Hiding the Past (17 page)

Read Hiding the Past Online

Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

Sweat began to
trickle down his back.  His heart was racing from the quick pace that he
had crossed the woods, but now it refused to slow down.  He slowly moved
closer to the building.

Morton recalled
the photograph of James Coldrick as a baby.  This was definitely where it
had been taken.
 

He knew this
cottage was significant.

Despite more than
sixty years of woodland growth, the top of a towering, herringbone-brick
chimney was still visible in the background.  The chimney belonged to
Charingsby.

He took out his
father’s digital camera and began taking photographs.  Although the
original image of James Coldrick as a baby had perished, along with the rest of
his
Coldrick Case Incident Wall,
he had thankfully stored a
high-resolution copy in his cloud space, which he had had the foresight to
retrieve last night, downloading it to his Photo Stream, in case there was no
internet connection today.  He held his phone up and stood exactly where
the photographer had snapped James Coldrick as a baby in 1944, wondering what
had gone so terribly wrong for that smiling, happy woman and her new-born son.

He cautiously
approached the cottage, regarding it with suspicion, as if it might be
booby-trapped with Semtex or some other incendiary device.  It wasn’t as
if these people didn’t have a penchant for blowing things up.  The
complete and total silence around him only added to his uneasiness as he neared
the building.

When Morton
reached the cottage he felt the need to stand still and double-check that he
was still alone.  He held the binoculars to his eyes and slowly turned
three hundred and sixty degrees.

He was alone.

Morton set down
his backpack and approached the front door.  He tentatively tried the
handle, but it was either locked or seized up from years of inclement weather
and disuse.  He was sure that the building had played a part in James
Coldrick’s early life and knew that he needed to get inside.  He pulled
the crowbar from his bag and slowly inserted it into the rotten frame.  As
he exerted all his energy into the tool, the door began to flex and groan under
the pressure.  Suddenly, it burst clean off its hinges in a cacophony of
metal and wood cracking, smashing down inwards onto a flagstone floor, echoing
sonorously among the surrounding trees. 
Great, now the whole estate
knows I’m here,
he thought
. 
He might just as well have buzzed
in at the main gate after all.

He froze to the
spot and waited, half expecting a pack of dogs or gun-wielding security guards
at any moment.
 

Minutes later,
nothing had come, so he cautiously stepped one foot inside the cottage, still
fearing something terrible was about to happen.  There was no way anybody
had been inside here for donkeys' years, he reasoned to himself. 
Donkeys'
years
- that was something his father would say, not a thirty-nine year
old man.  Christ.  He heard his father’s voice telling him to pull himself
together and with that ethereal voice in his mind, he strode confidently inside
the cottage.

Inside was
freezing and dark.  Morton took out the torch that he had found beside his
father’s bed.  The beam fell first onto a huge rack of antiquated shotguns
fixed to the wall.  He glanced around at the room’s simplicity and
realised that this wasn’t a cottage at all, but a simple two-room shooting box,
a relatively common sight on large estates.  They were designed to provide
accommodation and storage during the annual hunting season, yet this place
appeared like an abandoned relic from the past, untouched for countless
shooting seasons.  He moved the torchlight slowly around the room; the
beam illuminating the life of a forgotten past: packets of food on a large oak
table; a decorative sideboard stocked with plain white crockery; a small
bookcase containing a selection of classic titles; two fabric armchairs beside
a loaded open fire; a grimy Belfast sink stacked with unwashed plates.

He took a
closer look at the food on the table.  Some of the brand names were
familiar to him, yet the packaging told him that he was looking at food made
somewhere in the Thirties, Forties or Fifties.  The torchlight fell onto a
white packet with blue writing, which confirmed for him the exact decade:
Cadbury’s
Ration Chocolate.
  The building had stood unused since the war. 
But
why?
 

The torch beam
began to fade, which he thought was rather typical.  He shone the fading
light over to the adjacent room and hesitantly moved into the doorway.  It
was a small room and, just before the torch battery died, he caught sight of a
neat and tidy bed, all ready-made as if waiting for the owner to return. 
He spotted something else in the corner of the room just as the light
failed.  Something that set his heart racing.

Feeling acutely
vulnerable in the pitch-black room, he set down the backpack and fumbled about
for the box of matches.  Finally, he struck a match and the room took on
an eerie, shadowy glow.  He held the light over the object in the corner
of the room.  It was a tiny cot with blankets that, unlike the bed, were
all dishevelled and unkempt, dangling precariously over the wooden bars. 
He bent down and picked up a knitted, beige-brown teddy bear.  He drew it
close to his face, knowing to whom it once belonged.  Morton stood
clutching the bear, contemplating the sight before him, weighing the
implications of discovering an isolated shooting box, unused since the war,
which contained a baby’s cot. 
Had this been James Coldrick’s place of
birth?
 
The place where his mother had written the goodbye letter
to him?
  He tried to recall the contents of the letter. 
What
was it she had said
?  Something about being placed in an abominable
situation and what she feared would happen to him.  A wave of nausea
suddenly passed over him and he needed air that wasn’t almost seventy years old
inside his lungs.  He moved back into the main room of the shooting box
when something caught his attention.  He squatted down to the door, which
he believed he had just burst from its hinges, and took a closer look. 
The hinges
had
been forced open, but not by him and not just now. 
One was twisted, contorted and in the process of disintegration.  The
other hinge was missing entirely.  The door had been held shut by three
large metal straps, which were themselves time-rusted and decayed.

Morton was
beginning to form an idea of what had occurred here in 1944.

A tumultuous
double crack of nearby gunfire made Morton jump with fright.
 

They’d found
him.

He blew out the
match and ran for the door.  The last thing he wanted was to be cornered
in a deserted shooting box when nobody outside knew where he was.  He
peered cautiously into the woodland.  The only movement was a mass exodus
of birds taking to the skies in raucous screams.

Morton sprinted
to the nearest thicket and tucked himself into a purple rhododendron bush where
he observed a group of people with dogs striding into the clearing
approximately one hundred yards away.  He quickly raised the binoculars to
get a better look.  Five people and two golden retrievers.  Hunting
dogs.  Brilliant.  At least they weren’t Dobermans, he thought. 
The binoculars weren’t powerful enough to help identify the group heading
towards him, but it looked like four men and one woman.  He adjusted the
plastic focus ring as they neared him, their faces gradually gaining
clarity.  Morton couldn’t yet see the detail of their faces, but their
gait and mannerisms told him that they weren’t searching for an intruder on the
estate, but rather were out on a shooting expedition.

The group came
within fifty yards and incomprehensible fragments of their conversation drifted
across to him.  He tweaked the binoculars again and the group came into
focus.  The woman, attractive with a neat brown bob and blonde highlights,
whom he guessed to be in her mid-forties, seemed wholly out of place dressed in
a black pinstripe business suit, while the four men were dressed as
stereotypical aristocrats with tweed jackets, flat caps, plus-fours and
half-cocked shotguns.  He didn’t recognise the woman or two of the men,
one of whom was struggling under the weight of a mountain of luminous orange
clay pigeons.  The other two he categorically recognised: they were
undeniably his old friend Daniel Dunk and the Secretary of Defence, Philip
Windsor-Sackville.  The woman leaned over and pecked Philip
Windsor-Sackville on the cheek.
 

Morton heaved a
sigh of relief as the group changed direction so that they were no longer
heading straight for him.  He was relieved that the door to the shooting
box was facing him; from their angle, as far as they could tell, nothing had
changed since 1944.  They stood still for a moment, laughing and
joking.  Morton had an opportunity to get a decent photograph of them but
the camera was in the backpack, which was inside the bedroom of the shooting
box.  He lowered the binoculars and gauged that if he crawled quickly over
to the shooting box, he could just get back with the camera in time to take a photo
before they disappeared back into the woods.

Morton dived to
the ground and shimmied awkwardly through the long grass until he reached the
safety of the shooting box.  Once inside, he pulled himself up and grabbed
the digital camera from the backpack and slithered back out into the
undergrowth to get a photo.

The shooting
party were still stood in the same position, buying Morton a few more seconds
to switch the camera on and check that the flash was off.  Rather
surprisingly for his father, the digital camera was decent quality with an
impressive telephoto zoom and Morton quickly had the Secretary of Defence and
the woman, presumably his wife, giggling like hormonal teenagers in his
viewfinder.  He snapped them repeatedly.

The group began
to move, back in the direction that they had entered the woods.

Morton took one
last photo when suddenly his mobile loudly declared to the whole world that he
had just received a text message.

He ducked down
and froze, hoping that by some small miracle they hadn’t heard it. 
Parting the tall grass, his pulse quickened as he watched the group stand still
in unison, all turning quizzically.  One of them, Daniel Dunk, turned and
began to turn towards the shooting box.

He needed to
get out.
 

Fast.

Quickly and
gracelessly, Morton squirmed on his stomach back to the shooting box to collect
the backpack.  Scooping it up from beside the bed, he slung the backpack
onto his shoulder and turned to leave the room.  The stream of light
flooding in through the door suddenly darkened.

He turned his
head abruptly towards the shadow and was met with the sharp crack from the butt
of a shotgun.

 

It was just how he imagined heaven to
be.  Deep, penetrating warmth.  His head in the lap of a smiling,
flaxen-haired Scandinavian with a low-cut top, her breasts nudging the side of
his head.  Morton brought his eyes into focus.  It couldn’t be
heaven.  In heaven he wouldn’t have a nettling, wet stain in his boxers or
a headache like he had never felt in his life, as if his brain were full of
broken glass.
 

‘Try not to
move,’ the Scandinavian said in a voice that was distinctly
un-Scandinavian.  He knew the voice from somewhere.  It was the
waitress from earlier.  He flicked his eyes around and saw that he was not
in heaven at all, but in the middle of Sedlescombe village green with
urine-stained jeans and a marble-sized bump above his left ear.  He
ignored her advice and sat up, trying to cover his groin.  ‘It’s okay,’
she said, ‘it’s just a bodily function.  Involuntary.  I trained to
be a nurse.  Well, sort of.’

‘What
happened?’ Morton asked, glad that he still had the power of speech, if not of
his bladder.  He hoped to God he hadn’t leaked from any other orifices.

The woman
shrugged, inadvertently rubbing her breasts against his hair.  ‘I don’t
know.  We just found you here on the green, unconscious.  We’ve
phoned for an ambulance.’  And, as if by magic, an ambulance with the
added humiliation of blue flashing lights pulled up beside them, flagged down
by the frumpy woman from behind the counter of The Clockhouse Tearoom.

‘Thanks,’ he
said.

Evidently the
sarcasm wasn’t clear enough as the waitress replied, ‘You’re welcome.  I
could hardly leave a man who left a two pound tip half dead now, could
I?’  Two pounds, it sounded piffling now, but when he had left it on top
of a five pound twenty bill, it had seemed rather generous.
 

‘It ain’t good
for business neither,’ the frump added, needlessly pointing Morton out to the
two paramedics hurrying across the grass towards him.

‘Oh dear, what
have you done, sir?’ one of the paramedics said to him, as if he were a child.

‘Banged my
head,’ he answered, figuring that the truth would only serve to complicate
matters and elongate this embarrassing incident even further.

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