There was a chorus of ‘Oh, Mams’ and a pleading to stay in the street for just a bit longer, but the two boys none the less obeyed readily enough. They looked about the same age or thereabouts, and although Kelly wasn’t very good at guessing children’s ages, he was pretty sure this pair were both under five. That, of course, was an educated guess. It was term time after all. If they were any older than that they should have been at school. And glancing at the woman they had called Mam, Kelly didn’t think she would be someone who would take any nonsense on such matters. It did occur to him, though, that she was a little old to be the mother of these two small boys.
He became aware that the woman was studying him curiously now, which was hardly surprising. After all, a strange man had parked his car outside her front door and was now standing on the pavement, staring at her shamelessly.
‘Mrs Parsons?’ he enquired.
She looked puzzled
‘Who?’
‘You’re not Mrs Parsons?’
The woman shook her head. She was tall, broad rather than plump, and had long greying-brown hair which framed a strong kind face.
‘Oh. Perhaps I have the wrong address. I wanted to talk about the death of Trevor Parsons.’
‘Trevor? But I thought that was all over. I mean, it was more than a year ago that it happened, wasn’t it...’
The woman’s voice trailed away.
‘So you are Trevor Parsons’ mother?’
‘No. No. Not his mother.’
‘Well, you knew him, anyway?’
‘Oh yes. Of course. Look you’d better come in.’
Kelly followed her into the lofty hallway of the old Victorian villa. Inside the house was not unlike the two little boys who were now playing in the small front garden — a bit scruffy but well scrubbed. The tiled floor shone, although several of the tiles were chipped and broken, and the once white paintwork was scuffed and tinged with yellow, but none the less spotlessly clean.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ said the woman, leading the way into a big square room dominated by an old gas cooking-range and a huge wooden table covered with a flower-petalled plastic tablecloth.
‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing towards any one of a selection of ill-matched chairs. ‘Are you from the army? There’s nothing more I can tell you about Trevor, that’s for sure. It was a tragedy, his death, but I didn’t think anyone was all that surprised.’
‘You didn’t?’ Kelly queried, as he chose the chair nearest to him.
‘Well, no. Look, who did you say you were?’
Kelly, glad that he had had the foresight to ask Margaret Slade for that letter, produced it from his pocket.
‘There’ve been some other deaths in the Devonshire Fusiliers, and I have been asked by the families of some of the young people involved to investigate a little further. There are some unsolved mysteries in certain cases. I’m looking into it, that’s all at this stage.’
Kelly held out Margaret Slade’s letter towards the woman and she took it from him.
‘I see,’ she said.
Kelly waited in silence while she read it. When she had finished and looked up at him questioningly, he spoke again.
‘Forgive me, but I wonder if I could ask who you are and what your relationship to Trevor Parsons was. I thought you were his mother at first, because, you see, yours was his last civilian address.’
The woman nodded. ‘I’m Gill Morris,’ she said. ‘I was Trevor’s foster-mother, but only quite briefly...’
There was a crash as if a ton of bricks had been thrown against the kitchen door, which swung open to allow the two small boys to burst through, pushing their tricycle before them like some kind of battering ram. Not for the first time, Kelly marvelled at the amount of noise and commotion the very youngest of children could create.
‘No, you don’t. Out!’ commanded Gill Morris. And without even bothering to dissent, the two boys swung around, still pushing the tricycle before them with dangerous force and speed, and crashed through the door again.
‘They’re at the worst age,’ said Gill Morris, casting her eyes heavenwards. ‘They’re already quite big and surprisingly strong, but they have little or no brain at all to go with their physical power. And no control, either. They’re like miniature loose cannons.’
She smiled indulgently. Kelly raised one eyebrow in silent query.
‘Yes, I’m fostering these two, too,’ she said. ‘My Ricky and I, that’s what we do. We’re professional foster-parents, I suppose. He inherited this great big house from his parents and it just cries out to be filled with children, doesn’t it? We had three of our own, and then, when they started to grow up, it seemed natural to take in some more.’
‘I see,’ said Kelly. ‘So Trevor was one of them. What can you tell me about him?’
‘Not that much, really. We only had him for seven or eight months. He’d had a hell of a life as a youngster, poor kid. Knocked around by his dad. Neglected by his mother. He’d been in and out of care since before school age, and it had certainly affected him. He was a difficult kid, no doubt about that, but who could blame him? He was fifteen when he came to us and hadn’t seen either of his parents for years. And he was about sixteen and a half when he walked out one day. He always said he wanted to join the army, but we didn’t even know he’d done it until they came to tell us he was dead. Apparently, he’d joined up as soon as he was allowed to, at seventeen, but we didn’t know.’
‘So, what about the six months or so between when he was with you and when he was able to join the army? Why didn’t he give that address?’
‘I’m not even sure that he had an address. We heard through social services that they’d found him staying with a mate at one point. I don’t know anything for certain. We never saw him again after he left us. Funny really, some of the kids do get to be almost like your own, however much you fight against it, and a lot of them come back and visit. We’re surrogate grandparents a couple of dozen times over now, you know.’
As she spoke, Gill Morris sounded like any proud grandmother. He thought what a special person she must be. And her husband, come to that.
‘But Trevor, once he’d gone, he’d gone. And like I said, he wasn’t with us that long. Ricky and I even thought that it was quite possible that he may have slept rough for a bit. He always fancied himself as joining the SAS, you know. But there wouldn’t have been much chance of him getting into a regiment like that. To be honest, Ricky and I were a bit surprised that he got into the army at all.’
‘Really, why?’
‘Well, like I said, he was pretty screwed up by all that had happened to him. He liked the idea of playing soldiers, but he wasn’t exactly stable. I wouldn’t have put a gun in his hand, I can tell you that for nothing.’
‘And from what you said, it wasn’t a shock to hear that he had killed himself.’
‘Well, it was a shock, but when you thought about it, poor Trevor was so messed up that he had to be a likely candidate for suicide. You couldn’t imagine him coping with army life. You couldn’t imagine him coping with any sort of life, really. We just hoped that as he got older he’d settle down, sort his head out a bit. But he never got the chance, did he?’
‘It would seem not.’ Kelly was thoughtful. Maybe Trevor Parsons’ death had been a genuine suicide, after all. It still didn’t mean that Jocelyn Slade had killed herself, or that the deaths of Craig Foster and Alan Connelly had been genuine accidents.
‘So, you honestly have never thought that there was anything suspicious about Trevor’s death?’
‘No. Not at all. Should we have done?’
Kelly didn’t know quite what to say. ‘Probably not,’ he responded eventually. ‘It’s just that the parents of three other dead Devonshire Fusiliers are very suspicious indeed about the way in which their children died.’