When she stepped out of the lift, Marcus was waiting in the hallway. He stood and looked at her. His smile was wide, his teeth still perfect. She knew he travelled twice a year to a Hollywood dentist whose clientele were almost exclusively film stars. He was dressed entirely in black. Black Saint Laurent polo shirt. Beautifully cut black trousers and black Gucci shoes. She had a bet with herself that they were Gucci. A racing cert. He looked as fit and handsome as ever, and still disconcertingly baby-faced, his white-blonde curls almost as bright and shiny as they’d been twenty-five years ago. Remarkable. She said nothing. His pale blue eyes travelled up and down her appreciatively.
‘You look marvellous,’ he said quietly. ‘Can I kiss you hello?’
Trust Marcus to get the tone just right. Affectionate but polite; interested yet deferential.
She nodded. What was she doing letting him kiss her already? He put a hand on each shoulder, very lightly, leaned forward and kissed her swiftly and gently on the lips. Then he stepped back and looked at her again.
He led her into the apartment. It was magnificent.
Very modern; all black-and-white and shiny, steel and glass with huge windows giving a panoramic view of the river. On the big glass coffee table stood a bottle of Krug in a heavy silver ice bucket and two exquisite crystal glasses. Bloody typical, she thought.
He gestured her to a chair, opened the bottle and poured her a glass. He did not ask her if she wanted champagne. She thanked him and took the drink. His taste remained impeccable. His sense of style had always been devastating.
He sat opposite and asked how he could help her.
She told him that she had walked out of the paper and why, and for more than half an hour they discussed her job and the implications of the action she had taken. His advice was good, and sensible as ever.
‘Maybe what you really need is a new challenge,’ he said. ‘But you must make absolutely sure that you don’t let a tantrum govern the course of the rest of your life.’
She actually had no doubts about what she had done, and her job, or lack of it, was the least of her worries. But talking newspapers and careers to Marcus put her on easy ground.
It was when he stood over her and poured the last drop of champagne into her glass that he made the inevitable move. It was inevitable because for him it was just normal behaviour. He never felt shame. In spite of everything that he had tried to say to her after she had interrupted him with the two young girls, she knew that all he had really regretted was being found out. He was incapable of feeling shame at his own actions.
He put down the bottle, sank to his knees beside her low armchair, wrapped his arms around her and, before she realised what was happening, kissed her long and slow and deep on the lips. She made herself respond – just a bit.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.
‘You should have thought of that before,’ she replied.
‘I must have been crazy.’
‘I’ve always thought so.’
‘Jennifer, Jennifer.’
His lips were against her cheek. He was just breathing the words.
‘Nothing’s changed. Whenever I see you I want you, and as soon as I touch you I start to ache for you.’
His nerve was staggering, but he knew well the power he had always had over her. She supposed that was why she’d refused to see him after the break-up, after finding him with those two girls. The thought made her shudder. So much about Marcus made her shudder, yet when he touched her he was totally confident that he would still hit the spot. It was ridiculous.
His hands were starting to caress her breasts. He slipped one inside her shirt and let out a little gasp of pleasure and satisfaction as he discovered she was wearing no bra. With his other hand he undid the buttons of her shirt. She did not stop him. He sank his face in her breasts and with his tongue he eagerly lapped up the essence of her, tasted again the sweetness of her skin. She did not stop him.
After a while he raised his head. He was panting.
His eyes were bright.
‘Are you going to let me make love to you?’ he asked huskily.
The question was rhetorical. He was so sure of himself, the bastard. She nodded. She did not trust herself to speak.
‘Stand up then,’ he said. She did as she was told.
‘Take off your shirt,’ he commanded. She did so.
He reached up and undid her belt and unbuttoned the flies of her Levis and pulled them down. She was wearing light brogues. He slipped them off each foot and removed her jeans a leg at a time so that she was standing naked above him. He made her stand with her legs apart and then he reached up and buried his head in her. The strength of his animal desire was overwhelming, in spite of her mental revulsion against him.
He pulled her on to the thick carpeted floor alongside him. Somehow he had managed to remove his own clothes without her even noticing. He had always been able to do that. With the last vestige of her control, she made him draw back.
‘You must put something on.’ She reached for her handbag.
He threw back his head and roared with laughter at her.
‘I thought you didn’t like plastic bags,’ he said.
‘That was pre-AIDS,’ she said. ‘And before I knew some of your tastes.’
He was amazed.
‘Oh, you don’t have to worry – I always get the girlies first. No danger at all,’ he said.
He did not even realise what he was saying. She wanted to tell him how much he disgusted her, and then it was too late. He opened her legs and took her for the first time on the floor in the middle of the living room. He was very excited and it was over quite soon.
‘Remember how long the second time lasts,’ he said. She remembered.
He led her into the bedroom, spread a big white towel over the bed and massaged every inch of her body. Just like in the beginning, except that now Marcus used expensive scented oils instead of baby lotion. She tried not to think about who else he might have used them on. They made love for half the night – in every possible way, it seemed to Jennifer. After a while her brain ceased to have control of her body. Eventually they fell into an exhausted sleep. His deep and satisfied as ever, hers fitful and anxious, her very soul filled with self-disgust.
‘Oh shit,’ she thought to herself.
In the morning he woke her with his whistling, as usual. It was soon after seven. He was in the bathroom showering. He sounded wide awake and full of himself, as always. He emerged close-shaven, hair washed and brushed, teeth gleaming, but not yet dressed.
‘Come on lazybones,’ he teased.
She had not even let him see she was awake. She lay on her side, just peeping out of the corner of one eye as he came through the bathroom door. She feigned a sluggish awakening.
‘What time is it?’ she muttered.
When he told her she groaned.
‘You don’t alter, do you?’ he chuckled.
‘Are you going already?’ she asked.
‘Breakfast meeting,’ he said. ‘Come on, out of bed.’
‘Can’t I stay here for a bit?’ she inquired.
She saw the doubt in his eyes. She made herself look as kittenish as possible.
‘Why don’t we meet for lunch, here?’ He hesitated.
‘Well I don’t know…’ he began.
He was standing by the bedside in a black silk dressing gown. She reached out and pulled it apart. He was half erect. She leaned forward and took him in her mouth. All night she had deliberately not done that, she had been saving it up. He reacted at once. She felt him double in size inside her mouth, opened her throat the way she had learned so long ago, and swallowed in the whole of him.
Then as quickly as she had begun, she withdrew.
‘Don’t stop,’ he pleaded.
‘You have to go and I’m not going to hurry this,’ she said.
‘Lunchtime?’
This time she had him hooked.
‘How can I resist you?’ he asked. ‘
OK. Stay here and I will be back as soon as I can make it.’
She smiled her appreciation.
‘I must go home for an hour, I need some clean clothes,’ she said. ‘Can I have a key?’
She saw the doubt again. He did not say anything.
‘Marcus, if I go out I shall need a key to get back in,’ she said.
‘Why don’t we meet for champagne and sandwiches at the Waldorf and then we’ll come back here?’ he suggested smoothly.
She frowned at him. ‘Marcus, why on earth should I want to trek into the Waldorf when all that both of us want is here? What is the matter? Do you think I’m going to run off with the silver?’
He laughed what for him was a slightly nervous laugh.
‘No, of course not, don’t be daft. Of course you can have a key.’
Ten minutes later, the entry phone rang. It was Marcus’s chauffeur. His days of tube trains and black cabs were ancient history; even the editor’s Daimler was a thing of the past. His Bentley now awaited him. He fastened his silk tie and made for the door.
Just in time she called after him: ‘Don’t forget to square it with the porter.’
She waited five minutes, then jumped out of bed, hastily pulling on her jeans and shirt. The jeans felt uncomfortably tight now. She was out of practice with Marcus-style sex and she was quite sore. She shook herself angrily. She didn’t have time to think about any of that. In the kitchen she quickly made herself a cup of tea with a teabag in a mug. At the best of times she couldn’t function without tea in the mornings. Then she made her way into Marcus’s study.
From the time she had first known Marcus, he had always had a place at home to work. In the beginning in the rented fiat in Pelham Bay it was just an old desk dominating half the living room. Later, as he grew more affluent and was able to buy space, there was always a room set aside to be his office. And these working places inevitably had one thing in common – they were quite immaculate. Everything in its place and a place for everything.
Jennifer knew the way Marcus worked. She was quite sure that if there was a link between him and Bill Turpin, the secret of it would somehow be stored in his computer system. Marcus was good with computers, not a professional expert like Dominic, but certainly way beyond the level of your average journalist or businessman. She realised that the odds were against her finding what she was looking for. From when she had first known him, Marcus had always kept his desk locked, as he did all filing cabinets and any other office furniture. She was actually quite relieved to find that the door to his study was not locked.
Inside, everything was indeed in perfect order, as she had expected. Marcus had always been not only a very unusual man but an unusual journalist. Journalists are not known for keeping tidy desks or having tidy lives. Marcus could never bear disorder. His clothes and grooming were always impeccable, and so was his home. Even in the days when everyone she knew of their age was living in varying degrees of squalor, Marcus kept perfect house. In Pelham Bay he had cleaned his own fiat, of course, yet she could rarely remember seeing him do it. His early rising was the secret. When he used to visit her in her Dorset bedsit, she would often be woken at six in the morning by the sound of her own vacuum cleaner – Marcus having decided that the level of cleanliness fell way below his own high standards. When he cooked, and he cooked very well, he somehow managed to leave no mess at all. He would contrive to leave a kitchen cleaner than when he started – apparently with little or no effort – and he never dropped or broke anything. His coordination and timing were perfect. The thought obscurely occurred to her that it was quite likely he had lived his entire life without spilling a drop of milk.
Jennifer looked around her. The office was the ultimate in high tech, all glass and chrome again. There were two computers, one of them was an Apple Mac linked to the main frame of the Recorder group. With that Marcus could oversee the entire content and layout of any of his newspapers without moving from his black leather swivel chair. The second machine was a state-of-the-art IBM 486 equipped with a high-speed modem for communicating swiftly and efficiently with other systems throughout the world. Both sat on specially constructed tables lined up along the wall, with a fax and telephone-answering machine, a laser printer, and a sophisticated photocopier. There was a cabinet which she guessed housed television and stereo equipment. Along a second wall stood a row of filing cabinets, finished in black ash. The top of the huge desk running almost the length of the wall below the window, also made of beautiful black ash, was completely clear, apart from a marble paperweight, a Mont Blanc fountain pen and one framed photograph. The picture was of her and Marcus honeymooning after their wedding in the Caribbean. They both looked deliriously happy. He was tanned and handsome as ever. They were wearing tee shirts and beach shorts. She peered closely at the picture and, yes, she was sure of it, Marcus’s multicoloured Bermuda-style shorts definitely had ironed creases in them. Typical. She looked comfortably crumpled, which was also fairly typical. She studied the picture further. His white tee shirt could have featured in a commercial for soap powder. Obliquely she wondered if Marcus ever sweated except in bed. It suddenly occurred to her that she had never seen him do so, however hot the climate they were in. The original Joe Cool. But had he gone just too far? Jennifer’s mind snapped back to the present. She needed to know the truth and she had to move fast.
She tried the drawers in the desk first. Locked, and although it was academic because no way was she going to try and bust locks, she could see at a glance these were no ordinary desk locks. They were complex specialist jobs. All the filing cabinets were also locked and had similar locking devices fitted. She looked around the room again. There was not a single sheet of paper lying around anywhere, and more importantly, not a single computer disc. The man was abnormal, but then, that was what she had probably always been afraid of. She allowed herself a dark chuckle.
In one corner between the filing cabinets and the computer table was a forbidding-looking safe set both into the wall and the floor. She noticed it had a combination lock and spent a fruitless few minutes seeing if she could second-guess the number Marcus had fed it. She tried his birthday and her birthday and several other fairly obvious choices, but quickly concluded that she was just wasting her time.
Then she sat down at the two computers. As she had expected, she could not break into the hard drive of either of them. They were each user-protected and it was hopeless. Maybe Dominic could do it, she thought, but she couldn’t bring him here. That would be too risky at this stage, and in any case he wouldn’t come.
Damn, she thought. Damn bloody Marcus and his perfection. Didn’t he ever do anything sloppy? Didn’t he ever make mistakes? Wasn’t there just one little computer disc sitting somewhere unnoticed that she could get her eager hands on? Carefully she went over every inch of the room again, looking for something she might have missed. There was nothing at all. One last thought occurred to her. With not a lot of hope she checked the floppy disc compartment of the Apple Mac. Empty. Well, what did she expect? As if Marcus would forget to remove and file away a disc. Resigned to finding nothing again, she none the less checked the IBM.
Eureka! She couldn’t believe it – he had left a disc in the machine. He had forgotten it. He could make mistakes. She studied the disc. It was labelled, but the label simply bore a number written in letters: seven. Well, it was something, but the disc could be anything – his constituency records, his household accounts, even his blessed shopping list – because she knew very well he kept everything on computer, meticulously. On the other hand it could tell her something. And it was all she had.
She switched on the computer again and changed to disc-drive mode. The result was much the same as before; the floppy disc was coded and she could not get into it. Disappointing, but encouraging at the same time, even Marcus would not code his household accounts, would he?
She glanced at her watch. It was still only eight-thirty. She picked up the disc, her bag, and Marcus’s key,
and took off at a trot. Outside she climbed into the Porsche and headed for the city.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She arrived at Dominic’s office at five to nine. It was Monday morning. The dealers had been at their screens for hours, none the less the city gave the impression of reluctant awakening after the weekend.
‘He’s not here yet,’ the receptionist told her.
So she walked outside the front door and waited.
At nine o’clock prompt there was Dominic, looking clever and cross as usual. He looked even crosser when he saw Jennifer.
‘Good God, what on earth do you want?’ he asked.
‘Dominic, will you look at this disc for me?’
‘I suppose so, when I’ve time,’ he said.
‘It has to be now, Dominic, it’s vital.’
‘Jennifer, I am off on a two-day seminar this afternoon and I have a full morning. Are you mad?’
‘I’m desperate,’ she said.
There was something in her voice that stopped him in his tracks. He hadn’t really looked at her. When he did so he was astonished. Jennifer Stone was trembling, her face pale and drawn.
‘Please, Dominic, please,’ she said.
Good God, the woman was begging him.
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ he said.
She did not respond. Where was the usual banter, he asked himself silently. She bowed her head so that she was staring at the ground. She looked vulnerable, which was more than a little disturbing, because underneath the crossness and the impatience, Dominic was a kind man as well as a clever one. He also loved his wife deeply, and Jennifer, for all her faults, was his wife’s best friend.
‘Oh, come on then,’ he said, turning towards the door.
Gratefully she followed him into the big mirror-panelled hallway, and up in the lift to his third-floor office. The room was full of computers, mostly silent and still, awaiting their master. There was just one in the corner, on a modem to somewhere, buzzing and whirring away like some futuristic robot, which was probably more or less what it was.
The Cruelty of Morning Page 22