Authors: Hilary Bonner
She had decided that in order to keep up the appearance of informality she would make the trip in her own car, a modern MG convertible, which she
thought was a great little motor, even though Kelly, an MG purist, had looked down on it from the start.
She took the coast road to Paignton, then on through Dartington, and on to the moors via Buckfastleigh, so that she would pass the spot where Alan Connelly had been killed. The incessant rain which had fallen barely without pause through the first week of November had finally cleared up, and this was a beautiful day for a drive over Dartmoor. She slowed down as she approached the stretch of road where the accident had happened. It was not difficult to pinpoint. Karen had been told that part of the drystone wall on the north side of the road had been demolished by the rear end of the big articulated lorry, and angry black tyre marks criss-crossed the Tarmac, which had paled with age. Today, driving conditions were perfect. Everything was bathed in the orange glow of autumn sunshine. But Karen knew Dartmoor. She could imagine well enough how different it would have been on a dark wet night, with a swirling mist cutting down visibility to just a few feet.
Thoughtfully, she continued on to Two Bridges, turned right towards Moretonhampstead, just as Kelly had done two days previously in such very different driving conditions, and then, a couple of miles before Moreton, swung north through the pretty village of Chagford and up on to the remote part of the moor along the narrow winding road, which she knew led to Hangridge. All around her, vaguely purple hills, each topped with a tor, a distinctive irregular pile of granite, jaggedly dissected the skyline. Hangridge was relatively new. It had been built on MoD land in the 1970s. Karen knew almost exactly where the barracks were situated, built on a
hillside in a particularly remote and unforgiving part of the moor, not far from Okehampton. But she had never actually been there before. The camp was quite isolated, the last two or three miles reached only by its own specially constructed approach road, so even the most tenacious of tourists exploring the moor would be unlikely to pass it by chance. And, in any case, Karen, who had loved Dartmoor since she was a child, rarely had time any more to play tourist. In addition, with every promotion her job had become more and more that of a manager and less and less what she regarded to be that of a police officer. She was desk-bound far too much of the time. No doubt about that. Karen didn’t think that was healthy for any police officer, whatever their rank and job description. And at least one bonus of this so far unofficial inquiry was that it had already given her the excuse to get out of her office and back on the beat, as it were, even if only fleetingly.
She was mulling over these thoughts as a dip in the hills took her through a ragged patch of dark conifers. The road swung sharply to the right as it rose steeply upwards again and, as she turned the corner, quite suddenly she was confronted for the first time by Hangridge barracks, headquarters of the Devonshire Fusiliers and a crack infantry training depot. Karen was completely taken by surprise.
She didn’t know quite what she had expected, and indeed had been unaware of any particular expectations, but she had not been prepared at all for what lay directly before her, built in such a way that she could see almost the entire layout on the bleakly exposed hillside.
Karen was well aware of Hangridge’s reputation for
housing one of the army’s toughest training centres, a place designed to turn out elite fighting forces, or so she had been told, and she supposed that in her imagination she had conjured up a picture of some grim, moorland reincarnation of Colditz. Certainly, she admitted to herself, her extremely limited knowledge of the army was probably stuck in a time warp. Somewhere inside her head lurked an image of squat, black Nissen huts surrounded by unassailably tall walls or fences, topped by tangled rolls of potentially lethal barbed wire.
The reality of Hangridge could not have been more different. A neat cluster of conventionally built buildings, one or two storeys high, lay surrounded by playing fields which had been levelled out of the hillside. A rugby game was in process on one such field and groundsmen were at work on another. Karen realised that this was the kind of glorious moorland day which would even brighten the dark bleakness of Dartmoor Prison at Princetown, about as grim a building as you could get. But there was definitely nothing grim or at all forbidding about Hangridge. There was a perimeter fence, of course, made of wire netting, and even a strand or two of barbed wire here and there, but the whole impression of the place was open and pleasant.
Indeed, thought Karen, the place looked more like a comprehensive school than a barracks. Or her idea of a barracks, anyway. Of course, she reflected, as she drove very slowly towards the gates, Hangridge had been built in the ’70s when new comprehensive schools were popping up all over Britain. Obscurely, she wondered if the same architects had been used by the army.
The gates to Hangridge stood open, and only the presence of two young men on sentry duty, both carrying automatic rifles, detracted from the notion that the camp was as likely to be a centre of education for young civilians as a military establishment.
Karen pulled to a halt at the sentry point and wound down her window. One of the sentries stepped smartly forward. Every inch the soldier. But his dark blue beret, with its distinctive Fusiliers’ red and white feathered hackle, seemed too big for his head and Karen was struck at once by how young he looked. At first sight he could have been an overgrown fourteen-year-old. God, she must be getting old. This was boy-soldier land, but she knew the fresh-faced sentry had to be at least seventeen, probably more.
The young sentry saluted as he approached. He was of mixed race and rather gorgeous. His smooth olive skin gleamed with good health and he had big, beautiful, black eyes. There was something boyishly cheeky about him, and Karen could not help thinking how nice it would be to see him smile. She swiftly dismissed the thought from her mind and made an effort to pull herself together. She began to introduce herself, but it seemed she did not need to.
‘Good afternoon, miss,’ said the boy soldier respectfully, and Karen couldn’t help enjoying the moment. It had been a long time since anyone had called her ‘miss’, let alone an attractive young lad. Unmarried as she remained, she was none the less much more of a ‘madam’ nowadays than a ‘miss’.
‘The CO is expecting you,’ the sentry continued.
‘Thank you very much. Now, where do I go exactly?’
‘Just a minute, miss,’ interrupted the second
sentry, who looked equally boyish in spite of the stern expression he had adopted. ‘Your ID, please.’
The first soldier flushed slightly. Karen was reminded that these young men probably still had their L-plates on. They may have been primed by their commanding officers about her visit, but they were still supposed to go through the motions of correct sentry duty.
She produced her warrant card which was duly inspected almost to the point of unnecessary diligence, she thought, by the second sentry. Finally, she was directed to the largest and most centrally positioned of the cluster of buildings where, after she had parked her car in one of several spaces reserved for visitors, a third sentry led her directly to the CO’s office.
Gerrard Parker-Brown was exactly as she had remembered him from their previous brief meeting: warm, affable and almost disturbingly unmilitary.
He rose from his desk as she was shown into his room, and stared at her in undisguised surprise.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise. Terrible with names, always have been. But I remember you now. And I remember thinking when we met at that do, how unlike a police officer you were.’
He stepped forward and enclosed her right hand in both of his.
‘Splendid to see you again, absolutely splendid,’ he went on. ‘Now, coffee, tea? Something stronger?’
He grinned broadly, flashing big strong white teeth. He had sandy hair, cropped short around the sides, and somewhat unruly at the front, where it had been allowed to grow a little longer over a broad, open face heavily sprinkled with freckles. His square-jawed,
rather old-fashioned, kind of boy’s comic, good looks could only properly be described as handsome. There were prominent laughter lines around his dark brown eyes, which were framed by unusually long thick eyelashes. Karen couldn’t help registering that they were rather exceptional eyes, more like a woman’s than a man’s, although she didn’t remember noticing that before.
‘Coffee, please,’ she said, and found herself smiling at him involuntarily. He was quite disarming. ‘And I remember thinking how unlike an army officer you were.’
He positively beamed back at her. ‘That’s only because everybody still thinks in clichés,’ he said, gesturing for her to sit in one of the two low armchairs to one side of his desk, and lowering himself into the other. ‘But things have changed, about time too in many respects, but not all for the good, unfortunately. Army officers, police officers, we’re all the same nowadays, aren’t we? Bloody managers. Don’t know about you, it’s the endless paperwork that gets me down.’
‘Absolutely,’ smiled Karen.
She had not expected to meet this kind of kindred spirit in the British army, that was for certain. She studied Parker-Brown carefully for a moment. He was tall and slim, looked extremely fit, and she suspected that his almost excessively casual manner involved more than just a little bit of front. None the less, you couldn’t help responding to him. She had to make a conscious effort to remember that this was an extremely senior military man, commanding officer of a major infantry regiment, and she was a senior police officer with a job to do, which might yet prove to be extremely tricky.
‘So, what exactly can I do for you, Detective Superintendent?’
‘As I indicated to you on the phone, Colonel, I have one or two anxieties concerning the death of Alan Connelly.’
‘But I understood it was perfectly straightforward. A tragedy, of course, but there’s no mystery, is there? Private Connelly had left base without permission and was, unfortunately, extremely drunk. He more or less threw himself in front of an articulated truck, didn’t he, in conditions that made it almost impossible for the driver to have avoided hitting him? That’s what I understood, anyway.’
‘We have no evidence to the contrary, Colonel, but there are one or two so far unexplained aspects of the case, and as I was quite sure you would be as anxious as we are to clear everything up, I decided it might be helpful for you and I to have an informal chat.’
Karen was aware of the colonel studying her quizzically. The corners of his mouth twitched. Had she said something to amuse him? Karen was pretty certain that he had not been entirely taken in by her allegedly informal approach, and probably suspected that she had good reason for being there and that she would have some serious questions to ask. Indeed, she was becoming increasingly more determined to find out everything there was to know about Alan Connelly’s death.
‘Of course,’ he said. And then he waited.
Karen told him about the two men, believed to be soldiers, who had come to find Alan Connelly in the pub, and then more or less disappeared, and about how Connelly had earlier claimed that he was likely to
be killed and that his death would not be the first at Hangridge.
‘We have a reliable witness to all of that,’ she concluded, trying not to think too much about Kelly and the trouble he had got himself and her into over the years.
The colonel’s reaction surprised Karen. He burst out laughing. She observed in silence, more than a little thrown. Then he stopped laughing as abruptly as he had begun.
‘I’m so sorry, Detective Superintendent,’ he said. ‘That was absolutely appalling of me. A young man has lost his life in a tragic accident and I really shouldn’t have laughed. It’s just that, well, of course, you didn’t know Alan Connelly …’
He paused and it seemed some sort of response was called for. Karen obliged with a slight shake of her head.
‘No,’ continued Colonel Parker-Brown. ‘Well, to put it short, sharp and sweet, Connelly was a complete Walter Mitty. He damned near lived in a fantasy world. He was always making up stories. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself.’
‘What sort of stories, Colonel?’
The colonel flashed her the quickest of smiles. ‘Gerry, please.’ he said.
She nodded.
‘They varied. Some were quite funny, and the majority pretty harmless, but some were disruptive. Most were absurd, like saying he had a date with Kylie Minogue, and not just mentioning it in passing, you understand, but giving the lads an allegedly detailed account when he came back from a weekend pass. Oh, and he would claim that his father was a millionaire
and he’d only joined the army because it was a condition of his inheritance.’
The colonel paused again.
‘No truth in that either, I don’t suppose,’ commented Karen.
‘Indeed not, Detective Superintendent.’ Parker-Brown flashed her yet another of his grins. ‘Or may I call you Karen?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she responded automatically, while reflecting that this meeting was not going quite the way she had planned. One way or another the colonel seemed to be taking control. She supposed he was trained to do just that, and made a mental note to watch him in future. If indeed she ever had cause to meet with him again, she reminded herself.
‘No,’ continued Parker-Brown. ‘Connelly’s father was a shipbuilder in Glasgow, who lost his job some years ago when so many of the shipyards on the Clyde were closed down. He has never worked since and is apparently a manic depressive and an alcoholic, inclined to take out his own disappointment with life on his family. Violently, sometimes, I’m told. No wonder the boy took to fantasy—’
‘You’re extremely well informed,’ interrupted Karen.
‘We operate a major training programme here, with upwards of two hundred young people going through our infantry course at any given time. We take in soldiers from other regiments for specialist infantry training, and some of it is pretty demanding stuff. My staff give me a weekly report in writing on every young man and woman we have here. Our job is to train soldiers, and an intrinsic part of that, I’m afraid, is to weed out those who should not be in the army, or certainly not attached to infantry units.
Therefore, all of us in charge need to know about our young people. And that includes as much as possible about their backgrounds, as that can have considerable bearing on their behaviour and progress. I’m the boss. I need to be aware of everything, Karen. Past and present.’