Authors: Hilary Bonner
‘How are you doing, darling?’ he muttered, cursing himself as he became aware of what he had said. How was she doing? What a stupid fucking question. Whether she chose to talk about it or not, the woman was dying. His woman was dying. How did he think she was doing, for fuck’s sake. He glanced away, blinking rapidly.
‘Oh, not so bad,’ said Moira.
‘Yes, we thought you were a little better today, Mum, didn’t we?’ interjected Paula.
‘You know, I do believe I was,’ continued Moira. ‘I’ve not had a bad day at all, not at all.’
‘You ate nearly all of that chicken broth I made you this evening, didn’t you, Mum?’
‘I did, dear. And, do you know, I really enjoyed it.’
Kelly felt his shoulders tensing. He wasn’t sure how much of this he could listen to. It was the same every time. The imminence of Moira’s death was never mentioned, and to Kelly the scene around her bed all too often resembled a cross between a Brian Rix farce and something out of Alan Bennett. If it weren’t so fucking tragic, it really would be funny, he thought.
It was as if they all had parts in a play and were acting out their specific roles. Only Kelly wasn’t very good at his. He sometimes thought he might do better if he were allowed to talk properly to Moira about her illness, about the death which was not far away and about how she felt, knowing that she would not be around for much longer. That was what he wanted to do, deep inside, but Moira had made it quite clear that was not her way. And in any case, if she suddenly
did start to talk to him in that manner, he suspected he wouldn’t be able to cope with that either. After all, Kelly was just as much of an ostrich as all of them. Worse really, he supposed. He did not even want to be in the same room as poor sick Moira, let alone make inconsequential small talk.
Moira squeezed his hand.
‘So, come on, John, tell us how the book’s going. What sort of day have you had?’
Kelly looked at her blankly. Once again, the truth did not seem quite the reply to make. What sort of day had he had? As seemed to be his habit, he had failed to write a single word. He had then gone to a pub, even though he dared not even have a beer, ostensibly to think, and more likely in a deliberate subconscious ploy both to avoid attempting to write and to evade seeing Moira. In the pub, he had met a frightened young man who had told him that he feared for his life. The young man had, however, been very drunk. None the less, a little later Kelly had watched his dead body being loaded into an ambulance, and his veteran reporter’s brain had promptly begun to jerk into gear to such an extent that he had been able to shift his promised visit to Moira from the back of his mind straight out of his head altogether.
That was the sort of day he’d had.
‘Pretty good, really,’ he said. ‘Another couple of thousand words done and dusted.’
The next morning Kelly felt absolutely terrible. The alarm clock woke him at six and he managed to force himself out of bed within half an hour of being disturbed by its insistent shrill bleeping, which was pretty good for Kelly, who was not a man who had ever enjoyed mornings.
Whenever he had writing of any kind to do, he found that making an early start, before his brain became clogged up with other things, was the best and most efficient way to undertake the task. But lately, his enforced early rising had been a waste of energy and the pain inflicted had led absolutely nowhere, because Kelly seemed incapable of putting words onto paper whatever time he hauled himself out of bed, and early starts just made him feel tired and irritable throughout the day, more often than not.
Resolutely, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen and brewed himself a strong pot of English Breakfast tea. The steaming, hot, dark brown liquid, into which he ladled his customary three spoonfuls of sugar, hit the back of his throat like a blast of pure adrenaline. By God, sweet tea was the best reviver invented by mankind, he thought. Although, of course, it would never again taste quite so good to Kelly as it had during the many years when he had relied on it to cope with his regular morning
hangovers. There was among certain people, nondrinkers, Kelly suspected, a theory that alcoholics didn’t have hangovers. From extensive personal experience, Kelly did not agree with that. In fact, looking back, his drinking days had been more or less one long hangover, punctuated only by moments of total oblivion.
He put pot, milk bottle and sugar bowl, along with the mug of tea he had already poured and a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, onto a tray and carried the lot upstairs to his third and smallest bedroom, which he used as an office. Sitting down on his swivel-action black leather chair, he tried to make his body and mind relax as he switched on his computer. Perhaps this would be the morning, the morning when he would finally get it all together, when he would start to write at once and the words would continue to flow effortlessly and smoothly throughout the day.
Kelly took another long drink of the sweet, dark brown tea and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Writing, of course, was never like that. Not for John Kelly, anyway. It was instead a long drawn-out torture of inactivity. Kelly continued to find that his biggest problem in attempting to write a book was that he found the task ahead of him so overwhelmingly daunting that he barely saw the point in beginning it.
The screen before him shimmered into life and Kelly reached for his mouse, darting the cursor between the various icons before him. The documents containing the little of his book he had so far managed to compile were each called ‘Untitled’. Kelly had never been very good at titles.
He moved the cursor until it settled neatly pointing at ‘Untitled Chapter Three’, and allowed it to rest there for a while. Kelly had written ‘Untitled Chapter One’ in one big glorious rush, within days of quitting his job on the
Argus
four months previously. Filled with enthusiasm for his chosen new career, he’d found that the words had really flowed.
But that seemed like a lifetime ago. His flow had quickly slowed to a dribble. He had struggled through a rough draft of chapter two and then stopped altogether, although only he knew that was as far as he had got. ‘Untitled Chapter Three’ had remained a totally blank new document in his computer for almost three months now. And this was seriously bad news, not least because his bank balance was beginning to look extremely thin.
Kelly had been able to take advantage of a voluntary redundancy scheme operated by the
Argus
, when he had decided he had had enough of journalism. And he had calculated that the money, quite a generous amount for a local paper to offer, could, if he was careful, last him the best part of a year, and that that would, of course, be plenty of time in which to complete his first novel. Which would be an instant best seller. Well, Kelly was too realistic about writing to have ever thought that, but he had been confident enough of his own ability as a professional scribe to believe that he would eventually acquire a publisher for almost any sort of writing that he put his hand to.
Kelly was, however, not naturally careful with money. And although he did not consider himself in any way extravagant, and he probably wasn’t, he seemed to be getting through his pay-off at an
alarming rate. Certainly, much faster than he had anticipated. Unfortunately, the speed of his writing achievement was not keeping pace at all with his spending. Indeed, not only did it look as if his money was not going to last a year, neither did it look as if a year was going to be nearly long enough for him to complete even the first draft of his novel.
‘Fuck it,’ muttered Kelly.
He flicked the cursor from ‘Untitled Chapter Three’ onto games, selected backgammon, his favourite, and began to play. Situation normal. He dreaded to think how many days of his life he’d totally wasted during these last four months playing computer games.
In the first game, Kelly achieved a shut-out with no less than two of his mechanical opponents’ men on the bar. But he still managed to lose. He played three more games and lost all of them, too. Kelly was a good backgammon player, and well aware that one constant of playing against a computer is that there is always, as with anything automated and preprogrammed, a predictability factor. One way and another Kelly reckoned to beat his computer, at its highest level, something like seventy per cent of the time. Not today, it seemed. This really was not turning out to be a good morning.
Impatiently, Kelly closed the thing down. Not only did he feel as unable to write as he had done for weeks now, but it also seemed that he couldn’t even play backgammon any more. He tossed his mouse to one side, tucked the keyboard into its home on a retractable shelf slotted beneath the top of his desk, and stared for several minutes at the empty black screen.
Then he made a decision. It wasn’t much of a
decision. He guessed he’d been intent, subconsciously at least, on this course of action since encountering that fatal accident the previous night and discovering who the victim was. It had been just the kind of incident he could never resist delving into.
He reached for the phone to his left and pushed one button. A brisk female voice answered, a voice which always made Kelly smile. She had a way of answering the phone which, in itself, made it quite clear she had no time for prevarication.
‘Karen Meadows.’
‘Good morning, Detective Superintendent, and how are you this morning?’
‘Instantly plunged into a state of nervous tension by the very sound of your voice, Kelly.’
‘Now, that’s not kind …’
‘Probably not, but truthful. I don’t think I’ve heard from you since you left the
Argus
, and it’s been wonderfully peaceful, I can tell you.’
‘Oh, come on, Karen, you know you’ve been missing me …’
‘Really? I’m actually still coping with the flak from the last time you decided to meddle in police affairs—’
‘So am I.’ Kelly interrupted swiftly, and all the banter had gone from his voice.
When he and Karen had last had dealings together, the subsequent events had without doubt taken Kelly a step too far, and had more or less led directly both to him quitting journalism and for him and the high-ranking detective failing to be in touch with each other for an uncharacteristically long time.
He was well aware that under the circumstances it was going to be pretty hard for either him or Karen to
slip back into the way things had once been between them.
‘Yes, I’m sure you are, Kelly.’
There was no longer any inflection in Karen’s voice. He realised that she had picked up at once on the flatness in his own voice. It seemed that they remained strangely good friends, beneath it all, these two. Just like always. He hoped so, anyway. He knew that she understood, and she was probably the only person in the world who did. But then, he and Karen had always been drawn to each other, although there had never been even the remotest suggestion of their friendship developing into anything more than that. As far as Kelly was concerned, if he had thought about it at all, he would probably have come to the conclusion that he so valued their relationship the way it was, that he would not want to risk changing it. But the truth was that he didn’t think about it. He’d never thought about it. He and Karen were mates, that was all. They certainly had a great deal in common. They were both inclined to be loners by nature, and they shared a sometimes near-obsessional approach to their work. Kelly had been aware of some kind of bond between them virtually ever since he had first met Karen almost twenty years earlier, when she had been an ambitious young detective constable and he already a star of Fleet Street. Indeed, he had helped extricate her from the threat of a scandal which could have destroyed the high-flying career he had always believed she was destined for. Karen was not quite as much of a maverick as Kelly had always been, but she was certainly a free spirit, a talented and able police officer, fiercely independent, who quite frequently chose to rebel against the more petty
restrictions the police force imposed upon its officers.
‘You haven’t called to ask after my health, though, have you, Kelly,’ Karen continued in a perfectly normal sort of voice. ‘That’s never been your style.’
Kelly detected just a hint of edge there, but decided to ignore it. Instead he went straight to the point.
‘Do you know about that fatal death on the Buckfast road last night?’ he asked.
‘Vaguely,’ she responded. ‘I have a report on it somewhere. Sent to CID as a matter of routine because somebody died, that’s all. It seems straightforward enough …’
‘No. I don’t think it is.’
He heard Karen sigh down the line. ‘And what, pray, do you know about it exactly, Kelly?’
‘I was there. I don’t think it was an accident.’
Kelly held his breath. He had no idea whether the young squaddie’s death was an accident or not, but he did know that if he prevaricated at all he would lose her. Karen Meadows had always had a short attention span.
‘Really?’ The detective superintendent sounded as if she was trying for a mix of sarcasm and dismissal in her voice. Kelly knew her so well. Well enough to also be able to detect a distinct note of curiosity. She was interested. She wanted to know what he knew. He’d got her. He must not waste the opportunity.
‘Look, have you got time for a pint at lunchtime.’
‘Kelly, no …’
‘Just for a few minutes, we could go to the Lansdowne.’ He named the pub directly opposite Torquay police station.
‘Kelly, I haven’t got time to go to the toilet. I never
have time to go to the toilet. And you want me to meet you in a pub?’
‘They’ve got nice clean loos in the Lansdowne. We could chat in the ladies’, if you like.’
‘Very funny. All right. I’ll see you there at one-thirty. Don’t be late, I can spare half an hour, max.’
‘As if …’
Kelly was smiling as he finished the call. It was funny how his conversations with Karen Meadows almost always left him smiling. She had that effect on him. He really shouldn’t have left it so long to get in touch, while all the while hoping that she would contact him first. But, on the other hand, he supposed he had felt that he’d needed a reason, and maybe she had felt the same. After the last time. When Kelly had decided to actively intervene in a murder investigation gone wrong the previous year, the repercussions had been enormous, and had left him with death on his conscience. Kelly had acted honestly enough, as he almost always did, and his motives had, by and large, been good. But he had also behaved with reckless impulsiveness. He was not proud of the episode, and indeed it had led him to resign from the
Argus
on the grounds that he no longer wished to do a job which could lead him, however inadvertently, to cause such devastation.