Hiding the Past (9 page)

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Authors: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

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He opened the
Coldrick
Case
file.  It was now starting to bulge under the weight of paperwork
that he had generated.  Never before had he produced so much paperwork
with so few answers.  The first page contained the scribbled notes made at
Coldrick’s house five days ago. 
Five days – was that really all it had
been?
 He re-read the notes and was suddenly struck by Mary Coldrick’s
date of death: 1987.  He had never been a great believer in coincidences
before but if this case had taught him anything, then it was that a coincidence
was simply a connection waiting to be made.  Peter had told him that his
mother had started looking into the Coldrick family tree just before she died
which just
happened
to be the same year that the 1944 admissions
register disappeared. 
Coincidence
?  He didn’t think so.

Morton dialled
Soraya Benton’s mobile.  She picked up straight away.

‘Hi, it’s
Morton Farrier here.’

‘Oh hi,
Morton.  How are you?’

‘Fine thanks,’
he answered, before quickly pushing on from the pleasantries.  ‘I’ve got
some questions about Peter’s family.’

‘Sure, fire
away,’ she answered.

‘I was just
wondering if you knew anything about Peter’s mum’s death.’

There was a
short pause.  ‘Well, it was way before my time.  Peter said it was a
house fire, I think.  He was at school when it happened and his dad was
out somewhere.  That’s about all I know.’

‘Do you
remember what the cause was?’

‘I think it was
an electrical fault or gas maybe.  Why do you ask?’

‘I was just
wondering, that’s all.  Trying to tie up loose ends.  Explore all
avenues, that sort of thing.’

‘You don’t
suspect foul play, do you?’ she said incredulously.
 

‘No,’ Morton
replied, unconvinced by his own answer.

The front door
slammed shut and Juliette called out his name.  She sounded worried. 
He covered the receiver and called down to her.  ‘I’m on the phone. 
One second.’  Then back to Soraya.  ‘I’m just looking under every
rock.  I’ve got to go, thanks for your help.  I’ll get back to
you.’  He ended the call just as Juliette bounded into the room, red-faced
and slightly out of breath.  Her damp hair was pulled up in a ponytail
over a translucent-grey tide-line of sweat on her t-shirt.  She
was
worried.

‘What’s the
matter?’

She inhaled
sharply.  ‘We’re being watched.’
 

‘What?’

‘We’re being
watched.  There’s a guy at the top of St Mary’s Church with a pair of
binoculars,’ she said, moving towards the lounge window.  Morton followed and
stared up through the nets to a dark blurred outline on top of the church
tower.  ‘I’m going to call it in, get him picked up.’  Juliette
pressed some buttons on her mobile.

‘Wait,’ Morton
said.  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Why not? 
He might be a lead.’

‘Well he’s
gone, for one thing,’ Morton said.  ‘For another thing, what would you
have him charged with exactly?  Carrying a pair of binoculars?’

Juliette looked
up to the empty church tower and folded away her phone.  ‘I don’t like
this, Morton.’  She had regained her breath and placed her hands on her
hips the way she did when she wanted to exert her PCSO authority.  ‘You
need to start trusting the police.  This is getting out of hand, Morton.’

‘How do you
know he’s not just another tourist?’ Morton asked.  There were always
people up there with cameras and binoculars taking advantage of the sweeping
vista out to the coast.  Maybe she was just being paranoid.

‘How many
tourists with secret service style ear-pieces and top-of-the-range binoculars
trained on our house have you encountered before?’  It wasn’t a rhetorical
question.  ‘Hmm?’

None, he was
forced to admit.
 

Chapter Seven

 

Monday

 

The skies were ominously dark as Morton
walked the short distance from his car to Ashford Library on Church Road. 
After discovering that he was being watched yesterday, Morton was on high
alert.  He had checked his rear-view mirrors like he hadn’t done since he
had taken his driving test aged seventeen.  On his way to the library he’d
taken random and sudden turnings in an attempt to throw off any potential
chasers, though what good it would do him if someone really wanted to stalk him
he wasn’t sure.  He was as confident as he could be that he hadn’t brought
any nefarious followers with him as he entered the library.  If he had
been followed, then his pursuers would just have to take a book down to the
bean-bag-thronged ‘Chillax Zone’ and wait for him, evidently a place favoured
by the bizarre combination of foreign students and tramps.  The new-look
library even boasted a Costa Coffee concession with the caveat that food and
drink could only be consumed within the Chillax Zone, so Morton resisted the
urge to grab a large latte and instead took a vacant table in the Reading
Room.  He looked around the quiet tables: he was safe; his neighbours were
a group of old men too tight to buy their own newspapers, grunting and making
comment on the day’s headlines.

In the name of
reserving his seat in this surprising hive of activity, he placed his briefcase
containing a notepad and pen down on the table and approached the customer
service desk.  Behind the counter, a rotund teenaged girl was taking an
inordinate amount of pleasure spinning a skinny purple-haired youth with tight
black jeans on a swivel chair.  Neither were in any hurry to serve him.

‘Can I help
you?’ the girl said acerbically, bringing the chair to an abrupt halt.

‘Only if you
can spare the time,’ Morton said, biting his tongue.  ‘I’d like to see any
newspapers which cover the Tenterden area for 1987.’

‘
Kentish
Express
,
Kent
Gazette
,
Sussex
Express
or
Tenterden
Times
?’ the girl said, rattling the titles off like she was on speed.

‘
Tenterden
Times
,’ Morton answered, plumping for what seemed the most likely. 
The other papers sounded too general.

‘You want the
whole year?’ she asked incredulously.

‘I’m not sure,’
Morton said, ‘I’m looking for a particular story.  Can I start with
December and work my way backwards?’

‘Whatever,’ she
said with a shrug.  She waddled through a door behind the desk, leaving
the skinny lad staring at Morton like a wide-eyed baby.  Moments later she
returned, struggling to squeeze herself and two string-bound parcels of
newspapers through the door.

‘Gi's an hand,
Zane,’ she asked, and he went to her rescue, taking one of the bundles and
dumping it on the counter in front of Morton.  The two packages were
labelled ‘November’ and ‘December’.

Morton
reluctantly muttered his thanks and carried the stacks over to his desk. 
He sat down, carefully removed the string wrapping and plucked the final
Tenterden
Times
of 1987 from the pile and began to skip through the paper. 
He wondered how much of a feature the fire story would be in a paper whose
headline story shouted ‘Outrage over plans to close allotments!’  He
meticulously searched each and every page until the paper was finished, then
set it to one side and began the previous week, slowly building up a picture of
the highs and lows of the small Kentish town. 
Crash Biker was High on
Cocaine.  Why can’t Tenterden have more Doctors?  Guest House Owner’s
Dog Bit Neighbour.  Town under threat from Europe!

It occurred to
him then that Peter Coldrick’s death would have featured in this week’s paper
and might make for interesting reading.  If the collection of headlines
he’d just sifted through were anything to go by, then Peter’s apparent shotgun
suicide would have dominated at least the first twenty pages.

 

An hour later, Morton was re-threading a
string loop around the December newspapers when his mobile rang: the ultimate
sin in such a hallowed place.  The walls were adorned with laminated
pictures of mobiles with bold red lines struck through them, so it was of no
surprise to him when the grumpy old men at the adjoining tables tutted and threw
disgusted scowls at him, followed by disbelieving looks to one another.
 

A withheld
number.
 

The glares
worsened when Morton dared to press the green button and take the call. 
‘Hello?’ he whispered.

‘Hi, Morton,’
an upset voice said.  Whoever it was had been crying.  ‘Can you come
round at all?  I’ve just had the coroner’s report on Peter’s death.’ 
It was Soraya.

Morton headed
into the Chillax Zone where ‘Quiet Talking is Permitted’ and mouthed the words
‘large latte’ to the woman behind the Costa Coffee counter.  ‘What does it
say?’ he asked Soraya.  He heard her draw in a lengthy breath.

‘I’d rather
just show it you,’ she sniffled.  ‘Can you pop round?’

‘Yeah,
sure.  I’m busy for the moment, but I’ll be round as soon as I can.’

‘Thanks,
Morton.  See you in a bit.’

He said
goodbye, ended the call and paid for his coffee.  He sagged down onto a
bean bag and sipped his drink, as he stared up vacuously through a large
skylight just as fat, swollen droplets of rain began to explode above him,
gradually more and more until the skylight came alive with dancing water. 
He was fleetingly mesmerised until his thoughts turned back to Soraya.  He
took the fact that she was upset to mean that the coroner had taken the police
view that Peter had topped himself.  It still seemed like the most
unlikely thing in the world to Morton.

He finished his
drink, switched his mobile to silent and returned to his desk, where he
unstitched the November pile of papers and began skim-reading more stories that
were blown out of all proportion by the local newspaper.  He had reached
page six of the Friday 27
th
November 1987 edition of the
Tenterden
Times
when he located the single-paragraph story.

 

Neville Road Fire

Police have confirmed that a woman’s death
in a fire at her Neville Road home last week is not being treated as
suspicious.  Mrs Mary Coldrick, 41 is believed to have been asleep in an
upstairs bedroom when a cigarette started a severe fire which engulfed her home
last Thursday.  Mrs Coldrick’s husband and son, who were not home at the
time of the accident, are being comforted by friends.  Fire fighters
removed Mrs Coldrick’s body from the burnt-out building after a man described
by police officers as ‘a local hero’ failed to battle the flames to save her.

 

Morton read the story three times. 
Just twelve days after Mary Coldrick’s death, the admission register at St
George’s was removed.  Definitely not a coincidence. 
But
why
? 
Something happened before Mary’s death that prompted William Dunk to remove the
very file which would reveal the identity of James Coldrick’s parents. 
Yet it was
still
only circumstantial evidence.  He imagined PC Glen
Jones and WPC Alison Hawk’s reaction if he barged into the police station to
report the crime. 
He’d
probably end up being arrested for wasting
police time.

He pushed the
newspaper to one side and turned to the newspaper for the previous week, which
had as its headline story, ‘Woman Missing in Fire’ and a large, full page
photograph of the burning building.  Morton stared at the picture. 
It seemed somehow barbaric and cruel to show what was essentially Mary Coldrick
being cremated.  She was in there, burning alive as the firemen hosed on
gallons of water and the
Tenterden Times
photographer eagerly snapped
away, knowing his pictures would make the front page.  The sheer size of
the photo pushed the actual report of the blaze to page two.

 

Fire

A severe fire swept through a house in
Neville Road yesterday, leaving a local woman unaccounted for.  More than
forty firefighters were called to tackle the blaze shortly before 14.00
BST.  Mrs Mary Coldrick remains unaccounted for.  It is not yet known
if she was in the house at the time.  A neighbour, who was evacuated from
her home due to the intensity of the blaze, described how a passer-by responded
to her pleas for help, “I was shouting out that there was a fire and this man
tried to get into the back of the house but it was too fierce and he came back
out with his cheek all cut up and bleeding.”  Police are waiting for the
house to be declared safe so that they can conduct an investigation. 
Anyone with any information should contact Detective Olivia Walker.

 

Morton imagined the local hero staggering
from the flames, his face cut and bleeding, devastated at not being able to
save Mary Coldrick.  He wondered why the man hadn’t stepped forward to
accept the hero’s praise and possible front page of the
Tenterden Times.

Then an image
smashed into his mind.  The Brighton Scar Face. 
Another
coincidence?
 If the feeling in his gut was anything to go by, then
this ‘local hero’ had actually gone inside the house to make sure that Mary
Coldrick would not escape the blaze.  Had she given him the facial injury,
as she struggled to flee the inferno?  He felt nauseous as he looked back
at the photo of the burning building.  Perhaps it was a good thing that
Peter Coldrick was dead.  How on earth would he have told him
that
? 
By the way, Peter, your mum didn’t painlessly lapse into unconsciousness
from smoke inhalation, she was probably thrown into a wall of flames by a
psychopathic madman who inexplicably wants your whole family dead.

Morton took the
two newspapers over to a self-service photocopier, pumped in a handful of
twenty pence pieces and received black and white copies of the stories. 
He tucked the photocopies into his briefcase, re-bound the stack of newspapers
and left them on the vacant Customer Service Desk.

The automatic
front doors to the library parted, encouraging him to leave the warm and dry
confines and step out into the torrential downpour.  It was hard, vertical
rain that had been waiting patiently to be unleashed for several days.  He
pulled his coat in tightly and made a run for the car, as a dramatic flash of
lightening illuminated the sky and zig-zagged through the black clouds.

Morton was eternally grateful to get a
parking spot directly outside Soraya’s house.  He was fairly confident
that nobody had followed him, although the thick curtain of rain had prevented
him from seeing much beyond a car’s length behind him.  He waited in the
Mini for a few minutes, hoping that the rain would ease up a little, but it
only seemed to worsen.  He decided to use the opportunity to flick through
this week’s edition of the
Tenterden Times
, which he’d picked up at a
newsagents on his way here.  Just by looking at the headline Morton knew
that this was going to be a pointless exercise. 
Hunt on for Mystery
Lotto Winner.
  And, sure enough, Peter Coldrick’s death didn’t raise
as much as a paragraph in the paper.

Morton dialled
the main office of the
Tenterden Times
(incongruously based in
Maidstone).  A chirpy female receptionist answered, ‘Good afternoon, Weald
Newspaper Group, Melanie speaking, how can I help you?’

‘Good
afternoon, I’m ringing to enquire about a story in the
Tenterden Times.’

‘Oh yes,’
Melanie answered pleasantly, encouraging him to continue.

‘Well, I say a
story in the
Tenterden Times
but it’s actually a lack of a story. 
I wondered why you failed to report on the suicide of Peter Coldrick last
week?  He shot himself –’

‘One moment,
I’ll just put you through to our news team,’ Melanie interrupted.

The opening
bars of
Endless Love
were cut short by a growling male voice that didn’t
bother with all the company niceties.  ‘Yes?’

‘Good
afternoon,’ Morton said, attempting to tame the lion aurally, ‘I’m wondering
why the inscrutable death of Peter Coldrick last week wasn’t reported in the
Tenterden
Times
?’

The line went
quiet.  Was the lion tamed, or dead?

‘We didn’t
think it warranted space in what was a news-heavy week.  People commit suicide
all the time; it’s hardly a scoop,’ he answered gruffly.

Morton couldn’t
help himself.  ‘I’m sorry –
news-heavy
– you say?  Do I need
to read the headline about the search for someone who might have purchased a
lottery ticket from the newsagents on the High Street and who, by your own
admission, might not even be a local!  This man, Peter Coldrick is
supposed to have shot himself, but I’m telling you that-’

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