Jennifer interrupted his musings.
‘I forgot to ask you about the notebook?’
‘Oh yeah — another bit of a mystery that. The notebook is indecipherable at a glance. If it does contain computer codes and we could break into them, we might find some answers — Bill had a sophisticated computer in the cottage — but we’ve been unable so far to jack into the files on the hard drive, and there appears to be no additional software for it.’
‘Could I see it, and the watches and the other stuff you’ve collected?’ Jennifer asked.
He wanted to know why. She decided to tell him this much of the truth.
‘I know it’s crazy, I just feel they might mean something to me that they don’t to anyone else,’ she said.
‘It’s evidence, Jennifer.’
‘So? I wasn’t planning to steal the stuff.’
She opened her car door and started to climb in.
He caught her by the arm.
‘Ten o’clock tomorrow morning at the operations centre in Pelham Bay village hall,’ he said.
With his other hand he gently touched her face.
He smiled at her. ‘I suppose it could never have worked for us, could it?’ he asked.
‘No chance,’ she said. ‘We might have had fun trying though.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I was ever supposed to have fun,’ he said.
She laughed. That was the trouble, he thought, she had never taken him seriously for a moment. And he had never been able to take her lightly enough.
As soon as she got home to Seaview Road she phoned Anna.
‘Come to your senses yet, have you?’ asked her friend.
‘Shut up,’ said Jennifer. ‘Listen. I need some help. In total confidence. You and me only.’
‘Oh God,’ said Anna helpfully. ‘What have you done now?’
Jennifer took a deep breath.
‘Nothing. I need some cuttings. Are you still able to use the library at the Chronicle?’
‘Yes. In return for copious quantities of malt whisky delivered to the chief librarian every Christmas. But why do you need me and the Chronicle library, for Christ’s sake? Can’t Caroline help you? She keeps phoning me, incidentally.’
Caroline was Jennifer’s secretary at The Globe. Or used to be — Jennifer wasn’t quite sure any more. In either case, Caroline would help willingly. She would also talk. She couldn’t help it, and Jennifer had always accepted it as congenital.
‘Anna, you know Caroline can never keep her mouth shut, and this is serious. I want cuts on Marcus.’
‘Bloody Hell, Jen, I thought you didn’t want to hear his name again. You’ll never get him out of your system, will you?’
Jennifer was getting impatient.
‘Will you listen for once? It’s nothing to do with that. I have discovered something I would rather not have done, and I need to do some digging. I want copies of all the scandalous stuff about Marcus, all the speculation pieces about his money, the row over that devaluation story in the Recorder. Anything like that, anything at all.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Anna, I can’t tell you, not even you, not yet — I may have got it wrong. Will you fax the stuff to me?’
‘I suppose so. When do you want it? As if I couldn’t guess.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Jennifer, it means going in to town and I wasn’t planning to. And that means rearranging everything for Pandora...’
‘Please, Anna. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t vital.’
‘Oh all right,’ said Anna. ‘Whatever it is that’s getting at you, I expect you should leave well alone, but I don’t suppose you will listen. You never do.’
‘Said the pot.’
Jennifer was already feeling more cheerful, more positive. She had known Anna would do it for her. She’d never let her down yet. Jennifer held the phone away from her ear and smiled as Anna launched into a reassuring grumble concerning ‘being taken for granted’, and ‘hare-brained ideas’. The most wonderful thing about her oldest friend remained the way even the briefest and least consequential conversation with her could lift the deepest depression. Even when the world was closing in totally, the familiarity of a really good friendship could make you think that there was something in life worth carrying on for. Perhaps because she had never had children, she valued her one or two true friendships more than the friends concerned would probably ever know.
She’d been away barely two days, and so much had happened in North Devon that she had almost completely forgotten her other life. She did not want any further dealings with Jack and the paper until she had things a little clearer in her mind, which looked like being not for some time now. She had resigned, and when it dawned on them all that she really meant it, she assumed they would stop paying her. There wasn’t really a lot more to it, except the car, which was no longer worth a great deal. She just couldn’t be bothered with sorting it out, so it was easier to be an ostrich for a while and carry on driving the damn thing around.
‘Thanks Anna,’ she said.
‘Again,’ said Anna.
‘Thanks Anna again,’ Jennifer repeated obediently.
‘Too bloody right,’ said Anna.
But as she replaced the receiver, Anna McDonald felt deeply uneasy.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she told Dominic. ‘But something has happened to throw Jen completely. She’s just not herself.’
‘Well, that’s good news at least,’ said Dominic.
Anna couldn’t even be bothered to register that she’d heard what he had said. She was talking to herself really, thinking aloud.
‘She’s in a right state about something.’
The phone call had interrupted her lugubrious husband’s enjoyment of a late-night movie on TV.
‘Jennifer bloody Stone is always in a right state if you ask me,’ he grumbled.
The next morning gave Anna her first inkling of what might lie behind Jennifer’s call. The reopening of the old murder inquiry in Pelham Bay and the discovery of a body in Bill Turpin’s garden was a page lead in the one tabloid paper the McDonalds still had delivered along with the Times and the Telegraph.
Anna studied the piece thoughtfully, then contemplated calling Jennifer back and giving her the third degree. She decided against it. If the old bat wasn’t telling, then she wasn’t telling.
She would get the cuttings organised and have another go at Jen that night.
Sixteen
Jennifer slept fitfully — still unsure that she really wanted to dig up the past, but at the same time quite certain that she was going to. She could feel her anger and disgust at Marcus welling up inside her. She knew that if she tried to destroy him she would probably end up destroying a large part of her own life. She had shut her eyes quite determinedly and refused to examine her eternal doubts about his business dealings. She had walked away from the more unpleasant aspects of his sex life. To her shame she had done nothing about the youthful sex-for-sale trade that she knew he must be involved in. But murder? Now that her eyes had been involuntarily opened, her journalistic antennae were operating at full power. She wanted to know exactly what had been going on, what exactly the undercurrent she had felt for so long in Marcus’s life was really about. She was sure that everything was linked in some complex way to the goings on in Pelham Bay so long ago.
She was still fretting in the morning as she sat in her mother’s kitchen drinking tea. It was always tea for her in the mornings. There was nothing like a strong cup of English Breakfast to cut through a hangover, not that she had one that morning, it just felt as if she did. Her mother was already up and about. It was a treat for her to have her daughter at home, although, as usual, she wasn’t seeing much of her. Jennifer had always been rushing around doing something. Ever since her teens. Maybe even before. Over tea and toast they chatted about family. Her brother had married for the first time relatively late in life, and had had twin boys and then a daughter in short order. Mrs Stone was delighted. She’d more or less given up any hope of being a grandmother. The bad news was that Jennifer’s brother had been disillusioned with the Britain he had found waiting for him when he left the air force, and had emigrated to Australia where he worked for a small charter aircraft company. It was mostly Boys’ Own flying and he was in his element. He had never really grown up: the air force was responsible for that. But he had found a near-perfect wife, and eventually, what was for him, a near-perfect life. Jennifer envied him. It was sad for her mother that this new family was so far away, but every year she travelled to Australia and spent two months with them. Mrs Stone had made six visits now. She was a veteran, and Jennifer always paid for the tickets, first-class, an arm — and-a-leg job, but the least she could do. One year, not long after her father had died, she had taken a month’s holiday and travelled with her mother down under. That had been the best trip ever for Mrs Stone. All her family together again.