Chapter 50

“Did you hear that dog barking, Danny?” Harry asked, as his companion continued to work through the certificates. Danny paused, and listened, but heard nothing.

He shook his head, a slight look of bewilderment on his face. Harry stared back at him. “There was no dog, Danny. The point is, in this game we’ve got to start looking at the information that isn’t here, as much as the information that is. Take our Laurel McFry. A woman of independent means, doesn’t have to work, inherited a bundle when her dad died. Smell anything odd?”

Danny pondered again. “Not really … what are you driving at?” he asked.

“Laurel McFry’s father was a company manager when he married Colleen Blyth. Within four years, according to Laurel’s birth certificate, he was a company director. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d want to look at that a bit further. Laurel told us her father was pretty much absent during her childhood years – dealing with the family business. I’m starting to wonder about our Philip McFry, that’s all.”

“I thought it all rang pretty true, what she said, Harry,” Danny said.

“Maybe. But then again, McFry and Sons was already a hugely successful undertaking before the war. I’d like you to check out a list of the company directors in 1974, sometime - when we’ve finished up with these certificates.”

“OK, Harry,” Danny said, jotting a note down on a pad on the desk. Harry savoured the moment: it was a change for him not to have to clog up his mind with those curled-up post-it notes he kept writing himself, a pleasure to have someone he could delegate a job to. He could get used to the idea.

“Now – where were we? We missed something from Philip McFry’s marriage cert,” he said.

Danny hadn’t a clue what Harry was getting at. “What do you mean?” he asked.

Harry paused, for effect, before responding: “The witnesses.”

Danny picked up the marriage certificate again, and stared at it. Just a little sheepishly, he read out the names: “Margaret Lawrence and James McNaughton. Mean anything to you, Harry?”

“Could be friends. Could be relatives of either Philip or Colleen. But Philip’s mother was a Lawrence, so it’s unlikely they’re strangers pulled in off the street. Whoever they are, we might need to find out more about them.” He saw Danny scribble another note.

“Moving on – what have we got next?”

“How about Lillian Blyth’s birth cert? Lillian Susannah Blyth, born 1 August 1904 at Low Mills, Ripon, registered 12 August 1904. Father, Leonard Blyth, joiner. Mother, Christiana Blyth, maiden name Garbutt, born Ripon. Harry paused from keying in the details.

“You know, Danny… we could really do with seeing this Lillian McFry of ours. But it’s going to be delicate.”

Danny considered what Harry was saying. Lillian McFry was technically ‘his’ client, not ‘ours’. She might not take kindly to knowing he’d discussed her medals with someone else. “We’ll have to take it carefully, Harry,” Danny said. “Remember, she doesn’t know we’re looking into Laurel’s little problem.”

“That’s what I meant by it being ‘delicate’. Maybe we could just approach her from the angle of the medals – see what else she has to say?” Harry watched as Danny thought this over.

“I’m due to ring her later. I’ll see what she says,” Danny replied. It wasn’t out of the question that she should be told they thought someone else was after her medals, and Danny felt sure he could work up some excuse or other for Harry being around.

“What’s bugging me, Harry, is we never found a marriage reference for Lillian Blyth. At least not between 1940 and 1970, when Thomas McFry died.

Too many parts of this family just don’t seem to be there!”

Danny was right, Harry thought. The Blyth’s and the McFry’s, between them, seemed to be doing a good job of hiding themselves away.

“What have we got for Thomas?” he asked, turning back to his PC. 'Better press on,' he was thinking – those gaps would have to wait until later.

“Thomas McFry. Born 15 September 1911, Howgrave, North Yorkshire. Father, James McFry, Clothing Business Owner. Mother, Anne McFry, maiden name Lawrence, born Topcliffe, North Yorkshire. Registered at Ripon, North Yorkshire, 4 October 1911. That tally’s with Philip McFry’s details, doesn’t it, Harry?”

Harry nodded. “What about Stuart?” he asked.

“Stuart Allaister McFry. Born 12 July 1908, Howgrave, North Yorkshire. All the other details the same as those for Thomas.”

“Don’t you find it only slightly reassuring, Danny,” Harry said, leaning back in his chair, “that in all of this mess of people missing from the census, at least we know that these people actually existed?” He was smiling, and Danny, he noticed, was smiling, too.

*

Ah, but lives are so … complicated.

Jonathan Harcourt might never have known what happened to Lillian Blyth after they got split up in Madrid – although he thought she’d been sent to Guernica, in the north. But Philippe Bergerac knew. By the time the little fishing boat had landed its catch, it was early morning and the storms seemed to have died down, leaving only a trace of billowing cloud on the horizon.

His English wasn’t good, but the two strangers had a little French, and between them all they managed to make themselves understood well enough. He let them know that they, and their young baby, could stay at his house until they were ready to leave. He lived in a small cottage in the centre of St Jean de Luz, not far from the Spanish border, his widowed mother his only companion. As they walked from the harbour up towards the cottage, he learned more about the couple’s ordeal.

The two strangers, the petite woman and her younger, sandy-haired companion, told how they had been with the International Brigades, in Viscaya, one of the four Basque provinces that made up the north of Spain. They’d survived the atrocity of Guernica, a word that in a short time had become synonymous around the world with bloody death and the new warfare of aerial bombing. Philippe knew all about what had happened at Guernica, how the German aircraft had used the town as a proving ground for tactics that everyone fully expected would be used elsewhere in Europe in the not to distant future, if Adolf Hitler’s rise went unchecked. The French newspapers had reported how upwards of 1,600 people had died in the town as a result of the bombing alone. The whole of northern Spain was a chaotic patchwork of zones and areas held by differing forces, as the Basque republican armies pulled back in a desperate attempt to save Bilbao. The British and French governments, while militarily neutral, had provided some humanitarian aid, the British even taking boatloads of children to live in temporary accommodation in the English countryside, traumatized refugees from that ‘complicated’ war. Philippe had seen the slivers of dull grey on the horizon, British destroyers remaining at ‘arms length’ while the children had been ferried aboard.

Philippe Bergerac - a patriotic Basque from the south of France, had already done much to assist in finding homes for the stream of hungry, desolate souls who had made it across the border from Spain. When the flow of people fell to a trickle, he knew it was because the Nationalists had managed to close off the passes, not because the situation had improved for those living through the turmoil. It hadn’t been a surprise to see the little boat that night, but he hadn’t expected to find English people on it. Still less, a heroine.

When they had settled themselves in front of the fire in the downstairs room of the cottage, and Philippe’s mother had fed them with dishes of the robust fish stew the Bergerac’s seemed to subsist on, Lillian Blyth began to tell him more of her story. How she had come to enlist in the International Brigades, and had fought at Jamara, the river crossing to the east of Madrid. Had Philippe heard of Jonathan Harcourt? Did she know if he was still alive? She had asked. He shook his head: why would he know of this stranger? But he saw how the man who was with her – the man she called ‘Stuart’ – seemed to shift uneasily when she mentioned Harcourt’s name, and wondered why he might be jealous of him. Philippe could see the beauty of the woman before him, as she cradled her infant girl. She would be a very easy woman to fall in love with, he thought. At Jamara, Philippe learned, she had killed more than thirty Nationalists, occupying a trench with Harcourt. He, too, had played a heroic part in the battle, she said. Jamara was a name Philippe knew well – he had heard how hundreds of International Brigade soldiers had died there, defending Madrid.

After Jamara, she had been posted to the north, as part of a small group of International Brigaders that eventually found its base, fatefully, in Guernica, supporting Basque troops against advancing Nationalists. It was where they were on the afternoon of Monday, 26 April 1937, when they first heard the heavy drone of the bombers, heading down from the Bay of Biscay. She described to Philippe the firestorm that had erupted in the town, and the heavy civilian casualties that ensued. Ironically, their brigade headquarters was unscathed, but any thought of fighting back was abated. Lillian’s skills as a nurse were needed in the makeshift hospital camps that were set up to tend to the wounded.

Now, the young man took over, telling his host how Lillian had worked ceaselessly to help the casualties, not just of the bombing, but of the constant skirmishes between the republican and Francoist troops. “She should have a medal for what she did there. We lost count of the lives she saved,” he had told Philippe, shaking his head slowly, from side to side, as he spoke. It was at the moment he heard those words, Philippe would later recall, that he had determined that the endeavours of the Englishwoman should be remembered, that her contribution to his ‘country’ should be properly, and appropriately, acknowledged.

Chapter 49

Harry McFry learned a couple of important (and expensive) lessons soon after he started researching his own family history, and they were lessons he now kept firmly in mind whenever he was researching others’: don’t believe anything anyone tells you that they ‘remember’ about their family, and always try to triangulate your information.

His own father had left a sketchy note outling his family descent, when he’d died some fifteen years previously. When, much later, Harry had developed his own interest in genealogy, he’d used the note as his guide, leapfrogging generations backwards in one go, so that he was soon digging around in parish records for his eighteenth century forebears. Then, something an aunt had said to him at a family funeral had rung alarm bells, and he’d gone back to look at his father’s research and realized, with horror, that it included a fundamental error. Two years of his own searches had been, he knew then, in vain. He’d had to start all over again, from scratch, and it had un-nerved him to lose, at a stroke, so many of the ancestors he’d come to know so well. Older and wiser, now, Harry never took on trust information someone else gave him.

Triangulating his information became his trademark. If possible, he didn’t want just one piece of information about someone’s existence, he wanted two, three … sometimes more. If he found someone on a census, he’d want to find them in a trade directory, too. If it was a marriage or death certificate, he’d want to find out about the witnesses at the marriage, or the person who informed the death. That was just how Harry was, now, as young Danny Longhurst was starting to appreciate.

“So, Danny,” he said, slowly, “what do we ‘know’?”

Danny looked at the pages of facsimile copies on the desk between them.

“Well … we know that Laurel Blyth McFry is a female, born 25 January 1974, in Birkenhead, to Philip McFry, a company director, born in somewhere called Sutton Howgrave, North Yorkshire and Colleen McFry, maiden name Blyth. Place of birth ‘Not Known’. The birth was registered at Birkenhead, on 29 January 1974.” While Danny read this information out, Harry patiently input it into a genealogical software programme on his PC. “Next!” Harry barked, so that Danny shifted straight to Laurel’s father’s birth certificate.

“Philip McFry, male, born 27 February 1924, Howgrave, North Yorkshire. Father, James McFry, Clothing Business Owner. Mother, Anne McFry, maiden name Lawrence, born Topcliffe, North Yorkshire. Registered at Ripon, North Yorkshire, 3 March 1924.” Danny was getting the hang of Harry’s style, and moved straight on to the marriage details for Philip and Colleen, even while Harry was still on the screen for Philip McFry.

“Marriage, 3 June 1970, of Philip McFry, aged 46, Bachelor, Company Manager, of 73 Topcliffe Road, Thirsk, North Yorkshire. Father’s name, James McFry, Clothing manufacturer (deceased).” Danny waited a moment or two, while Harry caught up with him. “OK, Danny…” Harry said, “…fire away!”

Danny was enjoying working with Harry like this. Whenever he’d pieced family histories together himself, it had been working alone. There was something different about working alongside someone like Harry. He continued his task with relish:

“Colleen Blyth, aged 23, Spinster. No occupation. Address, 73, Topcliffe Road, Thirsk, North Yorkshire. Father’s name ‘Not Known’. Danny saw Harry pause from his typing, and look up at him.

“OK – so we know they were possibly living together before they got married. And that’s quite an age gap, wouldn’t you say? “ Harry asked, almost rhetorically.

“Old enough to be her father!” Danny exclaimed. They looked at each other. But they both knew: however complicated this story was, that was one complication they would be unlikely to have to deal with.

Chapter 48

It was a little after 2pm when Mabel Harris pushed open the door to the side room where Dacre Lawrence lay in bed. Mabel never liked hospitals, and she particularly didn’t like this one. It reminded her too much of the pain and anguish of a difficult childhood, her father having spent two years in and out of this same building, before expiring peacefully one night, in a ward not too far from where she was standing now. She wouldn’t normally have volunteered to visit Dr Lawrence, but she knew he had no family and, as the manager of the practice, she felt a certain duty fall on her shoulders when the other partners had met with her to discuss his current indisposition.

It had been a far from normal morning in the practice, with rumour and gossip circulating among staff quicker than an e-mail crosses the globe: by the time the meeting was called, Lawrence had suffered anything from a heart attack to an acute appendicitis. Renal failure also figured in discussions, but the consensus seemed to fall finally on a diabetic coma. It was almost a relief when news finally filtered through that he had had a stroke. To Mabel, the task also fell of re-scheduling appointments, which had kept her busy for most of the morning after the meeting.

She saw he was on his back as she entered the room, propped up by a couple of pillows and staring straight at her without the smallest flicker of warmth in his eyes. A small crust of what looked like it might be custard had dried at the edge of his mouth, and he needed a shave. A small part of her, that part which all women seem to have, felt a shard of pity for her helpless employer, lying vulnerably in the bed in front of her. She smiled.

“Now then, Dr Lawrence – how are you?” she asked. If her question sounded officious to the paralysed man, then that was how Mabel had intended it, repayment in kind for all the times he’d barked commands at her, the times he’d seemed to treat her as some sort of lower species. The boot, she thought, was well and truly on the other foot now!

She didn’t imagine who might visit the poor man. No family, and few friends. ‘Well, you’ve got your just deserts, now, Dacre Lawrence,’ she thought.

Lawrence detected every last ounce of what she intended. He could protest, of course – shout her down … but he’d only demean himself, struggling to form the words. Instead, he simply stared at her, his cold gaze the best rebuke he could manage.

Mabel sat on a chair beside the bed, and pulled a magazine out from her handbag. “I’ve brought something to read,” she said, in a slightly-exaggerated tone, not even bothering to look at him as she flipped it open. And for half an hour, Mabel Harris enjoyed the quiet contentment of being free from work, knowing that Dr Lawrence could do nothing about it, and knowing she’d be seen as a saint when she returned to the health centre. With a fair wind, she might even get away with a few more hours away from work in the weeks and months ahead…

Chapter 47

On the desk between Harry and Danny, the copy certificates they’d asked for were laid out, haphazardly. Harry was checking them off, one by one, against the list Danny had prepared from the indexes. At the same time, there were a lot of thoughts spinning through his mind.

He didn’t know much about the Spanish Civil War – but he knew enough. Those post-it notes stuck in the corner of his brain were getting pretty crowded, but he added another one: ‘Find out about Jonathan Harcourt’. While the little Harry McFry who lived up there was sticking it up, he caught sight of the reminder to look into the issue of Laurel’s shares. Maybe he could ‘throw a stone at two birds’ as Ana used to put it, when she was struggling to learn English idioms.

“Danny – make sure this is everything we asked for. I need to make a call,” he said, passing Danny the list.

‘Time to call in a few favours,’ Harry was thinking, as he picked up the phone. Moments later, he was through to his contact.

“Bill? It’s Harry here.”

From the other end of the line, Harry heard William Blunt’s deep guffaw of a laugh: “Harry McFry, GPI! My favourite private investigator! What’s happening, Harry?”

“I need you to check something out for me,” Harry said. He’d known Bill Blunt for only a little more than five years, but sometimes Harry thought it had been much longer, so familiar had they become. A respected journalist on the Birkenhead Beagle, Blunt it was who had broken the story of Harry solving the mystery of the Hartshorns. Since then, they’d shared a drink or two, usually in ‘The Letters’, a pub across the street which was Bill’s favourite haunt. A lot of people mistook Bill Blunt as a pompous old reactionary, but Harry knew there were depths to his friend that others never suspected. He liked Bill – he was a straight-down-the-middle sort of guy. He liked him better when he responded: “Just say the word, Harry boy. What’s the problem?”

Harry could sense that Bill smelled a story. ‘Better not give too much away, Harry’, he thought to himself. “It’s like this, Bill. I need to know who owns McFry and Sons now. Can you help?”

Sat in the corner of his office, half a mile away, Bill Blunt checked who was around. Over the way, he noticed a young girl reading a magazine on her late lunch break, and smiled to himself. “Sure, Harry. I’ll have my staffer look into it, and get back to you. You OK?”

There was a genuine concern in Blunt’s words, Harry noticed. He wondered what he knew. “Yeah, Bill, everything’s fine. But if you could get that information for me, I’d be grateful.”

Bill Blunt was trained to spot a lie when he heard it. The word on the street was right, he thought. Harry was on his uppers. Still, if there was something he could do to help him, he would. “Anything else, Harry?” he asked, not quite as an afterthought.

Harry paused a moment, before replying. “Yes. I need to find out about a Jonathan Harcourt – a journalist on the Daily Herald before the war. Anything you can get,Bill. But mostly what happened to him after he was in Spain during the Civil War.”

Bill asked Harry to spell out the name. “Sounds like you’re working on something interesting just now, Harry … want to let Bill in on it?” Bill Blunt hadn’t got where he was today by letting a possible story slip his grip.

“Can’t tell you now, Bill – I haven’t got the time. But if there’s a story in this somewhere, you know who’ll be getting it first,” Harry said.

Danny Longhurst paused from checking off the list Harry had given him, and saw his colleague was smiling, broadly, but just as quickly as Harry noticed that Danny was watching, the smile vanished. “Think you can help, Bill?” he asked.

Over in the newspaper offices, Bill Blunt was thinking. The Daily Herald ceased publication in 1964. More than forty years ago. He’d been a cub reporter out in Stockport at the time when the paper changed its name to the Sun, and he’d watched its political slant summersault backward and forwards ever since that date. It might be a tall order getting information on this Jonathan Harcourt chap. But it’s a brave man indeed who accuses Bill Blunt of ducking a challenge. “Don’t you worry, Harry. I think I’ve got an idea. Give me until the end of the day.” And with that, Blunt rang off, summoning his ‘staffer’ across from her desk, where she left her half-eaten sandwich, her diet Coke and her copy of a gossip magazine, until later.

Chapter 46

There aren’t too many fine restaurants in Birkenhead, but of those there are, you can bet that Cyril Galloway knows them. His travels as an antique dealer took him all across the north west of England, and he was familiar with some of the better places to eat in most of the towns he passed through. When he’d rung Colin McAllistair the day before, he’d suggested they meet up at noon in a small restaurant he knew just off Hamilton Square. He booked a specific table, knowing it would allow them to have a discrete discussion. He arrived a couple of minutes early, parking his car on the square, and had soon taken up his station at the table, awaiting McAllistair’s arrival, watching the lunchtime parade of office workers heading, through the persistent rain, for one of any number of sandwich bars that were to be found nearby.

When a middle-aged man carrying a zipped document holder pushed open the door, Galloway recognized the now much older face of the man he’d only met once before, in his shop in North Yorkshire. McAllistair had to scan the room before he saw the portly frame of Galloway, his weasly face older and more creased, but still unmistakably the man he’d met all those years ago.

Courteously, Galloway stood up as Colin approached: “It’s been a long time, Mr McAllistair!” he said, a thin smile breaking out as he shook Colin’s outstretched hand. “Yes. Twenty five years is a long time, Mr Galloway,” Colin replied, taking his overcoat off and hanging it on a nearby hook, before returning to sit opposite his ‘guest’.

“So kind of you to offer to buy this lunch, by the way. And you must call me Cyril. After all, we’re possibly going to be doing business again.” Colin had felt obliged, when Cyril had first suggested that they meet for lunch, to offer to pay. But whether that sense of obligation was due to a feeling that Galloway was the only person connected with the shameful affair of the disposal of Jonathan Harcourt’s medals, the only person who knew Colin’s part in the drama, I’m afraid only Colin McAllistair himself would know.

The waiter came, and the two men chose their meals. Colin noticed that Galloway already had a glass of red wine, and ordered one himself. Galloway leant across the table, his face etched with what looked to the academic like a troubling anxiety to know something: “Tell me, Colin … how did you fare with the medals this morning?”

Colin looked sheepish. He didn’t have a very positive report for his ‘colleague’. “Not too brilliantly, I’m afraid to say. The medals are most definitely the companion set to Jonathan Harcourt’s, and they are certainly those which were issued to a Lillian Blyth.” He waited for his companion’s response, but it was clear that Galloway was waiting for more from Colin. “The bad news is that the owner doesn’t appear to want to sell them. and they weren’t in their box when I saw them.”

Cyril visibly blanched. “Then where was it? Surely the medals would have been put back into the box?” His tone was harsh, like he was responding to a physical blow.

Colin wondered why Cyril was so insistent on knowing about the box. “I can only tell you that there was no box and there was no certificate. Just the medals, and when McFry left he just put them in his pocket.”

“Did you say McFry?” The question was sharp - Cyril was like a tiger now, his eyes alight. He scented something here, and was wondering if Dacre Lawrence had been wrong all along – Lillian McFry did have surviving family!

“Yes. Someone called Harry McFry has them. And as I say, he doesn’t seem too interested in selling them. He’s a private eye of some sorts, working hereabouts.”

Cyril considered this new information. Maybe this Harry McFry character didn’t have the box at all? Maybe little old Lillian McFry still had it, and with it the piece of paper both he and Dacre Lawrence coveted so much? He’d have to meet this Mr McFry, one way or another. But he started to sense that it wasn’t going to be as easy getting his hands on the box, and its contents, as at first he’d thought. For his part, Colin McAllistair was wondering what was so important about the certificate. There hadn’t been one with Harcourt’s medals, and they had still fetched an awful lot of money.

Their food came and, for a few minutes at least, Cyril Galloway seemed to forget about the medals, and the box, and the certificate. They made small-talk as though they were the best of friends, and not former co-participants in the grubby theft of Jonathan Harcourt’s mementos of his time as a fighter in a war no one much seemed to care to remember these days.