“The word’s out then?” Tayte said. “I saw the TV crew outside.”
Marsh nodded. “They didn’t waste any time getting here, either. We’ve closed The Archives to the public for as long as you need. Several people at the GRO are staying on to help out, too.”
Tayte was glad to hear that. The General Register Office was something he’d overlooked given the hour. They would need the GRO when it came to confirming the data on the many birth, marriage and death records they would have to pull out in order to get the job done. Probate records would also be heavily relied on and the census back to 1841. Other resources could be accessed online.
As they entered the Open Reading Room, where Tayte had previously used The National Archives computer facilities, he had to stop and stare. The team had grown significantly and they were all hard at work. The computer screens were all on, personal laptops were out and fingers were tapping furiously. There were people staring into microform readers and others poring over books and other documents. Several members of the general staff had clearly volunteered to stay on, too, helping with record retrieval.
“Everyone, this is Jefferson Tayte,” Marsh announced. “Aside from dear Marcus, he’s the reason you’re all here tonight.”
Tayte shot up a hand and felt his cheeks flush. “Thanks for turning out,” he said. “Your time and skills are very much appreciated.”
He sat in front of a vacant screen at one of the pods and a young man whose full beard made him look older than his years introduced himself as David. He brought Tayte up to speed.
“We’ve just confirmed that Sarah Groves was a direct descendant of one of the men on your list,” he said. “Dr Bartholomew Hutton.”
Tayte gave David a wide smile. He hadn’t expected a result so soon, but looking around the room again it was easy to see why. It confirmed his theory. Sarah Groves had been murdered along with Douglas Jones twenty years ago. Now, with Julian Davenport, they had three victims related to the hanged Fellows of the Royal Society.
“You said she was of direct descent?” Tayte said.
David nodded. “Firstborn dependant from each generation, all the way back.”
“Good. So we know exactly what we’re looking for.”
There was no grey area. With three victims confirmed they had a pattern to follow. They could discard any brothers or sisters they came across and concentrate on the path of the firstborn male or female, confident that it was the right path. Before he got too settled, Tayte called the team together. He had new data to introduce and thought it could be used to simplify the process and speed things up further.
He stood and raised his arms. “Can I please get your attention for a moment.” When the room quietened down he continued. “We have another victim - Alexander Walsh. He was murdered three days ago.”
Tayte read out the information Fable had given him, knowing that it would be easier to have everyone work back from present to past, from Walsh to another of the Fellows. Then they could eliminate one more ancestor from the list as the team had already done with Sarah Groves. It had taken a little over four hours to get that result. Now, as there were more of them and they were in full flow, he figured it would take less time to do it again.
He sat down, took off his jacket and metaphorically rolled up his sleeves with the rest of the team, feeling confident that from the two remaining Fellows they would learn the identity of the killer’s next victims.
Michel Levant was alone in his inner sanctuary, taking a bath. The capacious en-suite with its gold-plated fittings, green marble walls and pillars was a special place to which he retreated every night before bed. It was a place of contemplation and reflection; time and space to be shared with none other than the greatest love of his life - himself. To share a bath with anyone else was nothing less than disgusting to him. Diabolique.
He sank deeper into the hand-painted slipper bath and the therapeutic oils that Françoise had prepared for him, and allowed himself to become weightless. He sucked in the scent of French lavender and something intoxicating that he couldn’t quite place; something he would have to ask Françoise about in the morning when she came to him. With one hand he sipped Cristal champagne from a finely engraved coupé glass. With the other he pressed a button on a remote control and an LCD panel on the wall in front of him clicked into life. The sound was muted.
Levant had no use for television other than to keep abreast of current affairs, domestic and foreign. On this particular occasion the 24-hour news channel to which the television was eternally tuned made him sit up and spill his champagne. He was looking at The National Archives building. A female reporter was interviewing someone he hadn’t seen before, but standing behind her in the entrance was a big, dark-haired man in a tan suit that he most definitely had seen before.
“Mon Dieu! C’est Jefferson Tayte.”
The American was only on the screen for a second but it was long enough. Levant grabbed the remote control and turned the sound on. The reporter was talking into her microphone.
“Can you tell us how genealogy could aid the capture of this cold-hearted killer?”
The middle-aged man beside her smiled nervously. “I’m not really at liberty to go into the details,” he said. Then he proceeded to do just that. “We have a list of people,” he added in a low voice, as though he didn’t know the world was watching and listening. “I’ve been told they’re ancestors of the victims. We believe that from them we can identify the killer’s next target.”
“And once you’ve done that the police intend to set a trap?”
The man’s face turned red. “I think I’ve already said too much.”
The reporter held the man’s arm as he turned to walk away. “Is it true that you’ve been granted full access to the census?”
The man faced the camera again. “I believe so, yes. They’re usually locked for a hundred years, other than in special circumstances.”
“Circumstances such as these?” the reporter said. “How will you use the information?”
The man seemed to relax again. “The census is invaluable when it comes to identifying family relationships. It’s taken at ten-year intervals and gives us a snapshot of people living under the same roof at the time the census is taken. From there it becomes a simple matter to identify dependants by their relationship to the head of the household. That will be key to our research.”
“How far back will that research take you?”
“Too far for the census, I’m afraid. Beyond 1841, probate records often give up the same information with respect to naming dependants as beneficiaries and there are other methods, of course. Once we have a name, we can confirm the association via their birth or baptism records.”
The interview continued for a further half minute and Michel Levant listened with great interest. It all added up to the fact that Jefferson Tayte was making good progress in his quest to understand what Marcus Brown had been working on. It also told him where Tayte was and that information was paramount to him. Having had Tayte and Jean Summer followed from Kew to the Royal Society earlier that morning, his man had lost them amidst the bustle and confusion at Piccadilly Circus. Now Tayte was back at Kew and this time Michel Levant was resolved to handle the matter personally.
It took Tayte and the team at Kew until just after one-thirty in the morning to work through Alexander Walsh’s ancestry and by now there were close to forty experienced genealogists helping. They had identified a direct line of descent via firstborn dependants all the way back to Tory politician and field physiologist William Daws, whose studies into human blood - with a view to proving parent and child relationships - had so caught their attention at the Royal Society. It had taken around three hours to reach the result Tayte had expected to find since hearing the interview recording, although he still had no idea what the killer wanted with what seemed likely to have been William Daws’ old microscope.
Tayte had lost count of how much coffee he’d consumed and the bag of
Hershey miniatures he’d stuffed into his briefcase before leaving the hotel was almost empty. He drained another cup of bitter espresso, stood up and addressed the room.
“Great job so far, everyone,” he said. “We’ve matched Dr Bartholomew Hutton and William Daws. That just leaves two names remaining - Lloyd Needham and Sir Stephen Henley.”
A lady in a grey fleece stood up. “A few of us had started on them before you arrived,” she said. She waved a notepad. “We already have the names and particulars of their immediate dependants.”
“That’s great,” Tayte said. “Let’s get the details up on the board.”
He went over to the window where a whiteboard had been set up. “As we don’t know from which of our two remaining ancestors the next victim is likely to come, I’d suggest we split the team into two groups.”
He turned back into the room and sliced a palm out in front of him like a knife, dividing the room in half. “Left side, if you could take Henley. Right side gets Needham with me. I think we can safely say that the current firstborn descendants of these people are on someone’s hit list. If we can identify them quickly maybe we can save them. Accuracy is everything here so please confirm your findings. We can’t afford to cut corners.”
He asked the lady in the grey fleece to call out the details she had on her notepad and he wrote everything down on the whiteboard. Then he returned to his seat beside David and the search recommenced. Within the teams they organised themselves into sub-groups with some tackling the direct research while others confirmed any pertinent information as they found it.
It was slow going until 1837, when civil registration for births, marriages and deaths in England began. Prior to that they had to turn to the International Genealogical Index and the parish registers, which gave information on baptisms, marriages and burials. Fortunately for the genealogists, writing a last will and testament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was regarded as a moral duty by most people, expediting their research. Even so, it took almost twice as long to get another result.
The new day broke with no recognition from Tayte and it was approaching eight a.m. when he thought he’d found who he was looking for. He had an entry on his screen from the 1971 census. It showed an address in Surrey, listing the head of the household as a Mr Peter David Harper, age twenty-six. Below that were the names of the other people living at the same address at the time the census was taken. There was only one name: Elizabeth May Harper, age twenty-two, whose relationship to the head of the household was wife.
Tayte checked the subsequent census entries for any dependants and noted that none were listed. When he checked the most recent census he found that Peter Harper was still at the same address, but it now showed that he was living alone, suggesting that either through death, divorce or some other form of separation, his wife was no longer with him. After confirming that Peter Harper had no record of death, Tayte borrowed a mobile phone and called Fable, knowing that there was a fifty percent chance that he was looking at the killer’s next victim.
When daylight broke at the windows of a grey portacabin somewhere in East London, a man in a navy-blue security guard uniform was saying goodbye to the skinny peroxide blonde who had been to visit him. Most of the girls he’d used wouldn’t go back to the gasworks twice, but Lola Love as she called herself didn’t seem to mind the place, or him. He followed her to the gate, having put enough cash in her purse to keep her going for another day on whatever Class-A drug she was addicted to. He didn’t care. He locked up again and watched her walk awkwardly down the derelict road, where weeds were growing tall through the cracks in the potholed Tarmac. She had her arms crossed tightly in front of her, fishnets and high heels and little else on.
Does she feel the cold?
It was certainly a cool morning: clear and bright and dewy. He supposed she didn’t, or more likely she no longer cared. Returning to the portacabin he plugged the main gate surveillance camera back into the recorder and smiled to himself. It was easier than deleting data from the hard drive like he sometimes had to.
If anyone ever asks to see it, you blame the missing video on a fault. Simple. What else could it be?
No one ever asked. There was nothing of value at the old gasworks left to steal that hadn’t been stripped out long before the construction company he was contracted to bought the site. He thought about that surveillance camera as he plugged it back in. It had missed a lot recently. He’d slipped out at eleven p.m. and was gone almost five hours. But things hadn’t gone to plan.
This one is smarter than the rest. Too smart for his own good.
The man he had visited in the night was quick to produce the heirloom he sought. This time it was an ebony and brass sextant inlaid with ivory that once belonged to Lloyd Needham, astronomer and one-time hydrographer to William III. But the digits were not there. In their place he saw only the gouge marks where they had been purposefully obscured by the man who scoffed at him as he told him how he’d read all about Julian Davenport’s murder three months ago. This man was one of the older generation and he knew all about the digits, too. He’d said that they were now his insurance, committed to memory to keep him alive.
And that had been his mistake.
He’ll give up the digits. And you’ll know if he’s lying because you’re good. Just like in Kuwait City.
He’d brought the man back to the gasworks with him and ordinarily that wouldn’t have bothered him, but the parameters had changed. The American and the team of genealogists he’d seen on his portable television last night gave him cause to hurry now that the new day had dawned. His guest had been left long enough in that draughty old boiler house. Left to his thoughts.
That’s how you do it. You show them what they’re in for and you leave them to their own imagination for a while. They become more cooperative then.
He reached under the desk and slid out a black holdall from which he produced an old leather roll case that was once the property of a woman called Sarah Groves, descendant of Royal Physician and anatomist, Dr Bartholomew Hutton. He untied the case and rolled it open. It contained several antiquated surgical instruments, the metal still gleaming, the bone and tortoiseshell handles clean and bright. His eyes fell on the lancet and he smiled to himself as he considered that this simple physician’s instrument, which had no doubt been used to bleed many of Dr Hutton’s patients three centuries ago, was about to be used again - over and over again until Peter Harper told him what he wanted to know.
“Abducted?”
Tayte was talking on the phone with DI Fable. The detective was in Surrey at the address Tayte had given him an hour and a half ago. It was almost nine-thirty a.m. now and the team of genealogists, who were all now working on the last name from Tayte’s list, had reached something of an impasse in the closing stages of their research. A decision had to be made that Tayte did not want to make lightly and hearing that Peter Harper had been abducted from his home only served to compound the problem.
“When?” Tayte said. “Are you sure?”
Fable coughed into the phone before he spoke. “He was taken in the night,” he said. “Couldn’t say when for sure but his bed was slept in. It was unmade and -”
“How do you know it wasn’t some other night?” Tayte cut in. Knowing they had failed Harper by what could amount to just a few hours grated on his tired conscience.
“I was about to say that the last number redial facility on his phone showed that he made a call close to eight o’clock last evening. It’s boy-scout stuff.”
“I see,” Tayte said. “Sorry. Go on.”
Fable coughed again and cleared his throat. “His visitor didn’t use the front door like before. We believe he went in through an open bathroom window on the first floor - must have gone up the drainpipe. It’s a 50s terraced house. Still has the original iron pipework.”
“Terraced?” Tayte said. “Did any of his neighbours hear anything?”
“I’ve got people conducting a door-to
-door now but I wouldn’t hold your breath. We won’t know anything for a few hours. How’s the next name coming?”
“You mean the last name,” Tayte said, reminding them both that they only had one more chance. He sighed. “We’ve kind of lost the thread.”
“How’s that?”
“The Great War,” Tayte said. “During the Fourteen-Eighteen, a father and his young firstborn son - who must have lied about his age to get into the fight - were both killed. The father, Captain John Cornell, died in 1917 in Ypres. The son, Robert Cornell, didn’t make it that far. He fell in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme so the line of firstborn descendants from Sir Stephen Henley came to an abrupt end.”
“So that’s it?” Fable said.
“I don’t believe so. And this killer doesn’t seem to believe so either, does he? I’m sure it’s just a case of working out what contingency the father adopted before he died. Robert wasn’t an only child. He had a younger brother called Joseph.”
“Well that’s your man.”
“Probably, but I don’t like guesswork. There’s too much resting on us getting this right. I want to be sure.”
“Look Tayte. That might be a luxury you have in your world but you’re half into mine now. Don’t call it guesswork if it makes you uneasy. Call it a hunch. Christ, I work with them all the time. Besides, what else have you got?”
“Not much.”
“So do what I would do and run with it. You said the son died in 1916 and the father in 1917?”
“That’s right.”
“So the father had a whole year to make other plans before he was killed. If we’re talking about handing down a family heirloom then the younger brother was next in line to receive it, wasn’t he?”
Tayte knew it made sense. He’d even considered that as the Cornells had lived during uncertain times, such a contingency might already have been established by the time the war began.
“I’m heading back to London,” Fable said and Tayte heard him groan as if he wasn’t happy about it. “I’m giving an update briefing at Thames House. The Security Service want to hear the case progress from the horse’s mouth.”
The Last Queen of England: A Genealogical Crime Mystery #3 (Jefferson Tayte) Page 12
