Chapter 12

Dacre Lawrence was getting impatient. He’d allocated half an hour for his visit to Lillian McFry, and he saw, by a swift glance at his watch, that his time was almost up. He was worried that she knew more about the value of those medals of hers than had at first appeared. He shifted in his chair, leaning forward towards the woman in an attempt to give the impression of candidness:

“Mrs McFry, I am not sure whether you know, but I am a member of the board of governors of the North of England Museum of Labour History.” He paused, for reaction, but could discern none.

“Last month,” he continued, “I was approached by a dealer in antiques who mentioned to me that he had recently been invited by yourself to inspect Thomas’ medals, and to offer you a view on their value.”

Lillian, of course, knew this. She had reached that point in her life when she felt her allotted years were about to run out. She sometimes felt a strange sense of wonder that, after over a century, she was still very much alive, and living independently to boot - even if she also knew that being a centenarian didn’t have the social cachet it might once have had. Why, it seemed almost anyone could reach a hundred these days, with a little application. Hers, though, must have been an accidental achievement, since she hadn’t particularly aimed for it, nor had she modified her lifestyle much in its winning. It was only last year, after all, that she had stopped smoking the ten cigarettes a day that had been her habit for almost ninety years. But she had to face it: the odds were very much stacked against her seeing her 103^rd birthday. So, when she had started the process of tidying up her affairs, the question had naturally arisen as to what should happen to the three medals she stored at the back of her sideboard. She had found the address of a local auction house in the telephone directory, and had arranged for the medals to be inspected by one of their experts, who had made the trip to her small bungalow at her behest. He had been a particularly odious individual, she remembered, and probably not at all the ‘expert’ he had claimed to be. He had laid them out on the small dining table in the corner of Lillian’s lounge, and fingered them without the respect Lillian thought was their due. “These would be of some interest to a collector, Mrs McFry,” he had told her, “but not, I’m afraid, of any great monetary value. If we were to take these to auction, I expect we might raise a couple of hundred pounds each. More, as a set.” He had paused to await her reaction. When there was none, he went on: “Of course, you would incur our standard fees for our sale.” He had turned to look again at the three medals on the table, and seemed mesmerised for a minute.

Lillian McFry was disappointed, although she masked it well. In all her long years, she had never once played poker, but anyone who knew what she was thinking at that point and could match it to her expression would have marked her out as a player with which to contend.

“And the certificate?” she asked. He looked up at her. “I’m afraid I …” he said, meaning to ask her what she meant, but even as he did so he caught sight of the edge of a yellowing piece of paper half-hidden beneath the tissue paper in the box. Carefully, he pulled it out from the base of the cardboard box, unfolded it gingerly and began to read it. He had read barely a paragraph before he felt himself flush. His hands developed a perceptible tremor as his heart began to race, and he could feel the first beads of sweat breaking out on his brow.

*

Harry’s trip to the airport started with the familiar walk across the gardens of Hamilton Square, towards the red-bricked tower with its strident, Edwardian advertisement for ‘Frequent Electric Trains’ that marked the tube station. He had managed to avoid Mrs Shipman again on his descent to the street, but he knew it was only a matter of time before his luck ran out. He’d have to find that rent money from somewhere, or Harry McFry, GPI would soon be plain old Harry McFry.

As he crossed the square, the elegant facades of the buildings around him washed out in the slow drizzle of rain, he saw that the shop on the corner near the station was open. Good – there was a chance that at least one piece of this jigsaw was about to slot into place.

As he pushed open the door to the ‘Birkenhead Military Emporium’, a bell rang above his head, alerting the owner to come to the counter from a doorway near the back. Harry brushed a few drops from his coat as the proprietor caught his eye.

“Well, if it ain’t old Harry McFry!” His voice was casual and welcoming.

“How are you, Stan? Still flogging those Nazi helmets?” Stan Redfearn smiled back at Harry. It was a long-standing bone of contention with Harry that his old friend had chosen to make his living from selling memorabilia from the war. All about the shop were cabinets displaying cap badges, medals and other items from military uniforms, and here and there a shop dummy stood, incongruously, wearing a full outfit. They reminded Harry of outsized versions of the Action Man figures he’d played with as a child.

“It pays the bills, Harry. And a little bird tells me that’s more than some people are doing!” Stan hadn’t meant this to be as wounding as a casual observer might have thought – if he’d known exactly how precarious his friend’s position really was, he may have chosen his words more carefully.

Harry shrugged off the comment, and pulled up a chair near the glass cabinet counter where an old cash register sat. “Sit down, Stan – I’ve got something I need your help with”. Stan dragged another chair from the wall, and they were sat facing each other when Harry took the medals from out of his pocket. “What do you make of these?”

His companion took one look at them, shook his head from side to side slightly, and said only “If those are what I think they are, Harry, then old ma Shipman’s going to be getting her rent on time this month – and for a few more months after that, as well!”

Chapter 11

Harry McFry was starting to feel more than a little perturbed. Over two hours of patient interrogation of the census database held by Ancestry.com had left him bewildered and annoyed. His search for the ancestors of Laurel McFry was drawing a blank, and he had more than once cursed himself for failing to take more details down from the lady when he’d met her in the library that previous evening. ‘Assume’ wasn’t just making an ass of Harry, it was laughing in his ear. And another thing, he'd thought – why hadn’t he brought with him from home his own family history files? ‘You’re slipping, Harry,’ a small voice in the back of his mind was saying.

McFry was not a common name. He was sure that, when he’d researched his own line through the 1901 census back to the 1841, there hadn’t been many more than a couple of dozen McFry’s at each enumeration. That was how come he knew so much about Laurel’s family. Or had thought he did. It had been easy enough, at the time, to take a couple of sideways excursions into the four or five McFry families showing on each census, if only so he could exclude them from his research. Of course, given precisely that the name wasn’t so commonplace, there was a statistical probability that he and Laurel might indeed be related – distant ‘cousins’ as she had put it. But nothing in his previous trawlings had linked the families he had found. It would take much more work in the parish records if that was ever to happen.

He’d promised to report in to Laurel McFry later that day. Now, he was already framing his excuses and preparing himself for feasting on a dish he rarely ate, and hardly knew the taste of: humble pie. He picked up the small, leather portfolio that was on the corner of his desk and examined it again. Whoever ‘DKL’ was, they clearly knew a little about the McFry family. And who had taken the trouble to warn him not to go to his meeting with Laurel last night? These were questions he was still mulling over when the telephone rang. It was his sister-in-law, her pleasantly slow, warm drawl easily recognisable when she said the simple words “That you, Harry?”

“Sure it is, Carrie”. Even as he replied, alarm bells were ringing. Dammit, he’d forgotten that he’d agreed to go to the airport to make sure his young nephew arrived back safely from a trip to Madrid!

“Shouldn’t you not be here now?” she asked – still warm, despite the admonishment in her tone.

“Just leaving when you rang. Any news on the flight?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“Thirty minute delay. So you should still make it,” she said.

It was at times like these Harry knew he could do with a secretary, someone to help organise his day, make sure he was where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be. But the balance sheet of Harry McFry Genealogical Private Investigations wasn’t healthy enough to warrant another member of staff. Of course, as far as the outside world knew, he did have a secretary working for him. She was in her late 50’s, turned up punctually every day for work, and served as the butt of Harry’s excuses when things were going wrong. ‘Doris’ got the blame for just about everything in the office: if he couldn’t find a file, he told his client Doris had mislaid it. A payment overdue? Doris was to blame. Poor Doris was a convenient shield for when things were going pear-shaped. Just a shame she didn’t exist.

His younger brother Alan had met Carrie while they were both at university. Shortly after they both graduated, they’d marred and begun their family, settled into life in a large house beside Birkenhead Park. By the time they divorced, they were a nuclear unit of five, plus an old golden retriever, a couple of cats and a hutch of rabbits at the bottom of the long garden that led down to the park. Harry enjoyed the term ‘nuclear family’ – it always seemed appropriate for a world where divorce increasingly split and atomised couples and their children. Alan had moved out to Spain. He and Harry weren’t close, but they kept in touch fitfully via e-mails and the rare telephone calls Alan made home, usually when he was drunk. Meanwhile, without children of his own from a failed marriage, Harry had grown increasingly fond of his sister-in-law, and closer to his three nephews – the oldest of which he’d promised to collect today on his return from a visit to his father’s. Adam was a bright kid, but just twelve, and the thought of him stepping off a plane and making his way through a crowded arrivals hall with no-one to greet him wasn’t one Harry relished. Carrie worked, and so far as she knew Harry always seemed to be hanging around with time on his hands, so the last time he’d been round there for a meal she’d thought nothing of asking him if he minded meeting Adam.

“I’ll ring you when we’re on the way back,” he told her.

“Thanks, Harry.” He waited to see if she was going to say anything else, but there was silence, so he replaced the receiver with a hasty “No problem.”

As he grabbed his coat to leave – he had an hour to make it to the airport – he seemed to have a second thought and, turning back to his desk he plucked the three medals from the box where they lay, stuffed them in his pocket and left the office.

Chapter 10

As Danny Longhurst sat staring at a microfiche reader in the local records room at Birkenhead Library, he was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. He was worried – worried that maybe Harry McFry wasn’t taking Laurel’s story of a missing family seriously, and anxious that he’d made a mistake in sending him the medals so soon. What if McFry didn’t make the connections? So far, he couldn’t even be sure that Laurel was safe. But he knew Harry’s reputation as a genealogical private investigator. He’d have to relax – let time take it’s course. Not easy, when you knew what Danny knew. He pulled himself back to his task in hand – researching a book on the history of illegitimacy in Birkenhead. He already had a working title for the book, something suitably alliterative that his publisher had initially baulked at, and was almost finished his research phase. Taking up his pencil, he pulled himself closer to the microfiche screen – co-incidentally, Harry McFry’s favourite – and continued the steady, slow slog of taking notes from old copies of the Birkenhead Beagle.

*

Lillian McFry was starting to relax as Dacre Lawrence began to outline how he had known her husband.

“I can’t tell you the impression your husband made on me, Mrs McFry,” Lawrence told her.” He watched her carefully for reaction.

“When I was at university, I was quite the political activist. Thomas McFry once came to speak at the Oxford Union. He was a great orator, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you” - and he emphasised the ‘you’ with a slight lift of his tea cup, almost as a toast to her – “he could hold an audience like no-one I’ve seen since. It’s such a shame he died when he did. Nowadays, we’re accustomed to politicians hanging up their hats when they reach their ‘50’s. In those days, that would be the age many entered parliament.”

He paused as he saw that Lillian had shrunk a little. It was painful for her to recall how her husband’s dream of becoming an MP had been cut short by his untimely death. She seemed to drift off for a second, her mind elsewhere.

“Yes, there’s no doubt that his was a career cut short before it’s time. He had the same heart condition as my father, you know”. Here, Dacre saw that she had focused on him again. “Did you know they were cousins?” He was pushing all the buttons, now.

“I never knew my husband’s cousins,” Lillian said. “And if I did, I’m afraid that I just don’t recall them now. I’m 102, you know!” There was a tetchiness in her voice which alarmed him. In an instant, he retorted:

“Yes, I do! It’s hard to believe it, though, when I look at you. I see so many patients who are twenty years younger who are in much worse health. You’re clearly made of strong stuff, Mrs McFry. It’s quite remarkable that you are living here alone, at your age.” He hoped he’d softened her again. He was impatient to get the business of his visit over with.

“I wonder, Mrs McFry, whether Thomas ever mentioned anything about his campaign medals?” He raised an eyebrow, quizically, placing his cup back on its saucer.

So that was it, thought Lillian - he was after her medals! “I wonder, Dr Lawrence, how you come to know about the medals?” she asked, fixing him with a stare.

Dacre Lawrence had been prepared for this, but even so, as he looked squarely at the old woman with her cataracted eyes, he was reminded how his father used to look at him – as if he was a worthless creature, sullied by an obsession with money. How much did Lillian McFry really know about the medals and, more importantly, what else was in the box they were stored in?

Chapter 9

Laurel McFry was sipping a café latte in the coffee shop tucked away at the back of her favourite bookshop, whiling away time before an appointment with the bank. She was one of those rare and fortunate individuals sometimes encountered in life who didn’t need to work for their living. When her father died, Laurel inherited from him shares in the family business, a large house by the coast and income from a capital sum which, if invested sensibly (her father’s solicitor had assured her), would be more than enough to meet her needs. She had not been spoilt as a child, so had grown up knowing the value of money as well as the price of everything, something her father had been keen to teach her after her mother died when she was just seven years old.

She thought about her meeting with Harry McFry the night before. He’d been younger than she’d expected, from his telephone voice. She knew his reputation, of course. Had seen the write up of the Hartshorn case in the local papers, and felt if anyone could work out what had happened, Harry could. But she hadn’t liked the way he’d dismissed her telling him they were related. She knew she was only a ‘dabbler’ in genealogy when set beside someone with McFry’s expertise, but from the start her approach to researching her family history had been meticulous. She felt sure all her work was accurate – those hours spent poring over census records and microfiche, wheedling out tiny facts that helped piece together exactly who Laurel Blyth McFry was. Maybe Harry McFry wasn’t as smart as he liked (or liked other people) to think he was? Or then again, maybe she hadn’t been as diligent as she’d thought? Yet, when she’d first seen Harry as he entered the local records room, her instinctive thought was ‘I know this man’. She knew that, if she was right, she shared only a tiny fraction of the DNA handed down from their common ancestor. Perhaps it was the gene for doggedness, she mused.

Laurel had been driven to start her family history studies shortly after the death of her father. Here she was, alone now in the world without siblings or even aunts and uncles to turn to. She’d needed all the strength of character she developed as an only child to cope with the grieving, and like so many others in her position, the first, tentative need to know more about her parents, their lives and their ancestry, had grown to become almost an obsession. She sometimes imagined herself at a support group, standing in front of a circle of people and exclaiming ‘My name is Laurel McFry, and I’m a genealogist’.

Fortunately, her private income gave her plenty of opportunity to develop her new interest. Yet, she was careful in what she spent. Someone else in her circumstances might have merely hired a researcher to go off and complete her family tree for her – but that wasn’t Laurel’s way. Her father’s death may have been the spark that ignited her interest, but there were other drivers, too. Of her mother, she knew less than you might imagine. Her father, in his grief, had been reluctant to talk about her to Laurel. As the young girl grew up, she sensed his reluctance and held inside her all the questions she wanted to ask. She learned to lock them away, and only occasionally as a young woman did she pause to think who Colleen McFry was. She remembered the beautiful, warm woman who had played in the kitchen with her, taken her to school, fussed over her when she was ill, fed ducks with her in the park. These were memories from which her father was strangely absent - a time when Philip McFry had been busy tending to the affairs of the family business, so her first bond was with Colleen.

She remembered, of course, the funeral. All those strange faces, everyone dressed in black including, for the first time in her life, herself – a peculiarly itchy, black dress, she recalled. A day or two before, in the period that was a daze of grief, her father had somehow found time to take young Laurel to the huge department store in town to buy it for her. Trying it on and looking in the mirror, she had been fascinated by how grown-up it made her look. Then, standing on a wooden board beside the grave, watching as the box her mother was in was slowly covered by handfuls of soil as the mourners passed by.

Another sip of her coffee: it was cold now, and Laurel realised that somehow, another half hour of her life had been spent indulgently reminiscing. It was time she headed to see her bank manager.

*

Intrigued as Harry was by the three medals in the cardboard box, he knew they’d have to wait. No accompanying details, just three beribboned medals, with the inscription ‘LB, 1937’ on the back of them. Maybe he’d get a call from someone asking if he’d got them, apologising for forgetting to include a letter explaining what they wanted Harry to do with them? That was one of the pleasures of being a genealogical private eye – there was always something interesting around the corner. For now, though, he had work to do. He logged onto his Ancestry.com account, dragged a cigarette from the pack on the desk, and set to work hunting out his namesakes.

Chapter 8

In a large, open-plan office in a modern building overlooking Cardiff Bay, Gilbert was hard at work. A dozen or so people sat at desks spread all about the office, the steady hum of the air conditioning and the occasional tap of a keyboard the only sounds. Then, a large, network printer that sat squat on a desk in the middle of the office burst into life, and began churning out pages of print. It was the cue for Dave Morris to jump up from his seat, move across to the printer and grab the papers. For a moment or two he stared at the closely-printed data. A smile flicked across his face and, still reading the papers, he headed towards the desk of his section advisor, Tom Gauntless.

Gauntless was a dour man, not much one for praising his staff, yet respected by them all. Almost single handedly he had worked to establish the Family Health Services Counter Fraud Operation which his civil service masters now allowed him to manage. Working from this one national office, his team devoted their energies to identifying, investigating and preparing prosecutions of doctors, dentists, pharmacists and opticians who might be on the make. The multi-billion pound budget of the health service was easy cover for those few professionals who wanted to take advantage, and it was Gauntless and his men and women who were paid to stop them. He looked up as his young deputy approached, noticing he seemed to be pleased with himself.

“It’s Gilbert, sir. I think he’s onto something”. “Gilbert” was Morris’ baby. And an expensive one, at that. It was a complex piece of computer code that acted as a ‘robot’ by scouring its way through the countless millions of transactions that took place in family health services every day. Morris had picked the idea up from the Inland Revenue, who were using similar programmes to track tax evasion on internet-based auction sites. Nevertheless, the ‘idea’ had cost Gauntlet’s office over £300,000 in development time alone and, to date, had produced little of much worth. In fact, Dave had been starting to worry that his own judgement would be in question if something wasn’t found to justify the costs pretty soon.

Morris handed him the sheaf of print-outs. “Here it is, sir. Have a look at this,” he said, pointing at a line on the report “And here. It’s the same pattern each time.”

Gauntless wasn’t sure, at first, what the report was saying. Slowly, however, he got the picture. If “Gilbert” was right, someone had been accessing personal medical records all over the country that they had no right to see.

“Call a team meeting in half an hour, Morris. I think this one might be serious.” Inside Dave Morris’s head a battery of fireworks were going off – his faith in Gilbert had paid off.

*

Meanwhile, McFry’s office had warmed up enough for him to take off his coat and hang it on the hook next to the door. He dumped the envelopes in his in-tray, and started to finger the package. It was a padded envelope, about eight inches by twelve. Postcode indistinct. No return address. His address written in a tiny, scrawling hand. Quite heavy. He tore at the self-seal strip and pulled the envelope open. Inside, no note – just a buff-coloured cardboard box, perhaps four inches square and an inch deep. He slowly removed the lid, and stared for a moment at the three war medals that were tucked inside, nestling in a bed of tissue paper. This was getting interesting, he thought.

Chapter 7

“Haven’t seen you in the Cavendish for a while, Harry. What’s the matter – got someone new in tow?”

Charlie might have been right, except that Harry hadn’t been in a relationship – at least, that was, not with anything other than a bottle – for months now. Truth was, Harry preferred to drink alone. It was easier that way. He could spread himself thin across any number of bars, and no-one needed to know much about him. He knew it would be a while before he could go to the Cavendish again. People talk, and they have an awkward habit of talking the truth. All in all, it was better he wasn’t known as a regular anywhere or anyplace in town. Nobody wanted to hire a drunk private investigator. For the same reason, he was careful where he shopped -even the most hardened shopkeeper or till operator might raise an eyebrow if someone was calling in for a bottle of bourbon every day.

Harry was circumspect in his reply to Charlie: “You know how it is," he said. He thought he’d covered himself with the throwaway remark. But his voice had been flat, and Charlie knew his old pal well enough to know that something wasn’t well in the state of Harry McFry.

As he handed Harry the package, together with a whole other bunch of other mail, Charlie said: “You wanna talk about it?” Harry signed the proof of delivery with a flourish. “Not just now, Charlie. We’ll catch up soon – promise you,” as he touched his friend on the shoulder. Harry would have enjoyed nothing more than a couple of hours over lunchtime unburdening himself to Charlie. But that was the way to lose a friend. Anyway, he knew he had work to do – a census index to interrogate, and a jigsaw of events to piece together that was starting to make him wonder if he might, this time, have bitten off more than he could chew.

He turned away, clutching the mail tight to his side as he made to open the door.

“Harry…” Charlie called out. He’d seen the ‘final demand’ stamped on one of the envelopes he’d handed him. “Don’t be a stranger.” McFry smiled at him, turned back to the foyer and made towards the stairs.

En route to his office, Harry checked his mail. Charlie had been right - he still owed his history book club £25.99 for the ‘Selection of the Month’ he’d forgotten to cancel. Not a bad book, he remembered – but Waterstone’s had been advertising the book for half the price just last week. Mental note: keep on top of these things, Harry, or they’ll come back and bite you. Nothing much else apart from a bank statement. Except, of course, that package he’d signed for.

*

Even as Harry was wondering what the package might contain, Lillian McFry was standing in the kitchen pouring out a cup of tea for her guest. She was a mere 70 miles away (or thereabouts, depending on whether you want to rely on the RAC or the AA website to calculate the distance) - but for all Harry was aware, it might as well have been a lifetime ago. Sat now in a bulky armchair in the corner of Lillian McFry’s lounge, Dr Dacre Lawrence took the opportunity of his host’s absence to look around him. It was a small room, but even so the single bar of the electric fire, glowing bright orange beside its pale neighbour, fought hard to take the chill away. It was the kind of room he’d been in a hundred times or more during his professional career as a doctor. Dr Lawrence glanced at the sideboard, where an old clock ticked away the minutes in a charmless fashion. It was almost hidden by a forest of framed photographs, most of them faded now and suggesting (as if he didn’t already know) that the owner was older than the average resident of Vale View.

Presently, Lillian appeared at the door to the lounge, carrying a tray that held a single cup of tea, a bowl of sugar and a small plate of chocolate bourbon biscuits. Dacre Lawrence wondered immediately how he could appear polite, yet not have to eat a biscuit he’d managed to avoid in life for over half a century.

Lillian set the tray on a small table beside the chair where Lawrence sat. She had been immediately impressed by the doctor when she opened the door. He wore a smart, triple-breasted suit and had the bearing of someone who ‘knew the world’. She wasn’t sure she liked him – something about his smile made her shudder, inwardly – but he was all politeness when he asked her if she was Mrs Lillian McFry, and introduced himself. For his part, Lawrence made a measured assessment of his prey. There was no doubting that she looked much younger than someone who had lived out the century, and much less frail than he had expected. He couldn't help but wonder that there was more to Lillian McFry than met the eye. He cursed himself, inwardly, for not thinking to bring her a small token such as a bunch of flowers.

As soon as she’d ushered him into her lounge, her priority had been to make sure he had a cup of tea, at least, and – if possible – could be persuaded to eat at least one or two of the biscuits she’d kept in a tin in the cupboard for precisely that day when an unexpected visitor arrived.

“Won’t you have a biscuit with your tea, Dr Lawrence?” she asked. The old man felt himself shrink, inwardly, then – after gathering his strength – replied “Well, maybe just one.” His hand reached out gingerly towards one of the bourbon creams. With a palpable displeasure he managed to mask behind a smile, he bit into the sugary confection, and in a Proustian instant he was transported back to his late teenage years.

Dacre Lawrence had done well for himself. Always bright at school, a scholarship had sent him up to Oxford to study medicine. His training alone would have equipped him to make money, but he had in addition the sort of charm that could wheedle blood from the proverbial stone. His time at Oxford had been spent yes, in the ruthless pursuit of medical knowledge, but also – quite deliberately – in chasing the kind of worldly pleasures of which his own father might only ever have dreamed. He remembered how his father would return from work, take residence in his favourite armchair, and savour with relish a mug of fresh, steaming tea and a handful of those same bourbon creams that Dacre hated so much. "You don't need much money for life's simple pleasures - you remember that, son," he had once said to him. Instantly, Dacre had determined to ensure he would accumulate such wealth in his life that this was one piece of fatherly advice he would never have to worry about.

He came, in fact, to think that the Welfare State - the lodestone of his subsequent wealth - had been invented solely to ensure that he would never again have to eat such popular delights as a bourbon cream. Yet Dacre Lawrence also knew when to temper his disdain for the common people, even as he set himself above them. That, he always prided himself, was what made him different from many of his contemporaries. He took a particular pleasure when he saw his former college friends popping up on the television he’d had installed in his flat when he first set up practice. He knew that, while they were famous, he was already (as a doctor) earning more than they were ever likely to. Lawrence never courted fame more than he did money. It was only years later, when the world started to lavish ever-larger sums of money on the famous, that he started to feel the pangs of jealousy rise in his breast.

He took a sip from his tea, looked Lillian McFry straight in the eye, and said; “Madam, I expect you may know why I am here. If you do not, then please let me tell you the little I know about your late husband.” Lillian was startled by his mentioning Thomas so soon. Her husband had died over thirty years ago. Those who had known him - or even of him – were these days few on the ground. Which perhaps explains why she was so easily seduced by Dr Dacre Lawrence, his mellow tones, and his claim of a link to her family.

Chapter 6

As he unlocked the door to his small office, Harry McFry thought he already knew how the day would pan out. He carried with him the small, leather portfolio he’d picked up the night before, during his encounter with the glamorous Laurel McFry – no relation, he was sure, despite her claims. He’d have a quick check on the census records, where he was pretty confident he would find the woman’s ‘missing family.’ McFry had learned the hard way that, when it came to a census, there was no such thing as a missing person. They were always hiding there somewhere. Sure, their name might be miss-spelt. An age could be year or two out, or an index might be so inaccurate as to be laughable. But they were always there, waiting for him to dig them out. They couldn’t hide from Harry McFry.

Pushing open the half-glazed door with the words ‘Harry McFry, Genealogical Private Investigations’ etched into the glass, a brown envelope that had been slid underneath it caught his eye. He picked it up and tossed it casually into his in-tray, where it sat with all the other unopened rent demands from his landlady, the redoubtable Mrs Shipman. Time was not only running out for McFry Investigations – it had grabbed his lame excuses by the hand and jumped into a cab, destination: ‘Bankruptcy’. When he’d set himself up as a genealogical private eye two years ago, his hopes had been high that he could make a go of it. Here was something which brought together his two passions in life: family history research and crime investigation. But, with the exception of the Hartshorn case, the results of which made front page of the Birkenhead Beagle, he had come to rely on bread-and-butter stuff. There were only so many BMD look-ups a guy could do before he went insane.

Moving across to his desk, Harry pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. It was cold in here again. He’d leave his coat on until the old radiator in the corner warmed up the room some more. He fingered the portfolio, pulling open the silk cord that fastened it, lit up his first filter-tip of the day, and sat back in his chair. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, he started to leaf through the papers. Lists of births in the Shropshire area, mainly nineteenth century. Nothing unusual. A couple of Xeroxed photographs of family groups. Harry was beginning to wonder if all he’d picked up was some family historian’s research notes, and then, as he turned another leaf, it hit him like a sock to the jaw: in the middle of the page, capitalised and heavily underlined, were two words which set Harry’s heart racing: ‘James McFry’.

An uneasy feeling began to creep over him. Whatever was going on here, it didn’t make sense. A mystery call warning him to stay away from the library. Laurel McFry’s insistence that she and he were cousins, and her fanciful notion that her family had been ‘stolen’. And now, this. One thing was for sure, this might not be the open-and-shut case he thought it would.

He stubbed out his cigarette and switched on the old IBM that took up most of his desk. A solid, powerful machine that in spite of its age did everything Harry wanted it to.

“Come on there, my beauty – we’ve got work to do!” Sometimes Harry thought this heap of plastic and wires was the only real friend he had left in the world.

Just as the machine powered up, a buzzer sounded in his office. Visitors, Harry thought – things were certainly getting busy round here just now. He pressed an intercom button on his desk. “Yep?” he said.

“To be signed for, Harry. You’ll have to come down.” It was ‘Charlie the Post’. Harry had known Charlie a long while, drinking buddies from the time both their marriages had been foundering on the rocks inside their bourbon glasses. “OK, Charlie – I’ll be right down”. And with that, Harry made his way out of his office, down the corridor and out to the lobby of Meldew Buildings, checking carefully for any sign of Mrs Shipman as he did so.

Chapter 5

On a small estate on the outskirts of Telford, Shropshire, a silver grey Carlsson Mercedes C-class edged its way into Vale View, a tiny cul-de-sac of bungalows. With measured surety, the driver pulled up slowly outside one of them. “This is it, Mr Lawrence,” the driver said, “Number 28.” In the back seat, his passenger had been absorbed reading a file of papers, and had hardly even noticed the car had stopped. He glanced up at the neat little property, before folding away back into its file the foolscap note he’d been reading. The driver stopped the engine, undid his seat-belt and stepped outside the car.

Meanwhile, the elderly gentleman in the back straightened his tie, smoothed the few remaining strands flat over his pate, and clicked closed the briefcase on his lap. It was now or never. He’d waited years for this moment, and finally all his planning would pay off. He might even have licked his lips at the prospect. The driver opened the door for him, and with some difficulty Dr Dacre Lawrence heaved his portly frame from the car. He waved away his driver’s offer of assistance, with a brusque “Wait here for me.”

Lawrence surveyed the bungalow as he made his way up the path to the front door. 1950’s, only one bedroom, he expected. An aspidistra in the front window, just about visible through the dull grey of a net curtain. Well-kept, for sure, but miserably tiny. He looked at his watch: 11 am precisely – his driver knew the store Dr Lawrence set by punctuality. For a moment, he allowed himself to wonder whether the occupant of the house had even the remotest idea that, very shortly, she would be increasing the personal wealth of the already very affluent Lawrence by another £20 million. He very much doubted it. When he’d called to arrange the visit, she had at first taken some convincing, and he had been careful not to give away the real purpose of his visit. But when he had told her that he was a distant relative, and mentioned a few pertinent facts about her late husband, she had softened, and agreed that he should come to see her.

As she heard the car pull up outside her house, Lillian McFry slowly stood up from her seat by the wall-mounted electric fire that had just one bar switched on. She was dressed in her best clothes – her ‘Sunday Best’, she would have called it – and had, for the first time in years, made an effort with her make-up. She caught sight of herself in the oval mirror hung over the fire. She knew she had a good complexion for someone of her advanced age, and rarely now bothered to apply anything but a smear of lipstick. When you reach the age of 102, people had to take you as you were. She was often told that she could pass for someone twenty years younger, but since the world was harsh enough towards those in their 80’s, she didn’t think this counted for much.

Behind the huge leaves of the aspidistra, she thought she could make out the figure of a large man walking up the path from her front gate. So this was Dr Lawrence, who had seemed so insistent on wanting to meet her. She got few visitors these days, and these were always people she knew – a nurse called to see her once a week, and a neighbour popped in now and again. As her old friends and family pre-deceased her one by one, the world she knew had slowly shrunk, leaving her to ponder sometimes why it was that she among them all was still here. It was exciting to be getting a stranger visit her, for a change. At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and she slowly made her way up the corridor from the lounge to answer it.

Chapters 1 - 4

Chapter One

The pale sun was casting its final shadows through the dusty blinds in the office of Harry McFry, as evening beckoned. Just another chilly, late Tuesday afternoon in January in downtown Birkenhead. Outside, the last shoppers were leaving the local Kwik-Save laden with carrier bags, and the manager had already pulled down half of the shutters.

Harry McFry, proprietor of McFry Investigations, was tidying away loose papers from his desk when the telephone rang. His response as he picked up the receiver was automatic: “McFry, GPI. What can I do for you?” For a moment or two, there was silence at the end of the line, until a soft, sultry voice suddenly said: “I need your help, Mr McFry. I need your help more than I’ve ever needed anyone’s help”. There was an urgency hidden amongst the softness of the woman’s voice which made Harry shift uneasily in his chair. He sensed already that his usual double sourmash whisky on the rocks (with a slice of lime) in the saloon bar of the Brass Balance pub across the street from his office was in jeopardy.

“OK, ma’am – I’m listening. What exactly is the problem?” There was another pause, before she went on “Someone’s stolen my family, and I don’t know what to do.” Her voice was soft as a silk scarf – but Harry knew that it was the kind of scarf that could be pulled around your neck, tied tight and, before you knew it you were done for. He wanted to meet this woman – a dame with a silky, soft voice that hid a threat wasn’t that common in Birkenhead, and he felt a curious need to see her.

“I’m going to need some more details. Can you come in to see me?” he said.
“Where are you exactly?” she asked. Harry reeled off his address. “I know it,” she said, “I can be over in ten minutes.” Harry was unaccustomed to such pushiness. The janitor would be shutting the building up in a few minutes. “No, wait a minute. I’m closing up shop for the day just now, but I’ve got a slot around 10am tomorrow if that’s any good.”
“I need to sort this out now, Mr McFry. Is there anywhere else we can meet?” There was urgency in the voice again.

Harry thought for a moment. “Do you know the local records room in the Public Library?” She did. “Well, I’ll be at the third microfiche reader from the left as you enter the room. I can be there in ten.” Harry was just about to hang up, when it struck him he’d better find out who this was. “Hey, lady” he said, “what’s your name, by the way?”
Her voice was hesitant again. “It’s McFry,” she said, before hanging up.

Chapter Two

Harry sat and stared at the telephone, his mind replaying the conversation he’d just had. “McFry”, he said, to no-one in particular. “That name spells trouble in any dictionary you’d care to consult.” There were only three local McFry families he knew of, and he sure as hell would have remembered if he’d come across such a sultry sounding dame before now.

He shuffled the few last papers into an untidy pile and opened the drawer to drop them in, but they were still in his hand when he caught sight of the half empty bottle of Jim Beam at the back of the drawer. He paused, licked his lips, and looked long and hard at the bottle, like he’d never seen it before and needed to remember every detail. With scarcely another thought, he dropped the papers in on top of it, slammed the drawer shut, shrugged himself into a nondescript brown coat, pulled his hat down across his brow and left.

“Evening, Mr McFry,” It was Henry, the janitor, who stopped his mopping for a moment as Harry walked past. Henry took his job seriously. Nothing happened in Meldew Buildings that he didn’t know about.
“Evening, Henry, how’s it going?”
“You know.”
“Yeah! See you tomorrow.”
“So long!”

Harry took three steps towards the stairs, when he heard his office phone ringing again. He paused, began to turn back, then shook his head and continued towards the stairs. The phone continued its dull ringing, like it had nothing better to do for now, so it might as well ring.
Just as Harry was about to enter the stairwell, Henry called out, “You might want to watch yourself, Mr McFry. Old Ma Shipman’s down there. And she’s on the warpath.”

Harry stopped. He was three weeks behind with the rent. “Thanks, Henry,” he mumbled conspiratorially, at the same time turning back to the office to follow his well-worn path to the fire exit. The phone was still ringing. Something made him decide to answer it.
“McFry.” Terse. No nonsense. To the point. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be late for his date with the mystery woman.

The man’s voice on the other end of the phone was quietly forceful – clearly someone who was used to getting his own way. He spoke only a dozen words before the line went dead - but it was clear he meant them.
“Stay away from that library, McFry. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
Harry stood for a moment with the handset buzzing in his ear, before replacing it on its cradle. He opened his desk drawer, took out the bottle of Jim Beam, opened it and took a short, yet deliberate pull on its contents, before slapping the cork back and laying it carefully back in its home. He then opened the drawer beneath, took out a squat, snub-nosed revolver and, after tucking it into the holster under his arm, fastened the buttons on his coat and set off for the library.

Chapter Three

As he entered the street, Harry McFry shrugged himself deeper into his overcoat and pulled his hat down lower over his face. A depressing and desultory drizzle had begun, and the keen wind that was blowing it chilled him to the core. The short path to the Public Library seemed as if it would never end, and he was pleased to push open one leaf of the large double doors and step into the warm interior which, on any other day, might have been stifling.

He nodded a greeting to the security guard and, under the pretence of unfastening his coat and shaking the damp drizzle off his hat, quickly scanned the entrance foyer for anyone he might know, as well as those he didn’t. While appearing to be reading the Information Board, he carefully checked everyone in the foyer, looking for tell-tale body language that said “I don’t belong here”. He was waiting, too, for that quietly confident voice to whisper in his ear, “Time you weren’t here, McFry”.

When it didn’t come, he began to walk up the broad staircase that led to the local records office, but after three steps, he tutted and snapped his fingers in disgust and turned sharply, a perfect performance of ‘The Man Who Has Forgotten Something’. Retracing his steps to the foyer, he glanced quickly at the people there. Who had begun to rise from their seat? Who had suddenly discarded their newspaper in an untidy heap on the floor? Who looked as though they had been caught with their fingers in the till? No-one. The foyer looked exactly the same as it had when he had walked in. To complete the illusion of ‘Mr Forgetful’, he grabbed a bus timetable from the display stand, thrust it into his pocket and started again up the stairs.

Once in the Local History Research room, Harry made for his favourite microfiche reader and threw his coat onto the back of the chair. Before he could even begin to sit down a voice like honey drizzled on a warm croissant reached out to him from the neighbouring machine.

“Mr McFry?”
He turned to his left and saw her for the first time. The eyes that regarded him matched the dress, full and blue; her lips were redder than a number 3 pool ball. She looked like she had poured herself into her dress until it was full to the brim, and then added some more. Her hair was black and hung shining around her shoulders. With difficulty, Harry dragged himself away from the view and replied, “That’s me, Miss . . . McFry?”

“Call me Laurel,” she said quietly, before adding, after an almost imperceptible pause, “cousin.”

Chapter Four

Genealogical private eye Harry McFry stirred from his sleep, shifting uneasily on the creaky sofabed in the one room bedsit he rented on the top floor of a rambling, Edwardian villa in Rock Ferry. As he sat up and rubbed a hand across his brow, he began to piece together what had happened last night after he’d walked into the reference room at the records office of the Birkenhead Library.

‘That was some dame!’ he thought to himself, as he made his way to the ‘kitchen’ – a corner of the room where a sink, a drainer and a small oven sat. A tiny fridge was perched on a kitchen table, where the single chair told anyone who wanted to know that Harry wasn’t much one for entertaining. He turned on the only gas ring that still worked, lit it with a match and pulled the already full kettle over onto it. Taking a tin out from a cupboard on the wall, he began spooning the finely-ground Java coffee into a glass cafetiere. The world never made Harry’s acquaintance until he’d drunk at least two mugs of the stuff.

He peered out the small window next to the sink as he waited for the kettle to boil. Nothing much happening on the street below. A dog was sniffing at a lamppost and the paper boy rode past on his bike, aiming a kick at the dog, who was savvy enough to scoot away long before the arc of the foot had reached anywhere near the place where its rump had been. The street was now as empty as a politician’s promise. It was a dull, drizzly day, just like it had been last night, at the library.

Laurel McFry had been everything her voice suggested. Young and elegant, she’d stood with the poise of a debutante who had just come out of finishing school. Harry and Laurel were the only occupants of the room. Beyond the large counter built into the wall, Harry had seen the archivist was busy folding away maps from that day’s researches.
“I think you’ve some explaining to do, Miss McFry. If we were related, somehow I think I’d know. And what’s all this about your family being stolen?” Harry had spoken quietly. He didn’t want the archivist hearing. The girl had beckoned Harry to sit down, and they each pulled out a chair at the large, oak table in the centre of the room.

She was 28, maybe 29 years old, Harry reckoned, although her finely made-up face gave her a younger look. He’d automatically done the math: year of birth, 1978 or 1979. Chances were, the day she was born he’d have been listening to the Sex Pistols in the chaotic bedroom of one of the many punk rock girlfriends he seemed to have had around then.

“You’ll have to bear with me, Mr McFry – or … may I call you Harry? It’s a complicated story.” It always was, where a woman was concerned, Harry thought.

“You can call me whatever you like, Miss McFry – just don’t call me stupid.” Just then, he had heard a crash in the corridor outside. Through the frosted glass windows in the door, he caught sight of the shadow of someone rushing past. “Wait here,” he’d said to her, and jumped up to investigate the source of the noise. The corridor was clear, but a bookcase near the door to the records room had fallen – or been pushed – over. Harry saw that a small, leather portfolio was strewn among the few books on the floor. He glanced around to make sure he wasn’t being watched, picked it and a couple of the books up, and returned to the room, carefully wedging the portfolio between the two books. He'd had only a moment to notice that the initials 'DKL' were blocked out in gold letters on the front of the leather.

“It was nothing. Someone in a hurry must have knocked the bookcase in the corridor over.” He saw her glance at the books, and smiled.
“Been wanting to look at these three for a while now. Thought I’d grab them while I was there.” He wasn’t sure she’d bought it, but Harry knew that rule number one when dealing with a client was that they only needed to know what you wanted them to know. He’d look at that portfolio more closely in due time. “Now, where were we with this complicated story of yours?” he asked, trying less successfully than he hoped to mask his disdain.

She then proceeded to tell him how, for the last five years, she had been researching her McFry family history. Most of her work had been centred on the Shropshire McFry’s – a branch Harry was aware of, but which his own line had never connected with. He already knew a little about them – drapers and milliners in the nineteenth century, and just your ordinary agricultural labourers before then. If he recalled right, one of the farmer’s sons had been a bit smarter than his siblings. He’d managed to save a bit of capital, hung up his ploughshare and opened a little haberdashery shop in the town of Bridgnorth. The rest was textbook – a good marriage into money, and the birth of a small empire based on selling cloth and linen. From what Laurel McFry had told him, she was descended from this same James McFry. ‘The thing is, Harry, all the records I had of this family were photocopies taken from the census records at the records office. Then, this year, I got out a membership from Ancestry. I thought it might be useful to have the digital images so I could link them to my tree. But try as I might, I’ve never been able to find them”.

Harry tried to maintain an interest, but his mind had wandered already to what might be in the portfolio nestled between the two books on the table in front of him. He knew it wasn’t professional – it wasn’t as if he didn’t need the money that a case like this might bring (his overdue office rent needed attention, for one thing) – but there was nothing yet for him to get his teeth into. As far as he could see, this was just a simple case of a dumb dame who hadn’t really got to grips with the advanced search facility offered by the Ancestry site. Sure, he could take her money, find the records and everyone would be happy – but where was the pride in that?

“Lady – I like you,” he had told her, staring her full in the face so that he almost caught her blush, “so here’s what I propose to do. Give me a day, and I’ll get the information you need. And there’s no charge, as you’re a family member.” He had wanted to add the words ‘however distant’, but held back out of politeness to her.

“You won’t find them, Mr McFry,” (not ‘Harry’ now, he had noticed). “They’ve definitely been stolen”.

A shrill whistle suddenly sounded. The kettle had boiled, and Harry could have his first coffee.