The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson (sci fi books to read .TXT) 📗

as well as several thumbnail-sized photos lined up beside them. Except for Dan McLaughlin/McLachlan/McKintyre’s line, which had about twenty photos and a whole jumble of phone numbers and place names. I saw Stockport, Alcester and Kidderminster before I needed to close my eyes. I got a good grip on the edge of the kitchen table and forced myself to open them again. Shit. Was this really happening? Hold on tight.

‘OK. Hardest first,’ said Leonard, clicking on the images beside Dan. Immediately, multiple faces filled the screen in a veritable smorgasbord of potential Dans, which Leonard lined up neatly, side by side. I was finding it hard to focus with so many choices and for a brief moment I drifted off and wondered if it was possible I’d slept with them all.

‘Can you see him there? The right Dan?’

Leonard’s voice brought me back to the job at hand and I pictured myself walking slowly along this virtual line-up in a real-life police station, hands behind my back, staring through the glass. I imagined stopping and examining their faces in detail, taking my time to make sure I made the right decision, then slowly raising a scrawny finger to point and say, ‘That’s him, he’s the one!’ And then the guy running forward with his arms open, shouting, ‘I have a son, I have a son!’

But it wasn’t like that at all, because Dan McLachlan (as it turned out) hadn’t changed a bit. He still looked like the same handsome law student he’d been more than a decade ago, with just a little bit of manly wear and tear around the edges. Which got me wondering just how much wear and tear I’d accrued since my university days. As a distraction from thinking about that, I amused myself by doing the scrawny-finger-point thing at the photo of the real Dan.

‘Yes? That’s him?’ Leonard was absolutely delighted. ‘Aha! Excellent!’

I peered into Dan’s slightly older, still very arrogant face (oh yes, it was all coming back to me now), searching for a sign. Because, and it’s not just that he was the first on the list and looked like he’d aged well, even with my limited memory it seemed like he’d be a front-runner, if we’re playing the probability game. Because he’d stayed the weekend, if you get my drift. I searched older Dan’s blue eyes and perfectly shaped ears intently, but I couldn’t find a thing that reminded me of Norman.

Leonard slotted the winning Dan into the spreadsheet next to his name and began dispensing with the others, which was a shame, because a couple of them looked quite nice. As their faces disappeared from the screen I thought how lovely it might be to just choose a few more of them for a set and be done with it. But Leonard was already back to the spreadsheet, deleting like a man possessed and sending the losing Dans’ details into the abyss. Before I could even come to terms with the loss, he’d opened up another window on his computer.

‘Google Maps, Sadie!’

He sounded so proud I wondered if he might have invented it and, frankly, at this point it wouldn’t have surprised me. I only had a passing notion as to what one did with a Google Map, because I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d gone anywhere I hadn’t already gone a hundred times before. But all those little flags and bubbles looked impressive and I did at least recognize a map of the UK when I saw it.

Leonard’s fingers were almost smoking as he copied something from the winning Dan’s column, flicking from the spreadsheet to Google Maps. Next minute, a little red flag popped up on the map and even I understood what had just happened. If I wasn’t mistaken, that little red flag was the very location of Dan McLachlan, the lucky man behind door number one.

I looked closer at the map and saw with a mild shock that Dan’s flag was staked in Barnstaple, which was only about two and a half hours’ drive away. Bloody hell, now wouldn’t that be weird. Wouldn’t that just take the piggin’ biscuit, as Jax would say.

But while I was busy considering that if Dan was ‘the one’ then perhaps we could call the whole trip off with just an outing to Barnstaple and forget about the Fringe, Leonard had moved on to the next set of thumbnails.

Tony Simmons and I had sat beside each other in the same seats for a month’s worth of English Lit. classes, so I was fairly confident I’d recognize him. Funny what you do remember, but we fell into the same position as those lectures after we’d fumbled our way through things that one and only afternoon in his single bed. I’m not sure if I ever actually saw him from the other side, so a profile picture would probably have made things even easier. Left, as it goes. But there were only three pictures to choose from, and even with a front view and his face half obscured by somebody else’s pint, picking the correct Tony Simmons was a cinch. Once I’d confirmed his identity, Leonard went through his Google Map routine again and real Tony’s possible whereabouts were duly pinpointed. Swansea. Wales. Not so close this time.

As it turned out, though, it looked like I’d chosen a pretty unadventurous bunch for my six weeks or so of mayhem and one-night stands, because if Leonard and Google were to be trusted, all four of them had ended up within a five-hundred-mile radius of Edinburgh. James Knox, the musician, looked like he might even still be there. Even though Leonard said he couldn’t be quite sure, he had found a mobile phone number on a forum that the James in the photo I positively identified had been on looking to buy a second-hand Vespa in Edinburgh a year ago. Which gave me a bit of an indication as to how his musical career had panned