The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  With explicit and colourful use of language, Jennifer told Anna exactly how little she cared about Marcus’s opinion on any damn thing.

  ‘Have you been at the gin already?’ asked her friend.

  Yes, Jennifer admitted, ordering another round of double margaritas. But that did not alter her judgement about either her ex-husband or her future. She knew with dazzling clarity that Fleet Street was over for her. It was, in any case, a world that had changed almost beyond recognition. To survive, as indeed she was more than able, you had to change with it. She did not want to do that any more.

  Anna, of angel looks and tiger tongue, was unrelenting. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. All you need is a night on the piss, which I assume is why I’ve been dragged out to play. So let’s change the subject, shall we? Let’s talk about something else apart from bloody newspapers.’

  ‘I used to think there was nothing else,’ began Jennifer.

  Anna sighed in exaggerated weariness. Jennifer promised temporary obedience and picked up the menu. The two women ordered a hefty selection of Joe Allen upmarket comfort food and by the time they reached the Sticky Toffee Pudding stage Jennifer had begun to feel better.

  ‘Have you noticed, those two guys over there can’t keep their eyes off us,’ she remarked.

  Anna peered across the room. Sitting at a corner table was a PR man she vaguely recognised and another young man.

  ‘Bent as ninepenny bits,’ she announced.

  ‘Rubbish, they’ve both fallen instantly in love with me,’ said Jennifer. ‘Take me home before I disgrace myself.’

  They shared a cab, dropping off Anna first. She crept upstairs and eased herself into her side of the king-sized double bed, trying desperately and unsuccessfully not to wake Dominic. He mumbled something uncharitable about drunken women, and within seconds she had sunk into a deep alcohol-induced sleep.

  It seemed like just five minutes later that the telephone rang.

  Dominic drowsily picked up the receiver, cursed, and passed the phone to Anna. It was Jennifer.

  ‘Christ, what time is it?’

  ‘It’s a quarter to seven. I’m on the M4 heading west and I feel great.’

  Anna hauled herself into some kind of wakefulness.

  ‘You’re still pissed, you maniac. Drive slowly for once, will you? Where on earth are you going, anyway?’

  Giggles wafted across the airwaves. ‘I’m going home to Mummy of course. I told you I was going to. And I wanted you to be the first to know that I haven’t changed my mind…’

  ‘Jennifer, with the hangover will come remorse, I promise you. Remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’

  Fifteen years ago, a Fleet-Street legend had been created and two young journalists earned their cowboy nicknames when, after a drunken party, they took themselves off to Heathrow Airport and boarded the first plane to Los Angeles. They were halfway across the Atlantic before they became sober enough to realise what they had done.

  ‘Yeah, I remember. They both stayed in the States and made good lives for themselves. I remember that too.’

  ‘Yes. Well, if you are really going home to Mummy, Pelham Bay is hardly Hollywood, is it?’

  ‘Annie, I have a house in Richmond worth half a million even in a slump. I am going to buy a cottage by the sea and eat lotuses for ever. I don’t need all the props any more.’

  ‘Oh yeah? When are you giving the Porsche back?’

  The cellnet airwaves quavered slightly as Jennifer’s blasphemous description of what Jack and The Globe would have to do to reclaim their car shot through the skies. Unadorned with four-letter words, the message was simply that if ‘they’ wanted the Porsche, first ‘they’ had to find it and then ‘they’ had to take it from her.

  Anna began to laugh. Dominic grumpily got out of bed muttering that he might just as well now.

  ‘I’ve got to go. Take care, you daft old bat. Ring me when you get to Mummy’s.’

  With the last remark Anna found herself in convulsions of laughter. The giggles were infectious that morning.

  ‘Mummy’s! Poor bloody Mummy, I say. She’s really done it, you know, she’s really chucked it all in,’ she spluttered to Dominic, who was trying to look bored.

  It would not be long before he would give in to his curiosity. That was one thing about Jennifer Stone, she had never been boring. Just about every other darned thing, but boring? Never!

  As she approached the M5 turn-off at Bristol, Jennifer began to feel a relentless drowsiness.

  ‘Sobriety, hate it,’ she muttered to herself. And she wondered if her extraordinary sense of cheerfulness and adventure would wear off with the remains of last night’s excesses.

  She pulled in to the Bristol services area, parked, wound down the passenger window a couple of inches, fully reclined her driver’s seat and fell soundly asleep.

  It was a couple of hours later before she was fully awake. She fished her toilet bag from the untidy jumble which in the early hours she had flung into the front of the Porsche, and headed for the ladies’ loo. There were smudges of old make-up around her eyes. Ugh. Her mouth felt like somebody’s old socks and she suspected that her breath smelt much the same. After a haphazard clean-up, a quick rub of expensive moisturiser and a good scrub of her teeth, she was more or less ready for the day ahead.

  She threw her toilet bag back into the car, checked her cash situation, picked up her laptop computer, and headed for the self-service cafeteria, where she ordered a large black coffee.

  From the pocket of her black designer jeans she fished out the letter from a London estate agent that she had – with amazing clarity – thrust there just before leaving home. It was a round robin expressing interest in her big detached Richmond Hill property. She expertly tapped into the computer a brief letter, authorising them to put the house on the market. She had that to thank Marcus Piddell for, if nothing else. They had bought the house together when they married. She had bought her share with all she possessed in the world, he had purchased his with just a portion of the astonishing amount of wealth he had acquired over the years. He had offered to buy the whole house himself and put it in both their names. She, as ever, had been too fiercely independent to agree.

  She had, to some degree or other, loved Marcus probably throughout her adult life. When she’d said she could no longer live with him, she thought Marcus had ultimately been relieved, in spite of putting up his usual fight to keep her – out of habit more than likely; Marcus never expected to lose anything.

  He had eventually offered Jennifer a lump sum of £200,000 and their Richmond house with mortgage paid up as full settlement. A clean severance of all their mutual ties. She had agreed with equal relief. Her lawyer had pointed out that she could have taken her husband for far more, but Jennifer just wanted out. If there had been children she would probably have taken a different attitude. But there were none. And even as things were and having quit her job, as long as she could sell the house all right she was a fairly wealthy woman. She still had the two hundred grand in the bank plus a few quid she had saved herself. It wouldn’t last her long the way she had so far lived her life, but starvation was not just around the corner.

  She ordered more coffee and a large Danish pastry.

  Fully fortified, she strolled back to the Porsche and plugged the laptop into her portable bubble-jet printer. She signed the letter, fed it into the car fax, and watched it obediently wing its way back to the London estate agent.

  It was ten-thirty. At The Globe, the morning would just be getting going, the senior executives putting together their story lists for the eleven-fifteen conference. It would be around then that she would be missed, that it might occur to Jack, for undoubtedly the first time, that her resignation had been serious. Arrogant bastard.

  She unplugged the fax, switched the phone back to normal and dialled Pelham Bay 534536. Her mother sounded wonderfully, reassuringly, normal. She couldn’t stop because she was going to Safeways with Auntie Pat.
Jenny was on her way down? Oh, that was lovely. But what did she want for her dinner? How long was she staying, anyway, and to what did her mother owe the pleasure?

  Old habits die hard. Accustomed always to protecting her mother from anything that might worry her, Jennifer heard herself reply that she had taken a couple of weeks’ holiday. Any chance of a bed? It’ll cost you, said her mother.

  Jennifer smiled as she pushed the ‘end’ button on the phone and then switched it off. From now on she would be using the mobile only for outgoing calls. She was on the loose. A rolling Stone.

  Mrs Margaret Stone, widow of respected local builder Reg Stone, had never understood one jot about her daughter’s life. And Jennifer neither imagined nor desired that it could ever be otherwise. There was warmth and security and a whole different world back at number sixteen, Seaview Road, Pelham Bay. And her mother’s ageing had not changed that. Mrs Stone was almost eighty now, but she kept a fine home. All that should gleam, gleamed. The store cupboard was never bare. The patch of grass in the little back garden looked as if someone had trimmed it with a pair of scissors. There was always fruit in the bowl on the old sideboard and in summer flowers filled the vase standing before the fireplace.

  Jennifer arrived there just before one o’clock. Her mother, it seemed, was still out. She found the key – on the ledge as always – and let herself in. She switched the kettle on to boil and opened the cake tin she found in its usual place in the pantry. Inside were a pile of her mother’s currant buns. She took one and bit deep into the crumbly sweetness. She’d never found better baking anywhere in the world.

  The front door opened with a familiar rattle. In walked her mother and her aunt Pat.

  ‘You’ll not eat your dinner now, my girl,’ said her mother.

  Her smile was broad and ever-welcoming. She put down her shopping bags and opened her arms. Like a little girl Jennifer went to her and hugged her.

  ‘Hello, my darling,’ she said.

  In the bags were hot pasties.

  ‘No time to do you a proper dinner,’ grumbled her mother amiably. ‘There’s tinned fruit and clotted cream for afters. You’ll stay, Pat, won’t you?’

  They sat around the kitchen table. The local paper, still folded, lay on the worktop. And it was then the headline caught Jennifer’s eye. ‘Murder Inquiry Reopened After 25 Years. Did they lock up the wrong man?’

  Jennifer felt her mother watching her. Margaret Stone’s mind had yet to be affected by age. She was pin-sharp.

  ‘All right, maid?’ she asked gently.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Jennifer.

  ‘Brings back a few memories, aye?’

  Jennifer switched the conversation, asking about old school-friends, the welfare of other relatives living nearby, how the pebble ridge had held up to the early spring storms, and why the dickens had the council built a car park right over the river estuary by the new motorway bridge, as if that wasn’t bad enough already.

  All the while she could feel her mind slipping back in time. As soon as she could politely leave the table and the room, she used weariness as an excuse and retreated to her old bedroom, the familiar chintzy one at the back of the house.

  Mrs Stone noticed that her daughter had quietly picked up the local paper and folded it under her arm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jenny Stone had come face to face with death that long-ago August Sunday in Pelham Bay. Twenty-five years later, everything remained quite vivid. That headline in the local paper was devastating.

  ‘Did they lock up the wrong man?’ she read. ‘Police yesterday reopened inquiries into the murder of a woman strangled in Pelham Bay in 1970, and the disappearance of another young woman. The move follows the death of retired local businessman Bill Turpin. It is believed that vital new evidence has been discovered in his remote cliffside home which could also link Turpin with the murder of the Earl of Lynmouth twenty-five years previously.’

  Jenny, now Jennifer Stone, well-known journalist and former wife of a government minister, needed only to glance at that local paper story to find herself overwhelmed by a sense of panic.

  She stood uncertainly by the window of her comfortable old bedroom in the little terraced house just a few hundred yards from the sea at Pelham Bay. The sea in which she had found the body. The village where so many demons had been unleashed.

  She wrapped herself in the ugly old candlewick dressing gown still hanging behind the pink-painted door. It smelt of mothballs and felt wonderful. Rough and warm and reassuring. She lay down on the big wood-framed bed and shut her eyes, but it was no good. She reached out for the paper which she had folded on the bedside table and read that story again. Carefully. Slowly. What did it mean? Did the police think Bill Turpin had committed the murder? If he had, then there had been a terrible injustice all those years ago. But then, perhaps she had always secretly suspected that. A certain sense of guilt had been with her from the start.

  And that other disappearance? She skimmed the print once more. No, no new details, not yet.

  Her head ached dully now. It was more than last night’s booze. This was the pain of an old wound. It was as if it were yesterday. So clear the picture. That day when one part of her existence had ended and another begun, the day Marcus entered her life for the second time, never properly to leave it again.

  He had been plain Mark Piddle then, a silly name for a young man who was all sorts of things but never silly.

  Twenty-five years later she could still hear the clamour of Pelham Bay at play on that busy summer Sunday. She could smell the tang of the salt in the air and taste the very vinegar of the sea. And once more she heard and smelt and tasted all else that came later.

  Jennifer Stone was not the only one who read that local paper story with special interest.

  In his penthouse flat overlooking the River Thames, Sir Marcus Piddell was enjoying his breakfast. There was freshly squeezed orange juice, espresso coffee and that morning’s croissants from the best baker in town, brought to him as usual by his daily, who was presently engaged in making his bed. It was unseasonably warm and he was sitting on the terrace in a Victorian rocking chair, his Gucci-clad feet resting on the rail. God, he was feeling good. Last night they had sent around a couple of girls from his favourite Soho sex club again. He always felt more awake and alive than ever after a night of strenuous, imaginative sex. It recharged his batteries. There was a warm feeling in the pit of his stomach and his genitals were still tingling inside his jockey shorts. He shut his eyes and began to relive last night’s pleasures. It was almost as if he were touching the warm tender flesh again. A sudden sense of the tastes and the smells he had experienced overwhelmed him. He felt himself growing. When he was an adolescent the size of his sexual organs had actually embarrassed him. But not for long. He smiled at the memory, and reached down to his crotch to adjust slightly the bulge there. That was better. He could still think himself into an erection without even meaning to. Not bad for a man of forty-eight. The Soho joint was so much easier than a relationship – and they knew what he liked. He supposed he was taking a risk. But, what the hell! He was an unmarried man again, a free agent. Anyway he couldn’t help it. He never had been able to. He had always taken risks.

  He stretched. Self-satisfied. Super-successful. He loved the mornings, especially bright mornings like this. Always had done. He had never needed much sleep, and he was grateful for that. There were two things he believed all successful people had in common. An ability to manage with very little sleep and a relentless sex drive. Well, he would think that. Marcus Piddell could not imagine anyone sleeping their life away, and he could not survive without regular and exciting sex tailored to his special desires.

  He resisted the temptation to unzip his flies and reach in there to play with himself a little. He must stop thinking about last night’s excesses or he would never get any work done.

  He had already listened to the early news bulletins on the radio and read all the national papers. He r
etained the journalist’s obsession with being well informed. He started to open the bundle of local papers from his Devon constituency. He had easily won the nomination as parliamentary candidate for his old stamping ground when the seat became vacant. Everybody knew how they like local-born men and women to represent them in Devon. He had walked the election – even though the story of his name change became a running joke in the press. They had a field day relating how plain Mark had suddenly become classier Marcus, and, most amusing to them of all, how Piddell had once been spelt P-I-D-D-L-E and pronounced accordingly – but only the papers he didn’t control, of course, and it had not seemed to do him any harm. He was still a local boy made good. His rise to fame and fortune had been fast, and the new name – with emphasis firmly on the second syllable merely something he picked up along the way. A flashier byline, better sounding on the phone – and above all, no longer a name people laughed at.

  When he stood for election, he was the chairman of Recorder Group Newspapers, a multi-millionaire businessman with enormous influence. Many of his contemporaries had been surprised that he should want to enter Parliament. Marcus simply saw it as the next step. He’d had to resign the Recorder chairmanship when he became a government minister, of course, but that had made little practical difference. He still owned by far the majority shareholding in the group, and there was nobody at R.G.N. who doubted that he remained the only real boss.

  He quite fancied being prime minister. That was his true motivation and, always brashly confident, he saw no reason why he should not be PM, certainly well before he was fifty-five, which was still seven years away. That would give him at least ten years before his energy started to go. It would go, he supposed, although he could not really imagine that.

  He glanced at his watch. Still only eight o’clock.

  Plenty of time to scan the constituency news sheets before his car arrived at eight-thirty to take him to the House. He liked to be at his office there before nine, even when he had stayed in the chamber till two or three that same morning. It unnerved the others a bit. They hadn’t cut their teeth on daily newspapers like him. As an editor for almost ten years, he had developed the stamina to guide the last editions onto the presses in the early hours of the morning and then be back in the office before half the day shift had arrived. Kept ’em on the alert that way.