He cautiously approached the cottage, regarding it with suspicion, as if it might be booby-trapped with Semtex or some other incendiary device. It wasn’t as if these people didn’t have a penchant for blowing things up. The complete and total silence around him only added to his uneasiness as he neared the building.
When Morton reached the cottage he felt the need to stand still and double-check that he was still alone. He held the binoculars to his eyes and slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees.
He was alone.
Morton set down his backpack and approached the front door. He tentatively tried the handle, but it was either locked or seized up from years of inclement weather and disuse. He was sure that the building had played a part in James Coldrick’s early life and knew that he needed to get inside. He pulled the crowbar from his bag and slowly inserted it into the rotten frame. As he exerted all his energy into the tool, the door began to flex and groan under the pressure. Suddenly, it burst clean off its hinges in a cacophony of metal and wood cracking, smashing down inwards onto a flagstone floor, echoing sonorously among the surrounding trees. Great, now the whole estate knows I’m here, he thought. He might just as well have buzzed in at the main gate after all.
He froze to the spot and waited, half expecting a pack of dogs or gun-wielding security guards at any moment.
Minutes later, nothing had come, so he cautiously stepped one foot inside the cottage, still fearing something terrible was about to happen. There was no way anybody had been inside here for donkeys' years, he reasoned to himself. Donkeys' years - that was something his father would say, not a thirty-nine year old man. Christ. He heard his father’s voice telling him to pull himself together and with that ethereal voice in his mind, he strode confidently inside the cottage.
Inside was freezing and dark. Morton took out the torch that he had found beside his father’s bed. The beam fell first onto a huge rack of antiquated shotguns fixed to the wall. He glanced around at the room’s simplicity and realised that this wasn’t a cottage at all, but a simple two-room shooting box, a relatively common sight on large estates. They were designed to provide accommodation and storage during the annual hunting season, yet this place appeared like an abandoned relic from the past, untouched for countless shooting seasons. He moved the torchlight slowly around the room; the beam illuminating the life of a forgotten past: packets of food on a large oak table; a decorative sideboard stocked with plain white crockery; a small bookcase containing a selection of classic titles; two fabric armchairs beside a loaded open fire; a grimy Belfast sink stacked with unwashed plates.
He took a closer look at the food on the table. Some of the brand names were familiar to him, yet the packaging told him that he was looking at food made somewhere in the Thirties, Forties or Fifties. The torchlight fell onto a white packet with blue writing, which confirmed for him the exact decade: Cadbury’s Ration Chocolate. The building had stood unused since the war. But why?
The torch beam began to fade, which he thought was rather typical. He shone the fading light over to the adjacent room and hesitantly moved into the doorway. It was a small room and, just before the torch battery died, he caught sight of a neat and tidy bed, all ready-made as if waiting for the owner to return. He spotted something else in the corner of the room just as the light failed. Something that set his heart racing.
Feeling acutely vulnerable in the pitch-black room, he set down the backpack and fumbled about for the box of matches. Finally, he struck a match and the room took on an eerie, shadowy glow. He held the light over the object in the corner of the room. It was a tiny cot with blankets that, unlike the bed, were all dishevelled and unkempt, dangling precariously over the wooden bars. He bent down and picked up a knitted, beige-brown teddy bear. He drew it close to his face, knowing to whom it once belonged. Morton stood clutching the bear, contemplating the sight before him, weighing the implications of discovering an isolated shooting box, unused since the war, which contained a baby’s cot. Had this been James Coldrick’s place of birth? The place where his mother had written the goodbye letter to him? He tried to recall the contents of the letter. What was it she had said? Something about being placed in an abominable situation and what she feared would happen to him. A wave of nausea suddenly passed over him and he needed air that wasn’t almost seventy years old inside his lungs. He moved back into the main room of the shooting box when something caught his attention. He squatted down to the door, which he believed he had just burst from its hinges, and took a closer look. The hinges had been forced open, but not by him and not just now. One was twisted, contorted and in the process of disintegration. The other hinge was missing entirely. The door had been held shut by three large metal straps, which were themselves time-rusted and decayed.
Morton was beginning to form an idea of what had occurred here in 1944.
A tumultuous double crack of nearby gunfire made Morton jump with fright.
They’d found him.
He blew out the match and ran for the door. The last thing he wanted was to be cornered in a deserted shooting box when nobody outside knew where he was. He peered cautiously into the woodland. The only movement was a mass exodus of birds taking to the skies in raucous screams.
Morton sprinted to the nearest thicket and tucked himself into a purple rhododendron bush where he observed a group of people with dogs striding into the clearing approximately one hundred yards away. He quickly raised the binoculars to get a better look. Five people and two golden retrievers. Hunting dogs. Brilliant. At least they weren’t Dobermans, he thought. The binoculars weren’t powerful enough to help identify the group heading towards him, but it looked like four men and one woman. He adjusted the plastic focus ring as they neared him, their faces gradually gaining clarity. Morton couldn’t yet see the detail of their faces, but their gait and mannerisms told him that they weren’t searching for an intruder on the estate, but rather were out on a shooting expedition.
The group came within fifty yards and incomprehensible fragments of their conversation drifted across to him. He tweaked the binoculars again and the group came into focus. The woman, attractive with a neat brown bob and blonde highlights, whom he guessed to be in her mid-forties, seemed wholly out of place dressed in a black pinstripe business suit, while the four men were dressed as stereotypical aristocrats with tweed jackets, flat caps, plus-fours and half-cocked shotguns. He didn’t recognise the woman or two of the men, one of whom was struggling under the weight of a mountain of luminous orange clay pigeons. The other two he categorically recognised: they were undeniably his old friend Daniel Dunk and the Secretary of Defence, Philip Windsor-Sackville. The woman leaned over and pecked Philip Windsor-Sackville on the cheek.
Morton heaved a sigh of relief as the group changed direction so that they were no longer heading straight for him. He was relieved that the door to the shooting box was facing him; from their angle, as far as they could tell, nothing had changed since 1944. They stood still for a moment, laughing and joking. Morton had an opportunity to get a decent photograph of them but the camera was in the backpack, which was inside the bedroom of the shooting box. He lowered the binoculars and gauged that if he crawled quickly over to the shooting box, he could just get back with the camera in time to take a photo before they disappeared back into the woods.
Morton dived to the ground and shimmied awkwardly through the long grass until he reached the safety of the shooting box. Once inside, he pulled himself up and grabbed the digital camera from the backpack and slithered back out into the undergrowth to get a photo.
The shooting party were still stood in the same position, buying Morton a few more seconds to switch the camera on and check that the flash was off. Rather surprisingly for his father, the digital camera was decent quality with an impressive telephoto zoom and Morton quickly had the Secretary of Defence and the woman, presumably his wife, giggling like hormonal teenagers in his viewfinder. He snapped them repeatedly.
The group began t
o move, back in the direction that they had entered the woods.
Morton took one last photo when suddenly his mobile loudly declared to the whole world that he had just received a text message.
He ducked down and froze, hoping that by some small miracle they hadn’t heard it. Parting the tall grass, his pulse quickened as he watched the group stand still in unison, all turning quizzically. One of them, Daniel Dunk, turned and began to turn towards the shooting box.
He needed to get out.
Fast.
Quickly and gracelessly, Morton squirmed on his stomach back to the shooting box to collect the backpack. Scooping it up from beside the bed, he slung the backpack onto his shoulder and turned to leave the room. The stream of light flooding in through the door suddenly darkened.
He turned his head abruptly towards the shadow and was met with the sharp crack from the butt of a shotgun.
It was just how he imagined heaven to be. Deep, penetrating warmth. His head in the lap of a smiling, flaxen-haired Scandinavian with a low-cut top, her breasts nudging the side of his head. Morton brought his eyes into focus. It couldn’t be heaven. In heaven he wouldn’t have a nettling, wet stain in his boxers or a headache like he had never felt in his life, as if his brain were full of broken glass.
‘Try not to move,’ the Scandinavian said in a voice that was distinctly un-Scandinavian. He knew the voice from somewhere. It was the waitress from earlier. He flicked his eyes around and saw that he was not in heaven at all, but in the middle of Sedlescombe village green with urine-stained jeans and a marble-sized bump above his left ear. He ignored her advice and sat up, trying to cover his groin. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘it’s just a bodily function. Involuntary. I trained to be a nurse. Well, sort of.’
‘What happened?’ Morton asked, glad that he still had the power of speech, if not of his bladder. He hoped to God he hadn’t leaked from any other orifices.
The woman shrugged, inadvertently rubbing her breasts against his hair. ‘I don’t know. We just found you here on the green, unconscious. We’ve phoned for an ambulance.’ And, as if by magic, an ambulance with the added humiliation of blue flashing lights pulled up beside them, flagged down by the frumpy woman from behind the counter of The Clockhouse Tearoom.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Evidently the sarcasm wasn’t clear enough as the waitress replied, ‘You’re welcome. I could hardly leave a man who left a two pound tip half dead now, could I?’ Two pounds, it sounded piffling now, but when he had left it on top of a five pound twenty bill, it had seemed rather generous.
‘It ain’t good for business neither,’ the frump added, needlessly pointing Morton out to the two paramedics hurrying across the grass towards him.
‘Oh dear, what have you done, sir?’ one of the paramedics said to him, as if he were a child.
‘Banged my head,’ he answered, figuring that the truth would only serve to complicate matters and elongate this embarrassing incident even further.
‘That is a nasty bump,’ the other medic said, running a latex-gloved hand through his hair like a meticulous nit-nurse. ‘I think we need to get you off to hospital.’
‘No, really – I’m fine. I don’t want to go to hospital.’
The first paramedic gave him a quizzical look.
‘Really, I’ll phone my girlfriend. She can come and collect me. I’ll be fine.’
‘I told you it was a stupid idea, didn’t I?’ were the first words out of Juliette’s mouth when she collected him from The Clockhouse Tearoom. He had been released into her care on the proviso that she monitor him for twenty-four hours. Even though the Mini’s boot and entire back seats were crammed with enough bags of clothing to open a small boutique, Juliette still resented having her shopping spree brusquely curtailed by a phone call from the paramedics. ‘What did you think would happen?’ she persisted. He didn’t really have an answer for that. Then the Police Community Support Officer in her came to the fore. ‘Did you get a look at who did it to you?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And?’
‘The one and only Mr Daniel Dunk,’ he said.
‘What?’ Juliette said, shooting him an angry, quizzical look.
‘I know; that’s twice, at least, he’s had the opportunity to kill me and hasn’t taken it.’
‘This has gone far enough, Morton. We know who he is, where he lives and who he works for; it’s time to call this one in.’
‘I’m sure they’ll overlook the fact that I trespassed, damaged property and have no substantial evidence whatsoever.’ The evidence he did have was on his father’s digital camera, which had gone the same way as his laptop and all the evidence pinned to the Coldrick Case Incident Wall.
She sighed heavily and he knew that that was a sign she agreed with him but hated the fact. ‘What about the others, can you describe them?’
‘The woman was tall, dark hair, in a bob with blonde highlights. Quite slim, mid-forties. Pin-stripe suit. Bright red lipstick. And I mean bright red.’
‘Quite pretty?’
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Sounds like an e-fit for Miss Olivia Walker to me.’
‘She was kissing Philip Windsor-Sackville.’
‘Oh, well it can’t be her then, he’s married.’
‘Yeah, because it would be so unlike a politician to be having an affair.’
‘Morton, you’re so cynical all the time,’ she said, which he was forced to agree with.
He reached down for his phone, remembering that it was receiving a text message that had got him struck over the head in the first place. It had better have been important. He opened his messages and read the text. SHOPPING!!!! Hope you’re having a good day, Juliette xx. As tempting as it was to say something, he decided it was best to keep his mouth shut.
‘Stop!’ Morton suddenly warned Juliette, as she approached the front door of his father’s house. She froze in her tracks, like a Covent Garden mime artist, looking vaguely comical with her carrier-bag-filled hands raised in front of her. She looked back at him for guidance. ‘Come back here, quick,’ Morton called.
Something was wrong.
‘Look at the curtains upstairs,’ he said, once she had reached his side. ‘They were definitely closed when we left this morning, now look at them.’
‘Oh God, not another house. What shall we do?’ she asked, backing towards the Mini. It was very unlike Juliette to defer to him like this and that worried him all the more. Was it okay to phone the bomb squad because you thought that your house might be riddled with Semtex, since you distinctly recall leaving the curtains shut? ‘I think we should ring the police and ask for their guidance.’
‘Good idea,’ Juliette said, pulling out her mobile.
The question of what to do next was answered for them when the front door opened. And there, with a large smile on his face, stood Jeremy. The Miracle had arrived. ‘Afternoon. Are you coming inside, or just happy to look at the house from a distance?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Morton mumbled.
Juliette managed a laugh as they headed up the path to be greeted by Jeremy, like he hadn’t seen them in years.
‘It’s so good to see you both again,’ he said with a lengthy embrace. ‘How funny, I’ve got a pair of jeans and shirt exactly like that, Morton.’
‘That is funny,’ Morton answered. Jeremy seemed completely oblivious to the fact that they had moved in; he invited them to sit down for a cup of tea.
‘I’ve just got back from the hospital,’ he said. ‘He looks awful, doesn’t he? I had to step out because I found it really upsetting.’
It was unintentional, and he knew it was an awful thing to do, but Morton couldn’t quite manage to stifle a snigger that suddenly crept up on him.
Juliette booted him hard in the shin and made his laugh turn into a yelp.
‘What’s the matter?’ Jeremy asked.
‘He’s got concussion,’ Juliette said, glaring at Morton.
‘Have
you? What happened?’ He seemed genuinely concerned.
‘I fell over and banged my head,’ Morton said dismissively.
Jeremy looked at the lump protruding from Morton’s head and winced. ‘And the smell of urine?’ Jeremy asked.
Morton looked down at the large stain that splayed out from his jeans. Jeremy’s jeans. ‘Long story.’
‘Is Dad seeing someone else?’ Morton asked, as they began eating an unexpectedly tasty roast dinner cooked by Jeremy. He was warned by the paramedics of temporary memory loss but Morton searched through his store of memories and couldn’t recall ever having seen Jeremy cook a meal. There was one time when he attempted to heat custard by spooning it into a china bowl then heating it on the hob, wondering why the bowl cracked into five pieces, sending yellow mess all over the oven.
‘Someone else?’ Jeremy said. ‘As far as I’m aware he’s just dating Madge.’ Morton’s brain didn’t know which part of his answer to dissect first. Dating? His father had suddenly morphed into an American teenager.
‘How long’s that been going on then?’ Morton demanded.
‘God, two years or so now I would guess. She’s lovely, you’d really like her. Oh, I should have introduced you; she was at my leaving party. You’re not bothered about it are you, Morton? Surely not?’
‘It might have been nice for someone to mention it,’ he answered. He went to say, ‘It might have been nice for someone to ask me,’ and was glad he didn’t. Maybe he was over-reacting. It wasn’t as if he ran home to report the latest news in his life. ‘And who was the man in the photo?’ Morton asked, realising as the words tumbled out that no mention had been made of the camera.
‘What photo?’
Morton flushed. ‘I found Father’s digital camera and there were pictures on there at Coniston. Last summer I think they were taken.’
Hiding the Past (The Forensic Genealogist series Book 1) Page 16
