No Reason To Die

Seven

The following morning Kelly’s mobile rang just as he was parking at Newton Abbot railway station. And, as was usual for him, he had barely a minute to spare if he was going to catch his intended train.

He had no intention of replying, particularly as it was not yet 8 a.m., but he did glance at the display panel of his phone, nestling in its dashboard cradle, just in case this was a call he could not miss. News of Moira, perhaps.

In fact the caller was his son Nick, who, of course, knew that his father was up early every morning and at his desk. Or allegedly so, anyway. Hastily Kelly pushed the receive button. Nick was one of the very few people in the world that he always had time for — even if in this case it would have to be little more than a few seconds.

‘I just wondered how Moira was doing,’ enquired Nick over the airwaves.

‘Much the same, Nick.’ Kelly paused. ‘It’s not good, not good at all. I saw her last night. They say it might not be long now...’

‘Shit.’

Nick sounded both sad and angry. Kelly understood those emotions well enough. And he knew how fond Nick was of Moira, who had brought stability and more than a measure of happiness into Kelly’s life, and had stood by him even when he had seemed determined to self-destruct.

‘So how are you coping, Dad?’

‘Oh, you know, bloody useless as ever. If it wasn’t for those girls...’

‘Don’t put yourself down, Dad. I know how much you care, and Moira has always loved you for the man you are, not for the man you feel you should be.’

Kelly felt his eyes moisten and found rather to his surprise that he was also smiling, just a little. For a moment he forgot all about his train. Nick had a wonderful knack of knowing exactly what to say and when to say it, and Kelly was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude that he had been given a second chance to get to know his only son. He felt proud too. Nick was a fine young man. And successful. As an ex-army officer, probably too independent to stay in uniform for too many years, or so Kelly had always thought, he had fitted back into civilian life admirably. For nearly four years now he had been working in the City as some kind of business and IT consultant, one of those jobs Kelly could never quite get his head round, but he was well aware of the rewards it had brought his bachelor son. Nick lived in a luxurious London Docklands apartment, holidayed in all the best places, usually accompanied by one of the string of glamorous girlfriends who seemed to drift in and out of his life in remarkably trouble-free fashion, and drove the kind of cars his father could only dream about.

‘Thanks, Nick,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding. Look, Dad, I can’t get out of London this week, but I’ll drive down as soon as I can. I’d really like to see Moira...’

‘I know. And I’m sure she’d like to see you too.’

Kelly switched off the MG’s engine and began to dismantle his phone from its hands-free system. Simultaneously, he checked the clock on the dashboard.

‘Oh, Christ!’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve got about two minutes to catch a train. I’m sorry, Nick, I really have to go...’

‘Sure, sure. I’ll call you tomorrow. Where are you going, anyway?’

Automatically Kelly opened his mouth to tell Nick where he was going and why, then realised that would call for an explanation he had absolutely no time for.

‘Research,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll tell you when I see you. Bye.’

Given the way he lived his life it was all for the best that Kelly could still move fast for a big, slightly paunchy man in his late forties. He arrived on the platform with seconds to spare. The whole spur of the moment jaunt was absolutely typical Kelly, and had probably been inevitable from the beginning. Even though he had spent much of the previous night lying sleepless in his bed and telling himself that he would merely end up wasting both time and money.

The truth, however, was that he had probably made up his mind about what he was going to do the very moment that Karen told him about the second death at Hangridge.

Kelly was off to Scotland to see Alan Connelly’s parents. He had driven to Newton Abbot in order to board one of the direct cross-country trains running virtually the entire length of Britain from Penzance to Glasgow. It was a damned good service when it worked. But, unfortunately, nowadays it seemed to work despairingly rarely.

On this occasion everything had begun well. The train arrived on time at Newton Abbot, departing on schedule, at 7.53 a.m. precisely, and remaining so until it reached Birmingham. There, in the dark cavernous hinterland of one of the city’s network of cold black underground platforms, the red and grey Virgin Express sat for almost thirty minutes before anybody bothered to inform the passengers why.

Eventually the guard, or train manager as they were now called, muttered something about a mechanical fault. The passengers in Kelly’s carriage shifted uneasily. With the number of accidents there had been on Britain’s rail network recently, it had become almost as disturbing to be told your train had something wrong with it as to be told that an aircraft you were travelling on had developed a mechanical fault. Engineers were already working on the problem and we hope to be under way again shortly, continued the train manager in a flat, disinterested tone.

Kelly, wondering again, as he had done when he met Alan Connelly in The Wild Dog, what a Scotsman was doing in the Devonshire Fusiliers anyway, felt only bad vibes. He had been born impatient and he was, as ever, far more concerned with his personal timetable than his personal safety. And his pessimism in that respect was confirmed when, after another thirty minutes or so of complete lack of communication, the so-called train manager announced, with regret, that this particular train would be travelling no further that day. Would ‘customers’ make their way to platform eight and await the next train to Glasgow, which left at 13.51.

Kelly glanced at his watch. It was only just on midday. An already lengthy journey of around seven and a half hours was turning into a nightmare marathon. He was beginning to seriously wonder if the trip had been a good idea at all, particularly as he had embarked on it without making an appointment at the other end. But that, of course, had been deliberate. Kelly had been well trained in Fleet Street in the art of taking people by surprise. However, there were disadvantages, especially when you were paying your own fare and travelling second class on a saver ticket, instead of in the relative luxury of first class as provided by his former employers, and when the trip in question offered no reasonable chance, at least initially, of doing anything other than further depleting your already sorry bank balance.

On platform eight Kelly hunched his inadequate coat round his bony shoulders. It was a cold day and the platform seemed to have transformed itself into a wind tunnel. Things were not going well. At around 1.30, it was announced that the 13.51 was running half an hour late.

Kelly stamped his frozen feet on the unforgiving concrete and, wondering why he never seemed to remember to carry any gloves with him, rubbed his bare hands together in a vain attempt to warm them. There was quite a crowd on the platform awaiting the 13.51 to Glasgow, as was only to be expected when one Scotland train had been cancelled altogether. However, the proximity of so many bodies had done absolutely nothing to raise the air temperature. Kelly thought that might be because everybody’s body temperature had already sunk to the same low.

The train eventually turned up at around 2.30 p.m., almost exactly an hour before Kelly should have been arriving in Glasgow. It drew to a halt with a kind of breathless weariness which may just have been Kelly’s imagination — although, as he fought his way aboard along with all the other refugees from the earlier train, he began to think it wasn’t his imagination at all. This new train had a definite aura of weariness about it. Every carriage seemed already to be packed. Younger, nimbler folk than him won the race for the few remaining seats. Kelly ended up leaning against a toilet door in the corridor. He was now convinced that his journey was pure unmitigated folly.

After, with extreme difficulty among the people and bags piled up in the corridor, moving away from the toilet for about the third time for passengers who wished to use it, Kelly had had enough.

‘To hell with it,’ he muttered. He slung his bag over his shoulder and began to push his way through the masses. He was moving into first class. After all, he still had a credit card that worked. Just.

Almost as soon as he sat down, the new train’s manager was at his side waiting to check his ticket. Why was it, Kelly thought not for the first time, that the only thing which seemed to continually work well on Britain’s beleaguered railway system was the checking of tickets? Particularly if he didn’t happen to have the right one.

He handed over his credit card and tried not to wince as he signed a slip for more than a hundred pounds extra. He thought it was a disgrace that you couldn’t have a decent journey across Britain, in reasonable comfort, without paying out that sort of money for first class, and was on the brink of telling the train manager so in no uncertain terms. After all, he had only moved into first class and been forced to fork out the extra dosh because of yet another breakdown in the rail system. He restrained himself, though, partly because he knew it would be a waste of time and partly because all he wanted to do was to shut himself off from the world for the rest of his journey. Naturally, he vowed to write to Richard Branson about it all when he got home. And, naturally, he knew that he’d never get around to doing it.

He settled back into his seat and closed his eyes. He had no desire to sleep. He just wanted to think. And he told himself that he really could not hope to arrive in Glasgow in any fit state to have even the remotest chance of succeeding in his mission, had he still been leaning against a toilet door.

It had not been difficult for Kelly to find out Alan Connelly’s address. Karen Meadows was not his only police contact, which was just as well, because the way their last conversation had ended it had not seemed a good idea to ask her for any further information.

Instead Kelly had phoned George Salt, the retired policeman, now a civilian clerk at Torquay, who had been helping him out for years for a small consideration. Not cash, of course, that would have been open bribery and George Salt, in common with many of Kelly’s contacts in all sorts of walks of life, would never have gone down that road, but was more than happy to take the odd pair of tickets to a hot soccer game or a voucher for a weekend away in a luxurious hotel.

Kelly sighed. The only problem was that when he had been in full employment as a journalist those sort of perks came his way from time to time and he had been quite content to pass them on in order to cultivate a contact. These days he had to dip into his own pocket.

And, with what had started off as very nearly an eight-hour journey now lengthened by at least three hours, Kelly had good reason to wonder whether or not the tickets to a hot boy-band concert in Exeter, acquired for George’s eleven-year-old granddaughter — teenage started early nowadays, apparently — had been even a halfway worthwhile investment.

The train seemed to make the correct progress through the North of England into Scotland, but then there was a twenty-minute wait outside Glasgow Central, caused, as the guard so helpfully explained, by being delayed in the first place which meant there was no platform available.

Ultimately, Kelly arrived just before 8 p.m., almost four and a half hours behind schedule.

It was raining heavily in Glasgow. Anxious not to arrive at the Connelly home too late in the evening, Kelly hurried to the taxi rank. There was a long queue, due partly to the bad weather, Kelly suspected, and to his immense frustration another fifteen minutes or so passed before he was able to climb into the back of a cab. The driver did not seem particularly enthusiastic when Kelly recited the address he had been given for Alan Connelly, and when, after twenty-five minutes or so, they approached the Belle View estate, Kelly could understand why.

Belle View was an extremely inappropriate name for one of the grimmest council estates Kelly had ever seen. The sprawling grey complex, a mix of rows of unappealing houses and tenement blocks, was spread over a surprisingly large area. Kelly guessed it had been built in the late sixties, a period of housing development all involved preferred to forget. The houses had small front gardens, almost all of which were totally uncared for, and the tenement blocks stood in rectangles of grass. Or what had once been grass. Broken bedsteads, old tyres and the twisted remains of abandoned bicycles were more in evidence than trees or flowers, and what grass there was had either grown tall and wild in ragged clumps, or more frequently had been worn to a powdery brownish sward. Connelly’s family’s address was 23 Primrose Close. As the taxi progressed further into the estate, Kelly noticed that every street seemed to be named after a flower. There was a Bluebell Close, a Gardenia Way and a Camellia Crescent, and the ill kept road which appeared to be the main drag through Belle View was called Cherry Blossom Avenue. Idly, Kelly wondered if cherry trees had originally been planted here. No sign of them survived, that was for certain.

Yet again Kelly questioned why he had even bothered to come to Glasgow. No wonder young Alan Connelly was a Walter Mitty. Anyone could be forgiven for developing an overactive imagination if this was what they came home to. Colonel Parker-Brown’s description to Karen of a young man living out crazy fantasies, so much so that he could not be expected to succeed in the army, or anywhere else in life probably, began to make more sense with every second the cab passed through Belle View.

The driver slowed to a crawl as he entered Primrose Close. Number 23 was on the corner at the far end. Its garden was surrounded by a tall, neatly trimmed privet hedge, which stood out, spruce and vividly green in Belle View, where few householders had even attempted to bother with such niceties.

Kelly was able at once to ascertain that there was someone in. The lights were on both upstairs and down, an upstairs window was open, and as he opened the taxi door he could just make out the sound of voices — although it could have been a television — inside the house. Wondering if he would regret it, he paid the driver off, crossed the pavement, opened the freshly painted white gate ahead of him and walked up the short garden path. Primrose Close was at least reasonably well lit and the lights from inside the house also illuminated the garden. Kelly could see clearly a square of tidy grass to either side of him, edged by a colourful border of winter bedding plants, mostly pansies, and a sprinkling of autumn crocuses.

He rang the shiny brass doorbell on the dark-stained front door. He seemed to wait a long time then, but eventually a boy of about fourteen or fifteen answered the door. Kelly guessed that this was probably Alan Connelly’s younger brother. The boy was red-eyed, his hair dishevelled, his skin blotchy. He looked as if he had been crying.

Kelly felt like an intruder. It did not stop him. He was an old Fleet Street hand. He was used to intruding.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are either your dad or mum in?’

The boy nodded. He didn’t even look interested. ‘Dad, it’s for you,’ he called over his shoulder.

A small man, probably in his mid to late forties, came quickly to the door. He was slimly built and looked fit. He also looked remarkably like Alan Connelly.

‘Hi,’ said Kelly again. ‘My name is John Kelly, I’ve come up from Devon. It’s about Alan.’

The other man eyed him up and down, with only marginally more interest than had the boy who’d answered the door. And, like him, he looked as if he had recently been crying.

‘Are ye from the army?’ he asked eventually, in a voice with a heavy Glasgow accent.

Kelly dodged the question. ‘I was with your son,’ he said. ‘I was with Alan the night he died.’

Connelly looked at him suspiciously.

‘He was on his own. They told us he’d gone off on his own.’

Kelly nodded. ‘Yes. That’s right. He had. But I happened to meet him in a pub. We talked, and there were things that he said which still worry me.’

Kelly could see the curiosity flit across the man’s face. I’ve cracked it, he thought. I’ve cracked it.

‘You’d better come in.’

Kelly stepped into the hallway and pushed the door shut behind him. He already had something to think about. Colonel Parker-Brown had told Karen that Alan’s father was a drunk, yet not only was Mr Connelly totally sober, neither did he have the look of a drinker about him. And that was something Kelly knew about.

Connelly led the way into a living room which was both tastefully decorated and well furnished. A fair-haired woman, whom Kelly took to be Mrs Connelly, was sitting on the sofa. She was pretty, but there were dark shadows beneath her eyes and she looked pale to the point of illness. A girl of seven or eight sat on her lap, cuddling close. Kelly expressed his deepest sympathy for the loss of their son and succeeded in learning the Connellys’ Christian names. They were Mary and Neil.

‘All right, then, Mr Kelly,’ said Neil Connelly, still formal, as he sat down on the sofa next to his wife and gestured for Kelly to take one of the room’s two big easy chairs. ‘What exactly have ye come all this way to tell us?’

Kelly went through it all then. Everything that had happened in The Wild Dog the night Alan had died, everything Alan had said to him, and how afraid the young man had seemed. Mary Connelly did not respond at all. It was almost as if she had not heard a word Kelly had said, so immersed was she in her own private grief. Neil Connelly seemed merely mildly puzzled.

‘I wondered if your son had ever said anything like this to you,’ continued Kelly. ‘I wondered if, perhaps, what he had to say might mean any more to you than it would to me or to anyone else?’

‘No,’ said Neil Connelly, after a short pause. ‘No. I do na understand it at all. Ma boy was very happy in the army, I’m sure of it. He was a good soldier. He liked the life. He was na unhappy. If he had been, he would have told us. We’ve always been a close family, Mr Kelly.’

‘You hear about bullying in the army, Mr Connelly. Do you think Alan could have been the victim of bullying?’

‘Ma boy could look after himself.’

‘Of course. It’s just that he seemed so frightened, and I think it might be important to find out why. He didn’t seem like a young man who was happy in his life, not at all.’

Neil Connelly shrugged. ‘He was drunk, wasn’t he? They told me he was very drunk. And he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Our Al was na a drinker. He was only seventeen for Christ’s sake. My wife and I have tried to bring our children up properly.’

‘I’m sure you have, Neil.’

The other man frowned. ‘Look, what are you? Army welfare? We’ve had someone from welfare here already—’

‘I’m the man who’s trying to find out exactly what happened to your son, Neil,’ Kelly interrupted, dodging the question again. He looked around the room once more. Family photographs lined the wall. A picture of Alan, looking proud, in his army uniform, staring straight ahead from beneath his Fusiliers’ blue beret with its distinctive red and white hackle, took pride of place. Next to it was a photograph of a second young man in similar uniform. They could have been twins.

‘Another brother, I presume,’ remarked Kelly casually.

Neil Connelly smiled for the first time. It was a weak smile but it lit up his face.

‘No, that’s me twenty years ago,’ he said. ‘We had a lot in common, my boy and me. I did fifteen years in the army, in the same regiment, the Devonshire Fusiliers, and they were some of the best years of my life.’

‘Why the Devonshire Fusiliers?’ Kelly asked. ‘A regiment so far away from Scotland.’

‘Ah, well, there’s a bit of history in that,’ Neil Connelly explained, coming to life a bit as he did so. ‘My grandfather was a Devonian, from Plymouth, and he was called up to the Devonshires during the Second World War. Then, after the war, he stayed on as a regular. But my grandmother was a Scots lass, and when my grandfather retired from the army they moved up to Scotland. None the less, when my father decided to become a soldier, he wanted to join the same regiment as his da’, even though it was based at the other end of the country. As for me, all I wanted was to be a Devonshire Fusilier from when I was just a scrap of a lad. Ma boy was just the same. We’re a family of Fusiliers, Mr Kelly.’

Kelly studied the other man carefully. Neil Connelly, the way he described his family and the ordered, comfortable home in which they lived were not at all what he had been led to expect. Indeed, Connelly did not seem a bit like the picture of a bitter man, unemployed and probably unemployable, that Colonel Parker-Brown had painted to Karen.

‘So, what’ve you been doing since you left the army?’ Kelly asked conversationally.

‘I came out to a good job, in the shipyard. I wanted to see my children grow up. I’d have stayed a fusilier till they kicked me out, but for that. It all went wrong in the end, of course, when they announced they were closing down my yard. We were just about to buy our own house, move out of this place. Then I was made redundant. Me and hundreds of others. We managed, though. Mary went back to nursing. She’s an SRN and a good one.’ He glanced at his wife, who still gave no indication that she was even listening to what was going on, with obvious pride. ‘And I stayed at home to look after the kids for a bit.’

‘So have you been out of work since then?’

‘On and off. More off than on, I suppose. It’s not easy to find work in Glasgow. But then last year I joined the post office. Postman. I like it. Doesn’t pay great, but I like it.’

‘So you’re not out of work now.’

‘No. I am na.’

Kelly thought about it. Had Parker-Brown been deliberately lying to Karen, he wondered? Or had he merely been misinformed.

‘Look, what’s this all about?’ Connelly asked sharply.

‘There may be things you should know about, Neil,’ Kelly persisted. ‘For a start, there was another alleged accidental death at Hangridge, only a few months ago.’

‘Was there?’ Kelly could detect a definite note of curiosity in Connelly’s voice now.

‘You didn’t know, then?’ Kelly was well aware that he was stating the obvious. He hadn’t for one moment thought that the other man would know about the death of Craig Foster. He just wanted to stress the point.

‘No.’ There was a pause. Kelly waited. He wanted Connelly to be interested enough to come back at him, and was soon to be rewarded for his patience.

‘What happened?’

‘A young soldier was shot on a training exercise on the moors.’

Connelly shrugged. ‘It happens,’ he said. ‘It’s the army.’

‘Yes, but it is another sudden death. And your son indicated that there were more.’

‘My son was drunk. God bless him.’

Kelly had one last card to play.

‘Mr Connelly, would you describe your son as a fantasist?’

‘A what?’

‘Did he live in a fantasy world, make up stories?’

‘You have to be joking. You couldn’t be more down to earth than our Alan. He was always a sensible lad.’

‘So it would surprise you to know that his commanding officer told the police that Alan was a bit of a Walter Mitty?’

‘Surprise me? It would bloody astonish me.’

‘It’s the truth, Mr Connelly.’

Neil Connelly narrowed his eyes, appearing to think hard.

‘So you say,’ he responded eventually. ‘But how do I know that?’

‘I promise you I’m telling the truth, Mr Connelly...’

‘You’re not from the army, are you? You’re nothing to do with the army...’ Connelly rose abruptly to his feet. His wife seemed to hold her daughter even more tightly to her, but did not look up. Kelly thought she must still be totally in shock. Neil Connelly looked angry now. ‘You’re a bloody journalist, aren’t you? A vulture...’

Again Kelly avoided giving any information about himself. Instead he concentrated on trying to make Neil Connelly listen, on trying to convince the bereaved father that he had something to say that was worth listening to.

‘Look, Neil. Colonel Parker-Brown even went so far as to say that Alan’s days in the army were numbered because of his fantasising. He described him as a Walter Mitty.’

Neil Connelly sat down again on the sofa, as abruptly as he had risen from it. Kelly knew that he had at least succeeded in attracting the other man’s attention again. He stared at Kelly long and hard before eventually making a reply.

‘If my boy had been in any sort of trouble, he’d have told me,’ he announced.

‘Mr Connelly, I promise you, I’m telling you the truth,’ Kelly repeated. ‘I just think there are things that need looking into here. At the very least there’s justification for doing a bit of digging, trying to find out if anything amiss did go on at Hangridge. Your son would have wanted that, I’m sure of it. Why else would he have talked to me the way he did? I need your help, Mr Connelly, if I’m going to take this any further. And I really think it should be taken further, don’t you?’

Connelly stared at Kelly for a few moments longer, then he rose from his chair again and this time walked across the room to the mantelpiece, where he stood looking down at the pair of framed photographs taking pride of place. Two young men, proud and straight in the uniform of the Devonshire Fusiliers, looked back at him. One his own image from twenty years earlier, one that of an obviously cherished son.

After a few seconds he swung on his heel to face Kelly. His shoulders were back now, his jaw set and his gaze level and unblinking.

‘This is an army family,’ he announced. ‘My grandfather went right through the Second World War with the Devonshires and was killed in the last push across Europe. My father served at Suez with the Devonshires. I did my fifteen years — Northern Ireland, the Falklands and, finally, the Gulf War. My boy was the fourth generation of Devonshire Fusiliers in this family. He was born to be a soldier, and he would have been a mighty fine one, whatever you or anyone else has to say.

‘His death was a tragic accident. That’s all. I’ll not make trouble for the Devonshires. I’ll not do it.

‘I think you’d better leave, Mr Kelly.’