The Cruelty of Morning

The Dream Is Over

The dream is over, lover

And there’ll never be another.

You cast your spell on me

And I gave in quite willingly

To a lifetime’s fantasy.

But it was not to you I gave my love

I saw what was not there to have.

I offered my heart

To a thing apart.

I offered my flesh

To so much less

Than the man I created

Inside my head.

I offered my mind

And I was blind.

We shared sweet madness

Cocooned within badness.

My whole being craved

To be possessed by you.

I was afraid

Yet remained obsessed by you.

Strange, now that I see you clear

How I cannot bear you near.

The dream is over, lover,

And there’ll never be another.

Fifteen

The next day the urgency of the previous afternoon had mostly left Jennifer. She decided to go for a drive around all her old haunts and to take her mother with her. That would win a few bonus points. They drove to Pelham Bay, to the car park by the cliffs, and her mother said she would be quite happy sitting in the car while Jennifer went for a bit of a walk.

She strode out along the cliff path for a while, and then sat herself on a big sandstone boulder almost at the cliff edge. It was a brilliantly clear day. You could see Lundy Island and across the water to Wales. The only sound was the whirl of the wind and the crash of the waves against the rocks below. There was hardly anyone about, just a lone couple in the distance walking their dogs, and one man out on the furthest point of the rocks down below, casting a fishing line. The sun was a flash of silver on the water, which was so darkly green and blue that in places it appeared almost black. The foaming crests of the waves curled and entwined and reared up into endless bucking shapes, demonstrating with extravagant clarity how they had come to be called white horses. From where Jennifer sat there was a sheer drop a couple of hundred feet down to the sea, and she felt suspended above it. The wiry heath grass was springy beneath her feet, and the boulder on which she perched felt warm from the sunshine, although the breeze had a bitter chill to it. And it was the strength of the wind that day which was keeping the sky so clear and free of clouds. The wild flowers were in their full blaze of late spring glory, the deep pink of campions mixing crazily with the vivid blue of bluebells. A backdrop of deep green fern lay at the foot of dense woodland lifting up from the flat ledge of the cliff top and stretching right back over the great hill beyond. It was a magical day. The air tasted of salt — how she missed that in London. The wind was like a massage of sharp needles against her upturned face. She closed her eyes and breathed in the wonder of the moment.

Some lines of T. S. Eliot, which she had discovered only recently and instantly known the truth of, flashed unheralded across her mind.

She had begun to walk back to the car and her patiently waiting mother, when, on autopilot, almost, she had taken the other track, the one she knew led past old Bill Turpin’s cottage. If she was to unravel any of the mysteries of the past, this would be the key to open the first door. Instinctively she knew that, and although one half of her wanted to carry on with her life and have nothing more to do with the past, she could not do so.

She was not able to get very close to Bill’s cottage because the police had cordoned off the area. She was vaguely puzzled. She could not even follow the path which would have taken her past the cottage and along a circular route back to the car park. A uniformed officer told her politely that she would have to return the way she had come. Over his shoulder she could just glimpse the activity at the cottage. There were a number of police there, many dressed in overalls, and they appeared to be digging up the garden.

Jennifer tried, without a deal of success, to talk to the young constable about what was happening. Just as she was ready to give up and reluctantly retrace her steps, she heard a familiar voice, a good strong solid Devonian voice issuing orders. She smiled. He always had that ring of authority about him, did Todd Mallett. People were inclined to do what he told them automatically, couldn’t be a bad trait for a policeman. She turned to the constable again and asked if perhaps she could have a brief word with Sergeant Mallett, who was an old friend, she explained. Or maybe he was Inspector Mallett now?

The constable swiftly corrected her. ‘Detective Inspector Mallett, madam,’ he said.

He took her name and told her he would tell the detective inspector she would like to see him.

Minutes later, a beaming Todd Mallett strode across the grass towards her and held out his hand in greeting. A little formal, she thought, but he was, after all, a police inspector in front of all his men.

‘Congratulations on your promotion,’ she said, grinning.

‘Not before time, some say,’ he replied.

‘Which is probably to your credit.’

‘Glad something is,’ he said.

He looked her up and down appreciatively. She was wearing the same tight black jeans she had worn for the journey down the day before, along with black leather boots and a heavy black leather jacket with a lot of shiny metallic bits and pieces on it. An expensive-looking silk scarf was just visible at her neck. Her thick brown hair had been blown all over the place by the wind and her skin, as clear as ever, appeared lightly tanned. He supposed she could afford to buy sunshine any time of the year she pleased. Her eyes were just as emerald green and sparkling with life as he had remembered them. She wore no make-up. He thought that, by and large, the years had been kind to her. The hand which he clasped in his returned his grip firmly. She had workmanlike hands, the nails on her long fingers, although immaculately manicured, were clipped short and unvarnished. Her body remained as slim and lithe as ever. She never seemed to put on weight, and remained athletic-looking, even though she probably still took little or no exercise. He remembered that, apart from her swimming at school, Jennifer had always been totally uninterested in any kind of sport or exercise routine. He thought she looked like a biker, which he assumed was the intention, and reflected briefly that she was about the only woman in her forties he knew who would not appear totally ridiculous in such an outfit.

‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.

‘Not since the funeral...’ she responded.

‘Must be almost ten years?’ His voice a query. ‘You look good.’

‘So do you.’

It was the truth. Unlike his father, Todd Mallett had not thickened in girth with the years. He was a sportsman who still played cricket and had only recently given up rugby. His sporting activities had broadened his shoulders over the years, and given him plenty of muscle, while keeping in control any family tendency to fleshiness. The straight set of his mouth left no doubt as to his physical and mental toughness, but his grey eyes remained gentle and honest. He was just as she remembered him.

‘Are you here for long?’ he asked, trying to make conversation.

He was aware of the constable watching them with interest.

‘Maybe for ever,’ she replied.

Naturally he thought she was joking, but she wasn’t.

‘I’d like to talk to you,’ she said. ‘About all of this really...’

She gestured towards the activity around Bill’s cottage.

‘Is that why you came?’ he asked.

‘No. Sheer coincidence,’ she replied truthfully. ‘But I can’t help wanting to ask some questions now, now that...’

Her voice trailed off. He understood though. One of the few that did.

‘A pint tonight, at the Old Ship? Round eight o’clock?’ he queried.

She nodded enthusiastically.

‘Thank you, Todd,’ she said.

She hurried back to the car then. She’d kept her mother waiting far too long, selfish as ever, but meeting Todd like that, and with him apparently in charge of whatever inquiries were going on, was a stroke of luck. She’d always been a lucky reporter. She smiled at the memory of her first Fleet Street news editor, who had told her when she had once remarked on a piece of extraordinary good fortune that he only employed lucky reporters.

She took her mother out for lunch at the Waterside Hotel and then drove home. She was restless during the afternoon, eager to meet up with Todd.

Eventually eight o’clock arrived, and she pulled into the car park of the Old Ship just as Todd arrived in a big Volvo estate car with a baby seat strapped in the back. It was a timely reminder of his marital status.

‘Good God, you haven’t got another one, have you?’ she asked with singular lack of tact.

He smiled ruefully.

‘Yup, the three boys almost grown and bingo, along comes Charlotte Anne. As far as I can recall, I haven’t touched Angela much more than four times in the whole of our marriage, and every time a coconut.’

Jennifer laughed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

‘Not as ridiculous as you might think,’ he told her. ‘Just a very small exaggeration. Still, I wouldn’t be without the little one. I’ve always wanted a girl, and she’s a cracker.’

Not for the first time, Jennifer reflected on what a good decent man Todd was, and wondered why she couldn’t have grabbed him with both hands when she had the chance. No way, she thought. He was far too nice for her.

Inside they sampled some locally-brewed ale and she started to ask about Bill Turpin, his death, and the discoveries at his cottage.

It was then that Todd dropped his bombshell.

‘Look, this is going to shake you,’ he began. ‘You may as well know the biggest news first. We did a complete search of Bill’s cottage, including digging the garden. You saw that today.’

She nodded. On edge now.

‘This afternoon we found the remains of a young woman. She had been buried there for many years. That news is just about to be released.’

Jennifer looked at him as steadily as she could. She knew what he was going to say next. She just knew.

‘All we know for certain so far is that she was extremely small, in her late teens or very early twenties, and the approximate year she died. We have to wait for forensic now to help us identify the body, and of course there is always a chance with a corpse of this age that it never gets identified at all. But I have a hunch.’

He glanced at her. She was gazing at him steadily. She looked pale. Vulnerable. Not like herself at all.

‘Go on,’ she said quietly.

‘My hunch is that we’ve found Irene Nichols,’ he said.

A cold sweat enveloped Jennifer. So Irene had been dead all these years. She supposed she must have known it really. She struggled to keep her composure, and when she spoke she realised that her voice sounded perfectly level, which was not what she had expected. Years of Fleet Street training, clearly.

‘What else did you find?’ she asked.

Todd looked uneasy.

‘There’s one thing I must ask you,’ he said. ‘This is private isn’t it? Nothing to do with the paper?’

‘What paper?’ she replied.

‘Oh, like that is it?’

‘Yes, very like that,’ she said.

He had told her all of it then. Maybe he shouldn’t have, but he appreciated her urgent need to know.

Bill Turpin’s body had been discovered by the postman. Twice he’d called and heard Bill’s dogs howling. The house was shut up, so he had hammered on the back door to no avail. The door was bolted on the inside, but a kitchen window had not been properly fastened. The postman was a small man, slim and athletic. He clambered through the window and found the old man slumped across the kitchen table. He had used Bill’s phone to call the police. Two local officers and an ambulance were on the scene within half an hour and were immediately confronted with their first surprise. Bill had been sitting at the table surrounded by papers and money. A great deal of money. Nearly a quarter of a million in used notes, and over a million quid’s worth of share certificates. There were also statements and various papers referring to numbered Swiss bank accounts. Just a brief glance had showed Todd that Bill was worth four or five million. And probably much more. Everybody knew he had been successful in the holiday trade, but his local business ventures could not possibly have netted a fraction of the riches Bill Turpin had accumulated.

‘The papers had all been stacked in a tin box which had been taken from its hiding place by the inglenook fireplace. The door to the old bread oven was open when Bill’s body was discovered, and careful examination revealed that at the back of the oven was an ingeniously fabricated hiding place. The stone construction of the oven seemed solid enough, but if pushed in the right places the back pivoted to one side. And beyond it was a cavity containing two more tin boxes. So cleverly concealed was this hiding place that, had old Bill not been actually dealing with his boxes at the time of his death, and had he not left the door of the oven open, it would probably never have been found.

‘One tin box contained jewellery and two watches — a lady’s watch and a man’s pocket watch, a beautiful antique half hunter. The other held a selection of yellowed newspaper cuttings and a scribbled notebook with what could have been computer codes written in it.’

Todd was watching her face.

‘The pocket watch was inscribed, which was helpful,’ the policeman went on. ‘It belonged to the last Lord Lynmouth. He was murdered a couple of years after the war and his watch was taken the night he died. He disturbed burglars at his house on the edge of Exmoor and was strangled. There was a spate of big art thefts at the time — heavy stuff, priceless treasures disappeared that could only have gone to a certain kind of private collector, because goods like that could never go on display, too easily recognised. Quite an operation, it was, and nobody ever did get to the bottom of it.

‘There was always some suspicion that Bill Turpin had been involved, though. Do you remember hearing about the robbery when you were a kid?’

Jennifer half nodded, half shook her head. She did remember something: there had always been gossip about Bill. And she vaguely recalled Marcus telling her in the early days how he had once tried to turn Bill Turpin over and what a waste of time it had been. But Jennifer did not want to interrupt. She waited for Todd to get on with it. She wanted to know everything he could possibly tell her.

Todd didn’t push her. He took a long slow pull of his pint and eventually he continued.

‘The Earl of Lynmouth had a housemaid, who came forward and claimed that she had been hiding in the pantry at the time and had seen the old Earl murdered, and that she recognised the man who did it. She named him as Bill Turpin from Brinton, the village where he lived before the war, but she would never tell the police how she knew him. The police investigated as best they could, and, according to my father, who remembers the talk about the case even though it was before his time, there were those who were quite sure the housemaid was telling the truth. I mean, how could she just conjure up a name like that anyway? But the whole thing was bizarre. Nothing and nobody could persuade her to say any more. Apparently she was tuppence short of a shilling, very much on the slow side. According to Lord Lynmouth’s widow she had a history of fantasising, and there was no real evidence to link Bill to the crime — any more than there was with arms dealing out of Bristol and God knows what else folk said he was involved in in those days.

‘Eventually the whole thing receded into local myth, as these thing do, and was dropped. More or less forgotten about until now. And Bill Turpin may have got away with one hell of a crime — although I doubt you could prove that, even now we’ve found the watch.’

‘And the other watch?’ asked Jennifer, suspecting she knew the answer.

‘A dainty silver thing, inexpensive, tarnished with the years. My guess is that it belonged to Irene Nichols. I shall be showing it to her parents, but I don’t want to give them more misery for nothing, so I’m waiting till forensic have come up with the goods.

‘The cuttings we found included stories on the Lord Lynmouth burglary, several of the other big art robberies of the period, the disappearance of Irene Nichols, and the murder of Marjorie Benson — the girl whose body you found.’

He paused and took another long draught of his pint.

Jennifer felt she was being told too much to grasp in one sitting.

‘So what are you saying, Bill Turpin was a some kind of mass murderer, a serial killer, he strangled the Earl of Lynmouth, and then years later he killed Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson?’ she asked.

‘I know,’ Todd said. ‘It does sound far fetched.’ But there’s more. The Swiss bank statements indicated a regular annual income and several big one-off payments. Most came around the time of the murder of Lord Lynmouth in 1945 and during the following couple of years, and there was one for £100,000 in 1970 — dated not long after Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson were killed.’

Jennifer gasped. ‘You don’t think Bill Turpin was a paid hit man for goodness’ sake, do you?’

‘A pretty highly paid one, if he was,’ Todd replied. ‘That or a top-of-the-league burglar, or both. I just don’t know. It’s going to take a bit of sorting, this one...’

‘You’re telling me,’ Jennifer managed to mutter. ‘I don’t know about Lord Lynmouth and his treasures, but who would pay somebody a hundred grand to murder poor little Irene and some barmaid? Anyway, I don’t see that you have anything concrete linking Bill Turpin to the Marjorie Benson murder.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Todd. ‘But we have quite a coincidence, don’t we?’

‘The Durraton Gazette made it sound like more than that, as if you had hard evidence. OK, so he had stashed away cuttings about Marjorie Benson’s murder. You could never have jailed him for that, could you?’

Todd shook his head. ‘Of course not, but I’m sure they fit together somehow. There’s always a pattern. And we haven’t finished yet — the inquiry into the Marjorie Benson murder has been reopened just like the Gazette said.

Two murders in a little place like Pelham Bay within a few days — there’s not been another killing in Pelham since, you know. And nobody ever managed to find out who Marjorie was all those years ago. She remains a mystery. There was nothing at the golf club to give a clue as to her background, we couldn’t find any medical or national insurance records, nothing, and nobody every reported her missing. And we still have no motive for her murder, let alone the murderer.’

He leaned back in his chair, warming to his theme. He had already given a great deal of thought to the Lord Lynmouth connection, and it cleared his mind to explain his thinking to Jennifer.

‘You have to remember that Lord Lynmouth was the richest man in Britain and one of the richest in the world in those days,’ he continued. ‘There has never been private wealth like his in this country since. He died worth eight billion even after half his most valuable treasures were nicked. You can’t imagine it really. I don’t believe his death was a hitman job, I honestly do think he just got in the way of a massive burglary. He had next-to-no security. By modern standards, anyway. He didn’t stand a chance really. And he was up against real pros.

‘That network of fine-art burglaries was mightily organised all right, because even now I don’t think any of the sculptures or paintings taken have ever surfaced. The word in the trade was that there were a small group of manic collectors with money to burn — probably gathered God knows where during the war — who were willing to pay a fortune for old masters and that kind of thing, and then quite content to keep the stuff behind locked doors; the kind of stuff money normally cannot buy because most of it is either in museums and galleries or going to end up in them.

‘Several galleries were done at that time too — and nobody does that kind of thieving unless they have their market worked out. It’s very big business indeed. Lord Lynmouth had a Leonardo de Vinci, you know. Can you imagine what that was worth even then? He’d left it to the National Gallery, but it walked the night he was murdered and has never been seen since.’

Jennifer was watching Todd, her jaw dropped. His face was tight with concentration. It had clearly become something of an obsession for him.

‘Irene Nichols I agree with you about,’ he went on. ‘It’s impossible to imagine anyone paying money to have that poor little kid knocked off. But there does appear to have been another motive.’

‘And what was that?’ Jennifer struggled to keep her voice calm.

‘Well, we don’t know yet. Forensic have a long way to go...’ Todd was uneasy again.

‘Oh come on, you’ve got this far, you have to tell me the end of it. I know damn well you’d have had a pathologist on the spot, and he probably already has a pretty good idea of exactly what happened to the girl.’

Todd smiled. ‘Once a court reporter, always a pain in the arse,’ he said.

Her eyes implored him. He continued:

‘The soil in Bill Turpin’s garden was of the kind which preserved the body in much better condition than might have been expected after twenty-five years — like some of the bodies found in the Fred West murder investigations in Gloucester last year,’ he said. ‘So we were able to deduce more than we would have thought. Almost certainly the girl died of a broken neck. And we think there was a sexual motive behind the murder.’

Jennifer heard herself ask another question, the obvious one.

‘Not Bill Turpin, surely? He must have been well over sixty even back in 1970?’

Todd scratched his head. ‘I know. It doesn’t seem likely. But Bill was always a fit man, even in his sixties. And nobody ever knew anything about his sex life. He never appeared to have one after the war, according to my old man, and maybe that poor kid buried in his vegetable patch is the reason why. Maybe that’s what he liked to do to his women.’

‘What was what he liked to do to his women?’

Todd looked away. ‘The girl we found was tiny. There is damage to her pelvis and her back. The pathologist believes that someone had sex with her with such force that it broke her neck...’

Jennifer stared at him. She had one last question.

‘She has been buried for twenty-five years, surely you are talking theories. Even accepting that her body has been exceptionally well preserved, is there any way of actually proving that she was having sex when she died, and if there was, is there any way of scientifically proving who the man was?’

‘I am not sure about the first question, but apparently it’s a definite no to the second,’ said Todd, glumly.

Jennifer leaned back in her chair. Todd had not mentioned Marcus. There was no reason to, nothing to link Marcus with Bill Turpin and the body in the garden, nothing at all to link him, apparently, not even if it was Irene.

But Todd Mallett did not know what she knew about the man she had married. Todd did not know the doubts and fears she had lived with for twenty-five years.

Suddenly, as she sat in the lounge bar of the Old Ship, warm, beery and smoky, a comforting room, she could see again, clear as day, the image of her husband in the throes of his extreme sexual desire with those two young Oriental girls. There had been a crazed look in his eye which had frightened as well as disgusted her. A look she had never seen before. Unreal.

What if Bill Turpin hadn’t killed Irene Nichols? What if Mark had done it? What if Mark, later to become Marcus, Sir Marcus Piddell, government minister, was a murderer?

She tried to put the thought out of her mind, just the way she always had. But she couldn’t, not this time. Wasn’t this what she had suspected from the beginning, a suspicion that had lurked throughout her adult life and which she had never allowed herself to face fully? She had to discover the truth once and for all, to discover if there was a missing link between Mark and old Bill Turpin. But what link could there possibly be? And if Mark was a murderer, why was Irene’s body in Bill Turpin’s garden? Why was her watch concealed in one of Bill’s hidden tin boxes?

She didn’t know the answers and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to find out. Probably only she would ever suspect that Marcus was capable of murder, and she sincerely believed that only she had a hope of ever proving it if it was so. Yet if she set off on the path she was considering, she was already starkly aware of how her own life could be damn near destroyed by discoveries that she might make. For most of her adulthood she had been Mark Piddle’s woman. She had slept with him for the first time only days after Irene’s death. God, had she really been that unthinking, that callous? So much of what she was beginning to remember she would rather forget, but that was how it had always been.

She had drifted off into a kind of stunned reverie. Vaguely in the distance she heard Todd Mallett’s voice, kind, concerned, asking her if she was all right.

‘It was all a long time ago,’ she heard Todd say, and with a supreme effort of will she lurched back into the present.

Todd looked boyish. She knew that he cared about her, suspected he still carried a torch for her. He was an attractive man whose strength and kindness shone from his gentle grey eyes. She felt that if she could be close to him he would, if only for a short time, keep the nightmare at bay. She needed that.

‘Do you still have the beach hut?’ she asked coolly. The hut, belonging rather tackily to Angela’s parents, was the place they had used to make love all those years ago.

He was startled. He had genuinely not expected this, not after so long.

‘Y-yes.’ He actually stammered. There was just the hint of a query in his voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. She felt a fool. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest... Well I did. But forget I did. Please.’

He shook his head. ‘Jenny, I can think of nothing I would like more. I was just surprised... and flattered.’

He emptied his glass. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

She followed him meekly. He and her mother were the only people left in the world who called her Jenny. It made her feel like a schoolgirl again, if only very fleetingly.

‘We’ll leave your car here,’ he said, and escorted her to the Volvo.

He opened the passenger door for her. All she could see was the baby seat in the back, and she realised suddenly that she could not deal with any more guilt.

She turned to him and kissed him softly on the lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I want to, but I really shouldn’t have said anything. I just can’t...’

As ever, about everything, he was understanding.

‘It’s OK, you’re probably right,’ he said.

He kissed her forehead and closed the door of the Volvo.

Together they walked slowly across the car park to her Porsche. For once in her life she wasn’t sure she could cope with sleeping with anybody. Her brain was still in turmoil. She was not going to be able to stop now. She had to see this thing through, and she might as well get on with it.

Trying to sound very casual, she asked: ‘Will you be speaking to Marcus?’

‘Of course,’ Todd said. ‘Somebody will be, anyway. If the dead girl is Irene, that is. He was living with her at the time, after all. But it’ll just be a formality.’

‘I see. There’s nothing to link him, is there?’

‘No.’

He was puzzled. He had never liked Marcus Piddell. Todd thought he was an arrogant twister who had wheeled and dealed his way to the top, not caring whom he trampled on along the way. It probably went right back to the time Mark had ridiculed him and Angela on that long-ago Sunday in Pelham Bay, and Todd had always resented the hold Mark had over Jennifer. He was by and large a decent cop, he would never allow his personal feelings to colour his professional judgement. But even if he had wanted to think that Mark might be in some way involved, there was absolutely no indication of this.

Jennifer interrupted his musings.

‘I forgot to ask you about the notebook?’

‘Oh yeah — another bit of a mystery that. The notebook is indecipherable at a glance. If it does contain computer codes and we could break into them, we might find some answers — Bill had a sophisticated computer in the cottage — but we’ve been unable so far to jack into the files on the hard drive, and there appears to be no additional software for it.’

‘Could I see it, and the watches and the other stuff you’ve collected?’ Jennifer asked.

He wanted to know why. She decided to tell him this much of the truth.

‘I know it’s crazy, I just feel they might mean something to me that they don’t to anyone else,’ she said.

‘It’s evidence, Jennifer.’

‘So? I wasn’t planning to steal the stuff.’

She opened her car door and started to climb in.

He caught her by the arm.

‘Ten o’clock tomorrow morning at the operations centre in Pelham Bay village hall,’ he said.

With his other hand he gently touched her face.

He smiled at her. ‘I suppose it could never have worked for us, could it?’ he asked.

‘No chance,’ she said. ‘We might have had fun trying though.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I was ever supposed to have fun,’ he said.

She laughed. That was the trouble, he thought, she had never taken him seriously for a moment. And he had never been able to take her lightly enough.

As soon as she got home to Seaview Road she phoned Anna.

‘Come to your senses yet, have you?’ asked her friend.

‘Shut up,’ said Jennifer. ‘Listen. I need some help. In total confidence. You and me only.’

‘Oh God,’ said Anna helpfully. ‘What have you done now?’

Jennifer took a deep breath.

‘Nothing. I need some cuttings. Are you still able to use the library at the Chronicle?’

‘Yes. In return for copious quantities of malt whisky delivered to the chief librarian every Christmas. But why do you need me and the Chronicle library, for Christ’s sake? Can’t Caroline help you? She keeps phoning me, incidentally.’

Caroline was Jennifer’s secretary at The Globe. Or used to be — Jennifer wasn’t quite sure any more. In either case, Caroline would help willingly. She would also talk. She couldn’t help it, and Jennifer had always accepted it as congenital.

‘Anna, you know Caroline can never keep her mouth shut, and this is serious. I want cuts on Marcus.’

‘Bloody Hell, Jen, I thought you didn’t want to hear his name again. You’ll never get him out of your system, will you?’

Jennifer was getting impatient.

‘Will you listen for once? It’s nothing to do with that. I have discovered something I would rather not have done, and I need to do some digging. I want copies of all the scandalous stuff about Marcus, all the speculation pieces about his money, the row over that devaluation story in the Recorder. Anything like that, anything at all.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Anna, I can’t tell you, not even you, not yet — I may have got it wrong. Will you fax the stuff to me?’

‘I suppose so. When do you want it? As if I couldn’t guess.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Jennifer, it means going in to town and I wasn’t planning to. And that means rearranging everything for Pandora...’

‘Please, Anna. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t vital.’

‘Oh all right,’ said Anna. ‘Whatever it is that’s getting at you, I expect you should leave well alone, but I don’t suppose you will listen. You never do.’

‘Said the pot.’

Jennifer was already feeling more cheerful, more positive. She had known Anna would do it for her. She’d never let her down yet. Jennifer held the phone away from her ear and smiled as Anna launched into a reassuring grumble concerning ‘being taken for granted’, and ‘hare-brained ideas’. The most wonderful thing about her oldest friend remained the way even the briefest and least consequential conversation with her could lift the deepest depression. Even when the world was closing in totally, the familiarity of a really good friendship could make you think that there was something in life worth carrying on for. Perhaps because she had never had children, she valued her one or two true friendships more than the friends concerned would probably ever know.

She’d been away barely two days, and so much had happened in North Devon that she had almost completely forgotten her other life. She did not want any further dealings with Jack and the paper until she had things a little clearer in her mind, which looked like being not for some time now. She had resigned, and when it dawned on them all that she really meant it, she assumed they would stop paying her. There wasn’t really a lot more to it, except the car, which was no longer worth a great deal. She just couldn’t be bothered with sorting it out, so it was easier to be an ostrich for a while and carry on driving the damn thing around.

‘Thanks Anna,’ she said.

‘Again,’ said Anna.

‘Thanks Anna again,’ Jennifer repeated obediently.

‘Too bloody right,’ said Anna.

But as she replaced the receiver, Anna McDonald felt deeply uneasy.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she told Dominic. ‘But something has happened to throw Jen completely. She’s just not herself.’

‘Well, that’s good news at least,’ said Dominic.

Anna couldn’t even be bothered to register that she’d heard what he had said. She was talking to herself really, thinking aloud.

‘She’s in a right state about something.’

The phone call had interrupted her lugubrious husband’s enjoyment of a late-night movie on TV.

‘Jennifer bloody Stone is always in a right state if you ask me,’ he grumbled.

The next morning gave Anna her first inkling of what might lie behind Jennifer’s call. The reopening of the old murder inquiry in Pelham Bay and the discovery of a body in Bill Turpin’s garden was a page lead in the one tabloid paper the McDonalds still had delivered along with the Times and the Telegraph.

Anna studied the piece thoughtfully, then contemplated calling Jennifer back and giving her the third degree. She decided against it. If the old bat wasn’t telling, then she wasn’t telling.

She would get the cuttings organised and have another go at Jen that night.

Sixteen

Jennifer slept fitfully — still unsure that she really wanted to dig up the past, but at the same time quite certain that she was going to. She could feel her anger and disgust at Marcus welling up inside her. She knew that if she tried to destroy him she would probably end up destroying a large part of her own life. She had shut her eyes quite determinedly and refused to examine her eternal doubts about his business dealings. She had walked away from the more unpleasant aspects of his sex life. To her shame she had done nothing about the youthful sex-for-sale trade that she knew he must be involved in. But murder? Now that her eyes had been involuntarily opened, her journalistic antennae were operating at full power. She wanted to know exactly what had been going on, what exactly the undercurrent she had felt for so long in Marcus’s life was really about. She was sure that everything was linked in some complex way to the goings on in Pelham Bay so long ago.

She was still fretting in the morning as she sat in her mother’s kitchen drinking tea. It was always tea for her in the mornings. There was nothing like a strong cup of English Breakfast to cut through a hangover, not that she had one that morning, it just felt as if she did. Her mother was already up and about. It was a treat for her to have her daughter at home, although, as usual, she wasn’t seeing much of her. Jennifer had always been rushing around doing something. Ever since her teens. Maybe even before. Over tea and toast they chatted about family. Her brother had married for the first time relatively late in life, and had had twin boys and then a daughter in short order. Mrs Stone was delighted. She’d more or less given up any hope of being a grandmother. The bad news was that Jennifer’s brother had been disillusioned with the Britain he had found waiting for him when he left the air force, and had emigrated to Australia where he worked for a small charter aircraft company. It was mostly Boys’ Own flying and he was in his element. He had never really grown up: the air force was responsible for that. But he had found a near-perfect wife, and eventually, what was for him, a near-perfect life. Jennifer envied him. It was sad for her mother that this new family was so far away, but every year she travelled to Australia and spent two months with them. Mrs Stone had made six visits now. She was a veteran, and Jennifer always paid for the tickets, first-class, an arm — and-a-leg job, but the least she could do. One year, not long after her father had died, she had taken a month’s holiday and travelled with her mother down under. That had been the best trip ever for Mrs Stone. All her family together again.

Jennifer decided to hint that she might not be going back to The Globe. Mrs Stone was unmoved.

‘Huh, I knew there was something up,’ she said.

Jennifer smiled. She never had been able to pull the wool over her mother’s eyes as much as she thought she could. She might as well confess the rest of it.

‘Actually I’m thinking of buying a cottage by the sea here in North Devon and giving up London and newspapers for good,’ Jennifer announced.

Her mother did not have to say how much that would please her, but she knew her daughter well.

‘Are you sure you can do that, maid?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not sure — but I think I may be soon,’ replied Jennifer honestly. ‘There’s something I have to do before I can finally make any big decisions.’

‘Nothing to do with that old man and they murders?’ Mrs Stone queried.

Once again Jennifer was surprised by her astuteness. She shouldn’t be, but there it was. She knew her mother would worry herself sick if she thought Jenny was getting mixed up in it all again, so she decided to lie.

‘No, of course not,’ she said coolly.

But she wasn’t quite sure how convincing she was being. She changed the subject.

‘I tell you what, how about if we go to Oz together again to see Steve and the family?’

Mrs Stone’s face lit up. She’d love that. Jenny didn’t need to ask, did she?

‘In the autumn,’ said Jennifer. ‘Their spring. Stay three months if you like — and I’ll stay three months with you. Why the hell not?’

‘Don’t swear,’ said her mother. In some ways nothing changed.

And so, chatting comfortably with her mother, the time passed more quickly than Jennifer had expected. Suddenly it was nine-thirty, and she set off to drive to the operations centre in Pelham Bay. She arrived fifteen minutes early. But Todd was already prepared for her, as she had guessed he would be. A young constable showed her into the private office he had set up in a small storeroom. It was an airless little room with one tiny high-up window, but at least it gave him some privacy. A temporary phone line had been installed. The furniture comprised a desk covered in papers and two straight-backed chairs.

The constable closed the door, and Jennifer sat down opposite Todd across the desk. She was aware of his face softening as he looked at her, then, with a slight shrug of his burly shoulders, he became the police chief again.

He took several clear plastic bags from the box by his feet, cleared a space on his cluttered desk and spread them out. Each bag contained a piece of the evidence found in Bill’s cottage.

‘Can I look at the notebook, can I take it out of the bag?’ Jennifer asked.

‘No,’ said Todd. ‘But we’ve copied it. Hang on.’

He got up and headed for the operations room set up in the main body of the village hall. While he was gone, Jennifer studied the items of jewellery laid out before her. Irene’s cheap little silver-plated watch stood out like a sore thumb — well, she assumed it was Irene’s. It had indeed tarnished badly.

When Todd returned, she asked him if the body had now definitely been identified as Irene. He replied that it had. The dental records checked out, and his next job was to tell Irene’s parents. The police had already warned them of the possibility before the news had been announced that a long-dead body had been found. Todd hadn’t wanted them to put two and two together from a news bulletin.

Jennifer shuddered. She sympathised with Todd on the rotten job he was about to do.

‘I’ve done worse,’ he replied flatly. ‘They always believed Irene was dead anyway. Said there was no way she would have gone anywhere without telling them.’

Jennifer reached out a hand for the copies of the notebook. There were jottings on several pages. Groups of numbers and letters, disjointed words, nothing that made any sense. Yet she had seen something like it before. She knew she had.

‘Are these what you think are codes?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Todd replied. ‘But so far they are not a lot of good to us. As I told you, Bill Turpin had this super-advanced computer system but no software. If there was anything already on the hard disc, we have yet to break into it. God knows what he was planning to use the thing for, but it seems as if it had been programmed by somebody else and Bill had barely handled it. He was obviously a lot more sophisticated than anybody would have guessed, and pretty clever on the stock market, so maybe he aimed to use the computer to play the market. Who knows? When we checked the keyboard for his finger prints there were hardly any, so he may have tried to move into the computer age and not quite made it.

‘At the Penny Parade there is a basic Amstrad that they use for their accounts and stock-taking and so on, but, according to Johnny Cooke who does all that sort of stuff, Bill rarely even went near that.’

Todd paused. He was watching Jennifer’s face. He didn’t know quite what to make of her.

‘If you know anything, Jenny, suspect anything, have the slightest clue about anything...’ he began quietly. ‘Why don’t you tell me — and then let me do my job?’

‘I’m just interested,’ she replied.

‘That’s one word for it.’

‘Yes. Maybe I’ll write a book.’

‘Maybe you will,’ he said. ‘But that’s not it, either, is it?’

She put the copy of the notebook in her pocket and took one last look at the forlorn collection of jewellery.

‘Thanks Todd,’ she said.

She left her car parked outside the village hall and walked along Old Bay Road to the amusement arcade which she knew was now run by Johnny Cooke. Pelham Bay was something of a time warp. There were video games in the Penny Parade now instead of table football machines, yet surprisingly little else had changed. The resort was perhaps a bit more fish and chippy, but maybe her memory played tricks on her. It always had been a ropy place, the tattiest side of the seaside industry. The deckchairs were still for hire from the same stand, and a new breed of indolent young men had succeeded Johnny Cooke and all the others since. They were clones — immaculately tanned, shirtless in faded jeans, arrogant in the certainty of their youth. Only their hair was different. These lads had short-back-and-sides haircuts, the pudding basin shaven-around-the-edges look that was once again in fashion. Twenty-five years ago Johnny’s hair had been long and luxuriant, spreading onto his shoulders in true sixties and early seventies style.

The same local company was still selling its ever-excellent ice cream from a van parked by the slipway, and in the same spot too. She bought a large cornet and paid fifty pence for a deckchair. The price had gone up but the manners of the deckchair boys remained the same. The short swarthy young man handing the chairs out that day watched uncaring as she struggled to assemble the deckchair with one hand while balancing her melting cornet in the other. The blob of ice cream eventually gave up and fell with a resounding splat onto the cobbled promenade. Damn, she thought. Why hadn’t she performed this operation the other way around and bought the ice cream after hiring the chair? Maybe the deckchair boys and the ice-cream man were tied together in some unholy money-making alliance. Resignedly she approached the van again and bought a second cornet. The seller was stony-faced. Couldn’t she remember from her youth a red-cheeked, smiling, sort of beardless Father Christmas of a man who wooed the children with his affectionate charm as much as with his splendid ice cream? She was reminded of how much things do change with the years. It only appears that they remain the same. This fella sold her a second large cornet within just a couple of minutes and his eyes expressed no recognition. No nothing. Stony, all right, icy, even, to match his wares. So much for the warmth of human contact.

She returned to her chair and settled herself down. It was still fairly warm for May but, sitting right by the sea, she pulled her thick woollen jacket close around her. The wind was whistling up the slipway and along the promenade as usual. She pushed her chair into a more sheltered spot by the wall and sat watching the comings and goings at the Penny Parade. Nobody had ever changed its name.

After a while her patience was rewarded. A tall rangy man walked out of the main door and strolled across the path to the deckchair stand. He spoke briefly to the swarthy boy who handed him what she assumed were that day’s takings. The man counted the cash and put it into the leather bag he was carrying over his shoulder. He was strongly built and his body appeared more youthful than the age she knew he must be, somewhere in his early forties. But when he turned towards her his face showed every minute of the torment that he had been through. She was shocked. He was tanned by the wind but there was a greyness about him. His hair was grey. His eyes were quite lifeless. She registered all this in a second. Even though she knew he must have been shaken rigid by the events of the last couple of days, she had not expected his appearance to betray his protracted ordeal quite as blatantly as it did. But in spite of the premature ageing in his face, she recognised him right away. She had never met him before, strangely enough, never spoken to him. But she had kept in her mind always, however much she had tried to forget it, the bewildered broken face peering at her from the dock at Exeter Crown Court all those years ago. This was Johnny Cooke, and no wonder he looked the way he did. This was a man who had spent most of his adulthood in prison for a crime he might not have committed.

She knew he was running old Bill’s empire, Todd had told her that, told her that Bill had appeared to be Johnny’s saviour, helping him rebuild his life from the moment he was released from jail. Johnny would be aware now, of course, of the new police suspicions. The duplicity, the double-take of it all, that must have been the final blow, she thought. If the hand you thought was keeping you afloat turned out to be the one pushing you into the sea to drown, that was hardest of all to take, surely.

She watched Johnny stroll on from the deckchair stand and lean against the sea wall just a few feet from where she was sitting. His powerful shoulders were bowed. His physique looked as if it was probably sensational beneath his big fisherman’s sweater. He had always been well built, and she supposed he had further developed his body in prison. That was what strong healthy young prisoners did to keep themselves sane, wasn’t it?

He was peering out to sea, behaving much the way she had seen Bill Turpin behave when she was a girl. Ironic really. He looked so tired. She wanted to comfort him. She felt terribly guilty. She asked herself why, but she was just kidding herself. She knew well the reasons for her guilt. She was one of a handful of people in the world who had always had doubts about Johnny’s conviction. Severe doubts. And because of the nature of those doubts, she had deliberately made herself forget them, pretend they did not exist.

As she watched him now, as she saw the weariness and the sadness in him, the guilt overwhelmed her. She felt close to tears.

Then Johnny Cooke turned. Suddenly he was directly facing her and a miracle happened. The tiredness went entirely from his eyes. His mouth stretched into a beaming welcoming smile. Joy radiated from every pore of him. He crouched to the ground and stretched out his arms. His eyes were shining, no longer lifeless. Far from that. Every inch of him was bursting with life and love. She could hear a child’s voice and, looking over her shoulder, saw a toddler running along the promenade towards Johnny. The little boy was unsteady on his feet, wobbling a bit, but he knew exactly where he was going. Squealing with happiness, he flung himself into Johnny Cooke’s extended arms, falling onto his body with the total, as yet unspoiled, trust of little children in their parents. The big man clasped the boy in his arms and, standing up, hoisted the child triumphantly in the air above his head. The boy kicked his legs with delight, his yells of pleasure clear above the roar of the sea. And Johnny Cooke was laughing. A great bellow of a laugh that came from deep inside and poured out in a bubbly torrent like a rushing cliffside waterfall.

On the heels of the child came a pretty dark woman, much younger than Johnny, wheeling a pushchair. She was slightly plump, but that kind of youthful plumpness which made her in some ways even more attractive. It was a cliché, Jennifer knew, and probably nothing to do with her plumpness but more to some inner thing shining out from her, but you were sure that she must have a sunny nature. She was smiling too, although not like Johnny. Hers was a small contented half smile. As she reached the big man, he shifted the little boy into one arm, rested the other casually across the shoulders of the young woman and, bending, kissed her briefly, and with pleasurable familiarity, on the top of the head. The woman was chattering to him. Jennifer could just catch snatches...

‘He said two more words this morning. Cornflakes and natcha.’

‘...natcha?’ queried the big man.

‘Goodness knows,’ she replied, giggling.

He roared his appreciation. That great laugh again. And the little family retreated into the amusement arcade, heads close together, forming a secure triangle of love.

Jennifer felt the tears pricking the backs of her eyelids once more, as she blinked quickly in a desperate attempt to stop them flowing. They were a different kind of tears now. So Johnny Cooke had a family which obviously gave him great happiness. Thank God for that, she thought. She sat in the deckchair for another thirty minutes or so. The sun was not so bright now and the wind was quite sharp. She was uncomfortably cold by the time the young woman left the amusement arcade and set off along the promenade. This time the toddler sat in the pushchair, swathed in a fleecy blanket.

Jennifer waited another couple of minutes and then left her chair and walked across to the Penny Parade. She made her way past the fruit machines and the video games to the back of the arcade where, she remembered, the office was tucked in one corner. It was still in the same place. Johnny Cooke was sitting at a desk, head down, studying some papers. She knocked on the open glass door, standing hesitant in the doorway. He looked up.

‘Yes?’ he inquired.

He didn’t recognise her. Why should he, when he had only seen her once, really, in the witness box at Exeter, and her evidence had not even been important to his case.

‘Hello. I’m Jennifer Stone,’ she said.

The name obviously meant nothing either. He gazed at her inquiringly.

‘I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ he said again in the same questioning tone.

‘I... I... found the body,’ she began hesitantly.

Realisation spread across his face. The joyful happiness of a moment ago with his young child was instant history. The haunted look returned, and with it the greyness and the emptiness in his eyes.

‘And you married Mark Piddle,’ he said, using the old, never-to-be-mentioned, name.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. Her eyes spoke a legend more.

He half smiled. He had always seen humour in so much of it.

‘You’d best sit down,’ he said.

At first he was not forthcoming. She was aware that she was using her interviewing technique on him to get him going. But he was not a stupid man.

‘You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Was,’ she said firmly.

‘I’ve already had the vultures here, several of them are up the road in the pub, waiting,’ he said. ‘A long wait they’re going to have.’

He passed her a scribbled note. It offered Johnny a great deal of money if he would exclusively sell his story to a certain mass-circulation Sunday newspaper.

She raised her eyebrows. He knew exactly what her look was asking. Strange that there seemed this easy understanding between them under such strained circumstances, especially as he was clearly quite aware of her involvement with Mark.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘It looks like everything I have could be some kind of blood money. I want no more of it.’

He paused, as if deciding whether to trust her or not. ‘Is that what you are here for?’

‘No,’ she said.

His expression did not change. His eyes were boring into her head.

‘I promise you.’

He nodded, satisfied. ‘They found a will. Apparently the old bastard has left me everything. Millions maybe. How’s that for blood money?’

He got up from the desk, walked round and stood looking straight down at her.

‘Mark Piddle’s missus, eh?’ he said. To himself really.

‘Ex-missus,’ she repeated.

‘Oh, aye. I never understood it you know. Never understood why he lied.’

‘I know,’ she said.

He didn’t really hear, just went on talking.

‘I said I killed her because I felt I hadn’t looked after her properly. He knew what I meant, the bugger.’

He paused, realising at last what she had said.

‘And you knew too?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

Her shame was out in the open now.

‘You always knew?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She was being absolutely truthful. ‘For years I allowed myself to believe that I had misunderstood him. I suppose it was the only way I could live with myself and with Mark. But now, I know. Yes.’

‘So that’s why you are here.’ The eyes were boring into her skull again. ‘Guilty conscience, aye?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Definitely that.’

‘And what do you want?’

‘I want to find out the truth. I can’t deal with suspicions; and I have so many.’

He made her a mug of tea and sat down next to her and began to talk. He said this would be the one and only time he would discuss it with her; whatever happened next he wanted to get on with his own life.

‘Nobody can give me back the lost years, but I’m damned if I’m going to lose any more,’ he told Jennifer.

Again and again she went over with him both their memories of that night when he had visited Mark after he learned that Marjorie Benson was dead. His memory of it was still hazy in places; that was partly what had sunk him all those years ago. He had been so vague and frightened and unsure of himself, and Mark so confident and articulate and correctly sorrowful.

Johnny was talking about Marjorie Benson now. She glanced at him. There was no self-pity in the man when he talked about his own plight. He had accepted the years lost in jail, and he could take honest joy in his new happiness. He seemed to have so little bitterness. But when he spoke of Marjorie his voice had a catch in it. Even after all these years he looked as if he was about to break down when he talked about his devastation at her death. He had loved her so much he had just gone to pieces. He had been unable to think straight and his complete emotional collapse had not helped his case. In a way he hadn’t cared about himself until it was too late. He had been so much in love with her. He paused and put his head in his hands. He was quite a man, this Johnny Cooke, Jennifer thought to herself.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said, and felt what an inadequate, pathetic phrase that must sound coming from her lips, to this man who had suffered so much. She thanked him for his time and rose to leave.

When she reached the door he stopped her.

‘Are you sure you really want to know the truth?’

She nodded. ‘Don’t you?’ she asked.

‘No. It is over for me. Already it’s all coming back. I don’t even know why I talked to you. Maybe I thought it would help.

‘All that would really help me is for this to end now.’ He paused. ‘What I dread is another court case.’

She didn’t speak.

‘Don’t take this personal, like.’ He paused again. ‘But I never want to see you again as long as I live.’

She opened her mouth to speak, but there were no more words. She was standing in the doorway holding the handle of the glass door. Quickly she shut the door behind her and half ran through the amusement arcade. The tears were pouring down her face. A group of youngsters playing video games looked at her curiously. Outside she made straight for the beach and found herself one of those holes dug in the pebble ridge and she curled up in it and cried her heart out. For a half-lost life, for all that sadness, for two young women who died violently long before their time, and for herself. Oh yes, for herself.

When the tears stopped she made for the public lavatory to splash cold water on her face and repair the damage as much as possible with make-up. Eventually she felt suitably recovered to carry on to the next stage. She walked quickly back to the Porsche and drove to Durraton where she sought out Irene Nichols’s parents’ home. They still lived in the same house on that council estate in the roughest part of town, and they were not difficult to find. Several reporters had set up camp outside. She did not feel able to knock on the door with its peeling white paint. Instead, while being vague about her own identity, she engaged the reporters in conversation and learned that a family friend had indicated that Mr and Mrs Nichols did wish to make a statement and would be coming outside soon. They knew now that the body found in Bill Turpin’s garden was their daughter.

A regional TV team had just arrived and was busily setting up its equipment. After a wait of less than half an hour the Nichols came out of the house. They were drawn-looking, faces gaunt and tear-stained. They spoke of their great sorrow and also their relief that their daughter’s remains had at last been found. At least they could give her a Christian burial now and mourn her properly.

They were halting and inarticulate and incredibly moving. They went back indoors and the reporters and photographers disappeared swiftly to file their stories and wire their pictures and catch the next TV news bulletin.

Jennifer gathered what was left of her failing courage, and, alone now in the street, knocked on the door. The family friend answered, face tight with hostility.

‘Can’t you leave them alone?’ she snapped.

Jennifer swiftly explained that she was not a reporter seeking a story.

She gave her name and, then, haltingly, added: ‘Tell them I married Mark Piddle.’

Almost at once, Irene Nichols’ father came to the door. He was dark with anger.

‘You’ve got a bloody cheek comin’ yer,’ he said. ‘Wife of that murdering bastard.’

Jennifer did not explain that she was his ex-wife.

She homed in on the last chilling words.

‘Why do you say that, Mr Nichols?’ she asked mildly. She could see the hatred in his eyes.

‘Because ’e did for her, and I’ll never ’ear different,’ the man said.

‘The police are sure it was Bill Turpin.’

‘Yeah,’ said Irene’s father. ‘It wouldn’t be Sir Marcus bloody butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-’is-mouth Piddell, MP, would it?’

He looked at her through narrowed eyes. He hated her too. And he had the right.

‘I remember you, you little bitch. In ’is bed before my Irene was cold in ’er heathen grave.’

His voice rose to a hysterical scream.

‘Get off my property,’ he shouted.

Involuntarily she stepped backwards. He moved forwards and spat in her face. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before, not in all her years of professional intrusion into other people’s lives. She just stood there, unable to move.

‘Bugger off,’ he said. ‘And you tell ’im, that evil bastard, I hope he rots in hell.’

The friend came through the door and hustled Mr Nichols away. Jennifer wiped the saliva from her face with the back of her hand. She deserved that, she thought. Guilty, by default, of the most extraordinary self-deception.

Oh Marcus, Marcus. She stumbled back up the garden path to the Porsche parked in the road outside and climbed in. There was a box of paper hankies in the glove compartment. She gave her face a more careful clean-up, gunned the motor and drove back to her mother’s, severely shaken, but more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the whole dreadful business.

Seventeen

In London Marcus was anxiously keeping in touch with the news coming out of Pelham Bay. When he heard on late-night radio that a body had been found in Bill Turpin’s garden, he knew he needed help. Things could so easily get out of hand now.

He reached for the telephone and dialled a number. After two rings he was connected to an answering machine. His message was the only one he ever left. Two words. ‘Call me.’ He knew that the machine was checked every hour, day and night. Now all he had to do was wait. He had once enlisted the help of a friend at British Telecom to get the number traced. Then it had turned out to be a bedsit in London’s Clapham — completely empty except for the answerphone. The room was rented and the telephone line listed in the name of a North London motor car tyre company. Their address turned out to be merely an accommodation address.

Since then the contact number he was given, sent to him anonymously by post, had changed many times, usually around every six months. On one more occasion he had traced it back — this time to an empty room in Hammersmith listed in the name of a property company. Once again the company had only an accommodation address.

Fortunately that night he had not long to wait for the return call. It came just twelve minutes after he had left his message. He picked up the receiver quickly and it was with relief that he recognised the familiar sound of the caller he was hoping for. The voice was high-pitched and metallic. Computerised. It came to him through a piece of equipment known as a ‘squawk box’, which distorted it and made it unidentifiable. He flicked a switch on the phone. There was no security problem. There would be no Marcus-gate tapes. His phone could be scrambled, and by state-of-the-art equipment, naturally. Desperately gathering the wits that had never yet let him down, he explained swiftly and concisely what had happened. The voice at the other end listened carefully and gave him the most difficult advice of all to follow. Do nothing. Let them come to you. Wait for developments.

He replaced the receiver in its cradle, went to bed, and tried to sleep. It was a waste of time.

In the morning he knew he must stick to his usual routine and do what he had been told — nothing. But he so badly wanted to find out exactly what was going on in North Devon. He considered getting in touch with his own local paper editors there, to ensure both that they passed on information concerning the body to him straight away, and that he could control the papers’ interpretation of the story.

Several times he picked up a telephone to do just that. But Marcus’s brain continued to work smoothly even under the greatest stress. He knew that would only raise questions which at the moment did not exist and would be a mistake — certainly before the body was formally identified. He knew the advice he had been given was correct. All he could do was wait until that identification was made — and wait he must.

It was the police who told him the body of Irene Nichols had been found — and they gave him the news before it was released to the press.

‘You’re not strictly family, of course, sir, but we thought you’d like to know,’ said a voice on the telephone. A London policeman. He was glad of that. He would rather deal with someone anonymous than people from the West Country who might know him.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ Marcus said haltingly. ‘I suppose I had suspected from the moment I knew there was a body ... But it’s always a shock.

‘Can I do anything to help?’

‘Yes sir, you can,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll need to take a full statement from you.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Marcus responded. He had expected that — none the less he did not relish the prospect. And he was quite relieved when he was asked if he would be available for interview straightaway — at least it would get the ordeal over with.

When Jennifer reached 16 Seaview Road after her traumatic confrontation with Irene Nichols’s father, she went straight to the drinks cabinet in the front room and poured herself a stiff Scotch. Her mother heard the front door slam and followed her silently into the room.

‘I didn’t think you drank whisky,’ she said.

‘I don’t,’ replied Jennifer.

Mrs Stone shrugged. ‘There’s Clovelly herrings for tea,’ she said.

‘I’m not hungry.’

Jennifer knew she was trembling. She tried hard to appear normal, but she certainly couldn’t face eating anything. Herrings were about the last thing she could force down. The very thought made her feel sick.

‘You’re always hungry,’ persisted her mother. ‘And you like herrings.’

‘I think I’ve got an upset tummy,’ she lied.

Or maybe it wasn’t a lie any more. She wasn’t quite sure.

‘Well, put that bottle away then,’ said her mother unsympathetically, as Jennifer poured a second stiff measure into a tumbler.

Jennifer switched on the television and watched the news. The talk with the grief-stricken Mr and Mrs Nichols made the local and the national bulletins. It was harrowing stuff. And there was a few seconds’ snatched footage of Johnny Cooke going into the Penny Parade. He looked neither to left nor right, ignoring the questions thrown at him by the gathered media.

Mr and Mrs Nichols had said nothing publicly about their suspicions. Their views had been checked out by the police twenty-five years earlier and summarily dismissed. They were resigned to not being listened to properly — and they were just relieved now to have their daughter’s remains returned to them. Like Johnny Cooke they did not want to relive it all.

There was no evidence involving Marcus. Irene Nichols had lived with him. So what? In the event of any murder, Jennifer knew, the police always looked first at those closest to the victim. But Marcus had emerged from the beginning smelling of roses and would continue to do so. Marcus was so convincing, and always had been, in his reasoned sorrow. All the evidence of responsibility for Irene’s murder now pointed to Bill Turpin. Nobody knew who had murdered Marjorie Benson.

The only way Jennifer could find out if what she suspected was indeed the truth, was for her to make all the moves. Only she, with her special knowledge and memories, could point the finger at Marcus; only she could discover what was behind it all. She was certain of that, and she desperately needed to find the truth — although she was not very sure of what she would do with it when she ultimately had it.

She switched off the television and plugged her laptop computer into the mains. It was her habit to write things down, to clarify her thoughts by arranging them in proper sentences. Her jottings were interrupted by the shrill tones of the telephone ringing in the hall.

‘Anna,’ she said to herself.

She almost ran into the hallway. Her mother appeared at the kitchen door.

‘Don’t worry mum, I think it’s for me,’ she called.

‘And whoever else could it possibly be for when you’re in the house, my girl?’ muttered Mrs Stone as her daughter picked up the phone.

Jennifer wasn’t disappointed. It was Anna.

‘Plug in the toy box, your dispatches await,’ said the voice she had been hoping to hear.

‘You’re wonderful, did I ever tell you that Anna?’ she asked.

‘Not nearly often enough,’ came the reply. ‘And by the way, your inquiries do not have anything to do with murder and mayhem and bodies in the garden of a certain North Devon cottage, do they?’

Jennifer carried on as if she had not heard the question. ‘I’m going to hang up now and fetch the machine,’ she said.

She carried the laptop from the living room into the hall and prepared to insert its jack into the telephone socket.

‘Anna, are you ready?’

‘Jen, I know something’s very wrong. Can’t you tell me?’

‘Not yet, I just can’t. And not on the phone. I’ll be back in town soon. OK?’

‘I suppose. Just take care.’

‘See you very soon. Honest. And thanks...’

She plugged in her computer with its built-in fax modem. The newspaper cuttings would be sent down the phone line directly into the laptop’s hard drive and she would be able to study them at her leisure on the screen.

Anna had done a good job. Late into the night Jennifer read and reread the information her friend had sent her. The often only half-expressed queries about Marcus’s business dealings were endless. The financial pundits variously praised and wondered at his knowledge of the money market. Eventually she switched off the computer, but she remained thoughtful and unable to sleep properly throughout the night.

In the morning, Jennifer knew exactly what she must do. She was up early again and on the phone. Eventually she tracked down Marcus on his mobile. It was a Sunday morning. She could not try to contact him through his office, which was no great loss because they rarely knew where he was anyway, something of which she had an appreciation born of bitter experience. He was a maverick, Marcus, desperately difficult to work with. Thank God he still had the same personal mobile phone number.

He sounded surprised and a little alarmed to hear her voice. The surprise was understandable; she had not contacted him except through solicitors since that dreadful night when she had interrupted his sordid pursuits in their own home. But why should he be alarmed? Nervous even? Rare indeed.

She proceeded to give a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination.

‘I’ve quit the paper,’ she announced.

‘Have you indeed?’ he responded neutrally.

‘Look, the reason I’m calling has nothing to do with all the personal stuff between us — I’d still rather not think about that. I want your advice on the job. I want to talk to you — can we meet?’

Marcus believed her at once. What she was saying made sense because he had always been something of a mentor to her, and he knew that. She’d seen Marcus operate at full steam, and was quite aware that in both the world of newspapers and later as a businessman and politician he was the most surefooted of careerists.

‘Professionally I have greater respect for you than for anybody else in our world,’ she heard herself say. She sounded honest, and indeed she was speaking the truth — as far as it went.

She could feel him relax at the other end of the phone. She’d deliberately not mentioned that she was in Pelham Bay, nor the reopening of the murder inquiry and the discovery of the body in Bill Turpin’s garden.

He did — as she had expected him to. He knew, of course, that she would have read of it in the papers. It would have been unthinkable that she hadn’t. The whole thing was now public knowledge, and the identity of the newly-discovered body had been reported in the national as well as the regional press.

‘Of course I’ll meet you, darling, delighted to give you any help I can,’ he almost gushed. How dare he call her darling like that, she thought angrily. But she said nothing. His self-assurance positively bristled down the phone line.

Then, perhaps a little too casually, he broached the subject which was actually weighing heavily on both their minds.

‘Heard about Irene and the Bill Turpin business, have you?’ he asked.

She replied, with what she hoped was equal casualness and without comment.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Thought you would have done. The police have been in touch with me already, you know, right after they identified the body.’

He paused, waiting for her to say something. Once again she had no comment to make.

‘Poor little cow,’ he eventually remarked quite cheerily, and volunteered a brief account of his police interview.

A London-based detective, unfamiliar with the case, had gone over much of the old ground and had apparently left quite satisfied that Marcus could help them no further.

‘You know, it’s all so long ago I can only just remember her really, and I told the police all I knew at the time,’ he said.

By God, she thought, if her gravest suspicions were true, what a performer Marcus was. Any earlier hint of alarm had completely gone now — or had she in fact imagined it? He sounded so in control, so unconcerned; but then he always did.

They arranged to meet that night.

‘Come to my place for a drink,’ said Marcus.

He never lets up, she thought. But she had expected that too, indeed counted on it, and she agreed readily enough. He reminded her of his address in the luxurious Chelsea riverside block which she had never visited.

‘Your solicitor knows it well enough, but you probably don’t,’ he said. There was a smile in his voice.

‘Ha, ha,’ she responded lamely.

She told her mother she had to return to London for a couple of days, and within an hour was back behind the wheel of the Porsche and on her way. She drove straight to Anna’s house. She wanted to see Dominic. She didn’t like him particularly, but she had a great deal of respect for his brilliance.

It was early afternoon when she arrived, and Anna was out in the park with Pandora. For about the only time in her life, Jennifer was quite pleased that her friend was not there. Anna would ask too many questions and Jennifer remained both unable and unwilling to try to answer them. Dominic greeted her without great enthusiasm, as usual. She was never sure if he really did dislike her, or if it was all a game. To her it was a game; with him, who could tell? They were chalk and cheese. Rather grudgingly he made her tea, but he came to life when she showed him the copies of Bill Turpin’s notebook.

‘Definitely computer codes and sign-ins,’ he said. ‘Ways in to other people’s computer systems.’

‘Can you do anything with them?’ she asked.

‘Even you aren’t as ignorant as that, Jennifer,’ he replied. ‘Not without the relevant discs and programmes, of course I can’t.’

‘You wouldn’t have any way of knowing what computer systems they hack into.’

He looked at her as if he thought she had an IQ of 12. Compared with him she supposed she did.

‘Not without the discs,’ he said.

‘And if I could get hold of the discs?’

‘Maybe. What’s all this about?’

‘Oh, just a story.’

He gave a little sniff.

‘Whose life are you destroying this time?’ he asked.

‘What I like about you is that you always think the best of me,’ she replied.

She took the sheets of paper from him and headed for the door.

‘Aren’t you waiting for Anna?’

‘Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow, not sure when, I’ll call,’ she said.

She drove to her own house then. There was already a ‘For Sale’ board outside. Estate agents didn’t hang about nowadays, she thought. Once inside she had a bath, washed and dried her hair carefully, and dressed in tight faded blue Levi jeans and a heavy white cotton shirt open at the neck. She knew she looked good. She sprayed a little perfume around and applied make-up lightly. She looked just the way Marcus liked her best. As she was about to leave, the phone rang. She eavesdropped the caller via the speaker of her answering machine. It was Anna. She did not pick up the receiver because she really couldn’t talk to Anna yet.

She had arranged to meet Marcus at six o’clock. She arrived early — very unusual for Jennifer — and waited in the car for several minutes. At five past six she locked up the Porsche, which she left on a single yellow line, and walked into the foyer of Marcus’s block of flats. It was all marbled opulence. It would be. She spoke to the uniformed porter, who called up to Marcus’s apartment. After a brief conversation with Marcus, the porter summoned the lift for her and pumped in the special code that would take her up to penthouse level. Without the code, the lift stopped at the floor below.

When she stepped out of the lift, Marcus was waiting in the hallway. He stood and looked at her. His smile was wide, his teeth still perfect. She knew he travelled twice a year to a Hollywood dentist whose clientele were almost exclusively film stars. He was dressed entirely in black. Black Saint Laurent polo shirt. Beautifully cut black trousers and black Gucci shoes. She had a bet with herself that they were Gucci. A racing cert. He looked as fit and handsome as ever, and still disconcertingly baby-faced, his white-blonde curls almost as bright and shiny as they’d been twenty-five years ago. Remarkable. She said nothing. His pale blue eyes travelled up and down her appreciatively.

‘You look marvellous,’ he said quietly. ‘Can I kiss you hello?’

Trust Marcus to get the tone just right. Affectionate but polite; interested yet deferential.

She nodded. What was she doing letting him kiss her already? He put a hand on each shoulder, very lightly, leaned forward and kissed her swiftly and gently on the lips. Then he stepped back and looked at her again.

He led her into the apartment. It was magnificent. Very modern; all black-and-white and shiny, steel and glass with huge windows giving a panoramic view of the river. On the big glass coffee table stood a bottle of Krug in a heavy silver ice bucket and two exquisite crystal glasses. Bloody typical, she thought.

He gestured her to a chair, opened the bottle and poured her a glass. He did not ask her if she wanted champagne. She thanked him and took the drink. His taste remained impeccable. His sense of style had always been devastating.

He sat opposite and asked how he could help her. She told him that she had walked out of the paper and why, and for more than half an hour they discussed her job and the implications of the action she had taken. His advice was good, and sensible as ever.

‘Maybe what you really need is a new challenge,’ he said. ‘But you must make absolutely sure that you don’t let a tantrum govern the course of the rest of your life.’

She actually had no doubts about what she had done, and her job, or lack of it, was the least of her worries. But talking newspapers and careers to Marcus put her on easy ground.

It was when he stood over her and poured the last drop of champagne into her glass that he made the inevitable move. It was inevitable because for him it was just normal behaviour. He never felt shame. In spite of everything that he had tried to say to her after she had interrupted him with the two young girls, she knew that all he had really regretted was being found out. He was incapable of feeling shame at his own actions.

He put down the bottle, sank to his knees beside her low armchair, wrapped his arms around her and, before she realised what was happening, kissed her long and slow and deep on the lips. She made herself respond — just a bit.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

‘You should have thought of that before,’ she replied.

‘I must have been crazy.’

‘I’ve always thought so.’

‘Jennifer, Jennifer.’

His lips were against her cheek. He was just breathing the words.

‘Nothing’s changed. Whenever I see you I want you, and as soon as I touch you I start to ache for you.’

His nerve was staggering, but he knew well the power he had always had over her. She supposed that was why she’d refused to see him after the break-up, after finding him with those two girls. The thought made her shudder. So much about Marcus made her shudder, yet when he touched her he was totally confident that he would still hit the spot. It was ridiculous.

His hands were starting to caress her breasts. He slipped one inside her shirt and let out a little gasp of pleasure and satisfaction as he discovered she was wearing no bra. With his other hand he undid the buttons of her shirt. She did not stop him. He sank his face in her breasts and with his tongue he eagerly lapped up the essence of her, tasted again the sweetness of her skin. She did not stop him.

After a while he raised his head. He was panting. His eyes were bright.

‘Are you going to let me make love to you?’ he asked huskily.

The question was rhetorical. He was so sure of himself, the bastard. She nodded. She did not trust herself to speak.

‘Stand up then,’ he said. She did as she was told.

‘Take off your shirt,’ he commanded.

She did so.

He reached up and undid her belt and unbuttoned the flies of her Levis and pulled them down. She was wearing light brogues. He slipped them off each foot and removed her jeans a leg at a time so that she was standing naked above him. He made her stand with her legs apart and then he reached up and buried his head in her. The strength of his animal desire was overwhelming, in spite of her mental revulsion against him.

He pulled her on to the thick carpeted floor alongside him. Somehow he had managed to remove his own clothes without her even noticing. He had always been able to do that. With the last vestige of her control, she made him draw back.

‘You must put something on.’ She reached for her handbag.

He threw back his head and roared with laughter at her.

‘I thought you didn’t like plastic bags,’ he said.

‘That was pre-AIDS,’ she said. ‘And before I knew some of your tastes.’

He was amazed.

‘Oh, you don’t have to worry — I always get the girlies first. No danger at all,’ he said.

He did not even realise what he was saying. She wanted to tell him how much he disgusted her, and then it was too late. He opened her legs and took her for the first time on the floor in the middle of the living room. He was very excited and it was over quite soon.

‘Remember how long the second time lasts,’ he said. She remembered.

He led her into the bedroom, spread a big white towel over the bed and massaged every inch of her body. Just like in the beginning, except that now Marcus used expensive scented oils instead of baby lotion. She tried not to think about who else he might have used them on. They made love for half the night — in every possible way, it seemed to Jennifer. After a while her brain ceased to have control of her body. Eventually they fell into an exhausted sleep. His deep and satisfied as ever, hers fitful and anxious, her very soul filled with self-disgust.

‘Oh shit,’ she thought to herself.

In the morning he woke her with his whistling, as usual. It was soon after seven. He was in the bathroom showering. He sounded wide awake and full of himself, as always. He emerged close-shaven, hair washed and brushed, teeth gleaming, but not yet dressed.

‘Come on lazybones,’ he teased.

She had not even let him see she was awake. She lay on her side, just peeping out of the corner of one eye as he came through the bathroom door. She feigned a sluggish awakening.

‘What time is it?’ she muttered.

When he told her she groaned.

‘You don’t alter, do you?’ he chuckled.

‘Are you going already?’ she asked.

‘Breakfast meeting,’ he said. ‘Come on, out of bed.’

‘Can’t I stay here for a bit?’ she inquired.

She saw the doubt in his eyes. She made herself look as kittenish as possible.

‘Why don’t we meet for lunch, here?’ He hesitated.

‘Well I don’t know...’ he began.

He was standing by the bedside in a black silk dressing gown. She reached out and pulled it apart. He was half erect. She leaned forward and took him in her mouth. All night she had deliberately not done that, she had been saving it up. He reacted at once. She felt him double in size inside her mouth, opened her throat the way she had learned so long ago, and swallowed in the whole of him.

Then as quickly as she had begun, she withdrew.

‘Don’t stop,’ he pleaded.

‘You have to go and I’m not going to hurry this,’ she said. ‘Lunchtime?’

This time she had him hooked.

‘How can I resist you?’ he asked. ‘OK. Stay here and I will be back as soon as I can make it.’

She smiled her appreciation.

‘I must go home for an hour, I need some clean clothes,’ she said. ‘Can I have a key?’

She saw the doubt again. He did not say anything.

‘Marcus, if I go out I shall need a key to get back in,’ she said.

‘Why don’t we meet for champagne and sandwiches at the Waldorf and then we’ll come back here?’ he suggested smoothly.

She frowned at him. ‘Marcus, why on earth should I want to trek into the Waldorf when all that both of us want is here? What is the matter? Do you think I’m going to run off with the silver?’

He laughed what for him was a slightly nervous laugh.

‘No, of course not, don’t be daft. Of course you can have a key.’

Ten minutes later, the entry phone rang. It was Marcus’s chauffeur. His days of tube trains and black cabs were ancient history; even the editor’s Daimler was a thing of the past. His Bentley now awaited him. He fastened his silk tie and made for the door.

Just in time she called after him: ‘Don’t forget to square it with the porter.’

She waited five minutes, then jumped out of bed, hastily pulling on her jeans and shirt. The jeans felt uncomfortably tight now. She was out of practice with Marcus-style sex and she was quite sore. She shook herself angrily. She didn’t have time to think about any of that. In the kitchen she quickly made herself a cup of tea with a teabag in a mug. At the best of times she couldn’t function without tea in the mornings. Then she made her way into Marcus’s study.

From the time she had first known Marcus, he had always had a place at home to work. In the beginning in the rented fiat in Pelham Bay it was just an old desk dominating half the living room. Later, as he grew more affluent and was able to buy space, there was always a room set aside to be his office. And these working places inevitably had one thing in common — they were quite immaculate. Everything in its place and a place for everything.

Jennifer knew the way Marcus worked. She was quite sure that if there was a link between him and Bill Turpin, the secret of it would somehow be stored in his computer system. Marcus was good with computers, not a professional expert like Dominic, but certainly way beyond the level of your average journalist or businessman. She realised that the odds were against her finding what she was looking for. From when she had first known him, Marcus had always kept his desk locked, as he did all filing cabinets and any other office furniture. She was actually quite relieved to find that the door to his study was not locked.

Inside, everything was indeed in perfect order, as she had expected. Marcus had always been not only a very unusual man but an unusual journalist. Journalists are not known for keeping tidy desks or having tidy lives. Marcus could never bear disorder. His clothes and grooming were always impeccable, and so was his home. Even in the days when everyone she knew of their age was living in varying degrees of squalor, Marcus kept perfect house. In Pelham Bay he had cleaned his own fiat, of course, yet she could rarely remember seeing him do it. His early rising was the secret. When he used to visit her in her Dorset bedsit, she would often be woken at six in the morning by the sound of her own vacuum cleaner — Marcus having decided that the level of cleanliness fell way below his own high standards. When he cooked, and he cooked very well, he somehow managed to leave no mess at all. He would contrive to leave a kitchen cleaner than when he started — apparently with little or no effort — and he never dropped or broke anything. His coordination and timing were perfect. The thought obscurely occurred to her that it was quite likely he had lived his entire life without spilling a drop of milk.

Jennifer looked around her. The office was the ultimate in high tech, all glass and chrome again. There were two computers, one of them was an Apple Mac linked to the main frame of the Recorder group. With that Marcus could oversee the entire content and layout of any of his newspapers without moving from his black leather swivel chair. The second machine was a state-of-the-art IBM 486 equipped with a high-speed modem for communicating swiftly and efficiently with other systems throughout the world. Both sat on specially constructed tables lined up along the wall, with a fax and telephone-answering machine, a laser printer, and a sophisticated photocopier. There was a cabinet which she guessed housed television and stereo equipment. Along a second wall stood a row of filing cabinets, finished in black ash. The top of the huge desk running almost the length of the wall below the window, also made of beautiful black ash, was completely clear, apart from a marble paperweight, a Mont Blanc fountain pen and one framed photograph. The picture was of her and Marcus honeymooning after their wedding in the Caribbean. They both looked deliriously happy. He was tanned and handsome as ever. They were wearing tee shirts and beach shorts. She peered closely at the picture and, yes, she was sure of it, Marcus’s multi-coloured Bermuda-style shorts definitely had ironed creases in them. Typical. She looked comfortably crumpled, which was also fairly typical. She studied the picture further. His white tee shirt could have featured in a commercial for soap powder. Obliquely she wondered if Marcus ever sweated except in bed. It suddenly occurred to her that she had never seen him do so, however hot the climate they were in. The original Joe Cool. But had he gone just too far? Jennifer’s mind snapped back to the present. She needed to know the truth and she had to move fast.

She tried the drawers in the desk first. Locked, and although it was academic because no way was she going to try and bust locks, she could see at a glance these were no ordinary desk locks. They were complex specialist jobs. All the filing cabinets were also locked and had similar locking devices fitted. She looked around the room again. There was not a single sheet of paper lying around anywhere, and more importantly, not a single computer disc. The man was abnormal, but then, that was what she had probably always been afraid of. She allowed herself a dark chuckle.

In one corner between the filing cabinets and the computer table was a forbidding-looking safe set both into the wall and the floor. She noticed it had a combination lock and spent a fruitless few minutes seeing if she could second-guess the number Marcus had fed it. She tried his birthday and her birthday and several other fairly obvious choices, but quickly concluded that she was just wasting her time.

Then she sat down at the two computers. As she had expected, she could not break into the hard drive of either of them. They were each user-protected and it was hopeless. Maybe Dominic could do it, she thought, but she couldn’t bring him here. That would be too risky at this stage, and in any case he wouldn’t come.

Damn, she thought. Damn bloody Marcus and his perfection. Didn’t he ever do anything sloppy? Didn’t he ever make mistakes? Wasn’t there just one little computer disc sitting somewhere unnoticed that she could get her eager hands on? Carefully she went over every inch of the room again, looking for something she might have missed. There was nothing at all. One last thought occurred to her. With not a lot of hope she checked the floppy disc compartment of the Apple Mac. Empty. Well, what did she expect? As if Marcus would forget to remove and file away a disc. Resigned to finding nothing again, she none the less checked the IBM.

Eureka! She couldn’t believe it — he had left a disc in the machine. He had forgotten it. He could make mistakes. She studied the disc. It was labelled, but the label simply bore a number written in letters: seven. Well, it was something, but the disc could be anything — his constituency records, his household accounts, even his blessed shopping list — because she knew very well he kept everything on computer, meticulously. On the other hand it could tell her something. And it was all she had.

She switched on the computer again and changed to disc-drive mode. The result was much the same as before; the floppy disc was coded and she could not get into it. Disappointing, but encouraging at the same time, even Marcus would not code his household accounts, would he?

She glanced at her watch. It was still only eight-thirty. She picked up the disc, her bag, and Marcus’s key, and took off at a trot. Outside she climbed into the Porsche and headed for the city.

Eighteen

She arrived at Dominic’s office at five to nine. It was Monday morning. The dealers had been at their screens for hours, none the less the city gave the impression of reluctant awakening after the weekend.

‘He’s not here yet,’ the receptionist told her.

So she walked outside the front door and waited. At nine o’clock prompt there was Dominic, looking clever and cross as usual. He looked even crosser when he saw Jennifer.

‘Good God, what on earth do you want?’ he asked.

‘Dominic, will you look at this disc for me?’

‘I suppose so, when I’ve time,’ he said.

‘It has to be now, Dominic, it’s vital.’

‘Jennifer, I am off on a two-day seminar this afternoon and I have a full morning. Are you mad?’

‘I’m desperate,’ she said.

There was something in her voice that stopped him in his tracks. He hadn’t really looked at her. When he did so he was astonished. Jennifer Stone was trembling, her face pale and drawn.

‘Please, Dominic, please,’ she said.

Good God, the woman was begging him.

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ he said.

She did not respond. Where was the usual banter, he asked himself silently. She bowed her head so that she was staring at the ground. She looked vulnerable, which was more than a little disturbing, because underneath the crossness and the impatience, Dominic was a kind man as well as a clever one. He also loved his wife deeply, and Jennifer, for all her faults, was his wife’s best friend.

‘Oh, come on then,’ he said, turning towards the door.

Gratefully she followed him into the big mirror-panelled hallway, and up in the lift to his third-floor office. The room was full of computers, mostly silent and still, awaiting their master. There was just one in the corner, on a modem to somewhere, buzzing and whirring away like some futuristic robot, which was probably more or less what it was.

Dominic took off his jacket and threw it at the hat-stand by the door. It missed and fell to the floor in a crumpled heap. He didn’t even notice. He was probably the complete genetic opposite to Marcus, she thought vaguely. On auto-pilot she picked his coat up, draped it over a bent wire coat hanger she also found on the floor, and carefully looped the hanger on to the hat stand. He didn’t notice that either. He was already at work, hunched over a favourite monster. The computer was going through its warming-up mode. Expertly Dominic punched in the information it needed to get started. Even the way he touched the keyboard was special, almost as if he was playing a musical instrument. He didn’t hit the keys like a simple typist, he caressed them. She thought of her grandmother, a pianist of whom they used the old cliché ‘she could make a piano talk’. Dominic was like that with a computer keyboard. He knew he could do with it what others had no hope of doing, he was a maestro in his field.

She watched him insert the floppy disc and attempt to switch to disc drive. He began to play with the keyboard, coaxing the computer to do his will. After a few minutes he shook his head and turned to Jennifer.

‘It’s user-protected,’ he said. ‘I can’t do a thing without a password.’

Jennifer reached in her bag and came up with the copies of Bill Turpin’s notebook with its lines of computer codes.

‘Any good?’ she asked. He shook his head again.

‘No, this looks like God’s gift to hackers. That’s different. These are codes which provide information to allow an operator to break into other people’s computer systems through a modem. You need the codes and access to the software, one without the other is no good. Catch 22.’

He paused, and with a flash of his usual irritability added: ‘I told you that.’

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Good God, he thought, the woman’s apologising to me. ‘What is this all about Jennifer?’

‘Trust me Dom, I can’t tell you, not yet. You wouldn’t even want to know. All I can tell you is how much I need your help.’

Dom? She called him Dom? Something was very wrong, that was for sure.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I still can’t help without the password. There’s no way I can get into the disc without it. Look, do you know the person who programmed this disc?’

She nodded.

‘OK,’ he said again. ‘Have you any idea what he or she may have used for the password. Is it worth having a few guesses?’

She looked at him blankly.

‘Well?’ he said.

She thought frantically. What on earth would Marcus have used?

‘It has to be a word, yeah, not numbers?’ she asked.

‘Yes, a word of not more than eight letters. It can be just a meaningless jumble of letters, of course, but most people use a word.’

‘Yes,’ said Jennifer. She became aware that she was biting her nails.

‘Try Recorder,’ she said. And as she spoke she realised it was stupid. Marcus would not have used the name of his paper, and he hadn’t.

She tried some more. KRUG, his favourite champagne; EASTON, the street he had lived in when he first came to London; MARTHA, his mother’s name; JAMES, his father’s name. Then all of those backwards, GURK, NOTSAE, AHTRAM, SEMAJ. Nothing. It was hopeless. She had to get inside Marcus’s head. Suddenly she had a brainwave, or at least she hoped it was, because it was so simple, so obvious. What was the one constant factor in Marcus’s life apart from his driving ambition? The answer was a touch arrogant but also the truth — it was her, Jennifer Stone.

‘Try JENNIFER,’ she cried.

Dominic glanced at her curiously, but made no comment as he punched her name into the computer. It did not work. Neither did REFINNEJ or STONE or JSTONE or JENSTONE, or any of those backwards.

She felt defeated. Dominic was continuing without success to try variations of her name and the other words she had suggested to him. She must think back over all the years she had known Marcus. She had to believe that he had used a word with some significance to him. Almost everybody who ever chose a computer password did that, surely even Marcus. So what else was there?

‘It’s usually something really obvious, surprisingly enough,’ she heard Dominic say in the distance.

She was concentrating hard, trying to be methodical. When had she first had doubts about Mark, vague, indefinable doubts? It had been after the trial when she had half suspected he had lied about Johnny Cooke. He had convinced her that she had been confused, and allowing herself to be convinced had been the easy way out at the time. So it all went back to the very beginning in Pelham Bay. Everything that happened seem to stem from there...

‘Try PELHAM,’ she said suddenly. Dominic did so. Nothing.

‘Backwards?’ he asked.

She nodded. She felt it was hopeless. She would have to go in cold, but she needed more ammunition. She did not have enough to convince him, or maybe even totally to convince herself, and the stakes were so high. She was lost in despairing thoughts, not even watching Dominic or the computer.

Then she heard him say quietly: ‘I think you’ve cracked it, old girl.’

He was in. He was working the disc. She knew better than to speak.

After a few minutes he said: ‘Give me those codes.’

He studied the copies of the pages from Bill Turpin’s notebook.

‘What I can’t understand is why anyone should write codes like this down. They should be in the computer for the user to call up.’

‘What if the person who wrote them down never really trusted computers?’

He looked at her as if she were crazy.

‘It is possible, you know,’ she said with a smile.

It was the first time she had smiled at him that morning, and he realised how pleased he was to see it. Maybe he didn’t really dislike the old bat as much as he thought he did.

He turned back to the keyboard. She watched him for about ten minutes more, and ultimately could contain herself no more.

‘Any joy?’ she asked.

He swung around to face her, brows knitted in a deep frown.

‘I am a genius, not a magician,’ he said.

She laughed. He found that pleased him too.

‘Look, this is going to take time,’ he said. ‘I reckon that this disc is programmed to plug in through a modem with a particular computer system elsewhere. What exactly and where exactly is another bigger question.’

She breathed a sigh of relief: at least it wasn’t Marcus’s blessed laundry list. It looked as if she’d had some luck and stumbled across a disc that might at least give her a clue or two. But could Dominic put it all together?

Her eyes were a question mark.

‘The disc can only be put into operation with the right codes. Maybe one of these is it, maybe not.’ He held the copied notebook in his hand. ‘All I can do is try all the possible codes with all the possible combinations on the disc and give it a whirl.

‘I have to interrogate the disc, and if it is that important it will almost certainly be programmed to wipe itself clean if I ask the wrong question or feed it wrong information. It’s not a five-minute job.’

She just carried on looking at him, expectant. He sighed.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll work better on my own. I can’t stand being watched. Go away and come back in a couple of hours.’

She looked at her watch. It was already ten o’clock. Two hours would be cutting it very fine indeed. She wanted to get it all over with quickly, before Marcus had time to do too much thinking — and the man thought fast.

‘Two hours?’ she queried. Her expression was stricken.

He sighed. ‘OK. An hour-and-a-half — but don’t build up too many hopes.’

She kissed him on the top of his head.

‘You are a genius,’ she said. ‘I know that because you’ve told me often enough.’

‘That’s better,’ he replied.

She knew what he meant, and indeed she was feeling just a little better as she left him to it. If anyone could succeed it would be Dominic McDonald, that she believed absolutely.

An hour-and-a-half. She looked down at herself. She was a mess, her shirt was crumpled and her hair greasy and lank. She had not even waited to shower and shampoo, and she was aware that she smelt, which was not surprising after the night she had spent with Marcus. She tried not to think about it. She just hoped Dominic hadn’t noticed how she smelt, and in fact doubted that he had. Dominic was unlikely to notice anything like that. She desperately needed clean clothes and a bath, but she didn’t have time to go home to Richmond as she had told Marcus was her intention. She walked the streets until she found a branch of Marks & Spencer where she bought fresh underwear, a couple of cotton tee shirts and a plain black sweatshirt. It was cooler today and she could not stop shivering, but she was unsure whether it was the cold or what she was doing which was the cause of that. Outside in the street again, she slipped the black sweatshirt over her crumpled white shirt. It made her look fractionally more presentable — certainly she felt warmer and more comfortable — and with a bit of luck it might trap her smelliness within its thick cotton. There was a chemist’s shop across the road, where she bought toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo and a jar of her favourite moisturiser.

Little more than half an hour had passed. She began to walk as slowly as she could make herself back to Dominic’s office, and stopped on the way at an Italian coffee bar. She ordered a double espresso and found to her slight surprise that she was hungry. She and Marcus had not eaten properly the night before and she had skipped lunch as well. Of course when he was on a sexual roll, Marcus never needed to eat at all, or to sleep — she did. She ordered croissants and bacon and egg and fresh orange juice. The croissants were fresh and warm and mouth-melting, the bacon and egg tasted almost as good as it smelt, and the orange juice had definitely been in the form of several round fruits minutes earlier. There weren’t too many cafes in London that served a breakfast like this. She complimented herself on her luck and hoped fervently that it was an omen and that Dominic was also having good fortune and that her plans for the rest of the day would prove lucky too. After another double espresso, the hands of her watch had moved painfully forward to reach eleven-twenty. She paid her bill and headed for Dominic. She was stopped by the receptionist in the hall of his office, and had to wait impatiently while the man called upstairs before clearing a visitor for entry. It was eleven-twenty-seven when Dominic picked up the phone and confirmed that Jennifer was expected. This time with a yellow ‘Visitor’ tag stuck to her black sweatshirt, Jennifer rode to the third floor in the lift. As she opened the door to his office, the minute hand of the big electric clock on the wall clunked once and settled on the half-hour position. It was exactly eleven-thirty.

‘How prompt you are,’ said Dominic. He was beaming at her, looking positively smug.

‘You’ve done it, haven’t you?’ she said.

It was not really a question, because his face had already given her the answer. He was flushed with excitement. Obliquely she wondered if anything else excited Dominic as much as a computer. What about sex? Funny, she’d never asked Anna. They had talked often about sex. When she was much younger, Jennifer had given the men in her life points out of ten — much to Anna’s amusement. Marcus had always scored at least ten and sometimes 11 — also much to Anna’s amusement — but Jennifer never gave anything else away about him, and Dominic’s sexual prowess or lack of it had somehow not been mentioned. Jennifer had never even tried to imagine him in bed, and could not understand why her mind had jumped to such thoughts now. Perhaps it was tension. She made herself concentrate on the matter in hand.

Dominic had turned back to the computer and was beginning to explain.

‘With this disc, these codes and the right modem, I can now plug directly into the G7 computer system,’ he said.

Jennifer was no financial whizz-kid.

‘What’s G7?’ she asked.

Dominic looked amazed. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a journalist, for Christ’s sake.

The Group of Seven. The seven biggest money markets in the world. The seven countries that control the world’s finances.

‘Naturally they use computers to collate, store and communicate their business. Changes in our Bank Rate would all be communicated within G7 first. They have much more power than most people, including some financiers, think. If an exchange rate is about to be altered, a currency devalued, international loans given or called in — all are done through G7. For a private dealer to be able to plug into their computer is a bit like being fed a fortune on an intravenous drip.’

‘Bingo,’ said Jennifer. She had picked that up from Todd.

Dominic was fair bristling.

‘Rather more profitable than that,’ he said. ‘If you were fast enough you could always be ahead of the game. Making money is all about information, and you’d never get better information than from G7. You could make billions.

‘Amazing. Leaves you wondering how many people throughout the world have access to this.’

‘Is it legal?’ she asked, feeling stupid as soon as she said the words.

‘You’re kidding. This could blow the world money market sky high. Who did you get it from?’

‘An old friend,’ she replied.

He wasn’t really listening. He was busy on the keyboard.

‘I thought so, algorithms.’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Algorithms. An obvious protection. Means you can’t copy it. I’m afraid of going any further in case I wipe it.’

He paused. ‘I suppose you want this disc back.’

She held out her hand.

‘No chance of making a quick million quid first?’

‘Dominic,’ she said. There was a warning in her voice.

‘You’re right of course. I’d get found out. I’m not designed to be a master criminal.’

‘No you’re not, and thank God for it.’

There was feeling in her voice. When he offered the disc to her, she took it with one hand and brushed his cheek with her other.

‘Thank you Dominic,’ she said quietly.

Briefly he took her hand in his.

‘Whatever it is you’re doing, be careful Jen,’ he said.

She felt the tears pricking again. Pull yourself together, she ordered herself, and tried her best to do so. Banter, that was the answer. She flashed a smile at him.

‘I never knew you cared,’ she said.

‘Don’t kid yourself,’ he told her. ‘My only concern for your welfare is that I have a crazy wife who does care, the silly cow.’

She left the room laughing. Dominic would probably never know how wonderfully reassuring she had found him.

Nineteen

She retrieved the Porsche from its parking meter and headed back to Chelsea. She locked the copy of Bill Turpin’s notebook and the computer disc in the car. There was little risk of Marcus discovering it missing before she had completed her plans; she would make sure he had no time to go into his study. As she walked in to the entrance hall of Marcus’s block of flats, carrier bags containing her purchases under her right arm, she checked her wristwatch. It was twelve-fifteen, and she was almost sure Marcus would not be back before one. The porter recognised her immediately and called the lift for her, as instructed by Marcus, pumping in the appropriate code to dispatch her to the penthouse floor. She wondered fleetingly what selection of women he had ushered up to the penthouse over the years, and decided this was not the time to dwell on that.

As she shut Marcus’s front door, the phone rang, and she picked up the receiver in the hall. It was him, as she had guessed it would be.

‘Have you just got up?’ he asked. He sounded very good-humoured. He always did when he had got his own way.

‘Certainly not,’ she replied.

‘I called earlier, you must have heard the phone?’ he went on.

‘I told you, I needed to go back home to get some clean things.’

‘You sound tense.’

She must be careful, Marcus was no pushover.

‘Just knackered, I’m out of practice.’

‘Stand by. What you need is one of my knock-your-socks-off Bloody Marys. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

He had gone before she could ask him how long that would be.

She piled her purchases on the bed in the main bedroom and went into the study. Just in case he did look in there, she decided to check it out carefully. It looked fine, nothing seemed to be out of place. In fact there was very little that could have been put out of place, but she knew that if the Mont Blanc fountain pen were to be moved an inch away from where it normally lay, Marcus would notice at once.

Quickly she returned to the bedroom, removed all her clothes, and gratefully stepped under the pressurised shower in the en-suite bathroom. It wasn’t over yet, not nearly over, she thought, as she thoroughly shampooed her hair. Then, standing naked on the thick towelling mat, she rubbed herself all over with the newly purchased moisturising cream. She wrapped herself in one of Marcus’s big luxurious towels, and scrubbed her teeth energetically. She put moisturiser on her face and then applied a little mascara and lipstick, gave herself a quick spray of the Cartier perfume she always carried in her handbag, and dressed in the clean underwear beneath her new baggy tee shirt. She deliberately did not put her jeans back on, because Marcus never had been able to resist her legs. She was still brushing the tangles out of her hair when she heard him turn his key in the lock, and she did not go to meet him. He came looking for her in the bedroom and stood in the doorway clutching a huge bunch of lily of the valley in one hand and a big plastic bag of limes, for the Bloody Marys, in the other.

‘You look good enough to eat,’ he growled at her.

She turned away from the mirror, smiling. ‘Yes please,’ she said.

He threw the bunch of flowers at her and she caught them easily. He put down the bag of limes on the dressing table, strode across the room until he was standing behind her, and buried his face in her neck.

‘You smell so clean, so sweet,’ he said.

She swung around to face him and offered him her lips. He kissed her long and slow and deep. As ever he pushed himself against her and she could feel that he was already aroused. Typical Marcus.

‘When do you want your Bloody Marys, before or after?’ he asked.

She put a hand lightly over his crotch. ‘That’s what I want,’ she replied, which was, of course, what he had expected her to say.

‘You’re as randy as ever, you sexy bitch,’ he muttered approvingly. ‘Why did you ever leave me? I always told you we were two of a kind.’

‘Maybe we are — but I left you because you are a monster,’ she told him.

‘True enough, I expect,’ he replied.

‘You humiliated and degraded me — but none of that, apparently, seems to stop me fancying you to distraction.’

‘That’s because I give you what you want.’

His voice was a low growl and he wasn’t smiling now. He brushed a hand between her legs, raised his fingers to his face and breathed in the scent of her.

‘I know what you need.’

It had been true for so long.

She stepped back, deciding to take control, which she knew he liked.

‘Undo your flies,’ she commanded.

He did so. He was wearing his customary cotton jockey shorts beneath, which did not do a lot of good. His erect penis jumped out at her, as usual.

She did not touch him.

‘You know what I promised you,’ she said softly.

His whole body stirred. ‘Can I undress first?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she replied.

And she sank to her knees and took him in her mouth as he stood before her fully clothed in his beautifully-cut pin-striped Italian suit. His silk tie was still elegantly knotted around the neck of his Jermyn Street shirt, his feet clad in the inevitable Gucci brogues, shined to mirror finish. For a few brief seconds he felt a bit of a fool, then the magic of her tongue cast its spell over him. She was expert and it didn’t take long. When his moans of pleasure grew louder and she felt his whole body tense, she withdrew her mouth — there was a limit to what she was prepared to do. He came all down his immaculately pressed trousers and the spunk dripped onto his perfectly polished shoes. Obscurely, she thought with some satisfaction that, although it did not matter to him now, he would later be most annoyed at the state of his clothing. He was that kind of man.

She looked up at him, standing there panting, eyes glazed over, immersed in his own sexuality.

‘Now it’s my turn,’ she said.

‘Now can we get undressed?’ he asked.

She nodded, and pulled off her tee shirt, revealing only the briefest black panties and lacy bra fresh from Marks & Sparks. He reached out and touched her first on her breasts and then between the legs through the silky material.

‘Leave those on for a bit,’ he said.

He led her to the bed where she settled as comfortably as she could while she watched him take his clothes off. As always he folded everything neatly, and she rather hoped his trousers were ruined. He lay down on the bed beside her and played with her through her panties. He was quickly hard again. He wanted to be inside her and took it for granted that she wanted it too. He rolled over on top of her and did it to her around the side of the panties. It felt as if her every nerve-end was raw. The material rubbed into her, giving extra friction, and he enjoyed seeing her breasts strain against the silly bra as she writhed in orgasm. It did not occur to him that her climaxing could be anything other than genuine.

When he thought that she had finished, he pulled out of her and removed the bra and pants. Now for the serious business. He had her from behind over the side of the bed, then he laid her on her back and piled pillows beneath her, so that her pelvis was lifted and she was wide open for him — just like the first time he had made her come twenty-five years earlier. He turned her on her side and went in from the back; always he was in control. Finally he made her kneel, and with great, heaving strokes he brought himself to climax.

Afterwards they lay breathing heavily in each other’s arms. He had returned home just before one o’clock. It was now three-thirty, and they had barely stopped for two-and-a-half hours. She was exhausted. His stamina remained daunting. He was, as ever, totally confident of his power over her, and he must have been satisfied at last, because he suddenly remembered that he was hungry.

‘Good God, when did we last eat?’ he asked.

She lied that she did not remember. She could hardly tell him about her Italian cafe breakfast.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Bloody Marys and bacon sandwiches.’

He went into the bathroom and returned with his black silk dressing gown and a luxurious cream towelling robe which he threw to her. She followed him into the kitchen and watched him put good smoked bacon on the grill and half-baked French baguettes into the oven. While the bacon was cooking, he made a lethal-looking Bloody Mary in a huge jug: a generous slosh of Polish vodka, the juice of three or four limes, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, a spoonful of mustard and a slurp of tomato sauce for thickness; all well stirred, topped up with chilled tomato juice and poured over crackling ice cubes. He gave her a glassful in a crystal tumbler and she gratefully took a deep drink. He did make great Bloody Marys. She watched him slice open the warm baguettes, apply a thin scraping of butter and a generous layer of English mustard, and pile them full of bacon. He passed her one.

She was too nervous to eat much, and anyway had already eaten that huge breakfast, but he devoured his baguette hungrily. When he had finished and he had poured them each a third Bloody Mary, he leaned back in his pine kitchen chair and gazed at her appreciatively.

‘I do love you,’ he said.

She was startled.

‘I’m not sure you have ever told me that before,’ she replied. ‘Except in bed.’

‘’Course I have,’ he insisted. ‘And I miss you to distraction.’

‘Hmph,’ she said. ‘You don’t like having your style cramped.’

‘I was a fool,’ he said. ‘If I ever got another chance I wouldn’t mess it up.’

‘I wish I could believe you,’ she said.

‘Do you?’ he asked.

‘Do I what?’

‘Do you really wish you could believe me?’

‘I suppose I do, yes.’

‘Well, you can.’ His eyes were inside her head again.

She wriggled uncomfortably in her chair.

‘Why does it matter if I believe you or not, anyway?’ she asked.

‘Because you won’t come back to me unless you do,’ he said.

He was ablaze with sincerity.

‘And, I want you,’ he went on. ‘I want you more than anything else in the world.’

‘I’ve always known that Marcus,’ she said. ‘That has never been the problem.’

He laughed, then stopped abruptly.

‘I want you to be my wife again. I don’t know why I let it go wrong. Would you ever consider giving me another chance?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Is there anything I can do to make you consider it?’ he asked.

She let the silence stretch, as if she were giving his question serious thought. He did not take his eyes from hers.

‘There might be,’ she said.

‘Anything,’ he replied.

She took another deep breath.

‘There are two things I would absolutely demand were I ever to become your wife again. The first is that somehow or other you would have to gain control of your more unpleasant urges. No more other women — but most of all no more children.’

He looked shocked. ‘They weren’t children, for Christ’s sake.’

‘As near as dammit as far as I’m concerned,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, I don’t think you’re capable of giving up that side of your life.’

‘Of course I am,’ he told her, and, as always, he meant it — at the time of speaking.

She sighed. ‘If I ever found you with young kids again... I would kill you.’

She was very convincing. He blinked at her.

‘You will never have cause, I promise you, my darling,’ he said.

She sighed again. ‘Let’s say I believe you. And go on to the second condition. No more secrets.’

He raised one eyebrow.

‘I mean it, Marcus.’

He gave in. ‘What secrets?’

‘The kind of secrets that would put you in jail for the rest of your life.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.

She put down her glass. ‘OK Marcus. The game is over. I know more about what you have done than you can possibly imagine. I know more about why than you could ever guess. I know where you have been and where you are heading.’

Marcus’s expression darkened. He downed the remains of his third Bloody Mary in one.

‘Stop talking in riddles,’ he commanded.

‘That’s another thing. Don’t ever again tell me what and what not to do,’ she said.

He sneered at her. She was pleased to see that she was getting through at last, cracking the veneer. That had to be a hopeful sign.

‘You don’t say that in bed,’ he remarked crassly.

‘That was cheap and unworthy of you,’ she fired back.

‘Yes, maybe.’

He was half apologetic, looking down at his empty glass.

She did not put him out of his misery.

‘Look, what are you saying?’ he asked eventually.

‘I’m saying that I know,’ she replied simply.

Her gaze was direct. He found that it was unnerving and opted for bravado. Typical.

‘What do you know?’ he asked. His smile was a toothpaste commercial.

‘For a start I know that you killed Irene Nichols,’ she said.

The smile froze on his face. Like a trapped fox he smelt danger, and like the wily old dog fox that he was, all his senses were suddenly alert. He was going to give nothing away, keep his options open, seek out the extent of the danger. He was at his best in tight corners. His eyes were blank as he stared back at her, meeting her gaze. All she could see was emptiness. The ultimate solution: shut it all out, feel nothing. She waited for him to speak.

‘I think you’ve gone crazy,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ she replied.

She made her own eyes go blank too. He could see nothing at all in their deep greenness, and he sensed a ruthlessness in her that he had never before realised was there — but then, he had always said they were two of a kind.

She began to talk, keeping her voice low and deliberate, and choosing her words with care. She knew exactly what she was going to do now. She had been over it all again and again in her mind.

Her voice sounded as cold as she had intended.

‘Maybe I’m crazy to want to go on. But I do. I want my share of you, I want all that you have. I’ll go along with you, but only if it’s a true partnership this time.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know what on earth you are talking about,’ he said.

‘Oh yes you do, Marcus.’

She paused. The silence was long. Eventually she spoke again.

‘Bill Turpin told me,’ she said.

‘Bill Turpin?’ That really put him on red alert. ‘Told you what?’

‘Pretty damn near everything, I’d say.’

He studied her face. When he laughed it sounded dry and hollow, like wind through a rusty drain pipe.

‘Bill Turpin would not talk to you or anybody else,’ he said finally.

‘Maybe, maybe not. But he did tell me.’

‘You’re speaking in riddles again.’

He had walked over to the sink and was rinsing his Bloody Mary glass under the tap. It was something to do, and it meant he could turn his back on her. She could no longer see his face, and he was no longer looking at her. That was a relief to her too. She bit her bottom lip, concentrating hard. One false step now and it was all over.

‘Bill Turpin called me at the paper,’ she went on. ‘He said he wanted to talk to me about you. I was busy and I didn’t take a lot of notice. We always used to think he was half-mad, remember? Then I had the fight at the office. I just walked out, got in the car and drove — West, naturally.

‘On the way I started thinking about Bill, and you, and how it all began, and instead of driving to mother’s as I had intended, I went straight to the cliffs and to Bill’s cottage. I knocked on the front door and there was no reply. I walked round the back and I could see Bill slumped over the kitchen table. The back door was on the latch. I went in. He had fallen across the tin box of goodies the police found. What they didn’t find was Bill Turpin’s diary. I have that.’

‘What diary?’ Mark swung round. It was nice to see him looking pale and shaken.

‘Bill Turpin kept a diary. He wrote down everything. I don’t know why he kept it, but he did. Like I don’t know why he wanted to see me. I never knew him, our only link was you. I don’t know if he wanted to confess, or if he wanted to hook me too. Both unlikely, I should have thought, but he did call me, and I do have the diary.’

Marcus was desperately trying to recover.

‘What do you mean, hook you?’

Jennifer took a deep breath.

‘It was all in the diary. How you went out of control and killed Irene Nichols, how you turned to Bill Turpin for help, how the body was disposed of. And how you have belonged to Bill and his people ever since...’

‘What rubbish,’ he said.

She decided it was time to play her trump. She threw the copies of the Bill Turpin notebook onto the table. The computer codes jumped up at him.

‘I also have his master disc,’ she said. ‘I know about the direct access into G7, and I know the way it works. I know that you have used the Recorder to make an unbelievable fortune. I know there is a driving force behind you.

‘I know that the level of manipulation and corruption you are involved in is staggering, and that you could never get out of it even if you wanted to because of the weaknesses in you that have put you in the position you are in.’

She stopped and looked at him. He didn’t say anything. He was leaning against the sink. She noticed that his hands were trembling, which was encouraging, but he had not broken yet.

She had no choice. It was a risk, but she was going to have to go for the ultimate bluff.

‘And I know you have murdered more than once,’ she blurted out.

His eyes were very bright. He still didn’t say anything.

‘That’s the précised version,’ she went on. ‘I can give you more detail if you wish. It’s all in the diary.’

‘What are you going to do with the diary?’ he asked as casually as he could.

‘That depends on you.’

He just looked at her questioningly.

‘If you do what I want I shall burn it.’

‘And if not?’

It was her turn to shrug.

‘Can I see it?’

‘Do you think I would bring it here? You are a killer after all.’

He turned away. ‘You know I would never hurt you,’ he said softly.

She said nothing.

‘What do you want?’ he asked at last.

‘I want to know everything and I want to be part of everything,’ she said.

‘OK,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘You have to trust me as much as I will have to trust you. I understand your weaknesses and I also know your strengths. I want to be part of it all with you. You have always said we are two of a kind.

‘I want to get to the top, to the very top, at your side. But I have to know everything first, the whole truth, the dangers and rewards we would face together.’

‘So?’

‘So, if you want me on your side ... Get talking,’ she ordered.

He seemed to have dropped his pretence of not knowing what she was talking about. He walked back to the table and sat down opposite her, trying to stare inside her head, the way he always had. Everything that she was saying, everything about her indicated that she was as full of ambition and lust and as empty of principle as he was. He had indeed always said they were two of a kind. He had not recognised how much further that went than just their sexual appetites. As he tried to read the deepest recesses of her mind, he began to realise how much he wanted to believe that she really would go all the way with him. Together they could take over the world, she and he. He supposed he had always known that, wanted that more than anything.

‘There are things I have never told anybody.’ He stopped.

She felt no need to speak.

‘I’m not sure that I can, not sure that I dare.’ He looked tired suddenly.

‘Two of a kind, Marcus...’ She said it again. Barely a murmur.

He nodded.

‘Hasn’t the burden been lonely?’

He nodded again.

‘Well, then,’ she encouraged. ‘We can fight all the battles together. Together our future could be glorious.’

Oh, how he wanted to share it with her. What a relief it would be. His eyes were locked onto hers. She waited for him to speak.

‘I’m not sure you know what you are asking. There are things I try not even to think about. I am not an evil man, Jennifer, but I have done evil things.’

‘I have told you,’ she said. ‘I know a lot already, from the diary. So far I know nothing I cannot live with. You have killed, but I don’t think you ever meant to.’

She never failed to surprise him. He grasped the straw.

‘Of course I didn’t. They were accidents, all of them.’

All of them? So she was right — there had been more. She must not allow herself to flinch.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ she instructed calmly. ‘Begin with Irene. That was the beginning, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘That was the beginning.’

She had known it. Maybe always known that so much of what had happened to both of them in their lives stemmed from that time so long ago in Pelham Bay.

‘Go on, tell me about Irene.’ She was coaxing him.

He reached for the vodka bottle and the ice bucket. This time he poured a hefty neat slug of the clear spirit into a tumbler with just a couple of lumps of ice. He gestured with the bottle at her. She shook her head. He took a deep drink and briefly put his head in his hands. Jennifer had never lied to him, he was quite sure of that. He was certain she was being honest with him now, about her own aims and ambitions. He had always been able to trust her, hadn’t he? How much better it would be if there were two of them to share the good and the bad, two of a kind. Anyway, it seemed he may not have a lot of choice.

He leaned back in his chair, and then he began.

He began with the day he killed Irene.

Jennifer had known it, she really had, but hearing him say it was quite extraordinary. Now it was her turn to get up from the table and walk away because she did not want him to be able to see her face while he talked.

He told how he had gone home to his flat the second night she had refused to sleep with him and how he had been feeling quite desperate for sex. ‘You know, the way I get,’ he said. Jennifer knew, all right.

He told her how Irene had been asleep on the living-room couch, wearing one of his shirts with just a couple of buttons done up, and had woken as he entered the flat, slamming the front door behind him. He had been unable to wait. Within minutes he had his clothes off and was inside her. He came very quickly — but it seemed to bring him no satisfaction, no relief, so he took Irene into the bedroom and had her in every way he could think of. Nothing seemed to do him any good. The second time he couldn’t make himself come at all, whatever he did, and he did almost everything. He knew he was hurting her but he couldn’t stop. Eventually he pushed Irene back over the bed and she ended up with her head and shoulders crushed against the floor while he carried on pumping into her with all his might. She began to cry out for him to stop but he ignored her in his desperation to climax.

At some stage he heard something crack, he couldn’t be sure when. Eventually he made it. When he rolled off her she slumped in a heap on to the floor. To his horror he realised that her neck was broken and she was quite dead.

There was a catch in his voice. Was he crying? Jennifer did not dare to look round. So he had some feelings left, did he? She doubted it, but yes, he was definitely sobbing.

‘I have never been able to tell anyone, so I have never even thought about it, not since it happened,’ he said. ‘Blocked it out. You were right, you see, I am a monster.’

She did not react. He looked at her imploringly, seeking reassurance. He was gabbling a bit, talking too much, and that was just what she had been hoping for.

‘Look,’ he continued. ‘My first thought when I realised Irene was dead was to dial 999 — of course it was. Then I asked myself what good it would do, nobody was going to bring her back to life.

‘So I just concentrated on getting myself out of the whole dreadful mess...’

And Irene? Did he spare one fleeting thought for poor little Irene, Jennifer wanted to inquire? But she didn’t.

‘Why did you go to Bill Turpin?’ she asked instead.

He let out a big breath. ‘I’ve never known really. I had to get rid of the body. I just sensed he would know what to do. I’d been checking him out, you know I did that. We all wanted to be investigative reporters in those days. I was just one of a long line of would-be Carl Bernsteins to probe into the past of our local mystery man.’

‘So you did have something on him?’

‘No, but I tried to con him that I did, bloody fool that I was...’

‘He went along with it though, didn’t he?’ she responded. ‘He helped you...’

‘Yes. I didn’t know why at first, of course. But it suited him — in more ways than one.’

Marcus told her how he had run across the fields to old Bill’s cottage, and hammered on the door.

‘I was in a real state, but I tried to be Joe Cool all the same — true to form, I suppose. I told Bill I needed help right away with something very serious — that I’d put together an exposé of his criminal past, and in return for his help I’d destroy it.’

Marcus managed a high-pitched giggle. ‘He just smiled at me. Then he said: “You’m not trying to blackmail me, be ’ee boy?” He looked amused, not angry. It all seemed so unreal. I didn’t know what to say. I was frightened out of my mind. I thought I’d blown it altogether.

‘But, quite abruptly, he asked me what I had done. I told him. Then he made me tell him everything that had happened in the last few days which in any way concerned Irene, anything that could be connected to her death and exactly how she had died.

‘I gave him every detail. All about Johnny coming to us after Marjorie Benson was found, everything. He had that sort of effect, you know. You obeyed him. Of course I didn’t realise I was manna from Heaven for him, really. I provided a second murder and even a suspect for the first one. Poor Johnny, asking for it.

‘Eventually Turpin put down that blessed pipe of his and said he would sort everything out. He told me to stay where I was, so I did — while he went off in his car. It was some hours before he came back, it seemed like days. He just walked into the cottage, sat down at the kitchen table, got that old pipe working again and then he said: “You can go home now, it’s all clean.”’

Marcus’s voice sounded distant. He’d gone back in time now, remembering. He explained how the old man had instructed him on exactly what to say to the police: Irene had left home for work and never returned, simple as that. Keep it simple and stick to it.

‘Oh, and a word of advice,’ Bill had said, ‘if you ever want to blackmail anyone again, you’m going to have to be a bit more convincing... you young puppy. Go on — get off ’ome now.’

But as Marcus had reached the cottage door, Bill had called him back. It was the old man’s last words which held the sting in their tail.

‘You’ll hear from me — I may want something from you in return.’

What he had wanted from Marcus was custody of his life.

From that moment on, Marcus was never again to be entirely his own man.

‘Why did Bill Turpin want you under his control?’ she asked.

Marcus shrugged. ‘He told me he thought I was clever, didn’t have any morals, and had a weakness that would always be with me. The combination made me valuable to him, I suppose. I would have all the help in the world to raise me to positions of great power. All I had to do in return was to be absolutely loyal and always do exactly what I was told. Then I would remain infallible... whatever I did...’

Jennifer appeared totally shocked.

‘Bill Turpin was certainly not what he seemed, was he?’ she remarked mildly.

‘In a way he was,’ Marcus replied.

And he told her what he knew of Bill’s history, his time in the services, the death of his wife and children. Bill had told Marcus that during the war he had met a group of men who were as disillusioned with their country as he was. They shared his bitterness and despair, his anger at the hell they had been thrust into, and felt the world owed them something special after all they had been through. At the time Bill saw himself almost as a kind of Robin Hood, making up for society’s various injustices, inequalities, and cruelties. There were real villains among them, Marcus was sure, but they came from all walks of life and it was only their shared purpose which united them — to be free and powerful, and that had to mean rich as well. Bill’s involvement had initially been political in a way, although he would never have understood that, but had he been a more educated man, he would have channelled his rage against society differently; he might well have joined the communist party, as so many did in the reaction days of the fifties...

Jennifer interrupted Marcus at that point. He was warming to his theme, arguing around it in the way he was so good at, sounding quite smooth. She was not going to let him prevaricate.

‘So what actually was Bill Turpin?’ she asked.

Marcus shrugged again. ‘Not a man to cross,’ he said. ‘In the early days he was top muscle. The old Pelham gossip wasn’t the half of it.

‘He was involved in the Lord Lynmouth burglary, at least two other major art robberies, and God knows what else. Arms dealing — one of the great markets of our time. It seemed crazy, a joke when people talked about it back in Pelham, but Bill and his lot knew all about the international arms market from the beginning, from the war. Arms to Korea. To Suez — by fancy routes, of course. And to every African banana state invented. If it still seems far-fetched, think about what is public knowledge now — British firms, legitimate British firms, supplying weapons to the enemy during the Gulf War. Bill and his mates knew what they were about. They knew how to use the stuff they were flogging, for God’s sake — they’d lived through all that.’

Marcus was sweating. He wiped a silken arm across his forehead. She had been aware that he had been sniffing profusely. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He still didn’t stop sniffing. Strange that it had not ever occurred to her until this day that Marcus’s extraordinary energy could sometimes be chemically encouraged. Maybe he read her mind, she’d often felt he’d done that before — within seconds he had the sniffing under control.

She tried not to look at him. ‘Go on,’ she commanded.

He did so, quite intently. ‘Bill Turpin once told me how he’d learned during the war that he had one great talent — it was for killing people. Then he laughed as if that was a joke.’

Jennifer remembered what Todd had told her about the unsolved murder of the Earl of Lynmouth, about the string of fine-art robberies just after the war, and even about illegal arms deals out of Bristol. She had a vision of a small gang of highly trained soldiers, breaking and entering into big houses and galleries, using their army skills, and one of them with a special job for which he had a special talent — to listen, to watch, to wipe out anybody who got in the way. Swiftly. Cleanly. Silently. Bill Turpin. She had not believed what she was saying when she had asked Todd if he thought old Bill was some kind of hit man. It seemed that was more or less what he had been. The puzzle was starting to fit together finally. Marcus was still talking, and all she had to do now was listen.

Once Marcus began to tell the story, he could not stop, it was as if the floodgates had been opened. He tried to explain his mixed feelings of revulsion and gratitude towards Bill. When Marcus ran to the cottage he wasn’t even sure what he was asking for, he said. It was Bill who had immediately begun an elaborate cover-up operation with a calm efficiency which suggested it was not the first time.

Bill had always said they were kindred spirits, the two of them, which in the early days had sent shivers down Marcus’s spine. Bill unnerved him because Marcus never understood what he got out of it all. He had always known Bill was a very wealthy man, but he never lived as if he was. He lived exactly the way you would have expected without the other secret side to him. For Bill Turpin the game had all been in the playing. He had talked to Marcus about the perfect murder, enjoying the conversation.

‘And Marjorie Benson — it was Turpin who killed her, wasn’t it?’

Marcus nodded. ‘For sure. Not that he ever put it into words. He wouldn’t, the bugger.’

‘And Johnny Cooke?’

‘Yes, poor Johnny,’ said Marcus, in a voice which held no sympathy at all. ‘Wrong place, wrong time. Probably his destiny. Suited Turpin though. I had my instructions, all I had to do was give a more or less verbatim account of Johnny Cooke’s midnight visit the day after the murder. It certainly sounded like a confession — and what could make a murderer feel safer than to have another man convicted of his crime?’

Jennifer kept looking away. With difficulty she kept her voice neutral, pleasant even.

‘So why did Bill Turpin kill Marjorie Benson? Who was she, for goodness’ sake?’

Marcus shook his head. ‘Didn’t the diary tell you?’ he asked.

Jennifer answered him quickly.

‘Only that Marjorie had to die because she knew too much, because she could destroy everything.’

Marcus nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was always the real mystery — not Bill. I never had a clue who she was — but she really did have something on the old man, him and his buddies.

‘That’s all I ever knew really. I had nothing and he helped me — she had everything and he killed her.’

‘So did she try to blackmail him too?’

Marcus shook his head. ‘I don’t know, doesn’t seem likely the way Johnny described her. Bill was in no doubt that she had come to Pelham Bay to get him though, in some way or other.’

‘I wonder why he put her body in the sea,’ Jennifer said suddenly.

‘How the hell do I know?’ Marcus replied with a question. ‘I don’t suppose he did. I would imagine he rolled her into the river, there where it cuts through the dunes, and she was swept into the estuary.’

Of course, that would make sense. Out of sight, out of mind, until the tide carried her back the next day. Bill Turpin might have expected it to be longer before she was found. If Jennifer had not swum out so far, the tide would probably have taken the body out to sea again without anyone noticing; it could have been several days before she was discovered. But in the end that turned to Bill Turpin’s advantage. He had something tangible with which to frame poor Johnny Cooke...

Marcus was carrying on with his story. Jennifer listened carefully. Nobody had troubled him much for some time after Irene’s death; he had been instructed to join the Freemasons, which he did.

Bill Turpin’s friends were always referred to as just that — ‘The Friends’. At first Marcus had taken the innocent-sounding name for what it was, and not realised the extent of the formal structure involved. Only gradually had he learned just how big and influential The Friends were. They had considerable powers. With his move to London came a phone number, and he told her about his abortive attempts to trace it, always ending with an empty room rented to a non-existent company with an accommodation address. Apart from Bill, he only ever talked to disembodied voices, for many years to a voice that came to him through a voice box, so it sounded like a machine — he couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.

But he’d learned that almost everything he wanted he could have, all he had to do was ask.

‘And in return you gave them the power of the Recorder, and the influence of your whole business empire, and now your position as a junior minister,’ she said.

She felt his eyes on her back.

‘It’s easy to moralise,’ he said.

‘I am not moralising,’ she replied. ‘I am stating the facts.

‘I have no doubts at all that the way in which you have behaved is quite usual in the circles in which you move, and that there are always casualties. I don’t have a problem with that. High finance, big business, politics — all spell corruption to me. I’ve come to believe that if you can’t beat them, you may as well join them.

‘I want my slice now.’

She had swung around to face him again as she spoke. She looked slightly flushed, the way she did when she was having sex. She was excited. What a woman, he thought.

How could he ever have let her go?

He smiled his appreciation.

‘You are absolutely right,’ he said. ‘Every government has a hidden agenda. Almost everyone in the government in this country has an ulterior motive for everything that they do.

‘Think of what we pay our politicians and the way most of them live. Doesn’t often add up, does it? They nearly all have a lifestyle way above their income.

‘And think about the great political coups nowadays. The overthrow of Communism in Russia, for example. All about money, wasn’t it? Do you think Gorbachev did it on his own? Do you think he wasn’t backed? And who keeps that man Yeltsin in power — he’s so far up the Western backside it’s embarrassing.

‘Look at the Gulf war. All about money. All about oil. The most powerful governments in the world sent their armed forces into action on the orders of their money men. Everybody knows that — and why Saddam was quite deliberately let off the hook. If he had been wiped out, Iran would have ended up with a virtual oil monopoly. Bad economics, that’s all.

‘Even Bosnia is not what it seems. Europe’s money market has been stood on its head by the disruption there — and that suits certain people very well.

‘There is always a hidden agenda. Always. And I am just a tiny part of it, of course I am, part of the real motivation behind what happens in the corridors of power.’

Jennifer found what he was saying frightening yet impressive, and totally convincing. He was telling the truth. She had no doubts about that.

‘Did you know that twelve per cent of the world’s revenue is now generated by so-called criminal activity? If you pulled the plug, the economy would really collapse.

‘The Friends are simply a group of people, many in very influential positions, all with something to give, who ensure each other’s wealth and futures by securing information and power.’

Jennifer shivered.

‘Surely the Masons wouldn’t go as far as murder, would they?’ she asked.

‘Not as an organisation, of course not,’ Marcus said. ‘The Friends recruit the bad eggs from the Masons and con the good ones.

‘I remember asking Bill how he had got rid of Irene’s body, and how he was so sure my flat was clean. He touched the side of his nose and said not every PC Plod wanted to stay that way. I always assumed that he had called in a couple of tame policemen — and it made sense that they would be Masons.’

Jennifer imagined Todd’s reaction to that little theory. Good, decent Todd, why couldn’t she have stuck with him?

She sat down again at the kitchen table. ‘Do you know who runs The Friends, do you know other people involved?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never known. That’s the way it is... Sometimes I have suspected people, but never got any further. The only Friend I have ever definitely known was Bill Turpin. Other than that, they have always just contacted me over the phone.’

She turned to face him, keeping any expression out of her eyes. ‘And they funded you from the start? Made it possible for you to make even more money?’

‘Of course.’

‘Tell me about the other murders,’ she said.

‘I thought you knew?’

He was unwilling to relive it all. He looked at her appealingly. She was still smiling, quite relaxed, sexy, cool, in control. Her lips were very full and red from the sex. He could smell her. Now that they were talking like this, he found that he wanted her even more than before. He had to make himself listen to her.

He stared at her, fascinated by the change in her.

‘I want you to tell me,’ she said. ‘If we are to be a team from now on, you must tell me how they happened. I need to know the worst as well as the best.’

He took another deep drink of vodka. It had been after the first time she left him, he said, the time she had walked out when he hired the young stud for her. He had been distraught. Devastated. And in those days he really couldn’t live without her sexually. He was desperate for the kind of sexual satisfaction only she could give him. It got out of control.

She kept smiling. He was amazing. He was shifting the blame on to her again. If she had been there to fulfil his sexual needs, whatever it was he was about to tell her would never have happened. That seemed to be the theme.

She knew he liked Oriental women, he went on. There were two of them, just like the night she had interrupted him when he thought she was in Paris. This awful night, these two girls were delivered to his flat. Sisters. They had both been virgins, and he had sex with each one of them again and again, but he could not satisfy himself. His body craved for Jennifer. These were just substitutes on whom he took out his frustration. And eventually it had gone too far.

He began to wallow in his own self-pity. He broke down and began to cry in earnest. She went to his side and put her arms around him and comforted him.

‘It will be all right now there are two of us standing together, sharing the guilt,’ she said.

When he had calmed down she turned away from him once more.

‘Go on,’ she commanded. ‘Tell me what happened.’

It was a re-enactment of the death of poor Irene. He had hammered so harshly into one of the girls that her neck had broken. He only realised it when her sister started screaming at him and pummelling his back with her little fists. Eventually he had rolled off the girl, who was stone dead, her head at an impossible angle. Her sister became hysterical. He had tried to quieten her, that was all.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt her as well, really I didn’t.’

He was appealing to Jennifer now.

‘When I put my hands around her neck it was just to quieten her. But I closed my fingers too much. I was overexcited — in a panic. Suddenly I felt her go limp in my hands. They were both dead — but I didn’t mean to kill either of them. Really I didn’t.’

He was bleating. She thought he sounded pathetic as well as disgusting. But what he was telling her now was so appalling she could barely take it in. It was worse than she had expected. She had lived with this man, married him after he had done all this, been prepared to have his children. And she had suspected so much yet done nothing.

She heard herself say quite coolly: ‘What did you do next?’

‘I called The Friends, called my contact. I was told to check into a hotel for a couple of days and then carry on as usual.

‘When I went back to the flat it was as if nothing had happened. The bodies were gone, the place as it had been before. I knew there would be nothing to link me with the murders. The Friends only use professionals. Sometimes I cannot believe any of it ever happened.’

How convenient, she thought. Vaguely she remembered newspaper stories about the mutilated bodies of two Thai girls found tied together somewhere in Dockland. Another sex murder, the killer never found.

‘Is that all?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean, is that all?’

‘Any more bodies in the closet I should know about?’ She made her voice light.

‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’

‘I don’t know Marcus, not any more.’

Now her voice was flat. The tone in it startled him. She sounded different again.

‘I think I’d like to put some clothes on,’ she said.

He followed her into the bedroom and watched her take off the towelling robe and put it carefully on the bed. He was waiting for her to say something else, to make the next move. She had her back to him. Beneath the robe she was wearing the panties she had bought that day. She said nothing until she was dressed. She did not bother with a shower. She pulled on her old Levis and new sweatshirt, and then reached into the pocket of the dressing gown.

She drew out a small tape-recorder and held it up to him.

‘Thanks Marcus, I have everything I need to make sure you rot in jail now,’ she said.

His face disintegrated before her eyes. It took him five seconds to grasp it all — no more. Even at a time like this, Marcus remained quick.

He reached for the bedside table lamp, wrenched it from its socket and lunged at her. She ducked and avoided the attack easily. Had she misjudged him? Was he going to try to kill her after all?

He took a step backwards. He looked pathetic. No, she had not misjudged him. He was a dangerous man, but still her power over him remained. That hadn’t changed. Curious. He was trembling. He began to scream at her.

‘It was all a trick, wasn’t it? The whole damn thing. The sex — everything!

‘You conned me, you bitch. You conned me.’

He leaned forward and caught hold of her arm, shaking her.

‘Dreadful thing, the collapse of morality, isn’t it, Marcus?’ she said. Even under the stress of the moment, Marcus remembered her saying that to him once before, when she had blackmailed him into divorcing her. Why did he continue to underestimate her?

She wriggled out of his grasp. He half fell across the bed, yelling incomprehensible obscenities at her. She was astonished by how calm she felt.

‘Careful Marcus. Your true nature is showing.’

She thrust the tape recorder into her handbag and headed for the front door. He was following her.

‘What are you going to do?’ he wailed.

‘What do you think? I’m going straight to the police.’

‘Huh.’ For a brief moment he attempted to look as if he was in control.

‘That’ll do you no good. Half the top men in the Met are Friends.’

‘I am glad you are so confident,’ she said, reaching for the door handle.

He lunged at her again, one hand over hers, preventing her from opening the door. He was leering.

‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

She never had been, which was probably the reason for her power over him.

‘I could kill you,’ he said.

‘No, you couldn’t,’ she replied.

Even now, with what she had done and what she had against him, she was sure it was the truth.

‘Let go of me,’ she ordered.

Slowly he removed his hand and stepped back. He looked beaten. She sincerely hoped he was. His face was dark with rage and despair and fear. She felt only revulsion for this twisted shadow of the man she had married. He was evil, and she was going to get him. She had done what she should have done years ago. She had used her power over him to nail him. She was glad.

It had been part of her plan to destroy him, and the atonement of her own guilt, that he should know she had deliberately set out to do so. That is why she had shown him the tape recorder.

As she walked towards the door, she looked back over her shoulder at him.

‘By the way, there never was a diary,’ she said. That admission put her most at risk of all, but not to have told him, she was sure, would have been even more dangerous, because while she remained remarkably unafraid of Marcus, she was becoming quite terrified of his Friends.

As soon as she spoke she saw the panic lift and Marcus’s brain start to work again.

‘Then the only evidence is your tape, isn’t it?’ he said quietly. His eyes were ice, biting into her head.

He lurched forward for the final time and pulled her handbag from her with such force that the strap broke. He opened it and shook out the contents, catching the recorder as it fell. He tossed it forcefully into the room behind him so that it smashed apart as it hit the wall.

When he looked at her again his eyes were like death. It was time to run. Hastily she reached for the things which had fallen from her bag — all her keys were among them. As she bent down he kicked her in the kidneys with all his might. She fell to the floor, retching and clutching her side. The pain was intense, and so, at last, was the fear.

He stepped astride her, looking down, his face just a contorted mask. With his left hand he caught her by a shoulder, pulling her slightly upright towards him. He swung his right arm back, fist clenched. He was aiming for her face. She knew the full extent of his physical power. She cowered at his feet, too winded to speak, and waited for the blow, certain now that she had indeed made a fatal misjudgement. She was suddenly quite sure that he was going to kill her after all.

Abruptly he let her drop.

‘Just get out, you bitch,’ he hissed. The voice was barely human.

Something had stopped him. She had got it right, but only just. She made a desperate grab for her keys, abandoning money, credit cards, and all else that had been in her bag. Still clutching her side, she stumbled into the lift and made her escape.

Twenty

She half ran to the car park where she had left the Porsche. She wanted to get away. The sun was still shining, it was not yet five o’clock, and that seemed wrong. It should be the middle of the night. As she began to pull the car out of the car park, she hit the accelerator with such fury that she stalled the engine, something she never did. She was in more of a state than she realised. What Marcus had told her was so appalling she could barely take it in.

When she had put what she considered to be a safe distance between herself and Marcus, she slowed the Porsche to a halt. She leaned back in her seat and unzipped her jeans. Tucked into her pants was a micro tape recorder, a masterpiece of modern engineering. She wound the tape back a little and checked that it had recorded. Incredible quality for such a small and concealed instrument. She had deliberately let Marcus believe that he had removed the only evidence from her — she still felt that he would find it impossible to hurt her seriously himself, but was sure his ‘Friends’ would have no similar reservations.

She sat for a moment looking at the small tape recorder. She had achieved all that she had set out to achieve. But she felt quite sick.

She must calm down, be careful. She mustn’t blow it now. She had the tape and the computer disc. She certainly had him. She turned the car east and headed for Scotland Yard. After a couple of minutes, she pulled into the side of the road, remembering what Marcus had said.

‘Half the top men in the Met were Friends.’

The ramblings of a desperate man, or the truth? Probably a bit of both, she thought — a gross exaggeration for certain, but one ‘Friend’ in the Met could be enough to scupper her. And anyway, how could she be sure of getting to somebody who would take her seriously if she went in cold? She had not thought beyond conning and confronting Marcus, she realised. That had been a daunting enough task. So, now how should she handle it? Todd Mallett. She trusted him totally. She would call him and seek his advice. Damn. She had left her mobile phone at home in Richmond. Unlike her, but then it was an unlikely time in her life.

And so she decided to drive home. The traffic would be terrible at that time of day, and it would probably take her the best part of forty-five minutes to get there from Chelsea. None the less it was a good idea. She needed the comfort of her own familiar surroundings around her. She would phone Todd as soon as she got there.

The journey took forty minutes. She pulled the Porsche into the driveway and opened the electronic door to the garage with the flick of a switch inside the car. The garage door shut behind her. There was a connecting door from within the garage to the house. She opened the glove compartment at the front of the Porsche and took out the computer disc. Clutching her car keys, the computer disc, and the micro tape in her left hand, she used her right to unlock the house door, ran up the steps to the living room, flung herself full length on the big squashy sofa, and burst into a fit of painful, body-racking sobs.

It was a luxury she could not allow herself for long. It was no good falling apart now. She hoisted herself up to a sitting position, reached for the telephone on the coffee table, and asked directory inquiries for the number of Durraton Police station. She dialled it. Todd was not in and was not expected back that evening. Damn. And damn again.

She called directory inquiries once more, and got Todd’s home number. Then she looked at her watch. Still not six o’clock. There was no way he would be home by now, not Todd. He must be off somewhere working. She would leave it at least half an hour. She did not particularly wish to speak to his wife Angela, she was not sure if she could deal with that right now.

She was also not sure that she could cope with being on her own and keeping all of this to herself for much longer. It might be time for Anna. She thought about it. Yes, it definitely was. She needed another brain, and Anna was the one person she could trust one hundred per cent.

She dialled the Barnes number. Anna picked up the phone, which was a relief. Then she remembered that Dominic had told her he was off on a seminar. Would that be a problem? She hoped not.

Anna was furious with her.

‘What on earth is going in?’ she stormed. ‘You put the fear of God into Dominic this morning. He actually seemed concerned about you, said you weren’t yourself at all — which would usually have delighted him...’

Jennifer did not have the energy to respond. Her voice was quiet and distant. It stopped Anna short.

‘If you can come over this evening I will tell you everything,’ Jennifer said. ‘I need your help.’

‘Can’t you come over here?’ asked Anna.

‘No. I have some calls to make and I may have to leave messages and I need to use the computer and it would all be too complicated.’

‘Don’t babble,’ said Anna, in an attempt at normality. ‘Dominic’s away and I was just about to give Pandora her tea and put her to bed.’

Jennifer was ready for her. ‘Give her her tea, put her to bed, and when she’s asleep carry her out to the car and bring her over here. You’ve done it before, the last time she never stirred.’

‘Oh God,’ said Anna. ‘OK. I should be able to make it by eight.’

She paused. ‘And Jennifer... this had better be good.’

Then Jennifer did manage a wry laugh.

‘I don’t think “good” is quite the word for it,’ she said.

She put the receiver down with, in spite of everything, just the merest flash of the sense of well-being that she almost always experienced after talking to Anna. She went to the bathroom and peeled off her clothes. She put them in a plastic bag for the dustbin. Even the much-loved old Levis. A bit extreme, perhaps, but when it was all over she wanted nothing that would ever remind her of Marcus again.

She kept thinking about the sex with him. She had made a conscious decision to go to bed with him again, because she knew no other way that she could have convinced him to trust her and talk to her like he had, no other way to use her power over him. Jennifer had never lied to him before, she didn’t think, and never pretended either — certainly not in bed. That had given her all the advantages in the final confrontation, but it had been obscene, and with what he had told her afterwards, the obscenity was overwhelming.

Suddenly she felt nauseous again. It happened quickly. She fell to her knees in front of the lavatory pan and just managed to lift the lid before being heartily and extensively sick.

Afterwards she felt very slightly better. She clambered under the power shower and let a steaming hot jet of water drench her in its powerful stream. She stood there for a couple of minutes and then energetically shampooed her hair for the second time that day and soaped every half-inch of her body, as if she was washing the last vestiges of Marcus away. By the time she had let the water pour over her for several minutes more, she really did feel better.

She dressed in tee shirt and leggings, wrapped a towel around her hair, and then tried Todd at home. Angela answered. He was not there. She really was not having much luck.

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’ she asked.

‘Haven’t a clue.’

The voice at the other end was cold and unhelpful. Angela had never forgiven Jennifer for not only escaping from North Devon, but also, in every practical appearance at least, being highly successful in London. Jennifer had conquered worlds Angela could only dream about, and it made the policeman’s wife resentful. Little did she know how much at that very moment Jennifer envied Angela her rural family existence with Todd and their children. ‘Is there anywhere I can contact him?’ she asked.

‘Nope. He’s off playing cricket in a field somewhere.’

Cricket? Jennifer couldn’t believe it. It was absurd. Her ex-husband had just confessed mass murder to her, and the only man she knew who could help her and whom she could trust, a policeman re-investigating one of the murders, was playing cricket.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘It’s vital that I contact him.’ She was pleading, but the voice did not become any more friendly.

‘He’s playing cricket,’ Angela repeated. ‘And then it’ll be the pub afterwards. You know Todd.’

‘You know Todd,’ repeated Jennifer to herself in her head. Oh God, did Angela know about her and Todd? Or did she just suspect? It all seemed so unimportant now... to her. But she had to speak to him, she had to.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s about the murders in the Bay. I have new evidence. I must talk to him; hasn’t he got a mobile phone?’

She sensed Angela relenting slightly. Maybe she recognised the desperation in her voice. Not that she would be much moved by that. Come to think of it, Angela had always given every sign of disliking her, even when they were at school together, even when they were supposed to be friends.

‘It’s not working, I just tried it, it might be the batteries, they don’t seem to hold charge, he’s been meaning to get new ones,’ said Angela. ‘As soon as he gets in I’ll tell him to call you. That’s all I can do. Give me your number.’

Jennifer did so. It was the best she was going to get. Anyway, she supposed another few hours wouldn’t make any difference. She was probably being hysterical.

In North Devon, Angela replaced the receiver and reached for the message pad kept on the little shelf by the phone. It was where the whole family jotted messages and everyone checked it religiously. That way Todd would get his message as soon as he walked through the door, even if Angela had already gone to bed — which was quite likely knowing his cricket nights. Blast. The notebook wasn’t there. She roundly cursed her boys, one of whom had doubtless not replaced the book where it should be kept. Her endeavour to extract an admission from any of them proved fruitless. They barely paused in their extermination of innocent planets featured on the latest computer game which they had jacked into the living-room TV. The noise was deafening. And the baby was crying again — that child never seemed to stop.

Angela swiftly abandoned her rather half-hearted search for the notepad, and began a futile attempt to quieten her now screaming daughter.

‘To hell with Jennifer Stone,’ she muttered to herself.

When Todd Mallet came home there was no written note waiting for him, and his wife was, indeed, already in bed and asleep.

While she waited for Anna, Jennifer towel-dried her hair and then set herself up in her study with laptop computer and tape recorder. She jotted one or two thoughts into the laptop, just as she had done every day since the whole business had begun.

Then she braced herself for an unpleasant task, but something she none the less wanted to do. She wound back the tape in her voice-activated recorder and listened to her conversation with Marcus. It had only lasted around half an hour, she realised, but it had been the longest and most terrible half hour of her life.

She began to transcribe the tape methodically into her computer. By the time the doorbell rang she had almost completed the transcript. It made chilling reading.

At the front door she paused. She wanted to be quite sure who was outside. She peered through the peephole, and there stood Anna, comforting, wonderful Anna, clutching a woollen-wrapped bundle which presumably contained Pandora. She opened the door laughing.

‘Shush,’ commanded Anna.

Jennifer dropped her voice to a whisper: ‘Do you want to put her to bed?’ she mouthed.

Anna nodded. She followed Jennifer upstairs to a bedroom. Jennifer pulled back the duvet on one of the twin beds, and Anna carefully unwrapped her bundle and revealed a deeply sleeping Pandora. The child barely stirred as her mother laid her gently in the bed. Jennifer pulled the cover around her neck. Pandora snuggled down. A wonderful expression that, and when you watched a child settling into deep sleep you really knew what ‘snuggling down’ was, Jennifer thought.

She realised she was just standing there appreciating the peacefulness of the little girl while Anna tugged impatiently at her arm.

Together they left the room.

‘Come on,’ said Anna, taking charge. ‘Let’s sit down with a stiff drink, you look absolutely diabolical.’

‘Thanks,’ replied Jennifer.

But she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors on the landing, and it was indeed the truth. She had not dried her hair properly, or combed it through. It was damp and tangled. There were dark bags under her eyes which were still red and swollen from the tears she kept being unable to prevent, and her skin was blotchy and raw-looking for the same reason.

Downstairs she headed for the kitchen to make drinks. Anna steered her to an armchair in the sitting room.

‘Sit down, for Chrissake,’ she commanded.

Jennifer did so, obediently like a child. Anna disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Scotch, an ice bucket, a big bottle of fizzy mineral water and two glasses.

‘I don’t drink whisky,’ remarked Jennifer mildly.

‘Exactly,’ said her friend.

And Jennifer was reminded of the uncannily similar incident with her mother two days earlier. Two days? Was it only two days? She could not believe all that had happened.

Anna handed Jennifer a tumbler filled almost to the brim with whisky and ice and water, then poured a much smaller one for herself. She had to drive Pandora home, after all.

She watched Jennifer take a deep drink and slump back in her chair.

‘Shoot,’ she ordered.

Jennifer just looked at her. She didn’t know where to begin. She said ‘Umm.’ No more words came. As ever, Anna seemed able to almost read her mind.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ she coaxed.

And so Jennifer did. She began with how she had found the body of Marjorie Benson in the sea at Pelham Bay, how Mark Piddle had come to interview her and they had embarked on an all-powerful relationship that had lasted most of their adult lives.

This much Anna knew. Then Jennifer told her about the disappearance of Irene Nichols, Mark’s former girlfriend, which Anna also knew about because after Irene’s body had been found she had read about it in the papers — all of which had mentioned the Piddell connection — but Anna was amazed that Jennifer had never told her about it in all their years of friendship. Surely it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot. And Anna, who did not mean to interrupt, heard herself say exactly that.

‘In a way I did forget,’ said Jennifer in a very small voice. ‘I made myself forget, which is just part of my guilt.’

She went on then, becoming more and more fluent, taking Anna through it all in chronological order, how the old nightmare had returned from the moment of her return to Pelham Bay; and how, with every new little piece of information she gained, her terrible suspicions about the man that she married became a growing certainty.

She told Anna of the half-mad plot she had hatched. Her determination to trap Marcus. How she had decided to sleep with him again, to convince him that she was indeed his kindred spirit in more ways than just sexually. She had been sure she could do it if she kept her head. And she had been sure she was the only person in the world who could trap Marcus: that was why she had felt compelled to go through with it.

She told Anna almost every detail of the night she spent with Marcus, and how she tricked him in the morning so she could search his flat and how she took the computer tape to Dominic.

Then she stopped.

‘But you still don’t know for certain, do you?’ Anna queried.

‘Oh yes I do,’ said Jennifer. ‘I went back. Then I played my trump card. You haven’t followed it, have you?’

‘Not entirely, obviously,’ admitted Anna.

‘I convinced him that we were a true pair, that I only wanted to be his equal, to share every secret with him. He always said we were two of a kind. I convinced him that was so. That way I knew I could trap him.’

She stood up.

‘This afternoon I spent three hours in bed with Marcus, during which we drove each other to the heights of physical excitement that we could only ever reach together. At least, as far as he was concerned we reached them.’

Her words were quite clinical. She sounded robotic. It was the only way she could do this.

‘Sexual power is an extraordinary thing,’ she went on. ‘Marcus knows he has always had complete sexual power over me. That is why each time I have left him I have never dared see him again. In spite of whatever I might be feeling about him, I could never trust myself.

‘I was banking on him overlooking the sexual power I have always had over him, or at least, in his usual arrogant way, totally ignoring the possibility that I might ever use it against him.’

Anna was just staring at her, mesmerised.

‘Stay there,’ said Jennifer.

She was in charge again now, even if only briefly. Jennifer left the room and returned with her little tape recorder. She put it on the coffee table.

‘When we had finished in bed this afternoon, I called Marcus’s bluff,’ she announced in a matter-of-fact manner. ‘It worked. And this is the result.’

She pushed the recorder’s play button and went back to her armchair opposite Anna. As the tape played she drank whisky steadily and watched her friend’s face. Anna appeared to be quite stunned. The conversation ended before the tape. Jennifer rose to turn the machine off. After she had done so, there was complete silence in the room. Anna leaned forwards and poured herself another whisky.

She looked at her friend. Jennifer’s face was blank, expressionless.

‘God, you took a risk,’ said Anna at last.

Jennifer seemed startled. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘He could have killed you,’ replied her friend in a hoarse whisper.

‘No,’ said Jennifer, gingerly fingering her side which was beginning to display fairly substantial bruising. ‘A kick in the kidneys was as far as he could go. Marcus could never quite kill me. In any case, in the end he didn’t think he had a reason to.’

And she told Anna how she had tricked Marcus with her second tape recorder.

Anna took a swig of whisky.

‘I have never been so shocked in all my life,’ she managed to say.

Then: ‘Why haven’t you taken this straight to the police?’

‘After I turned off the tape, his last words to me were: “Half the top cops in the Met are Friends.”’

‘Oh come on, Jennifer, he’s bluffing you with that. It’s too far-fetched.’

‘Really. I’m sure he was bluffing when he said half — but I wouldn’t like to call his bluff that they don’t have anybody high up in the Met. Anyway, can you think of anything much more far-fetched than this entire story?’

Anna admitted that no, she couldn’t, not off-hand. But in that case she wanted to know exactly what Jennifer was planning to do. It seemed to her that her friend was sitting on dynamite.

Jennifer explained about Todd, the one policeman she could trust. She was waiting for him to call. Either in London or back in North Devon, she would make sure she saw him in the morning. That would be the beginning of the end of it all. What else could she do?

Anna had no fast answer to that, but still some questions to put.

‘So who are these murky ‘Friends’, do you know?’

Jennifer shook her head. ‘I’m not even sure how much Marcus knows about who they are.

‘After I’ve talked to Todd tomorrow, that will be for the police and I suppose the government to find out, won’t it? All I do know is that they are devious enough and powerful enough to have enabled Marcus literally to get away with murder.

‘He really has turned into a monster.’

Anna put her now empty glass on the table at her side.

‘Have you considered the danger you are still in?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think I am actually. I told you. Marcus does not think I have any evidence.’

‘Maybe not, but his friends may want to play safe.’

‘He thinks he has dealt with it, he probably won’t even tell them.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Anna again.

‘Are the doors and windows locked?’ she asked.

‘Anna, the place is like Fort Knox. Look, folding bars, all shut and locked. And we have a state-of-the-art alarm system. Marcus always insisted on incredible security...’

She paused, realising what she had said.

‘Ironic really,’ remarked Anna, pouring herself yet another Scotch.

Jennifer experienced a brief flash of normality. ‘Anna, you’re driving. You mustn’t drink any more.’

‘Coming from you that’s rich — but you are right,’ said her friend. She thought for a moment.

When she spoke again she sounded decisive. ‘You shouldn’t be here on your own. Look, let’s get a taxi back to Barnes, and you stay the night with me.’

‘I told you, I’m waiting for Todd to call,’ said Jennifer stubbornly.

‘All right, then I’ll just have to stay here,’ said Anna. ‘No reason to go home with Dom away in any case. Just remind me to phone him before we go to bed. He’ll go frantic if he rings home and only gets the answering machine.’

‘I love you, missus,’ said Jennifer.

‘I should think so,’ her friend replied. She added that she was starving. As usual she had fed her daughter and forgotten herself. What about getting a pizza delivered? Jennifer agreed readily enough, although she was not a bit hungry. The thought of food made her feel sick again, in fact.

But she dialled the number of the local Pizza Express and let Anna do the ordering. As she did so she reflected that she was glad Anna was staying for more reasons than one. It had not occurred to her before that she might be putting her friend in danger by confiding in her, and it was typical of Anna that she did not think of it that way either. None the less, it was reassuring that Anna would be with her now until the whole business was dealt with — because her security really was first-class. She was sure nobody could get to either of them as long as they were locked in the Richmond Hill house.

When the pizza arrived, Jennifer was surprised to find that she was hungry after all. The smell of it seemed to revive her battered senses. She opened a bottle of red Italian wine, and the two women settled down to eat and drink. While they did so they went over and over again the implications of the last few days.

‘It sends shivers down my spine,’ remarked Anna. ‘I just can’t understand how a man like Marcus could go mad like that. The first murder of Irene is just too awful on its own, but then to go on and kill two more in the same way. And don’t forget that’s just what he has told you about.’

‘Don’t,’ said Jennifer.

Anna repeated that she didn’t understand how Marcus could have allowed himself to be taken over by the same sexual behaviour again and again, when he knew how dangerous it could be.

‘There is nothing more compelling than the sex urge,’ said Jennifer, who knew what she was talking about. ‘Look at the way men in the public eye go again and again to massage parlours and knocking shops. They know they are going to get found out, and yet they can’t stop themselves.

‘Look at the way men in powerful positions come to believe that they can literally get away with anything, that the laws of the land aren’t for them, that they can get away with murder if they choose. Right back through history there are examples of men in high places believing they are above and beyond the law.’

Anna sighed. ‘The sex urge and the power complex,’ she said. ‘There is also the survival urge — and that is probably the greatest of all, whatever you say.

‘While we are citing examples of such things, did you read about that couple in America who were involved in the Mafia and killed their own daughter because she presented a threat to them?’ Jennifer shook her head. ‘Well, maybe you should look it up in cuttings... if you get the chance,’ said Anna.

‘Don’t be melodramatic’ replied Jennifer.

‘Melo-bloody-dramatic? My best friend tells me that her ex-husband is a mass murderer under the control of some secret effin’ criminal organisation, and then she says I am melo-bloody-dramatic?’

She was beginning to get a bit drunk. They both were.

‘Shall I open another bottle?’ Jennifer asked.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather call a cab and be bundled off to Barnes?’

‘Quite sure.’ Jennifer didn’t think that was a good idea at all.

‘Oh... Get another bloody bottle then.’ Anna gave in.

An hour or so later she called Dominic.

‘Don’t say anything on the phone,’ instructed Jennifer.

‘Do you think I’m effin’ daft?’ asked Anna in reply.

She had every intention of saying as little as possible to Dominic anyway. He would know she had drunk far too much as soon as she spoke, he always did.

When the two women had finished the second bottle, they prepared for bed.

‘Are you sure this blessed house is safe?’ asked Anna one last time.

‘Nobody could get in here, I promise you,’ said Jennifer.

‘And before I come up I shall put the alarm on down here. If a mouse coughs we will be wakened by the biggest racket you have ever heard — and it’s connected to the cop shop.’

‘Ah, to Marcus’s friends,’ murmured Anna.

She was slightly drunker than Jennifer, but then, she didn’t usually drink as much any more.

‘Go to bed,’ said Jennifer. ‘New toothbrushes, towels et cetera in the bathroom for you.’

Anna obediently hoisted herself up the stairs. Jennifer watched her with affection. At the top of the stairs, her friend turned. She stood above her holding the banister and swaying gently.

‘Have you got mice then?’ she asked.

‘Go to bed,’ said Jennifer once more, giggling in spite of everything.

Anna focused with difficulty, and all that whisky and red wine was starting to cause problems with her diction.

‘D’you remember when I told you Pelham Bay wasn’t Hollywood? Place ish more like bleedin’ Chicago! It’sh like a gangster movie, thish... The Pelham Connection...’

She threw her arms above her head in an extravagant theatrical gesture and nearly fell over.

‘Go to bed, Anna,’ said Jennifer yet again, this time as sternly as she could manage. But she was grinning broadly.

Dear Anna, what a good friend she was. Uncertainly Anna began to make her way along the landing to the bedroom she always used when she stayed with Jennifer. But she turned for one final time, and wagged a finger at Jennifer in what was supposed to be an imposing manner.

‘Jusht don’t unlock your bedroom windows,’ she ordered.

‘I won’t,’ promised Jennifer. ‘Good night.’

As she turned away, Anna called out: ‘Aren’t you coming up?’

‘I’ll be right behind you,’ said Jennifer. ‘Just something I want to do.’

She headed for the study where her laptop computer was still set up on the desk. She switched it on again and went to work. When she left the room fifteen minutes later, she was carrying a back-up floppy disc of all the material she had pumped into the machine over the last few days, as well as Marcus’s G7 disc. She entered the living room briefly to remove the micro tape from its recorder and then climbed the stairs. She could not resist peeping in at Pandora and then at Anna. Both were soundly asleep. Anna lying flat on her back. The booze had knocked her out. She was snoring. Jennifer smiled. It was reassuring to have them there with her, she had to admit. She went into her room and put the floppy discs and the tape on the bed, then she paused. It was no good — Anna had got her at it.

She left the room and toured the house, checking all the window locks, the bars downstairs, and that she had indeed part-set the burglar alarm. It would go off if anything moved downstairs, or if any of the locked or barred external doors and windows were tampered with. Everything was fine. The place really was totally secure. She had known that — but paranoia was obviously setting in. Back in her bedroom, she took the tape and the computer discs and put them both under her pillow.

‘Just in case,’ she said to herself, feeling faintly ridiculous.

Then she went into the connecting bathroom and brushed her teeth and cleaned her face. Old habits, she thought, even at a time like this. Finally she undressed and climbed gratefully beneath the goose-down filled duvet. Bliss. She was exhausted and she knew she could do no more that day, so she may as well give in to sleep. If Todd did call during the night, there was a bedside extension and she would wake up when the phone rang. If not she would deal with it all in the morning.

She could not even think about Marcus any more. She had to have sleep. Even as she was falling exhausted into her bed, she had wondered whether sleep would be possible. Amazingly it was. A combination of the relief of having shared her burden, of the close proximity of her best friend sleeping peacefully in the next room, and the soporific effect of two bottles of red wine preceded by rather a lot of whisky overwhelmed her.

She fell quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep. Her first proper sleep since the nightmare had begun.

Twenty One

Marcus removed the incriminating tape from the smashed recorder he had taken from Jennifer, extracted it from its plastic casing, cut it into several pieces with sharp scissors and fed the remains to the waste disposal unit in his kitchen sink. He stood by it until the grinding finished, only then satisfied that the tape had been effectively destroyed. He was still stunned by what had happened. What a crazy fool he had been, ruled by his cock yet again. If she had not told him about the tape, she could have broken him. Brought down by her own self-indulgence, he supposed.

Then a thought struck him — Jennifer should have remembered how streetwise he was. Even with ‘The Friends’ behind you, men did not achieve what Marcus had achieved without a quick and brilliant brain which continued to operate under extremes of pressure.

Christ, he thought suddenly, what do photographers and reporters do if they think someone might try to stop them getting a picture or a story? They have two cameras, two tape-recorders; the old double-bluff. He had done it himself often enough when he’d been on the road. So had Jennifer used that trick on him? He did not know; he must think this through.

There really was no other evidence, was there? The copy of Bill Turpin’s notebook was still on the kitchen table. The original was presumably already with the police, but it meant nothing without the appropriate software. Software. He decided to be methodical. He went into his study to check that nothing had been touched. It all looked in order, but suddenly, and with dazzling clarity, he became quite frighteningly sure that he had left the G7 floppy disc in the drive of the IBM computer the last time he’d used it. He remembered the phone ringing just as he finished editing a document, and when he returned to the computer to close it down he had been preoccupied. He checked the drive. Nothing. A little shakily he unlocked one of his big filing cabinets and began checking through his store of floppy discs. The G7 disc was missing.

He relocked the cabinet, sat down at his desk and went over and over what had happened and what it could mean. The computer disc alone would not be enough to incriminate him, would it? It would not necessarily lead back to him at all, but it would have his fingerprints on it. Still, that could probably be dealt with. It wouldn’t put him in the dock for murder, anyway. But if she still did have a tape? The more he considered it, the more he became convinced that the bitch really had outsmarted him. Two of a kind, he thought.

It was not the first time he had underestimated Jennifer. It would definitely be the last. He realised he was sweating, although it was quite cool in the flat. Jennifer would have been interested to see that he could sweat out of bed. He was also shaking quite badly now.

He had to make sure that there was no second tape. Would she have gone straight to the police?

He would have to confess to his Friends, like he always did, and he would just tell them they needed to get the disc off Jennifer and search for a tape. That was all. They had always done what he asked, hadn’t they? They had always given him everything he wanted, they would do so again, wouldn’t they?

And so he picked up the phone and dialled. It was still only just after five o’clock.

By five-fifteen a specialist team was on the case. Two men in a British Telecom van arrived to check out Jennifer Stone’s Richmond home at just past six o’clock, only minutes after she’d arrived there herself.

They could see there was someone inside the house. And by using powerful binoculars were able to identify Jennifer — from photographs biked to them en route from a source in the Globe office — through the big picture window on the landing. So far so good, at least they knew where she was. Swiftly they located the position of the distribution point governing the phone lines into the house. In built-up areas like Richmond Hill, these are concealed either beneath concrete pillars on the inner side of the pavements or behind green-painted iron cabinets set into walls. The distribution point for Jennifer’s house was beneath a concrete pillar which, with the right key, simply unlocks and is easily removed, revealing up to 1,000 pairs of wire, connecting subscribers to the exchange. To sort out which wires lead where, a copy of British Telecom’s records for the area is essential.

These men had such access, just as they had access to a British Telecom van, although they were not employed by BT at all.

By the time Jennifer made her second phone call to Todd Mallet, and spoke to Angela, the two bogus telephone engineers had successfully fitted a tap, with a radio transmitter allowing them to monitor Jennifer’s line from a distance.

They listened in to that call and reasoned, taking into account the time by which Jennifer had arrived in Richmond and her apparent desperation to reach the Devon policeman, that it was an acceptable risk to assume that Jennifer Stone had yet to take her evidence to the police. It seemed there was still time to act.

An hour or so later, the BT van pulled away. Anna, driving her Golf GTI without a great deal of skill as usual and noticing frighteningly little, had not even been aware of the departing van as she swung into Jennifer’s driveway. Jennifer herself hadn’t looked out of the window since arriving home, but to have remained in the street outside could have aroused suspicion, if only from a nosy neighbour. Because of its radio transmitter, the tap could be monitored from any place at all where the receiver was able to pick up an adequate signal. There was no sign of a surveillance operation in Jennifer Stone’s tree-lined street that night, yet her home was being watched every second, and when the downstairs and then the upstairs lights in the big imposing house were eventually switched off, at about midnight, figures started moving silently in the street again. Two dark-clad men slipped through the gate and disappeared into the shadows of the garden.

The explosion happened at just after five in the morning. Its roar could be heard right across the river in Chiswick and Brentford and in the other direction as far away as Kingston. It was a huge and devastating thing. The house which took the main force of the blast was almost completely flattened. Daylight would reveal that barely more than a few isolated bricks remained intact. Such was the power of the blast that, although detached and separated by trees and high walls, the two houses on either side were both almost completely demolished too. One was empty — its inhabitants thankfully away on holiday. The elderly couple in the second house were killed. Neighbours in other badly damaged houses, particularly the one directly opposite, also suffered appalling injuries. A pregnant woman was not expected to last the day in intensive care. A child was blinded, and one man lost both his legs.

Jennifer Stone, Anna McDonald, and her daughter Pandora were in the house at the heart of the explosion.

All three of them died at once. They were blown to pieces.

Twenty Two

Dominic was on his way into breakfast when the police called at his seminar hotel to break the news to him. They only knew Anna and Pandora were in the Richmond house because Anna had called a neighbour to ask her to feed her cat, and had said where she was and who she was visiting. The neighbour, an early riser and a worrier, had heard of the Richmond explosion on a radio newsflash soon after it happened and immediately called the police. Two officers from the Yorkshire force took Dominic, who never listened to the radio in the mornings, into the hotel’s conservatory overlooking the Yorkshire Moors and told him as gently as possible what had happened.

There was no gentle way to tell Dominic McDonald that his wife and only daughter were both dead.

Dominic did not seem able to register it. Eventually the police left. Shocked colleagues, also informed by the police, tried to comfort him. Dominic told them he would rather be alone and that he wanted to go home. He seemed calm and composed in spite of his distress. He went to his room to pack and then he disappeared.

They found him late that night shivering on a moorland rock escarpment. It was raining and he was soaked to the skin and shivering violently. He was wearing only light trousers and a shirt. His feet were bleeding and bruised because he had forgotten to put shoes on. When he saw the rescue party clambering towards him he was not sure if he felt relief or disappointment. He was well aware of how easy it could be to die of exposure in open moorland at night, even in late May. But he was not at all sure he wanted to live without Anna and Pandora.

They took him home to Barnes and as he stepped through the door of the comfortable, reassuring town house he burst into tears. The sobs racked his whole body. He did not stop crying for two days.

Todd Mallett was phoned at home while he was drinking his morning tea. The shock was terrible. He had vaguely heard on the radio of an explosion in the London area, but he didn’t even know where Jennifer Stone lived. No warning bells had sounded. Why should they? Mrs Stone was listed as Jennifer’s next of kin. She had to be told, and when the news came through to Durraton police station the desk sergeant, an alert and ambitious man, remembered seeing an entry in the log left by the duty officer the previous evening. Jennifer Stone had been trying to contact Detective Inspector Mallett.

Todd said very little, except that he would go to see Mrs Stone himself, and he wanted a policewoman to go with him.

After he put the receiver down he was overcome at first with a great sense of sorrow and loss, and then, when his brain cleared a little, his head was filled with crazy thoughts and suspicions. No. It was all too far-fetched. There couldn’t be that kind of connection. And he couldn’t work it out yet, but there were many questions to be asked. Frightening questions.

His wife came into the kitchen, fresh from the bathroom shower, and he told her about Jennifer. She turned white.

‘Oh my God, Todd,’ she said.

And then she confessed how Jennifer had called the previous night and she had somehow failed to pass the message on to him.

‘She sounded a bit desperate, I suppose... but I didn’t know...’ Angela Mallett’s voice tailed away.

Todd could think of nothing to say to her. Not for the first time since their marriage, he only narrowly stopped himself lashing out with his fists. Certainly he couldn’t be bothered to hide his own personal grieving.

The unanswered questions were whirling around his head, including the most obvious one of all which he had forgotten to ask the station sergeant and which had not been volunteered.

He called back.

‘What caused the explosion?’ he asked.

‘Gas,’ replied the desk sergeant. ‘Apparently it was one of those great gas explosions, like Ronan Point, and like that one that flattened God knows how many apartment blocks in America last year. Some fault which had caused a dangerous build-up for weeks...’

Todd interrupted. ‘Are they sure?’

‘I suppose so, sir.’

Todd replaced the receiver. Gas. And yes, if his suspicions were right they would be sure, like they had been sure all those years ago of Johnny Cooke’s guilt and Mark Piddle’s innocence.

Mrs Stone’s face turned grey when she opened the door to Todd and a uniformed woman police sergeant.

She had been in a trance since hearing, a few minutes earlier on the radio news, about the explosion on Richmond Hill. She had immediately called Jennifer’s phone number. It had been unobtainable. She had been just about to call the police, but something kept holding her back. She could not quite bring herself to make the call. Now they were with her.

Todd did not need to say anything.

‘Jennifer?’

And the word was more than a sentence. It was the final chapter of a life story.

He nodded. He felt so inadequate.

He should have been prepared for the next words, but he wasn’t.

‘Could you drink a cup of tea?’ asked the old lady.

On an impulse he reached out and took her in his arms. She clung to him, her whole body shaking, and he realised he was weeping.

Marcus also heard the news on the radio. He listened to the six a.m. bulletin as usual. The victims were not named and neither was the street in that first report. Richmond Hill was quite enough. He knew at once, and he cried out in anguish and despair, self-disgust and frustration, and of course, self-pity.

He phoned his contact number at once. The line had been disconnected. He was still in his bedroom. He climbed back into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and lay there whimpering. He just wanted to hide away from the whole world for ever.

When the doorbell rang, his first instinct was to stay there under the covers in the warm darkness. But the ringing was insistent, and then he thought, perhaps it’s them.

Half hysterical, his eyes wild and red-rimmed, he ran to the door. It was the police, a uniformed inspector and constable, let in by a surprised porter — he wasn’t used to police calls in his smart Chelsea building. The police were there simply because Marcus was, after all, Jennifer’s ex-husband, and he was a government minister. They had come to tell him but it was apparent that he already knew.

They expressed condolences and shock. Marcus could not communicate. He was incoherent. Eventually the two men said they would call back later.

‘He was in a right state, wasn’t he?’ said the new-to-the-job young constable on the way down in the lift from Marcus’s apartment.

‘He must still have loved her, even if they were divorced.’

‘Hmph,’ snorted the inspector, who didn’t like politicians very much. ‘His sort only love themselves.’

Jennifer Stone’s funeral in Durraton Parish Church was a grim affair.

Todd Mallett sat in the back of the church. He was convinced her death was not an accident, but in spite of his requests that the cause of the explosion be checked and double checked, the same answers always came up. The blast had been caused by a massive build-up of gas over a period of time. A leak which had gone unnoticed. It had happened before. It was just a tragic accident.

Todd watched Mrs Stone walk into the church. She looked broken, suddenly a very very old lady, grief etched in her face. She was being comforted by her son. The funeral had been delayed a week to allow him time to return from Australia and help with the arrangements.

They both looked to be in total shock. Todd Mallett was still in shock.

Just along the aisle he noticed a man of an acutely intelligent appearance who could not stop crying. He was every bit as distraught as Mrs Stone. Such was the degree of his distress that Todd made inquiries about him. The man was Dominic McDonald, the husband of Jennifer Stone’s friend who had died with her. No wonder he was in such distress. He had lost wife and daughter in one foul instant. Todd did not really know why, but after the service he felt moved to approach the man.

‘It was good of you to come,’ he said.

Dominic did not even focus on the policeman. ‘She was my wife’s best friend,’ he said simply.

On an impulse Todd asked him if he knew if Jennifer was working on anything before she died, if she had confided in her best friend. The other man looked at him — just for an instant — as if he was mad. It had not occurred to Dominic McDonald to put anything together, to consider a link between Jennifer’s extraordinary computer disc and her disturbing behaviour and her death. Dominic did not have that sort of brain. His entire family had been wiped out in a freak accident — and that was that. He shook his head in anguish and walked away. Nothing could get through to him.

Marcus Piddell sat at the front of the church. There was no way that he was going to destroy all he had ever gained, no way he was going to make a sacrifice of himself with one emotional outburst. He was on autopilot, he was a nervous wreck, but he continued to operate, to do what he had to do.

His statement about his ex-wife’s death, expressing his shock and distress, had been properly prepared and issued to the press. Now he was at her funeral. He was immaculately dressed in a black three-piece suit. He looked grief-stricken, his face the perfect mixture of pain and sorrow. After the service he had gone to Mrs Stone and bent over her so that his immense height seemed to form a protective comforting shield. His whole body language screamed out how much he cared. The photographers waiting in the churchyard leapt into action. They were mostly there because Jennifer Stone was Marcus Piddell’s ex. In the end she was better known for that than for anything, and how she would have hated it, Todd thought. The cameras flashed. High-profile tycoon and government minister comforts the mother of his tragic former wife. That would be tomorrow’s newspaper picture.

‘Nice performance, Mark,’ said Todd to himself cynically.

Outside the church, a figure stood apart from the rest of the mourners, alone and very still over by the lychgate, half concealed by rhododendron bushes. Was it? Todd was almost sure; yes, it was Johnny Cooke.

A touch uncertainly, the detective inspector walked over to him. Johnny looked as if he was about to turn away, but he didn’t. It was Todd who had kept him informed about everything concerning Bill Turpin, Todd who had so far been able to say so little to Johnny, but whose whole being had expressed concern and maybe even regret. Todd whose father had been the only one who seemed to care even a jot about the real truth all those years ago.

The two men nodded a somewhat awkward greeting.

‘I didn’t even know you knew her,’ said the policeman.

‘She came to see me.’

Had she indeed? Todd studied Johnny carefully.

‘And?’ he said.

‘And nothing much. She said she wanted to discover the truth... there’s not a lot of it about.’

Todd looked down at his feet. Johnny continued, unwittingly using almost the same words as his mother at the funeral of Jennifer’s father.

‘I just wanted to pay my respects...’

Todd met the other man’s steady gaze. ‘Look, I’m sure she did discover something, something important. If you know anything that could help, I mean, do you have any idea what she was after?’

Johnny shrugged and shook his head; he didn’t even seem interested.

‘I have a feeling it could be something that might clear your name, once and for all,’ encouraged Todd.

Johnny laughed. It was a hollow sound.

‘Do you know anything that can give me back half a lifetime?’ he asked. And then he did turn away.

Todd watched him stride down the lane outside the church, and like Jennifer Stone such a short time ago he was struck by his dignity. He knew he could never help Johnny Cooke, and Jennifer, always so full of the joys of living, was dead. But he owed them a debt, he felt, and his father too, and he wasn’t going to stop until he had done his best to settle that debt.

Marcus got his driver to take him straight to his London apartment. He had indeed done all that he should do, but he was genuinely severely shaken. He had loved Jennifer after all, hadn’t he? Inasmuch as he could ever love anyone, yes he had. Now what was he going to do? He felt alone and desperate.

As he walked through the front door, the phone was ringing, and when he picked it up the scrambler light blinked. The computerised scrambling mechanism could be operated by an incoming caller using the correct codes, as well as by the recipient of a call. The Friends took no chances.

An educated voice introduced itself as John Fitzsimmon. Marcus was astonished. John Fitzsimmon was a senior civil servant, well known throughout Whitehall. He was powerful and much respected, a pillar of the establishment, a man with a flawless reputation, tipped to be the next head of the civil service.

‘Good evening,’ said the caller, his cut-glass public school voice echoing from the receiver. ‘I understand we are members of the same club.’

‘I am a member of a lot of clubs,’ replied Marcus.

‘Waste of time,’ said John Fitzsimmon. ‘There is only one that matters.’

He then suggested that they go for a walk together in St James’s Park and have a chat. They should meet at the bandstand. Surprised but curious and, oddly, already heartened, Marcus quickly agreed.

He and John Fitzsimmon had never met, but each recognised the other.

‘Understand you’ve had a spot of bother, old boy,’ said Fitzsimmon by way of greeting. He held out his hand. Marcus took it. The Masons’ handshake — well, that was no great surprise. Fitzsimmon’s public-school drawl held all the confidence of generations of power and wealth, but family history and the right education were not quite enough to guarantee either of those any more.

‘Not to worry,’ continued the drawling voice. ‘Not your fault. These things happen. Got to be sorted out. Nobody likes it. But we can’t let anything interfere with the main game plan, can we?

‘Been sent by some mutual Friends...’ There was an almost imperceptible pause, and the lightest of emphasis on the word Friends. ‘...to give you a helping hand, old boy.’

Fitzsimmon seemed to know everything — he made that abundantly clear — which Marcus at first found disconcerting. But this man referred to the murder of six people and the maiming of several others as if to the correction of an accounting error. He treated it like a routine business operation. And maybe, thought Marcus, to these people he was mixing with, that was exactly what it was. So much that happened involving so many people at the top in the world was undoubtedly hidden-agenda stuff. He knew that. He had told Jennifer that. Things were rarely as they seemed. To the men and women who were really in charge of the world’s politics and finances, a few deaths in a suburb of London would be just a hiccup along the way to completing whatever plans were in progress. He began to feel not quite so alone.

In a straightforward businesslike manner, Fitzsimmon explained to him more than ever before how The Friends worked in protecting and cultivating their own. There were casualties along the way, only to be expected, couldn’t be helped.

‘You’re the important one. After all, you’re going to be prime minister, eh old boy? Eh? Can’t let you down, can we?’

From now on, John Fitzsimmon would be at his right hand.

‘And we’ll find you one of ours to be your PPS when you’re the PM eh, old boy? Eh?’

Marcus was in something of a daze. But when he returned to his Chelsea apartment he began to feel much better. He had started to convince himself that John Fitzsimmon was right. He was too important to be put at risk. Sacrifices had to be made, and the death of Jennifer Stone was a sacrifice. A terrible sacrifice, but a necessary one.

Over the next week he met Fitzsimmon every day. They dined together, drank together, and talked endlessly. At last Marcus had someone who seemed to know everything, in whom he could confide. Fitzsimmon had that air of infallibility about him exuded only by his kind, and Marcus found it infectious. The Whitehall wizard had instructions to give Marcus all the help and support he needed, to rebuild him, to steer him forwards, and to do everything he could to keep Marcus happy.

John Fitzsimmon had also been given detailed instructions about exactly what kept Marcus happy.

On the seventh day after Jennifer’s funeral, Fitzsimmon took Marcus to a safe house in Ealing.

‘I have a surprise for you, present from The Friends,’ he said.

In an upstairs room furnished with a big double bed and a settee, two Oriental girls stood nervously by the window. They were twins and were wearing matching silk kimonos. They were breathtakingly pretty.

‘There you are, old boy, should take your mind off things,’ drawled Fitzsimmon.

Marcus wasn’t sure that he was quite ready yet. It was this that had got him into the mess he was in, after all.

‘I... I’m not sure I can,’ he heard himself stammer.

‘Oh, from what I’ve heard you’ll manage,’ said Fitzsimmon unconcernedly. ‘They’re yours for the night; very young — the way you like ’em, eh old boy? But they know what to do, I’m told. Take care, won’t you?’

And he left Marcus to it.

Together the two girls undressed him. He did not protest or help, moving only enough to make it possible for them to remove his clothes. When he was standing naked, they slipped off their kimonos. Underneath, both were wearing silk teddies trimmed with lace. Their bodies were exquisite, pale and perfect in every detail.

Still Marcus did not have an erection. He stood limp and unsure of himself before them. Then first one and then the other of the two girls knelt before him and began to play with him and take him in her small soft mouth. It was like transmitting an electric current to a dormant robot. Marcus could feel his appetites being returned to him by tongue and touch. His sexuality was so much his driving force that it frequently overwhelmed him without his knowledge, sometimes almost against his will. He had reason to hate this lack of control — he who in every other way was such a controlled man. But his sex drive was a thing apart, and it could — as Jennifer Stone had found out — turn him into a monster.

Soon he was big and hard and all he could think about was sex. Everything else was dismissed from his mind and body by the urgency of his desires, which had indeed been the intention. He let rip. He went for it. Just like always.

In the next room, two men were watching Marcus Piddell’s sexual antics through a two-way mirror. They had been told he could do almost anything he liked, that it didn’t matter if he hurt the girls, that he probably would hurt them, but there was to be no permanent damage. Not again.

The fat man turned away in disgust. He had a daughter about the age of the twins in the other room, and if any man did to her what that bastard was doing to those poor kids, he would kill him, he thought.

‘What are we now?’ he asked in a broad Cockney accent. ‘Fucking pimps?’

‘We’re just doing our job,’ said his partner calmly. He was a little weasel of a man who, in better days, had once been a jockey.

‘Why have they laid all this on for that bastard anyway?’ The fat man was looking through the mirror again.

He felt sick. Not for the first time he wished to God he had never become involved with The Friends. He’d been an habitual punter who’d landed himself in trouble with the bookies. They had bailed him out... In return for certain services. And that was it; no escape after that, sucked in for ever, like it or not. There were a lot of racing people in the same situation.

‘Because “that bastard” is going to be prime minister one day,’ he heard the ex-jockey say.

Marcus had forgotten that anything in the world except his cock existed. He was now in his favourite situation. He had the two girls bent over the sofa and was hammering into them relentlessly from behind. The twins had not been prepared for this, nor for his size. First he plunged into one, holding the other one down with a strong arm, then he would change. Great powerful strokes. He was doing exactly what Jennifer had seen him do all those years before when she had returned unexpectedly to their apartment. The girls were looking in the direction of the two-way mirror, their faces registering pain and fear. Their little bodies were trembling, one of them was crying. Marcus’s face showed only the violence of his lust. His eyes were wild. He looked quite mad.

‘Gawd help us all,’ said the fat man.

Todd Mallett felt angry and frustrated. He had spent the week since Jennifer’s funeral going over and over the events that had followed the death of Bill Turpin. His chance meeting with Johnny had somehow made him even more determined to get to the bottom of it all. And his father, still racked with guilt and uncertainty over Johnny’s conviction, had begged him to find the truth at last, but Todd couldn’t seem to get near it.

Jennifer had been trying to contact him to tell him something important about the murders of Marjorie Benson and Irene Nichols. He had known the night they’d drunk together in the Old Ship that she had suspicions and maybe knowledge she hadn’t yet been prepared to share. Now it was too late. Whatever she knew about Bill Turpin and Marcus Piddell had died with her.

Todd was convinced that she had been murdered too, quite convinced of it. But if she had been, then her killers were so skilled that they’d managed to rig a gas explosion which had fooled the greatest explosive experts in the country. Todd had asked for more and more investigation. His superiors, the London Fire Brigade, and even British Gas, who would have loved nothing more than to have been able to blame foul play, were beginning to be bored with him.

The ‘Richmond Hill Explosion’ was to go down in history as a terrible accident, like so many other gas explosions when whole buildings had been destroyed. The experts reminded him again of the precedents: Ronan Point, the London tower block which collapsed like a pack of cards after a gas explosion in 1968, killing five people; the explosion in Motta Visconti, Northern Italy, in July 1994, when twenty-seven elderly people died in an old people’s home; the Coventry house flattened killing three when the priest who lived there lit his pipe — an IRA bomb had at first been suspected, and it was some days before the truth was uncovered; and, most spectacular of all, the explosion of an underground gas main in America’s New Jersey in August 1994, which vaporised eight blocks of flats leaving a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot crater and killing more than fifty. These things happened, and this latest explosion was yet another accidental tragedy. Todd must accept that.

He didn’t — but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.

He had followed every possible lead, painstakingly checking back over old material, looking into those fine-art burglaries again, following all the other rumours about Bill Turpin, even the off-the-wall stuff, like the arms-dealing out of Bristol. He just came to the same dead ends. Nobody had ever got anywhere with that burglary network after the war, that had been some well organised operation. There was certainly nothing concrete to link anything criminal with Bill Turpin — apart from the murder of poor Irene Nichols. Much of the evidence he had compiled even now against Bill was purely circumstantial, like the horde of crime cuttings the old man had collected, and the discovery of the extent of Bill’s wealth, his dealings on the stock market and his Swiss bank accounts. But how did a man like Bill Turpin get into all that kind of stuff, and what was he doing with some of the most elaborate and sophisticated computer equipment in existence?

Todd had taken to staying at the Pelham Bay operation centre — where investigations into the deaths of Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson were continuing, although probably not for much longer — virtually all day and all night, desperately trying to make sense of it all. His gut instinct told him that the Marjorie Benson murder must be a vital part of the riddle. He meticulously studied the court records, the statements taken, and even dug out Marjorie’s few pathetic personal effects. He’d found them still stashed away in an almost forgotten corner of the Devon and Exeter Constabulary stores — after all, nobody had claimed them: there was, it appeared, no one to do so.

And so Todd sat at the desk in his temporary office, staring at piles of neatly folded clothes, a few books, a bunch of keys, so little, all so uninspiring.

He touched things, picked objects up, as if hoping for inspiration. There were four keys. One he knew had been the key of Marjorie’s room at the golf club. There was a car key to a Ford of some kind — the records showed that attempts to trace it had proved futile, and there were two small suitcase keys. Nothing. Bugger all.

Todd was still fingering the keys, tossing the bunch up and down in his hand, when his sergeant rushed into the room.

‘Still here?’ asked Todd without a deal of interest. ‘Thought you left ages ago.’

‘Yeah — I’ve been down the road to the sports centre — got a game of squash booked. I left the key to my locker here somewhere...’

The man had started to rummage in his desk. Todd continued to throw Marjorie Benson’s keys monotonously up and down.

‘Shit,’ he said suddenly. With surprising speed for a big man, he lurched to his feet and half dragged the bemused sergeant out of the door with him.

‘Never mind your blessed squash — come with me!’ he ordered.

And he instructed the man to drive as fast as he could to the Royal Western Golf Club in Pelham Bay.

The lockers at the RWG were a law unto themselves.

It seemed there was only one man who knew anything at all about the system, such as it was, and he had been working there for a million years. Todd’s sergeant was despatched to bring him to the Club at once.

The elderly man who eventually arrived looked as if he should have been retired years ago. But Bert Cousins was part of the institution at the Royal Western. He peered short-sightedly at the two little keys Todd handed to him, and pointed to the slightly larger one.

‘Oh yes, that was one of ours,’ he said. Bingo, thought Todd. He looked around the ranks of lockers. Could one possibly have remained locked and abandoned for all this time? From the disorganised state of the place it seemed just possible...

‘What number, can you tell me?’ Todd asked.

Bert shook his head. ‘No way of telling. Long time ago though — we had a clear out a while back. Sorted out a lot of forgotten stuff, changed the locks and all, we did, got different keys now.’

Todd felt his heart sink.

‘What happened to the old stuff you found in the abandoned lockers?’ he asked desperately.

‘You should have seen it,’ muttered Bert. ‘Rotting sports gear mostly, ’ad to chuck that.’

Damn, thought Todd. But Bert was still talking.

‘Anything that looked as if anybody might claim it we put in the storeroom.’

Todd stood very still. ‘Is it still there?’

‘I should imagine so,’ replied the old man. ‘’Aven’t looked for donkeys’ years meself.’

Todd and his sergeant took the storeroom apart. Todd didn’t even know what he was looking for, but he was quietly certain that if he found it he would recognise it.

There were a number of ancient sports bags in varying degrees of decay. The fourth one Todd opened contained reams of paper, most of it covered with what seemed to be poetry, meticulously handwritten. There were also some letters. At the bottom of the bag was a sealed envelope. It contained a Canadian passport in the name of Claire Pearson. The photograph was of a young woman, probably in her early thirties.

Todd found that his hands were trembling.

‘You must have been here with Marjorie Benson, do you remember her?’ he asked Bert.

The old man nodded.

‘Can you remember what she looked like?’

Bert nodded again. ‘Not likely to forget after what happened to that poor maid.’

Todd showed him the picture in the passport. ‘Is that her?’ he asked.

‘Could be,’ mused Bert. ‘’Er hair’s the wrong colour, but I reckon that’s ’er right enough. Yep, I’m pretty sure of it.’

Todd was on his way back to his office before the old man had finished speaking.

It was an extraordinary night. Todd spent much of it communicating with the Canadian authorities by fax, phone and computer link. He and his sergeant sorted through and read the poems and the letters.

‘This is incredible, you wouldn’t think anybody would put stuff like this in a tatty old locker,’ said the sergeant at one point.

‘Presumably she thought it was a safe hiding place — and as it’s taken us twenty-five years to find it, she was probably right,’ replied Todd wryly.

By dawn a fairly clear picture had emerged. Marjorie Benson was really Claire Pearson, all right.

Several of the letters were from Claire Pearson’s mother, badly spelt, in places difficult to follow, painstakingly hand-printed on lined paper torn from an exercise book. The one which shook Todd and his sergeant rigid was at the bottom of the pile.

‘It’s your 21st birthday, my dear Claire, and I want you to know the whole truth about your past, about who you are,’ it began.

‘I should’ve told you a long time ago, I couldn’t find the words to your face...’

The story the woman told was a horrifying one: it was like something from the darker side of Dickens. She had been a housemaid to Lord Lynmouth. And when Todd checked his records, he found that the housemaid who had claimed Bill Turpin had killed Lynmouth was a woman named Audrey Pearson.

Audrey had indeed always been slow and of below average intelligence, always used by others. When she was just a teenager she became pregnant by Lynmouth, who was already an old man. An old man who should have behaved better.

Her mother sent Audrey away to have the baby.

‘That’s what they did in them days. Me mam went to school with Bill Turpin’s missus. When I began to show, they sent me to stay with the Turpins. They took me at night and I wasn’t allowed out of the cottage, because of the shame. When the baby was born they took the little mite away — I never even knew if it was a boy or a girl...’

‘They didn’t tell His Lordship until it was all over, and he was proper angry. He was never a cruel man. Still didn’t leave me alone, though, and I fell pregnant again — but I was allowed to keep you when you were born just at the start of the war. It was easy then, you see, they called me Mrs Pearson, said I’d wed a soldier killed in action...

‘So you had a proper name, respectable like.’

The letter went on to explain that the Earl of Lynmouth’s wife had been unable to give him children, and the Earl doted on his illegitimate daughter. But appearances had to be kept up at all costs. The wife accepted the situation as long as the truth was never told. Audrey’s parents were the fourth generation of their family to be in service to the Lynmouths. It was feudal. They did what they were told.

‘Then came the night when I saw His Lordship killed and I saw the man who did it and I knew him to be Bill Turpin. I was that frightened — I know he did me wrong, but His Lordship was the only person ever to show me kindness. I wanted them to catch the man who killed him so I told the police — but they didn’t believe I even knew Bill Turpin and I couldn’t tell them how I did. I couldn’t tell them that...’

The Earl’s widow did not trust Audrey to keep quiet, and feared the whole scandal might break. She had a distant relative, a farmer in Canada who needed help on his land. Audrey and little Claire, then six years old, were shipped out there. The old woman and Audrey’s parents died soon afterwards.

‘I wanted you to know the blood you have in your veins,’ wrote Claire Pearson’s mother. ‘Your father wasn’t some unknown soldier, he was an Earl.

‘He’d always have looked after us, he would never have let the bad things happen. If he hadn’t been killed it would all have been different...’

After Todd and his sergeant had both finished reading the letter, there was a moment of total silence in the ops room, shattered only by the shrill ringing of the fax phone. It was the first response from Canada to Todd’s inquiries concerning Audrey and Claire Pearson.

The farmer Audrey Pearson had been sent to work for had married her, but there were no further children. Both of them were now dead. The farmer, Jethro March, had been stabbed to death.

And Claire Pearson had been convicted of his manslaughter.

Todd could not believe what he was reading.

Immediately he reached for the phone and called Canada. Eventually he tracked down the, by-then retired, detective inspector who had worked on the case.

‘One of the saddest cases I ever had,’ said the Canadian D.I. ‘He was a vicious bastard, was Jethro March.

‘He used that poor woman he married like a slave, worked her half to death and knocked her about when he felt like it. But the daughter he put on a pedestal. She had a good education, went to college, the lot.

‘She’d flown the nest too, off doing a degree in Toronto. Then when she was twenty-one, suddenly, she went home to the farm, maybe because she wanted to protect her mother. Not long afterwards she stuck old Jethro in the gut with a bread knife. And once she’d started she couldn’t stop. Carved him to pieces, she did.

‘She might have got away with it altogether but for that — he’d been laying into her mother again and young Claire couldn’t take it any more. As it was she served four years — and a lot of people thought she shouldn’t have done a day.

‘The mother, who’d always been slow-witted, was damn near a vegetable at the end — Jethro’d knocked her about so bad. She died not long after Claire was released and then the girl just disappeared. She was half off her head by then, folk said...’

Todd was stunned.

He shuffled through the poems again. Yes. Here it was, the one he was looking for:

Straightforward little number, although not much of a poem, Todd thought. He didn’t know a lot about poetry, but he suspected some of Claire Pearson’s poems were quite good. Others like this one were just blurted out emotion in rhyme. The message certainly seemed clear enough, though.

Marjorie Benson, or Claire Pearson, her mind disturbed by her horrific experiences, blamed Bill Turpin for the plight which befell her and her mother. If he had not killed Lord Lynmouth, everything would have been all right — that was what her mother had believed. And Bill Turpin was in fact the only one left to blame.

Marjorie Benson had come to Pelham Bay to get revenge, with some idea that she was going to kill Bill Turpin, Todd was sure of it. Trouble was, she might have been seriously unhinged, but she wasn’t a cold-blooded murderess. By nature, by all accounts, she was a gentle romantic — a gentle romantic who had stabbed a man to death...

So what had happened that night twenty-five years ago on the sand dunes? Todd suspected that they had all been looking at it the wrong way around. Nobody set out to kill Marjorie. More likely she had simply seen Bill Turpin walking over the dunes after Johnny Cooke had left her and had been unable to contain herself any longer. She confronted him, told him what she knew about him, maybe threatened him, the silly bitch.

And Bill Turpin was a cold-blooded killer. He knew exactly what to do. He knew how to get rid of a problem like Marjorie Benson, and was well capable of framing an innocent man — poor muddled Johnny had been a gift on a plate.

What a story! Todd shook his head in disbelief. He felt a kind of elation. For several hours he had almost forgotten his own personal involvement. He was just a policeman unravelling a mystery, making discoveries which had lain dormant for a quarter of a century — and that was a very exciting thing to do.

Only gradually did he begin to drift back towards the present. So his father had been right all these years, and learning that was going to destroy him. Johnny Cooke had been wrongly convicted. Todd was quite sure of it. Poor bastard...

Todd Mallett’s sudden sense of euphoria evaporated as swiftly as it had arrived. The more he thought about things, the worse they seemed.

He might have solved one half of the mystery, but what about the rest of it? What about little Irene Nichols? What about Marcus Piddell?

Damn it, thought Todd. None of the night’s revelations had helped with any of that. In his mind, Bill Turpin was sown up as the murderer of Marjorie Benson — but he was sure so much more lay behind it all. He was even more convinced than ever that Jennifer Stone had known that it did — and that is why she had died.

He had learned nothing to shed any new light on Jennifer’s death. And he had learned nothing to link Marcus with any of it. In fact just the opposite.

He clenched both his fists in exasperation and smashed them down on his desk.

His sergeant, who had fallen asleep exhausted in his chair, jerked awake.

‘What’s up, guv?’ he asked groggily.

‘The real villains have got away with it yet again, that’s what’s up,’ said Todd Mallett.

Twenty Three

Dominic McDonald was a broken man. He decided not to go home after Jennifer’s funeral. He couldn’t face the empty Barnes house. Instead he went to stay with his sister, a painter who lived alone in a cottage in the Lake District. For a week he walked and wept alone, striding endlessly over the hills, and at night his sister cooked him big nourishing vegetarian meals. She didn’t eat meat and didn’t think her guests should either. Dominic didn’t mind, he probably didn’t even notice. He didn’t notice either how carefully she gave him space. She barely spoke to him unless he spoke to her first. He didn’t really want to talk and she sensed that. All day he walked. At first she feared the repetition of the Yorkshire Moors episode, but Dominic had moved on from the early craziness of his shock. He was not self-destructive any more. He just needed time and space to work out if he could rebuild his life, if he even wanted to.

At the end of the week he felt surprisingly healed. He would never get over the death of the wife and child he adored. It would be a very long time indeed before he would again lead a normal life — if that ever happened. He felt only half a man — because his relationship with Anna had been a complete one, which had made them both whole — but he knew he could function, and he decided that was what he must do, start functioning again.

And so he set off for London on the very day that The Friends provided the Oriental twins for Marcus, and that Todd Mallett sat glumly at his desk still trying in vain to read the mind of a dead woman.

Dominic forced himself to shut out the tide of grief which swept over him as soon as he stepped into the empty Barnes house. Quiet as the grave, he thought to himself. He shuddered.

Resolutely, he unpacked his small bag and went into the kitchen and cooked himself some supper. He made toast and scrambled egg. He didn’t really want the meal, but he needed to start a routine. After he had eaten, he did what he had so often done when Anna and Pandora were alive. He went to his study and switched on his computers. It was the first time he had even been in the room since the dreadful night when they had both been killed. The gentle hum of the machines was familiar. In one way that was comforting, and in another it hurt even more. The last time he had sat there, contentedly working, everything in the room had been more or less the same. But the familiar little world, the cocoon of private love in which he had existed, had now been shattered for ever.

He checked the big desk-top computer, routine, something he always did. This was the IBM machine he kept permanently attached to his modem, able to receive messages automatically from other computers. Several documents had been sent to him. That was not surprising. He cast an eye down the files, nothing he could be bothered with. Then he stopped in his tracks.

Jennifer Stone had sent him a computer message. He checked the date and time. May 28th at three minutes past midnight. A file had been fed from Jennifer’s computer to his around five hours before her death. His brain was starting to work again now — for the first time since it all happened. Before going to bed that dreadful night Jennifer had decided to send him a document. Why? And what was it?

He quickly checked its length. 44K. That was nearly 7000 words. Quite a document.

In trepidation he called it up and began to read.

It was a detailed account of the last five days of Jennifer Stone’s life. And it included the transcript of a tape.