The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘Uh yeah, tummy’s a bit dicky.’

  ‘Oh.’ Long drawn out. Speculative. ‘I thought you might be fretting over that poor maid.’

  Johnny tried to keep cool.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That poor murdered maid. You saw a bit of her, didn’t you boy?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Johnny’s voice came out in a croak.

  ‘Oh, I used to see you pair scuttling off together now and again. I often take old Jip for a stroll over the dunes of an evening.’

  Johnny knew his face was now crimson.

  ‘I haven’t seen her for a long time,’ he said quickly. ‘Not a long time.’

  He didn’t realise that he was shouting.

  ‘All right, boy, all right. Calm down.’ Bill had his eternal pipe in his hand. He sucked on the stem, still staring.

  ‘I am calm,’ Johnny snapped. ‘Do you mind if I go for a quick swim?’

  Bill shook his head.

  Johnny peeled off his shirt and jeans. Underneath he was wearing a pair of brief red swimming shorts. Two girl tourists walking by turned their heads for a better look. All the girls fancied Johnny, Bill Turpin knew that. Not surprising, he thought, good-looking boy and a fine body he had on him too. What a shame.

  Johnny sprinted down the slipway and across the stretch of beach to the sea. Bill leaned against the sea wall. The faithful Jip nuzzled affectionately against his leg. He pushed her lazily away with a foot.

  ‘Lie down, dog, will you.’

  The old man tapped his pipe against the wall and began the ritual of refilling and relighting it. He drew on the tobacco, blowing smoke through his mouth and nostrils. Johnny had swum a couple of hundred yards out to sea. He was moving very fast, ploughing through the water with his powerful crawl.

  Bill watched, squinting against the already bright sun; motionless, controlled, like an old tomcat waiting to pounce.

  Throughout the morning, Johnny wondered if he should take Mark’s advice and go to the police himself. When the blue Q car pulled up on the no-parking zone by the deckchair stand, he knew it was too late for that.

  He glanced quickly at Bill Turpin, but the old man looked away.

  Johnny ran his fingers through his long hair, still damp from swimming, as he watched Detective Chief Inspector Mallett heave his bulk out of the car. The policeman approached, trying to look reassuring. He could see the panic in Johnny at fifty paces, and it was not his style to frighten those he interviewed. He wanted the truth and he thought he knew the best way to get it. He was a ‘softly, softly’ man. People talked to Phil Mallett as a rule, they trusted him. He looked like a picture-book illustration of a Devonian country policeman, his skin smooth and creamy with very little beard, his cheeks excessively plump and pink. He adopted his most sympathetic, friendly look, and strolled over to Johnny with an almost too casual walk. The young detective inspector accompanying him was a different kettle of fish: an ambitious career cop, a graduate, whom Mallett suspected had been foisted on him by those who thought his methods were too old-fashioned and too soft.

  ‘Just you keep quiet unless I say otherwise,’ Mallett hissed at him out of the side of his mouth.

  Johnny knew his hands were shaking. He twisted them behind his back. The deeper he got into this, the more certain it became that his parents would have to hear about it. That was the worst of all. The recriminations, the tears, the oppressive caring.

  ‘Been swimming, have you?’ asked the inspector conversationally, looking at Johnny’s thick dark hair, wet and shiny from the sea.

  Come on, come to the point, get on with it, Johnny willed.

  The young inspector was kicking the ground with the toe of one shoe. He was just as impatient. The boy should have been picked up by a carload of uniformed bobbies and whisked straight off to the station in his opinion. No messing. Give him a scare.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind a dip myself.’ The chief inspector smiled as if he had made a joke.

  Johnny tried to smile, but was not sure if he succeeded. Mallett leaned against a pile of deckchairs adopting his best ‘I’m on your side … but’ manner.

  And then he asked the question Johnny had been dreading.

  ‘I understand you knew the young woman who was murdered on Saturday?’

  Johnny took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Well then, lad, you’d better tell me all about it.’

  Johnny told him how he had met Marjorie at the golf club and they had become friends. Just friends? Just friends, Johnny heard himself say. He had a feeling he was acting stupidly. He was right.

  Phil Mallett scratched his balding head.

  ‘Now why would a woman like that be interested in a young lad like you, Johnny?’ he asked wryly.

  ‘She was lonely. We used to walk out over the dunes and talk.’

  ‘Talk, eh?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What, a healthy good-looking feller like you? Out with an attractive older woman and just talking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The detective chief inspector shook his head sorrowfully. His eyes were very gentle. When he spoke again his voice was flat and expressionless.

  ‘I am not satisfied with your story, Johnny. I have to ask you to come back to the station with me now, where I will take a formal statement from you. I suggest that along the way you think very carefully about what you are going to say.’

  About bloody time too, thought the young inspector, as the two men led Johnny to the waiting car.

  Johnny was taken to the station’s only interview room where, sitting on a hard upright chair before a wooden table, he had stared resolutely down at his hands, clenched tightly in his lap, almost throughout the interrogation. His palms were sweaty and he was painfully aware of the tape recorder relentlessly putting on record the awful mess he knew he was making of it all. At last he raised his eyes and looked directly at Phil Mallett.

  ‘I was in love with her,’ he said. His chest felt tight.

  The young inspector could contain himself no longer.

  ‘Love?’ he snapped. ‘Is that what you call it? Is that what you called what you did to that girl on the riverbank last year?’

  Phil Mallett motioned sharply for the DI to be silent, but it was too late.

  Johnny looked as if he had been hit.

  ‘I knew it, I knew it, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you anything. I’m already branded by you lot, aren’t I? But you’re bloody wrong.’

  ‘When did you last see Marjorie Benson, Johnny?’

  Johnny hesitated, just for a second.

  ‘Ages ago.’

  Oh God. Another mistake? He didn’t know which way to turn.

  ‘I don’t think you’re telling the truth,’ said the detective chief inspector.

  Johnny felt the panic overwhelm him. Had Bill Turpin seen him with her the night she died? And had Bill talked to the police already?

  God, pray that the policeman was bluffing. Johnny was sweating now. He couldn’t admit that he had been with Marjorie just before she was killed, making love to her, pushing himself inside her. He just couldn’t. He didn’t even think about forensic evidence. About his semen in her. He was too muddled, not nearly clever enough for any kind of crime.

  He tried desperately to clear his head. He’d call the bluff.

  ‘All right, all right, I last saw her on the Tuesday before she died.’

  ‘Not on Saturday? My spies tell me that you always saw her on Saturdays.’

  Oh God, oh God, Johnny thought, he was tying himself in knots here.

  ‘Not last Saturday,’ he repeated. ‘Not the night she died.’

  Pray it was a bluff. Pray.

  ‘I see,’ said DCI Mallett. ‘Where were you on Saturday night then?’

  ‘I went to the pictures.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘On my own.’

  ‘Anyone see you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What film did
you see?’

  Johnny felt the trap closing around him. What was on at the Palais last week? He passed the cinema often enough.

  ‘James Bond … the new one … On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ he stammered.

  Fortunately for Johnny, the policemen hadn’t seen the film either. But he wasn’t fooled.

  ‘My advice to you is not to lie to me, boy,’ he said quietly. ‘If you do, things will only get worse for you.’

  At that moment, Johnny could not imagine how things could get any worse. He did not know the half of it. And he was not yet aware that while he was being interviewed. Mark Piddle had arrived at the police station.

  Mark had something to report. Quite a lot to report. He was not his usual cool self. Like Johnny on the previous Sunday night, he could not stop shaking, he was fighting for control. He knew how important it was to get things straight in his mind. He had every right to be upset. But he must not appear to be frightened.

  He blurted out the short version of his story to the desk sergeant, and was immediately taken to a side office to wait for Phil Mallett to become available to interview him. They brought him a cup of tea. He drank it gratefully, spooning in the sugar. He didn’t take sugar in his tea normally. But this was not a normal day. He stirred so much sugar into his cup the tea was almost like syrup. It was good for shock, they said.

  And he was shocked all right.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The following morning, Jenny learned why Mark had not called her. His girlfriend Irene had been reported missing. She had disappeared. Police feared a double murder, linked to the Marjorie Benson strangling.

  Jenny rang Mark at the paper. He had not given her his home number. Because of Irene. He had never made a secret of Irene, but Jenny had not cared. Poor Irene had somehow always seemed irrelevant.

  It took her until Friday to get hold of him, and when she did he sounded strained and distant, although she supposed that wasn’t surprising. Still no word about Irene, he told her. She had not come home on Tuesday night, then he discovered she had not been at work all day on Tuesday. That was all he knew and it wasn’t much. The police were worried. They feared the worst for Irene; that there was a nutter on the loose. Nobody seemed to give much for Irene’s chances of being alive.

  As he talked to Jenny, Mark began to experience the familiar stirring of his loins again. He fought for control. He couldn’t see her. Not yet. But by God, even with all that had happened, he wanted to.

  Jenny felt as if she was going quite mad. She was plagued by images of death. The body of Marjorie Benson floated determinedly in her head; there was no escape from the recurring nightmare of that face.

  And now the disappearance of Irene seemed to draw her further into the horror story. She did not want to become any more involved, and she knew that if she saw Mark again then she would. Yet Mark was the other image that was plaguing her. Mark kissing her and touching her, Mark finally entering her. She could not walk away from him. Her body craved him. The stress and unease brought her period on early, and as it started her first thought was that this meant she could begin the course of birth control pills more than a week earlier than she had expected. Then she would be protected. Then she could go to Mark on her terms. And she would go to him, in spite of a nagging feeling that she shouldn’t.

  Mark had not gone to work on that Wednesday when Jenny had tried so hard to contact him. In fact he had spent most of Wednesday at the police station, reporting the disappearance of Irene and giving the details of his midnight visit from Johnny Cooke on the night Marjorie Benson’s body was discovered. Looking strained and anxious, he explained that he had been worrying about Johnny’s visit and all that he had said, had realised that he should have reported it earlier, but had been sure that the boy would see sense and go to the police himself. And he hadn’t really believed that Johnny Cooke had killed Marjorie Benson. He thought Johnny was just hysterical. Then Irene had disappeared leaving no note, no word. This wasn’t like her at all, but they’d had a bit of a row, and he thought she’d gone to spend the night with her parents. It wasn’t until the hotel where Irene worked called to ask if she was all right because she hadn’t been in the day before and yet again hadn’t turned up, that he had started to worry and decided to go to the police. And it was then that he had begun to wonder if Irene’s disappearance could possibly have anything to do with Johnny and with Marjorie Benson’s murder.

  ‘God, I hope I’m wrong,’ he told DI Mallett.

  Mark came across as a controlled and intelligent young man, with nothing to hide but under great stress, and aware that the police would have to check him out.

  It is a fact of criminal record that most murders are committed by the relations or lovers of the victim. If Irene Nichols was dead Mark Piddle would, under normal circumstances, be the prime suspect. But these were patently not normal circumstances. There was the Marjorie Benson murder to consider and, in any case, there was no reason yet to suppose that Irene Nichols was not alive and well. People walk out of their homes all the time. Often they turn up again sooner or later. Sometimes not for years and years, and sometimes not at all. But even that doesn’t necessarily mean they are dead, and it’s certainly very difficult to try a case for murder without a body. There have only been a handful of such cases in history.

  And so Phil Mallett, although thorough as ever in his inquiries, was reasonably satisfied by Mark’s statement. The same could not be said about Johnny Cooke’s muddled ramblings. There was not yet enough hard evidence, but the finger did seem to be pointing more and more at Johnny, who actually had a record of sexual assault. Johnny was kept inside for further questioning, whilst the investigation proceeded and pending the results of the post-mortem examination of Marjorie Benson.

  The DCI was coming under more and more pressure from his peers to find a way of successfully charging Johnny; the bright young detective inspector who was snapping at Phil Mallett’s heels seemed to have no doubts whatsoever.

  ‘It’s always the lover,’ he said sagely – as if he had the benefit of years of experience of such matters, instead of merely a college education and too fast a promotion in the opinion of his immediate superior.

  As the evidence against Johnny Cooke accumulated, Phil Mallett felt himself being pushed further and further along what seemed to be an inevitable route. Nobody had time for what they called PC Plod tactics. DCI Mallett had been brought up in the force to believe that good police work involved tying up all the loose ends, being absolutely sure of yourself. But nowadays nothing mattered except figures, the ratio of crimes to convictions. Nobody talked about justice any more. That was almost a dirty word, and Phil had come to accept that you could only fight for your idea of the right way of doing things up to a certain point. One man cannot turn the tide. Anyway, perhaps this time he was wrong because he could not even fully explain why he was so afraid that a terrible mistake was about to be made.

  Yet Mark Piddle was surely a reliable witness. The post-mortem examination of Marjorie Benson ultimately proved that she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before she died, and when the results of a search of Johnny’s home were reported to him, the DCI knew that was it.

  He could no longer hold out for more time. The tide had come roaring in right over his head.

  With rare self-discipline, brought on by the shock he had experienced, Mark did not contact Jenny. By Sunday, exactly a week after she had floated into Marjorie Benson’s body, Jenny was desperate to see him. Her period had lasted only three days as usual. She thought she would now be more-or-less protected by the pill course she was beginning. In any case, she could wait no longer. She caught the Durraton bus on Sunday morning, alighting at the top of the hill above Pelham Bay, and quickly walked the couple of hundred yards to the house where she knew Mark lived. She was praying he would be there. She needed him and she was going to have him. She was being quite calculated about it, and was rather surprising herself.

  Downstairs in the hall there wa
s a list of all the tenants and their flat numbers. It was another hot day, and Jenny knew she was sweating slightly by the time she climbed the stairs to his flat. Mark answered the door shirtless, wearing only a pair of loose shorts. His face lit up when he saw her, but then clouded over again, as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see her or not. Her eyes took in his bare torso, his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, and his strong, muscular legs. She was tall, but he towered above her. He was all that a young man of twenty-three should be and more – lean and hard and very fitlooking. Much the way she had imagined from the touches and glimpses of him she had previously experienced. Seeing him like that in reality after having dreamed about him for so long threw her a little.

  ‘I – I was just passing,’ she stammered.

  ‘I was just going out,’ he lied. He was hardly dressed for going out. She was aware that he looked nervous and unsure of himself. And she already knew that was most un-Mark-like.

  ‘I know you’re upset, I reckoned I might be able to take your mind off things,’ she said.

  That sounded pathetic, she thought. Hardly surprising he didn’t reply.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in then?’ she asked. Even more pathetic.

  He stood back, letting her pass, and closed the door behind her.

  To hell with it, she thought. ‘You might like to know that I am now fully protected against unwanted pregnancy,’ she announced.

  She knew she was being quite shameless, particularly under the circumstances, but she just could not stop herself.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you want me any more?’

  He was still silent. She knew something was very wrong with him, and assumed it must be Irene’s disappearance. He was just not reacting the way she had already grown to expect. Strangely, her confidence was returning now. She reckoned she could fix that – make him react exactly the way she wanted him to.

  In one sudden movement she slipped her tee shirt above her head. She was not wearing a bra. She unzipped her miniskirt and removed it and her knickers both at once. Now she was standing naked before him. It had taken mere seconds.