The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  That was when she had confronted Mark with her concerns.

  ‘Mark, you told me Johnny was innocent, that he didn’t really confess anything…’

  The words came tumbling out.

  He interrupted her briskly: ‘You misunderstood me. He told me he killed the woman. I wanted him to be innocent – that’s different.’

  Impatiently, he bundled her into his car and drove her home.

  On the way she did not speak, but went over it all again and again in her mind. Question: Why would Mark lie? Answer: To get Johnny convicted. Question: Why would he want that if he didn’t believe Johnny was guilty? Answer: Because he was involved in the Marjorie Benson murder himself.

  He couldn’t be, could he, not her Mark? And it didn’t make sense anyway. Mark had never met Marjorie Benson, had he? Also he had been nowhere near the sand dunes that night. He had been working late and then went to a village dance miles away with his photographer. The police had checked that out. The police had checked everything. His alibi was cast-iron.

  Jenny had never seriously considered the possibility that Mark could have murdered Marjorie Benson, but even when she made herself do so, it quickly became obvious that he could not have done it. So what was it all about? Why was he landing Johnny in it? Or was she just being silly? Was her memory playing tricks on her, after all?

  She did not know Johnny Cooke – had maybe seen him by the deckchair stand but never spoken to him. She had no feelings for him either way, and if he was the murderer she hoped he rotted in jail. But if he was not? Jennifer Stone always had a reasonable sense of justice, yet she supposed she could be mistaken – about a lot of things. She was still in a state of shock when Mark had described Johnny’s midnight visit to her. That was true, although the doubts persisted.

  Irene’s disappearance was the most disturbing factor of all. Jenny had never met her, and knew very little of Mark’s relationship with her. She had known Mark was living with someone when she had so blatantly decided that she was going to sleep with him, yet it had never seemed relevant to her desire for Mark. And when Irene had disappeared there had been a large element of convenience about it as far as Jenny was concerned. She certainly did not like to think about any more sinister explanation for Irene’s disappearance.

  What if Mark had done something terrible to Irene? Jenny could not bring herself to allow the word ‘kill’ even to enter her head. But then, what had he done with the body? Also the police had been over his flat, and no doubt his car, with a fine toothcomb. She’d been reading too many detective novels. Only professional hitmen got away with murder – people like Mark left clues, as Johnny had done.

  The trial ended two days later. Johnny Cooke was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was led off to the cells still protesting his innocence. Mark was at court to hear sentence passed. Immediately afterwards he drove straight to Jenny’s school and waited for her outside. She was muffled up in her thick woollen uniform coat and a big scarf, with her school beret down over her ears. She didn’t look at all sexy, but appearances could be deceptive. Couldn’t they just? Whatever she was wearing, whatever she was doing, he could see only her face in the throes of orgasm and her body naked and wrapped around his. She spotted the Cooper at once and walked over to it, opened the door and climbed into the seat beside him. He didn’t touch her. He knew the rules. The procession of schoolgirls marching past the car were already bursting into giggles at the sight of them together. Jenny wasn’t smiling. At once she asked him about the verdict. When he told her she looked away, out of the window.

  ‘Do you think it’s right? Do you really think he did it?’

  She could feel Mark’s eyes all over her. She could always feel that.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘I am so mixed up about everything, all the different things you told me,’ she said.

  He leaned forward a little, close to her ear. His breath was warm and damp and familiar.

  ‘I can tell you three things with total certainty,’ he said. ‘Firstly, what I said in court is absolutely the way it happened with Johnny; and yes, you are mixed up, but it’s not surprising that your memory is playing tricks on you about a time when you had just found a body floating in the sea.

  ‘Secondly, Johnny Cooke is as guilty as hell. Justice has been done. He deserved life and he got it.

  ‘And thirdly, I am going to take you home with me now and I am going to remove all your clothes and I am going to put my tongue inside you and I am going to lick you and suck you until you come all over my face. And then I’m going to fuck you for a month – without stopping.’

  She turned to him. His eyes burned into her. The corners of his mouth were just twitched into a smile. She felt herself beginning to want him. All the questions she had planned to ask were stuck in her throat. Oh God, if she had understood the full power of sex before she ever did it she might have remained a virgin always.

  He parted his lips and ran his tongue along his teeth.

  ‘If we stay here a second longer I shall take off your knickers and do it to you in front of all your little friends,’ he said.

  The idea rather appealed to him.

  He started the engine, gunned the Cooper into gear and roared off towards his flat. He could hardly wait, he was aching for her again. And he knew full well that she was aching for him too – and that she always would be.

  Johnny Cooke could not remember being taken from the courtroom to the cell below. Neither could he remember the drive several days later to one of the grimmest prisons in the country – Dartmoor.

  He had lost weight during his months on remand in Exeter city jail, and the muscle seemed to have wasted on his strong young frame. The healthy tan had faded, his eyes dulled.

  It seemed unreal to him. Loss of liberty was the ultimate punishment to a young man like Johnny, who loved open spaces and the beauty of nature and the freedom to enjoy and explore them more than life itself. The rugged splendour of the moors glimpsed through the barred window of his cell in the desolate old prison on the edge of the little town of Princetown merely added to his anguish. Dartmoor was built by and for prisoners captured during the Napoleonic wars – the very sight of the place from the outside is a chilling reminder of another age. Yet ‘The Moor’, as it has always been known to its inmates, remained a key part of the twentieth-century prison service. Behind its towering black walls in the early winter of 1971 lay a world about which Johnny Cooke had had no idea. A world of fear and misery, stripped of all human dignity.

  Johnny was whisked at speed through the forbidding granite archway which forms the prison entrance. There was no way he could have seen the words carved almost two centuries earlier on the archway’s top three blocks by some long-forgotten craftsman. ‘Parcere subjectis’ – a line of Latin taken from Virgil’s Aeneid. It means ‘Spare The Vanquished’. But Dartmoor Prison has scant history of sparing anybody.

  Because of the nature of his offence, which was regarded as a sex murder, Johnny was taken to the notorious D Wing – at the time home to a selection of the most vicious criminals in the country.

  Johnny’s looks and youth caused him predictable torture. Johnny was not in any way streetwise or tough. He was bullied physically and sexually. From the start there were things that happened, things he felt unable to avoid or resist, which destroyed any vestige of self-esteem he had left.

  Early on he considered suicide, and even deliberated over ways in which he could kill himself. He really did want to die, and he was so desperate that it was probably only lack of courage which prevented him from ever actually making an attempt on his own life. Johnny could not stand pain, never had been able to. There was a weakness about him in spite of his imposing physique, and certainly he was never strong mentally, always muddled and unsure of himself.

  In D Wing Johnny spent many hours a day locked in his cell. Unlike most city prisons, The Moor never had a space problem, and so almost always serious offenders serving long s
entences were given cells to themselves. This could result in seemingly endless solitude spent in a small confined space. From the very first time the heavy door of his cell slammed shut, Johnny found himself in a cold sweat. He quickly discovered that confined spaces terrified him and could turn him into a gibbering wreck. He almost certainly suffered from claustrophobia, and the effect on his mental condition was devastating. None the less he came to prefer the hours spent trembling alone in his cell to those in the public areas of the prison where he was open to the unwelcome attentions of his fellow convicts. Visits to the latrines were particularly frightening. There were things that happened to Johnny in Dartmoor Prison which he found so horrible that his only defence was to shut his mind, to divorce his inner being from his body and its torment.

  He retreated into an inner shell. Almost from the moment he was taken to The Moor, Johnny stopped protesting his innocence. He simply did not have the energy. He felt broken, like a tired old man. His hopes and expectations had slumped to the lowest level, to that of mere daily survival. He had only one desire left – to be left alone.

  Johnny’s barrister, unhappy throughout with the way the trial had gone, suggested an appeal. Johnny shrugged big bony shoulders. He could not even be bothered to speak. There was no longer any fight left in him. At the end of a second prison visit, throughout which Johnny remained almost totally uncommunicative, his barrister advised him that he felt obliged to abandon the planned appeal.

  ‘I can’t do it without you, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I need you to help me rebuild our case.’

  Once again Johnny merely shrugged his shoulders. Every month his mother dutifully made the trek across the moors to visit her son. His father never came, which was actually a relief to Johnny. Mrs Cooke brought cigarettes and food, homemade cakes and pies. She was always best at the practical side of things, but the way in which she so determinedly continued to do the right thing by her boy was almost painful. So was the hurt in her eyes. With resolute brightness she almost ritualistically related to him the goings on at home. Silence seemed to frighten her, and throughout each visit she talked ceaselessly. Johnny found solace in silence, he longed for it, having swiftly discovered that, in spite of enforced solitude and high walls, prisons are noisy echoing places. He no longer wanted to talk to anyone really, and he certainly had little to say to his mother. He might have been comforted by some slight display of physical warmth, some show of tenderness amid the cruel bleakness, and once he reached across the table in the visiting room to touch his mother’s hand. She flushed and coughed and fussed a bit, leaning back in her chair away from him, still chattering about nothing. As quickly as she could she withdrew her hand, placing it firmly in her lap out of reach.

  Not once did Mabel Cooke reach out to touch her son, and from the moment he was convicted she never again mentioned the murder. From the very beginning she did not ask him to tell her whether or not he was guilty. Johnny assumed she had made up her mind that he was.

  He did not know that he had the right to refuse her visits. If he had known he would probably have done so. They simply made him despair even more.

  Jennifer didn’t dwell long on Johnny Cooke’s plight. Life was just too good for her. She did not want to think about anything that might spoil it. Quite deliberately she put Johnny’s trial, Irene’s disappearance and the whole rotten business out of her mind. Once she had done that, every day was a corker. She started to write to local papers asking for a job as a trainee reporter. The more she saw of Mark, and the more she learned of Mark’s job, the more certain she became that journalism was the career for her.

  It was nearly Easter when Mark gently broke the news that he had been offered a job in London, in Fleet Street. She surprised him yet again. She didn’t mind a bit. You could hardly build a career for yourself in Pelham Bay, she said, and she wouldn’t be far behind him anyway. She was heading for Fleet Street, she told him, definitely. He assured her that he would still try to be with her as much as possible. There were always weekends, he wanted her so badly. She had said cheerily that she wanted him too, but a man had to do what a man had to do – and so did a woman. She’d grinned at her own nonsense, apparently completely unworried by his news.

  Not for the first time he was struck by the equality of their relationship. In and out of bed they were on a par.

  She instinctively understood his desire for a wider canvas because she already had that desire herself. All that puzzled her was that she had not even known that he had been applying for jobs on the nationals. He mumbled something about it coming out of the blue. Was it her imagination or did he flush slightly?

  Always there were things about him that made her uneasy on occasions, but the power of his personality and the intoxicating effect he had on her overcame any doubts she had about him, as would be the case through so much of her adult life.

  It didn’t occur to her that he would even try to be faithful to her, indeed, how could he be? He was young and strong and eternally randy. But there was no reason why his behaviour with other women should bother her in those heady pre-AIDS days. The young Jennifer was almost without sexual jealousy, frankly she didn’t see the point, and once she became sure of Mark’s need for her, sure that he was not going to leave her, she found she was indeed totally unworried by whatever he might be doing when he was not with her. In any case she had absolutely no intention of being faithful to him should a suitable opportunity arise to experiment elsewhere. It hadn’t yet, as it happened, but then that was hardly surprising in Pelham Bay.

  And so, almost ten months after the death of Marjorie Benson and the disappearance of Irene Nichols, Mark Piddle left for London to join the Daily Recorder as an investigative reporter. Three months later, Jenny Stone landed a job as a trainee reporter on a local paper in Dorset. Just before she left North Devon she had sex with another man for the first time. It was an unlikely coupling. Smug Angela Smith’s boyfriend, Todd Mallett.

  She went to bed with him mainly because she liked to fantasise about wiping the smugness off Angela’s face by telling her in graphic detail exactly what she had done with Todd – she actually had no intention of so doing, but it was a delicious thought. The policeman’s son, recently enrolled in the force himself, slept with her because Angela was driving him crazy. She still wouldn’t let him have it, he would probably have to marry the old bag before she would do it, he had told Jenny. And Jenny was quite sure that was exactly what he would do in the end.

  Todd was a much more hesitant lover than the man she was used to. He made love like the boy he was – he was just nineteen – but he was gentle, considerate and affectionate. Their lovemaking was warm and cuddly rather than erotic: unlike sex with Mark, it did not disturb her. She felt in control, and was absolutely sure that if she wanted Todd more permanently she could have him. She suspected he was falling in love with her and needed only a little encouragement to leave Angela for her, yet that was the last thing Jenny wanted. She liked sleeping with Todd, but the experience served only to increase her desire for Mark and the level of sexual thrill only he had so far provided.

  Fortunately Mark proved to be as good as his word. He was doing his best to screw the whole of London, but throughout everything his singular need for Jennifer remained undiminished, and whenever he could get away he would visit her, as he had promised. First he would make the long trek back to North Devon, where he no longer had a flat and had to stay at the Durraton vicarage with his parents. So for a time they were reduced to using the back of his car for their sexual adventures, no longer the Cooper but an estate car chosen for the express purpose of those love-making weekends. Later he would travel to Dorset where, thankfully, Jenny had her own bedsit and later a flat shared with Anna McDonald who, with the television volume turned as loud as possible, stoically endured weekend after weekend of bedroom noise.

  ‘You’ll be worn out by the time you’re twenty-five,’ she told Jennifer – not actually believing a word of it.

  Discovering s
ex had transformed Jenny Stone. At a glance she looked and behaved much the same. She remained something of a tomboy, but men usually became instinctively aware of the ferocious sexuality lurking just below the surface. There was something indefinable in her manner which suggested the level of sexual enjoyment she was capable of.

  Gradually, as she sought out new partners, she began to realise how special the sex was between her and Mark. They were kindred spirits all right, and when they were together it was always sensational. She didn’t give a damn what or who he was doing in London, and he asked her no questions. She knew he would always come back to her, as, she suspected, she would to him. There were no other anxieties worth mentioning.

  She was starting to enjoy the only twenty-odd years in history when, if they wished, women could indeed treat sex the way so many men did. The only twenty years in history when they could sleep with whom they liked, whenever they felt like it, without fear of either pregnancy or death. And Jenny Stone was going to make the most of every thrilling minute of it.

  PART TWO

  THE CRUELTY OF MORNING

  DIAMOND DAY

  It was in the golden sunshine

  of an emerald studded morning