No Reason To Die

by Hilary Bonner

  In the first game, Kelly achieved a shut-out with no less than two of his mechanical opponents’ men on the bar. But he still managed to lose. He played three more games and lost all of them, too. Kelly was a good backgammon player, and well aware that one constant of playing against a computer is that there is always, as with anything automated and preprogrammed, a predictability factor. One way and another Kelly reckoned to beat his computer, at its highest level, something like seventy per cent of the time. Not today, it seemed. This really was not turning out to be a good morning.

  Impatiently, Kelly closed the thing down. Not only did he feel as unable to write as he had done for weeks now, but it also seemed that he couldn’t even play backgammon any more. He tossed his mouse to one side, tucked the keyboard into its home on a retractable shelf slotted beneath the top of his desk, and stared for several minutes at the empty black screen.

  Then he made a decision. It wasn’t much of a decision. He guessed he’d been intent, subconsciously at least, on this course of action since encountering that fatal accident the previous night and discovering who the victim was. It had been just the kind of incident he could never resist delving into.

  He reached for the phone to his left and pushed one button. A brisk female voice answered, a voice which always made Kelly smile. She had a way of answering the phone which, in itself, made it quite clear she had no time for prevarication.

  ‘Karen Meadows.’

  ‘Good morning, Detective Superintendent, and how are you this morning?’

  ‘Instantly plunged into a state of nervous tension by the very sound of your voice, Kelly.’

  ‘Now, that’s not kind …’

  ‘Probably not, but truthful. I don’t think I’ve heard from you since you left the Argus, and it’s been wonderfully peaceful, I can tell you.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Karen, you know you’ve been missing me …’

  ‘Really? I’m actually still coping with the flak from the last time you decided to meddle in police affairs—’

  ‘So am I.’ Kelly interrupted swiftly, and all the banter had gone from his voice.

  When he and Karen had last had dealings together, the subsequent events had without doubt taken Kelly a step too far, and had more or less led directly both to him quitting journalism and for him and the high-ranking detective failing to be in touch with each other for an uncharacteristically long time.

  He was well aware that under the circumstances it was going to be pretty hard for either him or Karen to slip back into the way things had once been between them.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you are, Kelly.’

  There was no longer any inflection in Karen’s voice. He realised that she had picked up at once on the flatness in his own voice. It seemed that they remained strangely good friends, beneath it all, these two. Just like always. He hoped so, anyway. He knew that she understood, and she was probably the only person in the world who did. But then, he and Karen had always been drawn to each other, although there had never been even the remotest suggestion of their friendship developing into anything more than that. As far as Kelly was concerned, if he had thought about it at all, he would probably have come to the conclusion that he so valued their relationship the way it was, that he would not want to risk changing it. But the truth was that he didn’t think about it. He’d never thought about it. He and Karen were mates, that was all. They certainly had a great deal in common. They were both inclined to be loners by nature, and they shared a sometimes near-obsessional approach to their work. Kelly had been aware of some kind of bond between them virtually ever since he had first met Karen almost twenty years earlier, when she had been an ambitious young detective constable and he already a star of Fleet Street. Indeed, he had helped extricate her from the threat of a scandal which could have destroyed the high-flying career he had always believed she was destined for. Karen was not quite as much of a maverick as Kelly had always been, but she was certainly a free spirit, a talented and able police officer, fiercely independent, who quite frequently chose to rebel against the more petty restrictions the police force imposed upon its officers.

  ‘You haven’t called to ask after my health, though, have you, Kelly,’ Karen continued in a perfectly normal sort of voice. ‘That’s never been your style.’

  Kelly detected just a hint of edge there, but decided to ignore it. Instead he went straight to the point.

  ‘Do you know about that fatal death on the Buckfast road last night?’ he asked.

  ‘Vaguely,’ she responded. ‘I have a report on it somewhere. Sent to CID as a matter of routine because somebody died, that’s all. It seems straightforward enough …’

  ‘No. I don’t think it is.’

  He heard Karen sigh down the line. ‘And what, pray, do you know about it exactly, Kelly?’

  ‘I was there. I don’t think it was an accident.’

  Kelly held his breath. He had no idea whether the young squaddie’s death was an accident or not, but he did know that if he prevaricated at all he would lose her. Karen Meadows had always had a short attention span.

  ‘Really?’ The detective superintendent sounded as if she was trying for a mix of sarcasm and dismissal in her voice. Kelly knew her so well. Well enough to also be able to detect a distinct note of curiosity. She was interested. She wanted to know what he knew. He’d got her. He must not waste the opportunity.

  ‘Look, have you got time for a pint at lunchtime.’

  ‘Kelly, no …’

  ‘Just for a few minutes, we could go to the Lansdowne.’ He named the pub directly opposite Torquay police station.

  ‘Kelly, I haven’t got time to go to the toilet. I never have time to go to the toilet. And you want me to meet you in a pub?’

  ‘They’ve got nice clean loos in the Lansdowne. We could chat in the ladies’, if you like.’

  ‘Very funny. All right. I’ll see you there at one-thirty. Don’t be late, I can spare half an hour, max.’

  ‘As if …’

  Kelly was smiling as he finished the call. It was funny how his conversations with Karen Meadows almost always left him smiling. She had that effect on him. He really shouldn’t have left it so long to get in touch, while all the while hoping that she would contact him first. But, on the other hand, he supposed he had felt that he’d needed a reason, and maybe she had felt the same. After the last time. When Kelly had decided to actively intervene in a murder investigation gone wrong the previous year, the repercussions had been enormous, and had left him with death on his conscience. Kelly had acted honestly enough, as he almost always did, and his motives had, by and large, been good. But he had also behaved with reckless impulsiveness. He was not proud of the episode, and indeed it had led him to resign from the Argus on the grounds that he no longer wished to do a job which could lead him, however inadvertently, to cause such devastation.

  And Karen Meadows, in spite of their long friendship, had made it quite clear at the time that she considered him to be a loose cannon with whom she no longer dared associate.

  He supposed he was lucky that only six months later she was prepared, at least, to talk to him.

  *

  Kelly got to the pub first as Karen knew he probably would have done, even without her warning against being late. He was sitting in the corner by the window, his usual pint of Diet Coke on the table before him, when she arrived, throwing the pub door wide open so that it banged against the wall behind it.

  Every head in the bar turned. Two CID men, sitting on tall stools, automatically lifted their pints and downed them. Karen knew they would not be comfortable to continue drinking in the same bar as their governor at lunchtime. It was raining again. Karen was wearing a long, white, caped mackintosh with a hood. She flung back the hood and tossed her bobbed dark hair. The pub lights enhanced its shine. The white cape fell open to display black sweater, black jeans and steel-tipped cowboy boots. She looked stunning. And her appearance was absolutely not what most people would expect of a policewom
an. The jeans were just tight enough to show her shape, which remained pretty damned fine. But Karen had no idea how good she looked and totally failed to notice Kelly’s admiring glance.

  She had made quite an entrance, yet she was unaware of that, too.

  She raised a hand towards Kelly, sitting in his corner, and strode across the bar to him. ‘I’ll join you in a pint of Coke,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘I’ve got a tricky meeting with the chief constable this afternoon, and I’m going to need all my remaining brain cells.’

  ‘Right …’ said Kelly, obediently rising from his seat and heading towards the bar.

  ‘And I’ll have a jacket potato with cheese, salad and a couple of sausages on the side. I’m absolutely fucking starving.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kelly again.

  ‘That’s all right, John, I’ll bring it over to you,’ called out Steve Jecks, the landlord.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kelly. This was a copper’s pub, and Steve, who had previously run another hostelry in Torquay which had also been a favourite haunt of local police, was a former copper. Karen was well aware that the waiter service was in her honour. Steve knew who she was well enough even though she was not a regular at the Lansdowne. She was head of regional CID and Steve knew all about keeping on the right side of the brass.

  She turned abruptly to Kelly, who had quickly returned to his seat. ‘So, let’s get on with it,’ she said.

  ‘And it’s lovely to see you, too.’ Kelly grinned at her.

  ‘Oh, stop it, Kelly. For a start, your boyish charm has never worked on me, and secondly, I’ve told you already, I don’t have any time.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Not even half an hour any more, twenty minutes max, now.’

  ‘OK.’ Kelly stopped playing games at once. ‘OK. I met the lad who was killed by that truck. It was in The Wild Dog, probably only minutes before he died …’

  He told Karen the whole story then, everything the young soldier had said about Hangridge, how frightened he’d seemed, the look in his eyes when he’d been escorted out of the pub by the two men who had come looking for him, and he put considerable emphasis on what had turned out to be not only the boy’s last words to him, but for all that Kelly knew may well have been the last words he ever spoke.

  ‘“They’ve killed the others. They’ll kill me, I’m sure of it.” That’s what he said, Karen, and half an hour or so later he was dead. Now, it may be possible that we just have some kind of weird sort of coincidence here. But I think it’s more than that. And, at the very least, surely it merits an investigation.’

  Karen was thoughtful. She really had been extremely hungry, and while Kelly talked she had been tucking into the jacket potato and sausages, brought over to her by Steve, with some gusto and not a little haste. She was therefore reluctant to speak at all, muttering merely a grunt or two every so often during Kelly’s discourse, until she had consumed enough of her meal to satisfy the worst of her hunger.

  ‘The boy was drunk, Kelly,’ she said eventually, narrowly avoiding spitting bits of half-chewed baked potato at him. ‘I’ve made a point of looking into the case since we talked on the phone. The post-mortem examination was held early this morning and, in fact, with the amount of alcohol he had in his system, he would have had to be blind drunk. I’m sure you noticed just how pissed he was, Kelly. You’ve had enough experience.’

  Kelly ignored the sarcasm, which Karen in any case felt had been rather beneath her, even though it was totally justified.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘But, none the less, the lad was genuinely terrified. You could see it in his eyes.’

  ‘Kelly, haven’t you heard of alcoholic paranoia? You of all people.’

  ‘Yes. Even suffered from it myself, Karen, just as you appear to be so kindly suggesting. Of course I know about alcoholic paranoia. But that wasn’t it. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Really. You a psychiatrist now as well as a potential Booker prize-winner, are you?’

  Karen didn’t know quite why she was being so hard on him, but she didn’t seem able to help herself. Perhaps it was because of what she had said to him as soon as he had phoned her that morning. Kelly always brought trouble. She watched him wince as she delivered her latest broadside, then shrug his shoulders. He didn’t rise to the bait at all, and instead answered her in a level tone.

  ‘Look, I can’t explain it, Karen, but I really did think the lad was one hundred per cent genuine and, OK, I know I can’t explain this either, but for some reason neither did I think he was suffering from alcoholic paranoia, or any other kind of paranoia, come to that.’

  Karen finished the final mouthful of her meal before responding. She was an organised eater and had arranged her meal into little food parcels, a piece of sausage, some cheesy potato and a sprinkling of salad in each, which she had devoured quite systematically in spite of her haste.

  ‘Look, Kelly, you saw the scene of the accident. You must have got some idea of what happened. There was one vehicle involved, a lorry being driven by a professional along a winding moorland road on a dark, rain-swept night, a pretty unsuitable road for a big artic’, even under the best of conditions, and one pedestrian who was out of his brains. Now, if that doesn’t add up to a straightforward, highly predictable scenario, I don’t know what does.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but you didn’t hear the lad talking …’

  ‘Let me tell you. Your squaddie, whose full name was Alan Connelly, by the way, and who shouldn’t even have been getting boozed up in The Wild Dog as he was only seventeen, just lurched out across the road in front of this extremely large articulated lorry. That’s what the driver said, and all the evidence, like tyre marks, etc, point to him having told the truth. There is absolutely no evidence to indicate any kind of foul play, and neither does there seem to have been any way the accident could have been the driver’s fault, not in that weather. The lad was out of his skull and the injuries that he received, according to the pathologist’s report, back up the driver’s claim that he seemed to virtually throw himself into the road. None the less, the poor bastard driver is totally traumatised and is still in hospital with shock. That’s about the sum of it, one of life’s minor tragedies. Nobody, but you, Kelly, has even suggested there could be anything more to it than that. So what are you really getting at?’

  Kelly shrugged again. ‘I don’t know, Karen. Of course I don’t know. But I do know this Alan Connelly was frightened silly and when I saw the pathetic little sod in a heap in that road, all I could think of was that he’d predicted his own death. And he’d been proven quite bloody right. There are some unanswered questions, Karen, you have to agree to that. What about those two men who turned up looking for him, for a start? And who were they? I asked them if they were from Hangridge, and come to think of it, they didn’t answer, but I felt sure they were soldiers. They had that look. And I just assumed they were mates of his. At first, anyway. But where were they when the boy was killed? They weren’t seen at the scene at all, and they haven’t come forward since, have they?’

  Karen finished her final food parcel, chewing appreciatively, and drained the last of her pint of Diet Coke.

  ‘Maybe they were drunk too, Kelly, and they and your tragic young friend just all went their separate ways outside the pub. Simple as that.’

  Kelly shook his head. ‘No. They weren’t drunk, no way. Not those two. And they wouldn’t have parted company with that boy, surely? They’d come to get him. They made it quite clear they were looking for him. Plus Connelly was so damned drunk, I find it hard to believe he could have made it half a mile down the road unaided.’

  ‘Oh, I dunno,’ muttered Karen, rising to her feet and swinging her latest extravagance, an eccentrically decorated Voyage handbag made of blue denim, with lots of dangly bits and designed to look like the top of a pair of jeans, over one shoulder. ‘It’s amazing what drunks can do.’

  ‘Yeah, all right, Karen, give it a break, will you.’

  Karen’s face broke into a grin
. She had a really cheeky, yet extremely warm way of doing so. It was quite endearing, but she was unaware of that too. Kelly sat quietly waiting for her to speak again.

  ‘OK, Kelly,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll at least see if we can find those two men. Do you remember what they looked like?’

  ‘Sort of, but they were bundled up against the weather – woolly hats, coat collars turned up, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Umm. Well, if you come across to the station with me, let’s try to get as full a description as possible on record. Do you think you might remember enough to be able to help put together a computer image?’

  Kelly nodded a little uncertainly.

  ‘Right. Then I’ll see what inquiries I can set in motion up at Hangridge. If your two men are soldiers stationed up there, and we can come up with good enough images, somebody out at the barracks might recognise them. Shouldn’t hold your breath, though, Kelly, however good a likeness you come up with. The army doesn’t take kindly to civilian plod poking about without a damned good reason.’

  ‘Which is precisely my point,’ said Kelly, rising to his feet, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair, and setting off in pursuit of Karen, who was already half out of the door. ‘They’ll cover up anything they can to keep it in the family.’

  Karen did not bother to reply. She knew he was right about that, though. Although the civilian police theoretically had jurisdiction over military establishments in almost all relevant matters, in practice the vast majority of non-combat deaths were investigated by the SIB, the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police, with no civilian police involvement at all. Civilian police forces were routinely notified of suicide and accidental deaths on military premises within their area, but only became actively involved when the RMP reported obvious foul play. And Karen was one of many senior officers who felt that all sudden non-combat deaths of military personnel should be investigated by civilian police forces in exactly the same way as all non-military sudden deaths were. Indeed, she believed it to be vital for such investigations to be independent as well as thorough.