The Spyglass File (The Forensic Genealogist Book 5)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  The colourful, fairy-tale life that Morton had in his mind’s eye for his real family suddenly became monochrome and tarnished. Nobody was smiling. There was just deep anguish. His image of the perfect family started to disintegrate before his eyes.

  ‘Well…’ Juliette began. But she had no words, either. She could see it for what it was.

  ‘I’m shocked,’ Morton stammered. ‘What on earth could my father have discovered that was so bad?’ Their eyes met. ‘I’ve just opened Pandora’s Box and don’t have a clue what to do next.’

  Juliette smiled. ‘You’ll do what you always do, you’ll do your research and you’ll find the answers—no matter how tricky it is.’

  Morton sighed, trying not to lose his patience. She didn’t understand. Besides which, she wasn’t listening anyway. She was engrossed in her mobile. ‘There’s only so much I can do online,’ he complained. ‘And I’ve done it; I can’t do any more.’

  He breathed out slowly, attempting to padlock the lid on his mind’s meanderings. Closing his eyes, he drew small circles on his temples with his index fingers. Another migraine was coming.

  When, eventually, he opened his eyes, he found Juliette’s mobile staring up at him from between his elbows. He looked up at her face, not understanding. ‘What?’

  She nodded at the phone.

  He picked it up, trying not to squint at the screen’s brightness. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. It was an email. Some kind of confirmation. His fingers spliced across the screen and the word Boston jumped out at him.

  ‘It was going to be a surprise,’ Juliette said.

  Then it made sense. It was a flight confirmation. Two passengers. Three weeks. In and out of Boston, Massachusetts.

  ‘Our honeymoon,’ she explained with a grin.

  He slid back his chair and pulled her into an embrace. He wanted to say thank you, but the words, pathetically insignificant, lodged in his dry throat.

  He held onto her as a rogue tear escaped from his right eye, and vanished into her top.

  ‘Wipe the file,’ Tamara directed. She was sitting beside Shaohao Chen in the kitchen of Cliff House, sipping a large glass of white wine. A faint whiff of smoke from the impromptu bonfire lingered in the air around them. She flicked her thumb and little fingernails together impatiently.

  Shaohao laughed, peering at his laptop screen. He had managed to gain access to Morton’s computer, remotely. She had no idea how but she was now looking at a long list of folder names on his computer—his previous cases. She craned her neck to see. The Glazier Case. The Mercer Case. The Lovekin Case. The Stiltman Case. The Coldrick Case. And there, at the top was a newly created file—The Finch Case. Seeing it like that made her shudder.

  ‘Just wipe it,’ she repeated, rubbing the goose bumps that had risen on her arms. They had already looked at the contents of the file and it had troubled her greatly. Morton Farrier was on to them.

  ‘Tamara, if I just wipe this one, he’ll become suspicious. I need to wipe the whole thing.’

  Tamara shrugged. Why would she care about that? ‘Just do it, clean the whole bloody computer out, for all I care. I just want that file irretrievable.’

  She stood over him and watched. A few clicks of the mouse and the files vanished. Gone. She breathed more easily, sipped her wine and paced over to the window. The fire was dying down now, the contents wiped from existence, just like his computer files.

  ‘Do you think that’s it?’ Shaohao asked.

  She thought for a moment, despite knowing the answer. She turned. ‘No.’

  ‘Then what are we going to do about him?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you want me to deal with it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘If he’s good at his job, then he’ll be coming to me fairly soon.’ She just needed to be patient and wait for him to come. And she needed to be ready when he did.

  Morton felt as though he was back inside the womb. He was curled up in the foetal position with his duvet tucked under his chin. A pool of sunlight streamed in through the open sash window. Beside his bed was a cold coffee, brought to him with a kiss almost an hour ago when Juliette had left for work. For some time, he had just lain and watched the steam rising from the cup, gradually reducing to nothing; his warm cocoon refused to release him. He had slept surprisingly well. Each time that he had found himself semi-consciously wandering through his father’s letters and the conundrums that they proposed, he was able to flatten the thoughts instantly with the knowledge that he would, in just three weeks’ time, be on Cape Cod, conducting research on the ground, finding the answers for which he searched, with luck.

  Outside, Rye was coming to life: the sounds of doors being opened and closed; the crunch of car tyres over the cobbles; seagulls cawing from the rooftops and unintelligible chatter. Then came the ten long strikes of the bells of St Mary’s Church. It was high time to get up.

  He took a protracted amount of time shaving, showering and getting himself ready for the day ahead. Breakfast—bagel and coffee at the kitchen table—was also drawn out, whilst he re-read his father’s letters. He read them calmly now, feeling nothing of the agonising rush of his blood and borderline panic that he had experienced last night.

  Then he thought of the Finch Case and his next steps. He wanted to try and trace the Susan Stubbs who had worked as a WAAF operator at Hawkinge during the war and write to her to suggest a possible meeting. Then there was the impossible task of researching William Smith and his family. He deliberated about which coffee shop to go to in order to conduct his work, then suddenly decided that it was too nice a day to be stuck indoors. On a whim, he phoned Barbara Springett and asked if he could pop over and see her. She told him that she would be home all day and that she had visitors who would be very pleased to meet him. Morton grabbed his laptop, his notepad and pen and the WAAF release papers that he needed her to sign and headed out to his car.

  In keeping with the lightness of his mood, he had driven sedately to her house, arriving almost an entirely different person to that of his last visit here, much of which was now a blur. He rang the bell and waited. The door was opened and three people stood in front of him: Barbara, with a large smile on her face, another lady a few years her junior and a man of a similar age.

  Morton inwardly gasped. He had missed something terribly huge in his research. The three of them were the spitting image of one another, all smiling together like some grotesque troupe act.

  ‘Morton, I’d like you to meet Paul and Rose—my delightful brother and sister,’ Barbara introduced. ‘Well, my half-brother and sister.’

  Morton leant across and shook their hands. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he heard himself saying, his brain scrabbling around in the haze of his previous visit for any mention of half-siblings. He couldn’t make the dots join together.

  ‘You’ve noticed the resemblance, then,’ Barbara laughed. ‘Come on in, we’re so thrilled that you decided to call today of all days!’

  ‘We try to meet up about once a month, if we can,’ Rose added, as Morton entered the house.

  ‘So, is that it? Job done?’ Paul asked, standing back to let Morton go before him. ‘You’ve found all of our mother’s wartime secrets?’

  The three of them laughed. Morton joined in.

  ‘No, not quite,’ he answered. ‘I’ve just come really to drop off some papers I need Barbara to sign.’

  ‘Right!’ Barbara said, ushering everyone to a seat in the lounge. ‘Who’s for tea and who’s for coffee?’ She counted up and began to leave the room, suddenly stopping and turning on her heels. ‘Do not start anything while I’m out of earshot, do you hear me?’

  ‘Loud and clear, darling sister,’ Paul replied.

  Morton studied their faces, still unable to believe the startling resemblance between them all. Paul was portly, bearded with a receding hairline, but he shared with Rose and Barbara a soft, rounded face and striking azure eyes. That Elsie Finch was mother to each of them was beyond question. Morton hurriedly returne
d to the start of his pad and scanned down his garbled notes for any mention of half-siblings. There was nothing. Had Barbara even told him about them?

  ‘So, your mother remarried soon after the war ended, then?’ Morton asked, using approximate ages as a gauge for when the second marriage must have taken place.

  Paul and Rose looked at each other. It was a clear look of not understanding.

  ‘Er…our mum remarried in 1968, just after our father died,’ Paul said, throwing another look at Rose.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ Morton said, mustering a voice that said that everything had suddenly become clear. But it hadn’t. ‘So…your dad was…?’

  ‘Lawrence Finch,’ Rose said with an uncertain smile.

  Morton frowned and set down his notepad. He was lost. ‘Sorry,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘I thought he was killed in the war?’

  ‘Our mother thought that he’d been killed at Dunkirk—she got a telegram—Paul’s got it somewhere, haven’t you?’ Paul nodded. ‘It said he was missing, presumed dead. Then she got a letter to say he was alive and well. He was a prisoner of war until 1945, when he came back home.’

  ‘I came along in 1946,’ Paul chipped in.

  ‘Followed by me in 1948,’ Rose said.

  Morton quickly added the new information to his notepad, deeply embarrassed. What else had he missed?

  Barbara entered the lounge with a tray of drinks and a plate of biscuits. ‘Here we go,’ she said, distributing the teas and coffees. ‘Help yourself.’ She took a seat beside Rose, sitting with a grateful sigh. ‘I hope you haven’t started without me!’

  ‘You didn’t tell him about us!’ Rose exclaimed. ‘Flippin’ cheek of it!’

  Barbara’s eyes widened. ‘I most certainly did!’ She looked to Morton for confirmation. ‘I told you that Laurie returned but never knew anything about me. I said to you that I feel—from these two—that I know my mother quite well, but none of us have any clue about what she did in the war. Apart from that I was a wartime mistake that happened when mum believed herself to have been a widow, of course.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not a mistake!’ Rose chirped.

  A mini-conversation erupted between the siblings, allowing Morton a few moments to gather his thoughts and quell his mortification. He never made catastrophic blunders like this. He needed to reassert himself as an authority, to try and claw back some credibility. He opened his laptop and waited for it to start then cleared his throat. He stepped into a lull in their conversation.

  ‘So, as I mentioned to Paul,’ Morton began, ‘the case is far from over, but I can show you one or two bits that I’ve found…I’m just waiting for the laptop…okay, here we go.’ He navigated through to his files but something was wrong. They had vanished. Every single case file that he had ever worked on was gone. ‘Sorry about this, I’m having trouble here…’ he mumbled. He closed the window and tried again. Still nothing. He ran a search for the file name. Nothing. He exhaled noisily and shut the laptop lid. ‘Technology,’ he said with a smile. ‘So. Your mother was born at Cliff House in Capel-le-Ferne. I went up there to take a look and got chased out by some mad old woman waving a stick at me and threatening to call the police…’

  An eruption of laughter sliced through his account, taking him by surprise. It was mildly amusing, he supposed, but not that funny. All three of them were in fits of laughter, to the point that Rose had to set her drink down on the coffee table, trying not to choke.

  Rose wiped her eyes. ‘Yes, she would very likely have killed you if she’d got hold of you!’

  Morton grinned, but he wasn’t sure at what. ‘Oh, you know her, then?’

  The laughter stopped as more odd looks darted between the siblings.

  ‘That would be Miss Havisham,’ Paul said. ‘At least, that’s what we call her.’

  ‘It’s their Aunt Kath,’ Barbara said. ‘Like I told you last time. She lives up at the house with her daughter.’

  ‘Our cousin, Tamara,’ Rose said, with a shudder. ‘We haven’t spoken to them since we were kids. Once mum remarried we didn’t see them much anymore. I think they felt affronted that Mum had dared to marry someone else.’

  ‘They’re not very nice people,’ Paul said. His face was regretful as he spoke.

  They had already answered Morton’s next question but he felt compelled to ask it anyway. ‘Is there any chance that they would talk to me about your mother?’

  They needed no time to confer or ponder his question; Paul and Rose shook their heads and both emphatically answered, ‘No.’

  The mood had shifted and an uncomfortable stillness hung in the room, each of them sipping their drinks. Morton had never felt so out of his depth and incompetent before. He needed to do something to save himself. Quickly.

  ‘Well, what I did find,’ he began, ‘was that your mother joined the WAAF.’

  There was a spark of interest in the three pairs of eyes and murmurings of intrigue. With few facts now at his disposal, Morton laboured an unrehearsed account of the work undertaken by the WAAF at Hawkinge. Barbara, Rose and Paul sat captivated, listening intently.

  ‘Wow! Who knew our mother had such an important job?’ Paul said when Morton had finished.

  ‘And she was promoted to Squadron Officer?’ Rose asked. ‘She never breathed a word! It sounds terribly grand to me.’

  ‘Whenever I asked what she did in the war,’ Paul said, ‘she would just dismiss me saying “Oh, the same as everyone else, muddled along.” Incredible.’

  Morton produced the WAAF release documents and handed them to Barbara. ‘If you could sign these papers then we should be able to find even more,’ he said, finally feeling that he was back with some kind of control. Whilst they pored over the paperwork, Morton pulled out his mobile, opened the picture of William Smith and deliberated about whether or not to show Barbara the photo of her father. It was something that he never did—pre-empted a case before it was complete. He looked at William’s face and decided against showing them. Finding anything about him was going to be a struggle. As Morton pocketed his phone, an idea struck him. He looked up at the three siblings. All of them shared Elsie Finch’s DNA, but only Barbara had William’s.

  ‘Would you mind taking a DNA test?’ Morton blurted.

  The three of them looked at each other, then back to him.

  ‘Who?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘All of you,’ Morton said, with a smile. ‘If I use an autosomal test, I can immediately rule out the genes that you share, leaving you, Barbara, with just your father’s side. Given his surname, it could be a quicker way of tracking down his family.’

  ‘I’m game,’ Barbara said, receiving instant assent from her brother and sister.

  ‘Great—I’ll get some test kits sent here,’ Morton said.

  ‘Here you go,’ Barbara said, handing over the completed release form.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll get these sent off to the Ministry of Defence right now and I’ll be in touch.’ He stood up, gathered his things and said goodbye. Barbara saw him to the door and, from back inside the lounge, he was sure that he could hear Rose whispering something to Paul about Morton’s incompetence.

  Barbara flinched when she heard it, but Morton feigned ignorance. He climbed into his car and left quickly.

  Once he was clear of the house, he sighed. Then laughed. How had he missed such crucial information? It was time to go home and start from scratch with the Finch Case. But first, he needed to get his laptop sorted out.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Morton was sitting in his study, transfixed by a smudge on the window. The shop where he had deposited his computer yesterday had just called to say that the files were all gone. Wiped clean, as if they had never existed. The person on the other end of the phone—a small boy, by the sound of his voice—had said impatiently that Morton himself must have deleted the files. They were removed two days ago at precisely 7.54pm, along with the back-ups. Morton had tried to argue, but there had seemed little point—-regardles
s of when they had been deleted and by whom, the boy was adamant that they were now lost forever. Morton had hung up the phone and just sat, wondering. Was it possible that someone had deleted them maliciously? In the course of his past work he had annoyed a hell of a lot of people. It was possible, but the list of suspects was far too long to bother even drawing up. His mind leap-frogged across the digital bones of his past cases, the computerised details all now entirely erased.

  The banging of a car door on the street below, followed by a workman’s holler, made Morton snap back to the present. He opened Juliette’s laptop and, after some narrowing down and cross-referencing in the online electoral registers, he whittled down the potential number of Susan Stubbses to four. He wrote the same standard letter to them all, explaining who he was and the case on which he was working. Next, he ordered three Ancestry DNA test kits and had them all sent to Barbara’s house. Then, he turned his attention back to the fundamentals of the Finch Case.

  Just as Barbara and her siblings had told him, Lawrence Finch had indeed returned from war; Morton located his death reference in the June quarter of 1968. He also found Paul and Rose Finch’s birth references, exactly as he had expected. In the September quarter of 1968 he found the details of Elsie’s second marriage to one Englebert Edward Goodall.

  Morton sat back in his chair and flipped through the case notes. So many enquiries—the DNA test, the letters to the Susans, the WAAF disclosure—were frustratingly in the hands of others. There was nothing left for it, but to turn his attention to what he had been avoiding researching: William Smith. It was going to be a very long and painful afternoon.

  In the end, Morton spent the entire rest of the day just researching the basics of William’s life. With a great deal of effort, he came across some useful snippets here and there online: the reference to William’s schooling in Brentwood in the Men of the Battle of Britain book had led Morton to find his baptism in Finchley, North London, which in turn allowed him to narrow down the search for his birth, followed by the marriage of William’s parents. It appeared, although Morton was really not certain at this point, that William had been an only child. He ordered both the certificates on the priority, twenty-four-hour service. He wanted to confirm his findings with the certificates before going back any further on the Smith family tree.