Having retrieved the two photographs of James Coldrick’s mother, Morton clicked on the ‘Photo Gallery’ tab and scrolled down to a close up of Maria Charlotte Windsor-Sackville. He held the images close to the laptop screen and compared the photos. The profile shot of Maria on the website looked to Morton like it had been taken in the sixties or seventies and bore no resemblance to the wartime photographs in his hand. But that meant nothing; she could have completely changed over those twenty or so years. There was certainly nothing in front of him that precluded them from being the same person.
Under the ‘News’ tab he read that on Saturday Sir David and Lady Maria Windsor-Sackville were to open Sedlescombe Village Fete. Might be worth a visit, he thought. He made a careful note of the date and time and pinned it to the wall.
Morton carefully drew up a neat family tree for the ‘illustrious’ Windsor-Sackvilles and compared it with the cul-de-sac tree for the Coldricks. He held them side by side, wondering at the connection. There has to be something here, Morton thought. As he cast his eyes over the short Coldrick tree, something suddenly struck him: if his suspicions were anywhere near correct, and the Dunks and Olivia Walker were helping to cover up the fact that David and Maria had given birth to an illegitimate child, then Finlay Coldrick could be in grave danger. Juliette’s suspension had just sent a major warning that he was closing in on the truth.
Morton raced down the stairs, called a garbled goodbye to Juliette and dashed out to the Mini. A moment later, he screeched out of Church Square on his way to Tenterden.
He had been sitting on Soraya Benson’s doorstep for over twenty minutes when she arrived home with Finlay in his school uniform, clutching a Spiderman lunchbox. She looked much prettier than the last time he’d seen her and he wondered if it was the faint trace of make-up or perhaps the smarter clothes that she was wearing. Her eyes were less puffy, less grief-stricken somehow. She was carrying three bulging Waitrose carrier bags.
‘Well, Fin, look what the postman left on the doorstep,’ she said. ‘Were you expecting a worn-out-looking genealogist to be delivered today?’
Fin shook his head. Morton guessed that he was recalling their previous encounter when he had made the poor child cry.
‘Hmm, me neither. What do you say we do with him? Invite him in or throw him out onto the streets?’
‘Throw him out,’ Finlay said seriously, a meaty frown bearing down over his eyes. Fair enough, Morton thought.
‘Please let me in,’ Morton pleaded, doing his best to overact the part, but actually wanting to skip the pleasantries and get down to more serious things. Like the fact that someone might be about to kill the eight-year-old currently barring his entrance to the house. After all, everything that was going on was because of him and his ancestry.
‘Nope,’ Fin answered.
Morton stood. ‘It’s quite important,’ he said to Soraya. She nodded and thrust her key into the lock, practically pushing Fin through the door.
‘Go and play in your room, Fin and I’ll call you for dinner.’ She turned to Morton. ‘Sorry, you weren’t out there long, were you? Had to pop to a friend’s then a quick dash around the supermarket.’
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘So, what’s all this about then? You seem agitated.’
Morton followed Soraya into the lounge and took a seat opposite her. ‘I think Fin’s life might be in danger,’ he announced dramatically. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he wondered if he should have gone in with a more gentle approach, but after all the time-wasting on the doorstep he needed to spell things out clearly. If Fin had belonged to him, though God knows this little encounter had cemented his resignation to never have kids, he would have run to his bedroom and checked there was nobody lurking under the bed or hiding in the wardrobe.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, her face turning pale.
Morton exhaled sharply and told her everything that he’d discovered about the Windsor-Sackvilles and his suspicions regarding James Coldrick’s parentage. Soraya listened impassively, allowing him to deliver the full story without interruption.
‘It does sound rather worrying,’ she said when he had finished. Morton stared at her. That was a bit of an understatement, he thought. ‘I think we’ll go and stay at my sister’s for a while, until this all blows over. She lives in St Michaels, just outside Tenterden.’
‘Will you go tonight?’ Morton asked.
Soraya nodded. ‘Yes, as soon as I’ve got a bag packed for each of us. Do you really think that Peter, James and Fin are descended from the Windsor-Sackvilles?’
This was the very reason that Morton seldom gave interim reports to clients. He was a long way from drawing that conclusion. ‘At this stage, it’s just a possibility. For decades people in the shadow of the Coldrick family having been hiding the past; it’s my job to reveal it - but I’m not there yet. Certainly, they – whoever they are – want to maintain a shroud of secrecy over James Coldrick’s birth.’
Soraya seemed to have glazed over. ‘That would be a turn up for the books,’ she said with a smile. ‘Related to a rich knight and member of parliament. It would certainly turn Fin’s life around.’ Her voice trailed off, but her eyes revealed to Morton that her mind was busy making alarming connections.
‘Let’s not jump the gun,’ Morton warned.
Soraya snapped back to reality. ‘Of course. Right, I’d better get packing.’
Morton had wanted to try a last ditch attempt to get out of the funeral tomorrow but the ringing of his mobile caused Soraya to finally check that her child was still in one piece playing on his Nintendo, or whatever it was that kids played these days. Certainly not the Action Man or Meccano of his youth. It was a withheld number, which usually meant a bank. Probably about to offer him a better deal for his ever-diminishing fifty grand.
‘Morton Farrier,’ a male voice said, more of a statement than a question.
‘Speaking.’
‘You’ve got ten minutes to leave your house.’ Not the bank then.
‘I’m not in my house,’ Morton said haughtily, trying to work out where he recognised the voice from.
‘I know you’re not,’ the voice said calmly, ‘but Juliette is and unless you want to be identifying her charred remains anytime soon, she needs to leave your house now.’
‘Who is this?’ he demanded, but the line went dead.
Panic mode set in.
He leapt up and ran for the door, yelling out to Soraya that he needed to go, at the same time speed-dialling Juliette. It rang endlessly. The journey time back home to Rye was twelve minutes. He wouldn’t make it in time. Couldn’t. He looked at the clock: 5:42.
The countdown had begun.
He jumped into the car and slammed his foot on the accelerator. Something inside told him that the call was genuine and not necessarily designed to scare him, although that was a definite by-product. He knew that man’s voice, but for the life of him couldn’t give the voice a face.
Juliette’s phone went to voicemail. He had to leave a message. He needed to be clear and succinct. ‘Juliette, listen to me. I need you to leave the house right now. I’m not joking. Someone’s made a threat. Meet me by the church. Phone me when you get this.’ He ended the call, taking a corner far too quickly, almost skidding off the road. If Juliette’s going to survive, you need to calm down! he admonished himself.
Morton slammed through the sleepy village of Wittersham. He was about half way home.
5:46. Six minutes.
He dialled Juliette again but there was no signal. Damn it!
He tried to clear his mind, to concentrate fully on the road. Juliette’s life depended on it. Besides, it might yet be a hoax, something designed to scare him, to warn him off the Coldrick Case. His instincts told him that the people he was up against really didn’t do hoaxes.
5:48. Four minutes.
Morton entered the village of Playden at sixty-eight miles per hour. He looked down at his phone and saw the 3G
signal had miraculously appeared. He hit the phone icon then selected Juliette’s mobile from the top of the list. Morton’s eyes levelled with the road, just as a Jempson’s supermarket delivery lorry limped out of a side road. Morton slammed on the brakes and drew to a near-stop, just meters from the back of the lorry, the de-acceleration sending his iPhone to the floor.
‘Juliette, are you there?’ Morton shouted into the footwell, as he zipped the Mini out into the oncoming lane to check traffic. Nothing. He sped past the lorry on the descent into Rye. ‘Juliette, if you can hear me, get out of the house!’
5:50. Two minutes.
Morton reached down and fumbled in the footwell. He finally found the mobile and raised it to his ear. The line was dead.
He redialled and pushed the Mini even harder.
5:51. One minute. He imagined her ‘quickly’ grabbing her handbag. Then her laptop. Then a few clothes because she had no idea how long she would have to stay away. If it was permanent, then she’d want to go around gathering up everything of sentimental value: her grandmother’s wedding dress; the old leather-bound photograph albums of people nobody in the family could identify; her external hard drive with thirteen months of their shared life in photographs on it.
5:52. Time up.
Receiving reproaching and angry looks from pedestrians, Morton sped up Rye High Street. One wrong step by a passer-by and that would be it. He turned the corner into Church Square too sharply, narrowly avoiding an elderly couple about to step off the pavement.
He stepped on the brakes outside the church entrance. No Juliette. Where was she? Morton leapt from the Mini and raced towards the house, a spasm of tachycardia thumping his body. He knew that if she was still inside the house then it was too late. She wouldn’t survive. The clock was nearing zero. Morton neared the front of the house.
‘Morton!’ a voice from behind him. Juliette’s voice. She was in the churchyard, sitting calmly on a bench, like a jaded tourist weary from a day’s sightseeing. No handbag. No laptop. No grandmother’s wedding dress. No photo albums or hard drives. Just her with an anxious, perplexed look on her face. He jogged over to her and sat down beside her on the bench, allowing himself to breathe deeply and properly.
‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ she asked.
Morton managed to say one word just as all of the windows of their house exploded outwards in a violent, projectile eruption. They both sat, dumbstruck, as angry tongues of fire licked from the spaces in the brickwork where windows had once been.
Chapter Eleven
Thursday
It was a very strange experience for Morton to wake up in his old bedroom in his parents’ house. He looked up at the brown blemish above the bed that multiple coats of white emulsion had failed to conceal over the years after a pipe had burst in the loft during a family holiday in the Lake District when he was fourteen. That stain was the only thing in the room that had existed before he left for university. He thought about how happy they had been as a family on that holiday. Just eight weeks later his mother was dead. She’d found a lump in her breast but elected not to tell anyone until she realised that it wasn’t going to go away of its own volition. By then it was too late.
He wondered if it was his mother’s death that had prompted his father to seemingly blurt out that Morton was adopted. Would he now be living in blissful ignorance if she were still alive? Maybe if he’d never been told he would now be dutifully keeping a stoic vigil at his father’s bedside rather than studying the amorphous mark on the ceiling. He wanted to wake Juliette and point out the stain, tell her the story about the holiday to Coniston, one of a mere handful of occasions when he had felt a genuine part of the Farrier family, not like some surplus limb. But he didn’t wake her; he left her curled tightly in a ball beside him, like a new-born kitten. She needed the sleep after all that had happened yesterday.
They had finally climbed into bed at three o’clock in the morning after driving from the police station to his father’s house. As if watching the entire contents of his house blasting out of the windows in flames hadn’t been bad enough, Morton had then been subjected to ‘an interview’ by the wonderful police duo of WPC Alison Hawk and PC Glen Jones. For the second time in nine days the dynamic pair had made him feel like a suspect. It didn’t help that Juliette was interviewed in a separate room. With typical Juliette foresight, the first thing she did after the explosion was to ‘get their story straight.’ Only then did she call the fire brigade. The problem was, getting his story straight made Morton feel all the more guilty. ‘Trouble seems to be following you, doesn’t it, Mr Farrier?’ Hawk had opened his questioning with. ‘Any reason why someone would want to flatten your house, Mr Farrier?’ Jones had asked, without giving him time to answer the first question. Morton shook his head and feigned shock that the explosion was thought to be a criminal act rather than electrical or gas. He had told them the agreed version of the truth – he’d been out shopping and had returned to collect Juliette to go out for a nice meal. Simple. Except then they wanted to know where the shopping was. And why Juliette was dressed in her work uniform for an evening out. Morton triumphantly held up a packet of unopened chewing gum and said, ‘Shopping.’ Another look passed between Hawk and Jones. ‘And as for the uniform thing,’ Morton added, ‘we were going to get a take-out, which was lucky, all things considered.’ Another look between them and he was released, grateful that Hawk and Jones hadn’t managed to whittle out of him the fact that he had received a warning to leave the house ten minutes prior to the explosion. Or that he had recognised the voice of the person issuing the warning.
Morton padded downstairs in his boxers to make a large cup of coffee. Everything in the kitchen was in the same place as it had always been since time immemorial. He surmised that it was probably his father’s parents who had first dictated where everything should live in the kitchen and woe betide anyone who dared to question it. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ had been one of his father’s many quips. Morton realised that he was thinking of his father in the past tense and didn’t really believe that he would pull through. He just wasn’t the type to survive illness or disease. He wasn’t one of those people who could ‘battle illness’ and fight back. He wasn’t a fighter and Morton was sure that his weak body would readily give up at the first obstacle.
He sipped his coffee and wondered where Jeremy was at that moment. After being passed from pillar to post, Morton had finally been able to speak to him in the early hours of the morning. He took the news with typical Jeremy histrionics. ‘Oh my God! I’m on my way,’ he’d cried. Morton had told him that he was staying at their father’s house for the time being, which Jeremy took as unfettered altruism. Morton refrained from adding more drama to Jeremy’s life by telling him that part of the reason for the relocation was because their house had exploded.
Morton tried to make a mental inventory of what he’d lost in the house. As huge curtains of fire poured from the gaping orifices where doors and windows had once been, the fire chief had rather optimistically said, ‘It might not be as bad as it looks.’ Then the roof collapsed. No, there could be nothing left at all. What hadn’t been singed, smoked, soaked or burned to a crisp would have been fatally crushed. He felt strangely emotionless about losing most of it. Furniture, clothes, books, DVDs – all replaceable junk. There were a few keepsakes that had belonged to his mother that he was gutted to have lost. And then there was the fact that everything connected to the Coldrick Case had gone up in smoke. His Coldrick Case Incident Wall that he’d spent so much time creating was now nothing more than a pile of boiling ash. But then that was probably the reason for the explosion in the first place: to destroy every last shred of evidence that he’d compiled. Fortunately, he had backed up most documents to the cloud, meaning that he still had remote access anywhere with an internet connection.
Juliette appeared in the kitchen looking dog-rough, her hair seemingly having been blow-dried in a hundred different directions
and a few ounces of fat pumped below her eyes as she slept. She was wearing an over-sized ‘I Love Derbyshire’ t-shirt that they’d found in his father’s wardrobe.
‘Shoot me,’ she hissed.
‘Morning!’ Morton answered brightly. ‘Coffee?’
‘Black. Biggest cup you can find. Three spoonsful of coffee,’ she said, flopping down onto the kitchen table. ‘Christ. Tell me yesterday was a nightmare and there’s a really good explanation as to why we’re here?’
He looked at her bedraggled body slumped on the table, her tough exterior having been shed overnight like excess skin. There was no way on earth she would have survived the explosion if she had remained inside. Now he knew what love was all about. He placed the steaming hot drink in front of her and stroked her hair. ‘I’m afraid not.’
Four large cups of coffee and a long, hot bath later - modern devices such as a shower having never been fitted in his parents’ house - and Morton was feeling somewhere near human again. He had found a packet of sausages in the freezer, which he had cooked with a tin of beans and a couple of slices of toast for their breakfast.
‘So, just so that I understand, some random guy just phones you and tells you your house is going to blow up in ten minutes?’ Juliette said, somewhat incredulously, as she shovelled a large forkful of food into her mouth. It was the first time that they had actually talked about the moments prior to the explosion without embellishment or omission.
Hiding the Past (The Forensic Genealogist series Book 1) Page 13
