No Reason To Die

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘Only if he thought he could get away with it,’ muttered Kelly.

  ‘What?’ Kelly knew that Karen had heard him perfectly well. You could tell that from the way she had snapped her reply.

  ‘I don’t know, Karen,’ Kelly replied in a more conversational tone of voice. ‘I expect he would, if he were privy to murders. Most people in that situation don’t find lying too difficult.’

  ‘Now you’re talking nonsense.’ Karen snapped the words again. For a moment Kelly thought she was going to hang up on him. And he wasn’t going to let her do that until he had extracted all the information he possibly could from her.

  ‘Look, just tell me one thing,’ he asked quickly. ‘Do you have the name of the recruit who was killed on the range.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘C’mon, Kelly. I know you. You’re always bloody trouble. I’ve made further inquiries and, to be honest, I’m pretty well satisfied now that Alan Connelly’s death was a tragic accident and no more.’

  ‘No you’re not, Karen, or you wouldn’t even have phoned me today.’

  Kelly was quite certain he was right. He knew Karen Meadows every bit as well as she knew him.

  ‘Apart from anything else, Kelly, I’m not sure that you of all people should be getting any further involved. You’ll start poking around and causing mayhem as usual. It’s not even your territory any more, is it? You’re supposed to be a novelist now.’

  ‘Yeah, and Hangridge is just a displacement activity, that’s all. And maybe a way of earning a bit of linage which I could certainly do with. Look, if everything is as above board as you say it is, what harm can there be in giving me that name?’

  He could hear Karen sigh.

  ‘I know I’m going to regret this …’ she muttered.

  Kelly waited. He still wasn’t sure whether or not Karen was going to give him the information he had asked for, but he knew well enough when to stop pushing her.

  ‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s Foster. Fusilier Craig Foster. Actually, I’m a bit surprised you don’t remember anything about his death. Though I must admit, I didn’t. But apparently it did get some press coverage, and you were actually working for the Argus at the time.’

  ‘Six months ago? I think I probably had other things on my mind.’

  Six months previously, Kelly had still been deeply involved with another case. And as always with him, his involvement had bordered on obsession and he had taken little notice of anything much else happening in the world.

  Karen didn’t respond. But he knew she would be well enough aware of what he was referring to.

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Kelly. No doubt I’ve told you too much already. Situation normal.’

  She hung up then without saying goodbye. Situation normal, indeed, thought Kelly.

  He replaced the receiver slowly and forced himself to turn his attention back to his computer screen.

  The phone rang again almost at once. It was Moira’s daughter Jennifer.

  ‘I just thought I’d call, John, to remind you that Mum’s expecting you over tonight.’

  Kelly knew what she meant. Could hear the unspoken words inside his head. Please don’t forget, or pretend to forget, or whatever it is that you do to avoid seeing Mum. Please don’t let her down again.

  The awful truth was that he didn’t want to visit Moira ever again. Not for as long as she was ill. And it was a tragic fact that she was not going to get better. Even if nobody was ever allowed to say the words. But he knew that this time he would visit, if only to make some amends for his many shortcomings.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ he promised. ‘You just give her all my love and tell her I’ll see if I can’t find a couple of hot new videos for her.’

  He put the phone down again, held his head in his hands for a few minutes, and then, with a great effort of will, reverted his attention yet again to the computer screen and made himself exit his games programme.

  ‘Right,’ he said, as he resolutely clicked on ‘My Documents’ and called up that empty document ‘Untitled Chapter Three’. For a good ten minutes he stared at the blank white screen, moving barely a muscle. Then, very suddenly he grabbed his mouse, quit Word and called up his games programme again.

  Halfway through being beaten rotten in his third backgammon game, he accepted that he was unable even to concentrate on that, let alone on writing. His thoughts were somewhere else. On a moorland road, late on a wet foggy night. And within the confines of an isolated barracks where young soldiers learned their trade well away from prying eyes. A place where almost anything could happen, and yet, even in the high-tech communications era of the twenty-first century, in a country which retained an allegedly free and probing press, it remained quite likely that nobody outside its sentry-posted perimeters would ever know.

  ‘Damn,’ Kelly muttered to himself. ‘There’s something going on up there, something big. I can just feel it.’

  Just an hour or so later, Karen Meadows received a totally unexpected phone call. Her head was buried in the inevitable piles of paper on her desk when it came, and Karen welcomed distractions from her paperwork every bit as much as Kelly did from his alleged writing.

  This call, however, was more than that, and, in addition to being merely unexpected, was also, she had to admit to herself, surprisingly welcome.

  ‘Good afternoon, Karen, it’s Gerry Parker-Brown here.’

  Good Lord, she thought. It had not really occurred to her that he would contact her. Indeed she had automatically assumed, under the circumstances, that she would have to chase him if she considered it necessary to follow up their meeting at Hangridge. Out loud she merely said: ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘I just called to tell you that I’m afraid the results of my preliminary inquiries at the camp have not so far been helpful at all,’ the colonel continued. ‘Nobody I’ve shown your pictures to has recognised either of the chaps from the pub, not from those images anyway, and neither have any of my men come forward to say that they were there.’

  Now that was not a surprise, thought Karen. She did wonder, however, why the colonel was calling to tell her nothing at all, and so soon.

  ‘It won’t stop here, though, I can assure you, Karen,’ Parker-Brown went on. ‘I will set up an internal inquiry and I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with something …’

  Karen remained unconvinced, but said nothing.

  ‘Even if they were soldiers, they could have been friends of young Connelly from another regiment, who knows? But I haven’t given up yet, Karen, and as soon as we get anything, anything at all, I’ll be right on to you, I promise.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Karen. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Indeed, she didn’t think there was much else to say. And she was still wondering what had motivated Gerry Parker-Brown to call her so quickly in order to give her no information. She did not think, somehow, that he was the kind of man to do anything much without a reason.

  ‘Meanwhile, I wondered how you felt about a drink and a spot of dinner,’ Parker-Brown went on smoothly.

  Karen nearly fell off her chair. Whatever had been flitting through her mind concerning this call, Colonel Gerrard Parker-Brown asking her out on a date had not figured at all. But that did seem to be what was happening. And she was so confused that she found herself unable to respond properly.

  ‘Um, well … I’m not sure … uh …’

  He interrupted her stumblings. ‘I know it’s a frightful cheek, but all too many of my evenings seem to get filled up with army business of one kind or another, and tonight I happen to be free. So I just wondered how you were fixed? I’m sick and tired of spending my free time on my own, if you want the truth.’

  The last bit was not particularly flattering, but the colonel – or Gerry, as Karen supposed she really must start thinking of him after this approach – had also managed to indicate pretty clearly that he was u
nattached. And she suspected that he had done so quite deliberately.

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’ she continued hesitantly, while at the same time feeling quite angry with herself. What on earth was the matter with her? Why was she so thrown at being asked out by a man? She knew the answer to that, of course. Her last thoroughly unwise love affair, which had been so important to her, had been with a married junior police officer, Detective Sergeant Phil Cooper, and it had left her totally disillusioned with men generally. When Cooper’s wife had found out, he had ended the affair at once. He had later tried to start it all again, of course, but Karen’s heart had by then been broken. It really had. And since that sorry episode, which apart from anything else had threatened to wreck her career, Karen had totally shut down her emotions. For almost a year now, both her head and heart had been closed to even the notion of romance. She had also shut down sexually, too. When Cooper had stepped out of her life, so her libido had also departed, and she had not felt so much as a flicker in that direction since.

  Parker-Brown interrupted her again, for which she was grateful, as she suspected that he may have stopped her causing both of them considerable embarrassment with her dithering.

  ‘Look, nothing special,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Just two people, who I suspect may have a great deal in common and who I hope may become friends, sharing a drink and a spot of supper. That’s all.’

  He had a pretty good turn of phrase, Karen had to give him that.

  ‘Well, I am free tonight …’ she began. She was free, in fact, virtually every night. Except when she was working. And that, at least, she suspected, might be one thing they had in common.

  ‘And?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’d be delighted,’ she heard herself saying. And she realised that she meant it too. Which was yet another surprise.

  He called for her at her flat at eight-thirty, just as he had said he would. He was wearing blue jeans, a black jacket and a bright white T-shirt. It was an extremely classy black jacket. Karen knew about clothes. She thought it was probably Paul Smith. And she was glad he had dressed casually. Karen only did casual. She spent a disproportionate part of her salary on very special designer numbers, but she preferred a DKNY track suit or an Armani bomber jacket to more formal wear.

  She was wearing khaki combat trousers from Replay, and a big, loose, white cotton Comme des Garçons shirt with an elaborately embroidered red abstract relief down one side of its front. She thought their styles matched rather well.

  He looked good, she had to admit it. And very young. She had already guessed that he was probably four or five years younger than her forty-three years, but out of uniform he appeared even more youthful. And rather more dishy, Karen thought. But then she had never been into uniforms. In her opinion, they were a necessary evil in certain professions, and she had been delighted to discard her own permanently when she had moved into CID.

  Covertly, she looked him up and down. With his shock of sandy hair, those crinkly eyes and that ready smile, he was an extremely attractive man. She would just have to overlook the fact that he looked so much like a square-jawed hero out of the Eagle or Boys’ Own, that was all.

  He was carrying a bunch of white roses which he handed over with a small bow.

  ‘Sorry to be so old-fashioned, it’s the way I was brought up,’ he said with a wide grin.

  He both looked and sounded as if he was trying to make a weak joke, but she suspected he was probably just telling the truth. After all, if ever a man had public school and Sandhurst written all over him, it was Gerrard Parker-Brown. Even his name spoke for itself. Karen could only imagine what sort of family he came from.

  ‘I thought this was just a drink between friends,’ she said, but softened the words by smiling back at him.

  ‘It is, but we passed a stall selling those roses and I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘Ah. You like flowers?’

  ‘I do. Gardening is my passion. Or it used to be …’

  He seemed about to tell her something, then stopped. Which was reasonable. They were, after all, standing in the doorway to her flat, and it was not quite the place for exchanging confidences.

  ‘Funny sort of hobby for a soldier, isn’t it?’ she enquired casually, as she gestured for him to step inside.

  ‘Not so much as you may think,’ he replied. ‘Some of the greatest generals in history were gardeners.’

  ‘Name two,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know, my mind has gone completely blank and I can’t think of one,’ he responded. ‘But it is true, honestly.’

  Laughing, she reached for her white mackintosh cape. The weather had improved dramatically during the last couple of days, but Karen didn’t trust it. It was still November. And she really did absolutely hate getting her hair wet. It went frizzy at the front and stuck out at an angle at the back and sides.

  He grinned at her. ‘If you’re ready, the car is waiting,’ he said.

  She found that a rather curious turn of phrase, but he did not give her time to pass comment. He spoke again almost immediately, as she picked up her car keys from the little narrow console-table she kept next to the front door.

  ‘Nice piece,’ he remarked. ‘Georgian?’

  She nodded, mildly surprised yet again. Not only did she not see him as a gardener, but neither would she have put him down as a man with any interest at all in antiques.

  In the car park, he steered her towards a black Range Rover. A uniformed soldier-chauffeur sat in the driver’s seat. Suddenly, the phrase ‘the car is waiting’ made sense.

  ‘One of the perks of the job,’ said Parker-Brown quickly, yet again giving her little time to say anything. ‘And it means I can have a drink.’

  She still said nothing. Just go with the flow, girl, she told herself.

  He took her to the Cott Inn at Dartington, where they drank bitter and ate piping hot steak-and-kidney pies. Conversation came easily, considerably more so than she would ever have expected.

  ‘I much prefer this to eating formally, I do hope you agree,’ he said, as they sat together by a raging fire.

  Karen settled back in her chair, idly watching the flames. She did feel extremely relaxed in this man’s company, that was for certain.

  ‘I do, I love it,’ she replied. ‘But I would have put you down for a formal man. I mean, with your background I wouldn’t have thought you’d ever had much experience of anything other than formal dining.’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty true of army life,’ he said. ‘Number one dress and the regimental silver and all of that—’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she interrupted. ‘And one would assume that with your sort of family background, too …’

  It was his turn to interrupt.

  ‘Karen, what on earth sort of background do you think I have?’ he asked.

  She paused and studied him carefully. His face was giving nothing away.

  ‘Well, public school and Sandhurst, I suppose,’ she said. ‘And with a name like yours, a pretty upper-crust family, I should imagine.’

  He grinned quickly, but was rather serious when he spoke again. ‘My father was also a fusilier, another professional soldier, but he wasn’t an officer,’ he began. ‘He was a corporal in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. His name was Graham Parker and I can barely remember him. He was killed in Northern Ireland in 1968 when I was just four years old and I don’t think we ever saw a lot of him at home …’

  Karen found herself doing mental arithmetic. That made Gerry forty, at least a year or two older than she had judged him to be, but still young to be a full colonel, she was sure.

  ‘It was only really the beginning of the troubles, not long after the civil rights march in Londonderry which is generally reckoned to have been the start of it all, and only weeks into the Royal Fusiliers’ first tour of duty over there,’ Parker-Brown continued. Karen noticed that his voice had acquired a far away note. ‘He was actually very, very unlucky. But enough of that. I
t was all a long time ago.’

  Parker-Brown flashed that grin again.

  ‘Anyway, my mother remarried a couple of years later, a plumber named Martin Brown. He adopted me and brought me up, and did his best to be a father to me. But my mother never wanted me to forget my real father and she thought it was important that I retained his name, which is how I became Parker-Brown. That was her solution. And Martin went along with it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Karen. ‘But what about your first name. Gerrard. I mean, isn’t that a bit posh for a corporal’s lad?’

  ‘Ah.’ Parker-Brown was smiling easily now. ‘It seems that my mother had been watching a film shortly before I was born, in which Gerrard Street, in the West End of London, featured briefly. She’s always suffered from occasional delusions of grandeur, my mum, and she so much liked the sound of Gerrard, which she did indeed think was suitably posh, that she decided that should be my name. Which is why I have two Rs in the middle, rather than the usual Gerard with one R. Unfortunately, she didn’t realise until too late that it’s actually a street full of Chinese restaurants and knocking shops, and not the tiniest bit posh.’

  Karen laughed and shook her head.

  ‘Not what you expected, eh?’ he enquired.

  She shook her head again.

  ‘So, didn’t you even go to public school, then?’

  ‘Absolutely not. State primary and then a grammar school. Thank God for the eleven-plus. The system may not have been perfect, but it did give kids like me a real chance. I always wanted to go into the army, and more particularly I wanted to be a fusilier like my dad, and in spite of having lost her husband in action, my mother encouraged me. She has always said she knew it was what my father would have wanted. He’d been a dedicated career soldier, you see, although in the ranks. She was more than happy for me to chose a military career. I don’t think she imagined that I’d be an officer, though – as you pointed out – she did give me the right name, I suppose. Anyway, grammar school gave me that opportunity. I passed the right exams and, yes, I did go to Sandhurst. That’s the only bit you got right.’