Hiding the Past (16 page)

Read Hiding the Past Online

Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

The smile
dropped from Soraya’s lips.  ‘Surely not?’  She looked at Juliette
for confirmation.  ‘My God.  I mean, you’re alright, aren’t you?’

‘Apart from
being dispossessed and having nothing other than the clothes we stand in, we’re
fine,’ Juliette said.

‘Oh golly, I’m
so sorry.  At least you’re alive, though.’

‘There is
always that.’

‘And you think
it’s because of Peter?’ Soraya asked.

‘I can’t think
of any other reason why someone would plant enough Semtex under my house to
destroy a small town.’

‘God,’ Soraya
said.  ‘By why, for goodness' sake?’

‘That’s what
we’re trying to work out,’ Juliette said.

The vicar
appeared from the church and touched Morton’s sleeve.  ‘Lovely reading,
Norton, lovely reading.  He must have meant a great deal to you.’

Morton smiled
politely and tried not to stare at the small furry creature resting on the
vicar’s head.

‘Will you be
joining us at the crem, Morton?’ Soraya asked.  ‘We’re going to be placing
Peter’s ashes in his parents’ grave in Sedlescombe churchyard.’

‘Sorry, we’d
have loved to come but what with all that happened yesterday we’ve got a lot to
sort out,’ he said, questioning in his mind whether it was right to say they
would ‘love’ to attend a cremation.

‘I understand.
 I’ll catch up with you in a day or two.  Take care, won’t you.’

Morton and
Juliette stood back and watched respectfully as Peter Coldrick’s coffin was
carried from the church by six pallbearers and loaded into the waiting hearse.

Juliette took
Morton’s hand.  ‘Come on then, Norton, let’s go back to your dad’s and
order a pizza or something.’

‘Good idea.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

4th
April 1944

Frederick James Windsor-Sackville marched purposefully
through the wide, oak-panelled hallway, having just arrived from a private
Whitehall meeting with several other key members of government.  At
sixty-four years, Frederick’s severe angular features and unforgiving eyes
belied his age.  He wore his best suit with a ruby tie and handkerchief
from the breast pocket.  He had a fine clipped moustache, which he trimmed
religiously each morning.

‘Go and fetch
David?’ he told one of his staff, who was following slightly behind.

‘Yes, sir,’ he
replied, scurrying off to find Frederick’s son, David.

‘I’ll be in my
study,’ Frederick barked, striding along the vast hallway, under painted
portraits of his distant ancestors.  He paused momentarily and looked up
at his father’s picture, hanging grandiosely above his study door. 
Frederick hoped his father would approve of all the sacrifices and difficult
decisions he had taken during the course of this ceaseless conflict in order to
protect the good name of the Windsor-Sackvilles, a job his son and heir, David
would need to continue.  He had shown excellent political wit around
Parliament, becoming a genuine asset to Churchill’s Coalition Government. 
With shrewd guidance and direction, he was sure his son could aim for the very
top.  The Windsor-Sackvilles
had
to benefit from the war. 
David’s only misdemeanour so far had been with
her
, something Frederick
had so far kept closely under wraps.

Frederick
entered the fastidiously tidy study and sat at his desk, pensively tapping his
fingers.  ‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered to himself, despising tardiness
and dilly-dallying.  Of course, he knew where his son would be: in the
orchard.

A light tap at
the door.  ‘Father?’ David said, breathlessly.

‘Come in and
sit down.  Shut the door.’

David obeyed
his father and sat down, knowing that his father had something significant to
say.

‘How is she?’
Frederick asked, his eyebrows furrowed.

David’s eyes
lit up.  ‘Very well.  The nurse thinks the baby will be here within
the hour.’

Frederick
clenched his jaw.  Not the news he wanted to hear.  ‘Look, I won’t
beat around the bush, David.  The war is changing direction.  Plans
are afoot for something big.  Something which will turn the tide of war.’

David’s face
fell.  ‘What does this mean?’

‘I think you
know what it means.  Over the next few weeks we need to sever all ties
with
Emily’s
family.  File everything you have in the archives
ready to be destroyed.’

‘And the baby?’
David asked, unable to look his father in the eyes any longer.

Frederick
waited until his son glanced up then shook his head solemnly.

 

‘A boy!’ the
nurse called, bundling the baby up and placing it on Emily’s naked breast.

Emily, tired
and exhausted, smiled and held the baby tightly to her. 
A boy! 
Exactly what she wanted.  What
they
wanted.  Needed.  A
boy to continue the family name. 
A gentle breeze fluttered in from
the orchard outside, cooling the sweat on Emily’s forehead.  She looked at
the boy, tenderly squirming and writhing in her arms.  Just like her, he
had bright blue eyes and chestnut-brown hair.  He was perfection.

‘Any ideas of
names yet?’ the nurse asked.

‘His father
wants him to be called James,’ Emily replied.

‘Lovely name!’
the nurse exclaimed.

 

 

Chapter Thirteen

 

Friday

 

Morton was sitting outside The Clockhouse
Tearoom in Sedlescombe in a t-shirt and jeans, with a pair of binoculars
dangling from his neck, rubbing his tired eyes.  He had barely slept last
night, having spent much of the night mulling over the
Coldrick Case. 
He
had countless more questions than he had answers, yet the involvement of the
Windsor-Sackvilles was becoming impossible to doubt.  As a forensic
genealogist, he needed firm, concrete proof – the type to be found in archives
and record offices.  He had spent most of the previous evening using his
father’s prehistoric PC to search www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ - the portal
used for locating government and private documents in England and Wales from
the eighth century to the present day.  He began by searching general key
words, leaving the date, repository, place and region fields blank, then
gradually began to narrow and refine his search.  As the evening wore on,
he had gained a better understanding of the political roles of the
Windsor-Saville family, but crucially, there were no private records pertaining
to the family in any repository.  All the documents he found links to,
even those recently released under various closure and secrecy rules, were
innocuous ones relating to the business of government – nothing which would
give him the evidence he needed to find a link from James Coldrick to the
Windsor-Sackvilles.  Whilst he was online Morton had searched the birth
index for a James Windsor-Sackville born circa 1944.  He wasn’t surprised
to read that ‘No matches found’ was the answer.  If James Coldrick was
indeed the illegitimate son of Sir David James Peregrine and Maria Charlotte
Windsor-Sackville then he doubted that they would be so blatant to have
registered his birth for the entire world to see.

A young, blonde
waitress set a tray down in front of Morton with a flirtatious smile.  He
thanked her and couldn’t resist a glance at her svelte figure as she tottered
back inside the tearoom.  Rather inexplicably, he felt quite relaxed, as
if he was on a jaunt in the countryside and had happened upon a twee, genteel
tearoom, replete with floral crockery and lace doilies.  Maybe it was
sitting on the patio on a hot, still day that was having a calming influence on
him.

As he poured
himself a filter coffee, Morton looked across at the pair of tall, grand, iron
gates, which barred entry to Charingsby.  If answers to the questions he
sought existed, then they would be found behind those gates.  All that
could be seen of Charingsby was a gravel, beech-lined drive cutting through a
billiard-table lawn.  Nothing of the house could be glimpsed from outside
– probably just the way the Windsor-Sackvilles liked it.  Morton was here
for one very simple reason: he wanted to gain entry into the estate.  Last
night he had spotted an anomaly and potential lead, which he needed to
explore.  According to the Ordinance Survey map, the sprawling estate of
Charingsby incorporated a gatehouse cottage, a run of tied workers’ cottages,
various out-buildings and a stable complex - something which corresponded with
Google Maps.  However, whilst carefully examining the whole estate using
the aerial satellite function on Google Maps, Morton spotted a small,
pale-coloured building set in the middle of what, according to the map, should
have been solid, ancient woodland.  He cross-referenced the location on
www.old-maps.co.uk/, where he pulled up images of the estate from 1841, 1873,
1908 and 1949.  The building appeared on the first three maps, yet was
absent by 1949.  A missing building on a map would not usually have
warranted the plan he was about to execute.  However, the fact that in the
background of the photograph of James Coldrick as a baby was a small,
pale-coloured building rang alarm bells in Morton’s head.  The fact that
there was a tall chimney to the west of the building was impossible to ignore.

Morton drank a
mouthful of coffee.  Gaining entry was going to be difficult and illegal,
much to Juliette’s dismay when he had told her of his plans.  She had
decided that she could no longer wait for the insurance money to come through,
so she called her best friend, Rita and the two of them went to Tunbridge Wells
to buy some clothes.  ‘A lot of clothes, Morton’ she had warned him. 
He could hardly protest.  He was happy enough for the time being helping
himself to Jeremy’s wardrobe and all that he had asked Juliette to buy for him
was a new laptop, since he’d inadvertently lost two in just over a week. 
Given all that had happened, he would rather be wandering aimlessly between
Next, Top Man, River Island and H&M, trying on new clothes than hatching a
plan of how best to enter the lair of the Windsor-Sackvilles.  Juliette
had told him it was quite possibly the single most stupid thing he could do
since they were very likely the people who had tried to kill them both two days
ago.  He agreed with her but made the trip to Sedlescombe nonetheless.

He had
considered waltzing innocently up to the high-tech video entry system mounted
on the high brick wall beside the gates and simply asking to be permitted to
view their archives.  Owners of such stately homes he’d encountered on
previous jobs had been only too willing to allow him to delve into their
private papers.  Somehow, he didn’t think the Windsor-Sackvilles would be
so accommodating.

Morton had come
prepared, having rummaged around his father’s house for items he thought he
might need.  He found a backpack, which he filled with a pair of National
Trust binoculars, digital camera, an Ordinance Survey map of the area, a torch,
box of matches, a bottle of water and a notepad and pen.  The addition of
a pair of wire-cutters and a crowbar destroyed the image that he was the
archetypal country rambler.

Morton took a
sip of coffee and pulled out the camera to check if anything was still on the
memory card.  He legitimized his recent carefree rummaging and plundering
of his father’s personal belongings by thinking of himself as some kind of
executor-in-waiting.  What with his mother being dead, Jeremy away in
Cyprus, it would fall to him to sort out his father’s affairs.  He
blithely skipped through countless images of his father’s garden, then came to
an out-of-focus image of his father, Jeremy, a young man and an old woman
holding ice-creams up to the camera.  The orange time-code stamp in the
corner dated the photos to last summer.  He skipped the camera on to a
photo of his father with his arms around the old woman, whom Morton could
clearly identify as Madge, the lady who had spent most of Jeremy’s leaving
party washing up in the kitchen.  She had seemed so nice, and yet here she
was, swanning around Coniston and the Lake District with his father, Jeremy and
an unidentified man.  The more photos Morton saw, the angrier he
became.  His father had taken this woman to Coniston and seemingly
revisited all the places that they had gone to as a family just before his
mother had died.  He wasn’t sure what he was most angry at, the fact that
his father was apparently seeing someone else, or the fact that he hadn’t been
told about it. 
What was his father doing with an old, grandmotherly
type like her anyway?
  Then he realised that he was comparing her to
his mother as she was when she died.  How old would his mother be
now?  Sixty-nine?  Christ, she’d be a wrinkly old woman
herself.  He hovered over the ‘Erase All’ option but thought better of it,
switched the camera off and tucked it away back in the rucksack before he did
something he might regret.

He finished his
cake and coffee and left a generous tip, hoping that the buxom blonde would
find the money and not the scowling frump behind the till.  With his
sunglasses perched on his nose, Morton casually strolled across the street to
the gates of Charingsby.  The village, bathed in total sunshine, was
entirely deserted, as if there had been some kind of an evacuation order. 
It sent a sinister chill down his spine when his eyes fell on the gothic,
shadowy structure of St George’s Nursing Home, just a stone’s throw away from
the Windsor-Sackvilles.  He rested his head on the cold iron bars but,
even with his head pressed to them, could only catch a glimpse of the house,
tiny and obscure in the distance.

Morton slowly
ambled along the road beside the village green, enjoying the warm sun on his
neck and a brief moment to take stock of the charming village.  It looked
as though Charingsby, having been occupied by the Windsor-Sackvilles since the
fifteenth century, had existed long before the majority of the village. 
Most of the houses along the main road provided a convenient hermetic seal
around the edge of the estate.

He continued
steadily through the village, until he came to a public footpath post, which
was slowly being strangled by an insidious weave of dark-green ivy.  The
sign pointed perpendicular to the road, running beside a row of delightful
houses, called Riverside Cottages.  The map confirmed that a river, after
which the cottages were presumably named, ran across two fields then entered a
wood at the edge of the Charingsby estate.  Morton took a swig of water
and stared at the river meandering into the distance; he just needed to follow
it and he’d be inside.  He downed the drink, crossed into the
freshly-ploughed field and began to trudge through the calf-length grass around
the edge, keeping close to the river and trying to look as much like a rambler
on a pleasant walk as he could.

As the safety
of the road slowly disappeared behind him, Morton wondered if he should quickly
give Juliette an update.  He had given her a rough overview of his plans,
but thought now might be a good idea to give her his exact location. 
Somewhere for the search party to start looking for him if he failed to return
home tonight.  He took his mobile out and, rather predictably, there was
no signal.  That was that then.

When he entered
the second field, which was being used for sheep-grazing, the footpath deviated,
veering sharply away from the river in front of him.  He knew that once he
stepped foot off the path he lost all defence that he was simply enjoying a
walk in the Sussex countryside.

It was now or
never.

With a deep and
decisive breath, he left the designated path behind and crossed the dry, crusty
brown field towards the woods, carefully following the winding river.  As
the distance between him and the footpath increased, Morton half wondered if a
gun-mounted jeep would suddenly roar out of nowhere, just like he had seen on
television when people tried to approach Area 51 in the Nevada desert. 
But no gun-mounted jeep appeared, just a fat hare making a break for the
hedgerow.

A few minutes
later, he reached the edge of the woods and realised that his plan of simply
lifting a section of fencing and passing underneath wouldn’t be so
straightforward; at the boundary of the woods the river was forced into a
narrow, concrete tube in order to pass under a heavy-duty, two-metre-high fence
topped with a vicious, double-curl of barbed wire.  Morton tugged at the
base of the fence but it was rigid, appearing to be fixed into the
ground.  He had to resort to Plan B and took out the pair of wire-cutters
that he had hoped he wouldn’t need.  First, he scanned the woodland with
his father’s National Trust binoculars, which were remarkably powerful given
that they were probably a free gift.  There was no sign of life beyond a
pair of blackbirds pecking furiously at an ant-infested mound of earth, so he
pulled out the cutters and took a final, fleeting glance around him.  He
couldn’t
see
anybody, but in these high-tech days that meant
nothing.  He’d once heard that the military were using satellites so
powerful that they could read the text on a newspaper lying on the pavement. 
God only knew who was watching him from outer space as he clipped through the
metal.

Six minutes
later, Morton had crudely cut a hole large enough to squeeze through.  He
knelt onto the grass and, with a deep breath and a final check around him, he
curled back the section of severed fence and crawled into the lion’s den,
dragging his backpack behind him.  He stood up and looked around. 
Nothing had changed in those few feet, yet being on the inside he felt
strangely closer to James Coldrick.  Closer to the truth somehow. 
Peter Coldrick’s words from Tuesday sprang into his mind. 
It’s as if
my family are all enclosed in a walled garden which has no door.
 

Maybe he had
just found that door.

Morton pulled
on the backpack, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead, and began to walk
cautiously under the cooling canopy provided by mature oaks, beeches and
sycamores.  He judged that in three or four hundred yards he would arrive
at the building.

He trod
carefully but quickly through a carpet of wild garlic and late-flowering
bluebells, deliberately choosing where his feet fell, so as to avoid leaving an
obvious path of crushed plants.  Finally, the thick woodland yielded to a
grassland clearing.  And there, at the centre, was the building he sought:
a small, dilapidated cottage.  Chunks of off-white plaster had fallen
away, revealing cracked, bare bricks.  Windows were either broken or
boarded up.  The place had suffered decades of decay and neglect. 
Adding to the sense of eeriness and uneasiness Morton was feeling, the plum
trees surrounding the house, which he had identified in the photograph were all
bare, their barren branches seeming to have died with the house.

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