Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

Certainly this was an extraordinary night. Those gathered seemed united in their sorrow. Kelly pressed his way further forward, almost bumping into Trevor Jones who greeted him warmly.

‘I knew Ben was at the police station so I thought I’d come straight out here just in case,’ the photographer explained. ‘Got a great shot of her arriving, Johnno. What a stunner, eh!’

‘She’s here then,’ Kelly murmured, almost to himself.

‘Oh yeah,’ nodded Trevor. ‘Arrived about fifteen minutes ago in a police car, which left almost straight away. We think there’s still a police presence in the house, though.’

Kelly nodded. There was sure to be, he thought. They’d never leave Angel alone there. After all, the whole place was still a crime scene. He reckoned she’d only be allowed to use the rooms they’d already cleared, and neither she nor anyone else except the scene-of-crime boys — the SOCOs — would be allowed near the area where the two men had died.

‘Well done, mate,’ he remarked absently to Trevor, as he moved on through the crowd. He didn’t really want to talk. He preferred to look, to listen, and to drink in the atmosphere. With some difficulty he pushed his way through to the front and found himself once again right up against the iron railings of the gateway where the smattering of floral tributes of the morning had now grown into a mountain of multicoloured blooms.

He crouched down beside them to read some of the messages. The candles and the bright security lights around Maythorpe, although they cast their own deep shadows, meant that he could do so quite easily.

‘We always loved you, Scott.’ ‘We will mourn you for ever.’ And some even more melodramatic: ‘Life without you will not be worth living.’ ‘My life is over now, as yours is.’

Quite quickly the muscles in Kelly’s calves started to ache and one of his ankles locked. With some difficulty he got to his feet and, forgetting that his right one was bruised and sore, he put rather too much weight on it. The pain caused him to stumble and he reached out desperately with his right arm in the general direction of the iron fencing, seeking support. In doing so he lurched against a figure, dressed in what appeared to be a long dark robe, pressed against the bars.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered automatically when he regained his footing.

There was no response. Kelly took a closer look. He only had a back view but he somehow guessed from what he could see of the figure’s build that this was a young woman. Certainly her nearly black hair, much the same colour that Kelly’s had once been, hung long and straight almost to her waist — not that hairstyles always told you anything. Her face must be shoved right into the railings, Kelly thought. She was standing completely still, apart from the rest of the crowd and without what seemed to be the almost obligatory candle. Her black hair and dark robe caused her to half disappear into the quite confusing shadows and rendered her almost invisible from even a short distance away. Kelly had not noticed her until he had bumped into her.

‘Sorry,’ he said again, a little louder. Still no response.

He shrugged and backed off, turning his attention once more to the rest of the gathered throng. They were singing another Scott Silver number now: ‘Why I’ll Always Love You’.

Kelly stood amongst them for several more minutes, silently listening. Somewhat to his surprise he found himself quite moved.

He glanced across to the big house safely cocooned behind its security gates and a ten-foot-high wall. Only it hadn’t proved to be quite so safe, had it? Terry James had breached the defences of Maythorpe Manor, albeit, it seemed, with the unwitting assistance of its owners, broken into Scott Silver’s home and killed him.

Kelly was desperate now to know exactly what had happened during the previous night. He stared steadily at the old grey mansion. Maythorpe, he knew, dated back to Tudor times but, following a fire, had been almost totally rebuilt during the Georgian era, hence its geometric design, which doubtless enclosed big high-ceilinged and well-proportioned rooms. What tragic secrets did the ancient manor hold within its lofty walls, he wondered.

A light behind one of the house’s ground-floor windows suddenly snapped out. Somewhere else another flicked on. Seconds later elsewhere on the first floor there was a flash of light and then just a little chink remained.

Kelly concentrated hard on that narrow slice of light. Then, after just a minute or so, that too disappeared. Inside the house someone had pulled back a curtain in order to look outside, he was sure of it. Then, to get a better view and in order to remain unseen, the light inside the room had been switched off.

Was that person still there, looking out, taking in the scene Kelly had just been marvelling at?

Angel Silver was inside there. Was it her at the window? How was she feeling? What was she thinking?

Kelly tried to put himself inside that beautiful porcelain head, convinced she was watching. He shut his eyes to concentrate. He could see her pale face quite clearly. But it told him absolutely nothing at all.

Moira Simmons retreated gratefully into the little office at the rear of Torbay Hospital’s children’s ward. It had been a busy and distressing night. In the early hours little Timmy Jordan, just seven years old, had finally lost his battle against leukaemia. Timmy had been ill on and off for almost two years and, like so many of the staff at the hospital, Moira had got to know him and his family well. Though the boy’s death had been inevitable for weeks, it was a bitter blow.

Moira felt drained. She had spent some time comforting Timmy’s devastated parents, whom she had come to regard as friends and whose grief she genuinely shared. They too had known that their son could not survive, but it had not made his eventual loss any easier for them to bear, and neither would Moira have expected it to.

She sank wearily into a chair and closed her eyes. Moira was small and blonde and had never even been threatened by the weight problems which affect most people in middle years. She had retained both a girlish figure and a youthful zest for life, the latter maintained in part at least by an ability to find humour in almost all that life had thrown at her. Which had been quite a bellyful over the years. That morning, though, Moira was leaning far more towards tears than laughter. Only her innate resilience, combined with the professional discipline of her many years in nursing, made it possible for her to stop herself breaking down.

One of the worst aspects of being a night sister was that all too often the sick seemed to die at night when their defences were at their lowest. Moira, perhaps because she knew only too well from personal experience what it was like to deal with despair, had a reputation for being particularly adept at comforting the bereaved. She had the knack of displaying just the right blend of concern, sympathy and professionalism. Only it wasn’t a knack, not really, rather something that came quite naturally to her.

After a few seconds she opened her eyes and gave herself a little shake. There were a whole load of tasks in the wards to be completed before she went off duty and the day staff came on at 7.30, and there was also her ritual morning wake-up call to be made.

She checked her watch: 5.55 a.m. That at least was perfect. She always made the call just before six. She reached for the desk phone and dialled a number which rang for well over a minute without reply. Eventually John Kelly, in bed in his three-bedroomed terraced house in St Marychurch, high above Torquay town centre and the seafront, answered with little more than a sleepy grunt.