Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Hilary Bonner
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
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by William Heinemann
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Copyright © Hilary Bonner 2002
Hilary Bonner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
William Heinemann
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THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO FRIENDSHIP
in memory of:
ABOUT THE BOOK
Will the secrets of a dark night ever be revealed?
When rock idol Scott Silver is found murdered, the prime suspect lies dead next to him. For Silver's killer broke into his mansion home on the South Devon coast and it appears that the rock star's mesmerising widow Angel killed the intruder in self-defence. However, gradually an intense and complex tale of intrigue and deception evolves.
Local paper journalist John Kelly, a man with a past which still haunts him, begins to investigate. Soon he finds himself falling under the spell of the beautiful but dangerous Angel. Kelly becomes embroiled in a sexual obsession so overwhelming that it threatens to destroy him. Yet he continues to seek the truth about the night two men died a brutal death ...
A MOMENT OF MADNESS
Hilary Bonner lives in Somerset and is a former showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. She is the author of six previous novels, The Cruelty of Morning, A Fancy to Kill For, A Passion So Deadly, For Death Comes Softly, A Deep Deceit and A Kind of Wild Justice.
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
NON-FICTION
Heartbeat – The Real Life Story
Benny – A Biography of Benny Hill
René and Me (with Gorden Kaye)
Journeyman (with Clive Gunnell)
With thanks to:
David Thomas and Gordon Hines of the Herald Express, Torquay; Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn and Detective Superintendent Steve Livings of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary; Detective Constable Phil Diss and Detective Sergeant Pat Pitts of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.
One
A uniformed police officer was at her side as she hurried from the house. She moved with an easy elegance, her head slightly bowed. The policeman opened the door of the waiting squad car for her and she stepped inside, sliding effortlessly across the back seat so her escort could sit beside her.
Kelly raised his binoculars to his eyes and focused them on her.
She was staring straight ahead, not looking at anything or anyone. Her short cropped hair was peroxide white. It changed colour almost from day to day, though, he knew that. Like Madonna, she was into changing her image with the wind. Yet this was no international star, no latter-day icon. She had been married to one, that was all. The only fame she had ever achieved in her own right had been when she was just a kid, and hardly anybody even remembered those early movies any more. John Kelly did, but he wasn’t a man who forgot easily. And he reckoned there had always been something about her, an aura almost, that had made her a star too.
Her face was very pale. He was struck at once by her beauty. He thought she looked a bit like a Victorian porcelain doll, fragile, slightly unreal. He had seen countless photographs of her, of course, over the years. And there had been that one meeting, brief and long ago. Even his memory of that, although it would never leave him completely, had faded with the passing of time. Even he had forgotten, he realised, the impact she could have in the flesh. She was breathtaking. It was almost as if shock and grief added somehow to her beauty. Her skin had a translucent quality to it. There were heavy dark shadows beneath the almond-shaped eyes – her only imperfection, but that came as something of a relief, confirmation, almost, that she was real.
The squad car began to move in a kind of circle round the gravel courtyard, kicking up a shower of tiny stones behind its rear wheels, as it headed for the electronically controlled security gates outside which Kelly stood watching. Very slowly, almost as if somebody were operating her too by remote control, just like the big iron-barred gates, she turned her head towards him.
Her eyes were violet. That was the only colour to describe them, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, only even more remarkable, Kelly thought. They were very dark, so dark it seemed almost as if there were no definition between pupil and iris, just big violet circles, deep and fathomless. For a few seconds she seemed no longer to be gazing vacantly into space but to be looking straight at him, staring at him. That’s how it felt, anyway, although he knew that was probably just an illusion. She wouldn’t actually be seeing anything, he supposed, let alone a tired old local newspaper hack, not after what had happened in her house the previous night.
The gates opened and the squad car came slowly through, while several uniformed policemen hovered in the short driveway, intent on preventing any renegade fa
ns from entering the grounds of Maythorpe Manor. Kelly stepped back, as did the fans, although at least a couple seemed intent on committing suicide beneath the wheels of the police car, which continued to move steadily forward. Self-preservation eventually saved the day. Even the most tenacious of the fans moved out of the way just in time to avoid any real chance of injury. The car turned left up the lane, still travelling at an almost leisurely pace, allowing the assembled cameramen and telly crews easily to snatch photographs of the woman in the back seat as it passed them by. Kelly was mildly surprised that the windows had not been blacked out.
Her facial expression did not change as a cacophony of flashbulbs exploded all around the vehicle carrying her. The newly widowed wife of the rock icon was well used to that sort of scene.
It had never been Angel Silver’s way to hide.
Two
Kelly watched the squad car disappear up the hill, the tall Devon hedges obscuring it from sight as it rounded the first corner.
Many of the people in the crowd, mostly women, but including a number of men, were weeping uncontrollably. Some had thrown themselves prostrate on to the ground, undeterred by the fact that the uneven surface of Rock Lane was still damp and muddy from an earlier heavy shower.
Several of the photographers took off at a run for their cars, in a hurry either to dispatch their pictures or give chase. Fat chance of that, thought Kelly.
He shivered, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his Barbour jacket. No warmth in it. He’d had one of those fancy linings once, but God knows where it was now. It was a cold damp morning, and before Angel Silver had been brought out he had been standing outside Maythorpe Manor for almost four hours.
Kelly was forty-eight years old and looked it. At least. He had grown a slight paunch, his once nearly black hair was thinning and had turned grey at the temples, his pale blue eyes had been dulled by the passage of time. Kelly had once been a shining light in his chosen profession and had seemed destined to be doing something far different by the time the big five-O approached. As it was, his life had been a roller coaster ride with rather more downs than ups. And there he was, still standing on doorsteps. Waiting. Watching. Freezing half to death.
The lane was particularly narrow by the turning to the grand Georgian house, and Kelly had been forced to leave his old MG in the tourists’ car park down in Maidencombe village, so he had been unable even to sit in it and be protected a little from the elements while he watched and waited. A reporter’s lot, hanging around for hours, just in case, regardless of the weather, but it didn’t get any easier as you got older.
With more than a little reluctance he removed his left hand from his pocket. He wasn’t wearing gloves, of course, because gloves were the kind of thing Kelly could never remember. In his fingers he clutched his mobile phone. Once he’d had to know every phone box, pub and public convenience on his patch. Nowadays mobiles had cut out the need to move away from a stakeout at all, except for calls of nature. There was no longer an excuse to spend hours in the nearest boozer. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, he reflected wryly, thinking about the effect too much alcohol had once had on his life.
Kelly leaned against the iron bars of the gate, which had closed again in silent precision, and thought for a moment or two. He was interrupted by the Evening Argus’ staff photographer at the scene, Trevor Jones, a bright-eyed young man with ginger hair. Trevor was full of the excitement of working on what was already undoubtedly the biggest story of his brief career.
‘I got a great one of her, Johnno,’ he yelled excitedly. ‘She looked straight at me.’
Kelly grinned. Like Princess Diana, Angel had that knack. No doubt every snapper on the case thought the same thing, as indeed he himself had. But he took pleasure in Trevor’s reaction. He liked the boy, and invariably felt himself fired by his boundless enthusiasm, even on routine stories. The photographer was a big gangling lad, half a head taller than Kelly, and a bit like a Great Dane puppy, Kelly reckoned, eager to please with soft brown eyes that still smiled easily, and inordinately long legs and arms.
‘I’d better get my film back to the factory,’ continued Trevor. ‘If you get any leads, you’ll give me a bell, won’t you, Johnno? Leave it to the Picture Desk, and with my luck I’ll be doing a golden wedding this afternoon.’
Trevor looked quite downcast at the thought as he shouldered his cameras and turned to leave.
‘Will do,’ Kelly called after him. He meant it. Given a choice he’d rather work with Trevor Jones than any of the other Argus snappers, in spite of the lad’s inexperience. He liked working with photographers who didn’t clock-watch and would do his bidding without too much argument. At least some of the time.
Trevor glanced back over his shoulder, ginger curls bouncing, flashed a smile of gratitude and gave a thumbs-up sign.
Kelly smiled. As he watched Trevor amble off down the hill he became aware that almost all of the journalists were now starting to leave the scene, believing presumably that there was no more mileage to be got here. A TV news team hurried past him. The cameraman trod heavily on Kelly’s right foot.
‘Watch yourself,’ Kelly yelled. He didn’t like the TV boys. Never had, since his very first days as a young reporter. They believed totally not only in their own superiority but also that it gave them the divine right to shove everyone else out of the way. Or just walk on them, Kelly thought wryly, tentatively wriggling his bruised toes inside his shoe.
‘Fancy an early pint?’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Can’t see much more happening for an hour or two.’
Kelly turned to face Jerry Morris, the Mirror’s veteran area man, a reporter of the old school, who either never remembered or simply didn’t care that Kelly had quit drinking alcohol years ago.
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Kelly said. ‘Got a couple of calls I want to make.’
Jerry waved him a careless farewell and set off down the hill in Trevor Jones’s footsteps.
Kelly switched his attention to the fans gathered outside the big house, forty or fifty of them already. Soon only they would remain. In spite of a natural cynicism finely honed by long years in newspapers, Kelly was quite impressed by their early presence.
Scott Silver, Angel’s rock star husband, had died in the early hours of the morning and the first reports of his death, ambiguous and hedging all bets, had broken on radio and TV breakfast news some time between 7 and 8 a.m., just three or four hours earlier. None the less the first wave of mourning fans had swiftly metamorphosed. Many were clutching photographs and posters of their dead idol, others carried flowers. The weeping and wailing, which had earlier reached a peak when their hero’s body had been carried off in the coroner’s van, had subsided now into a kind of low moaning. There was already a row of floral tributes on either side of the big gates. The towering manor house provided an imposing backdrop, and through the trees which surrounded it you could just glimpse the sea, iron grey that morning, a shade darker and even more forbidding than the wintry sky.
Kelly studied the scene idly as he punched just one button on his phone.
‘Meadows.’ Detective Chief Inspector Karen Meadows, already appointed the chief investigating officer on the case, always somehow managed to sound sharp, even if she had been roused from her bed in the middle of the night, as Kelly knew she had been.
‘Thanks again for the early tip,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but you didn’t call to thank me. What do you want?’
‘A few minutes of your time?’
‘You have to be joking. I don’t have any time. Not even a few minutes.’
‘So it is a murder inquiry, is it?’
‘Well, loosely speaking. Two killings. One murder probably, in the strictest sense of the word.’
‘Look, Karen, everybody’s speculating. All I’ve picked up since you tipped me off that Scott Silver was dead is what I’ve heard on the TV and radio news, which was bugger all, and a load of rumours out here at the house. Why don’
t you put me straight?’
He heard her sigh.
‘OK. Then you get off my back, John, all right? We found two bodies at Maythorpe Manor. One is Scott Silver and the other is almost certainly an intruder who broke into the house during the night. It looks fairly certain that he murdered Silver and was killed in self-defence.’
‘So you reckon they killed each other in the struggle?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well, how else do two men kill each other?’
‘I didn’t say that either.’
‘You’re talking in riddles, Karen.’
‘And you don’t listen, Kelly. There was a third person present, wasn’t there?’
‘Good God. Silver’s wife!’
‘At last. Your brain’s not been completely pickled then. Yup. We believe matey killed Scott Silver and that Angel Silver then killed him.’
Kelly’s right hand dropped involuntarily, letting the phone fall away slightly from his ear. He didn’t respond any further for a moment or two.
‘Kelly? Kelly, are you there? Stop mucking me about.’
He raised the phone again. ‘Sorry, Karen. Yes, I’m here. Just thinking, that’s all. You told me they’d both been stabbed, though, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, that’s right. The intruder was stabbed over and over again.’
‘And she did that? Angel?’
‘Yup. Looks like it.’
‘What will happen to her?’
Kelly was still adjusting to the idea that the slight, almost frail woman he found so captivating could have killed a man.
‘As long as everything adds up she’ll be charged with manslaughter. We’ve got to charge her with something sooner or later, whatever people may feel about justification, particularly in view of the way in which the second man was killed. I reckon she’ll plead self-defence, though, and get away with it.’
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