Hiding the Past (24 page)

Morton threaded
up the reel and wound on to the first page, which contained a brief synopsis of
the microfilm’s contents.  He was sure that he could feel the cool surge
of adrenalin rush into his heart.  Could it
really
be that the
answer to the Coldrick’s ancestral history was contained within the fat
celluloid roll in front of him? 
Really
?  A small part of him
didn’t want to read on, didn’t want to risk another dead end.  He’d given
everything to the
Coldrick Case
and if the answer wasn’t here then he
didn’t think that he had the stamina to continue.  There was a lot to be
said for the predictability of mundane family history research jobs.

He took a deep
breath and read the first page on the film.  The Vice Chief of the
Imperial General Staff said that, in the light of the possibility of invasion,
it was very desirable that all enemy aliens in counties in the south east
should be interned. No doubt ninety per cent of such aliens were well-disposed
to this country, but it was impossible to pick out the small proportion of
aliens who probably constituted a dangerous element.  In the
circumstances, the only course seemed to be that all aliens in this area should
be interned for the present.  The number is probably four to five
thousand.  These aliens should be categorised thus: ‘A’ are known Nazis
who are interned immediately, ‘B’ are the doubtful ones who will have
restrictions placed on them and ‘C’ were all the rest, mostly Jewish refugees.

Morton desperately
hoped that James Coldrick’s mother would appear in the ‘C’ category,
constituting one of the ninety percent of aliens ‘well-disposed to this
country’, yet he doubted that a Jewish refugee would have been willingly
photographed with a swastika around her neck.

He wound the
film on and discovered that the files were arranged haphazardly and in no
particular order.  At first he read each and every word on the record
cards.  After all, he had no idea of James Coldrick’s mother’s name and he
hoped that it would be the detail that would finally reveal the truth.
 

It was going to
be a long search, which might well stretch into days huddled at a microfilm
reader.

After several hours of fruitless
searching, Morton began to skim-read the entries, his eyelids gravitating
towards earth, like shop blinds at closing time.  He looked at the clock:
in little over two hours’ time Deidre Latimer would take great pleasure in
shooing him away.

He ploughed on,
but it had become an effort to stay focussed and the names that he read
received diminished process-time in his brain. 
Fritz Karthauser, Rozsa
Balogh, Charlottenne Hellman, Eva Loewenheim, Walter Tauchert, Hans Hacault,
Magda Mueller, Leni Raubal, Geli Reitsh
… the names skewed and twisted in
his addled mind.  He wasn’t even sure if Leni and Geli were men or
women.  He ached all over and the idea of making a note of where he’d
reached in the reel, packing up for the day and returning home and snuggling up
with Juliette took hold.  There was no guarantee that he’d find James
Coldrick’s mother anyway.  She could easily have been one of the names he
had read, having blithely skipped over her.  Then he thought of Dr
Baumgartner and the way that he held Morton in such high esteem.  What
would he think about him struggling to stay awake and casually casting his eyes
over the records, as if he were reading the Sunday papers, wanting to give up
halfway through?  He’d be mortified, that’s what.  Morton wasn’t that
person.  He needed to do this properly.

He switched off
the machine, stood, and contracted his tight leg and arm muscles.  A brisk
walk and a shot of caffeine would see him through the last quarter of the
reel.  He strode boldly past Deidre Latimer, across the car park and down
to Nero’s.  He had a plentiful choice of vacant seats, but Morton chose to
sit in the same comfy leather armchair where he had sat the last time he was
here, where Max had finally confessed the snippet of information about William
Dunk that had led him back here again.  There was something oddly comforting
in sitting in the same place, in remembering Max pulling apart his
double-chocolate muffin, casually revealing his corruption.  Morton drank
his coffee, feeling like an echo of himself that day, a third-party observer
watching the discussion taking place again.
 

A loud crash
and sound of smashing crockery as a tray of drinks hit the floor snapped Morton
from his reveries.  He was back in the room, back to the present
time.  He finished his drink and hurried back to the archives.

He returned to
the microfilm reader with a renewed zeal and desire to find the answer. 
He’d been scanning the reel for several minutes when his mobile rang. 
Damn, in his haste to minimise contact with Deidre Latimer in the lobby he’d
forgotten to switch off his phone, and now the amplified iPhone ringtone was
attracting the attention of the dozen or so disgruntled researchers, who were
currently glaring at him as though he’d just committed a terrible
atrocity.  Leaving your mobile switched on
was
a kind of atrocity
here, he supposed.  He elongated their pain as he deliberated whether or
not to answer: it was Jeremy, he had to answer.  Just in case.
 

‘Hi,’ Morton
whispered.

‘Morton, just
thought I’d tell you that Dad’s been moved back to the Atkinson Ward.  He
seems to be doing well.’

‘Oh, thank
God,’ Morton said, genuinely relieved that his father seemed to be pulling
through.

‘The only
trouble is that he keeps asking when you’re going to come in.’

‘Okay, tell him
I’ll be there this evening,’ Morton answered.  Whatever it was that his
father wanted to say had better be worth it, especially now that Quiet Brian
was making a beeline towards him with a condemning look on his face.  At
that moment Morton’s eyes did an involuntary double-take at the microfilm
reader and both Jeremy’s tinny voice and Quiet Brian’s admonishing whisper
sharply faded away, the aural equivalent of them blurring into the background.
 

He’d found her.

Regional Advisory Committee

Surname: Koldrich

Forename: Marlene

Date and place of birth: 18 November 1913,
Berlin

Nationality: German

Police Regn. Cert. No: 470188

Address: Sedlescombe, Sussex

The committee have decided that the alien
should be placed in Category ‘A’ – sent to Lingfield Internment Camp
immediately

Date: 20 May 1940

M stood for Marlene.  Marlene
Koldrich, the un-anglicised name of James Coldrick’s mother, Peter Coldrick’s
grandmother and Finlay Coldrick’s great grandmother.  He wasn’t surprised
to see that she was classified as a category A alien; it kind of went with the
territory of wearing a swastika in World War Two.  He hit the print button
and watched excitedly as a black and white copy spewed from the machine. 
He snatched the photocopy and considered his next move.  He supposed it
would be to find out what records still existed for Lingfield Internment Camp
and take it from there.  He’d ask Quiet Brian, he always seemed to be a
mine of military history information.  For no reason other than to be
completely satisfied that the entry was complete, Morton wound the film reel on
one page and was startled by the short entry.

The committee have decided to declassify
Marlene Koldrich

Date: 27 May 1940

Morton reread the entry.  From
category A to declassified in one week.  How did
that
happen? 
The more he thought of it, the more likely it seemed to him that
someone
in high authority had pulled the right strings.  Someone in government,
perhaps.  He doubted that Marlene had ever even made it to Lingfield
Internment Camp in the intervening week.

Morton left the
archives, carefully clutching his two printouts, his head in a tailspin. 
What on earth could have possessed the Regional Advisory Committee to take such
action?  After a grovelling apology to Quiet Brian for using his mobile,
Morton asked if there were any other records that might help him, but Quiet
Brian seemed quite certain that there were none that had survived.  Morton
had briefly considered calling up street directories or electoral registers for
Sedlescombe in 1940, but remembered that they weren’t produced during
wartime.  There was also no 1941 census taken.  National security and
all that.

As he crossed
the car park towards the Mini, Morton pulled out the torn corner of a newspaper
from his back pocket on which Dr Baumgartner had scribbled the phone number of
Professor Geoffrey Daniels.  The phone rang for several seconds before a
gruff, disgruntled voice answered.  When Morton explained that he was a
very good friend of Gerald
Baumgartner the voice swiftly softened.

Someone had evidently noticed that the
waiting room at the Conquest Hospital wasn’t a particularly great advert for
the place.  The blue plastic chairs had been wiped, the payphone mended
and a colourful set of three posters now adorned the walls.  Morton gazed
across the glossy attempts to educate and inform the ill and injured
public.  The first one showed four Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls
standing beside one another, painted as a father, mother, son and
daughter.  Above the family a tagline read ‘Diabetes often runs in families.’ 
The next featured a middle-aged distorted face with accompanying stroke
advice.  The last poster gave frank information on the symptoms of bowel
cancer.

He carried the
cup of tea, requested by his father, to the Atkinson Ward and placed it on the
cabinet beside him, receiving an appreciative nod from him.

‘How’s work?’
his father asked in a raspy, weak voice.  Jeremy had said on the phone
that their father was doing well but Morton had seen no evidence of it so
far.  He looked pasty and sallow, a haunted version of his pre-operative
state.  Morton still couldn’t quite believe that he wasn’t at death’s
door.

‘Very busy,’
Morton said.

His father
nodded.  ‘I suppose that’s why you haven’t been here much.’  It was a
rhetorical question; Morton didn’t need to answer it.  Actually, it was
bait and Morton did answer it.

‘I was here
last night, actually.’

‘I know,’ he
answered airily.

How could he
know?
Morton
wondered.  Had Jeremy or one of the nurses told him that Morton had kept a
stoic bedside vigil?  Or had his father heard every word of his extensive
tirade?  He didn’t want to ask.  He just wanted to know whatever it
was that his father’s cracked and sore lips were struggling to say. 

With what
seemed the greatest effort in the world, his father lifted his hand and placed
it on Morton’s.  He gripped Morton’s four fingers tightly.  ‘I’ve got
something to tell you,’ his sandpapery voice said, his eyes meeting Morton’s
earnestly for the first time.  Morton knew that he was about to be told something
big, something life-changing.  ‘It’s about your past.  It’s time you
knew.’

Wednesday

Well, the kitchen table of the Farrier
residence sure was an uncomfortable place to be.  Morton, Juliette, Jeremy
and Guy sat half-heartedly eating their way through the pile of toast in the
centre of the table, an awkward silence lingering over the cafetière that sat
between them.  Morton felt sorry for Jeremy and Juliette; he knew that
their brains were being eaten alive with questions that they wanted answering
but that neither of them could quite articulate.  Questions that he
himself had asked his father last night.  He felt most sorry, though, for
the bewildered-looking Guy, trying - and failing - to make the three stunned,
voiceless people at the table engage in small talk.  The poor chap had
even resorted to commenting on the weather.  He’d only arrived moments
before breakfast and hadn’t been privy to the long and emotionally intense
night that had followed Morton’s arrival back from the Conquest Hospital. 
In fact, the three of them had only gone to bed four hours ago and even then
Morton hadn’t slept a wink.  He’d left the hospital in a state of shock:
every fragment of his childhood had been pulverised and mashed up beyond all
recognition by that one, short conversation with his father; as far as he was
concerned, he had no past.  That small box in his brain where he stored
painful memories or parts of his life that he’d rather forget had exploded with
more force than had his own house.  Only this time, there were no
salvageable trinkets or trophies.

Morton had left
his father's bedside with the intention of driving straight home to clear his
head but when he saw that
The Harrow
pub was open, he parked up and went
inside.  He felt like a walking cliché as he downed two double
whiskeys.  But what he really sought from the pub was to be a faceless
blur in the corner, giving the news and the alcohol time to sink in.  It
had been many years since he’d last drunk in there and so he sat, incognito,
stewing over what he had just been told.  ‘Your biological mother was
raped at the age of sixteen,’ his father had said, matter-of-factly.  ‘And
in those days you didn’t just pop a pill and the baby was gone, you put it up
for adoption, which is exactly what she did.  And
that’s
how your
mother and I came to have you.’  The way that his father emphasised the
word
that’s
had made it sound as though it were the end of a long,
self-explanatory speech that required no further questioning.  And, as if
to underline the point, his father closed his eyes and emitted a deep
satisfying sigh, a crushing weight evidently having been lifted from his
reconditioned heart.  Over the years, Morton had convinced himself that
nature was indeed stronger than nurture and that no part of his character
attributes, or what had made him the person he was today, stemmed from his
adoptive parents, which now left him with the stark and numbing realisation
that fifty percent of his biological make-up came from a rapist.  And to
think that he was embarrassed at school to say that his father worked in
B&Q.  He imagined the reaction of standing up and telling his class
that his father was a man who liked to force schoolgirls to have sex with him.

‘So, you knew
my mother then?’ Morton ventured.

‘Of course I
knew her, I married her, didn’t I?’

‘My
biological
mother,’ Morton clarified.

For a brief
moment it appeared as though someone had pressed a pause button on his father,
for he lay frozen without so much as a flicker of movement.  Even his
glassy eyes were devoid of animation.  As Morton was assimilating the
possibility that his father had just pegged out in front of him, right at the
critical revelatory moment, which would have been just the kind of thing likely
to happen to him, he turned and met Morton’s anxious eyes.  ‘Yes, we knew
her.’  Another lengthy pause. 
God, this was like pulling teeth
,
Morton thought.  ‘Who was she?’ he asked, his whole body physically aching
to know the answer that he’d waited almost twenty years to hear.

‘She was just a
girl, a
sixteen
-year-old girl.’

Morton suffered
another pause.  ‘But what was her name?’

‘Her name’s
irrelevant,’ he said, now barely audible.  His eyes closed again and
turned his head.  ‘All long ago in the past.’

‘Please,’
Morton pleaded gently.

‘I need to
rest.’

‘Please,’ he
repeated, alarmed to discover that he was on the verge of tears.  He
couldn’t say anything else; he was emotionally parched.

His father was
unresponsive and Morton stood to leave.  And then the answer came. 
Without fanfare and even without his father opening his eyes or moving a muscle
– just five simple words.

‘Her name was
Margaret Farrier.’

Morton ordered a pint of beer and tried to
imagine his Aunty Margaret aged sixteen.  He was sure that he’d seen
photographs of her beaming brightly in her school uniform, a moment captured on
camera before her innocence was barbarically stolen by Morton’s natural
father.  It was odd but he felt a strange level of responsibility for his
biological father’s actions.  The flip side to that, however, was the
simple truth that if his father hadn’t raped Aunty Margaret then he wouldn’t be
here now.  It was a sickening and horrifying feeling to know that he owed
his entire existence to a rapist.

It took a second
pint for Morton to go home and muster the courage to go back to break the news
to Juliette and Jeremy.  The irony of finally discovering a latent
fraternal bond with Jeremy, to now discover that he was actually his cousin,
was not lost on Morton as he neared the house.

Morton tried
his hardest to put on something resembling a brave face.  Even just an
ordinary face would have done.  He wanted to stride into the kitchen
confidently and say, ‘Hi, everything okay?  You’ll
never
guess what
I’ve just found out!’ 
Wasn’t that how his family did things?
 
Dropped emotional bombshells and then ran away?  He was sure that his
father would have walked away if it were at all possible as soon as he’d
uttered the words, ‘And
that’s
how your mother and I came to have you.’ 
Job done.  Cheerio.  But Morton couldn’t appear any other way than
totally shell-shocked and mildly drunk.  Of course, they had both spotted
it as soon as he walked through the front door.  ‘What’s happened?’
Juliette had asked.  ‘It’s Dad, isn’t it?’ Jeremy had said, the pair of
them haranguing him before he’d even drawn breath.  He’d just managed to
keep his composure while he relayed what his father had told him and had just
finished telling them everything, when Guy arrived.  Suddenly, the world
fell silent and a raft of questions from Juliette and Jeremy were left
unspoken.

‘Right,’ Jeremy
said assertively.  ‘We’re going to get ready, then go and visit
Dad.’  Guy set down the piece of toast he was in the middle of eating and
obediently followed Jeremy from the room.
 

Morton nodded
and slumped down onto his arms, unable to talk anymore.  He was tired,
more tired than he’d ever been before and he just wanted to rest and not to
think.

‘Did they ever
find the bloke who raped her?’ Juliette asked, her voice loaded with
sympathy.  That must be her PCSO voice, Morton thought.  He expected
that she was itching to get into work and see what she could dig up. 
Morton shrugged.  He had no idea if
the bloke
- his father - had
escaped scot-free and went on to rape other schoolgirls or if he was behind
bars.  He might even be dead by now.

‘I’m going to
bed,’ Morton mumbled.

‘I’ll come
too.’

When he woke up he was drenched in sweat,
yet, according to the clock, he’d only been asleep for forty minutes.  He
sat up and stripped off his sodden t-shirt.  A flicker of his dream
flashed in his mind, like a snippet from a grainy film.  A fat Russian
Matryoshka nesting doll had spoken to him.  He couldn’t remember what he’d
said; just that it was an old man who didn’t look in the slightest bit
Russian.  He resembled someone haggard from years of working on the land
and after he had spoken, the top half of his body tilted open sideways and out
popped another man whom Morton identified as James Coldrick.  He said
something incoherent - at least, the memory of the dream was now incoherent -
then he too opened up and out sprang Peter Coldrick.  Then, just like the
two men before him, his body severed across the waist to reveal Finlay
Coldrick, who promptly burst into tears.  Morton wondered why his
exhausted brain had picked Russian nesting dolls to feature in what must surely
be the oddest dream he’d ever had.  Then he remembered the posters he’d
seen yesterday in the waiting room of the Conquest Hospital.

Then a thought
struck him, which fully woke him up.

Diabetes often
runs in families the poster had said.

Finlay Coldrick
had diabetes.  Peter Coldrick had diabetes. 
Didn’t William Dunk’s
death certificate cite diabetes as a cause of death?
  Morton reached
for his phone and accessed his cloud space, where he quickly located a photo of
William Dunk's death certificate, since the original had perished with
everything else on the
Coldrick Case Incident Wall. 
Yes, there it
was: diabetes mellitus.

Coincidence?

There was only
one way to be sure.  Another DNA test.

Morton climbed
out of bed as quietly as possible, doing his utmost not to disturb
Juliette.  There was no way on God’s green earth she would allow him to do
what he was about to do.  He quickly dressed and left the house.

As Morton made the fifty-minute journey
from Hastings to Dungeness, he mulled over the implications of his bizarre
dream.  If the diabetes was not a coincidence, then he had finally found
James Coldrick’s father: William Dunk.  It was certainly possible in terms
of the timeframe and location; William would have been thirty-one at the time
of James’s birth and he would likely have been living in Sedlescombe by
then.  According to a quick search on Ancestry, William Dunk had never
married, Daniel having been born in 1969 out of wedlock to one Sharon
Higgins. 
Could Daniel Dunk and James Coldrick have the same father in
William Dunk?  Were James Coldrick’s parents really a Nazi woman and a
handyman for the local gentry?
 
If so, then what part did the
Windsor-Sackvilles play? 
He needed yet more evidence.

Mercifully
there were no top-spec cars registered to the Chief Constable of Kent Police
parked on Daniel Dunk’s property; there were no cars at all in fact. 
Morton parked a safe distance away and pulled out the new pair of National
Trust binoculars to spy on the house.  He really must put the binoculars
back in his father’s wardrobe since it appeared that, contrary to Morton’s
initial belief, his father was making a decent recovery.  Jeremy had texted
to say that the doctors expected him to be allowed home within days. 
Another miracle; his family was full of them.  His
real
family. 
He hadn’t yet digested the news that his Aunty Margaret was his real, bona-fide
biological mother.  But then, how could you digest something like
that?  It was about as digestible as a stack of bricks.  He doubted
that he would ever even be able to
begin
to comprehend such
life-changing information, although it did make some kind of sense on some kind
of level.  If you’d asked him at any point in his life to honestly state
with whom in his family he felt the closest affinity, he would unquestioningly
have chosen Aunty Margaret.  He never could fathom where this syrupy
high-esteem in which he held her had come from.  After all, he could count
the number of visits she had made to the family home and his reciprocal visits
to her in Cornwall on one hand.  Was
he
the reason that she had
upped sticks as an eighteen-year-old and moved so far away?  Was there
significance to be found in the fact that her home was minutes away from Lands
End, as if she couldn’t live any further away without needing a submarine to
get home?  He raked through his back catalogue of memories of Aunty
Margaret and he realised that it was a mawkish romanticised
idea
of her
that he most loved; the kind of mother he’d wished that his own had been. 
Safe, constant, fun, Aunty Margaret’s visits always cast a heavy and palpable
shadow over his own restrained, conservative mother.  He realised that he
had always viewed Aunty Margaret’s interactions and close relationship with her
two daughters with an envious eye.  And now, at the age of thirty-nine, he
finally understood the affinity he had with Aunty Margaret.  His mother.

Morton raised
the binoculars to Dunk’s house once more and was convinced that it was
deserted.  No doubt Dunk was off doing whatever hitmen do when not engaged
in the business of killing innocents. 
Line dancing, perhaps?  Or
lace-making, maybe?
 Morton placed the binoculars in a rucksack he’d
found in Jeremy’s wardrobe, which he’d hastily packed the moment that the
realisation of his dream had sunk in.  He’d managed to sneak out of the
house leaving Juliette sleeping in blissful ignorance of the plan that he’d
impulsively hatched.  He was going to enter Dunk’s house to gather DNA
material: that was about as organised and detailed as his plan got.  He
switched his phone to silent, knowing that the first thing that Juliette would
do when she woke was to phone or text him, and the last time she did that, he was
within hitting range of Daniel Dunk, and that didn’t end too well.