The Recoverer (9).
by
Angharad.
The supermarket was the easy bit of the day, I bought a boot full of food including some easily made meals but not quite ready-made, may as well have takeaways as those, though they are slightly cheaper if you heat them yourself.

I looked up the local schools, as I thought, there was a girl's school just down the road but it was private. I looked up its website, its fees were pretty horrendous so I then wondered what Eton's would be, apart from out of my league. Nothing ventured nothing gained (or lost, my mind kept telling me). This is not my child why am I signing up to pay for education, isn't that the parent's job? I wondered if it was some way of them saving on school fees by having muggins here pay for it. I probably earn more than Jon does but I don't have a need for private education, I had no children. If this situation became different, I could have one child for whom I was newly responsible - oh poo.

Stephanie came in while I was looking at the website of St Margaret's Girl's School. "Is that where you're going to send me, Eve?"

"Why? You fancy it?" I threw back at her.

"It's gotta be better than the other place was."

"You don't know that, in fact we know very little about it and do you realise that you're going to have to survive as a girl amongst a whole school full of them?"

"Well, I assume all of them manage it so it can't be that hard," she replied and I nearly burst out laughing.

"Most of them have been practising since babyhood, you have had a month, I think I see some disparity there, don't you?"

"You seem to cope with slipping into femininity easy enough," was her glib response.

"Just because you can look okay in a skirt and use a bit of makeup doesn't make you a girl."

"I know, it's the bit between my ears does that."

I felt a conflict between wanting her to be right and also trying to make her understand just how large an adventure she was embarking on, one that she doesn't even have a clue about how vast it is, it's effectively teaching her to learn an entirely new way of life. I don't think I have it completely and I've been venturing forth as female for maybe ten years or so. It's not the big things that catch you out but myriad little ones that show you up as a fraud. Just one could get the girls looking more closely and if they spot a second, Steph's cover would be blown.

We made an appointment for a look at the new school and found that although it was expensive - tell me what isn't - she suggested she was ready to go there. Then she suddenly had to sit an entrance exam - this was worse that Cambridge, at least there you were going to a very prestigious university, here, just somewhere to hide until A-levels, poo she hadn't done GCSEs yet, not the best time to change schools with them due at the end of this year.

She agreed to come in and do the entrance exam which looked at core subjects and some desirables as well, we had to list those. She would face English, Maths, Science, History and Geography with French and Computing. The last, I suspected she knew most about rarely being without a device of some sort in her long fingered paws. I also wanted to take a summer job with a shop or office somewhere to see how other women deal with each other, I don't think It's something you can teach but it has to be learned by experience.

we also went to see a solicitor friend to do a statutory declaration for a change of name and then to a friend who manages the local department store to get Stephanie a temporary job. It was harder than I expected as she had no previous experience. He agreed he'd give her two weeks probation and then give us his decision. I couldn't argue so was left high and dry. we explained that she had an entrance exam the next day and while she dealt with it and did some paperwork for my own business, not the most enticing or exciting part of the job, but I saw we had a few unclaimed fees which made the prospect of school fees a little gentler on my pocket.

Sue came to visit after Stephanie had gone to work at the department store. Like the school they didn't know what she could do, so she expected to be moved about the place, which can be very tiring but she seemed to enjoy seeing how other people lived and after detailing all the drama of shop life to her mother and I, she went for an early night and was asleep quite quickly. By the end of the first week she was going to the cinema with some girls from work all of which went to her school, so she seemed to making friends. Perhaps, she was going to survive in the school but she still faced the ordeal daily. Both her mother and I tried to warn her that her friends may be the hardest to convince she was female and she could betray herself so easily, but she carried on regardless and seemed to be better integrated than we thought, so how long she had been watching girls and women may have been a lot longer than she ever let on.

Despite my concern for her, I still had a living to earn and I spent some long days investigating insurance cases as required by the various companies. I wasn't an assessor, so I wasn't responsible to valuing claims, I was more of a deal maker when things were damaged or stolen and then offered back to the insurance company at a fraction of the cost, sometimes because they were fakes and sometimes because they were damaged or too hot for collectors. Whatever, there seemed to be plenty of work at present but I was happy that Steph integrated further with her friends. Her exam results were of an acceptable level to the school so they had accepted her, so that was one headache dealt with and also my bank account took quite a hit as we were charged for the whole year, not by the term.

I also received a list as her guardian, of all the uniform stuff she'd need from gym kit to hankies and all parts in between. Why did she need three pairs of dark navy knickers although she didn't worry about it and I got the same doctor who did my pudenda disguise to do a similar thing for her, which mean she could use changing rooms for gym and games, all the showers were individual and she knew well enough not to linger in the changing rooms.

I was visited by a chief inspector of the local plod. I had heard of the case in the local media, radio and newspapers but hadn't gathered the details. Apparently, the police were investigating but had very little idea of who the perpetrator was. In fact, one could say they didn't have a clue and the insurance companies were chasing them.

Apparently, not too far away, there lived an old man who was very wealthy and being wealthy he liked to flaunt it a little and one day someone went there, beat him up quite badly and stole many of his paintings and other objet d'art. A sizeable truck was required to carry all the stuff away and their owner was conveyed to hospital with some uncertainty as whether or not he would survive. The police wanted me to review their data and see if it gave me ideas which I could pass on to them. One of the major insurance companies offered me a fee to investigate with a promise of doubling if the items were replaced and another bonus if someone was convicted of the crime.

I wasn't sure it was my sort of case but the money being offered was good and working with the police at an early stage was a novelty. Okay, I had to prove I was a help and for that I needed all the facts, the police seemed to be testing me, as if they didn't really approve of amateurs, except that I was such an amateur I'd earned fees of several million last year and access to better forensics, which I paid for, than they did. After seeing what evidence they would allow me to view I began to ask awkward questions which they found embarrassing. At one point I flounced off and sent an email to the insurance company chairman saying that the police couldn't catch colds let alone felons and were holding back major amounts of evidence. If they wanted my help it had to be as equals, otherwise, I no longer wanted to work with such a bunch of novices.

I believe the local police commissioner became involved as she was seeking re-election later that year and the chief constable was told to sort it. Hence my visit from a DCI who came asking for my help and this time nothing was to be hidden or privileged information. I told him that I would collaborate with them but if I thought they were back to their old tricks, I was out and I would run a parallel investigation and show them up and embarrass their hierarchy as much as I could. So he was aware heads could roll and his was one of them. In some ways I was already ahead of them, tracing paintings and sculptures that had been taken, and was checking out leads I ran down. Mike was researching for me and he looked at any and everything if there was a chance of a lead.

The police could have done the same but we were probably better at this sort of online research than they were because some of it can be very slow, Mike describes it as, wading through treacle. I told him if ever I did, I compare notes with him, but I had some experience of wading through mud. I did in recovering the loot from one heist that involved me wading through waist deep mud, locating the items and also a body and a car, a discarded firearm which had been used for a murder and enabled them to solve it. But it was hard work, I got through two pairs of waders and a metal detector thing, which was specially adapted for use in muddy water plus a flotation device, because I was working so much on my own.

I only had to remind the police that I was up to their level but without their powers including bearing firearms if necessary by mentioning the case and they tended to play ball. Unfortunately, there is an element in the police who got to learn of my transgender status and they were unhelpful as well as at times actively hostile. Two of them ended back dealing with parking tickets, after that I was viewed with a wary eye as being able to affect someone's job security. My efforts had won some respect. I had traced one of the paintings and they were gung-ho to recover it. I managed to cool their ardour and through it we collected a lead which could take us to the perpetrator of the original theft.

Stephanie was building her own life and making new friends, all female and most were students at St.Margret's as well as a good number of them being summer jobs at the department store. I let her keep all her money but she had to buy her consumables for herself including clothes. I did pay for her school uniform and paid her fees as well as feeding her, so I thought she has quite a good deal. But the case with the police was causing my time to be short especially in the evenings. We came to an agreement, she would have a substantial, subsidized meal at lunchtime and just a snack at night. If I had a chance I would eat at the police canteen and was becoming quite well known there, but all too often I was chasing up leads and out of town.

Mike found a piece of evidence we could expand upon and the whole thing was solved quite quickly, Mr Davis, the victim of the robbery died without ever regaining consciousness, so he never knew what he'd lost. His next of kin, a nephew, didn't care, he sold everything he inherited including the Victorian villa that his uncle had owned. I believe he blew lots of it on betting, a fools game, and didn't really enjoy the millions he'd inherited, but then he was a nasty piece of work and thought no more about it. That was until I learned he was killed in a fight out in Spain, where it is thought he came across the man who perpetrated the robbery and was guilty of murder.

One of the paintings was never recovered although I had several leads, then one day it came up at a sale room, anonymously of course, but we had a lead on him. He had been in Spain for several years and after his stabbing of the nephew and a few more clues, I liaised with Spanish police and our own plod and we carried out a multiagency hit. We got him and I was able to identify other treasures he'd stolen from other private collections, in which two people died. He was tried and found guilty of armed robbery, and three separate cases of murder and I probably earned the best part of half a million because I qualified to all the bonuses plus some more that hadn't been offered at the time and it also involved six different insurance companies. I'd also made some friends in the local plod and I hoped caused on or two to respect transwomen a little more.

This happened years after Stephanie had signed up for Maggies and she seemed to be making quite good progress, so the school seemed to suit her better than the boys one had and she was relatively happy. Her mother visited about once per month and often brought new clothes or money or both. She was working again and glad to have her independence, I understood this from my own point of view and so did Stephanie. Alas, her dad couldn't get his narrow mind around any of it and her parents divorced, her mother moved a bit closer to us and her dad went off with his happy clappy friends from the church. Last I heard he was thinking about ordination. The only thing missing from his religion was Christianity, built on fear and hate like some of the churches in the States there was no love or compassion involved so had the founder come back they'd have killed him again. We stay well away and Stephanie hasn't seen him for several years.

In her second summer holiday I gave her a job with my company, she was Mike's assistant rather than mine but we discovered she was good at researching for stuff on the internet, which was his strength. I was able to offer her a weekend job after the summer was over and she has proved quite an asset. The job has become more physical, with more violence from perpetrators so I have employed some muscle, young men who are pretty bright, have some martial training and discipline so are able to stand up to these violent scum we sometimes encounter.

I have had my operation and have now nothing at my groin except a facsimile of a very realistic looking pudenda and what's more, I have road tested it and it seems to work okay. So it seems that my future is a female even though the supreme court doesn't approve, but then I don't think about a pile of old fossils or a wealthy woman writer who seems to have lots of lesbian friends but no clue about how the real world works, but then I suppose if you're rich enough, it doesn't matter.