The tide was out, revealing a wide expanse of red sand crisscrossed with multiple ridged patterns and grooves produced by the outgoing water. I strode purposefully southwards towards Paignton Pier, past the imposing gray seawall of the Redcliffe Hotel, carrying my shoes and digging my bare toes into the sand. At one point, I stopped and looked behind me at the line of footprints I had created in the soft surface.

I couldn’t remember when I had last left footprints on a seashore. My grandparents had taken me very occasionally to the sea when I had been small, but we had never sat or walked on the beach. During the war, my grandfather had been posted to North Africa and had spent two years fighting his way back and forth across the Egyptian desert. As a result, he had developed an aversion to any form of sand.

“Bloody stuff gets everywhere,” he used to say, so under no circumstances did we ever go near it. Once or twice, he had been cajoled by my grandmother into sitting on the pebbles at Brighton while I had played in the water on day trips from our home in Surrey, but we had never holidayed at the seaside. In fact, thinking back, we had rarely holidayed anywhere. To my grandfather, going to the races every day was holiday enough, in spite of it being his job.

Paignton Pier, like every other pier at seaside resorts around the country, had been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century to allow pleasure steamers to dock when the tide was out and the harbor was dry. Steamers that would disgorge their passengers to indulge in the new health fashion of the time, of bathing year-round in salt water. It was testament to the ability of the Victorian engineers that the majority of the piers still existed long past the time when most folk had decided that immersing themselves in the freezing sea did their health more harm than good.

But the seaside piers had survived because they had been adapted as centers of entertainment. Paignton Pier was no exception, and I could see that amusement arcades had been built over much of its length.

I stood on the beach in the shadow of the pier and speculated again about what had been done right here to my mother. I also wondered where I had been at the time and whether I had been with my parents here in Paignton that fateful day. Had I been here before, in this very spot beneath the pier, as a fifteen-month-old toddler? Indeed, was I here when she’d died?

There was nothing much to see. I hadn’t expected there to be. Perhaps I was foolish to have come, and the image of where my mother had met her grisly end would haunt me forever. But something in me had needed to visit this place.

I pulled my wallet out of my trouser pocket and extracted the creased picture of my parents taken at Blackpool. All my life I had looked at that picture and longed to be able to be with my father. It was his image that had dominated my existence rather than that of my mother. The grandparents who had raised me had been my father’s family, not my mother’s, and somehow my paternal loss had always been the greater for me.

Now I studied her image as if I hadn’t really looked at it closely before. I stood there and cried for her loss and for the violent fate that had befallen my teenage mother in this place.

“You all right, boy?” said a voice behind me.

I turned around.A man with white hair and tanned skin, wearing a faded blue sweatshirt and baggy fawn shorts, was leaning on one of the pier supports.

“Fine,” I croaked, wiping tears from my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.

“We could see you from my place,” said the man, pointing at a cream-painted refreshments hut standing close to the pier. “We’re setting up. Do you fancy a cuppa?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Come on, then,” he said. “On the house.”

“Thank you,” I said again, and we walked together over to his hut.

“He’s all right, Mum,” the man shouted as we approached. He turned to me. “My missus thought you looked like you were going to do yourself in,” he said. “You know, wade out to sea and never come back.”

“Nothing like that,” I said, giving him a smile. “I assure you.”

He handed me a large white cup of milky tea and took another for himself from the cheerful-looking little lady behind the counter.

“Sugar?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said, taking a welcome sip of the steaming brown liquid. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“We need it to last, though,” he said. “July and August are our really busy times. That’s when the families come. Mostly just a bunch of old-age pensioners, OAPs, in June. Lots of pots of tea and the occasional ice cream, but very few burgers. We need the sun to shine all summer if we’re going to survive.”

“Are you open all year round?” I asked.

“No chance,” he said. “May to September, if we’re lucky. I’m usually a builder’s laborer in the winter. If there’s any work, that is. Not looking good this year with the economy going down the bloody tubes. At least most folk aren’t going abroad for their holidays, eh? Not with the pound so low. Too expensive.”

We stood together for a moment silently drinking our tea.

“I must get on,” said the man. “Can’t stand here all day. I also run the pedalos and the windsurfers, and they won’t get themselves out, now will they?”

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

He looked at my dark trousers and my white shirt.

“They’ll clean,” I said to him.

He looked up at my face and smiled. “Let’s get on, then.”

“Ned Talbot,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Hugh Hanson,” he said, shaking it.

“Right, then, Hugh,” I said. “Where are these pedalos?”

I spent most of the next hour helping to pull pedal boats and windsurfers out of two great big steel ship’s containers, lining them up on the beach ready for rent.

My trousers had a few oily marks on them from the pedal mechanisms and my white shirt had long ago lost its sharp creases by the time Hugh and I went back to the cream-painted hut for another cup of tea.

“Proper job,” he said, grinning broadly. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I replied, grinning back. “Best bereavement therapy I’ve ever known.”

“Bereavement?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“Yes,” I said. “My mother.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “When did she die?”

“Thirty-six years ago,” I said.

He was slightly taken aback, which I suppose was fair enough.

“Long time to grieve.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But I only found out where she died yesterday.”

“Where?” He seemed surprised. “Why does it matter where she died?”

“Because she died here,” I said. “Just over there.” I pointed. “Where I was standing on the beach.”

He looked over to where I had been under the pier, then he turned back to me.

“Wasn’t murdered, was she?” he asked me.

I stood there looking at him in stunned silence.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said.“I didn’t think she’d been old enough to be anyone’s mother.”

“She was eighteen,” I said. “She would have been nineteen in the September.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“How did you know?” I asked him.

“I didn’t,” he said. “But the murder of that girl was such big news round these parts. My father owned the business then, of course, but I was working for him. We were bigger then, with masses of boats for hire. Little motorboats with engines, you know, and those catamaran-float things with paddles. That murder shut us down completely for a week, and the summer seasons took years to recover.”

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?”