Хилари Боннер - No Reason To Die

‘Thanks, Nick,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding. Look, Dad, I can’t get out of London this week, but I’ll drive down as soon as I can. I’d really like to see Moira...’

‘I know. And I’m sure she’d like to see you too.’

Kelly switched off the MG’s engine and began to dismantle his phone from its hands-free system. Simultaneously, he checked the clock on the dashboard.

‘Oh, Christ!’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve got about two minutes to catch a train. I’m sorry, Nick, I really have to go...’

‘Sure, sure. I’ll call you tomorrow. Where are you going, anyway?’

Automatically Kelly opened his mouth to tell Nick where he was going and why, then realised that would call for an explanation he had absolutely no time for.

‘Research,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll tell you when I see you. Bye.’

Given the way he lived his life it was all for the best that Kelly could still move fast for a big, slightly paunchy man in his late forties. He arrived on the platform with seconds to spare. The whole spur of the moment jaunt was absolutely typical Kelly, and had probably been inevitable from the beginning. Even though he had spent much of the previous night lying sleepless in his bed and telling himself that he would merely end up wasting both time and money.

The truth, however, was that he had probably made up his mind about what he was going to do the very moment that Karen told him about the second death at Hangridge.

Kelly was off to Scotland to see Alan Connelly’s parents. He had driven to Newton Abbot in order to board one of the direct cross-country trains running virtually the entire length of Britain from Penzance to Glasgow. It was a damned good service when it worked. But, unfortunately, nowadays it seemed to work despairingly rarely.

On this occasion everything had begun well. The train arrived on time at Newton Abbot, departing on schedule, at 7.53 a.m. precisely, and remaining so until it reached Birmingham. There, in the dark cavernous hinterland of one of the city’s network of cold black underground platforms, the red and grey Virgin Express sat for almost thirty minutes before anybody bothered to inform the passengers why.

Eventually the guard, or train manager as they were now called, muttered something about a mechanical fault. The passengers in Kelly’s carriage shifted uneasily. With the number of accidents there had been on Britain’s rail network recently, it had become almost as disturbing to be told your train had something wrong with it as to be told that an aircraft you were travelling on had developed a mechanical fault. Engineers were already working on the problem and we hope to be under way again shortly, continued the train manager in a flat, disinterested tone.

Kelly, wondering again, as he had done when he met Alan Connelly in The Wild Dog, what a Scotsman was doing in the Devonshire Fusiliers anyway, felt only bad vibes. He had been born impatient and he was, as ever, far more concerned with his personal timetable than his personal safety. And his pessimism in that respect was confirmed when, after another thirty minutes or so of complete lack of communication, the so-called train manager announced, with regret, that this particular train would be travelling no further that day. Would ‘customers’ make their way to platform eight and await the next train to Glasgow, which left at 13.51.

Kelly glanced at his watch. It was only just on midday. An already lengthy journey of around seven and a half hours was turning into a nightmare marathon. He was beginning to seriously wonder if the trip had been a good idea at all, particularly as he had embarked on it without making an appointment at the other end. But that, of course, had been deliberate. Kelly had been well trained in Fleet Street in the art of taking people by surprise. However, there were disadvantages, especially when you were paying your own fare and travelling second class on a saver ticket, instead of in the relative luxury of first class as provided by his former employers, and when the trip in question offered no reasonable chance, at least initially, of doing anything other than further depleting your already sorry bank balance.

On platform eight Kelly hunched his inadequate coat round his bony shoulders. It was a cold day and the platform seemed to have transformed itself into a wind tunnel. Things were not going well. At around 1.30, it was announced that the 13.51 was running half an hour late.

Kelly stamped his frozen feet on the unforgiving concrete and, wondering why he never seemed to remember to carry any gloves with him, rubbed his bare hands together in a vain attempt to warm them. There was quite a crowd on the platform awaiting the 13.51 to Glasgow, as was only to be expected when one Scotland train had been cancelled altogether. However, the proximity of so many bodies had done absolutely nothing to raise the air temperature. Kelly thought that might be because everybody’s body temperature had already sunk to the same low.

The train eventually turned up at around 2.30 p.m., almost exactly an hour before Kelly should have been arriving in Glasgow. It drew to a halt with a kind of breathless weariness which may just have been Kelly’s imagination — although, as he fought his way aboard along with all the other refugees from the earlier train, he began to think it wasn’t his imagination at all. This new train had a definite aura of weariness about it. Every carriage seemed already to be packed. Younger, nimbler folk than him won the race for the few remaining seats. Kelly ended up leaning against a toilet door in the corridor. He was now convinced that his journey was pure unmitigated folly.

After, with extreme difficulty among the people and bags piled up in the corridor, moving away from the toilet for about the third time for passengers who wished to use it, Kelly had had enough.

‘To hell with it,’ he muttered. He slung his bag over his shoulder and began to push his way through the masses. He was moving into first class. After all, he still had a credit card that worked. Just.

Almost as soon as he sat down, the new train’s manager was at his side waiting to check his ticket. Why was it, Kelly thought not for the first time, that the only thing which seemed to continually work well on Britain’s beleaguered railway system was the checking of tickets? Particularly if he didn’t happen to have the right one.

He handed over his credit card and tried not to wince as he signed a slip for more than a hundred pounds extra. He thought it was a disgrace that you couldn’t have a decent journey across Britain, in reasonable comfort, without paying out that sort of money for first class, and was on the brink of telling the train manager so in no uncertain terms. After all, he had only moved into first class and been forced to fork out the extra dosh because of yet another breakdown in the rail system. He restrained himself, though, partly because he knew it would be a waste of time and partly because all he wanted to do was to shut himself off from the world for the rest of his journey. Naturally, he vowed to write to Richard Branson about it all when he got home. And, naturally, he knew that he’d never get around to doing it.

He settled back into his seat and closed his eyes. He had no desire to sleep. He just wanted to think. And he told himself that he really could not hope to arrive in Glasgow in any fit state to have even the remotest chance of succeeding in his mission, had he still been leaning against a toilet door.

It had not been difficult for Kelly to find out Alan Connelly’s address. Karen Meadows was not his only police contact, which was just as well, because the way their last conversation had ended it had not seemed a good idea to ask her for any further information.