With a wave of a large red umbrella, the leader began to push on up the hill and all heads turned away from Morton’s house. All except one.
Morton did a double-take when he spotted a man standing incongruously at the back of the young group. Shaohao Chen.
Chapter Twenty-One
Morton froze.
The group of students began to wander past him, leaving Shaohao Chen staring up at his house.
Morton was certain that he hadn’t yet been spotted but he had just seconds left before the parting crowd left him exposed. He quickly ducked down beside a teenage girl, who was thankfully entirely ignorant of his presence, and hurried, bent double, to the front of the pack.
The group leader looked down at him. ‘¿Qué estás haciendo?’
‘Hello!’ Morton whispered, placing his finger on his lips. ‘Just playing a spot of hide and seek.’
‘Coge tu camino, eres un extraño.’
‘Lovely. Thank you,’ Morton replied, darting into a narrow alleyway that he knew wound its way down to the High Street.
Once he was clear of Mermaid Street, he made a run for it, continuing all the way down to the railway station, where he sat breathlessly on a bench, watching to see if he had been followed.
Sufficient time had passed with no sign of Shaohao, but Morton didn’t want to chance going home to collect his car. Since he was at the station, he decided to take the train. A much safer option.
He waited, eyes fixed on the people entering the station until the train finally arrived.
With the old diesel train slowly heaving itself out of Rye, Morton phoned Juliette. She opened with the inevitable question. ‘What’s that noise? Where are you?’
‘On a train to Folkestone,’ Morton answered.
There was a short pause while Juliette processed what she was hearing. ‘Your car?’ she asked, with a sigh.
‘Well,’ Morton began, ‘long story.’
‘Shorten it,’ Juliette said.
And so he did.
‘Right, I’m sending a car around to pick him up; this is ridiculous,’ she said, when he had finished.
‘Pick him up on what grounds, exactly?’
‘I’ll think of something…’ she mumbled.
‘Well, good luck with that one,’ Morton said. ‘Just don’t go home alone, that’s all. Meet me somewhere and we’ll go in together.’
‘Right.’
He said goodbye, ended the call and began to gaze out of the window at the passing fields, villages and woodland that straddled the border between Sussex and Kent, allowing his mind to explore the growing complexities of the Finch Case. He puzzled over Shaohao Chen’s determination to prevent him from understanding what The Spyglass File was all about. Morton was sure that Chen would never reveal why; therefore, he needed to try and work out what that file was for himself. He thought back to the collection of empty folders in the office at Cliff House. What was the date of the first? He had been in a hurry and finding the email from Chen had occupied his concentration, but he was sure that it had been dated 1912. He pulled out his mobile phone and ran a simple Google search for ‘Spyglass 1912’. The first result surprised him. The answer had been under his nose all along; the file had been named after a person. He clicked the link. It was a reference on the Ancestry website to a marriage in 1912.
Name: Agnes Spyglass
Spouse surname: Finch
Registration year: 1912
Registration quarter: Oct-Nov-Dec
Registration District: Dover
Inferred County: Kent
Volume: 2a
Page: 2572
He now knew that The Spyglass File had been named after Elsie’s mother-in-law, Agnes, but he was still entirely oblivious as to the file contents.
Morton alighted from the train at Folkestone Central Station and walked briskly to the library. Another migraine was starting to burn behind his eyes. He found the library relatively empty and was able to return to the same microfilm reader that he had used last time. He quickly found the film for the 1943 editions of the Folkestone, Hythe and District Herald and loaded it onto the machine.
He watched through squinted eyes as the film buzzed under the glass, the images flicking past at high speed. He paused the film every now and then to check the dates. He reached July 1943 and began to scroll through the reel by hand until he reached the edition printed following Agnes’s death. He shifted the lens back and forth, reading the headlines of each story until he found it. WOMAN’S SUICIDE. Morton zoomed in and read the article.
Fall Over Cliff Near Folkestone
At an inquest at Folkestone yesterday on Mrs Agnes Finch of Cliff House, Capel-le-Ferne, deputy coroner (Mr J.R. Nightingale) highly praised the courageous conduct of Mr William Henry Collins of 3 Ham Cottages, Folkestone, who was lowered over the cliff for 150ft and who recovered the body, which was entangled in some barbed wire.
Mr Falkirk, 68, a neighbour of Mrs Finch’s, stated that on the 12 July he saw the deceased leaving her home in a state of high anxiety. She was carrying a metal torch with her, shouting that she was “Going to end it all.” Witness tried to calm the deceased, but she drew away and made for the cliff path.
A rescue party under Supt. Duke and St John Ambulance proceeded to the spot and Mr Collins was lowered over the cliff face, which had a drop of more than 500ft, to effect the recovery of the body lying on a ledge. On being brought to the top, Mrs Finch was found to be dead.
Inspr. W. Abrahams thanked Mr Collins on behalf of the police for his plucky action.
The coroner returned a verdict of “Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
Morton photographed the entry,
