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.