The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  She drove back to the Airport Hilton and arranged parking for her car for the duration of the two-day Paris trip. She booked a room for the night, plugged in to a house video and ordered a large meal and a bottle of good claret on room service. She refused to think about what she had just witnessed. All she knew was that this time it really was over between her and Marcus. She did not want to see him again as long as she lived. The man was depraved, and the terrible thing was that she had always suspected it. She had parted from him once before because she was afraid of what he could lead her into. Now she knew that Marcus Piddell could never have taken her halfway towards the depths he was capable of.

  Marcus had just been elected a Member of Parliament in her beloved West Country. As usual he had sailed through it, and she had played her role of politician’s wife pretty well too. Yuk. She thought back to the weeks of canvassing. Marcus had stayed in Durraton for the duration and she had travelled down from London every weekend, to stand smilingly alongside him in draughty village halls, even knocking on doors. He was good at the campaigning, and also he had a true knowledge of the West Country. She’d hoped that he would turn out to be a good constituency MP. And certainly, along with his parents and her mother, she had been briefly very proud of Marcus. In spite of all his extraordinary success in the city, and his rise to becoming a newspaper tycoon, it still meant a great deal to him to be given this kind of recognition in the place where he grew up. Jennifer had found his undisguised joy quite disarming, and had shared every moment of his jubilation. Now she wondered what sort of man she had helped into a position of such potential power. Because the one thing she had been sure of from the moment he won the seat was that Marcus would not be content to stay on the back benches for long.

  After she had eaten as much of the food as she wanted and drunk most of the claret, Jennifer reached for the phone to call Anna – it was a lifetime’s habit. Then she replaced the receiver in its cradle. What was she going to tell her oldest friend? She had no wish to share even with Anna what she had witnessed that night.

  She undressed, climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head. Strangely she slept quite well, and in the morning, professional to the last, she flew to Paris and negotiated a tough deal. On her return, she found herself a smart service flat in Kensington, and wrote to Marcus telling him she would be paying for it with his credit card until they had sorted out their affairs. She wanted a divorce and she wanted it fast.

  Marcus had prevaricated. He had pestered her much as before when she had left him. By his standards he positively grovelled. Certainly he made the same old promises, and told her how much he needed her. He would not discuss divorce.

  Every feeling that she had ever had for him had finally been destroyed. She was quite simply disgusted by him and wanted him totally out of her life. She told Anna that much – but she never told her why. ‘You were right, everything you ever thought about him, you were right,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t think I ever told you what I thought about him,’ replied Anna.

  ‘You didn’t have to.’ Jennifer managed a wry smile.

  ‘I certainly didn’t want to be right,’ Anna continued. ‘I just wanted you to be happy.’

  And she questioned Jennifer no further. Anna was always such a good friend, ever-present when needed, to listen or not. Strangely undemanding. Constant.

  The national press quickly picked up news of the Piddells splitting up, but both Jennifer and Marcus stuck to their official line that they were amicably separated and had no further comment. There wasn’t a lot of mileage in that – a kiss-and-tell was what the anti-Marcus tabloids needed. Half the press pack of Great Britain would have liked to get their hands on almost anything discrediting Marcus Piddell.

  Eventually, not believing what she was doing, Jennifer agreed to meet Marcus for a drink one lunchtime on an old river barge that had been turned into a wine bar. It was moored by Waterloo Bridge. The day was sunny, so she suggested a walk along the Embankment and, as they strolled, she told him bluntly that if he did not agree to a divorce immediately and come up with a reasonable settlement in her favour, the story of his sordid sexual habits would suddenly be front-page news.

  Marcus had been amazed.

  ‘Good God, Jennifer, that’s blackmail,’ he had exclaimed.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied drily. ‘Terrible thing, the collapse of morality, isn’t it?’

  The next day she received a letter delivered by messenger from Marcus’s solicitor. It agreed to a divorce by the quickest possible means and Marcus offered the house in Richmond, mortgage fully paid up, and £200,000 cash in full and final settlement. The only condition was that she should not discuss his affairs with any third party. Affairs! She had giggled in spite of herself. The choice of words was more appropriate than perhaps the lawyers were aware.

  She agreed at once, knowing that Marcus was probably expecting and wanting her to prolong their association by sticking out for a better deal. After all, that kind of money was just a drop in the ocean to him. But the Richmond house was worth three quarters of a million at the time, and Jennifer just wanted as clean as possible an end to it all.

  Soon afterwards Marcus was made a junior minister. A grateful government, in power largely because of the newspapers he still pretty well owned, was only just starting to reward Marcus Piddell. In North Devon they were all fiercely proud of him. Jennifer found it quite sickening.

  Back in Pelham Bay, Johnny Cooke found the rise and rise of Mark Piddle even more sickening than Jennifer did. By 1992 Johnny had been a free man for four years. Or had he? Johnny’s life sentence lasted seventeen years – it might have been less had it not been for recommendations of a long sentence given by the judge at his trial.

  But for Johnny it really did feel like a lifetime. The years before his sentence now seemed just a dream. The years in prison felt as if they had happened to someone else. When he first went to Dartmoor it was the other way around. It was the prison which was unreal, a kind of grim fantasy place. By the time he left, prison had become dreadful reality, his complete and only world.

  Gradually, over the long months and years, his condition of imprisonment began to change. He became more prison wise, and managed to wheedle his way into the more trusted jobs. Being allowed to work in the prison gardens, among plants and flowers, ultimately preserved his sanity. That and reading. He was finally allowed almost unlimited use of the prison library, and found great solace in books. Johnny had first learned the joy of losing himself in a book when he was still at school. Even back then he had always felt somehow awkward, out of place, different.

  Now, the grim reality of his loss of liberty, even the oppressive way in which the walls of his cell seemed to close in on him, all disappeared when he was reading. Only his body remained within the granite of The Moor, his soul escaped to roam free as the wind whistling across the tors towards the ocean he so much yearned to see again.

  Johnny was to remain grateful for the rest of his life for having been given the ability to bury his entire being inside the magic world of print on page.

  Books saved his sanity. The physical labour in the garden, combined with almost daily workouts in the prison gymnasium, saved his body from decline and restored much of the strength Johnny had lost in the early years. He almost wallowed in building up his body. He became obsessed with muscle development and with stretching his muscles at work in the garden. There was, after all, nothing else. When the time eventually came for him to leave jail, he was not sure that he wanted to go. He had become afraid of the world outside. He was completely institutionalised.

  When he finally went home to his mother’s house in Durraton in 1988 – his father had died while he was inside or he doubted he would have been welcome there – Johnny perversely experienced the same sort of near breakdown which he had gone through when he was sent to prison in the first place. The ability to come and go when he pleased, and do and be whatever he wanted on a whim, terrified the life out
of him. His mother fussed dutifully.

  ‘You’re my boy, and there’s always a place for you in this house,’ she told him stoically.

  He had no idea where else he could have gone – he had been imprisoned as a boy and emerged a man who had never experienced freedom. The attitudes of alleged friends, neighbours and people he met in the town numbed him. They nudged and stared and made no attempt at understanding, and certainly none of them wanted to employ him. Why should they, he thought? He was after all a convicted murderer. He did not feel free at all. He remained imprisoned within his heart every bit as much as he had ever been by the iron bars and granite walls of Dartmoor.

  It was Bill Turpin who finally released him. Bill Turpin who gave Johnny the opportunity to start his life again, to regain his self-respect and at least to look for a reason for carrying on. It took a long time – but it was a beginning.

  From the moment of his release from jail, Johnny was drawn to Pelham Bay. The might of the sea entranced him, as it had always done, and anyway, Pelham Bay was the only place which seemed to mean anything to him any more. This was where it had all happened…

  Then one day, as he stood by the sea wall staring out at the ocean, just as Bill Turpin had all those years ago, the old man had appeared silently at his side and offered him a job. Right out of the blue.

  ‘Nought much to start with, look after my fruit machines, keep an eye on the deckchair boys, nought much, but us’ll see,’ said Bill.

  ‘Why?’ asked Johnny. In his state of mind it was all he could think of to say.

  Bill Turpin sucked on his old black pipe – the same one, Johnny reckoned.

  ‘I never thought you was a bad lad…’ Bill mused. And he ambled off along the promenade leaving Johnny standing, still bewildered.

  Was it guilt, wondered Johnny. Was that it? He had learned at the trial that he had guessed right all those years ago and it had been old Bill who had tipped off the cops, told them about Johnny and Marjorie and seeing them together in the sand dunes. Johnny shook himself. What the hell?

  He trotted after the old man, catching him easily. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the job, whatever it is.’

  For Jennifer Stone, life went on much the same as it had before – but without Marcus. She returned to Pelham Bay only occasionally, but she did return to break the news of her divorce from Marcus – before it hit the local papers.

  Marcus, who could charm for England when he wanted to, had always made a huge fuss of Jennifer’s mother. And Mrs Stone could not help being impressed by him, particularly after he became the local MP. He was what was still referred to in Pelham Bay as ‘a good catch’. Among the many things she did not understand about her daughter and her daughter’s life was why Jennifer had not married Marcus when she first had the chance. After all, the pair of them had been obsessed with each other since Jennifer’s schooldays – and Mrs Stone knew and suspected more about that than anyone. And so this second divorce for Jennifer was a considerable shock as well as a disappointment.

  ‘Not another one, dear. Whatever is your Aunty Pat going to say this time?’ was Mrs Stone’s first remark.

  ‘Mother, really!’ said Jennifer, exasperated.

  Nothing changed in Pelham Bay. For her mother, the biggest problem still of a broken marriage remained the reactions of family, friends and neighbours, and because Marcus was a public figure, the break-up would be all the more embarrassing.

  Margaret Stone saw nothing strange in her own reactions. ‘Thank goodness your father isn’t alive to see this,’ she continued. ‘You know how upset he was the last time…’

  Jennifer retreated thankfully to the anonymous sanctuary of London. She loved her mother dearly, but often came to the conclusion that they were from different planets.

  Not long afterwards, Jennifer Stone was made an assistant editor at The Globe – number three in the hierarchy – although she suspected that was as far as she was going to go.

  And so it all might have continued, had Jennifer not endured one office row too many and decided to walk out of the paper. She would have heard about Bill Turpin, of course, and all that was discovered in his cottage. But whether or not she would have become personally involved if she had not physically been in North Devon at the time, she would never know.

  To have actually arrived in Pelham Bay at the time of old Bill’s death had seemed like another stroke of destiny. That summer Sunday, twenty-five years earlier, had in one way or another shaped the whole of her life. It had brought her and Mark together, forced her to grow up, introduced her to fear and the darker side of life. She had always known that it had played a part in shaping Mark’s future too, and not just that part which included her.

  She relived virtually the whole of her life that afternoon in May 1995 as she lay dozing on the big old bed in her mother’s back bedroom. And by the time she went downstairs again, she had vowed that she would at last try to find the answers to some of those old nagging questions.

  PART THREE

  THE CRUELTY OF MORNING

  THE DREAM IS OVER

  The dream is over, lover

  And there’ll never be another.

  You cast your spell on me

  And I gave in quite willingly

  To a lifetime’s fantasy.

  But it was not to you I gave my love

  I saw what was not there to have.

  I offered my heart

  To a thing apart.

  I offered my flesh

  To so much less

  Than the man I created

  Inside my head.

  I offered my mind

  And I was blind.

  We shared sweet madness

  Cocooned within badness.

  My whole being craved

  To be possessed by you.

  I was afraid

  Yet remained obsessed by you.

  Strange, now that I see you clear

  How I cannot bear you near.

  The dream is over, lover,

  And there’ll never be another.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The next day the urgency of the previous afternoon had mostly left Jennifer. She decided to go for a drive around all her old haunts and to take her mother with her. That would win a few bonus points. They drove to Pelham Bay, to the car park by the cliffs, and her mother said she would be quite happy sitting in the car while Jennifer went for a bit of a walk.

  She strode out along the cliff path for a while, and then sat herself on a big sandstone boulder almost at the cliff edge. It was a brilliantly clear day. You could see Lundy Island and across the water to Wales. The only sound was the whirl of the wind and the crash of the waves against the rocks below. There was hardly anyone about, just a lone couple in the distance walking their dogs, and one man out on the furthest point of the rocks down below, casting a fishing line. The sun was a flash of silver on the water, which was so darkly green and blue that in places it appeared almost black. The foaming crests of the waves curled and entwined and reared up into endless bucking shapes, demonstrating with extravagant clarity how they had come to be called white horses. From where Jennifer sat there was a sheer drop a couple of hundred feet down to the sea, and she felt suspended above it. The wiry heath grass was springy beneath her feet, and the boulder on which she perched felt warm from the sunshine, although the breeze had a bitter chill to it. And it was the strength of the wind that day which was keeping the sky so clear and free of clouds. The wild flowers were in their full blaze of late spring glory, the deep pink of campions mixing crazily with the vivid blue of bluebells. A backdrop of deep green fern lay at the foot of dense woodland lifting up from the flat ledge of the clifftop and stretching right back over the great hill beyond. It was a magical day. The air tasted of salt – how she missed that in London. The wind was like a massage of sharp needles against her upturned face. She closed her eyes and breathed in the wonder of the moment.

  Some lines of T. S. Eliot, which she had discovere
d only recently and instantly known the truth of, flashed unheralded across her mind.

  ‘We shall not cease from exploration.

  And the end of all our exploring,

  Will be to arrive where we started,

  And know the place for the first time.’

  She had begun to walk back to the car and her patiently waiting mother, when, on autopilot, almost, she had taken the other track, the one she knew led past old Bill Turpin’s cottage. If she was to unravel any of the mysteries of the past, this would be the key to open the first door. Instinctively she knew that, and although one half of her wanted to carry on with her life and have nothing more to do with the past, she could not do so.

  She was not able to get very close to Bill’s cottage because the police had cordoned off the area. She was vaguely puzzled. She could not even follow the path which would have taken her past the cottage and along a circular route back to the car park. A uniformed officer told her politely that she would have to return the way she had come. Over his shoulder she could just glimpse the activity at the cottage. There were a number of police there, many dressed in overalls, and they appeared to be digging up the garden.

  Jennifer tried, without a deal of success, to talk to the young constable about what was happening. Just as she was ready to give up and reluctantly retrace her steps, she heard a familiar voice, a good strong solid Devonian voice issuing orders. She smiled. He always had that ring of authority about him, did Todd Mallett. People were inclined to do what he told them automatically, couldn’t be a bad trait for a policeman. She turned to the constable again and asked if perhaps she could have a brief word with Sergeant Mallett, who was an old friend, she explained. Or maybe he was Inspector Mallett now?