‘I don’t think you’re telling the truth,’ said the detective chief inspector.
Johnny felt the panic overwhelm him. Had Bill Turpin seen him with her the night she died? And had Bill talked to the police already?
God, pray that the policeman was bluffing. Johnny was sweating now. He couldn’t admit that he had been with Marjorie just before she was killed, making love to her, pushing himself inside her. He just couldn’t. He didn’t even think about forensic evidence. About his semen in her. He was too muddled, not nearly clever enough for any kind of crime.
He tried desperately to clear his head. He’d call the bluff.
‘All right, all right, I last saw her on the Tuesday before she died.’
‘Not on Saturday? My spies tell me that you always saw her on Saturdays.’
Oh God, oh God, Johnny thought, he was tying himself in knots here.
‘Not last Saturday,’ he repeated. ‘Not the night she died.’
Pray it was a bluff. Pray.
‘I see,’ said D.C.I. Mallett. ‘Where were you on Saturday night then?’
‘I went to the pictures.’
‘Who with?’
‘On my own.’
‘Anyone see you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What film did you see?’
Johnny felt the trap closing around him. What was on at the Palais last week? He passed the cinema often enough.
‘James Bond... the new one... On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ he stammered.
Fortunately for Johnny, the policemen hadn’t seen the film either. But he wasn’t fooled.
‘My advice to you is not to lie to me, boy,’ he said quietly. ‘If you do, things will only get worse for you...’
At that moment, Johnny could not imagine how things could get any worse. He did not know the half of it. And he was not yet aware that while he was being interviewed. Mark Piddle had arrived at the police station.
Mark had something to report. Quite a lot to report. He was not his usual cool self. Like Johnny on the previous Sunday night, he could not stop shaking, he was fighting for control. He knew how important it was to get things straight in his mind. He had every right to be upset. But he must not appear to be frightened.
He blurted out the short version of his story to the desk sergeant, and was immediately taken to a side office to wait for Phil Mallett to become available to interview him. They brought him a cup of tea. He drank it gratefully, spooning in the sugar. He didn’t take sugar in his tea normally. But this was not a normal day. He stirred so much sugar into his cup the tea was almost like syrup. It was good for shock, they said.
And he was shocked all right.
Nine
The following morning, Jenny learned why Mark had not called her. His girlfriend Irene had been reported missing. She had disappeared. Police feared a double murder, linked to the Marjorie Benson strangling.
Jenny rang Mark at the paper. He had not given her his home number. Because of Irene. He had never made a secret of Irene, but Jenny had not cared. Poor Irene had somehow always seemed irrelevant.
It took her until Friday to get hold of him, and when she did he sounded strained and distant, although she supposed that wasn’t surprising. Still no word about Irene, he told her. She had not come home on Tuesday night, then he discovered she had not been at work all day on Tuesday. That was all he knew and it wasn’t much. The police were worried. They feared the worst for Irene; that there was a nutter on the loose. Nobody seemed to give much for Irene’s chances of being alive.
As he talked to Jenny, Mark began to experience the familiar stirring of his loins again. He fought for control. He couldn’t see her. Not yet. But by God, even with all that had happened, he wanted to.
Jenny felt as if she was going quite mad. She was plagued by images of death. The body of Marjorie Benson floated determinedly in her head; there was no escape from the recurring nightmare of that face. And now the disappearance of Irene seemed to draw her further into the horror story. She did not want to become any more involved, and she knew that if she saw Mark again then she would. Yet Mark was the other image that was plaguing her. Mark kissing her and touching her, Mark finally entering her. She could not walk away from him. Her body craved him. The stress and unease brought her period on early, and as it started her first thought was that this meant she could begin the course of birth control pills more than a week earlier than she had expected. Then she would be protected. Then she could go to Mark on her terms. And she would go to him, in spite of a nagging feeling that she shouldn’t.
Mark had not gone to work on that Wednesday when Jenny had tried so hard to contact him. In fact he had spent most of Wednesday at the police station, reporting the disappearance of Irene and giving the details of his midnight visit from Johnny Cooke on the night Marjorie Benson’s body was discovered. Looking strained and anxious, he explained that he had been worrying about Johnny’s visit and all that he had said, had realised that he should have reported it earlier, but had been sure that the boy would see sense and go to the police himself. And he hadn’t really believed that Johnny Cooke had killed Marjorie Benson. He thought Johnny was just hysterical. Then Irene had disappeared leaving no note, no word. This wasn’t like her at all, but they’d had a bit of a row, and he thought she’d gone to spend the night with her parents. It wasn’t until the hotel where Irene worked called to ask if she was all right because she hadn’t been in the day before and yet again hadn’t turned up, that he had started to worry and decided to go to the police. And it was then that he had begun to wonder if Irene’s disappearance could possibly have anything to do with Johnny and with Marjorie Benson’s murder.
‘God, I hope I’m wrong,’ he told D.I. Mallett.
Mark came across as a controlled and intelligent young man, with nothing to hide but under great stress, and aware that the police would have to check him out.
It is a fact of criminal record that most murders are committed by the relations or lovers of the victim. If Irene Nichols was dead Mark Piddle would, under normal circumstances, be the prime suspect. But these were patently not normal circumstances. There was the Marjorie Benson murder to consider and, in any case, there was no reason yet to suppose that Irene Nichols was not alive and well. People walk out of their homes all the time. Often they turn up again sooner or later. Sometimes not for years and years, and sometimes not at all. But even that doesn’t necessarily mean they are dead, and it’s certainly very difficult to try a case for murder without a body. There have only been a handful of such cases in history.
And so Phil Mallett, although thorough as ever in his inquiries, was reasonably satisfied by Mark’s statement. The same could not be said about Johnny Cooke’s muddled ramblings. There was not yet enough hard evidence, but the finger did seem to be pointing more and more at Johnny, who actually had a record of sexual assault. Johnny was kept inside for further questioning, whilst the investigation proceeded and pending the results of the post-mortem examination of Marjorie Benson.
The D.C.I. was coming under more and more pressure from his peers to find a way of successfully charging Johnny; the bright young detective inspector who was snapping at Phil Mallett’s heels seemed to have no doubts whatsoever.
‘It’s always the lover,’ he said sagely — as if he had the benefit of years of experience of such matters, instead of merely a college education and too fast a promotion in the opinion of his immediate superior.
As the evidence against Johnny Cooke accumulated, Phil Mallett felt himself being pushed further and further along what seemed to be an inevitable route. Nobody had time for what they called P.C. Plod tactics. D.C.I. Mallett had been brought up in the force to believe that good police work involved tying up all the loose ends, being absolutely sure of yourself. But nowadays nothing mattered except figures, the ratio of crimes to convictions. Nobody talked about justice any more. That was almost a dirty word, and Phil had come to accept that you could only fight for your idea of the right way of doing things up to a certain point. One man cannot turn the tide. Anyway, perhaps this time he was wrong because he could not even fully explain why he was so afraid that a terrible mistake was about to be made.