Chapter One

4th September 2023, Rye, East Sussex

 

Morton Farrier was anxious. He was sitting at his desk in his study on the top floor of his house on Rye’s famous Mermaid Street, checking his emails. He was hoping to find one from Duane Reckowski, a detective from Las Vegas who was in the process of reviewing the posthumous murder accusation against Morton’s grandfather, Alfred. During Morton’s visit to America earlier this year, he had met with Duane and his partner, Mark Marriott, to try and persuade them to run a DNA test on the knife which had apparently been used in 1980 to kill a prostitute, Candee-Lee Gaddy. After Morton had presented his own detailed investigation into the murder, the two men had reluctantly agreed to review the case and had eventually sent the knife for fresh DNA testing. When nothing had come back from the national DNA database, they had retained the services of Venator, an investigative genetic genealogy company in Salt Lake City, which happened to be owned and run by Morton’s former girlfriend, Maddie.

   He was hoping to hear from the detectives at any moment, but there was nothing from them in his inbox. What he did find, however, suddenly brought a wide smile to his face. It was from Natalia Pearson, a producer from Brine & Bagel Productions, informing him that he was down to the final two for the position of presenter on the pilot episode of what would be a brand-new television series: Celebritrees. As the title suggested, it was going to be a programme about celebrities researching their family trees.

  ‘So, basically a rip-off of Who Do You Think You Are?, then?’ had been his wife, Juliette’s reaction once she had learned what it was going to be about.

   ‘No…’ Morton had protested. ‘This is more hands-on, where the presenter—maybe yours truly—guides them through the genealogy process, letting the viewers experience the discoveries at the same time as the celebrities with no clue as to the direction the show will take. We start with them getting their own birth certificate and taking a DNA test. It’s more educational than other genealogy TV shows. And more organic.’

   ‘Hmm,’ she had replied. ‘And could be very boring.’

   ‘Thanks,’ he’d said.

   ‘You know what I mean… Generations of agricultural labourers hardly makes for riveting TV, now, does it?’

   ‘Every family has its colourful characters, black sheep and skeletons in the closet—you should know that.’

   ‘Well, yes,’ she’d agreed.

   ‘You never know who or what’s going to turn up.’

   The email was inviting Morton to do a further screen-test with a celebrity guest. He smiled at the thought of watching himself on the television, fancifully imagining that spending so much time with the famous guests would undoubtedly lead to enduring connections with A-listers from the world of film, sport, music and television. He pictured natural, blossoming friendships with the likes of Lewis Hamilton, Kylie Minogue, Meryl Streep, Madonna and Morgan Freeman, all inevitably coming to stay at his quirky home in Rye. Not that any of those people had been confirmed for the new show at all—the stars had yet to be announced—but still, Morton thought that whomever they found would surely enjoy being shown around the ancient town of Rye with him as their guide.

   If he passed the final screen-test in three weeks’ time, then filming would start in London in two months. Between now and then he had two genealogical cases to work on: the one that he was about to start and then a lucrative but simple case for a wealthy client in America.

   He was reading the email for a second time when the doorbell sounded.

With a sigh, he headed down the two flights of stairs to the front door, pulling it open to see a burly man with cropped hair and a black bomber jacket glowering at him. ‘Hello,’ Morton greeted the stranger.

   ‘You Morton Farrier?’ he asked.

   ‘Yes,’ Morton replied, somewhat tentatively. As unlikely as it was, given his appearance, he hoped that the man hadn’t just shown up on his doorstep, as others had done in the past, to request his genealogical investigation services.

   The man smiled and Morton relaxed. Then he took one step up, drew back his arm and promptly punched Morton square in the face.

The force of the impact pushed Morton backwards down onto the floor. Blood was pouring from his nose and his whole head hurt like merry hell.

   The man stepped inside the house and Morton pulled himself into a foetal position, bracing himself for more of a battering.

   ‘No, I don’t want your help finding my biological parents,’ the man said quietly. ‘I didn’t even know I was bloody well adopted.’ He kicked one of his big black boots into the back of Morton’s legs, making him yelp in pain.

   ‘What?’ Morton cried. But it was pointless, the man had already gone.

He remained motionless on the floor for several seconds, trying to work out just how much damage had been inflicted. He was fairly certain from the blood and pain that his nose was broken. His head was aching, and he could feel his left eye beginning to swell up.

   Very slowly, he pulled himself up and then hurriedly shut the front door in case his attacker should change his mind and return. What was that all about? Morton thought, hobbling into the kitchen, tugging off several sheets of kitchen roll with which to dab his tender nose and hearing an unpleasant crunching sound when he did. ‘Ouch,’ he said, and glanced down at his blood-splattered shirt.

   With shaking hands, he ran a glass of water and took a long drink. He worked to steady his breathing while he tried to recall what it was that the man had said. Something about not needing his help to find his parents? And that he hadn’t known that he was adopted? It made no sense whatsoever. To the very best of his knowledge, Morton had no clue at all what the man was talking about. He could safely say that, despite many mistakes in his career, he’d never unwittingly enlightened someone as to their being adopted. Mistaken identity, perhaps? No, the man had graciously checked his name before he had punched him to the ground.

   Morton slumped down at the kitchen table, totally bewildered. He took out his mobile phone, switched the camera to selfie mode and gasped at his reflection. ‘Jesus.’ How had one—very hard—punch done so much damage? he wondered. He looked as though he’d just lost several rounds in an entire boxing match. His nose was certainly broken, and his left eye was closing up right there before him in a swelling swirl of purple and blue. The bleeding from his nose had stopped, but a dry streak from nostril to chin remained.

   He knew he should phone the police and report the incident, but he also knew that the process would be drawn out and he’d be stuck in the house all day waiting for a disinterested constable to turn up and take a statement. It would have to wait.

   He also wondered if he should go to hospital. Was a nose one of those things like broken toes that doctors couldn’t fix? He didn’t know, so he typed the question into Google on his mobile phone. The top result, from the NHS, gave him the answer.

​

   A broken nose usually heals on its own within 3 weeks.

​

Three weeks. Exactly the amount of time until his final screen-test with a celebrity. With luck, he would be okay.

   The website then gave advice on how to check for a broken nose, listing the four main symptoms: pain, swelling and bruising. Check, all of the above. A crunching sound when you touch your nose. Check, the sound was hideous. Difficulty breathing through your nose. Check, it was impossible. Your nose changing shape. Check, it was apparently spreading across his face.

   And he was supposed to be seeing a client for the first time in just under two hours. Brilliant. He needed to get himself cleaned up and take a shower, but first he needed to take some strong painkillers.

 

Morton cautiously peered out of his kitchen window at the hordes of people trooping up and down the ancient cobbles of Mermaid Street. He and his wife, Juliette, had lived in the house for nine years and had now become used to the streams of holidaymakers who would have their photographs taken on the steps outside of his home owing to its quirky name, The House with Two Front Doors. It had been built in 1520 and, like most on the street, came with an interesting past, including the curved oak beams in his bedroom which an historian friend had reliably informed him had begun life on a thirteenth-century ship.

   He searched the faces of the crowds for any sign of the thug who had caused the acute pain on the front of his face. He was certain that he’d never seen the guy before, never mind given him any advice about who his biological parents might have been. Morton had spent the entirety of his time in the shower thinking, working backwards chronologically through his most recent cases. Not one of them bore any resemblance to what had apparently irked the thug. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the man had checked his name before landing the punch, he could easily have convinced himself that it had indeed been a case of mistaken identity.

   Morton was as sure as he could be that the man was now nowhere to be seen. He picked up his bag, slung it onto his shoulder and left the house, smiling politely at two women sitting on his front steps having their picture taken.

   ‘Sorry,’ one of them called after him.

   ‘It’s fine. Really…’ he said, giving them a dismissive wave.

   ‘Did you see his face?’ he heard one of them whisper as he hurried to his Mini at the rear of the property.

   He quickly climbed inside, locked the doors and then pulled down the sun-visor vanity mirror. He gasped at his hideous reflection. His nose was now swollen to double its normal size and the bridge was quite crooked—not permanently he hoped—while his left eye was dark purple and almost completely shut. ‘Hello, I’m Morton Farrier, forensic genealogist,’ he rehearsed to his reflection. He’d be very lucky if the woman he was going to see didn’t simply slam the door in his face.

   He sighed, flapped the visor back up and then programmed in the Satnav. ‘Boughton-under-Blean,’ he said as he typed, receiving the welcome news that it would involve a fifty-six-minute drive through the beautiful Sussex and Kent countryside.

 

Rather refreshingly, the Satnav hadn’t lied, and Morton arrived at South Street in precisely fifty-six minutes. He pulled up outside the end cottage in a terrace of six. They were charming little brick houses with slate roofs, a short front garden and each with its own vibrantly coloured front door. Each property in the row had two front-facing sash windows, one per floor. As Morton stepped out of the Mini, he noticed the For Sale board outside of the house he’d come to visit, and he remembered that the client had said that she had been clearing out her house and had found something she’d wanted investigating from her family’s past.

   Morton walked up to the duck-egg-blue front door and knocked.

   Moments later it was opened by a lady who appeared to be in her late-seventies or early-eighties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a warm smile. ‘Morton?’ she asked in an East London accent.

   ‘That’s me,’ he said, noticing how she was trying not to stare at his mangled nose. ‘Sorry about my face,’ he said. On the journey over he’d deliberated about what to say and had settled on the truth. ‘I opened the door to a thug this morning, who punched me. Completely out of the blue.’

   ‘Oh, blimey,’ she said. ‘What on earth for?’

   Morton shrugged. ‘I haven’t figured that one out yet.’

   ‘Well, you won’t get beat up here, so in you come,’ she said.

He followed her into a small living room with barely any furniture; just two armchairs and a sideboard. Only a handful of photographs remained on the walls, dull rectangles dotted around the otherwise bright yellow wallpaper, where other pictures had once hung.

   She leant forward and offered her hand to shake. ‘Molly Moon,’ she said.

   ‘Nice name,’ he commented.

   ‘Well, it is what it is, ain’t it. I think it sounds a bit daft, meself. Excuse the state of the house, I’m selling up, but I can still offer you a chair and make a cuppa, if you fancy?’

   ‘Lovely, thank you,’ Morton answered.

   ‘Be right with you,’ Molly replied, passing through into the adjacent kitchen.

   ‘Are you moving far?’ Morton called, as he took out his notepad and pen.

Molly stuck her head around the door and said, ‘I don’t mean to sound all la-di-da and all that, but this place is actually a little countryside get-away that me and me brothers decided to keep on after our old dad died years ago.’ She put on a posh accent and added, ‘It’s me country residence, dear, don’t you know?’

   ‘Lovely spot for it,’ Morton replied, having driven across the Kent Downs and witnessed that the village was completely surrounded by miles of open countryside and farmland.

   ‘Me dad picked it up cheap back in the eighties,’ she called over the rattle of the boiling kettle. ‘Daft old sod wanted to be able to look out over them hop gardens what he come to as a kid.’

   ‘I noticed all the hop fields as I was driving through,’ Morton replied.

   ‘Hop gardens, not fields. Get it right,’ Molly corrected with a laugh.

   ‘Sorry,’ he said.

   ‘Ain’t a problem, but if you’re gonna solve this family mystery, you need to get to grips with the old lingo,’ Molly said, as she stirred the drinks.

   ‘Oh, I see,’ Morton said. ‘Related to hop-picking, is it?’

   ‘So me old dad and aunt seemed to think, yeah,’ she replied, entering the living room with two mugs of tea and a packet of chocolate bourbons under her arm, which she handed over to Morton. ‘Help yourself.’

   ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking a biscuit and then getting himself ready to take notes.

   Molly pointed at a black-and-white photograph on the wall. ‘That’s the old bugger, there,’ she said. The picture was of a young man wearing what appeared to be the uniform of the Royal Sussex Regiment in the Second World War. She slumped down in the chair opposite him with a loud groan. ‘Cor blimey. I need new knees and new hips, so they keep telling me. That’s partly why I need to get shot of this place. Be sorry to see it go, though, but there you have it. Right, Morton—funny name, that, innit? Like that looker, Morten Harket, from A-ha. Used to fancy him back in the day. You ain’t Norwegian, are you?’

   Morton grinned. ‘No, it was my adopted great-grandmother’s maiden name.’

   ‘Oh, right. Anyway, Morton, where do you want me to start?’

   ‘Well, if you could explain a bit about this family mystery and we’ll take it from there.’

   Molly took a sip of tea, then began. ‘As you can probably tell from me accent, our family’s from the East End of London and for gawd knows how many generations we’ve been coming down to this village, hopping, like. Every September we came, like clockwork. You can’t imagine it now, but there used to be thousands of hop gardens ’round here and all of ’em needed picking; and it was mostly us Londoners what did it. Cor, it was hard graft, but we loved it, we did. It was something you looked forward to all year long. You know, it was a holiday, like. As kids it was like we’d won the pools or something, coming down here, hopping. Oh, you can’t imagine the difference. You couldn’t beat all that fresh air and open space, you really couldn’t.’

   ‘It is a lovely location,’ he agreed, smiling as he waited to hear something tangible to write on his notepad.

   ‘Course, it changed in the fifties when they got machines to do the picking and us Londoners was no longer needed. Now you don’t get a single Londoner down here, hopping. It’s sad, Morton, really sad.’

   ‘Yes, I can imagine,’ he said, not quite sure what he was imagining. ‘And you said your aunt was looking into something that had happened to someone in the family?’

   ‘That’s right. Me aunt, Nellie, was trying to find out what happened to her older brother, Ernest. Me poor old granny, she lost her eldest boy in the First War, then Ernest disappeared off the face of the earth, then Aunt Nellie died trying to find out what happened to him. People in our street used to whisper that we was all cursed, like. Don’t get too close to them Partridges or something bad’ll happen to ya,’ Molly said with a smirk. ‘Touch wood, it’s bypassed me dad’s side of the family.’

The ache from Morton’s nose and eye was spreading to his whole head and he was struggling to follow what Molly was telling him. ‘Right. So, one of your dad’s older brothers died in the war, a second disappeared—your aunt tried to find him with no luck—and you want me to try and track him down?’

   ‘That’s it!’ she praised. ‘You got it in one.’

   Morton sipped his tea. ‘Okay, so what can you tell me about the four siblings?’

   ‘Well, not much really,’ Molly replied. ‘Me dad never used to talk much about any of his family. Think it was too difficult for him, you know?’ She took in a long breath and looked upward, presumably for inspiration. ‘I can tell you their names: Herbert, Ernest, Nellie and Alfie—that was me dad. He was born in 1910, the youngest of the four of ’em. They was all born in Stratford in the East End. I never knew me grandparents, but I believe they was called Arthur and Maud Partridge. Me dad died in 1995, rest his soul.’

   Morton jotted down the basic information. ‘Great. And what about this mysterious uncle, Ernest. What do you know about him and his disappearance?’

   ‘Well, all’s I know is that he vanished into thin air in 1919, but me Aunt Nellie found other blokes what alsodisappeared under suspicious circumstances around the same time,’ Molly said, standing up and taking a book from the sideboard. ‘It’s all in ’ere. Well, some of it is.’

   Morton took the small book, turning it over and finding that it was an old, water-damaged journal. ‘What is it?’

   ‘I found it in the loft last week when I was sorting through the last bits and bobs of me dad’s. It don’t mean much to me. It was written by me Aunt Nellie. All kinds of theories, poems and notes and dates and what have ya, in there. Some of it’s rubbish and you can’t make head nor tail, but some of it might make sense to a—’ she switched to her posh voice again ‘—forensic genealogist like your good self. But poor old Aunt Nellie never got to the bottom of what happened to her brother before she died herself.’

   Morton took a cursory glance inside the journal. He estimated it to be around twenty pages long, although many pages—as Molly had just suggested—were now totally illegible. He noticed, too, that several had been torn out. He carefully opened the ledger and read the simple lines written neatly on the first page. An Investigation into the Mysterious Disappearance of Ernest George Partridge.

   ‘You said your aunt Nellie died trying to find out about Ernest’s disappearance. What happened to her?’

   ‘It weren’t talked about,’ she said quietly, as if not wanting to be overhead. ‘It was all hush hush, if you know what I mean.’

   Morton nodded but didn’t know what she meant. ‘Well, I’ll find out,’ he said, taking out his mobile phone and taking a photograph of the first page. Then, he carefully turned it over and photographed the second page.

   ‘What ya doing? Just keep hold of it—give it back when you’re done,’ Molly said.

   ‘Are you sure?’ Morton checked.

   ‘Oh, yeah. Them pages is hard enough to read as it is and there’s hardly any of ’em,’ she said. ‘Last thing you need is to have to keep looking on a flippin’ phone.’

   ‘Okay, thanks,’ Morton said. He usually wasn’t comfortable with taking a client’s property away, but in this case, with the journal’s illegibility, he thought it a sensible decision.

   He sipped his tea, staring at the rough Partridge tree he’d sketched out in his notebook while he tried to think past his headache to see if he had any further questions. If he hadn’t been feeling quite so wretched, he was sure he would have had plenty more to ask. But the tree, with some approximate names, dates and locations, would likely suffice as a starting point. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you get on with your packing and I’ll make a start on this when I get home.’

   ‘Blimey, that was quick,’ Molly said. ‘You got everything what you needed?’

   ‘I think so, yes,’ Morton answered, placing his notepad and Nellie’s journal into his bag. ‘Thank you for the tea and biscuits,’ he said. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

   ‘And you,’ she said, standing to see him out. ‘Good luck with that big shiner of yours. Hope they find the bloke what did it.’

   ‘Thanks,’ Morton said, opening the front door and stepping out onto the path.

   ‘See them lovely looking huts across the way?’ Molly said, pointing to two long single-story buildings fronted with black wood and glass at the top of a field on the other side of the road.

   ‘Yep,’ Morton said, trying and failing to fully open his bruised and painful eye.

   ‘Them’s the hopper huts we used to come down to every year. Generations of the Partridges stayed up there.’

   ‘But they look really modern,’ Morton commented, wondering if his vision was failing him.

   ‘Oh, yeah, they are. Only been there a couple of years. But they’re on the site of the old ones and made to look like a bit like what they used to. You can stay in ’em—they’re on that Airbnb. Bit more luxurious than what we had as kids, mind you.’

   ‘I bet,’ Morton replied. ‘Right. Thanks again. I’ll be in touch. Goodbye.’

   ‘See ya,’ Molly said, closing the door.

   Morton walked quickly to his car, climbed in, lowered the visor and took another look in the mirror. It was a really big shiner. And it had got worse since he’d left this morning. He started the engine, programmed in the Satnav to take him home, but just before he pulled away, he wanted to double-check that he’d read something correctly in Nellie’s journal. He took it out of the bag and flicked through to the page in question.

​

The Hop-picker Murders: potential victims

Jack Barlow - disappeared 1918

Ernest Partridge - disappeared 1919

Freddie Sparrow - disappeared 1920

Ginger Hester - disappeared 1920

​

Despite Morton’s head feeling as though it no longer belonged to his body, he had to admit that he was intrigued by the case. If he were going to pursue a career in television, then this would be a good case to go out on.