Morton spent the next hour sticking everything onto the empty wall. Suddenly his befuddled brain could make sense of the case as a whole. It was as if he could now see the straight edges of the jigsaw puzzle, leaving just the centre to be assembled. At the very bottom of the wall, just above the skirting board, he began to painstakingly create a timeline of events.
With a clear mind, he took a sip of his drink, then started up his laptop. The first thing that he wanted to do was to check Ancestry for an update on the three DNA tests. It was a fairly pointless exercise; Ancestry would have sent him a notification email were the results ready. He logged in and checked his DNA page anyway. The answer was the same for each test. Lab Processing. The results of the tests were imminent.
Next, he switched his attention to the illegitimate children born at Cliff House during the war. There had been five of them recorded in the baptism register of St Mary’s Church, Capel-le-Ferne.
Henry, son of Gwendoline Boxall
Richard Peter, son of Kath Finch
Sarah, daughter of Freda Hilder
Elizabeth, daughter of Ivy Starr
Samuel John, son of Phyllis Butcher
Knowing that all of the children were born in the 1940s, Morton began to search for each of them in turn in the 1916-2005 marriage index and the 1916-2007 death index.
He searched for a great deal of time, producing a long list of potential marriages or deaths for each child. Yet, by the time that he had finished, he felt entirely dissatisfied. He didn’t feel that a single entry that he had found, matched those children. There wasn’t one certificate on which he was prepared to spend money. The names were slightly wrong, or the registration districts were the other side of the country, or the age at death was considerably out. Those were usual genealogical conundrums, but not to be able to find a definite match for one of the five children born at Cliff House made him suspicious. There was another alternative, of course. It was one that he had begun to suspect yesterday in Folkestone Library: that all of those children had gone down the same route as Barbara Finch and had been adopted. If that were the case, then his research into them was completely over since adoption records were not in the public domain.
He switched lines of enquiry and wrote a reply to Barbara’s email, explaining that Elsie could not have named her cottage Valletta because of her honeymoon there, as it had been so named months prior to her marriage. He asked Barbara to contact Paul and Rose once more to see if they had any other suggestions to offer. Then he sent another, more pleading email to the journalist, Liu Chai.
Clutching his coffee, Morton moved to the evidence wall and began to meticulously re-read everything.
He paused part-way through Doris Sloan’s Mass Observation reports. Mr Wren’s house was hit and a pilot was killed. I saw him passing my house in his uniform, poor blighter. More dead in Folkestone and Dover. When will it end?
It was dated May 1941 and, in his mind, the pilot mentioned could have referred to Daniel Winter. What were the chances of another pilot turning up dead in the area like that? It still bothered Morton greatly that Daniel had died just hours after storming out of Susan’s house, having learnt that Elsie had given birth at Cliff House.
Returning to his laptop, Morton typed Doris Sloan’s address into Google maps. Her house was the neighbouring property to Cliff House. An idea was forming in his mind but Morton needed to know where Mr Wren’s house was—the place where Daniel’s body had been found. Turning back to the 1939 Identity Card Register, he entered the name ‘Wren’ residing in ‘Capel-le-Ferne’ and found his address: Heron’s Brook, which Google maps placed as the other adjacent property to Doris Sloan. It could well have been as innocent as purported, that Daniel had passed by Doris’s house on his way to Heron’s Brook, where he was accidently killed when a bomb hit the house. But if that had been the case, then why didn’t Doris Sloan name Daniel? She had known him from the early years of the war. Could it have been that Daniel had walked past her property in the other direction, heading for Cliff House and not Heron’s Brook and Doris only saw him from behind? It was tenuous, to say the very least.
Morton recalled a past case that he had worked on involving a death in the Second World War. He remembered searching through a raft of Town Clerk’s Department Records, which listed all the bombing raids that had taken place in that town, with detail of destruction to buildings and injuries or deaths caused. It was worth a shot. He typed out a quick email to Folkestone Library, asking if such records existed for the town and, if so, would they mind searching for a report into the incident on the night of 19th May 1941. He had just clicked ‘send’ when his mobile rang. It was Barbara Finch’s home number.
‘Hello, Barbara,’ Morton answered.
‘Hello, yes, I’ve just got your email,’ she said. ‘I’ve been onto Rose again and she suggests that you go and see her stepfather and ask him for yourself. The only thing is—’
‘—Is he still alive, then?’ Morton interrupted.
‘Yes, he’s in a home, he has his ups and downs apparently. I’ve never met him—bit of a tricky one, really. Once I first made contact with Paul and Rose, they felt it best not to tell him about me.’
‘Oh, okay. So he doesn’t know you exist?’ Morton asked.
‘No. He’s old and sometimes gets confused,’ she replied. After a moment she added, ‘I think what it is, really, is that they
