The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  Contents

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  THE CRUELTY OF MORNING

  It is just before dawn

  and the street

  beneath my feet

  is colder

  than the air.

  I have left you behind

  darling

  Left you in the night

  where you belong

  In the warm sticky darkness

  of my bed

  In the raging sweet madness

  of my head.

  I have left you behind

  darling

  Bathed in the glory

  moonlight creates

  Cursed eternally

  when daylight breaks.

  There is no place for you

  darling

  in the chill of dawning

  No room for you

  darling

  In the cruelty of morning.

  PROLOGUE

  Jenny Stone was away with the fishes. Her powerful crawl had taken her right out to sea beyond the last of the rocks that stretched jaggedly away from the cliffs to the south of Pelham Bay. She paused for a while in her strenuous swimming, and floated, arms outstretched, eyes shut, basking in the hot sunshine like a contented whale. It was the first Sunday in August 1970, another gorgeous day in an unusually hot summer. A day Jenny, then only seventeen, would never forget.

  A piece of seaweed brushed against her face and she flicked it idly away. A large lump of wood bumped her right shoulder, and Jenny, eyes still closed, reached out with the fingertips of her right hand.

  She touched something very cold and clammy.

  Suddenly her sense of smell was overcome with a stench she had never experienced before – yet she recognised it. And before her eyes were properly open, Jenny knew what she was going to see.

  Next to her in the water was the body of a young woman. She was naked to the waist. Her bright red skirt, torn and ragged, billowed with the rhythmic roll of the ocean. It was this material, hanging on the body in shreds, that Jenny had mistaken for seaweed. The dead woman’s legs and arms floated stiff and angular as wood. Her face was turned to one side, eyes open and bulging, looking at Jenny in sightless horror. For a brief terrible instant the two faces, one full of life and vitality and hope for the future, the other distorted by violent death, were pressed together by the currents.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It had been just another row in a newspaper office. Her reaction had been way over the top and she already knew it. She had very nearly broken down and wept.

  The tears pricked persistently against the back of her eyes. She just succeeded in keeping them back. Only once before, in twenty years, had Fleet Street made her cry.

  Then she had been a young reporter of twenty-four, and following a particularly virulent, although not that unusual, attack from her news editor, had fled from the newsroom to the ladies’ loo, desperately biting her bottom lip until, with relief, she could thrust shut the door of a cubicle. And there, alone with a lavatory pan, the floods of despair had overcome her. She had been two years into her first job on a national daily at the time, and already hardened enough to be angry at her own weakness. She had indulged in a good cry and then gone back to work. What else?

  On her return to the newsroom, tear damage repaired as much as possible, the old-hand reporter whom she sat alongside had not looked up from his typewriter.

  ‘I’m surprised at you, Jen,’ he said quietly. ‘Letting the old bugger get to you. Thought you knew better.’

  Now she was forty-two. Of course she knew better. She had coped with the toughest of jobs for twenty years, she had travelled around the world on the biggest and best stories, she had loved almost every minute of it, and she had finally made it to assistant editor of one of the top tabloid papers, The Globe. Well – until a few minutes previously she had been. So perhaps she didn’t know better, after all.

  It was May 1995. Early afternoon on an unseasonably hot day. She realised suddenly that she had been almost running through the streets. The silk shirt beneath the jacket of her linen suit was damp with sweat. The sleeves had started to wrinkle seriously under the arms and around the elbows. In the middle of everything else some small distant part of her brain sent a sharp reminder that she really must never buy linen again, however attractive the stuff looked on a hanger in a shop window.

  She put a hand up to flick ineffectively at the fringe of her thick brown hair – it was stuck to her forehead. Her hand, she noticed in a detached sort of way, was shaking.

  She paused and stepped to one side of the throng of people hurrying along the pavement. Typical London. Everyone rushing about trance-like. You could strip naked and stand screaming and nobody would notice. If they did they would quickly look away.

  She stepped into the welcome shadow of a towering office block and leaned heavily against the wall. She was breathing in quick gasps, like a panting dog. Ridiculous.

  ‘Come on Jen, pull yourself together,’ she told herself.

  Two passing young girls in micro-skirts fleetingly caught her eye and quickly looked away. True to London form.

  What was left of her beleaguered brain shot off at a tangent again. ‘I dressed like that once, several million years ago,’ she thought to herself. This time her lips did not move. Definitely no more talking to herself in the street. Whatever next?

  She fished in her shoulder bag for her mobile phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Yo,’ said a voice at the other end of the phone. She felt immediately more cheerful. A little light relief beckoned.

  ‘Yo? What the hell does that mean? Have you joined the American marines?’

  The man’s voice became weary. ‘Jennifer, how lovely to hear from you.’

  ‘You’re a liar, Dominic. What are you doing at home in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon anyway?’

  ‘I’m resting.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I’m resting. I have been suffering from exhaustion. Miles and I discussed it sensibly and I now take two afternoons’ rest a week.’

  ‘God, Dominic, you are a wimp.’

  ‘No doubt by your Amazonian standards I am, Jennifer. But we can’t all be that butch, can we? Would you like to speak to my wife?’

  ‘Yes, I would like to speak to Anna. But you know, try as I do, I still can’t think of her as your wife, Dominic. I just can’t.’

  Anna McDonald, her oldest and best friend, came on the line.

  ‘Have you really got nothing better to do with your day than bait poor Dominic?’

  ‘Not entirely one-sided, Anna. He’s improving. And, actually, from now on I may indeed have nothing better to do with my day.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come to Joe Allen for supper and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘Tell me now. I can’t come to supper. It�
��s Dominic’s half day.’

  ‘No supper, no story. All will be told only over many large margaritas. Incidentally, how does Dominic get to fix himself two afternoons off a week?’

  ‘Because he’s brilliant. He’s the best computer scientist in Britain. At least, he’s convinced his bosses he is. And that’s real brilliance.’

  ‘It’s obscene.’

  ‘And you’re jealous.’

  ‘True. I’ll pick you up seven-thirty.’

  ‘If you are driving I’m definitely not coming. I remember the last time. Just. And you insisted you were on the wagon…’

  ‘OK. I’ll get a taxi – Christ, you’ve reminded me! Brain death is setting in. I stormed off like a halfwit and left the car in the office car park. I’d better get it out of there before somebody else does that for me.’

  ‘Jennifer, what have you done?’

  ‘I’ll tell you at Joe’s. Seven-thirty?’

  ‘Oh, all right. When I’m divorced can I bring Pandora and come and live at your place?’

  ‘Only if you change the poor innocent’s name…’

  She pushed the ‘end’ button and noticed her hand had stopped shaking. Thank God for Anna. For twenty-five years, through two marriages and countless ups and downs, Anna had always been there. Of course she would come to supper, and not just to pick up on the latest drama. She knew she was needed. And there was never anyone better than Anna in a crisis.

  The memory of how she had first met Anna remained quite vivid to Jennifer and never failed to make her smile. Barely into her twenties then, Anna had already managed to appear totally sophisticated, Jennifer recalled.

  The two women had both been hired on the same newspaper training scheme. Booked into a hostel on her first night away from home, eighteen-year-old Jennifer had found a nearby cafe and settled down for supper alone.

  ‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ asked a cool and round-vowelled voice. Anna, a doctor’s daughter, had been brought up in Wimbledon and was conspicuously English middle-class in those days.

  ‘I do so hate eating alone, don’t you?’ she continued.

  Jennifer looked up for the first time into what she came to regard as arguably the most deceptively gentle grey eyes in the world and stammered her agreement.

  Later, when they came to share a flat, Anna had arrived with one neat suitcase of extraordinary design which, after a seemingly effortless flick, had sprung miraculously open to reveal her clothes, uncreased, immaculate, and sporting several designer labels, suspended in perfect order from their own hangers.

  Jennifer, surrounded at the time by crumpled debris and a selection of tatty carrier bags, had been impressed ever since. And thinking back to those early days with her friend had indeed made her smile.

  The original shock reaction to her own behaviour had faded now. Jennifer had a game plan for the rest of the day, and possibly for the rest of her life, and she wanted to get on with it. First a quick dash back to the office car park, then home for a short course in revival – a long bath and several cups of tea. She hailed a taxi.

  Back at The Globe, the key card still operated the doors to the car park. That was something. The Porsche continued to give her a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, although lessened somewhat by the dents and bruises on both sides. She told herself that driving a battered Porsche was a status symbol. The car was as smooth, as tight, and as quick as ever, but it was more than six years old and she had known that next time around she would not get another company motor like it. The days when she had swung the deal which included that car were long gone. Next time around it would be a small family saloon and be thankful. Yuk.

  Oh well, she’d probably solved that problem. It was unlikely that The Globe would ever again be providing her with any kind of company car.

  She slotted herself behind the wheel, thrust the gear lever forward and roared up the ramp, bouncing over the sleeping policemen. The tyres squealed as she jerked to a stop and prepared to use her key card again.

  She looked at her watch. A ladies’ Rolex. She had stormed out of the office at around one-thirty. At least nobody could accuse her of throwing a terminal tantrum after lunch. She was just in time to miss the late afternoon build-up of traffic; she should make it back to her house in Richmond soon after three-thirty. Plenty of time to recharge the batteries before going around to Anna’s. That bath, a knock-your-socks-off shower, a pot of English breakfast tea, a bit of a sleep, an early evening gin-and-tonic, and a little pre-dinner sparring with Dominic. Things were looking up.

  Unlike Dominic she was not used to being at home in the middle of a weekday afternoon. As she lay back in a bubbly bath, clutching a steaming mug of tea and listening to a play on Radio Four, she thought she could get to like it. The rest of the afternoon passed peacefully. The phone rang several times. She did not answer it. The word was undoubtedly already getting around and she did not want to talk to anybody yet – except Anna.

  She ordered a minicab for seven that evening.

  ‘You’re early, this must be serious,’ said Anna.

  She and Jennifer had always been an odd couple, the one appearing to be everything the other was not, both physically and in personality. Jennifer, striking looking but nothing more, was exceptionally tall and confidently forceful, bordering on brash on a bad day, inclined to toss her mane of thick dark hair when things didn’t suit her. Anna was barely five-foot-one, petite in build, neat of manner, seemingly diffident in behaviour, and quite devastatingly pretty. Her wispy white-blonde hair, falling straight to her shoulders from a central parting, framed a perfectly even-featured elfin face almost always composed into the most pleasant of expressions.

  She had an air of fragility about her. Confronted by adversity, Anna would smile in apparent deference and flutter her eyelashes. She really did flutter them. Jennifer thought Anna was the only woman she had ever actually seen do so. Anna was acutely aware of her femininity and had always used it ruthlessly. Even now, well into her forties, she was the kind of woman men referred to as a ‘sweet girl’.

  The very thought always made Jennifer smile.

  Appearances could indeed be deceptive. Anna had handled Fleet Street better than anyone Jennifer knew. One of the secrets of her success was that she was invariably underestimated. Jennifer could not remember her ever failing in anything she had set out to achieve, and joked that she had chosen Anna to be her closest friend because she knew she could never survive with her as an enemy. Anna invariably got her own way without those around her even noticing. Jennifer had always been open-mouthed in admiration of her and quite green with envy. You couldn’t even attempt to play the game the way Anna did when you were nearly six feet tall with the shoulders of a rugby lock forward.

  In fact Anna had a brain to die for, plus total confidence in her abilities, and was always quite certain of the various directions in which she wished to take her life. She had been a senior executive in the Murdoch organisation, widely tipped to be the first woman editor of a national daily, when she’d decided she would rather be a mother instead.

  She had been almost forty when she met Dominic McDonald, fell wildly in love for probably the first time – in the past it had not been Anna’s role to fall in love with the men in her life, they all fell desperately in love with her while she graciously accepted it – married him and became pregnant within a few months.

  When their child was born she announced with her usual certainty that she was going to give her daughter the attention she had previously only given to her career, that she would be quitting ‘The Street’ at least until Pandora came of school age, and that from now on she would be using her married name only.

  Astonished pleas from friends and colleagues, and even, quite remarkably, from Murdoch himself, did nothing to shake her from her intentions.

  At the time Jennifer thought Anna had gone stark staring mad. Now she wasn’t so sure. But the events had always given an edge to her relationship with her friend’s husband. Je
nnifer was honest enough to admit to herself that she did not like the power she felt Dominic had over Anna. Meanwhile her friend, sharp and cool as ever, merely accepted that her best friend and her husband were each jealous of the other’s place in her affections, and that was, after all, quite as it should be.

  It was no accident that while Jennifer waited for Anna to gather up coat and handbag, Dominic remained upstairs, resolutely engrossed in the task of putting Pandora to bed. Long, lanky, bespectacled, clever-faced, academic Dominic – a cliché on legs.

  ‘I told him you were in crisis and he said that would doubtless make you more obnoxious than ever and went into hiding,’ Anna remarked.

  Over the first margarita in Joe Allen, Jennifer related her news. ‘I walked out. Jack told me next week’s features were crap just one time too many. So I resigned!’

  ‘Good God, is that all?’

  Anna was totally unsympathetic. ‘You’ve had a row with the editor. Send in the bloody cavalry. That’s what editors are for, isn’t it? He won’t even mention your so-called resignation in the morning, as well you know.’

  ‘I’m not going to work in the morning.’

  ‘Don’t be so childish. Of course you’re going to work in the morning. You always do. You’re a survivor.’

  ‘Not any more. After I’d screamed obscene abuse at the bugger, I put my resignation in writing.’

  ‘So? He’ll tear it up, won’t he? He adores you, you know he does.’

  ‘Hmph. He’s got a bloody fine way of showing it. And I’ve had enough. I’m off.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Ridiculous or not, I’m going home to North Devon tomorrow and I have every intention of staying there.’

  ‘Really?’ Anna giggled. ‘I’d love to hear what Marcus would have to say about that,’ she said.

  Jennifer raised her eyebrows and tried to look disdainful. Marcus was her ex-husband. The remarkable Sir Marcus Piddell, newspaper tycoon and government minister. He had begun life as a local paper reporter in North Devon and risen relentlessly to the top. His ambition and his singleness of purpose had always been breathtaking.