by Dan Waddell
He was looking forward to the search, intrigued by what he might discover. It was this sense of expectation that he enjoyed most about the job. Like a potato plant, the best part of family history lies beneath the surface. By digging deep, the stories of the dead, silent through the years, could be told once more.
Yet immediately he faced a problem. Given his age on the death certificate – thirty-two – Nigel thought Beck might have been born in 1846 or 1847. Yet he could not find the birth of a single Albert Beck during those years. This was no surprise; it was not compulsory to register births, marriages and deaths until 1865, so not everyone did. Scanning the marriage indexes from 1865 onwards, Nigel had better luck. In September 1873 he had married. A call to the police hotline at the GRO revealed his wife was named Mary Yarrow.
Nigel used this information upstairs at the FRC. The 1881 census is held electronically on a database on one of the terminals in the census room, which houses all the censuses from 1841 to 1901. He knew that Beck, being dead, would not be listed, but he hoped that his widow, and whatever children the couple had, would still be at the Clarendon Road address. He could then acquire the ages of their children and track them through the following census returns, discover who they married and whether they had any children of their own.
‘Where are you, where are you?’ he muttered to himself as he keyed in the search terms, a familiar refrain of his at the beginning of a quest. He was waiting for that one discovery, the detail, the name, the entry that would help him unravel the past.
There it was, on Clarendon Road. Mary was listed as head of the household. There were two children: a daughter, Edith, who was five on census night 1881; and a son, Albert (at least the name lived on), who was three. Interestingly, a John Arnold Smith, thirty-four, was listed as a lodger. Nigel guessed he might be the new man in Mary’s life. Life as a widow with two children in mid-Victorian England would be tough, almost impossible to survive without the mercy of the parish, the looming gothic turrets of the workhouse casting a shadow over every step. A man around the house was essential. However, living in sin was not a fact you wished to advertise, hence the reason they would have neglected to tell the census numerators.
Part of Nigel hoped his hunch was wrong; if Mary was living with, and then chose to marry, her ‘lodger’, her surname and that of her children would have changed to Smith, making tracing their descendants virtually impossible because of the millions and millions of Smiths who would have been born, married or died in the next 125 years.
Back downstairs he searched the indexes of 1881 onwards for the marriage of a Mary Beck and John Smith. Unfortunately, he found it, in the summer of 1882. A new address was given for the couple, in Kensington. Nigel went back upstairs to the 1891 census and managed to track down the Smiths. The couple appeared to have had two children of their own, but one of the Beck children seemed to have disappeared. Edith was there, aged fifteen; yet there was no mention of Albert junior. Nigel managed to solve that mystery with a quick check of the death indexes: young Albert had died of tuberculosis in 1885, aged six, leaving only Edith from her first marriage.
Life was not proving kind to Mary. Nigel could picture her, weatherbeaten face drawn, aged before its time, the misery of losing first her husband then her only son etched across her features in the downward turn of her mouth and the dullness of her eyes. But she would have borne her tragedies and her life of quiet desperation with dignity and without self-pity, because so many like her did. These people did not parade or exhibit their emotions; nor did they seek to blame anyone for their misfortunes. Stoicism, forbearance, sobriety – these were often the words that sprang to his mind when he was blowing the dust off long-forgotten lives, in sharp contrast to the emotional incontinence he perceived in the modern world.
Only Edith was left of Albert’s offspring. At least it narrowed his options. Given she was fifteen in 1891, he calculated that she would be twenty-five in 1901 and there was every chance she would be married by then. Before he searched the marriage indexes – and the idea of dredging through hundreds of thousands of Edith Smiths to find the right one made his heart sink – he gambled on her not being married by 1901. He typed in the Kensington address and there they were: Mary Smith, John Arnold Smith, Edith Smith. Perhaps Edith was not marriage material, Nigel thought. He pictured a plain, dowdy young woman, lonely and unloved. He hoped he was wrong and that eventually she had married, and not simply because it would prolong the search.
His only option was to trawl the marriage indexes for the next twenty years, until 1921, when Edith would have been forty-five and too old to bear children. It took him two hours to list the details of the nineteen Edith Smiths who were married in the Marylebone district between the Aprils of 1901 and 1921. He went outside and phoned these to the GRO, and mentioned that he was looking only for an Edith Smith whose father’s name on the marriage certificate was given as either Albert Beck or John Smith, a railway signalman. They said it would take some time to pull nineteen marriage certificates. Three-quarters of an hour later he got the call to tell him that neither of the two possible fathers’ names were recorded on any of the certificates. Edith Smith was almost certainly a spinster; the pitiful picture he had created in his mind wasn’t fanciful.
He went down to the canteen to clear his head of the names and the dates before ringing Foster. He got himself a plastic cup of scalding brown water and sat down.
‘Hello, Nigel,’ a voice said hopefully.
Nigel turned and was greeted by a man in a brown suit with slicked-back hair. He knew him. Gary Kent, a reporter from the London Evening News. He’d hired Nigel a few times to poke around in people’s pasts. He expected to bump into Duckworth, unsavoury as the prospect was: but he’d hoped never to encounter Kent again.
‘Hello, Gary,’ he said suspiciously.
‘Been a while, hasn’t it?’
‘It has.’
‘I hear the job at the university fell through.’
‘Been speaking to Dave, then?’
Kent tapped his nose theatrically. ‘So does that mean you’re back in use?’
Nigel shook his head. ‘No, straight genealogy for me.’
‘Well, that’s not strictly true, is it? You’re working for the cops.’
Duckworth, Nigel thought. He said nothing.
‘Look, I’m interested in the story,’ Kent said. ‘Why have the Met hired you to work on the Notting Hill slaying?’
‘My indiscreet days are over, Gary. No comment.’
He knew Kent would not leave it there.
‘There must be some sort of family history angle there. You know I’ll find out: the cops are leakier than a Russian submarine. You might as well make a few quid from it while you can.’
‘I’m not saying anything. Not today, not tomorrow. Not forever. My days being your lapdog are over.’
Kent shook his head ruefully.
‘Duckworth’s cleaning up all the press work. You really want that fat toad lording it over you every time you see him?’
‘He’s welcome to it.’
‘What happened at that university to make you so holier-than-thou all of a sudden? Maybe I should make a few calls, have a poke around. There could be a story in it, particularly now you’re working for the forces of law and order.’
Nigel wondered whether he knew, whether he had already made those calls. ‘Do your worst, Gary.’
Kent shrugged and sucked in air between his teeth. ‘Shame. As I said, this genealogy game is pretty popular. Our newspaper might be looking for someone to do a piece or two about it. Maybe troubleshooting a few readers’ problems, some sort of ancestral agony aunt. Pains me to say it, but you could do all right if they need a photogenic young expert: twinkling blue eyes, good cheekbones, full head of hair, pair of glasses that make you look clever.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere, Gary.’
Kent just stared at him, nodding as if he understood exactly what Nigel was doing, as if every word
confirmed his expectations. ‘You obviously feel some loyalty to the police,’ he said, tossing his business card on to the table in front of Nigel. ‘Which reminds me. You must pass on my regards to DCI Foster.’ He turned to leave, but looked back over his shoulder. ‘Tell him it’s good to see him dealing with deaths outside the family for a change.’
Nigel was intrigued by Kent’s comment. He went outside and waited for the hack to leave before he called Foster.
The detective answered the phone with a growled ‘yeah’. He sounded distracted. Flustered, even.
‘His descendants died out,’ Nigel said succinctly.
‘What, all of them? How?’
‘Nothing suspicious. He had two kids: one died of TB when he was six; the other never married. I suppose there is a chance the daughter had a child even though she never married, but that would be impossible to trace, given the surname is Smith. The wife married again and had two more kids with another man. I could trace them, I suppose…’
Nigel’s voice trailed off. Despite his desperation to remain involved, he hoped to God that Foster would not make him do that: he was looking at two or three days’ backbreaking work, ploughing through thousands and thousands of Smiths; and he suspected it would be in vain.
‘No, they’re not the link. Beck wasn’t even their dad. I can hardly see them passing the story of his murder down the generations. Knock it on the head for now.’
‘One more thing.’
‘Yeah,’ Foster said, impatiently.
‘I’ve just been tapped up by a reporter from the Evening News. Gary Kent.’
Foster sighed.
‘Told me to pass on his regards.’
‘Forget him. He’s a creep. Right now, to be blunt, I couldn’t give a rat’s arse. Did he know about the reference?’
‘No, he didn’t mention it and I didn’t tell him anything. But he knows I’m working for you.’
‘Bully for him. If any more reptiles come crawling, tell them to shove it, too. And don’t fall for the money thing: newspapers will always find a way not to pay, so you won’t see a dime.’
There was a pause.
‘Detective, I was thinking: the Metropolitan Police archives have been destroyed, so there are no details of the murder.’
Foster murmured his assent.
‘The National Newspaper Library has copies of every single local and national newspaper going back a couple of hundred years. There’s a good chance it will have been reported in the press in 1879. I thought it might be worth digging the reports out.’
‘OK, sounds good. The one in Colindale? Is it open on Saturday?’
‘Yes, until four.’ He glanced at his watch. It was coming up to one p.m.
‘Will you have time?’
‘Let’s see,’ Nigel said.
‘Look, I tell you what. I’ll get someone to give this place a call and see if we can get it to stay open a bit later. Would that help?’
‘It would.’
‘Consider it done. Give me a call if you turn anything up.’
The line went dead.
10
Thanks to the vagaries of the Northern Line, it was approaching two thirty when Nigel exited the station at Colindale. The sun was out, offering even this ignored and unloved part of London a healthy glow. Nigel turned right and strode with purpose down Colindale Avenue, a soulless strip of road, eating up the forty or fifty yards to the newspaper library. It was built in 1903 as a repository for yesterday’s news, and opened to the public in 1932, a dirty red-brick building that still wears the austerity of the period.
Once inside the main reading room Nigel was hit by the familiar, rich, almost sickly smell of fading, worn paper. Becoming immersed in the bound volumes of newspapers was like entering a portal to the past. Here he was able to flesh out the stories of the people he hunted, their times and the events that shaped them. Inquests, court reports, obituaries, news reports, all these were genealogical gold. At the FRC, the act of looking through indexes rather than original forms removed you from history: at Colindale, you climbed a ladder and dived in.
Nigel found a seat. The whole archive is the size of several football fields – almost every single British newspaper, local and national, printed since 1820 is housed there – but the area given over to researchers is not much bigger than a penalty box. The main room has barely changed since 1932: the stark white walls, the wooden clock that has never shown the right time and, most of all, the fifty-six original reading tables. These were, to Nigel, objects of beauty. Not the tables themselves, but the reading stands perched on them. Made of brass in art deco style, each possesses a strip lamp – turned on by a switch that flicks with a satisfying thud – the table number and wooden frames, chipped and tattered from decades of use, on which to stand the huge bound volumes. If not for the odd, usually neglected computer terminal and the hysterical whirr of rewinding microfilm reels from the neighbouring room, it could be any time since 1932.
Nigel went to the inquiries desk first.
‘Hi,’ he said to the timid woman sitting behind the counter. ‘Nigel Barnes. I believe someone from the Metropolitan Police might have said I was coming.’
He winced at how formal his introduction sounded. Her eyes lit up.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘Ron on the order desk is expecting you. He’ll be helping you out.’
A minute or so later a proud-looking fat man, hands the size of shovels, was greeting him. He had a stubbled chin and an enormous stomach that strained against his T-shirt.
‘Sorry about keeping you here,’ Nigel explained.
‘Don’t worry, mate,’ Ron said. ‘I only had a night in front of the TV with the wife planned; frankly, you’re doing me a favour. Now what do you want first?’
He started with national newspapers: they carried stories of murder, the more gruesome the better, while the local papers were unpredictable. They came and went quickly, and often carried nothing more than market times and the price of apples. He asked for March 1879 copies of The Times, the paper of record. Although it was unlikely the murders would be in there, it was worth a try; he also ordered The Daily Telegraph – then The Times’s cheaper, downmarket rival – and finally, the News of the World, which served up a weekly diet of murder and sin even in 1879.
Ron disappeared into the depths of the repository. Nigel went to his seat and waited, trying to stop himself checking his watch every other minute. The reading table would be superfluous. All the volumes he’d ordered came on that most dreaded substance: microfilm. Nigel hated it. Scanning through endless reels of the stuff on badly lit screens coated in inches of dust, developing repetitive strain injury by having to rewind whole reels manually, threading the crumpled, creased pieces of film over the rollers and not under, it was as much fun as gouging his eyeballs out with a teaspoon.
When they came, he took the boxes through to the room filled with microfilm readers, huge machines with screens the size of 1950s televisions. He teed up The Times first. For the week following the murder, it carried nothing. Not for the first time, Nigel marvelled at the verbosity of the Victorian press. In one edition there was a report of a parliamentary debate that must have comprised more than 15,000 words, the newspaper columns densely packed, unbroken by illustrations or advertisements. How anyone read it without losing the will to live was beyond him.
Relieved, he turned next to the News of the World. The Screws was founded in 1843 and quickly established itself as a primary source of salaciousness, mining the magistrates’ courts of London for stories of murder and adultery. If Albert Beck’s death had not made its pages, then it was unlikely to have been reported by anyone else. The microfilm reel carried every edition for 1879. It was his intention to scroll briskly through January but, as always, he found it impossible to avoid being consumed by the past. As he spooled sedately through the weekly editions his eye was caught by wonderful, evocative yet matter-of-fact headlines: ‘Atrocious Outrage Near Bristol’ and ‘Threatening At
titude Of Nihilists’. The front page of each edition had a list of ‘Jokes Of The Week’ culled from other publications, so unfunny they seemed to have been filed from another planet – which, in effect, they were.
He found the first edition for April. There was a report from the Zulu War and a report on the exploits of the Kelly gang in Australia. He was about to scroll down to the next page when, at the bottom, he saw a headline that made his heart stop.
KENSINGTON: THIRD HORRIFIC MURDER
The story beneath read:
The bodies of all three men lay in pools of blood on the ground, a demon having wielded a sharp instrument to open them up. Up to one o’clock yesterday North Kensington had no clue as yet to the motive or identity of the fiend whose deeds have sown considerable terror within the local community. The first victim was named as Samuel Roebuck, a brickworker of Notting Dale, whose mutilated body was discovered in the fields near his home. The man had last been seen drinking on the evening of Monday March 24th, and the police initially believed the killing to be the consequence of a drunken altercation. But then on the morning of Saturday March 29th, the stabbed form of Albert Beck, a tanner, of nearby Clarendon Road, North Kensington, was discovered in the undergrowth of St John’s Church by a passer-by close to Ladbroke Grove. He leaves a widow and two small children in penury. The third victim was named as Leonard Childe, a 38-year-old blacksmith of Harrow Road, North Kensington, who leaves a widow and four children, the eldest being just thirteen. He was discovered during the early morning of Tuesday April 1st, near to Notting Hill station. Police authorities have called for calm in the area and are said to be closing in on the ghoul who perpetrated these wicked acts. Those who have witnessed any suspicious activity among relatives or neighbours, such as the sighting of blood-drenched clothes or lunatic behaviour, are entreated to present themselves at North Kensington police station to provide information.
Nigel finished reading, then left the room, headed down the short flight of stairs, all the time dialling Foster. By the time he made it out of the doors the phone was ringing.
