The Spyglass File (The Forensic Genealogist Book 4)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

The streets of Rye were heaving; the sun had at last bothered to make an effort. Morton, wearing shorts, t-shirt and sunglasses, ambled from his home in Mermaid Street towards St Mary’s Church, which loomed large over the town. Dodging past a large group of foreign students, he turned in front of the church, appearing at the Town Hall. He paused and couldn’t help but smile. A wedding had just erupted from inside. A young couple—she in traditional white and he in a dark grey suit—took centre stage on the steps outside, as their friends and family jostled around them. A photographer backed out in front of them and began directing the group.

  A surprising anxiety quivered in Morton’s stomach. In just over a week, that would be Juliette and him doing something that he had for so long vowed that he would never do. But things were very different now. Now he understood so much more of his past. With a past, he could have a future.

  He smiled warmly and, with a spring in his step, continued down to the High Street. It was time to play choose a café. Rye had millions of them. He was sure that there had to be some ancient law that dictated that there had to be one café for every household in the town. Today, he chose Hayden’s—a three-storey Georgian B&B with a menu comprised of local produce. He headed through the two rooms that made up the restaurant, hoping that there was a space on the small terrace out the back. He was in luck. A table for two was vacant.

  He sat down and pulled out his laptop and the growing bundle of Finch Case research. As he had just been about to leave his house this morning, the post had been thrust through the letterbox. Among the usual junk and bills were two envelopes, their stamped markings revealing the contents: the Ministry of Defence and the General Record Office; Elsie’s Record of Service and Agnes Finch’s death certificate.

  He placed both unopened envelopes down on his laptop.

  ‘Good morning,’ a young waiter greeted. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘A large latte,’ Morton ordered. ‘And Cheddar Eggs, please.’

  ‘Lovely. Thank you.’

  Morton tore first into the GRO envelope and pulled out the certificate.

  When and where died: 12th July 1943, Capel-le-Ferne, Kent

  Name and surname: Agnes Finch

  Sex: Female

  Age: 54

  Occupation: Widow of James Finch

  Cause of death: Suicide during a state of temporary insanity

  Signature, description and residence of informant: Certificate received from J.R. Nightingale, deputy coroner. Inquest held 21st July 1943

  Susan had been correct; Agnes Finch had killed herself. The certificate confirmed it but beyond that failed to provide any detailed information. Morton stared out to sea, considering the implications of Agnes’s suicide. Did he need to follow this up? Did it have any bearing on Elsie Finch’s war?

  Setting the certificate to one side, Morton opened the Ministry of Defence envelope and removed the contents: a letter of explanation, a list of common abbreviations and three sheets of folded A3 paper containing Elsie’s Record of Service.

  According to the letter of explanation, references to medical or disciplinary action would not be disclosed. On one sheet was written Elsie’s name, date of birth, details of her marriage and her nationality. On another was a list of her promotions and on the last was a list of official movements and engagements.

  ‘One latte for you,’ the waiter announced, setting the drink down in front of Morton. ‘The food’s just coming.’

  Morton thanked him, took a sip of the drink, then started to read through Elsie’s promotions. They matched exactly those that he had found on the website of the London Gazette. He moved on to the list of Elsie’s postings.

  27th June 1940 – 15thAug 1940 – RAF Hawkinge Wireless Intercept Station

  16th Aug 1940 – 14th Jan 1942 – RAF Kingsdown Wireless Intercept Station

  15th Jan 1942 – 24th Jan 1942 – Field Unit Valletta, Malta

  25th Jan 1942 – 19th January 1943 – RAF Kingsdown Wireless Intercept Station

  20th January 1943 - 12th July 1943 - RAF Bentley Priory

  Immediately below the last entry was a white censoring rectangle; the information about what had happened to Elsie following her posting to RAF Bentley Priory had been redacted.

  Morton was curious.

  He picked up Agnes’s death certificate, holding it beside Elsie’s Record of Service. Both events had occurred on the same day; something of either a medical or disciplinary nature had occurred on the very day of Agnes Finch’s death. Yes, he did need to follow up Agnes’s death; he needed to take another trip to Folkestone Library and search the local newspapers for mention of her suicide.

  He returned to Elsie’s previous postings; something else had drawn his attention. Valletta. Morton’s eyes settled on the word, his mind probing for significance. Clearly, her stationing on the island of Malta held sufficient importance for her to name her house after a city in which she had only spent little over one week of her life. But what was that significance? Morton opened his emails and sent a brief message to Barbara Finch, informing her that Elsie’s WAAF records had arrived, and asking that she enquire with Paul and Rose if they could shed any light on the Valletta connection.

  Morton had just typed ‘Valletta’ into Google when the waiter arrived carrying his lunch. ‘Cheddar Eggs,’ he declared.

  ‘Thank you,’ Morton replied, sliding back his laptop, as the waiter placed the toasted cheese scone topped with poached eggs, grated cheese and a side order of bacon in front of him.

  He ate quickly, his impatience at this critical stage of his research driving him to bolt down his food. After some time searching, he had found that the Y-Service in Valletta had played a vital role in intercepting radio and Morse traffic in the Mediterranean. As a consequence, the island was heavily defended throughout the war, despite relentless attacks from German and Italian forces based in Sicily. Elsie’s time on the island had coincided with the worst attacks in its history, dubbed ‘The Siege of Malta’.

  Morton copied a raft of sobering statistics from the internet. By the end of 1942, 14,000 tons of bombs had fallen on just 143 square miles of land, killing one in every two hundred island residents. One month after Elsie had departed Malta, King George VI had awarded the entire island the George Cross ‘…to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history.’

  As he continued to read, he remembered wryly what Paul Finch had said of his mother’s wartime: that she had just ‘muddled along,’ like everyone else.

  Morton sank back in his chair and finished the last of his drink, staring out over the rooftops to the River Rother that meandered through the cracked and parched salt marshes.

  He was keen to get to Folkestone Library to learn more about Agnes’s suicide but there was still one thing that he needed to do online.

  He ran a search into Liu Chai, the journalist whom Shaohao Chen had been convicted of assaulting. Morton found that he was a freelance journalist from Wandsworth, his name cropping up in several stories with links to China. The most recent story included Liu’s email address. Morton sent him a message asking him what he knew about Shaohao Chen, then shut his laptop and began to pack up his things.

  He paid his bill and sauntered home, enjoying the warmth of the early afternoon, as he jostled amongst the town’s tourists. Unlike some of his neighbours, Morton welcomed the great influx of visitors, even when, like now, they were staring at his house.

  A rotund lady with olive skin, struggling with the undulating cobbles, narrated—in Spanish, Morton thought—with grand hand gestures to buildings of interest. Evidently his house—with its two front doors—was one them. He really needed to clean the windows, he noticed, as a profusion of mobile phones began forever immortalising his house. Within minutes, his dirty windows would be plastered all over these students’ social media accounts. He stood back and patiently waited for the group to move on.

  With a wave of a large red umbrella, the leader began to push on up the hill and all
heads turned away from Morton’s house. All except one.

  Morton did a double-take when he spotted a man standing incongruously at the back of the young group. Shaohao Chen.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Morton froze.

  The group of students began to wander past him, leaving Shaohao Chen staring up at his house.

  Morton was certain that he hadn’t yet been spotted but he had just seconds left before the parting crowd left him exposed. He quickly ducked down beside a teenage girl, who was thankfully entirely ignorant of his presence, and hurried, bent double, to the front of the pack.

  The group leader looked down at him. ‘¿Qué estás haciendo?’

  ‘Hello!’ Morton whispered, placing his finger on his lips. ‘Just playing a spot of hide and seek.’

  ‘Coge tu camino, eres un extraño.’

  ‘Lovely. Thank you,’ Morton replied, darting into a narrow alleyway that he knew wound its way down to the High Street.

  Once he was clear of Mermaid Street, he made a run for it, continuing all the way down to the railway station, where he sat breathlessly on a bench, watching to see if he had been followed.

  Sufficient time had passed with no sign of Shaohao, but Morton didn’t want to chance going home to collect his car. Since he was at the station, he decided to take the train. A much safer option.

  He waited, eyes fixed on the people entering the station until the train finally arrived.

  With the old diesel train slowly heaving itself out of Rye, Morton phoned Juliette. She opened with the inevitable question. ‘What’s that noise? Where are you?’

  ‘On a train to Folkestone,’ Morton answered.

  There was a short pause while Juliette processed what she was hearing. ‘Your car?’ she asked, with a sigh.

  ‘Well,’ Morton began, ‘long story.’

  ‘Shorten it,’ Juliette said.

  And so he did.

  ‘Right, I’m sending a car around to pick him up; this is ridiculous,’ she said, when he had finished.

  ‘Pick him up on what grounds, exactly?’

  ‘I’ll think of something…’ she mumbled.

  ‘Well, good luck with that one,’ Morton said. ‘Just don’t go home alone, that’s all. Meet me somewhere and we’ll go in together.’

  ‘Right.’

  He said goodbye, ended the call and began to gaze out of the window at the passing fields, villages and woodland that straddled the border between Sussex and Kent, allowing his mind to explore the growing complexities of the Finch Case. He puzzled over Shaohao Chen’s determination to prevent him from understanding what The Spyglass File was all about. Morton was sure that Chen would never reveal why; therefore, he needed to try and work out what that file was for himself. He thought back to the collection of empty folders in the office at Cliff House. What was the date of the first? He had been in a hurry and finding the email from Chen had occupied his concentration, but he was sure that it had been dated 1912. He pulled out his mobile phone and ran a simple Google search for ‘Spyglass 1912’. The first result surprised him. The answer had been under his nose all along; the file had been named after a person. He clicked the link. It was a reference on the Ancestry website to a marriage in 1912.

  Name: Agnes Spyglass

  Spouse surname: Finch

  Registration year: 1912

  Registration quarter: Oct-Nov-Dec

  Registration District: Dover

  Inferred County: Kent

  Volume: 2a

  Page: 2572

  He now knew that The Spyglass File had been named after Elsie’s mother-in-law, Agnes, but he was still entirely oblivious as to the file contents.

  Morton alighted from the train at Folkestone Central Station and walked briskly to the library. Another migraine was starting to burn behind his eyes. He found the library relatively empty and was able to return to the same microfilm reader that he had used last time. He quickly found the film for the 1943 editions of the Folkestone, Hythe and District Herald and loaded it onto the machine.

  He watched through squinted eyes as the film buzzed under the glass, the images flicking past at high speed. He paused the film every now and then to check the dates. He reached July 1943 and began to scroll through the reel by hand until he reached the edition printed following Agnes’s death. He shifted the lens back and forth, reading the headlines of each story until he found it. WOMAN’S SUICIDE. Morton zoomed in and read the article.

  Fall Over Cliff Near Folkestone

  At an inquest at Folkestone yesterday on Mrs Agnes Finch of Cliff House, Capel-le-Ferne, deputy coroner (Mr J.R. Nightingale) highly praised the courageous conduct of Mr William Henry Collins of 3 Ham Cottages, Folkestone, who was lowered over the cliff for 150ft and who recovered the body, which was entangled in some barbed wire.

  Mr Falkirk, 68, a neighbour of Mrs Finch’s, stated that on the 12 July he saw the deceased leaving her home in a state of high anxiety. She was carrying a metal torch with her, shouting that she was “Going to end it all.” Witness tried to calm the deceased, but she drew away and made for the cliff path.

  A rescue party under Supt. Duke and St John Ambulance proceeded to the spot and Mr Collins was lowered over the cliff face, which had a drop of more than 500ft, to effect the recovery of the body lying on a ledge. On being brought to the top, Mrs Finch was found to be dead.

  Inspr. W. Abrahams thanked Mr Collins on behalf of the police for his plucky action.

  The coroner returned a verdict of “Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.”

  Morton photographed the entry, then re-read it. Agnes had thrown herself off the cliff tops near her home and clearly the testament of her neighbour, Mr Falkirk, had persuaded the coroner that she had intended to take her own life.

  Rewinding the film, he returned it to the cabinet and glanced up at the large clock on the wall. He had been here only ten minutes, but the pain in his head was increasing rapidly. Time to leave, he thought, turning back towards his belongings. As he did so, he caught sight of the small typed labels of the upper drawers of the filing cabinet. Parish Registers. Now that he was here, he might as well quickly try and locate Agnes’s marriage entry. Reluctantly, he slid open the metal drawer and pulled out the reel of film for baptisms, marriages and burials at Capel-le-Ferne, which fell in the Dover registration district, then returned to his machine.

  The backs of his eyes were on fire and he couldn’t bear to look at the screen as the images flashed past until he paused at October 1912.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his temples, then he began to systematically check each and every page. Thankfully, it was a small parish and it took just ten minutes for him to locate the marriage entry in December 1912. Agnes Spyglass was recorded as a twenty-three-year-old spinster, the daughter of Charles Edward Spyglass. Her husband was James Finch, a surveyor and the witnesses to the occasion were Ada Potter and Frances Jenkins.

  Morton sat back and stared at the entry. So Ada and Agnes had been friends for several years prior to the outbreak of war. But what could have been contained in those files that meant that they needed destroying a hundred and four years later? His pained eyes remained fixed on the screen in front of him, but his attention wandered off, back to when he was inside the office at Cliff House. The first file had been dated 1912, then the next—if he remembered correctly—had been dated 1940. Why the huge gap? It made no sense. Or maybe it was just his aching brain that couldn’t join the dots together.

  He swallowed down some headache pills with a gulp of water from a bottle in his bag, then tried to switch off for a moment. He desperately wanted to leave and the allure of his sofa at home was almost too much to bear. Yet he was here now and there were things that he could research. He knew that he had been too hasty in the speed at which he had just ploughed through the parish registers. It wasn’t his usual diligence.

  With a grudging sigh, he rewound the film back to the late 1800s and began to trawl through the r
egisters, hoping to find any mention of the Spyglass or Finch family, now believing that part of the answer to the mystery of The Spyglass File lay many years prior to the Second World War.

  An hour had passed and Morton yawned. His head still throbbed, punishing him for continuing. He had checked the marriage register until its termination in 1952. Not a single Finch or Spyglass. In the burial register he had found Agnes’s entry in July 1943 and that of her husband, James Finch in 1922.

  Another glimpse at the clock. He could leave now without searching the baptism register and catch the next train home, or he could wait for another hour and finish the job.

  He had to stay and complete it.

  Morton’s idea that Agnes had been born and baptised in Capel-le-Ferne proved to be incorrect, as he trudged through the dying days of the Victorian era and pushed into the early 1900s, without locating any members of the Spyglass or Finch family.

  When an entry presented itself onscreen, it took Morton an exorbitant amount of time to trust what his beleaguered eyes were telling him that they were seeing.

  When Baptized: 5th February 1912

  Child’s Christian Name: Eleanor Spyglass

  Parents’ Names: Agnes Spyglass

  Abode: Spring Cottage, Capel-le-Ferne

  Quality, Trade or Profession: single woman

  Ten months before she had been married to James Finch, Agnes had given birth to an illegitimate daughter.

  Morton photographed the entry, then opened up his laptop. Despite the pain in his head, he ran a series of quick searches in Ancestry for the marriage or death of Eleanor Spyglass. Nothing. According to the indexes, she neither married nor died. He tried a general search in all of their online records. Nothing. He switched his search to Agnes and found her on various censuses. In 1911, the closest to the baby’s birth, she was residing as a boarder at Spring Cottage, Capel-le-Ferne—the home of Ada Potter.

  Morton tried to ponder the question of whether The Spyglass file had been named after Agnes, or her illegitimate daughter, Eleanor, but the agony in his head prevented any meaningful thought process. Perhaps the link between the various Spyglass files was illegitimacy. He desperately wanted to stop, but he wasn’t finished yet. He still had forty years left to search of the baptism register.