A Moment Of Madness

Five

Kelly had parked the MG at the far end of the Argus car park where he always did. There was a tall wall there which protected the little motor somewhat both from sunshine and the worst excesses of weather.

He paused to light a cigarette as he approached it, and was vaguely aware of a figure taking off at a run and vaulting over the fence into the main road.

Instinctively Kelly sensed trouble. He quickened his pace slightly. His fears proved justified. Both the tyres on the driver’s side wheels of the MG had been slashed. They were completely destroyed.

Kelly kicked one of them in frustration, unlocked the driver’s door, flung in his lap-top computer and the digital camera duly acquired from the picture desk, both of which he had been carrying over one shoulder, then used his mobile to phone the MG specialist who looked after the car for him. The good news was that Wayne from Torbay Classic Motors had two of the right tyres in stock and would bring them straight over. The bad news was the price: £200. Ouch, thought Kelly. He supposed that he could claim for them on his insurance, but he had a £100 excess. It could have been worse, of course, and Kelly had little doubt that it would have been had he not interrupted whoever had vandalised his car. The MG could have been totally wrecked. Kelly supposed he should report the incident to the police. But for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain he didn’t want to. He had no real idea who might want to vandalise his car but he somehow felt sure it was connected with the Silver story. It occurred to him at once that it could be members of the James family. They wouldn’t be too pleased with him after his stalker story. The interpretation that he had put on what he had learned from his visit to their Fore Street home would not have pleased the family at all. And they were the sort who liked to take the law into their own hands.

On the other hand, of course, the tyre slashing could be just indiscriminate vandalism, but Kelly didn’t think so.

Kelly climbed thoughtfully into the driver’s seat. He preferred to wait there for his new tyres to arrive rather than going back into the Argus office. Hansford would only gloat and Kelly could not really blame him. As Robertson had predicted, Kelly had not been able to resist doing a bit of gloating himself when only a few minutes earlier he had returned those council minutes to Hansford and given him the editor’s message.

Wayne from Classic Motors was as good as his word and arrived less than half an hour later with two replacement wheels.

Within just a few minutes they were fitted and Wayne, a tall angular young man who was one of the best mechanics Kelly had ever encountered, loaded the original pair with their damaged tyres into the back of his van.

When he had finished Kelly asked him if he would just take a look underneath the car and check that nothing else was damaged. Wayne stroked a chin that had never quite recovered from a bad attack of teenage acne and regarded Kelly thoughtfully. But he made no comment, until, after spending several minutes both lying on the ground underneath the little motor and prodding around inside the bonnet he eventually spoke.

‘Looks OK to me, John,’ he said in his squeaky high-pitched voice. ‘Don’t forget you’re overdue for a service, though.’

Kelly nodded. ‘I’ll drop her in as soon as I get back from London.’

He drove back to St Marychurch then to pick up an overnight bag and leave a message for Moira. In the beginning, when they had first met it had been Moira who wouldn’t quite make the commitment of moving in with Kelly. She had, after all, only one major relationship behind her, a marriage to a man who had turned out to be a violent bully, and she told Kelly that after that she had vowed never to make herself vulnerable to any one man ever again. Then later Kelly suspected it had been him who wouldn’t quite make the commitment. They had settled eventually for a slightly disjointed way of life which seemed none the less to suit them well enough. Moira was one of the good ones, and not for the first time Kelly resolved to let her know more how much he valued her. When he got back from London, that was.

The first thing he noticed when he opened his front door was the smell of fresh paint.

As he closed the door behind him a blue-spotted blonde head appeared over the banisters.

‘I thought I’d start on the spare room,’ Moira called, then added with just a small note of anxiety, ‘You did say blue would be OK, didn’t you?’

She didn’t look surprised to see him turn up in the middle of the day. But then, she wouldn’t be. Kelly invariably seemed to manage to come and go from everywhere, including his place of work, on his own terms.

‘Sure,’ Kelly replied, peering at her up the stairs. ‘You know I reckon you always get it right. Shouldn’t you be home in bed, though?’

‘I just want to finish the first coat,’ she replied. ‘I’ve still got time for my seven hours.’

Kelly knew that all too often, particularly if she’d had a tough night, Moira felt unable to go straight to bed to sleep after coming off duty. Virtually the whole of Kelly’s house had been revamped that way. Moira enjoyed decorating and rejuvenating a home. And there had certainly been plenty of scope in Kelly’s house which he’d rented when he first came to Torquay and then managed to buy on a mortgage a few years later. She had eagerly taken on the task of giving his home a face-lift, and continued to regard periodic redecoration as a running task. It was a pleasure for her, she told him. It was how she unwound.

Kelly smiled up at her paint-spattered face. Moira was more or less free to come and go as she pleased, but she never took too much for granted. He liked that. And he liked Moira. A lot.

‘The blue suits you, by the way,’ he said.

Grinning, she held up her hands for him to see. They were both blue too. Moira was very good at painting and decorating, but she always seemed to give herself a coat of paint as well.

‘I’ve got to go to London,’ he said. ‘I’ve just popped back for a bag, and I was going to phone your machine and leave a message.’

When Moira was sleeping during the day she set her telephone answering machine to take calls with the ringing tone switched off.

‘Well, you can tell me to my face,’ she told Kelly, trotting down the stairs. She moved very quickly, almost jerkily. Perhaps that was why she got so much paint over herself, Kelly thought obliquely. She had a small pretty face, which matched her build, a fresh complexion, a ready smile and kind eyes, but there was something in them that made you instantly aware that she had suffered pain in her life.

Kelly had always vowed never to cause her any more.

When she reached the hall he leaned down to kiss her — she was a good six inches shorter than he was — taking care to find a patch of face which was not blue.

‘You’re supposed to paint the walls, not yourself, you know,’ he told her affectionately, stroking her blue-spotted hair.

‘I know, but all of us need brightening up,’ she responded.

Kelly shook his head in resignation. Then he studied her more closely. The shadows beneath her eyes were very dark that morning, and although she was smiling at him there was a strained tightness about her mouth. He knew that Moira’s cheery manner and apparently light approach to life frequently belied the weariness and stress of her job. He was also aware, particularly when he was working on something which excited him, that he was inclined to forget to give her the kind of support she undoubtedly needed.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

He touched a patch of blue-painted face with his fingertips.

‘Hard night?’

‘Yup.’

‘Anything you want to tell me about?’

Moira was silent for a moment, then she reached out and pulled him close to her.

‘Little Timmy Jordan died,’ she said eventually.

She didn’t tell Kelly much about her work, although he wasn’t quite sure whether that was his fault or hers, and he was in any case just as bad about his own job, but she had told him about Timmy. He knew that the boy’s death, although expected, would have hit her hard.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and kissed her again.

After a few seconds she drew away from him and held him at arm’s length. He could almost see the conscious effort she was making to shrug off the events of her night on duty. Not for the first time he marvelled at her. The NHS just wasn’t good enough for Moira and all the others like her, he thought.

‘So why London so suddenly, John?’ she asked.

‘It’s the Scott Silver murder,’ he told her. ‘One or two leads to follow up in town.’

Instinctively he did not elaborate. Old habits died hard. It really was ingrained in Kelly that you gave away as little as possible about a story. Not to anyone. Not even the woman you shared your life with.

‘I didn’t think you local paper guys were allowed off your patch. You’ve grumbled about it often enough.’

‘I’ve got a special pass,’ he grinned. ‘I’ve been given my freedom — but for less than a couple of days, though, so I’d better get a move on.’

‘You’re back when? Tomorrow night then?’

‘Gotta be. Back to jail the following morning.’

Moira chuckled. ‘I’ll be off duty. Would you like me to come round and cook you a meal to come home to?’

‘You bet,’ he said, and he meant it. In spite of his terrible track record, and his apparent reluctance to bring about any permanent changes in his more or less independent lifestyle, he always preferred not to come back to an empty house.

He eased his way past her then and loped up the stairs to the main bedroom where he slung a couple of spare shirts, a sweater, his toilet bag, and a few other bits and pieces into an overnight bag. Moira followed him.

‘Will you have some coffee before you go?’

‘I think I just want to get on,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you going to admire my handiwork first?’

‘Of course.’

When you paint walls which had previously been murky cream a kind of mid blue, it’s hard to tell what the finished results will be after just one coat. All you can see are cream and blue streaks. But Kelly dutifully expressed his admiration.

Back in the car Kelly found himself relishing the long drive, and put aside his lurking anxiety about who had damaged the MG. At least, thanks to Wayne, he could be fairly confident that there was no further unseen damage which could jeopardise him and his car. In fact, safely cocooned in the little motor, and heading away from Torquay towards the motorway, he almost convinced himself that it probably had been just a random act of vandalism. Only almost, though. He didn’t really believe that, but sometimes all you could do to keep paranoia at bay was to kid yourself a little. Meanwhile he had four hours plus all to himself to think, to work on his game plan.

He had come to love the West of England, and Torquay, the English Riviera, the splendid old seaside town with its faded grandeur, as much as anywhere he had ever lived. But to Kelly neither Torquay nor any other provincial metropolis could ever really compete with London, the city he had always somehow regarded as the centre of the universe. He still remembered his first job there, twenty-five years ago, a local-paper-trained grammar schoolboy with very little knowledge of life but a bellyful of ambition.

He’d been just twenty-three years old and full of hope and enthusiasm. He’d already got himself a young wife, Liz, his childhood sweetheart, who was drop-dead gorgeous, turning heads wherever she went, and a thoroughly nice human being as well. Too nice for him, probably. He never valued Liz as much as he should have done, of course. Never really valued her at all. And in some ways he had never really valued the job either. It had all come too easily to Kelly back then. Liz remained probably the best-looking woman he had ever been involved with. Their only son, Nick, was born almost precisely nine months after the marriage, and he had been the perfect baby, beautiful and bouncing with health, although Kelly had never appreciated him. He had been too busy doing other things. His natural ability as a journalist quickly won him star status on the Daily Despatch. It was Kelly who jetted off all over the world at the drop of a piece of copy caper. Kelly who dashed off to all the hottest trouble spots. There had been Cyprus, Israel, Northern Ireland, of course, revolutions, riots, famine, plague, and other national disasters world-wide, and finally the Falklands. That had been one of his last big ones before the rot set in.

Kelly could no longer quite remember how or why it had all gone wrong. There had been no specific incident. Burnout, people called it nowadays. But Kelly wasn’t even sure if it was as simple as that.

Kelly had been rocketed into the very highest level of journalism at a very young age. He had always been extraordinarily able in his chosen trade. He had never countenanced failure. On the big foreign stories he always had to be the one who got closest to the ousted president, interviewed the tortured dissidents in their Argentinian police cells, stood by as they cut a woman’s hand off for adultery in Saudi Arabia, and gained access to the cell of execution when they sent an American serial killer to the electric chair.

Huge stories, huge tasks, taking a mammoth toll on all around them. But Kelly hadn’t even realised he was under pressure. He had been plunged into an extraordinary working life, and not until years later did he realise just how extraordinary it had been.

For almost ten years Kelly did not stop. The awards came flooding in. He won reporter of the year, foreign correspondent of the year and feature writer of the year. But he could barely even remember the various awards ceremonies. They went by in a flood of alcohol accompanied by endless banter. Once, weary, unshaven, and just a little drunk, he had fallen off a plane returning from some now forgotten war, and an office car had picked him up from Heathrow to rush him straight to the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane to accept a major award from his peers. Kelly had attacked his stubbled face with his electric razor as he was driven through the streets of London, and the long-suffering Liz had met him at the Grosvenor with his dress suit into which he had changed in the gents, at the same time managing fortuitously to acquire a hit of cocaine from a kindred spirit which enabled him to get through the evening and even, miraculously, make a halfway lucid speech.

The excitement was such and the demands on his time and his energy levels so overwhelming that those early years of his marriage were all a bit of a blur. To his eternal shame, he later believed, he had regarded the birth of his only son more as an encumbrance than anything else. Nick’s arrival had been an accident. Kelly had not wanted children then — his life had seemed already to be too full and too busy — and maybe he also realised that his lifestyle did not lend itself well to fatherhood. When little Nick had come along, Kelly had barely paused to take notice.

Kelly had survived everything on a heady cocktail of large gin and tonics, adrenalin, and as the years passed, cocaine. There were women too, of course. Kelly had an apparently glamorous job, plenty of opportunity to play away from home, and plenty of money in his pocket.

At first it was the drinking and the drugs which got him through the long hours, the overnight flights followed by mad races to catch a deadline before you could even allow yourself to grab a few hours’ sleep, and then gradually, the drinking and the drugs began to make it more difficult for him to do his job, rather than easier.

Once in a central African state torn apart by revolution he had lain comatose in his hotel room after a particularly heavy binge just at the moment when the president and his entire cabinet were summarily executed. Kelly had been blissfully unaware of his colleagues filing copy down below. But those had been the days of teleprinter machines, and everything that all the other reporters had written lay in long curled strips on the floor of the office which housed the hotel’s machine. The hotel’s night porter, a legendary character who had gained such experience of the way the press worked during his country’s troubled history that he had ended up knowing almost as much about newspapers as many of the correspondents he encountered, had gathered up those remnants of everybody else’s copy, lumped them together, and sent them over to the Despatch.

The man had had a big soft spot for Kelly. People were drawn to him in those days. He had always had the ability to be both warm and charismatic if he chose. It was just his family and those close to him back then who were beginning to suffer the downside of his crazy lifestyle. The night porter did a good job. Kelly had received a hero-gram by return. Only he didn’t know it straight away. He had still been flat out.

Inevitably, perhaps, Kelly became overwhelmed by his excesses. Whatever he did in life he seemed to do to excess. Looking back he sometimes thought that because the thrill of his job had been so amazingly extreme, he had wanted that in every area of his life too.

The miracle was that he had not permanently destroyed himself during those heady days. But by God, he thought to himself as he approached the Chiswick flyover, a stone’s throw from his old London home, that hadn’t been his fault. He’d tried hard enough to kill himself in every way. And he’d had to sink right to the bottom of the pile before he could even begin to climb up it again. But Kelly still hated even to think about that.

He took his old route into town. Along the Cromwell Road, straight through Knightsbridge, down Constitution Hill past Buckingham Palace.

Then he decided to indulge in the sweet torture of driving along Fleet Street to Ludgate Circus. The wave of nostalgia he usually felt in this part of London was not as great as it would once have been, however. So many years had passed that the pull had lessened, and most of the buildings that had once meant so much to him were either long gone or had taken on an identity so different that he barely recognised them. The bulk of the pubs were still there, though, the King and Keys, the Old Bell, the famous Cheshire Cheese up that little alleyway on the left.

He swung a left, north up Farringdon Street and then right past Clerkenwell Green where he pulled in to check the route to Chain Street in his A to Z; his one visit to the Hobbs family home had been so long ago. His memory refreshed, the destination proved easy enough to find and just a few minutes later Kelly turned slowly into the street where Angel Silver’s mother lived.

A small group of men and women, some with cameras, were standing around outside what was sure to be her house. Robertson had been right, of course: the pack would have been doorstepping Mrs Hobbs from the moment the story broke. But their continued presence indicated that they hadn’t got what they wanted yet, and that at least was good news for Kelly. He pulled to a halt in a conveniently empty slot in residents’ parking and sat thinking for a moment or two. He’d get one crack at it, he reckoned, and he certainly didn’t want to get involved with the pack. The nationals would already have offered a bundle of dosh, for sure, and he had no money at all. In fact, he’d be lucky to get the expenses to pay for this trip.

He reached behind his seat for his overnight bag and removed a sheaf of notepaper. Swiftly he wrote a brief note. Then he got lucky. His first news editor had told him he only employed lucky reporters. Perhaps that had been at the root of Kelly’s demise, he thought to himself wryly. His luck had certainly changed, that was for certain. A bored-looking lad of twelve or thirteen, carrying a large canvas sack over his shoulder, turned into the road and pushed a circular of some kind through the letter box of the first rather twee front door that he came to. Then the second.

Kelly was out of the car quick as a flash.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Delivering something, are you?’

The boy, who had cropped brown hair and eyes which somehow indicated that they had already seen too much, studied him suspiciously.

‘Wot’s it look like?’ he enquired sullenly, his thin face setting into a deep frown.

Kelly glanced down at the bag. The words Clerkenwell Chronicle were printed in big blue letters on the grubby grey canvas. The local giveaway newspaper, Kelly guessed. At least he was working for a regional newspaper which still made an effort to be the real tiling. At least people still paid for it and its staff still got a proper wage. Well, very nearly. But it could be worse.

‘Delivering to number forty-four?’ he asked.

‘I might be.’

He was the sort of kid Kelly would like to shake. That wouldn’t help, though. Instead Kelly put his hand in his pocket and produced a five-pound note.

‘If I give you this,’ he said, waving the fiver enticingly in one hand and the sheet of folded notepaper in the other, ‘would you put this through number forty-four’s letter box for me?’

The boy looked unimpressed.

‘Make it a tenner,’ he said.

Shaking was too good for the brat, thought Kelly. A good kicking would be better. He paid up.

The boy grunted and carried on down the street, Kelly’s note stowed in his bag along with the giveaways.

There was nothing to do now but wait. Kelly climbed back into the MG, reclined the seat as far as it would go and almost immediately fell asleep. He was tired from the long drive and he had not spent very much of the previous night in his bed. It was long ago on the road that he had learned the knack of catnapping, grabbing your rest where and when you can.

He was woken by the strident ring of his mobile. Instantly awake, he picked it up and looked at the display panel. It was Hansford. Well, he certainly didn’t want to speak to him. Kelly settled back into his seat and let the phone ring until it diverted to his message service.

He peered down the road. The scene outside number forty-four had not changed. He wondered if he was wasting his and his newspaper’s time, just as Joe Robertson had feared. More than likely his ploy would have no success at all. It was almost six o’clock. The last of the wintry sun had dropped behind the tall buildings of Clerkenwell and the City to the east more than an hour ago. Kelly shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. He realised suddenly that he felt quite cold. It was November, after all. His excitement at being involved in a major story after so long had faded as well. Waiting did that to you.

When the phone rang again it woke him up. He reached out with a stiff arm. The movement sent a shooting pain down his back. He realised that he was now seriously cold. He was also cramped into an extremely awkward position and his whole body was aching. He had no idea how he had ever managed to fall asleep like that. Trying not to think about his discomfort he once more glanced at the phone’s display screen. It was Moira. He didn’t bother to answer her either. He wasn’t in the mood. He would call her later when he could choose the moment.

He really didn’t want to stay on this doorstep any longer. There was a limit, even for Kelly. Rachel Hobbs had his mobile number, and whether she called him or not Kelly would return to Chain Street in the morning. He rubbed his chilled fingers together, wondering why on earth he should ever have realistically thought that one encounter all those years ago would make any difference to either Angel or her mother. Suddenly, he no longer felt optimistic at all.