No Reason To Die (20 page)

Now, particularly since experiencing the closeness she had felt for Gerry Parker-Brown that morning and the promise of that kiss, she felt quite betrayed. She had to force herself to concentrate on her conversation with Kelly.

‘I checked the records specifically on Craig Foster,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask the court to check for any other deaths at Hangridge.’ She thought for a moment.

‘They have a brand new clerk at the coroner’s court. Old Reggie Lloyd remembered everything and would probably have volunteered the information.’ She paused. Kelly didn’t say anything.

‘Oh shit,’ she said again.

‘Ah,’ said Kelly.

Karen tried to sort out in her mind what she should do next.

‘Look, where are you, Kelly?’

‘I’m at home.’

‘Right. I have to check out officially what you’ve told me, Kelly. It changes everything. Don’t take this any further, will you? Please don’t do anything at all until I get back to you, all right?’

‘Sure,’ said Kelly.

Kelly smiled as he drove slowly along a dull red-bricked street looking for Margaret Slade’s address. He had lied to Karen, of course. He had already arrived in Reading when she called him, and he’d known she would not approve of him seeking out Jocelyn Slade’s mother, so he had decided at once not to tell her. The lie had come quickly and easily enough, and he had absolutely no intention of heeding her plea for him to do nothing until he heard from her further.

Mrs Slade’s home turned out to be a flat above a chip shop in what Kelly reckoned must surely be the most unattractive part of a town, which, with its towering central buildings and lack of any discernible sense of identity, he considered to be altogether thoroughly unappealing.

Kelly rang the bell four times before Margaret Slade finally answered. He had felt it in his bones that she was inside. And he would have stood leaning on the doorbell for the rest of the day, if necessary. He wasn’t giving up. This was getting important.

The woman who eventually answered the door looked wan, pale and shaky, her wispy, obviously dyed, reddish-brown hair framing an unnaturally white face. It took Kelly five seconds to realise that she was drunk, even though it was still quite early in the day, not long after two in the afternoon. But this was not the sort of drunkenness you associate with closing time in a pub or the end of a wild party. This was the drunkenness of a seasoned alcoholic. And Kelly recognised it instantly. He’d had plenty of experience, after all. Alcoholism, he suddenly suspected, had been the mystery illness Craig Foster didn’t tell his parents about, and quite possibly hadn’t been told about himself by Jossy.

Margaret Slade looked at him with unseeing eyes, as he greeted her courteously.

‘I don’t buy or sell anything at the door and you’ve got no chance at all of converting me to any religion that’s ever been invented,’ she said. She stood holding onto the door and swaying very slightly along with it, as it moved on its hinges.

He grinned.

‘I’m not buying or selling, and I’m certainly not preaching,’ he replied.

‘Ah.’ He could see that she was finally focusing on him, albeit with some difficulty, as if considering the situation. She looked puzzled. ‘I must have paid the rent,’ she went on. ‘It goes straight out of my social.’

She frowned at him, in considerable bewilderment, it seemed. Kelly didn’t say anything.

‘And Michael’s just turned seventeen, he doesn’t have to go to school.’

She leaned a little closer to Kelly and he was engulfed in a cloud of stale alcohol. But he didn’t mind much. Kelly was a bit like a reformed smoker who gets at least some kind of kick out of inhaling other people’s smoke. It was sad, he knew, but even old and second-hand alcoholic vapours were not totally repugnant to him.

‘So, who the fuck are you?’ she asked. And then, before giving him the chance to reply, continued with: ‘I don’t know you, do I?’

Kelly shook his head. ‘It’s about you daughter, Mrs Slade.’

‘My daughter?’ The eyes went blank again, her mouth tightened. ‘I don’t have a daughter. Not any more.’

‘I know. I’d like to talk to you about her death—’

‘You’re from the army,’ Margaret Slade interrupted. ‘Well, you can fuck off. I hate the fucking army. I never wanted my Joss to join in the first place, and she’d still be alive too, if she hadn’t. I reckon. So go on, then. I’ve told you, haven’t I? Fuck off.’

She pushed the door as if she were about to shut it in his face.

‘No, Mrs Slade, I’m not from the army.’

Margaret Slade wasn’t listening. The door kept closing on him. Kelly put his foot in it. It was a total myth that journalists were always doing that. Kelly could only remember even attempting to do so just once before in his life, and as this time a small rather frail woman was leaning against the door trying to close it, rather than a large fit man, the process was at least not so painful as he remembered it being on the previous occasion.

He went for broke.

‘Look, I think there is a possibility that your daughter was murdered, Mrs Slade,’ he told her through the fast-closing gap between the door and its frame.

He knew he had no right to say that. Not yet, anyway. He had no hard evidence, just a hunch. But he was quite determined to get to talk to Mrs Slade properly. Or, as properly as her condition would allow. And he suspected that only shock tactics would work with her.

He felt the pressure on the door lessen. Margaret Slade eased away a little, releasing her hold on the door, and he took the opportunity to step inside, closing the door behind him.

‘So who are you, then?’ she asked.

‘I’m just a man who doesn’t like lies and cover-ups,’ he said, realising that he sounded rather trite and pretentious, but he couldn’t help it. And, strangely enough, it was pretty much the truth.

He explained to her straight away, and as best he could, exactly who he was and how he’d got involved.

‘This Alan Connelly, when did you say he died?’

‘Just four days ago.’

‘Four days ago,’ she repeated carefully.

‘That’s three, then,’ she went on, after a small pause.

‘I didn’t realise that you knew about Craig Foster,’ responded Kelly.

‘Craig Foster, the lad Jossy was going out with? I don’t know anything about him at all. What’s happened to him, then?’

‘He was killed just weeks after your Jocelyn. A training accident, allegedly. He died of gunshot wounds.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Margaret Slade sounded genuinely upset. ‘He was ever such a nice kid. He and Jossy had only just started going out together. I never met him before … before she died. But he came to the funeral, you know. And he seemed ever so cut up.’

‘Mrs Slade, if you didn’t know about Craig, then what did you mean when you said: “That’s three, then.”’

‘What?’ Now, Margaret Slade just seemed bewildered. Kelly could almost see her brain cells fighting their way through the alcohol. ‘Three? Yes. There was a lad who died at Hangridge a few months before Jossy, I think.’

She paused. Kelly was practically on the edge of his chair, but he said nothing. The news he had given Mrs Slade seemed to have sobered the woman up somewhat. But Kelly didn’t dare push her.

‘Neither Jossy nor Craig would have been there when it happened,’ she continued. ‘And, as far as I’m aware, neither of them even knew about it. The army tend to forget things like that, don’t they? They’re not likely to tell the new recruits about the ones who’ve come to a sticky end, are they?’

Kelly found himself sitting ever closer to the edge of his chair.

‘So what happened to this boy, then?’

‘He killed himself too. Or so they said. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but you begin to wonder …’

‘And how exactly did he allegedly kill himself ?’

‘I don’t know. Do you know, I don’t think I ever asked. Now isn’t that extraordinary.’

Kelly didn’t think it was that extraordinary. He reckoned Mrs Slade’s brain would turn on and off according to the amount of alcohol swimming around in her system. She had appeared to be surprisingly lucid through most of their conversation, but then, so did a lot of alcoholics. He doubted she was very often capable of stringing facts together and coming to a conclusion.

‘Who are
they
? Who told you about him?’

She looked completely blank.

‘I don’t know, really I don’t,’ she said. ‘It was after the funeral. Another soldier, I think. Not Craig. No, not Craig. Like I said, I doubt he ever knew. An older man. I made a bit of a fool of myself, you see. I’d had a couple, of course. But it wasn’t that. I just broke down that day. I blamed myself …’

She gestured around the flat. Kelly had been so caught up in what she was saying that he had barely taken anything else in. She seemed to be inviting him to look around, so he did.

The place was a tip. The floors were covered in stained carpeting, the walls were so murky it was hard to see what colour they had started out, and there was very little furniture. Instead, boxes were piled against every wall alongside tottering heaps of
old newspapers and magazines.

‘I didn’t give Jossy much of a childhood, nor much of a home either,’ Margaret Slade continued. ‘We always seemed to be in a mess. Mind you, I defy anyone married to my old man not to have got themselves into a mess. That bastard. But when they told me that my Joss had killed herself, well, I just blamed myself, you see. I thought it was all my fault.’

‘You didn’t question it?’

‘No. I didn’t.’ She looked confused. ‘Why would I have done? This officer came round and I just believed everything he said. He was that sort. And I felt so dreadful. I just wanted to kill myself, too.’

She picked up a glass from the top of one of the boxes. It looked as if it contained whisky. She drained most of it in one.

‘And, in a way, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since,’ she said.

‘But when you learned there’d been another suicide, did that really not make you think at all?’

Margaret Slade laughed in a dry, humourless sort of way.

‘I don’t do a lot of thinking, really,’ she said. ‘I prefer to have a drink. You may have noticed.’

She had a self-awareness, a knowledge of her own behaviour, which was unusual among alcoholics, who were more often than not in total denial, Kelly thought. He had been, anyway.

Kelly decided to ignore her response.

‘Mrs Slade, did your daughter leave a suicide note of any kind?’

‘No. Well, nothing was found, anyway, that’s what they told me.’

‘Umm.’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘Actually, no, it’s not. The police would tell you that only around twenty-five per cent of suicides leave notes. But, obviously, it would make a huge difference if she had done.’ Kelly thought for a moment. ‘Tell me more about how you learned of the earlier suicide,’ he said.

Mrs Slade put her glass down and sat upright. She was obviously concentrating hard. Kelly thought that somewhere beyond the alcoholic stupor she actually had rather intelligent eyes.

‘It was strange, really,’ she said. ‘I do remember that the chap who told me, did so as if he was doing me a favour. Trying to reassure me, weird really. Like I said, I was in a dreadful state on the day of the funeral. I’d been a lousy mother, and Jossy didn’t have a father worth mentioning. But I hadn’t seen it coming or anything. And that made it worse. I didn’t even know that my daughter was so unhappy that she had decided to do away with herself. And on the day of the funeral, it just got too much for me. Then this chap started trying to tell me that it wasn’t my fault. At first I thought, what does he know? But he kept saying the army did that to people, that it wasn’t so unusual for youngsters just not to be able to cope. He was older, like I said, several years older than Jossy. At the time, I sort of assumed that he was one of the instructors at Hangridge, I think. He said that he’d known this boy who’d been in the intake before Jossy’s, who’d done the same thing.’

Mrs Slade paused. Kelly expected her to pick up her whisky glass again, but she didn’t. She just sat looking at him in silence for several seconds. Kelly could see that she was concentrating, trying to sort
things out in a mind more or less permanently addled by alcohol, but a mind which Kelly somehow suspected was actually pretty sharp in the rare moments when she was completely sober. If you caught her that day.

‘It made me feel better,’ she said suddenly. ‘Him telling me that, made me feel better. But I never saw a link with Jossy’s death. Never. Never thought, that’s odd, two young people at the same barracks killing themselves like that. I never questioned it.’

She picked up the whisky then, but didn’t take a drink, just held the glass in her hand and stared at the remaining contents.

‘Not surprising, really. Alcohol stops you questioning things, you see. I guess that’s what so good about it …’

Her voice tailed off.

‘I know,’ said Kelly gently.

She looked him in the eye properly for the first time. ‘Ah,’ she said.

He changed the subject then. He was there for a purpose, after all. And, as ever, he preferred not to talk about himself.

‘Mrs Slade, did Jocelyn ever say anything to you about being bullied, or perhaps being sexually harassed. You do hear of that in the army. I just wondered?’

‘No, she didn’t. But then, looking back, she didn’t say much to me about anything. And I can’t say I blame her …’

Kelly thought for a moment.

‘The soldier who told you about the other suicide, at Jocelyn’s funeral,’ he went on. ‘I don’t suppose he gave you a name, by any chance, did he?’

‘He told me the lad’s first name, yes, he did.’

‘And do you remember it?’

She smiled wanly. ‘Oh yes, I remember it all right. Same name as my bloody ex-husband, Jossy’s rat of a father. Trevor. Young Trevor, he called him.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kelly. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

He meant it too.

‘What are you going to do next?’ asked Mrs Slade.

‘I’m going to do my level best to break through the red tape of the military and find out exactly why four presumably fit and healthy young people, stationed at Hangridge, have died in little more than a year, Mrs Slade, that’s what I’m going to do,’ said Kelly.