Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

Kelly hadn’t expected this. Neither, he thought, would the police have done. Terry James was known as a petty criminal, not the type who would be expected to be an obsessive fan. The tingling in Kelly’s spine had extended right the way up his back and he was sure the hairs on his neck were starting to stand on end.

Lost in his own imaginings for a moment he could only just hear Mrs James talking to him. ‘You can see what I mean, you can see it, can’t you?’ she said.

Kelly saw all right. He saw a completely different scenario to the one with which he had expected to be confronted. He saw a potential stalker story. It had to be, surely. He no longer saw a petty thief-turned-killer in a blagging that went wrong, but a young man obsessed with his hero — so obsessed that he could be driven to almost anything. It happened. All the time. It was the curse of the modern celebrity. And it turned an already hot story into something else.

‘Did Terry ever try to get close to Scott Silver?’ he asked, casually checking that his tape recorder, which he had picked up off the table and was carrying in his left hand, was still running.

‘Oh yes, he went all over the country to concerts and stuff. He used to hitchhike, sleep on pavements to get tickets, anything,’ Mrs James told him chattily. ‘Then he’d wait outside the stage door, that sort of thing. He’d got loads of photographs of himself with Silver. Started being interested in him when he was a teenager, you see, and it just went on and on.’

‘Did Terry ever go up to Maythorpe Manor?’ Kelly asked.

‘Oh yes, he was always going up there, couldn’t keep away.’ Mrs James chuckled. She was so determined to portray her son as a misrepresented nice guy she didn’t seem to realise at all the disturbing interpretation which could be put on her words. ‘Sometimes he’d come home and say that Scott had spoken to him, or maybe his wife, that Angel, and he’d be pleased as punch. Then in the last few months he started helping out in the garden a bit, doing odd jobs and that. He was handy like that, was Terry...’

Mrs James’s voice tailed off and fresh tears started to form in her eyes. Kelly waited in patient silence for her to speak again, trying to look deeply sympathetic while he was actually thinking obscurely that Terry hadn’t appeared to be very handy in his own garden. After a minute or so, Mrs James produced a paper tissue from somewhere and blew her nose loudly. Then she continued, albeit a little more shakily.

‘H-he didn’t talk about it a lot — not a great talker, Terry wasn’t. But it was almost like he regarded them as friends. And my Terry was as loyal a man as ever walked this earth. You don’t hurt your friends, not our sort. He’d have died for his friends, Terry would...’ She paused as if at last hearing what she was saying.

Kelly butted in quickly, before she had time to think too much.

‘Maybe that’s exactly what he did, Mrs James,’ he said gravely, realising that the remark made absolutely no sense whatsoever. But Kelly was good at saying what people wanted to hear. And from the look in Mrs James’s eye that’s exactly what he had done.

‘Maybe he did,’ she said. ‘That would have been just like my Terry.’

‘Do you mind if I get a snap taken of this room? I think it says a lot about Terry, don’t you?’

‘Yes I do,’ said Mrs James. ‘It shows what he was really like, and what a big fan he was of Scott Silver. It shows that what I said was true, that he’d never have hurt Scott, never, don’t you think?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Kelly ingenuously. ‘It really does. So it’s OK if I call my photographer in, is it? I made him wait outside. Didn’t want to push things.’ He smiled reassuringly. Or at least tried to.

Mrs James just nodded. Kelly used his mobile to call Trevor Jones on his. The photographer responded even more swiftly than Kelly would have considered possible, ringing the doorbell within seconds. He must have been standing by his car on starting blocks, Kelly reckoned. Ken James, looking rather less enthusiastic than his mother about it all, showed Trevor up to the bedroom.

The snapper was all smiles and bouncing ginger curls, the kind of young man surely nobody could ever regard as a threat, which was another reason why Kelly liked working with him.

‘I’ll just rattle off a few frames then,’ said Trevor, doing so speedily before the Jameses had a chance to change their minds.

Kelly watched with one eye as Trevor shot the room from all angles, and then charmed Mrs James into posing for close-ups with some of the memorabilia. He really was turning into a smart operator, thought Kelly admiringly. Trevor failed to persuade Ken to be photographed, though. The big man merely responded with a sulky ‘Fuck off’ and kept himself determinedly out of shot.

‘I don’t suppose you have any of those pictures of Terry with Scott Silver, have you?’ Kelly asked Mrs James.

‘The police took most of them, I think,’ she replied, gesturing at the bare patches on the wall. ‘But there may be one or two in that drawer by the bed...’

She started rummaging around and eventually, under a pile of magazines, came up with a photograph which she studied morosely for a second or two before passing it to Kelly.

The reporter couldn’t believe his luck. In his hand he held a clear colour snap of the two dead men, both smiling for the camera. Scott Silver, whose ragged good looks had made him such an icon, along with his unusual high-pitched singing voice, even had an arm loosely around the neck of Terry James. Terry had been considerably taller and Scott had had to reach up to do so. His body language suggested that he was making a joke of their height difference. Already wearing cowboy boots with small heels, he was standing exaggeratedly on tiptoe. James was beaming from ear to ear. It was a good picture. And to make it absolutely perfect it had been taken outside Maythorpe Manor. The gates of the waterside mansion could be seen quite clearly in the background.

Gold dust, thought Kelly, wondering why the police had not taken this photo too. Maybe they had found and taken away another just like it, or maybe they’d overlooked it. Kelly knew of more than one occasion in the past when specialist police search teams had missed the obvious. Even experts were susceptible to human error. But Kelly didn’t really care what had caused the police to leave this picture behind. He was just so glad to have it.

Mrs James was still talking to him. ‘Yes, my Terry always carried his camera with him when he was going after Scott,’ she remarked.

Going after Scott . The words hit hard. That was how the world would see it — Kelly had realised that from the moment he had been shown Terry James’s bedroom. Now the man’s mother had actually said the words.

Kelly couldn’t wait to get away now. He had work to do. And he had all he needed to make a huge splash not only in the final edition of the Argus today, but also across just about every darned morning newspaper in the country tomorrow.

He extricated himself and Trevor Jones from the James family home as quickly as possible and only just prevented himself from running back to his car.

‘Right, first give the Argus all you’ve got, then send your stuff to Scope, including that pick-up pic,’ Kelly instructed Trevor. Scope was one of the major picture agencies and Kelly had already been on to its boss, Peter Murphy, that morning, just in case.

‘Murphy’s expecting you to wire,’ Kelly went on. ‘And your Desk won’t quibble because they’ll know what you’re doing is down to me. Any flak, send it my way. OK?’

‘Right,’ yelled Trevor as he flung himself into his car and gunned the engine. ‘I’m on it.’