by Dan Waddell
Nigel sat down, both officers facing him.
‘Bit airless down here,’ DS Jenkins said, wrinkling her nose once more. ‘The smoking room, I presume.’
Nigel nodded. ‘Beni realizes there’s a few of us desperate souls who like to combine…’
Nigel realized his unease over meeting here was not only caused by chivalry. Beni sold sandwiches, so the existence of this room was against the law. The DS saw the penny drop.
‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured him. ‘Secret smoking dens are the least of our worries.’ She looked around, taking her bag off her shoulder and laying it on the floor beside her feet. ‘Actually, I like it,’ she said. ‘It’s got character. I’d rather have places like this than one of those soulless chains any day.’
‘There’s been a coffee shop on this site since the seventeenth century, give or take a few decades,’ Nigel said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the coffee isn’t that great, but at least it tastes like coffee. And it rather lacks for comfort in here, but it makes me feel better to know I’m supporting an independent place with a bit of history, rather than some faceless, corporate monolith.’
She smiled at him once more. ‘Hear, hear.’
‘You’re a genealogist, then?’ DCI Foster asked, cutting in impatiently, as if he hadn’t heard the preceding exchange.
‘More of a family historian,’ Nigel replied.
‘There’s a difference, is there?’
‘Only a bit. But you wouldn’t believe how offended some people feel if you get it wrong.’
‘Much money in it?’
Nigel shrugged. No, he thought. ‘It’s a living.’
‘How do you get into something like that?’
‘It depends,’ Nigel answered. ‘I did a history degree at uni, and during the summer holidays I did some research for a guy who traced people’s family trees. I did it full time for a while. Then he dropped dead of a heart attack while giving a talk at a conference on early medieval finance, so I took over the business.’
Last year I tried to get out of it, he thought. But, like the Mafia, I was sucked back in.
‘And enough people actually pay you to trace their ancestors?’
‘Yeah. Genealogy’s a very popular pursuit. The third most popular on the Internet. Behind porn and personal finance.’
Foster’s face showed surprise.
‘Or wanking and banking,’ Nigel added. His face reddened immediately, unaware of how police officers reacted to smut.
DS Jenkins stifled a laugh; Foster smiled weakly.
Nigel felt the urge to smoke. The craving was too strong to ignore. He picked up his cigarette papers from the table. ‘Mind if I…?’
Heather gave her head a quick shake. He thought maybe she did mind. He felt a twang of disappointment for inciting her disapproval. But it would look pathetic to put away his fixings now, so he looked at Foster, who was staring intently at Nigel’s pack of tobacco. In the absence of a complaint, Nigel plucked a paper from the packet.
‘You ever traced your family tree at all?’ he said as he placed a wad of tobacco in the crease and started to roll it out expertly between the forefinger and thumb of each hand.
Foster shook his head.
‘My mum did,’ DS Jenkins said. ‘She hired you to do it for her.’
Nigel’s eyes shot up from the cigarette he was rolling. ‘Really? When?’
‘Two or three years ago. That’s how I got your number.’
Funnily enough, the reason they had chosen to call him, and not someone else, had simply not crossed his mind.
‘Jenkins,’ he said to himself. He could not remember and wondered whether he should pretend to, but realized she was sharp enough to know instantly whether he was bullshitting.
‘It’s all right. I don’t expect you to recall my family tree,’ she said, helping him out. ‘I bet you’ve traced your family tree back to the Domesday Book or something, haven’t you?’ she added.
He shook his head. ‘I can’t trace my own father.’
‘Your father?’ Heather said, eyes widening.
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Your mother’s side?’
He shook his head once more. ‘As I said, it’s a long story.’
‘Oh.’ A wary look crept across her face.
‘History has a habit of putting obstacles in your way,’ he explained. ‘It’s one of the reasons I liked the job.’
Neither Heather nor Foster appeared to notice his use of the past tense.
‘You get a real sense of achievement from helping people overcome those obstacles, track down relatives and ancestors they knew nothing about.’
Heather smiled at him. ‘I can imagine you do.’
‘I’m also interested in surnames: their origins, their meanings.’
‘Really? What does Jenkins mean?’
‘Kin of John. Or Jones, perhaps. “Kin” is Flemish in origin, but it’s one of those names that doesn’t really indicate an area or locality. Too popular, really. It was the forty-second commonest surname in America in 1939.’
‘What about him, then?’ she said, indicating Foster. ‘What does his surname mean?’
Nigel pulled a face. ‘Literal meaning is difficult to pin down, as is origin, the study of surnames being inexact, to say the least.’
‘Fair enough,’ Foster said, sitting forwards. ‘About why we’re here…’
‘Oh, go on,’ Heather interrupted. ‘What about the name Foster?’
‘There are several possibilities. It could be derived from a forester, a man who is in charge of a forest. Or someone who lived near a forest, or worked in a forest.’
Nigel thought it politic to leave out another explanation: one of Foster’s ancestors was either a foster child or a foster parent.
‘Fascinating,’ Foster said, as if it was anything but. ‘Now can we get on?’ He looked at his colleague.
She spread her arms wide, as if to say, ‘It’s your show.’
‘This morning we discovered a man’s body. He’d been murdered. At the scene we discovered a reference written by the killer. We believe it refers to a birth, marriage or death certificate. We thought you could help us out.’
Nigel lit his roll-up and inhaled deeply. ‘Could I see the reference?’
Foster shook his head slowly. ‘No. But I can tell you what it was: 1A137.’
‘Small “a” or capital?’ Nigel asked.
‘Capital.’
‘Should strictly be a small “a”. But it could be the reference for a birth, marriage or death certificate for central and west London issued between 1852 and 1946.’
‘Why those specific areas? And why those dates?’
‘Every district was given an index reference. Between the dates I mentioned 1a was assigned to Hampstead, Westminster, Marylebone, Chelsea, Fulham and Kensington.’
‘The body was found in Kensington,’ Heather said, looking across at Foster. ‘Think there’s anything in that?’
Foster rubbed his chin slowly. ‘I don’t think we can ignore it. Is there any way you can tell whether it’s a birth, marriage or death certificate?’
‘It could be any one of them,’ Nigel replied.
‘So could you go off and locate the certificate with this reference?’
‘Yes, no problem. But we’d get thousands of results. This is simply a reference to a registration district and a page number. If I’m going to have any chance of finding the certificate quickly then I need to know an exact year, preferably a name. The Family Records Centre has indexes going back as far as 1837.’
Both detectives sat back, frustrated. Heather took a sip of her coffee, while Foster stared at Nigel. The DCI sat forwards once more.
‘We found the victim’s mobile phone,’ Foster said. ‘The last-dialled number wasn’t a telephone number; it was punched in after his death. We thought it might have been pressed by accident, when the body was moved. But perhaps it
was put there intentionally.’
‘What was the number?’
‘1879.’
‘1879,’ Nigel said thoughtfully.
‘Is that enough for you to go on?’ Foster asked.
Nigel grimaced. ‘Yes, but it won’t be quick. A lot of people will have been born, married or died in 1879 in central and west London.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘A day. But then you have to order the certificates and wait for them to be copied and posted.’
‘Can’t we just go to the local register offices?’
‘That reference is a General Register Office index number, not a local office one. It would be of no help there. If this is a reference to a birth, marriage or death certificate, then it was discovered through the central index.’
‘Who handles that?’ Foster asked.
‘The General Register Office in Southport.’
‘Southport? What the hell is it doing there?’
‘London isn’t the centre of the universe, sir,’ Heather said.
‘It is when you work for the Metropolitan Police.’
There was a pause while Foster thought. Nigel watched him earnestly. The DCI drummed his right finger on the table.
‘Heather, get on the phone to headquarters. Get them to ask Merseyside Police to send a couple of officers to the GRO.’ He turned to Nigel. ‘What do they need to do?’
‘Commandeer a couple of staff to pull the full certificates – once you’ve identified the ones you need – and pass the information on to you as quickly as possible.’
‘Got that, Heather?’ Foster asked.
She went upstairs to make her call. Both men watched her go.
‘How busy are you at the moment?’ Foster said.
‘Relatively.’
‘Well, can I hire you and your staff to hunt down these references for me?’
Nigel’s cheeks flushed. ‘There’s a problem with my staff.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t have one. Not at the moment. I…’
Foster held his hand up to stop him. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Barnes. I’ll get you some help. They’ll be with you first thing. What time does this records centre let people in?’
‘Nine a.m.’
‘They’ll be waiting for the doors to open.’
Nigel experienced a feeling denied him for some time: excitement. For the first time in months, he couldn’t wait to start a day’s work.
6
It was after ten p.m. when Foster returned to his terraced house on a quiet, unspectacular street in Acton, too late to even think of going to the pub. He parked and then switched the engine off, but not the electrics so he could continue listening to the music. He didn’t know the song; it was piped through the stereo via his personal music player, a small metallic gadget no bigger than a matchbox. There were more than a thousand tracks on it, few of which he knew. One of the guys at the station had downloaded them for him a few months before. You didn’t have to build your own record collection these days, merely annex a friend’s or even a complete stranger’s off the Net. He couldn’t remember what had happened to the boxes of vinyl he assembled as a teenager. His first single? ‘Indiana Wants Me’, R. Dean Taylor. The simple fact that the protagonist was on the lam infuriated his father, which is probably why he treasured it so. God knows where the record was now. He made a mental note to download it.
The car was warm, the lights on the dash illuminated against the dark. He felt cocooned, as if he could recline the seat and sleep for hours. But, when the song finished, he turned the volume down to a murmur, picked up his mobile and called Khan to tell him to meet Heather at the FRC the next morning. Khan did not sound too enamoured at the prospect but Foster was beyond caring.
He climbed from the car, walked up the small paved path to his front door and unlocked it, flicking on the lights in the hall. He was relieved to see and smell that Aga, his Polish cleaner, had been that morning. He thumbed through some mail, found nothing interesting and added it to a growing pile of similar letters, then hung his coat up, took off his tie and jacket and went straight through to the kitchen, where he pulled the cork out of a half-drunk bottle of red wine that stood on the pine table in the middle of the clean tiled floor. He filled a vast glass. It was a ’62 Cheval Blanc that had tasted a damn sight nicer the previous evening, but was still drinkable. Taste didn’t matter so much: these days he needed at least a few glasses to ease his mind and body’s nightly fight against sleep.
The wine wasn’t his. None of the bottles were. His father, once he had retired from the force, sought a new passion and found it in wine, specifically Bordeaux. He collected bottles from all the best vintages, laying them down proudly, cataloguing them in a ledger. Occasionally, on special occasions, he would tootle off to the cellar, blow the dust off one he thought may drink well, open it up and serve it to his guests, offering alongside it a description of the vintage, the maker, whether it had been a good year and why, and some of the wine’s characteristics. Then he would sip and savour just one glass during the course of a meal, sometimes making it last a whole evening. Among the last phrases he remembered his father saying to him – before he took the cocktail that ended his pain – was, ‘Look after the cellar, son.’
‘Sorry, Dad,’ he muttered as he took another large slug, wincing at the acidic bite created by being left open twenty-four hours.
He wandered out of the kitchen and back into the hall, then turned into the sitting room. Occasionally, when he walked through the door, he detected a lingering hint of the lavender that formed part of the small bowls of potpourri his mother had left dotted around the place. They were one of the first things he threw out when he moved back into the house, on that drab November day a few weeks after his father’s death. And they remained among the last. The walls bore ghostly imprints, grey-white traces of now unwanted photographs and pictures. The sideboards were bare apart from a few well-thumbed magazines, the odd book and a couple of empty candleholders. The only photograph on display in the room – in the entire house, as it turned out – was of Foster at his wedding, grinning with an insouciance he no longer recognized beside his best man and best mate, Charlie. They had been inseparable.
He cast his eyes around the room. Seven years ago he’d moved in. It still looked like he was lodging.
He thought about the day, the murder, the body; then he thought about Barnes. He’d asked Foster whether he was aware of his own family history. He wasn’t, and he’d said as much. What was the point? But Barnes’s question reminded him of his father. Of those last few days. That was his significant family history.
He headed over to the bureau in the far corner of the room, the place where his father used to sit and pore over his paperwork, glasses perched on the end of his nose, a cigarette balanced on the rim of an ashtray, spiralling smoke. He lowered the lid for the first time in years, the past leaping out. There was a cup with his father’s pens, a half-shorn pad of writing paper, a Metropolitan Police paperweight detailing his years of service, 1954–1988, a letter opener in the shape of a sword and a photograph of Foster in short trousers, with his mum on Camber Sands. He stared at it for a few seconds then closed the bureau lid. Closed the past.
He collapsed on to the sofa and turned on the television, immediately muting the sound. He was tired, but he knew he was not yet ready to sleep. First he needed to switch off mentally, which meant emptying his head of all the thoughts swirling around in it.
They had nothing. The killer had left no detail, no trace, clue or weapon at the scene. No witnesses had yet come forward. There was no obvious motive. They had a reference carved on a chest, a number left on a mobile phone, a missing, severed pair of hands. That was all. They were still fumbling for a way in. Foster wanted to find the detail, the piece of information that would flick the switch and illuminate the investigation.
The house was silent, save for the odd creak from some shifting floorboard or the rattle of an ageing r
adiator. The first spots of rain spattered against the bay window. Foster took another hefty slurp of wine, and then went back into the kitchen to make sure there was more. There was: he could see the bold vermilion lettering of a Petrus, albeit one of the 1980s bottles, which he found a bit underwhelming compared to the complex vintages of other years, but that was why it was one of his favourites among his dad’s collection. Who wants wine that tastes the same every year? Not him, and not least when there were another six years downstairs to drink.
The wine was doing some good, smoothing the edges. He looked around for something else to do, an activity to help the wine take his mind off the day so that he could sleep, wake up in the morning and get this case out of neutral. He sat at the kitchen table and fired up his computer, a sleek silver laptop dormant. Then he uncorked the Petrus and poured himself a glass without allowing it to open up, an act he knew would make oenophiles swoon. It tasted tight. He knew he should buy in some lesser-priced, easy-drinking wines for times like these, but he never remembered. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearing eleven.
The computer was primed and ready for action. He opened his Internet connection and was straight on to the Net. Once online, the question was where to go. None of his favourite distractions appealed: Formula One racing websites, luxury car dealers and makers, spoof news sites. He checked his email but found only unsolicited invitations to enlarge his penis. As he pondered what to do, the images of the day seeped back into his mind, like smoke under a door.
One detail in particular: Why would someone not only commit murder but also sever the victim’s hands while he was still alive, if not to inflict maximum pain? Someone truly hated Darbyshire.
His mobile rang, vibrating and trilling next to the bottle of wine on the sideboard. He answered it.
‘Sir,’ Drinkwater said.
‘Yes, Andy.’ Foster admired his young colleague’s stamina. He’d been the first at the scene that morning and was still at it.