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“She was spreadeagled across the bed. That damned gun beside her. I can’t remember when I last saw so much blood...”

Kelly stopped again.

Karen was not going to give him an inch.

“Go on,” she instructed.

“She’d blown her fucking head off, hadn’t she?” Kelly leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and grasped his head with both hands, covering his face. For a moment Karen thought he was going to pass out. She still showed him no mercy, gave him no encouragement. Instead, once again, she waited in silence for him to continue to speak.

“I didn’t need a doctor to tell me she was dead, that’s for sure,” he said eventually. “I dialled 999, and the rest you know, I expect.”

“The rest I most certainly do not know. You are aware that the Met regard you as a suspect, I suppose?”

“Yes, and they’re dead right to,” responded Kelly instantly. “I am responsible for her death, I reckon.”

Karen sighed wearily. “Not again, Kelly,” she said. “We seem to have been down this road once before, I recall. Will you please stop playing games with me, and tell me in plain English what exactly you mean by that remark.”

Kelly leaned forward and bowed his head over the table. Karen could see the tension in him. His hands were trembling even more. Under different circumstances Karen might have felt sorry for him, but the way things were she had neither time nor inclination for any sympathy at all.

“Well, if it hadn’t been for me, if I hadn’t done what I did, I reckon she’d still be alive—”

“For Christ’s sake, Kelly,” Karen interrupted in a stentorian roar that caused both Chris Tompkins, and the young Met constable who had just returned with the requested glass of water, to look extremely startled. She was aware that she was conducting this interview in a far-from-textbook way, but she couldn’t help it. This was John Kelly, after all.

“All right. All right.” Kelly knew perfectly well what was required of him, Karen suspected, and from his demeanour it seemed that he might at last be prepared to give.

“I’ve been in touch with Jennifer Roth for some weeks, well, since just after I went to Jimmy Finch’s retirement do, actually,” he said, glancing at Karen rather sheepishly. She feared that she could guess what was coming next, and she also had a dreadful idea that she knew exactly where it was leading.

“Go on,” she prompted for what seemed the umpteenth time.

“Well, she’d already moved from Poole to Hammersmith. I tracked her down through the marina office. She’d left a forwarding address, simple as that.”

Karen shut her eyes briefly, then opened them again. She wondered how long it would have taken Dorset CID to think of that. And she should have arranged for such a simple enquiry herself, too.

“She’d found herself a job in an office,” Kelly went on. “A surprisingly good job, she said, but I think she also wanted to get away from her father, at least for a bit.”

“Anyway.” He stopped and glanced at Karen. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” he asked.

Karen thought that she might. She wondered if Kelly was ever going to stop playing games. And she also wondered if it was really just nerves that was making him behave like this or if he was covering something up. Mind you, she reckoned, if he was, then it was probably only his own thoughtless behaviour.

“Kelly, for Christ’s sake,” she said yet again.

He continued straight away then. “Well, I sought her out because I wanted to tell her what Jimmy Finch had said about Marshall confessing to him.”

“You did what?”

“I told her that Marshall had more or less confessed to killing her mother,” Kelly repeated a little sheepishly. “Not just about her mother’s death, but also implying that he’d killed her sister, too.”

“Terrific,” said Karen. “Absolutely terrific. And how did she respond to that, as if I couldn’t guess?”

“Look, I actually had a purpose in telling her what I did.” Kelly was on the defensive now. “I’d got the name of this doctor who was an expert on Recovered Memory Syndrome. You know about it?”

“Of course.” There’d actually been a conviction based on the highly controversial condition the previous year up in Merseyside which involved a young girl witnessing her father kill her mother in 1978. The girl, by then a twenty-nine-year-old woman, underwent intensive counselling sessions including hypnotherapy which had allegedly caused her to recall scenes that she had previously blanked out of her mind.

“Well, I suggested to Jennifer that she should see this doctor and undergo therapy, so that if she had any doubts at all about her memory of what happened she could at least be reassured. Well, that was the way I put it to her...”

Kelly paused. Karen smiled tightly. “Reassured” was a word that slipped rather too easily off the tongue of a one-time tabloid hack, she thought to herself. This time she waited a little more patiently for Kelly to start talking again.

“She listened to me but she didn’t seem all that keen; then she called me to say that she had made an appointment. I think she just wanted to talk to someone. Also, when you and the prosecuting counsel had all gone on about how she could have been disturbed as a child and that her memory, prompted by Marshall, might not be one hundred percent, I think something did seep through even though she wouldn’t have it at the time. I think she already had her doubts and I provided her with a way of putting them to rest. Or at least that’s what she hoped would happen.”

He paused and glanced at Karen as if he was looking for reassurance now.

“If you ask me, she so desperately wanted a father, a real father, that she willed herself to believe in Marshall, and that meant that she had to believe everything he told her about what happened with her mother and her sister. Marshall played daddy to her from the moment she rediscovered him, and she didn’t want it to end. By God, she didn’t.”

He stopped again. Karen studied him appraisingly. Sometimes she just could not believe the way Kelly behaved, the way he meddled.

“Psychiatrist yourself now, are you?” As she spoke she realized this was not the first time she had made that remark to him. But she had never been so serious before.

“Obviously not,” he replied very quietly. “I made a real balls-up of it. It’s true what I said before, all right, whatever you make of it. She’s dead because of me. I am responsible.”

“Two days ago now she phoned again and she said that she’d had several sessions with the shrink I’d recommended and that she had successfully recovered her memory, and that this time she was absolutely certain that she remembered everything correctly. She said she wanted to tell me all of it. But she wouldn’t talk on the phone. Said she wanted to meet me face-to-face. So I dropped everything and took the train to London.”

Kelly coughed dryly and reached for his glass of water. Karen was intrigued now.

“Why you, do you think?” she asked more gently.

“She said I’d provided the key to her memory and maybe I could tell her how to use it.” Kelly smiled. “Those were her exact words, come to think of it. Quite poetic really. I don’t think she knew who to turn to, actually. She had no friends worth mentioning and no family apart from Marshall.”

“What about going to the police?”

“Under the circumstances she didn’t think the police could help. Not this time round, as she put it.”

“Under what circumstances?”

Kelly smiled grimly. “Look, you don’t have to listen to me telling you anything secondhand,” he said. “I’ve got it all on tape.”