She had, to some degree or other, loved Marcus probably throughout her adult life. When she’d said she could no longer live with him, she thought Marcus had ultimately been relieved, in spite of putting up his usual fight to keep her — out of habit more than likely; Marcus never expected to lose anything.
He had eventually offered Jennifer a lump sum of £200,000 and their Richmond house with mortgage paid up as full settlement. A clean severance of all their mutual ties. She had agreed with equal relief. Her lawyer had pointed out that she could have taken her husband for far more, but Jennifer just wanted out. If there had been children she would probably have taken a different attitude. But there were none. And even as things were and having quit her job, as long as she could sell the house all right she was a fairly wealthy woman. She still had the two hundred grand in the bank plus a few quid she had saved herself. It wouldn’t last her long the way she had so far lived her life, but starvation was not just around the corner.
She ordered more coffee and a large Danish pastry. Fully fortified, she strolled back to the Porsche and plugged the laptop into her portable bubble-jet printer. She signed the letter, fed it into the car fax, and watched it obediently wing its way back to the London estate agent.
It was ten-thirty. At the Globe, the morning would just be getting going, the senior executives putting together their story lists for the eleven-fifteen conference. It would be around then that she would be missed, that it might occur to Jack, for undoubtedly the first time, that her resignation had been serious. Arrogant bastard.
She unplugged the fax, switched the phone back to normal and dialled Pelham Bay 534536. Her mother sounded wonderfully, reassuringly, normal. She couldn’t stop because she was going to Safeways with Auntie Pat. Jenny was on her way down? Oh, that was lovely. But what did she want for her dinner? How long was she staying, anyway, and to what did her mother owe the pleasure?
Old habits die hard. Accustomed always to protecting her mother from anything that might worry her, Jennifer heard herself reply that she had taken a couple of weeks’ holiday. Any chance of a bed? It’ll cost you, said her mother.
Jennifer smiled as she pushed the ‘end’ button on the phone and then switched it off. From now on she would be using the mobile only for outgoing calls. She was on the loose. A rolling Stone.
Mrs Margaret Stone, widow of respected local builder Reg Stone, had never understood one jot about her daughter’s life. And Jennifer neither imagined nor desired that it could ever be otherwise. There was warmth and security and a whole different world back at number sixteen, Seaview Road, Pelham Bay. And her mother’s ageing had not changed that. Mrs Stone was almost eighty now, but she kept a fine home. All that should gleam, gleamed. The store cupboard was never bare. The patch of grass in the little back garden looked as if someone had trimmed it with a pair of scissors. There was always fruit in the bowl on the old sideboard and in summer flowers filled the vase standing before the fireplace.
Jennifer arrived there just before one o’clock. Her mother, it seemed, was still out. She found the key — on the ledge as always — and let herself in. She switched the kettle on to boil and opened the cake tin she found in its usual place in the pantry. Inside were a pile of her mother’s currant buns. She took one and bit deep into the crumbly sweetness. She’d never found better baking anywhere in the world.
The front door opened with a familiar rattle. In walked her mother and her aunt Pat.
‘You’ll not eat your dinner now, my girl,’ said her mother.
Her smile was broad and ever-welcoming. She put down her shopping bags and opened her arms. Like a little girl Jennifer went to her and hugged her.
‘Hello, my darling,’ she said.
In the bags were hot pasties.
‘No time to do you a proper dinner,’ grumbled her mother amiably. ‘There’s tinned fruit and clotted cream for afters. You’ll stay, Pat, won’t you?’
They sat around the kitchen table. The local paper, still folded, lay on the worktop. And it was then the headline caught Jennifer’s eye. ‘Murder Inquiry Reopened After 25 Years. Did they lock up the wrong man?’
Jennifer felt her mother watching her. Margaret Stone’s mind had yet to be affected by age. She was pin-sharp.
‘All right, maid?’ she asked gently.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Jennifer.
‘Brings back a few memories, aye?’
Jennifer switched the conversation, asking about old school-friends, the welfare of other relatives living nearby, how the pebble ridge had held up to the early spring storms, and why the dickens had the council built a car park right over the river estuary by the new motorway bridge, as if that wasn’t bad enough already.
All the while she could feel her mind slipping back in time. As soon as she could politely leave the table and the room, she used weariness as an excuse and retreated to her old bedroom, the familiar chintzy one at the back of the house.
Mrs Stone noticed that her daughter had quietly picked up the local paper and folded it under her arm.
Two
Jenny Stone had come face to face with death that long-ago August Sunday in Pelham Bay. Twenty-five years later, everything remained quite vivid. That headline in the local paper was devastating. ‘Did they lock up the wrong man?’ she read. ‘Police yesterday reopened inquiries into the murder of a woman strangled in Pelham Bay in 1970, and the disappearance of another young woman. The move follows the death of retired local businessman Bill Turpin. It is believed that vital new evidence has been discovered in his remote cliffside home which could also link Turpin with the murder of the Earl of Lynmouth twenty-five years previously.’
Jenny, now Jennifer Stone, well-known journalist and former wife of a government minister, needed only to glance at that local paper story to find herself overwhelmed by a sense of panic.
She stood uncertainly by the window of her comfortable old bedroom in the little terraced house just a few hundred yards from the sea at Pelham Bay. The sea in which she had found the body. The village where so many demons had been unleashed.
She wrapped herself in the ugly old candlewick dressing gown still hanging behind the pink-painted door. It smelt of mothballs and felt wonderful. Rough and warm and reassuring. She lay down on the big wood-framed bed and shut her eyes, but it was no good. She reached out for the paper which she had folded on the bedside table and read that story again. Carefully. Slowly. What did it mean? Did the police think Bill Turpin had committed the murder? If he had, then there had been a terrible injustice all those years ago. But then, perhaps she had always secretly suspected that. A certain sense of guilt had been with her from the start.
And that other disappearance? She skimmed the print once more. No, no new details, not yet.
Her head ached dully now. It was more than last night’s booze. This was the pain of an old wound. It was as if it were yesterday. So clear the picture. That day when one part of her existence had ended and another begun, the day Marcus entered her life for the second time, never properly to leave it again.
He had been plain Mark Piddle then, a silly name for a young man who was all sorts of things but never silly.