by Dan Waddell
He wanted help: the whole area under surveillance, ART if possible. He’d spoken to Drinkwater. The suspect still hadn’t been charged and they were going before the court the next morning to ask for another forty-eight hours. They were convinced of Cable’s guilt; he had no alibis for any of the nights when the victims had disappeared, nor when their bodies were dumped. But they had not found any physical evidence, and Cable was not confessing.
Foster rang Harris to ask for help watching the tower block, but was knocked back; they were all employed trying to produce something with which to charge Cable.
‘He’s our man,’ Harris kept repeating.
Forest gave up. He asked to interview Cable, to look into his eyes and see him speak.
Harris was adamant he should take a few days off.
‘You look exhausted, Grant,’ he said.
Foster knew Harris didn’t want his doubtful, brooding presence undermining the certainty of his men.
He checked his watch. If he went to bed now he could get seven hours’ sleep, perhaps ease the ache in his head. But Nigel’s words at the National Archives kept ricocheting around his brain. ‘Anyone who seeks to forget the past has a corpse in the basement,’ he had said, words that carried a gruesome resonance for him. Foster had done all he could to forget his past and its terrible events, devoting himself to work, surrounding himself with gadgets and shiny things, medicating himself with alcohol, in effect shutting down his life. Yet this case had brought forth a torrent of memories and images of his father and his final hours.
He forced himself to think of the case – was there anything he and Heather had neglected to do? – but Nigel’s words haunted him still. Perhaps Harris was right. Cable’s arrest could have laid the events of 1879 to rest. Time would tell.
In little more than twenty-four hours they would know if the past was about to give up more of its dead.
He was sinking further. Tumbling head over paw into his own private Hades. His state of mind matched the squalor and filth and degradation of the stinking Dale in which he now plied God’s work. Jemima and the little ones kept well out of his way. For days he had not seen them, and when young Esau had crossed him that morning following his ablutions, he had whimpered and cried and sought sanctuary in his mother’s skirts. Her look was one of horror and bewilderment, no recognition for the creature he had become. But this was the Lord’s work he was doing, he could not rebel, nor ignore his calling. God had total authority. He remembered Saul and knew he could not deviate from this chosen path. ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’ It was for someone to show these pitiable creatures the foolhardiness of their ways, to show them the consequences of their alcoholic servitude. By walking the streets of that benighted Dale, those London avenues, gateway to the infernal regions, he could see his actions were justified; there were few souls staggering to and fro in their drunkenness, few women of loose virtue to allow those same fools to claw and paw at their soiled flesh. His mission would soon be over, he knew that; but these streets would be cleaner and less putrid for his actions.
Then he would meet his judgement.
The Dale was deserted, he noted with satisfaction. His fingers sought and held the hilt of his blade in his pocket, twitching against the cold steel. In this moment of distraction he inhaled through his nose, and at once almost retched at the sulphurous, rancid stink. He was not but a short walk from that mephitic swamp the local folk called the Ocean. A collection of clay pits in an ignored brick field, great holes where stagnant water, pig effluent and human excrement and waste had gathered to create one noxious pond with an unholy stink that stayed in the nostrils for days. Swiftly, from the pocket of his woollen coat, he brought a handkerchief doused with scent and clasped it to his gagging mouth. The nausea passed. He stood up, chastised. Until the deed was done, or the Ocean’s miasma was downwind, he could take air only through his mouth.
He walked down the new Walmer Road, past those streets of shame. Nowhere in London was more degraded and abandoned than life in those wretched places. He shuddered when he thought of what passed for life in that acre of sin surrounding William Street and the disgusting habits of the deluded fools who inhabited them. Yes, these people were poor; but what little money they had they squandered. Dissolute half-clad girls smoking in lice-ridden rooms, plying their awful trade with the steady inflow of certain submerged and criminal types.
They needed to learn the error of their ways. Once again his hand clasped the hilt of his dagger as he felt his gorge rise.
He managed to pass the despicable swamp without retching, then turned right on to St James Square, the air becoming cleaner, breathing easier among the respectable class whose dwellings sat around that glorious church. It made his heart swell to see its awe, silhouetted against the mild night sky. Passing it put purpose in his step, not that it had been waning.
He followed the road until it joined Saint Ann’s Villas, where he turned left towards the Royal Crescent on the edge of the Dale. A quick right took him down Queen’s Road. There were more people present here, the terror not as strong. He would soon change that…
He stood by the chapel on Queen’s Road, hidden in the shadows, watching that place. The Queen’s Arms. The stench of ale, wafting towards him on the breeze, was overpowering, almost as unbearable as the stink from that stagnant pit he had passed earlier. Again he breathed only through his mouth. He twisted his neck to one side, hearing it crack and feeling the relief from the pressure. He was calm, prepared, ready.
The door of the pub swung open; two men stumbled out. They squared up to each other, as if fixing for combat. But another emerged to intervene and one was pushed away, turning to leave. A huge man. He let him pass by, not wanting to risk such a mighty foe. Seconds later the other protagonist in the brawl that never was staggered from the public house, muttering obscenities and oaths at no one in particular. Much more like it, he thought.
The smaller man hawked phlegm into his throat and expectorated copiously into the street. Then he adjusted his cap and set off walking, veering slightly to his left before righting himself. Once more he brought phlegm into his throat and cleared it. He shook his head, as if to rid it of the fug, and increased his speed. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered to himself.
In the shadows he waited to see which way his victim would go. Praise God, the man went straight on, towards him. The man crossed the road, expectorating once more. He felt the knife in his hand and stepped from the shadow, falling in behind. The man turned instinctively, saw him and stopped.
‘Aye, what’s this business?’ the man slurred, his face puzzled, addled.
Without breaking stride he continued walking to him, pulled the knife from his pocket and drove it home, twisting sharply when it was sunk to the hilt.
The victim’s eyes turned glassy, rolled heavenwards – he would find no comfort there – and a gasp of air hissed from below, accompanied by the gurgle of his death. When he pulled the knife clear, the man collapsed to the floor. Immediately he picked up his quarry, carried it ten yards to a patch of ground upon which it seemed they were building yet more dwellings. Like a doll, he tossed it to the ground, not even bothering to hide the fruits of his labour. Only then did he look around: he saw no one. He was truly blessed. He replaced the knife in his pocket and hurried away from the scene, yet another night’s work complete.
21
Nigel reached the Family Records Centre as dawn approached after yet another night of fitful sleep, studded with dark, half-remembered dreams. Foster had arranged for the centre to be open at Nigel’s request. Phil on the desk was there waiting to let him in. It was barely six a.m., but he was still whistling. A tune Nigel could not make out. It was only as he returned from locking up his bag and coat that he realized it was ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely?’ by Peter Sarstedt.
‘You whistling that for my benefit, Phil?’ he asked.
Phil looked bemused. ‘Didn’t realize I was,’ he said, vaguely hurt.
&nb
sp; Nigel moved on. As he drifted towards the indexes, he heard Phil start up once more. This time he couldn’t make out the tune at all.
He went straight to the marriage indexes and hunted down the reference for Hannah Fairbairn, to a carpenter named Maurice Hardie. Thank God it wasn’t John Smith, he thought. At a terminal upstairs he tracked them via the census. In 1881 they were living in Bermondsey with three children; a nine-year-old girl and two boys, aged seven and three.
Next he was faced with a familiar problem. They simply vanished from the census. The death indexes told him that Maurice and Hannah died a day apart in 1889. A call to the General Register Office revealed influenza had claimed them both. They had been reduced to poverty, clinging on to the bottom rung of Victorian existence inside Bermondsey Workhouse. Two days later, their younger son, David, succumbed to the disease in the same desperate place.
That left two children: Clara, who would now be almost seventeen, and Michael, two years her junior. There was no record of their deaths so Nigel presumed they must have survived, but subsequent census returns proved fruitless. Neither was there a record of either getting married before the turn of the century.
He left the FRC, walked down Myddelton Street, through Exmouth Market, taking a left down Rosoman Street until he reached the London Metropolitan Archives on the corner of Northampton Road. Here were seventy-two kilometres of records, dating back to 1607, about the capital, its inhabitants and their lives. More pertinently, it held the records for the city’s Poor Law unions, who oversaw the running of the individual workhouses, in this case the St Olave Poor Law Union.
He ordered the admission and discharge register. In 1886 all five of the Hardie family were admitted. They had come voluntarily. The two young boys were malnourished, Michael awarded the stark description ‘imbecile’. Nigel knew exactly what had happened. Like many of the poor, they had chosen institutionalized grind and servility in order to survive. Maurice and Hannah would have slept in separate dormitories, the children too. There would have been minimal contact with each other. Wearing a uniform, woken at six, a day of menial work, in bed by eight; only the lack of bars and locks distinguished these places from prisons. People were free to leave at three hours’ notice, but to what? To starve, to freeze on the streets? They were imprisoned by circumstance.
Nigel wondered what events had led Maurice to abandon any hope of providing for his family and to seek the charity of the authorities. An injury perhaps? The boys were not yet old enough to support the family, and there was not enough work for young women like Clara to provide for them. In 1888 she had discharged herself, to try and lead a life beyond the workhouse walls. Maybe she believed she might even be able to reverse her family’s fortunes. Yet a year later, her parents and elder brother were dead, probably interred in the cheapest coffins possible and buried in the same unmarked grave. The day after David’s death, Clara came to collect her surviving brother, 7th September 1889.
Where had they gone? Nigel spent two hours searching through the registers of every asylum in London. Michael did not show up; he must have gone to live with Clara. But then the pair had slipped through a crack in time.
Outside he blinked against the late-afternoon spring sunshine. Time had spun away, hours lost as he buried himself in the past.
Then it struck him. An idea. He did not know what prompted it, but he had learned in his career as a genealogist always to follow a hunch. He returned to the FRC and went straight to the 1891 census. He typed in Clara Fairbairn and her date of birth.
There she was: same age. She had taken her mother’s maiden name. Why? He could only guess. To shake off the stigma of the poorhouse perhaps? He clicked the link to reveal other members of the household. Michael Fairbairn. He was living with her in a house in Bow, east London. All the other occupants of the house, Michael aside, were young women: all between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Clara was the eldest. Nigel guessed it was some sort of boarding house. Her occupation was given as matchworker. That and the location explained everything: she was working at the Bryant and May factory. She had found work, albeit of the most arduous and dangerous kind: working fourteen hours a day, prohibited from talking, punished for dropping matches, and at risk of contracting disfiguring and fatal cancer from the ever-present yellow phosphorous used to make the matches.
On the 1901 census Clara, aged twenty-nine, was listed working as a domestic servant at an address on Holland Park. Michael was not at the same address. Instead, he was living and working as a groom at stables on Holland Park Mews. It seemed a reasonable assumption that Clara had somehow inveigled Michael into the job when she got hers. A year later, Michael was dead of heart failure. A year after that, Clara was married, to a clerk named Sidney Chesterton, three years her junior. Nigel felt sure the two events were related; only now that her brother was dead was she able to forge a life of her own.
She and Sidney had four children, two of each sex. The first-born, a boy, had been named Michael. They settled in Hammersmith, at that time a semi-rural London satellite. On each birth certificate Sidney’s occupation grew grander so that, by the birth of his fourth child, he was a manager. What he managed wasn’t clear, but the Chestertons were middle class. Clara had come a long way from the workhouse steps. She eventually died in 1951. She was seventy-nine, an amazing age given the deprivations of her early life. He shook his head at her indomitability, wondering whether her descendants knew of her sacrifice; did they realize how this woman, who probably appeared to them only in sepia-tinted photographs at the bottom of a drawer or a box, had altered the path of their family, hauled it from the shadows and preserved a bloodline?
The centre was empty, the last remaining member of staff alternately glancing at Nigel and the clock on the wall, closing on seven o’clock. There was no way Nigel could complete the job that night, and his eyes ached. He called Foster and told him how far he’d reached. The detective was barely lucid, distracted by the looming deadline and the awful, impending prospect of a fourth victim.
Foster gazed up at the tower block, like a climber contemplating an unconquerable face. In the dusk light it seemed less ugly, yet still inscrutable. People had come and gone throughout the day, and he and Heather had watched them all: every delivery was checked, each workman questioned, each resident who left and arrived cross-referenced against the list they had. Nothing appeared different, or out of the ordinary.
At intervals Foster went and checked each and every bin, alley and scrap of wasteland around the block. Each time there was nothing to see; but while he could tell himself that he had been watching, and no one had slipped in without his knowing, he still expected to lift a lid or peer around a corner and see the sight he dreaded most of all.
As night fell there seemed little option but to sit in the car with Heather and wait. The lights of the flats flicked on one by one and the stream of people in and out became an intermittent drip. Gangs of youths congregated on a street corner, drinkers weaved their way to the pubs and late stragglers made their way back from work. Shouts, pounding bass and the feed-me screams of babies wafted through the air, mingling occasionally with the irregular sound of sirens hurtling along the Westway. He got out only once, to shoo away a mongrel threatening to piss on his offside rear tyre.
Foster had never felt so helpless. He ticked off the hours as they passed: ten, then eleven, midnight. The anniversary of finding the fourth victim in 1879 had begun. The first three had been found in the hours between the middle of the night and dawn. He saw no reason why this might be different.
The city noise abated, the streets cleared, though the sirens never stilled. One by one the lights of the block vanished, a few remaining illuminated as the wee small hours came and went, insomniacs staring numbly at screens. He and Heather barely spoke. There was nothing for it but to see how this would play out.
Dawn came. He let Heather doze. Foster had passed the point of tiredness, when sleep could come easily, and lapsed into a wired, restless exhaust
ion, unable to stop his leg from bouncing manically as he sat still. His mum used to call it St Vitus’s dance, he remembered through the fog in his brain. He had not done it in years.
As the sun rose, the tower block woke from slumber. The first workers left, the sybarites returned. Heather came round and poured two cups of stewed coffee from a flask.
‘What do we do?’ she asked.
‘We wait,’ he said. ‘There is nothing more we can do.’
His phone rang. Andy Drinkwater.
‘You’re up early,’ Foster said.
‘I never went to bed. Big development last night. About three it came through that they’d found a knife similar to the one that may have stabbed two of the three vics in Terry Cable’s garden, beneath the rosebushes or something. It’s with forensics now.’
For a second, Foster was speechless. ‘That’s bullshit,’ he blurted out.
‘What do you mean? I’m only telling you what I know.’
‘I know, Andy,’ Foster said. ‘It’s just that I’ll bet you all the blow in Amsterdam that the knife they found did not stab James Darbyshire or Nella Perry. And if it did, then it was planted in the garden to fit him up.’
‘Everyone here thinks it’s a breakthrough,’ Drinkwater muttered. ‘No sign of any action your end?’
‘None,’ Foster grunted. He knew that every minute that passed without a fourth victim would harden Harris and his cronies’ conviction that the right man was in custody. He ended the call, still shaking his head in disbelief.
‘What’s up with you?’ Heather asked.