An Inconvenient Death Read online

  Technically, Dr Kelly was telling the truth to the committee about Watts. He had said no such thing to her when they met. And yet it could be argued that he had been economical with the truth. It subsequently came to light that he had made those comments to Watts, but he had done so during a telephone conversation in June – the month before he died. Unbeknown to him, Watts had recorded their twenty-minute chat. Significantly, though, Dr Kelly died before his contact with Watts was known publicly.

  After the questions had come to an end, the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, Simon Hoggart, noted in his published account that ‘as he [Dr Kelly] pushed past me at the end to leave... he was smiling’. Was this a smile triggered by tension, or was it one of relief? Whichever it was, Bryan Wells congratulated Dr Kelly afterwards and the pair went to Wells’s office with Wing Commander Clark. After a brief discussion, Dr Kelly said he wanted to return to his daughter’s house in Oxford immediately. He did so having been told that he wouldn’t be required in London for the next day’s ISC hearing before midday.

  When he reached Oxford, he spoke for twenty minutes by phone to Sarah Pape, during which he said that he had been ‘overwhelmed’ by the number of friends and colleagues who had rung him to offer their support. He also mentioned that an offer of setting up a fighting fund had been made, should one be required in the event of legal action being taken against him by the MoD. Ms Pape, a plastic surgeon, later remembered: ‘It really was a very normal conversation. Believe me, I have lain awake many nights since, going over in my mind whether I missed anything significant. In my line of work I do deal with people who may have suicidal thoughts and I ought to be able to spot those, even in a telephone conversation... He certainly did not convey to me that he was feeling depressed; and absolutely nothing that would have alerted me to the fact that he might have been considering suicide.’

  In the meantime, the main point that the FAC took away from the hearing focused on Dr Kelly’s assertion that he could not be the ‘main source’ of Andrew Gilligan’s story. Within a couple of hours of the hearing’s conclusion, Donald Anderson had written a short letter to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, saying that the committee’s view was that it was ‘most unlikely that Dr Kelly was Andrew Gilligan’s prime source’. He added, witheringly, that the committee believed Dr Kelly had been ‘poorly treated by the government’ since admitting on 30 June in his letter to the MoD to having met Gilligan. The letter was released to the press at 7 that evening.

  QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

  By 16 July Dr Kelly seemed in better form than he had been for days. He and his daughter ate breakfast together with her fiancé, David, and they then spoke to Mrs Kelly to finalize the arrangements for her return by train from Cornwall that evening.

  Arriving in London later that morning, his good mood did not go unnoticed at the ISC hearing, which lasted less than an hour. Although it was held in private it is known that Dr Kelly was again accompanied by Bryan Wells and their Ministry of Defence colleague, Wing Commander Clark. Wells said later that Dr Kelly seemed more comfortable than during his appearance before the FAC and was in good spirits afterwards, even going so far as to discuss when he would return to Iraq. A tentative date of 25 July was agreed on, which apparently cheered Dr Kelly.

  During the hearing Dr Kelly again said that he believed the forty-five-minute claim had been included in the September dossier for ‘impact’, but he was unaware of the intelligence behind it. He said the dossier was a ‘fair reflection of the intelligence that was available and it’s presented in a very sober and factual way’. He added that he didn’t think it had been ‘transformed’, saying that because he had not seen the earlier drafts of it, he ‘wouldn’t know whether it had been transformed or not’.

  At some time approaching 5 p.m. Dr Kelly made his way back to Oxford. Rachel met him at the station about an hour later. Although he was anxious to return to his own house in order to have access to his computer so that he could do some work, Rachel persuaded her father to stay with her for supper. Janice Kelly arrived at about 8.30 p.m. after her train journey from Cornwall. Again, Rachel dutifully walked to the station to meet her mother and to carry her bag, knowing she was anxious for news of her husband. Rachel, plus her parents and David, then ate supper together during which Dr Kelly was, according to Rachel, apparently quiet but cheerful and looking forward to going home.

  By 10 p.m. the Kellys had decided to return to their house in Southmoor. Before leaving, Dr Kelly arranged with Rachel that they would meet the following evening, Thursday, 17 July, to walk down to a field near his house to look at a foal together, something they had done several times since the animal’s birth in May. Rachel was working the next day, and no set time was agreed upon for their walk at that point. David helped the Kellys to load some luggage into their car and then he and Rachel waved her parents goodbye, obviously unaware that they would never see Dr Kelly again.

  Dr Kelly drove home. When he got there he switched on his computer and read some emails, knowing that he had an urgent task to complete by the following morning before he could fully draw a line under his business with the FAC. Shortly before his appearance in front of the FAC on 15 July, Andrew Mackinlay, the MP whose intentions towards him had seemingly been misunderstood by Dr Kelly, had tabled two Parliamentary Questions about Dr Kelly for answer by Geoff Hoon. For Hoon to provide these answers, Dr Kelly would have to supply him with the relevant information, via the MoD.

  The first question asked when, over the previous two years, Dr Kelly had met Andrew Gilligan; the second requested a list of all journalists other than Gilligan whom Dr Kelly had met over the previous two years, plus the purpose of each meeting and when it took place.

  This would have been an onerous job at the best of times, but having to revisit the very ground which he had left the previous day must have made it even tougher. Despite his tiredness, it seems that Dr Kelly tried to make inroads into the task that night in order to be able to send the necessary details to the MoD before the agreed time of 10 a.m. the following day, so that answers could be prepared for Parliament by officials in the department. Half an hour after arriving at home, Dr Kelly went to bed.

  ‘MANY DARK ACTORS PLAYING GAMES’

  The next morning, Thursday, 17 July, the Kellys woke up at their house at 8.30 a.m. For them, this was quite a bit later than usual and a probable result of the strain they had been under during the previous two weeks.

  Dr Kelly was in his study working by 9 a.m. and at 9.28 a.m. James Harrison, Bryan Wells’s deputy at the MoD, sent Dr Kelly four further Parliamentary Questions tabled by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin. These related to Dr Kelly’s contact with Gilligan and whether he would face disciplinary action as a result of it.

  Harrison’s hurriedly written email to Dr Kelly was friendly in tone. It read: ‘David, More PQs! But plenty of time for reply. I expect that Bryan will deal tomorrow, James.’ As it was the last day on which the House of Commons was sitting before breaking for the long summer recess, there was no doubt a collective desire to square off the situation as soon as possible.

  At about 10 a.m. Dr Kelly spoke to his colleague Wing Commander Clark by phone, who found him to be tired but in good spirits. Significantly, Dr Kelly confided in Clark that Mrs Kelly had taken recent events badly and had been very upset that morning.

  Work may have been piling up but, proving that Dr Kelly was looking ahead, that morning Clark and Dr Kelly again discussed his imminent return to the Middle East. Clark booked a plane ticket to Iraq for Dr Kelly, scheduled for eight days later, on 25 July. He knew how keen Dr Kelly was to carry on with his duties supporting the Iraq Survey Group, the multinational fact-finding mission sent to find weapons of mass destruction there.

  At about 10.45 a.m. Dr Kelly spoke to his friend Olivia Bosch, like him someone with international experience as a weapons inspector, whom he knew via his work for the UN, and at 11 a.m. he took a coffee break. Next, he sent eight short, individual emails to frien
ds and professional contacts. He had typed these messages earlier, but records show they left his email account simultaneously at 11.18 a.m. Six of the messages spoke of his expectation of flying to Baghdad on 25 July. The seventh email, to a Philippe Michel, did not mention Baghdad but was also positive in that Dr Kelly wrote: ‘I know that I have a lot of good friends who are providing support at a difficult time.’

  The eighth email was in reply to Judith Miller, a reporter on The New York Times whom he had known for several years. She had written to him the previous day offering kind words over the political spat in which he had been caught and to congratulate him on his performance in front of the FAC. Miller’s message read: ‘David, I heard from another member of your fan club that things went well for you today. Hope it’s true. J.’

  In view of the fact that his body was found on Harrowdown Hill less than twenty-four hours later, Dr Kelly’s response was darkly ominous. He wrote: ‘Judy, I will wait until the end of the week before judging – many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time. Best, David.’

  While her husband worked, Mrs Kelly left the house for about half an hour to meet a friend and collect some photographs relating to the local history society, of which she was an active member. When she returned she tried to show these pictures to Dr Kelly to lighten the atmosphere at home. She went into his study at about 12.15 p.m. but her gesture was gently rebuffed. He apparently smiled, stood up, and said he hadn’t quite finished what he was doing. A little later, at about 12.30, he went to the sitting room where he sat alone in silence.

  Her husband’s low mood distressed Mrs Kelly. She was suddenly struck by a headache and nausea, and vomited, but within a few minutes had recovered enough to be able to make him some sandwiches and give him some water. He ate in silence as his wife, with him at the kitchen table, looked on.

  At about 1.30 p.m., after he had eaten, Mrs Kelly went upstairs to lie down – something she did often to combat her arthritis. Dr Kelly apparently returned to his study for a while and then went upstairs to check on her. He also changed into a pair of jeans in preparation for a walk.

  Mrs Kelly assumed that her husband then went for his walk at that point but, shortly before 3 p.m., she heard the telephone ringing downstairs. Believing that it could be an important call for her husband from the MoD, she got up to answer it. By the time she was downstairs, the ringing had stopped and she found Dr Kelly talking quietly on the phone in his study.

  Mrs Kelly didn’t know who had rung her husband but, by process of elimination, it is thought to have been Wing Commander Clark, whose phone records show that he called Dr Kelly at 2.54 p.m. for a further chat about the letter to be sent to the FAC. Clark told Dr Kelly that the letter needed to be tweaked so that the BBC reporter Susan Watts’s name could be taken out of the general list of journalists to whom Dr Kelly had spoken and put into a different paragraph which referred to the specific contacts that he had had with journalists. Dr Kelly agreed to this.

  Mrs Kelly returned to her bedroom without addressing another word to her husband. Similarly, he did not say goodbye to her. When she went downstairs at 3.20 p.m., he had gone. She never saw him again.

  GILLIGAN RE-GRILLED

  Just as Dr Kelly left for his walk, Andrew Gilligan was in Westminster sitting down for a private grilling in front of the FAC. This was the second time in the space of a few weeks that the BBC reporter had been required to give evidence to the committee, which was still investigating suggestions that Tony Blair’s government had exaggerated the case for Britain’s recent invasion of Iraq. The occasion was apparently a bad-tempered affair which did not go well for Gilligan. According to contemporaneous newspaper reports, it even resulted in the committee Chairman, Donald Anderson, holding an impromptu press conference in a corridor outside the committee room in which he accused Gilligan of changing his story about his meeting with Dr Kelly two months previously.

  Even more significant, though, is the curious choice of words Gilligan used at one point near the end of this highly charged meeting. When asked again about the identity of the source for his now infamous Today programme report Gilligan said: ‘I have tried to persuade my source to go on the record, for obvious career reasons he is unable to, and I must respect that confidence.’

  In response, Conservative MP Sir John Stanley shot back: ‘The fact you have just said that is clearly absolute confirmation from you that your source is not Dr Kelly.’ Sir John’s point was based on pure logic, for the identity of Gilligan’s alleged source was, of course, already known to all and sundry. There was no honour, merit or reason in Gilligan continuing to protect the name of Dr Kelly given that the MoD had unmasked him so brutally the previous week. Gilligan, however, said: ‘I simply cannot add anything at all to the evidence I gave [during my previous appearance] about my source.’

  Had Gilligan slipped up by inadvertently suggesting that Dr Kelly was not the source primarily responsible for tipping him off about the claims of ‘sexing up’ the case for war? Sir John Stanley certainly appeared to think so. From this, the question follows: did Gilligan in fact have another source – a principal source – to whom he had spoken before or after his meeting with Dr Kelly? If so, it is not far-fetched to consider that this man (Gilligan had referred to him as ‘he’) was well known, or the current or past occupant of an elevated post in public life. Indeed, based on Gilligan’s response, might he even have been a household political name? This would certainly explain Gilligan’s unnecessarily reticent reply.

  RUTH ABSALOM: LAST WITNESS

  It is not known exactly what route Dr Kelly took from his house because nobody saw him leave, but it is most likely that he turned left and walked for a few hundred yards before turning right and heading north along a bridleway which eventually took him over the A420 bypass to the village of Longworth. This was the first part of a walk lasting about half an hour which he often did with his family, and sometimes alone, to aid a back condition from which he suffered.

  By 3.20 p.m., when Mrs Kelly got up, Dr Kelly was about half a mile from his front door chatting to Ruth Absalom, their seventy-five-year-old neighbour.

  Dr Kelly and Mrs Absalom bumped into each other at the top of Harris’s Lane in Longworth. She found him to be just as he was whenever she saw him – friendly and polite. Her recollection is that he wasn’t carrying anything and she thought he had been wearing a jacket. Dr Kelly asked her how she was and they spoke for a few minutes until Mrs Absalom’s dog, Buster, started pulling at its lead. Mrs Absalom then told Dr Kelly she must go. He apparently replied: ‘See you again then, Ruth,’ and they parted with him saying ‘Cheerio, Ruth,’ and her replying ‘Bye, David.’ As she recounted the day after he was found dead, it couldn’t have been a more normal, natural exchange of words. ‘He wasn’t edgy or anything like that,’ she said.

  Mrs Absalom said Dr Kelly walked to her right – in other words, east – towards the Appleton Road, which led ultimately to another neighbouring village, Kingston Bagpuize. Walking along the Appleton Road represented one of two possible routes home for Dr Kelly. It is a long, straight road with few houses on it and no pavement for the most part. One of the few turnings off it is Draycott Road, which leads back to the A420 bypass and then to Southmoor, where Dr Kelly lived. On this basis, the Appleton Road would have been the logical route for Dr Kelly to take had he been returning home. It would not be the natural route to take if he was heading to Harrowdown Hill, the place where his body was found the following morning, because it leads in the wrong direction altogether.

  While Mrs Absalom was the last person known to have seen Dr Kelly alive, it is equally interesting to consider the number of people who did not see him that afternoon, despite being in the immediate area at the same time as he would have been on his walk. When the police carried out house-to-house inquiries in the weeks after his death, they visited a total of 167 local properties. Each was carefully selected to include any ‘premise which overl
ooked the possible routes taken [by Dr Kelly on 17 July 2003]’. Furthermore, a checkpoint was established by the police on the public footpaths that cross Harrowdown Hill woods in an effort to identify potential witnesses to the movements of Dr Kelly. And yet not a single positive sighting is known to have been logged. It is as though Dr Kelly simply vanished.

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  Back at Dr Kelly’s house, Mrs Kelly’s condition had not improved. She went to the sitting room and switched on the television to try to take her mind off the way she was feeling. Yet she was soon disturbed more than once by what she has described as some ‘callers’ at the front door, whom she spoke to momentarily. Who were these callers? Publicly, at least, nothing is known about them. Their identities, the times they called, whether Mrs Kelly had ever met them before, how many separate callers there were, what they wanted, or for how long they engaged Mrs Kelly in conversation, all remain a mystery.

  Wing Commander Clark rang Dr Kelly’s house for a second time at about 3.20 p.m. He spoke to Mrs Kelly, who explained that her husband had gone for a walk. Clark later said he asked whether Dr Kelly had his mobile phone with him and Mrs Kelly said she didn’t know. Clark then rang Dr Kelly’s mobile phone. It was switched off. Apparently an electronic voice said the number was unavailable at that time. Clark said he was ‘very surprised’ by this because Dr Kelly prided himself on being contactable at all times. He had once even taken a call from Clark while driving his noisy motorized lawn mower. Next, Clark rang Dr Kelly’s landline again because the response to the FAC letter needed to be finalized that afternoon with Dr Kelly’s help. Clark later said: ‘I spoke to her [Mrs Kelly] and said I had not been able to contact Dr Kelly on his mobile and I thought she might say something but she was quite matter of fact... I then said: “Could you ask Dr Kelly when he returns, could he give me a ring.” That is how the message was left with his wife.’