Хилари Боннер: A Moment Of Madness

With thanks to:

David Thomas and Gordon Hines of the Herald Express, Torquay; Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn and Detective Superintendent Steve Livings of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary; Detective Constable Phil Diss and Detective Sergeant Pat Pitts of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.

A uniformed police officer was at her side as she hurried from the house. She moved with an easy elegance, her head slightly bowed. The policeman opened the door of the waiting squad car for her and she stepped inside, sliding effortlessly across the back seat so her escort could sit beside her.

Kelly raised his binoculars to his eyes and focused them on her.

She was staring straight ahead, not looking at anything or anyone. Her short cropped hair was peroxide white. It changed colour almost from day to day, though, he knew that. Like Madonna, she was into changing her image with the wind. Yet this was no international star, no latter-day icon. She had been married to one, that was all. The only fame she had ever achieved in her own right had been when she was just a kid, and hardly anybody even remembered those early movies any more. John Kelly did, but he wasn’t a man who forgot easily. And he reckoned there had always been something about her, an aura almost, that had made her a star too.

Her face was very pale. He was struck at once by her beauty. He thought she looked a bit like a Victorian porcelain doll, fragile, slightly unreal. He had seen countless photographs of her, of course, over the years. And there had been that one meeting, brief and long ago. Even his memory of that, although it would never leave him completely, had faded with the passing of time. Even he had forgotten, he realised, the impact she could have in the flesh. She was breathtaking. It was almost as if shock and grief added somehow to her beauty. Her skin had a translucent quality to it. There were heavy dark shadows beneath the almond-shaped eyes — her only imperfection, but that came as something of a relief, confirmation, almost, that she was real.

The squad car began to move in a kind of circle round the gravel courtyard, kicking up a shower of tiny stones behind its rear wheels, as it headed for the electronically controlled security gates outside which Kelly stood watching. Very slowly, almost as if somebody were operating her too by remote control, just like the big iron-barred gates, she turned her head towards him.

Her eyes were violet. That was the only colour to describe them, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, only even more remarkable, Kelly thought. They were very dark, so dark it seemed almost as if there were no definition between pupil and iris, just big violet circles, deep and fathomless. For a few seconds she seemed no longer to be gazing vacantly into space but to be looking straight at him, staring at him. That’s how it felt, anyway, although he knew that was probably just an illusion. She wouldn’t actually be seeing anything, he supposed, let alone a tired old local newspaper hack, not after what had happened in her house the previous night.

The gates opened and the squad car came slowly through, while several uniformed policemen hovered in the short driveway, intent on preventing any renegade fans from entering the grounds of Maythorpe Manor. Kelly stepped back, as did the fans, although at least a couple seemed intent on committing suicide beneath the wheels of the police car, which continued to move steadily forward. Self-preservation eventually saved the day. Even the most tenacious of the fans moved out of the way just in time to avoid any real chance of injury. The car turned left up the lane, still travelling at an almost leisurely pace, allowing the assembled cameramen and telly crews easily to snatch photographs of the woman in the back seat as it passed them by. Kelly was mildly surprised that the windows had not been blacked out.

Her facial expression did not change as a cacophony of flashbulbs exploded all around the vehicle carrying her. The newly widowed wife of the rock icon was well used to that sort of scene.

It had never been Angel Silver’s way to hide.

Kelly watched the squad car disappear up the hill, the tall Devon hedges obscuring it from sight as it rounded the first corner.

Many of the people in the crowd, mostly women, but including a number of men, were weeping uncontrollably. Some had thrown themselves prostrate on to the ground, undeterred by the fact that the uneven surface of Rock Lane was still damp and muddy from an earlier heavy shower.

Several of the photographers took off at a run for their cars, in a hurry either to dispatch their pictures or give chase. Fat chance of that, thought Kelly.

He shivered, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his Barbour jacket. No warmth in it. He’d had one of those fancy linings once, but God knows where it was now. It was a cold damp morning, and before Angel Silver had been brought out he had been standing outside Maythorpe Manor for almost four hours.

Kelly was forty-eight years old and looked it. At least. He had grown a slight paunch, his once nearly black hair was thinning and had turned grey at the temples, his pale blue eyes had been dulled by the passage of time. Kelly had once been a shining light in his chosen profession and had seemed destined to be doing something far different by the time the big five-O approached. As it was, his life had been a roller coaster ride with rather more downs than ups. And there he was, still standing on doorsteps. Waiting. Watching. Freezing half to death.

The lane was particularly narrow by the turning to the grand Georgian house, and Kelly had been forced to leave his old MG in the tourists’ car park down in Maidencombe village, so he had been unable even to sit in it and be protected a little from the elements while he watched and waited. A reporter’s lot, hanging around for hours, just in case, regardless of the weather, but it didn’t get any easier as you got older.

With more than a little reluctance he removed his left hand from his pocket. He wasn’t wearing gloves, of course, because gloves were the kind of thing Kelly could never remember. In his fingers he clutched his mobile phone. Once he’d had to know every phone box, pub and public convenience on his patch. Nowadays mobiles had cut out the need to move away from a stakeout at all, except for calls of nature. There was no longer an excuse to spend hours in the nearest boozer. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, he reflected wryly, thinking about the effect too much alcohol had once had on his life.

Kelly leaned against the iron bars of the gate, which had closed again in silent precision, and thought for a moment or two. He was interrupted by the Evening Argus ’ staff photographer at the scene, Trevor Jones, a bright-eyed young man with ginger hair. Trevor was full of the excitement of working on what was already undoubtedly the biggest story of his brief career.

‘I got a great one of her, Johnno,’ he yelled excitedly. ‘She looked straight at me.’

Kelly grinned. Like Princess Diana, Angel had that knack. No doubt every snapper on the case thought the same thing, as indeed he himself had. But he took pleasure in Trevor’s reaction. He liked the boy, and invariably felt himself fired by his boundless enthusiasm, even on routine stories. The photographer was a big gangling lad, half a head taller than Kelly, and a bit like a Great Dane puppy, Kelly reckoned, eager to please with soft brown eyes that still smiled easily, and inordinately long legs and arms.