It was a way of life the young Bill Turpin was naturally expected to follow, and did as surely as day followed night.
Bill was born just late enough to escape service in the First World War, but two of his elder brothers died in the trenches. Bill could still remember the day his family learned that his brother Edgar had died.
His father, a quiet, undemonstrative Devonian, had wrapped his strong brown arms around his sole surviving son and held him tight.
‘They’ll take you away over my dead body, son,’ he had muttered. ‘I’ll swing before I lose another lad in the trenches.’
That war ended in time to save Bill Turpin. But it seemed he was destined to suffer at the hands of warring nations. In 1933 he married. He was twenty-nine years old. By local standards then he had taken his time in settling down. When he did wed he was sure as eggs were eggs that curly-haired Dorothy, twenty-year-old daughter of the village butcher, was the girl for him. Life seemed straightforward. It did not occur to Bill or his father, growing old now, but still fishing, that the world would be crazy enough to launch itself into another mighty bloodbath.
Bill’s only sadness at that time was that he and Dorothy had no children. Then just as once again a world war was looming, the miracle happened. Dorothy found she was pregnant and gave birth to twin girls. The fisherman’s happiness was complete. When his call-up finally came — he was pushing forty but the navy needed his seaman’s knowledge and his boat — he was so convinced of his own strength and powers of survival that he saw the war as just a brief interval in his domestic contentment.
And he felt that in many ways he was a lucky man. The government commandeered his solid wooden fishing boat to use as a minesweeper to detect the German acoustic mines which were detonated only by metal-hulled ships. Bill was trained as a naval officer to skipper his own vessel. There was security for him in that. He was fighting on his own territory, after all.
Then came the telegram telling him his wife and daughters were dead. A crippled German bomber had emptied its load over Brinton before crashing into the sea. A freak accident. The pilot had ditched the bombs to lighten his aircraft. He scored a direct random hit on the cottage where Bill had been born and where he and his wife had made their home with his widowed father. The whole family were asleep in bed when the bomb dropped. Grandfather, mother, and baby daughters died instantly.
Bill Turpin’s heart also died that day. He signed his fishing boat over to the navy and volunteered for all the toughest jobs going, anywhere and everywhere his increasingly grateful chiefs wanted to send him. They assigned him to a special operations unit. Bill behaved as if he had a death wish, and it was against the odds that he survived. In the years to come he never spoke of his war days, but he returned in 1945 a different man to the gentle good-humoured Bill of pre-war days.
He soon surprised his old North Devon friends by buying, outright, a little house just out of Pelham Bay, an isolated stone-built cottage carved into the cliffside and with sweeping views out to sea. Bill explained that business ventures during the war had made him a few bob, and now he wanted to invest it in a new life. But how an impecunious fisherman had come to make the kind of money he now seemed to have was the subject of much speculation in the area.
Soon after the war there had been a huge robbery at the grand old Exmoor house owned by the then Earl of Lynmouth. Art treasures worth millions had allegedly been stolen, and Lord Lynmouth killed. Few could remember the details, but Bill had been some kind of a suspect for a bit. Nothing came of it, of course, and the police had apparently investigated him only briefly, yet the rumours stuck around for generations and grew with the passage of time — as rumours are wont to do. Whenever there was a major crime anywhere in Britain, people in North Devon were inclined to mention the name of Bill Turpin. If you kept your ear to the ground in the pubs of Pelham Bay or Durraton you would hear whispers about old Bill being the brains, the muscle, or even the getaway driver — something never believed by anybody who had ever seen him drive — for everything from The Great Train Robbery to the famous escape of Mad Axeman Frank Mitchell from Dartmoor prison.
Mark Piddle and a generation of keen young reporters before him had all heard the gossip, and attempted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to unearth the hidden truth — assuming there was one. But far from being revealed as a closet master criminal, if Bill Turpin had anything at all to hide, his tracks were superbly well covered. Consistent lack of success inevitably led to loss of interest for Mark, as it had to the other would-be Carl Bernsteins before him. None of them were ever known to have found out anything worth a line anywhere.
Bill became regarded as a kind of mystery man, which he seemed almost to encourage and enjoy. Yet there appeared to be no mystery about his love life. Dorothy had indeed been the girl for him. The only girl. There was to be no other woman ever for Bill Turpin. He lived quietly for a while in his little house, and then gradually started to capitalise on the holiday trade which was on the up and up in Pelham Bay.
He would never fish again — that was part of his other life — but he seemed to have the knack of spotting what holidaymakers wanted and making cash from it. He had brought money back from the war all right, and he knew how to invest it in a way of life he understood. He remained a shadowy figure to the rest of Pelham Bay, a man nursing a terminally broken heart, asking for help from nobody, and accepting none. He appeared to have no friends and sought none. He was the sole survivor of his immediate family. A cousin had sought him out soon after the war and been sent packing. Bill Turpin wanted nobody close to him, nobody knowing his business — and nobody did.
He had come back from the war looking twenty years older than when he had left — yet the twenty-five years since then had barely altered him. Perhaps his back was a little more bent, but in 1970 Bill was still fit and strong in a slow sort of way. His eyes were a clear piercing blue and looked right through you. His head was bald, but so it had been when he came home in 1946, the crown of his head rubbed smooth by his tin helmet. The little hair left had whitened with the years, and his face appeared more leathery. That was all. Bill’s early life as a fisherman had already engraved his skin with deeply etched creases.
He had become a landmark in Pelham Bay as the boss of a selection of seaside tourist-traps. He did not care how he looked or what people thought of him.
Jip, his black labrador-collie cross, followed Bill everywhere, walking at the same ponderous pace just a foot or so from her master’s heels. Occasionally Bill would look down at the devoted dog and curse her in a mumbled growl.
Winter and summer he wore a grimy trilby hat, the brim turned down all the way round, and it was his habit to wear the hat indoors and out. In the summer the trilby protected his bald head from the sun. Once or twice Bill had suffered a sunburned head. Nowadays the trilby was never removed. The deckchair boys would joke about how Bill must look standing naked. His face and body weathered ebony. The top of his head and his legs startling white.
In winter he wore shirts with frayed collars beneath heavy cardigans and a big tweed overcoat with the collar turned up. The temperature of the day made little difference. He would don his thick winter layers and his heavy lace-up boots in early October, and stick to the overcoat and cardigans, however mild the climate, until shortly after the spring bank holiday. Then he would strip down to his baggy grey flannels, and, no matter how cold it might be, was rarely seen to put on a shirt, never mind a coat, until October.