“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.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I hadn’t seen my father for thirty-six years until the day he died.”
“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.