Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Apart from hurried calls of nature, taken in turn, usually combined with dashes to the sandwich shop up the road, they had left the station for only a few hours, in order to grab some much-needed sleep, since taking up their position there the previous day.

  Kelly checked his watch, wiping the raindrops off the face in order to do so. It was just past 9.30 P. M. Other journalists had come and gone during the course of the day, but none were there now. After all, they had no idea when, or even if, Marshall would step outside the station again. Nor did they even know for certain that Marshall was still inside.

  There were all sorts of other lines of enquiry the various news teams on the case could convince their desks that they should be on, lines of enquiry which did not necessarily involve getting soaked to the skin. Kelly glanced at the sky. The weather was so dreadful that day had turned into dark night rather early for the time of year. All he could see was blackness, certainly no sign of any stars or a moon, which indicated that the leaden cloud which had hung over Torquay since before dawn that morning was still solid above. Certainly the rain, which had subsided into light drizzle for a couple of hours around lunchtime and cleared totally for just an hour or so in the early afternoon, now seemed heavier than ever.

  But the young Kelly was already showing signs of the tenacity which would later lead him to the top of his profession in Fleet Street. He was determined to stand his ground. If Marshall was charged neither he nor anyone else would get anything other than a brief official statement from the police. But if he was not charged, then Kelly was determined to give himself every opportunity of being the first journalist to confront him. Already John Kelly did not give up easily. Not on any story as big as this one, and certainly not on this one. Not with his mother to contend with at home, he didn’t.

  Kelly’s dossier on Marshall was burning a hole in his notebook. Kelly was a local boy and he had homed in on the gossip right at the beginning, spurred on of course by the peripheral involvement of his mother, as head teacher of the Marshall girls’ primary school. Angela Kelly had known the two little girls well and had been extremely fond of them. She had known Clara Marshall too, and Richard, although a little less well, before all the fuss began. She was that sort of teacher. She made it her business to know about the children in her care and their families. Kelly’s mother had been involved from the start. And Kelly’s mother had taken the Marshall business very very personally. Which was why it was so personal to Kelly, too.

  Kelly hunched his inadequate raincoat, a shower-proof job which had been leaking all day, around his shoulders and looked down at his watch again. If Marshall was inside, which he was somehow quite certain he was—he was sure the man hadn’t been released yet and he didn’t think the police would have taken him anywhere else—and if there was not enough evidence to charge him, which Kelly’s police contacts had already indicated to him was likely, they would not be able to keep him much longer.

  Kelly was aware of Micky Lomas shuffling his feet disconsolately next to him. He knew he was more or less blackmailing the photographer into staying, because Micky didn’t dare leave as long as Kelly was prepared to keep up the vigil, in case Kelly got words and he had to confess to no picture. Micky had not uttered a word of dissent, but left Kelly in no doubt that he was extremely fed up.

  The reporter deliberately did not look at Micky. Maybe another smoke would put the snapper in a better mood. Kelly slipped a hand inside his coat pocket and fished out his cigarettes. The packet was sodden. He opened it carefully and passed it to Micky who took out a cigarette which promptly disintegrated in his fingers. The cigarettes were sodden, too. Micky impatiently tossed the one in his hand onto the ground and stood on it rather aggressively.

  “Sorry,” muttered Kelly.

  Micky just grunted, and from inside his state-of-the-art, thoroughly waterproof jacket, complete with hood, withdrew a dry packet of cigarettes which he threw at Kelly who, to his relief, caught it smartly while wondering what Micky’s reaction would have been had he dropped the cigarettes onto the wet pavement. Well, Micky might feel hard done by, but at least he was wearing proper heavy-weather gear, Kelly reflected as he lit up. Photographers always did and reporters never did. Kelly had no idea why, and made a mental note to pay Millets a visit as soon as his next paycheck came through. He glanced sideways. Micky was also wearing waterproof trousers and thick-soled boots. Kelly’s own feet were clad in inadequate city shoes as ever, and from about the knees down, the trousers of his green suit, of which he had been so proud only the day before, were wet through.

  Kelly didn’t have gloves either. And, summer or not, the thorough drenching he had now received meant that he was very cold indeed. He cupped his hands over his cigarette, wondering if the faint glow might warm his chilled fingers just a little.

  And as he did so the doors of the police station opened and out stepped Richard Marshall. He was quite alone.

  Kelly snatched his cigarette from his mouth and threw it on the ground. By his side Micky Lomas leapt into action with admirable swiftness. The young photographer moved smoothly forward, raising his camera to his eye as he did so, and had rattled off several frames of Marshall before the older man had time to blink.

  It was Kelly’s turn then.

  “Have you been released, Mr. Marshall?” he called out. “Can you tell us what is happening, please?”

  Marshall, whose attention had been focused on the flash of the camera exploding before him, swung on his heel and turned to face Kelly. It was impossible in the half-light outside the station to read the expression in his eyes. His body language said shock and aggression. His fists were tightly clenched and his head jutted towards Kelly.

  Involuntarily the reporter took a step backwards.

  Then he watched Marshall relax, unclench his fists and slide one hand into his pocket.

  “Yes. I’ve been released,” Marshall replied quietly. “The police have no grounds to hold me, no grounds whatsoever.”

  “So you are not going to be charged?”

  “What with?” asked Marshall.

  He stepped forward then, catching the full effect of the lights outside the station, and Kelly could momentarily see the big jowly face quite well. Marshall was smiling, his eyes crinkled at the edges. His voice was ironic, his expression friendly.

  Like Bill Talbot inside the station earlier Kelly decided to go for broke.

  “With the murder of your wife and children,” he said bluntly.

  Marshall’s eyes stopped crinkling, but the smile did not slip. Kelly had heard that he was a cool customer, and he was now learning just how cool.

  “I have nothing more to say to you, young man,” he said.

  Then a taxi pulled up by the curb giving Kelly’s trousers a further soaking as it did so, and Marshall, his eyes crinkling again with what appeared to be genuine amusement, swung away from him and walked towards it.

  “Mr. Marshall, please,” continued Kelly, gallantly ignoring his latest misfortune. “My readers want to hear your side of the story.”

  Marshall turned again.

  “No, they don’t,” he said mildly. “They want to see me crucified.”

  Kelly persisted. “They just want to know what happened, that’s all.”

  “So do I, young man, so do I,” said Marshall obliquely.

  “Look, would you do a proper interview with me? In-depth. Something to put the record straight once and for all.”

  Marshall managed a small hollow laugh. “Dream on, young man, putting the record straight on this one is something that’s never going to happen.”

  It was a totally ambiguous remark. Kelly studied the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s prime suspect carefully. Marshall was just so controlled for someone who may have murdered his entire family and spent a whole day and night and part of the previous day either locked up in a police cell or being questioned repeatedly. He had also been, by and large, perfectly pleasant in his manner, not at all what you might expect. Or
at least, not what you might expect unless you knew the kind of spell he was capable of putting on people, particularly women.

  A few weeks earlier Kelly had sought out Marshall’s latest mistress, Esther Hunter, the woman he had moved so quickly into Parkview, at the hairdressing salon she ran down by the harbour.

  He remembered vividly how she had reacted when he had asked her if she was aware of what people were saying about her man and if it worried her at all.

  “Of course I’m aware,” she had responded sharply. “How could I not be? And no, I’m not worried about any of it because it’s all a pack of wicked lies. Clara has gone off to live a new life and that’s all Richard and I want to do. That and be left alone. Now get off my premises.”

  Esther Hunter, Kelly felt, was a nice enough woman, kindly, and quite beyond reproach before her involvement with Marshall. Kelly believed absolutely that she did not accept for one moment that her lover could possibly have murdered his family. She was simply besotted with him.

  The reporter watched in silence as Richard Marshall opened the door of the taxi. He lowered himself into the back seat and then, with the door still open, addressed Kelly again.

  “I don’t actually want to talk to anyone about any of this anymore,” he said as mildly as before. “Not you, not the police either. In fact I’ve seen enough of the police over the last few days to last a lifetime. Hence the taxi home. There was no way I was going in a police car, even though they did offer.”

  He smiled wryly. It was a measured appeal for sympathy and understanding. Kelly had none of either for this man whom he honestly believed to be some sort of monster. He was, however, impressed by the way Marshall handled himself. No wonder the police had got nowhere, he thought to himself, as he watched the taxi splash its way up the road. And in that moment he had a dreadful feeling that they never would.

  It was past midnight before Kelly made it home. To Micky Lomas’s further annoyance the reporter had insisted on following Marshall back to the Parkview Hotel and taking up a vigil in the street outside. To be honest Kelly had not expected any kind of result. Rather childishly perhaps, he admitted to himself, he had just wanted Marshall to know that he was there. Waiting and watching. But after standing in the rain for another two hours or so, even Kelly had had enough.

  As he opened the front door to his house his mother hurried into the hallway from the sitting room.

  “Still up?” he enquired.

  “I wanted to know what has happened,” she said. Kelly was not surprised. He knew how much the Marshall affair was playing on his mother’s mind.

  “They’ve let him go,” replied Kelly shortly.

  “Oh my God,” said Angela Kelly. “Oh my God.”

  She backed away from her son, still staring at him but not really seeing him, he thought, and retreated into the sitting room again.

  He stood for a moment, dripping water onto the hall carpet, before shrugging out of his sodden raincoat which he draped over the hall-stand. His precious green suit, he feared, was ruined. He looked down at it sorrowfully. Then he took off the jacket, peeled off the trousers which stuck damply to his legs as he did so, and arranged them also on the hall-stand, forlornly hoping that they might dry without too much damage.

  He ran upstairs, pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans and returned downstairs to join his mother. She glanced towards him as he walked into the sitting room, failing, it seemed, to notice that he had changed his clothes already, just as minutes earlier she had failed to notice that he was wet through. All of which was out of character for Angela Kelly.

  She was sitting in the old leather armchair by the window.

  “Make us a cup of tea, John, will you?” she asked.

  Obediently he went to the kitchen and returned with two steaming mugs. His mother wrapped her hands around her drink, nursing it as if she were cold and it were warming her.

  “It’s my fault, John,” she suddenly blurted out.

  Kelly had already heard that from her. It was worse now, of course. Now that Marshall had been released.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Mum,” he responded.

  “I’m not being ridiculous, John. Lorraine Marshall told me her father had killed her mother. She actually told me, and I did nothing about it. Absolutely nothing.”

  “That’s not true. She didn’t tell you that. And you didn’t ‘do nothing’ about it.”

  “I may as well have done.” Angela Kelly put down her mug of tea on the table by her side, quite uninterested in drinking it, apparently, even though she had asked for it. Kelly noticed then that the previous year’s school photograph was also on that little table. It should have been hanging on the wall in the hall with the others. His mother had obviously been sitting looking at the picture until he arrived home. The Marshall sisters were side by side, sitting cross-legged in the front row. Kelly knew exactly which they were. His mother had pointed them out to him often enough. Two pretty girls, both with dark-brown hair and pale blue eyes like their father, smiling for the camera, just as they had been told to do, no doubt. They looked almost doll-like in their grey and maroon school uniforms. Kelly felt his mother’s eyes following his gaze.

  “Can you imagine that any father could kill two innocent little children like that?” his mother asked, her voice high-pitched, almost as if she were on the verge of hysteria.

  “No, Mum, I can’t,” he said. “Neither could anyone else, and neither could you. You shouldn’t blame yourself and you don’t even know for certain that you have any reason to do so.”

  “Oh, but I do, John. I do blame myself. And I do know. Really I do. Sometimes at night, I dream, sometimes it’s so vivid it’s actually like I can see him attacking Clara and those poor dear girls.”

  The words came tumbling out. Sighing, Kelly prepared himself to listen yet again to the same old story. His mother had been torturing herself over the past few months, and this had reached crisis point in the previous few days, since the police had finally decided to launch a missing persons enquiry and had eventually arrested Richard Marshall.

  “I just don’t understand why I didn’t go to the police at the time,” she said. “I’ll never forgive myself. I could have saved those two little girls.”

  “Look, I keep telling you, we still don’t even know for certain that they’re dead,” protested Kelly.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” responded his mother.

  Kelly slumped back in his chair. She was almost certainly right, of course. And the girls’ mother was almost certainly dead, too. Kelly had never met Clara Marshall or her daughters. He knew them only through his own mother who, although apparently more distressed by the fate of the children, also always talked fondly and regretfully of Clara Marshall whom she described as a quiet but warmly attractive young woman, totally devoted to her little girls.

  He said nothing more. After a bit his mother spoke again. Her eyes were very bright.

  “She told me her father had murdered her mother, and I did nothing about it,” she repeated.

  Kelly fished in his pockets for cigarettes, then remembered that he didn’t have any. The packet which had drowned within the folds of his inadequate raincoat had been his last. This really was turning out to be a bad day, he thought.

  “Look, Mum,” he began patiently, beginning the diatribe of reassurance that he had already uttered many times. “Lorraine Marshall told you in school that her father had ‘got rid’ of her mother. You said that she was upset, but if parents are having marriage difficulties of course their children are upset. You had absolutely no reason to suspect murder, for Christ’s sake. And you did do something. You went round to see Richard Marshall that evening.”

  Angela Kelly grunted in a derisory fashion. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? And he spun me this yarn about how Clara had run away with an Aussie backpacker and how his heart was broken, and I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then when the children didn’t come to school the next day and he called to say their mother
had taken them away with her, I swallowed that too.”

  “He’s an operator, Mum. Richard Marshall has a history of conning people. You may be a head teacher, but you’re not infallible, you know. And anyway, when you realized there could be something seriously wrong you went straight to the police…”

  “Yes, six months after the children disappeared. Six whole months after. And even then only when all the gossip started. I should have thought it through. I should have done something about it at the time. I shouldn’t have been taken in by the dreadful man.”

  “Look, the police interviewed Marshall then, didn’t they, and he convinced them too. He is very plausible.”

  But Bill Talbot also had regrets, Kelly knew that. Bill Talbot wished he had listened to the likes of Angela Kelly much earlier. Talbot was well aware that the investigation had taken far too long to get going, but until Clara Marshall’s father had stepped in, the police had really had nothing more than gossip and hearsay to go on.

  The reporter reflected on all that for a moment, until he was interrupted by his mother’s voice again.

  “It’s worse than that, John, and you know it,” she said, going off on a now-familiar tangent. “I told Marshall what Lorraine had said in school. I told him that she had said that her father had got rid of her mother. I honestly believe that he went and got the girls from Mrs. Meadows the next day and killed them because of what I’d told him. I believe that absolutely and nothing will ever make me change my mind.”

  Kelly didn’t bother to reply. He finished his tea and went to bed. He had no idea at all how to help his mother. Indeed, he didn’t think anybody could help his mother. She blamed herself, and that was that.

  In the morning Angela Kelly made no further mention of the previous night’s conversation as she served breakfast to her husband, also a schoolteacher, and to her son.