Hiding the Past (22 page)

Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

Morton
considered giving the very precise answer of the seventh of May 1944, but
settled for, ‘1944.’

‘Definitely
not, then. She was in America at that point. If you go over to the
Old Stables at the far side of the courtyard, we have a photo exhibition and
among them are pictures of her during the war.’

‘America?
What was she doing there?’

‘Her father
sent her out there for safety as soon as the Germans started bombing, sometime
early in 1940,’ Jean said.

‘When did she
come back to Britain?’

‘1945, only a
few months prior to her marriage to Sir David.’

‘Oh, I see,’
Morton said. It was looking highly unlikely that she was James Coldrick’s
mother. There was only one further possibility, and that was that she
gave birth in America, which would explain why there was no birth entry in the
English registers. Morton posed the question of a possible child to Jean,
who burst into laughter.

She seemed
almost offended at the very idea. ‘Heavens above! What on earth
made you ask me that? Goodness me, no, absolutely not. No,’ she
said. ‘Her first child was Philip, whom she gave birth to in 1946.
Heavens!’

Morton
shrugged. ‘Just an idea.’ He left Jean in a fit of giggles and made
his way back towards the courtyard. He wouldn’t be fulfilling the
forensic
part of his job title if he didn’t take a look at the photo
exhibition. On his way across the courtyard Morton spotted the gift
shop. He ducked inside and picked up a brand new pair of binoculars to
replace his father’s pair that had inadvertently become another casualty of the
Coldrick Case
.

He pulled out
the map of Mote Ridge and made his way to the Old Stables, a converted stable
block containing a potted history of the Spencer family and their ties with
Mote Ridge. Morton moved among a gaggle of pensioners, closely reading
the frankly over-the-top quantity of material relating to Princess Diana,
despite her only connection to Mote Ridge being that her great great great
grandfather had been born there. It was hardly her ancestral seat, but
the pensioners seemed to be lapping up the displays, cooing over pictures of
the infant princes. Photographs of the infant Prince George seemed to be
particularly popular with the visitors.

Morton passed
by the information pertaining to centuries-old members of the Spencer family
until he came to Lady Maria. Just as Jean had said, there were four
photographs of her in America during the war. The sceptic in him said
that the photos had nothing in them identifiably American, but that wasn’t the
point. The point was that the woman in photos was the same as the girl in
the portrait he had just seen, the same as the old, doddery lady at the
Sedlescombe Fete on Saturday;
not
James Coldrick’s mother. There
was no doubt now in Morton’s mind: M did not stand for Maria Charlotte
Windsor-Sackville née Spencer.

Feeling
dejectedly back at square one with the question of James Coldrick’s parentage,
Morton left Mote Ridge.

Morton was relieved to find that it wasn’t
a case of
déjà vu
he’d experienced the previous night. He arrived
at the Conquest Hospital and nothing he had dreamt about actually
occurred. He parked a long way from the main entrance, paid the parking
fee and made his way to the Atkinson Ward. What he hadn’t expected,
however, was to find a tattooed skinhead (‘Matt Hargreaves,’ the dry-wipe board
above his head announced) in place of his father. Morton stared at him
and received a snarl that, if Matt Hargreaves hadn’t been wired up to so many
machines, including an oxygen mask, would have undoubtedly turned into a ‘
What
are you staring at?
’

It was like
he’d stumbled onto the wrong ward. Maybe he had, they were all replicas
of each other, after all. But no, it was the correct ward. The men
in the neighbouring beds were the same men as before, watching their televisions,
oblivious to Morton’s growing panic.
Was that it?
Had his
father died and nobody had contacted him? Maybe his phone had run out of
battery. He checked it and it still had three bars of power and a full
signal. No missed calls. No text messages.
Surely Jeremy
would have called? Maybe he’d phoned Juliette first?
He stared
at his father’s replacement.

‘What?’ Matt
Hargreaves managed to rasp angrily.

‘Where’s my
father gone? He was here.’

Matt Hargreaves
growled something and turned his head toward the window, as if he couldn’t
quite cope with life if he were unable to shout or head-butt anyone who
irritated him.

Morton was
rooted to the spot, staring disbelievingly at him.

‘Hello?
You look for Mr Farrier?’ a deep, heavy Eastern-European accent said to
him. He turned to see a tall shaven-haired nurse with a kindly smile on
her face. He nodded and waited for the worst. ‘He go down for heart
operation.’

‘Oh,’ was all
Morton could manage to say. He left the ward and dialled Jeremy, who was
three floors above eating a cold Cornish pasty and drinking a hot cup of tea.

‘They had a cancellation, so they brought
Dad’s op forward,’ Jeremy said, thrusting the last of the ketchup-drenched
pasty into his mouth. Morton wondered if cancellation was a euphemism for
death.

‘How long’s he
been down?’ Morton asked, sitting opposite Jeremy in the deserted cafeteria.

‘About two
hours now,’ he answered with his mouth full. ‘It’ll probably take another
hour.’

‘How was he
before he went down?’ Morton asked, suddenly feeling nauseous.

‘Terrified, but
then so would I be if I had to have my ribcage cranked open and my heart
stopped.’ Morton imagined his father right now on the operating table,
neither dead nor alive, occupying some half-way space in the universe while
fate or God or whatever, decided which way he was going to go. ‘He was
actually more gutted that he hadn’t had a chance to speak to you yet,’ Jeremy
added.

‘Did he say
what it was about?’ Morton asked.

‘No, no
idea. I wouldn’t worry about it, though.’

‘No,’ Morton
answered. But he was worried. He needed to hear whatever his father
had had to say to him.

‘Do you want a
drink?’ Jeremy asked, standing and downing the last of his tea. ‘I think
we could be here a while.’

‘Coffee
please. Strong.’

As Jeremy stood
at the counter and filled two polystyrene cups, Morton’s mobile rang. It
was Dr Baumgartner. He told Morton that the results of the DNA test would
be back by the morning and he wanted to arrange a meeting to talk about the
contents of the copper box before his return to Birmingham on Wednesday.
They agreed to meet tomorrow afternoon, back in the
Sherlock Holmes
,
which seemed as good a place as any to learn the truth about whether or not Sir
David Windsor-Sackville was James Coldrick’s father. With Morton’s
certainty over Lady Maria not being James Coldrick’s mother, he still could not
rule out Sir David being his father.
Something
tied the Coldricks
to the Windsor-Sackvilles, why else would they have spent the best part of
seventy years hiding the past?

Morton ended
the call wondering at the subtle undercurrent of intrigue he’d detected in Dr
Baumgartner’s voice. But Morton knew better than to push for a premature
assessment. ‘Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, hurry your work,’ Dr
Baumgartner would say on a regular basis to slapdash students presenting
half-baked case files to him.

Jeremy returned
with the two drinks. ‘Everything okay? You look like you’re not
really with it.’

Morton snapped
back from his daydream. ‘Yeah, just thinking about Father.’

Jeremy offered
a comforting smile. ‘He does love you, you know, Morton.’

‘I know.’

And so they waited.

They had
finished their drinks and moved down to the ICU waiting room, which was the
mirror image of every other waiting room in the hospital. Their
conversation had naturally run dry and the two men sat in comfortable silence,
each engrossed in their own thoughts. Morton wondered what was going
through his adoptive brother’s head. His own mind leapt like a manic frog
between disparate problems. He wondered how Juliette had got on with her
first day back at work. He imagined that the senior officers in the
station would be keeping a close watch, monitoring her every move. He
would ring her once he’d heard news of his father but who knew when that would
be? Nobody was in any hurry to talk to them, it seemed. He felt
like going over to the nurses’ station and asking how soon his father would be
able to talk; but that seemed a rather crass and frivolous question to be
asking of a man with a ten-inch hole in his chest and no heartbeat.

Morton wondered
if he’d dozed off and was in a bizarre dream when he heard the faint opening
bars of
Dancing Queen
, steadily increasing in volume. He glanced
around the room and realised that he was fully awake and that there could be no
doubt over his brother’s sexuality when Jeremy fumbled in his pocket and pulled
out his mobile. He answered the phone and Abba stopped singing. It
only took a few sentences of half conversation for Morton to realise that he
was talking to Guy. Jeremy was evidently rebutting a suggestion of going
out tonight.

‘Go, Jeremy,
it’s fine. I can wait here,’ Morton interrupted.

Jeremy covered
the handset. ‘No, I’d rather wait here.’

‘Jeremy, he’s
not going anywhere and I’ve got your mobile number. Go out. Have fun.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

It felt like he’d been alone in the
waiting room for several hours before a young, female nurse appeared in the
waiting room with a smile on her face. Morton hoped she wasn’t one of
those people with that condition where they smiled after bad news. His
best friend at university, Jon, had burst into hysterical laughter when he was
told that his parents had been killed in a coach crash in Switzerland. He
literally couldn’t stop smiling all day long and Morton wondered if he was
secretly pleased that his parents were dead. Morton only realised that
wasn’t the case when Jon was incarcerated in a mental hospital the following
day.

‘Okay, so the
operation went very well. It took a bit longer than we would have liked,’
the nurse said and Morton glanced at the clock. Jeremy had been told it
would take around three hours. His father had been operated on for four
and a half hours. ‘We’ve moved him to ICU, which is standard procedure
after major surgery like this. You can see him but he won’t come round
from the anaesthetic for some time.’

Morton followed
the nurse into ICU. He found his father, mouth agape and milky eyes
half-opened so that he resembled the living dead. He was hooked up to an
even greater quantity of beeping and flashing machines than before.

He stood
watching his father’s chest rise and fall mechanically beneath the off-white
crust of bandages strapped to his torso. Wherever his father was right
now in the universe, his body looked peaceful. There was still a large
part of Morton that believed his father would never recover, but he realised
for the first time standing there that he wanted him to pull through; he wanted
his father to live.

‘You can go in
and see him,’ the nurse said.

Morton sat down
beside his father and tentatively said hello. He spoke quietly because it
felt odd talking to someone who you knew wouldn’t respond. They always
said on
Casualty
that the person could hear you and that familiar voices
might help them to recover. That was all well and good on television, but
the reality of sitting within earshot of the nurse whilst he spoke to an
inanimate object left him feeling rather stupid.

He gently
picked up his father’s gelid, bloodless hand. A large black bruise
splayed out from the entry point of the IV drip in his left hand. His
skin had turned into thin tea-stained paper, sagging into the hollows of his
cheeks and eye sockets. Morton looked pitifully at the frail man who had
raised him. Despite everything, he still couldn’t quite tally the word
father
with his emotions; it was like there was a link missing somewhere in the
chain.
Could that link be nothing more than a separate DNA structure?
Or was there more to it than that?
His father’s Victorian style of
child-rearing couldn’t have helped matters, but then it had done nothing to
damage the relationship between him and Jeremy. If anything was going to
damage their father-son bond, then it would be Jeremy’s sexuality. Morton
just couldn’t see his father, a man who frowned upon sex before marriage,
sitting at the breakfast table eating his daily fry-up whilst a half-naked
Australian man draped himself over Jeremy.

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