The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7), Nathan Goodwin [little red riding hood ebook TXT] 📗

derisive rolling of her eyes. It was only when he had shown her the online menu for the Bell Inn, suggesting it as a late-breakfast destination, that she began to calm.

Hungry and rattled, they reached the pub mid-morning. Grace had inexplicably cried for the entirety of the twenty-one-mile journey. Carrot sticks, Peppa Pig videos, nursery rhymes and a variety of toys had done little to subdue her.

‘Great. I hope she’s not sickening for something just before the party,’ Juliette commented, as Morton parked the car beside the pub. She exhaled, climbed out and proceeded to unfold the pushchair, before removing Grace from her car seat. Finally, she stopped crying.

Morton looked up at the old two-storey building. It was painted brilliant white, the lower half plastered and the upper half cladded in weather-boarding. Sandwiched between the two storeys was the name of the pub in large golden lettering. With the roof in terracotta tiles, it was the quintessential Kentish pub.

‘Brilliant,’ Morton mumbled, as he approached the front door. The website had expounded its range of wonderful menu options, yet had failed to mention anywhere the crucial fact that the pub was shut. Closed down. Empty. They had just driven all this way with a screaming child for nothing. Excellent.

‘Oh, you’re joking,’ Juliette sighed, when she too realised that they had wasted their journey here.

‘No lemon sole goujons for us, then,’ Morton lamented, pressing his nose to the grimy window. Inside was completely devoid of furniture. At the back of the room he could just make out the open fireplace where the bodies had been discovered in 1963. Zooming in on his mobile, he took a picture of the fireplace for the case file.

‘I was just thinking,’ he said.

‘Dangerous,’ Juliette quipped.

‘Do you fancy popping to Maidstone for lunch?’

Juliette shot him a dubious look. ‘No, I don’t. I’m guessing you don’t, either. You actually want to visit the Kent History and Library Centre. Right?’

‘Er…’

‘Look, if you need to go there then just drop us home and go—as long as you’re back before half past two when I need to leave for work.’

‘Sure?’

‘Very—I just want to go home now and sulk,’ she answered, putting Grace back into her car seat.

Morton smiled and collapsed the pushchair, appreciating his normal little family unit. Over the next few days, if his Aunty Margaret did arrive, all that normality might well go flying into the wind with the conjoining of his biological and adoptive families. It was something that he absolutely craved and dreaded in equal measure.

He slowly pulled away from the pub and Grace began to wail.

The glass doors to the Kent History and Library Centre parted in an automatic welcome; Morton stepped inside and headed to the main reception desk, where he received an access card on a lanyard from the smiling young librarian. Walking with a purposeful gait, Morton headed into the far-left corner of the building and swiped his access card to gain entry to the archive reading room. Aside from the man single-finger typing at a computer keyboard behind the helpdesk, there were just two other researchers occupying spaces at one of the three large tables in the centre of the room. Morton placed his laptop, notepad and pencil on one of the spaces and headed over to a bank of colourful folders, which provided indexes to all of the archive holdings. From a run of blue files, Morton selected Parish Records Addington-Bearsted and carried it over to his desk, where he flipped through until he reached the parochial records pertaining to Aldington. Hopefully somewhere in here he would find documents which might shed some light on Ann Fothergill’s time in the village.

The records covered a range of topics and a range of dates. He slowly ran his finger down the lists, past the baptisms, marriages and burials to the other documents relating to the organisation of the village. Workhouse registers. Rates. Minutes of the Parochial Church Council. Bastardy Bonds. Settlement & Removal Orders.

Under the heading of ‘Overseers—Miscellaneous’ his finger stopped on a particular record dated 1824. Survey of the Parish by William Stiles giving name of occupiers, acreages and land use. Probably compiled for tithe and rating purposes. This paper is complete.

Morton filled in the white document request slip and carried it over to the man who was still single-finger typing behind the desk. ‘Hi. I’d like to order this, please,’ he said, handing over the slip of paper.

The man took it with a near-smile. ‘It’s on microfilm. Is that okay?’

‘I might need to get copies. Is it alright to photograph the screen?’

The man grimaced. ‘Afraid not—the Church of the Latter-Day Saints owns the copyright—you’ll need to print out any copies you need.’

Morton held back from his desire to argue the absurdities of the Mormons begrudging his photographing a document on-screen compared to printing it out. Clearly this couldn’t be the case. ‘Right.’

‘It’ll be a few minutes,’ the man said, carrying the slip out through a door behind him.

Returning to his seat, Morton continued scanning the list of parish records, identifying several more documents for the relevant period which might be of interest. Some, he realised, would be contained on the microfilm that he had just ordered. He reached the end of the parish of Aldington. Only a few further documents were to be found in the small window of time in which he was searching. He completed two further request slips and walked them over to the helpdesk, just as the single-finger typist reappeared carrying the small black box of microfilm.

‘Here you go.’

Morton thanked him and carried it over to the reader, where he loaded the film and buzzed through to the correct section—Aldington P4/18/1. The records had a preamble, handwritten by the compiler in 1824. An account of the admeasurement of the Parish of Aldington in the County of Kent, giving an