A Moment Of Madness

Two

Kelly watched the squad car disappear up the hill, the tall Devon hedges obscuring it from sight as it rounded the first corner.

Many of the people in the crowd, mostly women, but including a number of men, were weeping uncontrollably. Some had thrown themselves prostrate on to the ground, undeterred by the fact that the uneven surface of Rock Lane was still damp and muddy from an earlier heavy shower.

Several of the photographers took off at a run for their cars, in a hurry either to dispatch their pictures or give chase. Fat chance of that, thought Kelly.

He shivered, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his Barbour jacket. No warmth in it. He’d had one of those fancy linings once, but God knows where it was now. It was a cold damp morning, and before Angel Silver had been brought out he had been standing outside Maythorpe Manor for almost four hours.

Kelly was forty-eight years old and looked it. At least. He had grown a slight paunch, his once nearly black hair was thinning and had turned grey at the temples, his pale blue eyes had been dulled by the passage of time. Kelly had once been a shining light in his chosen profession and had seemed destined to be doing something far different by the time the big five-O approached. As it was, his life had been a roller coaster ride with rather more downs than ups. And there he was, still standing on doorsteps. Waiting. Watching. Freezing half to death.

The lane was particularly narrow by the turning to the grand Georgian house, and Kelly had been forced to leave his old MG in the tourists’ car park down in Maidencombe village, so he had been unable even to sit in it and be protected a little from the elements while he watched and waited. A reporter’s lot, hanging around for hours, just in case, regardless of the weather, but it didn’t get any easier as you got older.

With more than a little reluctance he removed his left hand from his pocket. He wasn’t wearing gloves, of course, because gloves were the kind of thing Kelly could never remember. In his fingers he clutched his mobile phone. Once he’d had to know every phone box, pub and public convenience on his patch. Nowadays mobiles had cut out the need to move away from a stakeout at all, except for calls of nature. There was no longer an excuse to spend hours in the nearest boozer. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, he reflected wryly, thinking about the effect too much alcohol had once had on his life.

Kelly leaned against the iron bars of the gate, which had closed again in silent precision, and thought for a moment or two. He was interrupted by the Evening Argus’ staff photographer at the scene, Trevor Jones, a bright-eyed young man with ginger hair. Trevor was full of the excitement of working on what was already undoubtedly the biggest story of his brief career.

‘I got a great one of her, Johnno,’ he yelled excitedly. ‘She looked straight at me.’

Kelly grinned. Like Princess Diana, Angel had that knack. No doubt every snapper on the case thought the same thing, as indeed he himself had. But he took pleasure in Trevor’s reaction. He liked the boy, and invariably felt himself fired by his boundless enthusiasm, even on routine stories. The photographer was a big gangling lad, half a head taller than Kelly, and a bit like a Great Dane puppy, Kelly reckoned, eager to please with soft brown eyes that still smiled easily, and inordinately long legs and arms.

‘I’d better get my film back to the factory,’ continued Trevor. ‘If you get any leads, you’ll give me a bell, won’t you, Johnno? Leave it to the Picture Desk, and with my luck I’ll be doing a golden wedding this afternoon.’

Trevor looked quite downcast at the thought as he shouldered his cameras and turned to leave.

‘Will do,’ Kelly called after him. He meant it. Given a choice he’d rather work with Trevor Jones than any of the other Argus snappers, in spite of the lad’s inexperience. He liked working with photographers who didn’t clock-watch and would do his bidding without too much argument. At least some of the time.

Trevor glanced back over his shoulder, ginger curls bouncing, flashed a smile of gratitude and gave a thumbs-up sign.

Kelly smiled. As he watched Trevor amble off down the hill he became aware that almost all of the journalists were now starting to leave the scene, believing presumably that there was no more mileage to be got here. A TV news team hurried past him. The cameraman trod heavily on Kelly’s right foot.

‘Watch yourself,’ Kelly yelled. He didn’t like the TV boys. Never had, since his very first days as a young reporter. They believed totally not only in their own superiority but also that it gave them the divine right to shove everyone else out of the way. Or just walk on them, Kelly thought wryly, tentatively wriggling his bruised toes inside his shoe.

‘Fancy an early pint?’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Can’t see much more happening for an hour or two.’

Kelly turned to face Jerry Morris, the Mirror’s veteran area man, a reporter of the old school, who either never remembered or simply didn’t care that Kelly had quit drinking alcohol years ago.

‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Kelly said. ‘Got a couple of calls I want to make.’

Jerry waved him a careless farewell and set off down the hill in Trevor Jones’s footsteps.

Kelly switched his attention to the fans gathered outside the big house, forty or fifty of them already. Soon only they would remain. In spite of a natural cynicism finely honed by long years in newspapers, Kelly was quite impressed by their early presence.

Scott Silver, Angel’s rock star husband, had died in the early hours of the morning and the first reports of his death, ambiguous and hedging all bets, had broken on radio and TV breakfast news some time between 7 and 8 a.m., just three or four hours earlier. None the less the first wave of mourning fans had swiftly metamorphosed. Many were clutching photographs and posters of their dead idol, others carried flowers. The weeping and wailing, which had earlier reached a peak when their hero’s body had been carried off in the coroner’s van, had subsided now into a kind of low moaning. There was already a row of floral tributes on either side of the big gates. The towering manor house provided an imposing backdrop, and through the trees which surrounded it you could just glimpse the sea, iron grey that morning, a shade darker and even more forbidding than the wintry sky.

Kelly studied the scene idly as he punched just one button on his phone.

‘Meadows.’ Detective Chief Inspector Karen Meadows, already appointed the chief investigating officer on the case, always somehow managed to sound sharp, even if she had been roused from her bed in the middle of the night, as Kelly knew she had been.

‘Thanks again for the early tip,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but you didn’t call to thank me. What do you want?’

‘A few minutes of your time?’

‘You have to be joking. I don’t have any time. Not even a few minutes.’

‘So it is a murder inquiry, is it?’

‘Well, loosely speaking. Two killings. One murder probably, in the strictest sense of the word.’

‘Look, Karen, everybody’s speculating. All I’ve picked up since you tipped me off that Scott Silver was dead is what I’ve heard on the TV and radio news, which was bugger all, and a load of rumours out here at the house. Why don’t you put me straight?’

He heard her sigh.

‘OK. Then you get off my back, John, all right? We found two bodies at Maythorpe Manor. One is Scott Silver and the other is almost certainly an intruder who broke into the house during the night. It looks fairly certain that he murdered Silver and was killed in self-defence.’

‘So you reckon they killed each other in the struggle?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Well, how else do two men kill each other?’

‘I didn’t say that either.’

‘You’re talking in riddles, Karen.’

‘And you don’t listen, Kelly. There was a third person present, wasn’t there?’

‘Good God. Silver’s wife!’

‘At last. Your brain’s not been completely pickled then. Yup. We believe matey killed Scott Silver and that Angel Silver then killed him.’

Kelly’s right hand dropped involuntarily, letting the phone fall away slightly from his ear. He didn’t respond any further for a moment or two.

‘Kelly? Kelly, are you there? Stop mucking me about.’

He raised the phone again. ‘Sorry, Karen. Yes, I’m here. Just thinking, that’s all. You told me they’d both been stabbed, though, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right. The intruder was stabbed over and over again.’

‘And she did that? Angel?’

‘Yup. Looks like it.’

‘What will happen to her?’

Kelly was still adjusting to the idea that the slight, almost frail woman he found so captivating could have killed a man.

‘As long as everything adds up she’ll be charged with manslaughter. We’ve got to charge her with something sooner or later, whatever people may feel about justification, particularly in view of the way in which the second man was killed. I reckon she’ll plead self-defence, though, and get away with it.’

Manslaughter. So with the right judge she would probably end up with a suspended sentence, or even a conditional discharge, even if she pleaded guilty or was found guilty. But with the wrong judge, she could still end up with a custodial sentence. Angel Silver in jail. Now that would be a story.

Kelly reckoned Karen Meadows would probably prove to be right: that Angel would plead not guilty on grounds of self-defence and that almost any British jury would find in her favour. A woman who had watched her husband brutally killed by the man she had then attacked would be bound to get the sympathy vote, after all. Either way, Kelly’s antennae were waggling. Whatever happened it would make a decent change from parish council meetings and magistrates’ court. Kelly had been through the mill, God knows, but he’d never lost the nose for a good yarn. Nor the taste for it.

‘Where are they taking Angel?’ he asked.

‘Torquay Police Station. Where d’ya think? Oh, and I shouldn’t bother. You’ll not get near her. I’ll see to that.’

Kelly chuckled. He was starting to enjoy himself. Karen and he went back a long way.

Back to what for him would always be the good old days. They’d been close, very close. Kelly’s chuckle stretched into a fond smile at that memory. But it was more than that. Karen Meadows owed him. He’d probably saved her career at what might then have been the expense of his own, and she’d never forgotten it, bless her, unlike most of ’em. Hence the tip-off, hence the instant access to her through her mobile. She also understood him, of course, knew his driving force, knew what made him tick, and knew how to play the game too. Kelly wanted this one, and he suddenly became quite determined to get it. It was nice to feel as if he were back in the big time again. And what he wanted more than anything else was to get to Angel Silver. Karen had twigged that at once. Of course. She’d always been exceptionally bright and an astute judge of character. Except once, and that had nearly brought her down. Nearly, but not quite, thanks to Kelly. They’d been friends ever since, and it was a friendship Kelly valued as much as almost anything in his life — and that included his partner, Moira, his son, Nick, and even the job he still loved in spite of everything.

‘I’ll just have to wait then, won’t I?’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t suppose there’s anything else you can tell me?’

There was a pause.

‘I need something back.’

‘Whatever it is, you’ve got it,’ he replied glibly.

‘The intruder was one Terry James, 24 Fore Street, Paignton. Big boy, late twenties, but he still lived with his mum. Funny how often they do, his type, particularly from that sort of family. You may know ’em; we certainly do.’

Kelly thought hard. He was pretty sure he did know the James family. They were in and out of magistrates’ court on a regular basis, if he’d got the right bunch. Pub punch-ups and petty theft, that was their mark. And if Kelly had the right man in mind he had indeed been a big boy, well over six feet, and built like a stevedore.

‘I think I do, Karen,’ he said.

‘Got one conviction for GBH and several for minor thieving,’ Karen went on, echoing the thoughts running through Kelly’s head. ‘Be surprised if you hadn’t seen him in court.’

‘Reckon I may have.’

‘Well, anyway, our lads recognised him at once, but he’s yet to be formally identified. His brother’s on the way to the morgue as we speak, and the SOCOs are at the Jameses’ home, doing a search. Been there since the early hours. The place is still sealed, so if by any chance you’re planning to bowl over there give it a couple of hours, will you? I can’t keep a search team there any longer than that in any case, not with the resources we’ve got left after that last round of cuts. I need them at Maythorpe.’

‘OK,’ said Kelly, grinning at the phone. If by any chance, he thought. She knew darned well he’d be off to Paignton like a shot. ‘And what is it you want from me then?’

‘I want to know exactly what the family say to you. If you know the James lot you’ll also know they won’t give us houseroom. Look, this case seems clear enough, but I don’t want any mistakes. It’s too high profile. So just report back, John, every spit and fart, not just from the James family but anything else you come up with, you devious bastard. It might mean more to us than you.’

‘For you, Karen, anything.’

Kelly pushed the end button on his phone and punched the air gleefully with his free hand. Not only was he working on a potentially huge story but he already had a big lead. Life was looking up. Suddenly he didn’t feel cold any more.

He checked his watch: 11 a.m. on the dot. The only problem was that he really didn’t want to wait a couple of hours before heading off to Paignton. The days when provincial evening papers produced a last edition in the late afternoon were long gone, and, in any case, Kelly never liked holding back on a story. An overdeveloped sense of urgency was programmed into him and all of his kind. But when you had someone like Karen Meadows on your side you didn’t mess it up. If you made a deal you kept it. Well, more or less.

He would, he decided, compromise slightly and give it an hour and a half. The Argus’ final deadline was 2.30 p.m., which was actually a hell of a lot later than many evening papers. If the James family were halfway amenable he should still make it, and he’d certainly have no problem filling in the time. He had already filed an early story to the Argus, but there were also several nationals he wanted to send stuff to. He had the edge because some of them had not even managed to get staff men to the scene yet. It was not only the provincials that were run by cost cutters in suits nowadays. In Kelly’s day all the nationals had had a network of staff area men all over the country. That was no longer the case. Jerry Morris, a real survivor, was one of the last remaining. So Kelly reckoned it was time he cashed in on the inadequacies of modern newspaper management and started making the kind of money off this story that he had already promised himself he would.

He walked back down the hill, favouring his right foot, which was throbbing unpleasantly thanks to that TV cameraman, and through the pretty little thatched village of Maidencombe to the car park just up from the beach. The old MG gleamed wetly, raindrops from the earlier downfall still visible on its flat surfaces. Kelly kept the twenty-five-year-old car immaculately. It was his pride and joy. He had always loved MGs, and it was nice to have a car that went up in value if you looked after it, rather than down.

He unlocked the driver’s door and climbed in. He had learned the art of filing copy off the top of his head over the phone many years previously, and it didn’t take him long, sitting there in the car park, to send all that he had so far to the copy-takers of several London newspapers.

‘The widow of rock star Scott Silver, killed at his home in the early hours of yesterday morning, was last night at the centre of a bizarre double murder drama...’ he recited over the airwaves. And he knew it must be gripping stuff by the rapt attention of the copy-takers, who were generally far more cynical than any journalist.

Kelly still remembered during his early days in Fleet Street the copy-taker on his newspaper who invariably interrupted his stories with a muttered ‘Much more of this?’

Perhaps he was improving at last, he thought, as he finished filing his final story and then called Trevor Jones, mobile to mobile.

‘Twenty-four Fore Street, twelve-thirty,’ he told the snapper. ‘And if you get there before me, park down the road and don’t even move out of that tip of a car of yours until I get there.’

‘You got it,’ yelled Trevor over the airwaves. Kelly moved his phone a few inches further away from his ear. Trevor continued to bellow at him.

‘What’ve you got, Johnno?’ he asked excitedly. ‘Who lives there then?’

‘I’ll share that with you when I see you — and tell your desk you’re going off chasing fire engines or something. OK, mate?’

Kelly ended the call before Trevor could question him any more. Kelly had been weaned into Fleet Street by an old-fashioned news editor who had operated under such a strict policy of secrecy that it had driven his staff mad. None the less, Kelly had learned the lesson well enough that if you wanted to keep an exclusive you told nobody, not even your bosses, until the last possible minute. Don’t talk about it, write it, was the creed that had been drummed into him.

He started up the MG, enjoying as ever the unique throaty noise that it made, and motored back through Torquay, choosing to take the slower seafront road to Paignton rather than the ring road. He wasn’t in a hurry, after all. Along the way he stopped at one of the few seaside caffs that stayed open all year round, bought a cup of tea in a paper cup, and propped himself against the sea wall. A gusty breeze had blown up. Kelly balanced his cup on the wall and clapped his arms against his sides to warm himself up. He really must buy some proper cold weather gear, he told himself for the umpteenth time. But it was worth the chill in his bones just to stand there and watch the ocean that day. It was quite spectacular, an unusually big sea for South Devon. Huge waves roared up the beach, crashing into the wall against which Kelly was leaning. A particularly massive one sent a shower of salty spray on to the pavement, and Kelly beat a hasty retreat, just managing both to rescue his tea and get out of the way without a soaking. He found that he was smiling. There was, he thought, nothing more exhilarating than an English seascape on a day like this. The clouds were moving fast and a sudden break in them revealed a brilliant shaft of pale winter sunshine. Like the beam of a giant cinematic light it illuminated a big circular patch of water, changing the colour momentarily from dark grey to aquamarine, and reflecting off the white tips of the waves so that they turned into gleaming silver. Cecil B. de Mille could not have managed it better, thought Kelly. He felt his heart do a little flip. If there was greater beauty in the world than in this wild and wondrous scene, he really didn’t know what it was. There were some compensations to a backwater job on a backwater newspaper in a backwater town, he thought.

He checked his watch once more: 12.21 p.m. Fore Street was just a few minutes’ drive away. He reckoned he had given the police and the James family plenty of time, and he could feel his heart thumping in anticipation as he drove into Paignton along Esplanade Road and swung a right towards the railway station. But when he reached Fore Street there was a police squad car parked outside number 24. Kelly battled to keep his natural impatience under control. He’d have to wait again. He could not expect to get any result except a rocket from Karen Meadows if he knocked on the door while there was still a police presence.

Kelly drove slowly past the house. At the far end of the street he spotted Trevor Jones’s battered green VW Golf already parked there. The photographer raised a hand to him as he passed. Where Fore Street met the main drag Kelly manoeuvred a swift U-turn and pulled in against the kerb behind Trevor. Trying to look as casual as possible, Kelly clambered out of his own car and made his way to the passenger side of the old Golf. Trevor pushed the door open for him. Between them the two men shifted a pile of old newspapers, chip papers, chocolate wrappers and discarded film packets into the back of the vehicle so that Kelly could clamber in, his feet instantly becoming buried in even more debris.

Kelly passed no comment. He was used to the state of Trevor’s car. Instead, he quickly gave the younger man a précised version of what he had learned from Karen Meadows.

‘As soon as the bogies have gone I’m in,’ he said. ‘I don’t want ’em frightened by cameras so you wait here until I call you. Got it?’

Trevor Jones nodded, albeit a little reluctantly. Photographers were a nervous breed. They didn’t like waiting outside closed doors while reporters had access.

‘And you snatch anyone, anyone at all, going in or out,’ Kelly continued.

Trevor shot him a slightly reproachful look. The young snapper was already sitting with a camera ready, its 500-mil lens balanced on the dashboard and no doubt already focused on the door to number 24. Kelly smiled.

‘OK, OK, I’m sorry,’ he said.

Trevor might be relatively new to the game but he had been a quick learner from the start, and already didn’t miss too many tricks, even without coaching.

Kelly settled into the passenger seat. The assorted rubble on the floor made crackling noises as he shifted his feet a little. Suddenly there was a bang almost like a pistol going off. Kelly nearly jumped out of his seat, instinctively jerking his legs up so that his knees almost touched his chest, and covering his face with his hands.

‘It’s OK,’ he heard Trevor say. ‘I knew I’d lost a flashbulb in here somewhere.’

Kelly removed his hands from his face, shaking his head in mild disbelief.

‘You pillock,’ he said. ‘Apart from putting the fear of God into me, we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile here. You really are going to have to get this tip fumigated.’

Trevor mumbled something apologetic. Kelly glanced along the street in all directions. There was nobody about. If anyone, including the police, had heard the bang as the flashbulb had exploded they had apparently not thought it worth investigating. Very tentatively Kelly stretched out his legs again, once more checking his watch. If they were forced to wait for long they’d never make that deadline, he thought. But little more than ten minutes later a young uniformed policeman emerged from the James house accompanied by a man in a suit, who Kelly assumed was CID, and an older woman wearing grey trousers and a cream linen jacket whom he recognised as a detective sergeant he knew vaguely. She seemed to glance in the direction of the Golf. Kelly hunkered down in his seat and gestured to Trevor, who had already knocked off a few frames, to do the same. Kelly didn’t want to have to explain himself to Devon and Cornwall’s finest, and he had deliberately slotted the distinctive MG in behind Trevor’s car where it could not easily be seen from number 24. There were a lot of people around who would recognise Kelly’s MG straight away.

Kelly stayed in the half-crouch until he heard the engine of the squad car burst into life. He peeped cautiously through the side window as the police vehicle motored slowly away, fortunately proceeding in the direction it had been facing, which meant that it would not pass the two watching journalists and their cars. He waited another couple of minutes to be sure the coast was clear. Then he was in like Flynn, moving fast in spite of his bruised right foot, which was still causing him to limp slightly, out of the car, along the pavement, up the steps, through the patch of rubble which passed for a garden, and knocking on the door with its peeling blue paint.

A young man, equally as tall as Kelly remembered Terry James, eventually opened the door and looked him up and down with some distaste. From his vague memory of the dead man this could almost have been Terry James, although even more thickset and maybe a few years older.

‘If you’re looking for your lot they’ve just gone,’ growled the man, aggression oozing from his every pore.

‘I’m not police,’ said Kelly quickly.

‘What the fuck are you then? The Sally Army?’

Kelly smiled. ‘No, not exactly—’ he began.

‘I’ve got it, you’re a fucking vulture.’

‘I’m press, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Well, we’ve got nothing to say to yer. My brother’s just been murdered. Our Terry’s dead. Haven’t you got no respect?’

‘I just thought—’

This time Kelly was interrupted by the arrival at the door of a small dark woman, face tear-stained, hair dishevelled.

‘Who is it, Kenny?’

‘Some toerag reporter, Mam. Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of him.’

‘Mrs James,’ said Kelly quickly, taking an educated guess, ‘I’m so sorry about your son. I just want to find out what happened to him, every bit as much as you do, really. Things aren’t always what they seem, are they?’

‘No, they’re not,’ said Mrs James.

‘Well, I’d like to get the family’s side to things now, find out what really happened, put the record straight on your behalf,’ Kelly offered, coming out with the oldest line in the business. Nobody had been charged with anything yet; there was even a possibility that nobody would be. Terry James was dead, after all, so he couldn’t face trial, and who could tell how Angel Silver would ultimately be dealt with? None the less Kelly wanted a swift result while he still didn’t have to worry about sub judice.

‘Come on, Mam, let’s leave it,’ said Ken James, moving between the woman and Kelly and at the same time pushing the door with his shoulder in order to shut the reporter outside.

Kelly put his good foot in the door jamb and as he did so wondered if he might be making an extremely dangerous mistake. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever actually put his foot in a door before, and he wouldn’t have done so then if he hadn’t sensed that he could get through to Mrs James, that she wanted to talk. He certainly didn’t want to take her son on. But it seemed that he had. Kelly could feel the full weight of Ken James as the big man leaned heavily against the door, pushing it against the reporter’s now trapped foot and looking down on him menacingly.

‘Do you know what they’re saying about Terry, Mrs James?’ asked Kelly desperately, pushing his face against the now painfully narrow opening in the doorway.

Even Ken James hesitated. To Kelly’s immense relief the pressure on his trapped foot, encased in its flimsy shoe, eased. Kelly had banked on both Ken and his mother wanting to know what was being said. They weren’t the sort of people who had much trust in the police, after all. Karen had told him that, as if he had needed telling.

‘What are they saying?’ asked Mrs James, and Ken opened the door a few inches, freeing Kelly’s foot altogether. The reporter removed it swiftly. There was a limit. The way things were going in the foot department that day he was likely to end up unable to walk at all if he didn’t watch it.

He could see Mrs James quite clearly beneath her son’s arm, which Ken had stretched across the gap in the doorway, just in case Kelly was mad enough to attempt to barge in — which, in spite of a fairly cavalier track record, he most certainly was not. The woman’s glance was almost pleading.

‘Well, if you let me inside, I’d tell you everything,’ Kelly remarked in his ‘I’m a really reasonable and helpful bloke’ voice.

In response Ken James glowered at him with even more hostility. ‘The only reason we’ve got to talk to you lot is for cash, and lots of it,’ he growled.

His mother rounded on her son then. ‘You’ll not make money out of your brother’s death, Ken,’ she said, not loudly but with a force and an authority which surprised Kelly. ‘Not while I’m alive, at any rate.’

Ken James did not reply but bowed his head slightly as if in acknowledgement.

‘You’d better come in,’ said Mrs James to Kelly.

Her son stepped back, albeit with apparent reluctance, removing his arm and allowing the door to swing fully open again. Mrs James was little more than half the size of her son but there wasn’t much doubt about who was in charge in this household.

She beckoned Kelly into the hall. He was struck at once by the extreme cleanliness and order of the place, which came as something of a surprise after the neglected exterior. The floor of the hall was covered in plush dark red carpet which looked freshly vacuumed, the walls washed plain cream and covered in family photographs. Mrs James led him to an unexpectedly large kitchen at the back of the seemingly small terraced house. The kitchen was smart, modern, well equipped and gleaming. Obliquely Kelly found himself wondering where all those shiny new white goods might have come from. A second, younger woman was sitting at the table. She was sobbing gently into a wodge of tissues and barely looked up as Kelly entered. More than likely a sister to Terry and Ken, Kelly guessed. He knew the James lot were a large family. Two small boys, possibly the younger woman’s sons, appeared to be fighting to the death in front of the washing machine. Kelly was aware of the towering figure of Ken James right behind him, literally breathing down his neck. Nobody else in the room seemed to notice the huge commotion the two children were making.

‘Hello,’ he said to the woman at the table, putting on his ‘I’m a nice journalist’ face. ‘John Kelly, Evening Argus. So sorry to intrude at such a sad time.’

‘Like fuck,’ said Ken James loudly.

Kelly ignored Ken. The woman ignored Kelly.

‘May I sit down?’ he enquired, doing so without waiting for anyone to reply. He knew how to get himself established inside somebody’s home well enough.

‘So what are they saying about our Terry?’ asked Mrs James for the second time as she lowered herself into a chair opposite Kelly.

‘They’re saying that Terry broke into Scott Silver’s house, that he was disturbed by the rock star, whom he then stabbed to death in a struggle, and that Scott’s wife, Angel Silver, then killed Terry in self-defence,’ explained Kelly succinctly. He hadn’t been a top tabloid hack for nothing.

‘We fucking know that,’ growled Ken, who appeared to use only one adjective.

‘Yes, but do you believe it?’

‘No we don’t,’ said Mrs James. ‘Not for one minute. My Terry wouldn’t have hurt that Scott Silver. Never.’

‘He never hurt anyone, not Terry, except maybe in the pub or summat,’ interrupted Ken in what for him was presumably a normal sort of voice. ‘Even then the filth never got it right. He only ever fought back when people picked a fight with him, did Terry. There’s a sort who like to show how tough they are after they’ve had a few beers. They like to push big blokes like Terry. I know. I get it too. But Terry never wanted it, never went looking for it. Not like me. I can be an evil bastard, me.’ Ken looked quite pleased with himself at the thought and uttered the last words with considerable pride.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ replied Kelly as pleasantly as he could manage. Very casually he slipped a hand into one of the side pockets of his Barbour and withdrew a small tape recorder and a notebook. He put the recorder on the table and switched it on. Nobody objected, which was a result in itself.

‘But Terry does have a record both for grievous bodily harm and for theft, doesn’t he?’ Kelly continued conversationally.

‘Yeah, but you can always make things sound worse than they really are,’ responded Mrs James. ‘You heard what our Kenny said. When he got done on that grievous bodily harm charge it wasn’t Terry’s fault at all. There was a load of lads down the Pier Arms who decided to take him on and my Terry sorted the lot of ’em out. Then he was the one got done. He wasn’t into violence. He didn’t like it.’

Kelly sighed. ‘So why was he carrying a knife when he broke into Scott Silver’s house, Mrs James?’

‘I don’t believe he was. I’ve never known him carry any kind of weapon, have you, Ken, honestly now?’

‘No,’ said the big man. ‘Definitely not. It weren’t Terry’s style. He must have been fitted up.’

Kelly sighed again. He wasn’t getting very far. Classic denial. Strange how often it was that the seriously dodgy families were the ones who could kid themselves best.

‘Look, your Terry was surprised in the middle of the night while breaking into the Silver home. I understand the police found a suitcase he’d already filled with stuff. I’m not saying he meant to kill Scott Silver, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that he did.’

‘Kill Scott Silver?’ Mrs James produced a hollow mirthless laugh. ‘He’d never have done that. He wouldn’t have stolen from him either.’

Kelly had his notebook on his knee now and a Biro in his right fist, but so far the only mark he had made on the page was an uninspired doodle of something vaguely resembling a cat. Kelly liked cats.

‘Well, what do you think your son was doing in the Silver mansion last night then? He wasn’t exactly an invited guest, was he?’

‘Look, Mr Kelly, Terry was not the brightest of my boys...’

Kelly made a huge effort not to look at Ken. The thought of an even less bright version was a disturbing one.

‘He was a big softy, though. That was my Terry. He had a heart of gold. He didn’t go round hurting people, and that Scott Silver — well, Terry really loved him. Honest he did.’

Terry James loved Scott Silver? What the hell did that mean? Kelly was alert now. He wasn’t sure where Mrs James was leading but this was beginning to get interesting at last.

‘Look, let me show you something,’ the woman continued.

She ushered Kelly out of the kitchen, along the red-carpeted hallway, up the similarly red-carpeted stairs, past more immaculate cream walls dotted with yet more family photographs, and led the way into a small bedroom overlooking the street.

As she opened the door Kelly felt the familiar tingling sensation in his spine that he always got when his journalistic antennae were waggling on overdrive.

The room was a shrine to Scott Silver. Every inch of the walls was covered with posters and photographs of the rock star. If it hadn’t been for bare patches indicating that several photographs had been recently removed, almost certainly by the police, Kelly thought, you wouldn’t have been able to see the mid-blue-painted walls at all. There were old concert tickets drawing-pinned to the front of the wardrobe, piles of Scott Silver LPs in one corner and a neat stack of his CDs next to the state-of-the-art music centre. Even the rug thrown over the bed bore Silver’s picture.

Kelly hadn’t expected this. Neither, he thought, would the police have done. Terry James was known as a petty criminal, not the type who would be expected to be an obsessive fan. The tingling in Kelly’s spine had extended right the way up his back and he was sure the hairs on his neck were starting to stand on end.

Lost in his own imaginings for a moment he could only just hear Mrs James talking to him. ‘You can see what I mean, you can see it, can’t you?’ she said.

Kelly saw all right. He saw a completely different scenario to the one with which he had expected to be confronted. He saw a potential stalker story. It had to be, surely. He no longer saw a petty thief-turned-killer in a blagging that went wrong, but a young man obsessed with his hero — so obsessed that he could be driven to almost anything. It happened. All the time. It was the curse of the modern celebrity. And it turned an already hot story into something else.

‘Did Terry ever try to get close to Scott Silver?’ he asked, casually checking that his tape recorder, which he had picked up off the table and was carrying in his left hand, was still running.

‘Oh yes, he went all over the country to concerts and stuff. He used to hitchhike, sleep on pavements to get tickets, anything,’ Mrs James told him chattily. ‘Then he’d wait outside the stage door, that sort of thing. He’d got loads of photographs of himself with Silver. Started being interested in him when he was a teenager, you see, and it just went on and on.’

‘Did Terry ever go up to Maythorpe Manor?’ Kelly asked.

‘Oh yes, he was always going up there, couldn’t keep away.’ Mrs James chuckled. She was so determined to portray her son as a misrepresented nice guy she didn’t seem to realise at all the disturbing interpretation which could be put on her words. ‘Sometimes he’d come home and say that Scott had spoken to him, or maybe his wife, that Angel, and he’d be pleased as punch. Then in the last few months he started helping out in the garden a bit, doing odd jobs and that. He was handy like that, was Terry...’

Mrs James’s voice tailed off and fresh tears started to form in her eyes. Kelly waited in patient silence for her to speak again, trying to look deeply sympathetic while he was actually thinking obscurely that Terry hadn’t appeared to be very handy in his own garden. After a minute or so, Mrs James produced a paper tissue from somewhere and blew her nose loudly. Then she continued, albeit a little more shakily.

‘H-he didn’t talk about it a lot — not a great talker, Terry wasn’t. But it was almost like he regarded them as friends. And my Terry was as loyal a man as ever walked this earth. You don’t hurt your friends, not our sort. He’d have died for his friends, Terry would...’ She paused as if at last hearing what she was saying.

Kelly butted in quickly, before she had time to think too much.

‘Maybe that’s exactly what he did, Mrs James,’ he said gravely, realising that the remark made absolutely no sense whatsoever. But Kelly was good at saying what people wanted to hear. And from the look in Mrs James’s eye that’s exactly what he had done.

‘Maybe he did,’ she said. ‘That would have been just like my Terry.’

‘Do you mind if I get a snap taken of this room? I think it says a lot about Terry, don’t you?’

‘Yes I do,’ said Mrs James. ‘It shows what he was really like, and what a big fan he was of Scott Silver. It shows that what I said was true, that he’d never have hurt Scott, never, don’t you think?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Kelly ingenuously. ‘It really does. So it’s OK if I call my photographer in, is it? I made him wait outside. Didn’t want to push things.’ He smiled reassuringly. Or at least tried to.

Mrs James just nodded. Kelly used his mobile to call Trevor Jones on his. The photographer responded even more swiftly than Kelly would have considered possible, ringing the doorbell within seconds. He must have been standing by his car on starting blocks, Kelly reckoned. Ken James, looking rather less enthusiastic than his mother about it all, showed Trevor up to the bedroom.

The snapper was all smiles and bouncing ginger curls, the kind of young man surely nobody could ever regard as a threat, which was another reason why Kelly liked working with him.

‘I’ll just rattle off a few frames then,’ said Trevor, doing so speedily before the Jameses had a chance to change their minds.

Kelly watched with one eye as Trevor shot the room from all angles, and then charmed Mrs James into posing for close-ups with some of the memorabilia. He really was turning into a smart operator, thought Kelly admiringly. Trevor failed to persuade Ken to be photographed, though. The big man merely responded with a sulky ‘Fuck off’ and kept himself determinedly out of shot.

‘I don’t suppose you have any of those pictures of Terry with Scott Silver, have you?’ Kelly asked Mrs James.

‘The police took most of them, I think,’ she replied, gesturing at the bare patches on the wall. ‘But there may be one or two in that drawer by the bed...’

She started rummaging around and eventually, under a pile of magazines, came up with a photograph which she studied morosely for a second or two before passing it to Kelly.

The reporter couldn’t believe his luck. In his hand he held a clear colour snap of the two dead men, both smiling for the camera. Scott Silver, whose ragged good looks had made him such an icon, along with his unusual high-pitched singing voice, even had an arm loosely around the neck of Terry James. Terry had been considerably taller and Scott had had to reach up to do so. His body language suggested that he was making a joke of their height difference. Already wearing cowboy boots with small heels, he was standing exaggeratedly on tiptoe. James was beaming from ear to ear. It was a good picture. And to make it absolutely perfect it had been taken outside Maythorpe Manor. The gates of the waterside mansion could be seen quite clearly in the background.

Gold dust, thought Kelly, wondering why the police had not taken this photo too. Maybe they had found and taken away another just like it, or maybe they’d overlooked it. Kelly knew of more than one occasion in the past when specialist police search teams had missed the obvious. Even experts were susceptible to human error. But Kelly didn’t really care what had caused the police to leave this picture behind. He was just so glad to have it.

Mrs James was still talking to him. ‘Yes, my Terry always carried his camera with him when he was going after Scott,’ she remarked.

Going after Scott. The words hit hard. That was how the world would see it — Kelly had realised that from the moment he had been shown Terry James’s bedroom. Now the man’s mother had actually said the words.

Kelly couldn’t wait to get away now. He had work to do. And he had all he needed to make a huge splash not only in the final edition of the Argus today, but also across just about every darned morning newspaper in the country tomorrow.

He extricated himself and Trevor Jones from the James family home as quickly as possible and only just prevented himself from running back to his car.

‘Right, first give the Argus all you’ve got, then send your stuff to Scope, including that pick-up pic,’ Kelly instructed Trevor. Scope was one of the major picture agencies and Kelly had already been on to its boss, Peter Murphy, that morning, just in case.

‘Murphy’s expecting you to wire,’ Kelly went on. ‘And your Desk won’t quibble because they’ll know what you’re doing is down to me. Any flak, send it my way. OK?’

‘Right,’ yelled Trevor as he flung himself into his car and gunned the engine. ‘I’m on it.’

Kelly grinned. Trevor too would earn a few bob out of this, but what the younger man really wanted, more than cash, Kelly knew, was to see his by-line on a major exclusive in a big daily.

He checked his watch for the umpteenth time as he settled into the driver’s seat of his MG: 1.30 p.m. Bags of time. Kelly opened the glove compartment and pulled out the hands-free kit for his phone. He’d start filing on the run. It was second nature to him. First the Argus, in plenty of time for its final deadline, and then the nationals. That small-minded prick of a news editor wouldn’t like it, but that was tough. Kelly would do his duty, give all he had to the Argus first, but he wasn’t going to miss the chance of a major crack at the nationals. No way. Hansford would just have to put up with it. Nobody else would object to him making a few bob for a change. It could be quite a few bob too, he reflected cheerily, for him and young Jones. This story was getting better and better.

Kelly headed into Torquay town centre while he talked into his phone and drove around until he found a convenient parking space as close as possible to the police station on the corner of South Street. When he had finished filing he phoned Karen Meadows to give her a full report on his visit to the Jameses’ house, as promised.

‘And what the fuck do you want now?’ Karen yelled into her mobile. It had been a long day already and it was far from over. Karen had been called out at 3 a.m. and had been on the go ever since. Not only that, but she couldn’t quite get her head around the double killing. Angel Silver was still being interviewed by two of Karen’s team, but the rock star’s widow, understandably enough, Karen supposed, seemed unable to tell her story in a lucid way. She remained in shock, of course, and Karen was unsure how much longer she should hold her. Since that darned Human Rights Act had become law the previous year, police officers had to be even more careful than ever how they dealt with suspects — particularly one as high profile as Angel Silver, who also looked so frail you couldn’t help thinking she might fall over at any moment.

This was the kind of case which could turn round and bite you really hard unless you took great care. Scott Silver had been an icon, the circumstances of his death were unusual and highly dramatic to say the least. The eyes of the world were going to be focused on the way the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary handled this one, and Karen knew it.

She was alone in her office at Torquay Police Station, desperately trying to collect all her various thoughts together into a manageable package. At the very least it was vital in a situation like this to stick to correct procedure and ensure that no corners were cut. A senior police officer’s career could be all too easily terminated nowadays by an ill-considered move or lack of attention to detail. And Karen knew how high the stakes could be in an investigation as big as this one. She had been going over and over in her mind every course of action she had so far instigated as SIO, and attempting to assimilate everything she should do next.

Karen was an experienced detective with a reputation for being cool under pressure, but the exhilaration at being handed such a hot potato, which had so far carried her through the day, had temporarily evaporated. She was experiencing that energy slump most high fliers are prone to at some stage following an adrenalin rush. She felt tense and on edge, and the last thing she wanted to do was to talk to a journalist. Even to one she genuinely regarded as a friend.

‘Uh — I thought it was you who asked me to report back to you,’ Kelly replied down the airwaves, his voice calm, even very slightly amused.

Christ, thought Karen, so she had. But Kelly didn’t sound too offended. No man with his sort of background would, after all.

‘Sorry, I’m up to my ears,’ she continued more mildly, but not all that apologetically. ‘Just make it snappy, will you?’

‘OK. First thing, the family are quite adamant that Terry James never went out tooled up, not with a knife, not with anything,’ Kelly remarked.

‘They’re almost certainly right,’ Karen replied. ‘We think the knife he used was taken from a set in the kitchen of Maythorpe. Out of character or not, it looks like he picked it up when he broke into the house and when he was challenged by Scott Silver he certainly didn’t hesitate to use the thing.’

‘A panic attack,’ said Kelly.

‘Something like that.’ Karen chuckled without much humour.

‘But you guys obviously know by now what I found out at the house. James had some sort of fixation with Silver. I’ve gone on the stalker angle.’

‘Now there’s a surprise. Did you get anything else my lads might have missed?’

‘Dunno. Apparently James helped out at Maythorpe doing odd jobs—’

‘Yeah, we got that,’ Karen interrupted.

‘Still, how the hell did he get into the place in the middle of the night, Karen? It’s like Fort Knox out there.’

‘It should be, but not the way the Silvers have operated their security system. There’s a control panel on the wall outside which opens the gates, isn’t there? It seems that half the work force of Torquay had the combination. Angel is vague about whether or not she gave the number to Terry James, but I suspect that she did. And in any case, although there’s an alarm system both around the perimeter walls and at the house, connected with the security firm HQ in Newton Abbot, when they were indoors the Silvers were apparently lax at even setting it.’

‘Yes, but surely...’

Karen Meadows never heard what Kelly had to say. The detective she regarded as her right-hand man walked into her office looking worried and at the same moment her landline rang.

‘Can’t get any sense out of her, boss,’ DS Cooper began.

Karen waved him silent, ended her mobile call from Kelly with an abrupt ‘Got to go’ and picked up her desk phone.

The call lasted only seconds.

‘Right,’ said Karen finally. ‘Seven o’clock it is then.’

DS Cooper didn’t speak. He knew better. Instead he just looked at her enquiringly.

‘The chief constable wants to see me at HQ in Exeter, Phil. This evening. As if we all didn’t have enough to do.’

‘Dead right, boss,’ responded Cooper. ‘Predictable, though. Bet all the brass have got their knickers in a twist over this one.’

‘Yes, let’s just make sure we guys on the ground don’t, shall we? And as for Angel Silver, well, that was never going to be easy, and we’d better keep our carpet slippers on too. I’ll be along to have a go at her myself in a few minutes, OK?’

‘Very OK, boss.’

Cooper looked relieved, thought Karen, watching him leave the room. Even good officers liked nothing better than to pass the buck upwards, but the higher you got in the pecking order the harder that became. In any case, it wasn’t Karen Meadows’ style.

She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. If she could catnap for just a few minutes it might clear her head. It seemed the day could become even longer than she had thought it would be.

Not for the first time Karen was almost glad that there was no one in her life to whom she was answerable, nobody who might be tricky about the crazy demands put upon her by her job. Sometimes she felt lonely returning at night to a home she shared only with her cat, but at least she didn’t have to explain herself.

With a wry shaking of his head Kelly put his mobile phone in his pocket, climbed out of his car and walked thoughtfully along to the big square building which housed Torquay Police Station. As he joined the group of press, onlookers, and distraught fans who were already waiting on the station steps, he had no idea whether or not Karen Meadows was inside. But clearly Angel Silver was still being detained.

Angel Silver. An extraordinary name for an extraordinary woman. Yet Kelly knew that ‘Angel’ was not some affectation of the music world, but just a shortening of the name her parents had given her. Angelica. Absurdly grand for the daughter of a Billingsgate fishmonger.

A second Argus snapper, Ben Wallis, was already on a watching brief and was able to tell Kelly that there had been no developments at the station except the earlier release of a predictable official statement confirming that Angel was helping police with their inquiries.

Kelly shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his inadequate coat and settled into the waiting game again. As time passed the day became even chillier. By late afternoon he felt that his feet were turning into blocks of ice, particularly his sore right one. His back ached too. He was getting too old for this lark, he thought. That cup of tea and the bun from the seaside caff seemed like ancient history. He managed to persuade a girl reporter from the Western Morning News to nip to a sandwich shop on condition that he both promised to cover for her and paid. She returned with coffee and half a dozen hot pasties in a bag. Kelly attacked the coffee so eagerly he burned his lips. The pasties contained very little meat and the pastry was distinctly stale but Kelly barely noticed, and neither did Ben Wallis, who gratefully accepted one of them.

As darkness fell and six o’clock came and went, Kelly found himself mildly surprised at how long Angel was being held. He reminded himself that two men had died, and he wondered what the police were asking her and what she was telling them about the high drama that had unfolded in her home during the night.

Disconsolately he stretched his arms and legs, and hopped about a bit from one foot to the other in a bid to get his distinctly sluggish circulation going again. The bruised toes of his right foot continued to throb dully. Kelly was beginning to feel extremely weary. After all, he’d been on the case since his call from Karen just after 6.30 a.m. For a moment or two he considered giving up and going home. He didn’t suppose anyone at the Argus would notice or even care. They’d merely pick up from the dailies in the morning. But Kelly hated that sort of reporter. He always saw a job through and he’d never liked second-hand information, which he reckoned invariably led to trouble. Kelly liked to make his own mistakes.

At around eight o’clock it started to rain again. That, Kelly thought, was the final straw. There was no shelter worth mentioning. He had neither hat nor umbrella. Naturally. Icy raindrops cut through his thinning hair and ran down his neck beneath his shirt collar. He began to shiver uncontrollably.

Then, quite suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. Angel Silver emerged through the police station’s big doors. Several policemen escorted her as she began to walk down the station steps, one of them holding an umbrella over her. The couple of dozen or so assorted press, snappers, reporters, radio journalists, and TV teams pushed forward as one body. The area around the station, lit only by standard streetlamps, was suddenly flooded with film-set-scale illumination as cameras flashed and the lights of the TV teams burst into life.

Angel walked with a straight back, head held high, looking resolutely ahead, face even paler than before, if that were possible. Once more Kelly was struck by her beauty and the way she seemed able to isolate herself from all that was happening to her. He knew that she must be knocking forty now, but, even under such great stress, she looked years younger. There was an ageless quality about her.

Kelly was aware that at the rear of the police station there was a police parking area off public limits, where it would have been possible for her to be discreetly bundled into a vehicle and swept away without anyone having a chance to get near her. He suspected that it would have been Angel’s own decision not to sneak out of a back door.

A squad car came roaring around the corner and squealed to a halt as close as it could get to the station steps. One of the policemen escorting Angel stepped ahead to open the near-side rear door. The noise in South Street was every bit as overwhelming as the blazing light. The reporters, TV and written press were all calling out to Angel, desperate to persuade her to tell them what had happened and how she felt. She did not respond and, indeed, gave no indication that she even heard. The snappers and the TV cameramen were hassling each other for the best position for a final shot. Angel bent down to climb into the car and, as she did so, seemed to stumble slightly. A policeman immediately put an arm under her elbow to steady her. She looked round and slightly up at him as if in thanks and then her gaze wandered by him and it seemed almost as if she were taking in the extraordinary scene around her for the first time. It was then, for the second time that day, that Kelly got the impression she was staring straight at him. Certainly their gazes met. Kelly knew all about the Diana factor, but he really felt sure of it. There was something so hypnotic about those violet eyes, their intensity somehow enhanced by the dark shadows beneath them.

‘Angel, what happened in the police station?’ he called out as loudly as he could, aware of his own voice rising above the commotion. ‘Are you being charged with anything?’

Her gaze remained steady. Then she smiled. Well, it was almost a smile. Just an enigmatic lifting of her lips at the corners. A Mona Lisa smile. Slight, yet deep. Unfathomable. But it brightened her whole face.

Then she was gone. Into the car and sandwiched on the rear seat between two extremely large police officers.

Some of the pack ran to their motor cars in order to attempt to give chase. Kelly took his time. Thoughtful. It seemed more than likely that Angel was simply being returned home to Maythorpe, and, in any case, he knew from long hard experience that you could almost never successfully follow a police car.

He started back towards his MG, picking up a bag of chips, which he ate with one hand while he drove out to Maythorpe Manor. No wonder he was growing a paunch, he thought to himself.

Around the gates of the big old mansion probably upwards of a thousand fans of the dead rock star were now gathered in silent vigil, almost every one of them carrying a lit candle. The whole area was bathed in a kind of ethereal light.

Kelly had expected many more fans than had been gathered in the morning. None the less, he was amazed at the sight which confronted him as he approached the house on foot from the car park down in Maidencombe village. Involuntarily he slowed his pace, taking in every detail of the scene. Then suddenly the rather eerie silence was abruptly broken. The gathered fans burst almost as if by pre-arrangement into a song — probably Scott Silver’s most celebrated recording, certainly so well known that even Kelly, not a man with a great knowledge of contemporary music, recognised it at once.

It was a ballad, a hauntingly poignant number made all the more so by the circumstances in which it was being sung.

The haunting strains dripped like liquid through the night air. Kelly couldn’t make out all the words, but did remember that the song was a typical Silver number that had actually been about lost love rather than death. On this night, sung by this particular choir, it was a moving funeral dirge.

Kelly moved forward into the throng. People of all ages seemed to be gathered now. Scott Silver’s appeal spanned the generations. Many of the women and even a few of the men were weeping copiously. Kelly had never quite understood, even as a young man, the adulation many people feel for distant heroes, public figures and celebrities they don’t know — film stars, rock icons, royalty. He had never understood it but sometimes he envied its simplicity.

Certainly this was an extraordinary night. Those gathered seemed united in their sorrow. Kelly pressed his way further forward, almost bumping into Trevor Jones who greeted him warmly.

‘I knew Ben was at the police station so I thought I’d come straight out here just in case,’ the photographer explained. ‘Got a great shot of her arriving, Johnno. What a stunner, eh!’

‘She’s here then,’ Kelly murmured, almost to himself.

‘Oh yeah,’ nodded Trevor. ‘Arrived about fifteen minutes ago in a police car, which left almost straight away. We think there’s still a police presence in the house, though.’

Kelly nodded. There was sure to be, he thought. They’d never leave Angel alone there. After all, the whole place was still a crime scene. He reckoned she’d only be allowed to use the rooms they’d already cleared, and neither she nor anyone else except the scene-of-crime boys — the SOCOs — would be allowed near the area where the two men had died.

‘Well done, mate,’ he remarked absently to Trevor, as he moved on through the crowd. He didn’t really want to talk. He preferred to look, to listen, and to drink in the atmosphere. With some difficulty he pushed his way through to the front and found himself once again right up against the iron railings of the gateway where the smattering of floral tributes of the morning had now grown into a mountain of multicoloured blooms.

He crouched down beside them to read some of the messages. The candles and the bright security lights around Maythorpe, although they cast their own deep shadows, meant that he could do so quite easily.

‘We always loved you, Scott.’ ‘We will mourn you for ever.’ And some even more melodramatic: ‘Life without you will not be worth living.’ ‘My life is over now, as yours is.’

Quite quickly the muscles in Kelly’s calves started to ache and one of his ankles locked. With some difficulty he got to his feet and, forgetting that his right one was bruised and sore, he put rather too much weight on it. The pain caused him to stumble and he reached out desperately with his right arm in the general direction of the iron fencing, seeking support. In doing so he lurched against a figure, dressed in what appeared to be a long dark robe, pressed against the bars.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered automatically when he regained his footing.

There was no response. Kelly took a closer look. He only had a back view but he somehow guessed from what he could see of the figure’s build that this was a young woman. Certainly her nearly black hair, much the same colour that Kelly’s had once been, hung long and straight almost to her waist — not that hairstyles always told you anything. Her face must be shoved right into the railings, Kelly thought. She was standing completely still, apart from the rest of the crowd and without what seemed to be the almost obligatory candle. Her black hair and dark robe caused her to half disappear into the quite confusing shadows and rendered her almost invisible from even a short distance away. Kelly had not noticed her until he had bumped into her.

‘Sorry,’ he said again, a little louder. Still no response.

He shrugged and backed off, turning his attention once more to the rest of the gathered throng. They were singing another Scott Silver number now: ‘Why I’ll Always Love You’.

Kelly stood amongst them for several more minutes, silently listening. Somewhat to his surprise he found himself quite moved.

He glanced across to the big house safely cocooned behind its security gates and a ten-foot-high wall. Only it hadn’t proved to be quite so safe, had it? Terry James had breached the defences of Maythorpe Manor, albeit, it seemed, with the unwitting assistance of its owners, broken into Scott Silver’s home and killed him.

Kelly was desperate now to know exactly what had happened during the previous night. He stared steadily at the old grey mansion. Maythorpe, he knew, dated back to Tudor times but, following a fire, had been almost totally rebuilt during the Georgian era, hence its geometric design, which doubtless enclosed big high-ceilinged and well-proportioned rooms. What tragic secrets did the ancient manor hold within its lofty walls, he wondered.

A light behind one of the house’s ground-floor windows suddenly snapped out. Somewhere else another flicked on. Seconds later elsewhere on the first floor there was a flash of light and then just a little chink remained.

Kelly concentrated hard on that narrow slice of light. Then, after just a minute or so, that too disappeared. Inside the house someone had pulled back a curtain in order to look outside, he was sure of it. Then, to get a better view and in order to remain unseen, the light inside the room had been switched off.

Was that person still there, looking out, taking in the scene Kelly had just been marvelling at?

Angel Silver was inside there. Was it her at the window? How was she feeling? What was she thinking?

Kelly tried to put himself inside that beautiful porcelain head, convinced she was watching. He shut his eyes to concentrate. He could see her pale face quite clearly. But it told him absolutely nothing at all.