The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  The constable swiftly corrected her.

  ‘Detective Inspector Mallett, madam,’ he said.

  He took her name and told her he would tell the detective inspector she would like to see him.

  Minutes later, a beaming Todd Mallett strode across the grass towards her and held out his hand in greeting. A little formal, she thought, but he was, after all, a police inspector in front of all his men.

  ‘Congratulations on your promotion,’ she said, grinning.

  ‘Not before time, some say,’ he replied.

  ‘Which is probably to your credit.’

  ‘Glad something is,’ he said.

  He looked her up and down appreciatively. She was wearing the same tight black jeans she had worn for the journey down the day before, along with black leather boots and a heavy black leather jacket with a lot of shiny metallic bits and pieces on it. An expensive-looking silk scarf was just visible at her neck. Her thick brown hair had been blown all over the place by the wind and her skin, as clear as ever, appeared lightly tanned. He supposed she could afford to buy sunshine any time of the year she pleased. Her eyes were just as emerald green and sparkling with life as he had remembered them. She wore no make-up. He thought that, by and large, the years had been kind to her. The hand which he clasped in his returned his grip firmly. She had workmanlike hands, the nails on her long fingers, although immaculately manicured, were clipped short and unvarnished. Her body remained as slim and lithe as ever. She never seemed to put on weight, and remained athletic-looking, even though she probably still took little or no exercise. He remembered that, apart from her swimming at school, Jennifer had always been totally uninterested in any kind of sport or exercise routine. He thought she looked like a biker, which he assumed was the intention, and reflected briefly that she was about the only woman in her forties he knew who would not appear totally ridiculous in such an outfit.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.

  ‘Not since the funeral,’ she responded.

  ‘Must be almost ten years?’ His voice a query. ‘You look good.’

  ‘So do you.’

  It was the truth. Unlike his father, Todd Mallett had not thickened in girth with the years. He was a sportsman who still played cricket and had only recently given up rugby. His sporting activities had broadened his shoulders over the years, and given him plenty of muscle, while keeping in control any family tendency to fleshiness. The straight set of his mouth left no doubt as to his physical and mental toughness, but his grey eyes remained gentle and honest. He was just as she remembered him.

  ‘Are you here for long?’ he asked, trying to make conversation.

  He was aware of the constable watching them with interest.

  ‘Maybe for ever,’ she replied.

  Naturally he thought she was joking, but she wasn’t.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ she said. ‘About all of this really…’

  She gestured towards the activity around Bill’s cottage.

  ‘Is that why you came?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Sheer coincidence,’ she replied truthfully. ‘But I can’t help wanting to ask some questions now, now that…’

  Her voice trailed off. He understood though. One of the few that did.

  ‘A pint tonight, at the Old Ship? Round eight o’clock?’ he queried.

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Thank you, Todd,’ she said.

  She hurried back to the car then. She’d kept her mother waiting far too long, selfish as ever, but meeting Todd like that, and with him apparently in charge of whatever inquiries were going on, was a stroke of luck. She’d always been a lucky reporter. She smiled at the memory of her first Fleet Street news editor, who had told her when she had once remarked on a piece of extraordinary good fortune that he only employed lucky reporters.

  She took her mother out for lunch at the Waterside Hotel and then drove home. She was restless during the afternoon, eager to meet up with Todd.

  Eventually eight o’clock arrived, and she pulled into the car park of the Old Ship just as Todd arrived in a big Volvo estate car with a baby seat strapped in the back. It was a timely reminder of his marital status.

  ‘Good God, you haven’t got another one, have you?’ she asked with singular lack of tact.

  He smiled ruefully.

  ‘Yup, the three boys almost grown and bingo, along comes Charlotte Anne. As far as I can recall, I haven’t touched Angela much more than four times in the whole of our marriage, and every time a coconut.’

  Jennifer laughed.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

  ‘Not as ridiculous as you might think,’ he told her. ‘Just a very small exaggeration. Still, I wouldn’t be without the little one. I’ve always wanted a girl, and she’s a cracker.’

  Not for the first time, Jennifer reflected on what a good decent man Todd was, and wondered why she couldn’t have grabbed him with both hands when she had the chance. No way, she thought. He was far too nice for her.

  Inside they sampled some locally-brewed ale and she started to ask about Bill Turpin, his death, and the discoveries at his cottage.

  It was then that Todd dropped his bombshell. ‘Look, this is going to shake you,’ he began. ‘You may as well know the biggest news first. We did a complete search of Bill’s cottage, including digging the garden. You saw that today.’

  She nodded. On edge now.

  ‘This afternoon we found the remains of a young woman. She had been buried there for many years. That news is just about to be released.’

  Jennifer looked at him as steadily as she could. She knew what he was going to say next. She just knew.

  ‘All we know for certain so far is that she was extremely small, in her late teens or very early twenties, and the approximate year she died. We have to wait for forensic now to help us identify the body, and of course there is always a chance with a corpse of this age that it never gets identified at all. But I have a hunch.’

  He glanced at her. She was gazing at him steadily.

  She looked pale. Vulnerable. Not like herself at all.

  ‘Go on,’ she said quietly.

  ‘My hunch is that we’ve found Irene Nichols,’ he said.

  A cold sweat enveloped Jennifer. So Irene had been dead all these years. She supposed she must have known it really. She struggled to keep her composure, and when she spoke she realised that her voice sounded perfectly level, which was not what she had expected. Years of Fleet Street training, clearly.

  ‘What else did you find?’ she asked.

  Todd looked uneasy.

  ‘There’s one thing I must ask you,’ he said. ‘This is private isn’t it? Nothing to do with the paper?’

  ‘What paper?’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, like that is it?’

  ‘Yes, very like that,’ she said.

  He told her all of it then. Maybe he shouldn’t have, but he appreciated her urgent need to know.

  Bill Turpin’s body had been discovered by the postman. Twice he’d called and heard Bill’s dogs howling. The house was shut up, so he had hammered on the back door to no avail. The door was bolted on the inside, but a kitchen window had not been properly fastened. The postman was a small man, slim and athletic. He clambered through the window and found the old man slumped across the kitchen table. He had used Bill’s phone to call the police. Two local officers and an ambulance were on the scene within half an hour and were immediately confronted with their first surprise. Bill had been sitting at the table surrounded by papers and money. A great deal of money. Nearly a quarter of a million in used notes, and over a million quid’s worth of share certificates. There were also statements and various papers referring to numbered Swiss bank accounts. Just a brief glance had showed Todd that Bill was worth four or five million. And probably much more. Everybody knew he had been successful in the holiday trade, but his local business ventures could not possibly have netted a fraction of the riches Bill Turpin had accumu
lated.

  ‘The papers had all been stacked in a tin box which had been taken from its hiding place by the inglenook fireplace. The door to the old bread oven was open when Bill’s body was discovered, and careful examination revealed that at the back of the oven was an ingeniously fabricated hiding place. The stone construction of the oven seemed solid enough, but if pushed in the right places the back pivoted to one side. And beyond it was a cavity containing two more tin boxes. So cleverly concealed was this hiding place that, had old Bill not been actually dealing with his boxes at the time of his death, and had he not left the door of the oven open, it would probably never have been found.

  ‘One tin box contained jewellery and two watches – a lady’s watch and a man’s pocket watch, a beautiful antique half hunter. The other held a selection of yellowed newspaper cuttings and a scribbled notebook with what could have been computer codes written in it.’

  Todd was watching her face.

  ‘The pocket watch was inscribed, which was helpful,’ the policeman went on. ‘It belonged to the last Lord Lynmouth. He was murdered a couple of years after the war and his watch was taken the night he died. He disturbed burglars at his house on the edge of Exmoor and was strangled. There was a spate of big art thefts at the time – heavy stuff, priceless treasures disappeared that could only have gone to a certain kind of private collector, because goods like that could never go on display, too easily recognised. Quite an operation, it was, and nobody ever did get to the bottom of it.

  ‘There was always some suspicion that Bill Turpin had been involved, though. Do you remember hearing about the robbery when you were a kid?’

  Jennifer half nodded, half shook her head. She did remember something: there had always been gossip about Bill. And she vaguely recalled Marcus telling her in the early days how he had once tried to turn Bill Turpin over and what a waste of time it had been. But Jennifer did not want to interrupt. She waited for Todd to get on with it. She wanted to know everything he could possibly tell her.

  Todd didn’t push her. He took a long slow pull of his pint and eventually he continued.

  ‘The Earl of Lynmouth had a housemaid, who came forward and claimed that she had been hiding in the pantry at the time and had seen the old Earl murdered, and that she recognised the man who did it. She named him as Bill Turpin from Brinton, the village where he lived before the war, but she would never tell the police how she knew him. The police investigated as best they could, and, according to my father, who remembers the talk about the case even though it was before his time, there were those who were quite sure the housemaid was telling the truth. I mean, how could she just conjure up a name like that anyway? But the whole thing was bizarre. Nothing and nobody could persuade her to say any more. Apparently she was tuppence short of a shilling, very much on the slow side. According to Lord Lynmouth’s widow she had a history of fantasising, and there was no real evidence to link Bill to the crime – any more than there was with arms dealing out of Bristol and God knows what else folk said he was involved in in those days.

  ‘Eventually the whole thing receded into local myth, as these thing do, and was dropped. More or less forgotten about until now. And Bill Turpin may have got away with one hell of a crime – although I doubt you could prove that, even now we’ve found the watch.’

  ‘And the other watch?’ asked Jennifer, suspecting she knew the answer.

  ‘A dainty silver thing, inexpensive, tarnished with the years. My guess is that it belonged to Irene Nichols. I shall be showing it to her parents, but I don’t want to give them more misery for nothing, so I’m waiting till forensic have come up with the goods.

  ‘The cuttings we found included stories on the Lord Lynmouth burglary, several of the other big art robberies of the period, the disappearance of Irene Nichols, and the murder of Marjorie Benson – the girl whose body you found.’

  He paused and took another long draught of his pint.

  Jennifer felt she was being told too much to grasp in one sitting.

  ‘So what are you saying, Bill Turpin was a some kind of mass murderer, a serial killer, he strangled the Earl of Lynmouth, and then years later he killed Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson?’ she asked.

  ‘I know,’ Todd said. ‘It does sound far-fetched.’

  ‘What about his own death, then? I’d taken it for granted Bill died of natural causes. The Gazette article I saw indicated nothing to the contrary, and he was a very old man. Do you now suspect he was murdered too?’

  Todd half smiled. ‘And his murderer left all that cash behind? No. Bill died suddenly of a massive aneurism. No doubt about that. There’s more on the financial front by the way. His Swiss bank statements indicated a regular annual income and several big one-off payments. Most came around the time of the murder of Lord Lynmouth in 1945 and during the following couple of years, and there was one for £100,000 in 1970 – dated not long after Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson were killed.’

  Jennifer gasped. ‘You don’t think Bill Turpin was a paid hitman for goodness’ sake, do you?’

  ‘A pretty highly paid one, if he was,’ Todd replied. ‘That or a top-of-the-league burglar, or both. I just don’t know. It’s going to take a bit of sorting, this one…’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Jennifer managed to mutter. ‘I don’t know about Lord Lynmouth and his treasures, but who would pay somebody a hundred grand to murder poor little Irene and some barmaid? Anyway, I don’t see that you have anything concrete linking Bill Turpin to the Marjorie Benson murder.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Todd. ‘But we have quite a coincidence, don’t we?’

  ‘The Gazette made it sound like more than that, as if you had hard evidence. OK, so he had stashed away cuttings about Marjorie Benson’s murder. You could never have jailed him for that, could you?’

  Todd shook his head. ‘Of course not, but I’m sure they fit together somehow. There’s always a pattern. And we haven’t finished yet – the inquiry into the Marjorie Benson murder has been reopened just like the Gazette said. Two murders in a little place like Pelham Bay within a few days – there’s not been another killing in Pelham since, you know. And nobody ever managed to find out who Marjorie was all those years ago. She remains a mystery. There was nothing at the golf club to give a clue as to her background, we couldn’t find any medical or national insurance records, nothing, and nobody every reported her missing. And we still have no motive for her murder, let alone the murderer.’

  He leaned back in his chair, warming to his theme.

  He had already given a great deal of thought to the Lord Lynmouth connection, and it cleared his mind to explain his thinking to Jennifer.

  ‘You have to remember that Lord Lynmouth was the richest man in Britain and one of the richest in the world in those days,’ he continued. ‘There has never been private wealth like his in this country since. He died worth eight billion even after half his most valuable treasures were nicked. You can’t imagine it really. I don’t believe his death was a hitman job, I honestly do think he just got in the way of a massive burglary. He had next-to-no security. By modern standards, anyway. He didn’t stand a chance really. And he was up against real pros.

  ‘That network of fine-art burglaries was mightily organised all right, because even now I don’t think any of the sculptures or paintings taken have ever surfaced. The word in the trade was that there were a small group of manic collectors with money to burn – probably gathered God knows where during the war – who were willing to pay a fortune for old masters and that kind of thing, and then quite content to keep the stuff behind locked doors; the kind of stuff money normally cannot buy because most of it is either in museums and galleries or going to end up in them.

  ‘Several galleries were done at that time too – and nobody does that kind of thieving unless they have their market worked out. It’s very big business indeed. Lord Lynmouth had a Leonardo de Vinci, you know. Can you imagine what that was worth even then? He’d left it to the National
Gallery, but it walked the night he was murdered and has never been seen since.’

  Jennifer was watching Todd, her jaw dropped. His face was tight with concentration. It had clearly become something of an obsession for him.

  ‘Irene Nichols I agree with you about,’ he went on. ‘It’s impossible to imagine anyone paying money to have that poor little kid knocked off. But there does appear to have been another motive.’

  ‘And what was that?’ Jennifer struggled to keep her voice calm.

  ‘Well, we don’t know yet. Forensic have a long way to go…’ Todd was uneasy again.

  ‘Oh come on, you’ve got this far, you have to tell me the end of it. I know damn well you’d have had a pathologist on the spot, and he probably already has a pretty good idea of exactly what happened to the girl.’

  Todd smiled. ‘Once a court reporter, always a pain in the arse,’ he said.

  Her eyes implored him. He continued:

  ‘The soil in Bill Turpin’s garden was of the kind which preserved the body in much better condition than might have been expected after twenty-five years – like some of the bodies found in the Fred West murder investigations in Gloucester last year,’ he said. ‘So we were able to deduce more than we would have thought. Almost certainly the girl died of a broken neck. And we think there was a sexual motive behind the murder.’

  Jennifer heard herself ask another question, the obvious one.

  ‘Not Bill Turpin, surely? He must have been well over sixty even back in 1970?’

  Todd scratched his head. ‘I know. It doesn’t seem likely. But Bill was always a fit man, even in his sixties. And nobody ever knew anything about his sex life. He never appeared to have one after the war, according to my old man, and maybe that poor kid buried in his vegetable patch is the reason why. Maybe that’s what he liked to do to his women.’

  ‘What was what he liked to do to his women?’

  Todd looked away. ‘The girl we found was tiny. There is damage to her pelvis and her back. The pathologist believes that someone had sex with her with such force that it broke her neck.’