Morton studiedthe piece of paper. It was very little to go on – much less basicinformation than he was used to gathering on an initial visit to a client’shome. What was it that Peter had said on Tuesday? It’s as if myfamily are all enclosed in a walled garden which has no door. If you’regoing to get anywhere with it you need to find another way in. Andanother way in he would most certainly find.
Also in thewallet was a faded, sepia photograph that Peter had found amongst his father’spapers last week. Finding the picture was the catalyst for Peter to hirehim. Morton prepared the photo for a forensic analysis by scanning itinto his laptop at 2400 x 1800 dots per inch, the highest setting possible onhis scanner. Within a few seconds the image was in front of him onscreen,granting him the ability to zoom into any part of the photo with absoluteclarity. The first step was to get an overview of the originalimage. The photo was of an attractive, young woman – he guessed earlythirties - holding a small baby. Centering into the woman’s dark eyes,Morton saw pride and joy at the child she held in her arms. He estimatedthat the baby was around a month old. Despite the age and quality of thephoto, the woman looked to Morton like someone who cared what she looked like -her eyes, hair, lips and skin appearing flawless. The woman’s clothingand waved, side-rolled hair, coupled with the Box Brownie style ofphoto, suggested to Morton that it was taken shortly after James’ birth in1944. Behind her was a light-coloured building of some kind, surroundedby trees. To the west was a tall herringbone-brick chimney.
The next stepwas to undertake what three years studying history at University College Londonhad taught him – a forensic examination of the photograph. The photoanalysis was actually pretty simple: it took Morton under an hour to deduce theexact date on which the photograph had been taken. Not bad going, he hadto admit. He even knew the time of day that it was taken. Photoanalysis was one of Morton’s specialties, having achieved full marks in thePhoto Forensics module at university. His maverick lecturer, DrBaumgartner, on a three-year secondment from the Forensic Science Service, wasa man who encouraged his students to think outside the box and to ‘become moreknowledgeable of the minutiae in a photograph than of your own body.’ Hehad taught them how to interpret everything from architecture to historicweather patterns, clothing fashions to the breeding habits of bluebottles andpretty much everything in between.
First, Mortonmeasured the angles of the shadows in the photograph: 16.8º, emanatingfrom due west. He cross-referred these to online solar patterns whichgave only two possible possibilities in 1944: at 3.58pm on 7 May and 15September. Since James Coldrick was born in June, Morton’s initialassessment was that the photo was taken on 15 September. But that didn’tadd up with what he found next. The trees in the picture, which he’didentified as being Victoria plum, were covered in a nascent blossom, which bySeptember would have been replaced by fruit. Either James Coldrick’sbirth didn’t occur in June or, for the first time in his career, he’d made amistake with a photo analysis. He was inclined towards the former optionand tentatively noted ‘7th May 1944?’ on a scrap of paper, which heattached to the photo. Morton took the precautionary step he always tookwhen dealing with other people’s photographs, and backed the image up to hisonline cloud storage space, which meant that he could retrieve it at any timeor from any location with an internet connection.
Why wasJames Coldrick’s childhood so shrouded in mystery? He needed somewhere to start. Therecords for St George’s Children’s Home seemed like a good place.
Google helpfully informed Morton that thechildren’s home had long since closed down, the local authority insteadpreferring to farm out their abandoned youth to the more personal care offostering. The building now served as St George’s Nursing Home, for whichGoogle provided contact details and a pin-point location.
Morton dialedthe number and spoke to a girl who gave her name as KC Fellows. Whatkind of a name was that? He had read somewhere that traditional nameslike Edna, Gertrude, Ethel, Harold, Percy and Walter were dying out, which atthe time he thought was probably for the best, but not if their replacementswere KC, Kylie, Gandalf or Arsenal, an apparently unisex name appearing inmodern birth registers.
‘Don’t know; Iweren’t here then, I’ll ask Linda, she’s been here ages,’ KC answered. The line went quiet for a moment before Linda, the duty manager, picked up andlistened intently, whilst Morton repeated his plea.
‘I started herein eighty-three, when it became a nursing home,’ Linda said, in a thick,Yorkshire accent. ‘The records of the home were here for a while,until they were eventually transferred to the local archives at Lewes. Ithink because us and the children’s home were both Local Authority, there wasno big hurry to shift the files over. After that point we didn’t keepanything, I’m afraid, love.’ Morton wasn’t overly surprised by heranswer. They were hardly likely to keep such potentially sensitiverecords stashed in the corner on the off-chance someone might require accessyears later.
‘Is it likelythey would have had personal information in them?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I’msure. I mean, I didn’t like to be nosey, but there were filing cabinetsfull of the case histories of the poor kids that were held…’ she stoppedherself, ‘…living here.’ Linda lowered her voice. ‘Some of thosepoor kids, I tell you. What I read was just awful. Good job it wereclosed down, to be frank with you. Wouldn’t be surprised if it were another oneof them homes as ended up in the news, if you know what I mean.’
‘Yes,’ Mortonagreed absentmindedly. He thanked Linda, hung up and got himself readyfor a trip to Lewes.
Morton took the last space in thepot-holed, makeshift car park adjacent to East Sussex County Archives. Some bright
