He couldn’t be, could he, not her Mark? And it didn’t make sense anyway. Mark had never met Marjorie Benson, had he? Also he had been nowhere near the sand dunes that night. He had been working late and then went to a village dance miles away with his photographer. The police had checked that out. The police had checked everything. His alibi was cast-iron.
Jenny had never seriously considered the possibility that Mark could have murdered Marjorie Benson, but even when she made herself do so, it quickly became obvious that he could not have done it. So what was it all about? Why was he landing Johnny in it? Or was she just being silly? Was her memory playing tricks on her, after all?
She did not know Johnny Cooke — had maybe seen him by the deckchair stand but never spoken to him. She had no feelings for him either way, and if he was the murderer she hoped he rotted in jail. But if he was not? Jennifer Stone always had a reasonable sense of justice, yet she supposed she could be mistaken — about a lot of things. She was still in a state of shock when Mark had described Johnny’s midnight visit to her. That was true, although the doubts persisted.
Irene’s disappearance was the most disturbing factor of all. Jenny had never met her, and knew very little of Mark’s relationship with her. She had known Mark was living with someone when she had so blatantly decided that she was going to sleep with him, yet it had never seemed relevant to her desire for Mark. And when Irene had disappeared there had been a large element of convenience about it as far as Jenny was concerned. She certainly did not like to think about any more sinister explanation for Irene’s disappearance.
What if Mark had done something terrible to Irene? Jenny could not bring herself to allow the word ‘kill’ even to enter her head. But then, what had he done with the body? Also the police had been over his flat, and no doubt his car, with a fine toothcomb. She’d been reading too many detective novels. Only professional hit men got away with murder — people like Mark left clues, as Johnny had done.
The trial ended two days later. Johnny Cooke was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was led off to the cells still protesting his innocence. Mark was at court to hear sentence passed. Immediately afterwards he drove straight to Jenny’s school and waited for her outside. She was muffled up in her thick woollen uniform coat and a big scarf, with her school beret down over her ears. She didn’t look at all sexy, but appearances could be deceptive. Couldn’t they just? Whatever she was wearing, whatever she was doing, he could see only her face in the throes of orgasm and her body naked and wrapped around his. She spotted the Cooper at once and walked over to it, opened the door and climbed into the seat beside him. He didn’t touch her. He knew the rules. The procession of schoolgirls marching past the car were already bursting into giggles at the sight of them together. Jenny wasn’t smiling. At once she asked him about the verdict. When he told her she looked away, out of the window.
‘Do you think it’s right? Do you really think he did it?’
She could feel Mark’s eyes all over her. She could always feel that.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘I am so mixed up about everything, all the different things you told me,’ she said.
He leaned forward a little, close to her ear. His breath was warm and damp and familiar.
‘I can tell you three things with total certainty,’ he said. ‘Firstly, what I said in court is absolutely the way it happened with Johnny; and yes, you are mixed up, but it’s not surprising that your memory is playing tricks on you about a time when you had just found a body floating in the sea.
‘Secondly, Johnny Cooke is as guilty as hell. Justice has been done. He deserved life and he got it.
‘And thirdly, I am going to take you home with me now and I am going to remove all your clothes and I am going to put my tongue inside you and I am going to lick you and suck you until you come all over my face. And then I’m going to fuck you for a month — without stopping.’
She turned to him. His eyes burned into her. The corners of his mouth were just twitched into a smile. She felt herself beginning to want him. All the questions she had planned to ask were stuck in her throat. Oh God, if she had understood the full power of sex before she ever did it she might have remained a virgin always.
He parted his lips and ran his tongue along his teeth.
‘If we stay here a second longer I shall take off your knickers and do it to you in front of all your little friends,’ he said.
The idea rather appealed to him.
He started the engine, gunned the Cooper into gear and roared off towards his flat. He could hardly wait, he was aching for her again. And he knew full well that she was aching for him too — and that she always would be.
Johnny Cooke could not remember being taken from the courtroom to the cell below. Neither could he remember the drive several days later to one of the grimmest prisons in the country — Dartmoor.
He had lost weight during his months on remand in Exeter city jail, and the muscle seemed to have wasted on his strong young frame. The healthy tan had faded, his eyes dulled.
It seemed unreal to him. Loss of liberty was the ultimate punishment to a young man like Johnny, who loved open spaces and the beauty of nature and the freedom to enjoy and explore them more than life itself. The rugged splendour of the moors glimpsed through the barred window of his cell in the desolate old prison on the edge of the little town of Princeton merely added to his anguish. Dartmoor was built by and for prisoners captured during the Napoleonic wars — the very sight of the place from the outside is a chilling reminder of another age. Yet The Moor, as it has always been known to its inmates, remained a key part of the twentieth-century prison service. Behind its towering black walls in the early winter of 1971 lay a world about which Johnny Cooke had had no idea. A world of fear and misery, stripped of all human dignity.
Johnny was whisked at speed through the forbidding granite archway which forms the prison entrance. There was no way he could have seen the words carved almost two centuries earlier on the archway’s top three blocks by some long-forgotten craftsman. Parcere subjectis — a line of Latin taken from Virgil’s Aeneid. It means ‘Spare The Vanquished’. But Dartmoor Prison has scant history of sparing anybody.
Because of the nature of his offence, which was regarded as a sex murder, Johnny was taken to the notorious D Wing — at the time home to a selection of the most vicious criminals in the country.
Johnny’s looks and youth caused him predictable torture. Johnny was not in any way streetwise or tough. He was bullied physically and sexually. From the start there were things that happened, things he felt unable to avoid or resist, which destroyed any vestige of self-esteem he had left.
Early on he considered suicide, and even deliberated over ways in which he could kill himself. He really did want to die, and he was so desperate that it was probably only lack of courage which prevented him from ever actually making an attempt on his own life. Johnny could not stand pain, never had been able to. There was a weakness about him in spite of his imposing physique, and certainly he was never strong mentally, always muddled and unsure of himself.
In D Wing Johnny spent many hours a day locked in his cell. Unlike most city prisons, The Moor never had a space problem, and so almost always serious offenders serving long sentences were given cells to themselves. This could result in seemingly endless solitude spent in a small confined space. From the very first time the heavy door of his cell slammed shut, Johnny found himself in a cold sweat. He quickly discovered that confined spaces terrified him and could turn him into a gibbering wreck. He almost certainly suffered from claustrophobia, and the effect on his mental condition was devastating. None the less he came to prefer the hours spent trembling alone in his cell to those in the public areas of the prison where he was open to the unwelcome attentions of his fellow convicts. Visits to the latrines were particularly frightening. There were things that happened to Johnny in Dartmoor Prison which he found so horrible that his only defence was to shut his mind, to divorce his inner being from his body and its torment.