No Reason To Die

by Hilary Bonner

  About the Book

  John Kelly, once a reporter, always a maverick, has become embroiled in the mystery surrounding a series of disturbing deaths at a tough army training base in the heart of Dartmoor. Several young men and women have died suddenly and tragically, mostly from gunshot wounds that the army claims to have been self-inflicted. There is a plausible explanation for each death individually, but when put together these explanations look very suspicious indeed.

  Kelly takes his concerns to his old friend Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows and together they attempt to break through the wall of secrecy the army has erected. Their involvement in what they come to believe is a major conspiracy, coupled with upheaval and tragedy in their own personal lives, brings them closer than ever before. But when powerful men in high places try to silence the ex-journalist in a shocking and unexpected manner, this threatens to be the investigation which could finally finish John Kelly for good...

  About the Author

  Hilary Bonner is a former showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. She now writes full time and lives in the West Country where she was born and brought up and where all her books are based. She is the author of eight previous novels. She also co-wrote It’s Not a Rehearsal, the autobiography of Amanda Barrie. Hilary was the Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association in 2003.

  Also by Hilary Bonner

  FICTION

  The Cruelty of Morning

  A Fancy to Kill For

  A Passion So Deadly

  For Death Comes Softly

  A Deep Deceit

  A Kind of Wild Justice

  A Moment of Madness

  When the Dead Cry Out

  NON-FICTION

  Heartbeat – The Real Life Story

  Benny – A Biography of Benny Hill

  René and Me (Gorden Kaye)

  Journeyman (with Clive Gunnell)

  It’s Not a Rehearsal (with Amanda Barrie)

  HILARY BONNER

  NO REASON

  TO DIE

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446457900

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in 2005

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Hilary Bonner 2004

  The right of Hilary Bonner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by William Heinemann

  Arrow Books

  The Random House Group Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

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  Random House (Pty) Limited

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 09 945166 2

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Private James Collinson, aged 17, Private Geoff Gray, 17, Private Cheryl James, 18, and Private Sean Benton, 20; all of whom died suddenly and unexpectedly at the Princess Royal Barracks at Deepcut, headquarters of the Royal Logistics Corps.

  And while this book is a work of fiction, and all the characters in it are fictional, the extraordinary events surrounding the death of those four young soldiers, and certain other of the 1,748 non combat deaths recorded within the British Army since 1990, provide its inspiration.

  Acknowledgements

  Geoff and Diane Gray, parents of Private Geoff Gray and Yvonne and Jim Collinson, parents of Private James Collinson, without whose generous assistance this book may not have been possible. Their dignity and quiet determination are awesome, and it was an honour and a privilege to get to know them; Sergeant John Woods of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary in Torquay; Police Constable Steve Mudge, of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, formerly a sergeant in the Royal Military Police; former Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary; former Parachute Regiment Colonel John Pullinger; and last but far from least, Major Rachel Grimes of the Royal Logistic Corps, currently employed in the Ministry of Defence Press Office, who freely helped me with all factual matters in spite of being aware of the inspiration for this book, leaving me to think that if the army had been as open from the beginning with the families of the young soldiers who died at Deepcut, then Geoff, Diane, Jim, Yvonne, and all the others who have formed the pressure group Deepcut and Beyond, may not have felt forced to campaign with every means at their disposal in order to, one day, be told the truth.

  One

  The young man fell heavily. His right shoulder hit the floor first and the pain made him grunt. Then the rest of his body followed quite slowly. It was a bit like the final act of a very bad ballet. His head bounced just once on the ancient flagstones, while his arms flayed the air desperately searching for something to hang on to, until, after a final, ineffectually limp, kick of one leg, he lay spreadeagled, limbs outstretched, face up, eyes and mouth wide open in surprise.

  There was a trickle of blood on his forehead where he had caught it against the edge of the bar on the way down. After the grunt he did not make a sound, but then the fall must have made it even harder for him to speak than it had been before. Neither did he attempt to move. But movement had also been pretty difficult before.

  Kelly was sitting on a stool in the corner, as far away from the pool table as possible. Kelly didn’t like pool in pubs. The cues, and the gyrating bottoms of those brandishing them, turned your average bar room into an obstacle course. There was nobody playing pool that evening, but there were some things in life which even Kelly would take no chances
with.

  There was actually hardly anybody in the pub at all. It was a wet Monday night in early November and the rain had been falling incessantly since early morning. It had been almost horizontal across the car park when Kelly had arrived a couple of hours earlier, and the driving easterly wind had been so strong that walking against it had not been easy. This had hardly been a day for a drive over the moors to The Wild Dog, an isolated eighteenth-century coaching inn, built alongside one of the handful of roads crisscrossing the heart of Dartmoor. Kelly, however, was prepared to undertake almost anything almost any time, except the things he should be doing with his life.

  An elderly couple were sitting at a table at the far end of the bar, in the lounge area which Charlie Cooke, the landlord, a likeable but inadequate amateur from Birmingham, now used as a glorified dining room. Apart from the young man lying prostrate on the floor, they and Kelly were the only customers. In summer The Wild Dog was packed, and even in the winter, over weekends blessed with half-decent weather, the old inn attracted a quite respectable level of business with customers motoring out for lunch and dinner from the towns and cities on the edge of the moors, like Plymouth, Newton Abbot, and even Kelly’s own home town of Torquay down on the coast. But The Dog had little or no local drinking trade and, in common with so many country pubs, had come to rely entirely on the provision of food and the seasonal influxes of tourists. Pubs just weren’t pubs any more, thought Kelly morosely.

  He had watched the young man’s fall with a kind of detached fascination. It had been more of a slide really, head and shoulders first, as he had bent at the waist so far backwards that gravity had refused to allow his body to remain any longer on the stool. Then there had been that last almost lazy kick-out with one leg, as he had gradually descended to the floor, the weight of his lower body causing him to slide along the flagstones, worn slippery with age, until he lay full length, his head nearly inside the mighty old inglenook which dominated the room. He was, however, in no danger of burning. Only a small modern oil stove smouldered fitfully in the centre of the huge fireplace.

  The elderly couple continued to concentrate very hard on finishing their microwaved frozen lasagne. Charlie’s wife, who did most of the catering herself, didn’t cook on out-of-season weekdays, but Charlie reckoned he was a dab hand with the microwave. Kelly didn’t agree. He’d once eaten Charlie’s microwaved lasagne. It had been cool and soggy in the middle, dry and chewy round the edges, and totally and utterly tasteless. However, when the young man fell off his stool the elderly couple focused every bit of their attention on the sorry meal before them, as if it were a mouth-watering gourmet experience. And they gave absolutely no sign whatsoever of noticing the only bit of action The Wild Dog was likely to see that day.

  Kelly noticed. But then Kelly noticed everything. It was his life’s work really. One way or another, he had made a living since he was a boy out of watching and listening and then writing it all down. He had been a journalist for many years, at the very top in Fleet Street until he let the demons get to him, and then back to his local paper roots in South Devon. But that was all behind Kelly now. Kelly had had enough of destroying lives. He was no saintly philanthropist and he’d been a damned good investigative reporter, with a real nose for a story – the type of journalist who, by and large and with one or two notable exceptions, had achieved marginally more good than harm. It was the destruction of his own life Kelly had wanted to halt, far more than that of anybody else. He had decided he was going to be a novelist. Indeed he was already a novelist – in as much as that he had given up the day job and written half a treatment and almost two chapters of his first novel.

  However, Kelly was at the displacement activity stage. It seemed to be lasting rather a long time and Kelly suspected that it would probably last throughout whatever passed for his writing career.

  He put his pint glass down on the bar. It contained a couple of inches or so of warm, flat, Diet Coke. Kelly didn’t drink alcohol any more, not because he didn’t want to but because he knew, and this time round he really did know, that if he ever started drinking again it would kill him. Simple as that. But there was only so much Diet Coke a man could force down, and Kelly had been sitting in his corner of the bar for two hours, pretending to think. It had been a sorry pretence; his mind had remained more or less blank throughout. And the young man’s fall had been the only real diversion of his day.

  Kelly stared idly at the still prostrate figure on the floor. He supposed somebody should do something. He glanced towards the bar. On the other side of it he could just see the top edge of an open trap door, but there was no sign at all of the landlord. Charlie had disappeared into the cellar more than ten minutes previously, ostensibly to change a barrel. Kelly thought it likely he was bored rigid and wanted a change of scenery, and couldn’t say he blamed him. Business was hardly brisk.

  Kelly’s back ached from sitting on the tall, angular, wooden stool for so long. He reached behind his head to rub his neck muscles through the thick oily wool of his dark blue fisherman’s sweater, then stretched his arms above his head. He didn’t know what he was doing in a pub at all, to be honest. It was habit, he supposed. That morning he’d spent three hours at his screen playing computer games and periodically checking his email, which invariably consisted of unsolicited messages from suppliers of deeply sad soft porn and little else, before giving up even kidding himself that he was about to start writing at any moment. He’d made himself some scrambled eggs on toast for lunch and then gone through the same charade for most of the afternoon. By teatime he’d had enough. In a state of total frustration he’d taken off in his car and had made himself head for The Wild Dog, rather than a potentially cheerier hostelry nearer to home, so that he would be unlikely to find disruptive company. He was, after all, he told himself, merely looking for a change of scene, seeking out some new and convivial surroundings in which to plot his next chapter. Kelly sighed. Yet more self-deception. He had been just as unable to concentrate on the great novel in the pub as he had been at home, and The Dog was hardly convivial, as he had of course known it could not possibly be, in that weather, on a Monday evening in November. There was often just a touch of sackcloth and ashes about his behaviour, Kelly reflected.

  He took a deep drag on his cigarette, then hastily removed it from his mouth. Kelly made his own roll-ups, and this one had burned so close to the end that it felt dangerously hot to his lips. He stubbed out the remains in an overflowing ashtray. Its contents were all Kelly’s own work, an unedifying pile of tobacco waste produced entirely by his own appallingly abused lungs. Smoking was Kelly’s sole remaining vice, although he’d only given up the others because he’d had no choice. He smoked a lot and he didn’t care any more. The only thing about smoking he intended to give up was even pretending that he wanted to stop.

  Automatically, he reached for the tobacco and the packet of Rizla papers in his pocket. Then the boy on the floor made a sort of half-strangled gurgling sound. The elderly couple bent their heads so close to their plates of lasagne it looked as if they might be about to disappear into them. Kelly glanced down at the boy without enthusiasm. Oh, shit, he thought.

  ‘Charlie,’ he called anxiously across the bar. ‘Charlie.’

  The young man rolled over onto his side and made an unsuccessful attempt to rise up on one shoulder.

  ‘Charlie,’ called Kelly again. There was no reply. Kelly leaned over the bar and peered down through the open trap door. There was a light shining up from below, but if Charlie was still in the cellar he made no response. The pub was built on the side of a hill and Kelly knew that there was a delivery door to one side of the cellar leading out into the yard and the beer garden beyond. If the night outside were not so bleak he might have suspected that Charlie had finally done a runner, for which Kelly would not have blamed him one bit. Charlie, a city boy who had previously been a motor insurance salesman, readily told the story of how throughout his adulthood he had dreamed the romantic dream
of life as a country publican. But The Wild Dog, while being just the place for a writer who can’t write to torture himself in, had given Charlie a rude awakening, Kelly reckoned. It was, in Kelly’s opinion, a morgue in the winter and a tourists’ hellhole in the summer.

  Wondering what on earth he was doing in the place anyway, Kelly leaned a little further across the bar, until his attention was again demanded by more gurgling sounds from the floor. He swung round on the stool for another look. The young man’s eyes were popping and his lower jaw drooped alarmingly. Kelly had a dreadful feeling he knew what was going to happen next. And he was right. The young man began to retch, great heaving motions racking his body.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Kelly.

  He’d always been able to move fast for a big man, and somewhat amazingly he still could. In a single smooth movement he was alongside and bending over the fallen drinker. With one hand, he caught hold of the collar of the boy’s jacket at the back of his neck, while at the same time hooking the other beneath one of his arms.

  ‘Right, sunshine, up!’ he yelled.

  The couple eating their supper shrunk further into their chairs, their heads buried even deeper into their lasagne. Meanwhile the young man, perhaps startled into something loosely resembling consciousness by Kelly’s authoritative voice, began to at least come close to finding his feet, and, with Kelly’s help, rose almost upright, still retching. Ducking to avoid the gnarled old beams laced across the pub’s low ceiling, Kelly half dragged, half lifted him into the gents’ toilet, kicking open the door with one foot. Once inside, he pushed the boy’s head into the nearest latrine. He knew there wouldn’t be time to get him into a cubicle.

  They only just made it. The boy was at once resoundingly sick. Kelly leaned against the door breathing heavily. He might still be able to move fast, but all those years of self-abuse had left him monumentally short of breath nowadays whenever he took any form of exercise, however brief. And heaving a near dead-weight drunk into a toilet was actually a pretty demanding sort of exercise.