custody sergeant.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the offered tray of cornflakes and toast with a mug of sweet white tea. “Don’t have a copy of the Racing Post as well, do you?”
“Don’t push your luck, Mr. Talbot,” he said with a grin.
My opinion of the police had risen a few rungs, except, that was, for Chief Inspector Llewellyn. But, fortunately for me, there was no sign of him as I took my leave of their hospitality and rode in a taxi back to the racetrack.
I walked into the still-closed parking lot two at ten minutes to eight to find my old Volvo was exactly where I had left it the previous evening. It stood all alone on the grass not very far from the gap in the hedge, where there was now a white tent surrounded by blue-and-white POLICE / DO NOT CROSS tape. A bored-looking police constable stood guard on one side of the tent whilst a three-man television crew were setting up close by on the other, no doubt for a live broadcast for breakfast news.
I didn’t volunteer to them that I was the star witness to the crime. Instead I went over to my car, started the engine for warmth and used the cigarette lighter socket to charge up my mobile phone.
I then used it to call Luca.
“Sorry,” I said to him. “I can’t pick you and Betsy up today. Can you make it here by train?”
“No problem,” he said sleepily. “See you later.” He hung up.
I sat in the driver’s seat of my car and took stock of the situation.
The previous afternoon I had discovered that I hadn’t been an orphan all those years, only to be violently orphaned for real a little under an hour later. Or had I? Had the man in the linen suit really been my father? I had told Chief Inspector Llewellyn that I believed so, but did I still believe it in the cold light of a new day? Did I really have two Australian sisters? If so, shouldn’t someone tell them that their father had been murdered? Would they care? Did they know about me? And were their names Talbot or Grady? Or something else entirely?
I pulled the copy of the driver’s license from my trouser pocket and looked at the black-and-white photograph of my father. He had looked straight into the camera, and it seemed that his eyes were staring into my soul. Alan Charles Grady, the license read, of 312 Macpherson Street, Carlton North, Victoria 3054. I wondered what his home was like. There was so much I didn’t know.
I also wondered, as I had done for much of my sleepless night, if the sergeant had been right and the purpose of the attack had been specifically to do my father harm rather than to rob me. I realized that I still thought of him as my father, so that, at least, answered one of my questions. But why would anyone do him harm, let alone murder him?
“Where is the money?” the murderer had hissed at him. I had thought at the time that he meant the money from the bookmaking. But did he? Was there some other money that my father had had? Or owed? The police had shown me the total contents of his pockets. Other than the driver’s license and the credit cards with the name Grady on them, there had been a return ticket from Ascot to Waterloo, a packet of boiled sweets, the TRUST TEDDY TALBOT betting slip I had given him myself and about thirty pounds in cash. Surely that wasn’t enough to kill for.
“Be very careful,” my father had said to me as he lay dying on the grass where the white tent now stood. “Be very careful of everyone.”
But who in particular, I pondered. I glanced around me as if there might have been somebody creeping up on me. But I was still alone in the parking lot, save for the police guard at the tent and the TV crew, who were now packing up their equipment, the broadcast over.
I called Sophie. Rather, I tried to, but she wouldn’t answer her phone. She was cross with me. She had told me so at great length when I had telephoned her from Wexham Park Hospital to say I wasn’t coming to see her. I had thought about what I should say and had decided not to mention the sudden appearance of a living father in my life followed by his equally sudden permanent removal. Stress caused by unexpected situations did nothing for her condition and could bring on a severe bout of depression. Currently she was improving, and I was hopeful that she would soon be coming home, until the next attack.
Sophie rode a roller-coaster life with great peaks of mania followed by deep troughs of despair, every cycle seemingly taking her higher and lower than ever before. Between the extremities there were generally periods of calm, rational behavior. These were the good times when we were able to lead a fairly normal married life. Sadly, they were becoming rarer, and shorter.
“Have you been drinking again?” she’d asked accusingly.
I wasn’t an alcoholic. In fact, quite the reverse. I had never drunk to excess, except perhaps an excess of Diet Coke. But Sophie, in her irrational mind, believed absolutely that I lived for alcohol. However, her obsession was probably good for my health, as I now rarely touched the stuff. It made for a quieter life.
I’d had a single beer four hours previously, but I had still promised her that I hadn’t touched a drop. She wouldn’t be convinced.
“You’re always drinking,” she had gone on at full volume down the line. “You won’t come and see me because you’re drunk. Admit it.”
At that point I had come close to telling her that my father had been murdered and I couldn’t come to see her because I was being interviewed by the police. But then she may have become convinced that I was a murderer, and that might have sent her back over the edge of the chasm out of which she was slowly climbing. Better to be thought of as a drunk than a killer.
“I’m sorry,” I’d said, admitting nothing. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”
“I may not be here tomorrow,” she had replied more calmly. It was her way of telling me once again that, one day, she intended to commit suicide. Just a little reminder to me that she believed she was in control of the situation. It was a game we had been playing for at least the past ten years. I had no doubts that she had convinced herself it was true. However, after all this time, I was not so certain. The only occasions I thought she might actually do it were during some of her manic phases when she would imagine she had superhuman powers. One day there might be no one around to prevent her leaping from a window when she was convinced she could fly. It wouldn’t be a true suicide, more like an accident or misadventure.
I, meanwhile, was completely fed up with this half existence. In my darker moments, I had sometimes wondered if suicide would be the only means of escape from it for me too.
The second day of Royal Ascot didn’t quite have the excitement of the first. Murder in the parking lot was the talk of the racetrack, with conspiracy theories running full tilt.
“Did you hear that the victim was someone involved in doping?” I heard one man confidently telling another.
“Really?” replied the second. “Well, you never know what’s going on right under your nose, do you?”
For all I knew, they might have been right. There was scant factual information being given out by the police. Probably, I thought, because they couldn’t be sure of the true identity of the victim, let alone the perpetrator.
Luca and Betsy were surprisingly not at all inquisitive about my rapidly darkening eye. However, they were also suitably sympathetic, which was more than could be said for my fellow bookmakers, or even my clients.
“’Morning, Ned,” said Larry Porter, the bookie on the neighboring pitch. “Did yer missus do that?” He was obviously enjoying my discomfort.
“Good morning to you too, Larry,” I replied. “And, no, I walked into a door.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Pull the other one.”
I felt sorry for people who really had walked into a door. No one must ever believe them.
“Actually, I was mugged,” I said.
“We were all mugged yesterday,” he said, laughing expansively at his little joke, “by the bloody punters.”
“Maybe this punter”-I put my hand to my eye-“wanted more.”
The smile disappeared from his face. “Were you robbed, then?” he asked. Robbery of bookmakers was never a laughing matter in our business.
“No,” I said, thinking fast. I didn’t really want to say that it might have been murder on the mugger’s mind, not robbery. “Seems he was frightened off.”
“Not by your physique, surely,” said Larry, laughing again.
I just smiled at him and let it go. He must have weighed a good eighteen stone, with a waist that a sumo wrestler would have been proud of. I, meanwhile, was a lean, mean fighting machine in comparison, though, truthfully, I was somewhat scrawny. I never seemed to have any time to eat, or the inclination to cook, in my married but mostly solitary lifestyle.
