No Reason To Die
Authors: Hilary Bonner
| No Reason To Die |
| Hilary Bonner |
| UK (2004) |
John Kelly, once a reporter, always a maverick, has
become embroiled in the mystery surrounding a series of disturbing
deaths at a tough army training base in the heart of Dartmoor. Several
young men and women have died suddenly and tragically, mostly from
gunshot wounds that the army claims to have been self-inflicted. There
is a plausible explanation for each death individually, but when put
together these explanations look very suspicious indeed.
Kelly takes his concerns to his old friend Detective Superintendent
Karen Meadows and together they attempt to break through the wall of
secrecy the army has erected. Their involvement in what they come to
believe is a major conspiracy, coupled with upheaval and tragedy in
their own personal lives, brings them closer than ever before. But when
powerful men in high places try to silence the ex-journalist in a
shocking and unexpected manner, this threatens to be the investigation
which could finally finish John Kelly for good...
John Kelly, once a reporter, always a maverick, has become embroiled in the mystery surrounding a series of disturbing deaths at a tough army training base in the heart of Dartmoor. Several young men and women have died suddenly and tragically, mostly from gunshot wounds that the army claims to have been self-inflicted. There is a plausible explanation for each death individually, but when put together these explanations look very suspicious indeed.
Kelly takes his concerns to his old friend Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows and together they attempt to break through the wall of secrecy the army has erected. Their involvement in what they come to believe is a major conspiracy, coupled with upheaval and tragedy in their own personal lives, brings them closer than ever before. But when powerful men in high places try to silence the ex-journalist in a shocking and unexpected manner, this threatens to be the investigation which could finally finish John Kelly for good...
Hilary Bonner is a former showbusiness editor of the
Mail on Sunday
and the
Daily Mirror
. She now writes full time and lives in the West Country where she was born and brought up and where all her books are based. She is the author of eight previous novels. She also co-wrote
It’s Not a Rehearsal
, the autobiography of Amanda Barrie. Hilary was the Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association in 2003.
Also by Hilary Bonner
FICTION
The Cruelty of Morning
A Fancy to Kill For
A Passion So Deadly
For Death Comes Softly
A Deep Deceit
A Kind of Wild Justice
A Moment of Madness
When the Dead Cry Out
NON-FICTION
Heartbeat – The Real Life Story
Benny – A Biography of Benny Hill
René and Me (Gorden Kaye)
Journeyman (with Clive Gunnell)
It’s Not a Rehearsal (with Amanda Barrie)
NO REASON
TO DIE
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446457900
Published by Arrow Books in 2005
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Copyright © Hilary Bonner 2004
The right of Hilary Bonner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by William Heinemann
Arrow Books
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 09 945166 2
This book is dedicated to the memory of Private James Collinson, aged 17, Private Geoff Gray, 17, Private Cheryl James, 18, and Private Sean Benton, 20; all of whom died suddenly and unexpectedly at the Princess Royal Barracks at Deepcut, headquarters of the Royal Logistics Corps.
And while this book is a work of fiction, and all the characters in it are fictional, the extraordinary events surrounding the death of those four young soldiers, and certain other of the 1,748 non combat deaths recorded within the British Army since 1990, provide its inspiration.
Geoff and Diane Gray, parents of Private Geoff Gray and Yvonne and Jim Collinson, parents of Private James Collinson, without whose generous assistance this book may not have been possible. Their dignity and quiet determination are awesome, and it was an honour and a privilege to get to know them; Sergeant John Woods of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary in Torquay; Police Constable Steve Mudge, of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, formerly a sergeant in the Royal Military Police; former Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary; former Parachute Regiment Colonel John Pullinger; and last but far from least, Major Rachel Grimes of the Royal Logistic Corps, currently employed in the Ministry of Defence Press Office, who freely helped me with all factual matters in spite of being aware of the inspiration for this book, leaving me to think that if the army had been as open from the beginning with the families of the young soldiers who died at Deepcut, then Geoff, Diane, Jim, Yvonne, and all the others who have formed the pressure group Deepcut and Beyond, may not have felt forced to campaign with every means at their disposal in order to, one day, be told the truth.
The young man fell heavily. His right shoulder hit the floor first and the pain made him grunt. Then the rest of his body followed quite slowly. It was a bit like the final act of a very bad ballet. His head bounced just once on the ancient flagstones, while his arms flayed the air desperately searching for something to hang on to, until, after a final, ineffectually limp, kick of one leg, he lay spreadeagled, limbs outstretched, face up, eyes and mouth wide open in surprise.
There was a trickle of blood on his forehead where he had caught it against the edge of the bar on the way down. After the grunt he did not make a sound, but then the fall must have made it even harder for him to speak than it had been before. Neither did he attempt to move. But movement had also been pretty difficult before.
Kelly was sitting on a stool in the corner, as far away from the pool table as possible. Kelly didn’t like pool in pubs. The cues, and the gyrating bottoms of those brandishing them, turned your average bar room into an obstacle course. There was nobody playing pool that evening, but there were some things in life which even Kelly would take no chances with.
There was actually hardly anybody in the pub at all. It was a wet Monday night in early November and the rain had been falling incessantly since early morning. It had been almost horizontal across the car
park when Kelly had arrived a couple of hours earlier, and the driving easterly wind had been so strong that walking against it had not been easy. This had hardly been a day for a drive over the moors to The Wild Dog, an isolated eighteenth-century coaching inn, built alongside one of the handful of roads crisscrossing the heart of Dartmoor. Kelly, however, was prepared to undertake almost anything almost any time, except the things he should be doing with his life.
An elderly couple were sitting at a table at the far end of the bar, in the lounge area which Charlie Cooke, the landlord, a likeable but inadequate amateur from Birmingham, now used as a glorified dining room. Apart from the young man lying prostrate on the floor, they and Kelly were the only customers. In summer The Wild Dog was packed, and even in the winter, over weekends blessed with half-decent weather, the old inn attracted a quite respectable level of business with customers motoring out for lunch and dinner from the towns and cities on the edge of the moors, like Plymouth, Newton Abbot, and even Kelly’s own home town of Torquay down on the coast. But The Dog had little or no local drinking trade and, in common with so many country pubs, had come to rely entirely on the provision of food and the seasonal influxes of tourists. Pubs just weren’t pubs any more, thought Kelly morosely.
He had watched the young man’s fall with a kind of detached fascination. It had been more of a slide really, head and shoulders first, as he had bent at the waist so far backwards that gravity had refused to allow his body to remain any longer on the stool. Then there had been that last almost lazy kick-out
with one leg, as he had gradually descended to the floor, the weight of his lower body causing him to slide along the flagstones, worn slippery with age, until he lay full length, his head nearly inside the mighty old inglenook which dominated the room. He was, however, in no danger of burning. Only a small modern oil stove smouldered fitfully in the centre of the huge fireplace.
The elderly couple continued to concentrate very hard on finishing their microwaved frozen lasagne. Charlie’s wife, who did most of the catering herself, didn’t cook on out-of-season weekdays, but Charlie reckoned he was a dab hand with the microwave. Kelly didn’t agree. He’d once eaten Charlie’s microwaved lasagne. It had been cool and soggy in the middle, dry and chewy round the edges, and totally and utterly tasteless. However, when the young man fell off his stool the elderly couple focused every bit of their attention on the sorry meal before them, as if it were a mouth-watering gourmet experience. And they gave absolutely no sign whatsoever of noticing the only bit of action The Wild Dog was likely to see that day.
Kelly noticed. But then Kelly noticed everything. It was his life’s work really. One way or another, he had made a living since he was a boy out of watching and listening and then writing it all down. He had been a journalist for many years, at the very top in Fleet Street until he let the demons get to him, and then back to his local paper roots in South Devon. But that was all behind Kelly now. Kelly had had enough of destroying lives. He was no saintly philanthropist and he’d been a damned good investigative reporter, with a real nose for a story – the type of journalist who, by
and large and with one or two notable exceptions, had achieved marginally more good than harm. It was the destruction of his own life Kelly had wanted to halt, far more than that of anybody else. He had decided he was going to be a novelist. Indeed he was already a novelist – in as much as that he had given up the day job and written half a treatment and almost two chapters of his first novel.