He retreated into an inner shell. Almost from the moment he was taken to The Moor, Johnny stopped protesting his innocence. He simply did not have the energy. He felt broken, like a tired old man. His hopes and expectations had slumped to the lowest level, to that of mere daily survival. He had only one desire left — to be left alone.
Johnny’s barrister, unhappy throughout with the way the trial had gone, suggested an appeal. Johnny shrugged big bony shoulders. He could not even be bothered to speak. There was no longer any fight left in him. At the end of a second prison visit, throughout which Johnny remained almost totally uncommunicative, his barrister advised him that he felt obliged to abandon the planned appeal.
‘I can’t do it without you, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I need you to help me rebuild our case...’
Once again Johnny merely shrugged his shoulders.
Every month his mother dutifully made the trek across the moors to visit her son. His father never came, which was actually a relief to Johnny. Mrs Cooke brought cigarettes and food, homemade cakes and pies. She was always best at the practical side of things, but the way in which she so determinedly continued to do the right thing by her boy was almost painful. So was the hurt in her eyes. With resolute brightness she almost ritualistically related to him the goings on at home. Silence seemed to frighten her, and throughout each visit she talked ceaselessly. Johnny found solace in silence, he longed for it, having swiftly discovered that, in spite of enforced solitude and high walls, prisons are noisy echoing places. He no longer wanted to talk to anyone really, and he certainly had little to say to his mother. He might have been comforted by some slight display of physical warmth, some show of tenderness amid the cruel bleakness, and once he reached across the table in the visiting room to touch his mother’s hand. She flushed and coughed and fussed a bit, leaning back in her chair away from him, still chattering about nothing. As quickly as she could she withdrew her hand, placing it firmly in her lap out of reach.
Not once did Mabel Cooke reach out to touch her son, and from the moment he was convicted she never again mentioned the murder. From the very beginning she did not ask him to tell her whether or not he was guilty. Johnny assumed she had made up her mind that he was.
He did not know that he had the right to refuse her visits. If he had known he would probably have done so. They simply made him despair even more.
Jennifer didn’t dwell long on Johnny Cooke’s plight. Life was just too good for her. She did not want to think about anything that might spoil it. Quite deliberately she put Johnny’s trial, Irene’s disappearance and the whole rotten business out of her mind. Once she had done that, every day was a corker. She started to write to local papers asking for a job as a trainee reporter. The more she saw of Mark, and the more she learned of Mark’s job, the more certain she became that journalism was the career for her.
It was nearly Easter when Mark gently broke the news that he had been offered a job in London, in Fleet Street. She surprised him yet again. She didn’t mind a bit. You could hardly build a career for yourself in Pelham Bay, she said, and she wouldn’t be far behind him anyway. She was heading for Fleet Street, she told him, definitely. He assured her that he would still try to be with her as much as possible. There were always weekends, he wanted her so badly. She had said cheerily that she wanted him too, but a man had to do what a man had to do — and so did a woman. She’d grinned at her own nonsense, apparently completely unworried by his news.
Not for the first time he was struck by the equality of their relationship. In and out of bed they were on a par. She instinctively understood his desire for a wider canvas because she already had that desire herself. All that puzzled her was that she had not even known that he had been applying for jobs on the nationals. He mumbled something about it coming out of the blue. Was it her imagination or did he flush slightly?
Always there were things about him that made her uneasy on occasions, but the power of his personality and the intoxicating effect he had on her overcame any doubts she had about him, as would be the case through so much of her adult life.
It didn’t occur to her that he would even try to be faithful to her, indeed, how could he be? He was young and strong and eternally randy. But there was no reason why his behaviour with other women should bother her in those heady pre-AIDS days. The young Jennifer was almost without sexual jealousy, frankly she didn’t see the point, and once she became sure of Mark’s need for her, sure that he was not going to leave her, she found she was indeed totally unworried by whatever he might be doing when he was not with her. In any case she had absolutely no intention of being faithful to him should a suitable opportunity arise to experiment elsewhere. It hadn’t yet, as it happened, but then that was hardly surprising in Pelham Bay.
And so, almost ten months after the death of Marjorie Benson and the disappearance of Irene Nichols, Mark Piddle left for London to join the Daily Recorder as an investigative reporter. Three months later, Jenny Stone landed a job as a trainee reporter on a local paper in Dorset. Just before she left North Devon she had sex with another man for the first time. It was an unlikely coupling. Smug Angela Smith’s boyfriend, Todd Mallett.
She went to bed with him mainly because she liked to fantasise about wiping the smugness off Angela’s face by telling her in graphic detail exactly what she had done with Todd — she actually had no intention of so doing, but it was a delicious thought. The policeman’s son, recently enrolled in the force himself, slept with her because Angela was driving him crazy. She still wouldn’t let him have it, he would probably have to marry the old bag before she would do it, he had told Jenny. And Jenny was quite sure that was exactly what he would do in the end.
Todd was a much more hesitant lover than the man she was used to. He made love like the boy he was — he was just nineteen — but he was gentle, considerate and affectionate. Their lovemaking was warm and cuddly rather than erotic: unlike sex with Mark, it did not disturb her. She felt in control, and was absolutely sure that if she wanted Todd more permanently she could have him. She suspected he was falling in love with her and needed only a little encouragement to leave Angela for her, yet that was the last thing Jenny wanted. She liked sleeping with Todd, but the experience served only to increase her desire for Mark and the level of sexual thrill only he had so far provided. Fortunately Mark proved to be as good as his word. He was doing his best to screw the whole of London, but throughout everything his singular need for Jennifer remained undiminished, and whenever he could get away he would visit her, as he had promised. First he would make the long trek back to North Devon, where he no longer had a flat and had to stay at the Durraton vicarage with his parents. So for a time they were reduced to using the back of his car for their sexual adventures, no longer the Cooper but an estate car chosen for the express purpose of those love-making weekends. Later he would travel to Dorset where, thankfully, Jenny had her own bedsit and later a flat shared with Anna McDonald who, with the television volume turned as loud as possible, stoically endured weekend after weekend of bedroom noise.