A Moment Of Madness

Seven

Kelly played the tape over and over again. There was anger in Angel’s voice, but also the familiar vulnerability.

He wondered if she had got his note, or if it had merely become buried in fan mail as he had suspected. If not, it seemed likely that she had spoken to her mother and Rachel Hobbs had given her his number. Old hack that he was, he found himself oddly disturbed that she was angry with him. Also, although it was unlike him to give a damn, he hoped that he had not caused her to be angry with her mother, whom for some reason he quite genuinely liked.

Kelly frowned in concentration as he attempted to sort out his thoughts. He was so engrossed he did not even notice Moira, standing quietly in his office doorway.

For two or three minutes Moira watched in silence as Kelly kept pushing the play button on his digital answering machine. She had been in the kitchen when he had arrived home, but she heard him open the front door and run up the stairs, and had followed him, intending only to greet him in a normal fashion. But there had been something in the intensity of his manner as he kept playing his message which had stopped her.

Suddenly he seemed to become aware of her presence and swung round to face her. He looked mildly surprised.

‘I... I didn’t hear you,’ he stumbled.

She smiled uncertainly. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Yes, hi.’

‘Good trip?’

‘What? Oh yes.’ He was distracted, and it showed.

‘I saw the paper. It looked great. Got what you wanted, I assume?’

‘Yes,’ he said again, still looking as if his mind were somewhere else.

She walked across the room to him then, and, standing on tiptoe, stretched up to kiss his cheek.

‘Welcome back,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ he replied, abstractedly stroking her hair, almost the way he always did but not quite.

She pulled away again and studied him carefully. ‘You’d forgotten I was coming round, hadn’t you?’ she enquired.

‘Course not,’ he replied swiftly.

But she knew it was a lie. She knew him too well, well enough certainly to know how selfish he was when he got stuck into a story. He’d told her many tales about his time on the Despatch and although most of them were great entertainment she was well aware that he must have been a real monster to live with back then. Even without the booze and the drugs, and even though he was no longer a big-time operator, Kelly still had a selfishness about him when he was working. He hadn’t called her at all while he had been away, even though she had left two messages on his mobile voice mail.

‘Sorry I didn’t phone,’ he said then, almost as if he had been reading her mind. ‘I meant to last night, then Rachel Hobbs called, late...’

His voice tailed off. He was still preoccupied. Well, thought Moira, she was never going to change that in him so she might just as well make the best of it and take an interest.

‘So who was that on the machine?’ she asked.

He told her.

‘And why do you keep playing the message?’

‘I, um, don’t know.’

Kelly sounded as if he didn’t want to talk about it. Taking an interest was obviously not going to win her many bonus points on this occasion, thought Moira, just as Kelly abruptly changed the subject.

‘You cooking?’

‘Of course. That’s what we agreed, and I remembered, even if you didn’t.’

If he was aware of the acerbic note in her voice he certainly did not show it.

‘Tell me what’s for dinner then, beautiful?’ he asked her. ‘I’m absolutely ravenous. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’

Moira couldn’t help smiling at that. It could be infuriating, but there was something appealing in the boyish enthusiasm Kelly still displayed about his work, an enthusiasm which had remained undampened against the odds.

‘And I bet you didn’t remember that until now, either,’ she countered.

He grinned at her. ‘You’re not wrong,’ he said.

Then the phone rang. Kelly pounced on it, not bothering to look at the display panel, instead grabbing the receiver as if afraid the caller might not give him time to pick it up.

‘Hello, hello. Oh, it’s you.’

Moira detected a definite note of disappointment in his voice. She looked at him enquiringly.

‘It’s Nick,’ he mouthed to her.

Moira was surprised. She didn’t think she had ever seen Kelly anything but overjoyed to hear from the son he had only in recent years been reunited with. So who had he been expecting or hoping the caller would be? Angel Silver was the only person Moira could think of, although judging from the message she had heard Kelly play, that seemed pretty unlikely.

After only a minute or two more Moira headed back to the kitchen to tend the leg of lamb she was roasting, leaving Kelly to talk to his son in private. She was aware of him making a conscious effort to sound interested. That really was unlike him.

He must be seriously caught up in the Scott Silver case, she thought to herself as she removed the lamb from the oven, threw on more rosemary and garlic, and piled some potatoes and parsnips around it to roast alongside.

Well, she thought indulgently, it must be a good feeling for him to be involved with something other than council meetings and magistrates’ courts again.

Nick, alone for once in his dockland apartment, had also been surprised at the way his father had greeted him. He had grown accustomed to warm enthusiasm from Kelly.

‘Everything all right, Dad?’ he asked.

‘Of course, Nick. Couldn’t be better.’

‘Right. Good.’

‘And you?’

‘Yeah. Fine. Really fine. Got another big bonus this week. I’m thinking of trading the Porsche in for that new model I told you about that they’ve just brought out.’

‘Oh great, yeah.’

It wasn’t the words, but the lack of expression in them which puzzled Nick. Kelly shared his son’s love of sports cars. In his father’s case it was classic British racing cars, particularly MGs, of course. But Nick knew that he had also developed an interest in the Porsches his son so adored. Kelly was highly unlikely ever to be able to afford such a vehicle himself now, and Nick thoroughly enjoyed chucking his father his car keys and watching Kelly turn into a boy racer. On this occasion, however, there was barely a note of enthusiasm or any interest at all in Kelly’s voice.

Nick ran the fingers of one hand through his thick sandy hair, an inheritance from his blonde mother, and tried again. ‘You know we talked about you coming up to town for a weekend, well, if you could manage it within the next two or three weeks I’ll try to arrange a test drive.’

There was a pause. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to, Nick,’ Kelly replied eventually. ‘Not that quickly, anyway. There’s this big story, you see...’

Nick felt his shoulders tense. During the relatively small amount of time that he had spent with his father as a boy this was all he remembered hearing. Kelly was invariably away on some big story. Only as he’d grown older Nick had learned that that was not always the truth. All too often his father had been drunk or stoned, or with a woman other than Nick’s mother. Frequently all three, Nick reflected.

Nick had been ten when his mother and Kelly had finally split for good, but even before the final breakdown of his parents’ marriage he had seen very little of his father. When Kelly had not been away allegedly working, he would still, more often than not, arrive home only in the middle of the night and sometimes not at all. After the divorce Nick had seen virtually nothing at all of him until, a grown man of twenty-one and a young army officer, he had sought his father out of his own volition.

He still didn’t know quite why it had been so important to him to build a relationship with Kelly. Neither did he know why he had still cared. After all, looking back he didn’t even know whether his father had loved him at all during those early years. But it had been important. Possibly the most important thing in Nick’s life. And he had cared, desperately.

Kelly had tried to explain how the whole fatherhood thing just passed him by. He had pronounced himself overjoyed to be reunited with his only son and had told him: ‘It was only guilt and shame that kept me away from you. I honestly thought you and your mother would be better off if I didn’t go near either of you.’

Nick, all too aware of the depths his father had sunk to, had been moved by that. And he certainly had no doubt that his father loved him now. He could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice, every time they met or even talked on the phone.

Which was why this conversation was so peculiar. Kelly was so distracted. Ever since their reunion Nick had been aware of being at the centre of his father’s universe. Not today, though. And that disturbed Nick. He had grown to love Kelly every bit as much as he believed his father now loved him. It was more than love, really. It was an acute need for a part of his life he had previously felt to be missing.

Nick was twenty-seven, tall, fit, and well aware of his own attractiveness as well as his abilities. He had both charm and looks, and he knew it. He also had money. He had left the army two years previously and had since pursued a much more lucrative career. Nick liked the good things in life. During his time in the army he had been trained as a computer expert. The modern army, he had learned, no longer marches so much on its stomach as on its software, and Nick learned skills which he found to be much valued in civilian life. His official title now was ‘business consultant’, which covered all manner of territory. The reality was that he moved with rare ease among people he regarded to be the real movers and shakers of the world, and that he provided specialist services with a rare aplomb. Nick was the kind of young man who seemed to have been born with an old head on his shoulders, which, combined with the energy and daring of youth, had led to him already being very successful. His spacious and luxuriously appointed penthouse apartment, with its views down the river to Greenwich, was just one of the many trapping of that success. His Porsche was another.

Nick was the guy who had everything. And neither his business associates nor the succession of glamorous young women he dated would have believed just how much his relationship with his father meant to him.

Nick tried to ease the tension in his shoulders, moving them in a kind of circular movement to loosen the muscles.

Kelly was still talking. ‘... It’s this Scott Silver case. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of my stuff in the nationals. It’s the best yarn that’s come my way since God knows when...’

Nick listened absently. He just hoped that was all it was. He knew his father was proud of him, but wondered if Kelly realised that Nick too was proud of him for the way in which he had rebuilt his life. Nick didn’t just love his father, he liked and respected the man he had only been able to get to know just a few years previously. And Nick was pretty sure his father wouldn’t have any idea how frightened Nick got at the remotest prospect of Kelly turning back into the distant, thoughtless, shadowy creature of his boyhood memory. Nick was always afraid that his father would start drinking, fall back into his old ways. And Nick didn’t know if he could handle that. Not again.

‘Sure, Dad,’ he said. ‘I understand. No problem. Maybe I can get down to you guys soon.’

He made his voice bright and brisk, determined that his disappointment and fear wouldn’t show. Nick was good at hiding how he felt. That was another of the reasons for his success.

When Kelly walked into the Argus office early the next morning as promised, he received an excellent reception. Even Hansford congratulated him on his coup, albeit in his usual grudging way, and Robertson was ecstatic.

‘Great stuff, John,’ enthused the editor. ‘Seems like you haven’t lost your touch after all.’

Kelly liked compliments as much as the next man, albeit barbed ones. And he didn’t mind banter a bit. After all, he’d been weaned on it. But the most important thing that came along with his latest exclusive was that nobody, not even Hansford, was likely to suggest that he worked on anything other than the Silver story for a bit.

He had already had his usual quick run through the national dailies at home, but sitting at his desk he had another more thorough look, particularly at the Sun to which on this occasion he had filed exclusively. The Sun News Desk had asked him to give them the chance of an exclusive on any fresh material he came up with and he had done so. They paid well, from experience he found them less likely to mess freelances about than most of the rest, and he still had a couple of good old mates there, in senior positions now, whom he dealt with directly. Only the early issues reached Torquay, but Kelly felt sure that all the papers would have followed up his Sun stuff in their later editions. He had been more interested to see if any of the other nationals had anything that was new to him.

The Mail had an interview with one Mrs Sheila Nott, Angel and Scott Silver’s daily who had waxed lyrical about what wonderful people they both were and how, when she had said goodbye to Scott on the morning preceding his murder, she had had a premonition that it would be the last time she would ever see him. Nonsensical crap, thought Kelly.

Much more intriguingly the Mirror had a fairly detailed account of what they claimed to be the post-mortem reports on both Scott Silver and Terry James. Somebody must have had a good contact at the hospital, Kelly thought, turning the pages. Of course, there was no guarantee of the accuracy of the Mirror story, but Kelly doubted very much that any paper would go big on a flier with a tale that could have as many repercussions as this one.

It seemed that both Scott Silver and the man believed to have broken into his home had been the victims of frenzied attacks. Both of them had been stabbed several times. Scott Silver had suffered a total of eight stab wounds all over his body, primarily around the area of his heart and in his belly, but also in his upper arms, suggesting he had been trying to defend himself. Terry James had suffered even more wounds, possibly as many as ten.

Kelly thought about it for a moment or two. Karen Meadows had refused to tip him off about the results of the post mortem before the official report that would be given at the inquests into the two deaths, but he was fairly sure she’d be prepared to tell him if the Mirror story was fundamentally correct. He decided to phone her at once. She was her usual self, brisk, in a hurry, and gratifyingly straightforward.

‘As near as damned,’ she said in reply to his question.

‘So both of them were stabbed repeatedly? It must have been a blood bath out there.’

‘Yup. God knows how those bastards at the Mirror got hold of so much detail at this stage but that’s journalists for you.’

‘Good at their jobs, you mean,’ Kelly countered mischievously.

‘Good at being devious,’ she responded.

‘Any chance of a meet?’ he went on, not bothering to react to that one.

‘Now? In the middle of a murder investigation? You have to be joking.’

‘Nope. Thought you might like to talk to somebody you could trust.’

‘Is that another joke?’

He smiled and remained silent. He knew that she did trust him, and liked him. They wouldn’t have been having this conversation otherwise.

After a few seconds she seemed to relent.

‘I don’t even have any time to spend with myself right now, Kelly,’ she said. ‘But maybe soon, OK?’

‘OK.’

Kelly was thoughtful as he replaced the receiver. He was also slightly taken aback. From everything he had gathered about Terry James, he quite believed, in spite of the family’s protestations, that the man would not only strike out in self-defence, but also use a knife with no compunction at all in order to avoid being caught. Kelly had not swallowed the gentle giant stuff for one second. But he was surprised that the man would have stabbed Scott quite so many times. He had somehow imagined that when Scott had awoken and surprised the intruder, Terry James had hit out instinctively, once, maybe twice, and then stepped back, perhaps frozen by the horror of what he had done, and somehow given Angel a chance to grab the knife from him. It had also not occurred to Kelly, even though Karen Meadows had told him that James had been stabbed several times, that Angel could have launched a frenzied attack on the scale that the Mirror indicated. Rather he had imagined her too lashing out, probably striking James glancing blows with the knife, causing only shallow flesh wounds, before hitting a major artery.

Kelly concentrated, trying to imagine what had happened next. Angel always looked so fragile. But there was a toughness in her. She was a survivor, no doubt about that. And her mother had indicated to him that she would do anything to defend Scott. But Kelly had actually witnessed a frenzied knife attack once — well, a bayonet attack, to tell the truth — and remembered it all too clearly. It had been in the Falklands. Kelly had been yomping across the island with a British battalion. They had come over a rise straight into a group of Argentinian soldiers. Surprise and fear were a heady mix. The first man to be confronted face to face with an Argentinian had been a very young squaddie. He’d got the first blow in, bayoneting the Argentinian in the throat. Blood gushed out like oil from a geyser, drenching the squaddie and spattering everyone near him, including Kelly, who had shaken for days after the experience. Kelly suspected that the other man had died at once, but the British squaddie didn’t stop, perhaps couldn’t stop. He repeatedly stabbed the Argentinian soldier with his bayonet. It was hard to believe one man could have so much blood in his body. It spurted from every puncture point. Blood pressure. You had to see a human being stabbed, see the sheer power behind the blood which then bursts from the body, before you ever fully appreciated what the phrase meant. Kelly was all too well aware of just how much blood pressure there was within the human frame. The other soldiers had to pull the lad off. And when they did his appearance was ghoulish. He had looked as if he had been bathing in blood.

Kelly shuddered at the memory. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for Angel. How could she have done anything like that? He wondered if she’d been on coke at the time. Or did she still do smack? She certainly didn’t look like a druggie. She looked wonderful, in spite of her ordeal. But then, apart from that one time when he had done his best to rescue her from herself, she always had looked wonderful.

Karen Meadows hadn’t mentioned drugs. Neither had anyone else. Kelly knew that during the last year or two of his life Scott Silver had become a born-again Christian of some kind. Maybe that had meant he no longer did drugs, although there had been no doubting his involvement in the drug scene as a younger man. But Angel? Was she clean? Kelly had no idea. If drugs were involved that would affect any prosecution against her. He’d got the impression from Karen Meadows that the police were pretty sympathetic towards her. Drug involvement would change all that.

Whatever the truth, Kelly wondered what kind of effect having killed someone in such a way would have on Angel. He knew about how sometimes it was the apparently weakest amongst us who became the strongest when under attack, and were capable of acting with a viciousness that would normally be completely out of character. He would always remember seeing for the first time the picture in a newspaper of the man who had broken into former Beatle George Harrison’s home and attacked him. George’s wife, not a big woman, had leaped to her husband’s defence, and given his attacker a real hammering. The picture had shocked Kelly. He’d imagined, as was so easy for him to do, how the man must have spurted blood all over her, and yet she had just gone on hitting him. Some woman, he’d thought at the time.

What Angel had done was even more extreme. And it had led to a death.

He would see her face for a long time, pale, beautiful, almost translucent, surprisingly calm, as she’d been loaded into the police car that morning. He could hear her words on the answering machine. Angry. Afraid maybe, too. All of that.

He switched on his computer terminal and started to type. He wanted to send Angel another letter, to explain, to apologise. He’d done nothing to apologise for. He was a working journalist, after all. But it was important to him that she would realise that he was a friend as well as a hack — at heart always had been a friend to her — that he was on her side, and that she could depend on that.

It took him several attempts to get the words right, to explain how he felt, and find the right way of convincing her that he honestly believed her mother’s story would win sympathy and support for her. To try to make her believe that he really wanted to help her.

Finally he again asked for an interview. Well, he couldn’t help himself, could he?

‘You’ll have to talk to somebody sooner or later, Angel,’ he’d written. ‘Make it me. Make it somebody you already know is a friend, somebody who won’t let you down. I didn’t before. And I won’t this time.’

There was an element of moral blackmail there again, of course. Angel was well aware now of exactly who Kelly was and the secret he knew about her. This was the second time he had reminded her, and her mother had almost certainly done so too. Angel must realise that, if he chose, Kelly could write about her days as a prostitute at any time. He had first-hand knowledge. The photographs of her would still be on file at the Despatch. She probably did not know they had ever existed, and he didn’t intend to use them against her, never had. But they were there, none the less, and Kelly could confirm exactly who had been behind those dark glasses. He had a few trump cards in his hand. And he was rather hoping that all he had to do was drop a hint or two. Well, he was still a hack, after all. He knew how to walk that tightrope, how to please editors and those on the other side of the fence. He’d always been good, too, at making people like him if he put his mind to it.

He printed out the letter, folded it in his pocket, and set off for Maythorpe to play the waiting game. He didn’t intend to risk this latest note getting mixed up with all that fan mail and more than likely opened by somebody other than Angel, like Jimmy Rudge, Scott’s business manager, or even, heaven forbid, the police.

He would bide his time, wait till he had the opportunity to pass the letter to Angel personally. Then at least he would know that she’d got it.

He’d been standing outside Maythorpe Manor for almost two hours when Joe Robertson called.

‘Fancy a quick one or sixteen?’ he asked.

Kelly did. He didn’t much enjoy going into pubs any more, now that he no longer drank alcohol, but for Joe he would always make an exception. Kelly liked his editor’s company. Joe was one of the few people with whom he could reminisce about the good old days. Both men were inclined to remember the good moments rather than the bad, yet Joe knew all about the lowest points in Kelly’s past, and that made Kelly feel at ease with him. Even in a bar.

For just a second or two Kelly wondered about the wisdom of abandoning his stakeout. But he had a gut feeling that there were going to be no developments today. His only real purpose was to await an opportunity to pass Angel his letter, and, realistically, the chances of her walking out through the gates of Maythorpe that night amidst a group of waiting press were about nil.

It took Kelly less than twenty minutes to drive to the office pub. Joe was already standing by the bar, a slightly flushed Trevor Jones in attendance. Kit Hansford was sitting at a table with the picture editor. Kelly felt the news editor’s eyes boring into him as he walked in. He rather liked that. Hansford resented the closeness Kelly had with his editor, and Kelly had to admit to himself that he quite enjoyed the occasional opportunity to rub it in.

Joe was full of bonhomie. He also had a large glass of whisky in front of him and Kelly was pretty sure it wasn’t his first.

‘Well-timed, dear boy,’ Joe greeted him effusively. ‘Thought I’d better buy you two heroes a few. Pity I couldn’t send Trevor here to London with you, John, but there’s still plenty of mileage for you on this one, young man, I promise you that.’

Joe clapped Trevor on the back as he bought Kelly his usual Diet Coke. Trevor beamed. Basking in the glow of his editor’s approval he had obviously forgotten his earlier dissatisfaction with the Argus bosses.

‘Now, John,’ Joe continued. ‘I was trying to remember your story about the cockroach race. C’mon. You take over. I can’t even remember where it happened.’

Kelly grinned indulgently. He owed Joe a few good pub yarns. In fact he owed him a hell of a lot more than that.

‘Neither can I, not exactly,’ he said. ‘A run-down bar in a run-down town somewhere in Colombian drug-baron land. There were these cockroaches cowering in a corner and I had this bet on which one would dare to be first to scurry across the room to feast on a bit of old sandwich. I had a hundred quid on it and my little bugger won, no doubt about it. Only problem is I’d chosen to bet with two extremely large mercenaries. One of the bastards plonked his bloody great boot on my cockroach and that was the end of it and my winnings.

‘“Your ’orse ees dead,” he told me. Well, I know when I’m beaten. I paid up and did a runner. I wasn’t entirely suicidal. Not even then.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ roared Joe.

Kelly smiled easily enough. The stories sounded good. He knew that. They were of the rollicking hell-raising sort. The reality, of course, became very grim indeed. Kelly had indulged in all the vices. And he had gambled for England. It started with casinos in foreign towns, then he became hooked on horse racing — or rather on betting on horses. He had no interest whatsoever in the finer points of the races themselves or the horses which ran them. Eventually he would bet on anything. Hence the cockroach race. Kelly’s whole life became a kind of vicious circle. He would get drunk, often in some obscure part of the world, pick up a woman, usually in a bar, sometimes more than one, wake up the next morning next to somebody whose name he could probably not even remember, be overcome with remorse and go home to his wife, probably via a betting shop or two, and have a row. Liz half knew about the women, suspecting more than she would admit even to herself, Kelly had reckoned, and she certainly knew about the gambling. Kelly had been earning big money but he was spending even more. Cocaine, horses, women and whisky are an expensive combination. The debts mounted. The fights between Kelly and his wife became more frequent and more vicious. Kelly had vague memories of Nick in the background at these times, usually yelling his head off. As soon as possible after the fighting Kelly would invariably go off to some bar again and drink himself silly. Then he’d pick up a woman. Then he’d do some coke. Then the cycle would begin again.

Kelly remained mildly surprised by how quickly his downfall came once he started to slide. People think that the reporters of days gone by all spent their time getting drunk. In fact to be incapable of doing your job because of alcohol was a cardinal sin, and drugs were pretty much a no-go area in the Street of Shame, which kept rigidly to its own totally inexplicable code of conduct. After you’d brought in the story of the day, yes, you could get blind drunk if you wished. But not when you were in the middle of one. And if you were unofficial chief fireman like Kelly you always had to be able to pull yourself together because you never knew when the big one was going to break.

The first time Kelly was actually blind drunk in the office and incapable of putting his story together, a couple of fellow hacks ushered him out of the building, and covered for him. They even wrote his story, filing it under Kelly’s name.

Kelly doubted he ever thanked them. In fact he wasn’t sure if he even knew it had happened until he was told about it years later.

Kelly didn’t know how any of it happened really. These were the good old days when Fleet Street employers were about as tolerant and as benevolent as you could get. They checked him into a rehab centre. Not once, but three times. They warned him. Not once but several times. Then suddenly, it was all over.

One day he was the king, largely regarded as the best on-the-road operator in Fleet Street. He had a house in fashionable Chiswick, a beautiful wife, a baby son, and a flash car. He expected to get and was given the best stories. He ate in the best restaurants. On the rare occasions when he took a holiday it was to top hotels in the Caribbean or the South of France. He assumed now that he had thought that he was unassailable and that his glory days would last for ever, regardless of his increasingly erratic behaviour.

The next moment he had been sacked. The job that meant everything to him disappeared as quickly as one snort of the white powder he was so fond of. And his wife disappeared too. Not that he blamed her, after all she had put up with, although classically she went home to her mother leaving him to sort out the mortgage problems with the house and all his other debts. He didn’t do any such thing, of course. He failed to deal with any of it. He lost the house and although he had been given a generous pay-off from the Despatch, most of it went towards settling as many as possible of his debts, while at the same time keeping his various habits going until it too disappeared.

Within less than a year he ended up with no home as well as no income. He stayed with various friends until they wouldn’t put up with him any more. As soon as he got hold of any money he spent it on booze. He could no longer afford cocaine, but in any case coke was an achiever’s drug, designed to kill the need for sleep and keep the brain buzzing long after it would otherwise have slumped into oblivion. Kelly didn’t even want to achieve. It was only oblivion that he sought, and alcohol did that for him well enough. Women didn’t come into it any more. None would come near him. In the end he exhausted all his resources. There were no more friends prepared to pick up the pieces.

His fall from grace was every bit as spectacular as his rise to it had been. He actually did end up on the street. For several weeks he spent his nights in a cardboard box in the Waterloo underpass and his days begging. He would hang around Fleet Street pubs and offices, waiting for old mates to emerge and begging them for cash. Actually he used to pretend he was only asking for loans — that was the last vestige of his pride. But both sides knew the truth.

The guys he had worked with, once been at the forefront of, were deeply embarrassed, unwilling always to meet his eye. Which suited him. Kelly had not wanted contact, just their money, which they invariably handed over in order to get him to go away.

Looking back it remained a mystery to Kelly how he had got himself in that state. It was also a bit of a mystery how he had pulled himself out of it. He remembered that the first step had been to allow himself to be helped by one of the organisations which ministered to the winos of London. He had moved to a hostel which had been a vast improvement on a cardboard box, he had been persuaded to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and one day he had just stopped drinking. Simultaneously he had been able to start rebuilding, first finding himself any casual work going, more often than not in hotel kitchens, and ultimately getting back in touch with the few old friends he had not totally antagonised, in the hope of finding more gainful employment. It was then that Joe Robertson had come up trumps with his offer of a job in Torquay. And once Kelly got his foot back on the bottom rung of the ladder he began to climb it again, albeit just a little way, with less difficulty than he might have anticipated. It seemed he had been one of those people who had to sink to the very bottom of the pile before he could even start to recover.

The memory of it still shamed Kelly. And it still frightened him. He was aware more than most of the fragility of his own existence. He would never again have anything like the life he had enjoyed in those early Fleet Street days, he knew that. But although he was revelling in this rare treat of a really big story, he wasn’t sure that he would want that back, even if it were possible. The other side of the coin had been just too awful. Kelly had lived on the edge and he hadn’t been able to handle it.

Now he had a decent home in a gorgeous part of the world, a decent job, a good woman, and a fairly recently honed new relationship with his only son. He was possibly as near to content as he had ever been in his life.

If ever Kelly was tempted to drink again — and sometimes, watching friends down a gin and tonic at the end of the day or enjoy a bottle of fine claret, he did envy them — he just remembered how close he had come to total destruction. And he knew that he couldn’t take the risk.

He took a sip of his Diet Coke and heard Trevor Jones’s voice in the background jerking him out of his not-altogether-welcome reverie into the past.

‘Tell us about that hotel porter in Africa, Johnno...’

Kelly interrupted. ‘Not tonight, Trev,’ he said mildly. ‘I promised Moira I’d be home for supper.’

It was a lie. Moira was on duty. But Kelly was not in the mood for relating any more drunken stories of the good old days. They might make young photographers laugh, and even envy the swashbuckling lifestyle, but all too often they just left John Kelly feeling sad and empty.

Kelly spent most of the next three days, and half the night, doorstepping Maythorpe Manor. Not just professionally, but also personally, he found Angel Silver’s involvement in the double killing absolutely intriguing. Her account of what actually happened, whenever it could be obtained and printed, would, of course, make compulsive reading. But Kelly was beginning to accept that his fascination for the woman and for what had happened that night went far beyond his instinctive desire to be first with a great story.

For two days he did not even catch a glimpse of Angel, not even the twitch of a curtain indicating that she might be looking out, and certainly no shadowy view of a figure watching from a window.

Then at about 11 a.m. on the fourth day after Kelly’s trip to London, Angel appeared suddenly on the steps to Maythorpe and was hustled into a squad car by two policemen and a policewoman. This time there was not even the merest illusion of eye contact. Not for him, nor for anybody else, he suspected. Angel kept her head bowed. She was wearing a big black hat with a wide brim. He could not even see her face.

The gates to Maythorpe opened and the squad car sped through. Angel was sitting in the middle of the back seat flanked by the two policemen. Kelly caught another glimpse of the hat, and that was about all he could see of her.

One of the local agency snappers had managed to park his motorbike virtually in the hedge just opposite Maythorpe. He ran to it and took off with a squeal of wheels after the police vehicle. Kelly watched with amusement. He was in any case too old for car chases. And he would hazard an educated guess that Angel was being taken to Torquay Police Station again. He tried to call Karen Meadows to confirm but her mobile was switched to voice mail and Kelly didn’t think there was much chance of her having either the time or the inclination to call him back. None the less, he decided to follow his hunch, like he always did. The Argus Picture Desk had decided they could no longer keep a snapper outside Maythorpe, so, as he made his way down the hill towards the Volvo, Kelly called them and told them to get Trevor Jones to the police station smartish. His success gave him a little bit of authority for a change, he thought, as he drove as fast as he dared into central Torquay.

When he got to the station he found that there was quite a buzz among the small group of journalists already gathered outside. Kelly’s hunch had been right: Angel was already inside, and the word that something was happening at last had got around fast. Within an hour of Kelly arriving at South Street, several more reporters and photographers turned up, including Trevor Jones and two TV crews. The group waited for a further two hours before Karen Meadows, as senior investigating officer, accompanied by the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s chief press officer, came out on to the station steps to give a statement.

‘I can tell you that Mrs Angel Silver has been charged with the manslaughter of Terry James,’ she announced. ‘She will appear at Torquay Magistrates’ Court tomorrow morning to be formally charged before the Bench. She has been released on police bail and for your information, ladies and gentlemen, I understand that she has already left the station so there is no point in hanging around.’

Kelly tried to edge forward in an attempt to get a private word with the tall detective inspector, who politely refused to answer any of the questions which were thrown at her. But she was having none of that either, and merely turned smartly on her heel and retreated back through the police station’s big double doors.

The news came as no surprise. Karen had looked cool and in control as she spoke, but then she invariably did, thought Kelly. He knew that she must be into her early forties now, just a couple of years or so older than Angel, and he reckoned that as well as being a highly impressive woman, she had also become a first-rate copper. None the less, he didn’t believe for one minute that Angel had departed without being spotted. Kelly knew that the snappers had done a deal with each other. There were at least a couple of guys watching the only other entrance. It was just conceivable that Angel could have been hidden in one of several cars which had left through the gates to the yard round the back earlier that afternoon, but Kelly didn’t think so, not unless she had been lying on a car floor or something, and that wasn’t Angel Silver’s style. Not even when charged with manslaughter.

The TV crews were children nowadays. They filmed Karen, then immediately started moving away, as did several of the other journalists. Kelly and one or two of the old hands exchanged glances. Kelly walked up the street a short distance and quickly filed the latest development to the Argus on his mobile, giving Karen Meadows’ statement very nearly verbatim. He had retained his excellent short-term memory even if his long-term recollection, which had once been brilliant, was not quite what it was. On the way back he stopped at an Argus news-stand on the corner and bought a copy of his own paper. Then he walked casually back, half reading the paper as he did so, half looking over it, watching the doors to the station. He was sure she was still in there. And he had his own personal reasons for wanting to get close to her. If they bundled her into a vehicle round the back he might still see her but he had no chance of getting close. He remained convinced that Angel Silver wasn’t a back-door girl. The police might be trying to protect her, but he didn’t think she’d let them make her look as if she were hiding away.

He positioned himself so that he hoped he was close enough to get to her should he be given the opportunity, but in such a way that he didn’t look too conspicuous. And certainly not threatening. He saw that the others were trying to do much the same and that Trevor Jones had set himself up with a 1000-mil long tom in a shop doorway opposite. Smart lad that, he thought approvingly. Grafter too.

Over an hour later, just as Kelly was beginning to think maybe he and the few other know-alls who had stayed at the station stakeout had got it wrong after all and that Angel had been smuggled away, she came out.

Two policemen were alongside her plus two other men. Kelly recognised one of them easily enough. It was Jimmy Rudge again, Scott’s business manager. He guessed that the other was probably Angel’s lawyer. He looked the type, Kelly thought, but he wasn’t really interested in Angel’s escorts. Just in her.

Her head was no longer bowed. She held the wide-brimmed black hat in her hand and was staring straight ahead, looking neither to the left nor right. The violet eyes shone. Her face was paler than ever. That translucent skin looked paper-thin, almost as if at any moment it might split over those sharp cheekbones. As usual she wore very little makeup, just the familiar slash of vermilion lipstick.

She was dressed in tailored black trousers with turn-ups, very high-heeled shoes, and an expensive-looking black coat open at the front to reveal a simple white cotton shirt with the collar turned up. The effect was stunning. And even at this surely quite devastating time in her life, Kelly felt quietly certain that she knew it.

The motor-drives of the cameras belonging to the handful of snappers who had remained whirred busily. Kelly lurched forward, much faster than any of the others, even though he was probably the oldest. He was also probably the only one who knew exactly what he was going to do. After all, it was highly unlikely that Angel Silver would talk — and even if she did, nobody could print anything much, not now that she had been charged.

Before the police or the other two men accompanying her could stop him, Kelly was by Angel’s side thrusting his letter into her hand.

‘This time, please read this and get back to me,’ he commanded. ‘We need each other.’

He backed off at once, before he was manhandled out of the way, surprised partly by his own vehemence and also by realising that he meant the line he had spun her.

She turned and looked at him. That same look he had first experienced all those years ago when she had been half out of her head in that awful hotel bar, pulling anybody who’d have her to fund her drug habit. It was a look that had haunted him for seventeen years, he realised.

A look that said, ‘Can this really be happening to me?’

A look that said, ‘I’m not what I seem, really I’m not.’

A look full of vulnerability and contradiction, part hard and streetwise, part cool and controlled, part little girl lost.

It did for him. Just like before.