Obediently, the lorry driver climbed out of the car. His legs buckled slightly as he tried to stand up. The paramedic put a supportive arm around him and steered him off in the direction of the ambulance. Sergeant Smythe and Kelly watched for only a second or two before getting into the car themselves, where, within its relative shelter, the sergeant produced his notebook and jotted down everything Kelly was able to tell him.
His attitude to Kelly seemed considerably less cool now, which was perhaps not surprising. After all, Kelly had done a large part of his job for him. He had been able to tell the sergeant that the victim was a soldier and that his name was Alan, and where he was stationed. One call to the barracks at Hangridge should be enough to sort out full identification. The accident seemed straightforward enough and Kelly guessed that Sergeant Smythe couldn’t wait to get the scene cleared up so that he could return to the warm familiarity of Ashburton police station and a steaming hot cup of tea.
Kelly could well guess how the other man felt. He was shivering himself now, and it wasn’t with shock. He had seen all too many dead bodies in his time. The cold and the wet had seeped right through his inadequate clothing and he felt chilled to the bone. But he was not yet quite finished.
‘There’s just one thing, Sergeant,’ said Kelly. ‘The two men who turned up in the pub looking for this lad. Two more soldiers, I’m sure. Where did they go? Has anybody seen them?’
‘I don’t know anything about any two men,’ said Sergeant Smythe, reverting at once to his earlier attitude of near hostility. Smythe did not want any complications, thought Kelly. His body language defied Kelly to question him any further. However, Kelly had a thick skin. You grew one in the job he had done through most of his life.
‘But didn’t the lorry driver see them?’ he persisted.
Smythe studied him for a few seconds without enthusiasm. Then, sighing exaggeratedly, he opened the driver’s door and began to swing his long legs out onto the tarmac road, straight into an icy blast of windswept rain.
‘Wait here,’ he muttered to Kelly, who needed no encouragement whatsoever to remain exactly where he was, almost curled into the passenger seat of the police car, with his arms tightly wrapped round his chest in a futile bid to retain as much body warmth as possible.
The sergeant returned within only a couple of minutes, shaking droplets of icy water off his police issue waterproof jacket and all over Kelly as he climbed back into the car.
‘The driver didn’t see anybody else,’ he said. ‘He didn’t see anyone at all apart from chummy, when it was too darned late.’
‘But those two blokes must have been with the lad. They wouldn’t have left him in that state, would they?’
‘Who knows what a load of off-their-head soldiers will do,’ responded Sergeant Smythe flatly.
Kelly opened his mouth to respond but found he didn’t have the energy. He reached for the door handle. His fingers were so cold he had difficulty even grasping it. But the good news was that his body temperature was by now so low that when he eventually climbed out into the wind and rain he barely felt it any more. None the less, he began to sprint back to the MG, but his path was momentarily blocked by the ambulance containing the body of the dead squaddie, which was now slowly pulling away from the scene.
As Kelly watched it leave he could see again, all too clearly in his mind’s eye, the lad’s lifeless young face, and wondered fleetingly just how old he had been. Under twenty, definitely. Eighteen or nineteen, maximum, he thought. Little more than a child in the great scheme of things, and with so much life left to live. To his surprise Kelly, who was, after all, not unfamiliar with the spectacle of lives wasted and cut unnecessarily short, suddenly felt overwhelmed by a great sadness.
Three
Kelly had had enough. He wanted to get away from the scene, shut the dead boy’s face out of his head and get warm as soon as possible.
He decided he wouldn’t wait for the truck to be removed, after all. Instead, he would take that big detour, retracing his journey back along the road past The Wild Dog and swinging a right at Two Bridges. This would make his journey home at least half as long again as it should be, and he still wasn’t looking forward to negotiating the top of the moor in thick mist, but he had now got to the point where he preferred the prospect of a long and difficult drive to merely waiting around getting colder and colder in such dreadful conditions. The rain was showing no signs whatsoever of easing. A fire engine and garage emergency vehicle had arrived just after Kelly had identified the boy, but they would not be allowed to even start their tricky manoeuvre until the SOCOs had finished measuring tyre marks on the road and generally checking out the accident scene.
Kelly started the little car’s engine and proceeded to attempt to turn round so that he would be facing in the direction from which he had originally come — a feat accomplished not without difficulty in the poor visibility on one of the narrowest sections of the road, with a ditch on one side, a stone wall on the other, and a camber in the middle that could have been custom-built to wreck the low-slung exhaust system of an MGB.
He succeeded ultimately in executing something going on for a six- or seven-point turn and began to make his way back towards Two Bridges at little more than a crawl, as he struggled to see ahead through the mist and rain. But as he tentatively set out on the road over the highest section of the moor he would cross on his extended journey home, Dartmoor began to play one of its many tricks. The rain started to ease and the mist suddenly lifted. It was uncanny. A minute ago Kelly had hardly been able to see ten feet ahead, and now the road was totally clear.
Gratefully, he pressed his right foot down on the accelerator, the increased speed boosting the fairly meagre output of heat which was all the MG’s heater ever seemed able to produce. However, Kelly had only recently acquired a new soft top which fitted more snugly than any he had previously endured, and the little car was now just about warm enough to allow his body temperature to return to what he thought might be an almost normal level.
In the much improved conditions he relaxed slightly, easing the tension from his shoulders, and began to reflect on the events of the evening. Once he was comfortable enough to think about anything other than his own sorry physical state, he found that all his journalistic antennae were waggling. He told himself he was being ridiculous, but he couldn’t help it.
That lad in the pub had said that he was going to die. More than that. He had told Kelly he was going to be killed. And, probably only minutes later, he was dead. He had hinted at mysterious goings-on up at Hangridge. He had quite obviously been most unhappy to see the arrival of the two men who had been looking for him, and Kelly would not forget in a long while the look of abject fear in his eyes as he had stood in the doorway of The Wild Dog.
‘Minutes later he was dead.’ This time Kelly said the words out loud, as he motored through Newton Abbot, making himself abide by the speed limit, more or less, in spite of his eagerness to get home and dry. He didn’t want any speeding points on his licence; he certainly couldn’t afford to lose it again, that was for sure.
It was almost midnight by the time he arrived at his terraced home in St Marychurch, high above Torquay. He parked in the street outside and stepped out of the MG onto a dry pavement. The rain had obviously stopped here at least an hour or two hours earlier. He opened the little gate into his tiny front garden which — had he bothered to look he could have clearly seen, thanks to the illumination of the street lamp right outside — was almost completely overgrown by an impressive selection of weeds. Kelly did not look and, as usual, noticed nothing at all about his front garden until he stepped into it and a strand of bramble, blowing in the still strong wind, lashed him viciously across his left cheek.