A Moment Of Madness

by Hilary Bonner

  A central London phone number which he did not recognise appeared on the display. Rachel Hobbs?

  Kelly’s mood changed at once. He felt the adrenalin course through his body as he pressed the speak button.

  ‘John Kelly,’ he said.

  ‘You’d better come and see me,’ said a woman’s voice.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. It’s her.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he said as levelly as he could manage.

  ‘How soon can you be here?’ she asked.

  Automatically Kelly checked his watch. It was just gone 9.30. ‘Half an hour, maximum,’ he said.

  ‘Thought you wouldn’t be far away,’ said Rachel Hobbs, as she hung up.

  Kelly didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He threw a handful of cash at a surprised-looking waiter, soaked his nan bread in his barely touched chicken Madras, the rest of which he sorrowfully abandoned, and, munching his improvised sandwich, hurriedly left the restaurant. He didn’t even consider bothering to retrieve the MG from the multistorey car park in which he had earlier installed it at considerable expense. Instead he grabbed a black cab.

  At Chain Street there was still a small group of reporters and photographers outside number 44, and they gathered around as Kelly’s taxi pulled to a halt. The house was neat and well decorated, but without the twee front door and window boxes of most of the others in the road. Chain Street, built in the late Victorian era as a row of down-market workmen’s cottages, was now at the heart of London’s inner city rich-pickings real estate market. Indeed Mrs Hobbs’ tiny terraced house was probably worth almost as much as a big house in Essex nowadays, thought Kelly, shaking his head at the irony.

  When he rang the doorbell a couple of reporters stepped forward to ask him who he was. As he had expected, there was nobody outside the house who knew him. Kelly was history in national newspaper terms.

  ‘I’m just a friend,’ he said.

  Seconds later the voice he recognised from the brief telephone conversation called from the other side of the door, asking the same question.

  ‘It’s John,’ he replied, thinking how convenient it was sometimes to have such an anonymous Christian name. Not that the other guys were likely to know his name.

  He heard a key turn in the lock, then a bolt shoot back. The door opened an inch.

  ‘C’mon in – and hurry up,’ said the voice.

  Kelly pushed the door a little more and slid through the gap, shutting it swiftly behind him. Then he saw Mrs Rachel Hobbs for the second time in his life, standing at the foot of the stairs looking steadily at him. He knew she was now seventy years old, and had naturally expected her to have changed with the years. He knew that during much of her early life she had worked extremely hard, as a seamstress in a nearby factory. And he also knew, as well as any outsider probably, just some of the turmoil she had already faced concerning her extraordinary daughter. He supposed he had expected a little old lady, somebody overwhelmed by being at the centre of media attention again. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Rachel Hobbs was dressed in a crimson shirt which looked as if it was made of silk, and a short black skirt. The two were divided by a broad gold belt. Big jewellery dripped from her neck and wrists. Her hair was also big, just as it had been twenty years earlier, still platinum blonde and sporting two jewelled combs. She wore very high-heeled shoes and sheer stockings. Her legs remained good. Her figure could have been that of a woman little more than half her years. Only her face gave her age away at all. It was a face that had been lived in, but a good strong one. High cheekbones. Deeply etched laughter lines around almond-shaped eyes, similar to her daughter’s but more blue than violet and not nearly so remarkable, which were fringed by thick lashes heavy with mascara. False lashes? Kelly couldn’t be sure. Full lips painted ruby red. It was all a bit overwhelming for a terraced house in Clerkenwell.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you again.’

  Something in his voice or the way he looked at her must have given his surprise away.

  She smiled quizzically. ‘What did you expect, a Zimmer frame?’

  He smiled back. ‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ he said evenly. ‘You’ve kept a low profile for a long time. The only pictures I could dig up were over twenty years old and it must be getting on for that when we last met.’

  She nodded. ‘I made a deal with Angel when she married Scott. The deal was simple. I had to keep out of her public life or she’d cut me out of her private one. I couldn’t argue about that really. Angel saw me as a threat, her brassy mum from East London.’ She paused. ‘She’s a good kid at heart, though, always was. She’d have given me and her dad anything …’ She paused again and the mask slipped. For a moment she looked almost vulnerable.

  Kelly was fascinated. It was suddenly quite hard to grasp the reality of why he was visiting Rachel Hobbs again. The woman’s son-in-law had just been killed and her daughter was likely to stand trial for the manslaughter, at the very least, of the man believed to be his killer.

  As if reading his mind Rachel Hobbs pulled herself together. ‘Right, we’ll talk in the kitchen. And this had better be good,’ she said. ‘Not that I don’t know you’re conning me.’

  ‘I don’t reckon I’d dare.’

  ‘Oh, you’d dare,’ she said. Then she smiled again.

  ‘It’s been a very long time,’ he ventured.

  ‘For both of us,’ she said. Then, as if considering: ‘I thought you’d be an editor by now.’

  ‘So did I,’ he said.

  ‘You were destined for the top,’ she said. ‘That was the impression you gave, anyway. I followed your career for a bit. Then you just seemed to disappear.’

  ‘I certainly did.’ He didn’t want to go into that. Not even with her. Perhaps particularly not with her.

  Rachel Hobbs’ accent was definitely London but not quite as strong as Kelly had remembered. Maybe even his memory had become governed by clichés.

  ‘Right,’ she said again when they were seated on either side of the kitchen table, ‘I’ve decided to trust you, so let’s get on with it. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want you to tell me about Angel,’ he said. ‘Everything about her. What makes her tick, what she was like as a child – everything you can.’

  ‘Well, you know some of that, don’t you?’ she replied. ‘An awful lot more than most.’

  She glanced down at the kitchen table. Kelly saw that his note was lying on top of a small pile of papers.

  ‘“I helped Angel once, please let me do so again”,’ Rachel Hobbs read out loud. She looked up again at Kelly quizzically.

  ‘Moral blackmail, I think,’ she said.

  Kelly shook his head. ‘No, I don’t intend to reveal any secrets, whatever you do or don’t tell me today,’ he replied, knowing he was only telling half the truth. It was true that he had never intended to reveal the little sequence of events he and Angel and her mother had become embroiled in all those years ago. It was also true that he knew how to call in favours. That had always been the name of the game for Kelly.

  ‘I just want to write about Angel how she really is, the Angel probably only you know. Not her image. But the person. I want you to start at the beginning for me, to pretend that I know nothing at all.’

  Rachel Hobbs studied him in silence for several seconds. ‘OK,’ she said eventually, leaning back in her chair and averting her eyes so that she seemed now to be staring into the middle distance without really saying anything. ‘Everybody knows Angel’s beginning as a child star, and what a star she was, John. God, she was a gorgeous kid. I’d always wanted to do it myself, you know, go on the stage. I was the classic stage mum. I realise that. And I didn’t blame Angel when she made her stand. Did you know about that?’

  Kelly shook his head. If he’d ever known he’d forgotten. It hadn’t shown up in the cuttings he’d managed to get hold of. And it certainly wasn’t one of the secrets he’d referred to.

  ‘
The diaries picked up on it. One of Angel’s so-called friends must have blown the gaff, I reckon, but not Angel, and not me either, so nobody could ever make a lot of it. I’d wanted too much for her, I suppose. She showed talent, real talent, but then everyone knows that. You remember the way she was, I expect. Cute, they call it now, don’t they? We did it all, Angel and me: theatre, TV, that Hollywood movie. Then suddenly she was sixteen and nobody wanted her any more. I think it was me who was more upset, but Angel almost didn’t seem to realise that it was all ending. She went wild really. Wouldn’t stop spending. The money soon ran out. I suppose we should have had more control, but she was a determined kid. We had to sell the big house, and come back here along with my old dad, which was quite a squash in this little place, on top of everything else. It didn’t suit Angel, that was for certain. She was never going to stay.

  ‘Her name was still big enough to give her entry to the in-crowd and that was how she met Jimmy Carey, her own Hollywood superstar. Only he was a bit more faded than Angel realised. He was forty-seven and she was seventeen. I should have stopped it, or at least tried to. Me and her dad, we both should have done. But Angel had made up her own mind, as usual. She was just determined that she wasn’t going to stay in a little house in Clerkenwell with a fishmonger for a father.

  ‘We barely saw her for the next four years or so you know. Then she came back one day looking like death and with a black eye to boot. Just twenty-one and a battered wife with a drug problem. I could see it all at once, but Bill, her father, couldn’t. She was always his little girl to him. I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been. Well, I’d got her back, hadn’t I? I took her to our doctor – they’re used to drug problems round here – and with his help we weaned her off. She said she was going to divorce Carey and take him for every penny he had. She always had a practical streak, did our Angel. Then Carey died, didn’t he? He died of an overdose and there was that big scandal. Angel went back to the States for the funeral and to see to his affairs, as she put it. That was the biggest shock of all, I suppose. Carey had been a big star. He lived in a Hollywood mansion. He lived the high life. I guess we’d all assumed he was filthy rich but he’d gambled it all away. There’d been horses and casinos and, on top of it, bad business deals. It seemed he’d been on the brink of going under when he’d died. There was even talk that the overdose wasn’t an accident, of course, that he’d done himself in.

  ‘Anyway, Angel ended up with much, much less than she’d expected. Enough to buy a nice flat in the Barbican and put a tidy sum in the bank, but not nearly enough for the kind of lifestyle she wanted. She’d never had an agent or anything, just me managing her, but I didn’t know how to begin to reinvent her, and that’s what was needed, more or less. So I went back to the contacts I’d had in the business and fixed her up with Jack O’Sullivan. You’ve heard of him?’

  Kelly nodded.

  ‘Straight as a dye, Jack, and one of the best, but he just couldn’t get her off the ground either. She struggled around the fringes for a while, putting on a brave face, but that wasn’t Angel. She wasn’t born to struggle, to graft hard. Not our girl. There were a succession of men, of course, who were no damned good to her, and I knew she was dabbling in drugs again. But somehow she kept up the lifestyle, kept it all going. It wasn’t till you came along that I knew what was really going on.’ Rachel Hobbs looked at Kelly anxiously.

  ‘That’s not what I’ve come for, you should know that,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose I do or I wouldn’t have invited you in.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, she hit rock bottom you could say, couldn’t you? But then she got lucky, no doubt about it. Amazingly lucky. She could always attract men, of course, always looked so great. Still does, doesn’t she?’

  Kelly nodded again.

  ‘She met Scott Silver at a party and that was that. They were soul mates, she said. I’m sure he was hers. He was rich, attractive, and a famous rock star. Angel’s dream man. Just a week after they’d met she told me she was going to marry him. And she did. I wasn’t invited, of course. Nobody was. Ran off to Vegas, didn’t they? I never even met him till after the wedding. They’d managed to keep it a secret too. They came here late one night. They’d just flown back, they said. I’ll always remember it. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

  ‘Scott was not at all what I’d expected, you know. Surprisingly shy away from the spotlight, I thought. He was polite and friendly but you could tell he wasn’t a bit interested in me or Bill. Just wanted to get our Angel home to bed. She was ecstatic. He went upstairs to the lavatory and that was when she said it.

  ‘“I’ve got it all, Mum, now,” she said. “You won’t spoil it, will you?” I told her I didn’t know what she meant, but I did, of course. “I’m going to put that child star bit behind me. I just want to be Scott Silver’s wife. I’ll never cut you out of my life, but I don’t want you involved in the public side of it at all. If you carry on living off me I’ll never see you again.”

  ‘She was right, of course, I had lived off her. And not just financially, either. That wasn’t what she was getting at. She was always generous by nature, was Angel. It was more that I liked the glitzy side of things so much, all I ever wanted was to be involved in the showbusiness world. I’m honest enough now to admit that I revelled in her stardom. We’ve always been two of a kind, me and Angel. I knew she meant it, though. I have never since spoken about her publicly until now. Never. And this may be a mistake.’

  ‘It won’t be, Rachel. I won’t let Angel down. I didn’t before, did I?’ Kelly admitted to himself as he spoke that there was indeed an element of moral blackmail there. But they did owe him, Angel and her mum. And in any case, the curious thing was that he meant it. He was as captivated as he had been the very first time he saw Angel.

  ‘So let’s get some facts straight,’ he went on, giving Rachel Hobbs as little time as possible to dwell on her doubts. ‘Has she been in touch with you?’

  ‘Right after she called the police. Phoned to prepare me for the news to break, to tell me she was all right, and what had happened.’

  Rachel Hobbs ran the fingers of one hand nervously through her hair. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s almost as if there’s some kind of curse on Angel, you know. Just when things seem almost perfect the bottom falls out of her world. But this, this … it’s just so dreadful. I was horrified as much by what Angel told me she’d done as by Scott being murdered.’

  Kelly felt all his antennae waggling. ‘Can you remember exactly what she said?’

  ‘What do you think? Not that she said very much actually. She wasn’t hysterical or anything. Her voice was quite calm. But it was as if she just wasn’t functioning properly. Well, she wouldn’t have been, would she? It was all quite mechanical, I think.

  ‘She said that she and Scott had woken to find an intruder in their bedroom. A burglar, she assumed. He had a knife and he attacked Scott. Stabbed him. When Scott collapsed the bastard turned on her. She’d been terrified. There was another struggle and somehow she managed to get hold of the knife. She has no idea how really. She said, she said …’ Rachel Hobbs’ control wavered a little. There was a quaver in her voice. ‘She said she supposed that she must have stabbed him. The next thing she knew he was lying on the floor and she was covered in blood. But she didn’t know what happened. She couldn’t remember it clearly. She said she supposed she must have stuck the knife in him, that was how she put it …’

  ‘What did you think, Rachel?’

  ‘What do you think I thought, you daft bugger?’ There was fire in her voice again. She had never been short on pluck, Kelly reminded himself.

  ‘I thought it was all some awful nightmare,’ Rachel continued. ‘Can you imagine being phoned up in the middle of the night by your daughter and told something like that? It still hasn’t sunk in, to tell the truth.’

  ‘But were you surprised that she was capable of such a thing, even in self-d
efence?’

  Rachel Hobbs studied him with something verging on amusement.

  ‘No, I wasn’t surprised about that,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know about self-defence. She didn’t know that Scott was dead, did she? She was defending him, that’s what she told me. Angel would have done anything to defend Scott Silver, anything at all. She didn’t just love him. She worshipped him.’

  *

  Back in his Southampton Row hotel room Kelly was on such a high that he had completely forgotten his abandoned Indian meal and certainly felt no hunger. What he felt was elation. He always did when he knew he had a lead on the pack. He lay on his bed and contemplated what he had now on the Scott Silver case, and what he was going to do with it. He had been right, after all. He had had an edge. He had had a special way in to Rachel Hobbs. For once he had not been lying to his editor. He couldn’t have known whether she still cared about what he had done all those years earlier, but he would have bet six months’ wages – if he’d still betted like that, of course – that she would remember. And she had.

  It had actually been almost exactly seventeen years ago. Kelly had still been the number one fireman on the Despatch then, but he was already drinking more than anybody knew. He was also on the coke by then whenever he could get hold of it, anything to keep the energy levels up, to keep him motoring. The cracks were beginning to form, of course, only he had yet to become aware of them. He’d thought, if indeed he’d thought at all, that he could go on for ever on his crazy tightrope of thrills, chasing fire engines throughout the world on a diet of booze, girls and coke.

  The job that had led to his one previous meeting with Angel Silver’s mother had seemed routine enough when the news editor had asked him to go undercover on a hot tip. A former child star, famous for playing cute little kids, was allegedly working as a prostitute, pulling punters at a bar in a big London hotel. It was Angel Silver – only then her name was Angelica Hobbs.