Even Money

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.

“He’s all right, Mum,” the man shouted as we approached. He turned to me. “My missus thought you looked like you were going to do yourself in,” he said. “You know, wade out to sea and never come back.”

“Nothing like that,” I said, giving him a smile. “I assure you.”

He handed me a large white cup of milky tea and took another for himself from the cheerful-looking little lady behind the counter.

“Sugar?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said, taking a welcome sip of the steaming brown liquid. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“We need it to last, though,” he said. “July and August are our really busy times. That’s when the families come. Mostly just a bunch of old-age pensioners, OAPs, in June. Lots of pots of tea and the occasional ice cream, but very few burgers. We need the sun to shine all summer if we’re going to survive.”

“Are you open all year round?” I asked.

“No chance,” he said. “May to September, if we’re lucky. I’m usually a builder’s laborer in the winter. If there’s any work, that is. Not looking good this year with the economy going down the bloody tubes. At least most folk aren’t going abroad for their holidays, eh? Not with the pound so low. Too expensive.”

We stood together for a moment silently drinking our tea.

“I must get on,” said the man. “Can’t stand here all day. I also run the pedalos and the windsurfers, and they won’t get themselves out, now will they?”

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

He looked at my dark trousers and my white shirt.

“They’ll clean,” I said to him.

He looked up at my face and smiled. “Let’s get on, then.”

“Ned Talbot,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Hugh Hanson,” he said, shaking it.

“Right, then, Hugh,” I said. “Where are these pedalos?”

I spent most of the next hour helping to pull pedal boats and windsurfers out of two great big steel ship’s containers, lining them up on the beach ready for rent.

My trousers had a few oily marks on them from the pedal mechanisms and my white shirt had long ago lost its sharp creases by the time Hugh and I went back to the cream-painted hut for another cup of tea.

“Proper job,” he said, grinning broadly. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I replied, grinning back. “Best bereavement therapy I’ve ever known.”

“Bereavement?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“Yes,” I said. “My mother.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “When did she die?”

“Thirty-six years ago,” I said.

He was slightly taken aback, which I suppose was fair enough.

“Long time to grieve.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But I only found out where she died yesterday.”

“Where?” He seemed surprised. “Why does it matter where she died?”

“Because she died here,” I said. “Just over there.” I pointed. “Where I was standing on the beach.”

He looked over to where I had been under the pier, then he turned back to me.

“Wasn’t murdered, was she?” he asked me.

I stood there looking at him in stunned silence.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said.“I didn’t think she’d been old enough to be anyone’s mother.”

“She was eighteen,” I said. “She would have been nineteen in the September.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“How did you know?” I asked him.

“I didn’t,” he said. “But the murder of that girl was such big news round these parts. My father owned the business then, of course, but I was working for him. We were bigger then, with masses of boats for hire. Little motorboats with engines, you know, and those catamaran-float things with paddles. That murder shut us down completely for a week, and the summer seasons took years to recover.”

I stood on the concrete walkway and looked again at the space beneath the pier.

“They never caught the man who done it, did they?” he said. “That’s what really did for us all. No one felt safe with a killer on the loose. People stopped coming to Paignton for years. Stupid. The killer was probably a visitor from up-country anyway. After all, your mum wasn’t local, was she?”

I shook my head. “Were you here the day they found her?” I asked him.

“Certainly was,” he said. “It was Father who saw her lying under the pier and went over to wake her up. Helluva mad, he was. Sleeping on the beach isn’t allowed. We’re always having things damaged by people who use our stuff for shelters. Anyway, he couldn’t wake her up because she was dead. Bloody white, he went. I thought he was going to be sick. It was me as called the police. From a pay phone that used to stand on that corner.” He pointed.

“Did she really look like she was asleep?” I asked.

“I presume so,” he said. “I didn’t see her close up.” He sounded frustrated. “By the time I’d made the call, some bloody do-gooder security man had set up a load of rope to keep people away.”

“Was she naked?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.” He thought. “It’s a long time ago, but I think she had all her clothes on. Otherwise, Father wouldn’t have thought she was asleep, would he?”

“Is your dad still alive?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “The old boy died about ten years ago.”

Pity, I thought.

“Did anyone else see her before the rope went up?” I asked.

“A few other people did,” he said. “But I don’t know who they were.”

I must have looked disappointed.

“There was masses about it in the local paper for days and days,” he said. “They’ll surely have copies of them in the local library. Those reporters would have found out if she wasn’t properly dressed. They were here for ages. Television too.”

I looked at my watch. It was already almost ten o’clock. The library must be open by now. “Where is the library?” I asked

“In Courtland Road,” he said. “Not far. That direction,” he pointed.

“I might just go there later,” I said.

“Do you fancy a bacon-and-egg sandwich?” Hugh asked, changing the subject. “I’m having one.”

“I’d love one,” I said.

We sat on chairs put out for the customers of the refreshment hut, and his wife brought each of us a fresh mug of tea and a huge sandwich with so much bacon-and-egg filling that it was falling out the sides. I ate mine with eager relish. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry.

“How much do I owe you for that?” I asked, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand and drinking down the last of my tea.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You earned it.”

“Thanks, Hugh,” I said, and stood up. “I hope the sun shines for you all summer.”

“Thanks,” he said. He too stood up, and we shook hands. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“What?” I said.

“Find out more about your mother’s death.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Sometimes it’s better to leave sleeping dogs lie,” he said. “You might find out something you don’t like.”

How could anything be worse than finding out your own mother was murdered by your father, I thought.

“Thanks for the concern,” I said. “I was only one when she died, and I don’t remember her at all. But I have a need in me to find out more. She made me who I am, and I desperately want to learn more about her. At present, I know almost nothing. This is the only place to start.”

He nodded. “Let me know if you need any help. You know where to find me.”

“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.