Authors: Hilary Bonner
It was Jennifer who was shaking his arm. Calm, composed, dignified, wonderful Jennifer, who suddenly did not look calm at all. There were tears streaming down her cheeks.
‘She’s gone, John,’ she cried. ‘She’s dead. Mum’s dead.’
Kelly tried to stand up. It took more than one attempt. His left leg had gone to sleep and his spine seemed to have locked itself into a sitting position.
Eventually, if a little unsteadily, he struggled upright. He stared at Moira, lying on the bed before him. She actually looked much the same as she had the last time he had seen her, when she had still been desperately hanging on to life. But now she had let go. Kelly’s first reaction took him by surprise and rather shocked him. He immediately felt a terrific sense of relief. For Moira. For her daughters. And, of course, for himself. Then he was overwhelmed by a dreadful emptiness.
He wrapped his arms around Jennifer and pulled
her close to him. She leaned her head against his chest and sobbed her heart out.
Perversely, perhaps, it made Kelly feel a little better, not that Jennifer had broken down, but that she had wanted to turn to him as a shoulder to cry on. If he could at least give Jennifer a little comfort, then perhaps he wasn’t quite such a hopelessly inadequate bugger, after all.
In the morning Karen left home early again, not something she enjoyed but, none the less, she was actually quite glad to shut the door on her bedroom, which looked rather as if it had suffered a terrorist attack. In spite of her love of expensive designer clothes, she paid them little respect, which was one of the reasons why she preferred low-maintenance items, the sort that were not supposed to look freshly ironed. She was inclined to use the pretty, little, Victorian dressing chair at the foot of her bed as an alternative wardrobe, only when the pile of clothes upon it reached a certain level, they could do nothing other than fall onto the floor. She had not made her bed, either. Which wasn’t entirely her fault, she told herself. Sophie had looked so comfortable curled up on the crumpled duvet that Karen had not had the heart to move her. In any case, the cat would probably have bitten her had she attempted to do so.
Making a mental note to blitz the bedroom at the weekend, she hurried along the corridor to West Beach Heights’ famously rickety, ancient lift. In a nanny state increasingly governed by health and safety regulations, she found the ornate old lift, which moved both up and down only in a series of disconcerting jerks, rather reassuring.
For Karen, it was just another morning. She did think about Kelly and wondered whether she should
call him or wait for him to call her, but she still had no idea that Moira was dead when she arrived at her office, in Torquay police station, just before 8 a.m. In any case, in spite of her genuine feelings for the woman and for Kelly, it would have made no difference whatsoever. Karen had a job to do and she just wanted to get on with it.
She was nearly ready to approach the chief constable, to ask for his authorisation to set up a formal police investigation at Hangridge. This was not something she could do of her own volition. And it seemed pretty obvious that, in spite of trying to give every appearance of co-operating, Gerry Parker-Brown was not going to allow any kind of external investigation into the affairs of the Devonshire Fusiliers unless he was given little choice.
In terms of red tape there was a brick wall around Hangridge, Karen reckoned, much more impenetrable than the wire fence which was actually the army base’s only physical perimeter barrier. And she intended to do her damnedest to knock that brick wall down.
But first, she needed all the information she could lay her hands on. Certainly enough to persuade the chief constable that a full police investigation of goings-on at Hangridge was not just advisable but necessary.
It was still too early to ring Mike Collins, the newly appointed clerk to the coroner’s court, who had failed to return her call yesterday, so she decided to re-read the report he had already sent her of the inquest into the death of Craig Foster. This had actually contained few surprises except, perhaps, that the details of the military police investigation, conducted by the Special
Investigation Branch of the RMP, the army’s equivalent of the CID, were extremely sketchy. Their evidence had drawn the conclusion that Craig Foster had fallen on his own automatic rifle during a moorland training exercise, and in so doing had caused the gun to fire. He died from gunshot wounds to the chest. And although these did seem consistent with SIB’s conclusions, Karen remained unimpressed. She knew that SIB investigations should be conducted in more or less exactly the same way as by the CID. Indeed, SIB officers, although soldiers, were trained in CID procedure at civilian police college. Yet there appeared not to have been any witness statements taken, even though Foster was on an exercise with the entire training company of around a hundred and twenty men and women. Instead, the SIB report, read out at the inquest by an NCO, had taken the form of little more than an assumption of the obvious. And the coroner had appeared to accept the army version of events without question and simply to declare a verdict of accidental death. In truth, it could well still be the case, she realised, that Craig Foster’s death had been an accident. Everything fitted, after all, and soldiers did die in training accidents of this kind, if not regularly, at least often enough for another one not to initially raise any suspicions. None the less, from the inquest report before her, Karen did not consider that Craig Foster’s death had actually been proven to be an accident at all.
So engrossed was she in the report and her own thoughts that the time passed quickly and Mike Collins finally got back to her on virtually the dot of 9 a.m., before she’d made her planned second call to his office.
‘I’m really sorry, Detective Superintendent,’ he began. ‘Court finished late yesterday and I didn’t get your message until this morning because—’
Karen interrupted him there. She was neither interested in excuses nor incriminations. She just wanted to get on with it.
‘Spare me your life story, please,’ she said curtly. ‘I just want the full report of an inquest into the death of a young soldier – by the name of Jocelyn Slade – about six months ago, and I want it straight away.’
She also asked Collins, too new in his job to even have a chance of being able to remember off the top of his head, to search records for an inquest on a soldier called Trevor, who had allegedly committed suicide at Hangridge a further six months or so earlier, and indeed to look for any other deaths connected with the barracks or the Devonshire Fusiliers.
Perhaps anxious now to prove his efficiency, the newly appointed coroner’s clerk emailed her the requested report on Jocelyn Slade’s inquest within minutes, and promised to get back to her as soon as possible on her other request.
The Jocelyn Slade inquest came as a bombshell to Karen. Unlike the inquest into Craig Foster’s death, it did not just raise some procedural points and leave a few doubts hanging in the air. It was a revelation. Slade had allegedly shot herself with her SA80 rifle while on sentry duty at Hangridge main gates. Once again the coroner, now retired, seemed to have accepted the findings of the SIB investigation, that Jocelyn Slade had killed herself, without any discernible further inquiry. He pronounced a verdict of suicide in spite of evidence presented, which Karen, this time, considered to be highly questionable.
As she read, Karen could hardly believe her eyes. Jocelyn had been shot in the head five times. The SA80 was an automatic weapon. Karen had completed the obligatory police firearms courses and was, in fact, not at all a bad shot. She understood that an automatic used in a suicide attempt could continue to fire even after the first shot might well have done its job. But five hits? That was pushing it. And she noted that the investigation did not include any information on the angle of the shots, merely indicating that they had all been fired from close quarters, leading to the suicide verdict.
It was not satisfactory at all. And there was more. The second sentry on duty, at the entrance to the officers’ mess a hundred yards or so away from where Jocelyn Slade had been on duty, Private James Gates, had been called to give evidence. He said that he had heard shots and called the duty sergeant, who ordered a search of the perimeter area of Hangridge. But at first no body had been found, even though more than one soldier had several times passed right by the spot where Jocelyn’s body was eventually discovered.
Incompetence? Panic? All involved had, after all, been young and inexperienced. But Karen was not convinced. She considered the coroner’s verdict to have been, at the very least, highly unsatisfactory.
She had, of course, known Torbay’s former coroner, albeit only vaguely. And she was aware that Reginald Sykes had been an army officer himself, practising law within the military, before moving into civilian life as a solicitor in Torquay and ultimately becoming a coroner. Actually, even someone who did not know that would probably have guessed
something of Sykes’ military past. In total contrast to Gerrard Parker-Brown, she remembered Sykes as being something of a cliché on legs. With his small bristly moustache, accent you could cut with a knife and exaggeratedly upright bearing, he really had been a complete stereotype, old-style army officer.
She read the report several times, trying to imagine what could have happened to Jocelyn Slade. She wanted to call the chief constable straight away, but she made herself be patient, at least until she had heard back from the coroner’s clerk concerning any other deaths connected with Hangridge.
Only a couple of hours later Mike Collins called. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type. He had been a police officer, in common with many coroners’ clerks, and he was the sort who liked to demonstrate the failings of others, particularly if he felt that he had been dealt with critically himself, as he might well after the way Karen had spoken to him earlier. One way and another, Mike Collins was not the kind of man Karen liked a bit. But the truth was that she couldn’t have wished for a better person to be trolling through the court’s records.
‘Found him,’ said Collins triumphantly. ‘Fusilier Trevor Parsons, died just over a year ago. Verdict, suicide, like you said. Hard to believe that any coroner could have presided over three cases like this of young people from the same barracks, and not at least passed comment, isn’t it?’
Collins was only voicing Karen’s sentiments, but from him the comment sounded smug and self-satisfied. Quite deliberately, she did not respond. Instead she merely checked if he had unearthed any other Devonshire Fusilier cases. He hadn’t.
‘Fine, thank you,’ she said curtly. ‘So, just email me the report on Parsons, please.’
‘Already done it,’ said Collins, sounding even smugger.
Karen couldn’t wait to hang up and read the records of Parsons’ inquest. The similarities both with the death of Jocelyn Slade and the way in which such investigation as there was had been handled by the SIB, were immediately evident. Karen could feel the excitement coursing through her body.
Trevor Parsons, a seventeen-year-old recruit, had allegedly shot himself while on sentry duty at Hangridge and, like Jocelyn Slade, had died from multiple gunshot wounds, in his case three such wounds. The only witness called had been the young soldier he had been standing guard with, who had reported only hearing gunfire and then finding Parsons’ body when he went to investigate.
Karen spent just a few minutes assimilating the information and rehearsing how she was going to present it, before eventually calling the chief constable. As ever, she did not relish any dealings at all with Harry Tomlinson.
He kept her waiting for almost five minutes before eventually coming on the line, something he quite often did with her and which she suspected was quite deliberate.
Telling herself that the most important thing with Tomlinson was never to let him get to you, she explained the events so far as calmly and as succinctly as she could. Tomlinson listened without interrupting, and continued to say nothing even when she deliberately paused to allow him the chance to chip in. He was, she thought, giving nothing away.
And when she finally got to the real aim of her call, she still had no idea at all of how he might react.
‘I really do think we should initiate a police inquiry at Hangridge, now,’ she said finally. ‘I am not at all happy with the way the military investigations have been conducted, nor with at least one of the coroner’s verdicts.’
‘Karen, surely these are military matters, don’t we have enough crime to deal with?’
Karen hesitated. This was the kind of response she had feared, but there was more. Tomlinson’s attitude sounded so like that of Gerrard Parker-Brown, it was uncanny.
‘Look, sir, it seems to me that there is a distinct possibility that these cases could be criminal in some way, and I think, at the very least, we should look into them,’ she persisted. ‘I am convinced there is justification for that. In my opinion, all four investigations should be reopened and this time conducted by the civilian police force.’
‘Indeed, Detective Superintendent? And on what grounds exactly, pray, do you feel that we should take this course of action?’
Karen stifled her irritation with difficulty. The bastard was patronising her again. Surely, she’d given him grounds enough. Four deaths in just over a year, and at least two of them leaving a number of serious questions totally unanswered.
‘I thought I had explained that, sir …’
‘Nothing to warrant us meddling in legitimate army affairs, not as far as I can see. Gerry Parker-Brown is on the case, and he’s going to have another look at it all, just to dot the Is and cross the Ts, you understand. Decent chap, Gerry. Does a job
properly. Knows all about making sure we don’t have any misunderstandings. You should be in no doubt, Karen, that I trust him to clear this up in no time. It’s always been our procedure, as you well know, to let the SIB investigate these kind of deaths, which they have always done quite satisfactorily in my opinion, and I see no reason to start interfering now, stirring things up unnecessarily, that kind of thing.’