Moments later, a figure in a dark hat and dark coat filled the viewfinder. The woman turned back towards the house and waved.
Elsie squinted, trying to see the woman clearly. She had short, brownish hair and a pinched, witch-like face. The woman glanced up at her frowning, her uncertain face magnified in Elsie’s vision.
Elsie froze, watching as the woman said something to Agnes.
The woman pointed and Elsie froze.Tugging the telescope back, she shoved the blackouts into place, stripped down to her bra and knickers and dived into bed. She turned on her side to face the door and closed her eyes.
Agnes must have run at a remarkable speed, for no sooner had Elsie climbed into bed, than the unmistakable sound of hurried footsteps filled the corridor. They stopped outside Elsie’s room and she tried to regulate her breathing and heart rate. She was certain, as she waited for her door to be flung open, that the moment she ceased to think about her heart and lungs, they would stop working.
Agnes, on the other side of the door, cleared her throat and Elsie tried to prepare her justification, but it was as if her thoughts were tied to balloons, floating away from her, needing to be grasped and held onto. She heard a light tink as Agnes’s wedding ring touched her door knob. Her thoughts were scattered still and she had nothing to say but the truth. Was the truth so awful?
But Agnes said nothing, and moments later moved along the corridor towards her own bedroom.
Elsie flung her head back into the pillow and exhaled. She thought of what had just happened and what she had just heard. She replayed the only clear words over and over in her mind, trying to make sense of them. You can still use Daniel Winter...
Chapter Eight
Tamara Forsdyke stared at her laptop screen, unblinking. She had Googled the name Morton Farrier and the vague notion of familiarity suddenly solidified: he was the genealogist involved in several cases that had made the news at one time or another. Tamara had then pored over each of the search results in turn—most of them news stories—and a sharp fear rose inside her as she came to the conclusion that Morton Farrier could pose a considerable threat to her.
She looked at the clock in the corner of her laptop: it was time she left for a meeting in London. An important client was flying in from Beijing and she needed not to be late.
Tamara took one last look at Morton’s photo in the most recent news story, then shut her laptop, wondering what to do next.
Morton was reclining in his Mini, appearing quite like a dead person. Another migraine was sitting on his forehead with all the weight of a bag of ballast and he was waiting for the medication to kick in. Stress, his doctor had put it down to. ‘Did any change happen in your life around the time they started?’ the doctor had asked. ‘No,’ had been Morton’s reply. At the time, a one-word simple lie had seemed the quickest route to a packet of pills. What he should have said was: ‘Yes, my adoptive father died and, rather than spend time grieving, I carried on working—badly—whilst spending every waking moment trying to trace my biological father.’ But his perfunctory answer had worked; Morton had got what he had wanted: medication and the absolute avoidance of any kind of counselling. He didn’t need a psychologist to help him to join the dots between losing one father and the search for another.
He swigged down some more water, then reached for his bag and stepped from the car onto the wet pavement. Walking quickly through the dreary grey streets of Folkestone town centre, Morton arrived at the library. He bounded up the stairs with familiarity and entered the Heritage Room. It had been in this very building last year that he had taken his first genealogical steps towards finding his father. An echo of the desperation from his previous visit returned, as he found himself walking in his own footsteps towards the helpdesk. His research had come so far since that day, but, in a paradox familiar to all genealogists, the breaking down of one brick wall had only led to several others.
‘Can I help you?’ a voice asked, drawing Morton’s attention to the here and now. It came from a woman with pinched, shrew-like facial features. Her blonde bob had cast a generous dusting of dandruff over the shoulders of her blue suit.
‘Hi. I’d like to have a look at newspapers for the Hawkinge area around 1940, please.’
The woman bobbed her head emphatically and spoke as she marched across the room. ‘For Hawkinge you’re looking at the Folkestone, Hythe and District Herald. The originals are too fragile to produce, I’m afraid, so we have them on film.’ She reached the two microfilm readers, stopped and turned to face him. ‘Have you used one of these before?’
Morton glanced down. It was an old machine, one of the first varieties to be motorised. One speed forwards. One speed backwards. ‘Just a few times,’ he responded.
The woman pointed to a metal filing cabinet beside the reader. ‘They’re all in there; I’ll leave you to it.’
Morton thanked her, selected the film for 1940 and loaded it onto the machine, slowly winding his way through the grainy yellow
