“Did he do that to your eye?” the young woman asked, trying to push her way back in front of me.
“Yes,” I said. “He kicked me. That’s why I was unable to see the person responsible, or indeed anything else that happened.”
“But why was he killed?” implored the man.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I hadn’t seen my father for thirty-six years until the day he died.”
“Why not?” the young woman asked almost accusingly.
“He emigrated to Australia when I was one,” I said, “and my mother and I didn’t go with him.”
They suddenly seemed to lose interest in me. Maybe they could tell that I wasn’t going to be much help to them.
What they really should have asked me was why my mother hadn’t immigrated to Australia with my father. The answer was because she’d been murdered by him. Not that I’d have told them.
9
Early on Tuesday morning I drove to South Devon and parked near a long line of multicolored beach huts behind Preston Sands, in Paignton. I had left Kenilworth at four-thirty to avoid any rush-hour traffic and had made it to what was described by the travel agents as the “English Riviera” in a little over three hours.
Ironically, I had driven right past Newton Abbot racetrack, where they were racing later that day. But I wasn’t here for my work. Luca and Betsy had taken the equipment and would be standing at Newbury for the evening meeting. I hoped to be able to join them later.
I locked my old Volvo and went for a walk along the seafront.
It was still relatively early, and Paignton was just coming to life, with the deck-chair-rental man putting out his blue-and-white-striped stockpile in rows on the grass for the holidaymakers to come and sit on. There were a few morning dog walkers about, one or two joggers and a man with a metal detector digging on the sand.
It was a beautiful June summer day, and, even at eight in the morning, the sun was already quite high in the sky to the east, its rays reflecting off the sea as millions of dancing sparkles. The temperature was rising, and I was regretting not having worn a pair of shorts and flip-flops rather than my dark trousers and black leather shoes.
I thought back to the inquest the day before.
“South Devon,” Detective Sergeant Murray had said to me quietly as we had stood in the lobby of the courthouse.
“What?” I’d said.
“South Devon,” he repeated. “That’s where your mother was murdered. In Paignton, South Devon. Her body was found on the beach under Paignton Pier.”
“Oh,” I’d said inadequately.
“On the fourth of August, ’seventy-three.”
“Right, thank you,” I’d replied.
“And don’t tell the chief inspector I told you,” he’d said, keeping an eye on the door to the Gents’, through which his boss had disappeared.
“No,” I’d said. “Of course I won’t.”
He’d turned to move away from me.
“Did she have a child with her that was murdered as well?” I’d asked him. “A baby?”
“Not according to the file I read,” he’d replied quickly before hurrying away from me as the Gents’ door had opened.
My grandmother had probably been confused, I thought.
I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up the legs of my trousers and walked on Paignton beach.
I wasn’t really sure why I had come nearly two hundred miles in search of something that had happened nearly thirty-six years before. What did I think I would find? I wondered.
The previous evening I had used my computer to Google “Paignton Murder” and had been surprised to find over twenty-two thousand hits on the Web. Paignton must be a dangerous place, I’d thought, until I discovered that almost every reference was for Murder Mystery weekends or dinners at the local hotels. But there were, amongst all of those, reports of real murders by the seaside, though I could find nothing about the murder of a Patricia Jane Talbot in August 1973. The Internet simply did not stretch back far enough.
So here I was, walking along the beach, as if simply being here would give me some insight into what had gone on in this place all that time ago and why.
The tide was out, revealing a wide expanse of red sand crisscrossed with multiple ridged patterns and grooves produced by the outgoing water. I strode purposefully southwards towards Paignton Pier, past the imposing gray seawall of the Redcliffe Hotel, carrying my shoes and digging my bare toes into the sand. At one point, I stopped and looked behind me at the line of footprints I had created in the soft surface.
I couldn’t remember when I had last left footprints on a seashore. My grandparents had taken me very occasionally to the sea when I had been small, but we had never sat or walked on the beach. During the war, my grandfather had been posted to North Africa and had spent two years fighting his way back and forth across the Egyptian desert. As a result, he had developed an aversion to any form of sand.
“Bloody stuff gets everywhere,” he used to say, so under no circumstances did we ever go near it. Once or twice, he had been cajoled by my grandmother into sitting on the pebbles at Brighton while I had played in the water on day trips from our home in Surrey, but we had never holidayed at the seaside. In fact, thinking back, we had rarely holidayed anywhere. To my grandfather, going to the races every day was holiday enough, in spite of it being his job.
Paignton Pier, like every other pier at seaside resorts around the country, had been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century to allow pleasure steamers to dock when the tide was out and the harbor was dry. Steamers that would disgorge their passengers to indulge in the new health fashion of the time, of bathing year-round in salt water. It was testament to the ability of the Victorian engineers that the majority of the piers still existed long past the time when most folk had decided that immersing themselves in the freezing sea did their health more harm than good.
But the seaside piers had survived because they had been adapted as centers of entertainment. Paignton Pier was no exception, and I could see that amusement arcades had been built over much of its length.
I stood on the beach in the shadow of the pier and speculated again about what had been done right here to my mother. I also wondered where I had been at the time and whether I had been with my parents here in Paignton that fateful day. Had I been here before, in this very spot beneath the pier, as a fifteen-month-old toddler? Indeed, was I here when she’d died?
There was nothing much to see. I hadn’t expected there to be. Perhaps I was foolish to have come, and the image of where my mother had met her grisly end would haunt me forever. But something in me had needed to visit this place.
I pulled my wallet out of my trouser pocket and extracted the creased picture of my parents taken at Blackpool. All my life I had looked at that picture and longed to be able to be with my father. It was his image that had dominated my existence rather than that of my mother. The grandparents who had raised me had been my father’s family, not my mother’s, and somehow my paternal loss had always been the greater for me.
Now I studied her image as if I hadn’t really looked at it closely before. I stood there and cried for her loss and for the violent fate that had befallen my teenage mother in this place.
“You all right, boy?” said a voice behind me.
I turned around.A man with white hair and tanned skin, wearing a faded blue sweatshirt and baggy fawn shorts, was leaning on one of the pier supports.
“Fine,” I croaked, wiping tears from my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.
“We could see you from my place,” said the man, pointing at a cream-painted refreshments hut standing close to the pier. “We’re setting up. Do you fancy a cuppa?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Come on, then,” he said. “On the house.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and we walked together over to his hut.
