Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

Mrs Nott had been asked to wait in the living room, and Karen Meadows decided to talk to her herself, along with DS Cooper. The daily help could provide no hard information at all about who might have visited Angel Silver during the previous night, but she was willing, with little or no encouragement, to hazard a guess.

‘That reporter feller on the Argus , he’s always out here, snooping about,’ she said. ‘And he’s been here upstairs sometimes, in her bedroom more than likely, when I haven’t been supposed to know about it.’

Mrs Nott, making a quick recovery from her gruesome discovery, looked quite smug about that.

‘So how did you know about it then?’ Karen asked rather wearily.

‘You couldn’t miss that flashy little car of his, could you? He used to park it round the side of the house but there’s nowhere here to hide it, and how many dark green open sports cars are there around? I ask you.’

Mrs Nott had sniffed derisively. Karen felt an unwelcome shiver of anticipation run down her spine.

‘Do you know this reporter’s name, Mrs Nott?’ she enquired flatly, aware that it was a question she hardly needed to ask.

‘Course I do. His name’s been all over the papers, hasn’t it, ever since this started. John Kelly, that’s his name. And the papers isn’t all he’s been over, that’s for sure.’

Karen felt irritated. The woman’s sanctimonious superiority was a little hard to take.

‘Did you see John Kelly at this house last night?’ Karen asked sharply.

‘Well, no, of course I didn’t,’ responded Mrs Nott quite chirpily, apparently blissfully unaware of the warning chill in Karen Meadows’ voice. ‘I go to bed at night, me, at a proper time, like decent folk.’

The DCI sighed. ‘So have you any specific reason at all for suspecting that John Kelly may have been here last night?’

‘Well, he’s always sniffing around here, isn’t he?’ Mrs Nott repeated. ‘Can’t keep away. Well, he couldn’t anyway...’ The woman’s voice tailed off, as if she was suddenly remembering again what she had seen that morning.

‘Thank you, Mrs Nott. Doesn’t look like you can help us at all, really, does it?’ said Karen even more sharply. And this time Mrs Nott did at least have the grace to look a little uncomfortable, if nothing more, which made the DCI feel marginally better — although not for long.

One of the detective constables, an eager fresh-faced young man recently promoted from uniform, who had been sent on the house-to-house, was waiting in the hallway for her and DS Cooper to finish interviewing the cleaning lady.

‘Thought you’d like to know, boss, we’ve got an insomniac in the house across the way who saw a taxi pull up just before midnight and someone get out and walk towards Maythorpe,’ said DC Burns. ‘He couldn’t give any description worth having, said it was too dark. He saw little more than a shadowy shape and couldn’t even be certain whether it was a man or a woman, although he said he somehow thought it was a man. And he can’t see the gates to Maythorpe properly from his bedroom window where he was looking out, so he couldn’t even be sure this person went into the manor, but he said the taxi was there for at least half an hour because he stood by his window for that long drinking tea. Then he went back to bed so he didn’t know what time it left.’

Karen listened to DC Burns’s report in grim silence. She knew well enough that Kelly was off the road, so, had he been the midnight visitor, there would have been no distinctive MG arriving. Kelly’s pride and joy was a write-off, even if Kelly was mad enough to drive in spite of his ban. It was more than likely that if he had wanted to visit Maythorpe, he would have used a taxi.

‘Do we know the taxi firm?’ she asked eventually.

‘Yes, he saw that all right, boss. Tor Cars. You can’t miss ’em. They have those distinctive yellow and red signs.’

Karen nodded. ‘Right, get on to it then. Let’s find the driver.’

DC Burns, on what was almost certainly his first murder inquiry, left at once, almost running out of the door, coattails flapping. Karen absently watched him go for a moment. Burns was a big man, a stalwart of the local police rugby team. When excited he looked like an extremely large over-grown schoolboy, she thought. Phil Cooper was standing by the DCI’s side and she could feel his eyes on her. She turned towards him challengingly.

‘Even if it was Kelly, doesn’t mean he did anything to her, boss. It could even still have been an accident,’ said DS Cooper, not particularly convincingly but showing his usual intuition. ‘Let’s say it was him, he still may not even have entered the house. Word is he’s been in the habit sometimes of coming out here just for a look-see.’

Karen warmed to him more than ever. Cooper knew, as they all did, that she had a suspiciously soft spot for Kelly. Most of the others would either have said nothing or taken the piss.

‘That’s as maybe,’ she responded crisply. ‘Anyway, we’ve already got his fingerprints on file and his DNA following his arrest for drink driving. If he was involved in this he’s bound to have left a mark somewhere.’

‘Well, I expect his prints are everywhere in this house from what I’ve heard...’

Cooper looked uncomfortable as he paused, unsure perhaps if his boss wanted to hear the rest of what he was going to say. It was obvious anyway.

Karen shot him a wry look. Sometimes it seemed that the entire Devon and Cornwall Constabulary had little to do other than to gossip. She knew that it was generally believed that she and Kelly had once had a big affair, and she could well understand why even the possibility of such a liaison was considered so intriguing. After all, Kelly, even before the recent catastrophic events in his life, had been widely regarded as just a tired old hack who had seen better days, while Karen was a highly successful, crisply efficient senior police officer awaiting an expected promotion, in fact, to the rank of detective superintendent.

The truth, of course, would never be believed — how a tabloid journalist had chosen to save her career and proven himself to be one of the best friends she ever had. In any case, Karen actually much preferred the fictional version to the reality of her having made a fool of herself over a dangerous criminal who had more than likely been conning her all along. Now Karen Meadows was one of the few who remembered the person Kelly had once been and had always been able to see flashes of that in him.

Until he met Angel Silver, she thought. Karen had fallen wildly in love with David Flanigan all those years ago and had totally lost any sense of judgement — a condition, she suspected, that was at the root of John Kelly’s potentially disastrous behaviour.

Now it seemed that Kelly might have been driven to murder. Karen Meadows found herself suddenly overwhelmed with a terrible sadness, not to mention a sense of impending loss. The only way she knew to deal with it was simply to do her job.

‘We’d better get Kelly in for questioning,’ she said expressionlessly.

After he had returned home Kelly had sat up all night watching TV. Somehow he had not needed to sleep. And, in any case, he had known that he would not be able to. But at around 8 or 9 a.m. the exhaustion caught up with him and he did fall asleep in his armchair, TV still on, waking with a start just as the lunchtime news bulletin was starting.

‘The body of a woman has been found at Maythorpe Manor, the Torbay home of the late rock star Scott Silver. It is believed that she may be Silver’s widow, Angel...’

The shock ripped through Kelly’s body like a flash of freak lightning. Could she really be dead? He supposed that he shouldn’t be surprised. Well, not shocked, anyway.