Chapter Three
Friday
On this occasion Morton was happy to
confer the driving seat over to Juliette. Not that she minded. She
hated his driving. She said that he overtook far too much, and far too
dangerously; unlike her perfect driving. Her only concession to
recklessness was the additional ten percent of speed she knew that she might
get away with if she were ever pulled over by the likes of WPC Alison Hawk or
PC Glen Jones. Not that she would get pulled by them, it would much more
likely be Traffic Police, Juliette had explained to him in great detail one day
after they’d driven past a car accident.
They’re not Road Traffic
Accidents anymore, they’re Road Traffic Collisions. Car crashes are
rarely accidents, Morton.
Juliette pulled
into the Churchill Square car park in the city centre and found an empty
parking bay close to the exit to the shops.
‘Right, I’m
going to go and look at some clothes,’ she said, climbing from the car.
‘You do whatever you’ve got to do and we’ll meet in Starbucks. An hour
enough?’
‘Perfect,’
Morton said, as they made their way from the car. He knew that Juliette
would be fine once the magnetism of the shops had worked its magic and pulled
her in. Once she set foot over Karen Millen’s threshold it was like she’d
passed into Narnia and time meant nothing. She kissed him and reminded
him of their meeting arrangements, then they parted. He strode quickly
through the busy shopping arcades, out the other side and along a quiet side
street until he reached the Probate Office on William Street, a plain, brick
building fronted by a wide run of steps upon which was assembled a collection
of nettled men and women, exiled by the smoking ban.
Morton headed
through a small lobby area which fed a staircase and several key-padded doors
to which the public were not permitted. He approached a tiny serving
hatch, behind which were half-a-dozen suited workers floundering around an
open-plan office, cooled by four industrial-sized fans. Nobody seemed in
any particular hurry to do whatever jobs they had been charged with
undertaking. Morton waited impatiently for someone to acknowledge him, as
tiny molehills of sweat pushed to the surface of his forehead. He wiped
his face and emitted a polite cough. Several sets of eyes glanced in his
direction but only a woman who looked slightly crazed approached the
hatch. She had a mop of tightly-permed, bleached-white hair and dark,
squinty eyes framed by a bizarre pair of horn-rimmed glasses that could never,
in the history of the world, ever have been considered fashionable.
‘Hi, I’d like
to have a quick look at the probate indexes, please,’ Morton said with a
courteous smile.
She nodded and
sighed. ‘Hang on.’ She disappeared from sight momentarily and then
a door opened to Morton’s right.
‘Thank you,’ he
said, heading into the tiny room with a slight odour of must, where each wall
was crammed with large leather-bound ledgers. It was at least ten degrees
hotter in the stifling room than in the lobby area and Morton could feel the
perspiration making a break for freedom down his back.
‘Have you been
here before?’ the lady asked, leading him over to a solitary microfiche reader.
‘Yes, I
have.’ He had been several times - it was a quick and free way of finding
out if someone had left a will and, importantly, how much they’d
bequeathed. It would only provide him with basic information – if he
wanted more he would need to order a full copy of the will for five pounds.
‘Okay, so you
know that wills 1858 to 1980 are on the shelves and 1981 onwards on
microfiche?’ she asked, somewhat suspiciously, as if he were being
tested. She pronounced
fiche
as
fish.
Microfish, like
plankton.
‘Yes.’
‘Right then,’
she said, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Except she didn’t. Instead, she
stood with her arms folded in the corner of the room, watching as Morton
started up his laptop.
When she saw
that Morton was more than capable of switching on the reader all by himself,
she sighed and returned to the office, sending a momentary welcome burst of
cool air into the room. He picked up the thick folder of microfiches and
selected the first of two fiches, covering wills administered in 2012.
He slid the
fiche under the glass slider and the minuscule white lettering on a dark blue
background became instantly magnified. Shifting the plate around until he
came to the letter C, Morton quickly located
Coldrick
. Rather
unsurprisingly, James Coldrick was the sole entry for that surname.
Coldrick, James of 15 Westminster Rise,
Tenterden, Kent, died 3
January 2012,
probate Brighton
18 March Not exceeding £780,000, 9851305366G
Morton
was stunned. He didn’t know what figure he was expecting to see but to
discover that Peter Coldrick, living an austere wartime existence in his dreary
council house had been sitting on more than three-quarters of a million pounds'
inheritance when he died shocked him.
Where the hell had his father
got that kind of money from?
The general labourers that he’d ever
encountered in his genealogical work usually had a pittance at the end of their
lives; James Coldrick conversely had a small fortune.
The
white-haired lady suddenly pulled open the door. ‘Found what you were
looking for?’ she demanded. Morton didn’t want the woman to see what he
was looking at and hurried to type up the entry.
‘Yes, thanks,’
he answered curtly. She moved into the room and stood behind him, her hot
breath heavy on his nape.
‘Blimey, he did
alright for himself, didn’t he?’ she muttered. ‘Did you want that
printed?’
‘No,’ he
snapped, hoping that his abruptness might make his feelings perfectly clear but
no, she remained uncomfortably close as he saved the file, closed the lid of
his laptop and switched off the microfiche reader.
‘All done?’ she
said, sounding rather disappointed.
‘All
done.’ Morton thanked her and hurried from the claustrophobic building.
Once outside,
the sweat on his forehead instantly abated. He breathed deeply, grateful
to be out of the stuffy office, and made his way down the steps. One of
the smokers standing in front of him, a man in his forties, wiry and grubby
looking with crew-cut blond hair, dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the
floor and dragged a heavy black boot across it before ascending the steps two
at a time. As he levelled with Morton, a box of cigarettes fell from his
jacket pocket. Morton picked them up. ‘Excuse me, you’ve dropped
your cigarettes.’
The man
stopped in his tracks and turned, allowing Morton a full view of his face; not
the most aesthetically pleasing chap he’d ever clapped eyes on. A giant
pink fleshy scar ran from his right eye almost to the corner of his mouth.
‘Thanks,’ he
said tersely, snatching the box.
‘That’s okay,’
Morton said, mesmerised by the man’s magnificent scar. He wondered what
kind of accident, operation or fight could have caused his face to open from
eye to mouth. Morton watched as he disappeared inside the building.
He looked at
his watch – he had more than half an hour before he had to meet Juliette.
He pictured her trying on a veritable mountain of clothing but not actually
buying as much as a pair of knickers. Wrong size. Wrong colour.
Wrong style. Wrong label. He never could work that out. Then
again, there wasn’t an awful lot in the female psyche that he felt he did fully
understand.
Taking a
leisurely saunter through the crowded North Lanes, Morton stopped occasionally
to look at passing window displays of the tiny shops which adorned the rabbit
warren of thin passageways. He paused at an antique shop specialising in
war memorabilia and studied the items in the window. You never know what
you might find in such places. The highlight of an extensive ten-week
research job into one lady’s family history was his serendipitous locating of
her grandfather’s First World War medals in a junk shop in Hastings Old Town.
No such trinkets sprang out at him today.
Morton passed
into a quieter part of the city where the shops gave way to café bars and
restaurants, outside of which sat half-dressed youths on metal chairs. If
Morton had been more six-pack and less family-pack he might have removed his
own shirt, such was the heat of the day.
As he turned
into a side street, Morton heard the heavy thud of footsteps behind him,
quickly becoming louder. He turned at the last second, just as his bag
was brutally ripped from his shoulder, spinning him round from the force of the
theft.
He stood
dumbstruck, his brain frozen.
A flash of grey
and denim disappeared out of sight, carrying his bag.
‘Damn it!
Stop! He’s got my bag!’ Morton yelled, as soon as he was able to assimilate
his thoughts into the understanding that he’d been robbed. By then the
thief was long gone.
A group of
middle-aged men wearing identical yellow t-shirts with a red fish logo on the
breast pocket were sitting outside the nearest café, just metres away from
where Morton stood. Christians. They were bound to help. The
Good Samaritan and all that. They must have seen the perpetrator.
‘Excuse me, I’ve just had my bag stolen,’ Morton said shakily. ‘Did
anyone see the bloke who did it?’ Most looked away. One or two
shook their heads.
‘All I heard
was you shouting and swearing,’ one of them said.
Morton ignored
him and looked at the rest of the crowd, all ardently avoiding his gaze.
‘I think he was about five-ten, grey hoody,’ Morton persevered. ‘Did
anyone see him?’
‘No. We
didn’t see him,’ another said. ‘Now, if you would kindly leave us alone.’
‘Thanks,’
Morton muttered, walking away. He headed in the general direction taken
by the mugger in the vain hope that he might find the bag discarded in a shop
doorway. Not that it mattered: the important, valuable things like his
laptop and wallet were bound to be long gone.
Just as Morton
was taking a long breath in, trying to stop himself shaking, a hand fell onto
his shoulders. He whirled around, ready to hit whomever was touching
him. Juliette. His body went limp.
‘What’s the
matter?’ she asked.
‘I’ve just been
mugged. Had my laptop bag stolen.’
‘What?
When? What happened?’ Juliette probed, taking his hand and staring him in
the eyes.
‘Just some
bloke came out of nowhere and wrenched it from my shoulder. Five-ten with
a grey hoody – that’s about the only description.’
Juliette pulled
her phone from her pocket. ‘Right.’
‘What’re you
doing?’
‘Finding out
where the nearest police station is.’
Morton put his
hand over hers. ‘No. I don’t want to report it,’ he said firmly.
Juliette looked
incredulous. ‘Why on earth not? At the very least you can report it, get
a crime number and claim for it on the insurance.’
‘I’m just not
feeling much confidence in the police at the moment. Come on, let’s go
home. I’ve had enough of this place.’
With a
disbelieving shake of her head, Juliette pocketed her mobile and the pair
walked silently back to the car park.
The drive out
of Brighton was a welcome one for Morton. A whole ugly, shadowy
underworld faded into the hills behind him like a bad dream. A
den of
iniquity,
his father had once called the city. Maybe he was
right. Christians, robbers and weirdoes. Juliette had been uncharacteristically
quiet for some time, which he guessed was the after-effects of his refusal to
report the mugging. He knew that when he told her that, she’d never be
able to detach herself from her job and see it from his perspective. All she
would see was that a crime had been committed which needed reporting. It
was as simple as that in her world. That might have been what was bugging
Juliette initially but there was something else wrong now. She was
gripping the steering wheel so tightly that the sinews rose defiantly on the
backs of her hands. Morton’s suspicions were confirmed when the
speedometer crept over seventy. On a sixty road. Very un-Juliette.
‘Are you okay?’
he asked.
‘Yeah,’ she
answered half-heartedly. ‘Just a car behaving strangely behind us.’
‘Behaving
strangely how?’ Morton began to crane his head.
‘Don’t look
round! Jesus, Morton!’ Juliette snapped. ‘It’s been following us
for the last six miles.’
Morton inched
back into his chair, trying to catch a glimpse of the car in the wing
mirror. He couldn’t see any car behaving strangely. ‘Which one?’
