‘I’m—’
‘But you are from Stiles & Merchant?’ she interrupted swiftly.
‘Uh, no,’ Kelly repeated.
‘Oh.’ She looked puzzled.
‘The undertakers,’ she said, as if prompting him. ‘Aren’t you from the undertakers? I’ve been waiting all afternoon...’
It was Kelly’s turn to look puzzled. Craig Foster had died more than six months ago, according to both Gerry Parker-Brown and the death notice in the Argus. Kelly didn’t quite know what to say, so he merely shook his head.
‘Oh,’ the woman said again. ‘I was expecting the undertakers...’
Her voice trailed away.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kelly, making a conscious effort to regain both his brain and his voice. ‘I didn’t realise there had been a recent bereavement here. I wouldn’t have come—’
She interrupted him then, staring at him curiously.
‘Who are you, then? And what do you want?’
‘I came about Craig. Your son. I’m so sorry. I’ll come back another day.’
She stared a little longer, looking uncertain at first, and then appeared to make a decision.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t go. Not if it’s anything about Craig. Phillip wouldn’t want that. I know he wouldn’t. Please come in.’
Kelly was even more puzzled.
‘I... I don’t want to intrude,’ he stumbled. He did, of course, but he didn’t want to risk messing up the one and only opportunity he would probably have to get through to this woman.
‘No, we’ve been wanting you to come,’ she said, and opened the door wide for him to enter.
He did so at once. He realised that Mrs Foster must have mistaken him for someone else, but naturally he couldn’t resist the invitation.
She led him into a small tidy kitchen and gestured for him to sit down at a very shiny, new, pine table. A black and white spaniel curled up on the mat by the back door, opened one eye and closed it again. Some house dog, thought Kelly, as he accepted Mrs Foster’s offer of a cup of tea.
She poured from a teapot already on the table. The tea was a deep brown in colour, and Kelly could feel from the temperature of the mug she passed to him that it was only just warm. He reached for the sugar bowl and helped himself to four spoonfuls to be on the safe side, rather than his usual three. But the cool tea still tasted unpleasantly bitter and Kelly had to force himself to drink it.
‘So, what have you come to tell us?’ enquired Mrs Foster, and she sounded quite accusative.
‘I was rather hoping you may have something to tell me,’ responded Kelly.
She looked annoyed then.
‘My husband spent the last six months of his life writing letters. All he wanted was to know exactly what happened to our Craig. That wasn’t much to ask, surely? So far, we’ve not heard a word from the army since the first couple of weeks. And even then we got short shrift. My Phillip didn’t want to make trouble, he wasn’t that sort of man. He just wanted information, that’s all. Somebody to talk to him properly.’ Her voice softened. ‘He worshipped our Craig, honestly, he did.’
Kelly thought quickly. Mrs Foster’s attitude seemed very different to that of Neil Connelly, but, of course, six months later, she would at least have got over the initial shock of her son’s death. He decided that he would almost certainly achieve more from this meeting if he was absolutely honest from the start.
‘Mrs Foster, I’m not from the army,’ he said.
‘Not from the army?’ Now, she looked more than puzzled. She looked alarmed. Kelly felt slightly guilty about even being in her home. But he had no intention of stopping.
‘No, Mrs Foster.’ He appraised the woman sitting opposite him. She looked drawn and worn out, as if life had dealt her one blow too many. Her eyes were dull. Kelly took a deep breath and started talking.
‘Mrs Foster, I came to talk to you about how your son died. Look, I may be bothering you for nothing, and if so I apologise in advance, particularly at what is obviously a distressing time. But there has been another alleged accidental death at Hangridge—’
Kelly was about to tell the whole story, to explain how he had met Alan Connelly and what the young man had told him just minutes before he died. But Mrs Foster interrupted him.
‘Another death?’ she said, and her eyes were suddenly bright. ‘That’s three, then. Three in not much more than seven months, it must be.’
Kelly was completely taken aback.
‘What do you mean, three?’ he queried.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Mrs Foster picked up the mug of tea on the table in front of her and sipped it gingerly, as if it were considerably hotter than Kelly knew it to be.
Kelly shook his head.
‘Oh.’ Mrs Foster took another sip of tea. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but then, in spite of the instant spark of interest she exhibited when Kelly had begun to tell her about Alan Connelly, she didn’t look like a woman who was capable of hurrying any more. Kelly realised that he must not put any pressure on her. He waited.
After a few seconds she started to speak again.
‘Jossy was the first,’ she said. ‘The first we knew of, anyway. Jocelyn Slade, but they always called her Jossy. Craig did, anyway. She was Craig’s girlfriend. Well, they hadn’t known each other long and I’ve really no idea how serious they were about each other...’
‘And she was stationed at Hangridge?’ Kelly was puzzled and unwittingly echoed Karen’s remark to Gerrard Parker-Brown. ‘I didn’t even know there were women in infantry regiments.’
‘There aren’t. Jossy was in the Adjutant General Corps. She was at Hangridge for infantry training before being sent to Northern Ireland with her own regiment. That’s how she met our Craig—’
‘Ah.’ Kelly had interrupted Mrs Foster’s flow and cursed himself. ‘Please go on,’ he encouraged. ‘Will you tell me everything you know about Jossy’s death.’
Mrs Foster nodded. ‘That cut up about it, Craig was. She was eighteen, too, just a couple of months younger than our lad. She was shot. She died of gunshot wounds, just a few weeks before our Craig went. It wasn’t right, you know. Craig always said it wasn’t right. That’s why my Phillip got on to it, you see. He was writing and phoning right up to when he died, wanting to know what happened. Exactly what happened, he said. But you know the army. They closed ranks on us, really, we never got told anything. That’s what hurt, I think. Our boy dead and nobody even prepared to talk to us properly about it. He never got over it, Phillip, you know. He’d had a dodgy ticker for years, but he coped, did what the doctors told him. He’d learned to live with it, had Phillip. Till Craig went...’
Her voice tailed off. Kelly had a million questions and none of them were about Phillip Foster. But he knew that the moment had not yet come. If Marcia Foster was rambling, then it was because she needed to. Kelly had decades of experience of interviewing bereaved and distressed people. He knew better than to interrupt.
‘... After our Craig died, well, Phil stopped taking care of himself, watching what he ate, taking regular exercise, like he’d been told. Stopped all of that. He began working all the hours God gave, to forget, I suppose, and he even took up smoking again. Eventually his heart just gave out. So there you are. Six months ago I buried my only son, now I’m burying my husband.’
Kelly waited a few seconds before he spoke. ‘Mrs Foster, how exactly did Jocelyn Slade die? Was her death also supposed to be a training accident?’
‘No. She was on sentry duty. Standing outside the camp, by the main gates. They said she took her own life, shot herself. My Craig never believed it, you see. That was the thing. He said from the start that Jocelyn would never have killed herself. Not my Jossy, he used to say, not even after what they did to her. Not suicide. Not Jossy. But we took it all with a pinch of salt, to be honest, everything Craig said, because we knew he was that cut up, and, well, she was his girl. So if he accepted it was suicide, then he’d have blamed himself, wouldn’t he. In some way. Bound to have done. And we’d never met Jocelyn, you see. But then when our Craig went too, no more than six weeks later, it was, well, you can’t help wondering, can you? Something’s not...’