Chapter 115

While Danny Longhurst’s mind was performing genealogical gymnastics, Dacre Lawrence’s wasn’t any calmer. If he’d been there longer than a few days, he might have realized that the Sunday afternoon routine at Northallerton Hospital didn’t alter much. Some of the beds in the ward had emptied for the weekend, as relatives collected their loved ones and took them home, planning to return them on Monday.

For Lawrence, there was no such joy, and not even a visitor to break the figured monotony of the day. A mind locked in a body that can’t be moved, a voice all but stilled by a tongue that only vaguely forms the words it wants: it leaves the mind only to play its fevered tunes. The good doctor had had plenty of time to reflect on things as he lay in bed over the past few days.

His professional knowledge of how a stroke can affect someone led him to realize that it might be some considerable time before he recovered his missing faculty. He wasn’t even scheduled to see the consultant until Monday: he knew who it would be, and had never liked the man – and, he realized now, the feeling was most probably mutual. Lawrence’s sense of vulnerability was growing, by the hour. Even after seeing the consultant, he knew it might be some days before they began any meaningful treatment. So much of the care afforded to people in his situation consisted of watching, and waiting.

What had his life been, he wondered, to come to this? Years wasted in the pursuit of money – for what? He had no family, nobody who truly cared, one way or another, what happened to him. His colleagues at the practice would doubtless be speculating about his return, and had maybe even already organized things on the assumption that he wouldn’t be back.

That was it, then. Staring at the closed door to his room, listening to the sound of nurses chattering as they passed along the corridor outside… what had he done, after all, to deserve this? He wrestled with the problem for some time. What he had learned, in such a spectacular fashion, was that he hadn’t honoured his parents. They’d brought him into the world. Had lavished their love and attention on him, had sacrificed much (he now realized) so that he could make his way in life and repay them by … turning his back on them.

His mind traveled back to the day he had so wantonly discarded all his father’s papers, without even a second thought. At the time, it had seemed the sensible thing to do – all those books, all that ephemera stacked in boxes: who needed it? Certainly not Dacre Lawrence! There was nothing about his father, the retired factory worker living in his tiny house in Thirsk, that had suggested he was anything other than a hoarder of worthless papers.

The galling thing was to know that it had been Cyril Galloway who had forced him to reflect anew – the same Cyril Galloway who, he sensed, was double crossing him in his time of need, who might have been the closest person he had to a ‘friend’, but who had – Lawrence suspected – taken advantage of him, even before the stroke.

Now, he wondered whether the letter to Laurel McFry had been enough. He hoped she heeded his warning, kept a watch for Galloway. Had he redeemed himself, in some small measure, by writing to her? He could only hope so.

Chapter 114

Once safely back at Alan and Yolanda’s flat, Danny didn’t feel much like hanging around. Yolanda had opened the door to them looking flustered, speaking quickly in that strange language that the sisters reserved for themselves, and had hastened Ana into the lounge, gesticulating all the while. Danny, meanwhile, made straight for his room, where he collected his bag before heading back up the corridor, ignoring the discussion between the two women.

“See you later!” he shouted, closing the door behind him as he left. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of Ana, in the doorway of the lounge, and saw that she looked worried.

Just for now, though, he wanted to clear his mind of all that Ana had told him about Harry, and he was pleased, finally, to be alone again. Last night, after he’d split up from his colleague, he’d walked the streets until he’d found an internet café that was open well into the early hours of the morning. He’d spent a valuable few hours researching Dacre Lawrence, and was now relishing returning to the fray to pursue this, and one or two other, lines of enquiry. He’d guessed (correctly) that Harry hadn’t spent much time ruminating on these matters, a fact that Ana had (perhaps unwittingly) confirmed during their earlier discussion. It seemed to Danny as if their visit to Madrid could so easily have been a waste of time. Well, he for one wasn’t about to waste an opportunity to do a little research, when it presented itself.

He’d already discovered, pretty quickly, that Dacre Lawrence was the son of John Lawrence and Margaret Spears: born in late 1946, in Thirsk. The couple had married in the early part of 1946, in the same North Yorkshire town. Danny made a record of the reference number, in case Harry could magic up the certificate when they returned to Birkenhead the next day.

Then, some ‘deep Googling’ had revealed that Dacre had gone up to Oxford to study medicine, but had moved back to North Yorkshire to work in a small GP practice there in late 1960’s. A trawl of the birth index hadn’t uncovered any obvious siblings for Dacre – but Danny had learned to reserve judgement after the lessons he’d learned from working with Harry the previous week. Just because there was no obvious record, it didn’t mean you could trust there not to be something, somewhere, hidden away.

Danny had speculated to himself, earlier that morning, whether the Margaret Lawrence who was a witness at Philip McFry’s wedding to Colleen Blythe might have been this same Margaret Spears… he hadn’t had a chance to share his findings with Harry, but it was a notion which, once it took root in his mind, he was finding hard to shake off.

Now, as he took his seat in the same internet café and logged on, he pulled his notepad from his bag and started leafing through it. All around him, kids of his age were busy e-mailing friends, family or who knew who else, locked in their moment of revelation. It was busier than when he’d left the place in the early hours, but the clatter of the keyboards was strangely re-assuring, and better than the clatter of the McFry brothers and their mixed-up lives. It was a refuge for Danny, a place where he could ‘get into his zone’: do what he knew he could do, and do it well.

He found his sketchy notes of the discussion with Lillian McFry. Dacre Lawrence had told her that Thomas McFry and his father were cousins. Well, that would suggest that John Lawrence’s mother (or father) were brother (or sister) to one of the parents of Thomas, Stuart and Philip McFry.

He paged back through his notes until he found the birth details for Philip McFry, and reminded himself (with a jolt that prompted a broad grin to erupt on his face) that Philip’s father had been James McFry and his mother Anne … Lawrence! If he could prove that Anne and John were siblings, he knew at least that this would explain the ‘cousin’ relationship between Dacre and Thomas.

Working at something like a fever pitch, now, he pulled up the 1901 census records and searched for an Anne Lawrence born in Topcliffe, North Yorkshire. The 1901 census was the latest, publicly-available, English census and, if he could find Anne – preferably with a brother John - there was just a chance (he knew) he’d be a little closer to solving the mystery of Laurel McFry’s missing family. Which, he reminded himself, was what this was supposed to be all about, after all…