Every feeling that she had ever had for him had finally been destroyed. She was quite simply disgusted by him and wanted him totally out of her life. She told Anna that much — but she never told her why. ‘You were right, everything you ever thought about him, you were right,’ she said.
‘I didn’t think I ever told you what I thought about him,’ replied Anna.
‘You didn’t have to.’ Jennifer managed a wry smile.
‘I certainly didn’t want to be right,’ Anna continued. ‘I just wanted you to be happy.’
And she questioned Jennifer no further. Anna was always such a good friend, ever-present when needed, to listen or not. Strangely undemanding. Constant.
The national press quickly picked up news of the Piddell’s splitting up, but both Jennifer and Marcus stuck to their official line that they were amicably separated and had no further comment. There wasn’t a lot of mileage in that — a kiss-and-tell was what the anti-Marcus tabloids needed. Half the press pack of Great Britain would have liked to get their hands on almost anything discrediting Marcus Piddell.
Eventually, not believing what she was doing, Jennifer agreed to meet Marcus for a drink one lunchtime on an old river barge that had been turned into a wine bar. It was moored by Waterloo Bridge. The day was sunny, so she suggested a walk along the Embankment and, as they strolled, she told him bluntly that if he did not agree to a divorce immediately and come up with a reasonable settlement in her favour, the story of his sordid sexual habits would suddenly be front-page news.
Marcus had been amazed.
‘Good God, Jennifer, that’s blackmail,’ he had exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ she replied drily. ‘Terrible thing, the collapse of morality, isn’t it?’
The next day she received a letter delivered by messenger from Marcus’s solicitor. It agreed to a divorce by the quickest possible means and Marcus offered the house in Richmond, mortgage fully paid up, and £200,000 cash in full and final settlement. The only condition was that she should not discuss his affairs with any third party. Affairs... she had giggled in spite of herself. The choice of words was more appropriate than perhaps the lawyers were aware.
She agreed at once, knowing that Marcus was probably expecting and wanting her to prolong their association by sticking out for a better deal. After all, that kind of money was just a drop in the ocean to him. But the Richmond house was worth three quarters of a million at the time, and Jennifer just wanted as clean as possible an end to it all.
Soon afterwards Marcus was made a junior minister. A grateful government, in power largely because of the newspapers he still pretty well owned, was only just starting to reward Marcus Piddell. In North Devon they were all fiercely proud of him. Jennifer found it quite sickening.
Back in Pelham Bay, Johnny Cooke found the rise and rise of Mark Piddle even more sickening than Jennifer did. By 1992 Johnny had been a free man for four years. Or had he? Johnny’s life sentence lasted seventeen years — it might have been less had it not been for recommendations of a long sentence given by the judge at his trial.
But for Johnny it really did feel like a lifetime. The years before his sentence now seemed just a dream. The years in prison felt as if they had happened to someone else. When he first went to Dartmoor it was the other way around. It was the prison which was unreal, a kind of grim fantasy place. By the time he left, prison had become dreadful reality, his complete and only world.
Gradually, over the long months and years, his condition of imprisonment began to change. He became more prison wise, and managed to wheedle his way into the more trusted jobs. Being allowed to work in the prison gardens, among plants and flowers, ultimately preserved his sanity. That and reading. He was finally allowed almost unlimited use of the prison library, and found great solace in books. Johnny had first learned the joy of losing himself in a book when he was still at school. Even back then he had always felt somehow awkward, out of place, different.
Now, the grim reality of his loss of liberty, even the oppressive way in which the walls of his cell seemed to close in on him, all disappeared when he was reading. Only his body remained within the granite of The Moor, his soul escaped to roam free as the wind whistling across the tors towards the ocean he so much yearned to see again.
Johnny was to remain grateful for the rest of his life for having been given the ability to bury his entire being inside the magic world of print on page.
Books saved his sanity. The physical labour in the garden, combined with almost daily workouts in the prison gymnasium, saved his body from decline and restored much of the strength Johnny had lost in the early years. He almost wallowed in building up his body. He became obsessed with muscle development and with stretching his muscles at work in the garden. There was, after all, nothing else. When the time eventually came for him to leave jail, he was not sure that he wanted to go. He had become afraid of the world outside. He was completely institutionalised.
When he finally went home to his mother’s house in Durraton in 1988 — his father had died while he was inside or he doubted he would have been welcome there — Johnny perversely experienced the same sort of near breakdown which he had gone through when he was sent to prison in the first place. The ability to come and go when he pleased, and do and be whatever he wanted on a whim, terrified the life out of him. His mother fussed dutifully.
‘You’re my boy, and there’s always a place for you in this house,’ she told him stoically.
He had no idea where else he could have gone — he had been imprisoned as a boy and emerged a man who had never experienced freedom. The attitudes of alleged friends, neighbours and people he met in the town numbed him. They nudged and stared and made no attempt at understanding, and certainly none of them wanted to employ him. Why should they, he thought? He was after all a convicted murderer. He did not feel free at all. He remained imprisoned within his heart every bit as much as he had ever been by the iron bars and granite walls of Dartmoor.
It was Bill Turpin who finally released him. Bill Turpin who gave Johnny the opportunity to start his life again, to regain his self-respect and at least to look for a reason for carrying on. It took a long time — but it was a beginning.
From the moment of his release from jail, Johnny was drawn to Pelham Bay. The might of the sea entranced him, as it had always done, and anyway, Pelham Bay was the only place which seemed to mean anything to him any more. This was where it had all happened...
Then one day, as he stood by the sea wall staring out at the ocean, just as Bill Turpin had all those years ago, the old man had appeared silently at his side and offered him a job. Right out of the blue. ‘Nought much to start with, look after my fruit machines, keep an eye on the deckchair boys, nought much, but us’ll see,’ said Bill.
‘Why?’ asked Johnny. In his state of mind it was all he could think of to say.
Bill Turpin sucked on his old black pipe — the same one, Johnny reckoned. ‘I never thought you was a bad lad...’ Bill mused. And he ambled off along the promenade leaving Johnny standing, still bewildered.
Was it guilt, wondered Johnny. Was that it? He had learned at the trial that he had guessed right all those years ago and it had been old Bill who had tipped off the cops, told them about Johnny and Marjorie and seeing them together in the sand dunes. Johnny shook himself. What the hell?
He trotted after the old man, catching him easily. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the job, whatever it is.’
For Jennifer Stone, life went on much the same as it had before — but without Marcus. She returned to Pelham Bay only occasionally, but she did return to break the news of her divorce from Marcus — before it hit the local papers.