Her voice surprised him when she finally spoke again. But then, Angel Silver was full of surprises. Always had been. Suddenly she sounded quite hard.
‘I pulled the knife out of him. It came out as easily as it had gone in. He started to fall to the ground. He was clutching his belly. Scott kept making this dreadful gurgling sound. Suddenly I wanted to hurt the bastard, just like he’d hurt Scott. I lost it. I know I lost it. I can’t believe what I did. I stabbed him again. And again and again. I just couldn’t stop. I couldn’t, couldn’t stop.’ She paused. He waited.
‘So, does that make me a monster too, John?’
‘No,’ he said, and he meant it. He knew what fear could do to people, decent people, he knew how shock and blind terror could make them behave in ways they would not think themselves capable of. But he also thought she was probably lucky to have got away with a manslaughter charge. Like the chief constable and Karen Meadows, although for different reasons, he thought about the farmer Tony Martin, who, a couple of years earlier, had shot a young tearaway in the back when his home had been broken into. He’d been charged with murder, found guilty and been locked up. Obliquely Kelly wondered if that farmer would have faced the same charges had he been the beautiful wife of a rock icon instead of an unknown middle-aged man who presented a none-too-attractive image.
He took Angel’s hand again. This time she didn’t remove it. He must concentrate, make sure that he did not antagonise her. He needed more detail.
‘There must have been an awful lot of blood, Angel,’ he remarked, leading her forward as much as he dared.
She nodded and started to cry again. ‘I’d never seen so much blood. I didn’t know there was so much blood in a man’s body. There was Scott’s blood, and Terry James’s blood. It was just everywhere.’
‘You were lucky not to be injured yourself,’ Kelly continued, gently pushing and probing.
‘Lucky was one word for it. After what that bastard did to Scott, and when I realised fully what I’d done to him, when it all started to sink in, well, I wished that I was dead, John. I really did.’
‘So then what did you do, after you’d stabbed Terry James, what did you do next?’
‘I went to Scott. I tried to stop him bleeding. I pulled one of the sheets off the bed and I sort of wrapped it round him, as tight as I could, like a big bandage. Stupid, I suppose. I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I phoned for the police and for an ambulance, and I just sat with Scott until they came. It was terrible, John. I watched the blood gush out of him, watched his life just drain away. There was this dreadful gurgling sound and his eyes were wide open all the time, staring at me. That’s how it felt anyway, as if he were staring and staring at me. Yet I knew he couldn’t see anything. I just knew that. And then, and then, eventually the gurgling stopped. I felt his body go cold, I felt him go cold, John. I don’t remember much else. I know that the police came and the paramedics. I don’t remember what they did. What I did. I know they took my clothes away, but I don’t remember undressing. I know I was examined by a doctor but I don’t remember it happening. They told me later they’d taken a DNA sample from me, but I don’t remember that at all. I know somebody put me in a bath, washed me. But it’s all just a vague impression. At some stage I fell asleep. Can you believe that. I fell asleep. The body’s great defence mechanism. I fell asleep.
‘The next thing I remember clearly is the following morning – well, later that day really – being taken to the police station, being questioned. I felt like I was the villain. Like I was the murderer. And I had killed a man. But I’m not a murderer, I’m not, am I, John?’
There she was again, that poignantly charismatic mix of the vulnerable and the manipulative.
‘No you’re not, Angel, of course you’re not,’ he said. And again he meant it. Kelly believed that all too often victims were turned into villains. He had seen it happen. The law did that, and all its well-meaning hangers-on, the sort who get IRA murderers thousands of pounds in damages because their human rights have allegedly been violated.
He wanted so much to reassure Angel. He only narrowly resisted an absurd urge to take her in his arms and cuddle her. Instead he made himself concentrate on the matter in hand. He was an old-hand hack, for God’s sake, an accomplished interviewer, and this was one hell of a story.
‘Will you tell me about you and Scott, Angel?’ he asked. ‘I want to know about your time together, about your marriage.’
She nodded. Her face lightened slightly and her eyes brightened as she began to speak. ‘Scott was everything to me,’ she said. ‘You know what I was like before, don’t you? You know as well as anyone. Better than most. I don’t know what would have happened to me if it hadn’t been for Scott. Shall I tell you about how I met him?’
Kelly nodded. He’d heard versions of this story, including her mother’s, but never directly from her, of course.
‘I’d cleaned up my act, after … you know.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘You won’t write about that, will you, not ever, John? I just couldn’t bear it. Promise me?’
There she was, vulnerable again. Pleading. Irresistible. Little girl lost in a big bad world.
‘Don’t you think I would have done so by now if I’d ever intended to?’
‘I’ve never been up on a manslaughter charge before.’
She was sharp. Even at a time like this, even after having just disintegrated into near-hysterical tears. And she was right, of course. Everything in her past was suddenly of much more interest than it had ever been before.
She sighed, and started to smile.
‘I’d cleaned up my act,’ she said. ‘I’d moved back in with Mum in Clerkenwell. We’d sold the flat and invested what was left after I’d cleared my debts. I didn’t have much, but I was free again in every way. Mum found me this agent and I was even starting to work again. They got me this pantomime in Croydon. I was the puss in Puss-in-Boots.
‘Scott had this sister he was mad about who was also in the show. The word went round one night that he was in the audience. I couldn’t believe it. I’d always been crazy for him, you see, since I’d been a little kid. Me and half the rest of the world. He came back stage afterwards and his sister introduced us. The first words he said to me were, “Angelica Hobbs, I’ve been in love with you ever since I saw your first movie.”
‘And I said, “I’ve been in love with you since I heard your first record.” It was incredible really, looking back. I don’t suppose either of us was entirely serious, but he just looked at me with those come-to-bed eyes of his and I melted. I went with him that night, of course. There didn’t seem to be any choice, not for either of us, I don’t think. In the morning I woke up with him and I thought, You bloody fool, Angel, you’ve done it again. Easy lay, as ever. You’re just another groupie to him, you fool. If you weren’t before you will be now.
‘Then he woke up and we made love again. Well, there wasn’t much point in resisting then, was there? In any case, it was so good with Scott. Always was. I could never say no to him.
‘Then afterwards he said, “How do you feel like waking up to me every morning for the rest of your life?” I thought it was a really sweet thing to say. But it didn’t occur to me that he meant it.’
She picked up her mug and took a long drink from it. The coffee must be cold by now, Kelly thought. Her eyes were brighter than ever. Sparkling. The tears just a memory. She was transformed, smiling as she talked.
‘He did mean it, though. Three months later we were married in Vegas. It was all my dreams come true. He was the man of my dreams, he really was.’
She sighed deeply. Kelly studied her more closely than ever. From almost anyone else the words would be at best trite at worst a cliché and Kelly’s natural cynicism would have kicked in. But she got away with it in his book; the words were all right, somehow, coming from her. And he did not doubt her sincerity. Not for a moment.
‘Can you imagine losing that, John?’ she asked. ‘And in such a w
ay?’
Kelly couldn’t. He didn’t think he had ever had anything remotely like the way she had described her relationship with Scott to lose.
‘Was it really that perfect?’ he asked, the cynic shining through just a little.
She looked at him directly. ‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ she said. ‘Hard to believe, really. Somebody like me, somebody like Scott. We were soul mates.’
‘Didn’t you ever quarrel?’
She looked puzzled. ‘We didn’t have anything to quarrel about. We had a wonderful life. All this …’ she gestured at the opulent home, ‘a house in LA as well. We travelled when we wanted, did what we liked when we liked. Scott never needed to work again to keep it all going either. Anything he did was because he wanted to, no other reason. No pressure at all. And we had each other.’
From anyone but Angel it would have sounded sickeningly smug. She seemed quite ingenuous. Then her face clouded over.
‘There was only one thing that wasn’t perfect,’ she continued. ‘We wanted children. But you’d know about that. The whole world knows about that.’
She was right too. Angel Silver had suffered a series of much publicised miscarriages in the first few years of her marriage to Scott. The best fertility brains in the country were not able to sort the problem out. The final miscarriage almost killed her. Both Angel and Scott had talked publicly about their anguish. There had been one high-profile interview in which Scott said he had made the agonising decision that they would stop trying for a child.
‘I cannot risk Angel any more,’ he had announced memorably. ‘I can live without a child but I cannot live without my wife.’
Kelly stayed for another hour or so, going over with Angel half-forgotten details of her past, and going through again the night of the killings.
A couple of times Angel made an excuse and left the room for several minutes, reinforcing Kelly’s suspicion that she was taking cocaine. He decided to confront her, to let her know that he was not a fool, and that he remained as streetwise as ever.
‘I didn’t know you were still doing that stuff,’ he remarked mildly.
She looked startled.
‘C’mon, Angel,’ he went on, keeping his voice very gentle. ‘It takes one to know one.’
‘It’s only coke,’ she said sulkily. ‘I’d never get back on the smack. Never. This stuff I can handle. And it’s helping me get through all this. God knows I need something …’
She shot him that vulnerable, appealing look. He tried not to fall for it totally.
‘But you weren’t on it the night it all happened?’
He knew she’d been tested clean when she was charged with manslaughter four days after the killings. The police were well aware of Angel’s track record and if there’d been any kind of drug angle she’d never have got off with a manslaughter charge.
Angel shrugged. ‘I can take it or leave it.’
Kelly doubted that somehow. But maybe she believed it. Who knew?
‘The police searched your house. That’s routine. They didn’t find anything, though, did they?’
He knew that to be the case, and it was beginning to puzzle him more and more.
Angel scowled. ‘Even druggies run out of stuff sometimes.’
Her voice was hard-edged, heavy with sarcasm. He supposed she had a point. He changed the subject. He didn’t want to antagonise her. He had a great interview. And he had a feeling there would be more to come. He needed to keep her sweet. Oh, and to hell with it, he had to admit it, he didn’t want to upset her unnecessarily, to give her more grief. He wanted everything to be all right for her.
Ten
Kelly was on a high when he left Maythorpe Manor, and he didn’t know how much of that was due to having landed an interview with a woman half the world’s press were chasing, and how much of it was caused simply by having spent almost three hours in her company. He found Angel Silver mesmerising.
He was undoubtedly preoccupied, his excitement making him drive a little faster than usual, when it happened.
As he sped through the gates and swung a right, passing out of the illuminated area around Maythorpe and into the shadowy darkness of Rock Lane, a figure loomed suddenly in his headlights. Kelly was taken totally by surprise. A woman, long hair, long clothes, was standing quite still in the middle of the road directly in front of him. She seemed frozen, like a startled rabbit, her face lit up starkly. Kelly slammed on the brakes. There had been a heavy shower while he had been in the house with Angel and the road surface was still wet. The back wheels of the MG locked solid. The car went into a skid. Kelly gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white as he struggled to regain control. It was hopeless. The little car started to spin.
‘Jesus Christ Almighty!’ Kelly cried out involuntarily.
He was quite sure he was going to hit the woman. But at the last possible moment he was aware that she seemed to come to her senses and throw herself out of the way. It still seemed an age before he gained control of the MG again. And when he did he was facing the wrong way, albeit miraculously still on the tarmac and not smashed into one of the banked hedges on either side. Kelly and his car had turned a complete 180 degrees in the narrow road outside Maythorpe. Obliquely he thought that if he was offered a million pounds to complete a turn like that deliberately in the limited space available he would be unable to do it.
He stopped the car and jumped quickly out. There was no sign of anybody else around.
‘Are you all right?’ he called into the black nothingness. The darkness away from the bright security lights of Maythorpe was dauntingly total. He reached back in the car for the torch he always kept in the glove compartment and shone it around the now apparently deserted stretch of road.
Perhaps he had hit her after all. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she was lying there injured, or worse. Perhaps the force of the impact had thrown her into the hedge.
But there had been no impact. He knew that really. He was just in shock. She must be around somewhere though, mustn’t she?
Maythorpe Manor was quite isolated. Rock Lane was the sort of opulent semi-rural road the residents of which rarely left their dwellings by any means other than a motor car. Except when all the fans and press had been gathered outside the Silver home you were unlikely to meet any pedestrians, and certainly not at that time on Christmas night. Fleetingly, Kelly wondered if his imagination had been playing tricks on him. But he knew better.
There had been someone there, all right – a young woman whom he had very nearly killed. And he was pretty sure he recognised her as the one he had tried to talk to outside Maythorpe Manor in the days right after Scott Silver’s death, the woman who had always stood out as different to the rest of the fans, strangely apart and alone. What on earth was she doing there on Christmas night, he asked himself.
‘Hello, are you there?’ he called again.
No response. Was she hiding? Had she run off? If so, she must have moved faster than he had been able to after that near miss.
He turned and looked back towards Maythorpe. The gate had closed behind him. But he could see through the railings that Angel was still standing by the big front door. A frail-looking figure, white and pink, not moving.
He walked back to the gate, already closed behind him, and shouted to her through it.
‘Hey, did you see that?’
Even as he spoke she turned round and disappeared into the house, the big door closing behind her with a slam.
It was almost two in the morning when he got home. Boxing Day had started, and he expected he was not going to have a good one. The house was in darkness. He was relieved. Moira might, of course, have retreated to his bed but he thought that was unlikely. As he was out, she would almost certainly have gone back to her own home, particularly in view of her feelings about his visit to Angel Silver at such a time on such a day. Rather disloyally, he hoped that she was no longer in his house. He was not in the mood for explanations,
he was still in shock from his near collision with that young woman outside Maythorpe, and he much preferred to face Moira in the morning when he would have had time to collect his thoughts. He was also glad that Nick seemed to have gone to bed.
One way and another Kelly’s adrenalin was racing, and he didn’t feel tired even though it was so late, so he thought he would make a pot of tea and maybe read for a bit, try to settle down. The kitchen was beyond the living room, and as soon as Kelly switched on the light there he saw her. Moira had not gone home. She had fallen asleep in the big winged armchair by the window. And as the light snapped on she woke with a little jump.
Kelly tried for normality, tried to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were there,’ he said.
She nodded, rubbing her eyes sleepily.
‘Nick gone on up?’ he enquired.
‘Yes.’
‘Jennifer gone home?’ He was aware that he was slumping into banality but it was the best he could do at that hour of the morning. He was just desperate to avoid confrontation.
‘Yes.’
Oh dear, he thought. This was hard work, and the temptation just to walk away was almost overwhelming, but he reckoned Moira deserved better than that.
‘Sorry I was so long, I just couldn’t stop her talking,’ he said lightly.
Moira glanced at her watch. ‘Did you want to?’ she asked edgily.
‘Not really. It’s a great story.’
‘John, you’re supposed to be building bridges with your son. He comes to be with you for Christmas, to spend time with you, and then you just disappear. For hours. And you return in the middle of the night.’
‘It was work, Moira.’
‘That’s one word for it.’
Kelly felt his patience begin to run out. ‘Look, I just don’t understand why you’re being so bloody difficult about this. It’s the best bloody story I’ve got near for years. What do you expect me to do, give up on it?’
A Moment Of Madness Page 17
