The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  He opened the Durraton Gazette first. He always did. Extraordinary to think that he virtually owned it now. He chuckled to himself. It wasn’t a bad old rag. It never had been. Then he spotted the second story on the front. Not even the lead. Old Bill Turpin was dead and the police were going to reopen inquiries into the Pelham Bay murder and the disappearance of a second young woman at the same time. He was just five hours ahead of his ex-wife in North Devon, reading that same insignificant local paper article.

  It shook him to the toes of his Yves St Laurent silk socks.

  Like Jennifer, he scanned the story with professional speed. Like Jennifer, he was looking for mention of something more. His eyes flicked down the page. Nothing to worry about. Not yet. He realised he had been holding his breath. He let it out with a rush. He could breathe again. At least for now.

  Marcus made himself stay calm. He resolutely carried on reading through the other newspapers in his pile. At this stage in his career he could do without the reappearance of any ghosts from his past, however loose the link with him might appear to be and from however long ago. But he was a true survivor, and the story had not even made the nationals yet. It would do so, though, he was sure of that.

  He picked up the draft of the speech he was to give in the House that afternoon. He put it down again.

  His mind slipped back over the years – to the very beginning of his obsession with Jennifer Stone. He could see his white Mini Cooper parked outside the big Victorian house on the hill in which he rented a tiny flat, high above Pelham Bay. He could still see his girlfriend, Irene Nichols, so willing and compliant, lying, eternally grateful for almost any kind of attention, in his bed; and in his head, twenty-five years on, he heard the ring of the old black telephone calling him out on the murder inquiry. Down to the beach to see Bill Turpin.

  Marcus could not help himself. He was right there in Pelham Bay with Jennifer, poor little Irene, and all the rest of them, on that hot August Sunday in 1970.

  In his new bungalow overlooking the sea above Pelham, proud father Johnny Cooke was also doing battle with the past. There were many who could not understand how Johnny had felt able to return to Pelham Bay after all that had happened. But where else could he have gone?

  Johnny hugged his sleeping son so tightly the little boy started awake and began to whimper.

  A couple of days earlier, Johnny Cooke had been checking the week’s accounts when the phone rang. It was the new detective inspector in Durraton. Johnny immediately felt the familiar sweaty-palm sensation, and that blankness came over him again. Could he pop down to the station, the inspector wanted to know?

  Johnny was suddenly very cold. Sweating, but cold. He had become an established local businessman. True, he was struggling to keep everything afloat as the recession took its toll on the holiday trade, but he was pretty sure he could hold it together. Was his world now going to be destroyed all over again?

  The DI had been surprisingly sensitive and quick to reassure.

  ‘It’s all right Mr Cooke,’ he said. ‘We just want to let you know that Bill Turpin’s died. The postman found him. You seem to be the nearest he has to family, and there are one or two bits and pieces we’d like you to help us clear up.’

  Johnny felt the relief wash over him. He had spent seventeen years of his life in jail. He could not stand the smell of disinfectant. He could not sleep in a room with the door shut. Every morning he woke to the fear that he was still locked in a cell. And only after he had opened his eyes did any peace return. The normality of his life was a fragile thing.

  Now, having been to the police station and learned of the finds that had been made in Bill’s cottage and what they might indicate, Johnny just could not think straight. He had suffered so much. He closed his eyes to try to shut off the memories. But it was no good. It never was.

  Detective Inspector Todd Mallett, Durraton’s new detective inspector, had been just a lad with nothing much on his mind except how to get his way with the temperamental girlfriend who lay beside him in the hot sunshine that August Sunday. Now, twenty-five years later, he was having a drink in the bar of The Shipwright’s Arms with his father, retired Chief Superintendent Phil Mallett, who had been the detective chief inspector in charge of the murder inquiry – an inquiry about to be reopened.

  Throughout his boyhood, Todd Mallett had been aware of his father’s unease over this one case, the case which had blighted his career. Phil Mallett was a decent old-fashioned copper who always did everything strictly by the book. He would never cut corners. He would never bend the rules to gain a conviction. During his entire working life it had not once occurred to him to take a corrupt course of action in order to further his career. And so the Pelham Bay murder case had caused him many sleepless nights.

  After it was all over he had been so unsettled by the result of the case that he had asked to be transferred out of CID back to the uniformed branch.

  Now a pint of best bitter stood untouched on the table before him and Phil Mallett sat with his hands clasped in his lap, eyes cast downwards. He felt that his worst fears were about to be realised.

  His son took a swig of his own pint. It really wasn’t fair. His father was one of the few top cops he had ever known who really gave a damn for anything except their own skins and their pensions.

  He placed a hand on the older man’s shoulder. ‘Look, nobody is ever going to blame you, Dad, you did all you could,’ he said. ‘And anyway, we don’t know anything for sure yet…’

  Phil Mallett continued to study his big hands, callused from years of working in the garden of his beloved moorland home. He didn’t much care what people thought. He still blamed himself. He had not been strong enough back then. He had put his suspicions to one side. He had given in to the pressures around him. It was possible that a young man had lost his youth unjustly because of him.

  Ironically it was his son who had called him to the newly set-up operations centre following the discoveries in Bill Turpin’s cottage. And Phil Mallett wasn’t sure he could live with them. The beer was still untouched in front of him.

  ‘Thanks for the pint, Todd,’ he said.

  He rose to his feet and strode to the door, a big man, ramrod straight, a typical old-fashioned copper. His son followed, as tall but slimmer around the waist. Todd was a thoroughly modern policeman, a computer expert, sharper than his father, a bit of a wheeler-dealer, yet decent enough – still a chip off the old block.

  Phil Mallett was proud of his son. Much prouder than he was of himself.

  Standing in the street outside the village hall, transformed now into the special murder inquiry operations room, he could smell the sea clearly, hear the waves beating against the rocks. Strange. It was as if it were yesterday.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At the far end of the seafront down in Pelham Bay, there is a seawater swimming pool that was originally called The Lido, and always will be by the locals, even though during the boom time of the 1980s they heated the water and renamed it Pool Riviera. Next to it, opposite the beach huts, is a public lavatory with a flat roof. And there, on the first Sunday in August, 1970, the young Jennifer Stone was sunbathing with the gang, Liz Butler, the Mallett boys, Angela Smith, and Janet Farrell. A funny place to sunbathe – but it caught the sun perfectly all day long and a low wall kept off the wind from the sea.

  Jenny, they all called her then. She was seventeen years old. Just. Her birthday had been celebrated only a few days earlier. She lay with her long skinny legs outstretched, back comfortably supported by an upturned kitchen chair from Angela Smith’s parents’ beach hut across the footpath leading to the cliffs. A copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides was in her left hand, propped in the saucer hollow where her tummy would have been if she were not beanpole thin. Beanpole. They called her that sometimes. Jenny peered against the dazzling bright sun, no longer pretending to read, and kidded herself that if she hadn’t forgotten her sunglasses she would have finished several chapters by now. But the A-level
syllabus had run half its course, and Jenny had first looked at her copy of Cobbett a year ago. Since then she had done little more than flick through the first couple of chapters and dismiss them as slow and tedious. Well aware of her lack of application, Jenny was resigned to having to rely on what she picked up in lectures – between daydreams.

  The book finally fell from her grasp. Eyes closed and smiling just a little, Jenny dreamed happily of her one heavy sexual encounter to date – with that young reporter on the Durraton Gazette. Deep within the magic world inside her head, she lay outstretched against his hard bony chest and ran her fingers through the fuzz of hair that she knew sprouted there. Mills and Boon by the seaside. She felt his strong fingers stroke her body, his lips pressed hard on her lips and anywhere else he cared to press them.

  She was five-feet eleven-inches tall, and convinced that there was at least six inches too much of her. She moved with gawky awkwardness, she was painfully self-conscious, she longed to be five-foot nothing and shapely.

  Boys just did not seem to notice her. She was too young to realise that they noticed all right but were too nervous and self-conscious themselves to pick on somebody who probably loomed several inches above them.

  Then, two years earlier at an end of term school dance, that Durraton Gazette reporter, Mark Piddle, had taken her for a walk outside. Some walk. The dance had been arranged by staff at Jenny’s school and the local boys’ grammar school. Mark and his elder sister were there with their father, the vicar and school chaplain. The only drink provided was fruit punch. Mark spent the evening lacing his glass with illicit rum. Jenny, captivated by Mark since she’d first met him at Sunday school when she was eight – he was six years older and seemed very grown up – grasped the opportunity to renew an old acquaintance. As soon as she saw him again she realised how much she fancied him.

  Mark was exceptionally tall, almost six-four, with broad shoulders and great rangy limbs, one of the very few men Jennifer would ever meet who could tower over her. It was not just his size that made that possible. Marcus was a towering personality in every sense. The power of his physical presence was always remarkable, even when he was a very young man. And the strength of his will was such that it seemed to reach out and bend you towards it. Jennifer always felt that with him. She suspected that she experienced it from those earliest Sunday-school days. At the school dance it seemed, to the now fifteen-year-old Jenny, more tangible than ever. She felt as if a spell had been cast over her. Mark was a stunning-looking young man, but his effect on her went far beyond the near perfect beauty of his appearance, although that in itself was devastating enough.

  Mark was blond and blue-eyed and drop-dead gorgeous. When he was a small boy he had been known in the neighbourhood as ‘vicar’s little cherub’ – not a description he ever appreciated. The hair on his head was like a baby’s, flyaway and nearly white. It framed his face in a curly halo and made him look cherubic and innocent. Ironically he was to retain those guileless, fresh-faced, boyish good looks well into middle age. Looks that completely belied the kind of man he was.

  Back then, Jennifer could not keep her eyes off him.

  ‘Hallo, remember me?’ she trilled in a break between the Gay Gordons and the Valeta.

  Mark had poured a couple of healthy slugs of the rum into her glass of punch and when her eyes started to sparkle and her cheeks to burn had cheerily dragged her onto the dance floor. He knew a good thing when he saw one, and behaved as usual with the natural arrogance of the exceptionally beautiful.

  He was always sexually precocious, Mark, and he was twenty-one years old by then. The age gap between them was a big one in teenage terms. As they danced, Mark developed an erection, and when he pushed himself against her she seemed to respond eagerly enough. He was vaguely aware that one or two of the teachers were looking on with some concern and that his father was glaring at him. The girl was obviously very young, but oh, how he liked them young. And so, after the briefest courtesy of only a couple of dances, he had just one intention – to get her outside. The opportunity came with the regulation speeches. With a bit of luck it would be ten or fifteen minutes before they were missed. Plenty of time for Mark. He had taken Jenny quickly by the arm and, with her protesting in only the mildest of ways, led her out through the kitchens to the dustbin yard. Here, in an unlikely setting for romance, Jenny received her first kiss and very nearly lost her virginity.

  She found, as she had rather expected, that she thoroughly enjoyed the encounter, and made no attempt to stop Mark’s wandering hands. She was only fifteen and Mark had deliberately poured rum into her, but it was not all one-sided. Not at all. There was a chemistry between them from the start. He excited her to distraction in that very first sexual encounter – something that would never change in all the years to come. Mark had always made her want things she felt she shouldn’t want, do things she did not really want to do, sometimes did not even know were possible. That night his body was rubbing close and hard against hers, and he thrust his tongue between her teeth and deep into her mouth. He was balanced on one leg, pelvis pushed against her, the other leg bent upwards so that the knee forced her legs apart through the silky material of her skirt. His left hand was underneath her blouse, fingering an already erect nipple through the uplifting nylon lace of her obligatory Gossard Wonderbra.

  With his right hand he deftly unclipped the fastening at the back, freeing her breasts so that he could take the whole of them in his hands.

  Mark had had little finesse in those days, he had never felt the inclination to develop any, and anyway, on this occasion he knew he did not have the time. As usual he was ruled entirely by his own appetites. But, as he was already aware, that in itself could turn women on.

  Before Jenny really knew what was happening, he had moved on from her breasts. With his mouth still clamped over hers, he had swept her skirt up around her waist and his fingers were inside her knickers playing with her. To his surprise she was already wet, and his fingers slipped easily into her. Jenny couldn’t believe what was going on. It felt so good from the beginning. Shouldn’t she be protesting?

  She was vaguely aware that with his other hand Mark was undoing his flies. He took her hand and put it around him. He was big and hard and throbbing.

  Jenny felt the excitement she had yet fully to understand begin to overwhelm her. Mark was pushing her pants down now and she realised she was helping him. She mustn’t. She mustn’t get pregnant.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ he hissed. She knew better.

  But she was out of control. She stepped out of one leg of her knickers and with the new freedom he was able to thrust his fingers deeper inside her and move his hand over her crotch. He was instinctive about sex. Pure animal in his desire. What was she doing? There was such a buzz inside her. She knew she was moving with him like a wild thing. His thumb was rubbing her, clever, accurate, making her swell, driving her mad.

  He had his other arm up under her skirt now and he began to lift her up so that he could plunge himself into her. He couldn’t remember ever being with a girl who was so ready. Vaguely the thought occurred to him that she was the kind of kid he would expect to be still a virgin – but if she was, by God, she was ripe. This was going to be sensational.

  As he lifted her, his fingers dug into her bare bottom and he was able to play with her there a little. Oh how he loved that. It was damp from her juices, flowing so freely now. She was wriggling with pleasure. She loved it too. She was just a kid, but, God, she was sexy. She was amazing. They were two of a kind. Two young healthy animals desperate for it. He felt her weaken even more.

  She was moaning gently. She had forgotten everything in life except her own sex. He began to take his other hand out of her, moving and spreading his fingers as he did so, easing her as wide as he could. He put his hand briefly over hers and together they rubbed his cock in the warm wetness. He didn’t think he had ever been so big.

  Now he had both arms around her, clutching her bottom a
nd lifting her towards him. He felt her long legs wrap around him. She had both hands on his bum now. She knew what to do, all right. It was as if she had always known. He didn’t need a hand to guide himself into her.

  His breath was coming in short gasps, he took his lips off hers, panting for it, tensing every muscle for the thrust.

  She almost growled at him: ‘Do it to me, now, now. Please. Please.’

  He pulled back from her. He was going to go into her hard and strong and long…

  And it was at that moment an anxious prowling teacher saw shapes in the dark and called out.

  Mark swore and fell clumsily away from her. Jenny dropped to the ground, almost falling. He didn’t try to pick her up. He was too busy attempting to shove his cock back inside his trousers. God what was he going to do with it now?

  To her astonishment he ran off, leaving her there on the ground. She just managed to scramble to he feet and escape with her knickers in her hand.

  Mark made no attempt to contact her again, and gave no signs of recognition when she saw him at the school sports day later that year. She was not to know the reason why until two years later. Several times she had phoned his paper. Each time she was told he was out. Since then there had been nothing like that encounter for Jenny. No other boys Jenny had met had even tried anything like it. Ineffectual fumbles, yes. But there was nothing ineffectual about Mark Piddle. She had never known anyone else so overtly sexual – or so dangerous. She never would.

  And so, lying there on the roof of the lav that hot summer’s day, Jenny reflected on what might have been. She was never quite sure if she was secretly glad that teacher had turned up or not. She had been only fifteen. It was all a bit of a scramble and the consequences could have been disastrous. But sometimes she wondered if she was now going to stay a virgin for the rest of her life. Equally, sometimes she was afraid of her own sexuality. She had gone quite mad with Mark Piddle that night. Crazy for sex. Only she knew how much her body wanted and needed a man, a man who was all sex, like Mark. It thrilled her – and it frightened her.