‘Right,’ Jeremy said assertively. ‘We’re going to get ready, then go and visit Dad.’ Guy set down the piece of toast he was in the middle of eating and obediently followed Jeremy from the room.
Morton nodded and slumped down onto his arms, unable to talk anymore. He was tired, more tired than he’d ever been before and he just wanted to rest and not to think.
‘Did they ever find the bloke who raped her?’ Juliette asked, her voice loaded with sympathy. That must be her PCSO voice, Morton thought. He expected that she was itching to get into work and see what she could dig up. Morton shrugged. He had no idea if the bloke - his father - had escaped scot-free and went on to rape other schoolgirls or if he was behind bars. He might even be dead by now.
‘I’m going to bed,’ Morton mumbled.
‘I’ll come too.’
When he woke up he was drenched in sweat, yet, according to the clock, he’d only been asleep for forty minutes. He sat up and stripped off his sodden t-shirt. A flicker of his dream flashed in his mind, like a snippet from a grainy film. A fat Russian Matryoshka nesting doll had spoken to him. He couldn’t remember what he’d said; just that it was an old man who didn’t look in the slightest bit Russian. He resembled someone haggard from years of working on the land and after he had spoken, the top half of his body tilted open sideways and out popped another man whom Morton identified as James Coldrick. He said something incoherent - at least, the memory of the dream was now incoherent - then he too opened up and out sprang Peter Coldrick. Then, just like the two men before him, his body severed across the waist to reveal Finlay Coldrick, who promptly burst into tears. Morton wondered why his exhausted brain had picked Russian nesting dolls to feature in what must surely be the oddest dream he’d ever had. Then he remembered the posters he’d seen yesterday in the waiting room of the Conquest Hospital.
Then a thought struck him, which fully woke him up.
Diabetes often runs in families the poster had said.
Finlay Coldrick had diabetes. Peter Coldrick had diabetes. Didn’t William Dunk’s death certificate cite diabetes as a cause of death? Morton reached for his phone and accessed his cloud space, where he quickly located a photo of William Dunk's death certificate, since the original had perished with everything else on the Coldrick Case Incident Wall. Yes, there it was: diabetes mellitus.
Coincidence?
There was only one way to be sure. Another DNA test.
Morton climbed out of bed as quietly as possible, doing his utmost not to disturb Juliette. There was no way on God’s green earth she would allow him to do what he was about to do. He quickly dressed and left the house.
As Morton made the fifty-minute journey from Hastings to Dungeness, he mulled over the implications of his bizarre dream. If the diabetes was not a coincidence, then he had finally found James Coldrick’s father: William Dunk. It was certainly possible in terms of the timeframe and location; William would have been thirty-one at the time of James’s birth and he would likely have been living in Sedlescombe by then. According to a quick search on Ancestry, William Dunk had never married, Daniel having been born in 1969 out of wedlock to one Sharon Higgins. Could Daniel Dunk and James Coldrick have the same father in William Dunk? Were James Coldrick’s parents really a Nazi woman and a handyman for the local gentry? If so, then what part did the Windsor-Sackvilles play? He needed yet more evidence.
Mercifully there were no top-spec cars registered to the Chief Constable of Kent Police parked on Daniel Dunk’s property; there were no cars at all in fact. Morton parked a safe distance away and pulled out the new pair of National Trust binoculars to spy on the house. He really must put the binoculars back in his father’s wardrobe since it appeared that, contrary to Morton’s initial belief, his father was making a decent recovery. Jeremy had texted to say that the doctors expected him to be allowed home within days. Another miracle; his family was full of them. His real family. He hadn’t yet digested the news that his Aunty Margaret was his real, bona-fide biological mother. But then, how could you digest something like that? It was about as digestible as a stack of bricks. He doubted that he would ever even be able to begin to comprehend such life-changing information, although it did make some kind of sense on some kind of level. If you’d asked him at any point in his life to honestly state with whom in his family he felt the closest affinity, he would unquestioningly have chosen Aunty Margaret. He never could fathom where this syrupy high-esteem in which he held her had come from. After all, he could count the number of visits she had made to the family home and his reciprocal visits to her in Cornwall on one hand. Was he the reason that she had upped sticks as an eighteen-year-old and moved so far away? Was there significance to be found in the fact that her home was minutes away from Lands End, as if she couldn’t live any further away without needing a submarine to get home? He raked through his back catalogue of memories of Aunty Margaret and he realised that it was a mawkish romanticised idea of her that he most loved; the kind of mother he’d wished that his own had been. Safe, constant, fun, Aunty Margaret’s visits always cast a heavy and palpable shadow over his own restrained, conservative mother. He realised that he had always viewed Aunty Margaret’s interactions and close relationship with her two daughters with an envious eye. And now, at the age of thirty-nine, he finally understood the affinity he had with Aunty Margaret. His mother.
Morton raised the binoculars to Dunk’s house once more and was convinced that it was deserted. No doubt Dunk was off doing whatever hitmen do when not engaged in the business of killing innocents. Line dancing, perhaps? Or lace-making, maybe? Morton placed the binoculars in a rucksack he’d found in Jeremy’s wardrobe, which he’d hastily packed the moment that the realisation of his dream had sunk in. He’d managed to sneak out of the house leaving Juliette sleeping in blissful ignorance of the plan that he’d impulsively hatched. He was going to enter Dunk’s house to gather DNA material: that was about as organised and detailed as his plan got. He switched his phone to silent, knowing that the first thing that Juliette would do when she woke was to phone or text him, and the last time she did that, he was within hitting range of Daniel Dunk, and that didn’t end too well.
He locked the car and walked towards Smuggler’s Keep with the air of someone who had a God-given right to be there. Like a Jehovah’s Witness or an Avon lady. Not that either of those categories have a God-given right to do anything, least of all knock on strangers’ doors, thought Morton. He marched haughtily past Dunk’s gummy neighbour’s property and brazenly rapped the knocker on the wooden door, layers of peeling paint revealing its entire colourful history. He knew that he should have a back-up plan, at least something to say if Dunk should answer the door, but then what do you say to someone who knocked you unconscious the last time you saw them? Hi, me again! But he didn’t need to worry; there was nobody home. Morton walked the length of the house, or glorified shed as it might better be designated, stopping at each window to try to catch a glimpse inside, but each was covered by old, sun-bleached curtains. He reached the back door and glanced around him, not quite able to believe that the Coldrick Case had reduced him to breaking and entering. He wondered if his sudden moral degradation was an atavistic trait that he could attribute to his father. He still couldn’t comprehend that he was the by-product of a rape and he felt nauseous when the thought caught him unawares. He couldn’t stop himself from imagining what his father did to her and what that made him, the carrier of his Y chromosome. Not that a faulty gene pool made his actions defensible. If he were caught by the police he wouldn’t have a defence; his bag was filled with a whole bunch of equipment to help him enter Dunk’s property. Tooled up – wasn’t that the parlance of those involved in such iniquitous activities?
He set down the bag and pulled out a large rusting crowbar. After a deep breath and a final check to make sure that he was truly alone, he placed the crowbar in the crevice beside the lock. Before he had even applied the slightest pressure the door creaked open, slowly but
noisily.
Morton stared incredulously through the small gap that had opened up. It was never a good sign in films when a door creaked open to reveal a dark unwelcoming room. On the plus side, he seemed to recall that it wasn’t illegal to enter a house where the door had been left open. And it wasn’t as if he was going to steal anything. Well, maybe a little of Dunk’s flaky skin but that was hardly the crime of the century.
He gently pushed the door open with his foot. With a bit of daylight streaming in, it wasn’t quite the uninviting killer’s workshop that he had feared it might be. It was just a normal, if slightly run-down, lounge. It actually reminded him of Peter Coldrick’s house with its assortment of dilapidated furniture and rubbish strewn everywhere. The only addition were the multiple copies of The Sun and Nutz magazine, scattered liberally around the room. It shouldn’t be hard to pick up a DNA trace of Dunk among all this crap, Morton thought.
He reluctantly closed the door and stood for a few moments, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the subdued lighting. Within a couple of minutes he was able to see that tucked at the end of the lounge was a tiny kitchen. To even describe it as a kitchenette would be an over-exaggeration. A stand-alone cooker was piled high with a variety of crockery and saucepans, their contents in various stages of decomposition. It was book-ended by a fridge-freezer and a sink with another pile of dirty plates and pots. It didn’t surprise him that Dunk was a bit of a slob; it kind of went with the territory of a murdering thug.
Morton approached the sink and immediately recoiled at the disgusting stench. A plague of fat blue bottles that had been contentedly feasting on a putrefied plate of mess were disturbed by his presence and began pinging around his head.
With a pained grimace, Morton delved his hand into the abyss and pulled a wine glass from the sink. His disbelief that Dunk would even know what wine tasted like was confirmed by a perfect pair of rouge lip prints around the glass rim. He looked around the room but couldn’t see anything else remotely female. He suspected that whoever the lips belonged to didn’t actually reside here. What had Guy said? That Dunk’s wife or girlfriend had once worked at Charingsby? Something along those lines. Then a thought occurred to him. What if the lipstick marks belonged to Olivia Walker? He considered the implications of this as he rooted in the sink, retrieving a pint glass containing the last dregs of beer with the words ‘Stella Artois’ emblazoned on the side. It had to be Dunk’s. Morton carefully placed the glass in his bag and moved into a short dark hallway that fed into two rooms: a bathroom with predictably blackened, grimy grout and broken tiles on the wall and a small simple bedroom containing a double bed, a chest of drawers and small volcanoes of clothes dotted around the floor. This house was doing nothing to improve his opinion of Dungeness.
Then he noticed a large mahogany and glass gun cabinet mounted to the wall. Morton took a closer inspection. The velvet-lined case had capacity to hold four guns: only three were present. Which either meant, as he suspected all along, that Dunk had murdered Coldrick or that Dunk was currently roaming the Kentish countryside with a – what was it Juliette had called it? – ‘regular shotgun’.
As he gazed around the room, Morton suddenly realised that he was taking an inordinate amount of time over the simplest of tasks; he just needed to get Dunk’s DNA and get out. He didn’t need to be dawdling around like he was considering buying the place. He hurried over to the bed and, from the tell-tale concave impression in the pillow scraped a few hairs and pieces of dandruff into a plastic bag. That had to be enough of Dunk’s scalp to get a result.
Morton took one final look around the room, then cautiously opened the front door. No sign of any murderous yobs. Or bent police chiefs. Or gummy neighbours. All was still and silent in Dungeness.
Safely inside the Mini with the doors centrally locked, Morton took a moment to breathe deeply. He’d done it. Now he needed to get to Euston in record speed. Dr Baumgartner’s train would be leaving for Birmingham in two hours' time.
Morton predictably had to park a million miles away from Euston. He might as well have parked in Croydon. He ran through the heaving station, pushing past crowds of people, desperately hoping that he wasn’t too late. He glanced up at the huge yellow and black digital display which presided over the gates that led to the waiting trains. The train for Birmingham was due to leave in three minutes. They’d arranged to meet outside WH Smith’s but Dr Baumgartner was nowhere to be seen.
Morton desperately flicked his head left and right, craning his neck around the hordes of people trooping through the station.
He was fast running out of time.
Looking back at the time table display, he noted the platform number for the Birmingham train and made a run for it. As he neared the ticket barriers he wondered if he should get all Hollywood cop about it and leap over the barrier yelling something about him being a forensic genealogist and ‘would somebody stop the damn train’. Not really his style. Fortunately for him, a petite Asian lady had wedged open the disabled ticket barrier and was fixated by a youth in absurdly tight jeans and spiked purple hair staggering towards the train.
Morton ran past her, easily breaching the ticket barrier, where he caught sight of Dr Baumgartner, hanging his upper torso from the nearest train door and waving wildly.
‘Dr Baumgartner!’ Morton greeted.
‘Thought you weren’t going to make it,’ he replied.
‘Here,’ Morton said, thrusting his holdall into Dr Baumgartner’s waiting hand.
At that moment the train conductor blew his whistle and the train doors emitted their high-pitched warning to announce that they were about to close.
‘I should have the results by tomorrow,’ Dr Baumgartner just managed to say, before the doors abruptly smacked together in front of his face. And then he was gone. Back to Birmingham. Back to the headquarters of the Forensic Science Service.
With the rear end of the train almost faded from sight, Morton pulled out his mobile. Sixteen missed calls and two text messages. Not bad for a few hours in silent mode. Four were from Dr Baumgartner in unsurprising regular three-minute intervals preceding their scheduled meeting. One was from Jeremy and the rest were from Juliette. He dialled her mobile as he began his epic journey back towards the Mini.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Juliette greeted congenially.
‘Sorry, phone battery died,’ Morton lied, though why he didn’t just tell the truth, he wasn’t too sure. He vaguely thought that the truth was too complicated and he didn’t know who might be listening. Anyhow, it was a stupid mistake trying to pull the wool over Juliette’s eyes.
‘Liar. Your phone wouldn’t have even rung if your battery was dead.’ Oh yeah, Morton thought, forgetting whom he was talking to. She sounded like she was speaking from a dungeon.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Don’t change the subject. Where have you been?’
‘I’ll tell you when you get home. Where are you?’
‘I should be in a primary school with Roger giving a ‘Stranger Danger’ talk, but I told him I didn’t feel well and I had paperwork to catch up on so now I’m in the basement searching through a stack of bloody microfiches for anything on your aunty or mum or whoever she is to you now. PNC came back with nothing but then it wouldn’t because of how long ago the crime was committed.’
‘How likely is it that you’ll come up with something?’
‘Not. I don’t have the criminal’s name, date of birth, et cetera which would make the task a bit easier. Besides which, these records are regularly weeded for Data Protection.’
‘Well, thanks for trying.’
‘See you later.’
Morton hit the red button on his phone with a cynical intuition that Juliette wasn’t going to locate any records pertaining to his Aunty Margaret’s rape. He just had a hunch that his biological father had escaped justice and was freely roaming the streets. He remembered that Jeremy had tried to call him so he phoned his mobile.
‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ Jeremy began and Morton immediately feared the worst for his father. ‘I’m going back to Cyprus tomorrow.’
‘So soon?’ Morton said, feeling suddenly bereft of his newly-acquired relationship.
‘Now that Dad’s on the mend there’s no justification for the compassionate leave. Looks like his care is over to you and Juliette now.’
‘Hmm,’ Morton answered pensively. He doubted that it would be the last he’d hear of him, though. He’d overheard some of the blokes at the party talking about videos they’d uploaded to Facebook whilst in Afghanistan, so he doubted communication could be any more stunted in Cyprus.
Two hours later, a near-empty bottle of red wine had helped to distil Morton’s erratic thoughts. The house was silent but for the muted ticking from the grandfather clock in the hallway. He was sitting in his father’s lounge, staring at a family portrait that had hung over the fireplace since it had been taken. He couldn’t recall if the photo was taken for any particular birthday or anniversary but he remembered that he and Jeremy were told of their mother’s cancer days later. Possibly even the next day. He’d never really connected the two ideas before but now, looking up at himself as a fourteen-year-old boy with a grinning Jeremy - minus his top front teeth – sat beside him and their parents standing stoically behind them, he wondered if the picture had been taken as a desperate final snapshot of their dissolving nuclear family unit. Proof that they’d existed. Proof that could never be tarnished by insidious underlying family secrets. Say cheese! It was an image that should, under normal circumstances, be found amidst the yellowing pages of a photo album, not hanging proudly on the wall: Morton on a day trip to Hastings with his aunt, uncle and cousin. Uncle Peter, Aunty Maureen and cousin Jeremy. He felt sure that he could cope with their bizarre family foibles if it’d been like that.
Hiding the Past (The Forensic Genealogist series Book 1) Page 23
