by Dan Waddell
The Times noted here how Dart walked the length of the jury rail before returning to his original spot without saying another word, until:
Roebuck was not to be seen alive again!
Once again he allowed his words time to imprint on the consciousness of those present. Next he outlined the details of the second murder charge, relating to Leonard Childe, a 38-year-old blacksmith. Again, the night before he was found stabbed, Childe had been drinking at a local pub. Fairbairn had been drinking in the same pub and, as with the previous charge, was seen to row with the victim. Both were evicted from the premises. Dart said the prosecution would also produce a knife found at the lodgings of the accused, and an expert witness who would testify it was the same knife that had caused the fatal wounds.
The News of the World reported how, as the prosecution’s opening speech came to its close, Dart lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper.
It is the prosecution’s case that the accused is a man incapable of handling strong drink. A man who, rather than settling his quarrels with his fists or turning the other cheek, did brutally pull a knife and slay both unfortunates. Good Christian men know evil lurks in the bottom of a glass. We contend there is an even bigger evil lurking in the heart of the accused. Together they have forged a combustible and repellent concoction that has been midwife to these obscene and ungodly acts.
18
‘If this map is right, then it should be somewhere around here,’ Heather said, turning a photocopy of a map one way and then the other in the hope its mysteries would become clearer.
The bray of a car horn from their rear made them both jump.
‘The bastard,’ Foster said, checking the rear-view mirror and seeing, from the neck down at least, the male driver of a white van, slapping his steering wheel in frustration at their pedestrian pace.
‘Sir, don’t,’ Heather cautioned.
Foster bit his lip. He wanted to stop the car, climb out and, as the white-van Neanderthal bristled, produce his badge, administer a bollocking and tell him to watch out. The roads of London, where men and women developed the patience of toddlers at being held up in the choked streets, agitation growing at their role as insignificant cogs in the great city’s grinding daily machine, had long since been a bugbear for Foster. The resentment caused by the morning’s meeting with Harris, the ignominy of being sidelined, had not yet dissipated. Venting his spleen on a gormless van driver might prove cathartic.
Instead, aware from the corner of his eye of Heather’s concern, he merely continued to dawdle, gaining solace from the knowledge that he was adding a few increments to the rising blood pressure of the bottom-feeder behind him. Sure enough, there came another blare of frustration, just after Heather indicated that he should turn left on to Queensdale Road.
The street was empty. They parked outside a Sikh temple at the end of the road and got out of the car.
‘That’s where the Salvation Army mission was,’ Heather said, poring over the map once more. They had gone straight to the local studies section of the library at Kensington Town Hall. Within seconds of asking for a map they had obtained one, printed only a few years after the killings of 1879. Saunders Road was on there, at the end of what was then Queen’s Road, now Queensdale. They made a photocopy and drove straight to this spot.
Foster stood and looked at the map with Heather. He saw the angle of Saunders Road on the map, then gazed up at the point where it would have stood in the present day.
‘Jesus,’ he said.
Heather was as quick to work out where the road had been. It was a road no longer; instead, twin tower blocks, brown, beige and monstrous, two plinths of sixties functionalism, soared above them into the steel-grey sky. To their left was a terrace of handsome Victorian townhouses, costing well over a million each, Volkswagens and Beamers sitting patiently outside. Across the road was a different world: high-rise living with its neighbours from hell and claustrophobic menace. Despite spending all his life in the capital, it still took his breath away to see how these two quintessential styles of London existed side by side, rubbing away at each other like silk and sandpaper.
They worked out from the map that it was the nearest of the two tower blocks that covered the ground where Saunders Road had been.
‘This guy’s having a laugh,’ Foster said.
The pair reached the entrance of the grubby building. A young black woman leaving with a crusty-nosed child gave them a suspicious look, rumbling them as police immediately. The local force were probably seen and heard on a nightly basis, Foster thought. Inside the lobby, the smell of piss, neglect and bleach was heady rather than overpowering.
‘Twenty-four floors,’ Heather said, looking at the lift. She did not press the button to summon it, for which Foster was thankful. He dare not contemplate the evils it may contain. However, at that moment it opened. An acned youth in a white tracksuit, and blessed with the furtive face of a rat, stepped out.
‘How many flats in this building?’ Heather asked.
He stopped, looked at both, a vacant worry spreading across his face. Foster caught the unmistakable sweet whiff of marijuana.
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Maybe a hundred or summink.’
‘Thanks,’ Foster said and let him pass, though not without a long withering stare to worsen the youth’s stoned paranoia.
‘So, a hundred-plus flats, any of which could be the one our killer uses to dump the next victim. He could be in there now.’ He swiftly corrected himself. ‘They could be in there now.’
Heather nodded. ‘Nothing for it but to go door-to-door and keep an eye on every scroat who comes and goes.’
Foster plunged his hands deep into his coat pockets.
‘No point checking on who in this place has a record,’ he dead-panned. ‘Bet only the cleaning lady and the lift engineer don’t.’ He gave his colleague a grim smile. ‘Come on. Let’s make a quick phone call before we start.’
They went back to the car, where he switched on the heater and the radio. Together they formed a background murmur.
Andy Drinkwater’s phone seemed to ring for an age. Eventually he answered, sounding breathless.
‘It’s Foster.’
‘Sir,’ Drinkwater exclaimed. ‘You heard the news?’
‘What news?’
‘We’ve pulled in a suspect. Happened about twenty minutes ago.’
‘Who?’ He could already sense conflicting emotions: joy that the killer might have been caught before he could strike again; frustration that it was someone else who made the nick.
‘Details are still a bit fuzzy. He’s called Terry Cable. He fits the description on the sketch. Apparently, he’s previously served time for manslaughter and has a record of using GHB, including once for a date rape, though the charge was withdrawn.’
Bang to rights, then, thought Foster.
‘What was your news?’ Drinkwater asked.
‘We’ve found the place where the next killing will be. Or, at least, where the next body will be found. A tower block beside the Westway. Was hoping I could round up some help.’
Drinkwater paused. ‘It’s all hands to the pump here, sir.’
‘Don’t worry, Andy. I understand. Keep me updated.’
‘Will do.’
The line went dead.
‘What?’ Heather said, desperate to be in the loop.
‘They’ve pulled someone in. Sounds promising.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and clapped her hands together once as she spoke.
Foster didn’t share her sense of triumph, and he could see she’d noticed.
‘You’re not certain, are you?’ she queried.
Foster shrugged. ‘We have a suspect, at least. At last.’ But no, he thought, I’m not certain. ‘Come on,’ he added, turning the engine over. ‘Let’s get a coffee. We need all the energy we can get if we’re going door-to-door in a tower block.’
19
The hours had fallen away. A member of staff put his head around the doo
r to ask Nigel politely if he needed anything, and mutter apologetically that the library closed in half an hour. Nigel first had to shake his head to bring himself back into the present, and then checked his watch to make sure the librarian was not joking. He wasn’t; it was four thirty exactly.
‘Did the detective make any provision for me staying after hours?’ he asked.
The assistant shook his head dolefully.
‘Don’t suppose I can without his arrangement, can I?’
The assistant affirmed that was the case.
Nigel found his phone and called Foster. He told him that the library was to close in thirty minutes.
‘How much more have you got to look at?’ came the reply.
‘I’m on the final day of the trial; they’re about to reach a verdict, I think.’
‘Well, find that out. But there may be no need to dwell on it too long. Between me, you and the gatepost they’ve got someone in custody.’
Like Foster, Nigel could not decide whether he felt elated or disappointed.
‘But we still need to plough on and dig out what we can,’ Foster continued. He paused. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask them to let you stay there longer. But they won’t have anyone to bring you what you need, so you’ll have to make do with what you have. Send me photocopies of anything significant you find out about the trial. But don’t pull an all-nighter or anything like that. Chances are, we’ll need you tomorrow.’
That was fine with Nigel. He just wanted to reach the end of this newspaper narrative. The thought of leaving it now, albeit only overnight, was agonizing.
The trial had lasted just three days: two for the prosecution to open and present their case, half a day for the defence – defendants were not allowed to give evidence on their own behalf – and a further half a day for the judge’s summation. While the first two days had been given acres of coverage in the two newspapers Nigel was relying on, the third was not; the defence case amounted to little more than a half-hearted plea for innocence from a barrister and a former employer of the accused, who said he was a man of simple yet good character. It merited a few paragraphs only. These were set against a litany of prosecution witnesses, who attested to the accused’s drunken, violent nature, and the pages their testimony garnered. If the newspaper were to be believed, there could be only one verdict.
On the evening of the third day the jury retired, reaching a verdict within twenty minutes. The judge, one eye no doubt on the fact that the edition deadlines of the newspapers had passed, delayed until the next morning. Nigel could only wonder what that night was like for the condemned man – the dragging agony.
The next morning the courtroom was awash with people. Of the two reporters, the News of the World’s intoxicated, excitable representative best conveyed the exquisite tension of what happened next.
Every pair of eyes were on the dock. No event took place for what appeared to be an eternity, until the sound of a door opening below and the shuffle of feet on wooden steps indicated Fairbairn was on the way to his assignation with fate. The collective breath of the crowd was audible as the prisoner loped into the view of the galleries. This time, the first occasion during this trial, there were no cries, no declamations. Only silence unbroken. As always his gaze was to his feet, but once did Fairbairn raise his head and look towards the gentlemen of the press crushed into a single gallery. For all the world he looked as if he would speak to us, that the mute would break his silence and offer a sign of the obvious turmoil which raged within that gigantic cold heart. Yet there came only a heavy, baleful stare that communicated little, until his eyes settled back on his boots once more.
The clerk of the court appeared and all attentions were focused on the bench where Mr Justice MacDougall would take his seat for this final act. Breathless silence continued to reign, so much so that a pin could have been heard to drop, but it was broken with a gasp of such volume one would think that it had been rehearsed by the company present. The act that had brought forth this collective sound of wonder was the clerk’s placing of the black cap on the bench in front of where the judge would sit. My eyes went to the accused, to gauge his reaction at the sight of that awesome piece of apparel that indicated his terrible end. He was still peering down in front of his body, perhaps contemplating the abyss into which his mortal body would soon be launched.
The judge entered the court, resumed his place and asked the foreman of the jury if a verdict had been reached. The foreman answered in the affirmative and, when asked what that verdict was, replied ‘We have agreed that the accused is guilty’.
The clerk asked the customary question whether the man had anything to say before the sentence of death was passed. At last that huge face lifted from its earthly gaze and another gasp issued forth from those around. In a voice low and doleful, barely audible, Fairbairn at last loosed his tongue.
‘I never done the thing,’ he murmured, and that was all the pitiable creature could muster.
As was usually the case, the execution was fixed three clear Sundays after the sentence had been passed. But there was no sign of interest waning in the story: the next day The Times in a leader pronounced itself pleased with the verdict, and congratulated the prosecution for offering such a compelling case.
Nigel’s eye was also caught by another report of a gruesome killing in North Kensington. Under the headline ‘Man Slays Family’ was a short report of a man named Segar Kellogg, who had slit the throat of his wife, stabbed his son and then smothered his two daughters before turning the knife on himself. The son, the story said, was still alive though in a grave condition. The surname delighted Nigel: he came across it rarely. It was an occupational surname given to slaughtermen in Essex. John killed hogs. When the time came for a name to differentiate him from other Johns, he was named John Killhog. Over the centuries this had become Kellogg. How appropriate, Nigel thought grimly, that a man bearing that name had slaughtered most of his family.
Subsequent articles in the News of the World concentrated on the daily comings and goings of the condemned man. There appeared to be incredulity at the lack of a confession – Nigel knew it was customary for newspapers and periodicals to print special editions with the repentant ramblings of condemned men and women – and the view appeared to be that Fairbairn was harbouring secrets so dark that he was afraid to unburden himself. Others noted that he insisted on his innocence to whoever visited his cell. His mood was described as ‘serene’, yet elsewhere as ‘dark and morbid’. The Sunday before his execution the News of the World appeared to have grown weary of his reluctance to confess all, and carried barely a paragraph about him. It did note that an application had been made by the Royal College of Surgeons for Fair-bairn’s body to be submitted to them for dissection and study, a matter which was under the consideration of the Home Secretary.
Fairbairn was led to the gallows, only once faltering in his step. The executioner, Norwood, and his subject then shook hands. Fairbairn was asked whether he wished to say any final words. He turned to the selected reporters and said: ‘I never done the thing.’ Fairbairn died instantaneously, so the reports suggested, though, as was customary, his body was left on the scaffold for one hour before being taken down and transported to the Royal College of Surgeons.
Nigel stumbled out into the approaching twilight, after faxing what he’d found over to the incident room, and made his way to the tube, the details and events of the trial and execution replaying in his mind over and over. For some reason he felt immense sorrow for the dumb, child-like mute who had received the ultimate punishment. He thirsted to know more, to immerse himself in greater detail. A glance at his watch told him no archive would still be open. Instead, that evening, he would have to throw himself on the mercy of the Internet. Surely such a momentous set of murders, the trial and its aftermath would still ripple down the years?
This hunger for more knowledge grew keener during the hour it took him to reach his flat in Shepherd’s Bush. He was puzzled by Foster’s silen
ce, but figured the detective had been detained by other business. Perhaps they had caught the killer. Nigel did not actually care; his interest had been pricked by the events of 1879. He wanted to discover as much as he could to satisfy his own curiosity. He booted up his computer before he had even removed his jacket or put his bag on the floor. As soon as it came to life, the luminescent screen providing the only source of light in his flat, other than the remains of the day shining weakly through his window, he sat down and opened his Internet connection, typing the name ‘Eke Fairbairn’ into his search engine.
Two pages. Twenty-seven results. Is that all, he thought? He had expected more. It was as if what he had read and learned that day had vanished, airbrushed out of history.
He checked the results. Nearly all were linked to sites connected to the Hunterian Museum, housed within the Royal College of Surgeons. According to the first link he followed, the museum’s collection of anatomical exhibits included the skeletons of several criminals who had been dissected following execution. Among them was that of ‘murderer Eke Fairbairn’. So Fairbairn’s body was on actual display? Another link confirmed it was. He checked the museum’s opening times: nine the following morning. He sat back and rested his hands behind his head. Tomorrow he was going to meet the Kensington Killer.
Foster threw his jacket on the kitchen table and filled a glass of wine to the brim. It had taken him and Heather the entire evening to doorstep the first five floors of the tower block, twenty flats of surly men and women with a reflexive suspicion of the police. They had not seen anything out of the ordinary in the past few days, nor anyone new moving in. Even if they had, Foster sensed he’d be the last to know. He had had to co-opt DC Khan for the next day, but it still meant another forty-eight hours going door-to-door. The exact time they had before the killer was due to deliver his fourth victim.