Six minuteslater, Morton had crudely cut a hole large enough to squeeze through. Heknelt onto the grass and, with a deep breath and a final check around him, hecurled back the section of severed fence and crawled into the lion’s den,dragging his backpack behind him. He stood up and looked around. Nothing had changed in those few feet, yet being on the inside he feltstrangely closer to James Coldrick. Closer to the truth somehow. Peter Coldrick’s words from Tuesday sprang into his mind. It’s as ifmy family are all enclosed in a walled garden which has no door.
Maybe he hadjust found that door.
Morton pulledon the backpack, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead, and began to walkcautiously under the cooling canopy provided by mature oaks, beeches andsycamores. He judged that in three or four hundred yards he would arriveat the building.
He trodcarefully but quickly through a carpet of wild garlic and late-floweringbluebells, deliberately choosing where his feet fell, so as to avoid leaving anobvious path of crushed plants. Finally, the thick woodland yielded to agrassland clearing. And there, at the centre, was the building he sought:a small, dilapidated cottage. Chunks of off-white plaster had fallenaway, revealing cracked, bare bricks. Windows were either broken orboarded up. The place had suffered decades of decay and neglect. Adding to the sense of eeriness and uneasiness Morton was feeling, the plumtrees surrounding the house, which he had identified in the photograph were allbare, their barren branches seeming to have died with the house.
Sweat began totrickle down his back. His heart was racing from the quick pace that hehad crossed the woods, but now it refused to slow down. He slowly movedcloser to the building.
Morton recalledthe photograph of James Coldrick as a baby. This was definitely where ithad been taken.
He knew thiscottage was significant.
Despite more thansixty years of woodland growth, the top of a towering, herringbone-brickchimney was still visible in the background. The chimney belonged toCharingsby.
He took out hisfather’s digital camera and began taking photographs. Although theoriginal image of James Coldrick as a baby had perished, along with the rest ofhis Coldrick Case Incident Wall, he had thankfully stored ahigh-resolution copy in his cloud space, which he had had the foresight toretrieve last night, downloading it to his Photo Stream, in case there was nointernet connection today. He held his phone up and stood exactly wherethe photographer had snapped James Coldrick as a baby in 1944, wondering whathad gone so terribly wrong for that smiling, happy woman and her new-born son.
He cautiouslyapproached the cottage, regarding it with suspicion, as if it might bebooby-trapped with Semtex or some other incendiary device. It wasn’t asif these people didn’t have a penchant for blowing things up. Thecomplete and total silence around him only added to his uneasiness as he nearedthe building.
When Mortonreached the cottage he felt the need to stand still and double-check that hewas still alone. He held the binoculars to his eyes and slowly turnedthree hundred and sixty degrees.
He was alone.
Morton set downhis backpack and approached the front door. He tentatively tried thehandle, but it was either locked or seized up from years of inclement weatherand disuse. He was sure that the building had played a part in JamesColdrick’s early life and knew that he needed to get inside. He pulledthe crowbar from his bag and slowly inserted it into the rotten frame. Ashe exerted all his energy into the tool, the door began to flex and groan underthe pressure. Suddenly, it burst clean off its hinges in a cacophony ofmetal and wood cracking, smashing down inwards onto a flagstone floor, echoingsonorously among the surrounding trees. Great, now the whole estateknows I’m here, he thought. He might just as well have buzzedin at the main gate after all.
He froze to thespot and waited, half expecting a pack of dogs or gun-wielding security guardsat any moment.
Minutes later,nothing had come, so he cautiously stepped one foot inside the cottage, stillfearing something terrible was about to happen. There was no way anybodyhad been inside here for donkeys' years, he reasoned to himself. Donkeys'years - that was something his father would say, not a thirty-nine yearold man. Christ. He heard his father’s voice telling him to pull himselftogether and with that ethereal voice in his mind, he strode confidently insidethe cottage.
Inside wasfreezing and dark. Morton took out the torch that he had found beside hisfather’s bed. The beam fell first onto a huge rack of antiquated shotgunsfixed to the wall. He glanced around at the room’s simplicity andrealised that this wasn’t a cottage at all, but a simple two-room shooting box,a relatively common sight on large estates. They were designed to provideaccommodation and storage during the annual hunting season, yet this placeappeared like an abandoned relic from the past, untouched for countlessshooting seasons. He moved the torchlight slowly around the room; thebeam illuminating the life of a forgotten past: packets of food on a large oaktable; a decorative sideboard stocked with plain white crockery; a smallbookcase containing a selection of classic titles; two fabric armchairs besidea loaded open fire; a grimy Belfast sink stacked with
