Golden Mile to Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

those days it had seemed like an epic journey. There’d even been a stop at a pub called The Half-Way House, which couldn’t really have been halfway for
everyone
who travelled to Blackpool, where the men would have their first pint of the day and the women and kids would order cups of tea and cakes.
    It was after the stop that things really reached fever pitch. All the children – and many of the adults – would gaze into the distance, hoping to be the first one to spot Blackpool Tower.
    The tower! A tapering cast-iron structure pointing to the sky, which served no purpose other than to announce that Blackpool existed. It had been built a few years later than the Eiffel Tower, was only half the size and, instead of spreading its legs majestically across the Champ de Mars, it rose – beanpole-like – out of the Woolworths Building. A poor relation to the French model, in fact. But that it was inferior to the other tower didn’t matter to the kids on the bus – even if they’d heard of Paris. They spent fifty-one weeks a year in dark towns of huddled stone terraced houses, and they knew – with an absolute conviction – that Blackpool was the greatest place in the world. The enchanted kingdom. Fairyland.
    A great cheer always rose up when the Tower was sighted, and from then on, until the charabanc finally came to a halt in the coach park, the children would be nervously twisting and turning in their seats.
    A taxi had been the only way to get to the coach station in their home towns, but it was not the way that visitors journeyed from the bus to their boarding houses in Blackpool. As they stepped down from the bus, they were mobbed by dozens of local kids pushing wheeled vehicles which had once formed parts of prams and delivery bicycles. The family luggage would be loaded up on to one of these unlikely contraptions, then the Woodends – or the Ramsbottoms or the Battersbys – would follow behind the truck, savouring the sea air and relishing the thought of a whole week of freedom.
    â€˜Of course, it was different in them days,’ Woodend said. ‘For instance, now, you all eat the same meal at the same time, but when I was a kid, the mams did the shoppin’, an’ the landlady cooked a different meal for every family. There was one coal miner from Sunderland, I remember, who used to polish off six or seven pork chops at a sittin’. Nobody seems to have the appetite for that kind of eatin’ now. I expect it was the war – live on rations for a few years an’ your stomach’s bound to shrink.’
    â€˜The British have no idea what it’s like to be really hungry,’ Paniatowski said, so softly she could almost have been speaking to herself.
    â€˜What was that, lass?’
    â€˜Nothing, sir.’
    â€˜So I was imaginin’ it, was I? Come on, I hate it when people won’t say what’s on their minds.’
    Paniatowski sighed. ‘The British have no idea what it’s like to be really hungry,’ she repeated.
    â€˜But you do?’
    â€˜For five years – under Hitler – we were slowly starving to death in Warsaw. And after that, when my mother and I fled the city to escape the Russians, it was even worse. If I ever did have a decent meal before I came to England, then I certainly don’t remember it.’ Monika Paniatowski paused – as if embarrassed at having been forced to reveal something of herself to the big chief inspector – then glanced out of the window. ‘There is your tower, sir,’ she continued.
    So it was. And despite all the years which had passed since he’d last seen it – despite the changes he’d gone through in that time – Woodend felt just a twinge of that unbridled joy he’d experienced as a child.
    There were chief inspectors who would have sat in their offices and had their visitors shown in to them, but Turner was waiting in the