The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

‘Jusht don’t unlock your bedroom windows,’ she ordered.

  ‘I won’t,’ promised Jennifer. ‘Good night.’

  As she turned away, Anna called out: ‘Aren’t you coming up?’

  ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ said Jennifer. ‘Just something I want to do.’

  She headed for the study where her laptop computer was still set up on the desk. She switched it on again and went to work. When she left the room fifteen minutes later, she was carrying a back-up floppy disc of all the material she had pumped into the machine over the last few days, as well as Marcus’s G7 disc. She entered the living room briefly to remove the micro tape from its recorder and then climbed the stairs. She could not resist peeping in at Pandora and then at Anna. Both were soundly asleep. Anna lying flat on her back. The booze had knocked her out. She was snoring. Jennifer smiled. It was reassuring to have them there with her, she had to admit. She went into her room and put the floppy discs and the tape on the bed, then she paused. It was no good – Anna had got her at it.

  She left the room and toured the house, checking all the window locks, the bars downstairs, and that she had indeed part-set the burglar alarm. It would go off if anything moved downstairs, or if any of the locked or barred external doors and windows were tampered with. Everything was fine. The place really was totally secure. She had known that – but paranoia was obviously setting in. Back in her bedroom, she took the tape and the computer discs and put them both under her pillow.

  ‘Just in case,’ she said to herself, feeling faintly ridiculous.

  Then she went into the connecting bathroom and brushed her teeth and cleaned her face. Old habits, she thought, even at a time like this. Finally she undressed and climbed gratefully beneath the goose-down filled duvet. Bliss. She was exhausted and she knew she could do no more that day, so she may as well give in to sleep. If Todd did call during the night, there was a bedside extension and she would wake up when the phone rang. If not she would deal with it all in the morning. She could not even think about Marcus any more. She had to have sleep.

  Even as she was falling exhausted into her bed, she had wondered whether sleep would be possible. Amazingly it was. A combination of the relief of having shared her burden, of the close proximity of her best friend sleeping peacefully in the next room, and the soporific effect of two bottles of red wine preceded by rather a lot of whisky overwhelmed her.

  She fell quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep. Her first proper sleep since the nightmare had begun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Marcus removed the incriminating tape from the smashed recorder he had taken from Jennifer, extracted it from its plastic casing, cut it into several pieces with sharp scissors and fed the remains to the waste disposal unit in his kitchen sink. He stood by it until the grinding finished, only then satisfied that the tape had been effectively destroyed. He was still stunned by what had happened. What a crazy fool he had been, ruled by his cock yet again. If she had not told him about the tape, she could have broken him. Brought down by her own self-indulgence, he supposed.

  Then a thought struck him – Jennifer should have remembered how streetwise he was. Even with ‘The Friends’ behind you, men did not achieve what Marcus had achieved without a quick and brilliant brain which continued to operate under extremes of pressure.

  Christ, he thought suddenly, what do photographers and reporters do if they think someone might try to stop them getting a picture or a story? They have two cameras, two tape-recorders; the old double-bluff. He had done it himself often enough when he’d been on the road. So had Jennifer used that trick on him? He did not know; he must think this through.

  There really was no other evidence, was there? The copy of Bill Turpin’s notebook was still on the kitchen table. The original was presumably already with the police, but it meant nothing without the appropriate software. Software. He decided to be methodical. He went into his study to check that nothing had been touched. It all looked in order, but suddenly, and with dazzling clarity, he became quite frighteningly sure that he had left the G7 floppy disc in the drive of the IBM computer the last time he’d used it. He remembered the phone ringing just as he finished editing a document, and when he returned to the computer to close it down he had been preoccupied. He checked the drive. Nothing. A little shakily he unlocked one of his big filing cabinets and began checking through his store of floppy discs. The G7 disc was missing.

  He re-locked the cabinet, sat down at his desk and went over and over what had happened and what it could mean. The computer disc alone would not be enough to incriminate him, would it? It would not necessarily lead back to him at all, but it would have his fingerprints on it. Still, that could probably be dealt with. It wouldn’t put him in the dock for murder, anyway. But if she still did have a tape? The more he considered it, the more he became convinced that the bitch really had outsmarted him. Two of a kind, he thought.

  It was not the first time he had underestimated Jennifer. It would definitely be the last. He realised he was sweating, although it was quite cool in the flat. Jennifer would have been interested to see that he could sweat out of bed. He was also shaking quite badly now.

  He had to make sure that there was no second tape. Would she have gone straight to the police? He would have to confess to his Friends, like he always did, and he would just tell them they needed to get the disc off Jennifer and search for a tape. That was all. They had always done what he asked, hadn’t they? They had always given him everything he wanted, they would do so again, wouldn’t they?

  And so he picked up the phone and dialled. It was still only just after five o’clock.

  By five-fifteen a specialist team was on the case. Two men in a British Telecom van arrived to check out Jennifer Stone’s Richmond home at just past six o’clock, only minutes after she’d arrived there herself.

  They could see there was someone inside the house. And by using powerful binoculars were able to identify Jennifer – from photographs biked to them en route from a source in The Globe office – through the big picture window on the landing. So far so good, at least they knew where she was. Swiftly they located the position of the distribution point governing the phone lines into the house. In built-up areas like Richmond Hill, these are concealed either beneath concrete pillars on the inner side of the pavements or behind green-painted iron cabinets set into walls. The distribution point for Jennifer’s house was beneath a concrete pillar which, with the right key, simply unlocks and is easily removed, revealing up to 1,000 pairs of wire, connecting subscribers to the exchange. To sort out which wires lead where, a copy of British Telecom’s records for the area is essential.

  These men had such access, just as they had access to a British Telecom van, although they were not employed by BT at all.

  By the time Jennifer made her second phone call to Todd Mallet, and spoke to Angela, the two bogus telephone engineers had successfully fitted a tap, with a radio transmitter allowing them to monitor Jennifer’s line from a distance.

  They listened in to that call and reasoned, taking into account the time by which Jennifer had arrived in Richmond and her apparent desperation to reach the Devon policeman, that it was an acceptable risk to assume that Jennifer Stone had yet to take her evidence to the police. It seemed there was still time to act.

  An hour or so later, the BT van pulled away. Anna, driving her Golf GTI without a great deal of skill as usual and noticing frighteningly little, had not even been aware of the departing van as she swung into Jennifer’s driveway. Jennifer herself hadn’t looked out of the window since arriving home, but to have remained in the street outside could have aroused suspicion, if only from a nosy neighbour. Because of its radio transmitter, the tap could be monitored from any place at all where the receiver was able to pick up an adequate signal. There was no sign of a surveillance operation in Jennifer Stone’s tree-lined street that night, yet her home was being watched every second, and when the downstairs and then the upstairs lights in the bi
g imposing house were eventually switched off, at about midnight, figures started moving silently in the street again. Two dark-clad men slipped through the gate and disappeared into the shadows of the garden.

  The explosion happened at just after five in the morning. Its roar could be heard right across the river in Chiswick and Brentford and in the other direction as far away as Kingston. It was a huge and devastating thing. The house which took the main force of the blast was almost completely flattened. Daylight would reveal that barely more than a few isolated bricks remained intact. Such was the power of the blast that, although detached and separated by trees and high walls, the two houses on either side were both almost completely demolished too. One was empty – its inhabitants thankfully away on holiday. The elderly couple in the second house were killed. Neighbours in other badly damaged houses, particularly the one directly opposite, also suffered appalling injuries. A pregnant woman was not expected to last the day in intensive care. A child was blinded, and one man lost both his legs.

  Jennifer Stone, Anna McDonald, and her daughter Pandora were in the house at the heart of the explosion.

  All three of them died at once. They were blown to pieces.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dominic was on his way into breakfast when the police called at his seminar hotel to break the news to him. They only knew Anna and Pandora were in the Richmond house because Anna had called a neighbour to ask her to feed her cat, and had said where she was and who she was visiting. The neighbour, an early riser and a worrier, had heard of the Richmond explosion on a radio newsflash soon after it happened and immediately called the police. Two officers from the Yorkshire force took Dominic, who never listened to the radio in the mornings, into the hotel’s conservatory overlooking the Yorkshire Moors and told him as gently as possible what had happened.

  There was no gentle way to tell Dominic McDonald that his wife and only daughter were both dead.

  Dominic did not seem able to register it. Eventually the police left. Shocked colleagues, also informed by the police, tried to comfort him. Dominic told them he would rather be alone and that he wanted to go home. He seemed calm and composed in spite of his distress. He went to his room to pack and then he disappeared.

  They found him late that night shivering on a moorland rock escarpment. It was raining and he was soaked to the skin and shivering violently. He was wearing only light trousers and a shirt. His feet were bleeding and bruised because he had forgotten to put shoes on.

  When he saw the rescue party clambering towards him he was not sure if he felt relief or disappointment. He was well aware of how easy it could be to die of exposure in open moorland at night, even in late May. But he was not at all sure he wanted to live without Anna and Pandora.

  They took him home to Barnes and as he stepped through the door of the comfortable, reassuring town house he burst into tears. The sobs racked his whole body. He did not stop crying for two days.

  Todd Mallett was phoned at home while he was drinking his morning tea. The shock was terrible. He had vaguely heard on the radio of an explosion in the London area, but he didn’t even know where Jennifer Stone lived. No warning bells had sounded. Why should they? Mrs Stone was listed as Jennifer’s next of kin. She had to be told, and when the news came through to Durraton police station the desk sergeant, an alert and ambitious man, remembered seeing an entry in the log left by the duty officer the previous evening. Jennifer Stone had been trying to contact Detective Inspector Mallett.

  Todd said very little, except that he would go to see Mrs Stone himself, and he wanted a policewoman to go with him.

  After he put the receiver down he was overcome at first with a great sense of sorrow and loss, and then, when his brain cleared a little, his head was filled with crazy thoughts and suspicions. No. It was all too far-fetched. There couldn’t be that kind of connection. And he couldn’t work it out yet, but there were many questions to be asked. Frightening questions.

  His wife came into the kitchen, fresh from the bathroom shower, and he told her about Jennifer. She turned white.

  ‘Oh my God, Todd,’ she said.

  And then she confessed how Jennifer had called the previous night and she had somehow failed to pass the message on to him.

  ‘She sounded a bit desperate, I suppose … but I didn’t know —’ Angela Mallett’s voice tailed away.

  Todd could think of nothing to say to her. Not for the first time since their marriage, he only narrowly stopped himself lashing out with his fists. Certainly he couldn’t be bothered to hide his own personal grieving.

  The unanswered questions were whirling around his head, including the most obvious one of all which he had forgotten to ask the station sergeant and which had not been volunteered.

  He called back.

  ‘What caused the explosion?’ he asked.

  ‘Gas,’ replied the desk sergeant. ‘Apparently it was one of those great gas explosions, like Ronan Point, and like that one that flattened God knows how many apartment blocks in America last year. Some fault which had caused a dangerous build-up for weeks—’

  Todd interrupted. ‘Are they sure?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir.’

  Todd replaced the receiver. Gas. And yes, if his suspicions were right they would be sure, like they had been sure all those years ago of Johnny Cooke’s guilt and Mark Piddle’s innocence.

  Mrs Stone’s face turned grey when she opened the door to Todd and a uniformed woman police sergeant.

  She had been in a trance since hearing, a few minutes earlier on the radio news, about the explosion on Richmond Hill. She had immediately called Jennifer’s phone number. It had been unobtainable. She had been just about to call the police, but something kept holding her back. She could not quite bring herself to make the call. Now they were with her.

  Todd did not need to say anything.

  ‘Jennifer?’

  And the word was more than a sentence. It was the final chapter of a life story.

  He nodded. He felt so inadequate.

  He should have been prepared for the next words, but he wasn’t.

  ‘Could you drink a cup of tea?’ asked the old lady.

  On an impulse he reached out and took her in his arms. She clung to him, her whole body shaking, and he realised he was weeping.

  Marcus also heard the news on the radio. He listened to the six a.m. bulletin as usual. The victims were not named and neither was the street in that first report. Richmond Hill was quite enough. He knew at once, and he cried out in anguish and despair, self-disgust and frustration, and of course, self-pity.

  He phoned his contact number at once. The line had been disconnected. He was still in his bedroom. He climbed back into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and lay there whimpering. He just wanted to hide away from the whole world for ever.

  When the doorbell rang, his first instinct was to stay there under the covers in the warm darkness.

  But the ringing was insistent, and then he thought, perhaps it’s them.

  Half hysterical, his eyes wild and red-rimmed, he ran to the door. It was the police, a uniformed inspector and constable, let in by a surprised porter – he wasn’t used to police calls in his smart Chelsea building. The police were there simply because Marcus was, after all, Jennifer’s ex-husband, and he was a government minister. They had come to tell him but it was apparent that he already knew.

  They expressed condolences and shock. Marcus could not communicate. He was incoherent. Eventually the two men said they would call back later.

  ‘He was in a right state, wasn’t he?’ said the new-to-the-job young constable on the way down in the lift from Marcus’s apartment. ‘He must still have loved her, even if they were divorced.’

  ‘Hmph,’ snorted the inspector, who didn’t like politicians very much. ‘His sort only love themselves.’

  Jennifer Stone’s funeral in Durraton Parish Church was a grim affair.

  Todd Mallett sat in the back of the church. He
was convinced her death was not an accident, but in spite of his requests that the cause of the explosion be checked and double checked, the same answers always came up. The blast had been caused by a massive build-up of gas over a period of time. A leak which had gone unnoticed. It had happened before. It was just a tragic accident.

  Todd watched Mrs Stone walk into the church.

  She looked broken, suddenly a very very old lady, grief etched in her face. She was being comforted by her son. The funeral had been delayed a week to allow him time to return from Australia and help with the arrangements.

  They both looked to be in total shock. Todd Mallett was still in shock.

  Just along the aisle he noticed a man of an acutely intelligent appearance who could not stop crying. He was every bit as distraught as Mrs Stone. Such was the degree of his distress that Todd made inquiries about him. The man was Dominic McDonald, the husband of Jennifer Stone’s friend who had died with her. No wonder he was in such distress. He had lost wife and daughter in one foul instant. Todd did not really know why, but after the service he felt moved to approach the man.

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ he said.

  Dominic did not even focus on the policeman.

  ‘She was my wife’s best friend,’ he said simply.

  On an impulse Todd asked him if he knew if Jennifer was working on anything before she died, if she had confided in her best friend. The other man looked at him – just for an instant – as if he was mad. It had not occurred to Dominic McDonald to put anything together, to consider a link between Jennifer’s extraordinary computer disc and her disturbing behaviour and her death. Dominic did not have that sort of brain. His entire family had been wiped out in a freak accident – and that was that. He shook his head in anguish and walked away. Nothing could get through to him.