The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  Jennifer shuddered. She sympathised with Todd on the rotten job he was about to do.

  ‘I’ve done worse,’ he replied flatly. ‘They always believed Irene was dead anyway. Said there was no way she would have gone anywhere without telling them.’

  Jennifer reached out a hand for the copies of the notebook. There were jottings on several pages. Groups of numbers and letters, disjointed words, nothing that made any sense. Yet she had seen something like it before. She knew she had.

  ‘Are these what you think are codes?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Todd replied. ‘But so far they are not a lot of good to us. As I told you, Bill Turpin had this super-advanced computer system but no software. If there was anything already on the hard disc, we have yet to break into it. God knows what he was planning to use the thing for, but it seems as if it had been programmed by somebody else and Bill had barely handled it. He was obviously a lot more sophisticated than anybody would have guessed, and pretty clever on the stock market, so maybe he aimed to use the computer to play the market. Who knows? When we checked the keyboard for his finger prints there were hardly any, so he may have tried to move into the computer age and not quite made it.

  ‘At the Penny Parade there is a basic Amstrad that they use for their accounts and stock-taking and so on, but, according to Johnny Cooke who does all that sort of stuff, Bill rarely even went near that.’

  Todd paused. He was watching Jennifer’s face. He didn’t know quite what to make of her.

  ‘If you know anything, Jenny, suspect anything, have the slightest clue about anything…’ he began quietly. ‘Why don’t you tell me – and then let me do my job?’

  ‘I’m just interested,’ she replied.

  ‘That’s one word for it.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe I’ll write a book.’

  ‘Maybe you will,’ he said. ‘But that’s not it, either, is it?’

  She put the copy of the notebook in her pocket and took one last look at the forlorn collection of jewellery.

  ‘Thanks Todd,’ she said.

  She left her car parked outside the village hall and walked along Old Bay Road to the amusement arcade which she knew was now run by Johnny Cooke. Pelham Bay was something of a time warp. There were video games in the Penny Parade now instead of table football machines, yet surprisingly little else had changed. The resort was perhaps a bit more fish and chippy, but maybe her memory played tricks on her. It always had been a ropy place, the tattiest side of the seaside industry. The deckchairs were still for hire from the same stand, and a new breed of indolent young men had succeeded Johnny Cooke and all the others since. They were clones – immaculately tanned, shirtless in faded jeans, arrogant in the certainty of their youth. Only their hair was different. These lads had short-back-and-sides haircuts, the pudding basin shaven-around-the-edges look that was once again in fashion. Twenty-five years ago Johnny’s hair had been long and luxuriant, spreading onto his shoulders in true sixties and early seventies style.

  The same local company was still selling its ever-excellent ice cream from a van parked by the slipway, and in the same spot too. She bought a large cornet and paid fifty pence for a deckchair. The price had gone up but the manners of the deckchair boys remained the same. The short swarthy young man handing the chairs out that day watched uncaring as she struggled to assemble the deckchair with one hand while balancing her melting cornet in the other. The blob of ice cream eventually gave up and fell with a resounding splat onto the cobbled promenade. Damn, she thought. Why hadn’t she performed this operation the other way around and bought the ice cream after hiring the chair? Maybe the deckchair boys and the ice-cream man were tied together in some unholy money-making alliance. Resignedly she approached the van again and bought a second cornet. The seller was stony-faced. Couldn’t she remember from her youth a red-cheeked, smiling, sort of beardless Father Christmas of a man who wooed the children with his affectionate charm as much as with his splendid ice cream? She was reminded of how much things do change with the years. It only appears that they remain the same. This fella sold her a second large cornet within just a couple of minutes and his eyes expressed no recognition. No nothing. Stony, all right, icy, even, to match his wares. So much for the warmth of human contact.

  She returned to her chair and settled herself down.

  It was still fairly warm for May but, sitting right by the sea, she pulled her thick woollen jacket close around her. The wind was whistling up the slipway and along the promenade as usual. She pushed her chair into a more sheltered spot by the wall and sat watching the comings and goings at the Penny Parade. Nobody had ever changed its name.

  After a while her patience was rewarded. A tall rangy man walked out of the main door and strolled across the path to the deckchair stand. He spoke briefly to the swarthy boy who handed him what she assumed were that day’s takings. The man counted the cash and put it into the leather bag he was carrying over his shoulder. He was strongly built and his body appeared more youthful than the age she knew he must be, somewhere in his early forties. But when he turned towards her his face showed every minute of the torment that he had been through. She was shocked. He was tanned by the wind but there was a greyness about him. His hair was grey. His eyes were quite lifeless. She registered all this in a second. Even though she knew he must have been shaken rigid by the events of the last couple of days, she had not expected his appearance to betray his protracted ordeal quite as blatantly as it did. But in spite of the premature ageing in his face, she recognised him right away. She had never met him before, strangely enough, never spoken to him. But she had kept in her mind always, however much she had tried to forget it, the bewildered broken face peering at her from the dock at Exeter Crown Court all those years ago. This was Johnny Cooke, and no wonder he looked the way he did. This was a man who had spent most of his adulthood in prison for a crime he might not have committed.

  She knew he was running old Bill’s empire, Todd had told her that, told her that Bill had appeared to be Johnny’s saviour, helping him rebuild his life from the moment he was released from jail. Johnny would be aware now, of course, of the new police suspicions. The duplicity, the double-take of it all, that must have been the final blow, she thought. If the hand you thought was keeping you afloat turned out to be the one pushing you into the sea to drown, that was hardest of all to take, surely.

  She watched Johnny stroll on from the deckchair stand and lean against the sea wall just a few feet from where she was sitting. His powerful shoulders were bowed. His physique looked as if it was probably sensational beneath his big fisherman’s sweater. He had always been well built, and she supposed he had further developed his body in prison. That was what strong healthy young prisoners did to keep themselves sane, wasn’t it?

  He was peering out to sea, behaving much the way she had seen Bill Turpin behave when she was a girl. Ironic really. He looked so tired. She wanted to comfort him. She felt terribly guilty. She asked herself why, but she was just kidding herself. She knew well the reasons for her guilt. She was one of a handful of people in the world who had always had doubts about Johnny’s conviction. Severe doubts. And because of the nature of those doubts, she had deliberately made herself forget them, pretend they did not exist.

  As she watched him now, as she saw the weariness and the sadness in him, the guilt overwhelmed her. She felt close to tears.

  Then Johnny Cooke turned. Suddenly he was directly facing her and a miracle happened. The tiredness went entirely from his eyes. His mouth stretched into a beaming welcoming smile. Joy radiated from every pore of him. He crouched to the ground and stretched out his arms. His eyes were shining, no longer lifeless. Far from that. Every inch of him was bursting with life and love. She could hear a child’s voice and, looking over her shoulder, saw a toddler running along the promenade towards Johnny. The little boy was unsteady on his feet, wobbling a bit, but he knew exactly where he was going. Squealing with happiness, he flung himself into Johnny Cooke�
�s extended arms, falling onto his body with the total, as yet unspoiled, trust of little children in their parents. The big man clasped the boy in his arms and, standing up, hoisted the child triumphantly in the air above his head. The boy kicked his legs with delight, his yells of pleasure clear above the roar of the sea. And Johnny Cooke was laughing. A great bellow of a laugh that came from deep inside and poured out in a bubbly torrent like a rushing cliffside waterfall.

  On the heels of the child came a pretty dark woman, much younger than Johnny, wheeling a pushchair. She was slightly plump, but that kind of youthful plumpness which made her in some ways even more attractive. It was a cliché, Jennifer knew, and probably nothing to do with her plumpness but more to some inner thing shining out from her, but you were sure that she must have a sunny nature. She was smiling too, although not like Johnny. Hers was a small contented half smile. As she reached the big man, he shifted the little boy into one arm, rested the other casually across the shoulders of the young woman and, bending, kissed her briefly, and with pleasurable familiarity, on the top of the head. The woman was chattering to him. Jennifer could just catch snatches.

  ‘He said two more words this morning. Cornflakes and natcha.’

  ‘Natcha?’ queried the big man.

  ‘Goodness knows,’ she replied, giggling.

  He roared his appreciation. That great laugh again.

  And the little family retreated into the amusement arcade, heads close together, forming a secure triangle of love.

  Jennifer felt the tears pricking the backs of her eyelids once more, as she blinked quickly in a desperate attempt to stop them flowing. They were a different kind of tears now. So Johnny Cooke had a family which obviously gave him great happiness. Thank God for that, she thought. She sat in the deckchair for another thirty minutes or so. The sun was not so bright now and the wind was quite sharp. She was uncomfortably cold by the time the young woman left the amusement arcade and set off along the promenade. This time the toddler sat in the pushchair, swathed in a fleecy blanket.

  Jennifer waited another couple of minutes and then left her chair and walked across to the Penny Parade. She made her way past the fruit machines and the video games to the back of the arcade where, she remembered, the office was tucked in one corner. It was still in the same place. Johnny Cooke was sitting at a desk, head down, studying some papers. She knocked on the open glass door, standing hesitant in the doorway. He looked up.

  ‘Yes?’ he inquired.

  He didn’t recognise her. Why should he, when he had only seen her once, really, in the witness box at Exeter, and her evidence had not even been important to his case.

  ‘Hello. I’m Jennifer Stone,’ she said.

  The name obviously meant nothing either. He gazed at her inquiringly.

  ‘I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ he said again in the same questioning tone.

  ‘I … I … found the body,’ she began hesitantly.

  Realisation spread across his face. The joyful happiness of a moment ago with his young child was instant history. The haunted look returned, and with it the greyness and the emptiness in his eyes.

  ‘And you married Mark Piddle,’ he said, using the old, never-to-be-mentioned, name.

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. Her eyes spoke a legend more.

  He half smiled. He had always seen humour in so much of it.

  ‘You’d best sit down,’ he said.

  At first he was not forthcoming. She was aware that she was using her interviewing technique on him to get him going. But he was not a stupid man.

  ‘You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Was,’ she said firmly.

  ‘I’ve already had the vultures here, several of them are up the road in the pub, waiting,’ he said. ‘A long wait they’re going to have.’

  He passed her a scribbled note. It offered Johnny a great deal of money if he would exclusively sell his story to a certain mass-circulation Sunday newspaper.

  She raised her eyebrows. He knew exactly what her look was asking. Strange that there seemed this easy understanding between them under such strained circumstances, especially as he was clearly quite aware of her involvement with Mark.

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘It looks like everything I have could be some kind of blood money. I want no more of it.’

  He paused, as if deciding whether to trust her or not.

  ‘Is that what you are here for?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  His expression did not change. His eyes were boring into her head.

  ‘I promise you.’

  He nodded, satisfied. ‘They found a will. Apparently the old bastard has left me everything. Millions maybe. How’s that for blood money?’

  He got up from the desk, walked round and stood looking straight down at her.

  ‘Mark Piddle’s missus, eh?’ he said. To himself really.

  ‘Ex-missus,’ she repeated.

  ‘Oh, aye. I never understood it you know. Never understood why he lied.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  He didn’t really hear, just went on talking. ‘I said I killed her because I felt I hadn’t looked after her properly. He knew what I meant, the bugger.’

  He paused, realising at last what she had said. ‘And you knew too?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  Her shame was out in the open now.

  ‘You always knew?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She was being absolutely truthful. ‘For years I allowed myself to believe that I had misunderstood him. I suppose it was the only way I could live with myself and with Mark. But now, I know. Yes.’

  ‘So that’s why you are here.’ The eyes were boring into her skull again. ‘Guilty conscience, aye?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Definitely that.’

  ‘And what do you want?’

  ‘I want to find out the truth. I can’t deal with suspicions; and I have so many.’

  He made her a mug of tea and sat down next to her and began to talk. He said this would be the one and only time he would discuss it with her; whatever happened next he wanted to get on with his own life.

  ‘Nobody can give me back the lost years, but I’m damned if I’m going to lose any more,’ he told Jennifer.

  Again and again she went over with him both their memories of that night when he had visited Mark after he learned that Marjorie Benson was dead. His memory of it was still hazy in places; that was partly what had sunk him all those years ago. He had been so vague and frightened and unsure of himself, and Mark so confident and articulate and correctly sorrowful.

  Johnny was talking about Marjorie Benson now.

  She glanced at him. There was no self-pity in the man when he talked about his own plight. He had accepted the years lost in jail, and he could take honest joy in his new happiness. He seemed to have so little bitterness. But when he spoke of Marjorie his voice had a catch in it. Even after all these years he looked as if he was about to break down when he talked about his devastation at her death. He had loved her so much he had just gone to pieces. He had been unable to think straight and his complete emotional collapse had not helped his case. In a way he hadn’t cared about himself until it was too late. He had been so much in love with her. He paused and put his head in his hands. He was quite a man, this Johnny Cooke, Jennifer thought to herself.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said, and felt what an inadequate, pathetic phrase that must sound coming from her lips, to this man who had suffered so much. She thanked him for his time and rose to leave.

  When she reached the door he stopped her.

  ‘Are you sure you really want to know the truth?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘No. It is over for me. Already it’s all coming back. I don’t even know why I talked to you. Maybe I thought it would help. All that would really help me is for this to end now.’ He paused. ‘What I
dread is another court case.’

  She didn’t speak.

  ‘Don’t take this personal, like.’ He paused again. ‘But I never want to see you again as long as I live.’

  She opened her mouth to speak, but there were no more words. She was standing in the doorway holding the handle of the glass door. Quickly she shut the door behind her and half ran through the amusement arcade. The tears were pouring down her face. A group of youngsters playing video games looked at her curiously. Outside she made straight for the beach and found herself one of those holes dug in the pebble ridge and she curled up in it and cried her heart out. For a half-lost life, for all that sadness, for two young women who died violently long before their time, and for herself. Oh yes, for herself.

  When the tears stopped she made for the public lavatory to splash cold water on her face and repair the damage as much as possible with make-up. Eventually she felt suitably recovered to carry on to the next stage. She walked quickly back to the Porsche and drove to Durraton where she sought out Irene Nichols’s parents’ home. They still lived in the same house on that council estate in the roughest part of town, and they were not difficult to find. Several reporters had set up camp outside. She did not feel able to knock on the door with its peeling white paint. Instead, while being vague about her own identity, she engaged the reporters in conversation and learned that a family friend had indicated that Mr and Mrs Nichols did wish to make a statement and would be coming outside soon. They knew now that the body found in Bill Turpin’s garden was their daughter.

  A regional TV team had just arrived and was busily setting up its equipment. After a wait of less than half an hour the Nicholses came out of the house. They were drawn-looking, faces gaunt and tear-stained. They spoke of their great sorrow and also their relief that their daughter’s remains had at last been found. At least they could give her a Christian burial now and mourn her properly.

  They were halting and inarticulate and incredibly moving. They went back indoors and the reporters and photographers disappeared swiftly to file their stories and wire their pictures and catch the next TV news bulletin.