Even Money

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 bookmakers were villains unless proved otherwise, and even then there’d be some doubt remaining.

“Are you absolutely certain that this man was your father?” He stabbed his finger at the driver’s license that sat on the table in front of me, its black-and-white photograph clearly being that of the man I had left lying dead under a sheet at the hospital.

“No,” I said, looking up at the detective chief inspector, “I can’t say I am absolutely certain. But I still think he was. It was not so much what he looked like or what he said but his mannerisms and demeanor that convinced me. He picked at his fingers in the same way I watched my grandfather do a million times, and there was something about his lolloping walk that is somehow reminiscent of my own.”

“Then why is this license in the name of someone called Alan Grady?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Is it genuine?”

“We’re checking,” he said.

“Well, I still believe the man in that photograph is my father.” The detective chief inspector clearly didn’t share my confidence. “The DNA will tell us for sure one way or another,” he said. I had been asked for, and had given, a sample of my DNA at the hospital. “And you say he’s lived in Australia for the past thirty years or so?”

“That’s what he told me, yes,” I replied.

“And you believed him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” I said. “Why would he lie to me?”

“Mr. Talbot,” he said, “in my experience, people lie all the time.” He leaned forward and looked at me closely. “And I think you might be lying to me right now.”

“Think away,” I said. “But I’m not.”

“We’ll see,” said the detective chief inspector, standing up abruptly and walking out of the room.

“Chief Inspector Llewellyn has left the room,” said the detective sergeant for the benefit of the audio-recording machine that sat on the table to my left.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“Mr. Talbot,” said the detective sergeant, “you can leave anytime you like. You are not under arrest.”

Maybe not, I thought, but I had been questioned “under caution.”

“Then I would like to go home,” I said. “I have to be back at Ascot racetrack at ten-thirty in the morning.”

“Interview terminated,” said the detective sergeant, glancing up at the clock on the wall, “at twenty-two forty-five.” He pushed the STOP button on the front of the recording machine.

“Have you spoken to any of the other people who were there in the parking lot?” I asked him as we walked along the corridor.

“We continue to make inquiries,” he answered unhelpfully.

“Please can I have a photocopy of that driver’s license?” I asked him.

“What for?” he said.

“The photograph. The only one I have of my father was taken before I was born. I would like to have another.”

“Er,” said the detective sergeant, looking around at Detective Constable Walton, “I’m not sure that I can.”

“Please,” I said in my most charming manner.

Constable Walton shrugged his shoulders.

“OK,” said the sergeant. “But don’t tell the chief inspector.”

I wouldn’t, I assured him. I wouldn’t have told the chief inspector if his fly had been undone.

Sergeant Murray disappeared for a moment and returned with a blown-up copy of the license, which I gratefully folded and placed in my trouser pocket alongside the envelope of cash.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “Lost my dad too, about three months ago.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied. “Cancer.”

He walked me to the door of the police station, where we shook hands warmly, the comradeship of those with recently deceased fathers.

“Now, how do I get home?” I said, turning my morning-coat collar up against the chill of an English June night.

“Where’s your car?” he asked.

“In the parking lot at Ascot, I expect. That’s where I left it.” With, I hoped, all our equipment still safely in the trunk. The uniformed boys had helped me load everything in there before insisting that they drive me to the hospital. “You might have a concussion from that kick,” one of them had said. “Better safe than sorry.”

So here I was in Windsor town center at eleven o’clock at night with no transport, and I knew there was no chance of getting a hotel room anywhere near Ascot during the Royal Meeting.

“Where’s home?” asked the sergeant.

“Kenilworth,” I said, “in Warwickshire.”

“Outside our patch,” said Sergeant Murray.

“Does that mean you won’t send me home in a police car?” I asked him.

“Er”-he seemed to be undecided-“I suppose it does. You’ll have to get a taxi.”

“Do you have any idea how much a taxi to Kenilworth would cost?” I asked in exasperation. “Especially at this time of night.”

“I could arrange a lift to Ascot to get your car,” he said.

“It’ll probably be locked in the parking lot,” I said. “Or towed away.”

“Sorry, sir,” he said rather formally. “Nothing else I can do.”

“Don’t you have a spare cell I could use?” I asked.

“We can’t go offering cells as hotel rooms, now can we?” he said sarcastically.

“Why not?” I said. “If I was drunk and disorderly, you’d put me in a cell to sleep it off.”

“But you’re not,” he said.

“I could be,” I said, grinning at him. “It’d be cheaper than taking a taxi to Kenilworth.” And back again tomorrow, I thought. Much cheaper, even allowing for a fine, and more comfortable than sleeping in my car.

“I’ll see,” he said. “Wait here.”

He disappeared into the police station for a few minutes.

“OK,” he said. “On compassionate grounds only. I’ve had to say that you are distraught over the death of your father and in no state to be allowed to go home. And, for God’s sake, don’t tell Chief Inspector Llewellyn. He thinks you’re up to your neck in something dodgy.”

“Well, he’ll know where to find me, then.”

I didn’t sleep very well, but, in fairness, it was mostly due to having a thumping headache rather than the starkness of my surroundings. Understandably, my night’s accommodation hadn’t been designed with comfort in mind, but the kindly night-custody sergeant had provided me with a second blue-plastic-covered mattress from an empty cell next door. It had helped to make the hardness of the concrete sleeping platform almost bearable.

“We’re not very busy tonight,” he’d explained. “Just a couple of drunk drivers from the races. Bit too much of the champers, silly buggers.” He rolled his eyes. “Friday and Saturday nights are our busy times. We sometimes need camp beds and two or more in a cell.”

I was luckier than the two other residents as I slept with the light off and the door slightly ajar. Even though my cell had its own basic en suite facilities in the corner, I was invited in the morning to make use of the more salubrious staff washroom down the corridor, where I found a shower, shampoo and a disposable razor.

I looked at myself in the washroom mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight. My left eyebrow was swollen and turning a nice shade of deep purple, while my white shirt was decidedly pink around the collar where the previous evening I had unsuccessfully tried to wash out the blood that had run down my neck. It would have to do, I thought. No one really cares how their bookmaker dresses. The pinkish shirt would go well with the green-stained knees of my trousers.

Breakfast was also provided by my hosts.

“We are required to feed the drunks before their court appearances so I ordered you a breakfast too,” said the 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.

Thankfully, neither Luca, Betsy, Larry nor anyone else seemed to connect the murder in the parking lot with my black eye, and the novelty of it slowly wore off as the afternoon’s sport progressed.

“Was it just us or was the Internet down for everyone?” I asked Luca during a lull after the third race.

“What?” he said, busy with his keyboard.

“Yesterday. For the last,” I said. “Was it just us or everyone?”

“Oh,” he said. “It seems the whole system was down for nearly five minutes. And you know what else was funny?”

“What?” I asked.

“The phones were off too.”

“Which phones?” I asked.

“Mobiles,” he said. “All of them. Every network. Nothing.”

“But that’s impossible,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “But it happened. Everyone I spoke to said their phones wouldn’t work for about five minutes. No signal, they said. The boys from the big outfits were going nuts.”

By “the big outfits,” Luca meant the four or five large companies that ran strings of betting shops across the country. Each company had a man or two at the races who would bet for them with the on-course bookmakers to affect the starting prices.

The odds offered by the racetrack bookmakers often change before the race starts. If a horse is heavily backed, they will shorten its odds and offer better prices on the other horses to compensate. The official “Starting Price” was an approximate average of the prices offered on the bookmakers’ boards on the racetrack just as the race starts.

Big winning bets in High Street betting shops are nearly always paid on the official starting price, so, if someone loads money on a horse in their local betting shop, the company arranges for money to be bet on that horse with the racetrack bookmakers so that the odds on their boards drop and consequently the official starting price will be shorter.

For example, if a betting shop has taken a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of bets on a horse priced at ten-to-one, they stand to lose a million pounds if it wins. So the company will simply have its staff at the racetrack bet cash on that horse with the bookmakers, who will then shorten its odds. If the starting price drops to, say, five-to-one and it wins, the betting shop will only have to pay out half what it would otherwise have done.

If both the Internet and the telephones were not working for the five minutes before the race, then the betting shop companies would have had no way of getting the message to their staff to make the bets and change the starting prices.

“Any word on anyone being caught out?” I asked Luca.

“No, nothing,” he said. “Quiet as a whisper.”

A customer thrust a twenty-pound note at me, and I gratefully relieved him of it in exchange for a slip from the printer.

“Either someone doesn’t want to admit it,” I said, “or it was just a simple, accidental glitch in the systems.”

Word usually went around pretty quickly if a big company believed they had been “done.” They typically moaned about it ad nauseam and refused to pay out. Gambling wins, as well as losses, were notoriously difficult to pursue through the courts. The big boys believed that it was their God-given right to control the starting prices, and if someone managed to get one over on them, it was unfair. Most others believed that what was really unfair was how the major bookmaking chains could change the on-course prices so easily, often with only a very few of the many thousands of pounds that were bet across the counters in their High Street shops.

I shrugged my shoulders and took a bet off another customer. Luca pushed the keys on his computer, and out popped the ticket from the printer.

“At least our computer and printer didn’t go off as well,” I said to him over my shoulder.

“Well, they wouldn’t,” he said confidently. “Unless the battery went flat.”

Our system, like every other bookmaker’s, was powered by a twelve-volt car battery hidden away under the platforms we stood on. The batteries were provided freshly charged each day by the racetrack’s technology company, which also provided the Internet access-for a fee, of course. The same battery also powered the red-light-emitting diodes that showed the horses’ names and prices on our board. If the battery went flat, we would soon know about it. Our lights would go out first.

The lights stayed on, and we recouped most of our losses from the previous day as favorites were beaten in each of the first five races. I was beginning even to enjoy the day when Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn pitched up in front of me with DC Walton in tow.

“Making a bet, Chief Inspector?” I asked with a smile, looking down at him from my lofty position.

He didn’t appear amused. “We need to talk,” he said. “Now.”

“Can’t it wait?” I said. “I’m busy.”

“No,” he said crossly. “I need to ask you some more questions, now.” He emphasized the final word so sharply that Betsy looked questioningly at me.

I smiled at her. “Can you hold the fort for five minutes?”

“Sure, no problem,” she said.

I stepped down and moved away with the policemen to a quieter spot on the grass.

“Now, what’s so bloody urgent?” I said, deciding not to go on the defensive. “I’ve got a business to manage.”

“And I’ve got a murder investigation to run,” he replied unapologetically. “May I remind you, Mr. Talbot, that you remain under caution and that anything you say will be recorded.”

“Where’s your machine, then?” I asked.

“DC Walton will write down what is said.”

DC Walton was already writing.

“If you prefer,” he said, knowing I wouldn’t,“you can accompany us to the police station and be formally interviewed there.”

“Here is fine,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said almost smugly. “Now, Mr. Talbot, have you anything to add to your account of the incident in the parking lot last evening that resulted in the death of a man?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“And you still believe that the man killed was your father?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I do.”

“It seems you may be right,” he said slowly. “The DNA analysis appears to suggest that you and the deceased were closely related. It’s by no means a hundred percent certain, but it would be more than enough to settle a paternity case.”

So at least my father had been truthful about that.

“However,” he said,“the DNA results have thrown up something else.” He paused for effect. “Your father was still wanted for murder, from thirty-six years ago.”

“What?” I said, unable to properly take it in. “Are you sure?”

“Completely sure,” he said. “The DNA match is one hundred percent.”

“But who did he murder?” I asked, almost as if in a trance.

“Patricia Jane Talbot. His wife.”

My mother.