The D.I. had been surprisingly sensitive and quick to reassure.
‘It’s all right Mr Cooke,’ he said. ‘We just want to let you know that Bill Turpin’s died. The postman found him. You seem to be the nearest he has to family, and there are one or two bits and pieces we’d like you to help us clear up.’
Johnny felt the relief wash over him. He had spent seventeen years of his life in jail. He could not stand the smell of disinfectant. He could not sleep in a room with the door shut. Every morning he woke to the fear that he was still locked in a cell. And only after he had opened his eyes did any peace return. The normality of his life was a fragile thing.
Now, having been to the police station and learned of the finds that had been made in Bill’s cottage and what they might indicate, Johnny just could not think straight. He had suffered so much. He closed his eyes to try to shut off the memories. But it was no good. It never was.
Detective Inspector Todd Mallett, Durraton’s new detective inspector, had been just a lad with nothing much on his mind except how to get his way with the temperamental girlfriend who lay beside him in the hot sunshine that August Sunday. Now, twenty-five years later, he was having a drink in the bar of The Shipwright’s Arms with his father, retired Chief Superintendent Phil Mallett, who had been the detective chief inspector in charge of the murder inquiry — an inquiry about to be reopened.
Throughout his boyhood, Todd Mallett had been aware of his father’s unease over this one case, the case which had blighted his career. Phil Mallett was a decent old-fashioned copper who always did everything strictly by the book. He would never cut corners. He would never bend the rules to gain a conviction. During his entire working life it had not once occurred to him to take a corrupt course of action in order to further his career. And so the Pelham Bay murder case had caused him many sleepless nights.
After it was all over he had been so unsettled by the result of the case that he had asked to be transferred out of CID back to the uniformed branch.
Now a pint of best bitter stood untouched on the table before him and Phil Mallett sat with his hands clasped in his lap, eyes cast downwards. He felt that his worst fears were about to be realised.
His son took a swig of his own pint. It really wasn’t fair. His father was one of the few top cops he had ever known who really gave a damn for anything except their own skins and their pensions.
He placed a hand on the older man’s shoulder. ‘Look, nobody is ever going to blame you, Dad, you did all you could,’ he said. ‘And anyway, we don’t know anything for sure yet...’
Phil Mallett continued to study his big hands, callused from years of working in the garden of his beloved moorland home. He didn’t much care what people thought. He still blamed himself. He had not been strong enough back then. He had put his suspicions to one side. He had given in to the pressures around him. It was possible that a young man had lost his youth unjustly because of him.
Ironically it was his son who had called him to the newly set-up operations centre following the discoveries in Bill Turpin’s cottage. And Phil Mallett wasn’t sure he could live with them. The beer was still untouched in front of him.
‘Thanks for the pint, Todd,’ he said.
He rose to his feet and strode to the door, a big man, ramrod straight, a typical old-fashioned copper. His son followed, as tall but slimmer around the waist. Todd was a thoroughly modern policeman, a computer expert, sharper than his father, a bit of a wheeler-dealer, yet decent enough — still a chip off the old block.
Phil Mallett was proud of his son. Much prouder than he was of himself.
In the street outside the village hall, where the special murder inquiry operations room had been setup, he could smell the sea clearly, hear the waves beating against the rocks. Strange. It was as if it were yesterday.
Three
At the far end of the seafront down in Pelham Bay, there is a seawater swimming pool that was originally called The Lido, and always will be by the locals, even though during the boom time of the 1980s they heated the water and renamed it Pool Riviera. Next to it, opposite the beach huts, is a public lavatory with a flat roof. And there, on the first Sunday in August, 1970, the young Jennifer Stone was sunbathing with the gang, Liz Butler, the Mallett boys, Angela Smith, and Janet Farrell. A funny place to sunbathe — but it caught the sun perfectly all day long and a low wall kept off the wind from the sea.
Jenny, they all called her then. She was seventeen years old. Just. Her birthday had been celebrated only a few days earlier. She lay with her long skinny legs outstretched, back comfortably supported by an upturned kitchen chair from Angela Smith’s parents’ beach hut across the footpath leading to the cliffs. A copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides was in her left hand, propped in the saucer hollow where her tummy would have been if she were not beanpole thin. Beanpole. They called her that sometimes. Jenny peered against the dazzling bright sun, no longer pretending to read, and kidded herself that if she hadn’t forgotten her sunglasses she would have finished several chapters by now. But the A-level syllabus had run half its course, and Jenny had first looked at her copy of Cobbett a year ago. Since then she had done little more than flick through the first couple of chapters and dismiss them as slow and tedious. Well aware of her lack of application, Jenny was resigned to having to rely on what she picked up in lectures — between daydreams.
The book finally fell from her grasp. Eyes closed and smiling just a little, Jenny dreamed happily of her one heavy sexual encounter to date — with that young reporter on the Durraton Gazette. Deep within the magic world inside her head, she lay outstretched against his hard bony chest and ran her fingers through the fuzz of hair that she knew sprouted there. Mills and Boon by the seaside. She felt his strong fingers stroke her body, his lips pressed hard on her lips and anywhere else he cared to press them.
She was five-feet eleven-inches tall, and convinced that there was at least six inches too much of her. She moved with gawky awkwardness, she was painfully self-conscious, she longed to be five-foot nothing and shapely.
Boys just did not seem to notice her. She was too young to realise that they noticed all right but were too nervous and self-conscious themselves to pick on somebody who probably loomed several inches above them.
Then, two years earlier at an end of term school dance, that Durraton Gazette reporter, Mark Piddle, had taken her for a walk outside. Some walk. The dance had been arranged by staff at Jenny’s school and the local boys’ grammar school. Mark and his elder sister were there with their father, the vicar and school chaplain. The only drink provided was fruit punch. Mark spent the evening lacing his glass with illicit rum. Jenny, captivated by Mark since she’d first met him at Sunday school when she was eight — he was six years older and seemed very grown up — grasped the opportunity to renew an old acquaintance. As soon as she saw him again she realised how much she fancied him.
Mark was exceptionally tall, almost six-four, with broad shoulders and great rangy limbs, one of the very few men Jennifer would ever meet who could tower over her. It was not just his size that made that possible. Marcus was a towering personality in every sense. The power of his physical presence was always remarkable, even when he was a very young man. And the strength of his will was such that it seemed to reach out and bend you towards it. Jennifer always felt that with him. She suspected that she experienced it from those earliest Sunday-school days. At the school dance it seemed, to the now fifteen-year-old Jenny, more tangible than ever. She felt as if a spell had been cast over her. Mark was a stunning-looking young man, but his effect on her went far beyond the near perfect beauty of his appearance, although that in itself was devastating enough.