Hiding the Past (The Forensic Genealogist series Book 1)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

A rattling of bolts then Soraya Benton appeared before him. She was dressed just the same as the first day he’d met her in an oversized cream jumper and baggy jeans. Lacking now, however, was the sparkle in her eyes and the welcoming smile. ‘Hi,’ Soraya said, ‘come in.’

  Morton followed her into the lounge and sat himself down.

  ‘So what have you been up to, then?’ she asked, taking a seat opposite him. He could see her eyeing up the box file on his lap. ‘You look a bit worse for wear.’ She even managed a stinted, cracked attempt at laughter.

  Morton smiled. ‘It’s over, Soraya,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What do you mean? Did you find what you needed?’

  He paused to consider the question. ‘Yes, I did. I also found a lot more than I bargained for. Like your marriage to Daniel Dunk.’

  ‘What?’ she gasped, a look of terror flicking across her face. ‘I don't know what you're talking-’

  ‘It's over. Stop pretending,’ he interjected.

  Soraya's eyes fell as she waited for Morton to continue.

  He tapped the red file with his knuckles and revealed the handwritten title, ‘Misc. Charingsby’ emblazoned on the spine. It sent shockwaves of pain through him but it was worth every moment to see the look of sheer horror on her face.

  ‘It’s funny really,’ he said, ‘there I was, flailing around in the archives of Charingsby, not a hope in hell of pulling all the records I needed out before being caught, then I discover this little red box which someone had painstakingly already put together.’

  Soraya bit her lip and stared at him, the epitome of the rabbit trapped in the headlights. Morton, with a good deal of concentration and pain, managed to prise open the box file. ‘Everything I needed, everything I’ve been searching for these last two weeks is in here.’ He withdrew a pile of paper and provided a running commentary for each item. ‘The 1944 admission register for St George’s Children’s Home, bank statements confirming payments to James Coldrick totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds, documents unequivocally confirming Frederick and David Windsor-Sackville’s involvement with the Nazis in the first half of World War Two, including vast, multi-million pound payments made to the family from Berlin …’ Morton put the papers down. ‘I don’t really need to tell you about the rest of the folder, do I, Soraya?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’d suspected something was amiss for a while now. I became suspicious that day at Peter’s house when we went there together to search for his will and you miraculously found the All About Sedlescombe book, which I knew hadn’t been there at the time of his death. You put it there, didn’t you?’

  Soraya nodded.

  ‘Having first filtered the contents to suit your own needs?’

  Another nod.

  ‘The day that I met Peter he warned me not to trust anyone. He meant you. He knew you were up to something.’ Morton held up the box file and pointed to the word on the spine. ‘Do you know what gave you away?’ Morton asked rhetorically. ‘It was the letter a. As soon as I spotted this on the shelf I knew.’ He paused, allowing her the opportunity to say something in defence, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘You compiled this file.’ Another pause. ‘Which didn’t make sense to me. Why, I thought, would she need me to research everything that she already knew? Then it clicked – the stuff in here might well bring down the Windsor-Sackvilles, but to what end? What would you gain from that? Then it came to me - you don't want to bring them down at all - you want to be part of them, but you needed me to find something concrete to prove that your son is heir to the vast Windsor-Sackville empire. You needed the genealogical link that’s missing from this file. Well, I found you the link to Finlay's family. A will arrived in the post this morning; I guess you could call it Finlay’s inheritance. Here,’ Morton said, handing over a single sheet of paper.

  Soraya cast her eyes down the paper then looked up, perplexed.

  ‘It’s a search for the estate of William Dunk,’ Morton said cryptically.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Soraya mumbled.

  ‘William Dunk, your father-in-law - he left nothing behind other than the delightful house in which your husband now resides,’ Morton said with a large grin.

  ‘What’s Daniel’s dad got to do with anything?’ Soraya asked.

  ‘Oh yes, sorry, I forgot that bit. William Dunk was James Coldrick’s father.’

  ‘No,’ Soraya exclaimed incredulously. ‘Absolutely impossible.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, William Dunk is undoubtedly the biological father of James Coldrick.’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘William was the estate handyman – Marlene obviously fell in love with him, unbeknownst to the Windsor-Sackvilles. The result was James Coldrick. Marlene wasn’t silly enough to declare the truth. In short, your son has no relationship whatever with the Windsor-Sackvilles.’

  ‘You’re making all this up,’ Soraya protested.

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘To stop Fin from getting what he’s entitled to.’

  ‘He’s entitled to nothing, Soraya. Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Then why have they been buying James Coldrick’s silence all these years, then? Why go to such lengths to protect the truth?’ she demanded, anger rising in her voice. ‘If James was William’s son then why have the Windsor-Sackvilles spent all these years covering up the truth?’

  ‘They didn’t know. They believed James was the son of David Windsor-Sackville. Simple as that.’

  Morton briefly summarised what he had learnt from Professor Geoffrey Daniels about the plans to unite the Koldrichs and the Windsor-Sackvilles. ‘Ultimately, they believed that James had been created as part of that union, but D-Day marked a change of direction in the war. The last thing a prominent English family wanted in mid-1944 was a link to Nazi Germany. As you know from these documents in my lap, a wedding was even planned. They went as far as to draw up a new coat of arms for the pair, which they had emblazoned on a copper box,’ he said. Professor Daniels had emailed Morton a copy of the Koldrich family crest, which was a confirmed match for the other half on the copper box.

  ‘How are you so damn sure that William Dunk was James’ father?’ she demanded.

  ‘DNA. I borrowed a sample from your husband. It’s ironic really that he’s done so much damage to James Coldrick’s family. I wonder if he would have done the Windsor-Sackville’s bidding if he’d known that James Coldrick was his half-brother.’

  Soraya stared in disbelief, taking in the news.

  ‘One thing I'm still not sure of, though. You married Dunk in 2005, yet had Finlay with Peter in 2008. Was your relationship with Peter purely because you'd discovered in the archives that the Windsor-Sackvilles were paying off an illegitimate son? Did you go out looking for Peter in order to procure a child with him?’

  Soraya sat dumbstruck, her silence speaking for her.

  Morton let Soraya's guilt hang quietly between them before saying, ‘I’m on my way to the police station right now. Your husband, your deceased father-in-law, the Windsor-Sackvilles, Olivia Walker, will all be implicated. I’m giving you a chance.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I’ll do what I can to save your back but you need to disappear. Now.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Finlay. I was always working for him remember – not you – and as my client, he doesn’t deserve the fallout from all this. Take him and leave.’

  Right on cue, Finlay Coldrick strolled into the room. Rather bizarrely, Morton thought, the boy actually grinned from ear to ear when he spotted him. ‘Hi, Morton!’ he greeted. Even more bizarrely, he bent down and gave Morton a hug. ‘What happened to your arms?’

  ‘Long story,’ Morton said, genuinely taken aback by the child’s reaction. Maybe children weren’t such an alien species after all.

  ‘Fin,’ Soraya said sharply, ‘go to your room and pack some clothes into your holdall, like you used to when you went to stay at…
’ Her sentence faded and their eyes locked momentarily before Fin hurried from the room.

  ‘Would it really have been worth it, Soraya? I take it all this comes down to money?’ Morton asked, not pausing for an answer. ‘You realise that your husband is responsible for Peter’s and his mum’s deaths, don’t you?’

  Soraya suddenly burst into tears - uncontrollable, angry tears.

  ‘Goodbye, Soraya,’ Morton said. He took one last pitying glance at her then left the house, knowing that he would see neither Soraya nor Finlay ever again.

  ‘Done?’ Juliette asked him as he climbed back inside the hot police van.

  ‘Done. To the station,’ Morton replied emptily. None of the previous genealogy jobs he had completed had ever had even one percent of the drama of the Coldrick Case but they had all ended with a satisfying conclusion; this left him feeling hollow inside. So many lives had been destroyed and were about to be destroyed because of the Coldrick Case.

  It took six hours. Six long gruelling hours in the void that was Interview Room Three of Ashford Police Station and Morton had told Barnaby McHale, the middle-aged, yet spry Deputy Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police the entirety of the Coldrick Case, inside and out. He even confessed to the innumerable illegalities which he had committed along the way. McHale passively scribed several pages of notes, only occasionally interjecting to clarify a point which sounded quite ludicrous. ‘Your house blew up?’ he had asked, to which Morton nodded. ‘What, all of it?’ which seemed a slightly obtuse question. Morton nodded again and then continued with the interview. The only careful and discreet economies with the truth surrounded Soraya Benton and Max Fairbrother’s involvement. In the case of the bald-pated stalwart of East Sussex Archives, Morton felt his involvement to have been so insignificant and so long ago as to be ignorable but he couldn’t quite see how Soraya would escape investigation, seeing as she was married to the murderer that was Daniel Dunk. He wondered if killing more than one person made Dunk a serial killer or mass murderer. Neither was a great character trait in a husband, he reasoned, as he handed over all the documentation in his possession. McHale mentioned Olivia Walker’s astonishing rise to the top, muttering something about questionable nepotism by the Secretary of Defence. He told Morton that he would be personally overseeing an investigation into Mary and Peter Coldrick’s deaths. Then McHale shook his hand, acknowledged the possibility of Morton's facing his own charges but concluded nonetheless, ‘Very brave thing you’ve done, Mr Farrier.' But Morton didn’t feel brave; he felt like the clichéd fish out of water, albeit a very stubborn one, like a belligerent salmon, hacking its way against the prevailing current. Maybe a dog with a bone was more apt if he was going for animal analogies.

  Once the interview was over, McHale led Morton down the labyrinth of indistinguishable internal corridors until they reached the front doors where Morton was released back into the wild to find that the day had grown grey and chilly as a fine, almost imperceptible coating of drizzle fell from the sky.

  Juliette was waiting in civvies in her car and together they left the compound.

  She leant over and kissed him. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Fine, I think,’ he answered. After all that had gone on, he didn’t feel he was in much of a position to fully appreciate the implications of what he had just done. Before Morton was even halfway through his revelations to McHale it had become obvious that the ramifications for the Windsor-Sackvilles' political careers would be huge. Not to mention Olivia Walker’s high-flying career in the police and Dunk’s career in serial-killing. What the police didn’t tear apart, the newspapers surely would. It was all out of his hands now. Que sera sera and all that.

  ‘Could we make a quick detour on our way home, please?’ Morton asked.

  Juliette groaned.

  Morton nudged open the lych gate to Sedlescombe church with the tips of his bandaged hand. Among the documentation that he’d handed over to McHale was the burial certificate for Marlene Koldrich in this very churchyard. With the drizzle increasing to a constant saturating rain, he headed straight for the vestibule where, on his last visit, he had noticed a map of the churchyard pinned to the notice board. It told him that Marlene was buried in section R, grave number 22, which, according to the map was in the back right area of the churchyard.

  Oh the irony! On his previous visit here, he had been so absorbed with the task in hand as not to see the blindingly obvious. In front of him, sheltered by the overhang of an oversized yew, was the clean black granite grave of James and Mary Coldrick, the tell-tale signs of fresh earth and fresh flowers pronouncing Peter’s recent interment and behind it, directly behind it, was a subtle jaded wooden cross with a simple brass plaque at the centre.

  Marlene, died 6th June 1944.

  Here they all were.

  Together.

  If he had been a religious man, he might have uttered a prayer, or quoted some appropriate lines from the Bible about eternal unity, but he simply stood in the dusky wet churchyard as sporadic droplets fell from the yew above him. His head slightly bowed, he felt a profound sorrow for the remains of the tragic family before him; all of them innocent pawns in someone else’s game. He saw it all clearly now - the whole jigsaw completed, all making sense. Marlene, daughter of Eberhard Koldrich, sent to England as a young woman to ingratiate herself into English aristocracy in anticipation of a Nazi victory, finds willing hosts in the Windsor-Sackvilles, a family so self-important that their only care regarding the war was to be on the victors' side, regardless of consequence, ends up not falling in love with the son of an important government minister, but with the loutish estate handyman. She falls pregnant, manages to convince the Windsor-Sackvilles that they have a male heir on the way, then bang! D-Day happens and the course of the war changes direction and Nazi-sympathisers beat a hasty retreat. Among the documents in the box file was a small newspaper cutting that spoke of the death of ‘an unknown visitor’, only known by the name of Marlene, having committed suicide on the village green on 6th June 1944. Goodbye, Marlene. Lo and behold, the Windsor-Sackvilles are there celebrating at Chartwell with Churchill soon after VE Day and David James Peregrine Windsor-Sackville’s company, WS Construction, lands one of the biggest reconstruction contracts in Europe. Then follows the knighthood and nothing else is mentioned again until Mary Coldrick starts researching her husband’s family tree in 1987. Cue fire, cue death, cue huge payments landing in James Coldrick’s bank. Problem solved, until Peter Coldrick becomes curious. Cue gunshot wound to the head. Cue death.

  But what these people hadn’t reckoned on was the services of Morton Farrier, Forensic Genealogist.

  Morton stared at Marlene’s austere grave.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Morton said. He turned and left the family at peace.

  Chapter Twenty

  6th June 1944

  Emily held the baby tightly and ran from the house. She navigated the orchard easily - nobody knew it better than she - and made it to the periphery of the woods. As the baby began to scream and pain spiked her bare feet as she ran, she knew she could never escape, yet she kept running – pushing further and further into the darkness, her nightie catching and snagging on branches. Behind her, the crunching of heavy boots was gaining ground, easily homing in on the sound of the screaming child. She pulled him tightly into her bosom, hoping to stifle his cries. From the blackness behind her, an unseen hand reached out and grabbed Emily’s shoulder. It was over.

  ‘It’s finished, Emily,’ her assailant shouted.

  Emily turned to face him. ‘My name’s not Emily!’ she shouted back.

  ‘Fine. It’s finished, Marlene.’

  Emily visibly sagged. All the lies, all the pretense, all the hopes for the future were gone, another casualty of the global conflict. A political union between two prominent families, as orchestrated by her father, Eberhard, and Frederick Windsor-Sackville, was crushed and buried. She cared nothing at all of it, her initial aspirations shattered the moment her baby son arri
ved. James. What would become of him?

  ‘Hand the boy over, Marlene,’ he ordered.

  ‘What will you do with him?’

  ‘That all depends on what happens next. If you do as I ask, then he’ll live. If you don’t, then neither of you will see this war out.’

  Marlene nodded. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for James. She set the suitcase down, gently kissed him on the forehead and handed him over.

  ‘Well done. Now, listen – ’

  Marlene didn’t wait to hear the end of the sentence; she dropped the suitcase and bolted into a thicket of coppiced horse-chestnut trees. She knew that she was only a few hundred yards from the Charingsby perimeter fence. If she could just run faster!

  A sudden loud crack echoed through the dusky woods, a bullet was fired into the back of Marlene Koldrich’s skull. She dropped to the floor like a pile of old rags.

  David Windsor-Sackville pulled the safety-catch over the shotgun and returned to the crying baby. He knew what his father wanted him to do to the baby but, as he held him in his arms and watched as the tears abated, he knew he couldn't do it. He would take him to St George's where he could start a new life. The baby looked up at him and smiled.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Friday

  The house felt different without Jeremy there. Aside from his physical presence, there was something clearly missing. Quite what that something was, Morton wasn’t sure. He’d taken the plane as planned, back to Cyprus, back to his maddening vocation in the military. Morton was still having trouble reconciling that particular career choice with his gay brother.

  ‘God, look at the time,’ Juliette said, thrusting her finger towards the clock above the fireplace.

  ‘Damn it,’ Morton said. They were supposed to collect his father from hospital fifteen minutes ago. The house needed to be perfect for him. Everything in its place. It also needed not to look like they’d been squatting there for the last couple of weeks, news of which he’d yet to break to his father. Morton had to give Jeremy his due, he’d certainly gone to town in cleaning and tidying the house in preparation for his arrival. He’d make someone a lovely husband one day. And vice versa hopefully. There was just one last thing to do. ‘I’ll be two minutes.’ Morton hurried up the stairs, grabbed the new pair of National Trust binoculars that he’d purchased from Mote Ridge and pulled open his father’s wardrobe. In his clumsy haste, and having only minimal movement in his fingers, Morton upset the box of junk in which he was trying to insert the binoculars.