The Cruelty of Morning

The Cruelty of Morning

It is just before dawn

and the street

beneath my feet

is colder

than the air.

I have left you behind

darling

Left you in the night

where you belong

In the warm sticky darkness

of my bed

In the raging sweet madness

of my head.

I have left you behind

darling

Bathed in the glory

moonlight creates

Cursed eternally

when daylight breaks.

There is no place for you

darling

in the chill of dawning

No room for you

darling

In the cruelty of morning.

Prologue

Jenny Stone was away with the fishes. Her powerful crawl had taken her right out to sea beyond the last of the rocks that stretched jaggedly away from the cliffs to the south of Pelham Bay. She paused for a while in her strenuous swimming, and floated, arms outstretched, eyes shut, basking in the hot sunshine like a contented whale. It was the first Sunday in August 1970, another gorgeous day in an unusually hot summer. A day Jenny, then only seventeen, would never forget.

A piece of seaweed brushed against her face and she flicked it idly away. A large lump of wood bumped her right shoulder, and Jenny, eyes still closed, reached out with the fingertips of her right hand.

She touched something very cold and clammy. Suddenly her sense of smell was overcome with a stench she had never experienced before — yet she recognised it. And before her eyes were properly open, Jenny knew what she was going to see.

Next to her in the water was the body of a young woman. She was naked to the waist. Her bright red skirt, torn and ragged, billowed with the rhythmic roll of the ocean. It was this material, hanging on the body in shreds, that Jenny had mistaken for seaweed. The dead woman’s legs and arms floated stiff and angular as wood. Her face was turned to one side, eyes open and bulging, looking at Jenny in sightless horror. For a brief terrible instant the two faces, one full of life and vitality and hope for the future, the other distorted by violent death, were pressed together by the currents.

One

It had been just another row in a newspaper office. Her reaction had been way over the top and she already knew it. She had very nearly broken down and wept.

The tears pricked persistently against the back of her eyes. She just succeeded in keeping them back. Only once before, in twenty years, had Fleet Street made her cry.

Then she had been a young reporter of twenty-four, and following a particularly virulent, although not that unusual, attack from her news editor, had fled from the newsroom to the ladies’ loo, desperately biting her bottom lip until, with relief, she could thrust shut the door of a cubicle. And there, alone with a lavatory pan, the floods of despair had overcome her. She had been two years into her first job on a national daily at the time, and already hardened enough to be angry at her own weakness. She had indulged in a good cry and then gone back to work. What else?

On her return to the newsroom, tear damage repaired as much as possible, the old-hand reporter whom she sat alongside had not looked up from his typewriter.

‘I’m surprised at you, Jen,’ he said quietly. ‘Letting the old bugger get to you. Thought you knew better.’

Now she was forty-two. Of course she knew better. She had coped with the toughest of jobs for twenty years, she had travelled around the world on the biggest and best stories, she had loved almost every minute of it, and she had finally made it to assistant editor of one of the top tabloid papers, The Globe. Well — until a few minutes previously she had been. So perhaps she didn’t know better, after all.

It was May 1995. Early afternoon on an unseasonably hot day. She realised suddenly that she had been almost running through the streets. The silk shirt beneath the jacket of her linen suit was damp with sweat. The sleeves had started to wrinkle seriously under the arms and around the elbows. In the middle of everything else some small distant part of her brain sent a sharp reminder that she really must never buy linen again, however attractive the stuff looked on a hanger in a shop window.

She put a hand up to flick ineffectively at the fringe of her thick brown hair — it was stuck to her forehead. Her hand, she noticed in a detached sort of way, was shaking.

She paused and stepped to one side of the throng of people hurrying along the pavement. Typical London. Everyone rushing about trance-like. You could strip naked and stand screaming and nobody would notice. If they did they would quickly look away.

She stepped into the welcome shadow of a towering office block and leaned heavily against the wall. She was breathing in quick gasps, like a panting dog. Ridiculous.

‘Come on Jen, pull yourself together,’ she told herself.

Two passing young girls in micro-skirts fleetingly caught her eye and quickly looked away. True to London form.

What was left of her beleaguered brain shot off at a tangent again. ‘I dressed like that once, several million years ago,’ she thought to herself. This time her lips did not move. Definitely no more talking to herself in the street. Whatever next?

She fished in her shoulder bag for her mobile phone and dialled a number.

‘Yo,’ said a voice at the other end of the phone. She felt immediately more cheerful. A little light relief beckoned.

‘Yo? What the hell does that mean? Have you joined the American marines?’

The man’s voice became weary. ‘Jennifer, how lovely to hear from you.’

‘You’re a liar, Dominic. What are you doing at home in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon anyway?’

‘I’m resting.’

‘You’re what?’

‘I’m resting. I have been suffering from exhaustion. Miles and I discussed it sensibly and I now take two afternoons’ rest a week.’

‘God, Dominic, you are a wimp.’

‘No doubt by your Amazonian standards I am, Jennifer. But we can’t all be that butch, can we? Would you like to speak to my wife?’

‘Yes, I would like to speak to Anna. But you know, try as I do, I still can’t think of her as your wife, Dominic. I just can’t.’

Anna McDonald, her oldest and best friend, came on the line.

‘Have you really got nothing better to do with your day than bait poor Dominic?’

‘Not entirely one-sided, Anna. He’s improving. And, actually, from now on I may indeed have nothing better to do with my day.’

‘What?’

‘Come to Joe Allen for supper and I’ll tell you all about it.’

‘Tell me now. I can’t come to supper. It’s Dominic’s half day.’

‘No supper, no story. All will be told only over many large margaritas. Incidentally, how does Dominic get to fix himself two afternoons off a week?’

‘Because he’s brilliant. He’s the best computer scientist in Britain. At least, he’s convinced his bosses he is. And that’s real brilliance.’

‘It’s obscene.’

‘And you’re jealous.’

‘True. I’ll pick you up seven-thirty.’

‘If you are driving I’m definitely not coming. I remember the last time... just. And you insisted you were on the wagon...’

‘OK. I’ll get a taxi... Christ, you’ve reminded me! Brain death is setting in. I stormed off like a half-wit and left the car in the office car park. I’d better get it out of there before somebody else does that for me.’

‘Jennifer, what have you done?’

‘I’ll tell you at Joe’s. Seven-thirty?’

‘Oh, all right. When I’m divorced can I bring Pandora and come and live at your place?’

‘Only if you change the poor innocent’s name...’

She pushed the ‘end’ button and noticed her hand had stopped shaking. Thank God for Anna. For twenty-five years, through two marriages and countless ups and downs, Anna had always been there. Of course she would come to supper, and not just to pick up on the latest drama. She knew she was needed. And there was never anyone better than Anna in a crisis.

The memory of how she had first met Anna remained quite vivid to Jennifer and never failed to make her smile. Barely into her twenties then, Anna had already managed to appear totally sophisticated, Jennifer recalled.

The two women had both been hired on the same newspaper training scheme. Booked into a hostel on her first night away from home, eighteen-year-old Jennifer had found a nearby cafe and settled down for supper alone.

‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ asked a cool and round-vowelled voice. Anna, a doctor’s daughter, had been brought up in Wimbledon and was conspicuously English middle-class in those days.

‘I do so hate eating alone, don’t you?’ she continued.

Jennifer looked up for the first time into what she came to regard as arguably the most deceptively gentle grey eyes in the world and stammered her agreement.

Later, when they came to share a flat, Anna had arrived with one neat suitcase of extraordinary design which, after a seemingly effortless flick, had sprung miraculously open to reveal her clothes, uncreased, immaculate, and sporting several designer labels, suspended in perfect order from their own hangers.

Jennifer, surrounded at the time by crumpled debris and a selection of tatty carrier bags, had been impressed ever since. And thinking back to those early days with her friend had indeed made her smile.

The original shock reaction to her own behaviour had faded now. Jennifer had a game plan for the rest of the day, and possibly for the rest of her life, and she wanted to get on with it. First a quick dash back to the office car park, then home for a short course in revival — a long bath and several cups of tea. She hailed a taxi.

Back at the Globe, the key card still operated the doors to the car park. That was something. The Porsche continued to give her a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, although lessened somewhat by the dents and bruises on both sides. She told herself that driving a battered Porsche was a status symbol. The car was as smooth, as tight, and as quick as ever, but it was more than six years old and she had known that next time around she would not get another company motor like it. The days when she had swung the deal which included that car were long gone. Next time around it would be a small family saloon and be thankful. Yuk.

Oh well, she’d probably solved that problem. It was unlikely that the Globe would ever again be providing her with any kind of company car.

She slotted herself behind the wheel, thrust the gear lever forward and roared up the ramp, bouncing over the sleeping policemen. The tyres squealed as she jerked to a stop and prepared to use her key card again.

She looked at her watch. A ladies’ Rolex. She had stormed out of the office at around one-thirty. At least nobody could accuse her of throwing a terminal tantrum after lunch. She was just in time to miss the late afternoon build-up of traffic; she should make it back to her house in Richmond soon after three-thirty. Plenty of time to recharge the batteries before going around to Anna’s. That bath, a knock-your-socks-off shower, a pot of English breakfast tea, a bit of a sleep, an early evening gin-and-tonic, and a little pre-dinner sparring with Dominic. Things were looking up.

Unlike Dominic she was not used to being at home in the middle of a weekday afternoon. As she lay back in a bubbly bath, clutching a steaming mug of tea and listening to a play on Radio Four, she thought she could get to like it. The rest of the afternoon passed peacefully. The phone rang several times. She did not answer it. The word was undoubtedly already getting around and she did not want to talk to anybody yet — except Anna.

She ordered a minicab for seven that evening.

‘You’re early, this must be serious,’ said Anna.

She and Jennifer had always been an odd couple, the one appearing to be everything the other was not, both physically and in personality. Jennifer, striking looking but nothing more, was exceptionally tall and confidently forceful, bordering on brash on a bad day, inclined to toss her mane of thick dark hair when things didn’t suit her. Anna was barely five-foot-one, petite in build, neat of manner, seemingly diffident in behaviour, and quite devastatingly pretty. Her wispy white-blonde hair, falling straight to her shoulders from a central parting, framed a perfectly even-featured elfin face almost always composed into the most pleasant of expressions.

She had an air of fragility about her. Confronted by adversity, Anna would smile in apparent deference and flutter her eyelashes. She really did flutter them. Jennifer thought Anna was the only woman she had ever actually seen do so. Anna was acutely aware of her femininity and had always used it ruthlessly. Even now, well into her forties, she was the kind of woman men referred to as a ‘sweet girl’.

The very thought always made Jennifer smile. Appearances could indeed be deceptive. Anna had handled Fleet Street better than anyone Jennifer knew. One of the secrets of her success was that she was invariably underestimated. Jennifer could not remember her ever failing in anything she had set out to achieve, and joked that she had chosen Anna to be her closest friend because she knew she could never survive with her as an enemy. Anna invariably got her own way without those around her even noticing. Jennifer had always been open-mouthed in admiration of her and quite green with envy. You couldn’t even attempt to play the game the way Anna did when you were nearly six feet tall with the shoulders of a rugby lock forward.

In fact Anna had a brain to die for, plus total confidence in her abilities, and was always quite certain of the various directions in which she wished to take her life. She had been a senior executive in the Murdoch organisation, widely tipped to be the first woman editor of a national daily, when she’d decided she would rather be a mother instead.

She had been almost forty when she met Dominic McDonald, fell wildly in love for probably the first time — in the past it had not been Anna’s role to fall in love with the men in her life, they all fell desperately in love with her while she graciously accepted it — married him and became pregnant within a few months.

When their child was born she announced with her usual certainty that she was going to give her daughter the attention she had previously only given to her career, that she would be quitting ‘The Street’ at least until Pandora came of school age, and that from now on she would be using her married name only.

Astonished pleas from friends and colleagues, and even, quite remarkably, from Murdoch himself, did nothing to shake her from her intentions.

At the time Jennifer thought Anna had gone stark staring mad. Now she wasn’t so sure. But the events had always given an edge to her relationship with her friend’s husband. Jennifer was honest enough to admit to herself that she did not like the power she felt Dominic had over Anna. Meanwhile her friend, sharp and cool as ever, merely accepted that her best friend and her husband were each jealous of the other’s place in her affections, and that was, after all, quite as it should be.

It was no accident that while Jennifer waited for Anna to gather up coat and handbag, Dominic remained upstairs, resolutely engrossed in the task of putting Pandora to bed. Long, lanky, bespectacled, clever-faced, academic Dominic — a cliché on legs.

‘I told him you were in crisis and he said that would doubtless make you more obnoxious than ever and went into hiding,’ Anna remarked.

Over the first margarita in Joe Allen, Jennifer related her news. ‘I walked out. Jack told me next week’s features were crap just one time too many. So I resigned!’

‘Good God, is that all?’

Anna was totally unsympathetic.

‘You’ve had a row with the editor. Send in the bloody cavalry. That’s what editors are for, isn’t it? He won’t even mention your so-called resignation in the morning, as well you know.’

‘I’m not going to work in the morning.’

‘Don’t be so childish. Of course you’re going to work in the morning. You always do. You’re a survivor.’

‘Not any more. After I’d screamed obscene abuse at the bugger, I put my resignation in writing.’

‘So? He’ll tear it up, won’t he? He adores you, you know he does.’

‘Hmph. He’s got a bloody fine way of showing it. And I’ve had enough. I’m off.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Ridiculous or not, I’m going home to North Devon tomorrow and I have every intention of staying there.’

‘Really?’

Anna giggled.

‘I’d love to hear what Marcus would have to say about that,’ she said.

Jennifer raised her eyebrows and tried to look disdainful. Marcus was her ex-husband. The remarkable Sir Marcus Piddell, newspaper tycoon and government minister. He had begun life as a local paper reporter in North Devon and risen relentlessly to the top. His ambition and his singleness of purpose had always been breathtaking.

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.

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 retained 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 by-line, 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.

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 D.I. 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.

In the street outside the village hall, where the special murder inquiry operations room had been setup, he could smell the sea clearly, hear the waves beating against the rocks. Strange. It was as if it were yesterday.

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 and 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.

Most of her friends were virgins too. The sexual revolution might have wreaked rampant havoc everywhere else in the world by 1970, but in Pelham Bay and nearby Durraton married men still had ‘fancy women’, the contraceptive pill had yet to become freely available, young girls who got pregnant had their bottoms smacked by hysterical fathers, and books with a high sexual content, from Fanny Hill to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were known simply as ‘dirty’ and you had to cover them in plain brown paper.

Jenny and her friends had been ‘brought up proper’. It might not make much difference in the long run, but the rigours of doing their homework and not staying out late, added to more than their share of parental brainwashing, was inclined to protect their virginity for longer than usual.

So long, lanky Jenny lay dreaming about what she had never quite had, and of being five-foot nothing and shaped like an egg timer. Angela Smith was five-foot nothing and shaped like an egg timer.

A blow fly buzzed noisily in Jenny’s ear. She flicked at it instinctively and her eyes opened in an involuntary blink. There was Angela, looking smugly angelic like her name, leaning against Todd Mallett instead of a chair. Todd was totally captivated by Angela in those days. His arm was around her shoulders. His hand rested on her left breast, pretending its position was an accident. He stirred and kissed the top of Angela’s head.

That was quite enough for Jenny. She dumped Cobbett on the lavatory roof where she felt he belonged, and jumped to her feet, shouting that she was going for a swim.

The concrete was burning hot beneath her bare toes. Jenny ran as fast as she could along the parade to the steps, down over the pebble ridge to where the sea hit the flat rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. There are places there where the Atlantic is deep and green and the rocks form natural diving boards stretching out to sea. When the tide is high and the surf is low, it is safe to dive in and down to the sand and pebbles and weed twenty feet and more below. Jenny knew every natural diving board that Pelham Bay had to offer. Nimble-footed she ran from pebble to pebble across the ridge. Years of practice made sure that she never stumbled. Speed and fleetness of foot were the secret. She headed for the furthest of the flat rocks and sprinted into a dive. Down down into the cold water, then, floating slowly upwards into the sun again, Jenny rolled onto her back and lazily crawled seawards, looking back towards the holidaymakers splashing around in the shallows. She was a competition swimmer, powerful and confident.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Mark Piddle got the call. ‘Your patch, old boy,’ said his editor.

Mark was twenty-three years old now, a trainee reporter in the last year of his apprenticeship. He had first been to university and gained a degree. He often wondered how, because he had been an idle, although able, student, just waiting to do what he had always known was the only thing he could ever do — join the staff of a newspaper. He was spending the afternoon in bed with his girlfriend, Irene Nichols. He had moved her into his small one-bedroomed flat just two months before, and she was the first girl he had ever lived with. It was a whole new scene for Mark; he had found something he had needed for a long time, and everything else came second to the suddenly freely available sex, which dominated his life. Everything, that is, except the job that he had dreamed of since he was a small boy.

He replaced the receiver on the phone in the living room, thinking briefly as always of the days when he would be able to afford a bedside extension. Standing there for a moment, naked, still half-erect, scratching his head, his beard and his balls, he wondered if he could manage any serious work that day. But the thought of a body found in Pelham Bay — a murder, his boss Jim Sykes had said — was almost as exciting to Mark as sex. It was just that the timing of the call had not been good. He hadn’t finished yet. Through the open door of the bedroom he could see Irene still lying on the bed, her little-girl breasts pointing towards him, and he could feel his erection hardening again.

For just a couple of seconds he hesitated. Then he walked towards the waiting girl. It wouldn’t take long now. He was nearly there.

‘Who was it?’ asked Irene, in the ringing tones of the commonest area of Durraton, which Mark always pretended he did not notice. In fact it grated badly, in spite of his loudly proclaimed socialist ideals. As the son of Durraton’s vicar, Mark had been educated at a minor public school, populated mostly by farmers’ sons, which had given him an average education, an above-average arrogance and sense of his own importance, an even more above average obsession with sex and all its possible variations, and a distinctive accent which he was just beginning to learn to tone down to a universally acceptable level.

‘Jim,’ he said, deciding on a show of totally false indifference. ‘Still thinks he’s working for a national daily, silly old bugger. Our rag doesn’t come out until Thursday... but he just has to ring me up in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, doesn’t he? “My patch” indeed!’

Irene wanted to know what the story was. Mark was too busy to answer. His hand had slipped down between her legs. Typically he thrust three fingers into her without warning. She instinctively flinched, but he pushed all the harder. She was willing enough; even when he hurt her. That was why he had moved her in, to the dismay of her parents, who believed, quite correctly, that he was using her. His own parents pretended that they did not know Mark was living with anyone — let alone a girl from the lowliest council estate for miles around.

Mark was still at an age and way of thinking when all he required from a girl was a good time in bed. Actually, for him it was an attitude that was never to change much.

He never hit Irene — he was not violent in that way — but the sexual act was an act of aggression much more than of love for Mark. Their frequent protracted sessions left Irene more or less constantly slightly bruised and battered inside and out. But Mark excited her. He was someone from way beyond her limited horizons. And she doted on him, more like a puppy dog and its master than a young woman and her lover.

Mark was chewing on her breasts now. Her nipples were hard as buttons. She began to fidget obligingly. She had got used to the fingers harshly pushed inside her, and they were not hurting so much. With his other hand Mark shoved her legs upwards, spread them wide apart, and began to play with her bottom. She flinched again. He reached for some of the cream on the bedside table. It was not so bad then. Soothing almost.

Anxious as ever, she spoke to him in drawling throaty tones dedicatedly copied from bad American movies. ‘You’re not going are you?’

‘Certainly not,’ lied Mark. He rolled over between her legs, startlingly aware of his own desperate horniness again and sure in the knowledge that Irene would demand no further arousal. He drove himself into her. She was ready at any time for anything he wanted to do to her with little or no preparation. Anything at all in exchange for the certainty that he would let her be there that night and the next morning and the next night. Ashamed of his thoughts he hammered into her, bigger and harder and more selfishly than ever.

He thrust inside her so forcefully she slipped towards the side of the bed, so that her head and shoulders were over the edge. He had his hands on her shoulders, forcing her downwards. This made her pelvis swing up towards him, and seemed to force her open even more. He was a long way inside her and it was sensational. He knew he must be hurting her back, but he couldn’t stop. His mouth was on hers, his teeth bruising her lips. His tongue down her throat made it impossible for her to protest. Ultimately the top part of her body slipped off the bed, so that she was balanced on her head and shoulders, wedged on the floor against the side of the bed with her legs flailing helplessly in the air while he was still in there hammering away, relentlessly pressing her into the floor. The top of his body weighed a ton on her chest and shoulders, and he had his hands on her wrists now, pinning her down. His legs were still on the bed, and by kneeling slightly he was able to force himself into her even more powerfully. He liked the feeling of her total helplessness. He was so far in he thought he was going to touch his penis with his tongue as he thrust it into her throat. God, he liked it this way.

Irene could not move any part of her body except her legs. Ineffectively she tapped her feet against his back. He seemed to like that too. He was literally, grinding her into the carpet. She could feel her back beginning to give with the strain when finally, with one last triumphant push, he reached orgasm. For her it was near agony. For him it was ecstasy. He took his tongue out of her throat and shouted out to her what he was doing to her and what was happening to him. As he lifted himself off her and fell back, she hauled herself onto the bed alongside him and clung to him tightly the way she always did. She got very little from him sexually and even less emotionally, and she always followed their brutal apology for love-making with the same embarrassing plea.

‘You do love me, Mark, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

It was barely a minute since he had thrust himself into that knee-trembling gut-weakening climax, but Mark was young and strong, bursting with unspent energy, eager to get on with his life. He swung his long legs over the bed, ran his fingers through his curly fair hair and, turning slightly, looked down at the girl who would let him take any pleasure he asked for. He knew he should feel something more than he did for her. He actually wanted to feel more. But the harsh truth was that once she had satisfied his intense sexual appetites he didn’t feel anything. Nothing at all.

‘Gotta go,’ he said.

‘But I thought you weren’t going.’

‘Oh come on Irene. Get real. This is work.’

She pulled the sheets and blankets around her neck and watched him dress. His towering height and the spread of his shoulders seemed to fill the room. Sometimes it was as if that baby face and its halo of curls must really belong to somebody else. Sheer power surged from every inch of Mark. His limbs were thick and big-boned, but his body was lean and sinewy and totally masculine. It was covered by a film of fine down, soft and shiny. A faint, almost transparent fuzz coated his legs, belly, chest and arms. There was even some of this fuzz on his shoulders and back. Around his penis the hair was longer and silkier but still curiously soft.

He coaxed his genitals into a pair of stretch underpants and pulled on his faded blue jeans. He fastened his flies carefully and adjusted his balls as he did so. The mirror reflected a satisfying bulge and he knew that Irene was watching him as she always did. Amazingly he felt a slight stirring again. He ignored it but he was tinglingly aware that the bulge had grown larger. He put on a checked Levi shirt, leaving several buttons undone to show his suntanned chest. Strange that a man so fair did not burn in the sun. But Mark tanned easily. His skin was a gleaming pale gold. He shoved a notebook into a rear pocket of his jeans and a handful of loose change from the dressing table into one of the side pockets.

For the last time he approached the bed. He slipped his right hand under the bedclothes, widened Irene’s legs, quickly felt the wet stickiness there, squeezed his fingers together, and with his usual roughness, plunged them into her.

Abruptly he left her. As he strode through the living room he glanced casually over his shoulder and called out ‘Bye.’

Irene was swiftly out of bed. She had wrapped Mark’s towelling dressing gown around her and stood peering nervously around the bedroom door.

‘Will you be late?’ she called.

The answer came through the already closed front door. ‘Dunno.’

Mark bounced down the stairs, wondering about the lineage possibilities from the nationals, and whether, if he put his mind to it, he could find something that would last the week for the splash — front page lead — in the Durraton Gazette, and give him a bit of an edge on the big boys. He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his shirt where he always kept his car keys, and gave the balding tyres of his ancient battered Mini Cooper a vaguely anxious glance as he unlocked the door and slipped into the driver’s seat.

‘Crazy,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Only a bloody reporter would be expected to go and ferret out cops when he can’t even afford to keep his car legal.’

He knew he could still live at home with his parents and save himself a fortune, he had done so for his first year or so on the paper after university, but there was no way he could conduct the kind of sex life he wanted and needed from Durraton Vicarage. The back seat of the mini did not lend itself to the games he liked to play.

He firmly dismissed all further thoughts of sex. The prospect of getting to grips with a major story had already wiped out any initial feelings of irritation at being disturbed. The girl he had left in his bed was now a million miles from his mind. She no longer mattered — anyway she would still be there for him when he returned, whenever that was. The violent private joy which had so recently engulfed his whole being had happened to another man. Now Mark was on the real job.

Mark lived at the top of Pelham Bay — on the edge of the woodland leading down to the cliffs and less than a mile from the beach. Born, bred, and schooled locally, he had many friends and contacts in the area. He knew his way around, and as he wound along the coast road had already decided which of his contacts he would visit first. Bill Turpin. Who else?

Four

Down by the beach it had been business as usual. Just up from the slipway, Bill Turpin’s lads — bare-chested and belligerently beautiful — were handing out the deckchairs.

In Pelham Bay things had been the same for as long as anyone could remember. Bill Turpin, getting older, but still raking in the holidaymakers’ cash just like shovelling sand off the beach. And a succession of young bloods, meaningless St Christophers nestling among newly sprouting body hair, showing off their bronzed torsos to the straw-hat brigade.

On this hot August Sunday, the deckchair boys leaned luxuriously sullen against the sea wall. Theirs was the summer job for the budding Romeos of Pelham Bay, and has always remained so. Some things never change. An ideally idle way for students and professional loafers to make some beer money and eye up the imported talent. A job calling for little or no mental effort.

Old Bill Turpin habitually wore baggy grey flannels and grubby gym shoes without laces, so he shuffled when he walked. He was shirtless and weathered ebony by years of sun, salt, and wind — mostly salt and wind as he lived in Pelham Bay. Against his dark, gnarled body, even the deckchair lads seemed pale, plump and baby-like.

Bill had been born sixty-six years earlier in a fisherman’s cottage just back from the harbour in the fishing village of Brinton, set on the river estuary just a few miles up the coast from Pelham Bay. He was a man fashioned by the cruelty of the times in which he had grown to manhood and then to middle age, his life blighted forever by forces and quarrels of which he had little knowledge and over which he had no control.

He came from a long line of fishermen. Men who knew from some deep instinct inside them where the fish would be that night. In season they caught salmon in the River Brin, stretching their nets across the river to trap the shoals of big rich fish swimming upstream to spawn. More often they sailed out to sea at night to catch herring and mackerel and whiting, and came back the next day or sometimes several days later with holds full of fish that they sold at the quayside.

It was a way of life the young Bill Turpin was naturally expected to follow, and did as surely as day followed night.

Bill was born just late enough to escape service in the First World War, but two of his elder brothers died in the trenches. Bill could still remember the day his family learned that his brother Edgar had died.

His father, a quiet, undemonstrative Devonian, had wrapped his strong brown arms around his sole surviving son and held him tight.

‘They’ll take you away over my dead body, son,’ he had muttered. ‘I’ll swing before I lose another lad in the trenches.’

That war ended in time to save Bill Turpin. But it seemed he was destined to suffer at the hands of warring nations. In 1933 he married. He was twenty-nine years old. By local standards then he had taken his time in settling down. When he did wed he was sure as eggs were eggs that curly-haired Dorothy, twenty-year-old daughter of the village butcher, was the girl for him. Life seemed straightforward. It did not occur to Bill or his father, growing old now, but still fishing, that the world would be crazy enough to launch itself into another mighty bloodbath.

Bill’s only sadness at that time was that he and Dorothy had no children. Then just as once again a world war was looming, the miracle happened. Dorothy found she was pregnant and gave birth to twin girls. The fisherman’s happiness was complete. When his call-up finally came — he was pushing forty but the navy needed his seaman’s knowledge and his boat — he was so convinced of his own strength and powers of survival that he saw the war as just a brief interval in his domestic contentment.

And he felt that in many ways he was a lucky man. The government commandeered his solid wooden fishing boat to use as a minesweeper to detect the German acoustic mines which were detonated only by metal-hulled ships. Bill was trained as a naval officer to skipper his own vessel. There was security for him in that. He was fighting on his own territory, after all.

Then came the telegram telling him his wife and daughters were dead. A crippled German bomber had emptied its load over Brinton before crashing into the sea. A freak accident. The pilot had ditched the bombs to lighten his aircraft. He scored a direct random hit on the cottage where Bill had been born and where he and his wife had made their home with his widowed father. The whole family were asleep in bed when the bomb dropped. Grandfather, mother, and baby daughters died instantly.

Bill Turpin’s heart also died that day. He signed his fishing boat over to the navy and volunteered for all the toughest jobs going, anywhere and everywhere his increasingly grateful chiefs wanted to send him. They assigned him to a special operations unit. Bill behaved as if he had a death wish, and it was against the odds that he survived. In the years to come he never spoke of his war days, but he returned in 1945 a different man to the gentle good-humoured Bill of pre-war days.

He soon surprised his old North Devon friends by buying, outright, a little house just out of Pelham Bay, an isolated stone-built cottage carved into the cliffside and with sweeping views out to sea. Bill explained that business ventures during the war had made him a few bob, and now he wanted to invest it in a new life. But how an impecunious fisherman had come to make the kind of money he now seemed to have was the subject of much speculation in the area.

Soon after the war there had been a huge robbery at the grand old Exmoor house owned by the then Earl of Lynmouth. Art treasures worth millions had allegedly been stolen, and Lord Lynmouth killed. Few could remember the details, but Bill had been some kind of a suspect for a bit. Nothing came of it, of course, and the police had apparently investigated him only briefly, yet the rumours stuck around for generations and grew with the passage of time — as rumours are wont to do. Whenever there was a major crime anywhere in Britain, people in North Devon were inclined to mention the name of Bill Turpin. If you kept your ear to the ground in the pubs of Pelham Bay or Durraton you would hear whispers about old Bill being the brains, the muscle, or even the getaway driver — something never believed by anybody who had ever seen him drive — for everything from The Great Train Robbery to the famous escape of Mad Axeman Frank Mitchell from Dartmoor prison.

Mark Piddle and a generation of keen young reporters before him had all heard the gossip, and attempted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to unearth the hidden truth — assuming there was one. But far from being revealed as a closet master criminal, if Bill Turpin had anything at all to hide, his tracks were superbly well covered. Consistent lack of success inevitably led to loss of interest for Mark, as it had to the other would-be Carl Bernsteins before him. None of them were ever known to have found out anything worth a line anywhere.

Bill became regarded as a kind of mystery man, which he seemed almost to encourage and enjoy. Yet there appeared to be no mystery about his love life. Dorothy had indeed been the girl for him. The only girl. There was to be no other woman ever for Bill Turpin. He lived quietly for a while in his little house, and then gradually started to capitalise on the holiday trade which was on the up and up in Pelham Bay.

He would never fish again — that was part of his other life — but he seemed to have the knack of spotting what holidaymakers wanted and making cash from it. He had brought money back from the war all right, and he knew how to invest it in a way of life he understood. He remained a shadowy figure to the rest of Pelham Bay, a man nursing a terminally broken heart, asking for help from nobody, and accepting none. He appeared to have no friends and sought none. He was the sole survivor of his immediate family. A cousin had sought him out soon after the war and been sent packing. Bill Turpin wanted nobody close to him, nobody knowing his business — and nobody did.

He had come back from the war looking twenty years older than when he had left — yet the twenty-five years since then had barely altered him. Perhaps his back was a little more bent, but in 1970 Bill was still fit and strong in a slow sort of way. His eyes were a clear piercing blue and looked right through you. His head was bald, but so it had been when he came home in 1946, the crown of his head rubbed smooth by his tin helmet. The little hair left had whitened with the years, and his face appeared more leathery. That was all. Bill’s early life as a fisherman had already engraved his skin with deeply etched creases.

He had become a landmark in Pelham Bay as the boss of a selection of seaside tourist-traps. He did not care how he looked or what people thought of him.

Jip, his black labrador-collie cross, followed Bill everywhere, walking at the same ponderous pace just a foot or so from her master’s heels. Occasionally Bill would look down at the devoted dog and curse her in a mumbled growl.

Winter and summer he wore a grimy trilby hat, the brim turned down all the way round, and it was his habit to wear the hat indoors and out. In the summer the trilby protected his bald head from the sun. Once or twice Bill had suffered a sunburned head. Nowadays the trilby was never removed. The deckchair boys would joke about how Bill must look standing naked. His face and body weathered ebony. The top of his head and his legs startling white.

In winter he wore shirts with frayed collars beneath heavy cardigans and a big tweed overcoat with the collar turned up. The temperature of the day made little difference. He would don his thick winter layers and his heavy lace-up boots in early October, and stick to the overcoat and cardigans, however mild the climate, until shortly after the spring bank holiday. Then he would strip down to his baggy grey flannels, and, no matter how cold it might be, was rarely seen to put on a shirt, never mind a coat, until October.

Occasionally when it rained he would unearth the ageing military riding mac which he had picked up somewhere on his travels during the war.

‘They don’t make coats like this any more,’ he would sigh, struggling into the stiff raincoat without bothering with a shirt beneath. The buckles were corroded and jammed almost solid, but Bill battled with them relentlessly. Then he would turn up the high collar and happily face any deluge, although, in reality, the old coat’s waterproofing power must have been long worn out.

Bill’s life appeared to be devoted to the making of money, and spending was no real part of it. He had one good suit, although it did smell of mothballs, and a fairly respectable car, a five-year-old Morris 1300. And once a week in the winter he would spruce himself up in the dark grey suit, dress in the only shirt he possessed without a frayed collar, select one of half a dozen unexciting ties in dark blues and reds, and drive to market in Durraton.

That was Bill’s big outing. He would buy all the meat and vegetables he needed for the following week, chat to the few tradesmen he knew, and spend the lunchtime in one of the market pubs playing euchre with dominoes. He enjoyed his market day outing every Tuesday, and would regularly down five or six pints of strong bitter. Then, as Tuesday was the only day of the week he ever had a drink, he would drive sedately but rather unsteadily home. You could get away with it in those days.

In the summer, of course, there was no market-day excursion. Bill stayed steadily at his post, raking in the tourists’ cash, wandering contentedly among his money traps. There was the giant slide in the fairground. At two shillings for as many goes as you like, in half a season the huge, ugly, scaffolding-like contraption would have already paid for itself many times over.

Then there was the bob-a-ride plastic elephant outside the public lavatory by the south-side putting green, and the belly boards and Malibu boards which Bill rented out from the deckchair stand. The slot machine paradise of Penny Parade, where nothing cost a penny any more, remained probably the most successful money-spinner of them all.

Bill Turpin could afford his deceptively lazy air. The seaside life brought him in a small fortune every summer. In the winter he could put his feet up while inventing new ways of emptying the tourist purse. Not so long ago, visitors to Penny Parade would have been happy with a few fruit machines, a couple of penny rollers, an automatic shooting range, What the Butler Saw, and an elderly football table. By 1970 they were already demanding electronic bingo and elaborate light-flashing sensation instead of those simple golden-oldie games of carefully rigged chance. Whatever the customers called for, Bill Turpin gave them. And they paid for it over and over again.

So the cash flowed on this particular Sunday in drought-hit Britain. It was a magical day of bright blue skies and wispy white clouds and the crowds swarmed to the seaside in the hope of finding a Spanish sun beating down on English sand. But dear old Pelham Bay did not have a reputation for being the bleakest beach in North Devon for nothing. The wind was sending a sandstorm along the beach and whistling up the slipway which separates the pebble ridge stretching untidily northwards from the grand old sea wall to the south.

By midday the crowds were streaming landward of the iron-grey pebble ridge to shelter from the tornado that in other seaside towns would have been a gentle breeze. They dug hollows in the pebbles on the burrows side of the ridge and stretched their bodies agonisingly over the stones. Ultimately the discomfort of their angular beds beneath, and the burning of the sun above given a knife edge by the wind from which there was never a true hiding place, drove them to seek other amusement. And when they surfaced from their pebble pits, the holiday hordes, skins reddened and blotchy now, strolled up and down the seafront determined to enjoy themselves regardless.

With the true resolution of the British holidaymaker, they tucked into the local gastronomic delicacies, some not so delicate. The menu was varied: homemade ice cream, the artificial looking whip kings and pink-and-green rainbow-striped concoctions of the mass-produced sort, synthetic hot dogs, takeaway chow mein and chop suey, Wimpy-burgers, fish and chips in cardboard cartons, bottled cockles and mussels pretending to be fresh, toffee apples, lukewarm tea in paper cups, fizzy pop, candy floss, and drinks on a stick.

Bill leaned with apparent idleness on the wall gazing at something floating in the sea. Or was there anything, right out across the bay beyond the rocks? There was just a speck in the distance. Bill’s eyes might be tired but when he stared out to sea he could spot what others missed: the way the tip of a wave curled, a patch of dark water maybe, or the whirl of a current. All clues of some kind to a true seaman.

His face was screwed up tight against the bright light of midday glare.

‘Could be nought,’ he muttered.

He swung slowly away from the wall and the sea beyond and strolled across the promenade to his deckchair stand.

Johnny Cooke was over by the deckchairs watching old Bill through narrowed eyes. You could see his brain turning over, Johnny reckoned. What was he thinking, what was he plotting, what was he remembering as he stood there? Was he just counting his money in his head? That was what they all said, in Pelham Bay, and as one of Bill Turpin’s deckchair lads Johnny had plenty of opportunity to indulge in the fruitless pursuit of trying to read his boss’s mind. He could sense Bill’s ice cool gaze swinging towards him. Boring into him. Johnny smartly turned his back and returned to his other favourite pastime of looking the grockles up and down. Grockles, the holidaymakers who annually invaded his beautiful county, responsible for turning lovely seaside spots like Pelham Bay into glorified shanty towns. Them and the greed they inspired.

A short, fat man, wearing the kind of Bermuda shorts that had been in fashion five years earlier, was struggling up the slipway. Behind him three small children were squabbling noisily, one in tears.

‘Go on, go on, here’s the money. Get yourself an ice cream and shut up, for Gawd’s sake,’ the man shouted.

It was just a typical Sunday in Pelham Bay. The smell of fish and chips and hot-dog onions drowned the tang of the sea. The rattle of the fruit machines, the clamour of the fairground, the everlasting hubbub of family quarrels and playing children, could all be heard loud and clear above the roar of the waves.

A couple of hours or more passed routinely. The sun, not quite so burning hot now, had moved around in the sky and shone on Johnny again. He basked in its gentler warmth. He felt drowsy.

But suddenly he was startled out of his pleasant half-wakefulness by a piercing scream which rose above the holiday clamour and shattered his fleeting sense of peace forever. It was unnaturally high, a scream of almost inhuman shock and fear.

Johnny jumped to his feet, no laziness about him now, and like all the holidaymakers around him, ran to the sea wall and peered in the direction of the screaming.

It was Jenny Stone he could hear. Jenny Stone overcome with shock, yelling her heart out.

Five

Mark Piddle had arrived at the murder scene little more than a couple of hours after Jenny’s shock discovery. Jim Sykes had got the word long before the news had been officially released. You had to hand it to the old goat, thought Mark grudgingly. And he would have been even quicker if he hadn’t stayed at home after the phone call to give Irene one final seeing to. Mind you, that hadn’t taken long. He roared the Cooper into the heart of Pelham Bay, and grinned to himself. Not a bad life...

He swung the Cooper, naked tyres squealing, into the sharp corner of the road down to the beach. It reached a dead end at the slipway, and to the right was a public car park. Mark was a keen surfer and a member of the surfing club, based in those days in the little wooden hut at the rear of the car park. He waved cheerily at the car park attendant. There was a kind of unofficial agreement that the surfers parked for free, but you had to keep the grumpy white-coated attendant sweet. A group of the lads were sitting forlornly outside the hut enjoying the sun, but despondent because that day, even in windy Pelham Bay, there was little or no surf.

Mark parked and briskly walked the hundred yards or so to the deckchair stand in search of Bill Turpin. There was not much happened in Pelham Bay that Bill Turpin didn’t know about. Bill was not a gossip, and it was partly that which made his value as a contact so much greater to a reporter. If you could get the non-talkers to talk to you, then you were always on the verge of cracking the ‘big one’ — or so the Jim Sykeses of the newspaper world always promised.

Mark picked himself a chair, set it up, and sat down next to Johnny Cooke.

‘Wotcher Casanova,’ he said.

Johnny whistled a few unrecognisable notes and grinned at him. Mark was the only person who ever referred to Johnny’s court case of the previous year. Everyone else pretended it had never happened. Johnny would have preferred it to be out in the open, so that he could explain to anyone he cared enough about that it hadn’t been the way it seemed. It really hadn’t. He found the direct approach a welcome change. It made him feel comfortable with Mark. He knew Mark’s amusement was genuine. The reporter really couldn’t give a damn.

He held out his hand. ‘That’ll be a bob for the deckchair, thank you,’ he said.

‘You have to be joking,’ replied Mark. ‘Where’s the Walt Disney of the West of England?’

‘On the prowl as usual. And if you don’t get out of that chair smartish he’ll make the pair of us into sausage meat for his hot dogs.’

Mark produced a packet of Gauloises and lit one — it was more of an affectation than a habit.

He puffed a cloud of smoke into the blue sky. ‘Your boss and me, we’re like that, mate.’ He held up his hand with two fingers crossed. ‘I’m telling you.’

Johnny was saved from answering by the arrival of Bill Turpin who, chewing his foul-smelling pipe, seemed to materialise from nowhere. He had an uncanny knack of doing that.

‘Doing all right on that paper of yours, then, boy.’ A statement rather than a question.

Mark started. ‘Yeah. Oh yeah.’

‘Well then, price of a deckchair won’t worry you. Johnny, give him a ticket.’

Mark fished around in his pocket for change.

There was no point in arguing with Bill Turpin. The old man chewed his pipe some more. ‘Discount for locals,’ he said. ‘That’ll be a tanner.’

‘Right,’ said Mark. ‘You’ve taken my last penny as usual, so what about some help? What do you know about this body, Bill? Is it on?’

‘’Tis on, lad, like I told the police...’ he began. That made sense, thought Mark. Bill would be first stop for the cops too.

‘I don’t know much worth telling... I was standing there by the ice cream van, just looking out over the sea wall and I could see something floating in the water...’

Bill’s voice trailed off. ‘Anyway, next thing I know Reg Stone’s maid is screaming her poor little heart out right across the bay.’

‘Reg Stone’s maid? The councillor?’

‘Yep. That maid of his is down here all summer with them mazed lot who lie around on the lavatory roof over by the lido.’

‘Oh I know that lot. Don’t think I know the girl though.’

Mark had never even asked her name that night at the school dance. Unusually for him he could still remember every detail of his encounter with Jennifer Stone by the dustbins, although he had no idea who she was. He had been turned on by her to distraction, and it had been days before his excitement had died down.

But the teacher who had interrupted that promising encounter, whilst not identifying Jenny who kept in the shadows, had identified Mark as he ran off. The school threatened Mark with the police if he ever went near one of their pupils again, and he was left in no doubt that if he tried to pursue the girl who had so aroused him, he would end up in jail. It was only because his father was the school chaplain that the police had not been called this time, he was told. He had shortly afterwards found Irene, and had been using her ever since as a poor but willing substitute. Nothing that he did to Irene ever seemed really to satisfy him. Yet the young body that had clung to him so eagerly in the dustbin yard had left a lasting impression.

Mark had his notebook out now.

‘How does she fit into it all then?’

‘Found the body, poor maid. Out swimming.’

‘Hey, what a great line. I’d better have words with young Miss Stone...’

‘You’ll be bleddy lucky. Took her straight off to ’ospital. In a terrible state. Terrible.’

‘Shock, huh?’ Mark turned to a clean page in his notebook, jotted down ‘Stone’ and began to doodle the letter S into an elaborate snake. He picked Bill’s brains about the time the body was found and any other details he could think of, but the older man was reticent, even for him.

‘No way it could have been an accident, I don’t suppose?’ Mark looked at Bill thoughtfully.

‘Not the way I heard it,’ said the old man. ‘Strangled. That don’t happen by accident, do it?’

‘Ah. Cops tell you that?’

‘Mebbe. Cops! Pah. Don’t know what they think I do all day apart from sticking my nose into other folks’ business.’

Mark laughed. ‘Trouble is, you usually do know other folks’ business, don’t you?’

‘Too sharp by ’alf, boy, that’s your trouble. You lads today need a couple of years in the army. That’d wipe the smirk off your smug young faces. Put on a bit of muscle too.’ He shook Mark by the shoulder.

Mark tried to wrench away the old man’s hand, but he could not force the bony fingers apart.

‘Jesus Christ, Bill. Let go, will you?’

Bill obliged and Mark rubbed his sore shoulder. Bill looked pleased with himself, he was almost grinning. He secretly enjoyed his encounters with Mark when the young reporter came looking for information. They had had each other’s measure from the beginning, these two. None the less Mark had no idea that Bill was even remotely aware of his attempts to uncover the secrets of the old man’s past. Mark should have expected that, because he knew Bill always found out about anything and everything happening in Pelham Bay. But with the brash confidence of youth, it had somehow not occurred to Mark that Bill would have been aware of his futile investigations. In fact Bill had watched, untroubled, as Mark fruitlessly questioned distant relatives, business contacts, and anyone even vaguely connected with the old man. In a way Bill accepted this kind of attention as his right — more of an accolade than an intrusive insult, and he was quite certain that no local paper hack was going to make any discoveries likely to cause him concern. The older man would amuse himself giving Mark a bit of a hard time, but even so he always seemed to have some little gem that he would pass on — just as he had on this occasion. There was a lot in Mark which Bill Turpin recognised and which Mark Piddle had yet to learn about himself.

Bill thrust his right hand deep into the pocket of his old grey flannels, and with his left removed the pipe which all the time had been clasped between his teeth.

‘Load of nancy boys, you youngsters today...’

He paused, looking as if he might say more, then shoved the pipe back between his teeth and stomped off towards the Penny Parade. The faithful Jip, dozing in the shade of the deckchair pile, climbed creakily to her feet and followed.

Mark shouted after him. Bill glanced over his shoulder, still walking forwards. ‘Do they know who the dead girl is yet?’ called Mark.

Bill Turpin stopped walking. Mark was by his side again now. Bill blew a cloud of foul smoke into his face. Mark recoiled, coughing, and was sure he spotted a look of some satisfaction on Bill’s face.

The old man turned on his heel and strode off without replying, upsetting the plans of his dog, already looking for another place to settle for a sleep.

‘Thank you so much,’ Mark muttered to himself.

He set off along the seafront towards the lido. Police were mingling with the crowds asking questions, but Mark did not see any people that he knew. He paused by the lavatory roof, raised a couple of feet above the upper path. The lavatory itself was entered from the lower path, almost at sea level. A girl and a boy were still there, squatting close together, talking intently.

‘Hi. Mark Piddle. Durraton Gazette.’

The girl, shapely and sure of herself, stood up. She was wearing the briefest of bikinis. Mark found his eyes almost directly in line with her crotch and tried not to stare.

‘If it’s Jenny you want, she’s in hospital,’ said the girl.

‘So I heard. Did you see anything?’

‘We heard Jenny screaming and went to help her out of the water. A couple of policemen clambered out across the rocks to try to bring the body in. But we never saw it...’

The girl sniffed and the corners of her lips curled downwards. Mark thought how unpleasant her facial expression was. He preferred to look at her ripe young body.

‘You don’t know who the dead girl was, then?’

‘No,’ the girl caught hold of the boy’s hand.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Mark.

‘Pussy Galore,’ said the girl, simpering.

Mark was suddenly irritated.

‘You wouldn’t know what to do with it, darling, and nor would your boyfriend, I reckon,’ he snapped at her, glaring at the boy and daring him to retaliate. The boy flushed and fumbled for words. It was to be a long time before Todd Mallett would grow into the kind of man who was not easily intimidated by anyone.

‘Clear off,’ he said lamely.

‘Yeah, clear off,’ echoed the girl, no longer quite so sure of herself.

Mark gazed steadily at the pair of them. They were embarrassed now. He was suddenly sure they were both virgins.

‘If you want any more lessons you know where to find me,’ he said.

The girl looked pleadingly at the boy. He tugged at her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go. Ignore him.’

Mark felt better now. He turned and jogged back along the seafront to his car. There was nothing left to see. The body was long gone. The only police in sight were junior officers asking routine questions. Mark supposed the County CID had been called in, but he would probably do best on the phone to the cops that evening.

Jenny Stone. The girl who had bumped into a body while out swimming. That was the obvious story. He climbed into the driver’s seat of the battered Cooper.

‘A nice new open sports job, that’s what you should be driving, Mark boy.’

The mini started at the third attempt.

‘Come on, heap,’ Mark coaxed.

He grated the little car into reverse gear, kicking up a cloud of dust as he turned sharply and roared out of the car park. He passed a couple of the boys from the nationals just arriving, and started to make his plans. He would stop off at home, make his police calls, see if anyone could name the body and quickly file a few parts of early lineage. If he could get some sort of story together before the staff men, it could be worth a few bob. Then he would drive to Reg Stone’s house and wait for Jenny to be brought home. With a bit of luck, everybody else would go to the hospital. The national pack, area men up from Plymouth and down from Bristol, wouldn’t know where Reg Stone lived, just back from the burrows in Pelham Bay — but Mark did, because Reg Stone was a councillor. The others would find out fast enough, but Mark would have the edge. If Jenny came out of hospital tonight, he might just be alone on the doorstep. He smelt an exclusive. He glanced at his watch. Jenny Stone would not be released from hospital for a bit, he was sure. If he got home quickly now there would be time for more than just filing some lineage. That sexual banter with those two good-looking kids really had made him randy. The girl was sixteen or seventeen, Mark supposed. Irene was twenty-one, but she still had almost the body of a child.

By now he was driving so fast he almost lost the Cooper on the hairpin bend at the bottom of the hill leading to his flat. He regained control by the skin of his teeth, screeched to a halt and ran up the stairs three at a time. The front door was open, and he quickly bolted it behind him. Irene came into the living room from the kitchen to greet him. She was wearing a tight cotton dress. He could see her nipples through the material. She started to speak to him. He unzipped his flies and his cock virtually jumped out through the gap. Even he sometimes wished it wouldn’t do that.

Irene wasn’t sure she could take any more that day. She took a step backwards. He didn’t even notice. His arms were around her. He picked her up and bent her face downwards over the back of the sofa, pushing her dress up around her waist as he did so.

‘Not there, Mark, please, I’m so sore,’ she said.

‘Open your legs wider then,’ he hissed. She did so. He thrust into her and started to come almost at once. It was like that for him sometimes. Particularly after he had been working.

An hour later he was sitting in the Cooper outside the Stones’ terraced house. Waiting in the dark. He had been joined by the Durraton Gazette’s only photographer. At eleven o’clock, just as he had given up hope, Mr and Mrs Stone arrived home with their only daughter.

The snapper had his instructions. Don’t snatch.

Naturally he disobeyed and immediately shoved camera and flash into Jenny Stone’s face. Her father was not pleased.

‘She’s upset,’ he said. ‘Leave her alone, you buggers.’

In the mere split second of flashlight, Mark had been instantly sure he knew Jenny from somewhere. He cursed his snapper, but resolutely continued with his persuasive routine of logic and sweet-talk. One quick chat with him now and it would keep all the other reporters at bay, he would tell the story sensitively, etc. etc. Jenny stared at the young man. She was coming around from shock. Gradually she began to realise who he was.

‘It’s all right, Dad, I may as well get it over with. They said at the hospital half the world’s press wanted to talk to me.’

Reg Stone gave in reluctantly. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said to Mark. ‘She needs sleep.’

Mark followed parents and daughter into the house and shook hands with all three of them. As he did so Jenny smiled a small half smile. They were in the brightly lit hallway by now, and Mark could see her clearly. In spite of herself and all that was happening, there was a direct challenging look in her eye.

Jesus. It was that kid he’d nearly had at the school dance. Jenny. Of course. He hadn’t bothered to ask her name that night, he’d been so horny, but when she had phoned his office she told them to tell him Jenny had called, Jenny from the dance. She must be seventeen now. God, she’d been ripe then. He remembered the feel of her. She hadn’t just complied. She had gone for it. Extraordinary. He had wanted to go back for her the next day. How he had wanted to, he just hadn’t dared after what had happened. Strange how well he could remember the sensations of that night. Two years on and he could still smell and taste her.

He pulled himself together. Put all those thoughts out of his mind. Gently he began to question Jenny.

He was a good interviewer, a natural. She was very articulate. She spoke in quotes. She was badly shaken, but calm. It was a great talk, and Mark knew it would make first-class copy.

When Mark and the snapper left, Jenny followed him out of the door and called after him. He turned back to her. She was silhouetted against the light from the house and her head was tilted slightly to one side. He could not see her face — just the shape of her standing there — but her body language was eloquent. She looked indignant and purposeful.

‘Why did you never contact me again after the dance?’ she asked quietly.

He was astonished. He didn’t know what to say.

She continued to interrogate him. ‘Why were you always out when I called your office?’

He knew he was mumbling and stumbling. How could she throw him like this? She was just a girl.

Eventually he found some words: ‘You were only fifteen, for Chrissake, you were jailbait,’ he said. ‘I was warned off. Heavily.’

‘I’m seventeen now,’ she replied.

The photographer had got into his car and switched on his headlights. As she spoke, Jennifer’s face was suddenly illuminated — one eyebrow raised as if in contempt. She parted her lips very slightly in that half smile. It was a mocking smile — and yet so seductive. She made him nervous. It was ridiculous, she was still only a kid. Mark heard himself giggle weakly. He almost ran to the Cooper, gunned the engine and shot off down the street. He could feel her eyes on the back of his neck as he drove away. It made his skin prickle with excitement.

Jennifer Stone made two decisions that night: firstly that she would have Mark Piddle. This time he wouldn’t get away. He would be the one to take her virginity. He had already very nearly done so after all. Soon, very soon, they would make love together. But this time it would be on her terms. When she chose. And somehow watching him work as a newspaperman had made her want him even more. She sensed the thrill that he got from his job and she wanted that too — which took her to the second decision. She would start writing to local papers tomorrow. She would become a journalist like Mark.

Strange that she could think that way on such a night. But she did.

Exhausted, she fell asleep. But in her dreams she found the body again, only this time it had no face. She woke screaming. It took her mother almost an hour and two more of the tranquillisers she had been given to calm her daughter down.

Six

Johnny Cooke’s mother heard on the six o’clock local news that the body of a girl, believed to have been murdered, had been found in the sea at Pelham Bay. She shook her head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know,’ she said to herself. ‘What is the world coming to?’

Mrs Mabel Cooke had been born and brought up in Durraton. She knew everyone, and everyone knew her. She had that smugness about her found among certain people who live in a small town and are overly sure of themselves and their social standing.

She busied herself in the kitchen preparing a high tea. Neither Johnny nor her husband would be home much before seven, but Mrs Cooke liked to be prepared. She sliced meat from the lunchtime joint of pork, put tomatoes in a dish, laid the table with a selection of homemade pickles, and put three apple dumplings in the oven to warm gently. There were cold boiled potatoes and wrapped sliced bread to eat with the meat, tomatoes and pickles. Mrs Cooke did most of her own baking, but saw nothing incongruous in providing tasteless sliced bread along with her homemade delicacies. The apple dumplings she had baked the day before, using big green cooking apples wrapped in a thick layer of shortcrust pastry.

Soon after seven, her husband and son arrived. They sat at the kitchen table and waited for Mrs Cooke to brew the tea before touching the food. Then they ate quickly. After they had finished, Mr Cooke lit his pipe.

‘Did you hear about that murdered girl?’ he asked his wife.

‘I did. I tell you, Charlie, I don’t know what the world is coming to, that I don’t. Do they know who she is yet?’

Charlie Cooke shook his head. ‘Reg Stone’s maid found the body. Johnny ’eard ’er screaming, didn’t you boy?’

Johnny nodded.

Mrs Cooke rubbed her hands together mournfully. ‘I hope and pray it’s not a local girl, that’s all,’ she said.

‘Why?’ asked Johnny. ‘If it’s not a local girl, doesn’t her life matter then, Mother?’

‘Don’t be so cheeky, young man,’ snapped Charlie Cooke. ‘That’s your trouble, son. Too quick on the draw when you shouldn’t be and not quick enough when you should. You know full well what your mother means...’

Johnny picked up his cup of tea and headed for the sitting room.

‘And where do you think you’re going now?’ said his father.

‘Television. There’s a film...’

‘You get worse, boy, ’stead of better. No chance of you helping your mother wash up is there?’

‘Oh, leave the boy alone, Charlie. I’m happier doing it on my own. Let him be.’

Johnny slunk gratefully into the sitting room and buried his senses in the over-dramatic thriller just starting on ITV. It treated him to a car chase, a shoot-out, half a dozen killings and an armed robbery within the first few minutes.

Mr Cooke soon followed his son into the room and, lowering himself into his favourite chair, grumbled: ‘As if there isn’t enough bleddy violence in real life, you have to watch it on TV too.’

Johnny ignored him. His father grunted, picked up the Sunday Express and turned to the sports pages. When she had finished the washing-up, Mabel Cooke joined her husband and son in front of the TV. About half an hour later the phone rang. It was Mr Cooke’s Rotary Club policeman friend, Chief Inspector Ted Robson. The two men were on a committee together organising the annual fête, and, as they discussed final arrangements, Ted Robson described how he had been called out that afternoon when the body was discovered in Pelham Bay.

When Mr Cooke returned to the living room he remarked conversationally: ‘Ted says that dead woman worked out at the Royal Western Golf Club — behind the bar. Marjorie something or other, Ted said...’

Johnny stopped watching television. He looked blankly at his father.

‘You’ve played a bit there with your Uncle Len, Johnny,’ said his mother. ‘Did you know her?’

‘Know her?’ Johnny repeated vacantly. ‘Um. I’m not sure.’

Johnny’s father reached sideways and shook his son by the shoulder.

‘Wake up boy, will you? Your mother asked you a question. Did you bleddy know ’er or not?’

‘I... I suppose so. I saw her about the place. Yes.’

Johnny was twiddling a piece of hair around his fingers now.

‘Where was she from?’ his mother continued. ‘What was she like then?’

Johnny shook his head.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ his father asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Johnny got up and walked quickly to the door. ‘I’ve got to go out.’

‘I thought you wanted to watch this bleddy film,’ said his father.

‘I did, but I forgot something...’ Johnny was on his way out.

‘Where are you going?’ called his father.

Johnny had already slammed the front door shut behind him and was running down the road.

Seven

At the bottom of his street, Johnny stopped running, turned around and walked back up the alley leading to the rear of the house where he stealthily took his bicycle out of the garden shed. He cycled as fast as he could down to Pelham Bay, straight to the golf club. Two police cars stood in the car park. Johnny recognised one of the caddies, a boy who used to be at his school. As casually as he could manage, he asked what was going on.

‘They’ve found Marjorie Benson dead,’ came the reply.

Johnny cycled on to the slipway, peddling like a lunatic. He propped his bike against the deckchair stand and set off along the three miles of beach. He took off his battered desert boots and red nylon socks and walked barefoot, kicking the sand with his toes. As he walked his chin sank lower and lower into his chest, and he began to sob great heaving sobs which racked his body. The tears came freely, burning hot and pouring down his cheeks, soaking the front of his tee shirt.

A couple taking a late stroll along the water’s edge looked at him curiously as he passed. Johnny didn’t even notice them. His grief was the grief of a very young man, too young to know that time can heal and despair does lift. His world had ended and Johnny made no attempt to wipe away the tears. It was the first time Johnny had wept since the death of his grandfather, and once again he felt that overwhelming sense of guilt. This time he was to blame.

He stooped to pick up a handful of pebbles and threw them angrily into the sea, tears still pouring down his face. He squatted in the sand, sobbing for what seemed like hours. But in the end the tears did stop. Dusk had turned to pitch blackness and within its comforting cloak he relived the six months of his life since he had first met Marjorie Benson.

It had been the day of his eighteenth birthday. His uncle had invited him to play a round of golf with him in the morning. Johnny was a natural athlete, he had been given golf lessons at school, and although he played very little he wasn’t bad. He had the makings of a good golfer. At lunchtime Uncle Len had made a great show of buying him a pint in the clubhouse — it was his eighteenth birthday after all. Marjorie was behind the bar. He had been aware of her from the moment he walked into the place. He found her extraordinarily attractive, and to his delight she seemed to take every opportunity to chat to him. She didn’t talk down to him, either, the way he suspected most women of her age would — he guessed she was in her early thirties. She looked stunning in a simple short black skirt and soft clingy white sweater which emphasised her sleek boyish figure. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her body as she moved. She caught him looking, raised her eyebrows inquiringly and smiled. He blushed crimson and was glad to be asked to join his uncle for lunch in the dining room.

It was while Uncle Len was visiting the gents’ that Marjorie strode through the room, barely pausing as she dropped a piece of paper into Johnny’s lap. It was a scribbled note inviting him to her room in the clubhouse and telling him how to get there.

‘Make sure nobody sees you,’ he was instructed.

Johnny couldn’t believe it. Could this possibly mean what he thought it meant? As his uncle returned to the table, Johnny was afraid that he was still blushing and would give himself away. After lunch he turned down the offered lift back to Durraton with a vague excuse. As soon as the coast was clear he nipped up the stairs behind the bar and found Marjorie’s room as directed. Surreptitiously he tapped on the door. When she opened it he saw that she had changed into a shirt which reached almost to her knees. She was wearing nothing else. Several buttons were undone at the front and he could just glimpse the slight swell of her breasts. Her legs were bare and brown and so were her feet. He even found her toes attractive. She leaned forward and lightly touched his shoulder, drawing him into the room.

He was overwhelmed by the nearness of her. He thought that she smelt of spring flowers and cool clear water drawn straight from a well. She closed the door behind him and he stood quite still, his arms hanging limply by his sides. He was terribly nervous. He did not know what to do. She stepped towards him, placed her hands loosely behind his neck and kissed him very gently on the lips. Her touch was feather light. He thought he had not felt anything so lovely in the whole of his life. She tasted of honey. He thought he had never tasted anything so delicious. He did not move. He realised he was frightened. He had been ever since the court case. Now here was a complete stranger who was making all the going. Whatever happened he supposed he would get the blame.

She was caressing the back of his neck, long fingers reaching inside his shirt.

‘Your skin is like satin bathed in sunshine,’ she whispered. ‘Warm, smooth, soft.’

She spoke beautiful English, with a slight accent Johnny could not place.

She placed her lips against his ear, barely touching, her tongue flicked against him, wet, tantalising.

‘Would you like to stay here with me a while?’

He felt himself nod.

She smiled. ‘Do you like me?’

He nodded again.

‘Would you like us to lie down together?’

This time he could not even nod. He felt the deep blush spread over his face again and realised sharply just how afraid he was. Crazily he imagined some kind of trap. He pulled himself abruptly away from her, and took several steps backwards in the direction of the door, until he was able to reach behind him for the handle.

‘I can’t,’ he stumbled. ‘You don’t know about me... I just can’t...’

She moved towards him again and touched his cheek. ‘It’s all right. Everything is all right. Just stand where you are, perfectly still.’

Her eyes were locked onto his. There was something eerie about her. It was as if she was hypnotising him, willing him to put his trust in her. She spoke to him softly, reassuringly, resting her arms lightly on his shoulders, before eventually she kissed him again, and gradually he realised that this was going to be different from anything he had previously experienced. And he became quite certain that he could indeed trust her.

He could sense the poetry in her. This was how it had always been meant to be. She began to undress him. She unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off him. Johnny knew he had a fine, well-muscled body. She stepped back and admired him and then she started to stroke his shoulders, his chest, his back, his stomach. Oh, and she was so gentle, so loving, all the time looking deep into his eyes. He reached out for her, ready now to take her in his arms.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. Don’t move, my love.’

She crouched before him and unlaced his shoe, and lifting each foot in turn she took off his shoes and socks. Incredibly, extraordinarily she brushed her lips over his feet, flicked her tongue between his toes. She reached up and undid his belt, unzipped his flies and then slid his trousers down over his long lean thighs. Again he reached for her. Again she told him no.

She pulled his trousers off him, first one leg, and then the other. He stood before her in white Marks & Spencer Y-fronts. This was unreal, he thought. It must be a dream.

‘You are beautiful,’ she told him. ‘So beautiful. You have the body of an angel. My own angel.’

She reached up and felt him through the smooth cotton. Then her fingers tucked inside the waistband and she pulled his pants down. First off one leg and then the other. Now he was naked. He glanced down at himself with interest. He wasn’t even erect. She was in charge of everything this first time they were to be together. Even that.

She took him in her hands and stroked him and he started to swell. Then she knelt up and took him in her mouth. He had not known what she was doing to him was even possible. He really hadn’t. Her lips were so warm, her tongue was so gentle, he thought he was going to die of pleasure.

Eventually she coaxed him to the bed, sitting him on the edge. She stood in front of him and he saw that she was naked. He had not noticed her slip off the loose shirt. He gazed at her, loving every inch of her with his eyes. This time she stood still, enjoying the feel of his gaze, understanding him and his desires. Her breasts were perfect, standing up, pointing towards him. Her flat tummy led to the warm mound of her womanhood and crazily he noticed that her pubic hair was a different colour to the distinctly red hair of her head. She sat on the bed beside him, took his hand and kissed it.

‘Do you want everything I have in me to give? Do you want to give me everything?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’

Her lips were everywhere, all over him, driving him mad. Then she showed him what to do to send her crazy. He stroked her, he sucked her nipples, and his fingers played endlessly in the soft wetness between her legs. By the time she opened her legs wide and guided him into her he was so excited it was over almost at once.

‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered.

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘You are so beautiful. You are going to give me so much pleasure.’

She began to stroke his body again, starting behind the ears, rubbing, teasing, gently prodding, using her hands and her lips. With her fingertips she traced a path from the pit of his throat to the base of his belly, and by the time she got there he was erect again and dying to be inside her once more.

For the second time she took him in her mouth and ran her tongue around him, up and down, around and around his stiffness. Then she mounted him and rode him, rocking backwards and forwards until she reached a wonderful, extravagant climax. As it burst from her, so she tightened around him, almost hurting him, urging even more sensation from her body. He watched her face. Her eyes were closed tight and her lips were apart. Her tongue was moving inside her mouth and her glorious body was opening and closing even more deliciously around him and she made him climax again, squeezing every last drop out of him and into her. He really was in heaven.

But afterwards she sent him away.

‘I was alone and I needed it,’ was all she would tell him. That and: ‘You looked so handsome, so nice.’

Her eyes were full of longing and despair. She clenched her fists tightly, almost as though she were in pain.

He had asked if he could see her again and she had said no. Only when, in desperation, he refused to leave until she agreed, did she give in.

‘Can you get out at night?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he had said recklessly.

‘Next week then, after midnight. I’ll meet you at the back door.’

And so for four wonderful months he had sneaked out of his house at midnight and ridden his bicycle to the golf club where he hid it in bushes before meeting her at the back door. At first they met once a week, then twice, then three, sometimes four times. No wonder Johnny was so sure he had flunked his A-levels. They just could not get enough of each other. She always made him leave before it was light. But he began to live only for those stolen few hours. She taught him so much. He learned to enjoy licking and kissing her sexy wetness as much as she seemed to like to take him in her mouth. He learned where to push with his tongue, where to squeeze with his lips, where to nibble, oh so delicately, with his strong white teeth. He would never forget the first time he brought her to orgasm with his mouth. She bucked beneath him like an unbroken pony. It was so exciting, he had come himself all over the bedclothes.

And he would never forget the first time he climaxed in her mouth. He was sitting naked on the edge of the bed and she was kneeling before him. She was so good at it and her tongue was so clever. She had begun to play with his scrotum with her hands when suddenly it happened. He hadn’t meant to do that to her. He had tried to pull himself away. But she had her hands on his bottom and was dragging him further into her. And as he pumped himself into her sweet mouth he realised that her throat was moving. She was swallowing his come. He found the idea so exciting he thought his orgasm was never going to stop.

Afterwards, when they lay in each other’s arms, warm and snug and satisfied, he had apologised. She had told him never to apologise for an act of love. And anyway, it made her feel that she was drinking his heart.

Drinking his heart! Oh, the glory of her.

He was so happy he wanted to tell the world about their love. But she insisted their meetings be the most carefully guarded secret. And so he had to creep in and out of the clubhouse in the dark to reach the joyous haven of her bedroom.

One night she had asked him what he would most like in all the world to do with her. He had replied that he would like to take her into deep woodland in the sunshine and lie with her among golden daffodils and gently tickle her entire body with a soft fern until she begged him to touch her with his hands and to enter her and give her all of his love. Other women might have mocked him. She was delighted with his answer. The use of language they shared was a great part of their pleasure.

Three days later, Marjorie told him to meet her at a remote crossroads early in the afternoon. She arrived in a borrowed car and they drove deep into the countryside. It was the only time they ever really went anywhere together, and the only time they met in daylight. She parked in an old disused quarry and they ran hand in hand like children deep into dense woodland. It was early May and the spring flowers were still blooming. With lovers’ luck they found a small clearing surrounded by big old oak trees. It was carpeted with daffodils and bluebells.

He had cried out: ‘It’s my daffodil glen.’

And she had replied with pleasure: ‘Blue and yellow, like a painting by Monet, only nature is an even greater artist. You are also an artist, my love, and I am your canvas.’

He undressed her the way she had undressed him that first time, gently, tenderly, deliberately. The sun dappled her lovely body as he laid her down, found a piece of fern and began to stroke her with it just the way he had told her he wanted to. She opened her legs and he brushed her there with it, just a tease of a touch. When she could endure it no longer she reached for his hands and placed them firmly on her body and he could feel the strength of her desire through his fingertips. When he rolled on top of her she was smiling at him, her lips parted in anticipation of shared joy. When they climaxed together under the big oak trees, she took him truly to heaven again. Only after they had finished and dressed each other did he think of the madness of what they had done. Other people did walk through woods on sunny days. But that day their dream had held.

Then one night he dared to tell her that he loved her. And he felt her whole being tense beside him. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Nonsense.’

But he meant it, from the depths of his soul he meant it.

‘It’s my fault, I should not have let it go this far, we’ve got to stop,’ she said.

At first he thought she must be joking. Then he started to beg her to tell him she did not mean it. Then he was just begging. There were tears in his eyes and he was trembling. She felt her heart melt. He had invaded her soul and she could not turn him away. But she told him they must be more careful. She was sure the bar steward was suspicious, and it was imperative for his safety that nobody knew about them. He neither knew nor cared what on earth she was talking about. All that mattered was that she had agreed that she would go on seeing him, although from now on they would meet less often and in the sand dunes. It was summer, she told him, it was warm enough.

Anywhere would have been warm enough for Johnny as long as Marjorie Benson was there. In the beginning he had thought that she was embarrassed because he was so young, and that was the reason for her demands for total secrecy. But gradually he realised there was much more to it than that. Marjorie Benson was a mystery. He told her everything about himself, his grandfather, how he had lost his virginity along with a string of other boys with a young school matron, even the court case he tried so hard to forget. She told him next to nothing. He knew that she was thirty-one years old, and that she wrote poetry. Her past was never discussed, any questions he might ask were ignored or skilfully fielded. She was intelligent bordering on intellectual and he sensed that she had been highly educated. She was certainly not Johnny’s idea of your average barmaid.

He saw her as the loveliest thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted that their relationship had begun simply because she needed sex. He also knew that, however much she protested, it was far more than that now for both of them. That was all he knew. But it was sufficient.

And so they began to meet on the sand dunes. Not as often as before — he had to accept her terms — but at least they were still lovers. Several times more she tried to end it. He couldn’t understand why, and she would not explain. She merely told him there was a part of her life she could not share with him, that she should not really have started a relationship with anyone. But she could never quite manage to dismiss him forever.

‘Don’t you know that I would die for you,’ he told her once. His eyes blazed his passion. He really did love her.

‘You do not know what you are saying,’ she replied. And there was a deep weariness in her voice.

The very first time they met in the dunes, cloaked in the safety of the night’s pitch blackness, they had gathered handfuls of scrub grass for a makeshift bed, stripped naked, and spread their clothes on top of it. She had told him to lie on his back and look at the stars, and then she had started to work on his body with her lovely warm wet tongue and her soft fingers.

She was from a different planet. He had found a kindred spirit, another total romantic, and he loved her so much for that. All other girls that he had known would have laughed if he had tried to use the language he and Marjorie shared. Her poetry was so much better than anything he had ever managed, and she wrote for him. He thought it was the most beautiful poetry in the world. Eventually he stopped trying to find out more about her because he realised he must accept Marjorie Benson merely for what she was to him, the complete package, mystery and all.

His favourite poem had been the one in which she came as near she ever did to telling him that she loved him.

She had handed him the poem, scribbled on a page torn from an exercise book, and he had showered her with kisses. Her face had been wet with tears. He could still taste the saltiness of her skin.

He loved her so much — and now she was dead.

At first his brain did not function at all. He could not think in the present — only relive the glorious past with the woman he worshipped.

Then he had an idea. The only person he could think of who might be able to help him was Mark Piddle. Johnny jogged back to his bicycle carrying his shoes and socks, damp now from lying on the wet sand, pulled them on, and cycled swiftly up the hill to the run-down Victorian house in Cliff Road in which Mark and Irene shared a flat. By the time he arrived it was just after midnight. He was sobbing uncontrollably as he propped his bike against the iron railings outside, and when it fell over as he climbed the steps to the front door, he did not bother to put it upright again. He flung open the door which was never locked — and took the stairs to Mark’s first-floor flat three at a time. Johnny had been there a couple of times to play chess with the reporter. This visit would be a bit different.

There was no bell so Johnny hammered loudly on the battered door.

Inside Mark was still on the phone. He had already filed copy to four national dailies that night — the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Express and The Telegraph — and had nearly finished dictating his story to the copy-takers of a fifth title, Fleet Street’s newest tabloid, The Sun. He would have loved to keep his interview with Jenny Stone until next day, when he would have been able to file it early enough for it to get the show he thought it deserved, and he could then have gone for an exclusive deal with one of the major papers, but he knew the nationals’ own staffers would have caught up by then. So he was completing a ring-around aimed at catching as many of tomorrow’s last editions as possible. It would work to his advantage locally, though, because only the first editions reached Devon and so, with a bit of luck, the interview would still be fresh around the Durraton area for Thursday’s Gazette. The snapper, too, was back in the office, desperately trying to wire a picture quickly enough to catch the last editions of the nationals.

It seemed that Irene, although waiting up for Mark, had fallen asleep on the sofa. The hammering grew louder and louder. Wondering who the hell it could be at that time of night, Mark covered the mouthpiece of the telephone receiver with his hand and yelled at her to answer the door.

Irene, now wearing skin-tight jeans and one of Mark’s shirts, took some time to stir, but obediently heaved herself awake and went to the front door. Johnny was leaning against the doorpost. His eyes were wet and rimmed with crimson, his face red and swollen from the tears, and the front of his tee shirt still damp with them. His jeans were covered with sand and wet patches from squatting on the beach. His whole body seemed to be shaking, and his breath jerked in short sharp gasps, making it difficult for him to talk.

His voice, when it came, was high-pitched and hysterical. ‘I killed her, Irene, I killed her. I murdered her...’

Mark heard the shouted words just as he completed reading over his piece to the Sun. He hung the phone up quickly and dashed to the door.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said.

Irene, gentle as ever, took Johnny by the hand and led him to the sofa. He was weeping hysterically again.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Mark again. ‘Get him a drink or something. Brandy. Have we got any brandy?’

Irene shook her head. ‘Only some beer in the fridge.’

‘Tea then,’ instructed Mark. ‘Hot sweet tea. Go on, Irene. Move yourself.’

He could just catch Johnny’s incoherent mumblings through the boy’s tears.

‘I killed her. I did it. It was me.’

Mark was stunned into silence. He became aware that the boy was wet with sweat, yet shivering with cold.

‘Irene, get my thick fisherman’s sweater,’ he called. ‘And hurry up, will you? Where’s that tea?’

Irene brought the sweater promptly and made Johnny peel off his damp tee shirt. She had also taken a clean towel out of the airing cupboard and she rubbed Johnny dry with it before pushing his limp arms into the jumper.

‘You get the tea, the kettle’s boiling,’ she told Mark, who was so surprised at being ordered around by Irene that he did so at once.

Although the night was warm, Irene switched on both bars of the electric fire and Johnny’s shivering grew less violent. He took the mug of hot sweet tea when Mark offered it to him and obediently began to sip it. He had stopped sobbing too. The liquid was warming him, making him feel better in spite of everything. He struggled desperately to gain control of himself.

Mark perched on the arm of the only armchair, watching him, amazed and fascinated.

‘OK then, Johnny me lad, what’s this all about?’

‘Marjorie. She’s dead.’

Johnny looked as if he were about to cry again.

‘Get a hold of yourself,’ snapped Mark. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Marjorie Benson. They found her today...’

Mark interrupted. ‘I know that, for Chrissake.’

Of course he did. It was his job. He had been told the identity of the body by a contact at about the same time that Johnny’s father had learned who she was.

‘So what are you telling me, Johnny?’

‘It’s my fault. I murdered her.’

‘You?’ Christ, thought Mark. Was this going to be the big one?

‘Yes. If I had done what I should have done she would still be alive. I left her to die.’

‘Now hang on a minute. Are you really saying you killed her?’

‘As near as makes no difference.’ Johnny buried his head in his hands.

Mark stood up. ‘What the hell does that mean? Are you telling me that you strangled that poor bloody girl?’

‘Oh no, oh no, no.’

Johnny wailed in anguish. His eyes were wide with horror.

Mark shook him by the shoulders.

‘Listen to me, Johnny. Did you strangle Marjorie Benson?’ Mark was pleased by how calm his voice sounded.

Johnny gazed at him in amazement. ‘Me? How could I? I loved her...’

‘Loved her? She was nearly twice your age. Was she your bird then?’

‘I suppose so. As much as she was anybody’s.’

Mark asked how long Johnny had been seeing her and a host of other questions about the relationship. He was surprised that nobody knew about it. Johnny explained about Marjorie’s demands for secrecy. How they had met every Saturday night and sometimes one or two other nights a week in the sand dunes behind the burrows, right over by the estuary, where hardly anybody went during the day, let alone at night.

‘On Saturday nights?’

Mark was starting to think now. His reporter’s brain turning the information over quickly in his head. ‘So you saw her last night?’

‘Yes, we met in the dunes and made love. The moon was out...’

‘After you’d screwed her, then what?’

Johnny winced. Screwed her... that wasn’t what it had been like.

‘I just left her there. She always insisted. I had to go first and then she would walk back to the golf club on her own. She had a room there. She never wanted to be seen with me, you see.’

‘Terrific,’ said Mark.

Johnny looked at him pleadingly. ‘I came to see you because I thought you would know what they’re saying. Did she die on the dunes?’

‘Yes. The last time anyone saw her alive was when she left the golf club yesterday evening at about nine o’clock. Except you, apparently.’

‘So it is my fault. If I hadn’t left her there she would still be alive.’

Mark raised his eyes skyward.

‘Johnny, have you been to the police?’

‘The police? Of course not. I can’t tell them anything.’

‘You can tell them what you’ve just told me.’

Johnny looked as if he was going to cry again.

‘She was all right when I left her.’

‘Was she, Johnny?’

‘What do you mean? Of course she was. Dear God, Mark. You don’t think I did it, do you?’

‘No, no, of course I don’t.’

Mark spoke swiftly. The prospect of Johnny losing control again did not appeal to him.

‘I’m just thinking of the way it will look to the cops. You were probably the last person to see her alive — apart from her killer. What time did you get home last night?’

‘I don’t know. About one o’clock, I suppose. It was eleven-thirty when I left Marjorie, I think. But I didn’t go straight home. It was such a beautiful clear starry night. I had my bike and I stopped up the top of Uckleigh Hill for a smoke.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Mark said. ‘So you sat there for over an hour? How do you think that is going to sound? Anyone see you?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Naturally not! What were you doing?’

‘Writing in my notebook. You know, a poem. I’ve told you before.’

‘How could you write in the dark?’

‘The moon was so bright. I like writing things by moonlight.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Mark, for the umpteenth time.

‘Is it important?’ asked Johnny.

‘It’s all important, Johnny boy. The doctors reckon Marjorie died between elevenish and one a.m. If you’d had the sense to go straight home to your mum, things might be looking a bit better for you.’

Johnny put his head in his hands again.

‘I wouldn’t have hurt her, never. You believe me, don’t you Mark?’

‘Yes, I believe you. But you must go to the police, though, Johnny. If you leave them to find out from somebody else, it will look even worse.’

‘But they couldn’t find out from anyone else. Nobody else knows. Only you. You wouldn’t tell, would you...?’

‘Whether I would or not will probably make no difference. I just don’t believe that in a village like Pelham Bay, you and Marjorie Benson kept your great affair a total secret. Anyway, you’ve told me and I’m a journo. What if I go and write a story about the last love in Marjorie Benson’s life?’

‘Oh please, Mark. I can’t take any more.’

‘All right. You came to me as a mate, so I’ll respect that. And I won’t go to the police, either. But you should. You really should. You can’t keep this thing hidden. It’s not scrumping apples.’

‘Look Mark, the police aren’t going to believe a word I say, are they? Not after last year. I’m down in their books as some kind of violent sex maniac, aren’t I?’

‘Rubbish. Anyway you’ve got no choice but to chance it.’

Johnny lost control again. He jumped to his feet.

‘Thank you very much, friend,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not going near the bloody police. And if you do, I’ll never forgive you, never.’

‘Hey, Johnny, wait,’ Mark called, as Johnny wrenched open the front door onto the landing.

But by the time Mark had followed him outside, Johnny was already on his bike, careering down the hill. And he’d forgotten to switch his lights on.

‘Bloody fool,’ muttered Mark.

He went slowly back up the stairs to his flat, deep in thought. Irene was full of questions he couldn’t answer.

‘Oh shut up and come to bed for Chrissake,’ he snapped. ‘I’m bloody knackered.’

For once sex did not feature in his mind at all. Irene fell asleep but, in spite of his tiredness, Mark lay awake for hours beside her. He certainly wouldn’t go to the police, but what a good tale it was. A toyboy lover who had been with the dead woman on the night she was murdered. That was a story that would write itself — an absolute cracker.

‘You came to me as a mate so I’ll respect that,’ he had told Johnny.

Frightfully noble, but it wasn’t going to get him a job on a national, was it? Still, he liked Johnny Cooke. And if he did blow the gaff on him the whole affair could get very messy and he would be in the middle of it. He thought he would probably let matters take their course. He would keep his promise.

It was just about the last decent thing Mark Piddle ever did.

Eight

Mark woke feeling pretty ropy after eventually falling into a fitful sleep. He had dreamed an almost wet dream about Jenny Stone. He had an erection but there was nothing unusual about that. More unusual was the fact that he did not want to roll over on top of Irene and hump himself selfishly to orgasm. Seeing Jenny last night had stirred up all those feelings from two years ago that he had previously not allowed himself to remember. He resolved to telephone her as soon as he got to his office — he just hoped he hadn’t misread the signs, because he wanted her. God, how he wanted her. He got out of bed and walked with some difficulty to the bathroom. He wanted to pee, but he couldn’t. It was no good. He was burning up inside. He sat on the lavatory and made himself come. All he had to do was close his eyes and imagine he was inside Jenny Stone and it wasn’t difficult at all. But it brought little relief. This was ridiculous.

He left the house at seven-thirty, before Irene was up, and raced the Cooper into Durraton to the office. When he got there he made himself a cup of tea and scanned through all the papers, reading up on the various versions of the murder until he thought it was a respectable enough hour to phone the Stones’ house. He just hoped Jenny would answer, and he got lucky. She did. The sound of her voice made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He was afraid his voice sounded high-pitched and strange. His cock was straining fit to burst against his trousers.

After waking screaming from her nightmare, Jenny had been afraid to sleep again. When the phone rang she was sitting, wearing her pink candlewick dressing gown over her pyjamas, in the bay window of the front room. She had probably never moved as fast in her life at that hour of the morning as she did then. She jerked out of her seat as if it were fitted with starting blocks, and sprinted into the hall where the only phone in the house sat in isolated splendour on its own wrought-iron table. She picked up the receiver before the end of the third ring. Her mother had not even emerged from the kitchen.

It was Mark Piddle. Unbelievable. She felt as if she had willed him to call. She glanced at her watch. It was just gone eight o’clock. And he would have been working late into the night. She smiled to herself. Oh yes, he was hers all right, and this time on her terms. He had called to see if she was OK, Mark said. Not really, she had replied, but she would be.

The reporter thanked her for the interview and told her he hoped she would get over the shock soon. He was very formal. Then he asked if he could see her, maybe buy her a drink. She could feel his tension down the phone line. Her stomach seemed to tighten in a knot. She heard herself say yes.

‘What time?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean, what time? What about fixing a day first?’ she replied.

‘It’s got to be today.’

‘Why?’ She knew she was teasing him.

‘Because I can’t wait any longer,’ he said.

She giggled. ‘Half past six in the pub by the cricket ground,’ she said.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Let’s make it lunchtime. Then I’ll take you for a drive. Please.’

He didn’t often say please.

‘Haven’t you got to work this afternoon?’

‘Please,’ he said again.

They met at one o’clock. She was wearing shorts, a skimpy lacy top, and no bra. He wanted to reach out right away and touch her nipples. He could see them clearly through the flimsy material: they were big and dark. She asked for a Cinzano and lemonade. Ghastly drink. He bought it for her and ordered a pint of bitter for himself. God, he didn’t want to waste time in a pub. When could he get her out of here?

She asked him to tell her everything he knew about the murder. He supposed that was natural enough under the circumstances. He gave her the basic facts, then, swearing her to secrecy, he told her about Johnny Cooke’s midnight visit. He was trying to impress her. He explained how Johnny had kept saying that it was his fault, how at first he had thought the boy was actually confessing to murder.

‘And he wasn’t?’ asked Jenny.

‘He just felt guilty, you know,’ said Mark.

She asked him if he was quite sure Johnny was innocent.

‘Soft as shit, that lad,’ Mark had replied, and had explained vaguely about Johnny’s past. About the court case.

‘One drunken night he got out of his pram with some bird he picked up. Now he reckons he’s labelled a sex offender. He may be right.’

Eventually she allowed him to lead her from the pub. They hadn’t been there half an hour. It seemed like an eternity to Mark. He drove like hell. He knew where he was going. He took the river road away from the coast and swung the Cooper into the old quarry a few miles up the valley. There were bushes there you could drive straight into and be totally private even in daylight.

Before the engine had died away he had her in his arms. He remembered the frenzy of the dustbin yard at the school dance. She had made it quite clear then exactly what she wanted. His tongue was down her throat and she was responding just like before. He had one hand on her breasts, squeezing those seductive nipples, and the other on her lower thigh. He thrust it up the leg of her shorts and pushed his fingers inside her knickers. At last he could feel her. He could feel all the delicious crevices of her. She was wet again. Could she really be a virgin still? He had one finger inside her. God, she was hot. Then he felt her start to struggle. She was trying to push his hand away. He thrust his tongue further down her throat. He couldn’t stop, he just couldn’t. She was strong and firm and quite cool. Not frightened at all. She put both hands under his chin and pushed his face backwards off her. Then she slapped him as hard as she could right across one cheek. He collapsed back into the driver’s seat, stunned.

‘I thought you wanted it,’ he gasped.

‘I do,’ she replied. ‘More than you can ever imagine. And I want my first time to be with you.’

So she was a virgin. It was probably just nerves. He touched her cheek with his hand.

‘So do I,’ he said. ‘Will you let me now?’

She shook her head.

‘No. It’s got to be right. I’m not doing it in a car. And I don’t want to get pregnant.’

‘You won’t,’ he told her. ‘I brought a packet of three with me.’

‘I don’t want to lose my virginity to somebody wearing a plastic bag over his thing.’

Mark laughed in spite of himself. ‘OK, I’ll take it out,’ he told her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied.

His frustration was almost too much to bear.

‘I don’t remember you being bothered before.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think I must have gone mad. That teacher did me a good turn. This time I want everything to be right.’

‘And how do you plan to arrange that?’

‘For a start I want to go on the pill and I want you to get them for me. I can hardly go to our family doctor, can I? You can fix it, I’ll bet. Get me some pills and I’m all yours.’

She smiled what she hoped was her most winning smile.

‘Just like that. And meanwhile what do you suggest I do with this?’

To hell with it. He unzipped his trousers.

‘Oh that’s OK,’ she told him casually. ‘I’ll deal with that. I’ve done that before.’

She had too. She took him in her hands and began to play with him. It was bliss. She told him he could touch her on the breasts but nowhere else. He did better than that. He undid her ridiculous blouse, lowered his lips to her nipples, and sucked them like there was no tomorrow. He felt her stiffen and thought for one moment that she was going to give in and let him have her. It did not occur to him to try and force her. He wanted her panting for it, crying out for it, the way he knew she could. She worked on him like crazy and it didn’t take long. He came in great spurts all over his trousers, the car seat, and her hands. But his desire to be inside her was so overwhelming that once again it brought scant relief. Calmly she mopped him up with a handful of paper tissues taken from the box on the back seat.

He took her home, then went out and got very drunk. He slept on the sofa. In the morning he stole a packet of pills from Irene’s stock of them, which she kept in the bathroom cabinet. He just hoped she wouldn’t notice. Actually he didn’t really care. He had arranged to see Jenny again that evening. He picked her up at seven and drove straight to the lay-by. She didn’t protest. He gave her the pack of pills.

‘I’ve got a rug, we can lie down outside if you don’t want to do it in the car,’ he told her. ‘Nobody will see us here.’

She glanced at the pills.

‘Don’t be silly, I’ve got to start taking these after a period and they don’t make you safe right away,’ she said. ‘It’ll be at least a fortnight.’

His lower body was one big ache. ‘I can’t believe this,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll bring you off again if you want,’ she volunteered, and started to unzip his flies.

‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel worse than not doing anything.’

He decided on a last try. With the forefinger of one hand he lightly traced the hardness of her nipples. He brought his lips close to her ear and began whispering to her.

‘I won’t hurt you. I’ll make you ready and I’ll slip into you so gently. I won’t hurt you.’

Strange, he meant that too. He would never hurt Jenny Stone. He was sure of it.

‘I know you won’t hurt me, that’s not the point,’ she said rather prissily and with supreme self-confidence.

How could she be prissy at a time like this? And how could she be so cool and confident and in charge? Virgins weren’t supposed to behave like that.

He carried on trying.

‘You know how much I want to be inside you,’ he said. ‘You want it. I know you do. I want to fill you up. I want to drive you wild. You can be wild, can’t you, crazy?’

She pushed him away again. Grumpily he started the motor and drove her home.

She went straight to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached under her skirt, putting both hands on herself. She rocked backwards and forwards. Her act of willpower was extraordinary. But never again would Mark Piddle think he could have her and just walk away. He had to learn to do as she said.

She wanted Mark to lie in bed longing for her body, just as she had longed for his so many times. She shut her eyes and tried not to think about him. She had never had sex, and yet she could imagine so vividly what it would be like.

Mark turned the car round and drove back to his flat. This time he was going to have to give it to Irene, and how he was going to give it to her.

She had been asleep on the couch and was still only half awake when he made her kneel on the floor. He didn’t want to look at her face. He didn’t want to see her compliance. He didn’t want to see her wince when he hurt her inside. Poor little Irene. He was quite detached. She was just satisfying his need now until he could do what he really wanted with the girl who was driving him mad. He pushed himself straight into her. It didn’t take long. But the frustration still burnt in his belly. He made her suck him until he was hard again and then he took her into the bedroom, threw himself on top of her and hammered into her once more. This time she was on her back with her head over the edge of the bed and he maneuvered her like he had before so that her pelvis was pivoted upwards and he could get deeper into her than in any other position. It was his second erection. It was going to last a long time. And it was going to take some satisfying. He pushed into her with all his strength, with all his might.

The next day was a Wednesday. Three days after she had discovered Marjorie Benson’s body, Jenny still could not sleep without having terrible nightmares. And her desire for Mark Piddle was driving her wild. She was determined to stick to her own terms, and to make sure that he would never just drift out of her life again. But all day Wednesday passed and Mark did not call. Had she teased him too much? Had he moved on to some other, easier girl? Every time the phone rang in the tiled hall of 16 Seaview Road, Jenny rushed to pick up the receiver. It was never Mark.

Johnny was at the deckchair stand again. He had turned up as usual every day since Marjorie’s death, sticking to his routine. But oh, how he missed her, and how afraid he was. He thought he wanted to die. He could not eat, he felt dull and listless.

Bill Turpin did nothing but prowl around all morning. Johnny had been acutely aware of the old man’s thoughtful staring. The boy tried desperately to behave normally. But he knew he was not winning the struggle.

He felt that Marjorie had been everything to him, She alone had understood when he had told her all about himself, and he had shared everything with her, the secret thoughts he had never allowed anyone else near.

That morning’s tourists seemed noisier and more mindless than ever. Johnny felt contempt for them. He knew it was hypocritical, wrong even, but he couldn’t help himself. All his life he had watched their convoys arriving, clogging the roads with their caravans and their campers, crawling along in fear of sharp corners and high hedges, winding lanes and steep hills. They threw litter over the moors, at the roadside, and on the beach. They crowded out the pubs on Saturday nights and demanded discos where once there had been only joyous peace. They provided a ceaseless market for the rubbishy souvenirs that appeared in all the shops just before Whitsun, and were relentlessly replaced as fast as they sold until long after August bank holiday.

But take them to the small unspoilt beaches of North Devon where the cliffs are carved out of marble and the rocks have been given muscle by Michelangelo, where the sea is deep green above drowned forests and the sand is the finest in the world, and most of them would feel nothing. Johnny was certain of his own superiority. He revelled in the mighty poetry of nature. It was in his head all the time.

He had explained all this to Marjorie and she had not laughed at him, nor criticised when he told her how in a moment of madness the previous summer, he and a couple of friends had toured the district scrawling ‘Grockles Go Home’ on posters and lavatory walls. Marjorie recognised the true Johnny Cooke, and Johnny had loved that in her. He was no vandal. Underneath his veneer of bravado he was a quiet introverted boy, eighteen years old and already resigned to having nowhere in particular to go, happy to hand out Bill Turpin’s deckchairs and daydream in the sun. At least, until last Sunday he had been.

Brooding adolescent Johnny, sensitive but youthfully arrogant, with his long wavy dark brown hair, black eyes and perfect body, was handsome and he knew it. There had already been a selection of girls in his young life, most of them older than him, but he had never had a regular girlfriend. Until Marjorie. He had never before been interested in making the effort to get to know somebody, to care, to learn to love. By and large he had lived in a world of his own, wandering off for long lonely walks, reading the books he had found he really loved and not bothering or remembering to read the books he needed to read in order to pass his exams at school.

When he was thirteen, Johnny had been taken ill with meningitis, and, during the weeks of convalescence became even more of a loner. Boys of thirteen are not usually very interested in sitting quietly and talking, in putting the world to rights, and Johnny’s friends soon became bored with visiting him while he was sick. It was a thoughtful time for him. His instinctive confidence in the health and strength of his young body had been shaken rigid. He had been brought close to death at an age when death is a lifetime away and a lifetime seems like eternity.

It was almost too much to bear: the sympathy, the understanding, the sense of near tragedy. When he started to regain his strength, he needed to get out of the house, to clear his head. So he fell into the habit of visiting his grandfather, a big quiet man, a retired farmer who never seemed to get excited about anything, good or bad. Before he met Marjorie, Johnny’s grandfather had been the only true confidant in his life — but then his grandfather had died.

The old man had lived in a solid square house with a garden of vegetables and fruit and a garage in which he kept his bicycle and sacks of potatoes and boxes of sweet-smelling apples. He and Johnny would go for long, long walks through the fields by the sea. And Johnny would ask him what he thought of God and the prime minister, and why the world was always on the edge of war. On these walks he would pour out all the crazy mixed-up ideas and worries of a thirteen-year-old who had had too much time to think. And the old man would produce boiled sweets from deep pockets, butterscotch and fruit drops, some without paper and covered in fluff. He would rub them on his shirt to clean them and then take out his false teeth so that he could suck the sweets more easily.

He would listen with the patience of his eighty years and a lifetime lived in the peace of the countryside.

‘In my day us was only worried about filling us bellies and keeping warm in winter,’ he told Johnny. ‘Then there was war, two of the buggers. And us worried about keeping alive. There wadden time for nought else.

‘I tell ’ee this, boy, I don’t know if us be better off now or not. Buggered if I do.’

His words never amounted to anything clever or profound, but the old man had a natural wisdom about him, and wisest of all, he knew how much Johnny needed somebody to listen. And so the boy spent almost all his days with his grandfather, and his evenings scribbling poems in exercise books.

Most of it was not really true poetry, just outpourings of feelings, the things he said during the day put on paper in bad blank verse. All about knocking down the walls of ignorance, rushing through dark tunnels into vacuums of freedom, and trying to get back through the tunnel again because it was cosier on the other side.

But as Johnny grew strong once more, he went back to school and re-found his friends. He began to forget the fear. He stopped writing poems, and he stopped seeing his grandfather.

When the old man died he hadn’t visited him for months. Johnny was consumed with guilt and the thought that his grandfather had gone for ever was almost unbearable.

At the funeral everyone was glad the weather was fine. The ham was sweet, the pickles held the tang of last summer, the tea was strong, and they talked about everything except dying.

The coffin, and the flowers, and the body of Johnny’s grandfather, flabby and red and ugly with great age, had been burned. Johnny thought suddenly of flesh burning. Just for a moment he had a dreadful vision of flames licking through the rosewood and biting into the still body of his grandfather.

He left his ham and pickles, went to the lavatory, and was secretly sick. When he came back his face was white, but his hands were steady. And he sat down and ate his meal.

Twice now in his young life he had been confronted by death. Its shadow would never leave him. The third time was approaching — and that would finally destroy him.

On the night of his grandfather’s funeral, he had slipped out of the house taking with him all the money that he had. He had spent the evening in pubs where his age was not known, drinking more beer than he had ever drunk before. In the third pub he visited he found himself chatting up a pretty red-haired girl wearing thick eyeliner and the shortest possible miniskirt. Through the beery haze she looked very desirable to Johnny. He bought her whisky-and-coke and ordered a large whisky for himself.

The girl happily took up Johnny’s offer to walk her home, and raised no objections when he suggested a detour along the unlit riverside path by the park. They sat together on a bench and began to kiss. So far so good. She responded eagerly. Johnny fondled her breasts through the flimsy material of her blouse and she barely protested. He could feel that her nipples were hard. He didn’t know much — but he knew that was a good sign. He kissed her, gently at first, then a little more forcefully. He parted her lips with his tongue and began probing, exploring, inside her mouth. She was still responding, flicking her tongue against his, sucking his mouth. Very promising. He began to undo the buttons of her blouse. She pushed his hand away. Each time he tried to get a hand inside her blouse she pushed him away. Oh, how he wanted to feel those pert rounded breasts, to tweak those hard little nipples between his fingers.

He had an erection in spite of all the booze. Hopefully he placed her hand on the bulge in his trousers. She felt it for a few seconds, moving her fingers just a little, then took her hand away. He couldn’t make her put it back.

He began stroking her legs above the knees. He was aware that her skirt had slid up nearly to her crotch. She was teasing him with her mouth but not letting him do any of the things he so wanted to do with his hands.

Finally, drunk and frustrated, he held his left arm across her body and shoved his right hand, hard and directly on target, up between her legs. The skirt did not offer much protection. He ripped at her underwear, tearing tights and knickers in his eagerness. It was not until the next morning that he realised how stupid he had been.

The girl had screamed, struggled ferociously, and with the strength of fear managed somehow to heave him off her. She had jumped to her feet, slipped on the grass, fallen over, further damaged her already laddered tights, and covered her clothing in mud and grass stains. She ran off, sobbing and shouting that her father would kill her when he saw the state she was in.

Johnny sat on the seat a bit longer. He was very drunk. His stomach, assaulted earlier by the emotion of the day, started to rebel against the beer and whisky to which it was unused. He was sick again, and finally staggered unsteadily home, still feeling dreadfully ill. His father, who had waited up, took one look at him and gave him the lecture of his life. It was mostly wasted because Johnny could remember almost nothing when he woke the next morning.

His memory began to return all too vividly a little later when two policemen arrived on the Cooke doorstep. Johnny’s mother immediately telephoned his father, who came home from the greengrocer’s shop he ran in the town. The girl, forced by her parents to explain her appearance, had blurted out that she had been attacked by Johnny Cooke.

Johnny, suffering from the first real hangover of his young life, said over and over again that he didn’t do anything. The truth was that he couldn’t really remember what he had done, the police were not convinced, and so Johnny faced the court proceedings which were to continue to haunt him. The girl, it transpired, was only fifteen years old, and Johnny was charged with indecently assaulting a girl under the age of consent. The landlord of the pub where both youngsters had been drinking also found himself in trouble — but that didn’t help Johnny.

What did help him, in true small-town style, was the friendship of his father with the local police chief inspector — his Rotary Club friend Ted Robson. Only that prevented charges of attempted rape.

Johnny had appeared before the magistrates, pleaded guilty, and been put on probation for three years. His protests of innocence had not impressed his father, who never felt quite the same about his son again. His mother just pretended the incident had not happened. But the publicity in the local press had, she told her closest friends, ‘nearly killed her’.

‘Just you behave yourself, my boy,’ she would warn continually. ‘Another do like the last affair and it would kill your father.’

Johnny knew what she really meant. The eleventh commandment ruled his family: don’t get found out.

Suddenly Johnny was startled back to the present. Bill Turpin loomed at his side. He had crept up in that disconcerting way he had. Silent footsteps. Johnny felt the old man’s breath before he heard a sound.

‘Morning, boy. All right this morning be ’ee?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Feeling better, then?’

Johnny’s flesh started to crawl. Did Bill Turpin know something? Oh God. If it was going to be anybody it would be Bill, the nosy old bugger.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Well, I thought you seemed a bit off-colour the last day or two.’

‘Uh yeah, tummy’s a bit dicky.’

‘Oh.’ Long drawn out. Speculative. ‘I thought you might be fretting over that poor maid.’

Johnny tried to keep cool.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That poor murdered maid. You saw a bit of her, didn’t you boy?’

‘What are you saying?’ Johnny’s voice came out in a croak.

‘Oh, I used to see you pair scuttling off together now and again. I often take old Jip for a stroll over the dunes of an evening.’

Johnny knew his face was now crimson.

‘I haven’t seen her for a long time,’ he said quickly. ‘Not a long time.’

He didn’t realise that he was shouting.

‘All right, boy, all right. Calm down.’ Bill had his eternal pipe in his hand. He sucked on the stem, still staring.

‘I am calm,’ Johnny snapped. ‘Do you mind if I go for a quick swim?’

Bill shook his head.

Johnny peeled off his shirt and jeans. Underneath he was wearing a pair of brief red swimming shorts. Two girl tourists walking by turned their heads for a better look. All the girls fancied Johnny, Bill Turpin knew that. Not surprising, he thought, good-looking boy and a fine body he had on him too. What a shame.

Johnny sprinted down the slipway and across the stretch of beach to the sea. Bill leaned against the sea wall. The faithful Jip nuzzled affectionately against his leg. He pushed her lazily away with a foot.

‘Lie down, dog, will you.’

The old man tapped his pipe against the wall and began the ritual of refilling and relighting it. He drew on the tobacco, blowing smoke through his mouth and nostrils. Johnny had swum a couple of hundred yards out to sea. He was moving very fast, ploughing through the water with his powerful crawl.

Bill watched, squinting against the already bright sun; motionless, controlled, like an old tomcat waiting to pounce.

Throughout the morning, Johnny wondered if he should take Mark’s advice and go to the police himself. When the blue Q car pulled up on the no-parking zone by the deckchair stand, he knew it was too late for that.

He glanced quickly at Bill Turpin, but the old man looked away.

Johnny ran his fingers through his long hair, still damp from swimming, as he watched Detective Chief Inspector Mallett heave his bulk out of the car. The policeman approached, trying to look reassuring. He could see the panic in Johnny at fifty paces, and it was not his style to frighten those he interviewed. He wanted the truth and he thought he knew the best way to get it. He was a ‘softly, softly’ man. People talked to Phil Mallett as a rule, they trusted him. He looked like a picture-book illustration of a Devonian country policeman, his skin smooth and creamy with very little beard, his cheeks excessively plump and pink. He adopted his most sympathetic, friendly look, and strolled over to Johnny with an almost too casual walk. The young detective inspector accompanying him was a different kettle of fish: an ambitious career cop, a graduate, whom Mallett suspected had been foisted on him by those who thought his methods were too old-fashioned and too soft.

‘Just you keep quiet unless I say otherwise,’ Mallett hissed at him out of the side of his mouth.

Johnny knew his hands were shaking. He twisted them behind his back. The deeper he got into this, the more certain it became that his parents would have to hear about it. That was the worst of all. The recriminations, the tears, the oppressive caring.

‘Been swimming, have you?’ asked the inspector conversationally, looking at Johnny’s thick dark hair, wet and shiny from the sea.

Come on, come to the point, get on with it, Johnny willed.

The young inspector was kicking the ground with the toe of one shoe. He was just as impatient. The boy should have been picked up by a carload of uniformed bobbies and whisked straight off to the station in his opinion. No messing. Give him a scare.

‘Wouldn’t mind a dip myself.’ The chief inspector smiled as if he had made a joke.

Johnny tried to smile, but was not sure if he succeeded. Mallett leaned against a pile of deckchairs adopting his best ‘I’m on your side ... but’ manner.

And then he asked the question Johnny had been dreading.

‘I understand you knew the young woman who was murdered on Saturday?’

Johnny took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well then, lad, you’d better tell me all about it.’

Johnny told him how he had met Marjorie at the golf club and they had become friends. Just friends? Just friends, Johnny heard himself say. He had a feeling he was acting stupidly. He was right.

Phil Mallett scratched his balding head.

‘Now why would a woman like that be interested in a young lad like you, Johnny?’ he asked wryly.

‘She was lonely. We used to walk out over the dunes and talk.’

‘Talk, eh?

‘Yes.’

‘What, a healthy good-looking feller like you? Out with an attractive older woman and just talking?’

‘Yes.’

The detective chief inspector shook his head sorrowfully. His eyes were very gentle. When he spoke again his voice was flat and expressionless.

‘I am not satisfied with your story, Johnny. I have to ask you to come back to the station with me now, where I will take a formal statement from you. I suggest that along the way you think very carefully about what you are going to say.’

About bloody time too, thought the young inspector, as the two men led Johnny to the waiting car.

Johnny was taken to the station’s only interview room where, sitting on a hard upright chair before a wooden table, he had stared resolutely down at his hands, clenched tightly in his lap, almost throughout the interrogation. His palms were sweaty and he was painfully aware of the tape recorder relentlessly putting on record the awful mess he knew he was making of it all. At last he raised his eyes and looked directly at Phil Mallett.

‘I was in love with her,’ he said. His chest felt tight.

The young inspector could contain himself no longer.

‘Love?’ he snapped. ‘Is that what you call it? Is that what you called what you did to that girl on the riverbank last year?’

Phil Mallett motioned sharply for the D.I. to be silent, but it was too late.

Johnny looked as if he had been hit.

‘I knew it, I knew it, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you anything. I’m already branded by you lot, aren’t I? But you’re bloody wrong.’

‘When did you last see Marjorie Benson, Johnny?’

Johnny hesitated, just for a second.

‘Ages ago.’

Oh God. Another mistake? He didn’t know which way to turn.

‘I don’t think you’re telling the truth,’ said the detective chief inspector.

Johnny felt the panic overwhelm him. Had Bill Turpin seen him with her the night she died? And had Bill talked to the police already?

God, pray that the policeman was bluffing. Johnny was sweating now. He couldn’t admit that he had been with Marjorie just before she was killed, making love to her, pushing himself inside her. He just couldn’t. He didn’t even think about forensic evidence. About his semen in her. He was too muddled, not nearly clever enough for any kind of crime.

He tried desperately to clear his head. He’d call the bluff.

‘All right, all right, I last saw her on the Tuesday before she died.’

‘Not on Saturday? My spies tell me that you always saw her on Saturdays.’

Oh God, oh God, Johnny thought, he was tying himself in knots here.

‘Not last Saturday,’ he repeated. ‘Not the night she died.’

Pray it was a bluff. Pray.

‘I see,’ said D.C.I. Mallett. ‘Where were you on Saturday night then?’

‘I went to the pictures.’

‘Who with?’

‘On my own.’

‘Anyone see you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What film did you see?’

Johnny felt the trap closing around him. What was on at the Palais last week? He passed the cinema often enough.

‘James Bond... the new one... On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ he stammered.

Fortunately for Johnny, the policemen hadn’t seen the film either. But he wasn’t fooled.

‘My advice to you is not to lie to me, boy,’ he said quietly. ‘If you do, things will only get worse for you...’

At that moment, Johnny could not imagine how things could get any worse. He did not know the half of it. And he was not yet aware that while he was being interviewed. Mark Piddle had arrived at the police station.

Mark had something to report. Quite a lot to report. He was not his usual cool self. Like Johnny on the previous Sunday night, he could not stop shaking, he was fighting for control. He knew how important it was to get things straight in his mind. He had every right to be upset. But he must not appear to be frightened.

He blurted out the short version of his story to the desk sergeant, and was immediately taken to a side office to wait for Phil Mallett to become available to interview him. They brought him a cup of tea. He drank it gratefully, spooning in the sugar. He didn’t take sugar in his tea normally. But this was not a normal day. He stirred so much sugar into his cup the tea was almost like syrup. It was good for shock, they said.

And he was shocked all right.

Nine

The following morning, Jenny learned why Mark had not called her. His girlfriend Irene had been reported missing. She had disappeared. Police feared a double murder, linked to the Marjorie Benson strangling.

Jenny rang Mark at the paper. He had not given her his home number. Because of Irene. He had never made a secret of Irene, but Jenny had not cared. Poor Irene had somehow always seemed irrelevant.

It took her until Friday to get hold of him, and when she did he sounded strained and distant, although she supposed that wasn’t surprising. Still no word about Irene, he told her. She had not come home on Tuesday night, then he discovered she had not been at work all day on Tuesday. That was all he knew and it wasn’t much. The police were worried. They feared the worst for Irene; that there was a nutter on the loose. Nobody seemed to give much for Irene’s chances of being alive.

As he talked to Jenny, Mark began to experience the familiar stirring of his loins again. He fought for control. He couldn’t see her. Not yet. But by God, even with all that had happened, he wanted to.

Jenny felt as if she was going quite mad. She was plagued by images of death. The body of Marjorie Benson floated determinedly in her head; there was no escape from the recurring nightmare of that face. And now the disappearance of Irene seemed to draw her further into the horror story. She did not want to become any more involved, and she knew that if she saw Mark again then she would. Yet Mark was the other image that was plaguing her. Mark kissing her and touching her, Mark finally entering her. She could not walk away from him. Her body craved him. The stress and unease brought her period on early, and as it started her first thought was that this meant she could begin the course of birth control pills more than a week earlier than she had expected. Then she would be protected. Then she could go to Mark on her terms. And she would go to him, in spite of a nagging feeling that she shouldn’t.

Mark had not gone to work on that Wednesday when Jenny had tried so hard to contact him. In fact he had spent most of Wednesday at the police station, reporting the disappearance of Irene and giving the details of his midnight visit from Johnny Cooke on the night Marjorie Benson’s body was discovered. Looking strained and anxious, he explained that he had been worrying about Johnny’s visit and all that he had said, had realised that he should have reported it earlier, but had been sure that the boy would see sense and go to the police himself. And he hadn’t really believed that Johnny Cooke had killed Marjorie Benson. He thought Johnny was just hysterical. Then Irene had disappeared leaving no note, no word. This wasn’t like her at all, but they’d had a bit of a row, and he thought she’d gone to spend the night with her parents. It wasn’t until the hotel where Irene worked called to ask if she was all right because she hadn’t been in the day before and yet again hadn’t turned up, that he had started to worry and decided to go to the police. And it was then that he had begun to wonder if Irene’s disappearance could possibly have anything to do with Johnny and with Marjorie Benson’s murder.

‘God, I hope I’m wrong,’ he told D.I. Mallett.

Mark came across as a controlled and intelligent young man, with nothing to hide but under great stress, and aware that the police would have to check him out.

It is a fact of criminal record that most murders are committed by the relations or lovers of the victim. If Irene Nichols was dead Mark Piddle would, under normal circumstances, be the prime suspect. But these were patently not normal circumstances. There was the Marjorie Benson murder to consider and, in any case, there was no reason yet to suppose that Irene Nichols was not alive and well. People walk out of their homes all the time. Often they turn up again sooner or later. Sometimes not for years and years, and sometimes not at all. But even that doesn’t necessarily mean they are dead, and it’s certainly very difficult to try a case for murder without a body. There have only been a handful of such cases in history.

And so Phil Mallett, although thorough as ever in his inquiries, was reasonably satisfied by Mark’s statement. The same could not be said about Johnny Cooke’s muddled ramblings. There was not yet enough hard evidence, but the finger did seem to be pointing more and more at Johnny, who actually had a record of sexual assault. Johnny was kept inside for further questioning, whilst the investigation proceeded and pending the results of the post-mortem examination of Marjorie Benson.

The D.C.I. was coming under more and more pressure from his peers to find a way of successfully charging Johnny; the bright young detective inspector who was snapping at Phil Mallett’s heels seemed to have no doubts whatsoever.

‘It’s always the lover,’ he said sagely — as if he had the benefit of years of experience of such matters, instead of merely a college education and too fast a promotion in the opinion of his immediate superior.

As the evidence against Johnny Cooke accumulated, Phil Mallett felt himself being pushed further and further along what seemed to be an inevitable route. Nobody had time for what they called P.C. Plod tactics. D.C.I. Mallett had been brought up in the force to believe that good police work involved tying up all the loose ends, being absolutely sure of yourself. But nowadays nothing mattered except figures, the ratio of crimes to convictions. Nobody talked about justice any more. That was almost a dirty word, and Phil had come to accept that you could only fight for your idea of the right way of doing things up to a certain point. One man cannot turn the tide. Anyway, perhaps this time he was wrong because he could not even fully explain why he was so afraid that a terrible mistake was about to be made.

The forensic tests that Johnny had sexual intercourse with Marjorie Benson shortly before she died, and when the results of a search of Johnny’s home were reported to him, the D.C.I. knew that was it.

He could no longer hold out for more time. The tide had come roaring in right over his head.

With rare self-discipline, brought on by the shock he had experienced, Mark did not contact Jenny. By Sunday, exactly a week after she had floated into Marjorie Benson’s body, Jenny was desperate to see him. Her period had lasted only three days as usual. She thought she would now be more-or-less protected by the pill course she was beginning. In any case, she could wait no longer. She caught the Durraton bus on Sunday morning, alighting at the top of the hill above Pelham Bay, and quickly walked the couple of hundred yards to the house where she knew Mark lived. She was praying he would be there. She needed him and she was going to have him. She was being quite calculated about it, and was rather surprising herself.

Downstairs in the hall there was a list of all the tenants and their flat numbers. It was another hot day, and Jenny knew she was sweating slightly by the time she climbed the stairs to his flat. Mark answered the door shirtless, wearing only a pair of loose shorts. His face lit up when he saw her, but then clouded over again, as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see her or not. Her eyes took in his bare torso, his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, and his strong, muscular legs. She was tall, but he towered above her. He was all that a young man of twenty-three should be and more — lean and hard and very fit-looking. Much the way she had imagined from the touches and glimpses of him she had previously experienced. Seeing him like that in reality after having dreamed about him for so long threw her a little.

‘I... I was just passing,’ she stammered.

‘I was just going out,’ he lied. He was hardly dressed for going out. She was aware that he looked nervous and unsure of himself. And she already knew that was most un-Marklike.

‘I know you’re upset, I reckoned I might be able to take your mind off things,’ she said.

That sounded pathetic, she thought. Hardly surprising he didn’t reply.

‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in then?’ she asked. Even more pathetic.

He stood back, letting her pass, and closed the door behind her.

To hell with it, she thought. ‘You might like to know that I am now fully protected against unwanted pregnancy,’ she announced.

She knew she was being quite shameless, particularly under the circumstances, but she just could not stop herself.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you want me any more?’

He was still silent. She knew something was very wrong with him, and assumed it must be Irene’s disappearance. He was just not reacting the way she had already grown to expect. Strangely, her confidence was returning now. She reckoned she could fix that — make him react exactly the way she wanted him to.

In one sudden movement she slipped her tee shirt above her head. She was not wearing a bra. She unzipped her miniskirt and removed it and her knickers both at once. Now she was standing naked before him. It had taken mere seconds.

Mark just stared at her. Her breasts were full and round. He had touched them, had his mouth round them already, and he knew how beautiful they were. But seeing her totally naked was something else. She was innocent — yet completely aware. There was nothing coy in the way she stood, she was a young woman waiting to make love for the first time. She was breathing deeply and her breasts were rising and falling in rhythm. The honesty of her desire gave her beauty. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes were fixed on her pubic mound. She caught the direction of his gaze and involuntarily her hand reached for herself, and she lightly fingered the hair there. She stared at him, unblinking, every inch of her an invitation. Yet he did not have an erection. Mark Piddle, superstud, was standing looking at a naked young girl, and he didn’t have a hard-on. He was transfixed. Mesmerised.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he heard her say softly.

She was reassuring him. Amazing. But he began to believe that this time it would be.

She stepped forward and took him in her arms and he buried his head in her neck. Then the smell of her engulfed him. The same body scent that had driven him wild two years earlier, that had excited him so much when they had been together in his car, when she had refused to let him take her, even though he knew she had wanted it as much as him. He was aware that she was sweating slightly and also that her juices must already be running. She smelt of earthy demanding sex. And it was delicious.

Now he was starting to swell at last. He felt her slip her hands inside his shorts and her touch was electric. She undid the button of the waistband. They were old tennis shorts and their soft whiteness flattered his youthful brown skin. With the fingers of one hand she traced patterns through the fuzzy baby hair covering his chest, down over his flat stomach, down, down. He helped her remove the shorts. He was wearing no underpants. They stood naked, looking at each other. He was fully erect now. This time he took her in his arms.

‘I won’t hurt you, Jenny, I’d never hurt you,’ he muttered urgently, unaware that it had never occurred to her that he would.

His cock dug into her belly, damp yet burning against her. He could feel her eagerness and began to realise that she had no fear of the size of him, nor of the power of his desire.

‘I know you won’t,’ she said, clinging to him.

‘I am going to make you so ready that when I put it into you it will just slip in as if it belongs there,’ he told her.

‘I think it does belong there,’ she whispered.

He melted. He laid her on the bed then and opened her legs and buried his head between them. She had read about this, but what Mark was doing to her exceeded her wildest expectations. He licked and sucked and nibbled her to distraction, and she felt herself opening wide as he darted his tongue in and out of her. Mark was loving it too. Out of guilt he had occasionally done this to Irene — although only usually to get round her again after having served her roughly. But he knew the pleasure it could give. It was the only time he ever brought Irene to orgasm, because when he actually entered her he always did so with such force and selfishness that the poor girl didn’t stand a chance.

This was the bed he had shared with Irene. He tried to put all thoughts of her out of his mind. With Jenny starting to writhe and moan beneath him, it was not difficult.

She was saying something. What was it? She was squeezing his head with her legs, blocking his ears.

‘Can I taste you too? I’d like to know what you taste like.’

Could she? This was unbelievable. This was sensational. This was what he had been looking for all his life. She was just like him. She was pure animal, and the sex in her was taking control of her now. Her first time and she wanted to suck his cock!

With practiced agility he swung round in the bed so that he was kneeling above her. He was careful not to push it at her — he didn’t want to put her off. She teased the end of him with her tongue. She paused — and he was pretty sure she was licking her lips. Then she lifted her head and took him in her mouth. He realised that she really had been licking her lips, deciding to herself whether she liked the taste and the smell of him. Obviously she did. Her tongue moved like a hot wet worm and she sucked him into her.

He couldn’t stand any more of it. He was afraid he was going to come in her mouth — and that would be sure to put her off on her very first time. He hauled himself off her, turned around and lay on the bed beside her. She looked dreamy, eyes half closed, in another world.

‘Do it to me, do it to me now, oh please, oh please.’

Those same words, that same husky voice, two years on. He rolled over on top of her, held himself up on one arm and reached with his other hand to guide himself into her. She was there before him, her hands around him, steering him into her. Incredible. Her legs were bent up around him. She was ready. Gently, gently, firmly, firmly, he pushed himself slowly into her until the whole length of him was inside. Then he started to move. He saw the surprise flicker fleetingly in her eyes, then the lust darken her pupils. Suddenly she was moving with him, as if she had done this all her life. It had not hurt her at all. She had indeed been ready.

She heaved and rolled and tossed beneath him like a wave in the ocean on a wild stormy day. It was too much. He came like a steam engine, shooting into her deep sweetness. He had never felt such ecstasy. Such fulfilment. All his life he had been violently searching for this kind of satisfaction. Yet here was the satisfaction without violence at all. He rolled off her, breathing like a marathon runner, and felt a wonderful peace enveloping him. He thought he could sleep for a month, float away on a cloud of joy. But he wouldn’t let himself do that. He wanted to take her to the heights of orgasm, to make her fly. He realised that he had never before given a damn whether any woman he was with came or not, but this was different. This was really different.

‘I’m sorry it was so quick,’ he whispered to her. ‘The second time I’ll last for ever, I promise. I want to make you come and come. You are going to have amazing orgasms, I just know it.’

She was lying beside him, panting still. Smiling. Eager for anything that might come next. He stretched out a hand and began to play with her.

‘You are something else,’ he said.

Her smile broadened. Then she threw back her head against the pillows and went for it, using her fingers. Just watching her made him hard again very fast. This time he would have the control to give her even greater pleasure. He lowered himself carefully on top of her again, and very gently eased the length of him into her. He thought he was bigger than he had ever been, but she didn’t seem to mind. Mind? She loved it.

When he was completely inside and he knew she was comfortable with him in there, he started to move, to really move. He could feel her muscles opening and closing around him all the time as he sucked and stroked her breasts. After a while he rolled her over on top of him. He reached behind and played with her there with his fingers. Teasing, tantalising the glands she had not known existed. She loved that too. She was off in a trance. He kept thinking she was going to come at any moment, but he knew that she hadn’t quite made it.

He lay beneath her, thanking God that he could always last so long the second time. Then he lifted her off him and bent her over the edge of the bed. He wanted her in every possible way, and he knew she wanted that too. She was strong and athletic, not a compliant cell in her body. At one point, face down and flat on the bed, she had somehow managed to lift her legs and wrap them around him backwards, making him go even deeper inside her. Then she reached back with her arms, stretching behind him, and probed and pushed and stroked with her long fingers. She must be double-bloody-jointed, he thought desperately as he was finally unable to last any longer. His second orgasm was better even than the first. Deep deep satisfaction once more. Oh yes, this was what he had been looking for. If only he had found her before. And if only he could make her come. God, he wanted her to come.

He lifted her up the bed and rested her head on the pillows. Then he cuddled her. He had never bothered to do that to anyone before, either.

‘That was the best ever,’ he told her.

‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she replied.

‘No,’ he said truthfully. He looked at her glistening with sweat, still panting. ‘God I want to give you an orgasm.’

‘Well maybe I’ve had one,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like.’

He laughed and shook his head.

‘No. You’ll know when it happens. And it’s going to be a sensation. I’m sure of that. Shall I try one more time?’

She smiled invitingly. This time he went down on her again. Irene had always come so obligingly quickly when he did that. But not this one. He sucked her for ever. He wouldn’t let her suck him. He wanted her to concentrate on herself. She did. Giving in totally to all the lovely softness, the wet warmth of it. She was so close all the time, he knew that. But he couldn’t quite send her over the edge.

Eventually she had to go home and he still hadn’t brought her to orgasm.

‘It was good for you, wasn’t it?’ he asked anxiously.

God, he had never given a damn before. Then he asked her if she could get away the next evening and be with him; he would make her come then definitely. She just smiled.

The police called the next morning and asked Mark to go to the station again, for the third and final time. Several different officers went over every word of his statement, asking him the same questions repeatedly. Again and again they made him tell them what had happened, with Johnny, with Irene, checking and double-checking every fact. Always he gave the same answers he had on the previous occasions. All that he said made sense. Every so often they left him alone in the interview room, except for a constable standing silently just inside the door. And every time he was left alone he found himself thinking about Jenny. In fact, apart from his actual sessions with the police, and in spite of all that was going on, and all his unease and his fears, he spent most of the twenty-four hours before he would be with her again thinking about her.

By the time she arrived at his flat the next evening, he had all kinds of plans for her. They melted into each other’s arms as she stepped through the door.

‘God I want you,’ he muttered.

‘Me too,’ she said eagerly.

No game playing with this one. Pure lust, pure sex, pure need. He undressed her slowly and carefully and, when she stood naked before him, led her into the bedroom. There was a big white towel on the bed. She looked at him with just a hint of alarm in her eyes. He whispered reassurance. Obediently she lay down as he instructed and waited for him. He could smell her already. He stripped to his underpants. His erection had started as soon as he heard her knock on the door, but he was trying not to think about it. He reached for the baby oil he had put on the bedside table.

For the rest of the afternoon, Mark used all the imaginative tricks he had ever learned to bring Jenny Stone to the heights of her considerable sexuality. She purred with pleasure, like a great big sexy kitten. A wild cat kitten, he thought, a puma, a panther. He used his fingers and his tongue and the touch of his body, feather-light and tantalising, but he would not enter her until she begged him to. Not until she seemed almost unconscious with pleasure, crying out again and again for him to fuck her, did he eventually do so.

And even his extraordinary sexual energy was waning by the time he finally saw her face change and knew what was beginning to happen to her.

Watching her writhing beneath him, listening to her animal cries, experiencing her contractions so acutely it was almost painful — he had known she was going to be wild, yes he had always known that, but Mark had not imagined anything like this. The feeling for him was sensational. Now he could let go at last, now he could think about his own pleasure. He relaxed his tense muscles and in one final, nerve-rending thrust he was coming too, coming with her, shouting his joy as loudly as she was screaming hers. In the last throes of her passion she kicked out so hard and with such strength that she smashed a hole in the sloping ceiling at one side of his bed and severely stubbed her toe.

She felt no pain. Only the greatest, most extreme, and inexplicable pleasure in the world.

Afterwards it took him a long time to calm her down. To bring her back to normality. She lay trembling in his arms, damp and warm and wonderful and stinking of it, her hair soaking wet with her own sweat, unable to speak at first.

When she did she grinned crookedly at him, raised her eyebrows quizzically, and said: ‘So that’s what all the fuss is about.’

He kissed her long and hard on the mouth.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know how I ever lived without it,’ she replied.

And she meant it.

Ten

During the rest of that year, Jenny and Mark continued to explore the craziest heights of their sexuality. He didn’t think any two people could be better matched, although she didn’t know yet that they had anything special. He was quite sure that she thought it was always like this and that every woman was like her. She was still at school, for Christ’s sake. Mark sometimes fantasised to himself about Jenny in a gymslip, but he instinctively knew never to ask her to play dressing-up games. To her, that would be silly and demeaning. She was an animal, a highly toned totally sexual animal, not a tart — and Mark knew the difference.

In the September, Jenny had gone back to school, the final year of her A-level GCEs, and not even her closest school friends knew she was sleeping with Mark. From the very beginning, sex to Jenny Stone was something you did, not something you talked about. She wasn’t into giggly girly chat, and she was always suspicious of people who talked about sex all the time, wondering whether they actually did it at all. Anyway, she had to be careful — her parents thought Mark was too old for her. She overheard her father once telling her mother that he didn’t like the look in the young feller’s eye. Jenny knew exactly what he meant, and she loved that look in Mark Piddle’s eye.

Their lust for each other did not diminish, instead it seemed to grow more intense. They were obsessed with each other’s bodies.

Irene did not reappear. Sometimes Jenny tried to talk to Mark about it, but he would immediately pull down the shutters. He told her it was another life; whatever had happened to Irene, he did not want to know about it any more.

At the end of August, Johnny Cooke was charged with the murder of Marjorie Benson. The word was that the police suspected him of having killed Irene too, but, in spite of extensive searches, no body was found.

For the rest of her life, Jennifer Stone could never get over her own reaction to Johnny’s arrest. At first she hardly noticed it, just as she had hardly noticed the disappearance of Irene. She had been trying to put the murder and her discovery of the body out of her mind, and it wasn’t all that difficult because of her obsession with Mark Piddle. She was totally besotted by him as he was by her. All she could really think about, night and day, was their sex life together. That had become the sole reason for her existence, and it was desperately hard for her to concentrate on her schoolwork or to behave normally at home. Her excuses for the time spent in Mark’s bed were always elaborate and well thought out, but, none the less, she knew her parents suspected that something very heavy was going on.

If she had thought about Johnny and the murder and the events surrounding it, she might have been concerned from the beginning — but, strange though it appeared in retrospect, she did not think about it at all.

The trial did confront her with some unpleasant realities. It started at Exeter Crown Court just before Christmas. Jenny, of course, was a witness because she had found the body, and so was Mark, to whom Johnny had made his confession. Twenty-five years later, Jenny remembered that as the start of her niggling worries. She was quite sure in her own mind that Mark had originally told her he believed Johnny to be innocent. When she confronted Mark he was as cool as ever. He must have confused her, he said. Johnny had confessed, right enough, and Mark reckoned he was guilty as hell.

He didn’t look at her as he spoke. But she accepted what he said. She was, after all, quite besotted by him.

At the trial, and under formidable cross-examination, Johnny continued to protest his innocence but finally admitted that it was he with whom Marjorie Benson had had sex on the night of her death. There was further damning evidence against him.

He had sex with Marjorie Benson probably only minutes before her death. He eventually admitted that was so only after forensic tests showed that semen found inside her was his.

Secondly, when her body was discovered she was wearing a skirt but no blouse. She had obviously struggled with her assailant, and clumps of hair had been ripped from her head. The missing blouse, torn and crumpled, had been found screwed up beneath a pile of logs in the shed where Johnny kept his bicycle. There were hairs found on the blouse with the follicles of skin still attached to them. They came from Marjorie Benson’s head. And the blouse had large imitation brass buttons, one of which bore a clear thumb print — it was Johnny Cooke’s. Johnny’s defence counsel had asked why on earth the boy should take such incriminating evidence to his own home. The prosecution counsel countered with a list of murderers who had collected bizarre and incriminating souvenirs from their victims. The jury was captivated, so much so that Johnny’s barrister wished he had never queried the evidence in the first place.

Thirdly there was Johnny’s confession to Mark Piddle. Mark gave his evidence with his usual cool lucidity. He told the court how Johnny had come to him within hours of the body being found, and, still in shock, had confessed everything and begged Mark not to go to the police. He had said: ‘I killed her,’ and: ‘It is my fault she is dead.’ Mark gave what he described as a more or less verbatim account of the midnight meeting. He was articulate and convincing.

Jenny had already given her evidence when he was called. As a material witness she was therefore able to sit in the public gallery if she wished. Upset again by the renewed vision of that grotesque body floating beside her, she had nearly left the court. But some morbid fascination led her to stay for the rest of the day, and as she watched Mark in the witness box, she began to feel more and more uneasy. He was so sure of himself, yet while he was talking she looked at Johnny Cooke, the accused. He was staring at Mark, shaking his head. At one point he started to stand up, as if he was going to protest, until his barrister put a firm hand on his shoulder, keeping him in his seat. Jenny listened very carefully, then she waited outside the court for Mark. She was more bewildered than anything else.

‘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 hit men 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 Princeton 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 sentences 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 sex 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.