Hiding the Past (The Forensic Genealogist series Book 1) Read online

  ‘We’ll be in touch, Mr Farrier,’ Jones said. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

  Morton said goodbye and watched from the lounge window to make sure that they actually left. The Volvo left the square with gratuitous speed, leaving in its fume-ridden wake a welcome silence.

  He emitted a long and protracted sigh when he realised that it was all over. Everything was finished now that Coldrick was - whether by his own hand or another's - deceased. Whatever mystery might have lurked in his family had died with him. And that was that. Job done, thank you very much.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ Morton said, the very moment that Juliette had stepped across the lounge threshold.

  ‘Let me get in first, Morton. Jesus. Hello?’

  ‘Sorry. Hello,’ he said, kissing her on the lips.

  Juliette sighed and made a meal of removing her steel-toe-capped boots before she answered. ‘It’s suicide, Morton. No sign of forced entry, no suspicious prints. Ballistics, forensics; everything points towards him killing himself. Not to mention that there were suicide notes, including the one to you: imagine how that looked. “Morton Farrier, isn’t he your bloke, Juliette?” Christ.’

  Morton resented the implication that he was somehow to blame for Coldrick’s suicide note, but knew better than to change the tracks along which their discussion was running if he wanted further information. He wondered if he could really have it so wrong in his mind when all the weight of the evidence was stacked against him. Then he considered what Juliette had just said. ‘Ballistics?’

  She nodded. ‘Uh-huh.’

  Calm, passive Peter Coldrick had shot himself? Morton couldn’t imagine a less likely method of suicide. Riding an elephant into an electricity pylon seemed only slightly less of a plausible way to die. It was so absurd as to be laughable. ‘It can’t be right, Juliette.’

  ‘Well, we’ll find out soon enough - there’ll be an investigation and inquest after the post-mortem in the next few days. It’s going to be a thorough one, the Chief Constable of Kent has decided to descend upon us for a few days. Some procedural, quality assurance monitoring thing or other, which is just what we need. With her breathing down our necks, you’re pretty much guaranteed a meticulous job,’ she said, heading to the bedroom.

  ‘That’s something I suppose,’ Morton mumbled, keeping close to her heels.

  ‘I might be able to find out more tomorrow. I’m on at five in the morning standing outside the damned house,’ she complained, pulling on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and loose-fitting t-shirt that had been purchased with the unfulfilled idea of a regular jogging routine.

  ‘Does that sound normal to you?’ Morton asked. ‘Have you ever guarded the house of a suicide before? Murder maybe, but not suicide.’

  Juliette paused then shook her head. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything. Like I said, the big boss is in so we’ve got to go OTT on everything.’

  Morton didn’t get it. What were they worried about, that Coldrick’s dead body might return? He thought about it for a moment and the idea came to him that maybe he could use this abnormality in police procedure to his advantage.

  ‘Will it just be you there?’ he asked tentatively.

  ‘I expect so now that SOCO have done their bit; might be two of us. Why?’

  ‘You need to let me get inside,’ Morton said.

  Juliette laughed as she left the bedroom and dumped herself down into the sofa. Morton trailed in behind her.

  ‘I’m serious, Juliette. Turn your back, do whatever you have to do. I really need to see if I can find what Coldrick wanted to show me.’

  Juliette rolled her eyes. ‘Why do you care, anyway? Surely the job’s finished now he’s dead? Does it really matter what he wanted to show you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Morton answered. Granted, it was the shortest-lived case of his career, but one that had piqued his curiosity – what if Coldrick’s suspicions held even a nugget of truth? Kent Police might not find Coldrick’s death suspicious, but he sure did. Maybe it was simply that he had nothing better to do. Whichever way, he wanted to get inside that house. ‘Please, Juliette. I just need five minutes in there.’

  ‘No, Morton. Anyway, I might get to the station tomorrow and be doing something completely different.’

  Morton sighed and sloped off into the kitchen to make dinner, hoping that by making his disappointment evident, she might take pity on her dejected boyfriend and change her mind. She didn’t. She did what Juliette did best, and changed the subject. ‘Did you get the email from Jeremy today?’ she called.

  ‘No, what was that?’

  ‘Invite to a leaving party Saturday night. It’s all a bit rushed as his regiment’s being posted out on Monday.’

  Morton had known that the day of Jeremy’s posting overseas was looming ever closer, but he’d put it to the back of his mind, hoping that the day would never arrive.

  ‘We’ve got to be at your dad’s house at seven.’

  Morton groaned. ‘I suppose that means he’ll be there, then.’

  ‘Of course he’ll be there. Did you think Jeremy wouldn’t invite his own dad or something?’ Juliette asked, appearing at the kitchen doorway. ‘It’s been ages since you’ve been to see him or spoken to him. It won’t hurt you.’

  ‘I spoke to him on his birthday,’ Morton countered.

  ‘That was two minutes on the phone five months ago, Morton.’

  She was right: it was time to make an effort. It just didn’t come naturally to him and even saying the word dad felt like he was speaking in tongues.

  ‘Are we supposed to get him a going away present? Do Smith’s do a Sorry you’re leaving for the crap-hole of the world, hope you don’t get blown up by a suicide bomber card?’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical, Morton,’ Juliette said, circling her arms around his midriff as he began to prepare the dinner. ‘It’s okay to be worried about him.’

  Morton exhaled, allowing his tense muscles to relax in her embrace. As he considered his brother out in Afghanistan, he became aware, possibly for the first time since he was eighteen, of a bond between him and Jeremy. Was it a genuine fraternal bond? Or just the type of bond that forms when two people live in the same house for several years? A lone tear ran down his cheek and plopped unceremoniously onto the chopping board.

  ‘Bloody onions,’ he muttered.

  Chapter Two

  Thursday

  Morton woke with a start and sat bolt upright, his breathing out of control and his heart feeling like it was about to burst from his chest cavity, just like that scene in Alien that had scared the hell out of him when he had stupidly first watched it at the age of nine. He had been dreaming of Peter Coldrick without the benefit of the roof of his mouth. Peter had looked right at him, shouting, ‘Come over; I’ve found something. Come over; I’ve found something.’ Morton strained his eyes to see the clock: five forty-nine a.m. He needed to get up and clear his head. His tired mind was whirring as he stumbled from the bedroom towards his study. What was he doing, continuing to research the family history of a dead man with no known family? With Coldrick dead, he could just take the money and run. What was the point in continuing? He searched inside for the answers. First of all, he had no other work on at the moment, having cleared a good two weeks in his diary for researching Coldrick’s family. Secondly, he felt that his obligation to find Peter Coldrick’s family still stood, since payment had changed hands. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, no prior job had ever held such intrigue before. He needed to give it more time. Morton sat at his cluttered desk and pulled open the cardboard wallet containing the research notes taken at Coldrick’s house on Tuesday, as he reflected on the visit. He’d spent six hours in Peter’s company trying to build a picture of the Coldrick family, asking probing questions which ultimately led nowhere. Despite the severe lack of leads emanating from the meeting, Morton felt a strong affinity with the pitiful man before him. A man, like himself, struggling to connect with his identity. The only difference between them
was that Peter was labouring under the weight of his past, while Morton did his best to ignore his. He decided that he really liked this man.

  Slowly, he read aloud what he’d written, trying to absorb the information as he spoke. ‘Peter Coldrick, born 1971. Only child of James and Mary Coldrick, née Balfour, married 1970. Mary died in a house fire 1987, James of cancer 2012. Peter, no siblings. James Coldrick, no known siblings. Parents unknown. Born 6th June 1944 in Sussex village of Sedlescombe. Taken to St George’s Children’s Home and spent childhood there until fifteen. Worked as a general labourer on various farms.’

  Morton studied the piece of paper. It was very little to go on – much less basic information than he was used to gathering on an initial visit to a client’s home. What was it that Peter had said on Tuesday? It’s as if my family are all enclosed in a walled garden which has no door. If you’re going to get anywhere with it you need to find another way in. And another way in he would most certainly find.

  Also in the wallet was a faded, sepia photograph that Peter had found amongst his father’s papers last week. Finding the picture was the catalyst for Peter to hire him. Morton prepared the photo for a forensic analysis by scanning it into his laptop at 2400 x 1800 dots per inch, the highest setting possible on his scanner. Within a few seconds the image was in front of him onscreen, granting him the ability to zoom into any part of the photo with absolute clarity. The first step was to get an overview of the original image. The photo was of an attractive, young woman – he guessed early thirties - holding a small baby. Centering into the woman’s dark eyes, Morton saw pride and joy at the child she held in her arms. He estimated that the baby was around a month old. Despite the age and quality of the photo, the woman looked to Morton like someone who cared what she looked like - her eyes, hair, lips and skin appearing flawless. The woman’s clothing and waved, side-rolled hair, coupled with the Box Brownie style of photo, suggested to Morton that it was taken shortly after James’ birth in 1944. Behind her was a light-coloured building of some kind, surrounded by trees. To the west was a tall herringbone-brick chimney.

  The next step was to undertake what three years studying history at University College London had taught him – a forensic examination of the photograph. The photo analysis was actually pretty simple: it took Morton under an hour to deduce the exact date on which the photograph had been taken. Not bad going, he had to admit. He even knew the time of day that it was taken. Photo analysis was one of Morton’s specialties, having achieved full marks in the Photo Forensics module at university. His maverick lecturer, Dr Baumgartner, on a three-year secondment from the Forensic Science Service, was a man who encouraged his students to think outside the box and to ‘become more knowledgeable of the minutiae in a photograph than of your own body.’ He had taught them how to interpret everything from architecture to historic weather patterns, clothing fashions to the breeding habits of bluebottles and pretty much everything in between.

  First, Morton measured the angles of the shadows in the photograph: 16.8º, emanating from due west. He cross-referred these to online solar patterns which gave only two possible possibilities in 1944: at 3.58pm on 7 May and 15 September. Since James Coldrick was born in June, Morton’s initial assessment was that the photo was taken on 15 September. But that didn’t add up with what he found next. The trees in the picture, which he’d identified as being Victoria plum, were covered in a nascent blossom, which by September would have been replaced by fruit. Either James Coldrick’s birth didn’t occur in June or, for the first time in his career, he’d made a mistake with a photo analysis. He was inclined towards the former option and tentatively noted ‘7th May 1944?’ on a scrap of paper, which he attached to the photo. Morton took the precautionary step he always took when dealing with other people’s photographs, and backed the image up to his online cloud storage space, which meant that he could retrieve it at any time or from any location with an internet connection.

  Why was James Coldrick’s childhood so shrouded in mystery? He needed somewhere to start. The records for St George’s Children’s Home seemed like a good place.

  Google helpfully informed Morton that the children’s home had long since closed down, the local authority instead preferring to farm out their abandoned youth to the more personal care of fostering. The building now served as St George’s Nursing Home, for which Google provided contact details and a pin-point location.

  Morton dialed the number and spoke to a girl who gave her name as KC Fellows. What kind of a name was that? He had read somewhere that traditional names like Edna, Gertrude, Ethel, Harold, Percy and Walter were dying out, which at the time he thought was probably for the best, but not if their replacements were KC, Kylie, Gandalf or Arsenal, an apparently unisex name appearing in modern birth registers.

  ‘Don’t know; I weren’t here then, I’ll ask Linda, she’s been here ages,’ KC answered. The line went quiet for a moment before Linda, the duty manager, picked up and listened intently, whilst Morton repeated his plea.

  ‘I started here in eighty-three, when it became a nursing home,’ Linda said, in a thick, Yorkshire accent. ‘The records of the home were here for a while, until they were eventually transferred to the local archives at Lewes. I think because us and the children’s home were both Local Authority, there was no big hurry to shift the files over. After that point we didn’t keep anything, I’m afraid, love.’ Morton wasn’t overly surprised by her answer. They were hardly likely to keep such potentially sensitive records stashed in the corner on the off-chance someone might require access years later.

  ‘Is it likely they would have had personal information in them?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure. I mean, I didn’t like to be nosey, but there were filing cabinets full of the case histories of the poor kids that were held…’ she stopped herself, ‘…living here.’ Linda lowered her voice. ‘Some of those poor kids, I tell you. What I read was just awful. Good job it were closed down, to be frank with you. Wouldn’t be surprised if it were another one of them homes as ended up in the news, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ Morton agreed absentmindedly. He thanked Linda, hung up and got himself ready for a trip to Lewes.

  Morton took the last space in the pot-holed, makeshift car park adjacent to East Sussex County Archives. Some bright county official had once felt that housing the entire archives for East Sussex in the most unwelcoming, unreachable and inadequate building in Lewes was a good idea. Well, it certainly stopped casual passers-by. You really had to want to go there. He longed for the imminent opening of The Keep, a modern, purpose-built facility on the outskirts of Brighton.

  Once inside, his jovial mood promptly dissipated. The lobby was guarded by Miss Latimer, a fubsy pit-bull of a woman who delighted in throwing out amateurs who had ‘popped in on the off-chance’ without the requisite raft of identification. In all the years that Morton had been visiting the archives, she had never once smiled or passed a single pleasantry. She was all rules and regulations. Fill in that form. No pens allowed. You can’t take your laptop bag into the archives. He sometimes wondered if she had a condition that meant she couldn’t actually physically smile.

  ‘Good morning,’ Morton said brightly.

  Miss Latimer scowled. ‘Kindly fill in that form, so we know why you’re here.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Latimer,’ he said, smiling, as he signed the declaration of adherence to the rules that he had never actually read.

  ‘Does that say Moron?’ she asked flatly.

  Very amusing of the ancient spinster, he was forced to admit. ‘Morton,’ he corrected, pushing all of his prohibited items into a locker. He made his way upstairs to the search room, where the conspiracy to marginalise the public continued with the air conditioning being set permanently to freezing. All in the name of archive preservation, Miss Latimer had told him when he had complained on a previous visit.

  He handed his reader’s ticket to Max Fairbrother, the softly spoken, bald-as-a-mushroom st
alwart, who had been the senior archivist there for more than thirty years. He passed a moment of small talk with Max before setting down his laptop on one of the large tables in the centre of the room. He headed over to the burgeoning shelves and selected a thick file pertaining to Sedlescombe. The folder housed an index to all archives relating to the village. If what he was looking for existed, it would be catalogued here. He located St George’s Children’s Home and thumbed through an index to a range of records - pages of indexes to governors’ meetings, accounts, special fund-raising events, building developments, photographs and newspaper cuttings. He reached the admission registers, which were neatly marked with an official red stamp in the bottom right corner: ‘Closed for 75 years.’ This was common practice for such sensitive documents but it didn’t faze him in the slightest; being on first-name terms with Max usually meant that such rules were negotiable. The negotiation being that Miss Latimer didn’t find out.

  Morton carefully examined the index. Something was wrong. Next to the register for 1944 were three small, typed words which sent a bundle of pins down his spinal cord: ‘Missing on Transfer’. He considered the possibility that it was a coincidence that the records were missing and flicked through the rest of the documents: the admission registers for 1944 were the only files listed as missing.

  He hurried to the front desk and, in hushed tones, briefly informed Max what he was searching for.

  Max reached across the cluttered desk and took the ledger from Morton. He flicked back and forth through several pages, his lower lip curling as he searched. Morton knew that Max had no idea why the register might be missing. ‘It doesn’t give a reason,’ he answered finally. ‘Sometimes it will say that the document wasn’t supplied by the donor. I don’t know, sorry.’