Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

‘I’ll just have to wait then, won’t I?’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t suppose there’s anything else you can tell me?’

There was a pause.

‘I need something back.’

‘Whatever it is, you’ve got it,’ he replied glibly.

‘The intruder was one Terry James, 24 Fore Street, Paignton. Big boy, late twenties, but he still lived with his mum. Funny how often they do, his type, particularly from that sort of family. You may know ’em; we certainly do.’

Kelly thought hard. He was pretty sure he did know the James family. They were in and out of magistrates’ court on a regular basis, if he’d got the right bunch. Pub punch-ups and petty theft, that was their mark. And if Kelly had the right man in mind he had indeed been a big boy, well over six feet, and built like a stevedore.

‘I think I do, Karen,’ he said.

‘Got one conviction for GBH and several for minor thieving,’ Karen went on, echoing the thoughts running through Kelly’s head. ‘Be surprised if you hadn’t seen him in court.’

‘Reckon I may have.’

‘Well, anyway, our lads recognised him at once, but he’s yet to be formally identified. His brother’s on the way to the morgue as we speak, and the SOCOs are at the Jameses’ home, doing a search. Been there since the early hours. The place is still sealed, so if by any chance you’re planning to bowl over there give it a couple of hours, will you? I can’t keep a search team there any longer than that in any case, not with the resources we’ve got left after that last round of cuts. I need them at Maythorpe.’

‘OK,’ said Kelly, grinning at the phone. If by any chance, he thought. She knew darned well he’d be off to Paignton like a shot. ‘And what is it you want from me then?’

‘I want to know exactly what the family say to you. If you know the James lot you’ll also know they won’t give us houseroom. Look, this case seems clear enough, but I don’t want any mistakes. It’s too high profile. So just report back, John, every spit and fart, not just from the James family but anything else you come up with, you devious bastard. It might mean more to us than you.’

‘For you, Karen, anything.’

Kelly pushed the end button on his phone and punched the air gleefully with his free hand. Not only was he working on a potentially huge story but he already had a big lead. Life was looking up. Suddenly he didn’t feel cold any more.

He checked his watch: 11 a.m. on the dot. The only problem was that he really didn’t want to wait a couple of hours before heading off to Paignton. The days when provincial evening papers produced a last edition in the late afternoon were long gone, and, in any case, Kelly never liked holding back on a story. An overdeveloped sense of urgency was programmed into him and all of his kind. But when you had someone like Karen Meadows on your side you didn’t mess it up. If you made a deal you kept it. Well, more or less.

He would, he decided, compromise slightly and give it an hour and a half. The Argus ’ final deadline was 2.30 p.m., which was actually a hell of a lot later than many evening papers. If the James family were halfway amenable he should still make it, and he’d certainly have no problem filling in the time. He had already filed an early story to the Argus , but there were also several nationals he wanted to send stuff to. He had the edge because some of them had not even managed to get staff men to the scene yet. It was not only the provincials that were run by cost cutters in suits nowadays. In Kelly’s day all the nationals had had a network of staff area men all over the country. That was no longer the case. Jerry Morris, a real survivor, was one of the last remaining. So Kelly reckoned it was time he cashed in on the inadequacies of modern newspaper management and started making the kind of money off this story that he had already promised himself he would.

He walked back down the hill, favouring his right foot, which was throbbing unpleasantly thanks to that TV cameraman, and through the pretty little thatched village of Maidencombe to the car park just up from the beach. The old MG gleamed wetly, raindrops from the earlier downfall still visible on its flat surfaces. Kelly kept the twenty-five-year-old car immaculately. It was his pride and joy. He had always loved MGs, and it was nice to have a car that went up in value if you looked after it, rather than down.

He unlocked the driver’s door and climbed in. He had learned the art of filing copy off the top of his head over the phone many years previously, and it didn’t take him long, sitting there in the car park, to send all that he had so far to the copy-takers of several London newspapers.

‘The widow of rock star Scott Silver, killed at his home in the early hours of yesterday morning, was last night at the centre of a bizarre double murder drama...’ he recited over the airwaves. And he knew it must be gripping stuff by the rapt attention of the copy-takers, who were generally far more cynical than any journalist.

Kelly still remembered during his early days in Fleet Street the copy-taker on his newspaper who invariably interrupted his stories with a muttered ‘Much more of this?’

Perhaps he was improving at last, he thought, as he finished filing his final story and then called Trevor Jones, mobile to mobile.

‘Twenty-four Fore Street, twelve-thirty,’ he told the snapper. ‘And if you get there before me, park down the road and don’t even move out of that tip of a car of yours until I get there.’

‘You got it,’ yelled Trevor over the airwaves. Kelly moved his phone a few inches further away from his ear. Trevor continued to bellow at him.

‘What’ve you got, Johnno?’ he asked excitedly. ‘Who lives there then?’

‘I’ll share that with you when I see you — and tell your desk you’re going off chasing fire engines or something. OK, mate?’

Kelly ended the call before Trevor could question him any more. Kelly had been weaned into Fleet Street by an old-fashioned news editor who had operated under such a strict policy of secrecy that it had driven his staff mad. None the less, Kelly had learned the lesson well enough that if you wanted to keep an exclusive you told nobody, not even your bosses, until the last possible minute. Don’t talk about it, write it, was the creed that had been drummed into him.

He started up the MG, enjoying as ever the unique throaty noise that it made, and motored back through Torquay, choosing to take the slower seafront road to Paignton rather than the ring road. He wasn’t in a hurry, after all. Along the way he stopped at one of the few seaside caffs that stayed open all year round, bought a cup of tea in a paper cup, and propped himself against the sea wall. A gusty breeze had blown up. Kelly balanced his cup on the wall and clapped his arms against his sides to warm himself up. He really must buy some proper cold weather gear, he told himself for the umpteenth time. But it was worth the chill in his bones just to stand there and watch the ocean that day. It was quite spectacular, an unusually big sea for South Devon. Huge waves roared up the beach, crashing into the wall against which Kelly was leaning. A particularly massive one sent a shower of salty spray on to the pavement, and Kelly beat a hasty retreat, just managing both to rescue his tea and get out of the way without a soaking. He found that he was smiling. There was, he thought, nothing more exhilarating than an English seascape on a day like this. The clouds were moving fast and a sudden break in them revealed a brilliant shaft of pale winter sunshine. Like the beam of a giant cinematic light it illuminated a big circular patch of water, changing the colour momentarily from dark grey to aquamarine, and reflecting off the white tips of the waves so that they turned into gleaming silver. Cecil B. de Mille could not have managed it better, thought Kelly. He felt his heart do a little flip. If there was greater beauty in the world than in this wild and wondrous scene, he really didn’t know what it was. There were some compensations to a backwater job on a backwater newspaper in a backwater town, he thought.