Authors: Hilary Bonner
With rather less urgency, two officers carrying cases emerged from the police car. SOCOs, thought Kelly. Scenes of Crime Officers, whose attendance was standard procedure nowadays in the case of sudden death, even when there was little or no suggestion of any kind of foul play.
Sergeant Smythe promptly set off to join the various newcomers. ‘You’ll have to wait,’ he called over his shoulder in a rather peremptory tone.
Kelly hunched his inadequately clad shoulders against the rain and did just that. Icy-cold droplets ran down his neck inside his collar. He shivered. One aspect of journalism that he had been looking forward to leaving behind was the waiting. Door-stepping,
they called it. Waiting on the outside, looking in, waiting on the off-chance that somebody who knew something might give you a minute of their time, and, in so doing, enough information to make a story. Kelly was too old for door-stepping. Come to think of it, he reckoned he had always been too old for door-stepping. But here he was, at it again. And this time he wasn’t even being paid for it, he grumbled silently to himself.
Eventually, Audley Richards stood up and stepped back from the body on the ground. Then the paramedics, by now looking as if they were quite satisfied that there was nothing they could do to help, began to load the dead man onto a stretcher.
The Home Office pathologist produced a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, removed one with one hand and put it in his mouth, and with his other hand raised an old Zippo lighter to the cigarette’s end. Funny how many doctors smoked, thought Kelly idly. Indeed, doctors were probably leaders of the do what I say, not what I do brigade, he reflected.
The flame of Dr Richards’ lighter flickered uncertainly for just a few seconds before dying out. Two further attempts to light up produced only the same result.
‘Damn,’ muttered Audley Richards, hunching his back against the wind and rain, as he tried to provide some sort of protection from the elements with his body’s bulk.
‘Allow me,’ said Kelly, stepping smartly forward and cupping his hands around the pathologist’s cigarette end.
‘What the fuck are you doing here, Kelly?’ asked the doctor conversationally, his small Hitler-like
moustache bristling as he spoke. He and Kelly went back a long way. Kelly respected Audley Richards because of his reputation for professionalism, and was prepared to overlook his perennial grumpiness. Dr Richards, on the other hand, had always made it quite clear to Kelly that he saw no use whatsoever for journalists in general, and that he was particularly incensed merely by Kelly’s presence on earth. This did not, however, prevent him from gratefully taking advantage of the shelter provided by Kelly’s cupped hands in order to finally light up.
‘Just driving by,’ said Kelly. ‘Or trying to.’
Richards grunted around his cigarette, which had finally begun to burn surprisingly well under the circumstances.
‘I think I may know the victim,’ Kelly continued.
‘Poor sod,’ said Audley Richards. Kelly eyed him quizzically. Poor sod because he was dead, or poor sod because he had been unlucky enough even to have met Kelly in passing? Kelly wasn’t at all sure. But while he was still working it out, Sergeant Smythe approached and touched him lightly on one arm.
‘Right, you can have a look now, if you wish.’ Sergeant Smythe turned to the pathologist. ‘Unless you have any objections, Dr Richards? Unorthodox, I know, but the lad doesn’t seem to have any identification papers on him at all, and we do need to find out who he is.’
‘No objections, Sergeant. Nothing more I can do. The whole thing’s perfectly straightforward, if you ask me. One word of warning.’ Audley Richards extended a thumb in the general direction of Kelly. ‘It won’t be if he gets involved.’
‘You know this man, Doctor?’
‘Oh, yes, I know him, Sergeant. Just make sure his coat button isn’t a camera, that’s all.’
The sergeant looked puzzled. Kelly stepped past him before he had time to change his mind and approached the paramedics who were now loading their stretcher into the ambulance.
‘The sergeant says I can have a look,’ he began.
The older of the two paramedics looked towards Sergeant Smythe, who nodded his assent, albeit a little uncertainly.
The body on the stretcher was entirely covered by a blanket. The second paramedic pulled it back, exposing the face of the dead young man.
There didn’t seem to be a mark on him. Kelly had mentally prepared himself for a gruesome sight. But this lad just looked as if he were in a deep sleep. Whatever injuries he had sustained must have been solely to his body. His face remained untouched and Kelly had no problem at all identifying him.
Sergeant Smythe had followed him over to the ambulance. Kelly turned round to face him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. It is the lad I met in the pub.’
‘Right,’ responded Smythe. ‘You and I had better have a chat then, hadn’t we, Mr Kelly.’
He led Kelly over to his patrol car and gestured to one of the paramedics to follow them. The interior light snapped on as the sergeant opened the nearside rear passenger door. There was already a man sitting in the back seat, and Kelly registered at once that this must be the lorry driver. He had a wide, plumpish face, etched with laughter lines around his eyes and mouth, indicating that he was probably a jovial good-humoured sort. At that moment, however, he appeared anything but jovial. His skin was so pale it
looked almost as if all the blood had been drained from him, his eyes were red-rimmed and bright with shock, and he was trembling.
‘OK, mate,’ said the sergeant quite gently. ‘The ambulance boys are going to look after you now. All right?’
Obediently, the lorry driver climbed out of the car. His legs buckled slightly as he tried to stand up. The paramedic put a supportive arm around him and steered him off in the direction of the ambulance. Sergeant Smythe and Kelly watched for only a second or two before getting into the car themselves, where, within its relative shelter, the sergeant produced his notebook and jotted down everything Kelly was able to tell him.
His attitude to Kelly seemed considerably less cool now, which was perhaps not surprising. After all, Kelly had done a large part of his job for him. He had been able to tell the sergeant that the victim was a soldier and that his name was Alan, and where he was stationed. One call to the barracks at Hangridge should be enough to sort out full identification. The accident seemed straightforward enough and Kelly guessed that Sergeant Smythe couldn’t wait to get the scene cleared up so that he could return to the warm familiarity of Ashburton police station and a steaming hot cup of tea.
Kelly could well guess how the other man felt. He was shivering himself now, and it wasn’t with shock. He had seen all too many dead bodies in his time. The cold and the wet had seeped right through his inadequate clothing and he felt chilled to the bone. But he was not yet quite finished.
‘There’s just one thing, Sergeant,’ said Kelly. ‘The
two men who turned up in the pub looking for this lad. Two more soldiers, I’m sure. Where did they go? Has anybody seen them?’
‘I don’t know anything about any two men,’ said Sergeant Smythe, reverting at once to his earlier attitude of near hostility. Smythe did not want any complications, thought Kelly. His body language defied Kelly to question him any further. However, Kelly had a thick skin. You grew one in the job he had done through most of his life.
‘But didn’t the lorry driver see them?’ he persisted.
Smythe studied him for a few seconds without enthusiasm. Then, sighing exaggeratedly, he opened the driver’s door and began to swing his long legs out onto the tarmac road, straight into an icy blast of windswept rain.
‘Wait here,’ he muttered to Kelly, who needed no encouragement whatsoever to remain exactly where he was, almost curled into the passenger seat of the police car, with his arms tightly wrapped round his chest in a futile bid to retain as much body warmth as possible.
The sergeant returned within only a couple of minutes, shaking droplets of icy water off his police issue waterproof jacket and all over Kelly as he climbed back into the car.
‘The driver didn’t see anybody else,’ he said. ‘He didn’t see anyone at all apart from chummy, when it was too darned late.’
‘But those two blokes must have been with the lad. They wouldn’t have left him in that state, would they?’
‘Who knows what a load of off-their-head soldiers will do,’ responded Sergeant Smythe flatly.
Kelly opened his mouth to respond but found he didn’t have the energy. He reached for the door handle. His fingers were so cold he had difficulty even grasping it. But the good news was that his body temperature was by now so low that when he eventually climbed out into the wind and rain he barely felt it any more. None the less, he began to sprint back to the MG, but his path was momentarily blocked by the ambulance containing the body of the dead squaddie, which was now slowly pulling away from the scene.
As Kelly watched it leave he could see again, all too clearly in his mind’s eye, the lad’s lifeless young face, and wondered fleetingly just how old he had been. Under twenty, definitely. Eighteen or nineteen, maximum, he thought. Little more than a child in the great scheme of things, and with so much life left to live. To his surprise Kelly, who was, after all, not unfamiliar with the spectacle of lives wasted and cut unnecessarily short, suddenly felt overwhelmed by a great sadness.
Kelly had had enough. He wanted to get away from the scene, shut the dead boy’s face out of his head and get warm as soon as possible.
He decided he wouldn’t wait for the truck to be removed, after all. Instead, he would take that big detour, retracing his journey back along the road past The Wild Dog and swinging a right at Two Bridges. This would make his journey home at least half as long again as it should be, and he still wasn’t looking forward to negotiating the top of the moor in thick mist, but he had now got to the point where he preferred the prospect of a long and difficult drive to merely waiting around getting colder and colder in such dreadful conditions. The rain was showing no signs whatsoever of easing. A fire engine and garage emergency vehicle had arrived just after Kelly had identified the boy, but they would not be allowed to even start their tricky manoeuvre until the SOCOs had finished measuring tyre marks on the road and generally checking out the accident scene.
Kelly started the little car’s engine and proceeded to attempt to turn round so that he would be facing in the direction from which he had originally come – a feat accomplished not without difficulty in the poor visibility on one of the narrowest sections of the road, with a ditch on one side, a stone wall on the other, and a camber in the middle that could have been
custom-built to wreck the low-slung exhaust system of an MGB.
He succeeded ultimately in executing something going on for a six- or seven-point turn and began to make his way back towards Two Bridges at little more than a crawl, as he struggled to see ahead through the mist and rain. But as he tentatively set out on the road over the highest section of the moor he would cross on his extended journey home, Dartmoor began to play one of its many tricks. The rain started to ease and the mist suddenly lifted. It was uncanny. A minute ago Kelly had hardly been able to see ten feet ahead, and now the road was totally clear.
Gratefully, he pressed his right foot down on the accelerator, the increased speed boosting the fairly meagre output of heat which was all the MG’s heater ever seemed able to produce. However, Kelly had only recently acquired a new soft top which fitted more snugly than any he had previously endured, and the little car was now just about warm enough to allow his body temperature to return to what he thought might be an almost normal level.
In the much improved conditions he relaxed slightly, easing the tension from his shoulders, and began to reflect on the events of the evening. Once he was comfortable enough to think about anything other than his own sorry physical state, he found that all his journalistic antennae were waggling. He told himself he was being ridiculous, but he couldn’t help it.
That lad in the pub had said that he was going to die. More than that. He had told Kelly he was going to be killed. And, probably only minutes later, he was dead. He had hinted at mysterious goings-on up at
Hangridge. He had quite obviously been most unhappy to see the arrival of the two men who had been looking for him, and Kelly would not forget in a long while the look of abject fear in his eyes as he had stood in the doorway of The Wild Dog.
‘Minutes later he was dead.’ This time Kelly said the words out loud, as he motored through Newton Abbot, making himself abide by the speed limit, more or less, in spite of his eagerness to get home and dry. He didn’t want any speeding points on his licence; he certainly couldn’t afford to lose it again, that was for sure.
It was almost midnight by the time he arrived at his terraced home in St Marychurch, high above Torquay. He parked in the street outside and stepped out of the MG onto a dry pavement. The rain had obviously stopped here at least an hour or two hours earlier. He opened the little gate into his tiny front garden which – had he bothered to look he could have clearly seen, thanks to the illumination of the street lamp right outside – was almost completely overgrown by an impressive selection of weeds. Kelly did not look and, as usual, noticed nothing at all about his front garden until he stepped into it and a strand of bramble, blowing in the still strong wind, lashed him viciously across his left cheek.
‘Fuck,’ he said loudly, brushing it away. He touched his face cautiously. He felt sure the damned thing had drawn blood. He glanced at the garden then, taking in its sorry condition with mild disgust. He supposed it really was time he did something about it, but he couldn’t afford to pay a gardener given the state his finances were in, and Kelly certainly wasn’t much of a gardener himself. Before
she’d been taken ill, his long-time partner Moira had always been in charge of the gardens, the tiny one at the front and the slightly bigger walled one at the back.