The vagaries of memory, the legacy of war. The last thing in the world Richard Jury wants to think about is the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood and made orphans of so many of the gaunt and sad-eyed children pictured in this handful of snapshots his old friend Mickey Haggerty shoves toward him on the desk.
Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the City police, has asked for Jury's help. Two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London's last bomb site, where once stood a pub called the Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for more than fifty years as a child who didn't. The grandchild of brewery magnate Oliver Tynedale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing...but did she?
Mickey also has a murder to solve. Simon Croft, prosperous City broker and son of the one-time owner of the Blue Last, is found shot to death in his Thames-side house. But the book he was writing about London during the German blitzkrieg has disappeared.
Jury wants to get eyes and ears into Tynedale Lodge and looks to his friend Melrose Plant to play the role. Reluctantly, Plant plays it, accompanied on his rounds of the Lodge gardens by nine-year-old Gemma Trim, orphan and ward of Oliver Tynedale; and Benny Keegan, a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy.
"We are all orphans," says Mickey. "Leftovers," says Gemma.