“Thanks,” I said, really meaning it.
I waved at his wife, who was still busily making prawn filled baguettes and crab sandwiches behind the counter, and walked away.
“That way,” Hugh shouted after me, pointing. He took half a dozen steps towards me. “Go up Lower Polsham Road, under the railway, second left into Polsham Park, and then Courtland Road is first on the right. The library is on the left, you can’t miss it.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked in the direction he had pointed.
Paignton Library did indeed have a newspaper section, but it only kept copies for the previous six weeks.
“You’ll have to go to Torquay,” said a kindly lady behind the counter in hushed librarian tones. “They keep all the back issues of the local papers on microfiche.”
“Microfiche?” I said.
“Photographic sheets,” she said. “The newspaper pages are photographed and made very small on the sheets. You need a special machine to see them. Saves us keeping mountains of the real papers.”
“And Torquay Library definitely has them?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she replied. “They’ll have all the back copies of the Herald Express, and probably the Western Morning News as well.”
“Are they the local papers?” I asked her.
“The Herald Express is very local, just for Torquay, and the Western is for the whole of Devon and Cornwall.”
“Thank you,” I said, and departed back to my car.
I sat in a darkened room at Torquay Library at one of the microfiche machines and read all there was in the Herald Express newspapers of August 1973 concerning the eighteen-year-old Patricia Talbot, found murdered under Paignton Pier.
Just as Hugh Hanson had said, there had been masses about it for days and days. It had still been the front- page headline story some seven days after the discovery of the body. But in spite of all the column inches, there was very little actual detail, and no reports of progress with the investigation.
However, I did discover that she had not been found naked, as I had feared, and, in spite of some speculation in the reports, there appeared to have been no evidence of any sexual assault. The local police were quoted as confirming that she had been strangled and that she had been dead for several hours before she was discovered on the beach at seven-twenty in the morning by a Mr. Vincent Hanson.
Hugh’s father, I presumed.
Most of the reports centered around the fear that an unsolved murder on the beach would have a detrimental effect on the local tourist industry that was already suffering badly from families going on cheap package holidays to Majorca instead of to the English seaside.
There was surprisingly little actual information about Patricia Talbot herself. No mention of whether she was on holiday in Paignton or had been working there. No report of any hotel where she had been staying, or even if she had been alone in the town or with her husband. Not a word about any fifteen-month-old son left motherless. Only once was my father even mentioned and only then to report that he had nothing to say. There was no photograph of him. The actual quote-“I have no comment to make at the moment,” said Mr. Talbot outside Paignton Police Station-had appeared in the paper three days after the discovery of the body.
So he hadn’t run off immediately, I thought.
I had exhausted all the coverage in the Herald Express, so I went back to the reference library desk.
“Do you have the Western Morning News?” I asked a young member of the library staff.
“When for?” he said.
“August 1973,” I said.
“Sorry, we only have the Morning News back to ’seventy-four,” he said. “You’d have to go to Exeter, or maybe to Plymouth, for anything earlier than that.”
“Ah well,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” I began to turn away.
“But we’ve got the Paignton News for ’seventy-three, if that’s any good,” he said. “They went out of business in ’seventy-six.”
The Paignton News had been a weekly publication, and the week of the murder it had reported nothing more than I had already read in the Herald Express. I almost left it at that, but something made me scan through the following week’s edition, and there I found out what my grandmother had meant.
On the third page there was a brief account of an inquest at South Devon Coroner’s Court that had been opened and adjourned into the sudden and violent death of one Patricia Jane Talbot, aged eighteen, of New Malden in Surrey.
According to the paper, the post-mortem report stated that the major cause of death had been asphyxiation due to constriction of the neck, and that the hyoid bone had been fractured, which was consistent with manual strangulation.
The piece concluded by stating that the deceased had been found to be pregnant at the time of her death, with a female fetus estimated at between eighteen and twenty weeks’ gestation.
Indeed, he had murdered her baby.
He had murdered my sister.
10
Ididn’t get to Newbury for the evening racing. Instead, I went straight home to Kenilworth.
I was angry.
In fact, I was absolutely livid.
How could my father have come to Ascot, just one week previously, and been so normal and so natural, even so agreeable, when he held the knowledge that he had murdered my mother together with her unborn child?
It was despicable, and I hated him for it.
Why had he come back from Australia and turned my life upside down?
Had he come because of the glass-grain RFIDs and the money? Surely it hadn’t been just to see me?
I lay awake for ages, tossing and turning, trying to sort it all out, but all I came up with were more and more questions, and no answers.
Whose money was it in his rucksack?
Was the money connected to the RFIDs and the black-box programmer?
Was he killed because he hadn’t handed over the money or was it the black box and the glass grains that were so important?
And what exactly were they for?
Every punter has a story of how they think a crooked trainer or owner has run the wrong horse in a race. How a “ringer” has been brought in to win when the expected horse would have had no chance. Unexpected winners have always made some people suspicious that foul play has been afoot, and, in the distant past, before racing was a well-organized industry, rumors of ringers abounded, and there must have been some truth to them.
But running a ringer has always been more difficult than most people believe, especially from a large, well- established training stable, and not only because horse identification has become more sophisticated with the introduction of the RFID chips. Sure, a horse will be scanned by an official vet the first time it runs and randomly thereafter, and this, together with the detailed horse passport, makes it difficult to substitute one horse for another. But the real reason is that too many people would have to be “in the know.”
There is an old Spanish proverb that runs: A secret between two is God’s secret, between three it is all men’s.
To run a horse as a ringer requires the inside knowledge of a good deal more than three men. The horse’s groom, the horsevan driver, the traveling head lad and the jockey just for a start, in addition to the trainer and the owner.
It would be impossible to keep it a secret from any of them because they would simply recognize that the horse
