The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  He’d driven north in Colin Dunlop’s hybrid, enjoying all the benefits it conveyed, stopped at a castle in Northumberland sometime in the early hours to see if his aunt’s Mini was still waiting for him there. Needless to say, the Mini had vanished, disappeared into the ether with its rust holes and its string. Solomon had considered stopping at the school, lured by the idea of laying his head upon a blue blanket. Then he’d thought of DCI Franklin and the favour she was doing him, in return for the favour he had once done her.

  Not many hours later and here he was, five minutes from Thomas Methven’s only living relative, not far from the nursing home in which his client had breathed his last. A strange juxtaposition, Solomon thought as he parked Colin Dunlop’s car in a nearby cul-de-sac (misdirection, of a sort). Then again, Heir Hunters like him understood all about the odd ways people turned out to be connected. Especially in a city like Edinburgh, where somewhere along the line everybody knew everybody else.

  Solomon’s quarry was a woman called Iris Fortune. Widow, never any children, lived most of her life in London but originally from the north. He arrived on her doorstep at 8 a.m. hoping to surprise her. Only for her to appear before he’d even had the chance to knock. An old lady with hair all teased about like a stick of candyfloss, she caught him blowing his nose with one hand and trying to palm a gritty tic tac with the other. Good impressions mattered if one wanted to leave with a contract signed and sealed.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Fortune?’

  Solomon held out his hand, but Iris Fortune didn’t take it.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Solomon Farthing.’

  ‘Like the money?’

  A quarter of a penny once, the lowest denomination possible. Why was it that even on the doorstep of a stranger, Solomon was reminded of his net worth. He attempted gravitas despite the crumple of his shirt.

  ‘I have some news for you, about a relative.’

  ‘They’re all dead.’

  Solomon touched a hand to his dishevelled hair, realized he had been bested somehow before he’d even got into Iris Fortune’s hall.

  ‘Yes, well, maybe . . .’ he replied. ‘But one of them has left something behind.’

  Indoors things were much as he expected. China ornaments. Vertical blinds. Three-piece suite in beige. It should be easy, Solomon thought. Famous last words. On the television set in the lounge there was a first-person shooter frozen in the middle of a game. He couldn’t hide his surprise.

  ‘Is someone else here?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Iris Fortune laughed, ‘my great-nephew showed me how. Runs through our family like a streak of raspberry ripple.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Death by shooting.’

  And Solomon knew at once that he had come to the right house.

  The tea Iris Fortune offered was Earl Grey. Solomon had been hoping for a sherry, or at the very least a coffee. But somehow this old lady knew just how to keep him on a leash. She sat opposite him on the sofa turning the pages of the contract he had cobbled together by the photocopying machines at Kew, a small crinkle in her forehead.

  ‘So who exactly is dead?’ she said. ‘I can’t help if I don’t have a surname.’

  An old Heir Hunter trick. Get the client to sign before confirming full name and d.o.b., plus anything else that might mean they could claim the estate themselves. Solomon knew that Iris Fortune was looking for elucidation. But he wanted to obfuscate as long as possible until he was sure the commission on fifty thousand would be his.

  ‘I’d rather we agreed it was a case worth pursuing together before we go into all the boring nitty gritty,’ he replied.

  ‘But how can I decide if I don’t know the name?’

  Like everything in life, Solomon thought, you take a gamble. Still, he gave her the spiel.

  ‘Well, I’m pretty sure of the connection. You can check my credentials, if you like, speak to one of my previous clients.’ A gamble of his own. ‘But really it would be an acknowledgement of the unpaid work I have carried out on your behalf so far, an agreement that we will tackle the rest of the case together. And share whatever we find.’

  Solomon liked to think it sounded as though he was offering some sort of partnership when he said this, rather than holding a relative’s legacy to ransom so that he could take most of it for himself. But still Iris Fortune had questions.

  ‘Five figures, you say? Split how many ways?’

  Solomon wriggled a little in his chair thinking of the Reverend Jennie Methven’s enormous family tree. And the much smaller one in his pocket, which he had sketched himself.

  ‘An eighth is common,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a sixth. But I suspect there could be significantly less once we investigate. Do you have a lot of cousins?’

  Iris Fortune frowned as though counting out the cousins for herself. The one who wore her hair in pigtails. The one who ran away to sea. The one they cremated and sprinkled in the rose garden. All on the wrong side of the family, of course. C’est la vie. Or c’est la mort. That was just the way life and death worked. It was Mrs Fortune’s next remark, however, that made Solomon’s heart skip.

  ‘And why would I not just pursue it myself? You can get everything on that web thing these days, can’t you.’

  Yes, Solomon thought. You can. Along with Colin Dunlop and all the other Heir Hunters knocking on your door and shouting through the letterbox, leaving constant phone messages the minute the case appeared on the QLTR list. Solomon tugged at the flap of his cuff, tried to stop his fingers starting with their incessant fluttering this early in the day. He was certain he had seen Colin Dunlop following him around Edinburgh’s bypass in his aunt’s stolen Mini. Then again, he could have been hallucinating. Half a bottle of Fino drunk to the bone while he was lying in a London graveyard the night before might have had the same effect.

  ‘You could spend a lot of time following the wrong path,’ he said, now attempting sincerity. ‘Only to find someone else has got there first. I would be saving you the trouble.’

  A knight in muddy corduroys.

  ‘And what was your name again?’

  ‘Solomon,’ he said. ‘Solomon Farthing.’

  Iris Fortune blinked then. ‘You’ll be related to Godfrey.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  ‘My grandfather,’ he replied.

  They still asked him sometimes, Solomon’s clients. Where’d my watch go? How about that coat? What did he do with those earrings my mother used to have? As though it wasn’t them or their relatives who had bartered their worldly goods, but some stranger who had taken everything from them on the promise of a return, only to run away and never come back. It was over forty years since Godfrey Farthing had died and still people spoke about him as though he was hiding somewhere with everything they had ever owned.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Solomon said, holding out a somewhat leaky biro acquired by deception from the National Archive. ‘I just need you to . . .’

  But Mrs Fortune laughed then like a child skipping round a maypole, as though there could be nothing better in life to do than that.

  ‘Oh, son, I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ve been watching that programme for years now. You know the one.’

  And he did.

  ‘Heir Hunters,’ she said. ‘So interesting. Got to be careful, old women like me all on our own. Don’t know who might come calling.’

  Solomon couldn’t stop the flutter of his fingers then as fifty thousand began to slip from his grip. He tried to rally.

  ‘Well, there are always things that we can bring to the table . . .’

  But Iris Fortune just shook her head as though she was doing him a favour rather than the other way round.

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that. I’ve got that web thing through the back. Would you like to see it? Ancestry dot com.’

  ‘Ancestry dot com,’ Solomon echoed, understanding that his five-figure commission was about to disappear
like dust off the mantelpiece.

  He pulled a blue kerchief from his pocket, patted at his forehead, felt, all of sudden, every single crush, spit and crumple of the last few days. He missed the dog, that was what it came down to. The way it used to lean against his leg at dispiriting times like this. But the dog was long gone, lost to a boy in Northumberland who had won him with the toss of a coin. Just as Solomon would be long gone, too, once Freddy Dodds’s men realized he was back in town. Solomon had a sudden premonition of his return to that basement flat in the crescent, no camouflage of any sort to protect him now, his first visitor one of those Edinburgh Men of an unsavoury disposition come to welcome him home. With a brick. Or a bat. Or the toss of another coin to see which of his limbs they should threaten first. Freddy Dodds standing in the hallway, calculating what he might get for the grandfather clock. While Colin Dunlop slid seamlessly into the seat in which Solomon sat now.

  It was then that Iris Fortune held out the unexpected hand of an Edinburgh kind of friendship.

  You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

  ‘Now son, I may be able to help you,’ she said, patting the seat on the sofa next to her. ‘But let’s start again, shall we. And give me it all this time, chapter and verse.’

  Thomas Methven (deceased) was her brother – or half one at least. A baby boy born to a Daisy Pringle in November 1918, abandoned to a Mabel Methven née Kerr six months later to make up for the child she had lost. Along with a pawn ticket, no.125, of course, not the kind of evidence Margaret Penny of the Office for Lost People might appreciate, but the only real proof Solomon Farthing had of Thomas Methven’s roots.

  It hadn’t been hard to trace Daisy Pringle through the records after that. An only child who had lived a life of full abandon once the war to end all wars had finally run its course. Her paper trail had proved fulsome even on an initial, speculative surf. Marriages. And divorces. Her signature on a couple of death certificates, too. Solomon knew that once he did some proper digging, all sorts of shenanigans might appear.

  Daisy Pringle, it turned out, had been one of the lucky generation. Bright Young Things, wasn’t that what they called them? Girls and boys who only ever wanted to dance. Left home as soon as she could and made for London, champagne cocktails and skirts at the knee. No wonder she gave away her first-born child, Solomon had thought as he wrote it all down. Who wants to move into a new era with a constant reminder of the previous one hanging on your hip?

  And yet, the real treasure had not been Daisy Pringle, but the other child she left behind. A daughter called Iris, born ten years after the first. The product of a short-lived marriage to an airman who had later crashed and burned. And even better, the daughter was still alive; and sitting before Solomon now.

  ‘Oh no, son,’ said Iris Fortune, dismissing the rough family tree Solomon had sketched by way of demonstration. ‘I’ve never had a brother.’

  Solomon was not surprised by this reaction. It wasn’t uncommon for Heir Hunters to know more about a family than the family knew themselves.

  ‘Your mother may not have mentioned it,’ he said. ‘She was very young at the time.’

  ‘My mother told me everything,’ said Iris Fortune. ‘A very voluble woman.’

  And judging by Daisy Pringle’s paper trail, Solomon thought this was probably true.

  ‘I did have a brother-in-law though.’ Iris Fortune sat a little straighter. ‘And nephews, too, by marriage. If that’s any good.’

  She began to tick them off on her fingers as though she was doing the reckoning for herself:

  Reggie Fortune. Brother-in-law. Shot in the desert.

  ‘Some time in 1943, I think. Not that I ever knew Reggie. Only from photographs, of course.’

  A great nephew. Iraq, the first time. Wounded by Friendly Fire.

  ‘Imagine going all that way only to get it from your own side. He ended up with that thing they all talk about . . .’

  Iris Fortune fished for the word.

  ‘Gulf War Syndrome?’ Solomon suggested.

  ‘No, the one you get after.’

  Relief, Solomon thought. That you are still alive.

  ‘Stress,’ Iris Fortune declared, as though it was something you got after a bad day at the office. ‘Post Traumatic . . .’

  Then there was Uncle Bob.

  ‘Belgium, 1917. One of the doomed.’

  And his twin brother, James.

  ‘Shot by some sniper a month later when he stood up to go to the toilet. You’d think he’d have learned by then.’

  Iris Fortune paused at that, as though only now considering the devastation.

  ‘Imagine losing two sons in the same year. How awful. My father-in-law was the only one left after that. Albert Fortune. Though everyone called him Bertie. Thank God he came home or his mother would have shot herself, too, probably . . . through the back in the larder.’

  With a ladies’ gun, thought Solomon, pearl inlay on the handle.

  ‘She spent a lot of time in there, polishing her china,’ Iris Fortune continued. ‘Always was a doomy sort of person.’

  She brushed a crumb from her lap as though to dismiss all those who had been stupid enough to end their days floundering in the mud of a battlefield.

  ‘Quite a military family, really. All on my husband’s side, of course.’

  Solomon glanced again at the television screen frozen in a moment of madness. He had never been interested in war, not the way that other boys were. The make-believe sticks. The belts strung across the chest. Running along that riverbank as though it was a canal in the desert they never would get back. The only wars his generation had ever been called to were on the barricades. Anti-Vietnam. Pro-abortion. Gay rights. You name it, they marched. Culture wars, wasn’t that what they called it in America now? They were all obsessed with guns over there. Black. White. Old. Young. Men and women both. Even children knew how to pull a trigger. Whatever had become of those crusading years?

  Solomon felt melancholy settling on him at the thought that life was nothing but brutal in its brevity, whereas Iris Fortune seemed revitalized now that she had accounted for all the deaths by shooting in her family tree. She put a hand to her perfumed hair, the scent of geraniums rising in the warmth of the living room.

  ‘I can show you some photographs, if you’d like?’

  Solomon sighed. He preferred to sign the deal before he got caught in albums and family stories that often turned out to be untrue. Then again, he had already decided he must not leave the house without Iris Fortune’s signature on his contract. What other chance did he have with Freddy Dodds? Not to mention DCI Franklin. So he slid back into the depths of the sofa.

  ‘Pictures would be good.’

  They looked through albums until Solomon thought he would go cross-eyed. Then she brought it out. A black-and-white photograph of a group of men – soldiers, all lounging on the grass as though oblivious to the big guns that must have been firing just beyond the ridge. Solomon could tell at once that it dated from the first war rather than the second. There were the leg straps and the flat tin helmets, the brass buttons and the belts.

  ‘This one’s George Stone,’ said Iris Fortune, pointing to an older man at the end of the line. ‘He went all the way with my father-in-law.’

  She moved her finger along.

  ‘I don’t know who he is, the man with the book. But the boy here is called Beach. And this one . . .’ She indicated a man standing in the background in the shadow of a tree.

  ‘This one is your grandfather, I think.’

  Solomon started. What was it about this case that wherever Thomas Methven led, Godfrey Farthing followed? A story Solomon had not been able to untangle yet. He stared at the photograph of his grandfather as a young man, barely into his twenties, not much older than Solomon had been when the old man went into the ground. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen a picture of his grandfather at this age before, felt all of a sudden as though he had been playing a game his whole life and
now, without warning, realized it might be over before he’d properly begun.

  Iris Fortune was pointing further down the line of men at a soldier with a cheery smile and a very neat moustache.

  ‘This is Bertie, my father-in-law.’

  Both Solomon’s hands were trembling as he touched a finger to the twenty-something Bertie. Then to Godfrey Farthing, where he stood beneath a tree.

  ‘Did he know my grandfather well,’ he asked, ‘your father-in-law?’

  But Iris Fortune shook her head.

  ‘No idea. Bertie hardly spoke about the war at all. Said once that the walnuts were bitter. But I’ve still got the watch he wore then.’

  She pulled back her sleeve to reveal a small thing with a rim of gold that glinted in the morning light.

  ‘He gave it to my husband for a wedding present. Said it would bring us luck seeing as it had survived, too.’

  Solomon blinked at this relic of an old war, still ticking away after all this time. Then Iris Fortune let her sleeve drop and turned again to the pile of albums, slipped out one with hard covers and black sugar-paper pages. She flipped open the front and showed Solomon a photograph of a young woman laughing on the steps of a registry office.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘On my wedding day.’

  Next to her, a man with the same gold watch on his wrist and a spray of lilies of the valley pinned to his lapel.

  ‘That’s my Bill, Bertie’s youngest.’

  Pointed out her mother-in-law, Annie. Her sister-in-law, Alice. And next to them an older man in his fifties, somewhat awkward in an ill-fitting jacket. Iris Fortune ran her hand across the front of the photograph.

  ‘This is Bertie,’ she said. ‘He was supposed to wear his lucky suit for the wedding, but the laundry lost it the day before. Ended up wearing one that belonged to his dead son instead. It was strange, the luck just ran out of him after that. Lost all his money, kept on giving it away.’

  Solomon frowned at the dapper man in the crumpled suit, wondered what his grandfather would have made of Bertie Fortune if they’d ever stayed in touch. He noticed a woman at the very edge of the wedding group wearing a hat with a huge curled feather. The elusive Daisy Pringle, perhaps.