She felt no pain. Only the greatest, most extreme, and inexplicable pleasure in the world.
Afterwards it took him a long time to calm her down. To bring her back to normality. She lay trembling in his arms, damp and warm and wonderful and stinking of it, her hair soaking wet with her own sweat, unable to speak at first.
When she did she grinned crookedly at him, raised her eyebrows quizzically, and said: ‘So that’s what all the fuss is about.’
He kissed her long and hard on the mouth.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know how I ever lived without it,’ she replied.
And she meant it.
Ten
During the rest of that year, Jenny and Mark continued to explore the craziest heights of their sexuality. He didn’t think any two people could be better matched, although she didn’t know yet that they had anything special. He was quite sure that she thought it was always like this and that every woman was like her. She was still at school, for Christ’s sake. Mark sometimes fantasised to himself about Jenny in a gymslip, but he instinctively knew never to ask her to play dressing-up games. To her, that would be silly and demeaning. She was an animal, a highly toned totally sexual animal, not a tart — and Mark knew the difference.
In the September, Jenny had gone back to school, the final year of her A-level GCEs, and not even her closest school friends knew she was sleeping with Mark. From the very beginning, sex to Jenny Stone was something you did, not something you talked about. She wasn’t into giggly girly chat, and she was always suspicious of people who talked about sex all the time, wondering whether they actually did it at all. Anyway, she had to be careful — her parents thought Mark was too old for her. She overheard her father once telling her mother that he didn’t like the look in the young feller’s eye. Jenny knew exactly what he meant, and she loved that look in Mark Piddle’s eye.
Their lust for each other did not diminish, instead it seemed to grow more intense. They were obsessed with each other’s bodies.
Irene did not reappear. Sometimes Jenny tried to talk to Mark about it, but he would immediately pull down the shutters. He told her it was another life; whatever had happened to Irene, he did not want to know about it any more.
At the end of August, Johnny Cooke was charged with the murder of Marjorie Benson. The word was that the police suspected him of having killed Irene too, but, in spite of extensive searches, no body was found.
For the rest of her life, Jennifer Stone could never get over her own reaction to Johnny’s arrest. At first she hardly noticed it, just as she had hardly noticed the disappearance of Irene. She had been trying to put the murder and her discovery of the body out of her mind, and it wasn’t all that difficult because of her obsession with Mark Piddle. She was totally besotted by him as he was by her. All she could really think about, night and day, was their sex life together. That had become the sole reason for her existence, and it was desperately hard for her to concentrate on her schoolwork or to behave normally at home. Her excuses for the time spent in Mark’s bed were always elaborate and well thought out, but, none the less, she knew her parents suspected that something very heavy was going on.
If she had thought about Johnny and the murder and the events surrounding it, she might have been concerned from the beginning — but, strange though it appeared in retrospect, she did not think about it at all.
The trial did confront her with some unpleasant realities. It started at Exeter Crown Court just before Christmas. Jenny, of course, was a witness because she had found the body, and so was Mark, to whom Johnny had made his confession. Twenty-five years later, Jenny remembered that as the start of her niggling worries. She was quite sure in her own mind that Mark had originally told her he believed Johnny to be innocent. When she confronted Mark he was as cool as ever. He must have confused her, he said. Johnny had confessed, right enough, and Mark reckoned he was guilty as hell.
He didn’t look at her as he spoke. But she accepted what he said. She was, after all, quite besotted by him.
At the trial, and under formidable cross-examination, Johnny continued to protest his innocence but finally admitted that it was he with whom Marjorie Benson had had sex on the night of her death. There was further damning evidence against him.
He had sex with Marjorie Benson probably only minutes before her death. He eventually admitted that was so only after forensic tests showed that semen found inside her was his.
Secondly, when her body was discovered she was wearing a skirt but no blouse. She had obviously struggled with her assailant, and clumps of hair had been ripped from her head. The missing blouse, torn and crumpled, had been found screwed up beneath a pile of logs in the shed where Johnny kept his bicycle. There were hairs found on the blouse with the follicles of skin still attached to them. They came from Marjorie Benson’s head. And the blouse had large imitation brass buttons, one of which bore a clear thumb print — it was Johnny Cooke’s. Johnny’s defence counsel had asked why on earth the boy should take such incriminating evidence to his own home. The prosecution counsel countered with a list of murderers who had collected bizarre and incriminating souvenirs from their victims. The jury was captivated, so much so that Johnny’s barrister wished he had never queried the evidence in the first place.
Thirdly there was Johnny’s confession to Mark Piddle. Mark gave his evidence with his usual cool lucidity. He told the court how Johnny had come to him within hours of the body being found, and, still in shock, had confessed everything and begged Mark not to go to the police. He had said: ‘I killed her,’ and: ‘It is my fault she is dead.’ Mark gave what he described as a more or less verbatim account of the midnight meeting. He was articulate and convincing.
Jenny had already given her evidence when he was called. As a material witness she was therefore able to sit in the public gallery if she wished. Upset again by the renewed vision of that grotesque body floating beside her, she had nearly left the court. But some morbid fascination led her to stay for the rest of the day, and as she watched Mark in the witness box, she began to feel more and more uneasy. He was so sure of himself, yet while he was talking she looked at Johnny Cooke, the accused. He was staring at Mark, shaking his head. At one point he started to stand up, as if he was going to protest, until his barrister put a firm hand on his shoulder, keeping him in his seat. Jenny listened very carefully, then she waited outside the court for Mark. She was more bewildered than anything else.
‘Mark, you told me Johnny was innocent, that he didn’t really confess anything...’
The words came tumbling out. He interrupted her briskly.
‘You misunderstood me. He told me he killed the woman. I wanted him to be innocent — that’s different.’
Impatiently, he bundled her into his car and drove her home.
On the way she did not speak, but went over it all again and again in her mind. Question: Why would Mark lie? Answer: To get Johnny convicted. Question: Why would he want that if he didn’t believe Johnny was guilty? Answer: Because he was involved in the Marjorie Benson murder himself.