‘She’s unconscious, John,’ responded Jennifer quietly. ‘Why don’t you pull up a chair. Come and sit with her.’
Not for the first time Kelly was amazed at the nineteen-year-old’s composure and dignity. He thought she was one hell of a kid, and vowed to tell her so one day. But not now. It was neither the time nor the place. And, anyway, he didn’t have the words. Again.
There was an orange plastic chair just to his left by the door. He carried it over to the bed and sat down, as Jennifer had suggested, alongside. There was a clock above Moira’s bed. It said 9.23 p.m. He had left the hospice at half past seven that morning and he had not called once since then to find out how Moira was.
And yet — and yet — he loved her so. He touched Moira gently on one cheek. Her skin felt cool and clammy. He hoped she knew how much he had cared for her, really cared, even though he had not always shown it and had sometimes behaved very badly towards her. Now that it was too late, far too late, he wished he had behaved differently on so many occasions, looked after her better throughout their relationship, and been a much better all-round partner to her.
His mind began to wander over their time together. He felt the burden not only of grief but of guilt. He tried to concentrate on what was happening in the little room, tried to think of anything he could do that might help. But his eyelids seemed to be made of lead. It had, of course, been a long day and a short night previously. He blinked and shook his head furiously, glancing around him at Moira’s three daughters — Jennifer on one side of the bed, her two sisters on the other, sitting quietly watching their mother. Jennifer was holding Moira’s left hand, Paula her right, while Lynne every so often stroked her hair. Nobody was saying anything. Well, now there really was nothing to say. Kelly shifted on the hard plastic chair in an attempt to make himself more comfortable. It didn’t seem to help much. The minutes ticked slowly by. The silence continued. Kelly’s mouth felt dry. He licked his lips and thought about suggesting that he went in search of tea or coffee. He shifted on the chair again. He was very uncomfortable and extremely ill at ease. However, after a bit, his eyelids began to feel heavy, and then he had no further conscious memory until he felt his arm being gently shaken. He opened his eyes at once. It hurt to do so. They felt sore and were slightly stuck together. He must have fallen asleep again, and he had no idea how he had managed to do so under such circumstances, and seated so uncomfortably. Neither did he have any idea how long he had been asleep. Automatically, he checked the clock above the bed. It said 2 a.m. He must have slept, somehow, for at least three hours.
It was Jennifer who was shaking his arm. Calm, composed, dignified, wonderful Jennifer, who suddenly did not look calm at all. There were tears streaming down her cheeks.
‘She’s gone, John,’ she cried. ‘She’s dead. Mum’s dead.’
Kelly tried to stand up. It took more than one attempt. His left leg had gone to sleep and his spine seemed to have locked itself into a sitting position.
Eventually, if a little unsteadily, he struggled upright. He stared at Moira, lying on the bed before him. She actually looked much the same as she had the last time he had seen her, when she had still been desperately hanging on to life. But now she had let go. Kelly’s first reaction took him by surprise and rather shocked him. He immediately felt a terrific sense of relief. For Moira. For her daughters. And, of course, for himself. Then he was overwhelmed by a dreadful emptiness.
He wrapped his arms around Jennifer and pulled her close to him. She leaned her head against his chest and sobbed her heart out.
Perversely, perhaps, it made Kelly feel a little better, not that Jennifer had broken down, but that she had wanted to turn to him as a shoulder to cry on. If he could at least give Jennifer a little comfort, then perhaps he wasn’t quite such a hopelessly inadequate bugger, after all.
Twelve
In the morning Karen left home early again, not something she enjoyed but, none the less, she was actually quite glad to shut the door on her bedroom, which looked rather as if it had suffered a terrorist attack. In spite of her love of expensive designer clothes, she paid them little respect, which was one of the reasons why she preferred low-maintenance items, the sort that were not supposed to look freshly ironed. She was inclined to use the pretty, little, Victorian dressing chair at the foot of her bed as an alternative wardrobe, only when the pile of clothes upon it reached a certain level, they could do nothing other than fall onto the floor. She had not made her bed, either. Which wasn’t entirely her fault, she told herself. Sophie had looked so comfortable curled up on the crumpled duvet that Karen had not had the heart to move her. In any case, the cat would probably have bitten her had she attempted to do so.
Making a mental note to blitz the bedroom at the weekend, she hurried along the corridor to West Beach Heights’ famously rickety, ancient lift. In a nanny state increasingly governed by health and safety regulations, she found the ornate old lift, which moved both up and down only in a series of disconcerting jerks, rather reassuring.
For Karen, it was just another morning. She did think about Kelly and wondered whether she should call him or wait for him to call her, but she still had no idea that Moira was dead when she arrived at her office, in Torquay police station, just before 8 a.m. In any case, in spite of her genuine feelings for the woman and for Kelly, it would have made no difference whatsoever. Karen had a job to do and she just wanted to get on with it.
She was nearly ready to approach the chief constable, to ask for his authorisation to set up a formal police investigation at Hangridge. This was not something she could do of her own volition. And it seemed pretty obvious that, in spite of trying to give every appearance of co-operating, Gerry Parker-Brown was not going to allow any kind of external investigation into the affairs of the Devonshire Fusiliers unless he was given little choice.
In terms of red tape there was a brick wall around Hangridge, Karen reckoned, much more impenetrable than the wire fence which was actually the army base’s only physical perimeter barrier. And she intended to do her damnedest to knock that brick wall down.
But first, she needed all the information she could lay her hands on. Certainly enough to persuade the chief constable that a full police investigation of goings-on at Hangridge was not just advisable but necessary.
It was still too early to ring Mike Collins, the newly appointed clerk to the coroner’s court, who had failed to return her call yesterday, so she decided to re-read the report he had already sent her of the inquest into the death of Craig Foster. This had actually contained few surprises except, perhaps, that the details of the military police investigation, conducted by the Special Investigation Branch of the RMP, the army’s equivalent of the CID, were extremely sketchy. Their evidence had drawn the conclusion that Craig Foster had fallen on his own automatic rifle during a moorland training exercise, and in so doing had caused the gun to fire. He died from gunshot wounds to the chest. And although these did seem consistent with SIB’s conclusions, Karen remained unimpressed. She knew that SIB investigations should be conducted in more or less exactly the same way as by the CID. Indeed, SIB officers, although soldiers, were trained in CID procedure at civilian police college. Yet there appeared not to have been any witness statements taken, even though Foster was on an exercise with the entire training company of around a hundred and twenty men and women. Instead, the SIB report, read out at the inquest by an NCO, had taken the form of little more than an assumption of the obvious. And the coroner had appeared to accept the army version of events without question and simply to declare a verdict of accidental death. In truth, it could well still be the case, she realised, that Craig Foster’s death had been an accident. Everything fitted, after all, and soldiers did die in training accidents of this kind, if not regularly, at least often enough for another one not to initially raise any suspicions. None the less, from the inquest report before her, Karen did not consider that Craig Foster’s death had actually been proven to be an accident at all.