Occasionally when it rained he would unearth the ageing military riding mac which he had picked up somewhere on his travels during the war.
‘They don’t make coats like this any more,’ he would sigh, struggling into the stiff raincoat without bothering with a shirt beneath. The buckles were corroded and jammed almost solid, but Bill battled with them relentlessly. Then he would turn up the high collar and happily face any deluge, although, in reality, the old coat’s waterproofing power must have been long worn out.
Bill’s life appeared to be devoted to the making of money, and spending was no real part of it. He had one good suit, although it did smell of mothballs, and a fairly respectable car, a five-year-old Morris 1300. And once a week in the winter he would spruce himself up in the dark grey suit, dress in the only shirt he possessed without a frayed collar, select one of half a dozen unexciting ties in dark blues and reds, and drive to market in Durraton.
That was Bill’s big outing. He would buy all the meat and vegetables he needed for the following week, chat to the few tradesmen he knew, and spend the lunchtime in one of the market pubs playing euchre with dominoes. He enjoyed his market day outing every Tuesday, and would regularly down five or six pints of strong bitter. Then, as Tuesday was the only day of the week he ever had a drink, he would drive sedately but rather unsteadily home. You could get away with it in those days.
In the summer, of course, there was no market-day excursion. Bill stayed steadily at his post, raking in the tourists’ cash, wandering contentedly among his money traps. There was the giant slide in the fairground. At two shillings for as many goes as you like, in half a season the huge, ugly, scaffolding-like contraption would have already paid for itself many times over.
Then there was the bob-a-ride plastic elephant outside the public lavatory by the south-side putting green, and the belly boards and Malibu boards which Bill rented out from the deckchair stand. The slot machine paradise of Penny Parade, where nothing cost a penny any more, remained probably the most successful money-spinner of them all.
Bill Turpin could afford his deceptively lazy air. The seaside life brought him in a small fortune every summer. In the winter he could put his feet up while inventing new ways of emptying the tourist purse. Not so long ago, visitors to Penny Parade would have been happy with a few fruit machines, a couple of penny rollers, an automatic shooting range, What the Butler Saw, and an elderly football table. By 1970 they were already demanding electronic bingo and elaborate light-flashing sensation instead of those simple golden-oldie games of carefully rigged chance. Whatever the customers called for, Bill Turpin gave them. And they paid for it over and over again.
So the cash flowed on this particular Sunday in drought-hit Britain. It was a magical day of bright blue skies and wispy white clouds and the crowds swarmed to the seaside in the hope of finding a Spanish sun beating down on English sand. But dear old Pelham Bay did not have a reputation for being the bleakest beach in North Devon for nothing. The wind was sending a sandstorm along the beach and whistling up the slipway which separates the pebble ridge stretching untidily northwards from the grand old sea wall to the south.
By midday the crowds were streaming landward of the iron-grey pebble ridge to shelter from the tornado that in other seaside towns would have been a gentle breeze. They dug hollows in the pebbles on the burrows side of the ridge and stretched their bodies agonisingly over the stones. Ultimately the discomfort of their angular beds beneath, and the burning of the sun above given a knife edge by the wind from which there was never a true hiding place, drove them to seek other amusement. And when they surfaced from their pebble pits, the holiday hordes, skins reddened and blotchy now, strolled up and down the seafront determined to enjoy themselves regardless.
With the true resolution of the British holidaymaker, they tucked into the local gastronomic delicacies, some not so delicate. The menu was varied: homemade ice cream, the artificial looking whip kings and pink-and-green rainbow-striped concoctions of the mass-produced sort, synthetic hot dogs, takeaway chow mein and chop suey, Wimpy-burgers, fish and chips in cardboard cartons, bottled cockles and mussels pretending to be fresh, toffee apples, lukewarm tea in paper cups, fizzy pop, candy floss, and drinks on a stick.
Bill leaned with apparent idleness on the wall gazing at something floating in the sea. Or was there anything, right out across the bay beyond the rocks? There was just a speck in the distance. Bill’s eyes might be tired but when he stared out to sea he could spot what others missed: the way the tip of a wave curled, a patch of dark water maybe, or the whirl of a current. All clues of some kind to a true seaman.
His face was screwed up tight against the bright light of midday glare.
‘Could be nought,’ he muttered.
He swung slowly away from the wall and the sea beyond and strolled across the promenade to his deckchair stand.
Johnny Cooke was over by the deckchairs watching old Bill through narrowed eyes. You could see his brain turning over, Johnny reckoned. What was he thinking, what was he plotting, what was he remembering as he stood there? Was he just counting his money in his head? That was what they all said, in Pelham Bay, and as one of Bill Turpin’s deckchair lads Johnny had plenty of opportunity to indulge in the fruitless pursuit of trying to read his boss’s mind. He could sense Bill’s ice cool gaze swinging towards him. Boring into him. Johnny smartly turned his back and returned to his other favourite pastime of looking the grockles up and down. Grockles, the holidaymakers who annually invaded his beautiful county, responsible for turning lovely seaside spots like Pelham Bay into glorified shanty towns. Them and the greed they inspired.
A short, fat man, wearing the kind of Bermuda shorts that had been in fashion five years earlier, was struggling up the slipway. Behind him three small children were squabbling noisily, one in tears.
‘Go on, go on, here’s the money. Get yourself an ice cream and shut up, for Gawd’s sake,’ the man shouted.
It was just a typical Sunday in Pelham Bay. The smell of fish and chips and hot-dog onions drowned the tang of the sea. The rattle of the fruit machines, the clamour of the fairground, the everlasting hubbub of family quarrels and playing children, could all be heard loud and clear above the roar of the waves.
A couple of hours or more passed routinely. The sun, not quite so burning hot now, had moved around in the sky and shone on Johnny again. He basked in its gentler warmth. He felt drowsy.
But suddenly he was startled out of his pleasant half-wakefulness by a piercing scream which rose above the holiday clamour and shattered his fleeting sense of peace forever. It was unnaturally high, a scream of almost inhuman shock and fear.
Johnny jumped to his feet, no laziness about him now, and like all the holidaymakers around him, ran to the sea wall and peered in the direction of the screaming.
It was Jenny Stone he could hear. Jenny Stone overcome with shock, yelling her heart out.
Five
Mark Piddle had arrived at the murder scene little more than a couple of hours after Jenny’s shock discovery. Jim Sykes had got the word long before the news had been officially released. You had to hand it to the old goat, thought Mark grudgingly. And he would have been even quicker if he hadn’t stayed at home after the phone call to give Irene one final seeing to. Mind you, that hadn’t taken long. He roared the Cooper into the heart of Pelham Bay, and grinned to himself. Not a bad life...