The person he wanted was sitting in the middle, the others circled around her, like children hearing a story.
'Good evening, Sheena,' he said, as silence fell.
Ciderwoman was wearing the same clothes as on their previous meeting. In the late dusk, and away from the harsh lights of the police station, she appeared less grimy. Her eyes, yellow and narrow, stared long and hard at him for some time before informing the brain.
'What the fuck do you want?' she said, remembering him at last. She looked at the gnarled old man next to her, bald head, bushy dirty-grey beard, sucking on a cigarette as if his life depended on it while he rocked forwards and back. 'This one's a copper,' she slurred. 'Asked me about that murder in the church.'
'Sorry to gatecrash the party when it's going so well,' Foster said. 'But I'm afraid I need your help again, Sheena. The rest of you might be able to help me, too.' He pulled a copy of the photo of the dead tramp from his inside jacket. 'Do any of you know this guy?'
Ciderwoman snatched the photo from his hand and put it within an inch of her face. She shut one eye and tried to focus. Foster pulled a small torch from his pocket and flicked it on.
'This might help.'
He gave it to Ciderwoman. She held it unsteadily in one hand and shone it on the picture.
'He's fucking dead,' she said eventually.
'I know that. Do you recognize him?'
She looked again. The others had crowded behind both her shoulders to take a look. She passed the torch and picture to a few others.
'Never seen 'im,' she said with certainty.
The photo did the rounds: no one else had seen him either.
'If he did hang around this part of town, would it be fair to say you'd know him?'
She cracked her tombstone smile. 'If he'd hung around here, it'd be fair to say I'd probably shagged him,' she said, then let rip with her wheezy, gasping laugh.
The rest joined in.
That's an image that will take some time to dispel, Foster thought.
Nigel was browsing the online catalogue when Ron returned, a couple of bound volumes under his arm, wheezing with the effort. No microfilm, Nigel thought with some relief. He took them from him and placed one volume on the reading stand. He pushed his glasses back from the tip of his nose and opened the front cover. The pages were dry as sandpaper and as stiff in his hand. It felt wonderful; he could almost sense the years falling away. He flicked giddily through the pages, until he reached the edition of April 2nd.
He thought wrong. There wasn't a single word.
The newspaper consisted of two pages, both filled with advertising, grocery prices, a trade directory and other minutiae of Victorian life. Any other time it would have been a fascinating insight. But not now.
He needed news.
Ron had shuffled away towards his station. Nigel called him back.
'Can you get the Kensington News and West London Times for 1879?' Nigel asked.
'Never heard of them,' Ron said mournfully.
'It's one newspaper,' Nigel replied. 'A weekly.'
Ron ambled slowly out of the room, back towards the depths.
Half an hour later, Ron returned with another bound volume. Nigel found the edition for April 4th.
The murder spree was front page. It concentrated on the worried reactions of Notting Hill residents, including a number who believed the killer to be some sort of golem. One 'eyewitness' had described seeing a man 'more than seven feet in height, hair overgrowing his visage' in the vicinity of the first murder.
Nigel read the report carefully. Nothing was new until he reached the point where the reporter had managed to find a talking head who claimed to know the person who had found the body. The man, unnamed, had been taking an early-morning walk beside the Hammersmith and City Railway when he came across the body near the station.
He rose to go and ring Foster. Then he stopped: Notting Hill Gate was underground. Unless this guy lived in a tunnel, what the hell was he doing walking alongside the track?
Nigel sat back down. Hammersmith and City Railway.
Which line was that now? The Hammersmith and City Line still ran, of course, but it didn't go to Notting Hill Gate. That was on the Central Line.
He thought the Circle and District Lines ran through it too.
He needed a reference book. He checked a few of the shelves, but they had nothing useful. The Internet, he thought. He went to the library catalogue and clicked the Internet icon. His first search term was 'London underground'. A minute later he had 369,000 results to choose from. The first was an online journey planner; the second was the Transport for London official website. He clicked that. For what felt like an age nothing seemed to happen. Just when he was about to try again, the page appeared. He clicked the link marked 'tube'. He scanned the page as quickly as he could, looking for a link to the network's history. He could not see anything about history. On the browser, he clicked 'back' to the list of search results.
The next result was more promising. It was 'Underground history: the disused stations on London's underground'. It concentrated on the 'ghost' stations on the tube: the platform you can see, if your eyes work in the dark, between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn on the Central Line, which has been closed since 1932, and used to be the station for the British Museum; or Down Street on the Piccadilly Line between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner.
He clicked back on the browser once more. He entered 'Notting Hill station' and hit return. The first listed site was Wikipedia: a free encyclopedia, the entries submitted by punters. He clicked it and read the short, bland entry.
7
Notting Hill Gate tube station is a London underground station in Notting Hill. On the Central Line it is between Holland Park and Queensway, and on the District Line and Circle Line it is between High Street Kensington and Bayswater. It is in both zones 1 and 2. It opened on July 30,1900 and is most famous for its proximity to Portobello Road, the site of the movie Notting Hill, the Notting Hill Carnival, and the Portobello Market.
July 30, 1900? Nigel read it again and again. But the date didn't change. Was it a typo? Or was it right? If so, where the hell was the station before then? It existed, he had read about it in several newspapers.
But where was it? He thought of Foster and his team waiting to pounce at Notting Hill Gate. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten p.m. I'll give it another ten minutes, he thought.
He typed in the address for Google and entered the search term 'History of the London underground'.
The first hit was a site that offered a history of the tube decade by decade, beginning with 1860.
In 1863 it told how the Metropolitan Railway was opened between Paddington and Farringdon Street, stopping at Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road (now Great Portland Street), Gower Street (now Euston Square) and King's Cross. No mention was made of Notting Hill.
The next page told the story of how the independent Hammersmith and City Railway opened between Paddington and Hammersmith in 1864 as a feeder for the new underground system. Locomotives ran on the overground track and then entered the underground system.
The intermediate stations on this new railway were Notting Hill (now Ladbroke Grove) and Shepherd's Bush.
Before he had even finished the sentence, Nigel had dug into his pockets, grabbed his mobile phone, dialled it and put the phone to his ear. It rang twice and went dead. He looked at the screen: blank. He checked his pockets: he had a fifty-pence coin. That would last seconds - landline-to-mobile phone calls devoured money. He ran down the stairs to the pay phone, picked up the receiver and called Foster.