I had wanted so much for my father to be there and to be like the other dads, shouting encouragement from the touchline during my school soccer matches, carrying me high on his shoulders when we won, consoling and wiping away the tears when we lost.
I had amused my teammates with made-up stories about how my father had died bravely saving me from drowning, or from enemies, or from monsters. Now I discovered that even the story I had been told, and had believed unquestionably, had itself been a lie.
I looked at the figure lying silently on his back in front of me, covered by a crisp white sheet. I folded the sheet down to his chest so I could see his face. He looked as if he was just asleep, peaceful, with his eyes closed, as if he could be wakened by my touch. I placed my hand on his shoulder. His flesh was already cooling, and there would be no awakening here ever again. I stroked his suntanned forehead for the first and last time in my life and considered what might have been.
I should be angry with him, I thought. Angry for going away and leaving me all those years ago. Angry that he had then taken so long to come back. Angry that I’d had sisters for nearly thirty years whom I’d never met. And angry that he’d come back at all and added complications to my already complex existence.
But I have always believed that anger is an emotion that needs to be expressed, to be vocalized with passion, towards someone who can respond or be hurt. Somehow, directing anger towards my dead father’s corpse seemed pointless and wasteful of my energy.
I would save my anger, I decided, for the young man who had so abruptly taken away any chance I might have had to make up for time lost in the past. I grieved not so much for the death of my father but for the loss of the opportunity that had come so close.
I stood up and pulled the sheet back over his face.
A man in a light brown suit came into the secluded cubicle behind me.
“Mr. Talbot?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, turning around.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Murray,” he said, showing me his warrant card. “Thames Valley Police.” He paused, looking down at the inert form beneath the sheet.“I’m very sorry about your father,” he said, “but we really need to ask you some questions.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Shall we go and find somewhere more suitable?”
He seemed relieved. “Yes, good idea.”
One of the nurses showed the two of us into a small room provided for families-grieving families, no doubt-and a second plainclothes policeman came in to join us. We sat down on more of the gray-plastic-and-tubular-steel chairs.
“This is DC Walton,” said Detective Sergeant Murray, introducing his colleague. “Now, what can you tell us about the incident in the parking lot at Ascot?”
“I’d call it more than just an incident,” I said. “I was attacked and my father was fatally stabbed.”
“We will have to wait for the post-mortem to determine the actual cause of death, sir,” said the detective sergeant rather formally.
“But I saw my father being stabbed,” I said.
“So you did see your attacker?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know that I’d recognize him again. His face was covered. All I could see were his eyes, and that was only for a split second.”
“But you are sure it was a man?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” I said. “He had a man’s shape.”
“And what shape was that?”
“Thin, lithe and agile,” I said. “He ran at me and came straight up onto my equipment trolley and kicked me in the face.” I instinctively put my hand up to the now-stitched cut in my left eyebrow.
“Was he white or black?” he asked.
“White, I think,” I said slowly, going over again in my mind the whole episode. “Yes, he was white,” I said with some certainty. “He had white hands.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t wearing light-colored gloves?” the detective sergeant asked.
I hadn’t thought about gloves. “No,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I still think he was white. His eyes were those of a white man.” I remembered that I’d thought at the time that they were shifty-looking eyes, rather too close together for the shape of his face.
“Can you describe what he was wearing?” he asked.
“Blue denim jeans and a charcoal-gray hoodie, with a black scarf over the lower part of his face,” I said. “And black boots, like army boots with deep-cut soles. I saw one of those rather too close up.” The detective constable wrote it all down in his notebook.
“Tall or short?” the detective sergeant asked.
“Neither, really,” I said. “About the same as my father.”
“Tell us about your father,” he said, changing direction. “Can you think why anyone would want him dead?”
“Want my father dead?” I repeated. “But surely this was just a robbery that went wrong?”
“Why do you think that?” he asked.
“I just assumed it was,” I said. “It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a bookmaker has been robbed in a racetrack parking lot. Not even the first time for me.”
Both policemen raised their eyebrows a notch in unison. “About five years ago,” I said. “At Newbury. I was walking back to my car in the dark after racing in late November. There was a gang of them on that occasion, not just one like today.”
I could still recall the pain of the ribs they had broken with their boots when I refused to hand over my heavy load of cash after a particularly bad day for the punters. I could also remember the indifference of the Newbury police to the robbing of a bookmaker. One of them had even gone as far as to say that it was my own fault for carrying so much money in my pocket. As far as I could tell, no serious attempt had been made by them to catch the perpetrators.
“Bookies get robbed all the time,” I said. “Some people will try anything to get their money back.”
“But you say you weren’t robbed on this occasion,” said the detective sergeant.
“No,” I admitted, feeling for the envelope of cash that was still safely in my trouser pocket. “But I simply imagined the thief was disturbed to find he had an audience, so he took off.”
“Now, about your father,” he said. “What was his full name?”
“Peter James Talbot,” I said. The detective constable wrote it down.
“And his address?” he asked.
“I’m not sure of his full address,” I said, “but I believe he lived in Melbourne, Australia.”
“Then can you tell us, Mr. Talbot,” the detective sergeant said, “why the man, who you claim was your father, had a credit card and a driver’s license in his jacket both in the name of Alan Charles Grady?”
3
Are you telling us that you didn’t know your father existed?” the detective chief inspector asked.
“Well,” I said slowly, “yes and no.”
“Which?” he demanded. “Yes, obviously I knew that he existed thirty-seven years ago, but, no, I didn’t know until today that he still existed.” It was confusing. After all, he didn’t now exist, not as a living being anyway.
I was again with Detective Sergeant Murray and DC Walton, but we had transferred as a group from Wexham Park Hospital to Windsor Police Station, swapping the grieving families’ room for a stark police interview room with no windows. The chairs at each place, I noticed, could have come from the same manufacturer’s batch.
We had been joined by Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, who did not extend the nicety of expressing sympathy for my dead father. I decided I didn’t like him very much, and he clearly had no good feelings towards me either.
“A bookmaker, eh?” he’d said by way of introduction, curling his lip. He, like many, clearly believed that all
