“It’s my fault, John,” she suddenly blurted out.
Kelly had already heard that from her. It was worse now, of course. Now that Marshall had been released.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Mum,” he responded.
“I’m not being ridiculous, John. Lorraine Marshall told me her father had killed her mother. She actually told me, and I did nothing about it. Absolutely nothing.”
“That’s not true. She didn’t tell you that. And you didn’t ‘do nothing’ about it.”
“I may as well have done.” Angela Kelly put down her mug of tea on the table by her side, quite uninterested in drinking it, apparently, even though she had asked for it. Kelly noticed then that the previous year’s school photograph was also on that little table. It should have been hanging on the wall in the hall with the others. His mother had obviously been sitting looking at the picture until he arrived home. The Marshall sisters were side by side, sitting cross-legged in the front row. Kelly knew exactly which they were. His mother had pointed them out to him often enough. Two pretty girls, both with dark-brown hair and pale blue eyes like their father, smiling for the camera, just as they had been told to do, no doubt. They looked almost doll-like in their grey and maroon school uniforms. Kelly felt his mother’s eyes following his gaze.
“Can you imagine that any father could kill two innocent little children like that?” his mother asked, her voice high-pitched, almost as if she were on the verge of hysteria.
“No, Mum, I can’t,” he said. “Neither could anyone else, and neither could you. You shouldn’t blame yourself and you don’t even know for certain that you have any reason to do so.”
“Oh, but I do, John. I do blame myself. And I do know. Really I do. Sometimes at night, I dream, sometimes it’s so vivid it’s actually like I can see him attacking Clara and those poor dear girls.”
The words came tumbling out. Sighing, Kelly prepared himself to listen yet again to the same old story. His mother had been torturing herself over the past few months, and this had reached crisis point in the previous few days, since the police had finally decided to launch a missing persons enquiry and had eventually arrested Richard Marshall.
“I just don’t understand why I didn’t go to the police at the time,” she said. “I’ll never forgive myself. I could have saved those two little girls.”
“Look, I keep telling you, we still don’t even know for certain that they’re dead,” protested Kelly.
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” responded his mother.
Kelly slumped back in his chair. She was almost certainly right, of course. And the girls’ mother was almost certainly dead, too. Kelly had never met Clara Marshall or her daughters. He knew them only through his own mother who, although apparently more distressed by the fate of the children, also always talked fondly and regretfully of Clara Marshall whom she described as a quiet but warmly attractive young woman, totally devoted to her little girls.
He said nothing more. After a bit his mother spoke again. Her eyes were very bright.
“She told me her father had murdered her mother, and I did nothing about it,” she repeated.
Kelly fished in his pockets for cigarettes, then remembered that he didn’t have any. The packet which had drowned within the folds of his inadequate raincoat had been his last. This really was turning out to be a bad day, he thought.
“Look, Mum,” he began patiently, beginning the diatribe of reassurance that he had already uttered many times. “Lorraine Marshall told you in school that her father had ‘got rid’ of her mother. You said that she was upset, but if parents are having marriage difficulties of course their children are upset. You had absolutely no reason to suspect murder, for Christ’s sake. And you did do something. You went round to see Richard Marshall that evening.”
Angela Kelly grunted in a derisory fashion. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? And he spun me this yarn about how Clara had run away with an Aussie backpacker and how his heart was broken, and I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then when the children didn’t come to school the next day and he called to say their mother had taken them away with her, I swallowed that too.”
“He’s an operator, Mum. Richard Marshall has a history of conning people. You may be a head teacher, but you’re not infallible, you know. And anyway, when you realized there could be something seriously wrong you went straight to the police...”
“Yes, six months after the children disappeared. Six whole months after. And even then only when all the gossip started. I should have thought it through. I should have done something about it at the time. I shouldn’t have been taken in by the dreadful man.”
“Look, the police interviewed Marshall then, didn’t they, and he convinced them too. He is very plausible.”
But Bill Talbot also had regrets, Kelly knew that. Bill Talbot wished he had listened to the likes of Angela Kelly much earlier. Talbot was well aware that the investigation had taken far too long to get going, but until Clara Marshall’s father had stepped in, the police had really had nothing more than gossip and hearsay to go on.
The reporter reflected on all that for a moment, until he was interrupted by his mother’s voice again.
“It’s worse than that, John, and you know it,” she said, going off on a now-familiar tangent. “I told Marshall what Lorraine had said in school. I told him that she had said that her father had got rid of her mother. I honestly believe that he went and got the girls from Mrs. Meadows the next day and killed them because of what I’d told him. I believe that absolutely and nothing will ever make me change my mind.”
Kelly didn’t bother to reply. He finished his tea and went to bed. He had no idea at all how to help his mother. Indeed, he didn’t think anybody could help his mother. She blamed herself, and that was that.
In the morning Angela Kelly made no further mention of the previous night’s conversation as she served breakfast to her husband, also a schoolteacher, and to her son.
Adam Kelly was a good solid man who had no time at all for anything fanciful. He’d apparently gone to bed early the night before and left his wife to do her fretting alone. Indeed, Kelly doubted that his mother had shared any of her true feelings about the Marshall case with him. She saved that for her only son, he thought wryly.
He studied her carefully. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked as if she had almost certainly been crying during the night. He noticed then that there was a brandy glass upside down on the draining board and that the bottle of brandy, normally kept for medicinal use only in their house, stood on the worktop alongside. Kelly was further alarmed. He didn’t suppose for one minute that Angela Kelly had consumed more than a measure or two, but he had never before known his mother to drink spirits at all — except occasionally as part of a hot toddy if she had the flu or a bad cold. It was all getting very worrying. He did hope she was not going to dwell on the Marshall case for much longer. But he already feared that she would.
Leaving her and his father at the kitchen table he walked into the hall to make a check call to the police station. The policeman who answered the phone was a young man Kelly had been to school with. The first bit of luck he’d had in days, thought Kelly wryly, still mourning the demise of his beloved green suit.
“No, there’s no plans to bring him in again that I know of,” said PC Joe Willis morosely.
Kelly was already well aware that almost everybody even remotely involved with this case was affected by it in some way. And it only took a little bit of prompting to make PC Willis considerably more forthcoming.