The Spyglass File (The Forensic Genealogist Book 5) Read online

  Praise for The Spyglass File

  ‘If you like a good mystery, and the detective work of genealogy, this is another mystery novel from Nathan which will have you whizzing through the pages with time slipping by unnoticed’

  Your Family History

  ‘The first page was so overwhelming that I had to stop for breath…Well, the rest of the book certainly lived up to that impressive start, with twists and turns that kept me guessing right to the end… As the story neared its conclusion I found myself conflicted, for much as I wanted to know how Morton's assignment panned out, I was enjoying it so much that I really didn’t want this book to end!’

  Lost Cousins

  ‘Author Nathan Dylan Goodwin has given students of the Second World War, and avid family historians another great genealogical read’

  Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter

  ‘Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s latest Morton Farrier genealogical mystery deserves its five-star reviews on Amazon. A gripping story that will have you sneaking away to read just one more chapter!’

  Historian

  ‘Like his previous books, also set in England, this one keeps you intrigued right up to the very end… His style of weaving the past and present together is outstanding’

  Bay Area Genealogical Society

  ‘A really good read and a mystery which holds you to the end’

  The Wakefield Kidsman

  ‘The historical detail is superb. The author’s tale winds its 1940s path through the Battle of Britain, the Coventry Blitz, pregnancies and half-siblings aided by 2016 laptops, smart phones and autosomal DNA tests. The characters are so well developed that as one progresses through the book they feel like your friends. Author Goodwin expertly leaves readers cliff-hanging at the close of most chapters as the tale skillfully transitions the 75-year chasm. This book is very well written’

  The Livermore Roots Tracer

  ‘It is another page turner… This book is multi-layered with two timeframes and plots, one reflecting the other. There is the 1940s mystery and Morton Farrier, the researcher of 2016 trying to solve it. Even with this depth the book flows smoothly, creating a need to know what happens next. It is simply fascinating’

  Genealogical Society of the Northern Territory

  About the Author

  Nathan Dylan Goodwin was born and raised in Hastings, East Sussex. Schooled in the town, he then completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Radio, Film and Television, followed by a Master of Arts Degree in Creative Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University. A member of the Society of Authors, he has completed a number of successful local history books about Hastings, as well as other works of fiction in this series; other interests include reading, photography, running, skiing, travelling and of course, genealogy. He is a member of the Guild of One-Name Studies and the Society of Genealogists, as well as being a member of the Sussex Family History Group, the Norfolk Family History Society, the Kent Family History Society and the Hastings and Rother Family History Society. He lives in Kent with his husband and young son.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  nonfiction:

  Hastings at War 1939-1945

  Hastings Wartime Memories and Photographs

  Hastings & St Leonards Through Time

  Around Battle Through Time

  fiction:

  (The Forensic Genealogist series)

  Hiding the Past

  The Lost Ancestor

  The Orange Lilies – A Morton Farrier novella

  The America Ground

  The Spyglass File

  The Missing Man – A Morton Farrier novella

  The Suffragette’s Secret – A Morton Farrier short story

  The Wicked Trade

  The Spyglass File

  by

  Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  Copyright © Nathan Dylan Goodwin 2016

  Nathan Dylan Goodwin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where the names of real people have been used, they appear only as the author imagined them to be.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author. This story is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding, cover or other format, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design: Patrick Dengate

  www.patrickdengate.com

  For Pauline

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Historical Information

  Acknowledgments

  The Missing Man - Prologue

  The Missing Man - Chapter One

  Further Information

  Prologue

  12th July 1943, Capel-le-Ferne, Kent

  Elsie Finch stood on the narrow path that rose to five hundred feet above the dramatic white cliffs, the wind coursing through her blonde unkempt hair. She cut a striking figure as she glanced down over the cliff edge. Flaps of her ripped blue dress danced gaily in the breeze and slow streams of bright red blood flowed down from the abundance of scratches on her exposed arms and legs.

  She edged forward, to the spot of flattened grass that, just seconds before, had been where her mother-in-law had stood. Elsie leaned over as far as she dared, and peered below. She gasped and stepped back in horror; the body had fallen to a ledge part way down and was now motionless, lying broken and entwined in great ringlets of rusting barbed wire.

  Elsie closed her eyes, her train of thought brittle, suddenly. The desire to flee, to escape this nightmare was overwhelming, but there was one thing left to do.

  Tugging back on her errant thoughts, she tried to replay her mother-in-law’s last words before she had plummeted over the cliff, but they were grainy, vague and distorted. The Spyglass File—that was what she had said.

  If Elsie found The Spyglass File, she would find her baby.

  Chapter One

  3rd June 1940, Dunkirk Beach, France

  They entered the town of Dunkirk as the walking ghosts of their fathers’ generation. They wore their boots, their scarred helmets and their ill-fitting uniforms. They
carried their Great War guns. They had marched through places appallingly memorable: Ypres, Cambrai, Flanders and the Somme. They had fought on the land of the dead, ploughed and planted just twenty times since.

  Laurie Finch, with his two remaining comrades, staggered into the town. The three men instinctively stopped and looked around them in a detached way, shiny black sludge from a discarded Austin K2 ambulance licking at their boots.

  He knew that it was Dunkirk because the road signs had told him so. But this place could never have been a normal French seaside town. It could never have lived. It could never have seen joy or laughter or love; it could never have been anything other than what it was now.

  Long columns of British army trucks and lorries had been dumped at the roadside. Wheels missing. Smouldering. Wires spewing forth from open bonnets. The buildings around them abandoned, windowless and roofless, like unfinished dolls’ houses, fire continuing the destruction wrought by the endless pounding of Luftwaffe bombs and bullets. The streets, soaked from burst water mains, were strewn with debris: glass, shrapnel, clothing, unidentified engine parts and the charred unrecorded corpses of bullet-ridden soldiers and civilians. Several severely wounded men were slumped on the pavement, their eyes empty, accepting their certain fate.

  By wordless agreement, the three men continued through the town, side-stepping the wreckage and the rubble, the craters in the road and the twisted remains of their comrades. Their vision was blinkered, centred on the point just a few streets ahead, where the buildings ended and the salvation of the beach began. The place where the rescue boats awaited them.

  None of them flinched as a drunken naked man suddenly appeared from a side road on horseback, galloping past them, whooping and waving a tin helmet in the air.

  Onwards they walked, following in death’s footprints.

  Just as they neared the final row of beachfront properties, Laurie shot out his arm to stop his friends, recognising the brief agonising groan of surrendering bricks and mortar. The men dived to the ground as the entire corner building collapsed in a thunderous crash, enveloping them in a dirty granular darkness.

  It was the first moment in several days when time had behaved as it should; each minute that passed with the men pinned to the floor, choking, contained exactly sixty seconds.

  One by one, the men stood, spat out mouthfuls of grainy spittle and shook off their rind of dust. Then they gazed ahead.

  For days they had known that they would be the last of the last. The fourth battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment had been among the ill-fated chosen to form the rear-guard, allowing the rest of the British Expeditionary Force to evacuate. At every bridge they had crossed, sappers had waited, detonating their charges just moments later.

  Yes, they knew they were the last of the last, but they hadn’t expected this. Evidence of the final hours of tens of thousands of soldiers was encapsulated in the detritus which appeared on the beach like an uninterrupted lurid tide line: countless bicycles with frames twisted beyond recognition; dozens of axe-smashed motorbikes; hundreds of thousands of smashed rifles, stacked in an enormous pyre; an unimaginable quantity of helmets; thousands of burned out cars and trucks; horses with bullet holes behind their eyes; crashed and wrecked RAF aircraft.

  And the dead.

  All around them, the dead.

  A ragged mongrel chewing on the fingers of a corpse.

  ‘Your land is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. Your fields—strangers are devouring them in your presence; it is desolation.’

  Laurie turned to Bill Rhodes, who had just uttered those words and wondered when he had last heard him speak. Had he spoken today, before now? Had Joe spoken today? Or had the three of them just walked, one foot in front of the other, as they had done since the order had been given to evacuate? Five days ago, the bleakness of their situation had percolated down through the ranks, when an order to retreat to high ground at Mont des Cats had been issued. Somewhere in the region of seven thousand men and bumper-to-bumper queues of British army transport had ascended the hill for the dubious sanctuary of the Gothic monastery. But the order of Trappist monks residing there could not offer them any protection from the twenty Luftwaffe warplanes that had relentlessly bombed and machine-gunned the hill, nor could the monks protect them from the blasting that followed from approaching German tanks and mortar fire, nor from the advancing line of infantry. Chaos had infiltrated the infallible precision of the British army, and finally the order had been given to abandon the monastery and head twenty miles north-east to an evacuation point at Dunkirk. It had been, and continued to be, every man for himself.

  Tears welled in Laurie’s eyes.

  Amidst the carnage, there was hope.

  A snaking line of soldiers—a few hundred, Laurie guessed—wound its way from the beach, through the shallows of the English Channel, past the carcasses of several destroyed vessels, to two small navy warships, where the men were being dragged aboard. Above them, a swarm of Nazi Stuka dive-bombers circled rapaciously. Waiting.

  It was Laurie who went first. He broke into a run, summoning the last of his energy for the short distance to the end of the line that led—in surely just a few hours—to the embracing shores of England. To home.

  He reached the blood-stained khaki of the final soldier in line and fell to the sand behind him, at last surrendering to the pain that blistered his mind and body.

  A hand squeezed his shoulder and Laurie turned and smiled. It was Joe Morrison, his oldest friend. He and Joe had signed up together for six months’ service in July 1939, when the absolute certainty of war had yet to disseminate to the working men being recruited into the militia. Why had they even signed up? He had no idea, now.

  Directly above Joe, Laurie caught sight of the first of the Stuka bombers manoeuvring into a descent at almost ninety degrees, its inverted gull wings silhouetted in the sun’s hazy periphery. The hideous, terrifying wail of the plane’s Jericho trumpet pre-empted his warning cry and the line of men dispersed chaotically, the desperation to run outweighing the certain knowledge that they had nowhere to go.

  Laurie fell to his side and covered his head with his hands.

  The guns opened up, loud and staccato, ripping through the sand right beside him, the wail growing to a deafening crescendo.

  There were screams and shouts all around him, as bullets tore into flesh.

  Laurie rolled to his front and closed his eyes, sand raining down on his back, knowing that his life was all but over.

  Finally, just a few feet above the beach, the Stuka pulled up, heading into a steep climb to re-join the rest of the group circling above them. But another had just begun to dive.

  The hope of rescue and setting foot back in England dissolved, escaping him like a drop of water on the sand. He wouldn’t get to see his wife, Elsie, or his mother or sister ever again. He would never have children. He would never grow old. The knowledge that he was going to die in France, all alone, crushed the final grains of his resolve. With that clarity of understanding came a weakening of his muscles and a speeding up of his heart. He urinated on himself and began to sob.

  The ear-splitting cry from the Jericho trumpet signalled the imminent opening up of the Stuka’s guns.

  Something—he didn’t know what—forced him to open his eyes.

  With his hands clasped to his ears, he watched as the Stuka’s bomb cradles opened in the air directly above them, and four hundred-and-ten-pound bombs came hurtling down in his direction.

  Paradoxically for Laurie Finch, the seconds of helpless waiting as the bombs fell, were both brief, giving him no time to react, move or speak and yet also simultaneously drawn out, allowing him the time to realise and accept his fate.

  Chapter Two

  21st June 1940, Bramley Cottage, Nutley, East Sussex

  Elsie Finch stood at the open back door of her cottage, gazing out into the garden. It was so perfect that it could have been a painting, she thought, with a note of contempt. The sky w
as one simple tone of turquoise, the woods behind the garden a thousand shades of green. She exhaled as she took in the neat cobbled path that wound its way through immaculate flower beds to the orchard beyond. It was too damned perfect, that was the trouble. ‘You must open your delightful garden to the public,’ Mrs McKay had enthused last week from her high perch in the village hall, speaking on behalf of one of the several committees of which she considered herself an indispensable part. ‘We could charge a shilling entry to raise money for the war effort.’

  Elsie stepped outside, leant back on the doorframe and raised one arch-shaped eyebrow, thinking about the war effort. What bloody war? Here, tucked away in the Sussex countryside, her nearest neighbour more than half-a-mile away, there was no war. She strained her ears to hear something—anything at all—but there was nothing to be heard but that wretched, empty silence. Even the honey bees, flitting and shuffling restlessly between the purple chive flowers and those of the mauve sage were silent. As she fussed with her blonde hair, pointlessly impeccable and styled in shoulder-length rolls, she was certain that, if she were to die in wartime, it would be from the slow sinking-sand monotony of what her life had become.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she murmured, just to break the pitiful stillness, as she plucked a cigarette from the packet of Wills’ Gold Flakes that she squeezed in her hand. She lit it and took a long drag, reflecting on the last few months since her wedding day. Her heart began to tighten as she thought of that blustery day, two weeks before the declaration of war, when she had become Mrs Laurie Finch. Just four weeks later, her husband had been whisked off to France with the British Expeditionary Force, leaving her here, the anxious housewife. Since that unremarkable day last August when she had ceased to be Miss Elsie Danby and she had left her job as the village school teacher—as was the expectation—her life had fallen into a ghastly routine. It was a routine no less exacting or precise than one of the dreadful knitting patterns given to her by her mother, which was now stuffed among a pile of other useless papers in the kitchen. Baking, tidying, washing, cleaning, knitting. Endlessly.