The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  Damn, thought Todd. But Bert was still talking.

  ‘Anything that looked as if anybody might claim it we put in the storeroom.’

  Todd stood very still. ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘I should imagine so,’ replied the old man. ‘’Aven’t looked for donkeys’ years meself.’

  Todd and his sergeant took the storeroom apart.

  Todd didn’t even know what he was looking for, but he was quietly certain that if he found it he would recognise it.

  There were a number of ancient sports bags in varying degrees of decay. The fourth one Todd opened contained reams of paper, most of it covered with what seemed to be poetry, meticulously handwritten. There were also some letters. At the bottom of the bag was a sealed envelope. It contained a Canadian passport in the name of Claire Pearson. The photograph was of a young woman, probably in her early thirties.

  Todd found that his hands were trembling. It had to be the murder victim previously known only as Marjorie Benson, didn’t it? But he couldn’t be certain with just a grainy old staff photograph and one taken after her death to go on.

  ‘You must have been here with Marjorie Benson, do you remember her?’ he asked Bert.

  The old man nodded.

  ‘Can you remember what she looked like?’

  Bert nodded again. ‘Not likely to forget after what happened to that poor maid.’

  Todd showed him the picture in the passport.

  ‘Could that be her?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be,’ mused Bert. ‘’Er hair’s the wrong colour, but I reckon that’s ’er right enough. Yep, I’m pretty sure of it.’

  Todd was on his way back to his office before the old man had finished speaking.

  It was an extraordinary night. Todd spent much of it communicating with the Canadian authorities by fax, phone and computer link. He and his sergeant sorted through and read the poems and the letters.

  ‘This is incredible, you wouldn’t think anybody would put stuff like this in a tatty old locker,’ said the sergeant at one point.

  ‘Presumably she thought it was a safe hiding place – and as it’s taken us twenty-five years to find it, she was probably right,’ replied Todd wryly.

  By dawn a fairly clear picture had emerged. Marjorie Benson was really Claire Pearson, all right.

  Several of the letters were from Claire Pearson’s mother, badly spelt, in places difficult to follow, painstakingly hand-printed on lined paper torn from an exercise book. The one which shook Todd and his sergeant rigid was at the bottom of the pile.

  ‘It’s your 21st birthday, my dear Claire, and I want you to know the whole truth about your past, about who you are,’ it began.

  ‘I should’ve told you a long time ago, I couldn’t find the words to your face…’

  The story the woman told was a horrifying one: it was like something from the darker side of Dickens. She had been a housemaid to Lord Lynmouth. And when Todd checked his records, he found that the housemaid who had claimed Bill Turpin had killed Lynmouth was a woman named Audrey Pearson.

  Audrey had indeed always been slow and of below average intelligence, always used by others. When she was just a teenager she became pregnant by Lynmouth, who was already an old man. An old man who should have behaved better.

  Her mother sent Audrey away to have the baby. ‘That’s what they did in them days. Me mam went to school with Bill Turpin’s missus. When I began to show, they sent me to stay with the Turpins. They took me at night and I wasn’t allowed out of the cottage, because of the shame. When the baby was born they took the little mite away – I never even knew if it was a boy or a girl…’

  ‘They didn’t tell His Lordship until it was all over, and he was proper angry. He was never a cruel man. Still didn’t leave me alone, though, and I fell pregnant again – but I was allowed to keep you when you were born just at the start of the war. It was easy then, you see, they called me Mrs Pearson, said I’d wed a soldier killed in action…

  ‘So you had a proper name, respectable like.’

  The letter went on to explain that the Earl of Lynmouth’s wife had been unable to give him children, and the Earl doted on his illegitimate daughter. But appearances had to be kept up at all costs. The wife accepted the situation as long as the truth was never told. Audrey’s parents were the fourth generation of their family to be in service to the Lynmouths. It was feudal. They did what they were told.

  ‘Then came the night when I saw His Lordship killed and I saw the man who did it and I knew him to be Bill Turpin. I was that frightened – I know he did me wrong, but His Lordship was the only person ever to show me kindness. I wanted them to catch the man who killed him so I told the police – but they didn’t believe I even knew Bill Turpin and I couldn’t tell them how I did. I couldn’t tell them that…’

  The Earl’s widow did not trust Audrey to keep quiet, and feared the whole scandal might break. She had a distant relative, a farmer in Canada who needed help on his land. Audrey and little Claire, then six years old, were shipped out there. The old woman and Audrey’s parents died soon afterwards.

  ‘I wanted you to know the blood you have in your veins,’ wrote Claire Pearson’s mother. ‘Your father wasn’t some unknown soldier, he was an Earl. He’d always have looked after us, he would never have let the bad things happen. If he hadn’t been killed it would all have been different…’

  After Todd and his sergeant had both finished reading the letter, there was a moment of total silence in the ops room, shattered only by the shrill ringing of the fax phone. It was the first response from Canada to Todd’s inquiries concerning Audrey and Claire Pearson.

  The farmer Audrey Pearson had been sent to work for had married her, but there were no further children. Both of them were now dead. The farmer, Jethro March, had been stabbed to death.

  And Claire Pearson had been convicted of his manslaughter.

  Todd could not believe what he was reading. Immediately he reached for the phone and called Canada. Eventually he tracked down the, by-then retired, detective inspector who had worked on the case.

  ‘One of the saddest cases I ever had,’ said the Canadian DI. ‘He was a vicious bastard, was Jethro March. He used that poor woman he married like a slave, worked her half to death and knocked her about when he felt like it. But the daughter he put on a pedestal. She had a good education, went to college, the lot.

  ‘She’d flown the nest too, off doing a degree in Toronto. Then when she was twenty-one, suddenly, she went home to the farm, maybe because she wanted to protect her mother. Not long afterwards she stuck old Jethro in the gut with a bread knife. And once she’d started she couldn’t stop. Carved him to pieces, she did.

  ‘She might have got away with it altogether but for that – he’d been laying into her mother again and young Claire couldn’t take it any more. As it was she served four years – and a lot of people thought she shouldn’t have done a day.

  ‘The mother, who’d always been slow-witted, was damn near a vegetable at the end – Jethro’d knocked her about so bad. She died not long after Claire was released and then the girl just disappeared. She was half off her head by then, folk said…’

  Todd was stunned.

  He shuffled through the poems again. Yes. Here it was, the one he was looking for:

  You have hidden in the night

  Thinking you are out of sight

  But I shall find you.

  She was such a gentle soul

  And life took a wicked toll

  Because of you.

  Her hopes destroyed

  My future crushed

  Because of you.

  You have only death to give

  And so you don’t deserve to live.

  Straightforward little number, although not much of a poem, Todd thought. He didn’t know a lot about poetry, but he suspected some of Claire Pearson’s poems were quite good. Others like this one were just blurted out emotion in rhyme. The message certainly seemed clear enou
gh, though.

  Marjorie Benson, or Claire Pearson, her mind disturbed by her horrific experiences, blamed Bill Turpin for the plight which befell her and her mother. If he had not killed Lord Lynmouth, everything would have been all right – that was what her mother had believed. And Bill Turpin was in fact the only one left to blame.

  Marjorie Benson had come to Pelham Bay to get revenge, with some idea that she was going to kill Bill Turpin, Todd was sure of it. Trouble was, she might have been seriously unhinged, but she wasn’t a cold-blooded murderess. By nature, by all accounts, she was a gentle romantic – a gentle romantic who had stabbed a man to death…

  So what had happened that night twenty-five years ago on the sand dunes? Todd suspected that they had all been looking at it the wrong way around. Nobody set out to kill Marjorie. More likely she had simply seen Bill Turpin walking over the dunes after Johnny Cooke had left her and had been unable to contain herself any longer. She confronted him, told him what she knew about him, maybe threatened him, the silly bitch.

  And Bill Turpin was a cold-blooded killer. He knew exactly what to do. He knew how to get rid of a problem like Marjorie Benson, and was well capable of framing an innocent man – poor muddled Johnny had been a gift on a plate.

  What a story! Todd shook his head in disbelief.

  He felt a kind of elation. For several hours he had almost forgotten his own personal involvement. He was just a policeman unravelling a mystery, making discoveries which had lain dormant for a quarter of a century – and that was a very exciting thing to do.

  Only gradually did he begin to drift back towards the present. So his father had been right all these years, and learning that was going to destroy him. Johnny Cooke had been wrongly convicted. Todd was quite sure of it. Poor bastard.

  Todd Mallett’s sudden sense of euphoria evaporated as swiftly as it had arrived. The more he thought about things, the worse they seemed.

  He might have solved one half of the mystery, but what about the rest of it? What about little Irene Nichols? What about Marcus Piddell?

  Damn it, thought Todd. None of the night’s revelations had helped with any of that. In his mind, Bill Turpin was sown up as the murderer of Marjorie Benson – but he was sure so much more lay behind it all. He was even more convinced than ever that Jennifer Stone had known that it did – and that is why she had died.

  He had learned nothing to shed any new light on Jennifer’s death. And he had learned nothing to link Marcus with any of it. In fact just the opposite.

  He clenched both his fists in exasperation and smashed them down on his desk.

  His sergeant, who had fallen asleep exhausted in his chair, jerked awake.

  ‘What’s up, Guv?’ he asked groggily.

  ‘The real villains have got away with it yet again, that’s what’s up,’ said Todd Mallett.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Dominic McDonald was a broken man. He decided not to go home after Jennifer’s funeral. He couldn’t face the empty Barnes house. Instead he went to stay with his sister, a painter who lived alone in a cottage in the Lake District. For a week he walked and wept alone, striding endlessly over the hills, and at night his sister cooked him big nourishing vegetarian meals. She didn’t eat meat and didn’t think her guests should either. Dominic didn’t mind, he probably didn’t even notice. He didn’t notice either how carefully she gave him space. She barely spoke to him unless he spoke to her first. He didn’t really want to talk and she sensed that. All day he walked. At first she feared the repetition of the Yorkshire Moors episode, but Dominic had moved on from the early craziness of his shock. He was not self-destructive any more. He just needed time and space to work out if he could rebuild his life, if he even wanted to.

  At the end of the week he felt surprisingly healed.

  He would never get over the death of the wife and child he adored. It would be a very long time indeed before he would again lead a normal life – if that ever happened. He felt only half a man – because his relationship with Anna had been a complete one, which had made them both whole – but he knew he could function, and he decided that was what he must do, start functioning again.

  And so he set off for London on the very day that The Friends provided the Oriental twins for Marcus, and that Todd Mallett sat glumly at his desk still trying in vain to read the mind of a dead woman.

  Dominic forced himself to shut out the tide of grief which swept over him as soon as he stepped into the empty Barnes house. Quiet as the grave, he thought to himself. He shuddered.

  Resolutely, he unpacked his small bag and went into the kitchen and cooked himself some supper. He made toast and scrambled egg. He didn’t really want the meal, but he needed to start a routine. After he had eaten, he did what he had so often done when Anna and Pandora were alive. He went to his study and switched on his computers. It was the first time he had even been in the room since the dreadful night when they had both been killed. The gentle hum of the machines was familiar. In one way that was comforting, and in another it hurt even more. The last time he had sat there, contentedly working, everything in the room had been more or less the same. But the familiar little world, the cocoon of private love in which he had existed, had now been shattered for ever.

  He checked the big desk-top computer, routine, something he always did. This was the IBM machine he kept permanently attached to his modem, able to receive messages automatically from other computers. Several documents had been sent to him. That was not surprising. He cast an eye down the files, nothing he could be bothered with. Then he stopped in his tracks.

  Jennifer Stone had sent him a computer message.

  He checked the date and time. May 28th at three minutes past midnight. A file had been fed from Jennifer’s computer to his around five hours before her death.

  Dominic knew the Richmond house well enough. He could see her in her office typing away, a glass of something beside her no doubt. He wondered where his wife had been. In bed probably from the sound of her when she had called him that evening. He half smiled at the memory. Then he thought about his daughter. Where might she have been? The pain hit him again. He made a conscious effort to pull himself together.

  His brain was starting to work again now – for the first time since it all happened. Before going to bed that dreadful night Jennifer had decided to send him a document. Why? And what was it?

  He quickly checked its length. 44K. That was nearly 7,000 words. Quite a document.

  In trepidation he called it up and began to read. It was a detailed account of the last five days of Jennifer Stone’s life. And it included the transcript of a tape.

  About the Author

  Hilary Bonner is the author of twelve crime novels, mostly stand-alone psychological thrillers. The Cruelty of Morning, her first, was originally published in 1995 by Heinemann, as a paperback original. They asked her to tone down the sex – apparently the only time this request had been made of a first-time author in Heinemann’s hundred-year-plus history! Her most recent novel, Death Comes First, was published in 2015, and others include Friends to Die For (2014). She has also written five non-fiction books and a number of short stories. A former chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, she was for many years a Fleet Street journalist, show-business editor of three national newspapers, and assistant editor of one. She is now a full-time writer, living in rural Somerset and London’s Covent Garden.

  ‘Hilary Bonner’s secret is that as a top journalist she’s been there, seen it close up and asked the crucial questions. She plots with pace, passion and that marvellous ability to keep you turning the pages long after you meant to put out the light’ – Peter Lovesey, bestselling crime writer

  Copyright

  Published in Great Britain by

  John Blake Publishing Limited

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  First published in 1995

  This ebook edition first published in 2015 by John Blake Publishing Limited

  ePub: 978–1–78606–104–1

  Mobi: 978–1–78606–105–8

  PDF: 978–1–78606–106–5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  © Copyright Hilary Bonner 1995, 2015

  The lines on p.207 from ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot are reproduced by kind permission of the Eliot Estate and Faber and Faber Ltd

  The right of Hilary Bonner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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