The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  Marcus Piddell sat at the front of the church.

  There was no way that he was going to destroy all he had ever gained, no way he was going to make a sacrifice of himself with one emotional outburst. He was on autopilot, he was a nervous wreck, but he continued to operate, to do what he had to do.

  His statement about his ex-wife’s death, expressing his shock and distress, had been properly prepared and issued to the press. Now he was at her funeral. He was immaculately dressed in a black three-piece suit. He looked grief-stricken, his face the perfect mixture of pain and sorrow. After the service he had gone to Mrs Stone and bent over her so that his immense height seemed to form a protective comforting shield. His whole body language screamed out how much he cared. The photographers waiting in the churchyard leapt into action. They were mostly there because Jennifer Stone was Marcus Piddell’s ex. In the end she was better known for that than for anything, and how she would have hated it, Todd thought. The cameras flashed. High-profile tycoon and government minister comforts the mother of his tragic former wife. That would be tomorrow’s newspaper picture.

  ‘Nice performance, Mark,’ Todd muttered cynically to himself.

  Outside the church, a figure stood apart from the rest of the mourners, alone and very still over by the lychgate, half concealed by rhododendron bushes. Was it? Todd was almost sure; yes, it was Johnny Cooke.

  A touch uncertainly, the detective inspector walked over to him. Johnny looked as if he was about to turn away, but he didn’t. It was Todd who had kept him informed about everything concerning Bill Turpin, Todd who had so far been able to say so little to Johnny, but whose whole being had expressed concern and maybe even regret. Todd whose father had been the only one who seemed to care even a jot about the real truth all those years ago.

  The two men nodded a somewhat awkward greeting.

  ‘I didn’t even know you knew her,’ said the policeman.

  ‘She came to see me.’

  Had she indeed? Todd studied Johnny carefully.

  ‘And?’ he said.

  ‘And nothing much. She said she wanted to discover the truth … there’s not a lot of it about.’

  Todd looked down at his feet. Johnny continued, unwittingly using almost the same words as his mother at the funeral of Jennifer’s father. ‘I just wanted to pay my respects…’

  Todd met the other man’s steady gaze. ‘Look, I’m sure she did discover something, something important. If you know anything that could help, I mean, do you have any idea what she was after?’

  Johnny shrugged and shook his head; he didn’t even seem interested.

  ‘I have a feeling it could be something that might clear your name, once and for all,’ encouraged Todd.

  Johnny laughed. It was a hollow sound.

  ‘Do you know anything that can give me back half a lifetime?’ he asked. And then he did turn away.

  Todd watched him stride down the lane outside the church, and like Jennifer Stone such a short time ago he was struck by his dignity. He knew he could never help Johnny Cooke, and Jennifer, always so full of the joys of living, was dead. But he owed them a debt, he felt, and his father too, and he wasn’t going to stop until he had done his best to settle that debt.

  Marcus got his driver to take him straight to his London apartment. He had indeed done all that he should do, but he was genuinely severely shaken. He had loved Jennifer after all, hadn’t he? Inasmuch as he could ever love anyone, yes he had. Now what was he going to do? He felt alone and desperate.

  As he walked through the front door, the phone was ringing, and when he picked it up the scrambler light blinked. The computerised scrambling mechanism could be operated by an incoming caller using the correct codes, as well as by the recipient of a call. The Friends took no chances.

  An educated voice introduced itself as John Fitzsimmon. Marcus was astonished. John Fitzsimmon was a senior civil servant, well known throughout Whitehall. He was powerful and much respected, a pillar of the establishment, a man with a flawless reputation, tipped to be the next head of the civil service.

  ‘Good evening,’ said the caller, his cut-glass public school voice echoing from the receiver. ‘I understand we are members of the same club.’

  ‘I am a member of a lot of clubs,’ replied Marcus.

  ‘Waste of time,’ said John Fitzsimmon. ‘There is only one that matters.’

  He then suggested that they go for a walk together in St James’s Park and have a chat. They should meet at the bandstand. Surprised but curious and, oddly, already heartened, Marcus quickly agreed.

  He and John Fitzsimmon had never met, but each recognised the other.

  ‘Understand you’ve had a spot of bother, old boy,’ said Fitzsimmon by way of greeting. He held out his hand. Marcus took it. The Masons’ handshake – well, that was no great surprise. Fitzsimmon’s public-school drawl held all the confidence of generations of power and wealth, but family history and the right education were not quite enough to guarantee either of those any more.

  ‘Not to worry,’ continued the drawling voice. ‘Not your fault. These things happen. Got to be sorted out. Nobody likes it. But we can’t let anything interfere with the main game plan, can we?

  ‘Been sent by some mutual Friends…’ There was an almost imperceptible pause, and the lightest of emphasis on the word Friends. ‘…to give you a helping hand, old boy.’

  Fitzsimmon seemed to know everything – he made that abundantly clear – which Marcus at first found disconcerting. But this man referred to the murder of six people and the maiming of several others as if to the correction of an accounting error. He treated it like a routine business operation. And maybe, thought Marcus, to these people he was mixing with, that was exactly what it was. So much that happened involving so many people at the top in the world was undoubtedly hidden-agenda stuff. He knew that. He had told Jennifer that. Things were rarely as they seemed. To the men and women who were really in charge of the world’s politics and finances, a few deaths in a suburb of London would be just a hiccup along the way to completing whatever plans were in progress. He began to feel not quite so alone.

  In a straightforward businesslike manner, Fitzsimmon explained to him more than ever before how The Friends worked in protecting and cultivating their own. There were casualties along the way, only to be expected, couldn’t be helped.

  ‘You’re the important one. After all, you’re going to be prime minister, eh old boy? Eh? Can’t let you down, can we?’

  From now on, John Fitzsimmon would be at his right hand.

  ‘And we’ll find you one of ours to be your PPS when you’re the PM eh, old boy? Eh?’

  Marcus was in something of a daze. But when he returned to his Chelsea apartment he began to feel much better. He had started to convince himself that John Fitzsimmon was right. He was too important to be put at risk. Sacrifices had to be made, and the death of Jennifer Stone was a sacrifice. A terrible sacrifice, but a necessary one.

  Over the next week he met Fitzsimmon every day.

  They dined together, drank together, and talked endlessly. At last Marcus had someone who seemed to know everything, in whom he could confide. Fitzsimmon had that air of infallibility about him exuded only by his kind, and Marcus found it infectious. The Whitehall wizard had instructions to give Marcus all the help and support he needed, to rebuild him, to steer him forwards, and to do everything he could to keep Marcus happy.

  John Fitzsimmon had also been given detailed instructions about exactly what kept Marcus happy.

  On the seventh day after Jennifer’s funeral, Fitzsimmon took Marcus to a safe house in Ealing.

  ‘I have a surprise for you, present from The Friends,’ he said.

  In an upstairs room furnished with a big double bed and a settee, two Oriental girls stood nervously by the window. They were twins and were wearing matching silk kimonos. They were breathtakingly pretty.

  ‘There you are, old boy, should take your mind off things,’ drawled F
itzsimmon.

  Marcus wasn’t sure that he was quite ready yet. It was this that had got him into the mess he was in, after all.

  ‘I … I’m not sure I can,’ he heard himself stammer.

  ‘Oh, from what I’ve heard you’ll manage,’ said Fitzsimmon unconcernedly. ‘They’re yours for the night; very young – the way you like ’em, eh old boy? But they know what to do, I’m told. Take care, won’t you?’

  And he left Marcus to it.

  Together the two girls undressed him. He did not protest or help, moving only enough to make it possible for them to remove his clothes. When he was standing naked, they slipped off their kimonos. Underneath, both were wearing silk teddies trimmed with lace. Their bodies were exquisite, pale and perfect in every detail.

  Still Marcus did not have an erection. He stood limp and unsure of himself before them. Then first one and then the other of the two girls knelt before him and began to play with him and take him in her small soft mouth. It was like transmitting an electric current to a dormant robot. Marcus could feel his appetites being returned to him by tongue and touch. His sexuality was so much his driving force that it frequently overwhelmed him without his knowledge, sometimes almost against his will. He had reason to hate this lack of control – he who in every other way was such a controlled man. But his sex drive was a thing apart, and it could – as Jennifer Stone had found out – turn him into a monster.

  Soon he was big and hard and all he could think about was sex. Everything else was dismissed from his mind and body by the urgency of his desires, which had indeed been the intention. He let rip. He went for it. Just like always.

  In the next room, two men were watching Marcus Piddell’s sexual antics through a two-way mirror. They had been told he could do almost anything he liked, that it didn’t matter if he hurt the girls, that he probably would hurt them, but there was to be no permanent damage. Not again.

  The bigger and older of the watchers, once well-muscled now merely fat, turned away in disgust. He had a daughter about the age of the twins in the other room, and if any man did to her what that bastard was doing to those poor kids, he would kill him, he thought.

  ‘What are we now?’ he asked in a broad Cockney accent. ‘Fucking pimps?’

  ‘We’re just doing our job,’ said his partner calmly.

  He was a little weasel of a man who, in better days, had once been a jockey.

  ‘Why have they laid all this on for that bastard anyway?’

  The fat man was looking through the mirror again. He felt sick. Not for the first time he wished to God he had never become involved with The Friends. He’d been an habitual punter who’d landed himself in trouble with the bookies. They had bailed him out … In return for certain services. And that was it; no escape after that, sucked in for ever, like it or not. There were a lot of racing people in the same situation.

  ‘Because “that bastard” is going to be prime minister one day,’ he heard the ex-jockey say.

  Marcus had forgotten that anything in the world except his cock existed. He was now in his favourite situation. He had the two girls bent over the sofa and was hammering into them relentlessly from behind. The twins had not been prepared for this, nor for his size. First he plunged into one, holding the other one down with a strong arm, then he would change. Great powerful strokes. He was doing exactly what Jennifer had seen him do all those years before when she had returned unexpectedly to their apartment. The girls were looking in the direction of the two-way mirror, their faces registering pain and fear. Their little bodies were trembling, one of them was crying. Marcus’s face showed only the violence of his lust. His eyes were wild. He looked quite mad.

  ‘Gawd help us all,’ said the fat man.

  Todd Mallett felt angry and frustrated. He had spent the week since Jennifer’s funeral going over and over the events that had followed the death of Bill Turpin. His chance meeting with Johnny had somehow made him even more determined to get to the bottom of it all. And his father, still racked with guilt and uncertainty over Johnny’s conviction, had begged him to find the truth at last, but Todd couldn’t seem to get near it.

  Jennifer had been trying to contact him to tell him something important about the murders of Marjorie Benson and Irene Nichols. He had known the night they’d drunk together in the Old Ship that she had suspicions and maybe knowledge she hadn’t yet been prepared to share. Now it was too late.

  Whatever Jennifer Stone knew about Bill Turpin and Marcus Piddell had died with her.

  Todd was convinced that she had been murdered too, quite convinced of it. But if she had been, then her killers were so skilled that they’d managed to rig a gas explosion which had fooled the greatest explosive experts in the country. Todd had asked for more and more investigation. His superiors, the London Fire Brigade, and even British Gas, who would have loved nothing more than to have been able to blame foul play, were beginning to be bored with him.

  The ‘Richmond Hill Explosion’ was to go down in history as a terrible accident, like so many other gas explosions when whole buildings had been destroyed. The experts reminded him again of the precedents: Ronan Point, the London tower block which collapsed like a pack of cards after a gas explosion in 1968, killing five people; the explosion in Motta Visconti, Northern Italy, in July 1994, when twenty-seven elderly people died in an old people’s home; the Coventry house flattened killing three when the priest who lived there lit his pipe – an IRA bomb had at first been suspected, and it was some days before the truth was uncovered; and, most spectacular of all, the explosion of an underground gas main in America’s New Jersey in August 1994, which vaporised eight blocks of flats leaving a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot crater and killing more than fifty. These things happened, and this latest explosion was yet another accidental tragedy. Todd must accept that.

  He didn’t – but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.

  He had followed every possible lead, painstakingly checking back over old material, looking into those fine-art burglaries again, following all the other rumours about Bill Turpin, even the off-the-wall stuff, like the arms-dealing out of Bristol. He just came to the same dead ends. Nobody had ever got anywhere with that burglary network after the war, that had been some well organised operation. There was certainly nothing concrete to link anything criminal with Bill Turpin – apart from the murder of poor Irene Nichols. Much of the evidence he had compiled even now against Bill was purely circumstantial, like the horde of crime cuttings the old man had collected, and the discovery of the extent of Bill’s wealth, his dealings on the stock market and his Swiss bank accounts. But how did a man like Bill Turpin get into all that kind of stuff, and what was he doing with some of the most elaborate and sophisticated computer equipment in existence?

  Todd had taken to staying at the Pelham Bay operation centre – where investigations into the deaths of Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson were continuing, although probably not for much longer – virtually all day and all night, desperately trying to make sense of it all. His gut instinct told him that the Marjorie Benson murder must be a vital part of the riddle. He meticulously studied the court records, the statements taken, and even dug out Marjorie’s few pathetic personal effects. He’d found them still stashed away in an almost forgotten corner of the Devon and Exeter Constabulary stores – after all, nobody had claimed them: there was, it appeared, no one to do so.

  And so Todd sat at the desk in his temporary office, staring at piles of neatly folded clothes, a few books, a bunch of keys, so little, all so uninspiring.

  He touched things, picked objects up, as if hoping for inspiration. There were four keys. One he knew had been the key of Marjorie’s room at the golf club. There was a car key to a Ford of some kind – the records showed that attempts to trace it had proved futile, and there were two small suitcase keys. Nothing. Bugger all.

  Todd was still fingering the keys, tossing the bunch up and down in his hand, when his sergeant rushed into the room.
/>   ‘Still here?’ asked Todd without a deal of interest. ‘Thought you left ages ago.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve been down the road to the sports centre – got a game of squash booked. I left the key to my locker here somewhere …’

  The man had started to rummage in his desk.

  Todd continued to throw Marjorie Benson’s keys monotonously up and down.

  ‘Shit,’ he said suddenly.

  With surprising speed for a big man, he lurched to his feet and half dragged the bemused sergeant out of the door with him.

  ‘Never mind your blessed squash – come with me!’ he ordered.

  And he instructed the man to drive as fast as he could to the Royal Western Golf Club.

  The lockers at the RWG were a law unto themselves.

  It seemed there was only one man who knew anything at all about the system, such as it was, and he had been working there for a million years. Todd’s sergeant was despatched to bring him to the Club at once.

  The elderly man who eventually arrived looked as if he should have been retired years ago. But Bert Cousins was part of the institution at the Royal Western. He peered short-sightedly at the two little keys Todd handed to him, and pointed to the slightly larger one.

  ‘Oh yes, that was one of ours,’ he said.

  Bingo, thought Todd. He looked around the ranks of lockers. Could one possibly have remained locked and abandoned for all this time? From the disorganised state of the place it seemed just possible…

  ‘What number, can you tell me?’ Todd asked.

  Bert shook his head.

  ‘No way of telling. Long time ago though – we had a clear out a while back. Sorted out a lot of forgotten stuff, changed the locks and all, we did, got different keys now.’

  Todd felt his heart sink.

  ‘What happened to the old stuff you found in the abandoned lockers?’ he asked desperately.

  ‘You should have seen it,’ muttered Bert. ‘Rotting sports gear mostly, ’ad to chuck that.’