A Moment Of Madness

Eleven

Kelly slammed down the phone. He had spent just about every waking moment for two weeks either trying to get to see Angel or thinking about her.

Now both Angel’s mobile, to which he had in any case never got a reply, and the telephone number for Maythorpe, where he had only ever spoken to the answering machine anyway, had been summarily changed.

Kelly really had no idea how he was going to get in touch with her directly ever again. And, mindful of Angel’s threat, he couldn’t really approach Rachel Hobbs again. His only solace was that presumably all the other journalists he knew who would be chasing the rock star’s widow were facing the same problems. The previous evening, on his daily trip out to the big old manor house, he had once again put a note in the big letter box by the gate: ‘We must talk. I made a deal with you that I am trying to keep. We really need to talk.’

He didn’t just want Angel’s permission to print, he wanted her reaction now to all that had happened to her. He was after an up-date. He wanted to know how the trial, relatively brief though it had been, had affected her in addition to everything else she had gone through. How was she getting through her days? Was she completely traumatised? He wondered about that. Maybe that was why she was shutting herself off this way. Maybe her quite horrific experience had unhinged her. Maybe she was suicidal. His interest wasn’t just professional, he knew himself well enough to admit that. He found that he was seriously worried for her safety, and deeply frustrated that he could not get near her to find out how she was coping.

The number of fans outside Maythorpe had diminished daily. There was, after all, little there to encourage pilgrims. He had seen the strange young woman only once more, early one evening just a few days after the trial, and as soon as she caught sight of Kelly she did her now familiar disappearing trick. He hadn’t even been given a chance to get near her, not, based on past experience, that he thought it would do him much good if he had.

Contact with the outside world seemed to be limited during that time to a visit from a Sainsbury’s delivery van every couple of days, and the ubiquitous Mrs Nott who was frequently in and out. Kelly had approached her a couple of times for the hell of it, but the woman was largely uncommunicative and, when pressed, merely remained fulsome in her praise of her employer. Kelly had been told that she was probably the best-paid daily help in the West of England and that her wages had continued to be delivered in full even when Angel had shut the house up after Scott’s death. Angel knew how to buy loyalty, he thought, and was then a bit ashamed of himself because he really had no idea what kind of person Mrs Nott was. It was just that there was something about the small plump woman with her tight little mouth which made him think that money rather than friendship would be her driving force.

He leaned back in his chair and racked his brain to no avail. He did what he so often did when he was stuck. He called Karen Meadows. This time it turned out not to be such a good idea.

Karen was on her way home. She felt lousy. She had a rotten cold and she’d left the station early, intending to take to her bed and fight it off.

‘What do you want?’ she asked Kelly nasally.

‘And hello to you too,’ said Kelly.

‘Look, I’m not in the mood.’

‘I can hear that. Have you got a cold?’

‘My God, the man’s a genius,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry. I just wondered if you had any word at all on Angel Silver.’

‘Now there’s a surprise.’

Kelly ignored the sarcasm.

‘Well, have you?’

‘Angel Silver was tried and acquitted, in case it escaped your notice, John. She is no longer any of my business.’

‘I suppose not. It all went pretty smoothly for her really, didn’t it? Nobody gave her much of a hard time, did they?’

Karen made no response to that. She knew what Kelly was getting at and privately she agreed with him. The word from above had been pretty strong. The chief constable had made it quite clear to Karen that there must be no repetition of the Tony Martin case, when public opinion had been so strongly behind the farmer who was at first jailed for life for murder after killing an intruder at his home. Harry Tomlinson had put pressure on Karen, and she knew well enough the pressure he had been under from higher authorities like the Home Office. The processes of law had had to be seen to be executed, but everyone involved had probably known the result that they wanted and, more than likely, everything possible had been done at the highest level to ensure that. Angel had stabbed a man to death and had to be charged with something. Yet, as Tomlinson had said, if Angel Silver had been jailed for killing the man who had killed her husband there would almost certainly have been a public outcry. The jury had fortuitously cleared Angel, and Karen had absolutely no idea just how much the prosecution services had been acting under any particular instructions, but she did know that somehow the right judge had been picked for the job.

There was little doubt that had the jury found Angel guilty of manslaughter, Lord Justice Cunningham would have pronounced the most lenient sentence possible.

‘Are you there, Karen?’

‘Yes. I’m here.’

‘It’s just that I made a deal not to print my interview until I’d talked to Angel again. I wondered if maybe you still had some way of contacting her.’

‘No,’ said Karen abruptly. ‘Neither am I interested in your pathetic bloody problems. I’ve got enough of my own, thank you very much. Now bugger off.’

She pushed the end button on her phone. Her nose was running. She sniffed miserably and rummaged around in her handbag, open on the passenger seat, for a paper tissue.

She knew she was inclined to blow hot and cold with Kelly, but sometimes she just couldn’t help it. Apart from anything else the old bugger always seemed to find her Achilles heel.

It wasn’t that she had any real doubt about what had happened at Maythorpe House the night Scott Silver and Terry James had died. And, while believing absolutely that Angel had to stand trial, she also approved absolutely the verdict. Karen stood somewhere in between the wet liberals of the force and the aggressive right. She hoped she stood for common sense. Also she could not help but be aware that her adroit handling of the Silver case had not gone unnoticed.

It was just that whenever politics came into policing, which it so often did nowadays, Karen was left with that uneasy feeling.

By the end of January Kelly was just about ready to break his agreement with Angel. He felt he had kept his end of the deal by waiting that long, and there was no doubt that Angel was giving him the run-around. Then he arrived at Maythorpe one afternoon just as Jimmy Rudge, Scott’s business manager, was driving through the gates on his way out. Immediately Kelly swung the MG in front of Rudge’s black Range Rover, blocking his way. He quickly jumped out of the little car and made his way to the driver’s door of Rudge’s much bigger vehicle. Acting on impulse he tried to open the door, which seemed to be locked.

Jimmy Rudge wound down his window a scant couple of inches.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he enquired sharply. His voice was calm but his eyes looked a bit panicky.

However, Kelly withdrew at once, stepping smartly backwards, and feeling vaguely ridiculous.

‘John Kelly, Evening Argus—’ he began.

‘I know who you are, you bloody fool, you’ve been around every bloody corner since this thing began,’ Jimmy Rudge shouted through the window, his voice no longer calm at all. It gave Kelly a fleeting sense of satisfaction to see the smooth bastard lose his cool.

But all he said was a quiet: ‘I’m sorry.’ However, he made no attempt to return to his car, which continued to block Rudge’s path.

‘Yes, well.’ Jimmy Rudge switched his gaze hopefully from Kelly to the MG and back again. Kelly made no move.

‘So OK, what do you want?’ asked Rudge huffily.

‘I just wanted to know how Angel is,’ Kelly replied quietly.

‘She’s fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes really.’

Kelly still didn’t budge.

‘For God’s sake, man, how would you expect her to be?’ asked Rudge then. ‘Her husband’s been murdered and she’s just stood trial for the manslaughter of the man who killed him. She’s been through hell. But she’s coping and she’s coping by keeping away from people like you.’

Kelly felt wounded by that remark. Of course he was after a story. But he actually had the story already, or the bulk of it, anyway. He wanted to explain that he was trying to do the decent thing; that he really did consider himself to be Angel’s friend; that maybe he had proved that in the past. Perhaps some of that showed in his face. At least Jimmy Rudge sounded marginally less hostile when he spoke again.

‘Look, Angel’s a survivor — if you know anything about her you’ll know that.’

He was right, of course, and the thought cheered Kelly.

He nodded. ‘She’s given me an interview already, but we made a deal that I wouldn’t use it until she gave me the go-ahead. I’ve tried to keep that deal, but now she won’t even talk to me.’

Rudge looked mildly surprised. That gratified Kelly too.

‘Any chance of you asking her to call me?’

Rudge chuckled without much humour. ‘This is the first time I’ve managed to get to see her in weeks,’ he said. ‘And we’ve got so much stuff to sort out, you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘Would you try?’ Kelly persisted.

Rudge sighed. ‘I’ll try,’ he said flatly.

Kelly was far from convinced but reckoned that was the best he was going to get. He returned to the MG, reversing it out of the way to allow Rudge to pass.

‘Thanks,’ he called, more in encouragement than anything else, as the two vehicles’ paths crossed.

He watched the black Range Rover disappear up Rock Lane. There was nobody else around at all. The fans seemed finally to have deserted Maythorpe altogether. It was the worst sort of January day, cold and dull. The sky grey and low with the imminence of rain. That grim sort of winter weather which made even Kelly, who was totally disinterested in sun-seeking, wonder idly whether life wouldn’t be rather more pleasant in a Mediterranean climate. Kelly’s head felt as heavy as the atmosphere. There was a tickle in his nose. Suddenly he sneezed, several times. He wondered if, like Karen Meadows, he too was getting a cold. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. Why did he never have a handkerchief? The weather and his physical discomfort pretty much matched his mood.

It happened just after 11 p.m. on one of Moira’s nights off. Kelly had cooked dinner for her. She was a far better cook than him, but she seemed to like it when he cooked and he enjoyed doing something for her which gave her pleasure. He did little enough, after all, and although he and Moira seemed to be muddling along well enough he was aware of a certain strain lurking just below the surface. And he knew how distant and preoccupied he had been for so much of the time ever since he had become involved in the Silver case.

The meal went surprisingly well, one of his better efforts. He had managed to cook the sirloin steaks just how they both liked them, thanks to the iron griddle pan that was his favourite kitchen utensil. They were nearly black on the outside and nicely pink inside, all the juices satisfactorily sealed within the almost charred crust.

He and Moira were sitting together in contented companionship on the big sofa, half watching an old movie, Moira stretched out and leaning against him. He undid her bra and was lazily playing with one of her breasts while she occasionally made appreciative noises. He was about to suggest that they go to bed when they were interrupted by the ringing of the phone in the hall.

Kelly jumped to his feet at once, pushing Moira away. He hurried out into the hall. ‘No ID Received’, read the message on the display panel of his digital phone. Somehow he just knew who was calling. There was a tingling sensation running up and down his spine. The adrenalin was racing. He was quite sure that it was Angel calling before he even picked up the phone. Certainly it was true that he didn’t get too many phone calls at that time of night, but it was more than that. He had a sixth sense about the bloody woman, he really believed that he did.

He pressed the receiver to his ear.

‘Hello,’ he said quietly, and he could hear the expectancy in his own voice.

Again, she didn’t introduce herself. ‘You’d better come round,’ she said.

‘What, now?’

‘Whyever not?’

‘It’s nearly midnight,’ he protested mildly, taking care not to say her name, although he might as well not have bothered. As usual Moira was ahead of the game.

‘I don’t bloody believe it,’ he heard her call irritably from the living room. ‘Tell her you’ll go round tomorrow, for Christ’s sake, John.’

Angel was speaking again. Her voice bantering to the point of mockery, yet she somehow managed to sound flirtatious at the same time. ‘Ten minutes past eleven. I see you’re showing your usual strict attention to the facts.’

‘Well, it is late...’

If he took off for Maythorpe now he knew what Moira would say to him — that he had gone running again, jumped to Angel’s whim. Moira would be right too. He had spent weeks trying to get Angel even to speak to him and now, yet again, she just expected him to drop everything and go to her.

‘About to turn into a pumpkin, are you?’

‘Well, no, but—’

She interrupted him. ‘I don’t like buts,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come and see me or not? It’s quite simple.’

An entire choir of voices in his head warned him not to let her have her own way like this, not to let her run rings round him. He reminded himself then that he did have a major story to sort out. Funny how that could be so easily overshadowed in his dealings with Angel. He did have a good professional reason for seeing her, although suddenly it almost seemed like just an excuse to go running, which he was, of course, about to do. So there was little point, really, in continuing to protest.

‘OK. I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he said.

He put the phone down and turned to face the music — in the shape of Moira, who came out into the hall from the living room, buttoning her blouse with one hand, and reaching for her coat from the hat-stand behind the front door with the other.

‘Right, I’ll be off then,’ she said.

‘No, don’t,’ he said automatically. ‘I won’t be long this time, I promise. Go to bed. I’ll be back before you know it.’

‘Spare me, John. You’ll stay with that woman for as long as you can, and don’t think I don’t know it.’

‘Look, Moira, you know I’ve got this interview burning a hole in my notebook. It really is work, you know. You don’t want me to lose the story, do you?’

‘Quite frankly, John, I don’t care about your damned story, and I sometimes doubt you do that much, either.’

‘Why on earth else would I turn out in the middle of the night?’ he asked, realising at once that he had made a mistake.

‘John, will you please stop kidding yourself?’ Moira replied wearily.

‘I’m a reporter and I’m chasing the best story I’ve worked on in years,’ he insisted.

She let him drop her off at her house.

It was fifteen days since the end of the trial and two days since his confrontation with Jimmy Rudge. Kelly had no idea whether Rudge had precipitated the call from Angel or not, and neither did he care very much. Neither did he care as much as he would have expected about the front pages he was, he hoped, about to capture.

Instead, as he pulled away from outside Moira’s house and headed out to Maidencombe, the thoughts that filled his head were of seeing Angel Silver again, of getting close to that fragile, so beautiful woman who he knew could wind him round her little finger. Something about which he already seemed to have little control.

This time the gates of Maythorpe Manor didn’t open for him immediately on his arrival. He stepped out of his car and tried the intercom. It remained switched off. Angel was still not encouraging visitors.

He waited for a moment, standing there by the gates bathed in the illumination of the security lights. He couldn’t see any lights on in the house, but he knew that the drapes were heavy. After a couple of minutes he automatically reached for the mobile phone in his pocket. Then he remembered that the phone number at Maythorpe had been changed and the only mobile number he had for Angel no longer worked either. He cursed himself for not having had the presence of mind to ask for her new phone numbers when she had called. She might or might not have given them to him, but he had been so excited by her call he hadn’t even thought to ask. A very elementary mistake for an old hack. Damn and blast, he thought.

In frustration he went back to his car and gave several blasts on the hooter. Nothing happened. He was starting to feel quite angry. He leaned on the hooter. A continuous wail filled the night air. He resolved not to stop until either she opened the gates for him or he was arrested. And at that moment he wasn’t entirely sure which was more likely.

After a good minute or so of unremitting noise the front door of Maythorpe opened, revealing the silhouette of a figure. Simultaneously the big iron gates swung apart in their usual magical way.

Kelly roared through them much faster than he would normally.

He came to a halt with a screech of tyre rubber and was quickly out of the car.

‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he enquired with a forcefulness that quite took him by surprise. ‘You command me out here in the middle of the bloody night and then you keep me locked out—’

Her very silence stopped him in his tracks. She was standing quite still, smiling that small smile. It might have been either apologetic or mocking. He wasn’t quite sure which. Perhaps a bit of both. She looked pale. No makeup. Hair straggly with dark roots that had not been apparent at the trial now emerging. There were black rings beneath her eyes which had that familiar faraway hazy look to them. She was wearing a flimsy silk dressing gown, almost exactly the same pale flesh colour as her face. Strange how it seemed perfectly normal for Angel Silver to greet a guest to her house in such a garment. She swayed slightly, reaching out a hand for support. Kelly stepped forward, taking it at once. He was pretty sure she was high again. Could she only bring herself to see him when she was half out of it, he wondered. Or maybe she was high most of the time. He really had no idea. He had no idea either how she managed to look so beautiful in spite of the roots and the black rings round her eyes and the very fact that she was plainly continuing to abuse her body.

‘I thought it was you who wanted to see me,’ she said eventually.

Infuriating bloody woman, he thought.

‘You gave me an interview. We made a deal. I’ve stuck to my part of it. I said I wouldn’t print till I’d cleared it with you. I haven’t even been able to get near you since the trial.’

Kelly was trying very hard to be professional. She swung away from him without speaking, and walked off towards the living room. He closed the front door behind him and followed her. She was standing with her back to the fireplace, eyes blazing.

‘Have you any bloody idea what it’s like to go through what I’ve been through?’ she asked.

He shrugged a kind of apology and was about to speak, but she didn’t give him time.

‘No of course you haven’t,’ she continued. ‘Not you, not anyone. So don’t you dare criticise me. Don’t you dare. I haven’t been able to talk to anyone, you bloody fool. Since the trial it’s been even worse. The relief was just so overwhelming. But I think it was only after that I really thought about what happened, what I’d done.’

Kelly nodded, understanding. ‘It’s just that you always seem to summon me in the middle of the night, that’s all,’ he said lamely.

‘Always? Summon? Middle of the night?’

She had that mocking look about her again. ‘It’s still not even midnight. You’ve only ever been here once before, and I don’t recall that you needed much persuasion. In any case...’ she was looking at the floor, lower lip trembling, vulnerable now, ‘... maybe it takes me all day to pluck up the courage to talk to someone like you.’

All day and a load of coke, he thought. He reckoned she was still playing games with him. Quite deliberately he hardened his approach to her, determined to stick to being strictly professional about this and not to let her get to him in any other way.

‘Are we on the record?’ he enquired, producing his tape recorder from his jacket pocket.

She pouted. ‘I suppose so. You’re only interested in me for what you get from me, aren’t you? You’re just using me, you beast.’

She pulled an exaggeratedly hurt face, then half smiled at him again, flashing those violet eyes. She was being very slightly flirtatious, making a little-girl appeal to his better nature. But Kelly was not a complete pushover. Not yet, anyway.

‘And you? You’re not using me?’

Her brow darkened.

‘All right, you miserable bastard, let’s get this over with, shall we?’

She sat on the same sofa they had shared for the previous interview. He joined her and switched on his recorder.

‘First of all — and there’s really no point in continuing if we can’t sort this out — do I take it that I have your agreement to run the interview we’ve already done when I see fit, plus anything you tell me today?’

‘Oh, all right,’ she said sulkily, taking a cigarette from a packet by her side and offering him one.

He accepted and lit hers. ‘Anything else I can get for you?’ she enquired coquettishly.

She really was a chameleon. One minute she was one woman, the next another. The way she had spoken clearly implied that she was offering something like coke. He watched her as she leaned back in the sofa, the flimsy dressing gown slipping up her body so that one thigh was exposed almost to her crotch. On the other hand, he thought she could have been offering herself. She had, after all, done that before, freely enough and often enough.

He dismissed the thought. Either way she was a cheeky bitch, he thought. And dangerous. Always dangerous. No doubt about that. He made himself concentrate on the job in hand, ignoring her suggestive query.

‘So tell me exactly how you’ve been feeling since the trial?’ he asked. ‘You’re right: I cannot know. Who could? Tell me how you’ve been coping.’

‘I feel absolutely devastated,’ she replied, suddenly disarmingly straightforward, no longer appearing to be playing any kind of role. ‘Not only have I lost the love of my life and had to watch him die in such a terrible way, but I killed a man trying to defend Scott and myself and I have had to stand up in a court of law and explain what I did. I have been given a conditional discharge and I walked free and everybody seems to think that should please me. That I should just be able to put it behind me, build a new life. But I can’t. I shall never get over it. It will haunt me always.

‘In some ways...’ She hesitated, and those unnaturally bright violet eyes were full of pain. ‘In some ways it would have been better if they’d sent me to jail. I don’t even have anything to fight against, do I? I have been treated with...’ she hesitated again, as if searching for the word, ‘... compassion, I suppose. Maybe I would have preferred some sort of punishment, I feel so guilty, you see...’

The words tailed off.

‘What do you feel guilty about?’ Kelly prompted gently. He could guess the answer, of course, but he needed her words.

‘I feel guilty because I didn’t save Scott, and I feel guilty because I killed a man.’

‘In self-defence, Angel.’

‘Yes, in self-defence,’ she repeated tonelessly.

‘And now, how do you get through your days? I wondered that before. I’m surprised that you stay here, rattling around in this big house. Aren’t you lonely?’

She turned to face him directly.

‘I am more lonely than I ever thought or believed would be possible,’ she said, and he just knew that she meant every word. ‘I don’t know why I stay here. Maybe I won’t for much longer. I think I stay because I don’t have the energy to leave. And maybe because I always felt closest to Scott here. This house was his dream, and mine, you know, not the place in Hollywood. I’m thinking of getting rid of that. We hardly ever went there and I certainly don’t want to go there now. This was our dream, this was our home, this big old English country house by the sea.’

She sighed. ‘How do I get through my days?’ She sounded almost whimsical. ‘I sleep late, I watch videos, I listen to music, sometimes Scott’s music, sometimes other stuff. The hours pass. I don’t really know how exactly.’

She flashed him a challenging look. ‘And I do a little coke occasionally, but you know that, don’t you?’

He nodded. Rather more than a little, he suspected.

She was suddenly anxious. Yet another mood change. ‘You won’t print that, will you?’

‘No,’ he said.

He asked her some more questions about her feelings, about that terrible night, about the trial, squeezing all the information he could from her, searching for the most emotive quotes, going over and over the old ground in the hope of touching on something new, something more special than the stuff he already had.

He had a kind of checklist in his head of points he wanted to raise.

‘Have the fans bothered you at all?’ That was just his way in. He had something specific on that subject that he wanted to ask her.

‘Not really. They were bound to turn up. Millions of people loved Scott...’

Angel had that faraway look again. ‘They’ve been a kind of support, really, a reminder of how special Scott was. They were the only thing that got through to me in the beginning. Were you there, on that first night, when they all had candles and were singing his songs?’

He nodded.

‘Yes, I was sure you would have been.’

‘There was one fan who was nearly always there,’ Kelly said, getting to the point he had been wanting to raise. ‘She stood out from the rest, she looked like a kind of hippy throwback — long hair, long robes. I wanted to ask you if you knew who she was.’

Another mood change. A flash of irritation. ‘I don’t know who any of them are,’ Angel snapped. ‘They’re fans. Scott had millions of them.’

‘But this one was different. She was often here when nobody else was, too. She was even outside on Christmas night when I came here. I nearly killed her when I left. She just loomed in front of the car. You were watching, I saw you.’

‘For God’s sake, I may have been watching but I couldn’t see anything. Just shadows. Certainly not enough to recognise anyone. You screeched to a halt, then you drove off. That was all I saw.’

‘But for days on end she stood by the railings by the gate, in the same spot, with her face pressed to the fence. You must have seen her then. You couldn’t have missed her. She seemed so strange I even wondered if I should tell the police. I was afraid she might be some sort of a threat to you.’

Angel looked bored. ‘For God’s sake...’ she said. And then, referring much less warmly to her dead husband’s adoring public than she had earlier, she went on, ‘OK, maybe I do know the one you mean. She’s just some stupid fan, only even worse than most of them. She’s in some idiot religious sect. She was always hanging around here trying to get Scott involved. She drove the poor bastard mad, but she’s harmless.’

Kelly nodded. He supposed he would have to be satisfied with that. It was plausible enough. Anyway, all the loose ends were more or less tied up now. He really had a cracking piece, and that, he knew, was what he should concentrate on. He could see the headlines as clearly in his mind as if they were already printed: ‘How I held my dying love in my arms’, ‘Scott and Angel, our great passion’, ‘How I killed for my darling’.

It was gripping stuff and he was going to clean up on this one. He had so much more than had ever come out in court. That good turn of seventeen years ago really had paid off, he thought cynically.

‘Right, I’d better get to work,’ he said.

He couldn’t wait to get home to his computer and feed all the extra material he had gathered into his original copy.

Angel was quiet as she showed him to the door. Yet again he was struck by the paradoxes in her. He was aware that she treated him by and large with a mixture of flirtatiousness and contempt, but as ever it was her vulnerability which melted him. He studied her closely as she stood there in the big doorway, holding the silky gown close to her thin body, white hair lank and wispy, eyes bright from the coke. He thought she looked at her most fragile. And at her most beautiful. Although God knew how.

On an impulse he bent down and kissed her cheek. She did not pull away.

‘Be gentle with me, Johnny,’ she said.

Nobody, but nobody, had ever called him Johnny before. If anyone but her had made a remark like that to him he would probably have laughed in their face. It was different with her. Everything was different with her.

‘Angel, sweetheart, I promise you, when my stuff hits the streets public opinion will be on your side like never before,’ he said, genuinely hoping that would prove to be so. ‘The whole world is going to love you and feel for you. And the knocks on the door from press and TV will stop, they really will, because there won’t be any point, not after I’ve finished.’

She smiled wanly.

‘OK,’ she said.

Suddenly he wanted just to take her in his arms and comfort her. But he resisted the urge. In any case, she’d probably slap his face. Waiflike and vulnerable one moment, sarcastic and provocative the next, you never knew how she was going to react, how she was going to be, you really didn’t.

He settled for touching her left hand lightly. ‘Goodbye then, and don’t worry,’ he told her.

Somewhat to his surprise she reached up with her other hand and stroked his cheek.

‘You’re not a bad man, John Kelly. Do you know that? You can come and see me again if you like.’

His heart sang. As he drove away through the big gates he felt so elated that he punched the air. He was glad the hood of the car was up. He wouldn’t have wanted her to see that gesture. He just hadn’t been able to help himself.

Not only had he pulled off one of the greatest journalistic coups of his career, but Angel Silver wanted to see him again. OK, she was lonely. Kelly was around. She probably saw him merely as someone who was always available for her. And Kelly was a good listener. Kelly was also somebody she could use for her own ends.

To hell with it, he thought. He didn’t really care what her reasons were.