No Reason To Die

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘No. No. Not his mother.’

  ‘Well, you knew him, anyway?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. Look you’d better come in.’

  Kelly followed her into the lofty hallway of the old Victorian villa. Inside the house was not unlike the two little boys who were now playing in the small front garden – a bit scruffy but well scrubbed. The tiled floor shone, although several of the tiles were chipped and broken, and the once white paintwork was scuffed and tinged with yellow, but none the less spotlessly clean.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ said the woman, leading the way into a big square room dominated by an old gas cooking-range and a huge wooden table covered with a flower-petalled plastic tablecloth.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing towards any one of a selection of ill-matched chairs. ‘Are you from the army? There’s nothing more I can tell you about Trevor, that’s for sure. It was a tragedy, his death, but I didn’t think anyone was all that surprised.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ Kelly queried, as he chose the chair nearest to him.

  ‘Well, no. Look, who did you say you were?’

  Kelly, glad that he had had the foresight to ask Margaret Slade for that letter, produced it from his pocket.

  ‘There’ve been some other deaths in the Devonshire Fusiliers, and I have been asked by the families of some of the young people involved to investigate a little further. There are some unsolved mysteries in certain cases. I’m looking into it, that’s all at this stage.’

  Kelly held out Margaret Slade’s letter towards the woman and she took it from him.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  Kelly waited in silence while she read it. When she had finished and looked up at him questioningly, he spoke again.

  ‘Forgive me, but I wonder if I could ask who you are and what your relationship to Trevor Parsons was. I thought you were his mother at first, because, you see, yours was his last civilian address.’

  The woman nodded. ‘I’m Gill Morris,’ she said. ‘I was Trevor’s foster-mother, but only quite briefly …’

  There was a crash as if a ton of bricks had been thrown against the kitchen door, which swung open to allow the two small boys to burst through, pushing their tricycle before them like some kind of battering ram. Not for the first time, Kelly marvelled at the amount of noise and commotion the very youngest of children could create.

  ‘No, you don’t. Out!’ commanded Gill Morris. And without even bothering to dissent, the two boys swung around, still pushing the tricycle before them with dangerous force and speed, and crashed through the door again.

  ‘They’re at the worst age,’ said Gill Morris, casting her eyes heavenwards. ‘They’re already quite big and surprisingly strong, but they have little or no brain at all to go with their physical power. And no control, either. They’re like miniature loose cannons.’

  She smiled indulgently. Kelly raised one eyebrow in silent query.

  ‘Yes, I’m fostering these two, too,’ she said. ‘My Ricky and I, that’s what we do. We’re professional foster-parents, I suppose. He inherited this great big house from his parents and it just cries out to be filled with children, doesn’t it? We had three of our own, and then, when they started to grow up, it seemed natural to take in some more.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kelly. ‘So Trevor was one of them. What can you tell me about him?’

  ‘Not that much, really. We only had him for seven or eight months. He’d had a hell of a life as a youngster, poor kid. Knocked around by his dad. Neglected by his mother. He’d been in and out of care since before school age, and it had certainly affected him. He was a difficult kid, no doubt about that, but who could blame him? He was fifteen when he came to us and hadn’t seen either of his parents for years. And he was about sixteen and a half when he walked out one day. He always said he wanted to join the army, but we didn’t even know he’d done it until they came to tell us he was dead. Apparently, he’d joined up as soon as he was allowed to, at seventeen, but we didn’t know.’

  ‘So, what about the six months or so between when he was with you and when he was able to join the army? Why didn’t he give that address?’

  ‘I’m not even sure that he had an address. We heard through social services that they’d found him staying with a mate at one point. I don’t know anything for certain. We never saw him again after he left us. Funny really, some of the kids do get to be almost like your own, however much you fight against it, and a lot of them come back and visit. We’re surrogate grandparents a couple of dozen times over now, you know.’

  As she spoke, Gill Morris sounded like any proud grandmother. He thought what a special person she must be. And her husband, come to that.

  ‘But Trevor, once he’d gone, he’d gone. And like I said, he wasn’t with us that long. Ricky and I even thought that it was quite possible that he may have slept rough for a bit. He always fancied himself as joining the SAS, you know. But there wouldn’t have been much chance of him getting into a regiment like that. To be honest, Ricky and I were a bit surprised that he got into the army at all.’

  ‘Really, why?’

  ‘Well, like I said, he was pretty screwed up by all that had happened to him. He liked the idea of playing soldiers, but he wasn’t exactly stable. I wouldn’t have put a gun in his hand, I can tell you that for nothing.’

  ‘And from what you said, it wasn’t a shock to hear that he had killed himself.’

  ‘Well, it was a shock, but when you thought about it, poor Trevor was so messed up that he had to be a likely candidate for suicide. You couldn’t imagine him coping with army life. You couldn’t imagine him coping with any sort of life, really. We just hoped that as he got older he’d settle down, sort his head out a bit. But he never got the chance, did he?’

  ‘It would seem not.’ Kelly was thoughtful. Maybe Trevor Parsons’ death had been a genuine suicide, after all. It still didn’t mean that Jocelyn Slade had killed herself, or that the deaths of Craig Foster and Alan Connelly had been genuine accidents.

  ‘So, you honestly have never thought that there was anything suspicious about Trevor’s death?’

  ‘No. Not at all. Should we have done?’

  Kelly didn’t know quite what to say. ‘Probably not,’ he responded eventually. ‘It’s just that the parents of three other dead Devonshire Fusiliers are very suspicious indeed about the way in which their children died.’

  Gill Morris nodded her head slowly. ‘I grasped that from your letter,’ she said. ‘But all I can tell you about Trevor, Mr Kelly, is that the poor kid had probably been a tragedy waiting to happen for many, many years.’

  Kelly left quickly after ascertaining that Gill Morris could help him no more. And what she had told him, while not necessarily having any relevance at all to the other deaths, had sown the first seeds of doubt in his mind. Back behind the wheel of the MG, he told himself that was no bad thing. It was important for him to keep as open a mind as possible in order to conduct a proper investigation. If he was too convinced that the deaths were suspicious, then his inquiries could end up being just as perfunctory as he was sure the army’s had been. He needed to be very sure of himself before coming to any conclusions. He owed Karen that, because he knew she was sticking her neck out probably more than ever before.

  He checked his watch and, as he did so, cursed his luck that the home of the witness in the Jocelyn Slade case, Fusilier James Gates, was in London, and East London at that, which meant that when approaching from the west the whole of the city centre had to be crossed. After all, the Devonshire Fusiliers still considered their home county to be their major source of recruitment, and Kelly already knew from his days as an Evening Argus reporter that approximately sixty per cent of the regiment’s strength were native Devonians. Yet so far his investigations had taken him to Scotland and to Reading, and now he needed to travel to London proper. It was, however, only just gone ten o’clock. There was therefore plenty of time to make the return trip that day, and as he was already
in Exeter, Kelly decided to pick up one of the Plymouth or Cornwall to London expresses from St David’s station.

  He parked in the station car park. The next train, due just half an hour later, arrived at St David’s on schedule. For a change, the journey passed without incident and the train also arrived at Paddington on time. Kelly took the tube to Mile End, having already checked the London A–Z, which he always kept in his car, to plot the short walk necessary to take him from the tube station to what he believed to be James Gates’ family home. He no longer had the money for cross-London taxis, and in any case he hoped that the tube would actually be quicker. Certainly, on this occasion, his entire journey turned out to be a surprisingly efficient one.

  His walk took him through a fairly rough part of London to a council flat in an uninviting tower block. A legacy from the sixties, he thought. A sullen-looking young man, with close-cropped orange hair and a sprinkling of freckles, answered the door. He looked about the right age to be Gates himself. Kelly wondered if he had struck really lucky.

  ‘James Gates?’ he ventured.

  The young man scowled. ‘Is that some kind of a sick joke?’ he asked.

  ‘Uh, no.’ Kelly was puzzled. You never knew what sort of response to expect in a situation like this, but the reaction of this particular youth was highly curious, at the very least.

  ‘I’m looking for James Gates,’ Kelly persisted.

  The young man’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Well, you’d better try the cemetery, then, hadn’t you.’

  Kelly felt his pulse quicken.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘My brother’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ Kelly repeated the word. It was all he could manage. He was totally stunned. He felt as if he had been hit by a thunderbolt.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Kelly struggled to overcome his shock. He knew he had to explain fast. ‘I’m investigating the deaths of a number of soldiers at Hangridge barracks, on behalf of their families.’

  ‘About time,’ said the young man.

  ‘Could you spare me a few minutes?’

  ‘Are you police?’ The young man stared at Kelly suspiciously.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’re army?’

  Kelly opened his mouth to reply, but was prevented from doing so when the young man answered his own question.

  ‘No, you can’t be, or you’d have known Jimmy was dead.’

  ‘Absolutely right. I’ll explain everything if you’ll give me the chance. Look, what’s your name?’

  The young man seemed to consider for a few moments. ‘It’s Colin,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Right. Well, Colin, if I could come in just for a few minutes, then I’ll explain exactly why I’m here.’

  Colin stood in the middle of the doorway, square on, staring at Kelly for several moments more, before abruptly stepping back and gesturing for him to enter.

  Gratefully, Kelly followed Colin Gates through a dark hallway and into a sparsely furnished but spotlessly clean and tidy sitting room. Colin threw himself almost full length across a sofa rather unattractively upholstered in vivid red leather, which clashed with his hair. The only other chairs in the room were the four upright ones positioned around a brightly shining, wooden dining table. Kelly pulled one of those across the room and sat down facing Colin.

  ‘I had no idea your brother was dead,’ he said. ‘Would you tell me what happened to him?’

  ‘They posted him to Germany. He died only five days later. An army chaplain and a major came round in the middle of the night to tell us.’

  ‘But what happened exactly, Colin? Do you know?’

  Colin Gates shrugged. ‘We know what they said happened. They found our Jimmy dead in a paddling pool. He was pretty tanked up, allegedly, and fell in and drowned. So they said.’

  ‘You’re not convinced?’

  ‘No. I was never convinced, but who was going to listen to me?’

  Kelly studied Colin Gates more carefully. He was long and gangly and, upon reflection, Kelly realised that he was probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. But there was something in his manner that made him give the impression, at first, of being older. He was, thought Kelly, a lad who had had to grow up fast.

  ‘Your parents didn’t agree, then?’

  Colin Gates sniffed in a rather derisory, dismissive sort of way.

  ‘Me dad said I’d been watching too many bad movies. But then, he did twenty years in the paras and came out a staff sergeant. He’s army through and through, me dad. The military police investigated, over there in Germany. They showed Dad their report, a tragic accident they said, and Dad accepted it.’

  Another one, thought Kelly. Army families lived by a different code, it seemed. The habit of obeying orders and accepting what those in authority told them sometimes stayed with them, Kelly was beginning to realise years after they actually quit the military. For ever, probably.

  ‘But you didn’t accept it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  Colin shrugged again, and this time said nothing.

  Kelly changed tack.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ he asked. ‘How old are you, anyway?’

  Colin shrugged again. ‘I’m sixteen. I’ve just left school. I’ve got a temporary job in a hotel kitchen, but I hate it. I’ve taken a sickie today. Don’t tell me dad, that’s all. Jimmy was the golden bollocks round here. I’m the little bugger nobody listens to.’

  Colin grinned. Kelly thought there was something rather likeable about him in spite of the aggressive front he affected.

  ‘I won’t,’ he said. He glanced round the room. There were a few family photographs on a shelf above the fireplace, and that was about all. Most of those seemed to be of a young man in uniform, whom Kelly assumed to be James.

  ‘What about your mother?’ he asked. ‘What does she think.’

  ‘She buggered off when I was a baby,’ said Colin. ‘Dad said she didn’t take to being an army wife. Me nan brought me and Jimmy up, but she died a couple of years back.’

  ‘Colin, will you tell me, please, why you didn’t believe the army version of your brother’s death?’

  Colin drew his knees up to his chest and spent what seemed to Kelly to be an inordinately long period of time staring at his trainer-clad feet. ‘If you like,’ he said eventually. ‘Jimmy and I was always mates, you see. He told me all about it. About how he’d been on duty with that girl, who they said killed herself. Jimmy never believed that. He said he knew she hadn’t. Just knew it. He said there were all sorts of things wrong. He gave evidence, didn’t he, at her inquest, and he told them how he and the others had searched where her body was found, and it just hadn’t been there. Jimmy reckoned she must have been moved. Also, there was some drunken Irish bloke trying to get into the officers’ mess without any proper identification that night. Made quite a commotion, apparently. Then this Rupert came out and said to let him by. Jimmy said sentry duty was a joke at Hangridge. They didn’t have a clue who was coming and going half the time, he said.’

  ‘Did he ever find out who the Irishman was?’

  ‘No. At least, I don’t think so. He never told me, anyway. There was something else, though. He said, after he heard the shots the night the girl died, he saw someone running across the playing field away from the perimeter fence. He called out, challenged like – you know, the way they’re supposed to.’ Colin Gates paused and looked directly at Kelly. ‘“Who goes there?” Is that what they really say?’

  Kelly found himself grinning. ‘I don’t have a clue,’ he said. ‘Go on. Did Jimmy tell you what happened next.’

  Colin Gates nodded.

  ‘Yeah. Apparently, this person kept running and just disappeared out of sight. Our Jimmy didn’t even know whether it was a man or a woman. He said he thought it was a man, though, b
ut he wasn’t sure why.’

  Kelly was fascinated. ‘Why didn’t he say all that at the inquest?’ he enquired.

  ‘He said he wasn’t asked anything like that, that it was all sort of cut and dried, really, and he never got the chance to say anything except answer the questions he was asked.’

  ‘But he had told the military police about seeing someone running across the playing field, away from the scene?’

  ‘Oh yes. He said they kept pushing him about identifying whoever it was, but he hadn’t a clue.’

  ‘So it would be in the MP records.’ Kelly was thinking aloud.

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  With the elasticity of extreme youth Colin Gates suddenly swung his legs off the sofa and straightened himself, so that he was sitting bolt upright and staring quite directly at Kelly.

  ‘Do you think my brother’s been murdered, then? Is that what all this is about?’

  Kelly found that he was quite disconcerted by the young man’s blunt approach.

  ‘Colin, I didn’t even know your brother was dead until ten minutes ago,’ he responded rather lamely, he thought.

  ‘Right.’ Colin continued to stare at Kelly for what seemed like another long period of time. ‘How many deaths have there been up at Hangridge, then?’ he asked eventually.

  Kelly reckoned then that the young man before him was probably considerably more astute than he looked.

  ‘I’m not sure that I know the answer to that,’ he replied truthfully. ‘Every time I move I seem to discover another one.’

  Karen was in her office at Torquay police station. Her mobile was on the desk before her. And it was ringing. But she made no attempt to pick it up and answer it. Instead, she sat staring at it as Kelly’s number appeared on the display panel.

  ‘Damn,’ she thought. What was it about her life? Everything in it seemed to get complicated. And it was invariably her own fault. Her relationship with Kelly had never been complicated before. In addition, although they had had their ups and downs over the years, their rather unusual friendship, which she so valued, had always remained strong. Until now.