Хилари Боннер - No Reason To Die

Marcia Foster stopped abruptly. ‘Look, who are you? If you’re not army, who are you?’

Kelly did his best to enlighten her. It wasn’t easy. He was a one-time journalist pretending to be a novelist, sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong again. The story of his life, really, and now he no longer even did it for a living. It was actually quite tricky to make it halfway clear to Mrs Foster what he was doing getting involved in these deaths, not least because he wasn’t quite sure himself.

Mrs Foster, however, did not seem to find it as bewildering as he did.

‘Oh, a writer, are you?’ she responded. ‘That would explain it, then.’

‘Yes,’ said Kelly, who wasn’t sure it explained anything, but was extremely pleased that she thought so. He told her then how his interest had been aroused, all about meeting Alan Connelly in the pub and what the boy had told him.

‘I wish my Phil was here,’ she said. ‘He didn’t have the strength to fight the way he would have done once. And nobody would listen to him. That’s what finished him, I think. Do you know, we even had to fight to get Craig’s belongings back, and we never got anything like all his stuff back, we were quite sure of that.’

‘What about Jocelyn Slade’s family?’ asked Kelly. ‘What do they think about all of this?’

‘We only ever knew of her mother, and Craig said she’d been ill for years. We wrote to her after Jossy died. My Phil was good at things like that. But we never heard back. And after Craig was killed, well, Phil wasn’t interested in anything except that. Although Phil always did think there was a link between Craig and Jossy dying, but then he became so ill he just wasn’t capable of following it through. And me, well, I had my hands full looking after Phil. So, do you think their deaths were linked, Mr Kelly? Do you think our Craig and his Jossy were murdered?’

‘I don’t know, Mrs Foster. I don’t know enough about anything yet. All I do know is that three young people have died suddenly and somewhat curiously, within a short period of time, and that the third one predicted his own death. “They killed the others, they’ll kill me too,” he said. What we do have here, Mrs Foster, is the makings of something extremely suspicious indeed. At the very least.’

Kelly felt quite excited as he climbed back into his car. Three deaths at Hangridge. What was going on in the barracks of the Devonshire Fusiliers?

It really did seem that he might have been right from the start, and that his gut instinct about Alan Connelly’s death being suspicious had been spot on.

While he considered what steps he should take next, he reached in his pocket for his mobile phone and attempted to switch it on. The phone didn’t seem to be working. He held it to the car’s interior light and peered at the display panel. Damn. The battery was dead. He had forgotten to take his charger to Scotland the previous day and he supposed that he must have finally emptied the battery when he made his calls from the train. He hadn’t switched it on since then. If Moira or the girls had been trying to call him, he wouldn’t even know.

He checked his watch. It was almost 9.30 p.m. Still not too late to go round. They’d be pleased to see him.

It took Kelly less than fifteen minutes to drive from Babbacombe along the coast road, with its rows of pretty, flower-adorned private hotels, to Moira’s St Marychurch street. He pulled to a halt outside her pale-blue-painted house and, as was almost customary, stayed in the car for a moment or two while he steeled himself for the visit. It was awful that he had to do that. But he couldn’t help it.

After a couple of minutes he climbed out of the car, locked it, and then stepped across the pavement towards Moira’s front gate. As he did so, he looked at the house properly for the first time. There were no lights on. No lights at all. Yet there were always lights on after dark, because Moira could no longer leave the house and one of the girls was always with her. And he knew that even when she was trying to sleep they left a low light on.

Kelly’s heart sank into his belly. He rang the doorbell. He hammered on the door. He called through the letterbox. There was no response. There really was nobody in.

He turned his back on the house and leaned against the front door. It was a cool evening but he realised that he was sweating. The palms of his hands were damp and the brow of his head felt as if it was on fire. He closed his eyes. He was shaking.

‘Oh, my God,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Oh, my God. It can’t be. Not yet, surely. She can’t have...’

Automatically, he reached into his pocket for his phone before remembering that it was not working. There was a phone box at the end of the road. He took off for it at a run. He didn’t somehow trust himself to drive his car the short distance.

When he got there, he had to fish out his diary to look up Jennifer’s mobile number. He fed pound coins into the phone and dialled.

‘We’ve been trying to reach you since this morning, John,’ she responded at once. ‘Mum got so bad in the night that we called the doctor in the early hours. We were going to call you as well, but she wouldn’t let us. You know what she’s like. She said she’d be fine once the doctor had given her something, and she didn’t want your night’s sleep disturbed because you get up so early to write. Anyway, the doctor made her as comfortable as he could, but... but, I guess there’s not much left that he can do. Not any more. And he rang later to say he’d got her a place in the hospice at Newton Abbot. We’re all with her now...’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Kelly.

He walked briskly back to the MG, trying to calm down. Moira wasn’t dead, but she was dying. That was the message, more or less, and was only what had been expected for some time. None the less, he was still trembling. It had really shaken him to arrive at Moira’s house and find it locked up and dark. And, as ever, the guilt ate away at him in a totally physical fashion, as if some vicious alien creature was gradually devouring his internal organs. He hadn’t been in touch for two days and Moira had refused to let him be disturbed in the night because he was writing. Which was actually a very bad joke.

The hospice was in a modern purpose-built building on the outskirts of Newton Abbot. Kelly had been there once before, to visit an old friend who had died in the hospice the previous year, and had hoped never to have cause to step foot in the place again.

When he had made his first visit, the atmosphere had not been what he had expected. The hospice was a calm and peaceful establishment where the nursing was both unobtrusive and highly efficient, as well as noticeably caring. Kelly thought the staff who worked there were remarkable. It was not a job he could do, that was for certain. However you dressed it up, people went into a hospice to die, and Kelly didn’t think he could cope with that.

He tapped lightly on the door to Moira’s room. Jennifer opened it, smiled and ushered him in. All three girls were gathered round Moira’s bed. But they rose to leave almost as soon as Kelly arrived.

‘You’ll want to be alone with Mum,’ said Jennifer. ‘In any case, we could do with a cup of tea or something.’

Kelly nodded. As ever, none of the girls had uttered a word of criticism. They did not know, of course, that to his further shame, Kelly was not at all sure that he did want to be alone with Moira, but he could not possibly say so. He sat by the bed, very close to her, and put his hand over one of hers.

Moira smiled weakly at him. She looked terribly ill, but Kelly could see that she was genuinely pleased to see him.