Hiding the Past (14 page)

‘Nope,’ Fin
answered.
 

Morton
stood.  ‘It’s quite important,’ he said to Soraya.  She nodded and
thrust her key into the lock, practically pushing Fin through the door.

‘Go and play in
your room, Fin and I’ll call you for dinner.’  She turned to Morton.
‘Sorry, you weren’t out there long, were you?  Had to pop to a friend’s
then a quick dash around the supermarket.’

‘No, it’s
fine.’

‘So, what’s all
this about then?  You seem agitated.’

Morton followed
Soraya into the lounge and took a seat opposite her.  ‘I think Fin’s life
might be in danger,’ he announced dramatically.  As soon as the words were
out of his mouth he wondered if he should have gone in with a more gentle
approach, but after all the time-wasting on the doorstep he needed to spell
things out clearly.  If Fin had belonged to him, though God knows this
little encounter had cemented his resignation to never have kids, he would have
run to his bedroom and checked there was nobody lurking under the bed or hiding
in the wardrobe.

‘What do you
mean?’ she asked, her face turning pale.

Morton exhaled
sharply and told her everything that he’d discovered about the Windsor-Sackvilles
and his suspicions regarding James Coldrick’s parentage.  Soraya listened
impassively, allowing him to deliver the full story without interruption.

‘It does sound
rather worrying,’ she said when he had finished.  Morton stared at
her.  That was a bit of an understatement, he thought.  ‘I think
we’ll go and stay at my sister’s for a while, until this all blows over. 
She lives in St Michaels, just outside Tenterden.’

‘Will you go
tonight?’ Morton asked.

Soraya
nodded.  ‘Yes, as soon as I’ve got a bag packed for each of us.  Do
you really think that Peter, James and Fin are descended from the
Windsor-Sackvilles?’

This
was the very reason that Morton seldom
gave interim reports to clients.  He was a long way from drawing
that
conclusion.  ‘At this stage, it’s just a possibility.  For decades
people in the shadow of the Coldrick family having been hiding the past; it’s
my job to reveal it - but I’m not there yet.  Certainly, they – whoever
they
are – want to maintain a shroud of secrecy over James Coldrick’s birth.’

Soraya seemed
to have glazed over.  ‘That would be a turn up for the books,’ she said
with a smile.  ‘Related to a rich knight and member of parliament. 
It would certainly turn Fin’s life around.’  Her voice trailed off, but
her eyes revealed to Morton that her mind was busy making alarming connections.

‘Let’s not jump
the gun,’ Morton warned.

Soraya snapped
back to reality.  ‘Of course.  Right, I’d better get packing.’

Morton had
wanted to try a last ditch attempt to get out of the funeral tomorrow but the
ringing of his mobile caused Soraya to finally check that her child was still
in one piece playing on his Nintendo, or whatever it was that kids played these
days.  Certainly not the Action Man or Meccano of his youth.  It was
a withheld number, which usually meant a bank.  Probably about to offer
him a better deal for his ever-diminishing fifty grand.

‘Morton
Farrier,’ a male voice said, more of a statement than a question.
 

‘Speaking.’

‘You’ve got ten
minutes to leave your house.’  Not the bank then.

‘I’m not in my
house,’ Morton said haughtily, trying to work out where he recognised the voice
from.

‘I know you’re
not,’ the voice said calmly, ‘but Juliette is and unless you want to be
identifying her charred remains anytime soon, she needs to leave your house
now.’

‘Who is this?’
he demanded, but the line went dead.
 

Panic mode set
in.

He leapt up and
ran for the door, yelling out to Soraya that he needed to go, at the same time
speed-dialling Juliette.  It rang endlessly.  The journey time back
home to Rye was twelve minutes.  He wouldn’t make it in time. 
Couldn’t.  He looked at the clock: 5:42.
 

The countdown
had begun.

He jumped into
the car and slammed his foot on the accelerator.  Something inside told
him that the call was genuine and not necessarily designed to scare him,
although that was a definite by-product.  He
knew
that man’s voice,
but for the life of him couldn’t give the voice a face.

Juliette’s
phone went to voicemail.  He had to leave a message.  He needed to be
clear and succinct.  ‘Juliette, listen to me.  I need you to leave
the house right now.  I’m not joking.  Someone’s made a threat. 
Meet me by the church.  Phone me when you get this.’  He ended the
call, taking a corner far too quickly, almost skidding off the road. 
If
Juliette’s going to survive, you need to calm down!
he admonished himself.

Morton slammed
through the sleepy village of Wittersham.  He was about half way home.
 

5:46.  Six
minutes.
 

He dialled
Juliette again but there was no signal. 
Damn it!

He tried to
clear his mind, to concentrate fully on the road.  Juliette’s life
depended on it.  Besides, it might yet be a hoax, something designed to
scare him, to warn him off the
Coldrick
Case
.  His instincts
told him that the people he was up against really didn’t do hoaxes.
 

5:48. 
Four minutes.
 

Morton entered
the village of Playden at sixty-eight miles per hour.  He looked down at
his phone and saw the 3G signal had miraculously appeared.  He hit the
phone
icon then selected Juliette’s mobile from the top of the list.  Morton’s
eyes levelled with the road, just as a
Jempson’s
supermarket delivery
lorry limped out of a side road.  Morton slammed on the brakes and drew to
a near-stop, just meters from the back of the lorry, the de-acceleration sending
his iPhone to the floor.

‘Juliette, are
you there?’ Morton shouted into the footwell, as he zipped the Mini out into
the oncoming lane to check traffic.  Nothing.  He sped past the lorry
on the descent into Rye.  ‘Juliette, if you can hear me, get out of the
house!’

5:50.  Two
minutes.

Morton reached
down and fumbled in the footwell.  He finally found the mobile and raised
it to his ear.  The line was dead.

He redialled
and pushed the Mini even harder.

5:51.  One
minute.  He imagined her ‘quickly’ grabbing her handbag.  Then her
laptop.  Then a few clothes because she had no idea how long she would
have to stay away.  If it was permanent, then she’d want to go around
gathering up everything of sentimental value: her grandmother’s wedding dress;
the old leather-bound photograph albums of people nobody in the family could
identify; her external hard drive with thirteen months of their shared life in
photographs on it.

5:52. 
Time up.

Receiving
reproaching and angry looks from pedestrians, Morton sped up Rye High
Street.  One wrong step by a passer-by and that would be it.  He
turned the corner into Church Square too sharply, narrowly avoiding an elderly
couple about to step off the pavement.

He stepped on
the brakes outside the church entrance.  No Juliette. 
Where was
she? 
Morton leapt from the Mini and raced towards the house, a spasm
of tachycardia thumping his body.  He knew that if she was still inside
the house then it was too late.  She wouldn’t survive.  The clock was
nearing zero.  Morton neared the front of the house.

‘Morton!’ a
voice from behind him.  Juliette’s voice.  She was in the churchyard,
sitting calmly on a bench, like a jaded tourist weary from a day’s
sightseeing.  No handbag.  No laptop.  No grandmother’s wedding
dress.  No photo albums or hard drives.  Just her with an anxious,
perplexed look on her face.  He jogged over to her and sat down beside her
on the bench, allowing himself to breathe deeply and properly.

‘Do you want to
tell me what’s going on?’ she asked.

Morton managed
to say one word just as all of the windows of their house exploded outwards in
a violent, projectile eruption.  They both sat, dumbstruck, as angry
tongues of fire licked from the spaces in the brickwork where windows had once
been.

Thursday

It was a very strange experience for
Morton to wake up in his old bedroom in his parents’ house.  He looked up
at the brown blemish above the bed that multiple coats of white emulsion had
failed to conceal over the years after a pipe had burst in the loft during a
family holiday in the Lake District when he was fourteen.  That stain was
the only thing in the room that had existed before he left for
university.  He thought about how happy they had been as a family on that
holiday.  Just eight weeks later his mother was dead.  She’d found a
lump in her breast but elected not to tell anyone until she realised that it
wasn’t going to go away of its own volition.  By then it was too late.

He wondered if
it was his mother’s death that had prompted his father to seemingly blurt out
that Morton was adopted.  Would he now be living in blissful ignorance if
she were still alive?  Maybe if he’d never been told he would now be
dutifully keeping a stoic vigil at his father’s bedside rather than studying
the amorphous mark on the ceiling.  He wanted to wake Juliette and point
out the stain, tell her the story about the holiday to Coniston, one of a mere
handful of occasions when he had felt a genuine part of the Farrier family, not
like some surplus limb.  But he didn’t wake her; he left her curled
tightly in a ball beside him, like a new-born kitten.  She needed the
sleep after all that had happened yesterday.

They had
finally climbed into bed at three o’clock in the morning after driving from the
police station to his father’s house.  As if watching the entire contents
of his house blasting out of the windows in flames hadn’t been bad enough,
Morton had then been subjected to ‘an interview’ by the wonderful police duo of
WPC Alison Hawk and PC Glen Jones.  For the second time in nine days the
dynamic pair had made him feel like a suspect.  It didn’t help that
Juliette was interviewed in a separate room.  With typical Juliette
foresight, the first thing she did after the explosion was to ‘get their story
straight.’  Only then did she call the fire brigade.  The problem
was, getting his story straight made Morton feel all the more guilty. 
‘Trouble seems to be following you, doesn’t it, Mr Farrier?’ Hawk had opened
his questioning with.  ‘Any reason why someone would want to flatten your
house, Mr Farrier?’ Jones had asked, without giving him time to answer the
first question.  Morton shook his head and feigned shock that the
explosion was thought to be a criminal act rather than electrical or gas. 
He had told them the agreed version of the truth – he’d been out shopping and
had returned to collect Juliette to go out for a nice meal.  Simple. 
Except then they wanted to know where the shopping was.  And why Juliette
was dressed in her work uniform for an evening out.  Morton triumphantly
held up a packet of unopened chewing gum and said, ‘Shopping.’  Another
look passed between Hawk and Jones.  ‘And as for the uniform thing,’
Morton added, ‘we were going to get a take-out, which was lucky, all things
considered.’  Another look between them and he was released, grateful that
Hawk and Jones hadn’t managed to whittle out of him the fact that he had
received a warning to leave the house ten minutes prior to the explosion. 
Or that he had recognised the voice of the person issuing the warning.

Morton padded
downstairs in his boxers to make a large cup of coffee.  Everything in the
kitchen was in the same place as it had always been since time
immemorial.  He surmised that it was probably his father’s parents who had
first dictated where everything should live in the kitchen and woe betide
anyone who dared to question it.  ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ had
been one of his father’s many quips.  Morton realised that he was thinking
of his father in the past tense and didn’t really believe that he would pull
through.  He just wasn’t the type to survive illness or disease.  He
wasn’t one of those people who could ‘battle illness’ and fight back.  He
wasn’t a fighter and Morton was sure that his weak body would readily give up at
the first obstacle.

He sipped his
coffee and wondered where Jeremy was at that moment.  After being passed
from pillar to post, Morton had finally been able to speak to him in the early
hours of the morning.  He took the news with typical Jeremy histrionics. 
‘Oh my God!  I’m on my way,’ he’d cried.  Morton had told him that he
was staying at their father’s house for the time being, which Jeremy took as
unfettered altruism.  Morton refrained from adding more drama to Jeremy’s
life by telling him that part of the reason for the relocation was because
their house had exploded.

Morton tried to
make a mental inventory of what he’d lost in the house.  As huge curtains
of fire poured from the gaping orifices where doors and windows had once been,
the fire chief had rather optimistically said, ‘It might not be as bad as it
looks.’  Then the roof collapsed.  No, there could be nothing left at
all.  What hadn’t been singed, smoked, soaked or burned to a crisp would
have been fatally crushed.  He felt strangely emotionless about losing
most of it.  Furniture, clothes, books, DVDs – all replaceable junk. 
There were a few keepsakes that had belonged to his mother that he was gutted
to have lost.  And then there was the fact that
everything
connected to the
Coldrick
Case
had gone up in smoke.  His
Coldrick
Case Incident Wall
that he’d spent so much time creating was now nothing
more than a pile of boiling ash.  But then that was probably the reason
for the explosion in the first place: to destroy every last shred of evidence
that he’d compiled.  Fortunately, he had backed up most documents to the
cloud, meaning that he still had remote access anywhere with an internet
connection.

Juliette
appeared in the kitchen looking dog-rough, her hair seemingly having been
blow-dried in a hundred different directions and a few ounces of fat pumped
below her eyes as she slept.  She was wearing an over-sized ‘I Love
Derbyshire’ t-shirt that they’d found in his father’s wardrobe.
 

‘Shoot me,’ she
hissed.

‘Morning!’
Morton answered brightly.  ‘Coffee?’

‘Black. 
Biggest cup you can find.  Three spoonsful of coffee,’ she said, flopping
down onto the kitchen table.  ‘Christ.  Tell me yesterday was a
nightmare and there’s a
really
good explanation as to why we’re here?’

He looked at
her bedraggled body slumped on the table, her tough exterior having been shed
overnight like excess skin.  There was no way on earth she would have
survived the explosion if she had remained inside.  Now he knew what love
was all about.  He placed the steaming hot drink in front of her and
stroked her hair.  ‘I’m afraid not.’

Four large cups
of coffee and a long, hot bath later - modern devices such as a shower having
never been fitted in his parents’ house - and Morton was feeling somewhere near
human again.  He had found a packet of sausages in the freezer, which he
had cooked with a tin of beans and a couple of slices of toast for their
breakfast.

‘So, just so
that I understand, some random guy just phones you and tells you your house is
going to blow up in ten minutes?’ Juliette said, somewhat incredulously, as she
shovelled a large forkful of food into her mouth.  It was the first time
that they had actually talked about the moments prior to the explosion without
embellishment or omission.

‘Well, not
really a random guy.’

‘What?’ she
asked, lowering the fork and giving him her full attention.

‘I recognised
the voice, but it wasn’t until about five o’clock this morning that I realised
who it was.’

‘And?’

‘Daniel Dunk.’

‘The guy who
lives at Dungeness with the car registered to Olivia Walker?  Why would he
do that?’

‘God
knows.  It might have been a Mafia-style attack – a final warning to keep
away from the
Coldrick Case.
  If he’d actually wanted me dead, then
I would be.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the day we make the
link between Daniel Dunk, the Coldricks, the Windsor-Sackvilles and the Chief
Constable of Kent Police our house turns to rubble, do you?’

‘No,’ she
answered definitively.

‘At least we’ve
got somewhere to stay for the time being.  Every cloud, and all that.’

‘Morton, that’s
a terrible thing to say.  I hardly think your dad suffering a heart attack
is our silver lining.’

‘I didn’t mean
it like that,’ he said, as he carried his plate over to the sink. Eighteen
years in this house had taught him that he had to wash the dishes before he did
anything
, no matter how life or death it was.  His mother would
turn in her grave if she knew he had taken the decision to leave the washing up
for later.  It was somewhat churlish to act rebelliously towards his
long-dead mother and near-dead father, but he did it anyway.

This time, Morton duly paid the parking
fee at the Conquest Hospital, though he very much resented having to pay at
all.  It was disgusting to be charged to park in a hospital, he thought,
paying for the privilege of visiting a dying relative.  He’d read
somewhere a few weeks ago that some NHS trusts were now offering discounts for
regular visitors and terminal patients were even lucky enough to be given a
free parking permit.  How generous.

Juliette took
his hand and they made their way to the Atkinson Ward, where his father had
been transferred.  They found him once again cordoned off by a plastic
curtain, sitting up reading
The Daily Mail. 
He looked a different
man to the one Morton had last seen, life seemingly returning to his fragile
body.

‘Hi, Dad,’
Juliette said, sounding oddly comfortable labelling Morton’s adoptive father
‘Dad’.  Certainly more comfortable than he did.  His father looked up
with a smile and set down the paper.

‘Hello,’ he
said cheerfully.  ‘Lovely weather, isn’t it?’
 

Morton was
curious at what went on inside his father’s head for him to be screened off
from the world, rigged up to more machines than your average robot and the
first thing he has to say is a comment about the weather.  ‘Shall I open
the curtain, so you can enjoy the sunshine?’ Morton asked.

‘No, thank
you,’ his father answered, waving a finger vaguely towards the curtain. 
Morton assumed it was something to do with the other patients.  He never
had been a great socialiser.

‘How are you?’
Juliette asked.

‘Been
better.  They tell me I have severe atheromatous in the something or other
proximal artery and something in the other one.  Furring of the arteries
in layman’s terms.  They’ve put me on warfarin tablets,’ his father
said.  He pronounced ‘warfarin’ as ‘Wolverine’ and Morton imagined his
father as the new addition to the X-Men.

‘So it’s
definitely your heart then?’ Juliette said.

‘Yes, it was a
heart attack.  I’ve got to see a specialist dietician and I’ve been told
by at least two dozen doctors that a ‘lifestyle’ change is in order. 
Ha!  A lifestyle change, at my age.  I ask you.  What do they
think I’m going to do, start drinking carrot juice and pumping iron at the
gym?  Not on your Nellie!’

Juliette
smiled.  ‘Maybe just cut back on some of your…’

‘Pleasures?’
his father interjected.

‘Extravagances,’
Morton corrected.  His father raised his eyebrows.  ‘I brought you in
the bits you asked for from home.’  He lifted the bag and placed it on the
bed, then instantly fretted about the assortment of bacteria and germs he had
inadvertently transferred from the floor.

‘Thank you, at
least now I can get out of this awful gown they’ve stuck me in.  Would you
be able to pop back home again later and get my slippers?’

‘Yes, of
course,’ Morton said.  He hadn’t wanted to broach the whole explosion
thing and the fact that they had, to all intents and purposes, now moved into
his house.  He reasoned that it would only add more stress to his ailing
heart if he knew that there was a stack of washing up festering on the worktop
at home.

‘How’s work?’
his father asked.

‘Usual,’ Morton
said, not really considering that ‘usual’ couldn’t have been more of a contradictory
way of describing his current employment status.

‘Has anyone
told Jeremy?’ his father asked.  ‘About my health, I mean.’

‘I phoned him
last night,’ Morton said.  ‘He’s on his way home.’  He couldn’t gauge
from his father’s voice whether or not he had done the right thing in informing
him.  It would be just like his father to snap, ‘
You can’t just recall
a member of Her Majesty’s armed forces because of a little thing like
this.  I’m fine
.’

‘You did, oh
good,’ his father said, evidently pleased that The Miracle would soon
return.  ‘You’re looking very summery, Juliette,’ his father said.