Nigel reached the Family Records Centre as dawn approached after yet another night of fitful sleep, studded with dark, half-remembered dreams. Foster had arranged for the centre to be open at Nigel's request. Phil on the desk was there waiting to let him in. It was barely six a.m., but he was still whistling. A tune Nigel could not make out. It was only as he returned from locking up his bag and coat that he realized it was 'Where Do You Go To My Lovely?'
by Peter Sarstedt.
'You whistling that for my benefit, Phil?' he asked.
Phil looked bemused. 'Didn't realize I was,' he said, vaguely hurt.
Nigel moved on. As he drifted towards the indexes, he heard Phil start up once more. This time he couldn't make out the tune at all.
He went straight to the marriage indexes and hunted down the reference for Hannah Fairbairn, to a carpenter named Maurice Hardie. Thank God it wasn't John Smith, he thought. At a terminal upstairs he tracked them via the census. In 1881 they were living in Bermondsey with three children; a nine-year old girl and two boys, aged seven and three.
Next he was faced with a familiar problem. They simply vanished from the census. The death indexes told him that Maurice and Hannah died a day apart in 1889. A call to the General Register Office revealed influenza had claimed them both. They had been reduced to poverty, clinging on to the bottom rung of Victorian existence inside Bermondsey Workhouse.
Two days later, their younger son, David, succumbed to the disease in the same desperate place.
That left two children: Clara, who would now be almost seventeen, and Michael, two years her junior. There was no record of their deaths so Nigel presumed they must have survived, but subsequent census returns proved fruitless. Neither was there a record of either getting married before the turn of the century.
He left the FRC, walked down Myddelton Street, through Exmouth Market, taking a left down Rosoman Street until he reached the London Metropolitan Archives on the corner of Northampton Road. Here were seventy-two kilometres of records, dating back to 1607, about the capital, its inhabitants and their lives. More pertinently, it held the records for the city's Poor Law unions, who oversaw the running of the individual workhouses, in this case the St Olave Poor Law Union.
He ordered the admission and discharge register.
In 1886 all five of the Hardie family were admitted.
They had come voluntarily. The two young boys were malnourished, Michael awarded the stark description 'imbecile'. Nigel knew exactly what had happened.
Like many of the poor, they had chosen institutionalized grind and servility in order to survive.
Maurice and Hannah would have slept in separate dormitories, the children too. There would have been minimal contact with each other. Wearing a uniform, woken at six, a day of menial work, in bed by eight; only the lack of bars and locks distinguished these places from prisons. People were free to leave at three hours' notice, but to what? To starve, to freeze on the streets? They were imprisoned by circumstance.
Nigel wondered what events had led Maurice to abandon any hope of providing for his family and to seek the charity of the authorities. An injury perhaps?
The boys were not yet old enough to support the family, and there was not enough work for young women like Clara to provide for them. In 1888 she had discharged herself, to try and lead a life beyond the workhouse walls. Maybe she believed she might even be able to reverse her family's fortunes. Yet a year later, her parents and elder brother were dead, probably interred in the cheapest coffins possible and buried in the same unmarked grave. The day after David's death, Clara came to collect her surviving brother, 7th September 1889.
Where had they gone? Nigel spent two hours searching through the registers of every asylum in London. Michael did not show up; he must have gone to live with Clara. But then the pair had slipped through a crack in time.
Outside he blinked against the late-afternoon spring sunshine. Time had spun away, hours lost as he buried himself in the past.
Then it struck him. An idea. He did not know what prompted it, but he had learned in his career as a genealogist always to follow a hunch. He returned to the FRC and went straight to the 1891 census. He typed in Clara Fairbairn and her date of birth.
There she was: same age. She had taken her mother's maiden name. Why? He could only guess.
To shake off the stigma of the poorhouse perhaps?
He clicked the link to reveal other members of the household. Michael Fairbairn. He was living with her in a house in Bow, east London. All the other occupants of the house, Michael aside, were young women: all between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.
Clara was the eldest. Nigel guessed it was some sort of boarding house. Her occupation was given as matchworker. That and the location explained everything: she was working at the Bryant and May factory.
She had found work, albeit of the most arduous and dangerous kind: working fourteen hours a day, prohibited from talking, punished for dropping matches, and at risk of contracting disfiguring and fatal cancer from the ever-present yellow phosphorus used to make the matches.
On the 1901 census Clara, aged twenty-nine, was listed working as a domestic servant at an address on Holland Park. Michael was not at the same address.
Instead, he was living and working as a groom at stables on Holland Park Mews. It seemed a reasonable assumption that Clara had somehow inveigled Michael into the job when she got hers. A year later, Michael was dead of heart failure. A year after that, Clara was married, to a clerk named Sidney Chesterton, three years her junior. Nigel felt sure the two events were related; only now that her brother was dead was she able to forge a life of her own.
She and Sidney had four children, two of each sex.
The first-born, a boy, had been named Michael. They settled in Hammersmith, at that time a semi-rural London satellite. On each birth certificate Sidney's occupation grew grander so that, by the birth of his fourth child, he was a manager. What he managed wasn't clear, but the Chestertons were middle class.
Clara had come a long way from the workhouse steps.
She eventually died in 1951. She was seventy-nine, an amazing age given the deprivations of her early life.
He shook his head at her indomitability, wondering whether her descendants knew of her sacrifice; did they realize how this woman, who probably appeared to them only in sepia-tinted photographs at the bottom of a drawer or a box, had altered the path of their family, hauled it from the shadows and preserved a bloodline?
The centre was empty, the last remaining member of staff alternately glancing at Nigel and the clock on the wall, closing on seven o'clock. There was no way Nigel could complete the job that night, and his eyes ached. He called Foster and told him how far he'd reached. The detective was barely lucid, distracted by the looming deadline and the awful, impending prospect of a fourth victim.
Foster gazed up at the tower block, like a climber contemplating an unconquerable face. In the dusk light it seemed less ugly, yet still inscrutable. People had come and gone throughout the day, and he and Heather had watched them all: every delivery was checked, each workman questioned, each resident who left and arrived cross-referenced against the list they had. Nothing appeared different, or out of the ordinary.
At intervals Foster went and checked each and every bin, alley and scrap of wasteland around the block. Each time there was nothing to see; but while he could tell himself that he had been watching, and no one had slipped in without his knowing, he still expected to lift a lid or peer around a corner and see the sight he dreaded most of all.
As night fell there seemed little option but to sit in the car with Heather and wait. The lights of the flats flicked on one by one and the stream of people in and out became an intermittent drip. Gangs of youths congregated on a street corner, drinkers weaved their way to the pubs and late stragglers made their way back from work. Shouts, pounding bass and the feed-me screams of babies wafted through the air, mingling occasionally with the irregular sound of sirens hurtling along the Westway. He got out only once, to shoo away a mongrel threatening to piss on his offside rear tyre.
Foster had never felt so helpless. He ticked off the hours as they passed: ten, then eleven, midnight. The anniversary of finding the fourth victim in 1879 had begun. The first three had been found in the hours between the middle of the night and dawn. He saw no reason why this might be different.
The city noise abated, the streets cleared, though the sirens never stilled. One by one the lights of the block vanished, a few remaining illuminated as the wee small hours came and went, insomniacs staring numbly at screens. He and Heather barely spoke.
There was nothing for it but to see how this would play out.
Dawn came. He let Heather doze. Foster had passed the point of tiredness, when sleep could come easily, and lapsed into a wired, restless exhaustion, unable to stop his leg from bouncing manically as he sat still. His mum used to call it St Vitus's dance, he remembered through the fog in his brain. He had not done it in years.
As the sun rose, the tower block woke from slumber.
The first workers left, the sybarites returned.
Heather came round and poured two cups of stewed coffee from a flask.
'What do we do?' she asked.
'We wait,' he said. 'There is nothing more we can do.'
His phone rang. Andy Drinkwater.
'You're up early,' Foster said.
"I never went to bed. Big development last night.
About three it came through that they'd found a knife similar to the one that may have stabbed two of the three vies in Terry Cable's garden, beneath the rosebushes or something. It's with forensics now.'
For a second, Foster was speechless. 'That's bullshit,' he blurted out.
'What do you mean? I'm only telling you what I know.'
'I know, Andy,' Foster said. 'It's just that I'll bet you all the blow in Amsterdam that the knife they found did not stab James Darbyshire or Nella Perry.
And if it did, then it was planted in the garden to fit him up.'
'Everyone here thinks it's a breakthrough,' Drink water muttered. 'No sign of any action your end?'
'None,' Foster grunted. He knew that every minute that passed without a fourth victim would harden Harris and his cronies' conviction that the right man was in custody. He ended the call, still shaking his head in disbelief.
'What's up with you?' Heather asked.
'The past does repeat itself.'
'That's a bit cryptic. What you on about?'
'In 1879, as you know, there was a series of murders in Kensington. The newspapers went ballistic, the natives got restless and the cops panicked; they arrested a guy to stop bucket after bucket of shit being tipped over their heads. Then they realized they'd better get a case against the man they'd chosen to be their suspect. So, lo and behold, a knife turns up in his lodgings.'
'You've told me all of this.'
'Yes, but what I haven't told you is that, lo and behold, a knife has turned up in Terry Cable's garden, just when the press were beginning to get a bit restless about the lack of any charges.'
He could see Heather take this in. Ready to play devil's advocate.
'Have you considered the idea he might actually be guilty?'
'Considered it. Dismissed it. Come on, Heather, you can see what's happening here as clearly as I can.
They're so desperate they've convinced themselves that he's guilty. It doesn't follow that, because he's the only suspect, he's the right suspect. No one has given me any indication of a possible motive.'
'What about the GHB?'
'That's coincidence: detail, not motive. Why did he kill these people? Why did he remove parts of their body? Why did he leave them in those exact same places on those exact same days? They have no answers to those questions. We know why -- the killer's following a pattern. And because of what happened during and after the trial in 1879, we may even know the motive.'
'So they have a suspect and no motive; you have a motive and no suspect.'
'I know in which position I'd rather be,' he muttered.
'You hope we find a body, don't you?' Heather said, turning to face him, a smile on the corner of her lips. 'Proves you right if we do.'
'No,' he maintained. 'I think we'll find a body different from wanting to. And we might find the killer. But we would have had a damn sight better chance if we had more manpower and if everyone had not been scattered to the four winds trying to fit up some sleazeball to deter a shitstorm in the press.'
His gaze returned to the tower block. Inside, the lights were coming back on.
Noon came. Foster was still there, spent by lack of sleep. He was beginning to doubt whether it was worth it. Cable seemed certain to be charged; a fourth body had not turned up, after all. Had he been wrong?
Heather might have been right: Cable could be their man. He shook his head to clear it. However blurred his thinking had become, he still refused to accept Cable's guilt. Of course, if Barnes called and told him that Terry Cable was a descendant of Eke Fairbairn, that would change everything; until then he would not move.
He had sent Heather home to grab a couple of hours' sleep. She was reluctant, but he needed someone with energy at his side when the names came through from Barnes. He sat there, window open, a cool breeze helping keep him awake, blowing in more sounds from the street. For the past half-hour loud music had been blaring from a window high up in the tower block, indistinguishable white noise save for the thump of a bass and what sounded like handclaps.
There was something familiar about it, Foster thought, but from a hundred feet below it was impossible to assign any tune to the rhythm. Whoever lived in the flat obviously loved the song because each time it ended, it would start again.
His arm was out of the window, absent-mindedly tapping on the car door, beating time along with the percussion and bass. After a few repeat hearings he thought he'd found the rhythm, and it was possible to make out the melody carried by the singer. Foster started to whistle a tune. A disco song, he was sure.
Not his favourite genre; he was more a loud guitar and sneering, disenchanted vocals man, but there were a few disco tunes he'd admit to liking. What was this one, though? It was bugging him so much he felt like climbing out of his car, jumping in the lift and asking whoever was playing it to death.
Each time the rhythm changed to indicate the chorus, he started to whistle the hook. The singers were a group of women, though a hazy recollection suggested there might have been a bloke with them.
It rhymed with 'boots', the only word of the chorus he remembered. Then it came: 'Going Back To My Roots', by Odyssey. Got it, he thought, content to have scratched that itch.
Then he stopped, sitting forwards, as if an ice cube had been put down his back.
He sprang from the car, jogged to the tower-block entrance, through the doors and punched the lift button. It clanked into action, but he couldn't stand the wait. He took the stairs, striding up two at a time, adrenalin overriding fatigue. By the time he reached the tenth floor he could feel his heart pumping in his ears. Through a door he reached a dim corridor, lit only by grubby windows at each end. There was no need for him to follow the numbers on the door; he could follow the noise. As he strode down the corridor it got louder and louder, more and more distorted.
A straw-haired woman in a worn red dressing gown over jeans and a T-shirt, her face creased by smoking, stepped out of her door into the corridor.
She saw Foster, clocking his suit.
'Are you here about whoever's making that bloody noise?'
'Who lives there?'
She shrugged. 'Bert died six weeks ago. I thought it had been empty since. Council's probably given it to some fucking kids who're gonna make my life a misery.'
'Go back inside,' Foster said. 'I'll sort it out.'
'You better,' she said and disappeared, though Foster noticed she left the door slightly ajar.
He stopped at number 65; the bass was making the door hinges rattle, as if they might blow. He knocked loudly. No response. He tried once more.
No answer again.
He took a step back, lifted his foot and crashed his heel against the door. It failed to budge, but he sensed another attempt might break the lock. It didn't, but on his third kick he heard a splinter, and with his fourth attempt it flew open.
He walked in to be faced with three doors. The noise was coming from the one in front of him. He opened it and was almost floored by the wall of sound. In the middle of the room on the floor was a small, round chrome CD clock radio. The LCD
display showed 12.15. Save for the clock, the room was unadorned. A grubby net curtain barely covered the window, through which he could see the outline of central London. He made for the stereo and, covering his hand with the sleeve of his shirt, he bumped the off switch. At last, silence.
Now that one of his senses had been restored, he looked around. The place stank. The flocked white wallpaper was stained and grey, bearing the shadows of old furniture. To one side was a kitchen. He walked in; nothing except a few battered, obsolescent white goods.
He returned to the small entrance hall. Opened one door and was hit by the smell of pervasive damp.
The bathroom. Nothing except the drip from a scaled bath tap. Closed the door, tried the next one.
The smell hit him first. One he knew well. It emanated from the only thing in the room. The body of a woman. From the stench, he knew she had been here longer than twenty-four hours. She was on her back in the middle of the floor, dressed in a pair of jeans and a brown sweater. A few flies buzzed around her. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and put it over his nose, then leaned down for a closer look. It was the hair he noticed. There was none.
From the brow to beyond the crown was only a fleshy mass and the white dome of her skull.
She had been scalped.