The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  Morton suspected that the final report, not included with the letter as mentioned, had been detached long ago and was what he had just read in the case file box. So, Samuel Banister had possibly been assisted to a new life in Chicago. Interesting, Morton thought, as he photographed the dispatch.

  The penultimate letter in the box was written by another Bow Street officer, Daniel Bishop, and Morton had been about to leave it in place and put the rest of the letters back on top of it and return the box, when he spotted Jonas’s name within the text. The short memo was clearly in response to a direct question from Bow Street: ‘…I have heard nothing at all of Blackwood nor Nightingale since they embarked on their latest case…’ Although it did not say so, the implication was clear, that Jonas Blackwood and Thomas Nightingale had not returned or made contact when they should have done, at least up to the point when this letter had been written. He quickly checked the date: 30th October 1826.

  Something bothered Morton. He quickly leapt up and hurried to the collections counter, where he had to stand behind a doddery old man, who was informing the grey-haired assistant all about something in which she clearly had no interest. Morton coughed loudly, hoping to make clear that he was waiting to be seen.

  It worked. The old man told the lady that he would let her get on and promptly shuffled off across the room with a gentle nod to Morton.

  ‘Has the box I just handed in gone back yet?’ Morton said quickly.

  The grey-haired lady frowned and turned to look to the side.

  Morton saw it at the same time as she, being pulled away on a white trolley stacked with finished documents. ‘I’d like it back,’ he blurted, ‘please.’

  Though seemingly irritated by his apparent ineptitude, she called out for her colleague to stop and plucked the box from the trolley. ‘I’ll need the other document back first,’ she said, clutching it to her chest, as if he somehow meant to do harm to the contents.

  Morton nodded, carefully packed the letters away into the box, aware that he was being scrutinised, then returned it to her. Once it was safely on the desk in front of the lady, she passed the box to him for a second time. ‘I just needed to double-check something,’ he said, feeling the need to justify himself.

  ‘Shall I keep this one back?’ she asked, placing a hand on the returned correspondence. ‘Just in case?’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ Morton said, only half-joking.

  She arched an eyebrow and settled on leaving the box exactly where it was, whilst watching as Morton went back to his table.

  He flicked rapidly through the pile of cases until he reached the report of the arson attacks, which Blackwood and Nightingale had been called upon to investigate, and of which he had caught a glimpse earlier.

  Date: 18th October 1826

  Location: Ramsgate, Kent

  Nature of investigation: Arson

  By whom directed: Mr Bull

  Principal Officer(s): Jonas Blackwood & Thomas Nightingale

  Detail: To investigate with discretion a series of deliberate arson attacks against the person and property of Mr Isaac Bull, local squire, and to apprehend the culprit(s).

  Summary:

  The summary had been left blank, which both puzzled Morton and added to a rising suspicion inside of him. He made a hasty check of the case files which had preceded it: all of them had been completed—to a lesser or greater extent—fully.

  Something was amiss.

  Morton closed his eyes, shutting out the muffled sound of researchers milling about around him, and the hushed voices, and the watchful stare of the grey-haired lady. In his mind, he took the names, locations and dates of the parts which troubled him, assembling and analysing them, then rearranging them in a different order when they refused to cohere.

  A while later, he had created a narrative, which made some degree of sense to him; it was one which needed to be proven or disproven but could not be ignored or left in its current speculative state.

  Opening his laptop, he saw that another email had arrived from his Aunty Margaret. Despite the heightened desire to test his new theory on an aspect of the Fothergill Case, he clicked to read the message: ‘Hi again. Well, yes, my father was away a great deal with business. He had a large number of suppliers who were out of town and he used to say it was this uniqueness that made his business stand out from the likes of Bobby & Co. It was all we were used to, but I suppose from the perspective of a stranger it would have seemed odd how often he was away. It caused some problems at home—I remember your father had a big row with him once in the 70s—challenging him on why he’d seen his van parked up in some back street of Sevenoaks! Have no idea now of the whys and wherefores, but there you have it. Soon after that your mother and father moved out and I wasn’t too long behind them! Families! Love, M x.’

  There was something there, in the part about the argument in the 70s, which he would like to raise with her again, next time they were face-to-face. Whatever the finer detail of the disagreement had been, it had held sufficient depth at the time to have remained in her memory.

  He minimized his emails, and opened a web browser, logging on to the British Newspaper Archive, where he ran a search for Jonas Blackwood and Thomas Nightingale. Several results, but the first was the one which he wanted.

  ‘Ramsgate Herald. 5th November 1826. Missing. Two persons by the names of Thomas Nightingale and Jonas Blackwood, who left London on the 17th October last, and who arrived in Ramsgate on the same day, and have not been since heard of. Mr Nightingale is a man 5ft 10in. high, thin faced, dark hair and whiskers, and 33 years of age. Mr Blackwood is a man of 6ft, stout with dark hair, a dark moustache, and 38 years of age. Both gentlemen were wearing black coats, dark blue trousers and black boots. Any persons who will give any information that will lead to their discovery will be very handsomely rewarded, by calling or sending to the offices of the Bow Street Magistrates Court, Westminster.’

  The article, Morton noted, was very clear in not articulating that the two men were Principal Officers. Returning to the search results, Morton found further appeals for the two men in many other local and regional newspapers, running for several weeks more.

  Morton opened the document of notes which would form the basis of his final report into the Fothergill Case, and saw confirmation of one part of his misgivings. Ann Fothergill baptised 19th July 1803, St Mary the Virgin Church, Ramsgate to Sophia Fothergill. Sophia married Isaac Bull in 1816. Sophia buried 1817…

  Jonas Blackwood and Thomas Nightingale had disappeared following the commencement of a new case, in Ramsgate, which had been commissioned by a man named Isaac Bull. Around this time—possibly, he had to admit, by coincidence—the bodies of two men were interred in the chimney place of a pub owned by Ann Fothergill. But, the problems with this neat narrative—namely that when the two men had been discovered in 1963, they had been wearing coastguard uniforms—became more troubled when Morton ran a search for the death of Isaac Bull and found that he had been buried just three weeks after Sophia in 1817.

  Suddenly, a multitude of possible explanations entered Morton’s mind. He sat staring into space, giving each possibility due consideration, before moving on to the next. His previous belief that Ann had parted company with the smuggling group in 1825 now looked much more doubtful and threw a new uncertain light on his research here.

  Picking up his mobile, Morton began to re-read the case files and correspondence, which he had photographed that afternoon, reappraising it with the latest information in mind. He stalled at the letter, which had been incorrectly dated as 1821, which Jonas Blackwood had sent to Bow Street. ‘Memorandum from J. Blackwood, Principal Officer. Aldington, Kent. 18th November 1821. Please pass word to Mr Proctor that I will see him to-morrow—smuggling case here terminated by client. I shall return to Bow Street to-morrow morning by chaise. Your obedient servant, J. Blackwood.’

  What if it hadn’t been incorrectly dated?

  Morton hastily ordered the case files for the previo
us period to that which he had already searched, 1818-1824.

  And now came a frustrating wait.

  He placed the documents back into the box, and handed it in at the counter, half-expecting, but not receiving some pithy remark about keeping it by in case it should be required again.

  He strolled down to the ground floor, unable to prevent himself from working to unravel the threads of the case. He took a weak watery coffee from a vending machine and looked at the digital display board, which gave timings in red LED letters for document delivery.

  As he sat at a small table and drank the insipid coffee, his thoughts leapfrogged around the case, ending up at what had happened last night at Braemar Cottage. According to Juliette, two police officers had been waiting inside the property, not, as Morton had suggested, in the outbuilding itself. Phillip Garrow had managed to reach the back of the garden without being detected until one of the police officers had spotted movement down the garden, using a pair of the homeowner’s binoculars. They had rushed out to get him, but he had disappeared over the back fence before they had been able to apprehend him. There was still no sign of him.

  ‘And what was in the outbuilding?’ Morton had pressed Juliette, expecting the answer to be along the lines of nothing at all, or the usual garden junk which people store in such places.

  ‘Two wooden barrels,’ she had revealed.

  Morton had sat up in bed, stunned. ‘What?’

  ‘Two wooden barrels,’ she had confirmed.

  ‘No… Full of gold guineas?’ Morton had said. ‘Jesus, they were right.’

  ‘Not full of gold guineas, no,’ Juliette had said. ‘Full of nothing. They were empty. No, tell a lie, there was one coin, a single gold guinea, found wedged at the bottom of one of them.’

  ‘Oh…’ Morton had said, entirely flummoxed by her disclosure.

  The barrels of gold guineas had existed but did not any longer. When they had been emptied, it was impossible to say. Any number of previous tenants in the past hundred-and-ninety-odd years could have discovered them.

  With a small insignificant beeping, the display board changed and documents ordered half an hour previously were now available in the search room.

  Morton dropped the half-drunk coffee into a bin and bounded upstairs to the Archive Study Area, where he was relieved to see somebody different sitting behind the desk: a middle-aged brunette with round glasses and a wide smile of welcome. ‘What can I do for you, love?’ this new archivist asked.

  Morton handed over his History Card, asking for the Bow Street case files and watched with slight edginess, as she marched up and down the shelving until she reached the place where the documents destined for him were contained.

  ‘Ah. Here we are,’ she said, reaching for it, then passing it over the counter to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ Morton said, returning to his desk.

  The case files were arranged chronologically in a similar fashion to those which had followed later. The main problem he had was not really knowing for what he was searching.

  He looked at the clock. The building would be closing in just over an hour: he needed to navigate the delicate balance between diligence and haste very prudently.

  Jonas Blackwood appeared in the second document, working with another officer by the name of James John Smith. The case, Morton read, was about the cold-blooded murder of a shoe-shop owner in Bishop Stortford. He skim-read the remainder of the text, keeping alert for any keywords which might be linked to his investigations.

  Further cases of forgery, larceny and burglary were investigated by either Jonas Blackwood or Thomas Nightingale, or a combination of the two, as the years rolled on.

  Aware that time was fast disappearing, Morton pushed through the documents at a speed which he found unsettling and unprofessional. It would be very easy to miss the kind of minor anomaly which was actually the very thing for which he was searching.

  Without realising it, he had reached the case file to which the letter of 18th November 1821 had referred.

  It had not been incorrectly dated at all; Jonas Blackwood had been employed by a private client on the 4th October 1821.

  Morton read it, baffled.

  Phil was sitting in Katie’s borrowed Astra, his head tipped back, fast asleep. He woke suddenly and with a sharp jolt. Recognition of where he was—in a quiet car park just outside New Romney—took several seconds. It took several more seconds to find his mobile, the cause of his having woken at all. Clara.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘Where are you, Phil?’ she asked. She had been crying, he could tell.

  ‘Just out,’ he answered.

  ‘The police have been here, again.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he replied, not in the least bit surprised. He sniffed. ‘I’m going to hand myself in in the morning.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. He could not tell from her tone whether she thought that a good idea or not, or even whether she believed him. Did she really care if he was sent to prison? He wouldn’t be, though. He actually hadn’t stolen anything—just been trespassing, really. The most he’d get was some community service order.

  ‘Yeah, really,’ he confirmed. He was telling her the truth. In the morning he was going to return the Astra to Katie and make his way to Ashford Police Station.

  ‘So,’ Clara began, ‘what are you doing now?’

  Phil rubbed his face and looked at the time. 6.22pm. ‘Waiting. Then bringing forward some money that’s coming our way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Money, Clara, MONEY!’ he repeated. ‘We need money. We have no money.’

  ‘But what are you doing, exactly?’ she asked. ‘I don’t like the sound of it.’

  ‘Do you want the bailiffs turning up?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but…’

  Phil sighed, terminated the call and switched the phone onto silent.

  He tipped his head back and closed his eyes again, seeing a flash of the empty barrels, receiving another gut-wrenching kick of realisation that the gold—if it had ever existed—was now gone. Some greedy bastard had got there first. And to think he’d spent so much money on that metal detector. Well, that was going straight back to Amazon.

  His thoughts began to slow down, as he thought of his new strategy. It did not take long for his contemplations to become stretched and torn, before plummeting into blackness.

  It was just gone two-thirty in the morning when Phil climbed out of the car, pulled up his hood and began to jog along the deserted residential streets. He reached the bungalow in fewer than ten minutes. He slowed and changed his gait to one of casual confidence and walked up to the front door of Arthur Fothergill’s house. He pulled the key from his pocket, inserted it into the lock and silently pushed open the door.

  In the hallway Phil stood, motionless.

  The only sounds were a gentle clock ticking from the kitchen.

  He moved a short way down the dark corridor. Arthur’s bedroom door was shut.

  He pulled out his mobile, switched on the torch function and held it to the ceiling. The white beam struck what Phil was looking for: the smoke alarm. A small green LED light flashed rhythmically.

  Reaching up, he pulled on a small white flap of plastic, which revealed the internal wiring. He tugged the rectangular battery from its cradle and pulled off the black cap which connected it to the alarm.

  The green LED light slowly faded to nothing, as Phil pocketed the battery and closed the flap. Moving into the kitchen, Phil shone the phone around the worktop. He spotted the breadbin, and pulled it open to find a half-consumed loaf of wholemeal bread. He took out two slices and placed them under the grill. Then, he turned the grill up to maximum, sending a steadily growing orange glow into the room.

  He glanced around him with a new sense of urgency.

  Hanging from a rail beside the fridge were a tea-towel, hand-towel and oven glove. Phil grabbed all three, and placed them on the open door of the grill, before feeding the tea-
towel gently in above the bread slices.

  It took seconds for the tea-towel to blacken and then quickly catch light.

  He watched the flames fanning out, reaching the oven glove and hand-towel.

  Phil looked around him and noticed the apron on the back of the door. He pulled it down and placed it on the worktop above the grill, dangling the neck string around the kitchen roll holder.

  He stood back, taking in all of the objects on the worktop, many of them highly combustible.

  Hot flames were now ravaging the apron, stretching fiery probes sideways to the wooden cupboards which framed the oven.

  The flames were now devouring the kitchen roll, seeming to utilise it as a ladder to reach the cupboards above.

  There was no way, now, that this fire was going to go out of its own volition.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  18th October 1826, Ramsgate, Kent

  Jonas gazed out of the post-chaise, as they coursed along the rutted Kentish countryside. Darkness would come early tonight. A black veil, seemingly being pushed down from above, had left just a peculiar thin band of light grey sitting above the distant horizon.

  He had not said so, but Jonas would have much preferred a case more localised to Westminster. Having rounded up the Aldington smuggling gang just two nights ago, he was exhausted. The magistrate, Sir Richard Birnie, had handed him and Nightingale this new case, saying that, as often happened, their services had been requested personally.

  ‘What do we know about this case?’ Nightingale asked from the seat beside him.

  Jonas drew a breath. ‘Gentleman by the name of Isaac Bull—a local landowner—has had several properties damaged by arson. He’s of the belief that they are protests or revenge attacks and that the identity of the culprit is probably known locally, but he’s being protected.’