Then a thoughtstruck him, which fully woke him up.
Diabetes oftenruns in families the poster had said.
Finlay Coldrickhad diabetes. Peter Coldrick had diabetes. Didn’t William Dunk’sdeath certificate cite diabetes as a cause of death? Morton reachedfor his phone and accessed his cloud space, where he quickly located a photo ofWilliam Dunk's death certificate, since the original had perished witheverything else on the Coldrick Case Incident Wall. Yes, there itwas: diabetes mellitus.
Coincidence?
There was onlyone way to be sure. Another DNA test.
Morton climbedout of bed as quietly as possible, doing his utmost not to disturbJuliette. There was no way on God’s green earth she would allow him to dowhat he was about to do. He quickly dressed and left the house.
As Morton made the fifty-minute journeyfrom Hastings to Dungeness, he mulled over the implications of his bizarredream. If the diabetes was not a coincidence, then he had finally foundJames Coldrick’s father: William Dunk. It was certainly possible in termsof the timeframe and location; William would have been thirty-one at the timeof James’s birth and he would likely have been living in Sedlescombe bythen. According to a quick search on Ancestry, William Dunk had nevermarried, Daniel having been born in 1969 out of wedlock to one SharonHiggins. Could Daniel Dunk and James Coldrick have the same father inWilliam Dunk? Were James Coldrick’s parents really a Nazi woman and ahandyman for the local gentry? If so, then what part did theWindsor-Sackvilles play? He needed yet more evidence.
Mercifullythere were no top-spec cars registered to the Chief Constable of Kent Policeparked on Daniel Dunk’s property; there were no cars at all in fact. Morton parked a safe distance away and pulled out the new pair of NationalTrust binoculars to spy on the house. He really must put the binocularsback in his father’s wardrobe since it appeared that, contrary to Morton’sinitial belief, his father was making a decent recovery. Jeremy had textedto say that the doctors expected him to be allowed home within days. Another miracle; his family was full of them. His real family. He hadn’t yet digested the news that his Aunty Margaret was his real, bona-fidebiological mother. But then, how could you digest something likethat? It was about as digestible as a stack of bricks. He doubtedthat he would ever even be able to begin to comprehend suchlife-changing information, although it did make some kind of sense on some kindof level. If you’d asked him at any point in his life to honestly statewith whom in his family he felt the closest affinity, he would unquestioninglyhave chosen Aunty Margaret. He never could fathom where this syrupyhigh-esteem in which he held her had come from. After all, he could countthe number of visits she had made to the family home and his reciprocal visitsto her in Cornwall on one hand. Was he the reason that she hadupped sticks as an eighteen-year-old and moved so far away? Was theresignificance to be found in the fact that her home was minutes away from LandsEnd, as if she couldn’t live any further away without needing a submarine toget home? He raked through his back catalogue of memories of AuntyMargaret and he realised that it was a mawkish romanticised idea of herthat he most loved; the kind of mother he’d wished that his own had been. Safe, constant, fun, Aunty Margaret’s visits always cast a heavy and palpableshadow over his own restrained, conservative mother. He realised that hehad always viewed Aunty Margaret’s interactions and close relationship with hertwo daughters with an envious eye. And now, at the age of thirty-nine, hefinally understood the affinity he had with Aunty Margaret. His mother.
Morton raisedthe binoculars to Dunk’s house once more and was convinced that it wasdeserted. No doubt Dunk was off doing whatever hitmen do when not engagedin the business of killing innocents. Line dancing, perhaps? Orlace-making, maybe? Morton placed the binoculars in a rucksack he’dfound in Jeremy’s wardrobe, which he’d hastily packed the moment that therealisation of his dream had sunk in. He’d managed to sneak out of thehouse leaving Juliette sleeping in blissful ignorance of the plan that he’dimpulsively hatched. He was going to enter Dunk’s house to gather DNAmaterial: that was about as organised and detailed as his plan got. Heswitched his phone to silent, knowing that the first thing that Juliette woulddo when she woke was to phone or text him, and the last time she did that, he waswithin hitting range of Daniel Dunk, and that didn’t end too well.
He locked thecar and walked towards Smuggler’s Keep with the air of someone who had aGod-given right to be there. Like a Jehovah’s Witness or an Avonlady. Not that either of those categories have a God-given right to doanything, least of all knock on strangers’ doors, thought Morton. Hemarched haughtily past Dunk’s gummy neighbour’s property and brazenly rappedthe knocker on the wooden door, layers of peeling paint revealing its entirecolourful history. He knew that he should have a back-up plan, at least somethingto say if Dunk should answer the door, but then what do you say to someone whoknocked you unconscious the last time you saw them? Hi, meagain! But he didn’t need to worry; there was nobody home. Morton walked the length of the house, or glorified shed as it might better bedesignated, stopping at each window to try to catch a glimpse inside, but eachwas covered by old, sun-bleached curtains. He reached the back door andglanced around him, not quite able to believe that the Coldrick Case hadreduced him to breaking and entering. He wondered if his sudden moraldegradation was an atavistic trait that he could attribute to his father. He still couldn’t comprehend that he was the by-product of a rape and he feltnauseous when the thought caught him unawares. He couldn’t stop himselffrom imagining what his father did to her and what that made him, the carrierof his Y chromosome. Not that a faulty gene pool made his actionsdefensible.
