A Moment Of Madness

Ten

Kelly was on a high when he left Maythorpe Manor, and he didn’t know how much of that was due to having landed an interview with a woman half the world’s press were chasing, and how much of it was caused simply by having spent almost three hours in her company. He found Angel Silver mesmerising.

He was undoubtedly preoccupied, his excitement making him drive a little faster than usual, when it happened.

As he sped through the gates and swung a right, passing out of the illuminated area around Maythorpe and into the shadowy darkness of Rock Lane, a figure loomed suddenly in his headlights. Kelly was taken totally by surprise. A woman, long hair, long clothes, was standing quite still in the middle of the road directly in front of him. She seemed frozen, like a startled rabbit, her face lit up starkly. Kelly slammed on the brakes. There had been a heavy shower while he had been in the house with Angel and the road surface was still wet. The back wheels of the MG locked solid. The car went into a skid. Kelly gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white as he struggled to regain control. It was hopeless. The little car started to spin.

‘Jesus Christ Almighty!’ Kelly cried out involuntarily.

He was quite sure he was going to hit the woman. But at the last possible moment he was aware that she seemed to come to her senses and throw herself out of the way. It still seemed an age before he gained control of the MG again. And when he did he was facing the wrong way, albeit miraculously still on the tarmac and not smashed into one of the banked hedges on either side. Kelly and his car had turned a complete 180 degrees in the narrow road outside Maythorpe. Obliquely he thought that if he was offered a million pounds to complete a turn like that deliberately in the limited space available he would be unable to do it.

He stopped the car and jumped quickly out. There was no sign of anybody else around.

‘Are you all right?’ he called into the black nothingness. The darkness away from the bright security lights of Maythorpe was dauntingly total. He reached back in the car for the torch he always kept in the glove compartment and shone it around the now apparently deserted stretch of road.

Perhaps he had hit her after all. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she was lying there injured, or worse. Perhaps the force of the impact had thrown her into the hedge.

But there had been no impact. He knew that really. He was just in shock. She must be around somewhere though, mustn’t she?

Maythorpe Manor was quite isolated. Rock Lane was the sort of opulent semi-rural road the residents of which rarely left their dwellings by any means other than a motor car. Except when all the fans and press had been gathered outside the Silver home you were unlikely to meet any pedestrians, and certainly not at that time on Christmas night. Fleetingly, Kelly wondered if his imagination had been playing tricks on him. But he knew better.

There had been someone there, all right — a young woman whom he had very nearly killed. And he was pretty sure he recognised her as the one he had tried to talk to outside Maythorpe Manor in the days right after Scott Silver’s death, the woman who had always stood out as different to the rest of the fans, strangely apart and alone. What on earth was she doing there on Christmas night, he asked himself.

‘Hello, are you there?’ he called again.

No response. Was she hiding? Had she run off? If so, she must have moved faster than he had been able to after that near miss.

He turned and looked back towards Maythorpe. The gate had closed behind him. But he could see through the railings that Angel was still standing by the big front door. A frail-looking figure, white and pink, not moving.

He walked back to the gate, already closed behind him, and shouted to her through it.

‘Hey, did you see that?’

Even as he spoke she turned round and disappeared into the house, the big door closing behind her with a slam.

It was almost two in the morning when he got home. Boxing Day had started, and he expected he was not going to have a good one. The house was in darkness. He was relieved. Moira might, of course, have retreated to his bed but he thought that was unlikely. As he was out, she would almost certainly have gone back to her own home, particularly in view of her feelings about his visit to Angel Silver at such a time on such a day. Rather disloyally, he hoped that she was no longer in his house. He was not in the mood for explanations, he was still in shock from his near collision with that young woman outside Maythorpe, and he much preferred to face Moira in the morning when he would have had time to collect his thoughts. He was also glad that Nick seemed to have gone to bed.

One way and another Kelly’s adrenalin was racing, and he didn’t feel tired even though it was so late, so he thought he would make a pot of tea and maybe read for a bit, try to settle down. The kitchen was beyond the living room, and as soon as Kelly switched on the light there he saw her. Moira had not gone home. She had fallen asleep in the big winged armchair by the window. And as the light snapped on she woke with a little jump.

Kelly tried for normality, tried to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were there,’ he said.

She nodded, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

‘Nick gone on up?’ he enquired.

‘Yes.’

‘Jennifer gone home?’ He was aware that he was slumping into banality but it was the best he could do at that hour of the morning. He was just desperate to avoid confrontation.

‘Yes.’

Oh dear, he thought. This was hard work, and the temptation just to walk away was almost overwhelming, but he reckoned Moira deserved better than that.

‘Sorry I was so long, I just couldn’t stop her talking,’ he said lightly.

Moira glanced at her watch. ‘Did you want to?’ she asked edgily.

‘Not really. It’s a great story.’

‘John, you’re supposed to be building bridges with your son. He comes to be with you for Christmas, to spend time with you, and then you just disappear. For hours. And you return in the middle of the night.’

‘It was work, Moira.’

‘That’s one word for it.’

Kelly felt his patience begin to run out. ‘Look, I just don’t understand why you’re being so bloody difficult about this. It’s the best bloody story I’ve got near for years. What do you expect me to do, give up on it?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

He could see her relenting a little. Nobody understood the importance of work more than Moira, although he supposed his paled into insignificance alongside hers.

‘I don’t know. I just didn’t like the way you dropped everything and went running when that woman called you. And Nick was completely bewildered—’

‘It wasn’t like that, Moira, and you know it,’ Kelly interrupted.

‘Do I?’

‘Oh, come to bed for Christ’s sake,’ he said, making one last attempt to restore the situation.

Somewhat to his surprise she agreed to do so, and without passing any further comment. But he suspected that it might be only because she was too sleepy to be bothered with getting herself back to her own home.

Kelly didn’t get to see Angel Silver again until her trial three weeks later. It wasn’t for want of trying, but when he phoned all he got was her answering machine. Her mobile seemed never to be switched on. He wrote again but received no reply.

It became an almost daily routine for him to drive out to Maythorpe and just look. He never even got a glimpse of Angel. Several times he stopped his car and tried to use the intercom system on the gates. There was never any response. After a bit he didn’t bother any more, and instead merely drove slowly by.

Once, that now familiar young woman, whom he was so sure he had nearly hit on Christmas night, was again standing in silent vigil by the gate, staring towards the house. He pulled up alongside.

She turned to look at him but gave no sign of recognition.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I think we had a near miss, you and I.’

She just stared at him blankly.

‘Christmas night?’ he tried again.

Her eyes remained blank.

‘Why did you run off?’ he asked her.

He thought just a flicker of some indefinable reaction crossed her pale face, but he wasn’t even sure of that. Then abruptly she turned her back on him, pressing her face against the railings as he had seen her do before.

He switched off the engine of his car and climbed out.

‘Look, will you please talk to me? You nearly got yourself killed, you know. Frightened me half to death. You must have been frightened too, surely?’

Still no reply.

He took a couple of steps forward, reached out a hand and placed it on her shoulder. It was supposed to be a gesture of reassurance. But it didn’t quite work out. She jumped away from him and turned to face him again, her face full of alarm.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she cried. It was the first time he had heard her speak. She had a strong northcountry accent at odds, somehow, with her slightly oriental features.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told her, removing his hand at once. Her eyes blazed at him for a few seconds, then she dropped her gaze to the ground, and once more turned away and pressed her face to the railings, almost as if he wasn’t there.

‘Who are you?’ he asked gently. He expected no further response and got none. He was beginning to get very curious about her, that was all.

‘Why do you keep coming here?’ he persisted.

She didn’t turn, she didn’t move, and he only just caught her words, she spoke so softly.

‘To pay my respects, of course,’ she said.

Only minutes later Nick called his father on his mobile. At once Kelly started to talk about the Silver case.

‘There’s this young woman, I’m sure she’s involved, sure she’s more than a fan, but I just can’t get her to talk to me.’

‘Not everybody in the world wants to talk to journalists, you know, not even such a celebrated one as you.’ Nick knew that he was being heavy with the sarcasm but his father hadn’t even bothered to ask how he was, and he was already used to being the centre of attention as far as Kelly was concerned. His father’s obvious lack of interest in him both offended and irritated Nick.

‘If only I could get to Angel. I have this feeling there’s so much more to all of this. I don’t even know where the bloody woman is...’

Nick was only half listening. He couldn’t believe it. His father hadn’t appeared to take in Nick’s deliberately cutting remark. And he seemed to have only one topic of conversation.

After four or five minutes of much the same Nick ended the call abruptly. His father did not even seem to notice.

He really is obsessed, thought Nick glumly. He just hoped that Kelly had the strength not to fall into any other old traps.

Exeter Crown Court was packed for the trial. And there were hundreds more onlookers crowding the streets around the ancient walls of Exeter Castle within which the modern courtrooms had been constructed. Kelly had a coveted press pass and a seat inside the court. Part of the public gallery as well as the normal press bench had been allocated to press because of the exceptional interest in the case.

From the moment Angel was led into the court Kelly was riveted. As ever, everything about her mesmerised him. She was impassive. Her face gave nothing away. The violet eyes were bright but expressionless. On the first day of the trial she wore a simple pale beige shift dress. Her hair was still peroxide blonde, much the same as it had been when he had visited her at home three weeks earlier, although perhaps a little longer already, parted at one side and combed straight and flat to her head. The effect was as stunning as ever. Yet her arms were so painfully thin, accentuating somehow that air of fragile vulnerability which was so much a part of her.

Angel pleaded not guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of self-defence, as had been expected. She had a leading London barrister, Christopher Forbes, representing her. And from the way the red-robed judge, Lord Justice Cunningham, looked at Angel from the start Kelly felt little doubt that Forbes’ task would not be too difficult. The judge seemed quite captivated by Angel. Another one, thought Kelly, who knew the feeling.

When Angel was put on the stand she gave her evidence clearly but quietly, faltering only twice — first when she described seeing the initial knife blow struck against her husband, and secondly when she told how she had grabbed the knife from Terry James and plunged it into him.

‘It wasn’t just that I was trying to protect Scott. I was terrified. I–I thought I was going to be next.’

It was dramatic stuff, made all the more dramatic by an outburst at that point from the public gallery. Ken James, his mother, and other members of the clan were up there, and they weren’t best pleased with what they were hearing.

‘My brother never hurt anyone,’ shouted Ken James.

There were other cries of ‘Shame’ and ‘Lies’ and even ‘You lying bitch’. At least it looked as if the angry attentions of the James family were being diverted from him, thought Kelly disloyally.

Lord Justice Cunningham, a distinguished-looking man used only to obedience, acted swiftly.

‘Anyone perpetrating any further outbursts from the public gallery will be removed from the court,’ he thundered. ‘I will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’

The gallery subsided into a reluctant silence. At least for the time being.

Angel looked up at the James family as if mildly interested in something which had nothing really to do with her. Kelly wished she would look at him. He wanted to see directly into those eyes again, to try to fathom the unfathomable.

But by and large Angel’s attention was firmly focused on the judge and the two counsels. Kelly thought the prosecuting counsel was amazingly gentle. It was almost as if even the prosecution already regarded the result of the trial to be a foregone conclusion — a conclusion which would cause the police, the legal system, and the government, he thought, the least trouble. It occurred to Kelly that there was an element of show trial about the proceedings, or as near as you were ever likely to get to that in the UK, anyway. Kelly always looked for hidden agendas, and he was bloody sure there was one here. Up to a point he understood it, and probably agreed with it, though even Kelly himself had given Angel a slightly harder time when he had interviewed her, he reckoned. There was, of course, no mention of drugs. How could there be? None had been found and Angel had been clean when tested on her arrest.

Prosecuting counsel did ask, as indeed Kelly had asked Karen Meadows, how Terry James had been able to gain entry to such an apparently well-protected property undetected.

‘Scott and I were probably always too trusting of people, particularly people who work for us,’ Angel had replied winningly, and she had gone on to explain how she and her husband had somehow lost the habit of setting the zoned house burglar alarm, with its window-and-door-alert system, when they were indoors.

‘Maythorpe was our home, and we always felt safe there,’ she said. ‘And we didn’t know how wrong we were to feel that until it was too late.’

The judge seemed completely satisfied by Angel’s answer. As indeed he did with all her answers.

About the only moment when Kelly thought the jury might even consider an unexpected guilty verdict came when the weapon was passed among them. Several of the jurors looked uncomfortable and one woman visibly blanched. The carving knife which had been used to kill the two men at Maythorpe Manor on that terrible November night really was a lethal-looking weapon. And when prosecuting counsel asked Angel why she had used it to stab Terry James so many times, Kelly was aware of the jurors studying her intently, doubtless wondering, as he had done from the beginning, how she could have been so brutal. But yet again Angel’s reply struck exactly the right note.

‘I had no idea how many times I stabbed him,’ she said, her voice very quiet and just a little shaky. ‘I was fighting for my life, trying to save my husband. I know I kept striking out at him, but I can’t even remember exactly how it all happened. I was terrified, I was out of my mind.’

Lord Justice Cunningham actually nodded his bewigged head sympathetically. Kelly was not surprised. He had had previous experience of Cunningham, who was probably the oldest judge on the circuit now and who many involved in both the legal profession and the police force thought should be pensioned off. He could have been hand-picked to handle this case, and indeed most probably had been, Kelly thought wryly. Some judges were seriously into human rights, even the human rights of known villains. Others paid only lip service. Cunningham was one of the others. Only more so. Kelly reckoned that if he could get away with it, Lord Justice Cunningham would like to provide all law-abiding householders with loaded revolvers and sit back while they summarily dispatched anybody at all who dared to violate their homes. Without any interference from the law whatsoever.

The trial lasted only three days. The judge’s summing up was so sympathetic that the jury seemed left with little choice but to find Angel not guilty, and a verdict of justifiable homicide was recorded.

Angel reacted hardly at all. Kelly thought there might have been just a hint of her Mona Lisa smile. He made his way quickly outside in order to watch her leave the court. She posed for photographs on the steps, wearing a cream and blue dress with a hemline several inches above the knee that was slightly more flamboyant than the beige number of the previous day. He suspected she might have been fairly confident of the outcome by day two. Angel was always well aware of the effect she had on men. Red judges were not likely to be an exception.

Her solicitor, a local man called Rupert Grant, whom Kelly knew vaguely, gave a brief statement. ‘Mrs Silver is, of course, relieved by the decision of the court. There could, however, be only one outcome. Mrs Silver acted entirely in self-defence, and in defence of her dying husband, against an intruder in her home. Justice has been done and Mrs Silver asks now only to be allowed to get on with her life. Thank you very much, ladies and gentleman.’

Grant put a protective hand under Angel’s elbow and made to guide her into the waiting car. But she stopped him, making a kind of halt motion with her free hand, leaned towards him, and whispered something in his ear.

Grant nodded.

‘Just one more thing, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, raising his voice to be heard above the clamour. ‘Mrs Silver wants me to say that she remains quite distraught at having been responsible for the death of another human being, regardless of the circumstances. And she says that she feels for the James family at this dreadful time.’

Kelly looked on admiringly. She was some woman, that Angel. For all her fragility and apparent vulnerability she never seemed to stop thinking. Once again she had been ahead of the game. She had killed a man and she wanted to make it quite clear how she felt about it. Her solicitor hadn’t done that, so she had quickly put him right. She knew a thing or two about PR, Kelly thought.

She was probably fortunate, though, that none of the James clan seemed to be in the vicinity. He doubted they would have been much impressed.

Angel stood very still with her head slightly bowed, a sad half-smile flitting around her lips. Grant turned to her questioningly when he had finished speaking. She gave a little nod. He put his hand on her arm again and this time was allowed to guide her down the steps and into a waiting black limo, which departed at once, belting through the portalled entrance of the old castle and down the narrow road leading into Exeter town centre, scattering the crowd before it.

Kelly had no idea whether Angel was being taken back to Torbay and her Maidencombe home or away somewhere again to hide from the fuss.

He really had to speak to her now. He had already written his story, of course, based around her interview, and he was quite gratified to realise that he had obtained considerably more detail than had come out in court. He wouldn’t want to run the piece today, in any case, because it would just get caught up with the court material. But he would certainly like to turn it round soon. Public interest was a highly disposable commodity. The attention span of your average Fleet Street News Desk was quite astoundingly short. Kelly was hoping to make some real money with his exclusive, as long as it remained an exclusive, he thought wryly.

He had promised Moira a lavish holiday when the case was finished, and he really did intend to keep that promise. He valued his relationship with her, and he knew it was time he demonstrated that.

But neither could he break his promise to Angel. It wasn’t just that it would go against the grain to let her down in any way, it was also that, strangely enough, much of his success as a journalist had been based on keeping promises, not breaking them. In fact, it was when his alcohol and drug-fuelled state of mind had deteriorated to the point where he could barely remember the deals he had made, let alone ensure that he stuck to them, that his professional life had started to collapse around him and he’d lost the plot.

But that was years ago. He was on the up again now. Occasionally the thought had occurred to him, as he had nursed his cherished exclusive through the weeks of waiting for Angel to stand trial, that maybe he would get a recall to the big time when his story dropped. Maybe some young pipsqueak Fleet Street editor would see that tired old hacks like him did have their uses, that he could still pull in the big one. He didn’t really believe it, though. And in any case he remained unsure that he even wanted it any more. He suspected he wouldn’t last long, for reasons entirely different from before, in the national press of today. Kelly was old school. He believed in checking and double-checking and not printing until you were absolutely sure. He’d cracked the old joke many times about never spoiling a good story with facts. But it was a joke. In Kelly’s book you never risked spoiling one with half-truths either.

He watched the rear of the limo disappear round the corner at the bottom of the hill. First things first, he told himself. He found himself a quiet spot in the castle yard and filed his version of the morning’s events. It would be the splash in the Argus that evening, of course. No doubt about it.

When he had finished he walked back to the front of the courthouse. Almost everybody had disappeared. There was no sign any more of any lawyers, court officers, or police, and the gathered crowds outside the walls had dwindled away. The photographers had gone to wire their pictures. Only a couple of other reporters, who had also no doubt been using their mobiles to file copy, remained chatting by the gates. So, that was it, Kelly thought. It was all over, apart from getting his exclusive sorted out and making a few bob. That was all that was left now.

He returned to his car, parked in a nearby car park, and began the drive back to Torbay. On the way he decided that he might as well take a run out to Maidencombe. He didn’t know where else to look for Angel, after all. He thought that if he were her he would have been tempted to hide away somewhere again until the dust had settled. But he knew better than to try to second-guess her.

The fans had returned to Maythorpe with a vengeance. Hundreds of them were gathered outside the gates, again singing Scott Silver songs. There were flowers once more piled alongside the railings. Many of the fans carried banners. The messages were predictable: ‘We will always love you, Scott’, ‘Gone but not forgotten’. There was also an outpouring of support for Angel: ‘Thank you for trying to save him’, ‘Live your life for Scott’.

Kelly walked amongst the crowd for a while. It was a lovely sunny afternoon, almost like a spring day, even though it was only mid-January, and very different to the bleak wintry weather around the time of Scott’s death. There were several journalists there and the usual TV crews. Kelly quickly learned that Angel had returned to her home, but the limo carrying her had raced through the gates, and neither she nor anybody else had made a further press statement. Neither had she posed for photographs this time. Angel knew when to milk it and when not, thought Kelly cynically. She knew how to keep the pack panting.

He pushed his way through the crowd to the gate and stood looking at the intercom for a moment or two, considering if it was even worth trying it.

‘Don’t bother, it’s been switched off,’ Jerry Morris, the Mirror’s area man told him.

Kelly nodded, unsurprised, and turned to chat to Morris.

It was then that he noticed the young woman he had nearly run over on Christmas night, the one who intrigued him so much. She was standing right alongside, and it was probably only because she was so still and silent, and dressed in her usual dull dark clothes, that he had not been aware of her presence before. As he would already have expected somehow, almost as if he knew her, she carried no banner, and neither was she joining in the singing. She had her back to him and her face was pressed against the railings as usual.

‘Hello again,’ he said to her.

She did not reply, nor even turn to look at him.

‘Well, at least Angel is free,’ he went on, trying desperately to coax her into conversation.

There was no response. Nothing at all discernible. Although he thought her shoulders tensed slightly.

‘It would have been terrible if they’d locked her up, wouldn’t it?’ he continued conversationally. ‘After all, she was only trying to protect Scott...’

The young woman swung round then to face him. Her features were screwed into an expression of pure fury, her arms hung loose by her sides but her fists were tightly clenched. She uttered a strange sound, which Kelly couldn’t quite make out. It was a kind of moan. Derisory? Scornful? He wasn’t sure.

She was about to talk to him, surely. To tell him what had made her so angry. But she didn’t speak. Instead she suddenly raised her right fist and shook it at him. Kelly was quite taken aback. He didn’t think anybody had ever actually shaken their fist at him before. For a brief moment he thought she was going to strike out at him. But she didn’t do that either. Instead she lowered her arm, pushed past him and half ran up the hill in the direction of the main Torquay road. He watched her reach the first corner and disappear behind the big Devon hedges. Did she have a car, somewhere? Was she on foot? If so, perhaps he could persuade her to let him give her a lift wherever she was going.

He hot-footed it back to the MG, which was parked down the hill in the Maidencombe beach car park again, quickly started the little motor and took off after her, taking the most direct route through the village to the main road. At the top he turned left. He thought that if she had no transport he should be able to see her then. But he couldn’t. He motored slowly for about a mile or so in the direction of Torquay. There was no sign of the girl. She could not possibly have got further on foot, and if she was in a vehicle she would be long gone. He turned in a side road, returned to Maidencombe and this time swung off the main drag directly into Rock Lane. Maybe she was still lurking there somewhere, he thought, or maybe she had even returned to stand outside Maythorpe again.

But Rock Lane was deserted, except outside the old manor house, of course, where the waiting crowd parted reluctantly for him. Kelly slowed almost to a halt, looking for her. Still no sign.

Yet again she had disappeared, it seemed. But then, she was good at that.