The Case of the Forsaken Child by Alison Golden & Grace Dagnall

Author:Alison Golden & Grace Dagnall
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Mesa Verde Publishing
Published: 2020-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY

“NOR TO ME, lad.” Graham stood and tipped his head back, draining the last of his tea. “Good cuppa that, just what the doctor ordered. Thank you.” He put away his notebook and shrugged on his jacket. “So, Mrs. Morgenstern, you’ll be in touch if the car moves again, or if you see anyone nosing about?”

“Depend on me, Inspector. Consider it as good as done. I say, what do we have to call Constable Barnwell now?” she asked as she showed them to the door. “After all his medals from the Queen? I wasn’t sure how to address him when he came last week.”

“PC Barnwell is perfectly fine, Mrs. Morgenstern,” Roach said, kindly.

“He’s not a ‘Sir’ yet then?” the elderly lady asked, half-seriously. “People who show up to Buckingham Palace in their finery normally come out with a knighthood, don’t they?”

“Not yet, he isn’t. But you never know what he might get up to next.” Graham politely thanked Mrs. Morgenstern for her time, handed her his card, and headed back to the car with Roach.

“Imagine it,” Jim said. “’Arise, Sir Bazza’.”

“I can see him now, swinging into a garden party under a Sea King chopper,” Graham added. “The Dangling White Knight of Gorey.”

Both men managed to close their doors before being overcome with laughter, a welcome respite from the strain of the past few days.

Graham pulled out of Mrs. Morgenstern’s driveway and onto the long track to the Naismith’s farmhouse. Whilst he carefully navigated the muddy, pitted dirt, Roach recovered from the giggles. “They’d make a fortune selling all this off,” he said, looking around. “The housing developers will be queuing up to grab a piece when the Naismiths are ready to sell.”

The battered Vauxhall they were seeking was parked despondently a few yards from the front door to the farmhouse. Its original forest green colour had faded, the chassis leached and rusted by the elements. Dents were evident in places, patches of sanded down filler in others. It was an unglamorous presentation, even for a thirty-year-old clunker. It sat at a twenty-degree angle to the farmhouse like it had landed there after being tossed and abandoned.

The farmhouse was a large, symmetrical, boxy construction. It had good-sized windows and a sturdy wooden front door that was adorned with only a small diamond bevelled glass window and an old iron knocker. The scruffy front garden was bordered by a picket fence badly in need of a coat of creosote, the grass a little too long to be neat. It was divided into two by a paved path and surrounded by borders of hardy, green shrubs and bare earth.

“The car seems out of place,” Graham said.

Roach looked around. “It looks totally in place, if you ask me,” he said.

“I mean, it’s shoddily parked.”

“Yeah… and?” Roach was genuinely confused.

“As if whoever drove it arrived in a hurry, threw it down, and left it there before rushing off.”

“Maybe they’re just poor at parking. It’s not like they have any white lines to guide them.

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