‘Right!’ Barbara said, ushering everyone to a seat in the lounge. ‘Who’s for tea and who’s for coffee?’ She counted up and began to leave the room, suddenly stopping and turning on her heels. ‘Do not start anything while I’m out of earshot, do you hear me?’
‘Loud and clear, darling sister,’ Paul replied.
Morton studied their faces, still unable to believe the startling resemblance between them all. Paul was portly, bearded with a receding hairline, but he shared with Rose and Barbara a soft, rounded face and striking azure eyes. That Elsie Finch was mother to each of them was beyond question. Morton hurriedly returned to the start of his pad and scanned down his garbled notes for any mention of half-siblings. There was nothing. Had Barbara even told him about them?
‘So, your mother remarried soon after the war ended, then?’ Morton asked, using approximate ages as a gauge for when the second marriage must have taken place.
Paul and Rose looked at each other. It was a clear look of not understanding.
‘Er…our mum remarried in 1968, just after our father died,’ Paul said, throwing another look at Rose.
‘Oh, okay,’ Morton said, mustering a voice that said that everything had suddenly become clear. But it hadn’t. ‘So…your dad was…?’
‘Lawrence Finch,’ Rose said with an uncertain smile.
Morton frowned and set down his notepad. He was lost. ‘Sorry,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘I thought he was killed in the war?’
‘Our mother thought that he’d been killed at Dunkirk—she got a telegram—Paul’s got it somewhere, haven’t you?’ Paul nodded. ‘It said he was missing, presumed dead. Then she got a letter to say he was alive and well. He was a prisoner of war until 1945, when he came back home.’
‘I came along in 1946,’ Paul chipped in.
‘Followed by me in 1948,’ Rose said.
Morton quickly added the new information to his notepad, deeply embarrassed. What else had he missed?
Barbara entered the lounge with a tray of drinks and a plate of biscuits. ‘Here we go,’ she said, distributing the teas and coffees. ‘Help yourself.’ She took a seat beside Rose, sitting with a grateful sigh. ‘I hope you haven’t started without me!’
‘You didn’t tell him about us!’ Rose exclaimed. ‘Flippin’ cheek of it!’
Barbara’s eyes widened. ‘I most certainly did!’ She looked to Morton for confirmation. ‘I told you that Laurie returned but never knew anything about me. I said to you that I feel—from these two—that I know my mother quite well, but none of us have any clue about what she did in the war. Apart from that I was a wartime mistake that happened when mum believed herself to have been a widow, of course.’
‘Oh, you’re not a mistake!’ Rose chirped.
A mini-conversation erupted between the siblings, allowing Morton a few moments to gather his thoughts and quell his mortification. He never made catastrophic blunders like this. He needed to reassert himself as an authority, to try and claw back some credibility. He opened his laptop and waited for it to start then cleared his throat. He stepped into a lull in their conversation.
‘So, as I mentioned to Paul,’ Morton began, ‘the case is far from over, but I can show you one or two bits that I’ve found…I’m just waiting for the laptop…okay, here we go.’ He navigated through to his files but something was wrong. They had vanished. Every single case file that he had ever worked on was gone. ‘Sorry about this, I’m having trouble here…’ he mumbled. He closed the window and tried again. Still nothing. He ran a search for the file name. Nothing. He exhaled noisily and shut the laptop lid. ‘Technology,’ he said with a smile. ‘So. Your mother was born at Cliff House in Capel-le-Ferne. I went up there to take a look and got chased out by some mad old woman waving a stick at me and threatening to call the police…’
An eruption of laughter sliced through his account, taking him by surprise. It was mildly amusing, he supposed, but not that funny. All three of them were in fits of laughter, to the point that Rose had to set her drink down on the coffee table, trying not to choke.
Rose wiped her eyes. ‘Yes, she would very likely have killed you if she’d got hold of you!’
Morton grinned, but he wasn’t sure at what. ‘Oh, you know her, then?’
The laughter stopped as more odd looks darted between the siblings.
‘That would be Miss Havisham,’ Paul said. ‘At least, that’s what we call her.’
‘It’s their Aunt Kath,’ Barbara said. ‘Like I told you last time. She lives up at the house with her daughter.’
‘Our cousin, Tamara,’ Rose said, with a shudder. ‘We haven’t spoken to them since we were kids. Once mum remarried we didn’t see them much anymore. I think they felt affronted that Mum had dared to marry someone else.’
‘They’re not very nice people,’ Paul said. His face was regretful as he spoke.
They had already answered Morton’s next question but he felt compelled to ask it anyway. ‘Is there any chance that they would talk to me about your mother?’
They needed no time to confer or ponder his question; Paul and Rose shook their heads and both emphatically answered, ‘No.’
The mood had shifted and an uncomfortable stillness hung in the room, each of them sipping their drinks. Morton had never felt so out of his depth and incompetent before. He needed to do something to save himself. Quickly.
‘Well, what I did find,’ he began, ‘was that your mother joined the WAAF.’
There was a spark of interest in the three pairs of eyes and murmurings of intrigue. With few facts now at his disposal, Morton laboured an unrehearsed account of the work undertaken by the WAAF at
