Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

“I do understand, Phil,” she said.

He managed a wan smile. “I know you do, Karen,” he said quietly. The use of her Christian name, something he usually avoided at work, further indicating just how troubled he was. “But even that doesn’t always help.”

She could see the pain in his eyes, and it made her feel terribly sad.

He looked over his shoulder then and glanced around the room, as if checking out, a little late, she thought, whether anyone was listening to their conversation. Then he spoke in a whisper.

“Can I come round this evening?”

She nodded. She couldn’t say no, and he knew it. That was the way it had been since the night of Marshall’s appeal, and that was the way it would continue. Phil Cooper, the man who didn’t cheat on his wife, had become rather good at it, it seemed to Karen.

Most days he seemed to find an excuse to spend at least some time with her. She had given him a key to her flat. If they weren’t able to be together at night, she became accustomed to being woken by him early in the morning when he had sneaked away from home to come to her. More usually, he would spend at least a couple of hours with her, often more, after work. Occasionally he would stay for the whole night. Karen had no idea what he told his wife, but she accepted totally that he was experiencing genuine anguish. There was absolutely no question of her not believing that. And so was she.

She was, of course, well aware that one day they would have to confront the reality of their situation. Fate would probably play a part, she thought. It often did in these situations. Meanwhile she was happy to be an ostrich. Well, happy was something of an exaggeration. But there were only two alternatives. One was that they should stop seeing each other, and the other was that Cooper would take the initiative and tell his wife. The first was definitely not an option, and she somehow suspected that it never would be. As for the second, well — although their present situation was far from ideal, she accepted that quite probably neither of them was ready for that second option yet. Apart from anything else, in love as she was, Karen was also aware of the implications on her career if this professionally dangerous relationship blew up in their faces. And her career was all there had been in her life for a very long time. She did not take lightly any threat to what she had achieved through sheer hard work and determination. Her recent promotion to detective superintendent had very nearly not happened because a previous case she had led had threatened to go catastrophically wrong. Now already she was facing another tricky time in the job, and she knew darned well that she was lucky not to have found herself in much bigger trouble.

Politics, as executed by Tomlinson, a master politician if nothing else, had been her saviour, she suspected. The chief constable and those who pulled his strings at Westminster, had, she reckoned, decided that to take matters further, and certainly to delve into any kind of witch-hunt concerning blame in the Marshall affair, would serve merely to draw further attention to it and cause more mayhem than already existed.

Karen was, however, almost certainly in a more vulnerable position than she had ever been before.

John Kelly, too, found himself more upset than he had expected to be by Marshall’s release. It bugged him. It really bugged him. He didn’t like to think about the reasons why this case mattered so much to him. Kelly had allowed himself to be brought down both by events around him and by his own behaviour often enough in the past.

Like Karen Meadows, he forced himself to put on a brave front. He made himself concentrate on other aspects of his life — his work with the Argus , his son Nick, Moira, the woman he lived with who was always so patient with him — rather than dwelling on a situation he could do nothing about.

However, just over three weeks after the Sun ’s serialization of Richard Marshall’s story, Kelly made one of his increasingly rare trips to London for a farewell party for the newspaper’s veteran crime correspondent, Jimmy Finch.

Kelly enjoyed his occasional forays back into a world he had long ago left, but this time he had an ulterior motive. Finch’s swan song had been to mastermind the Marshall buy-up. Kelly wanted to talk to him about it. He couldn’t resist the opportunity. The case was on Kelly’s mind all the time, however much he tried to deny it. He knew that Finch would have spent a lot of time with Richard Marshall and, knowing the reporter’s habits, he would almost undoubtedly have gone drinking with him.

The party was held at a wine bar not far from the Sun ’s Wapping offices and just around the corner from the Tower Hotel where Kelly booked himself in for the night. There was a good turnout, mostly other journalists, but also quite an impressive cross-section of police contacts, not to mention a villain or two. Finch was old school, the reporter’s reporter who also managed to walk the tightrope in his speciality, thus maintaining the trust of his connections on either side of the law while at the same time somehow or other managing to keep his extremely demanding tabloid editor happy. He was a popular man, big, brash and genial, his lifestyle evident in both his girth and his flushed features.

Jimmy Finch, already showing the signs of having had a considerable amount to drink, greeted Kelly, his equal in height but certainly not in bulk, with an enthusiastic bear hug, and led him straight to the bar.

Kelly found that there were more old friends at the bash than he might have expected, and enjoyed the evening in spite of not being able to drink himself. He did not, however, forget his hidden agenda.

Quite deliberately he waited until the early hours of the following morning before contriving to get himself involved in a conversation with the by then extremely well oiled Finch about the Marshall buy-up. The other man had a selection of the usual kind of tales, ranging from the machinations of extracting every jot of the story from Marshall to how the opposition were shaken off, and naturally Jimmy Finch was the hero of every one.

Kelly gave him his full attention, chuckling appreciatively in all the right places, before asking casually: “So what do you think then, Finchy, did he do it or not?”

“Completely innocent, old boy,” replied the veteran crime man. “As told to the Currant Bun, and you’d never doubt Britain’s greatest newspaper, would you?”

Kelly grinned. “There speaks one of the few men in Fleet Street to work to full retirement age and be looking forward to a hefty News International pension,” he said.

“Dead right, Johnno.” Finch was on the whisky now. His diction remained surprisingly clear — he was, after all, well practised in the arts of coping with copious quantities of alcohol — but his flushed features had turned almost purple. Although the temperature in the air-conditioned wine bar was still pleasant enough there was a film of sweat on his forehead and cheeks. He was breathing heavily. Kelly wondered obliquely how long Finch would actually live to enjoy his generous pension. And as he gently returned the other man to the question he so wanted to hear answered, he reflected that there were some advantages to not drinking, like having a brain still in working order at the end of a night like this one, for a start. Kelly’s history of alcoholism had nearly destroyed him twice, and he was absolutely sure that he wouldn’t survive a third time. It was actually plain blind fear that kept him sober while all around him drank. He ordered himself a Diet Coke and Jimmy Finch another large whisky without asking him whether he wanted it, lining the glass up on the bar alongside the two already waiting there. Flattery, Kelly thought, might be the answer.