The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  Jennifer stared at him. She had one last question. ‘She has been buried for twenty-five years, surely you are talking theories. Even accepting that her body has been exceptionally well preserved, is there any way of actually proving that she was having sex when she died, and if there was, is there any way of proving who the man was? I mean we have DNA now.’

  ‘I am not sure about the first question, but apparently it’s a definite no to the second,’ said Todd, glumly.

  Jennifer leaned back in her chair. Todd had not mentioned Marcus. There was no reason to, nothing to link Marcus with Bill Turpin and the body in the garden, nothing at all to link him, apparently, not even if it was Irene.

  But Todd Mallett did not know what she knew about the man she had married. Todd did not know the doubts and fears she had lived with for twenty-five years.

  Suddenly, as she sat in the lounge bar of the Old Ship, warm, beery and smoky, a comforting room, she could see again, clear as day, the image of her husband in the throes of his extreme sexual desire with those two young Oriental girls. There had been a crazed look in his eye which had frightened as well as disgusted her. A look she had never seen before. Unreal.

  What if Bill Turpin hadn’t killed Irene Nichols?

  What if Mark had done it? What if Mark, later to become Marcus, Sir Marcus Piddell, government minister, was a murderer?

  She tried to put the thought out of her mind, just the way she always had. But she couldn’t, not this time. Wasn’t this what she had suspected from the beginning, a suspicion that had lurked throughout her adult life and which she had never allowed herself to face fully? She had to discover the truth once and for all, to discover if there was a missing link between Mark and old Bill Turpin. But what link could there possibly be? And if Mark was a murderer, why was Irene’s body in Bill Turpin’s garden? Why was her watch concealed in one of Bill’s hidden tin boxes?

  She didn’t know the answers and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to find out. Probably only she would ever suspect that Marcus was capable of murder, and she sincerely believed that only she had a hope of ever proving it if it was so. Yet if she set off on the path she was considering, she was already starkly aware of how her own life could be damn near destroyed by discoveries that she might make. For most of her adulthood she had been Mark Piddle’s woman. She had slept with him for the first time only days after Irene’s death. God, had she really been that unthinking, that callous? So much of what she was beginning to remember she would rather forget, but that was how it had always been.

  Jennifer had drifted off into a kind of stunned reverie.

  Vaguely in the distance she heard Todd Mallett’s voice, kind, concerned, asking her if she was all right.

  ‘It was all a long time ago,’ she heard Todd say, and with a supreme effort of will she lurched back into the present.

  Todd looked boyish. She knew that he cared about her, suspected he still carried a torch for her. He was an attractive man whose strength and kindness shone from his gentle grey eyes. She felt that if she could be close to him he would, if only for a short time, keep the nightmare at bay. She needed that.

  ‘Do you still have the beach hut?’ she asked coolly.

  The hut, belonging rather tackily to Angela’s parents, was the place they had used to make love all those years ago.

  He was startled. He had genuinely not expected this, not after so long.

  ‘Y-yes.’ He actually stammered. There was just the hint of a query in his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. She felt a fool. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest … Well I did. But forget I did. Please.’

  He shook his head. ‘Jenny, I can think of nothing I would like more. I was just surprised … And flattered.’

  He emptied his glass. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  She followed him meekly. He and her mother were the only people left in the world who called her Jenny. It made her feel like a schoolgirl again, if only very fleetingly.

  ‘We’ll leave your car here,’ he said, and escorted her to the Volvo.

  He opened the passenger door for her. All she could see was the baby seat in the back, and she realised suddenly that she could not deal with any more guilt.

  She turned to him and kissed him softly on the lips.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I want to, but I really shouldn’t have said anything. I just can’t…’

  As ever, about everything, he was understanding.

  ‘It’s OK, you’re probably right,’ he said.

  He kissed her forehead and closed the door of the Volvo.

  Together they walked slowly across the car park to her Porsche. For once in her life she wasn’t sure she could cope with sleeping with anybody. Her brain was still in turmoil. She was not going to be able to stop now. She had to see this thing through, and she might as well get on with it.

  Trying to sound very casual, she asked: ‘Will you be speaking to Marcus?’

  ‘Of course,’ Todd said. ‘Somebody will be, anyway. If the dead girl is Irene, that is. He was living with her at the time, after all. But it’ll just be a formality.’

  ‘I see. There’s nothing to link him, is there?’

  ‘No.’

  He was puzzled. He had never liked Marcus Piddell. Todd thought he was an arrogant twister who had wheeled and dealed his way to the top, not caring whom he trampled on along the way. It probably went right back to the time Mark had ridiculed him and Angela on that long-ago Sunday in Pelham Bay, and Todd had always resented the hold Mark had over Jennifer. He was by and large a decent cop, he would never allow his personal feelings to colour his professional judgement. But even if he had wanted to think that Mark might be in some way involved, there was absolutely no indication of this.

  Jennifer interrupted his musings.

  ‘I forgot to ask you about the notebook?’

  ‘Oh yeah – another bit of a mystery that. The notebook is indecipherable at a glance. If it does contain computer codes and we could break into them, we might find some answers – Bill had a sophisticated computer in the cottage – but we’ve been unable so far to jack into the files on the hard drive, and there appears to be no additional software for it.’

  ‘Could I see it, and the watches and the other stuff you’ve collected?’ Jennifer asked.

  He wanted to know why. She decided to tell him this much of the truth.

  ‘I know it’s crazy, I just feel they might mean something to me that they don’t to anyone else,’ she said.

  ‘It’s evidence, Jennifer.’

  ‘So? I wasn’t planning to steal the stuff.’

  She opened her car door and started to climb in.

  He caught her by the arm.

  ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow morning at the operations centre in Pelham Bay village hall,’ he said.

  With his other hand he gently touched her face.

  He smiled at her. ‘I suppose it could never have worked for us, could it?’ he asked.

  ‘No chance,’ she said. ‘We might have had fun trying though.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I was ever supposed to have fun,’ he said.

  She laughed. That was the trouble, he thought, she had never taken him seriously for a moment. And he had never been able to take her lightly enough.

  As soon as she got home to Seaview Road she phoned Anna.

  ‘Come to your senses yet, have you?’ asked her friend.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Jennifer. ‘Listen. I need some help. In total confidence. You and me only.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Anna helpfully. ‘What have you done now?’

  Jennifer took a deep breath.

  ‘Nothing. I need some cuttings. Are you still able to use the library at the Chronicle?’

  ‘Yes. In return for copious quantities of malt whisky delivered to the chief librarian every Christmas. But why do you need me and the Chronicle library, for Christ’s sake? Can’t Caroline help you? She keeps phoning me, incidentally.’
<
br />   Caroline was Jennifer’s secretary at The Globe. Or used to be – Jennifer wasn’t quite sure any more. In either case, Caroline would help willingly. She would also talk. She couldn’t help it, and Jennifer had always accepted it as congenital.

  ‘Anna, you know Caroline can never keep her mouth shut, and this is serious. I want cuts on Marcus.’

  ‘Bloody Hell, Jen, I thought you didn’t want to hear his name again. You’ll never get him out of your system, will you?’

  Jennifer was getting impatient.

  ‘Will you listen for once? It’s nothing to do with that. I have discovered something I would rather not have done, and I need to do some digging. I want copies of all the scandalous stuff about Marcus, all the speculation pieces about his money, the row over that devaluation story in the Recorder. Anything like that, anything at all.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Anna, I can’t tell you, not even you, not yet – I may have got it wrong. Will you fax the stuff to me?’

  ‘I suppose so. When do you want it? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Jennifer, it means going in to town and I wasn’t planning to. And that means rearranging everything for Pandora…’

  ‘Please, Anna. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t vital.’

  ‘Oh all right,’ said Anna. ‘Whatever it is that’s getting at you, I expect you should leave well alone, but I don’t suppose you will listen. You never do.’

  ‘Said the pot…’

  Jennifer was already feeling more cheerful, more positive. She had known Anna would do it for her. She’d never let her down yet. Jennifer held the phone away from her ear and smiled as Anna launched into a reassuring grumble concerning ‘being taken for granted’, and ‘hare-brained ideas’. The most wonderful thing about her oldest friend remained the way even the briefest and least consequential conversation with her could lift the deepest depression. Even when the world was closing in totally, the familiarity of a really good friendship could make you think that there was something in life worth carrying on for. Perhaps because she had never had children, she valued her one or two true friendships more than the friends concerned would probably ever know.

  She’d been away barely two days, and so much had happened in North Devon that she had almost completely forgotten her other life. She did not want any further dealings with Jack and the paper until she had things a little clearer in her mind, which looked like being not for some time now. She had resigned, and when it dawned on them all that she really meant it, she assumed they would stop paying her. There wasn’t really a lot more to it, except the car, which was no longer worth a great deal. She just couldn’t be bothered with sorting it out, so it was easier to be an ostrich for a while and carry on driving the damn thing around.

  ‘Thanks Anna,’ she said.

  ‘Again,’ said Anna.

  ‘Thanks Anna again,’ Jennifer repeated obediently.

  ‘Too bloody right,’ said Anna.

  But as she replaced the receiver, Anna McDonald felt deeply uneasy.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she told Dominic. ‘But something has happened to throw Jen completely. She’s just not herself.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news at least,’ said Dominic.

  Anna couldn’t even be bothered to register that she’d heard what he had said. She was talking to herself really, thinking aloud.

  ‘She’s in a right state about something.’

  The phone call had interrupted her lugubrious husband’s enjoyment of a late-night movie on TV.

  ‘Jennifer bloody Stone is always in a right state if you ask me,’ he grumbled.

  The next morning gave Anna her first inkling of what might lie behind Jennifer’s call. The reopening of the old murder inquiry in Pelham Bay and the discovery of a body in Bill Turpin’s garden was a page lead in the one tabloid paper the McDonalds still had delivered along with The Times and The Telegraph.

  Anna studied the piece thoughtfully, then contemplated calling Jennifer back and giving her the third degree. She decided against it. If the old bat wasn’t telling, then she wasn’t telling.

  She would get the cuttings organised and have another go at Jen that night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jennifer slept fitfully – still unsure that she really wanted to dig up the past, but at the same time quite certain that she was going to. She could feel her anger and disgust at Marcus welling up inside her. She knew that if she tried to destroy him she would probably end up destroying a large part of her own life. She had shut her eyes quite determinedly and refused to examine her eternal doubts about his business dealings. She had walked away from the more unpleasant aspects of his sex life. To her shame she had done nothing about the youthful sex-for-sale trade that she knew he must be involved in. But murder? Now that her eyes had been involuntarily opened, her journalistic antennae were operating at full power. She wanted to know exactly what had been going on, what exactly the undercurrent she had felt for so long in Marcus’s life was really about. She was sure that everything was linked in some complex way to the goings on in Pelham Bay so long ago.

  She was still fretting in the morning as she sat in her mother’s kitchen drinking tea. It was always tea for her in the mornings. There was nothing like a strong cup of English Breakfast to cut through a hangover, not that she had one that morning, it just felt as if she did. Her mother was already up and about. It was a treat for her to have her daughter at home, although, as usual, she wasn’t seeing much of her. Jennifer had always been rushing around doing something. Ever since her teens. Maybe even before. Over tea and toast they chatted about family. Her brother had married for the first time relatively late in life, and had had twin boys and then a daughter in short order. Mrs Stone was delighted. She’d more or less given up any hope of being a grandmother. The bad news was that Jennifer’s brother had been disillusioned with the Britain he had found waiting for him when he left the air force, and had emigrated to Australia where he worked for a small charter aircraft company. It was mostly Boys’ Own flying and he was in his element. He had never really grown up: the air force was responsible for that. But he had found a near-perfect wife, and eventually, what was for him, a near-perfect life. Jennifer envied him. It was sad for her mother that this new family was so far away, but every year she travelled to Australia and spent two months with them. Mrs Stone had made six visits now. She was a veteran, and Jennifer always paid for the tickets, first-class, an arm–and-a-leg job, but the least she could do. One year, not long after her father had died, she had taken a month’s holiday and travelled with her mother down under. That had been the best trip ever for Mrs Stone. All her family together again.

  Jennifer decided to hint that she might not be going back to The Globe. Mrs Stone was unmoved.

  ‘Huh, I knew there was something up,’ she said.

  Jennifer smiled. She never had been able to pull the wool over her mother’s eyes as much as she thought she could. She might as well confess the rest of it.

  ‘Actually I’m thinking of buying a cottage by the sea here in North Devon and giving up London and newspapers for good,’ Jennifer announced.

  Her mother did not have to say how much that would please her, but she knew her daughter well.

  ‘Are you sure you can do that, maid?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’m not sure – but I think I may be soon,’ replied Jennifer honestly. ‘There’s something I have to do before I can finally make any big decisions.’

  ‘Nothing to do with that old man and they murders?’ Mrs Stone queried.

  Once again Jennifer was surprised by her astuteness. She shouldn’t be, but there it was. She knew her mother would worry herself sick if she thought Jenny was getting mixed up in it all again, so she decided to lie.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said coolly.

  But she wasn’t quite sure how convincing she was being. She changed the subject.

  ‘I tell you what
, how about if we go to Oz together again to see Steve and the family?’

  Mrs Stone’s face lit up. She’d love that. Jenny didn’t need to ask, did she?

  ‘In the autumn,’ said Jennifer. ‘Their spring. Stay three months if you like – and I’ll stay three months with you. Why the hell not?’

  ‘Don’t swear,’ said her mother. In some ways nothing changed.

  And so, chatting comfortably with her mother, the time passed more quickly than Jennifer had expected. Suddenly it was nine-thirty, and she set off to drive to the operations centre in Pelham Bay. She arrived fifteen minutes early. But Todd was already prepared for her, as she had guessed he would be. A young constable showed her into the private office he had set up in a small storeroom. It was an airless little room with one tiny high-up window, but at least it gave him some privacy. A temporary phone line had been installed. The furniture comprised a desk covered in papers and two straight-backed chairs.

  The constable closed the door, and Jennifer sat down opposite Todd across the desk. She was aware of his face softening as he looked at her, then, with a slight shrug of his burly shoulders, he became the police chief again.

  He took several clear plastic bags from the box by his feet, cleared a space on his cluttered desk and spread them out. Each bag contained a piece of the evidence found in Bill’s cottage.

  ‘Can I look at the notebook, can I take it out of the bag?’ Jennifer asked.

  ‘No,’ said Todd. ‘But we’ve copied it. Hang on.’

  He got up and headed for the operations room set up in the main body of the village hall. While he was gone, Jennifer studied the items of jewellery laid out before her. Irene’s cheap little silver-plated watch stood out like a sore thumb – well, she assumed it was Irene’s. It had indeed tarnished badly.

  When Todd returned, she asked him if the body had now definitely been identified as Irene. He replied that it had. The dental records checked out, and his next job was to tell Irene’s parents. The police had already warned them of the possibility before the news had been announced that a long-dead body had been found. Todd hadn’t wanted them to put two and two together from a news bulletin.