by Dick Francis
Or, in laymen’s terms, my father had died from being stabbed twice in his stomach with a knife. The wounds had caused his lungs to be full of blood rather than air, so he had suffocated to death.
My father had, in fact, died due to a lack of oxygenated blood to his brain.
Just as my mother had. But for different reasons.
I was called by the coroner to give evidence of identification. The letter of summons had indeed been in the pile of mail I had opened on Saturday evening. Amongst other things, it spelt out the dire consequences of my failure to attend the court proceedings.
I was asked by the court usher to state my full name and address, and then to hold a Bible in my right hand. I read the Coroner’s Court oath from a card. “I swear by Almighty God, that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth and nothing but the truth.”
“You are the deceased’s son?” asked the coroner. He was a small, balding man, the meager amount of hair that he did retain being combed right over the top of his head. Throughout the proceedings, he had been writing copious notes in a spiral-bound notebook, and he now looked expectantly at me over a pair of half-moon glasses.
“Yes,” I said. I was standing in the witness-box of the court.
“What was your father’s full name?” he asked.
“Peter James Talbot,” I said.
“And his date of birth?”
I gave it. I knew every detail of my father’s birth certificate as well as I knew my own. The coroner wrote it down in his notebook.
“And his last permanent address?” he asked, not looking up.
I pulled the photocopy of the driver’s license from my pocket and consulted it. “He lived at 312 Macpherson Street, Carlton North, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia,” I said.
“And when did you last see your father alive?” he asked.
“As he was lifted into the ambulance at Ascot racetrack,” I said.
He wrote furiously in his notebook.
“So you were present at the time of the assault?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He wrote it down.
“Was that when your eye was injured?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said again.
The coroner seemed to glance over at Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, who was sitting on a bench to his right.
“Are the police aware of your presence at the time of the assault?” the coroner asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded, as if he had done his bit for the investigation, and wrote something down in his notebook.
“Did you observe the body of the deceased after death at Wexham Park Hospital?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said once more.
“Can you swear to the court—and I remind you, Mr. Talbot, that you are under oath—that the body you observed at that time was that of your father?”
“I believe it was my father, yes,” I said.
The coroner stopped writing his notes and looked up at me.
“That doesn’t sound very convincing, Mr. Talbot,” he said.
“Until the day of his death,” I said, “I hadn’t seen my father, or even known of his existence, for the past thirty-six years.”
The coroner put down his pen.
“And how old are you, Mr. Talbot?” he asked.
“Thirty-seven,” I said.
“Then how can you believe that the deceased was your father if you haven’t seen him since you were one year old?”
“He told me so,” I said.
The coroner appeared amazed.
“And you took his word for it?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, “I did. We had been speaking about family matters for some time before the attack on us in the Ascot parking lot, and I became convinced that, indeed, he was my father as he had claimed. In addition, I was informed by the police last Thursday that DNA analysis had confirmed the fact.”
“Ah,” he said. He turned towards Chief Inspector Llewellyn. “Is this so, Chief Inspector?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, standing up. “The DNA indicated that Mr. Talbot here and the deceased were very closely related. Almost certainly father and son.”
I briefly wondered why the police had not informed the coroner’s office of the DNA results beforehand. It might have saved me from even attending.
The coroner wrote furiously for about a minute in his notebook before looking up at me. “Thank you, Mr. Talbot, that will be all.”
Nothing about Alan Charles Grady, and, less surprisingly, nothing about Willem Van Buren. Identification of the deceased had been formally established as Peter James Talbot.
“May I arrange a funeral?” I asked the coroner.
He again turned towards the chief inspector. “Do the police have any objection to an order being issued?”
Chief Inspector Llewellyn stood up. “At this time, sir,” he said, “we would prefer it if the body would remain available for further post-mortem inspection.”
“And why is that?” the coroner asked him.
“We have reason to believe, sir, that the deceased may have been connected with other past crimes, and we may wish to perform further DNA testing.”
“Do the necessary samples not already exist?” the coroner asked him.
“We may have the need to gather more,” said the detective chief inspector.
“Very well,” said the coroner. He turned back to me. “Sorry, Mr. Talbot, I will not issue a burial order at this time. You may reapply to my office in one week’s time.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I looked at the detective chief inspector with renewed loathing. I was sure he had objected to me organizing a funeral only to irritate me.
“This inquest is adjourned,” said the coroner. “Next case, please.”
Those of us only concerned with the death of the now formally identified Peter James Talbot stood up and filed out of the court. In addition to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn and myself, there was Detective Sergeant Murray, three other men and a young woman who all made their way ahead of me from the courtroom into the lobby. I was pleased to note that I couldn’t see the shifty-eyed man from the parking lot and Sussex Gardens amongst them, not that I really expected him to be. It would surely have been far too dangerous for him to appear as I might have recognized him and told the police.
However, I was rather concerned that one of these four strangers might have been sent by him to gather information, so I rushed out to get a better look at them, and to see what they were doing.
One of the men and the young woman were standing with Chief Inspector Llewellyn and appeared to be asking him some questions, one with a notebook, the other with a handheld recorder. Reporters, I thought. One of the other two men was chatting with Sergeant Murray, but I couldn’t see the fourth anywhere in the lobby. I rushed out of the building, but he had seemingly disappeared completely. I stood in the street, turning around and around looking for him, but he’d gone.
I went back up the steps and into the building.
Both the reporters saw me at the same instant and hurried across.
“Do you know why your father was killed?” asked the young woman, beating the man to it by a short head.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
She ignored my question. “Did you see the person who was responsible for his death?” she asked, thrusting her recording device into my face.
“No,” I said.
“Would you recognize the killer again?” asked the man, forcing his way in front of me and elbowing the woman to the side.
“No,” I said, hoping that he would print the answer so the killer would read it.
“Did he do that to your eye?” the young woman asked, trying to push her way back in front of me.
“Yes,” I said. “He kicked me. That’s why I was unable to see the person responsible, or indeed anything else that happened.”
“But why was he killed?” implored the man.
“Why not?” the young woman asked almost accusingly.
“He emigrated to Australia when I was one,” I said, “and my mother and I didn’t go with him.”
They suddenly seemed to lose interest in me. Maybe they could tell that I wasn’t going to be much help to them.
What they really should have asked me was why my mother hadn’t immigrated to Australia with my father. The answer was because she’d been murdered by him. Not that I’d have told them.
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 cheerf
ul-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.”