He removed the lid and peered inside, before lifting out the contents one by one, laying them along the edge of his kitchen table as though he was starting an inventory of sorts. First was a shopping list written on the back of an anniversary card, To my darling. Milk. Pickle. Tea. Next a coral-shaded lipstick rubbed to a stub, like his wife had been rubbed down, too. Then there was a clipping from the Edinburgh Evening News – a picture of him amongst his roses.
First prize.
After that a note that he recognized – the one where he had written, Sorry. And inside the fold, three dried rose petals, brown and fragile. Also a photograph of the two of them together, young people grinning at the camera as though they had all the time in the world.
Thomas Methven lifted the photograph close, peered into the grey of a life long past. His wife was wearing a dress that flared from the waist. He had hair pushed back from his brow and fixed with brilliantine. They were standing on the promenade at Hastings holding hands. It had been their honeymoon. Somewhere as far away as they could imagine, before they came home to Edinburgh and never left again. He remembered the argument about whether to go further – across the Channel to France, perhaps, take a look at the tapestry with the king who got an arrow in his eye during another battle long ago. It was his wife who had wanted to go, step off the white cliffs into a different kind of world. But he had been away once before and come home, had no reason to explore any further. What was the world, he used to say, if it could not be glimpsed in the faces of the roses he had spent a lifetime growing along the path to their front door.
Now, as he laid the photograph on the table along with all the rest, he considered whether in fact they should have travelled further. Then there would have been so much more. A whole lifetime of experiences spread out in black and white and Technicolor, the two of them ageing square by square by square. He looked into the shoebox again, hoping for another reminder that once his wife had been here. A handkerchief, perhaps. Her wristwatch. But under the detritus of a life well lived, there was something different. The remnants of a war.
There was a quiver in Thomas Methven’s hand as he lifted the rest of the box’s contents into the light, to lie amongst the crumbs.
A stub of pencil.
A plaque like a huge bronze penny: Britannia holding out her wreath.
Also a pawn ticket, no.125. That small square of blue. He knew at once what these things were. The remains of his father. All that was left of a man on which his son could rebuild.
At the bottom of the shoebox was a notebook the size of a man’s palm. The book was stiff and crinkled with age, as though it had got damp once and never quite recovered. He lifted it out with care, noted the slight tremor in his right hand again, getting much worse now. He ran one shaky finger over the front cover, then opened it and read the name on the inside page:
Methven.
As though he might have written it himself.
The notebook was all faded inside, with its blue horizontals and its red verticals at the far edge where the reckoning was due. Methven turned the first page, fingers sweaty on the brittle paper. He recognized the contents immediately. A profit-and-loss account.
Several names were listed, only ever written in pencil, never in ink. P. Flint. A. Walker. Someone called Jackdaw. An Arthur Promise and a George Stone. Also a soldier called Bertie Fortune – a lucky man indeed.
Vertical columns indicated what each man had put in and what had gone out again, written in his father’s neat hand:
A wishbone;
A tanner;
A reel of pink cotton.
Typical of soldiers to have something with which to sew their clothes. He traced the passage of each object from one man to the next, like his own passage across the northern oceans when he was a young man, there and back and there again, each time a slightly different path.
He turned a few more of the stiff pages, came to a series of entries over consecutive dates culminating in one for a cap badge owing to the man called Arthur Promise. For a chicken. The yellow. Unpaid. After that there seemed to be one more game, all its ins and outs, before the writing in the notebook ended with a double line at the bottom of the last entry, as though to mark a reconciliation of what had gone before. Always pay your debts, that was what his mother had said, whatever happens. She had been very particular about that.
And Thomas Methven could see at once that every one of these debts had been settled, a thick grey pencil line cancelling them out, but in a different hand. He wondered what game it was the men had played that ended with everything back where it had been at the beginning, turned to see what came next – a new round, perhaps – found the pages blank.
Thomas Methven knew that his father had been a soldier once. A tall man with serious eyes, standing in his uniform with his hand upon a table, small son by his side – a photograph his mother kept on her mantelpiece until the day she died. His father had been a man who loved to till the soil, as his son did, that was what she said. Always digging in his garden, before he was sent to till the soil of a foreign land to see what might grow there. Methven had heard all the stories. How his father had gone to war, though he did not have to. How he had kept a strict record of his earnings, so that there might be some savings once he returned. How he had looked after the little things, even when he was away, so that the bigger things might look after themselves. Nothing left of him now but a Dead Man’s Penny. Methven ran one finger over the inscription on the bronze plaque.
For Freedom and Honour.
Remembered his mother muttering as she shoved it into a drawer in the kitchen. Murderers. That was what she called them. A life-long pacifist, his mother, always wore the white poppy, never the red.
But when war came round again, as it must, Thomas Methven had grasped it with both hands, too. Signed for a sailor, never did go home. Stood instead on the deck of a rolling boat on the great northern ocean, ice on the lanyards, chickens in the hold, taking his turn at the watch. He remembered how huge the sky had been, as dark sometimes as a piece of velvet laid across his eyes. Other times ablaze with the luminous path of the Milky Way. He could hear it still, that constant roaring in his ears, a young man again peering through the waves in the darkness, the whip of sleet on his cheeks. At night now he missed his hat with its fur earflaps, his petrol-scented oilskin falling almost to the tips of his boot. He had been warm then, he thought, not cold like he felt now, deep inside his bones. Then he saw again the rolling of the boy amongst the surf, the bright splash of a sou’wester, glimpsed once, then vanished, the empty churn of the ocean as the boat steamed on ahead.
Thomas Methven looked again at the list of small treasures bet by men long dead. Then at the pawn ticket on the edge of his kitchen table, wondered what exactly it might redeem. He could still hear the soft slap and scuffle of cards as his fellow sailors played for pennies beneath the fo’c’sle, the happy exclamations when one triumphed, the swearing when all the others lost. Exchanging pinches of tobacco for a sliver of soap or an extra biscuit. Those postcards that came from Russia, 2d a time to buy. Just like his father, Thomas Methven understood how sometimes the simplest things were worth the most.
He laid the notebook aside, next to the pencil and the plaque and the little pawn ticket, peered into the shoebox again. There was a neat lining of newspaper laid on the bottom, date printed along the perforated edge. June 1971. The era of all change. Decimalization. The turn of old money into new. Methven and his wife had been all alone in the world then. No children. No brothers or sisters. His mother not long in the ground, too. He had been his own man at last; come to Edinburgh with nothing and made good all on his own. Spent a lifetime adding up the numbers for an insurance company in the certainty that it would have made his father proud.
The tremor in Methven’s hand worsened now as he contemplated lifting the edge of the newspaper to see what lay beneath, wondered if the letter might be hiding in the box, too. 1971 and sitting in the cinema with that envelope bur
ning a hole through the inside pocket of his jacket. He remembered the figures on the screen looming large, dust swirling in the projector’s beam as the letter pressed against his heart, holding his wife’s hand in the dark as though they were newlyweds again, wondering whether to confess.
The letter had arrived two days before, sliding onto his doormat in Edinburgh as though it was nothing more than an ordinary bill, nothing to indicate the incendiary nature of what it contained. He had read it and put it in his pocket. Then later he had put it further away than that. Couldn’t remember where, now, maybe torn into little pieces and scattered in the compost – where he planned to bury the Dead Man’s Penny, once the breakfast things were cleared. Blood money. That was what the offer in the letter had amounted to. One man’s legacy to his only son. But Thomas Methven always had been a man who grew roses and thought only of the future, not someone beholden to his past.
He looked out of the kitchen window now to where his roses were just starting to unfurl. The pride of the street, that was what his wife used to call them, great blooms in orange and pink. Ever since she had died he had found himself talking to the roses, telling them about this and that, about the war that was in the news. Sometimes, after he had picked greenfly from the stems and applied feed where it was needed, he came inside and wept. Sat in his armchair in front of the fire in the lounge, face wet with remembering everything he could no longer get back. He wondered often about digging the roses from the ground, dragging them from the earth, all their long roots cut through with one slice of his spade. It felt wrong now that they should bloom and bloom and bloom again, while his wife and everything that had gone before her would only ever decay.
He turned back to the television set, where a man in khaki was laughing as another wearing nothing but a dirty tracksuit put the barrel of a gun into the mouth of a boy. The boy could have been twelve, but might also have been fifteen. Thomas Methven knew straight away that if it was the first then the boy would survive; and if it was the second he would not. He saw again a boy he once knew rolling twice in the heave and froth of the northern ocean before he disappeared. Then his wife’s mouth, coral against the satin. Also his father, a man so long dead Methven could not remember what he looked like. Felt the tears rise.
He missed his father. He’d missed him as a boy and now he missed him again. Every day. With a pain at the very centre of his chest that never seemed to grow any smaller, only larger and larger, till it had become a mountain that he could never climb. Thomas Methven knew he was supposed to be strong, a man who could tend to it all, including the roses. And yet every day he sat in his chair in his empty living room and found himself crying like a child; felt his father close, like a second skin, now that he was old himself.
What was it about the past, that it would never leave a man alone?
PART TWO
The Pawn
2016
One
The tree began with a single name.
Thomas Alexander Methven.
Then the dates.
b.1920/21 d.2016.
A whole life encapsulated in fewer than all the letters of the alphabet. What was it about death, Solomon Farthing thought, that it left one so easily reduced?
His initial foray in pursuit of Thomas Methven (deceased) had brought him to New Register House – that hallowed hall at the east end of Princes Street where all the actual records were stored. Solomon knew that most Heir Hunters had it at their fingertips these days, digital portals to every possible record there could be when it came to hunting the deceased. Census reports. Passenger lists. The database of the Salvation Army. Also the Mormons – the biggest of the lot. But Solomon had always preferred the hand-made approach. One line after another written out with a fountain pen in black ink following a visit to the ledgers in Births Marriages and Deaths.
The nursing home had given him the information he needed to begin. A name. An approximate d.o.b. A copy of the death certificate, too. A GP had signed off the latter, but that didn’t mean a thing. Cash for Ash. That was what they used to call it. Sending in a junior doctor to sign for the deceased, one hundred and fifty quid and no questions asked. Illegal in Scotland now, though not in the south. Another sign of their divided nation, perhaps. Either way, paperwork lied, of that Solomon was certain. Or at least it never told the complete, unvarnished truth.
He’d arrived at New Register House with a stolen dog on a string, discovered on his doorstep only that morning when he returned from his trip to the nursing home in a squad car summoned by DCI Franklin, but driven by PC Noble, of course. PC Noble had delivered Solomon right to his front door in the crescent, refusing to acknowledge his suggestion that she drop him somewhere further down the street. When they arrived, there had been a small dog wearing a blue kerchief sitting on the step. PC Noble had glanced at Solomon in the rear-view mirror.
‘Is that your dog?’ she’d asked.
Assaulting a police officer. Housebreaking with Intent. Kidnap (or was it Dognap). How ironic if all the charges that could have been pinned on Solomon Farthing came down to the taking of a creature he didn’t even want.
‘Probably a neighbour’s,’ he’d said.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Who, the neighbour?’
PC Noble’s look had been enough to shrivel Solomon’s most intimate organs. Nobody in Edinburgh spoke to their neighbour.
‘The dog.’
‘How should I know?’
‘Maybe you should give him one. Make him feel at home.’
Solomon hadn’t replied, heaved himself from the back of the squad car and tried to ignore the dog as it trotted forwards to wait for him. PC Noble had scrolled down the window.
‘The DCI said to call her if you find anything. And next time you might want to shower first. You stink like a teenager.’
She’d been laughing as the squad car pulled away.
And yet . . .
As Solomon had stood on his doorstep with a dog that didn’t belong to him at his feet, it hadn’t been lilac he could smell, or even his own sweat. But a man already swimming towards him from out of the past, fifty thousand in used notes clutched in his fist for whoever might pull him to shore first.
At New Register House, Solomon handed the dog over to the security guard sitting by the entrance, an old acquaintance from years of ducking and diving through the archives. He planned to return the dog to its owner at the feet of Greyfriars Bobby once he’d done his initial search. He’d tied a string to its kerchief in an attempt to assert some authority on his walk into town, found the dog leading him instead.
The security guard owed Solomon a favour. The Heir Hunter had rescued the man’s aunt from a charlatan just like himself once, turned up at the optimum moment when the guy was snug on her sofa, eating Rich Tea, about to fleece her for forty per cent. The aunt had gone to the Caribbean on what Solomon had saved her. He’d only charged ten per cent that time, knew that he’d been on the side of the angels. It had been a good day’s work.
Once inside, Solomon made his way to the Finders’ Room, not a friendly place despite being housed in a building with a splendid copper dome not far from the city’s heart. Thirty computers in an L-shaped space, office lights blinking, every workstation taken except for two saved for urgent business by the police. The only sound was the ripple of fingertips on keyboards. Solomon Farthing’s idea of hell.
He ignored the eyes glancing at him now from over the other monitors, as he settled to his allocated station. Everybody here behaved as though they did not know anyone else in the room. But they were all familiar to each other, professionals and serious hobbyists with bent-over backs and suspicious stares. Occasionally an interloper appeared, an enthusiastic amateur exclaiming:
They’re here!
As they raised their heads from a census record to share the discovery that their great-grandparents really had been alive once. But generally it was the usual suspects, clocking each other in and clocking each other out.
Solomon knew that they would all be working on the latest list from the QLTR. The Queen’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer, looking after all those ownerless goods. Assets from dissolved companies. The things missing persons left behind. Lost or abandoned property. Not to mention Treasure Trove.
Quod nullis est fit domini Regis.
That which belongs to no one becomes the King’s.
Well, not if Solomon Farthing had anything to do with it, or any of his fellow Heir Hunters, given the number of them hunched over the monitors now. They would all be digging into whichever abandoned estate had the biggest sum of money as yet unclaimed. But they would have no interest in conferring. It said something about the nature of his industry that no one wanted to share.
Solomon’s first attempt to get to know his dead client had taken place early that morning – by the bins, round the back of the nursing home, once DCI Franklin had abandoned him to await the arrival of PC Noble instead. A small gathering of care-workers indulging in an early morning smoke, happy to tell Solomon Farthing what they knew.
They’d begun with introductions. Kassia. Pawel. Nico. Estelle. What would they do if the vote went Leave, Solomon had thought as he shook hands. Or, more important, what would he and the rest of the country do once they left. They all remembered Thomas Methven, a veteran of particular charm and erudition, who slid away as Edinburgh’s cherry trees began to drop their flowers.
‘Everyone wanted to sit next to him at the card table,’ said Kassia. ‘They used to argue about who would play his hand in bridge.’
‘He only did it to be polite,’ said Estelle. ‘Didn’t really approve of gambling.’
‘He liked to watch though. Write up the odds.’
The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing Page 6