The Blood Detective

by Dan Waddell

  It had taken five killings for the police in 1879 to bring the murderer to justice. This time he wanted it to stop at three.

  He went to his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. Inside were copies faxed by Barnes of newspaper reports of the 1879 trial. Foster sat down at the table and began to read. Soon, tiredness crept in. He grew weary of having the trial filtered through the lens of a Victorian hack. He wanted to learn the details first-hand, assess the evidence himself. He called Barnes and left a message, asking if the original court transcripts were available and to contact him first thing in the morning. Some clue as to why this was happening would be in there.

  He stood up and stretched. He walked through to the lounge and wondered what to do with himself. This house had long since stopped being a home; it was more a place in which he rested and refuelled. It had always been like that, ever since his father’s death. Eight years in which he had shut down every part of his life apart from work.

  He wondered what his dad would make of this case. When he first became a detective, shortly after his father had retired, Foster would go through current cases with him, get his opinion, his hunches, ideas on where to look next. His dad would give examples of tough cases he’d cracked, but would always warn against making assumptions: ‘Nearly every mistake that I know of has been made when people start seeing what they want to see, not what’s actually there.’ Foster always emerged from those conversations with a sense of purpose, a plan of action.

  For the first year or so following his father’s death, he still heard his voice. He held conversations in his head, outlining the problem, the sticking point, his father’s voice responding in its usual economical way. But it faded, began to wane. He could conjure up images of his father, and occasionally he would hear him speak. But, when he sat and consciously tried to bring him to mind, he was out of reach. The voice merged into others, those of colleagues, friends. The past had slipped away.

  But if he ever needed the sage words of his father, it was now. Could he get it back? Rebuild his father’s memory? Can you summon a voice back from the void?

  He went to the bureau, unlocked it and lifted the lid. There it still all was, exactly as it had been left. He had done this countless times, picked up the paperweight, stared at the pictures, then closed the bureau again. But this time he decided to go further. He looked at the picture of himself as a boy, with his mum on Camber Sands. It brought back no memory; he had been only two. These people were strangers. Neither of his parents were interested in photography, and few pictures existed of him and his sister. Yvonne, he thought, a memory stirring. Not a pleasant one either. She lived on the other side of the world with her family; he hadn’t seen or spoken to her since the funeral. She blamed him, not only because of what he did, but for not including her, consulting her. He remembered the last words she had flung at him before she walked away from the church, as the rain slanted down in sheets.

  ‘One day I will forgive you. But right now that day seems a long, long way away.’

  He knew it was down to him to re-establish some sort of contact, to bring that day forward, but the longer he left it the more difficult it became. He winced and cast the image and the anger in her voice to one side, returning to the photo of his younger self at the seaside. Still, no memory came.

  There was always one memory he could not erase. His father, frail and pale, lying on his bed, a monumental weariness seeping from every pore. It had overridden the figure of his youth. The tall, rigid man, not an ounce of fat on him – unlike Foster, whose excesses and indiscipline had bestowed a tyre of fat around his middle. His father did everything with economy: drank, ate, slept. His emotions too; all was confined and controlled.

  Foster put the picture back down and rooted through some papers. A few paid bills, an invitation to a Met dinner, other trivial day-to-day correspondence, none of which bore his father’s imprint or any semblance of his soul.

  His mobile, bursting to life, broke this bout of introspection.

  ‘It’s Drinkwater.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  Drinkwater paused. ‘Well, it’s going. Where are you?’

  Foster noted his young colleague’s hesitancy. ‘At home. You get a starring part in the Terry Cable interview?’

  ‘I sat in for a bit.’

  ‘What’s your gut feeling?’

  Again, Drinkwater paused. ‘He fits the profile; he’s got previous for violence, including sexual assault, which fits in with the Dammy Perry killing.’

  ‘There was no sign of sexual assault there.’

  ‘He carved her breasts up, sir.’

  ‘That wasn’t motivated by sex,’ he said. ‘But go on.’

  ‘Well, the clincher seems to be his use of GHB. They found traces in Ellis’s blood. Loads of it. Seems you’re right: the killer kept him topped up with it for the whole time he held him. In the end his heart gave way.’

  Before he could be murdered, Foster thought.

  ‘This guy’s a user himself, and has used it on other people. Mainly women. Also, his car was seen on Ladbroke Grove on the night Darbyshire was dumped.’

  ‘Sounds like they’re sniffing the right lamp post,’ Foster said.

  But he was puzzled; if this guy did spike all three victims with GHB, then a more damning sighting would have placed him in one of the pubs in which they had last been seen. Surely Williams and his team were parading him in front of drinkers, showing his photo to barstaff?

  ‘But,’ Drinkwater said.

  ‘But what? Come on, Andy. I know something’s bugging you.’

  Drinkwater took a deep breath. ‘OK, he fits the profile, he uses GHB and, yeah, we have an eyewitness who places him near the scene of one murder. But everyone here is acting as if it’s open and shut. They’re spraying this bastard with hot shit. They’ve dug up every bit of sleaze on him – and that’s a lot, believe me – and are giving him it with both barrels. He hasn’t been allowed to sleep, his brief seems next to useless, and the bloke is petrified. Doesn’t know what’s hit him. You just know they’re going to keep coming at him until he crumbles.’

  ‘So, what’s the problem? If he killed three people then they should do everything except take his fingernails off with pliers.’

  ‘Thing is, sir, you’ve seen the crime scenes, you’ve seen how little’s been left at them. You’ve said yourself how calm and calculated this killer is. Does a bag of sleaze with a GHB problem – who gets flustered the first time a copper asks his fucking name – seem like the killer to you?’

  He didn’t. And Foster trusted Drinkwater’s judgement.

  ‘Anyone else got their doubts?’ he asked.

  ‘No one,’ Drinkwater said emphatically. ‘They’re all but breaking open the champagne. They’ve got the go-ahead to raid his place today and they think, even if that doesn’t turn up enough, he might crack. One of them said they might have enough already, if they sprinkle it with stardust and the CPS are willing to give it some topspin.’

  Foster knew he had no basis to go to Harris; to do so would compromise Drinkwater. And the suspect was only being questioned. While that remained the case, it made no sense to cause a scene.

  Except that the killer was due to strike in the next forty-eight hours.

  20

  Nigel had not seen anything like it. Rows upon rows of organs and other, well, ‘specimens’ was the best word he could muster, preserved in formaldehyde. His eyes were drawn – half through fascination, half through revulsion – to a jar in which a perfectly formed, tiny human foot floated free in its sea of liquid. The severed left foot of a small child killed by smallpox, whose body was dissected by the surgeon to try to understand that awful disease. Nigel wondered darkly if the parents were aware their little one’s corpse had been carved up so the world could better understand the viruses that threatened it.

  Next he was enthralled by a set of jars in which the dead fetuses and offspring of what seemed to be every mammal and creature
known to man were suspended in their formaldehyde baths. There was something clinical, yet hauntingly beautiful, too, about all these samples, lit and stacked on shelves in their thick glass containers, like some nightmarish pharmacy. He knew now where notorious British artists – charlatans and poseurs, to his jaundiced eye – gained their inspiration. Carving up and preserving cows was not a new pursuit.

  Nigel enjoyed new discoveries like this, secret places where London’s past had been preserved. Literally, in this case. Once again the years fell away, the atmosphere of the time rose up from the murk. A world of disease, crude surgery, experimentation, discovery. A world on the cusp of change.

  It heartened him that a place such as this existed. A centuries-old collection of anatomical and surgical artefacts that told the story of modern surgery in the most graphic way possible. Only in London, he thought. Only in this benighted, storied city would there be a room where pickled wombs, babies’ limbs and infant sloths were lined up for the inspection of the general public. Looking around, he guessed that most of those doing the inspecting were medical students, though a few art students were among them, sketching away, brows furrowed in concentration.

  He had already dwelled for more minutes than he had intended at a section of the museum displaying early surgical instruments, aghast at their nightmarish design, his imagination conjuring macabre pictures of the agony they would cause an unanaesthetized patient aware of every incision and slice. Nigel had been expecting to see a few rusty scalpels and fake skeletons. Instead, he had stepped into a few quiet, plushly decorated rooms that resembled a cross between an horrific art installation and the set of a Cronenberg film.

  He wondered who the people were whose organs had been pickled, their livers, hearts, kidneys immortalized. Perhaps they had been donated to John Hunter, the pioneering eighteenth-century surgeon whose collection this was, by grave robbers. Nigel knew these men made a living from selling corpses to medical schools for dissection and study, the fresher the better.

  He checked the pamphlet he’d picked up on the way in. Fairbairn’s body was on the mezzanine.

  There were yet more exhibits upstairs, where it was less crowded. Here the story of modern surgery was told in greater detail. Nigel cast his eye around the room until it alighted on a glass case featuring a skeleton.

  As he got nearer, he could see the dirty, yellowed skeleton was that of a large man. Probably around the same height as Foster, perhaps a few inches taller. The eye sockets were vast black caverns; the ribcage was wider than any other part of the body, save the shoulders, and the rictus grin was sinister.

  Nigel scoured the display case for some form of identification. Falling to his haunches, he saw a small inscription beside the skeletal feet.

  ‘Eke Fairbairn. Murderer,’ he read. ‘The dissection of executed criminals was abolished by law in 1832. However, in exceptional circumstances, the Home Secretary and the family of the executed convict gave permission for his body to be released to the College for further study. His skeleton has stood in the museum ever since.’

  Nigel stood and peered more closely at the giant man’s bones. He was no medical expert but he could make out what appeared to be breaks or cracks to parts of the body, to the right tibia and collarbone, while the enormous skull appeared misshapen. But was this any surprise, given that it had stood for more than a century and a quarter inside a glass case, presumably being taken out and moved several times? Probably a case of wear and tear. He remembered references in the newspaper reports he had read the previous day to a limp. The defendant stood awkwardly, and there had been something wrong with his arm, which suggested a deforming Victorian malady such as rickets.

  Nigel checked his watch and cursed under his breath. It was ten thirty and he had not yet called Foster.

  By ten thirty Foster and Heather had covered a further two floors, more flats of the surly and unresponsive. One woman complained of her neighbour playing music at four a.m., waking up her small child. The neighbour explained he worked nights and was just unwinding when he got back in, claiming the woman next door was twitchy and neurotic. They nodded and smiled, not wanting to get drawn into petty conflicts. Each flat they visited was duly checked against the electoral roll; flats where they obtained no response would be visited later in case the inhabitants were at work. Any new tenants would have their backgrounds checked. Foster hoped their presence at the scene would flush out the killer, force him to do something that would draw their attention to him.

  At the very moment when he was wondering whether he would ever get the smell of urine in the communal hallways out of his nostrils, his mobile rang. It was Nigel.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked, without greeting.

  He could tell Nigel was taken aback, stuttering his response.

  ‘Look, I asked you to get in touch with me first thing,’ said Foster. ‘It’s ten thirty now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ the genealogist managed to mutter. ‘I was at a museum,’ he added.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve found the killer, the 1879 killer.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘I mean that the museum I went to this morning had Eke Fairbairn’s skeleton in a glass case on exhibition.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His body was given to medical science after his execution. There was a plaque on the case he’s kept in. All it said was that he was a murderer, nothing we didn’t know.’

  ‘Can anyone see this?’

  It occurred to Foster that if the killer was copying Fairbairn’s spree, then he may well have gone to pay respects to his predecessor himself. Maybe even more than once. He would give this museum a call, see if they’d noticed anyone suspicious hanging around or, even better, whether they had CCTV footage of the displays.

  ‘Listen, Nigel, I read the newspaper reports you faxed over. Very interesting. But what I want to see are the original records of the trial: transcripts, descriptions of evidence, the judge’s summing up. Is there anywhere I could find that sort of information?’

  ‘The National Archives. We know he was tried at the Old Bailey, and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey give a verbatim report of everything that happened in court. But the newspapers were pretty exhaustive…’

  ‘I just want to see it myself, how it happened, how it unfolded, without any interpretation whatsoever.’

  They arranged to meet in a few hours at the National Archives. In the interim, Barnes said there was something he wanted to check out at the British Library.

  ‘Whatever,’ Foster said wearily. ‘Just don’t be late.’

  Three hours later Foster arrived at the National Archives in Kew, half airy modern glasshouse, half monstrous pebble-dashed carbuncle. It reminded Foster of a modern university campus, though once inside he saw the student body was more mature. There was an atmosphere of determination, of people purposefully going about serious research, congregating in small groups to whisper their findings, dead ends described, problems shared and solutions suggested.

  Nigel met him at reception. They went to the café, the tables overflowing with people. Barnes told him he had ordered the Criminal Proceedings of the Old Bailey covering the session in which Fairbairn’s trial had been held, and that it would take up to an hour for it to be ready. In the meantime, he had something for Foster to read.

  From his case he produced three photocopied sheets. Not more newspaper reports, Foster thought. When Nigel handed them over, he could see they were copies of pages from a book.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the memoir written by Norwood, Fairbairn’s executioner. They all did it; people lapped up their experiences. Anyway, it turns out that Fairbairn was his first execution. There’s a lengthy account of it in the book; here’s an extract from that. You might find it useful.’

  Foster began to read.

  On my arrival at the prison, I was met by a warder, dressed in ordinary prison garb. He took my name and pulled on a large string, which r
ang the Governor’s bell. In a few seconds I was met by the Governor himself, a very nice gentleman, of military bearing, and very well dressed. We passed time with the usual niceties. He said that I should make sure of taking a substantial tea this evening, what with all that was to follow the next day.

  He passed me on to the Chief Warden, who kindly showed me to my quarters, a snug lodging at the back of the gaol. We shared a smoke together and I could see this gentleman was agitated by what was to happen. He said he felt quite upset about the fate of Fairbairn, that he hoped the man would get a reprieve. I asked why.

  ‘Because, sir, I feel he is not guilty of the crimes for which you will hang him.’

  I said nothing. It was not my position to question the workings of justice, merely carry out my work in the most expeditious manner possible. I admit now, as this was my first hanging, that I started to experience some unease at the prospect.

  The next day I rose at 5 a.m. and, not being able to stomach the prospect of breakfast, I made my way to the scaffold, where I ensured it was clean and ready. Then, at 7.45 a.m., I returned with the group to play out the last scenes of the drama. We went to the doctor’s room, to which the prisoner was brought. He was a man of enormous height, though the stoop of his body tried to cover for it. He said not a word. He was taken to an adjoining room, where he and the minister conducted prayers. When they returned, I was called to do my duty. I approached Fairbairn. His mournful brown eyes looked up at me, a sight I will see in my mind’s eye until the day I leave the earth. I still don’t know why, but I patted his gigantic shoulder.

  ‘Keep your pluck up,’ I heard myself say, for my own benefit.

  Fairbairn walked without assistance to the scaffold. For his last words he proclaimed only his innocence in a slow, sonorous voice. I placed the hood over his head, my hands only then showing signs of trembling. The noose was placed around his neck, and I made certain he was placed under the beam of the drop. Everything was in place and, as quick as lightning, the culprit was plunged into the hereafter.