‘Guessing you aren’t going to a wedding or funeral,’ the driver quipped.
Morton tried to offer a polite smile. ‘No, just doing a bit of research there.’
The driver nodded again, as he pulled out onto the main road.
‘I might need to stop on the way to get some cash out—not sure I’ve got enough,’ Morton said, watching for the driver’s reaction.
Another nod. ‘No worries. I can tell you the cost already, though—we work on total mileage, so you’re not paying over the odds whilst you’re sat at the traffic lights. It’ll be six eighty. Got enough?’
Morton nodded, a palpable sense of relief washing over him. He then noticed the identification lanyard around the driver’s neck. Jesus, but he was getting jumpy.
He breathed out slowly, looking out of the window as they sailed past the White Rock Hotel, before reviewing the paperwork in front of him. Somewhere along the course of his research into the Lovekin Case, he had made a mistake. A big mistake. Overlooked something crucial. He had to have done, as the documents in front of him, when viewed holistically, made absolutely no sense.
It had started out making sense. He had been trying to locate Harriet and Christopher’s place of burial in the St Clements Church registers. He hadn’t found them there, but he had instead found the burial of Christopher Elphick’s mother, Lydia. It had been Morton’s hunch that Lydia Elphick and Lydia Bloom, Eliza’s friend from the Westwell workhouse, were one and the same person, confirmed when he had found her marriage entry. There was something quite satisfying knowing that Lydia and Eliza had stuck together since their incarceration in the workhouse and that their children had gone on to marry each other.
‘Well, it’s lovely weather for it,’ the taxi driver muttered. ‘Think I’d rather be doing some research inside a nice cool church than driving!’
‘I’ll be outside—looking at graves,’ Morton answered.
‘Oh, right,’ the driver said, his words carrying an oblique question mark behind them, which Morton ignored, concentrating on the papers in his lap. The more he read them, the less logical they were. He really needed to be back home in his study, to view these extra pieces of the puzzle in the context of the whole Lovekin Case.
At last, the taxi pulled off the main road and began to slow down, drawing into a rectangular gravel car park.
Morton crammed the stack of paperwork into his bag, still none the wiser, and watched as the church came into view.
The driver drew to a stop beside the lych gate. ‘Here you go, mate. Six eighty then, please.’
Morton handed over the money and climbed out of the car, peering cautiously around him. There were four cars and a white van in the car park, but suspiciously, no sign of their occupants. A flicker of pink in his peripheral vision suddenly drew his attention. It was a middle-aged lady with a blonde bob, tugging on the lead of a fluffy slipper of a dog that was eagerly sniffing at the front wheel of the white van. ‘Ruby!’ she called loudly.
Dog walkers, he told himself, that’s all they are. He really needed to relax and stop being so jumpy. They hadn’t followed him here; he was safe.
He walked up the narrow tarmac path towards the church, enjoying the warmth and stillness of the place. Church in the Wood was nestled, as it had been since the thirteenth century, within the boundary of an ancient forest and packed with hundreds of years of tombs and memorial stones. Morton paused and briefly admired the early gothic style architecture of the church itself, with its clay-brown roof tiles and flint stone walls, then continued along the path. When he took in the vastness of the burial ground, which extended through fences, thickets and dense shrubbery into the far distance, he was glad not to have asked the taxi driver to wait for him.
To have conducted a thorough search of this ground, with its huge abundance of graves, would have taken days. Gratefully, he reached into his bag and pulled out a series of photocopies that he had just made in the library from a spiral-bound booklet of burials 1637-2000. One of the copies was of a plan of the churchyard, which was neatly broken into alphabetised zones. He was headed to section N, which was almost at the other end of the burial ground.
Morton wandered the grassy paths, which seemed to slice the churchyard into haphazard and nonsensical sections, appreciating the tranquillity of the place as he walked.
A green woodpecker darted from the path in front of him, splintering the silence with its shrill warning cry, as it was enveloped into the dense oak canopy just in front of Morton.
He stopped, briefly enjoying the shaded respite, to look again at the map; he was roughly in the right area. Stepping from the path, he approached the nearest grave—a headstone dating from the 1920s. On the back, in small black lettering was the grave number: OJ14.
Leaving the path, he moved between graves, checking for reference numbers as he went. He quickly reached the first grave marked with the letter N, and then began to systematically check each and every headstone.
As Morton stooped down, struggling to read the weatherworn names on the stone in front of him, he caught sight of the grave behind, the surname seeming to shout out to him. Elphick. It was one of three identical headstones in a row.
With a smile, he stepped towards
