The archivist pouted. ‘But you do have a name?’
‘Alec Sutherland. Born 1902, went for a soldier in 1918.’
‘Well,’ said the archivist. ‘We don’t hold the Records of Service here, I’m afraid. You’d have to go to the National Archive at Kew for that. Or look up the summary online. But I can see what we do have, if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes.’
‘No problem,’ said Solomon.
And the archivist disappeared through a door stamped ‘Staff Only’, as though to discourage any suggestion that Solomon might follow and help with the search himself.
The moment he was gone Solomon took his chance, moved across to the computer and logged on using the Post-it note with the password stuck beneath the lip of the desk. He accessed the National Archives website via the archivist’s Favourites tab, typed the name into the search box for the WWI service records and waited for him to appear. Alec Sutherland, the foundling boy, made sudden flesh on the computer screen. Five foot ten. Fair hair. Good teeth. A farm worker who had enlisted in the Northumberland Fusiliers, February 1918, in the market town Solomon had skirted earlier. The next step back on Thomas Methven’s family tree, perhaps.
The details came from a medical report made when Alec Sutherland had first signed up. Solomon frowned at the screen, double checking the dates. Alec Sutherland had almost certainly lied about his age, he thought, if the record from the foundling school was to be believed. Onscreen it said he was eighteen when he enlisted. But the boy had been deposited at the school as a baby in 1902, went to France in April 1918 in time for the last Big Push. Sixteen, if that, nothing but a farm boy weighed down by a pack almost as big as himself. What was it about a society that called them heroes, Solomon thought, when all it ever did was use boys as fodder for the guns.
There was no address given for Alec Sutherland other than that of the school for lost boys where he’d grown up, with its field of buttercups and two kinds of clover, a river at the bottom of a hill. More disappointing, there were no next of kin listed on the service record either, other than the headmaster of the school at the time. Still, Solomon reached for his piece of paper that started with Thomas Methven at the bottom, yet only stretched as far as Archibald and Mabel Methven née Kerr at the top, scribbled the boy’s name and his dates next to theirs and pondered the connection. It was Thomas Methven’s real parents he was attempting to track, Alec Sutherland his only lead so far.
As he was about to fold the paper again, Solomon’s eyes lingered for a moment on the space where he’d scribbled his grandfather’s name. Godfrey Farthing b.1893 d.1971, standing at the counter of the Borders Observatory in his khakis cancelling an advert for the sale of a child. Solomon hesitated, moved the cursor to the search box, was about to try for a new record when the door marked ‘Staff Only’ swung open once again.
The archivist appeared, blinking from behind two smudged lenses as though he knew something untoward had happened in his absence but couldn’t be sure quite what. He was carrying a brown envelope, disappointing in its thinness, tied with a neat piece of string.
‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ he said.
‘But there is something,’ Solomon replied, standing by the edge of the table as though he’d been waiting there all along.
The archivist nodded, untied the knot with delicate fingers and tipped the envelope upside down. A piece of card slid out and lay on the felt between them like a landed fish. The archivist turned it over for Solomon to see. He recognized what it was immediately. A field postcard from the first war, written in pencil, sent by an Alec Sutherland of the Northumberland Fusiliers. The card was dated:
8 November 1918.
On one side, I am quite well were the only words not yet crossed out. On the other, the address of a farm that took in babies. But it was not that detail which got Solomon Farthing’s heart leaping. Rather something else inscribed on the card. There, above the address, the name of someone he had encountered before. On a black-and-white photograph dated 1918, two ladies with babies all about their feet. Also a girl not that much younger than Alec Sutherland had been at the time. Fourteen. Fifteen, perhaps, flowers about her wrist.
Daisy Pringle.
A soldier’s sweetheart left behind in the hay.
Two
Kew was a garden of delights. A vault of every possible document one could imagine. Then some more. Solomon arrived having driven half the day and through the night from a castle in the north. No dinner but the remains of a packet of orange tic tacs. No documentation to ensure entry but the ID card of a man called Colin Dunlop, secured before he left the castle by a certain sleight of hand. The morning of the third day into his search for Thomas Methven’s living next of kin, and already Solomon had landed at the mothership. If he’d bothered to keep her informed, Solomon was certain that DCI Franklin could not fail to be impressed.
The National Archive was an ark of MI5 proportions, three floors with plenty of glass, all the proper treasures hidden from view. Just like at MI5, an emptying of pockets took place at the door. Pens and bags. Coats and food. No suspicious items allowed should one wish to proceed. Solomon laid what remained of his life on the floor of a small metal locker in order to secure entry. One dead Nokia. One walnut shell rubbed to the nub. A sad state of affairs. Yet as he made his way towards the Document Reading Room, his fingers started with their flutter against his corduroy trousers, his heart with its one two skip beneath his tweed. The Internet was all very well, but this place was the holy grail of Heir Hunting. A physical manifestation of all life’s weft and weave.
At the entrance to the inner sanctum on the second floor, Solomon handed over his recently acquired ID to receive a Reading Ticket in return.
‘Mr Dunlop,’ said the man at the desk, cross-referencing the official documentation with his computer file. ‘Not been in for a while.’
Thank goodness, thought Solomon, for the virtual. No reason for Colin Dunlop of Dunlop, Dunlop & Dunlop to plough his furrow in person when he could do it all from behind a screen. As he passed through to the next level, Solomon wished for a moment that he had the wherewithal to attempt a hack on his fellow Heir Hunter’s National Archive account. One swift bypass of an encrypted password and he could find out what the Edinburgh Man was really working on that required him to trace every one of Solomon Farthing’s steps. A parallel investigation, perhaps. All the answers to the truth about Thomas Methven already connected, Colin Dunlop right now sipping tea at some old lady’s table as she signed for fifty thousand – minus commission, of course. But Solomon was damned if he was going to let his dead client go that easily, still had a couple more rolls of the dice.
Solomon had come to London because he had a feeling that all of life led there. Not just the remains of Alec Sutherland’s full service record, hidden somewhere deep in the stacks. But also the girl he had left behind. Daisy Pringle, last seen on a black-and-white photograph from 1918, flowers about her wrist.
Cherchez la femme.
Wasn’t that what all good Heir Hunters said? Always easier to trace the female of the species, if only through births, rather than the male, who had a higher tendency to disappear. But as he’d driven south towards the truth of it all, Solomon Farthing had known deep in his belly that there was more to it than that. He had come to London to uncover everything he’d left behind when he was seven years old, riding north on the back seat of an old Ford accompanied by a woman wearing gloves and a man wearing a grey felt hat.
Solomon’s trip in the opposite direction, almost sixty years on, had been somewhat more comfortable, his hands on the wheel of a sleek grey car ‘borrowed’ from Colin Dunlop, his fellow Heir Hunter not aware yet of the favour he had done. It was Peter who had facilitated the handover, meeting Solomon near the exit to the castle, ice cream dribbled down his T-shirt, the remains of a cone skewered on the dog’s whiskers, too. Both of them had looked guilty. Solomon had decided not to ask.
‘He’s in there.’
Peter had pointed towards the castle’s famous Poison Garden, and it had seemed appropriate somehow to Solomon that Colin Dunlop of Dunlop, Dunlop & Dunlop was spending his time in the north checking all those deadly plants.
‘Did you get it?’ he’d asked.
Peter had grinned as he slid a car key into Solomon’s hand – the result of a distraction involving a dog escaped into the castle’s motte and bailey, the creature creating argy bargy amongst the visitors while a boy practised the art of pickpocketing as everyone looked the other way. Solomon had felt bad, if only for a moment, about a fellow Heir Hunter’s loss. But there was no way his aunt’s Mini would have made it all the way to London, let alone back again. Besides, what else was a ward from a naughty boys’ home for, if not a naughty kind of deed?
Peter had cheered as they drove out of the castle gates on seats clad in leather and an engine that purred, the dog yipping, too. Even Solomon grinned as they glided down lanes stuffed with cow parsley and Queen Anne’s Lace, no wind whistling about their feet this time. There was something satisfying about robbing those who had all the advantages, in order to help out those who did not.
But Peter had not been cheering when instead of turning on to the A1, Solomon had turned in at the gates that marked the beginning of that long drive to the foundling school.
‘I thought we were going to London,’ the boy said.
‘I am,’ Solomon replied.
‘What about me?’
‘You live here.’
‘My parents live in London.’
‘I thought they were dead.’
Peter had subsided then, pouting as though he was the one who had been wronged. But ten minutes later when the schoolmaster arrived to fetch him, the boy deserted Solomon with a grin on his face and barely a backward glance. Solomon’s whole body had been sore as he watched Eddie Jackson take Peter by the hand. A father in loco parentis to his temporary son. The afternoon had been closing in as he began to put the miles between them again, getting dark as he crossed from the north of the country to the south. As midnight rose with the road, Solomon had tried to sing:
‘It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .’
Given up ten minutes in when the absence of the dog became too loud.
The boy had bought the dog. At the end of the long drive as they’d waited for Eddie Jackson to appear, Peter had stopped sulking and laid out his opening offer on the edge of the car’s front seat instead. An ID card for the National Archive slipped from Colin Dunlop’s pocket, along with the car key, while everyone around him chased after a dog on the loose. Solomon had been tempted, of course, but still he had refused.
‘I’m not taking you to London.’
A city for boys. But only once they were grown.
But Peter had not given up at the first refusal, offered Solomon something else. A petrol card registered to a Mr Colin Dunlop. One swipe of its chip and gallon after gallon could be at Solomon’s fingertips, enough to get there and back again twice over should he feel the need. Solomon had refused once more, despite the sudden one two leap of his heart at the thought of fuel on demand.
But the boy would not give up. He turned to nod towards the dog where it lay on the back seat, asleep for once and snoring.
‘We could toss for it,’ he’d said, eyes bright. ‘See who gets lucky.’
Rummaged in his pocket and brought out the little tarnished tanner that Solomon had given him the evening before. Solomon’s fingers had given a wild flutter at the thought of a gamble he might be prepared to take. He’d tried to imagine the coin falling the wrong way, letting the dog go, adding another debt to all those he had yet to repay. On the other hand, it would only be doing what all proper Edinburgh Men did. Gambling with other people’s money, rather than their own.
Ten a.m. and despite an empty feeling inside at the absence of anything resembling breakfast (or, perhaps, the dog), Solomon Farthing discovered that luck, or happenstance, or perhaps an Heir Hunter’s instinct, was about to serve him well.
The first document he had requested from the depths of the National Archive was an extract from the 1911 Census, just to check there really had been a Daisy Pringle resident at a baby farm in the north. When it arrived Solomon held the paper to his nose and sniffed. Supposition was one thing, pawn tickets and crumpled pages from a Bible. But this was evidence. A document smelling of sawdust and old carbon, the real stuff of life.
The first entry on the Census record was for a Mr Noel Pringle, head of the household and proprietor of the actual farm next door. Stacks in the fields and manure in the yard, cows, dogs and pigs, as opposed to gables and babies crying, warm milk sliding from a wrist.
The second name was that of his wife, Mrs Dora Pringle, signing off the schedule with a flourish that suggested she must have been the one who was really in charge.
The third was a Miss E. Penny, Secretary to Mrs Pringle. A name Solomon remembered from Peter’s register with the marbled endpapers, counting the abandoned in, then counting them out again in one neat account.
The next three names on the Census were all nursemaids who slept in – an Elsie, an Ingrid and a Jane. Solomon blinked, remembered the whisper of an old woman waking him from beneath a blue blanket at a school for foundling boys. Hadn’t she said that he could call her Janie? The last remnant of a previous generation, perhaps.
At the bottom of the list of adults was a man named Tony, some sort of travelling salesman who had arrived at the baby farm that day and been allowed to stay the night.
But the rest of the 1911 Census record was taken up with children. Those who had died. And those who had lived. Thirteen babies, all of indeterminate origin, listed and named as foundlings, amongst other things. Solomon ran the tip of his finger over the names, considered what might have become of them. Turnip farmers. Or footmen. A lady’s maid or a teacher of girls. Either way they were the lucky generation, he thought. Too young to fight the first war. Too old, perhaps, for the one that would come next.
But his main interest was not in the foundlings listed on the Census, rather another child who appeared alongside. Noel and Dora Pringle’s daughter, Daisy. Eight years old in 1911. Making her fifteen when the photograph Solomon had in his pocket was taken. And judging by a field postcard sent towards the very end of 1918, the nearest thing Solomon had found to Alec Sutherland’s next of kin.
Before moving on to his second document, Solomon did a little checking to solidify what he had found out so far. He sourced a record for the marriage of Noel and Dora Pringle. Then a certificate proving the arrival of Daisy, a happy moment in 1903. Noel and Dora’s marriage had been witnessed by one of Noel’s brothers, a man called Walter who came from somewhere across the border. Solomon smiled. He knew that if he pursued that branch of the Pringle family tree he would find a newspaper proprietor and his ledger at the end of it. A favourite uncle, perhaps, just when Daisy Pringle needed one the most.
But it was with the second document Solomon Farthing had requested that he struck real gold – still a day to go before DCI Franklin would be expecting a result and here it was,
Ding
Ding
Ding!
Solomon almost stood and cheered when he read through the paper, then read it again, practically shouted it to the rafters:
He’s here!
Like those interlopers at New Register House in the Athens of the North. For the second piece of paper was a birth certificate for a baby boy, born in the district of Northumberland in which the Pringles’ baby farm once resided – a piece of paper that contained the following truths:
Date of Birth: November 1918
Place of Birth: Mrs Pringle’s Home for Lost Souls
Sex: Male
Mother’s name: Daisy Pringle
Father’s name: Blank
All signed off by a Miss E. Penny, Secretary in December 1918. Proof that Daisy Pringle once had a child of her own, when she was still a child herself.
But it was two other lines on th
e birth certificate that told Solomon Farthing he had followed the correct branch of Thomas Methven’s family tree after all. The first came almost at the bottom, as though it was the most insignificant thing:
Father’s occupation: Soldier
And the second, nearer the top. One more line completed in neat handwriting instructing the world as to the name by which Daisy Pringle wished her child to be known:
Forenames: Alexander (Alec)
Alec Sutherland and Thomas Alexander Methven linked once again. Not only by a pawn ticket, no.125, this time. But also by a name. One man’s legacy to his only son.
Three
It was lunchtime when Solomon Farthing quit the National Archive at Kew, his future in one pocket, his past in the other, Old Mortality caught somewhere in between. Outside the sun shone hot as he left the mothership behind and entered the neighbouring green. He made his way across the grass to stand on a bridge overlooking a river. The water here was clear, rippled with weed wending its way back and forth like a mermaid’s hair. So easy to slide into, Solomon thought. If only he dared.
His first trip to London in more than ten years had been a success. Not only had he evaded the attentions of his fellow Heir Hunter, shaking Colin Dunlop from his tail somewhere between here and the north, but he had also found what every person in his industry sought – a birth certificate for his dead client, Thomas Methven. And like all good Heir Hunters, Solomon Farthing knew that a birth certificate almost always led to a living relative, somewhere along the line.
As Solomon stared into the water, sunlight shifting and refracting off its surface, he was satisfied that he had completed his task. Nothing left to do but doorstep the lucky recipient of all his digging and get them to sign, commission on fifty thousand within his grasp at last.
And yet . . .
In the right-hand pocket of his jacket he had other news, the details of which filled his heart with sorrow rather than the joy that usually came with the knowledge that someone else’s treasure was almost within his grip. The findings from another file ordered from deep within the hidden stacks. Not Pringle this time. Or even Alec Sutherland. But Farthing. All that remained of Solomon’s father, on which he might rebuild.
The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing Page 22
