Hiding the Past (2 page)

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 6
^thJune 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 ‘7
^thMay 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.