Hiding the Past (11 page)

Read Hiding the Past Online

Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

‘Where was the
book?’ he asked.

Soraya tapped
on the top shelf of the nearest bookcase.  ‘Right here.  Under our
noses.’  Morton looked at the shelf where her hand rested – right on top
of
Tracing Your Family Tree –
then down at the bold title on the binding
of
All About Sedlescombe
.  He was as sure as he could be that the
book was not there on Tuesday when he visited the house, as the row of books to
which Soraya referred -
Ancestral Trails: The Complete Guide to British
Genealogy and Family History, Tracing Your Family Tree,
Explore Your
Family’s Past, From Family Tree to Family History –
had been a topic of
discussion between him and Peter.
 

‘I’m sure that
wasn’t here on Tuesday,’ he said to Soraya.

‘How can you be
sure?’ she asked.

‘Peter and I
were discussing all the avenues he had explored to research his family tree and
the books came up.  I would have noticed that book.’

Soraya shrugged
dismissively.  ‘Maybe the police moved things around during their
investigations?’

‘Maybe. 
Anyway, look what I found upstairs,’ he answered, holding up the copper box.

Soraya took the
object and turned it over in her hands, not quite sure what she was supposed to
be looking at.

‘Peter
mentioned it to me in a phone message - it belonged to his dad.’

‘Oh,
right.  Does it help?’

Morton
shrugged.  ‘Maybe.  I was really hoping to find something
inside
the
box but maybe it was the box itself that Peter wanted to show me. The coat of
arms could be a lead.  Heraldry isn’t my forte so I’ll have to get it
checked out.’

Soraya
half-heartedly pulled open another drawer.  ‘I can’t find anything about
his
wishes
,’ she said, making ‘wishes’ sound like a demand.  ‘I
mean, who the hell do I get to take the ceremony?  He never went to church
so far as I’m aware – does that make him a humanist or just a lazy
Christian?  I’ve got no idea.’  Soraya looked at Morton for help, but
he had no idea either.  Six weeks of the
Tenterden Times
revealed
an alarming trend in modern funerals – for young people at least – no black
clothes, a large photo of the deceased on an easel by the coffin,
Angels
and/or
I’ll be Missing You
(the Puff Daddy and Faith Evans version –
never
the Police version), a mixture of friends' tributes and the odd religious
passage followed by a burial in a football shirt.  Not really something
Morton could suggest for Coldrick.

‘Just get a
Church of England minister and keep it simple,’ he suggested.

‘Hmmm.’

Other family
members would be the obvious next step but Morton knew that was a blind
alley.  ‘Any friends?’ he suggested tentatively, knowing the answer before
Soraya answered.

‘Not really…’
Her voice trailed off, leaving the silence to finish the sentence.

‘Are you going
to let Fin go to the funeral?’
 

Soraya looked dumbstruck,
as if this was the first time she had even considered it.  The blood
appeared to drain from her face as she weighed the prospect of her
eight-year-old son attending his father’s funeral.  She shrugged and
turned her back to him, retuning her focus to the stack of paperwork in the
bureau behind her.  Her rummaging became more frantic until a huge pile of
papers fell to the floor.  ‘You know what, I can’t do this.  You’re
right, just keep the funeral simple.  If he wanted a special all-singing,
all-dancing service then he should bloody well have told someone.’ She burst
into tears and Morton now felt comfortable in pulling her into an
embrace.  Soraya clung to him, sobbing gently on his shoulder.  ‘I
just want all this to be over.’  She released her hold and took a deep
breath.  ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ he
reassured.  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.  There’s nothing more to
be done here today.’

Morton
carefully placed the copper box and the book containing the letter and
photograph into his briefcase and led the way out of the macabre house into the
pounding rain.

 

Morton pulled up outside his house, the
impacting rain relentlessly hammering the car.  He switched off the engine
and stared out into the grey gloominess.  He hoped that Soraya would be okay
by herself after she had insisted she wanted to be alone when they left Peter's
house.  ‘I’ve got some bits to do before I collect Fin from school,’ she’d
said, so he sat and watched as she ran from the car with her coat pulled up
over her head.  Seconds later she was gone inside and he made his way
home.

Morton picked
up his briefcase from the back seat of the car and dashed inside his house.
 He slammed the door on the foul weather and picked up the collection of
damp post squashed against the wall.  He set down his briefcase and
flicked through the pile of dreary bills and correspondence; at the bottom was
a white envelope with the familiar red stamp of the General Register Office
emblazoned on the front: William Dunk’s death certificate.  Morton tore it
open and scanned the content.

 

Date and place of death: Eighteenth July
2002, Conquest Hospital, Hastings

Name and surname: William Charles Dunk

Sex: Male

Date and place of birth: 1 April 1913,
Stepney, London

Occupation and usual address: Handyman (retired),
Smuggler’s Keep,

Dungeness Road, Dungeness, Kent

Name and surname of informant: Daniel Dunk

Qualification: Son

Usual address: Smuggler’s Keep, Dungeness
Road, Dungeness, Kent

Cause of death:

I
(a) Myocardial infarction

(b) Left ventricular hypertrophy and
coronary atherosclerosis

(c) Diabetes mellitus

It was correct; it had to be the right
William Dunk.  Morton read the certificate three times and wondered what a
‘handyman’ - a euphemism if ever there was one - born in London and living in
Dungeness, was doing coercing Max Fairbrother into stealing the 1944 admission
file for St George's.

He scooped up
the rest of the day’s post and made his way upstairs.  Juliette was on a
late shift, so the house was deserted.  Still feeling paranoid about the
house being watched, Morton tentatively checked that each room was definitely
empty, even going as far as looking in the wardrobe and under the bed. 
Outside, Church Square stood deserted, the inclement weather deterring tourists
and nefarious visitors alike.  Satisfied that he was completely alone, he
made himself a coffee and a cheese sandwich and sat down at his desk with the
death certificate, the copper box, the headshot photo and letter.  No
matter how many times he studied each item, he could find no common link that
made any logical sense.  He had two new leads: firstly to locate William
Dunk’s son, Daniel, and politely enquire as to his father’s ‘handyman’ dealings
in the late 1980s and secondly, to research the coat of arms on the box which,
he realised, might well not have any connection to the
Coldrick
Case
at
all.  James Coldrick could just as easily have picked it up from a junk
shop as inherited it. 
Was it the box itself that Peter wanted to show
him, or the contents, which were now missing?

Morton opened
up Juliette’s laptop and ran an online electoral register search for Daniel
Dunk.  Two minutes later, the results unequivocally confirmed that Daniel
still resided at Smuggler’s Keep, Dungeness.  Perfect.

 

Chapter Eight

 

7
th
May 1944

A vociferous skylark rose hastily from the
noiseless orchard, piercing the calm skies which had, for the past four years,
been filled with turbulence and anger.  For almost two months now, the
skies had been empty of the German
Luftwaffe
planes, which Emily had
watched droning over in their hundreds, day and night for what seemed like a
lifetime.  The current tranquillity alarmed her.

‘Emily, smile!’
a voice belonging to William Dunk called fondly behind her, snapping her from
her reveries. 
Smile. 
That’s what she needed to do – it was
no use fretting.  It was always going to be a long game.

‘Wait!’ Emily
said.  ‘I want a photo with the baby.’

William
playfully rolled his eyes and waited as she passed through the white-blossomed
plum trees to her home, where the baby was resting in his cot.  Inside was
pleasantly cool, the flagstone flooring providing a welcome barrier to the
oppressive heat outside.  She pushed open the door to the bedroom that she
shared with the baby and found him wide awake, contentedly staring through the
window at the dense woodlands in the distance.  Emily smiled and watched,
wondering what the darling child could be thinking about.  Maybe he had
some innate sense of the foreboding she felt.  Maybe he knew that things
were changing.

The baby turned
his head and noticed Emily, the faint flicker of a smile erupting on his tiny,
precious face.  His first smile had appeared just four days ago, an event
Emily now wanted to try and capture on camera.  She picked the baby up and
carried him out into the calmness of the afternoon.

‘How do I
look?’ Emily asked her companion.

‘Stunning – as
always,’ William replied, holding the Box Brownie camera up to his face.

‘Try and get
him smiling,’ she said, ignoring his flirtatious comment.  She carefully
angled the baby towards the camera, avoiding the direct glare from the sun.

A clunk and a
flash and the day was forever captured.

William set the
camera down in the long orchard grass.  He walked the short distance to
her and leant in to kiss her on the lips but she turned at the last moment.

‘No, we
can’t.  I’ve told you – it’s over.  Now that I’ve got the baby…’ Her
voice trailed off.

‘We can go from
here.  Disappear – it’s easy in wartime.  I’ll pretend he’s mine,
I’ve told you.’

Emily shook her
head indignantly.  ‘I need to feed him.  Goodbye, William. You
shouldn't come here again - for all our sakes.’

She pulled the
baby tight to her chest and strode through the orchard into the house.

William, used
to her brashness by now, watched and wondered.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

Tuesday

 

Dungeness really was a bleak craphole when
it was raining, Morton thought.  It was also a bleak craphole when it
wasn’t raining.  Craphole was the wrong word; it was just
weird
,
all those wooden and tin shacks, dilapidated buildings and all that endless
shingle.  They even had tumbleweed.  If anything told you that a
place was uninhabitable then it was tumbleweed.  A paradise for artists,
though, apparently.

Morton slowed
down to ten miles an hour as he drove along Dungeness Road, the monstrous
nuclear power station looming large in front of him.  He’d once heard that
the residents of Dungeness were issued with free iodine tablets, ‘just in case’
of an emergency at the power station. 
They’d need a bit more than that
to protect them in their balsa wood homes if that thing went up
, he
thought.  Maybe that was why they didn’t bother with bricks and mortar
down here: nothing short of a concrete bunker hundreds of feet below ground
would be left unaffected if the power station had so much as a minor leak.

Google Maps on
his iPhone had helpfully stuck a bright red pin in the exact location of Daniel
Dunk’s house, so Morton knew to slow to a snail’s crawl as the building drew
closer.  The house was a ramshackle, wooden construction with a lopsided
garage slumped to one side, having lost the will to live countless years
ago.  The garden, comprising shingle and sporadic bursts of ugly, green
sea kale, merged seamlessly with that of a neighbouring garden.  Property
boundaries didn’t seem an issue in Dungeness.

Morton
indicated to pull over, though he had no idea why, since there wasn’t a single
soul around.  Not even a seagull braved the harsh Dungeness rain. 
Morton leant over to the back seat and pulled out his Nikon D90 digital
SLR.  He attached a telephoto lens, zoomed into the house and snapped the
bungalow during the brief seconds of clarity provided by the intermittent
windscreen wiper.  If it weren’t for the electoral register telling him
that the house was actually occupied he would never have believed that anyone
could have lived here.  He zoomed in to rotten window frames with tightly
drawn, washed-out curtains and photographed the peeling paint on the blue
door.  What made anyone
want
to live here?  The only
explanation he could come up with was isolation.  William Dunk might as
well have been living on another planet.  He considered the nefarious
goings-on which could take place in such acute remoteness.  All sorts of
plotting and scheming.

Morton moved
the camera to the front of the house.  ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed, as a black
BMW X6 filled the eyepiece.  It was the same car that had followed him and
Juliette out of Brighton and it was parked here, on Daniel Dunk’s drive. 
This time he was able to focus on the number plates.  ‘RDA 220,’ he said,
repeatedly snapping the vehicle.  The luxurious, lavish vehicle was a
stark juxtaposition to the decaying, deprived surroundings.

From the corner
of his eye something moved.  He swept the camera back over to the house as
a thin wiry man slammed the front door shut and made his way to the BMW. 
The man kept his head down and, for the moment, hadn’t noticed the telephoto
lens focused on him.  Morton caught a rain-blurred profile shot and
gasped.  The frozen frame in the viewfinder revealed that the man sported
a large scar running from his left eye down to the corner of his mouth. 
The Brighton Scar Face. 
Was he Daniel Dunk?

The Brighton
Scar Face started the BMW and Morton was suddenly faced with the possibility of
coming face-to-face with him.  He had no choice but to quickly swing the
Mini onto the adjoining property and make his way up the concrete drive towards
a white-washed, weather-boarded house, hoping desperately that the Brighton
Scar Face was unaware that Morton had upgraded his mode of transport since
their last drive-by meeting.  Morton reached the house, killed the engine
and slumped down in his seat, just in time before the BMW sped past.

Seconds later
and the BMW had disappeared into dense sheets of rain.

With a long
breath out, Morton sat back up and started to relax.
 

His heart
skipped a beat, as a shadow passed by and thumped hard on his window.  He
turned to see a hoary furrow-browed man wearing an oversized yellow poncho
staring angrily into the car.  Morton got his breath back, opened his
window an inch and discreetly centrally locked the doors.

‘What do you
want?’ the rheumy-eyed man demanded, revealing a gummy, toothless mouth.

‘I’m looking
for Daniel Dunk,’ Morton answered politely.  The old man eyed him
suspiciously and Morton wondered if he was about to get an axe through his
head. 
Were there any normal, sane people here?
 

‘That’s his
place there,’ the man said, pointing to Smuggler’s Keep.  Morton could see
rage rising in the old man’s eyes.  ‘But you knew that already, ‘cause I
saw you pointing that
thing
at his house.’  The old man flicked an
irate finger at the camera resting on the passenger’s seat.  ‘What do you
want here, I asked you?’

Morton wasn’t
about to hang around and have this conversation.  He turned the ignition,
flung the car into reverse and raced off the driveway, sending a plethora of
small stones firing in all directions from under his tyres.

The old man
hurried down the drive, brandishing his fist in the air and shouting
furiously.  Morton caught the gist of the rant; he was about to phone the
police.

He reached the
empty road and pushed the Mini to full pelt, quickly propelling Dungeness into
the rear view mirror.

 

Morton’s study resembled the Major
Incident Room of a police station, which pleased him immensely.  No
previous job had ever required him to pin photos of men suspected of murder,
arson and stalking to his cork board, which he had gleefully stripped of
inconsequential rubbish as soon as he had returned from Dungeness.  Gone
were the archive opening hours, interesting snippets from magazines and reviews
of books he might one day purchase.  Now it was adorned with photos,
certificates, photocopies, factoids and scraps paper connected by a veritable
cat’s cradle of string and multi-coloured pins.  At the centre of the
board was a freshly printed photo of Daniel Dunk.  Adjacent to the photo
was William Dunk’s death certificate.  The two men had loitered in the
peripheral shadows of the Coldrick family for the past two decades. 
But
why?
Morton wondered.

His mobile
rang: Juliette.  He’d been trying to reach her the moment he had left
Dungeness but her phone had been switched off.

‘Is everything
alright?’ she asked, a tinge of worry in her voice.

‘Yeah, I think
so,’ Morton said vaguely.

‘I saw that I
had twelve missed calls from you and I thought something must have
happened.’  Morton could hear the concern in her voice abating as he told
her about his morning.  ‘Oh, I thought it was something serious.  So,
is that all you wanted?’

He wondered if
she was annoyed because she
wanted
it to be something serious. 
Super Juliette to the rescue.

‘I need a
favour.’

She
sighed.  ‘What?’

‘I need you to
look up Daniel Dunk’s number plate; I don’t think it’s his car somehow. 
It might reveal who he’s working for.’  It didn’t take a great detective
to work out that someone driving a fifty grand car wouldn’t live in a
radioactive rundown shed in Kent’s dumping ground.

Another sigh
from Juliette.  ‘Give me the number.  I’ll see what I can do.’ 
Morton read out the licence plate from the photograph in front of him. 
Despite it being engrained in his memory, he wanted to be completely
certain.  Juliette repeated it back to him and then hung up.

Having turned
that line of enquiry over to Juliette, Morton switched his attention to his
other lead: the copper box.  He picked it up and turned it over in his
hands.  It was a very unremarkable box, being without pattern or
decoration but for the intricate coat of arms emblazoned on the lid.  Time
had aged the copper to a dull, rust–brown.  Tinges of oxidised light green
filled the deepest of the carved ravines.  He doubted it held monetary
value but hoped it held value in progressing the
Coldrick Case.

Morton set the
box down beside him, switched on Juliette’s laptop and ran a Google search on
how to identify a coat of arms.  He made his way through the first of
15,100,000 pages, adding and subtracting search criteria as he went, hoping
magically to identify the arms.  He learnt about shields, supporters,
ordinaries, helms, coronets, compartments, and mantling but nothing specific
enough just to tell him to whom the box belonged.  The Institute of
Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury kept appearing in his searches
as an authority on the subject, so he decided to give them a call, naively
hoping for an immediate, over-the-phone analysis.  A pleasant-sounding
lady asked him where he lived and told him that the best thing to do would be
to bring the item in and they would research it for him.  Morton really
didn’t want to venture back out into the cold and rain, he much preferred the
idea of sitting with a bucket of coffee, staring glibly at his new
Coldrick
Case Incident Wall,
as he had named it.  He’d also hoped that Juliette
would have called back by now.  How long did it take to tap a bunch of
letters and numbers into a computer?

He took one
last look at the
Coldrick Case Incident Wall
and set out for Canterbury.

 

He hadn’t been to Canterbury for some
time.  The last time was to visit their archives, housed rather superiorly
in a section of the Cathedral. 
Beat that, Miss Latimer, in your tiny
flint shed
.  He still couldn’t quite grasp the idea of her as a
Deidre.
 

If it had been
anything resembling a nice day, he might have taken the time to wander around
the Cathedral.  He had a vague recollection of a primary school visit in
the dim, dark days of his childhood.  All he could remember from the
day-trip was colouring in a picture of a stained glass window and his
travel-sick friend, Clive’s vomit washing up and down the aisle of the coach
all the way home.

By some strange
miracle, Morton found a parking spot within half a mile of the Institute and,
clutching his briefcase in one hand and a large golfing umbrella in the other,
hurried as fast as he could to the building.

The Institute,
a modest, medieval building, was on Northgate, just within the city
walls.  Morton wasn’t sure whom he had been expecting when he got there,
but, as he crossed the threshold into the air-conditioned building, he was
greeted by a sweaty, rotund, black-bearded man in his mid-forties whose name
badge announced him as Dr Garlick, which Morton thought an appropriate name for
a man who bore a strong resemblance to a garlic bulb.

Dr Garlick took
Morton into a small side office with only a tiny, latticed window for
light.  The walls were bursting at the seams with heavy, disorganised
books and files.  Dr Garlick sat behind a cluttered oak desk, switched on
a powerful desk lamp and placed a pair of glasses on his nose, looking
expectantly at Morton’s briefcase.  Morton carefully pulled the copper box
out and watched as Dr Garlick’s eyes lit up.

‘What a
marvellous little artefact!’ he said animatedly, as he took the box from Morton
and turned it over in his hands.

‘Is it?’ Morton
said, still finding it quite unremarkable.

‘Oh yes. 
Unusual.  It’ll take a bit of investigation though.  Can you leave it
with me?’ Dr Garlick asked, passing the back of his hand over his sweaty
forehead.

Morton had a
flash of paranoia. 
What if he’s working in cahoots with the Dunk
family too?
  He reasoned that he couldn’t distrust everyone he came
into contact with or the case would never progress.  ‘Fine,’ he said,
before adding, ‘just don’t let that copper box leave this building with anyone
other than me.’

Dr Garlick
seemed slightly taken aback but nodded in agreement.  ‘Of course, of
course.’

 

The rain had faded into a misty drizzle as
Morton headed back towards his car, a much lesser sense of urgency in his
stride.  He imagined bounding into the police station and handing a great
wodge of paperwork to PC Glen Jones and WPC Alison Hawk.  Although, actually,
he would need to speak to someone in much higher authority about it.  ‘
Entirely
circumstantial,’ WPC Alison Hawk would say.  ‘Do you actually have
any
concrete evidence that Daniel Dunk is responsible for the death of Mary
Coldrick, Mr Farrier?’  Morton would become one of those joke characters
in television police dramas that return week after week with increasingly
bizarre claims. 
Aliens abducted my cat.  My grandmother has
turned into a blue tit. 
No, he couldn’t go to the police until he had
something – anything - solid.

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