Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

And then there was Moira. She was his rock, and Kelly was well aware of the stability she had given him and the state he might still be in, were it not for her. He loved Moira. In a way. In his way. But without that edge of danger which came with high passion, which he had last experienced so long ago he could barely remember it. The trouble was that although Kelly knew well enough that he would still be falling about in a gutter somewhere had he failed to get his life back on an even keel — with not a little help from Moira, whom he had met just a year after joining the staff of the Argus thirteen years previously — he was still an adventurer at heart. Still a chancer inside his head. It was what, once a very long time ago, had made him such a good reporter. Good reporters, the really great ones, were not often anything but chancers. They had a boldness about them, a belief in their own immortality, their own omnipotence. But when that belief was shaken it was often hard for them to hold themselves together. Kelly was the sort who had hung on to his own particular brand of greatness by little more than a single thread. When that thread had broken, so had Kelly. And he had long ago accepted that he would never be that man again.

As he swung the MG into the Argus car park and pulled to a halt, Kelly struggled to snap out of the morose mood he had slumped into. He was aware that he had acquired a tendency towards self-pity. He’d have to watch that. He disliked it in others and even more in himself. At least he had a really good story to bury himself in. It was a long time since he’d worked on anything as big as this.

Stepping out of the car he took a last couple of puffs from his cigarette and inhaled deeply, before tossing the fag end casually on to the ground. The offices of the Argus were, of course, non-smoking. God, how Kelly hated the health-conscious, squeaky-clean, political correctness of modern life. He strode briskly through the big swing doors into the streamlined modern reception area that could have been the entrance to any factory or office block. Nothing indicated press at all. As ever, Kelly allowed himself a brief moment of nostalgia. He was, after all, old school, local-paper-trained, Fleet Street-honed. Hot metal was in his blood and he longed for the noise and the dirt and the sheer exuberance that had once been so much a part of newspaper life.

He made his way unenthusiastically through the ground-floor advertising department and climbed the stairs to the editorial offices above. The journalists produced their newspaper out of one big anonymous grey room. Pale grey walls framed a highly regulated working area in which mid-grey computers sat on lines of dark grey desks. Everything about the Argus newsroom was grey — including the atmosphere, Kelly always thought. There was the usual soft mechanical buzz, which was just about the only buzz you ever got from the place, he reckoned. Reporters sat quietly at their terminals with their heads down. The subeditors had tired eyes, too few of them dealing with too much copy, much of it supplied by reporters who weren’t really worthy of the job description, in Kelly’s opinion.

On his way to his own grey desk Kelly passed the photographers’ room. He almost bumped into Trevor Jones, who came hurrying out, camera bag over his shoulder.

‘Back to normal for me today,’ muttered the younger man glumly. ‘I’m off to cover the opening of that new supermarket. I don’t think they like it when you get an exclusive on this bloody newspaper.’

Kelly smiled sympathetically. Kit Hansford certainly gave that impression sometimes. And Kelly was under no illusions about the young news editor’s opinion of him.

He switched on his computer, logged in, and began to put together a final piece for the midday edition. When he had finished he went on-line to check recent material about Scott and Angel Silver. Having avoided the office the previous day and had no time to use his own computer at home, this was his first chance. On the Net, predictably enough, the principal stuff was fan-based. He plumbed in to the archives of all the national newspapers he could access. The trouble with the Net was that you could only get out what somebody else had put in. Kelly was well aware of the value of the Internet but was wary about the high level of misinformation it contained. He trolled through anything relevant that he could find, and then checked the archives of his own newspaper. The Silvers had lived in Maidencombe for almost ten years, and the Argus had given their various exploits considerable coverage.

But Kelly learned little that was new to him. He had a computer for a brain when it came to storing tabloid-style trivia in his head, although he needed sometimes to remind himself of precise details.

There was something in particular he had been looking for, although he wasn’t sure what use he would be allowed to make of it. The name jumped off the screen at him. Mrs Rachel Hobbs. A spread in the News of the World ’s colour supplement featured a half-page picture of a small bejewelled woman with big platinum-blonde hair and an even bigger smile perched on the edge of a large sunken bath, the central feature in the pink satin bedroom of her Essex home. At least most of it seemed to be made of pink satin. Including the wallpaper. No, surely not. Kelly peered more closely at the photograph. Well, it looked like pink satin to him.

Rachel Hobbs. Angel’s mother. There was also a mother-and-daughter picture featuring Angel as a truly angelic-looking teenager. It was an old story, dated 12 August 1979. Kelly remembered vaguely how the Hobbs family, enriched by Angel’s earnings as a child star, had moved into that big flash house. Then when Angel’s bubble had burst, only two or three years after that article had been printed, they had moved back to the same little terraced house in Clerkenwell where Angel had been born and brought up, which, for whatever reasons, the family had never sold. Angel was thirty-nine now. She would have been sixteen then, her mother forty-eight, according to the News of the World report. The various archives were full of material on Angel, including a number of stories concerning her disastrous first marriage to James Carey, a Hollywood actor thirty years her senior. There was even a photograph of her wedding to Carey showing Angel standing alongside her mother, smiling broadly again, and her embarrassed-looking father, Bill, who being a year or so younger than his wife had apparently been exactly the same age as the bridegroom. There were many others tracing Angel’s life since her marriage to Scott but no more at all featuring her mother, except a brief item recording the death of Bill Hobbs, which carried only an old picture of him and his wife. Kelly remembered Rachel Hobbs as having been the archetype showbiz mum, but she seemed to have dropped totally out of sight.

He had been to the Clerkenwell house once many years ago. He wondered if Mrs Hobbs would remember. He suspected she would. It had, after all, been a pretty memorable visit. Suddenly Kelly wanted nothing more than to bowl up to London and talk to Rachel Hobbs. About what it was like to be the wife of a Billingsgate fish porter with a daughter like Angel and then a son-in-law like Scott. About the double killing at Maythorpe Manor, which must surely have turned her world upside down almost as much as it had her daughter’s. He had a strong feeling that Rachel Hobbs could somehow lead him to her Angel.

He phoned one of the few old mates he had left in The Street, a reporter on the Sun , who he was sure would be able to confirm for him whether or not Rachel Hobbs still lived at the Clerkenwell address. He could, and she did. None the less, the odds were against Kelly going anywhere except on his own patch. That was how life was in provincial journalism. To travel outside the Argus ’ meagre circulation area was a rare thing indeed.