by Dick Francis
“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.
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 was not the right one. People who work every day with horses see them as individuals with different features and characteristics rather than just as horses. It has often been said that every great trainer needs to know his horses’ characters better than he knows those of his own family. Lester Piggott was said to be able to recognize any horse he had ridden even when it was walking away from him in a rainstorm.
Just as everyone would realize pretty quickly, if not immediately, that a celebrity look-alike was not the real thing, so too would racing folk easily spot a ringer, unless it was far removed from its normal environment. And it was too much to expect that a secret conspiracy of even a handful of people would hold for very long.
So what real good were the rewritable identification RFIDs?
I finally went to sleep, still trying to work out the conundrum.
I was not sure what the noise was that woke me, but one moment I’d been fast asleep, the next I was fully conscious in the dark and knowing that something wasn’t quite right.
I listened intently, lying perfectly still on my back and keeping my breathing very quiet and shallow.
As usual in the summer, I had left open one of my bedroom windows for ventilation. But I could hear nothing out of the ordinary from outside the house. Nothing except for the breeze, which rustled the leaves of the beech tree by the road, and the occasional hum of a distant car on Abbey Hill.
I had begun to think I must have been wrong when I plainly heard the sound again. It was muffled slightly by the closed bedroom door, but I knew immediately what it was. Someone was downstairs, and he was opening the kitchen cabinets. The cabinet doors were held shut by little magnetic catches. The sound I had heard was the noise made when one of the catches was opened.
I lay there wondering what I should do.
Detective Sergeant Murray had warned me that witnesses to murder were an endangered species, and now I began to wish I had taken his warning a bit more seriously.
Was the person downstairs intent on doing me harm or was he happy to go on exploring while leaving me to sleep?
The problem was that I didn’t really imagine my intruder was searching through my kitchen cabinets for something with which to make himself a cup of tea or coffee. He would be after my father’s rucksack and its hidden contents, and they were not downstairs in the kitchen but deep in the recesses of my wardrobe, up here with me in my bedroom. It would only be a matter of time before he would have to come upstairs, and then he surely would know that I must be awake.
I thought about making lots of noise, stamping my way down the stairs and demanding to know who was in my house, in the hope that he might be frightened away. But then I remembered the two stab wounds that had killed my father. Was my visitor the shifty-eyed man from the Ascot parking lot, and did he have his twelve-centimeter-long blade with him ready to turn my guts into mincemeat as well?
Ever so quietly, I stretched out my hand towards the telephone that sat on my bedside table, intending to call the police. I decided it was better to be still alive, even if it did mean I would have the difficult task of explaining why there was thirty thousand pounds’ worth of someone else’s cash in my wardrobe. Much be
tter, I thought, than drowning in my own blood.
But there was no dial tone when I lifted the receiver. My guest downstairs must have seen to that.
And, as always, I had left my mobile in the car.
What, I wondered, was plan C?
There was nothing to be gained from simply lying there in bed and waiting for him to come up and plunge his knife into my body. I was sure he wouldn’t just go away when he failed to find what he had come for downstairs. Clearly, he would rather have found the booty and departed silently, leaving me blissfully asleep, or else he would have come up and dealt with me first. But I was under no illusion that he would give up before he had searched everywhere, whether or not I was wide awake or fast asleep, or very dead.
It wasn’t that dying particularly frightened me. But I didn’t really want to go yet, not when Sophie was making such good progress. And not now that I knew I had sisters to meet in Australia. And particularly not before I had discovered what this was all about. I had always felt rather sorry for soldiers who died in wars, not only because they were dead but because they would never know who won or if their sacrifice had been worth it.
Maybe I just wanted to die in my own time, not at someone else’s wish and whim.
I looked around in the dim luminosity that filtered through the curtains from the ambient streetlight glow outside. Sadly, my bedroom wasn’t very well equipped with any form of handy weapon.
I gently levered myself out of bed and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts. I might not be able to prevent myself being killed, but I was determined that I would not be found in a state of total undress.
Perhaps I should just throw the money and the other things down the stairs and let my visitor take them away. Anything to stop him coming up to get them himself, with murder in mind.
I silently crossed the room to the wardrobe, but before I had a chance to open it I heard the third tread of the staircase creak. I had been meaning to fix that step for years but couldn’t be bothered to lift all the carpet. I had become so obsessed with the creak that I missed it out, always taking two steps together at that point. The wear of the carpet there—or, rather, the lack of it—was even becoming noticeable against the others.
