I found out that it hadn’t only been my mother and father who were staying in Paignton at the time of Tricia’s death. Both my grandparents had been with them, and I had been there as well. It seemed that the holiday in Devon had been my father’s idea, an attempt to make things better amongst them all, but it had actually made them much worse.
“Peter and Tricia argued all the time,” my grandmother said, placing her head to one side and closing her eyes. “On and on, they went. They physically fought more than once. Peter slapped her, and she scratched his face.”
Hence the traces of my father’s skin and DNA under Tricia’s fingernails, I thought. The DNA the police had found and wrongly believed was her killer’s.
“Then she told him that her baby wasn’t his,” Nanna said. “She told him that it was your grandfather’s baby. He went completely wild.”
“Peter went wild?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “But Teddy went wild as well, because she threatened to tell everyone and to get it in the newspapers. She said he would lose his bookmaker’s license.”
I wasn’t sure if that was actually true, but it would have been enough to frighten my grandfather.
“But was the baby Tricia was carrying really Grandpa’s child?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at me again, “I believe it was.”
“But are you certain?” I pressed her.
“Yes,” she said. “I had suspected it even before she said anything. I’d been telling Teddy over and over for months that we would be better off without her round, but he wouldn’t have it. He thought he was in love with her. Then the morning after Tricia tells us that he’s the father of the baby, he walks into the hotel where we were staying and tells me it’s finished between them. Then he calmly tells me that he’s strangled the little bitch.”
I stared at her almost in disbelief.
“But why did my father run away if he hadn’t killed her?”
“Because I told him to,” she said quite matter-of-factly, as if it was the most common of things to do.
“But why?” I asked her.
“So that Teddy wouldn’t get arrested for murder.”
“But why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Because then we would have been ruined,” she said, as if it was obvious. “What would I have lived on with your grandfather in jail?”
The faithful, practical, scheming wife, I thought. She had not only seen no need to go to the police and repeat what her husband had said about strangling his daughter-in-law, she had even sent away her only son in the full knowledge that he would be blamed for the killing, simply to protect her income.
Perhaps strangling the “little bitch” had been her idea too. Was that what she had meant Teddy to do by continually saying they would be better off without her around? Had my grandfather finally got the message?
And my father had gone to the other side of the world, banished forever by his domineering mother in order to save her tyrannical husband from justice. No wonder he hadn’t asked after her when he had spoken to me at Ascot.
“How about me?” I said with passion. “Why didn’t my father take me with him?”
“He wanted to,” she said. “But I told him he couldn’t. I said that I would look after the child. He tried to say that he would come back for you, but I told him to go and start somewhere else and forget that you ever existed. It was for the best.”
“Not for me,” I said with barely contained fury.
“Oh yes. It was the best for all of us.” She said it with unshakable conviction. “And I decided that it was also the best for me.”
It was like a knife to my heart. How could this woman have sent my father out of my life like that? He had done nothing to deserve it. And how could she have then kept silent about it for so long? Just because she thought it was the best for her.
I had sat in the chapel of Slough Crematorium only the previous afternoon with my head bursting with anger. Now I felt totally bereft. I had been cheated of my right to grieve properly for my father, and I further believed that I had been cheated out of my rightful life.
I stood up. I didn’t want to hear any more. I looked down at her, this frail demented eighty-year-old woman whose decisions had destroyed so much.
She, and my grandfather, had together raised me from babyhood into adult life in a stable home, even if it had not been a particularly happy one for me. I had loved them, trusted them and believed what they had told me as being the truth, only for it now to emerge as a tangled web of lies and deception.
I walked to the door without turning back and I went away.
I would never visit her again.
21
I went straight from the nursing home to Leicester racetrack, but, afterwards, I couldn’t recall a single moment of the journey. My mind had been too preoccupied trying to come to terms with what I’d been told.
As I had so hoped, I was, after all, not the son of a murderer. But I was the grandson of one. I had stood alongside my grandfather on racetracks for all those years as his assistant, unaware of the dreadful secret he and my grandmother had concealed. Far from being the ones who had stepped in and cared for me in my time of need, they had been the very architects of my misery.
Automatically, as if on autopilot, I parked the Volvo and began to unload the equipment. I pulled out our odds board with TRUST TEDDY TALBOT emblazoned across the top. I stopped unloading and looked at it. I would have laughed if I didn’t feel so much like crying. Trust Teddy Talbot to ruin your life.
Luca and Duggie were waiting for me as I pulled the equipment trolley into the betting ring.
“How did you get on yesterday?” I asked. “With the delinquents?”
“Great,” said Luca. “We’re all set.”
“Do you think they will do it right?” I asked.
“Should do,” said Duggie. “And they’re not all delinquents.”
I smiled at him. I suppose I was pleased that he was standing up for his friends.
“And besides,” he said, “I told them you were a mean bastard and would come looking for them in the night if they spent your money on drugs.”
I stared at him, and he simply smiled back at me. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
“Good,” I said finally.“Let’s hope the horses are not all withdrawn at the overnight declarations stage.”
“How about you?” Luca asked as we set up our pitch. “Did you have a good day?”
“No,” I said without clarification.
“Not Sophie?” he asked with concern.
“No,” I said. “Sophie’s doing well. I was just dealing with some other family business. Don’t worry about it.”
He looked at me with questioning eyes, but I ignored him.
“I’ve decided that we are going to change our name,” I announced. “From today, we shall be known as ‘Talbot and Mandini.’”
I smiled at Luca, and he smiled back.
“But we haven’t done the partnership papers yet,” he said.
“I don’t care,” I said. “If you’re still up for it, then so am I.”
“Sure,” he said with real pleasure showing on his face.
“How about ‘Talbot, Mandini and Masters’?” said Duggie, joining in the fun.
“Don’t push your luck, young Douglas,” I said. “You’re still on probation, remember?”
“Only until Monday,” he said with a pained expression.
“That will be up to me,” I said. “And Luca,” I added quickly, remembering my new position as partner rather than sole owner.