No Reason To Die

Eighteen

Karen arrived home just before 9 p.m. and embarked on her usual round of last-minute tidying before Kelly’s arranged visit half an hour or so later. However, most of her flat was already moderately clean and tidy. After all, her recently acquired cleaning lady, Shirley, an out-of-work actress whose impecunious state had forced her to move in with her mother a couple of streets away, had made her weekly visit only the day before.

The bedroom, however, was its usual tip. Although Shirley was undoubtedly a good and thorough cleaner, and had even informed Karen that she was going to convert her house-cleaning activities into a proper business which would transform her finances, Karen was not entirely sure she was cut out for the job. Shirley — who had taken to wearing black T-shirts with the words DUST BUST emblazoned in white across her ample bosom, in order, she said, to attract attention to her new enterprise — had attitude. A lot of attitude. Unless Karen’s bedroom was in at least some kind of order, Shirley wouldn’t even go into it.

However, as she stood in the doorway looking at the mayhem within, Karen had to admit that Shirley probably had a point. The pile of clothes on the chair at the foot of her bed had once again spread onto the floor. And entangled among the various items were at least a couple of pairs of old knickers.

Karen set about putting shirts and trousers on hangers, throwing casually abandoned shoes into the bottom of her wardrobe, and gathering up the more unsavoury items destined for the washing machine. Then she stopped. What on earth was she doing? There was absolutely no way Kelly was going anywhere near her bedroom. That was just not going to happen. So why was she so frantically tidying the room?

‘For God’s sake,’ she muttered to herself. Sometimes, she wondered what on earth was going on in her head.

She abandoned the rest of the mess at once, made her way into the sitting room, flopped onto the sofa and switched on the TV to Sky News in order to catch up on the day’s events. Yet another major royal scandal appeared to be breaking, and Karen, while actually something of a closet republican, had a real weakness for royal gossip — the more scurrilous the better. The British royal family were, after all, the world’s greatest soap opera, she thought.

And in spite of all that was on her mind, she quickly became embroiled in the latest revelations, which cast almost inarguable doubt on the paternity of a major young royal. Indeed, she was so engrossed that she was surprised, when she glanced at her watch, to find that it was already ten minutes to ten.

She checked both her mobile phone and landline for messages, in case she had missed any calls. Her only message was from the irritatingly persistent Alison Barker.

‘Such a pity you couldn’t make dinner with Sally, but she’s coming down again in a couple of weeks and I just wondered...’

Karen pressed delete. She was even less interested than usual in Alison Barker. She was puzzled. Kelly was normally punctual and she had realised when he’d phoned her earlier in the day that he’d had something he was dying to tell her, which made it all the more unlikely that he would be even five minutes late. She tried both of Kelly’s numbers, but was merely switched straight to voicemail on each.

She wandered around the flat, picking up books and magazines and putting them down, periodically looking out of the window, watching for Kelly’s car to turn into the car park. Ten o’clock came and went, and still Kelly had not arrived. A thought occurred to her then. Perhaps he had emailed her. Karen had left her police station office just after six thirty and she thought she had last checked her email about half an hour before that. Surely Kelly would not have cancelled that late in the day, would he? And surely he wouldn’t have chosen email to do so, at such short notice.

None the less she logged onto her computer, which she kept hidden away in a Victorian roll-top desk in a corner of her big, high-ceilinged living room. And, indeed, there was an email from Kelly, timed 6.12 p.m., apologising for having to put off their meeting. She must have just missed it.

Karen read the message over two or three times. She was more than a little puzzled. The email, crucially she thought, made no mention at all of how important their postponed meeting might be, something Kelly had already made clear. In fact, it gave very little away, and that in itself made her deeply suspicious.

She could not imagine what could have happened to make Kelly back out of a meeting he had been so keen to arrange. But something had happened, she was quite sure of that.

More than that, John Kelly was up to something. She knew him well. She just knew he was up to something and, whatever it was, he had been quite determined not to tell her about it.

She logged off her computer, shut it away in the desk and, completely preoccupied, made her way into the kitchen where she opened a bottle of red wine. Unusually, although she hadn’t eaten anything except Phil Cooper’s crisps since lunchtime, she wasn’t hungry. But she could do with a proper drink.

Thoughtfully, she wandered back into the living room and flopped down on the sofa again. The television was still on. Karen didn’t even glance at the screen. Instead she reached for her cordless phone, took her palmtop computer out of her handbag, looked up a phone number and dialled it.

‘Hello, Jennifer?’ she queried. ‘Karen Meadows. I was just calling to see how you and your sisters were getting on?’

‘Oh, that is kind of you,’ said the voice at the other end of the line, making Karen feel like a total rat. She didn’t know it, but one way and another Moira’s daughters seemed to have a habit of unwittingly doing that to people. Or to her and Kelly, anyway.

‘We’re fine. Well, we’re coping. I mean, we were expecting it, after all. But it’s always a shock, isn’t it...?’

‘Yes, of course. And your mother was just such a lovely person.’

Karen paused. As ever she was too impatient to keep up small talk for long, even under these circumstances.

‘Don’t suppose Kelly is with you, by any chance, is he?’ she enquired casually.

‘No,’ responded Jennifer, sounding slightly puzzled herself. ‘Should he be?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ Karen responded swiftly. ‘I haven’t been able to raise him at home or on his mobile and it occurred to me that he might have been visiting you.’

‘No. We haven’t seen him since the day of the funeral, actually.’

Jennifer spoke without a note of criticism. Typical, thought Karen. And she was now behaving just as badly as no doubt Kelly was.

‘Oh, well, I expect he’s very busy,’ she responded lamely, and managed one or two other platitudes before ringing off, slamming the receiver quite violently back on its charger.

She had known it. She really had known it. Kelly had been lying. That meant he was keeping something from her. And that was sure to mean trouble. Because, with Kelly, it damned well always did.

Meanwhile, Kelly had decided, mainly because he was so on edge that he just couldn’t sit at home waiting, to go out to Babbacombe early and eat in The Cary Arms, the lovely old pub built into the cliffside just above beach level, which was one of his favourite hostelries in the area. He arrived around 8.30, ordered steak and chips and a Diet Coke, followed by a couple more Cokes and a coffee in order to while away the time until closing. At around 11.20, aware of the landlady starting to fidget demonstrably, he made his way to the borrowed Volvo, parked in the car park down by the beach. It was a completely dark night. No moon and no stars were visible. The lights from the couple of houses to one side of the beach and the pub above them, barely cut through the cloak of blackness which seemed to have wrapped itself around Kelly. He shuffled across the car park to the Volvo, moving unnaturally slowly. It had, of course, been raining earlier in the day, and Kelly suspected there might be a shower again at any moment.

Once inside the Volvo, he rolled a cigarette and sat smoking with the window wound down, looking around him as best he could. Apart from what were now the relatively distant lights of the pub and the two beach houses, Kelly could see nothing at all.

Every few minutes he flicked on his lighter in order to check his watch. It was almost like a nervous tic. At exactly midnight, he opened the car door and stepped out.

The night was surprisingly warm for the time of year, even though he could feel the dampness of the sea air around him. As he shut the car door he took a long deep breath, savouring the salty seaweedy smell.

Both the sea and the beach were as black as the sky. He shivered, even though he was not cold, as he peered around him, screwing up his eyes in the hope that they might adjust a little to the lack of light. He could still see absolutely nothing. With extreme care, he again proceeded across part of the car park, raised just above the beach alongside the deserted beach café, which opened only in the summer, and then just during daylight hours, and attempted to negotiate the small flight of steps which led down to sea level. At the bottom he stumbled. He had somehow expected one step more. He fell almost to one knee and had to use the iron railing flanking the steps to haul himself upright again.

He had decided to obey all his instructions meticulously, including not bringing a torch, but he could really have done with one. He just hoped he didn’t break his neck before even encountering Deep Throat.

There was barely a breath of wind, which was why the night was so unseasonably warm. Yet visibility was so bad he thought that the darkness of the night was probably being intensified by a sea mist. He really did feel as if he were engulfed in a slightly clammy blanket, a feeling he thought was unique to the coast, particularly in foggy conditions. Certainly, he had experienced nothing like it inland anywhere in the world. It was strangely disorientating. Momentarily, Kelly lost his sense of direction, and only the sound of the waves gently lapping on the shingly beach told him that the sea was to his right, and the wooded hill leading up to Babbacombe proper and the main drag into Torquay was to his left. There was no other sound at all. You could hear no passing traffic noise down at Babbacombe beach, of course, and the lack of wind made the night almost eerily silent.

Kelly stood for a minute listening. Was there someone else already on the beach, he wondered? Not only could he not see anything, but neither could he hear anything. He began to pick his way over the shingles, straight along the beach as he had been instructed, startlingly aware of the rhythmic thumping of his heart, which, in the otherwise intense silence, seemed unnaturally loud. He slid each foot cautiously in front of the other. Once, a particularly large pebble caused him to stumble for a second time, but this time he righted himself immediately and continued to move painstakingly forwards.

Visibility was so poor that he almost walked into the cliff at the far end of the beach, unaware that he had even reached it. And he paused for a moment before adhering to his instructions once more, turning on his heel and shuffling back along the beach.

Twice more he repeated this manoeuvre, and, just as he had almost reached the far cliff for the third time and was beginning to wonder if he was the victim of an elaborate hoax, it happened.

Suddenly he sensed that someone was behind him. He had neither heard nor seen anything, but all his senses told him that there was another presence on the beach and that it was threateningly close to him. The beat of his heart not only seemed extraordinarily loud now, he was also aware that it was much faster than usual, indeed his heart was racing. He tried to turn around, and opened his mouth to speak, or maybe to scream. He wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. He was not given the chance to do either.

With no further warning, an arm locked around his throat and he felt the pressure of a large, strong body against his back. The crook of his assailant’s elbow locked beneath his chin, crushing his larynx. Kelly raised his own arms and lashed out with them frantically in all directions, desperate to make any kind of contact. A second arm from behind knocked his down to his side and pinned them there. The grip around his throat felt like steel and was tightening. He was being choked. Then he was aware of his attacker shifting his balance.

Oh, my God, thought Kelly. This is it. This is really it. I am going to die. This time, I really am going to die.

He forced himself to think. He realised he probably had only a few seconds of life left. Kelly knew a bit about unarmed combat. Certainly enough to be aware that his assailant was a professional. And Kelly reckoned he knew exactly what was coming next. He steeled himself for the sickening thud of a knee in the small of his back, before his head would be jerked back and his neck broken. Swift, silent and brutally efficient.

He struggled to clear the black fog inside his head, which was now every bit as dense as that outside.

He had once, briefly, undergone self-defence training with an elite para unit. The purpose had allegedly been to write a feature for his newspaper, but Kelly at the time was travelling the world seeking out the worst trouble spots. He had already been kidnapped by guerrilla forces in a remote part of a war-torn African state, and had had a narrow escape. So he’d paid close attention to his brief experience of military training, reckoning it might one day save his life. But he had never before had occasion to use any of the manoeuvres he had learned, and had no idea whether, even if he could remember what to do, he would stand a chance of executing any of it. Particularly against a professional. Kelly was twenty-odd years older, and carried a couple of stone more weight, almost all of it around his belly, than he had back then. And there was also the little matter of not one, but two drug and alcohol detoxes along the way.

Never mind, he told himself. He knew it was brain power which counted for most, in these situations, rather than brute force. He forced his brain to work. To remember. To maintain the discipline not to lose control even as death looms. To tell his body what to do. But the fog inside his head was already impenetrable.

So instead, he abandoned all thoughts of conjuring up some magical move of self-defence from the distant past, and merely struggled mindlessly, trying to slide his body down and away from the steel-like grip. Quite frantic now, he wriggled and kicked with all his might. One thing he did remember, was that a moving target was always more difficult to dispatch, not that he could move very much.

However, his terror seemed to give him a kind of frenzied strength, and he thought he actually managed to kick his assailant sharply on one shin — certainly, the grip around his throat suddenly slackened just enough for him to be able not only to breathe but to do the only other thing he could think of by way of a counter-attack. He yanked his head downwards and twisted his lower jaw as best he could in order to find his target, then buried his teeth into a section of what appeared to be exposed wrist, using all his strength to drive them into the bare flesh. The grip around his neck slackened totally then. Kelly realised two things. One was that he was no longer being strangled and, the other, that this slight reprieve would not last. After all, the grip of the second arm, the one pinioning his own arms to his body, had not slackened at all.

However, he took advantage of the brief, partial respite to cry out with all his might. Even in this moment of abject terror, logic told him that there was no one around to hear him — the pub and the pair of houses below it would both be tightly shut against such an unpleasant night and, in any case, were at the far side of the beach, but he didn’t know what else to do. And, curiously, he found that just the sound of his own voice, which he had thought he might never hear again, gave him some fleeting comfort.

‘No, no,’ he yelled as loudly as he could manage. ‘Help, help, help!’

But the moment was over in a flash, as he had expected it to be. The steel-like grip of his assailant’s arm locked around his throat again, once more crushing his larynx, not only making any further sound impossible but also again making it extremely difficult to breathe. Kelly could only gasp for air. His legs had turned to jelly. He felt his body begin to go limp, his eyes start to glaze over, and all reason begin to drain from his brain.

He prepared to die. And with what remained of his strength, he braced himself against the sickening thud he expected to feel at any moment in the small of his back.

But, instead, the grip around his arms and body slackened. It made little difference, however, and he was sure his assailant would have known that, because he had no strength left to put up any further fight. And he was certainly not able to even attempt to break free and escape. In any case, he knew he had no chance at all of getting away. Instead he half stood, half leaned against his attacker, barely breathing, like an old, broken, rag doll.

Then suddenly he was aware of a bright light shining in his face. He blinked rapidly, half strangled, half brain-dead, desperately trying to work out what was happening. It was a torch. Of course. A torch. And for some reason his attacker was shining it directly into his face. Why? Why would he do that? Even in Kelly’s befuddled state the answer came quite quickly. Just to double-check. To be sure that he had the right man. That would be it. Yet again Kelly prepared to die.

The torch remained shining straight into his face for several seconds. Then, as abruptly as it had arrived, the blazing light was gone. The torch had been switched off. Kelly could hear his heart beating even louder and faster than ever, and was absolutely sure it would not be doing so for long. He was also aware of a warm wetness between his legs. Somewhere, deep in his subconscious, he registered that he must have involuntarily urinated.

Then the arm around his throat was abruptly withdrawn. Instinctively, Kelly tried to turn around, his legs buckling beneath him, to face whoever was attacking him.

Before he could do so, the dull thud he had been anticipating came. But there was no knee in his back. Instead he felt the torch smash into the side of his head. Obscurely, as he sank to his knees on the beach, the thought occurred to him that it must be a rubber torch or else the blow would have been much more brutal. Perhaps even lethal.

Neither could he have been hit with as much power as he would have expected, because he had not been caused to collapse totally nor plunge into full unconsciousness. Instead, swaying only slightly, he remained kneeling almost upright for a moment, the rough edges of the shingle digging through his thin trousers into the flesh of his knees. Then, needing more support, he toppled forwards onto his hands.

His head felt as if it belonged to somebody else, and somebody else that he did not know, at that, but he still remained just about conscious, even though a million coloured lights danced before his eyes.

Then, just as he had earlier been aware of the close proximity of his assailant immediately before being attacked, Kelly realised that he was once again more or less alone. He heard the crunching of shingle to his left and peered into the gloom. He could just make out a shadow heading for the cover of the densely wooded hill.

His head felt as if it were taking a ride on a fairground roundabout without him. And suddenly he was not aware of his heart beating at all. Although, as he was still breathing, he assumed it must be.

He straightened slightly and sat back on the beach, bringing his knees up to his chest and resting his head on them. His head was still spinning. He recognised that he had concussion. He had experienced it once before when he had taken a nasty fall ranch-riding in Arizona. On a story, of course. Kelly had never had time for hobbies. And he had had no more opportunity to fully master the art of horse-riding than the art of self-defence.

He wrapped both his hands around his head in an effort to soothe it, tentatively fingering the bruise which was already beginning to form on his forehead, and remained there, sitting on the stony beach for several minutes. The shingle was icy-cold and slightly wet, probably just from the mist and the dampness of the sea air, yet Kelly barely felt it as he struggled to regain normal consciousness. But then, his trousers were already wet. And as his mind and senses began to function again, even if only marginally, he became aware of the stench of urine mixing with the salty tang of the air.

After a bit, and with extreme caution, he raised his head from his knees and moved it slowly from side to side. It no longer spun for England. And although there was already considerable swelling on his forehead where he had been hit, it seemed that there was no blood. Apparently, the skin had not been broken and the blow had missed the more vulnerable spots. The potentially lethal spots. The parts of a man’s head and neck with which Kelly somehow felt sure his assailant would be thoroughly familiar. It was almost as if he been hit with care. That didn’t make sense, of course. But Kelly could think of no alternative, not in the state he was in, anyway.

Obliquely, the story of John Lee, the man they couldn’t hang, drifted across his muddled mind. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Lee had been employed as a footman in a house secluded in the hillside woodland above Babbacombe beach, the woodland into which Kelly’s attacker had just disappeared. Lee had been condemned to death for the murder of his mistress, but had always denied the crime. When sentenced, he had predicted: ‘The Lord will not let me hang.’ And, indeed, when he was taken to be hanged in the courtyard of Exeter’s forbidding old walled castle, now the regional crown court and in those days home of the assizes, the trap beneath the gallows had, quite extraordinarily, failed to open three times. So, as was customary, after the third attempt, nineteen-year-old Lee’s death sentence had been repealed.

Crazy, violent images coursed through Kelly’s dazed brain. He was still unable to think rationally and there were still bright lights dancing around before his eyes, not unlike the symptoms of a very bad migraine.

He could, however, think clearly enough to register one thing.

He should be dead. Like John Lee more than a century earlier, he really should be dead. He was sure of it. Somebody had come onto that beach that night to kill him. Somebody skilled in the art of death. And yet, at the last moment, his attacker had backed off and left him.

Kelly was alive. He was still alive. And he didn’t know why.