journalistic past to either of the two women. He hadn’t wanted to frighten them away, not at that stage. And, in any case, even if he had mentioned it to Margaret Slade, he very much doubted that she would have been in any condition to remember.
‘Well, the thing is,’ he continued. ‘If you give me exclusive rights to place any stories and information that we come up with between us, I can make quite enough money directly from the media. You wouldn’t need to pay me anything.’
‘Better still.’
‘Right.’ Kelly paused. ‘You seem to know that I was a journalist. How? I don’t think I told you …’
‘No, you said you were a writer, so I looked you up on the Net,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t find any books, but then all these newspaper stories kept popping up, and I found a biog’ on you when you’d been a speaker at a journalists’ training seminar a few years ago.’
‘Ah.’ Kelly would have to rethink his opinion of Margaret Slade. When sober, she was very different to the image he had conjured up of her in his mind. He now detected a distinctly educated note in her voice, which he had totally missed when he first met her. But then, she had been so drunk it would have been difficult to detect anything. However, her memory of that afternoon seemed to be rather better than he would have considered possible, given the state she was in. None the less, his initial reaction had been to be surprised that she had a computer at all, let alone that she was able to surf the Net so effectively.
‘It’s a very old computer,’ Margaret Slade continued,
as if reading his mind. She really did seem to be an unusually perceptive woman. ‘I bought it second-hand for Jossy when she was still at school. Before … before …’
She paused mid-sentence and Kelly was momentarily puzzled. She had already said she bought the computer when Jossy was still at school. She could have been about to say ‘before Jossy died’, but that was obvious. She wouldn’t have bought her a computer afterwards, would she?
‘Before I started drinking again,’ she continued eventually.
‘Ah,’ said Kelly.
‘Yes. Look. I want you to know about my drinking before we go any further.’
‘You sound sober enough, now,’ said Kelly.
‘It is ten to eight in the morning,’ responded Margaret Slade, a light irony in her voice.
She had a sense of humour too, thought Kelly.
‘Fair enough,’ said Kelly. ‘But you don’t sound like someone who was drunk when they went to bed last night.’
‘And you’d know that?’
‘Oh, yes. First-hand knowledge. For many years. And I suspect I was probably much much worse than you’ve ever been.’
‘You must have gone some, then,’ retorted Margaret Slade.
Kelly was beginning to rather enjoy this conversation. ‘I certainly did,’ he replied.
‘Well, it began in the usual way for me, as a young woman. Social drinking, that sort of thing. It was the seventies. Everybody I knew was drinking. About the only thing Jossy’s father and I had in common
was the booze. I think it’s why I married him. My parents, well, they were already getting worried about my drinking, and they disapproved of Trevor from the start. Wish I’d listened to them. Then I might not be in this state.
‘Anyway, after Trev left me, I very nearly hit rock bottom. But I managed to pull myself together, reckoned I had to, for the kids. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and somehow or other I kicked the drink. It was never easy for me, but I did it. Then my parents died suddenly one after the other, and they left me some money. We didn’t always live in this crummy flat, you know. I had a nice little house.
‘I wasn’t such a bad mother, either, I don’t think. Not all the time, anyway. I was dry for what – six, seven years. Then when Jossy was, oh, about fourteen, I started again. It was man trouble. Story of my life. I thought I’d found Mr Right, and he turned out to be an even bigger rat than my ex-husband. He conned me out of a lot of money. I took out a mortgage on our little house to invest in an office-cleaning business he was starting, and guess what, it went bust. If it ever bloody existed. And then, when he had milked me virtually dry, he took off. Gone. I was left bitter, twisted and broke. Naturally, I thought that alcohol was my only solace, and that was the final straw.
‘We lost the house, ended up in this dump, and I don’t think I’ve been sober for a day since. Until – until the day after you came calling.’
‘Really?’
‘I went to an AA meeting again that night. That very night. Half canned, still. First time in nearly five years. I thought I’d screwed my Jossy up. I thought I
was the reason she was dead, and that made me not care about anything else at all, including myself. Now I know it may have been nothing to do with me. I need to find out the truth, for me and for my girl. She could have been murdered, John, that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’
Kelly spoke carefully.
‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘It has to be possible. But it isn’t going to be an easy ride to find out what really happened. The army will block us all the way, I’m sure of it. They’ve already started doing just that.’
‘I didn’t imagine for one minute that it would be easy, John,’ Margaret Slade responded. ‘That’s why I wanted you on board. I had an uncle who was a Fleet Street reporter. It was years ago and he’s dead now, but I still remember his stories from when I was a kid. If an old tabloid hack can’t find a way through red tape and obstruction, I don’t know who can.’
Kelly found that he was smiling when he put the phone down. The adrenaline was starting to pump. He couldn’t wait to get on the case. He wanted to call Alan Connelly’s father straight away, to try to persuade him that he should be prepared to question the army’s version of events, and that he should get in touch with Margaret Slade.
He looked at his watch again. It was still not quite eight o’clock. He didn’t dare ring the Connelly household yet, not before at least 8.30, he reckoned. He had not exactly been welcomed into their home with open arms, and he suspected that Neil Connelly was not going to be all that pleased to hear from him, let alone if he disturbed the family too early in the morning. Kelly had to persuade the man to listen and
to think, and he had to be very careful in his approach.
He mulled all this over as he picked up the mug he had used in the early hours and made his way into the kitchen to make more tea. His right leg was still not functioning properly. He kicked it to and fro as he refilled the kettle, and while he waited for it to boil. Spending half the night in that chair had done him no good at all. He stretched his back and his arms. Everything ached.
He made tea in the same unwashed mug, pouring boiling water over a tea bag, and perched on one of the two stools alongside what Moira had called the breakfast bar. Moira. The service sheet from her funeral lay on the worktop next to the cooker. He hadn’t noticed it in the night. But then, he had been in a kind of sleepless haze.
His mind was buzzing now. First of all there was Hangridge and the possibly immense significance of his conversation with Margaret Slade. Her approach to him presented something of a dream scenario. In his mind’s eye, he could already see the avalanche of major stories with which he would bombard Fleet Street. Not to mention TV and radio. Then there would be the book, the real-life story of Hangridge, just an extension of the investigative journalism he had made a lifelong career of, something he was well qualified for – unlike attempting to be a novelist. And after that, the film …
Yes. There was all of that. But mixed up with it, somehow, were his feelings for Moira, his sense of loss, his compassion for her, and his guilt. He felt genuine compassion, too, for the young Hangridge soldiers who had died, and for their bereaved families.
Predictably enough, however, it was Hangridge that was dominating his thoughts. It wasn’t just that the slowly unfolding drama was becoming so intriguing. He was also aware that his involvement in it would be sure to distract him from his pain. He told himself that Moira would have understood.
He checked his watch again. Quarter past eight. Still too early. There was a possibility, of course, that Neil Connelly had returned to his job as a postman, in which case he would probably have left his home hours earlier, but Kelly didn’t think so. He reckoned it might be some time yet before Connelly would have recovered sufficiently from the shock of his son’s death to return to work. He wandered into the living room and whiled away the next fifteen minutes watching breakfast TV. At 8.30 promptly he called the Connellys in Glasgow, which turned out to be something of an anticlimax. There was no reply. The family had an answering machine but Kelly did not leave a message. He needed to make a personal approach, and he needed it to be good. He would just have to keep calling until he could speak to Neil Connelly direct. Momentarily, he cursed himself for not phoning earlier, even though he knew really that he had done the right thing. He had no idea if Mrs Connelly still worked or not, but maybe Neil Connelly had returned to his job already, after all. If he had called earlier, he may have caught him. On the other hand, maybe the family were just not answering the phone. Maybe the whole lot of them – Alan Connelly’s mother, father, younger brother and sister – had shut themselves away from the world in their neat little home, an oasis of order on that grim housing estate, isolated by their grief.
Kelly shivered. There was no physical reason for it. The room wasn’t cold and he wasn’t ill. He remembered his mother’s old saying, that somebody had walked over his grave. Maybe they had. Kelly could think of one hell of a lot of folk who might like to.
Just before nine he called Karen Meadows. She was another one he had to use his best persuasion techniques on. He really needed her help. He also suddenly wanted very much to know what progress she had made, if any, during the six days since Moira had died.
‘I didn’t expect to hear from you today,’ she said.
‘No, well, I guess we all just try to carry on,’ responded Kelly. He thought he sounded trite and pathetic at the same time.
‘Yes, I guess we do.’ At least he could rely on Karen Meadows not to be judgemental, thought Kelly. It was perhaps a strange asset for a police officer. Kelly was not sure that he had ever been aware of her passing any kind of personal judgement on anyone.
‘I wanted to talk about Hangridge,’ he said bluntly.
‘Today? Are you sure?’ She was being quite gentle with him. By her standards, certainly. He appreciated it.
‘Absolutely sure,’ he said.
‘OK, I was going to call you tomorrow, anyway. I just didn’t want to bother you the day after the funeral, but I do need to talk to you.’
That made Karen Meadows the second woman to surprise him that morning. And he had still not had breakfast. She had not been ready to give much away the last time they had met. All that stuff about
procedure and protocol. Something must have happened. Something that had changed her mind, made her actually want to talk to him.
‘I just wondered how you’ve been getting on with it, and if—’ he began.
‘No,’ she interrupted swiftly. ‘Not on the phone. Can you meet me this evening?’
‘Of course. The pub? Or do you want to go for something to eat …’
‘No. My place. About half past seven. We need to talk in private.’
Kelly felt a burst of adrenaline coursing through his veins. This was out of character. What did it mean? What was going on?
He agreed at once and Karen then ended the call with the abruptness he was used to, which he was actually rather more comfortable with than her earlier gentle approach. He finished his tea, wolfed down a bowl of cornflakes and then tried the Connellys’ number again. This time Neil Connelly himself answered promptly. Maybe the family had been having a lie-in. Kelly doubted they had been sleeping well. He knew all about not sleeping well.