Kelly took on board the note of criticism in her voice and decided he’d better accept it. It was probably justified. Kelly was not noted for being sensible. Karen didn’t need to spell that one out. He waited for her to continue.
‘There’s something else, Kelly. A witness has come forward, just this morning, after noticing a report of the accident in an old copy of the Argus. A passing motorist who saw a young man, almost certainly Connelly, walking along the side of the road a couple of hundred yards or so away from The Wild Dog, just minutes before the accident. He was weaving erratically. The witness said he nearly hit him. And, apparently, Connelly seemed to be quite alone.’
‘All right,’ said Kelly. ‘But if he really was alone, where did those two men go to so suddenly, right after having found someone they had been searching for? And why? Why did they leave him alone? If indeed they did. If I’m right and they were soldiers, they probably know all about keeping themselves out of sight when they want to. Are you sure Parker-Brown doesn’t know a hell of a lot more than he’s telling you, Karen?’
‘Look, I’ve no doubt he’s as reluctant as any other army officer to let the police force meddle in army affairs, in spite of trying to give the opposite impression,’ responded Karen. ‘But I have absolutely no reason to believe that he is hiding anything that is in any way pertinent to this case.’
‘Come on, Karen. How many soldiers are there up at Hangridge? I bet your colonel knows them all. So why can’t he lead you to those two who came to the pub, eh? I bet he knows bloody well who they are.’
‘Kelly, you’re running away with yourself. How many times do we have to go over this ground. We don’t even know that these men were soldiers, for God’s sake. And for your information the total complement at Hangridge, including the training unit, is well over a thousand men and women. I very much doubt that Parker-Brown could recognise and name all of them.’
‘I bet he’s got a fair idea, from the way you describe him.’
‘Oh, Kelly. In any case, you only saw the two men briefly in the pub. Sometimes E-fit images are terrific and sometimes they’re a bad joke. How the hell do I know how good yours were, when I doubt you do yourself. The two guys you created looked pretty damned peculiar, I know that, especially in those silly hats. Look, closing ranks against the meddling of the civilian police force is one thing, Kelly, but I really don’t think the commanding officer of the Devonshire Fusiliers would tell me a deliberate lie. Come on. Do you, Kelly?’
‘Only if he thought he could get away with it,’ muttered Kelly.
‘What?’ Kelly knew that Karen had heard him perfectly well. You could tell that from the way she had snapped her reply.
‘I don’t know, Karen,’ Kelly replied in a more conversational tone of voice. ‘I expect he would, if he were privy to murders. Most people in that situation don’t find lying too difficult.’
‘Now you’re talking nonsense.’ Karen snapped the words again. For a moment Kelly thought she was going to hang up on him. And he wasn’t going to let her do that until he had extracted all the information he possibly could from her.
‘Look, just tell me one thing,’ he asked quickly. ‘Do you have the name of the recruit who was killed on the range.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well?’
‘C’mon, Kelly. I know you. You’re always bloody trouble. I’ve made further inquiries and, to be honest, I’m pretty well satisfied now that Alan Connelly’s death was a tragic accident and no more.’
‘No you’re not, Karen, or you wouldn’t even have phoned me today.’
Kelly was quite certain he was right. He knew Karen Meadows every bit as well as she knew him.
‘Apart from anything else, Kelly, I’m not sure that you of all people should be getting any further involved. You’ll start poking around and causing mayhem as usual. It’s not even your territory any more, is it? You’re supposed to be a novelist now.’
‘Yeah, and Hangridge is just a displacement activity, that’s all. And maybe a way of earning a bit of linage which I could certainly do with. Look, if everything is as above board as you say it is, what harm can there be in giving me that name?’
He could hear Karen sigh.
‘I know I’m going to regret this...’ she muttered.
Kelly waited. He still wasn’t sure whether or not Karen was going to give him the information he had asked for, but he knew well enough when to stop pushing her.
‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s Foster. Fusilier Craig Foster. Actually, I’m a bit surprised you don’t remember anything about his death. Though I must admit, I didn’t. But apparently it did get some press coverage, and you were actually working for the Argus at the time.’
‘Six months ago? I think I probably had other things on my mind.’
Six months previously, Kelly had still been deeply involved with another case. And as always with him, his involvement had bordered on obsession and he had taken little notice of anything much else happening in the world.
Karen didn’t respond. But he knew she would be well enough aware of what he was referring to.
‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’ he asked.
‘No, Kelly. No doubt I’ve told you too much already. Situation normal.’
She hung up then without saying goodbye. Situation normal, indeed, thought Kelly.
He replaced the receiver slowly and forced himself to turn his attention back to his computer screen.
The phone rang again almost at once. It was Moira’s daughter Jennifer.
‘I just thought I’d call, John, to remind you that Mum’s expecting you over tonight.’
Kelly knew what she meant. Could hear the unspoken words inside his head. Please don’t forget, or pretend to forget, or whatever it is that you do to avoid seeing Mum. Please don’t let her down again.
The awful truth was that he didn’t want to visit Moira ever again. Not for as long as she was ill. And it was a tragic fact that she was not going to get better. Even if nobody was ever allowed to say the words. But he knew that this time he would visit, if only to make some amends for his many shortcomings.
‘I’ll be there,’ he promised. ‘You just give her all my love and tell her I’ll see if I can’t find a couple of hot new videos for her.’
He put the phone down again, held his head in his hands for a few minutes, and then, with a great effort of will, reverted his attention yet again to the computer screen and made himself exit his games programme.
‘Right,’ he said, as he resolutely clicked on ‘My Documents’ and called up that empty document ‘Untitled Chapter Three’. For a good ten minutes he stared at the blank white screen, moving barely a muscle. Then, very suddenly he grabbed his mouse, quit Word and called up his games programme again.
Halfway through being beaten rotten in his third backgammon game, he accepted that he was unable even to concentrate on that, let alone on writing. His thoughts were somewhere else. On a moorland road, late on a wet foggy night. And within the confines of an isolated barracks where young soldiers learned their trade well away from prying eyes. A place where almost anything could happen, and yet, even in the high-tech communications era of the twenty-first century, in a country which retained an allegedly free and probing press, it remained quite likely that nobody outside its sentry-posted perimeters would ever know.