Kelly didn’t have gloves either. And, summer or not, the thorough drenching he had now received meant that he was very cold indeed. He cupped his hands over his cigarette, wondering if the faint glow might warm his chilled fingers just a little.
And as he did so the doors of the police station opened and out stepped Richard Marshall. He was quite alone.
Kelly snatched his cigarette from his mouth and threw it on the ground. By his side Micky Lomas leapt into action with admirable swiftness. The young photographer moved smoothly forward, raising his camera to his eye as he did so, and had rattled off several frames of Marshall before the older man had time to blink.
It was Kelly’s turn then.
“Have you been released, Mr. Marshall?” he called out. “Can you tell us what is happening, please?”
Marshall, whose attention had been focused on the flash of the camera exploding before him, swung on his heel and turned to face Kelly. It was impossible in the half-light outside the station to read the expression in his eyes. His body language said shock and aggression. His fists were tightly clenched and his head jutted towards Kelly.
Involuntarily the reporter took a step backwards.
Then he watched Marshall relax, unclench his fists and slide one hand into his pocket.
“Yes. I’ve been released,” Marshall replied quietly. “The police have no grounds to hold me, no grounds whatsoever.”
“So you are not going to be charged?”
“What with?” asked Marshall.
He stepped forward then, catching the full effect of the lights outside the station, and Kelly could momentarily see the big jowly face quite well. Marshall was smiling, his eyes crinkled at the edges. His voice was ironic, his expression friendly.
Like Bill Talbot inside the station earlier Kelly decided to go for broke.
“With the murder of your wife and children,” he said bluntly.
Marshall’s eyes stopped crinkling, but the smile did not slip. Kelly had heard that he was a cool customer, and he was now learning just how cool.
“I have nothing more to say to you, young man,” he said.
Then a taxi pulled up by the curb giving Kelly’s trousers a further soaking as it did so, and Marshall, his eyes crinkling again with what appeared to be genuine amusement, swung away from him and walked towards it.
“Mr. Marshall, please,” continued Kelly, gallantly ignoring his latest misfortune. “My readers want to hear your side of the story.”
Marshall turned again.
“No, they don’t,” he said mildly. “They want to see me crucified.”
Kelly persisted. “They just want to know what happened, that’s all.”
“So do I, young man, so do I,” said Marshall obliquely.
“Look, would you do a proper interview with me? In-depth. Something to put the record straight once and for all.”
Marshall managed a small hollow laugh. “Dream on, young man, putting the record straight on this one is something that’s never going to happen.”
It was a totally ambiguous remark. Kelly studied the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s prime suspect carefully. Marshall was just so controlled for someone who may have murdered his entire family and spent a whole day and night and part of the previous day either locked up in a police cell or being questioned repeatedly. He had also been, by and large, perfectly pleasant in his manner, not at all what you might expect. Or at least, not what you might expect unless you knew the kind of spell he was capable of putting on people, particularly women.
A few weeks earlier Kelly had sought out Marshall’s latest mistress, Esther Hunter, the woman he had moved so quickly into Parkview, at the hairdressing salon she ran down by the harbour.
He remembered vividly how she had reacted when he had asked her if she was aware of what people were saying about her man and if it worried her at all.
“Of course I’m aware,” she had responded sharply. “How could I not be? And no, I’m not worried about any of it because it’s all a pack of wicked lies. Clara has gone off to live a new life and that’s all Richard and I want to do. That and be left alone. Now get off my premises.”
Esther Hunter, Kelly felt, was a nice enough woman, kindly, and quite beyond reproach before her involvement with Marshall. Kelly believed absolutely that she did not accept for one moment that her lover could possibly have murdered his family. She was simply besotted with him.
The reporter watched in silence as Richard Marshall opened the door of the taxi. He lowered himself into the back seat and then, with the door still open, addressed Kelly again.
“I don’t actually want to talk to anyone about any of this anymore,” he said as mildly as before. “Not you, not the police either. In fact I’ve seen enough of the police over the last few days to last a lifetime. Hence the taxi home. There was no way I was going in a police car, even though they did offer.”
He smiled wryly. It was a measured appeal for sympathy and understanding. Kelly had none of either for this man whom he honestly believed to be some sort of monster. He was, however, impressed by the way Marshall handled himself. No wonder the police had got nowhere, he thought to himself, as he watched the taxi splash its way up the road. And in that moment he had a dreadful feeling that they never would.
It was past midnight before Kelly made it home. To Micky Lomas’s further annoyance the reporter had insisted on following Marshall back to the Parkview Hotel and taking up a vigil in the street outside. To be honest Kelly had not expected any kind of result. Rather childishly perhaps, he admitted to himself, he had just wanted Marshall to know that he was there. Waiting and watching. But after standing in the rain for another two hours or so, even Kelly had had enough.
As he opened the front door to his house his mother hurried into the hallway from the sitting room.
“Still up?” he enquired.
“I wanted to know what has happened,” she said. Kelly was not surprised. He knew how much the Marshall affair was playing on his mother’s mind.
“They’ve let him go,” replied Kelly shortly.
“Oh my God,” said Angela Kelly. “Oh my God.”
She backed away from her son, still staring at him but not really seeing him, he thought, and retreated into the sitting room again.
He stood for a moment, dripping water onto the hall carpet, before shrugging out of his sodden raincoat which he draped over the hall-stand. His precious green suit, he feared, was ruined. He looked down at it sorrowfully. Then he took off the jacket, peeled off the trousers which stuck damply to his legs as he did so, and arranged them also on the hall-stand, forlornly hoping that they might dry without too much damage.
He ran upstairs, pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans and returned downstairs to join his mother. She glanced towards him as he walked into the sitting room, failing, it seemed, to notice that he had changed his clothes already, just as minutes earlier she had failed to notice that he was wet through. All of which was out of character for Angela Kelly.
She was sitting in the old leather armchair by the window.
“Make us a cup of tea, John, will you?” she asked.
Obediently he went to the kitchen and returned with two steaming mugs. His mother wrapped her hands around her drink, nursing it as if she were cold and it were warming her.