A Moment Of Madness

Six

Kelly checked into the Grand Hotel in Southampton Row for the night. Cheap and cheerful. If you could call £70 for a small single room for the night cheap. But it was by London standards.

As soon as he had dumped his bag in his room he walked along to Soho, ordered a pint of Diet Coke in the French House, and wished as ever that it was a pint of Guinness. Kelly always seemed to be meeting reformed alcoholics who said that not only would they never touch a drop again, they didn’t even miss it. Kelly missed it terribly. He missed what he considered to be the unique refreshment of a pint of cool bitter, he missed the clink and the fizz of a well-made gin and tonic, long and icy in a decent glass, he missed the warmth on the tongue of a fine claret and the taste it leaves behind, and most of all, of course, he missed the burn and the buzz of a shot of whisky as it hits the back of the throat.

There was nobody in the bar that he knew, except Gavin, the manager, who had once run Scribes Club just off Fleet Street. Kelly allowed himself a brief moment of nostalgia before he swallowed the last of his Coke and left. This was not a drink to linger with, and neither was a bar empty of familiar company. Then he wandered up Greek Street to an Indian restaurant of which he had fond memories. The lack of first-class ethnic restaurants was one of the things Kelly missed terribly about life in the sticks and he reckoned a good Indian meal would cheer him up.

Indeed, the food he ordered looked and tasted excellent but he had only just started eating when his mobile phone rang.

A central London phone number which he did not recognise appeared on the display. Rachel Hobbs?

Kelly’s mood changed at once. He felt the adrenalin course through his body as he pressed the speak button.

‘John Kelly,’ he said.

‘You’d better come and see me,’ said a woman’s voice.

Jesus Christ, he thought. It’s her.

‘I’d love to,’ he said as levelly as he could manage.

‘How soon can you be here?’ she asked.

Automatically Kelly checked his watch. It was just gone 9.30. ‘Half an hour, maximum,’ he said.

‘Thought you wouldn’t be far away,’ said Rachel Hobbs, as she hung up.

Kelly didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He threw a handful of cash at a surprised-looking waiter, soaked his nan bread in his barely touched chicken Madras, the rest of which he sorrowfully abandoned, and, munching his improvised sandwich, hurriedly left the restaurant. He didn’t even consider bothering to retrieve the MG from the multistorey car park in which he had earlier installed it at considerable expense. Instead he grabbed a black cab.

At Chain Street there was still a small group of reporters and photographers outside number 44, and they gathered around as Kelly’s taxi pulled to a halt. The house was neat and well decorated, but without the twee front door and window boxes of most of the others in the road. Chain Street, built in the late Victorian era as a row of down-market workmen’s cottages, was now at the heart of London’s inner city rich-pickings real estate market. Indeed Mrs Hobbs’ tiny terraced house was probably worth almost as much as a big house in Essex nowadays, thought Kelly, shaking his head at the irony.

When he rang the doorbell a couple of reporters stepped forward to ask him who he was. As he had expected, there was nobody outside the house who knew him. Kelly was history in national newspaper terms.

‘I’m just a friend,’ he said.

Seconds later the voice he recognised from the brief telephone conversation called from the other side of the door, asking the same question.

‘It’s John,’ he replied, thinking how convenient it was sometimes to have such an anonymous Christian name. Not that the other guys were likely to know his name.

He heard a key turn in the lock, then a bolt shoot back. The door opened an inch.

‘C’mon in — and hurry up,’ said the voice.

Kelly pushed the door a little more and slid through the gap, shutting it swiftly behind him. Then he saw Mrs Rachel Hobbs for the second time in his life, standing at the foot of the stairs looking steadily at him. He knew she was now seventy years old, and had naturally expected her to have changed with the years. He knew that during much of her early life she had worked extremely hard, as a seamstress in a nearby factory. And he also knew, as well as any outsider probably, just some of the turmoil she had already faced concerning her extraordinary daughter. He supposed he had expected a little old lady, somebody overwhelmed by being at the centre of media attention again. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Rachel Hobbs was dressed in a crimson shirt which looked as if it was made of silk, and a short black skirt. The two were divided by a broad gold belt. Big jewellery dripped from her neck and wrists. Her hair was also big, just as it had been twenty years earlier, still platinum blonde and sporting two jewelled combs. She wore very high-heeled shoes and sheer stockings. Her legs remained good. Her figure could have been that of a woman little more than half her years. Only her face gave her age away at all. It was a face that had been lived in, but a good strong one. High cheekbones. Deeply etched laughter lines around almond-shaped eyes, similar to her daughter’s but more blue than violet and not nearly so remarkable, which were fringed by thick lashes heavy with mascara. False lashes? Kelly couldn’t be sure. Full lips painted ruby red. It was all a bit overwhelming for a terraced house in Clerkenwell.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you again.’

Something in his voice or the way he looked at her must have given his surprise away.

She smiled quizzically. ‘What did you expect, a Zimmer frame?’

He smiled back. ‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ he said evenly. ‘You’ve kept a low profile for a long time. The only pictures I could dig up were over twenty years old and it must be getting on for that when we last met.’

She nodded. ‘I made a deal with Angel when she married Scott. The deal was simple. I had to keep out of her public life or she’d cut me out of her private one. I couldn’t argue about that really. Angel saw me as a threat, her brassy mum from East London.’ She paused. ‘She’s a good kid at heart, though, always was. She’d have given me and her dad anything...’ She paused again and the mask slipped. For a moment she looked almost vulnerable.

Kelly was fascinated. It was suddenly quite hard to grasp the reality of why he was visiting Rachel Hobbs again. The woman’s son-in-law had just been killed and her daughter was likely to stand trial for the manslaughter, at the very least, of the man believed to be his killer.

As if reading his mind Rachel Hobbs pulled herself together. ‘Right, we’ll talk in the kitchen. And this had better be good,’ she said. ‘Not that I don’t know you’re conning me.’

‘I don’t reckon I’d dare.’

‘Oh, you’d dare,’ she said. Then she smiled again.

‘It’s been a very long time,’ he ventured.

‘For both of us,’ she said. Then, as if considering: ‘I thought you’d be an editor by now.’

‘So did I,’ he said.

‘You were destined for the top,’ she said. ‘That was the impression you gave, anyway. I followed your career for a bit. Then you just seemed to disappear.’

‘I certainly did.’ He didn’t want to go into that. Not even with her. Perhaps particularly not with her.

Rachel Hobbs’ accent was definitely London but not quite as strong as Kelly had remembered. Maybe even his memory had become governed by clichés.

‘Right,’ she said again when they were seated on either side of the kitchen table, ‘I’ve decided to trust you, so let’s get on with it. What do you want to know?’

‘I want you to tell me about Angel,’ he said. ‘Everything about her. What makes her tick, what she was like as a child — everything you can.’

‘Well, you know some of that, don’t you?’ she replied. ‘An awful lot more than most.’

She glanced down at the kitchen table. Kelly saw that his note was lying on top of a small pile of papers.

‘“I helped Angel once, please let me do so again”,’ Rachel Hobbs read out loud. She looked up again at Kelly quizzically.

‘Moral blackmail, I think,’ she said.

Kelly shook his head. ‘No, I don’t intend to reveal any secrets, whatever you do or don’t tell me today,’ he replied, knowing he was only telling half the truth. It was true that he had never intended to reveal the little sequence of events he and Angel and her mother had become embroiled in all those years ago. It was also true that he knew how to call in favours. That had always been the name of the game for Kelly.

‘I just want to write about Angel how she really is, the Angel probably only you know. Not her image. But the person. I want you to start at the beginning for me, to pretend that I know nothing at all.’

Rachel Hobbs studied him in silence for several seconds. ‘OK,’ she said eventually, leaning back in her chair and averting her eyes so that she seemed now to be staring into the middle distance without really saying anything. ‘Everybody knows Angel’s beginning as a child star, and what a star she was, John. God, she was a gorgeous kid. I’d always wanted to do it myself, you know, go on the stage. I was the classic stage mum. I realise that. And I didn’t blame Angel when she made her stand. Did you know about that?’

Kelly shook his head. If he’d ever known he’d forgotten. It hadn’t shown up in the cuttings he’d managed to get hold of. And it certainly wasn’t one of the secrets he’d referred to.

‘The diaries picked up on it. One of Angel’s so-called friends must have blown the gaff, I reckon, but not Angel, and not me either, so nobody could ever make a lot of it. I’d wanted too much for her, I suppose. She showed talent, real talent, but then everyone knows that. You remember the way she was, I expect. Cute, they call it now, don’t they? We did it all, Angel and me: theatre, TV, that Hollywood movie. Then suddenly she was sixteen and nobody wanted her any more. I think it was me who was more upset, but Angel almost didn’t seem to realise that it was all ending. She went wild really. Wouldn’t stop spending. The money soon ran out. I suppose we should have had more control, but she was a determined kid. We had to sell the big house, and come back here along with my old dad, which was quite a squash in this little place, on top of everything else. It didn’t suit Angel, that was for certain. She was never going to stay.

‘Her name was still big enough to give her entry to the in-crowd and that was how she met Jimmy Carey, her own Hollywood superstar. Only he was a bit more faded than Angel realised. He was forty-seven and she was seventeen. I should have stopped it, or at least tried to. Me and her dad, we both should have done. But Angel had made up her own mind, as usual. She was just determined that she wasn’t going to stay in a little house in Clerkenwell with a fishmonger for a father.

‘We barely saw her for the next four years or so you know. Then she came back one day looking like death and with a black eye to boot. Just twenty-one and a battered wife with a drug problem. I could see it all at once, but Bill, her father, couldn’t. She was always his little girl to him. I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been. Well, I’d got her back, hadn’t I? I took her to our doctor — they’re used to drug problems round here — and with his help we weaned her off. She said she was going to divorce Carey and take him for every penny he had. She always had a practical streak, did our Angel. Then Carey died, didn’t he? He died of an overdose and there was that big scandal. Angel went back to the States for the funeral and to see to his affairs, as she put it. That was the biggest shock of all, I suppose. Carey had been a big star. He lived in a Hollywood mansion. He lived the high life. I guess we’d all assumed he was filthy rich but he’d gambled it all away. There’d been horses and casinos and, on top of it, bad business deals. It seemed he’d been on the brink of going under when he’d died. There was even talk that the overdose wasn’t an accident, of course, that he’d done himself in.

‘Anyway, Angel ended up with much, much less than she’d expected. Enough to buy a nice flat in the Barbican and put a tidy sum in the bank, but not nearly enough for the kind of lifestyle she wanted. She’d never had an agent or anything, just me managing her, but I didn’t know how to begin to reinvent her, and that’s what was needed, more or less. So I went back to the contacts I’d had in the business and fixed her up with Jack O’Sullivan. You’ve heard of him?’

Kelly nodded.

‘Straight as a dye, Jack, and one of the best, but he just couldn’t get her off the ground either. She struggled around the fringes for a while, putting on a brave face, but that wasn’t Angel. She wasn’t born to struggle, to graft hard. Not our girl. There were a succession of men, of course, who were no damned good to her, and I knew she was dabbling in drugs again. But somehow she kept up the lifestyle, kept it all going. It wasn’t till you came along that I knew what was really going on.’ Rachel Hobbs looked at Kelly anxiously.

‘That’s not what I’ve come for, you should know that,’ he said.

‘I suppose I do or I wouldn’t have invited you in.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, she hit rock bottom you could say, couldn’t you? But then she got lucky, no doubt about it. Amazingly lucky. She could always attract men, of course, always looked so great. Still does, doesn’t she?’

Kelly nodded again.

‘She met Scott Silver at a party and that was that. They were soul mates, she said. I’m sure he was hers. He was rich, attractive, and a famous rock star. Angel’s dream man. Just a week after they’d met she told me she was going to marry him. And she did. I wasn’t invited, of course. Nobody was. Ran off to Vegas, didn’t they? I never even met him till after the wedding. They’d managed to keep it a secret too. They came here late one night. They’d just flown back, they said. I’ll always remember it. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

‘Scott was not at all what I’d expected, you know. Surprisingly shy away from the spotlight, I thought. He was polite and friendly but you could tell he wasn’t a bit interested in me or Bill. Just wanted to get our Angel home to bed. She was ecstatic. He went upstairs to the lavatory and that was when she said it.

‘“I’ve got it all, Mum, now,” she said. “You won’t spoil it, will you?” I told her I didn’t know what she meant, but I did, of course. “I’m going to put that child star bit behind me. I just want to be Scott Silver’s wife. I’ll never cut you out of my life, but I don’t want you involved in the public side of it at all. If you carry on living off me I’ll never see you again.”

‘She was right, of course, I had lived off her. And not just financially, either. That wasn’t what she was getting at. She was always generous by nature, was Angel. It was more that I liked the glitzy side of things so much, all I ever wanted was to be involved in the showbusiness world. I’m honest enough now to admit that I revelled in her stardom. We’ve always been two of a kind, me and Angel. I knew she meant it, though. I have never since spoken about her publicly until now. Never. And this may be a mistake.’

‘It won’t be, Rachel. I won’t let Angel down. I didn’t before, did I?’ Kelly admitted to himself as he spoke that there was indeed an element of moral blackmail there. But they did owe him, Angel and her mum. And in any case, the curious thing was that he meant it. He was as captivated as he had been the very first time he saw Angel.

‘So let’s get some facts straight,’ he went on, giving Rachel Hobbs as little time as possible to dwell on her doubts. ‘Has she been in touch with you?’

‘Right after she called the police. Phoned to prepare me for the news to break, to tell me she was all right, and what had happened.’

Rachel Hobbs ran the fingers of one hand nervously through her hair. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s almost as if there’s some kind of curse on Angel, you know. Just when things seem almost perfect the bottom falls out of her world. But this, this... it’s just so dreadful. I was horrified as much by what Angel told me she’d done as by Scott being murdered.’

Kelly felt all his antennae waggling. ‘Can you remember exactly what she said?’

‘What do you think? Not that she said very much actually. She wasn’t hysterical or anything. Her voice was quite calm. But it was as if she just wasn’t functioning properly. Well, she wouldn’t have been, would she? It was all quite mechanical, I think.

‘She said that she and Scott had woken to find an intruder in their bedroom. A burglar, she assumed. He had a knife and he attacked Scott. Stabbed him. When Scott collapsed the bastard turned on her. She’d been terrified. There was another struggle and somehow she managed to get hold of the knife. She has no idea how really. She said, she said...’ Rachel Hobbs’ control wavered a little. There was a quaver in her voice. ‘She said she supposed that she must have stabbed him. The next thing she knew he was lying on the floor and she was covered in blood. But she didn’t know what happened. She couldn’t remember it clearly. She said she supposed she must have stuck the knife in him, that was how she put it...’

‘What did you think, Rachel?’

‘What do you think I thought, you daft bugger?’ There was fire in her voice again. She had never been short on pluck, Kelly reminded himself.

‘I thought it was all some awful nightmare,’ Rachel continued. ‘Can you imagine being phoned up in the middle of the night by your daughter and told something like that? It still hasn’t sunk in, to tell the truth.’

‘But were you surprised that she was capable of such a thing, even in self-defence?’

Rachel Hobbs studied him with something verging on amusement.

‘No, I wasn’t surprised about that,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know about self-defence. She didn’t know that Scott was dead, did she? She was defending him, that’s what she told me. Angel would have done anything to defend Scott Silver, anything at all. She didn’t just love him. She worshipped him.’

Back in his Southampton Row hotel room Kelly was on such a high that he had completely forgotten his abandoned Indian meal and certainly felt no hunger. What he felt was elation. He always did when he knew he had a lead on the pack. He lay on his bed and contemplated what he had now on the Scott Silver case, and what he was going to do with it. He had been right, after all. He had had an edge. He had had a special way in to Rachel Hobbs. For once he had not been lying to his editor. He couldn’t have known whether she still cared about what he had done all those years earlier, but he would have bet six months’ wages — if he’d still betted like that, of course — that she would remember. And she had.

It had actually been almost exactly seventeen years ago. Kelly had still been the number one fireman on the Despatch then, but he was already drinking more than anybody knew. He was also on the coke by then whenever he could get hold of it, anything to keep the energy levels up, to keep him motoring. The cracks were beginning to form, of course, only he had yet to become aware of them. He’d thought, if indeed he’d thought at all, that he could go on for ever on his crazy tightrope of thrills, chasing fire engines throughout the world on a diet of booze, girls and coke.

The job that had led to his one previous meeting with Angel Silver’s mother had seemed routine enough when the news editor had asked him to go undercover on a hot tip. A former child star, famous for playing cute little kids, was allegedly working as a prostitute, pulling punters at a bar in a big London hotel. It was Angel Silver — only then her name was Angelica Hobbs.

The paper’s aim was to check out the tip and, if it was true, to expose Angelica in a big way. Kelly’s task was to find her, get close to her, and get pulled. It was not the kind of assignment he liked but it went with the tabloid territory. And he had appreciated it for the seriously great yarn that it was.

Angel hadn’t been hard to find. On only his second night hanging around in the bar the paper had been told was her regular haunt, he had spotted her. He did not immediately recognise her. Angelica Hobbs’ hair had been raven black rather than its familiar blonde. Indeed, it was during that period of life that her chameleon tendencies had evolved. She had been wearing tinted glasses and heavy makeup, something for which she had not previously been known. After all, Angelica had actually once been described by a major film critic as ‘the fragile English rosebud of our cinema’.

She had walked straight to the bar, mincing slightly as she did so, and a glass of pink champagne had been provided by an unsmiling barman as soon as she sat down on one of the tall stools. If this young woman was indeed a prostitute — and there was something indefinable about her that suggested that — then her visit was probably business for the barman too, Kelly had thought wryly. He watched her take a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and light one up. Perhaps she had felt Kelly’s eyes on her. Abruptly she took off her glasses and looked right at him. Christ, it really was her, he thought. Angelica Hobbs. You could never mistake those eyes: almond-shaped and brilliant violet. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s, he had thought then as he had again when he had encountered her all these years later. And she was so beautiful. Most women wore heavy makeup in an attempt to enhance their looks. It was almost as if Angelica Hobbs had plastered the stuff on her face to tone hers down. Instead of the flawless porcelain complexion Kelly remembered from her films, Angelica’s skin had the matt look which usually indicated bad skin coated with thick layers of slap.

She remained stunning, though. Although too thin. Far too thin.

For several seconds the two of them stared at each other. Eventually Angel’s eyebrows rose in some silent query. Was that the come-on? Kelly had felt awkward, embarrassed, unusually unsure. He looked away. He needed to watch her for a bit. And, to be honest, he needed a few more drinks before he felt he could take this one any further.

He glanced over his shoulder. The photographer he was working with was sitting in a corner of the bar with a virtually untouched beer on the table in front of him. Kelly jerked his head slightly in the direction of Angelica Hobbs and gave a small nod. Michael Phildon, one of the Despatch’s hot shots, nodded back even more discreetly.

Phildon’s job now would be to snatch what pictures he could of the young woman, preferably with a punter or two on her arm.

Kelly remembered that Phildon hadn’t had long to wait. A man appeared as if by magic at Angelica’s side. Kelly guessed that he was an Arab and he had that air of confidence about him of the seriously rich who have never had cause to lose their certainty that money can buy anything.

Kelly saw Mike Phildon slip out of the far door of the bar. Phildon had been a good twenty years older than Kelly, but he was the kind who never went off the boil, an expert in his trade. A photographer with years of experience behind him of working on investigations and exposés, including more than his share of sex exposés like this one.

A few minutes later Angel and her Arab punter also left the bar. Kelly had known that Phildon would be lurking somewhere unseen in the foyer. He’d have the pair of them on celluloid in a flash without either of them knowing they’d been had. They didn’t call Mike Phildon Super Snatcher for nothing.

Kelly stayed at the bar patiently waiting. Less than an hour later Angelica returned alone. Ready to pull another trick, no doubt. Kelly watched again as she settled on to the same bar stool and the still unsmiling barman provided her with another glass of pink champagne. She had passed him a wad of notes, a considerably greater amount of money than the price of a couple of glasses of pink champers, even in that rip-off joint, Kelly had reckoned.

He had stared hard. Again she took off her glasses and gave him the come-on. This time he pulled his stool closer to hers and offered her another drink.

It was not very long before they were leaving the bar together. She had been quite direct, businesslike almost.

‘Do you have a room here?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. It was a two-bedroomed suite, in fact, equipped in anticipation of a result with another photographer and state-of-the-art recording equipment in the locked second bedroom.

They walked to the lift together. He realised that she was swaying slightly. She stumbled and he grasped her by the elbow to prevent her falling. Her bones were so thinly covered by flesh that they felt sharp to his touch. He had already noticed how thin she was, but it was more than that. Angel was quite emaciated.

She leaned against him. The dark glasses slipped down her nose and he could see her violet eyes close up for the first time. There was a blankness in them, and her pupils were dilated. He wondered what on earth she had been taking. Her black silk dress had slipped off one shoulder. He could see an ugly black bruise over her collar bone. Out of the corner of an eye he glimpsed Mike Phildon stepping softly forward from a shadowy corner beneath the staircase, camera at the ready. On an impulse Kelly pulled Angel closer to him so that Mike Phildon would be unable to snap her without the protection of her tinted specs.

Then, even more impulsively, he heard himself speak. There was something about her, the way she looked at him, her fragility, which made it impossible for him to throw her to the wolves.

‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you for something to eat. You look starving.’

Kelly had surprised himself. He was, after all, a dedicated tabloid hack, top man, and his behaviour had been completely out of character.

Angel made no protest. She had probably been unable to. In the taxi it became apparent that she was beyond eating. She just slumped in the seat beside him, passing no comment when he redirected the taxi driver from the restaurant he had planned to take her to, giving him instead the address of a hotel he had used before. Somewhere where the staff were used to couples with no luggage turning up unannounced.

In the room he swiftly acquired he had poured himself a Scotch from the hip flask he invariably carried and only gave her one when she insisted.

‘I know who you are,’ he told her.

She did not argue. ‘Add to the thrill, does it? Would you like me to put on a gym slip?’

He’d shaken his head, wondering why she made him feel so sad. At one point she began to undress. He’d stopped her, thought about telling her who he was and then thought better of it in case he frightened her.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.

‘Girl’s got to make a living,’ she told him, and shortly afterwards said that she needed to use the bathroom.

She seemed a long time. He tapped on the door. No response. Eventually he tried the handle. The door opened, she had not even bothered to lock it. Inside she was slumped on the lavatory seat, a syringe on the tiled floor beside her. He picked it up and smelled it. Smack. He had thought as much.

Angel looked at him with unfocused eyes, a silly smile on her lips. ‘I feel better now,’ she said.

He helped her to the bed and she lay back against the pillows. ‘I think you should go home,’ he told her. ‘Have you got anyone to look after you?’

She had shaken her head and fallen deeper into her drugged stupor.

Kelly was quite full of sorrow for her by then. He remained unable to explain to himself why this waif of a girl moved him so, but she had done from the very beginning. From the first moment he had looked into her eyes she had had this effect on him.

He went through her handbag then. There was a diary with some phone numbers and addresses at the back. Rachel Hobbs had been listed there — Angelica’s mother. Kelly had known all about her. Everyone did in those days — the archetypal pushy stage mum, generally regarded as being of the opinion that she was as much a star as her daughter had once been.

Kelly called Rachel Hobbs’ number. It was 2 a.m. An irritable voice, heavy with sleep, answered. But the irritation turned to what seemed like genuine concern when Kelly told her who he was and what had happened, exactly what her daughter was doing and the state she was in. However, being media wise, Mrs Hobbs was not just concerned about her daughter’s welfare.

‘You’re going to make a meal of this, I suppose, in that rag of yours. Well, I have no comment to make to add to whatever rubbish you’re going to write. Just tell me where my daughter is and I’ll come and get her.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Mrs Hobbs,’ said Kelly. ‘I’m bringing your daughter home. Oh, and I didn’t ring you for a quote, by the way. I don’t intend to run with this story. I rang you because you’re not only Angelica’s mother, you made her what she is. So now you’re the one who has to get her sorted. If you don’t, there will be other reporters, I promise you. If she goes back on the game to fund this habit of hers it will only be a matter of time before she gets found out big time. Mind you, she mightn’t even live that long.’

Kelly had not waited for Rachel Hobbs to reply. Instead he called a cab, wrapped his jacket round Angel, helped her out of bed, and bundled her down the stairs and out of the hotel. She was still only semiconscious when they arrived back at that same terraced house in Clerkenwell, the house the family had moved back to when Angel’s child star bubble had burst, the house Kelly had revisited earlier that night, seventeen years later.

Kelly had helped Angel into the house, half carrying her. Mrs Hobbs had put her to bed and made him a cup of tea.

‘I had no idea she’d gone on the game. I had no idea it had got that bad,’ Rachel Hobbs told him, and she had looked at him quizzically. ‘Are you really not going to write this?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘To tell you the truth, Mrs Hobbs, I’m not sure I can answer that,’ he had responded honestly. And he had never been able to answer it, really. It had always been inexplicable. Kelly hadn’t been a soft touch for a sob story, that was for certain — not in those days, anyway.

‘I’m grateful,’ she’d told him. And he’d known that she had been.

The next day Kelly informed his bosses at the Despatch that there’d been a mistake. The girl looked like Angelica Hobbs, but it wasn’t her, he was sure of it.

The news editor had not been best pleased. He’d wanted to know why Kelly hadn’t taken the girl up to the suite they’d hired at great expense. Kelly had said she’d refused to go with him there. He didn’t know why. She’d insisted they go back to her flat. The news editor was suspicious, Kelly knew that, but his reputation had yet to be completely destroyed. He was still the Despatch’s leading fireman, after all, and his version of events had been reluctantly accepted. More or less. They’d pored over Mike Phildon’s photographs, but they were snatches, albeit good ones, and none had caught Angel without the dark glasses. Kelly had made sure of that.

He knew that they’d sent another team round to the same hotel bar for a few nights, but he’d hoped that Angel would never be found there again. And she wasn’t.

He’d often thought of her, even then, and wondered how she was getting on. One of the other dailies picked up the story that she’d been booked into the famous Priory rehabilitation clinic. He’d supposed that had been inevitable. At least she and her mother were trying to do something. Three months later he’d received a phone call.

He’d recognised her accent at once, Hollywood Cockney meets stage school English.

‘My mother tells me I owe you a thank you,’ she said.

‘Think nothing of it,’ he replied.

‘I can barely remember that night.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘In any case I just want to blank the whole thing out. You really did me a big favour, you know. When I realised how close I’d come to be splashed all over the Despatch even I knew something had to be done.’

‘Didn’t you want to do it just for yourself? You were on a free fall to destruction. That stood out a mile.’

There had been a brief pause, then she’d said something which had sent a little shooting pain right through his heart.

‘I guess I never liked myself that much, Mr Kelly.’

He struggled to find the right reply. ‘And now?’

There had been another pause, and when she eventually spoke again she carefully avoided answering him properly.

‘I promise you one thing, Mr Kelly, I’ll never get in that state again.’

Then she’d thanked him again and hung up. He’d sat at his desk thinking about her even more, trying to work out why she captivated him so much, and wondering why he hadn’t invited her out to dinner or something. Perhaps it was because he recognised that she was just a fantasy for him. Perhaps because one side of him was disgusted by her behaviour and yet he recognised a lot of himself in her. Maybe he’d realised even then that he was sliding down a similar slippery slope.

But less than a year later Angel met and married Scott Silver after a whirlwind romance, and their marriage had always been represented as one of the great love affairs of the showbusiness world. Kelly had never met or spoken to Angel since, nor seen her except on TV and in newspaper photographs, until the killings at Maythorpe Manor.

The next morning Kelly e-mailed his story back to Torquay, along with the up-to-date snaps Rachel Hobbs had allowed him to take of her with the digital camera which he was able to connect directly to his lap-top, in time to catch the first editions of the Argus. He’d written his piece the previous night before going to bed, but it didn’t do to give ’em copy too early. They thought you hadn’t worked hard enough for it. Kelly’d learned that long ago as well as so many other tricks.

He had nothing more to do in London, but when he spoke to Hansford he invented a story about meeting contacts. He had no intention of reappearing at the Argus office until the following morning, as agreed with the editor. After a quick breakfast he rescued his car from its extortionately expensive car park and set off through the heavy London traffic, heading west across the city towards Chiswick and the start of the M4.

On the way he called Karen Meadows on his mobile. If they were about to charge Angel Silver all his hard work could be wasted — for the time being, at any rate.

‘She’s going to be charged, almost certainly, but I can’t tell you when or even exactly with what, John,’ said Karen. ‘You’ll be all right for tonight’s edition, though, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

‘And tomorrow morning?’

‘What’ve you got, John? Something you’ve flogged to the nationals, I presume.’

‘Not yet,’ said Kelly lightly. And that much was true. He would file just as the lunchtime edition of the Argus hit the streets. The paper did pay him a regular monthly wage, after all, even if it was a pittance compared with what he had once earned.

‘I’ll tell you what I want—’

The DCI interrupted him. ‘You don’t have to, I know. But even Angel Silver isn’t mad enough to give you or anyone else an interview right now. Anyway, I’ve got someone with her. For her own protection, you understand.’

Kelly understood. ‘And the post mortem — did that tell you anything you didn’t know already?’

There was a pause. Then she went formal on him. ‘You’ll have to wait for that, John. Our inquiries have only just begun.’

‘Forensic?’ he queried. ‘DNA?’

‘Already?’ she responded. ‘You’ve got to be joking. Only in the movies do you get forensic results this quick. And DNA, as you well know, takes three weeks or more. Look, John, we’ve got a double killing here. I’m really not going to be able to help you any more until we’re damned sure we know exactly what happened.’

‘But you do know, don’t you?’ Kelly was always persistent. ‘That’s what you told me, anyway.’

‘Well, yes. It seems straightforward enough. But two men have been stabbed to death on my patch and one of them was one of the biggest rock stars in the world. This is not a good case to make mistakes on. I’ve already got the chief constable on my back, and he’s got the Home Office on his.’

‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ said Kelly as he ended the call.

He knew that any major crime was always surrounded by people working to their own agenda. The police were no exception. In this case there really seemed to be very little detection to be done, but Karen Meadows would be only too well aware of how high profile the case was, and she was obviously determined that nothing was going to go wrong. That would be disastrous PR.

Kelly drove to Torbay without a break and headed for Classic Motors. It might have been his imagination, but he’d reckoned the MG had sounded a little rough on the way home, so he decided to heed Wayne’s warning about the overdue service and drop the car off straight away.

Wayne lent him his courtesy car as usual, which was rather a posh term for the overly large elderly Volvo, which felt to Kelly rather like a tank after the MG. None the less he decided to continue on out to Maidencombe, to the Silver home. The Volvo seemed particularly huge and clumsy as Kelly manoeuvred it through the village and down the slope to the beach car park. He had deliberately avoided attempting to negotiate Rock Lane, where, as he had expected, a number of fans and a smattering of press were still gathered outside Maythorpe Manor. Kelly mingled with them for a bit, soaking up the atmosphere, picking up a few quotes, gathering what information he could.

Nobody had caught sight of the rock star’s widow since the police had escorted her back to the old manor house after she had been questioned at Torquay Police Station.

Trevor Jones was there again. In fact, looking at him, Kelly wondered if he had been home at all. The young photographer was unshaven and slightly dishevelled-looking, his bright eyes hooded with tiredness. Even his normally unquenchable enthusiasm seemed to have waned slightly. Doorstepping did that to you, thought Kelly wryly.

‘Has Jimmy Rudge been out again?’ he asked.

‘Nope,’ replied the the youngster flatly. ‘The police come and go. The SOCOs have only just left. God knows what they were doing in there. The postman’s been already with another two big sacks of mail. And that was today’s big thrill.’

There was still a lone policeman on duty by the gate, and Karen Meadows had indicated a further presence inside. The mound of floral tributes to the murdered rock star had grown into a small mountain.

Kelly wandered over for a closer look. It was then that he noticed the same young woman he had accidentally collided with on the night after the murder, the one who had stood apart from the rest. She was standing apart now, but this time leaning against the railings looking unseeingly towards the crowd rather than into the grounds of Maythorpe Manor.

Kelly had not seen her face before but he was sure it was the same young woman. She had the same long robes and the same long lank hair. Several strands of beads hung round her neck and she carried a further strand in her left hand, like a rosary. She looked like a kind of sixties throwback.

He took a couple of paces nearer to her. She was prettier than he had at first thought, but she wore no makeup and everything about the way she dressed and the way her hair hung untended, almost straggly, indicated someone who took little interest in their appearance, and certainly someone who made no attempt to look attractive.

She was very dark, her hair almost black, her skin olive brown. The shape of her eyes suggested that she might have some oriental blood. They were red-rimmed and her cheeks were tear-stained.

Kelly was standing right in front of her now, but she gave no sign that she was even aware of him being there.

‘You look very upset,’ he said.

There was absolutely no response.

He tried again. ‘Scott must have meant a great deal to you.’

She glanced at him then, as if suddenly surprised by his presence. ‘Yes,’ she said in a quiet, distant sort of voice. ‘He did. A great deal...’ Her voice tailed off and she turned and walked away from Kelly.

‘Miss, miss,’ he called after her, ‘I’m from the Argus. Would you talk to me? Will you tell me who you are?’

Her shoulders stiffened and her pace quickened. Kelly did not attempt to follow her.

When Kelly eventually returned home he walked, as was his habit, straight through the hall, and up the stairs to his spare-room office in order to check his telephone answering machine. A disconcerting message awaited him.

‘I may owe you a favour from half a lifetime ago but don’t you ever go near my mother again.’

That was all. Nothing else. A woman’s voice, but the caller did not leave her name.

She did not have to. The accent, still Hollywood Cockney mixed with stage school English. The slight lisp. Such a distinctive unusual voice. Such an unusual woman.