'Anywhere else?'
'There's always a possibility they already owned the death certificate.'
'What do you mean?'
'It's in the family; they could be related to the dead man. Or it could simply have fallen into their possession.'
'Let's discount that for now. For all the other possibilities, the person would have had to order it and get it sent to an address?'
'Unless they paid for it at the FRC and collected it a few days later.'
Foster went back to scanning the document, as if it would yield more secrets the longer he stared at it.
'Well, that gives us something to work on,' he said to his two officers. 'We need to get someone along to the FRC, get hold of any CCTV footage, find out if anyone else has ordered this certificate, who they were, OK?'
Drinkwater left the room.
Foster looked at Nigel. 'There is something else you can do for us, which sort of relates to your last theory about how the killer got hold of the certificate.
Is it possible to trace someone's family going forwards?
Not their ancestors but their descendants?'
Nigel nodded. 'It's called the "bounceback technique".
You go back in time to trace the path of someone's family to the present day.'
'So you could trace the living descendants of Albert Beck?'
'No problem.'
'Will you go and do that?'
Nigel had his bag and coat in his hand before Foster finished his request.
The last train chased into the night. He could hear the great clank and wheeze of its infernal engine while he stood, waiting at the dark secluded end of the street, his eyes fixed on the Elgin.
The warm orange glow of its light poured out, illuminating the dark wall of the convent across the street. The door occasionally flapped open and the drunken chatter and laughter would waft its way towards him. He jerked his head sharply to the right, feeling his neck click. He'd watched them come and go, many of them, but not yet the perfect one.
The one that strayed.
The sulphur stink of the underground train was in his nostrils. He shuddered. Out of curiosity, he had ridden it once.
It was worse than he imagined: Hades on wheels. It had been the previous summer. The weather intolerably warm, barely a cough of wind to chase away the heat and smoke. He descended the stairs at Baker Street with fear in his heart. The first rush and roar of the train, the hot blast as it steamed in, all of it damn near had him running back up the wooden steps; but he ventured on.
Underground, in that coffin on tracks, he knew the devil was with him. The decadent, the godless, the drunks and the whores; it was their chosen chariot. Around him men smoked their pipes, the smoke billowing through the airless carriage, mingling with the foul odour of the gas lamps. As they passed west they were plunged alternately into bright, eye-blasting light and profound darkness. He lasted two stops in the fetid atmosphere before he thought asphyxiation would claim him.
At Paddington he emerged, gulping in great lungfuls of air.
I'll go to Hell when the Lord tells me and not before, he vowed, and had not been anywhere near it since. He wasn't alone in his fear, most people he knew hated the thing.
Then he saw him leave. The perfect one. He stepped out of the pub, staggered forwards, righted himself, and then lurched to the side. He kept out of sight as the man stuttered across the Grove. Great drunken fool could barely lift his head. The drunk reeled towards the station; he stepped from the shadows to follow. He wondered where the chase would lead; north of the station, into the farmlands and fields of Notting Barn?
That would be perfect: they were building streets there, rows and rows of townhouses for the rich folk brought in by the underground and its feeder railway.
But no. Just before the station, the drunk took a left. He kept his distance, was able to give thanks to another night without the fog but quickened his pace when he saw they were reaching the area where the lights became scarce. The man swayed and he felt himself smile; this was too easy.
His quarry crossed the road, away from the track, to the verge beside the underground line. There was dark sodden earth. Away from the light, he found it hard to find him, but his eyes adjusted and he could see why the drunk had listed towards the dark: he needed to urinate. He stopped and looked behind: nothing not a peep. The drunk was staggering over the verge, up a dirt track that would soon be a road. The empty husks of a few houses were around them, silhouettes in the pitch-black night. He watched the man stop near a wall and could hear the drill of urine hit the sopping ground.
From his pocket he pulled the knife, clutching it tight in his hand. His last few steps were bounding and cat-like, swallowing the ground between them. The drunk was shaking himself dry, unaware of danger, lifting his head to drink in the night air. As he did so, his pursuer wrapped his left arm around his throat, dragging him back, and the knife was plunged deep into his chest. He barely made a noise, other than a grunt, before he sank to the ground.
His night's work done, he slipped back into the tar-black night. . .
By the time Nigel left the station on Friday, the Family Records Centre was closed. When the doors opened on Saturday morning he was waiting outside eagerly. He was relishing the day ahead, wondering what secrets and lies would be disinterred. The new guy -- Phil, Nigel thought his name was -- was behind the customer inquiries counter, whistling the tune to 'One Day At A Time' by Lena Martell. Nigel nodded as he walked past.
'Made quite a stir yesterday,' Phil said.
'Who did?' Nigel answered innocently, even though he knew exactly what Phil was referring to.
'Your friends from the Met. What's the crime?'
'Nothing much,' Nigel lied. 'Just helping them out with a bit of research.'
Phil nodded while leafing through a pile of documents.
He still hadn't looked at Nigel.
'Good work if you can get it, eh?' he said, finally making eye contact, his face round and friendly.
'I suppose,' Nigel said, wondering if Duckworth had been his less than reticent self.
Phil went back to sorting his pile of documents.
As he wandered over to the birth indexes, Nigel could hear Phil begin whistling the first few bars of'Coward Of The County' by Kenny Rogers.
He was looking forward to the search, intrigued by what he might discover. It was this sense of expectation that he enjoyed most about the job. Like a potato plant, the best part of family history lies beneath the surface. By digging deep, the stories of the dead, silent through the years, could be told once more.
Yet immediately he faced a problem. Given his age on the death certificate - thirty-two - Nigel thought Beck might have been born in 1846 or 1847. Yet he could not find the birth of a single Albert Beck during those years. This was no surprise; it was not compulsory to register births, marriages and deaths until 1865, so not everyone did. Scanning the marriage indexes from 1865 onwards, Nigel had better luck. In September 1873 ne na^ married. A call to the police hotline at the GRO revealed his wife was named Mary Yarrow.
Nigel used this information upstairs at the FRC.
The 1881 census is held electronically on a database on one of the terminals in the census room, which houses all the censuses from 1841 to 1901. He knew that Beck, being dead, would not be listed, but he hoped that his widow, and whatever children the couple had, would still be at the Clarendon Road address. He could then acquire the ages of their children and track them through the following census returns, discover who they married and whether they had any children of their own.
'Where are you, where are you?' he muttered to himself as he keyed in the search terms, a familiar refrain of his at the beginning of a quest. He was waiting for that one discovery, the detail, the name, the entry that would help him unravel the past.