The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing Read online

  ‘Sewn inside his burial suit,’ said the DCI.

  ‘What?’ Solomon had come across lots of odd things in his career as an Heir Hunter. But he’d never heard of that before. Money for a funeral worn like a second skin.

  ‘The undertaker found it when she came to dress him,’ said DCI Franklin. ‘Called the home. They called us. Said it was about fifty thousand, give or take.’

  Despite the early morning hour, Solomon felt a sudden tingle inside at the prospect of this case. Fifty thousand. In cash. Twenty per cent of which would start to sort his problem very nicely indeed, thank you very much.

  ‘Don’t suppose he left any instructions about what to do with it?’ he asked.

  Where there was a will there was a way, but not for an Heir Hunter. A will was the last thing Solomon wanted to stumble across.

  ‘Not that we can find,’ said the DCI. ‘No idea where the money came from or where it should go. The home thought he was an indigent. They were about to call Margaret Penny at the Office for Lost People and get them to arrange the cremation when I stepped in.’

  Fifty thousand up in smoke, thought Solomon, saved by the DCI to live another day.

  ‘Why don’t you investigate yourself?’ he asked.

  The DCI leaned against the doorframe. She seemed tired all of a sudden. ‘It’s legit. The death’s non-suspicious, signed off by the GP. No reason to pursue it further than the sudden death report.’

  Solomon understood at once what she meant. Cuts. Cuts. And more cuts. That was what it amounted to. Till they were all sliced down to the marrow, let alone the bone. He’d heard all about the demise of the Edinburgh Enquiry Team, those specialists in non-suspicious death, dispersed to the four winds, north, south, east and west. All the experts were gathered at a flashy new crime campus on the other side of the country now. Glasgow always had worn whatever wealth it had on its sleeve. Whereas Edinburgh (rather like the deceased Thomas Methven) preferred to keep it under wraps.

  ‘Why not just pass it over to UH?’ he said. ‘Let them deal with it.’

  A cursory trawl for potential inheritors by the crown office, then publish it on their lists and watch the vultures like him pile in.

  ‘We will if you can’t find a living relative,’ said DCI Franklin. ‘Thought you might like to have a go first.’

  Solomon smiled.

  You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

  ‘Where’s the money now?’ he asked sliding open every one of Thomas Methven’s empty drawers with a casual air.

  ‘In the nursing-home safe,’ said the DCI.

  ‘Don’t you want to secure it?’

  ‘We will if you can’t find anyone to claim it,’ she said. ‘Till then it’s lost property, nothing more.’

  Finders Keepers, thought Solomon.

  ‘How long do I have?’ he asked.

  ‘Four days.’

  ‘Four days!’

  ‘Only so much I can do to detain the paperwork.’

  And Solomon knew exactly what paperwork meant. Margaret Penny of the Office for Lost People wading in and wanting to know why an old man’s last wishes hadn’t been respected. Fifty thousand up in smoke inside Thomas Methven’s burial suit because she was a stickler for the rules. He fiddled with the edge of the nylon net curtains hanging at the window, looked out over the deceased’s last view of the world. Would it be to his advantage to play hard to get? he wondered. But when Solomon turned back, the DCI was dipping a hand into her pocket, as though fishing for a lucky charm recovered from between a dead man’s floorboards.

  ‘There is one more thing that recommends you.’

  Solomon blanched, tried to joke. ‘Family silver?’

  DCI Franklin smiled then as though she’d known all along it was the right thing to involve him. She pulled her hand from her pocket, held the treasure out. Not a silver cap badge with a lion raising its paw. But a pawn ticket, no.125. That small slip of blue.

  1918

  One

  It was November, the beginning of an uneventful month, nothing but cold mornings and ice fringing the shaving bucket, air that covered them all in a blanket of dew the moment they ventured out. The rain was falling again as though to turn the world into a river, water running with abandon through the pond beyond the farmhouse – in one side, out the other – each small channel joining with the next until it had become something to wade through whenever one of them wanted the latrine.

  Captain Godfrey Farthing stared out of the farmhouse window at the pools gathering in the yard. It was just like the river they were supposed to be crossing, he thought, if only the order would come. A stretch of water a mile or so away, flat and unexceptional, bordered by willows not yet destroyed by machine-gun fire. Godfrey had been on reconnaissance to survey their embarkation point. Found it all disappointingly ordinary. Saplings and stubby reed beds, a grassy field on the opposite bank with no distinguishing features other than the likelihood that this was where the enemy would shoot them all down.

  He’d come away wondering whether it really was worth the effort, wriggling in reverse through the dips and troughs of the intervening marsh until his uniform was soaked and stained. As he’d walked back to the farmhouse where what remained of his unit had made their billet, all Godfrey could imagine was the impossibility of traversing such a flat and undistinguished piece of land without exposing his men wholesale to the enemy. They’d probably drown in some drainage ditch along the way, floundering beneath a shower of bullets before they even got their chance. It would be a stupid death, unnecessary, like a toddler fallen into a neighbour’s ornamental pool. But then again, wasn’t that what the war had become now? Something stupid to do every day because, well, they hadn’t been instructed to do anything else.

  The whole thing reminded him of Private Beach.

  I’ll be seeing you, then.

  Speaking his goodbye as though he was going home for tea rather than into the great lacuna of death. It was not until much later that Godfrey wondered if in fact Beach’s words had been more prescient than he realized.

  I’ll be seeing you, then.

  If only he had listened. Too late now.

  ‘You know the end is coming.’ Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson tipped his chair as though he was at school again declaiming amongst the sixth-formers (which he had been, not long since). ‘A matter of days now, maybe a week.’

  Godfrey refused to look up from the postcard he was supposed to be writing to his mother. ‘We’ve heard that one before.’

  It said everything about the difference between them that Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson tipped his chair without thinking, while Captain Godfrey Farthing couldn’t bear to watch.

  They had been waiting almost ten days already and still no orders had reached them, not even of the most trivial kind. No drilling instructions or supply counts. No demands to dig ditches where no ditches were required. It was as though they had been forgotten, sent forwards to make camp, then abandoned, nothing left for the section to do but sit tight as the war rolled on in front. Godfrey knew he ought to send a messenger, ask why the rest of his company had not joined them yet. But as each morning dawned greyer than the next, he had found himself putting it off, then off again, one day pooling quietly into the next.

  ‘No, but really.’ Ralph tipped forwards now, leaning towards Godfrey across the table as though to emphasize what he had to say. ‘I think it might be true this time.’ Tapped with his fingers on the edge of Godfrey’s postcard.

  Godfrey stared at the boy’s scrubbed nails. Dear Mother, they say the end is coming . . . Slid the card a fraction away from Ralph Svenson’s hand.

  Second Lieutenant Svenson was a boy really, only nineteen, but still a commissioned officer, not been in the war six months. He’d arrived too late for any sort of real action, with a grin as wide as the Channel and that scent of lemon oil he liked to slick through his hair. He was the new subaltern, an unwelcome reminder that Godfrey had already forgotten the name of his la
st. That was what happened when all your men disappeared. You got reassigned to the company of strangers; had to go back to the start. Godfrey knew he should have taken the boy under his wing, been a sort of father-figure. But he found he could not. Ralph had a way about him that resisted instruction. Also something that was lost to Godfrey now – the exhausting eagerness of youth.

  Ralph withdrew his hand, sulking, tilted his chair again and fiddled with something in his pocket as he stared out of the window with those strange translucent eyes. Godfrey knew that his Second was bored. A young man hardened by a few weeks in a drill square, abandoned to lounge around in the muck.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ the boy had complained only the day before, fed up with parading the men to no purpose. ‘They’ve left us here to rot.’

  Ralph hadn’t taken part in any battles yet. No crouching in a muddy dip waiting to be sliced by shrapnel. No running at the enemy with bayonets fixed. That was why he liked to feast on rumours of the end. Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson was hoping they would not come true yet.

  The farmhouse they had commandeered was a lavish affair – practically Versailles after everything that had gone before. The rats. The dugouts. The low stink of gas. Foxholes with finger bones poking from the sides. By contrast their new billet had stone walls and a roof thick with tiles, windows that still had both shutters and glass. There were outbuildings big enough for a horse and a cow, had there been any livestock left. There was a barn for the men to bunk in. A grain store in which Private Flint had strung the washing wall to wall. Also the worn stub of a boot-scrape at the front entrance, as though what mattered above all else here was at least an attempt at keeping clean.

  While they waited Godfrey had set himself and Ralph up in the parlour. Fireplace with a wooden mantel. Narrow settle set along one wall. A table stained with the ring of a vase. Also a small crucifix hanging to the left of the door. Godfrey liked to touch the crucifix before he went to bed each night. A reminder of all that was past for him now. And what might still be to come.

  There was even a rose bush in the garden – the promise of spring, Godfrey had thought when they first arrived, if any of them lasted long enough to see. Great blowsy things in pink and orange, perhaps, scattering fragrant petals to the summer winds.

  Beach would have declared it a palace.

  Now that’s really something.

  First spoken as they crouched beneath the third day of a bombardment that turned out later to be useless for all concerned.

  As they had approached the farmhouse that first day, single file along the muddy lane, Godfrey had thought it a palace, too. Yet still he had anticipated pushing open the door to find disaster. A man sprawled on the hearth with a bullet through his face. A woman slumped over the kitchen table, throat sliced, skirt hitched high. It was how they all encountered the new these days – as though they could taste death before it landed, that urge rising within them to run back to what they all understood best. The mud. The guns. The relentless train rides to disaster. The knowledge that the end was coming whether they liked it or not.

  But then the chicken had appeared, strolling around the corner of the grain store, followed by another and another, a whole flock of them scraping and pecking about Captain Godfrey Farthing’s feet. The chicken had turned its black eye upon Godfrey as though to ask a question, made him think of Beach’s eyes the morning that he died. Then he had caught the lazy flap of an apron on a clothes line; a row of winter cabbages wrapped in scraps of sacking to protect them from the frost. Who looked after their cabbages, he thought, if they themselves had been ravaged? The men obviously agreed, because behind him Godfrey had heard them walking faster then, two-by-two down the lane, breath clouding in the cold air of yet another year winding towards its end.

  In the parlour, Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson got up all of a sudden and retrieved a rough wooden cup from the mantel. He placed it on the table before Godfrey, then delved into his uniform and produced a pair of dice.

  ‘Two sixes and it’ll be over in a week.’

  Ralph called the dice his lucky charm, wouldn’t go anywhere without them. Godfrey had refrained from pointing out that his Second was putting his trust in something random. Might as well take his chances raising his head above the parapet of a front-line trench to check the direction of the wind.

  Now he ignored Ralph’s request and considered what to write on the blank expanse of his postcard.

  Dear Mother . . .

  ‘Two fives, ten days.’

  We are all going on fine here . . .

  ‘Two threes, a month.’

  The weather is wet . . .

  ‘C’mon, Farthing,’ Ralph grumbled. ‘Aren’t you even going to take a punt?’

  Godfrey gripped at his stub of pencil. ‘You know I don’t gamble.’

  ‘We all gamble.’

  Godfrey blinked. Ralph Svenson was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about that. ‘All right. Two fives, then.’

  Ralph grinned, shook the wooden cup as though he was mixing some sort of cocktail, tumbled the dice onto the table.

  A six and a three. No win. Not even close.

  At once Ralph began again, rattling off the various combinations he was sure would secure the correct result. Two threes. A five and a one. Two sixes followed by a two and a four together. He threw to bet on when the war might end – in a week, in a fortnight, in a month. At least that was what he told Godfrey. But Godfrey knew it was the other way around. Ralph threw in the hope of one last battle; some reason to flash his pistol before the other side strung whatever white linen they had left above the line.

  It was almost admirable, Godfrey thought now, Ralph’s belief in his ability to summon the result that he desired, even if that was the extension of the war long enough for him to fire his gun. The boy did it in the same way he might order up a cocktail.

  Gin fizz, cherry on the side, please.

  With a simple wave of his hand. A bit like Godfrey’s ability to summon Beach.

  I’ll be seeing you, then.

  Those flat grey eyes.

  Godfrey looked again at the blank card beneath his hand, Ralph’s dice spinning once again. He had never tasted a cocktail until he came to France. Then it had been just the one in a bar a few miles back from the line that first year. An intoxicating mix of brandy and champagne that had sent him spinning, too. He’d never wanted a second in case it didn’t live up to the first. But recently he had started to wonder if this was some sort of handicap to living. Enjoyment wasn’t a sin, was it? Or anticipation? The end might come, after all. But after that, there would always be something else.

  There was a sudden commotion outside in the yard, men shouting, others laughing, a flurry of squawks and flaps. Ralph stopped with the dice and cup.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said.

  For the end, thought Godfrey, if only for the poultry. His Second Lieutenant stood, pushed his chair in towards the parlour table.

  ‘Want to join us?’

  Godfrey looked at the blank piece of card before him, nothing written on it but the date, 5 November. Then at his second. Ralph’s eyes were pale, very clear, like Godfrey imagined a glacier might be if he ever had the opportunity to see one close.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  We are all going on fine here. The weather is wet, but we have plenty to eat and the conditions are favourable. Yesterday I walked into the village and drank a cocktail.

  It couldn’t be any worse than what had happened so far, could it, thought Godfrey, the sudden fizz of bubbles on his tongue.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ he said, putting down his pencil. ‘Clear my head.’

  ‘If you’re certain.’

  Ralph was already at the door, one eager hand through his hair, the other tugging at his tunic, disappearing into the stone passageway with a shout to the men outside.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  The clamour from the yard growing louder, someone shouting in turn.
<
br />   ‘Catch the bugger!’

  Ralph calling excited instructions.

  ‘This way. Over here now.’

  Nothing more than a leader amongst boys.

  Godfrey slipped the postcard into his top pocket, the pencil in beside, buttoned them both down. He got up from the table with its water stain, lifted his coat from the back of his parlour chair. He would leave the men to their fun, go out the back so as not to get in the way of their game. They liked to play with life and death, even if it was just a chicken, throw the dice and decide which one would be next. But if the end really was coming, Godfrey Farthing wasn’t sure that he wanted any part of it yet.

  Two

  The real game had begun the second night after they’d arrived, light fallen from the sky as seven men spread themselves amongst the ground sheets, across the barn’s stone floor:

  Hawes, the temporary sergeant;

  Private Flint;

  Private Walker;

  Corporal Bertie Fortune;

  Private Jackson, known as Jackdaw;

  Private Promise;

  And Lance Corporal Archie Methven, the accountant. The man who kept them all straight.

  Seven o’clock and already dark outside, their cook, George Stone, cleaning up after dinner in the farmhouse kitchen, and it was Percy Flint who had brought out the cards. Hair slick. Cuffs turned neat. His parting a white arrow on his scalp.

  ‘Six playing,’ Flint said. ‘Me. Walker. Fortune. Promise. Jackdaw. Hawes. The accountant to hold the bank.’

  Gambling was forbidden in the army, but everybody did it. One more way to get through the day, until the next one dawned.

  ‘Not me.’

  James Hawes, the temporary sergeant, was sitting a bit away from the others, reading a book with a faded red cover, thick arms, and a splatter of freckles across the back of his neck. When he’d first arrived over two years before, James Hawes had joined in every game. Now he almost never gambled, turned and turned the pages instead.

  ‘Five, then,’ said Flint. ‘Walker, Fortune, Jackdaw, Promise. Me to deal.’ Percy Flint liked to lay out the parameters. Transactional arrangements were where he came to the fore.