'No, they're not the link. Beck wasn't even their dad. I can hardly see them passing the story of his murder down the generations. Knock it on the head for now.'
'One more thing.'
'Yeah,' Foster said, impatiently.
'I've just been tapped up by a reporter from the Evening News. Gary Kent.'
Foster sighed.
'Told me to pass on his regards.'
'Forget him. He's a creep. Right now, to be blunt, I couldn't give a rat's arse. Did he know about the reference?'
'No, he didn't mention it and I didn't tell him anything. But he knows I'm working for you.'
'Bully for him. If any more reptiles come crawling, tell them to shove it, too. And don't fall for the money thing: newspapers will always find a way not to pay, so you won't see a dime.'
There was a pause.
'Detective, I was thinking: the Metropolitan Police archives have been destroyed, so there are no details of the murder.'
Foster murmured his assent.
'The National Newspaper Library has copies of every single local and national newspaper going back a couple of hundred years. There's a good chance it will have been reported in the press in 1879. I thought it might be worth digging the reports out.'
'OK, sounds good. The one in Colindale? Is it open on Saturday?'
'Yes, until four.' He glanced at his watch. It was coming up to one p.m.
'Will you have time?'
'Let's see,' Nigel said.
'Look, I tell you what. I'll get someone to give this place a call and see if we can get it to stay open a bit later. Would that help?'
'It would.'
'Consider it done. Give me a call if you turn anything up.'
The line went dead.
Thanks to the vagaries of the Northern Line, it was approaching two thirty when Nigel exited the station at Colindale. The sun was out, offering even this ignored and unloved part of London a healthy glow.
Nigel turned right and strode with purpose down Colindale Avenue, a soulless strip of road, eating up the forty or fifty yards to the newspaper library. It was built in 1903 as a repository for yesterday's news, and opened to the public in 1932, a dirty red-brick building that still wears the austerity of the period.
Once inside the main reading room Nigel was hit by the familiar, rich, almost sickly smell of fading, worn paper. Becoming immersed in the bound volumes of newspapers was like entering a portal to the past. Here he was able to flesh out the stories of the people he hunted, their times and the events that shaped them. Inquests, court reports, obituaries, news reports, all these were genealogical gold. At the FRC, the act of looking through indexes rather than original forms removed you from history: at Colindale, you climbed a ladder and dived in.
Nigel found a seat. The whole archive is the size of several football fields - almost every single British newspaper, local and national, printed since 1820 is housed there -- but the area given over to researchers is not much bigger than a penalty box. The main room has barely changed since 1932: the stark white walls, the wooden clock that has never shown the right time and, most of all, the fifty-six original reading tables. These were, to Nigel, objects of beauty.
Not the tables themselves, but the reading stands perched on them. Made of brass in art deco style, each possesses a strip lamp -- turned on by a switch that flicks with a satisfying thud - the table number and wooden frames, chipped and tattered from decades of use, on which to stand the huge bound volumes. If not for the odd, usually neglected computer terminal and the hysterical whirr of rewinding microfilm reels from the neighbouring room, it could be any time since 1932.
Nigel went to the inquiries desk first.
'Hi,' he said to the timid woman sitting behind the counter. 'Nigel Barnes. I believe someone from the Metropolitan Police might have said I was coming.'
He winced at how formal his introduction sounded. Her eyes lit up.
'Oh, yes,' she said eagerly. 'Ron on the order desk is expecting you. He'll be helping you out.'
A minute or so later a proud-looking fat man, hands the size of shovels, was greeting him. He had a stubbled chin and an enormous stomach that strained against his T-shirt.
'Sorry about keeping you here,' Nigel explained.
'Don't worry, mate,' Ron said. 'I only had a night in front of the TV with the wife planned; frankly, you're doing me a favour. Now what do you want first?'
He started with national newspapers: they carried stories of murder, the more gruesome the better, while the local papers were unpredictable. They came and went quickly, and often carried nothing more than market times and the price of apples. He asked for March 1879 copies of The Times, the paper of record. Although it was unlikely the murders would be in there, it was worth a try; he also ordered The Daily Telegraph -- then The Times'1* cheaper, downmarket rival - and finally, the News of the World, which served up a weekly diet of murder and sin even in 1879.
Ron disappeared into the depths of the repository.
Nigel went to his seat and waited, trying to stop himself checking his watch every other minute. The reading table would be superfluous. All the volumes he'd ordered came on that most dreaded substance: microfilm. Nigel hated it. Scanning through endless reels of the stuff on badly lit screens coated in inches of dust, developing repetitive strain injury by having to rewind whole reels manually, threading the crumpled, creased pieces of film over the rollers and not under, it was as much fun as gouging his eyeballs out with a teaspoon.
When they came, he took the boxes through to the room filled with microfilm readers, huge machines with screens the size of 1950s televisions.
He teed up The Times first. For the week following the murder, it carried nothing. Not for the first time, Nigel marvelled at the verbosity of the Victorian press. In one edition there was a report of a parliamentary debate that must have comprised more than 15,000 words, the newspaper columns densely packed, unbroken by illustrations or advertisements.
How anyone read it without losing the will to live was beyond him.
Relieved, he turned next to the News of the World. The Screws was founded in 1843 and quickly established itself as a primary source of salaciousness, mining the magistrates' courts of London for stories of murder and adultery. If Albert Beck's death had not made its pages, then it was unlikely to have been reported by anyone else. The microfilm reel carried every edition for 1879. It was his intention to scroll briskly through January but, as always, he found it impossible to avoid being consumed by the past. As he spooled sedately through the weekly editions his eye was caught by wonderful, evocative yet matter-of fact headlines: 'Atrocious Outrage Near Bristol' and 'Threatening Attitude Of Nihilists'. The front page of each edition had a list of 'Jokes Of The Week'
culled from other publications, so unfunny they seemed to have been filed from another planet which, in effect, they were.
He found the first edition for April. There was a report from the Zulu War and a report on the exploits of the Kelly gang in Australia. He was about to scroll down to the next page when, at the bottom, he saw a headline that made his heart stop.
KENSINGTON: THIRD HORRIFIC
MURDER
The story beneath read:
The bodies of all three men lay in pools of blood on the ground, a demon having wielded a sharp instrument to open them up. Up to one o'clock yesterday North Kensington had no clue as yet to the motive or identity of the fiend whose deeds have sown considerable terror within the local community. The first victim was named as Samuel Roebuck, a brickworker of Notting Dale, whose mutilated body was discovered in the fields near his home.
The man had last been seen drinking on the evening of Monday March 24th, and the police initially believed the killing to be the consequence of a drunken altercation.