Read Hiding the Past Online

Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

Hiding the Past (13 page)

‘And did you
find anything under the Coldrick name at all?’ Morton asked, hoping that his
thirty pounds an hour of research fees had gone on something more than one
piece of paper and yet more uncertainty.

‘Nothing, I’m
afraid.  The name isn’t registered at all.  Ever.’

Morton needed
his best friend and saviour, Google, and he needed it now.  He downed the
hot coffee, thanked Dr Garlick for his time and handed over a cheque for a
hundred and eighty pounds - surely a world record for a photocopy of the
Windsor-Sackville coat of arms.

Outside, all
signs of the last two days’ inclement weather had completely passed. 
Morton took off his jacket and buried the copper box inside it and made a beeline
for his car.

When he reached
the Mini he called the Conquest Hospital for an update on his father and a
nurse on the assessment ward told him that there had been no change in his
condition.  Some mercy, he supposed.

 

Morton parked on the drive behind
Juliette’s car.  He looked at his watch curiously.  She wasn’t due to
finish work for another hour.  Hurrying up the stairs into the lounge, he
found her in uniform, frowning, contemplative and staring at the lounge
floor.  Something had happened.  It had to be his father.  The
hospital must have called whilst he was driving home.  Part of him didn’t
want to ask.  But he had to know.  ‘What is it?’  She met his
gaze and he saw that she had been crying.

She shook her
head.

‘It’s my
father, isn’t it?’

‘What? 
No, I don’t know anything about your dad.  I was hoping you were going to
tell me.’

‘He’s stable at
the moment.  They’re running every test known to man and he’s rigged up to
drips, heart monitors and God knows what.  I’m going back up later tonight
with some bits from his house.’

‘I’ll come with
you.’

‘Fine. 
What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve been
suspended.’

‘What? 
What for?’

‘Accessing
prohibited information,’ she said, her voice on the cusp of an angry
outburst.  Morton knew he needed to tread
very
carefully.

‘The number
plate?’

She nodded,
then prolonged his agony by saying nothing more except, ‘I have to go back in
for an interview at some point.’

‘And?’

‘The BMW’s
registered to Olivia Walker,’ she said.

‘Olivia
Walker?’ Morton repeated.  He knew the name, but couldn’t place it. 
He’d heard it in the last few days – some connection to this case.

‘Kent’s Chief
Constable,’ she added, as if she could tell what he was thinking.

It took a
moment for Morton to digest the news.  Daniel Dunk’s BMW was registered to
the highest ranking police officer in Kent.  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

‘Me
neither.  All I know is that it's not a personal car; it's one of more
than half a dozen used for the security of key members of the government, like
the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Northern Ireland Secretary, et cetera.’

‘Are you sure
about this?’

Juliette’s body
sagged.  ‘I was suspended.  How much surer do I need to be?’

‘So Daniel
Dunk’s working for the Chief Constable of Kent?’ Morton said, as much to
himself as to Juliette.  Although this latest development had made the
picture even more abstract, he still thought with great excitement about all
the new pieces of string and coloured drawing pins he needed to add to his
Coldrick
Case Incident Wall.

‘Christ knows,
but something dodgy is going on.  Not even five minutes after I’d run the
number plate search I was hauled into the inspector’s office and told to
explain myself.  I said I saw the owner of the vehicle acting suspiciously
but he wasn’t having any of it, suspended me there and then.  I’m starting
to think fifty grand is nowhere near enough money for this job of yours.’

‘Hmm,’ Morton
agreed, attempting to mentally place the new acquisitions to the
Coldrick
Case
jigsaw.  ‘You said Olivia Walker is in charge of the security of
key government ministers – would this happen to include the Secretary of
Defence?’

‘Philip
Windsor-Sackville, yeah, I believe so.  Why?’

‘I’ll make a
cup of tea and bring you up to speed.’

Morton strolled
into the kitchen, unable to shake the name Olivia Walker.  He knew her
name from somewhere else. 
But where was it?
  He boiled the
kettle, searching his mind for a match.

Then it struck
him.
 

She was the
officer in charge of the investigation into Mary Coldrick’s death.

What a
coincidence!

‘There’s
something else about your Chief Constable,’ Morton said, handing Juliette a mug
of tea.

Morton told
Juliette
everything
about the
Coldrick Case
, even the finer
details that he had previously skipped over.  Juliette clasped the mug of
tea like a frozen vagrant and listened intently to him, only interrupting to
clarify when something had taken place.  ‘But this was
last
week,’
she had said.  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’  He’d told her it was
because he hadn’t wanted to bore her.

Morton carried
the copper box and the photocopy of the Windsor-Sackville arms to his
study.  He carefully placed the photos of James Coldrick and his mother,
along with her letter inside the box and tucked it away under his desk. 
Opening up Juliette’s laptop, he punched ‘Windsor-Sackville’ into Google. 
Only seven million two hundred and fifty thousand websites to trawl
through.  The top results concerned Frederick James Windsor-Sackville.

 

BBC – History – Windsor-Sackville
(1880-1965)

Frederick James Windsor-Sackville was a
Conservative politician and
prominent member of government.  His much lauded
welfare reforms…

www.bbc.co.uk/history_figures/windsor_sackville.shtml
- 25k

 

Time 100: Frederick James
Windsor-Sackville

The illustrious statesman who served his
country in WW1 before becoming
Chancellor of the Exchequer.

www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/windsor-sackville.html
- 33k

 

Windsor-Sackville – Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia

Political family headed up by Frederick
James Windsor-Sackville.  He was born
18 May 1880…

En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor-Sackville –
359k

 

Morton scrolled down past generic
biographies of Frederick James Windsor-Sackville, wanting to find out
information about his son, Sir David and his grandson, the current Secretary of
Defence.  Most of the websites that he clicked on seemed to agree that
David James Peregrine Windsor-Sackville was a rising star in the Conservative
party prior to World War Two.  Then, having gained a place in Churchill’s
Coalition Government, he secured the family’s fortunes at a time when other
gentry were losing theirs, by landing large reconstruction contracts for his
fledgling company,
WS
Construction
.  Having helped populate
half of post-war Britain with cheap prefabs, David became a key member of the
government’s rebuilding programme; many of Britain’s most unsightly 1950s
concrete monstrosities owed their creation to WS Construction and David James
Peregrine Windsor-Sackville.  A knighthood followed in 1964. 
Maintaining his place close to the centre of the British political system, it
was inevitable that his son, Philip would follow in his footsteps, ascending to
the role of Secretary of Defence in the current Coalition Government.  As
stated by Dr Garlick, David married Maria Spencer in 1945, their first child,
Philip, arriving the following year in December 1946.  Morton took a page
of notes before clicking on the family’s own website.

 

The Windsor-Sackville Family

Information, quotes, speeches and
biographies on this distinguished British
family.

www.windsor-sackville.org.uk/ - 28k

He looked around the website ‘of this most
eminent of English families’ designed with elegant colour-schemes and an old
English style font.  Clicking on the Family Tree tab, he followed the
ancestral line of the Windsor-Sackvilles.  He studied the screen for some
time then stared at the
Coldrick Case Incident Wall. 
The only
logical explanation that he could come up with was that James Coldrick could
have been the son of Sir David James Peregrine and Lady Maria Charlotte
Windsor-Sackville.  It certainly made sense on
some
kind of level. 
Had they placed the illegitimate James - born a year
before
their
marriage - just metres away at St George’s Children’s Home and then bought his
silence when he grew up with several hundred thousand pounds?  Had they
killed Mary Coldrick when she began to pry into her husband’s past?  Had
they killed Peter Coldrick when he too grew curious and began to ask the wrong
questions?  Did the ‘M’ at the end of the wartime letter written to James
Coldrick stand for Maria? 
Could it really be as simple as that?
 Morton
doubted it.  It all felt a bit too crowbarred into place, the kind of
surmises dreamed up by amateur genealogists determined to find that elusive
link to royalty.  He’d lost count now of the number of clients who claimed
to be descendants of a mistress of Henry VIII, as if that even meant
anything.  Congratulations, your twenty times great grandfather was an
adulterous rogue and your twenty times great grandmother was a harlot. 
You
must feel so honoured to have such blue blood running through your veins.

Having
retrieved the two photographs of James Coldrick’s mother, Morton clicked on the
‘Photo Gallery’ tab and scrolled down to a close up of Maria Charlotte
Windsor-Sackville.  He held the images close to the laptop screen and compared
the photos.  The profile shot of Maria on the website looked to Morton
like it had been taken in the sixties or seventies and bore no resemblance to
the wartime photographs in his hand.  But that meant nothing; she could
have completely changed over those twenty or so years.  There was
certainly nothing in front of him that precluded them from being the same
person.

Under the
‘News’ tab he read that on Saturday Sir David and Lady Maria Windsor-Sackville
were to open Sedlescombe Village Fete. 
Might be worth a visit
, he
thought.  He made a careful note of the date and time and pinned it to the
wall.

Morton
carefully drew up a neat family tree for the ‘illustrious’ Windsor-Sackvilles
and compared it with the cul-de-sac tree for the Coldricks.  He held them
side by side, wondering at the connection. 
There has to be something
here
, Morton thought.  As he cast his eyes over the short Coldrick
tree, something suddenly struck him: if his suspicions were anywhere near
correct, and the Dunks and Olivia Walker were helping to cover up the fact that
David and Maria had given birth to an illegitimate child, then Finlay Coldrick
could be in grave danger.  Juliette’s suspension had just sent a major
warning that he was closing in on the truth.

Morton raced
down the stairs, called a garbled goodbye to Juliette and dashed out to the
Mini.  A moment later, he screeched out of Church Square on his way to
Tenterden.

 

He had been sitting on Soraya Benson’s
doorstep for over twenty minutes when she arrived home with Finlay in his
school uniform, clutching a Spiderman lunchbox.  She looked much prettier
than the last time he’d seen her and he wondered if it was the faint trace of
make-up or perhaps the smarter clothes that she was wearing.  Her eyes
were less puffy, less grief-stricken somehow.  She was carrying three
bulging Waitrose carrier bags.

‘Well, Fin,
look what the postman left on the doorstep,’ she said.  ‘Were you
expecting a worn-out-looking genealogist to be delivered today?’

Fin shook his
head.  Morton guessed that he was recalling their previous encounter when
he had made the poor child cry.

‘Hmm, me
neither.  What do you say we do with him?  Invite him in or throw him
out onto the streets?’

‘Throw him
out,’ Finlay said seriously, a meaty frown bearing down over his eyes. 
Fair
enough
, Morton thought.

‘Please let me
in,’ Morton pleaded, doing his best to overact the part, but actually wanting
to skip the pleasantries and get down to more serious things.  Like the
fact that someone might be about to kill the eight-year-old currently barring
his entrance to the house.  After all, everything that was going on was
because of him and his ancestry.

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