by Dan Waddell
He held back from telling her that Duckworth made most of his money these days doing the bidding of national newspapers. Whenever someone became news, the tabloids would be on the blower, asking him to research their family history, see if there were any skeletons in the closet, or help them track down other family members to speak to. Before leaving for the university, Nigel had worked for the press a few times, though he’d always loathed himself for it. But the money compensated for that.
‘How did he know we were police?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps someone at the GRO, or in the centre here.’
She shook her head. ‘No one knows about the reference outside the team. Apart from you.’
Heather had swiftly mastered the art of making Nigel feel uncomfortable. As if realizing this, her face softened and she gave him a warm smile.
‘Don’t worry, Nigel. We don’t reckon you’ve told him. Christ, we only told you eighteen or so hours ago and you’ve barely been out of our sight since. Perhaps you could use your skills of persuasion to find out his source?’
‘Consider it done,’ he said earnestly. ‘I don’t think he knows about the reference or he would have told me. He’s the sort of guy who can’t hide things, especially if he thinks he can lord it over you.’
‘So what did he want?’
‘Talked a bit of shop.’
Khan intervened. ‘We should tell Foster. Warn him that the press might get this.’
‘Get what?’ Heather asked. ‘All he can say is that detectives were at the Family Records Centre. It means nothing. We could be tracing our family trees for all he knows, some sort of police genealogy drive. Let the little creep do his worst.’
DC Khan stood up and went to the Gents. Heather looked at Nigel.
‘So what was that about the “world of academia”?’
He enjoyed her interest in him, but she was veering too close to an area he wished to avoid. Nothing Duckworth said seemed to have gone unnoticed by her.
‘Eighteen months ago I gave this up. It wasn’t panning out the way I expected. I got an offer to work at Middlesex University, setting up a course in family history. Things didn’t work out,’ he explained, not wanting to go into any more detail.
‘You got fed up with genealogy?’
‘Running a business doing other people’s genealogy.’
‘But you’re back doing it.’
Yes I am, he thought. Except now I’m working for the police on a murder case and it feels like a shot at redemption.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s find the rest of those certificates.’
8
By early afternoon Heather had faxed through the references for 457 birth, death and marriage certificates. The most Nigel had ever ordered at the end of one day was seventeen. It had taken four days before he could collect the copies. The 457 were all found, copied and faxed through to West London Murder Command in less than two hours.
Nigel was told to meet at murder squad HQ in Kensington at four p.m. He was there ten minutes early. He announced himself downstairs to a woman on the desk and was told to take a seat. He had nothing to read and there was nothing on the table for him to flick through, but then this was hardly the dentist’s.
Heather finally emerged from a lift and passed him through the security gate. They ascended several floors, stopping at an open-plan office. Only a few people were milling about, some on the phones, a few more staring at their computer screens. Nigel expected more activity, hubbub, not the sort of inertia you would witness in a provincial insurance office.
The only giveaway that this was the incident room at the heart of a murder investigation was at the back of the room: a large whiteboard, which was attracting Nigel’s appalled fascination long before they turned right and started walking towards it.
A series of photographs were arranged on it, two rows of two, surrounded by notes scribbled in red pen. As he neared he could see the pictures were of a person, a body. Darbyshire’s. Nigel had never seen a corpse before. Without thinking, he stopped, stomach lurching. The first picture top left was of the dead man’s corpse at the scene, clad in a pinstripe suit. Only the pallid, lifeless face and the pale blue lips gave any indication that the man had not just passed out. The next was more graphic. Taken from a position just below the victim’s feet, Nigel could clearly make out two ragged stumps, white bone protruding where the hands had been removed.
His eyes fell on the next picture, a close-up of a naked chest, showing a small scar. The knife wound, he assumed. The last was of a series of marks and cuts; he could make out no order until he realized that it was the reference he’d been working on that day.
Nigel turned and looked at Heather.
She held his arm, squeezed it softly, then turned away. ‘Come on,’ she urged gently.
Nigel fell in behind her, casting a last glance back at the whiteboard.
They went to the left-hand corner of the office, across a small corridor and through a large door. The meeting room was bare apart from a wooden table in the middle. DCI Foster was there, sitting on one end of the table, scanning a certificate. He nodded at Nigel, his glance flickering with concern.
‘You look like shit,’ he said.
‘We just walked past the whiteboard,’ Heather explained.
‘Sit down there.’ Foster pulled out a chair with his foot. When Nigel sat, he got up, reached over to the tray in the middle of the table and poured a tea. ‘Sugar?’
Nigel shook his head, the images still haunting his mind. ‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ he mumbled.
Foster put the cup in front of him.
‘It gets easier,’ Heather said. ‘But not much.’
‘I think I’ll stick with death certificates. Less messy,’ he added, looking up at her.
‘Definitely less messy,’ she repeated. Again the smile was warm. Other than the thrill and the excitement, he was finding another reason why he wanted to stick around this murder investigation for as long as he was allowed.
Nigel sipped a lukewarm mouthful of tea as Foster pointed to another man in the room, who Nigel hadn’t noticed. He was tall, well-built, in his mid-thirties, blandly handsome.
‘This is DI Andy Drinkwater.’
They shook hands.
DI, Nigel thought. Detective Inspector. A rank below Foster, one above Heather.
‘DI Drinkwater and DS Jenkins will be helping you go through this pile of certificates. I have to do a press conference with the victim’s widow in front of a mass of reptiles, all of them wanting to know one thing: Did she do it?’ He peeled his coat from the back of the chair. ‘And before you ask. No, she didn’t.’
Nigel felt the shock at seeing the whiteboard’s contents begin to wear off. The surname of the detective to whom he’d just been introduced finally registered with him. ‘Your surname’s Drinkwater?’
The detective eyed him suspiciously. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly.
‘I’ve never met a Drinkwater.’
‘Really,’ said Drinkwater slowly.
‘It’s not a common name any more. Do you know what it means?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a very interesting name,’ Nigel said.
‘It’ll be about the only thing interesting about Andy,’ Foster interrupted. He’d paused at the door, wanting to hear the etymology of his junior’s surname.
Drinkwater gave him a sardonic smile. ‘Why’s it interesting?’
‘There are two theories: either your ancestors lived in such poverty that they could not afford to buy beer, they could only drink water…’
‘Or?’ Drinkwater asked, curiosity aroused.
‘Or your ancestor was such a drunk that he was given the name “drink water” ironically.’
‘It’s not ironic any more,’ Foster said derisively. ‘Andy here doesn’t drink, spends his time working out and running on treadmills with all the other pod people.’ He grinned. ‘That’s made my day.’
Foster left f
or the press conference.
Drinkwater was smiling. ‘Thanks for that, Mr Barnes,’ he said half seriously and sat down.
On the table were three piles of paper: birth, marriage and death certificates.
‘Nigel, you take the marriage certificates.’
‘Are we looking for anything in particular?’ he asked.
Drinkwater shrugged. ‘Anything that has anything to do with the murder. The name, Darbyshire, or the location, St John’s Church: there might be a few who got married there. Put them to one side and we can have another look at them.’
He picked up a certificate and the room became silent. Nigel could hear voices coming from elsewhere, the persistent ringing of phones, but the three of them sat and sifted through the documents without saying a single word, reading and rereading, checking every name, every address, every witness on every form for any link. During the course of the next few hours, several links began to turn up: Drinkwater found the birth certificate of a girl who lived on St John’s Crescent; Nigel a couple of marriages that took place at St John’s Church. These formed the basis of a meagre pile requiring further inquiry. Heather found nothing relevant; it was heavy going. Many of the causes of death listed on the certificates were conditions she had never heard of, described in terms no longer used.
Nigel found it enthralling. The thrill of the chase had always been the job’s main attraction, yet here the rewards were even greater, the purpose more noble. He scanned each document. His pile was reducing more quickly than the other two. For a second he thought he might be going too fast, but then he realized he was the only one used to reading the handwriting and scrutinizing the documents at a glance. Yet he had not come across anything he deemed significant and wondered whether he should have subjected the discarded documents to closer scrutiny.
‘Bingo!’ Heather shouted, startling the other two.
‘What?’ Drinkwater asked.
She held her finger up to quieten him as she reread the form. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, inserting an emphatic ‘a’ between the ‘b’ and ‘l’ to show her surprise. ‘Jesus!’ She scrabbled in the pocket of her jacket on the back of the chair and found her mobile. She dialled quickly.
‘Tell us what it is, Heather,’ Drinkwater demanded.
Without speaking she tossed the certificate in front of him. ‘Sir, it’s Jenkins,’ she said into the phone. ‘Get back here as soon as you can. We’ve found it.’
Nigel watched as Foster, lounging on the table, his tie pulled loose from his neck, read the death certificate.
‘It’s got to be it, hasn’t it?’ Foster said eventually, looking at Heather and Drinkwater.
The certificate belonged to an Albert Beck, a 32-year-old tanner of Clarendon Road, North Kensington. He had been found stabbed to death in the grounds of St John’s Church, Ladbroke Grove on 29th March 1879. The day James Darbyshire’s body had been discovered.
Foster stared at the certificate, pulling at his bottom lip.
‘We need to see if we have anything in our archives about this crime,’ he said at last.
Drinkwater scribbled in his notebook.
Nigel had been quiet ever since Foster arrived. ‘Much of the Metropolitan Police archives were destroyed in the Blitz. I think you’ll find that the records from the second half of the nineteenth century were decimated.’
Foster nodded. ‘Thanks. But get someone to check it out, Andy.’ He turned to Nigel. ‘The killer must have seen this death certificate, or known of it in order to have led us to it, correct?’
Nigel nodded.
‘And you said this reference was from the central index. Does that mean he or she could only have ordered it from the Family Records Centre?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Nigel replied. ‘There are several web-sites where you can browse the indexes online, though it costs you; or you can order online from the GRO.’
‘Anywhere else?’
‘There’s always a possibility they already owned the death certificate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s in the family; they could be related to the dead man. Or it could simply have fallen into their possession.’
‘Let’s discount that for now. For all the other possibilities, the person would have had to order it and get it sent to an address?’
‘Unless they paid for it at the FRC and collected it a few days later.’
Foster went back to scanning the document, as if it would yield more secrets the longer he stared at it. ‘Well, that gives us something to work on,’ he said to his two officers. ‘We need to get someone along to the FRC, get hold of any CCTV footage, find out if anyone else has ordered this certificate, who they were, OK?’
Drinkwater left the room.
Foster looked at Nigel. ‘There is something else you can do for us, which sort of relates to your last theory about how the killer got hold of the certificate. Is it possible to trace someone’s family going forwards? Not their ancestors but their descendants?’
Nigel nodded. ‘It’s called the “bounceback technique”. You go back in time to trace the path of someone’s family to the present day.’
‘So you could trace the living descendants of Albert Beck?’
‘No problem.’
‘Will you go and do that?’
Nigel had his bag and coat in his hand before Foster finished his request.
The last train chased into the night. He could hear the great clank and wheeze of its infernal engine while he stood, waiting, at the dark secluded end of the street, his eyes fixed on the Elgin. The warm orange glow of its light poured out, illuminating the dark wall of the convent across the street. The door occasionally flapped open and the drunken chatter and laughter would waft its way towards him. He jerked his head sharply to the right, feeling his neck click. He’d watched them come and go, many of them, but not yet the perfect one.
The one that strayed.
The sulphur stink of the underground train was in his nostrils. He shuddered. Out of curiosity, he had ridden it once. It was worse than he imagined: Hades on wheels. It had been the previous summer. The weather intolerably warm, barely a cough of wind to chase away the heat and smoke. He descended the stairs at Baker Street with fear in his heart. The first rush and roar of the train, the hot blast as it steamed in, all of it damn near had him running back up the wooden steps; but he ventured on.
Underground, in that coffin on tracks, he knew the devil was with him. The decadent, the godless, the drunks and the whores; it was their chosen chariot. Around him men smoked their pipes, the smoke billowing through the airless carriage, mingling with the foul odour of the gas lamps. As they passed west they were plunged alternately into bright, eye-blasting light and profound darkness. He lasted two stops in the fetid atmosphere before he thought asphyxiation would claim him. At Paddington he emerged, gulping in great lungfuls of air. I’ll go to Hell when the Lord tells me and not before, he vowed, and had not been anywhere near it since. He wasn’t alone in his fear; most people he knew hated the thing.
Then he saw him leave. The perfect one. He stepped out of the pub, staggered forwards, righted himself, and then lurched to the side. He kept out of sight as the man stuttered across the Grove. Great drunken fool could barely lift his head. The drunk reeled towards the station; he stepped from the shadows to follow. He wondered where the chase would lead; north of the station, into the farmlands and fields of Notting Barn? That would be perfect: they were building streets there, rows and rows of townhouses for the rich folk brought in by the underground and its feeder railway.
But no. Just before the station, the drunk took a left. He kept his distance, was able to give thanks to another night without the fog, but quickened his pace when he saw they were reaching the area where the lights became scarce. The man swayed and he felt himself smile; this was too easy.
His quarry crossed the road, away from the track, to the verge beside the underground line. There was dark sodden earth. Away from the lig
ht, he found it hard to find him, but his eyes adjusted and he could see why the drunk had listed towards the dark: he needed to urinate. He stopped and looked behind: nothing, not a peep. The drunk was staggering over the verge, up a dirt track that would soon be a road. The empty husks of a few houses were around them, silhouettes in the pitch-black night. He watched the man stop near a wall and could hear the drill of urine hit the sopping ground.
From his pocket he pulled the knife, clutching it tight in his hand. His last few steps were bounding and cat-like, swallowing the ground between them. The drunk was shaking himself dry, unaware of danger, lifting his head to drink in the night air. As he did so, his pursuer wrapped his left arm around his throat, dragging him back, and the knife was plunged deep into his chest. He barely made a noise, other than a grunt, before he sank to the ground.
His night’s work done, he slipped back into the tar-black night…
9
By the time Nigel left the station on Friday, the Family Records Centre was closed. When the doors opened on Saturday morning he was waiting outside eagerly. He was relishing the day ahead, wondering what secrets and lies would be disinterred. The new guy – Phil, Nigel thought his name was – was behind the customer inquiries counter, whistling the tune to ‘One Day At A Time’ by Lena Martell. Nigel nodded as he walked past.
‘Made quite a stir yesterday,’ Phil said.
‘Who did?’ Nigel answered innocently, even though he knew exactly what Phil was referring to.
‘Your friends from the Met. What’s the crime?’
‘Nothing much,’ Nigel lied. ‘Just helping them out with a bit of research.’
Phil nodded while leafing through a pile of documents. He still hadn’t looked at Nigel.
‘Good work if you can get it, eh?’ he said, finally making eye contact, his face round and friendly.
‘I suppose,’ Nigel said, wondering if Duckworth had been his less than reticent self.
Phil went back to sorting his pile of documents. As he wandered over to the birth indexes, Nigel could hear Phil begin whistling the first few bars of ‘Coward Of The County’ by Kenny Rogers.
