The land, once cleared, stood empty until 1849 when Patrick Robertson, a London merchant rented the entire America Ground from the Crown for £500 per year. Soon after, he erected rows of fashionable Victorian streets—three of which were named after him—containing hotels, shops and houses. Holy Trinity Church was built on the site of the former Black Horse.
The America Ground remained in the hands of the Crown until 1995, when it was sold to a London development company called Five Courts. There is no suggestion of impropriety on their part at any stage!
The Forester’s Arms eventually closed its doors as a public house, becoming at one point an art gallery and then, as it is still used to this day, as a private residence.
The newspaper report of Thomas Honeysett’s court case was largely based on a true account that occurred in my family tree in 1851. A Thomas Vincent Hatherley, governor of the Cranbrook Union Workhouse, administered savin to Harriet Dengate and another girl, having got them both ‘in the family way’. He was sentenced by the Kent Assizes to two years’ hard labour.
All of the records that Morton uses in his research are real, but with fictitious content.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to various professionals who have offered their invaluable assistance with the technical aspects of this book—notably with police procedure and legal matters—so, my grateful thanks go to: Helen Woollven, Julia Pettman, Belinda Lewis, Kate Hughes, and Rebecca Woods.
My thanks also go to Patrick Dengate for creating an image of the America Ground as I imagined it to have been, and to Julia Gibbs for her proof-reading services.
Finally, my thanks go to Robert Bristow for his continuing support.
Although The Forensic Genealogist series can be read in any order, turn the page for Morton Farrier’s next adventure.
The Spyglass File - Prologue
12th July 1943, Capel-le-Ferne, Kent
Elsie Finch stood on the narrow path that rose to five hundred feet above the dramatic white cliffs, the wind coursing through her blonde unkempt hair. She cut a striking figure as she glanced down over the cliff edge. Flaps of her ripped blue dress danced gaily in the breeze and slow streams of bright red blood flowed down from the abundance of scratches on her exposed arms and legs.
She edged forward, to the spot of flattened grass that, just seconds before, had been where her mother-in-law had stood. Elsie leaned over as far as she dared, and peered below. She gasped and stepped back in horror; the body had fallen to a ledge part way down and was now motionless, lying broken and entwined in great ringlets of rusting barbed wire.
Elsie closed her eyes, her train of thought brittle, suddenly. The desire to flee, to escape this nightmare was overwhelming, but there was one thing left to do.
Tugging back on her errant thoughts, she tried to replay her mother-in-law’s last words before she had plummeted over the cliff, but they were grainy, vague and distorted. The Spyglass File—that was what she had said.
If Elsie found The Spyglass File, she would find her baby.
Chapter One
3rd June 1940, Dunkirk Beach, France
They entered the town of Dunkirk as the walking ghosts of their fathers’ generation. They wore their boots, their scarred helmets and their ill-fitting uniforms. They carried their Great War guns. They had marched through places appallingly memorable: Ypres, Cambrai, Flanders and the Somme. They had fought on the land of the dead, ploughed and planted just twenty times since.
Laurie Finch, with his two remaining comrades, staggered into the town. The three men instinctively stopped and looked around them in a detached way, shiny black sludge from a discarded Austin K2 ambulance licking at their boots.
He knew that it was Dunkirk because the road signs had told him so. But this place could never have been a normal French seaside town. It could never have lived. It could never have seen joy or laughter or love; it could never have been anything other than what it was now.
Long columns of British army trucks and lorries had been dumped at the roadside. Wheels missing. Smouldering. Wires spewing forth from open bonnets. The buildings around them abandoned, windowless and roofless, like unfinished dolls’ houses, fire continuing the destruction wrought by the endless pounding of Luftwaffe bombs and bullets. The streets, soaked from burst water mains, were strewn with debris: glass, shrapnel, clothing, unidentified engine parts and the charred unrecorded corpses of bullet-ridden soldiers and civilians. Several severely wounded men were slumped on the pavement, their eyes empty, accepting their certain fate.
By wordless agreement, the three men continued through the town, side-stepping the wreckage and the rubble, the craters in the road and the twisted remains of their comrades. Their vision was blinkered, centred on the point just a few streets ahead, where the buildings ended and the salvation of the beach began. The place where the rescue boats awaited them.
None of them flinched as a drunken naked man suddenly appeared from a side road on horseback, galloping past them, whooping and waving a tin helmet in the air.
Onwards they walked, following in death’s footprints.
Just as they neared the final row of beachfront properties, Laurie shot out his arm to stop his friends, recognising the brief agonising groan of surrendering bricks and mortar. The men dived to the ground as the entire corner building collapsed in a thunderous crash, enveloping them in a dirty granular darkness.
It was the first moment in several days when time had behaved as it should; each minute that passed with the men pinned to the floor, choking, contained exactly
