Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

He really didn’t want to stay on this doorstep any longer. There was a limit, even for Kelly. Rachel Hobbs had his mobile number, and whether she called him or not Kelly would return to Chain Street in the morning. He rubbed his chilled fingers together, wondering why on earth he should ever have realistically thought that one encounter all those years ago would make any difference to either Angel or her mother. Suddenly, he no longer felt optimistic at all.

Kelly checked into the Grand Hotel in Southampton Row for the night. Cheap and cheerful. If you could call £70 for a small single room for the night cheap. But it was by London standards.

As soon as he had dumped his bag in his room he walked along to Soho, ordered a pint of Diet Coke in the French House, and wished as ever that it was a pint of Guinness. Kelly always seemed to be meeting reformed alcoholics who said that not only would they never touch a drop again, they didn’t even miss it. Kelly missed it terribly. He missed what he considered to be the unique refreshment of a pint of cool bitter, he missed the clink and the fizz of a well-made gin and tonic, long and icy in a decent glass, he missed the warmth on the tongue of a fine claret and the taste it leaves behind, and most of all, of course, he missed the burn and the buzz of a shot of whisky as it hits the back of the throat.

There was nobody in the bar that he knew, except Gavin, the manager, who had once run Scribes Club just off Fleet Street. Kelly allowed himself a brief moment of nostalgia before he swallowed the last of his Coke and left. This was not a drink to linger with, and neither was a bar empty of familiar company. Then he wandered up Greek Street to an Indian restaurant of which he had fond memories. The lack of first-class ethnic restaurants was one of the things Kelly missed terribly about life in the sticks and he reckoned a good Indian meal would cheer him up.

Indeed, the food he ordered looked and tasted excellent but he had only just started eating when his mobile phone rang.

A central London phone number which he did not recognise appeared on the display. Rachel Hobbs?

Kelly’s mood changed at once. He felt the adrenalin course through his body as he pressed the speak button.

‘John Kelly,’ he said.

‘You’d better come and see me,’ said a woman’s voice.

Jesus Christ, he thought. It’s her.

‘I’d love to,’ he said as levelly as he could manage.

‘How soon can you be here?’ she asked.

Automatically Kelly checked his watch. It was just gone 9.30. ‘Half an hour, maximum,’ he said.

‘Thought you wouldn’t be far away,’ said Rachel Hobbs, as she hung up.

Kelly didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He threw a handful of cash at a surprised-looking waiter, soaked his nan bread in his barely touched chicken Madras, the rest of which he sorrowfully abandoned, and, munching his improvised sandwich, hurriedly left the restaurant. He didn’t even consider bothering to retrieve the MG from the multistorey car park in which he had earlier installed it at considerable expense. Instead he grabbed a black cab.

At Chain Street there was still a small group of reporters and photographers outside number 44, and they gathered around as Kelly’s taxi pulled to a halt. The house was neat and well decorated, but without the twee front door and window boxes of most of the others in the road. Chain Street, built in the late Victorian era as a row of down-market workmen’s cottages, was now at the heart of London’s inner city rich-pickings real estate market. Indeed Mrs Hobbs’ tiny terraced house was probably worth almost as much as a big house in Essex nowadays, thought Kelly, shaking his head at the irony.

When he rang the doorbell a couple of reporters stepped forward to ask him who he was. As he had expected, there was nobody outside the house who knew him. Kelly was history in national newspaper terms.

‘I’m just a friend,’ he said.

Seconds later the voice he recognised from the brief telephone conversation called from the other side of the door, asking the same question.

‘It’s John,’ he replied, thinking how convenient it was sometimes to have such an anonymous Christian name. Not that the other guys were likely to know his name.

He heard a key turn in the lock, then a bolt shoot back. The door opened an inch.

‘C’mon in — and hurry up,’ said the voice.

Kelly pushed the door a little more and slid through the gap, shutting it swiftly behind him. Then he saw Mrs Rachel Hobbs for the second time in his life, standing at the foot of the stairs looking steadily at him. He knew she was now seventy years old, and had naturally expected her to have changed with the years. He knew that during much of her early life she had worked extremely hard, as a seamstress in a nearby factory. And he also knew, as well as any outsider probably, just some of the turmoil she had already faced concerning her extraordinary daughter. He supposed he had expected a little old lady, somebody overwhelmed by being at the centre of media attention again. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Rachel Hobbs was dressed in a crimson shirt which looked as if it was made of silk, and a short black skirt. The two were divided by a broad gold belt. Big jewellery dripped from her neck and wrists. Her hair was also big, just as it had been twenty years earlier, still platinum blonde and sporting two jewelled combs. She wore very high-heeled shoes and sheer stockings. Her legs remained good. Her figure could have been that of a woman little more than half her years. Only her face gave her age away at all. It was a face that had been lived in, but a good strong one. High cheekbones. Deeply etched laughter lines around almond-shaped eyes, similar to her daughter’s but more blue than violet and not nearly so remarkable, which were fringed by thick lashes heavy with mascara. False lashes? Kelly couldn’t be sure. Full lips painted ruby red. It was all a bit overwhelming for a terraced house in Clerkenwell.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you again.’

Something in his voice or the way he looked at her must have given his surprise away.

She smiled quizzically. ‘What did you expect, a Zimmer frame?’

He smiled back. ‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ he said evenly. ‘You’ve kept a low profile for a long time. The only pictures I could dig up were over twenty years old and it must be getting on for that when we last met.’

She nodded. ‘I made a deal with Angel when she married Scott. The deal was simple. I had to keep out of her public life or she’d cut me out of her private one. I couldn’t argue about that really. Angel saw me as a threat, her brassy mum from East London.’ She paused. ‘She’s a good kid at heart, though, always was. She’d have given me and her dad anything...’ She paused again and the mask slipped. For a moment she looked almost vulnerable.

Kelly was fascinated. It was suddenly quite hard to grasp the reality of why he was visiting Rachel Hobbs again. The woman’s son-in-law had just been killed and her daughter was likely to stand trial for the manslaughter, at the very least, of the man believed to be his killer.

As if reading his mind Rachel Hobbs pulled herself together. ‘Right, we’ll talk in the kitchen. And this had better be good,’ she said. ‘Not that I don’t know you’re conning me.’

‘I don’t reckon I’d dare.’

‘Oh, you’d dare,’ she said. Then she smiled again.

‘It’s been a very long time,’ he ventured.

‘For both of us,’ she said. Then, as if considering: ‘I thought you’d be an editor by now.’

‘So did I,’ he said.

‘You were destined for the top,’ she said. ‘That was the impression you gave, anyway. I followed your career for a bit. Then you just seemed to disappear.’