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and steered him off in the direction of the ambulance. Sergeant Smythe and Kelly watched for only a second or two before getting into the car themselves, where, within its relative shelter, the sergeant produced his notebook and jotted down everything Kelly was able to tell him.
    His attitude to Kelly seemed considerably less cool now, which was perhaps not surprising. After all, Kelly had done a large part of his job for him. He had been able to tell the sergeant that the victim was a soldier and that his name was Alan, and where he was stationed. One call to the barracks at Hangridge should be enough to sort out full identification. The accident seemed straightforward enough and Kelly guessed that Sergeant Smythe couldn’t wait to get the scene cleared up so that he could return to the warm familiarity of Ashburton police station and a steaming hot cup of tea.
    Kelly could well guess how the other man felt. He was shivering himself now, and it wasn’t with shock. He had seen all too many dead bodies in his time. The cold and the wet had seeped right through his inadequate clothing and he felt chilled to the bone. But he was not yet quite finished.
    ‘There’s just one thing, Sergeant,’ said Kelly. ‘Thetwo men who turned up in the pub looking for this lad. Two more soldiers, I’m sure. Where did they go? Has anybody seen them?’
    ‘I don’t know anything about any two men,’ said Sergeant Smythe, reverting at once to his earlier attitude of near hostility. Smythe did not want any complications, thought Kelly. His body language defied Kelly to question him any further. However, Kelly had a thick skin. You grew one in the job he had done through most of his life.
    ‘But didn’t the lorry driver see them?’ he persisted.
    Smythe studied him for a few seconds without enthusiasm. Then, sighing exaggeratedly, he opened the driver’s door and began to swing his long legs out onto the tarmac road, straight into an icy blast of windswept rain.
    ‘Wait here,’ he muttered to Kelly, who needed no encouragement whatsoever to remain exactly where he was, almost curled into the passenger seat of the police car, with his arms tightly wrapped round his chest in a futile bid to retain as much body warmth as possible.
    The sergeant returned within only a couple of minutes, shaking droplets of icy water off his police issue waterproof jacket and all over Kelly as he climbed back into the car.
    ‘The driver didn’t see anybody else,’ he said. ‘He didn’t see anyone at all apart from chummy, when it was too darned late.’
    ‘But those two blokes must have been with the lad. They wouldn’t have left him in that state, would they?’
    ‘Who knows what a load of off-their-head soldiers will do,’ responded Sergeant Smythe flatly.
    Kelly opened his mouth to respond but found he didn’t have the energy. He reached for the door handle. His fingers were so cold he had difficulty even grasping it. But the good news was that his body temperature was by now so low that when he eventually climbed out into the wind and rain he barely felt it any more. None the less, he began to sprint back to the MG, but his path was momentarily blocked by the ambulance containing the body of the dead squaddie, which was now slowly pulling away from the scene.
    As Kelly watched it leave he could see again, all too clearly in his mind’s eye, the lad’s lifeless young face, and wondered fleetingly just how old he had been. Under twenty, definitely. Eighteen or nineteen, maximum, he thought. Little more than a child in the great scheme of things, and with so much life left to live. To his surprise Kelly, who was, after all, not unfamiliar with the spectacle of lives wasted and cut unnecessarily short, suddenly felt overwhelmed by a great sadness.

Three
    Kelly had had enough. He wanted to get away from the scene, shut the dead boy’s face out of his head and get warm as soon as possible.
    He decided he wouldn’t wait for the truck to be