The same local company was still selling its ever-excellent ice cream from a van parked by the slipway, and in the same spot too. She bought a large cornet and paid fifty pence for a deckchair. The price had gone up but the manners of the deckchair boys remained the same. The short swarthy young man handing the chairs out that day watched uncaring as she struggled to assemble the deckchair with one hand while balancing her melting cornet in the other. The blob of ice cream eventually gave up and fell with a resounding splat onto the cobbled promenade. Damn, she thought. Why hadn’t she performed this operation the other way around and bought the ice cream after hiring the chair? Maybe the deckchair boys and the ice-cream man were tied together in some unholy money-making alliance. Resignedly she approached the van again and bought a second cornet. The seller was stony-faced. Couldn’t she remember from her youth a red-cheeked, smiling, sort of beardless Father Christmas of a man who wooed the children with his affectionate charm as much as with his splendid ice cream? She was reminded of how much things do change with the years. It only appears that they remain the same. This fella sold her a second large cornet within just a couple of minutes and his eyes expressed no recognition. No nothing. Stony, all right, icy, even, to match his wares. So much for the warmth of human contact.
She returned to her chair and settled herself down. It was still fairly warm for May but, sitting right by the sea, she pulled her thick woollen jacket close around her. The wind was whistling up the slipway and along the promenade as usual. She pushed her chair into a more sheltered spot by the wall and sat watching the comings and goings at the Penny Parade. Nobody had ever changed its name.
After a while her patience was rewarded. A tall rangy man walked out of the main door and strolled across the path to the deckchair stand. He spoke briefly to the swarthy boy who handed him what she assumed were that day’s takings. The man counted the cash and put it into the leather bag he was carrying over his shoulder. He was strongly built and his body appeared more youthful than the age she knew he must be, somewhere in his early forties. But when he turned towards her his face showed every minute of the torment that he had been through. She was shocked. He was tanned by the wind but there was a greyness about him. His hair was grey. His eyes were quite lifeless. She registered all this in a second. Even though she knew he must have been shaken rigid by the events of the last couple of days, she had not expected his appearance to betray his protracted ordeal quite as blatantly as it did. But in spite of the premature ageing in his face, she recognised him right away. She had never met him before, strangely enough, never spoken to him. But she had kept in her mind always, however much she had tried to forget it, the bewildered broken face peering at her from the dock at Exeter Crown Court all those years ago. This was Johnny Cooke, and no wonder he looked the way he did. This was a man who had spent most of his adulthood in prison for a crime he might not have committed.
She knew he was running old Bill’s empire, Todd had told her that, told her that Bill had appeared to be Johnny’s saviour, helping him rebuild his life from the moment he was released from jail. Johnny would be aware now, of course, of the new police suspicions. The duplicity, the double-take of it all, that must have been the final blow, she thought. If the hand you thought was keeping you afloat turned out to be the one pushing you into the sea to drown, that was hardest of all to take, surely.
She watched Johnny stroll on from the deckchair stand and lean against the sea wall just a few feet from where she was sitting. His powerful shoulders were bowed. His physique looked as if it was probably sensational beneath his big fisherman’s sweater. He had always been well built, and she supposed he had further developed his body in prison. That was what strong healthy young prisoners did to keep themselves sane, wasn’t it?
He was peering out to sea, behaving much the way she had seen Bill Turpin behave when she was a girl. Ironic really. He looked so tired. She wanted to comfort him. She felt terribly guilty. She asked herself why, but she was just kidding herself. She knew well the reasons for her guilt. She was one of a handful of people in the world who had always had doubts about Johnny’s conviction. Severe doubts. And because of the nature of those doubts, she had deliberately made herself forget them, pretend they did not exist.
As she watched him now, as she saw the weariness and the sadness in him, the guilt overwhelmed her. She felt close to tears.
Then Johnny Cooke turned. Suddenly he was directly facing her and a miracle happened. The tiredness went entirely from his eyes. His mouth stretched into a beaming welcoming smile. Joy radiated from every pore of him. He crouched to the ground and stretched out his arms. His eyes were shining, no longer lifeless. Far from that. Every inch of him was bursting with life and love. She could hear a child’s voice and, looking over her shoulder, saw a toddler running along the promenade towards Johnny. The little boy was unsteady on his feet, wobbling a bit, but he knew exactly where he was going. Squealing with happiness, he flung himself into Johnny Cooke’s extended arms, falling onto his body with the total, as yet unspoiled, trust of little children in their parents. The big man clasped the boy in his arms and, standing up, hoisted the child triumphantly in the air above his head. The boy kicked his legs with delight, his yells of pleasure clear above the roar of the sea. And Johnny Cooke was laughing. A great bellow of a laugh that came from deep inside and poured out in a bubbly torrent like a rushing cliffside waterfall.
On the heels of the child came a pretty dark woman, much younger than Johnny, wheeling a pushchair. She was slightly plump, but that kind of youthful plumpness which made her in some ways even more attractive. It was a cliché, Jennifer knew, and probably nothing to do with her plumpness but more to some inner thing shining out from her, but you were sure that she must have a sunny nature. She was smiling too, although not like Johnny. Hers was a small contented half smile. As she reached the big man, he shifted the little boy into one arm, rested the other casually across the shoulders of the young woman and, bending, kissed her briefly, and with pleasurable familiarity, on the top of the head. The woman was chattering to him. Jennifer could just catch snatches...
‘He said two more words this morning. Cornflakes and natcha.’
‘...natcha?’ queried the big man.
‘Goodness knows,’ she replied, giggling.
He roared his appreciation. That great laugh again. And the little family retreated into the amusement arcade, heads close together, forming a secure triangle of love.
Jennifer felt the tears pricking the backs of her eyelids once more, as she blinked quickly in a desperate attempt to stop them flowing. They were a different kind of tears now. So Johnny Cooke had a family which obviously gave him great happiness. Thank God for that, she thought. She sat in the deckchair for another thirty minutes or so. The sun was not so bright now and the wind was quite sharp. She was uncomfortably cold by the time the young woman left the amusement arcade and set off along the promenade. This time the toddler sat in the pushchair, swathed in a fleecy blanket.
Jennifer waited another couple of minutes and then left her chair and walked across to the Penny Parade. She made her way past the fruit machines and the video games to the back of the arcade where, she remembered, the office was tucked in one corner. It was still in the same place. Johnny Cooke was sitting at a desk, head down, studying some papers. She knocked on the open glass door, standing hesitant in the doorway. He looked up.