Hiding the Past (25 page)

Read Hiding the Past Online

Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

He locked the
car and walked towards Smuggler’s Keep with the air of someone who had a
God-given right to be there.  Like a Jehovah’s Witness or an Avon
lady. 
Not that either of those categories have a God-given right to do
anything, least of all knock on strangers’ doors,
thought Morton.  He
marched haughtily past Dunk’s gummy neighbour’s property and brazenly rapped
the knocker on the wooden door, layers of peeling paint revealing its entire
colourful history.  He knew that he should have a back-up plan, at least
something
to say if Dunk should answer the door, but then what do you say to someone who
knocked you unconscious the last time you saw them? 
Hi, me
again! 
But he didn’t need to worry; there was nobody home. 
Morton walked the length of the house, or glorified shed as it might better be
designated, stopping at each window to try to catch a glimpse inside, but each
was covered by old, sun-bleached curtains.  He reached the back door and
glanced around him, not quite able to believe that the
Coldrick Case
had
reduced him to breaking and entering.  He wondered if his sudden moral
degradation was an atavistic trait that he could attribute to his father. 
He still couldn’t comprehend that he was the by-product of a rape and he felt
nauseous when the thought caught him unawares.  He couldn’t stop himself
from imagining what his father did to her and what that made him, the carrier
of his Y chromosome.  Not that a faulty gene pool made his actions
defensible.  If he were caught by the police he wouldn’t have a defence;
his bag was filled with a whole bunch of equipment to help him enter Dunk’s
property. 
Tooled up
– wasn’t that the parlance of those involved
in such iniquitous activities?

He set down the
bag and pulled out a large rusting crowbar.  After a deep breath and a
final check to make sure that he was truly alone, he placed the crowbar in the
crevice beside the lock.  Before he had even applied the slightest
pressure the door creaked open, slowly but noisily.

Morton stared
incredulously through the small gap that had opened up.  It was never a
good sign in films when a door creaked open to reveal a dark unwelcoming
room.  On the plus side, he seemed to recall that it wasn’t illegal to
enter a house where the door had been left open.  And it wasn’t as if he
was going to steal anything.  Well, maybe a little of Dunk’s flaky skin
but that was hardly the crime of the century.
 

He gently
pushed the door open with his foot.  With a bit of daylight streaming in,
it wasn’t quite the uninviting killer’s workshop that he had feared it might
be.  It was just a normal, if slightly run-down, lounge.  It actually
reminded him of Peter Coldrick’s house with its assortment of dilapidated furniture
and rubbish strewn everywhere.  The only addition were the multiple copies
of
The Sun
and
Nutz
magazine, scattered liberally around the
room. 
It shouldn’t be hard to pick up a DNA trace of Dunk among all
this crap,
Morton thought.

He reluctantly closed
the door and stood for a few moments, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the
subdued lighting.  Within a couple of minutes he was able to see that
tucked at the end of the lounge was a tiny kitchen.  To even describe it
as a kitchenette would be an over-exaggeration.  A stand-alone cooker was
piled high with a variety of crockery and saucepans, their contents in various
stages of decomposition.  It was book-ended by a fridge-freezer and a sink
with another pile of dirty plates and pots.  It didn’t surprise him that
Dunk was a bit of a slob; it kind of went with the territory of a murdering
thug.

Morton
approached the sink and immediately recoiled at the disgusting stench.  A
plague of fat blue bottles that had been contentedly feasting on a putrefied plate
of mess were disturbed by his presence and began pinging around his head.

With a pained
grimace, Morton delved his hand into the abyss and pulled a wine glass from the
sink.  His disbelief that Dunk would even know what wine tasted like was
confirmed by a perfect pair of rouge lip prints around the glass rim.  He
looked around the room but couldn’t see anything else remotely female.  He
suspected that whoever the lips belonged to didn’t actually reside here. 
What
had Guy said?
 
That Dunk’s wife or girlfriend had once worked at
Charingsby?
  Something along those lines.  Then a thought
occurred to him.  What if the lipstick marks belonged to Olivia
Walker?  He considered the implications of this as he rooted in the sink,
retrieving a pint glass containing the last dregs of beer with the words
‘Stella Artois’ emblazoned on the side.  It had to be Dunk’s.  Morton
carefully placed the glass in his bag and moved into a short dark hallway that
fed into two rooms: a bathroom with predictably blackened, grimy grout and
broken tiles on the wall and a small simple bedroom containing a double bed, a
chest of drawers and small volcanoes of clothes dotted around the floor. 
This house was doing nothing to improve his opinion of Dungeness.

Then he noticed
a large mahogany and glass gun cabinet mounted to the wall.  Morton took a
closer inspection.  The velvet-lined case had capacity to hold four guns:
only three were present.  Which either meant, as he suspected all along,
that Dunk had murdered Coldrick or that Dunk was currently roaming the Kentish
countryside with a – what was it Juliette had called it? – ‘regular shotgun’.

As he gazed
around the room, Morton suddenly realised that he was taking an inordinate
amount of time over the simplest of tasks; he just needed to get Dunk’s DNA and
get out.  He didn’t need to be dawdling around like he was considering
buying the place.  He hurried over to the bed and, from the tell-tale
concave impression in the pillow scraped a few hairs and pieces of dandruff
into a plastic bag.  That had to be enough of Dunk’s scalp to get a
result.

Morton took one
final look around the room, then cautiously opened the front door.  No
sign of any murderous yobs.  Or bent police chiefs.  Or gummy
neighbours.  All was still and silent in Dungeness.

Safely inside
the Mini with the doors centrally locked, Morton took a moment to breathe
deeply.  He’d done it.  Now he needed to get to Euston in record
speed.  Dr Baumgartner’s train would be leaving for Birmingham in two
hours' time.

 

Morton predictably had to park a million
miles away from Euston.  He might as well have parked in Croydon.  He
ran through the heaving station, pushing past crowds of people, desperately
hoping that he wasn’t too late.  He glanced up at the huge yellow and
black digital display which presided over the gates that led to the waiting
trains.  The train for Birmingham was due to leave in three minutes. 
They’d arranged to meet outside
WH Smith’s
but Dr Baumgartner was
nowhere to be seen.

Morton
desperately flicked his head left and right, craning his neck around the hordes
of people trooping through the station.

He was fast
running out of time.

Looking back at
the time table display, he noted the platform number for the Birmingham train
and made a run for it.  As he neared the ticket barriers he wondered if he
should get all
Hollywood cop
about it and leap over the barrier yelling
something about him being a forensic genealogist and ‘would somebody stop the
damn train’.  Not really his style.  Fortunately for him, a petite
Asian lady had wedged open the disabled ticket barrier and was fixated by a
youth in absurdly tight jeans and spiked purple hair staggering towards the
train.

Morton ran past
her, easily breaching the ticket barrier, where he caught sight of Dr
Baumgartner, hanging his upper torso from the nearest train door and waving
wildly.

‘Dr
Baumgartner!’ Morton greeted.

‘Thought you
weren’t going to make it,’ he replied.

‘Here,’ Morton
said, thrusting his holdall into Dr Baumgartner’s waiting hand.

At that moment
the train conductor blew his whistle and the train doors emitted their
high-pitched warning to announce that they were about to close.

‘I should have
the results by tomorrow,’ Dr Baumgartner just managed to say, before the doors
abruptly smacked together in front of his face.  And then he was
gone.  Back to Birmingham.  Back to the headquarters of the Forensic
Science Service.

With the rear
end of the train almost faded from sight, Morton pulled out his mobile. 
Sixteen missed calls and two text messages.  Not bad for a few hours in
silent mode.  Four were from Dr Baumgartner in unsurprising regular
three-minute intervals preceding their scheduled meeting.  One was from
Jeremy and the rest were from Juliette.  He dialled her mobile as he began
his epic journey back towards the Mini.

‘Where the hell
have you been?’ Juliette greeted congenially.

‘Sorry, phone
battery died,’ Morton lied, though why he didn’t just tell the truth, he wasn’t
too sure.  He vaguely thought that the truth was too complicated and he
didn’t know who might be listening.  Anyhow, it was a stupid mistake
trying to pull the wool over Juliette’s eyes.

‘Liar. 
Your phone wouldn’t have even rung if your battery was dead.’ 
Oh yeah
,
Morton thought, forgetting whom he was talking to.  She sounded like she
was speaking from a dungeon.

‘Where are
you?’ he asked.

‘Don’t change
the subject.  Where have you been?’

‘I’ll tell you
when you get home.  Where are you?’

‘I should be in
a primary school with Roger giving a ‘Stranger Danger’ talk, but I told him I didn’t
feel well and I had paperwork to catch up on so now I’m in the basement
searching through a stack of bloody microfiches for anything on your aunty or
mum or whoever she is to you now.  PNC came back with nothing but then it
wouldn’t because of how long ago the crime was committed.’

‘How likely is
it that you’ll come up with something?’

‘Not.  I
don’t have the criminal’s name, date of birth, et cetera which would make the
task a bit easier.  Besides which, these records are regularly weeded for
Data Protection.’

‘Well, thanks
for trying.’

‘See you
later.’

Morton hit the
red button on his phone with a cynical intuition that Juliette wasn’t going to
locate any records pertaining to his Aunty Margaret’s rape.  He just had a
hunch that his biological father had escaped justice and was freely roaming the
streets.  He remembered that Jeremy had tried to call him so he phoned his
mobile.

‘Bad news, I’m
afraid,’ Jeremy began and Morton immediately feared the worst for his
father.  ‘I’m going back to Cyprus tomorrow.’

‘So soon?’
Morton said, feeling suddenly bereft of his newly-acquired relationship.

‘Now that Dad’s
on the mend there’s no justification for the compassionate leave.  Looks
like his care is over to you and Juliette now.’

‘Hmm,’ Morton
answered pensively.  He doubted that it would be the last he’d hear of
him, though.  He’d overheard some of the blokes at the party talking about
videos they’d uploaded to Facebook whilst in Afghanistan, so he doubted
communication could be any more stunted in Cyprus.

 

Two hours later, a near-empty bottle of
red wine had helped to distil Morton’s erratic thoughts.  The house was
silent but for the muted ticking from the grandfather clock in the
hallway.  He was sitting in his father’s lounge, staring at a family
portrait that had hung over the fireplace since it had been taken.  He
couldn’t recall if the photo was taken for any particular birthday or
anniversary but he remembered that he and Jeremy were told of their mother’s
cancer days later.  Possibly even the next day.  He’d never really
connected the two ideas before but now, looking up at himself as a
fourteen-year-old boy with a grinning Jeremy - minus his top front teeth – sat
beside him and their parents standing stoically behind them, he wondered if the
picture had been taken as a desperate final snapshot of their dissolving
nuclear family unit.  Proof that they’d existed.  Proof that could
never be tarnished by insidious underlying family secrets. 
Say
cheese!
 
It was an image that should, under normal circumstances, be found amidst the
yellowing pages of a photo album, not hanging proudly on the wall: Morton on a
day trip to Hastings with his aunt, uncle and cousin.  Uncle Peter, Aunty
Maureen and cousin Jeremy.  He felt sure that he could cope with their
bizarre family foibles if it’d been like that.

Morton’s mobile
suddenly sounded loudly from his pocket.  ‘Hello,’ he answered, hoping
that the voice on the other end was calling with good news.

‘Morton?’
Professor Geoffrey Daniels asked in a gruff, baritone voice.

‘Yup,
speaking.’

‘Have you
checked your emails yet?’

‘No, not today,
why’s that then?’

‘I’ve found
Marlene Koldrich’s birth certificate and have emailed you a translation.’

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