‘I’m a reporter and I’m chasing the best story I’ve worked on in years,’ he insisted.
She let him drop her off at her house.
It was fifteen days since the end of the trial and two days since his confrontation with Jimmy Rudge. Kelly had no idea whether Rudge had precipitated the call from Angel or not, and neither did he care very much. Neither did he care as much as he would have expected about the front pages he was, he hoped, about to capture.
Instead, as he pulled away from outside Moira’s house and headed out to Maidencombe, the thoughts that filled his head were of seeing Angel Silver again, of getting close to that fragile, so beautiful woman who he knew could wind him round her little finger. Something about which he already seemed to have little control.
This time the gates of Maythorpe Manor didn’t open for him immediately on his arrival. He stepped out of his car and tried the intercom. It remained switched off. Angel was still not encouraging visitors.
He waited for a moment, standing there by the gates bathed in the illumination of the security lights. He couldn’t see any lights on in the house, but he knew that the drapes were heavy. After a couple of minutes he automatically reached for the mobile phone in his pocket. Then he remembered that the phone number at Maythorpe had been changed and the only mobile number he had for Angel no longer worked either. He cursed himself for not having had the presence of mind to ask for her new phone numbers when she had called. She might or might not have given them to him, but he had been so excited by her call he hadn’t even thought to ask. A very elementary mistake for an old hack. Damn and blast, he thought.
In frustration he went back to his car and gave several blasts on the hooter. Nothing happened. He was starting to feel quite angry. He leaned on the hooter. A continuous wail filled the night air. He resolved not to stop until either she opened the gates for him or he was arrested. And at that moment he wasn’t entirely sure which was more likely.
After a good minute or so of unremitting noise the front door of Maythorpe opened, revealing the silhouette of a figure. Simultaneously the big iron gates swung apart in their usual magical way.
Kelly roared through them much faster than he would normally.
He came to a halt with a screech of tyre rubber and was quickly out of the car.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he enquired with a forcefulness that quite took him by surprise. ‘You command me out here in the middle of the bloody night and then you keep me locked out –’
Her very silence stopped him in his tracks. She was standing quite still, smiling that small smile. It might have been either apologetic or mocking. He wasn’t quite sure which. Perhaps a bit of both. She looked pale. No makeup. Hair straggly with dark roots that had not been apparent at the trial now emerging. There were black rings beneath her eyes which had that familiar faraway hazy look to them. She was wearing a flimsy silk dressing gown, almost exactly the same pale flesh colour as her face. Strange how it seemed perfectly normal for Angel Silver to greet a guest to her house in such a garment. She swayed slightly, reaching out a hand for support. Kelly stepped forward, taking it at once. He was pretty sure she was high again. Could she only bring herself to see him when she was half out of it, he wondered. Or maybe she was high most of the time. He really had no idea. He had no idea either how she managed to look so beautiful in spite of the roots and the black rings round her eyes and the very fact that she was plainly continuing to abuse her body.
‘I thought it was you who wanted to see me,’ she said eventually.
Infuriating bloody woman, he thought.
‘You gave me an interview. We made a deal. I’ve stuck to my part of it. I said I wouldn’t print till I’d cleared it with you. I haven’t even been able to get near you since the trial.’
Kelly was trying very hard to be professional. She swung away from him without speaking, and walked off towards the living room. He closed the front door behind him and followed her. She was standing with her back to the fireplace, eyes blazing.
‘Have you any bloody idea what it’s like to go through what I’ve been through?’ she asked.
He shrugged a kind of apology and was about to speak, but she didn’t give him time.
‘No of course you haven’t,’ she continued. ‘Not you, not anyone. So don’t you dare criticise me. Don’t you dare. I haven’t been able to talk to anyone, you bloody fool. Since the trial it’s been even worse. The relief was just so overwhelming. But I think it was only after that I really thought about what happened, what I’d done.’
Kelly nodded, understanding. ‘It’s just that you always seem to summon me in the middle of the night, that’s all,’ he said lamely.
‘Always? Summon? Middle of the night?’
She had that mocking look about her again. ‘It’s still not even midnight. You’ve only ever been here once before, and I don’t recall that you needed much persuasion. In any case …’ she was looking at the floor, lower lip trembling, vulnerable now, ‘… maybe it takes me all day to pluck up the courage to talk to someone like you.’
All day and a load of coke, he thought. He reckoned she was still playing games with him. Quite deliberately he hardened his approach to her, determined to stick to being strictly professional about this and not to let her get to him in any other way.
‘Are we on the record?’ he enquired, producing his tape recorder from his jacket pocket.
She pouted. ‘I suppose so. You’re only interested in me for what you get from me, aren’t you? You’re just using me, you beast.’
She pulled an exaggeratedly hurt face, then half smiled at him again, flashing those violet eyes. She was being very slightly flirtatious, making a little-girl appeal to his better nature. But Kelly was not a complete pushover. Not yet, anyway.
‘And you? You’re not using me?’
Her brow darkened.
‘All right, you miserable bastard, let’s get this over with, shall we?’
She sat on the same sofa they had shared for the previous interview. He joined her and switched on his recorder.
‘First of all – and there’s really no point in continuing if we can’t sort this out – do I take it that I have your agreement to run the interview we’ve already done when I see fit, plus anything you tell me today?’
‘Oh, all right,’ she said sulkily, taking a cigarette from a packet by her side and offering him one.
He accepted and lit hers. ‘Anything else I can get for you?’ she enquired coquettishly.
She really was a chameleon. One minute she was one woman, the next another. The way she had spoken clearly implied that she was offering something like coke. He watched her as she leaned back in the sofa, the flimsy dressing gown slipping up her body so that one thigh was exposed almost to her crotch. On the other hand, he thought she could have been offering herself. She had, after all, done that before, freely enough and often enough.
He dismissed the thought. Either way she was a cheeky bitch, he thought. And dangerous. Always dangerous. No doubt about that. He made himself concentrate on the job in hand, ignoring her suggestive query.
‘So tell me exactly how you’ve been feeling since the trial?’ he asked. ‘You’re right: I cannot know. Who could? Tell me how you’ve been coping.’
‘I feel absolutely devastated,’ she replied, suddenly disarmingly straightforward, no longer appearing to be playing any kind of role. ‘Not only have I lost the love of my life and had to watch him die in such a terrible way, but I killed a man trying to defend Scott and myself and I have had to stand up in a court of law and explain what I did. I have been given a conditional discharge and I walked free and everybody seems to think that should please me. That I should just be able to put it behind me, build a new life. But I can’t. I shall never get over it. It will haunt me always.
‘In some ways …’ She hesitated, and those unnaturally bright violet eyes were full of pain. ‘In some ways it would have been better if the
y’d sent me to jail. I don’t even have anything to fight against, do I? I have been treated with …’ she hesitated again, as if searching for the word, ‘… compassion, I suppose. Maybe I would have preferred some sort of punishment, I feel so guilty, you see …’
The words tailed off.
‘What do you feel guilty about?’ Kelly prompted gently. He could guess the answer, of course, but he needed her words.
‘I feel guilty because I didn’t save Scott, and I feel guilty because I killed a man.’
‘In self-defence, Angel.’
‘Yes, in self-defence,’ she repeated tonelessly.
‘And now, how do you get through your days? I wondered that before. I’m surprised that you stay here, rattling around in this big house. Aren’t you lonely?’
She turned to face him directly.
‘I am more lonely than I ever thought or believed would be possible,’ she said, and he just knew that she meant every word. ‘I don’t know why I stay here. Maybe I won’t for much longer. I think I stay because I don’t have the energy to leave. And maybe because I always felt closest to Scott here. This house was his dream, and mine, you know, not the place in Hollywood. I’m thinking of getting rid of that. We hardly ever went there and I certainly don’t want to go there now. This was our dream, this was our home, this big old English country house by the sea.’
She sighed. ‘How do I get through my days?’ She sounded almost whimsical. ‘I sleep late, I watch videos, I listen to music, sometimes Scott’s music, sometimes other stuff. The hours pass. I don’t really know how exactly.’
She flashed him a challenging look. ‘And I do a little coke occasionally, but you know that, don’t you?’
He nodded. Rather more than a little, he suspected.
She was suddenly anxious. Yet another mood change. ‘You won’t print that, will you?’
‘No,’ he said.
He asked her some more questions about her feelings, about that terrible night, about the trial, squeezing all the information he could from her, searching for the most emotive quotes, going over and over the old ground in the hope of touching on something new, something more special than the stuff he already had.
He had a kind of checklist in his head of points he wanted to raise.
‘Have the fans bothered you at all?’ That was just his way in. He had something specific on that subject that he wanted to ask her.
‘Not really. They were bound to turn up. Millions of people loved Scott …’
Angel had that faraway look again. ‘They’ve been a kind of support, really, a reminder of how special Scott was. They were the only thing that got through to me in the beginning. Were you there, on that first night, when they all had candles and were singing his songs?’
He nodded.
‘Yes, I was sure you would have been.’
‘There was one fan who was nearly always there,’ Kelly said, getting to the point he had been wanting to raise. ‘She stood out from the rest, she looked like a kind of hippy throwback – long hair, long robes. I wanted to ask you if you knew who she was.’
Another mood change. A flash of irritation. ‘I don’t know who any of them are,’ Angel snapped. ‘They’re fans. Scott had millions of them.’
‘But this one was different. She was often here when nobody else was, too. She was even outside on Christmas night when I came here. I nearly killed her when I left. She just loomed in front of the car. You were watching, I saw you.’
‘For God’s sake, I may have been watching but I couldn’t see anything. Just shadows. Certainly not enough to recognise anyone. You screeched to a halt, then you drove off. That was all I saw.’
‘But for days on end she stood by the railings by the gate, in the same spot, with her face pressed to the fence. You must have seen her then. You couldn’t have missed her. She seemed so strange I even wondered if I should tell the police. I was afraid she might be some sort of a threat to you.’
Angel looked bored. ‘For God’s sake …’ she said. And then, referring much less warmly to her dead husband’s adoring public than she had earlier, she went on, ‘OK, maybe I do know the one you mean. She’s just some stupid fan, only even worse than most of them. She’s in some idiot religious sect. She was always hanging around here trying to get Scott involved. She drove the poor bastard mad, but she’s harmless.’
Kelly nodded. He supposed he would have to be satisfied with that. It was plausible enough. Anyway, all the loose ends were more or less tied up now. He really had a cracking piece, and that, he knew, was what he should concentrate on. He could see the headlines as clearly in his mind as if they were already printed: ‘How I held my dying love in my arms’, ‘Scott and Angel, our great passion’, ‘How I killed for my darling’.
It was gripping stuff and he was going to clean up on this one. He had so much more than had ever come out in court. That good turn of seventeen years ago really had paid off, he thought cynically.
‘Right, I’d better get to work,’ he said.
He couldn’t wait to get home to his computer and feed all the extra material he had gathered into his original copy.
Angel was quiet as she showed him to the door. Yet again he was struck by the paradoxes in her. He was aware that she treated him by and large with a mixture of flirtatiousness and contempt, but as ever it was her vulnerability which melted him. He studied her closely as she stood there in the big doorway, holding the silky gown close to her thin body, white hair lank and wispy, eyes bright from the coke. He thought she looked at her most fragile. And at her most beautiful. Although God knew how.
On an impulse he bent down and kissed her cheek. She did not pull away.
‘Be gentle with me, Johnny,’ she said.
Nobody, but nobody, had ever called him Johnny before. If anyone but her had made a remark like that to him he would probably have laughed in their face. It was different with her. Everything was different with her.
‘Angel, sweetheart, I promise you, when my stuff hits the streets public opinion will be on your side like never before,’ he said, genuinely hoping that would prove to be so. ‘The whole world is going to love you and feel for you. And the knocks on the door from press and TV will stop, they really will, because there won’t be any point, not after I’ve finished.’
She smiled wanly.
‘OK,’ she said.
Suddenly he wanted just to take her in his arms and comfort her. But he resisted the urge. In any case, she’d probably slap his face. Waiflike and vulnerable one moment, sarcastic and provocative the next, you never knew how she was going to react, how she was going to be, you really didn’t.
He settled for touching her left hand lightly. ‘Goodbye then, and don’t worry,’ he told her.
Somewhat to his surprise she reached up with her other hand and stroked his cheek.
‘You’re not a bad man, John Kelly. Do you know that? You can come and see me again if you like.’
His heart sang. As he drove away through the big gates he felt so elated that he punched the air. He was glad the hood of the car was up. He wouldn’t have wanted her to see that gesture. He just hadn’t been able to help himself.
Not only had he pulled off one of the greatest journalistic coups of his career, but Angel Silver wanted to see him again. OK, she was lonely. Kelly was around. She probably saw him merely as someone who was always available for her. And Kelly was a good listener. Kelly was also somebody she could use for her own ends.
To hell with it, he thought. He didn’t really care what her reasons were.
Twelve
Kelly’s story was huge. He sold the full interview to the Sun who paid him handsomely, but not as much as they would have done had he been able to guarantee them total exclusivity. He couldn’t do that because he was bound to let the Argus publish first, if he wanted to keep his job, that is, and he knew the other nationals would lift what they felt they could get away with from it. But the impact of his coup was enormous. Local and nati
onal radio and TV all invited Kelly to go on air to talk about Angel. He was the only person in the media to have got near to her.
It felt as if he were back in the big time. It felt good. Really good.
Even Nick called specially to say well done.
‘That Christmas night visit paid off after all, then, Dad,’ he remarked without making any further comment.
Kelly was on cloud nine. He felt seriously good towards everyone who was important in his life – Nick and Moira, of course, but perhaps particularly Karen Meadows who had given him more help from the beginning than she had either needed to or even perhaps should have done.
The evening that his story broke, Moira was on duty and Kelly was alone at home in St Marychurch when he suddenly decided on impulse to pay Karen a thank you visit. Deliberately he did not call her first. At best she would be slightly embarrassed, and at worst she would try to put him off. Kelly reckoned the best thing to do was to just pop round to her place. If she wasn’t there then he would lose nothing, and if she was he somehow didn’t think she would shut the door in his face.
On the way to her seafront apartment he stopped at a late-night supermarket, which he knew had a special pet shop section, where he bought a bottle of champagne and another, more unlikely, present.
Karen’s apartment block had an intercom system. Kelly was pleased when she answered swiftly after he rang the appropriate bell, but then not so pleased when she took almost half a minute or so to speak again after he announced himself.
‘Come on up,’ she said eventually, albeit a little grudgingly, at the same time pushing the buzzer which allowed him to enter.
She was waiting at her front door when he stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor. Her expression didn’t give a lot away.
He grinned at her in what he hoped was a disarming fashion, handed her the champagne with one hand and his second offering, in a supermarket plastic carrier, with the other.
‘Late Chrissie pressies,’ he said. ‘The bubbly’s for you, and there’s something in the bag for the lovely Sophie.’
A Moment Of Madness Page 20
