Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

He touched a patch of blue-painted face with his fingertips.

‘Hard night?’

‘Yup.’

‘Anything you want to tell me about?’

Moira was silent for a moment, then she reached out and pulled him close to her.

‘Little Timmy Jordan died,’ she said eventually.

She didn’t tell Kelly much about her work, although he wasn’t quite sure whether that was his fault or hers, and he was in any case just as bad about his own job, but she had told him about Timmy. He knew that the boy’s death, although expected, would have hit her hard.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and kissed her again.

After a few seconds she drew away from him and held him at arm’s length. He could almost see the conscious effort she was making to shrug off the events of her night on duty. Not for the first time he marvelled at her. The NHS just wasn’t good enough for Moira and all the others like her, he thought.

‘So why London so suddenly, John?’ she asked.

‘It’s the Scott Silver murder,’ he told her. ‘One or two leads to follow up in town.’

Instinctively he did not elaborate. Old habits died hard. It really was ingrained in Kelly that you gave away as little as possible about a story. Not to anyone. Not even the woman you shared your life with.

‘I didn’t think you local paper guys were allowed off your patch. You’ve grumbled about it often enough.’

‘I’ve got a special pass,’ he grinned. ‘I’ve been given my freedom — but for less than a couple of days, though, so I’d better get a move on.’

‘You’re back when? Tomorrow night then?’

‘Gotta be. Back to jail the following morning.’

Moira chuckled. ‘I’ll be off duty. Would you like me to come round and cook you a meal to come home to?’

‘You bet,’ he said, and he meant it. In spite of his terrible track record, and his apparent reluctance to bring about any permanent changes in his more or less independent lifestyle, he always preferred not to come back to an empty house.

He eased his way past her then and loped up the stairs to the main bedroom where he slung a couple of spare shirts, a sweater, his toilet bag, and a few other bits and pieces into an overnight bag. Moira followed him.

‘Will you have some coffee before you go?’

‘I think I just want to get on,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you going to admire my handiwork first?’

‘Of course.’

When you paint walls which had previously been murky cream a kind of mid blue, it’s hard to tell what the finished results will be after just one coat. All you can see are cream and blue streaks. But Kelly dutifully expressed his admiration.

Back in the car Kelly found himself relishing the long drive, and put aside his lurking anxiety about who had damaged the MG. At least, thanks to Wayne, he could be fairly confident that there was no further unseen damage which could jeopardise him and his car. In fact, safely cocooned in the little motor, and heading away from Torquay towards the motorway, he almost convinced himself that it probably had been just a random act of vandalism. Only almost, though. He didn’t really believe that, but sometimes all you could do to keep paranoia at bay was to kid yourself a little. Meanwhile he had four hours plus all to himself to think, to work on his game plan.

He had come to love the West of England, and Torquay, the English Riviera, the splendid old seaside town with its faded grandeur, as much as anywhere he had ever lived. But to Kelly neither Torquay nor any other provincial metropolis could ever really compete with London, the city he had always somehow regarded as the centre of the universe. He still remembered his first job there, twenty-five years ago, a local-paper-trained grammar schoolboy with very little knowledge of life but a bellyful of ambition.

He’d been just twenty-three years old and full of hope and enthusiasm. He’d already got himself a young wife, Liz, his childhood sweetheart, who was drop-dead gorgeous, turning heads wherever she went, and a thoroughly nice human being as well. Too nice for him, probably. He never valued Liz as much as he should have done, of course. Never really valued her at all. And in some ways he had never really valued the job either. It had all come too easily to Kelly back then. Liz remained probably the best-looking woman he had ever been involved with. Their only son, Nick, was born almost precisely nine months after the marriage, and he had been the perfect baby, beautiful and bouncing with health, although Kelly had never appreciated him. He had been too busy doing other things. His natural ability as a journalist quickly won him star status on the Daily Despatch . It was Kelly who jetted off all over the world at the drop of a piece of copy caper. Kelly who dashed off to all the hottest trouble spots. There had been Cyprus, Israel, Northern Ireland, of course, revolutions, riots, famine, plague, and other national disasters world-wide, and finally the Falklands. That had been one of his last big ones before the rot set in.

Kelly could no longer quite remember how or why it had all gone wrong. There had been no specific incident. Burnout, people called it nowadays. But Kelly wasn’t even sure if it was as simple as that.

Kelly had been rocketed into the very highest level of journalism at a very young age. He had always been extraordinarily able in his chosen trade. He had never countenanced failure. On the big foreign stories he always had to be the one who got closest to the ousted president, interviewed the tortured dissidents in their Argentinian police cells, stood by as they cut a woman’s hand off for adultery in Saudi Arabia, and gained access to the cell of execution when they sent an American serial killer to the electric chair.

Huge stories, huge tasks, taking a mammoth toll on all around them. But Kelly hadn’t even realised he was under pressure. He had been plunged into an extraordinary working life, and not until years later did he realise just how extraordinary it had been.

For almost ten years Kelly did not stop. The awards came flooding in. He won reporter of the year, foreign correspondent of the year and feature writer of the year. But he could barely even remember the various awards ceremonies. They went by in a flood of alcohol accompanied by endless banter. Once, weary, unshaven, and just a little drunk, he had fallen off a plane returning from some now forgotten war, and an office car had picked him up from Heathrow to rush him straight to the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane to accept a major award from his peers. Kelly had attacked his stubbled face with his electric razor as he was driven through the streets of London, and the long-suffering Liz had met him at the Grosvenor with his dress suit into which he had changed in the gents, at the same time managing fortuitously to acquire a hit of cocaine from a kindred spirit which enabled him to get through the evening and even, miraculously, make a halfway lucid speech.

The excitement was such and the demands on his time and his energy levels so overwhelming that those early years of his marriage were all a bit of a blur. To his eternal shame, he later believed, he had regarded the birth of his only son more as an encumbrance than anything else. Nick’s arrival had been an accident. Kelly had not wanted children then — his life had seemed already to be too full and too busy — and maybe he also realised that his lifestyle did not lend itself well to fatherhood. When little Nick had come along, Kelly had barely paused to take notice.

Kelly had survived everything on a heady cocktail of large gin and tonics, adrenalin, and as the years passed, cocaine. There were women too, of course. Kelly had an apparently glamorous job, plenty of opportunity to play away from home, and plenty of money in his pocket.