Authors: Hilary Bonner
He told her then, in some detail, about the inquest reports, and the various anomalies. ‘I also have an address for a young man who was called as a witness at the inquest into Jossy’s death. The other sentry. James Gates. Didn’t you go to the inquest, Margaret?’
‘I did, yes. But I was drinking then, wasn’t I. I hardly remember anything about it. Don’t forget, it never occurred to me to query that Jossy had killed herself.’
‘So you don’t remember Gates’ evidence.’
‘Vaguely. Now you mention it. Very vaguely.’
‘Well, it seems the coroner was more than a little vague too.’ Kelly gave Margaret Slade a summary of James Gates’ evidence. ‘It should have rung extremely loud warning bells. But the coroner challenged nothing and passed a suicide verdict, almost as directed by the army. Fucking disgrace, actually.’
‘Ah. So your next move is to talk to Gates?’
‘Absolutely. Him, and Trevor Parsons’ family, of course. I may find you some more campaigners there, Margaret. James Gates could be trickier, though. It’ll be a question of whether or not I can get to him, I reckon. He’s probably still a serving soldier. If he really thinks there was anything dodgy about those deaths, he’s likely to be pretty nervous about speaking to me or anyone else.’
Kelly thought for a moment.
‘I will tell you something I want from you, Margaret. A signed letter authorising me to act on behalf of the families. I’ll certainly need something like that if I’m going to get anywhere with the army, and it could be useful to show to all kinds of people. I suggest you list the other families involved so far, mentioning briefly what happened to their sons, and, of course, include your own details. Can you do that?’
‘Of course. I’m a drunk, not an idiot.’
‘A permanently sober drunk, I hope.’
‘So do I.’
‘Indeed. So can you fax it to me? Have you got a fax machine?’
‘No. But there’s one I can use at an office equipment shop just down the road. I’ll send it as soon as they open in the morning, at eight, I think.’
‘Good.’
‘John, reassure me, we’re not just imagining some kind of conspiracy, are we?’
‘No, Margaret, I’m damned sure of it. Actually, I get more and more sure with every step we take. And, for what it’s worth, my police contact, who is someone with very well-developed intuition in these
matters, is damned sure of it too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be getting anything like this level of cooperation. Something’s going on, and it’s very nasty indeed.’
‘It’s pretty hard to get your head around, isn’t it? I mean, I keep going over and over in my mind what we are talking about here. If it really is murder, who on earth would want to kill a load of young soldiers? And why?’
‘I don’t know, Margaret. And, if I’m honest, I don’t know if we’ll ever know. But there is no doubt that the army has successfully covered everything up so far, and one thing we can do is blow that cover-up wide open.’
‘You’ve said it, John. And how!’
Kelly found he was smiling broadly again as he ended the call. Margaret Slade was turning out to be some woman. He liked feisty, intelligent women who were not afraid of a fight. And that thought led him back to Karen Meadows and the somewhat disastrous end to their evening together, which caused him to stopped smiling at once.
Karen had been right. He was on an emotional roller coaster. He just couldn’t sort his feelings out at all.
Margaret Slade was as good as her word. The fax came through shortly after eight. Kelly folded it and tucked it into the top pocket of his suede bomber jacket. He had been waiting for it. He was all ready to leave the house and drive to Exeter to visit the last civilian address listed for Trevor Parsons. Once he was involved in an investigation, Kelly didn’t waste any time.
The drive to Exeter took little more than forty-five minutes, and it was still only just nine when Kelly pulled up outside a big, rambling, old house on the outskirts of the town. Two small boys, scruffily dressed but somehow well-scrubbed-looking, rosy-cheeked and apparently brimming with good health, were squabbling over a broken tricycle on the pavement right outside.
As Kelly stepped out of his MG, a large woman, in her early fifties, opened the front door.
‘Inside, you two, before you have an accident out there in that street,’ she ordered.
There was a chorus of ‘Oh, Mams’ and a pleading to stay in the street for just a bit longer, but the two boys none the less obeyed readily enough. They looked about the same age or thereabouts, and although Kelly wasn’t very good at guessing children’s ages, he was pretty sure this pair were both under five. That, of course, was an educated guess. It was term time after all. If they were any older than that they should have been at school. And glancing at the woman they had called Mam, Kelly didn’t think she would be someone who would take any nonsense on such matters. It did occur to him, though, that she was a little old to be the mother of these two small boys.
He became aware that the woman was studying him curiously now, which was hardly surprising. After all, a strange man had parked his car outside her front door and was now standing on the pavement, staring at her shamelessly.
‘Mrs Parsons?’ he enquired.
She looked puzzled
‘Who?’
‘You’re not Mrs Parsons?’
The woman shook her head. She was tall, broad rather than plump, and had long greying-brown hair which framed a strong kind face.
‘Oh. Perhaps I have the wrong address. I wanted to talk about the death of Trevor Parsons.’
‘Trevor? But I thought that was all over. I mean, it was more than a year ago that it happened, wasn’t it …’
The woman’s voice trailed away.
‘So you are Trevor Parsons’ mother?’
‘No. No. Not his mother.’
‘Well, you knew him, anyway?’
‘Oh yes. Of course. Look you’d better come in.’
Kelly followed her into the lofty hallway of the old Victorian villa. Inside the house was not unlike the two little boys who were now playing in the small front garden – a bit scruffy but well scrubbed. The tiled floor shone, although several of the tiles were chipped and broken, and the once white paintwork was scuffed and tinged with yellow, but none the less spotlessly clean.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ said the woman, leading the way into a big square room dominated by an old gas cooking-range and a huge wooden table covered with a flower-petalled plastic tablecloth.
‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing towards any one of a selection of ill-matched chairs. ‘Are you from the army? There’s nothing more I can tell you about Trevor, that’s for sure. It was a tragedy, his death, but I didn’t think anyone was all that surprised.’
‘You didn’t?’ Kelly queried, as he chose the chair nearest to him.
‘Well, no. Look, who did you say you were?’
Kelly, glad that he had had the foresight to ask
Margaret Slade for that letter, produced it from his pocket.
‘There’ve been some other deaths in the Devonshire Fusiliers, and I have been asked by the families of some of the young people involved to investigate a little further. There are some unsolved mysteries in certain cases. I’m looking into it, that’s all at this stage.’
Kelly held out Margaret Slade’s letter towards the woman and she took it from him.
‘I see,’ she said.
Kelly waited in silence while she read it. When she had finished and looked up at him questioningly, he spoke again.
‘Forgive me, but I wonder if I could ask who you are and what your relationship to Trevor Parsons was. I thought you were his mother at first, because, you see, yours was his last civilian address.’
The woman nodded. ‘I’m Gill Morris,’ she said. ‘I was Trevor’s foster-mother, but only quite briefly …’
There was a crash as if a ton of bricks had been thrown against the kitchen door, which swung open to allow the two small boys to burst through, pushing their tricycle before them like some kind of battering ram. Not for the first time, Kelly marvelled at the amount of noise and commotion the very youngest of children could create.
‘No, you don’t. Out!’ commanded Gill Morris. And without even bothering to dissent, the two boys swung around, still pushing the tricycle before them with dangerous force and speed, and crashed through the door again.
‘They’re at the worst age,’ said Gill Morris, casting her eyes heavenwards. ‘They’re already quite big and
surprisingly strong, but they have little or no brain at all to go with their physical power. And no control, either. They’re like miniature loose cannons.’
She smiled indulgently. Kelly raised one eyebrow in silent query.
‘Yes, I’m fostering these two, too,’ she said. ‘My Ricky and I, that’s what we do. We’re professional foster-parents, I suppose. He inherited this great big house from his parents and it just cries out to be filled with children, doesn’t it? We had three of our own, and then, when they started to grow up, it seemed natural to take in some more.’
‘I see,’ said Kelly. ‘So Trevor was one of them. What can you tell me about him?’
‘Not that much, really. We only had him for seven or eight months. He’d had a hell of a life as a youngster, poor kid. Knocked around by his dad. Neglected by his mother. He’d been in and out of care since before school age, and it had certainly affected him. He was a difficult kid, no doubt about that, but who could blame him? He was fifteen when he came to us and hadn’t seen either of his parents for years. And he was about sixteen and a half when he walked out one day. He always said he wanted to join the army, but we didn’t even know he’d done it until they came to tell us he was dead. Apparently, he’d joined up as soon as he was allowed to, at seventeen, but we didn’t know.’
‘So, what about the six months or so between when he was with you and when he was able to join the army? Why didn’t he give that address?’
‘I’m not even sure that he had an address. We heard through social services that they’d found him staying with a mate at one point. I don’t know
anything for certain. We never saw him again after he left us. Funny really, some of the kids do get to be almost like your own, however much you fight against it, and a lot of them come back and visit. We’re surrogate grandparents a couple of dozen times over now, you know.’
As she spoke, Gill Morris sounded like any proud grandmother. He thought what a special person she must be. And her husband, come to that.
‘But Trevor, once he’d gone, he’d gone. And like I said, he wasn’t with us that long. Ricky and I even thought that it was quite possible that he may have slept rough for a bit. He always fancied himself as joining the SAS, you know. But there wouldn’t have been much chance of him getting into a regiment like that. To be honest, Ricky and I were a bit surprised that he got into the army at all.’
‘Really, why?’
‘Well, like I said, he was pretty screwed up by all that had happened to him. He liked the idea of playing soldiers, but he wasn’t exactly stable. I wouldn’t have put a gun in his hand, I can tell you that for nothing.’
‘And from what you said, it wasn’t a shock to hear that he had killed himself.’
‘Well, it was a shock, but when you thought about it, poor Trevor was so messed up that he had to be a likely candidate for suicide. You couldn’t imagine him coping with army life. You couldn’t imagine him coping with any sort of life, really. We just hoped that as he got older he’d settle down, sort his head out a bit. But he never got the chance, did he?’
‘It would seem not.’ Kelly was thoughtful. Maybe Trevor Parsons’ death had been a genuine suicide,
after all. It still didn’t mean that Jocelyn Slade had killed herself, or that the deaths of Craig Foster and Alan Connelly had been genuine accidents.
‘So, you honestly have never thought that there was anything suspicious about Trevor’s death?’
‘No. Not at all. Should we have done?’
Kelly didn’t know quite what to say. ‘Probably not,’ he responded eventually. ‘It’s just that the parents of three other dead Devonshire Fusiliers are very suspicious indeed about the way in which their children died.’
Gill Morris nodded her head slowly. ‘I grasped that from your letter,’ she said. ‘But all I can tell you about Trevor, Mr Kelly, is that the poor kid had probably been a tragedy waiting to happen for many, many years.’
Kelly left quickly after ascertaining that Gill Morris could help him no more. And what she had told him, while not necessarily having any relevance at all to the other deaths, had sown the first seeds of doubt in his mind. Back behind the wheel of the MG, he told himself that was no bad thing. It was important for him to keep as open a mind as possible in order to conduct a proper investigation. If he was too convinced that the deaths were suspicious, then his inquiries could end up being just as perfunctory as he was sure the army’s had been. He needed to be very sure of himself before coming to any conclusions. He owed Karen that, because he knew she was sticking her neck out probably more than ever before.
He checked his watch and, as he did so, cursed his luck that the home of the witness in the Jocelyn
Slade case, Fusilier James Gates, was in London, and East London at that, which meant that when approaching from the west the whole of the city centre had to be crossed. After all, the Devonshire Fusiliers still considered their home county to be their major source of recruitment, and Kelly already knew from his days as an
Evening Argus
reporter that approximately sixty per cent of the regiment’s strength were native Devonians. Yet so far his investigations had taken him to Scotland and to Reading, and now he needed to travel to London proper. It was, however, only just gone ten o’clock. There was therefore plenty of time to make the return trip that day, and as he was already in Exeter, Kelly decided to pick up one of the Plymouth or Cornwall to London expresses from St David’s station.
He parked in the station car park. The next train, due just half an hour later, arrived at St David’s on schedule. For a change, the journey passed without incident and the train also arrived at Paddington on time. Kelly took the tube to Mile End, having already checked the London
A–Z
, which he always kept in his car, to plot the short walk necessary to take him from the tube station to what he believed to be James Gates’ family home. He no longer had the money for cross-London taxis, and in any case he hoped that the tube would actually be quicker. Certainly, on this occasion, his entire journey turned out to be a surprisingly efficient one.