The Blood Detective

There was a picture of Dammy Perry on the front page, dressed in a full-length gown, straw hair, broad smile, bleached eyes peering from the page. She looked ethereal, otherworldly. Above the picture, in bold type, the headline read: 'Could She Have Been Saved?'

No, thought Foster. He turned, as directed by the story, to page three.

'There are six pages in total,' Harris said.

'Jesus!'

'And there's a leader on the comment page. It says we should hold an investigation into how our forces came to be at the wrong tube station and missed the chance to catch the killer.'

Foster was only half listening as he leafed through the pages. The headlines were a succession of lurid questions: 'When Will Fiend Strike Again?' 'What Are Cops Doing?' There was a picture of Simon Perry, 'Slain Dammy's Brother', managing to look both bereaved and self-regarding.

'Fish-and-chip paper,' Foster said, tossing it back on to the desk.

A thin, joyless smile spread across the superintendent's face. 'To you, Grant, it may be. But this is exactly what we don't need. Do you know how bad this looks?'

Foster was in no mood to get into an argument about media perception. 'I can see how, reported like this, it looks bad. But the fact is, we discovered he was going to dump a body only a few hours before he actually did. The genealogist found out it was to be Notting Hill. There wasn't time to research the whole history of the London underground. It was a genuine, honest mistake. In any case, she was dead before her body was dumped.'

'Her brother will cause us no end of problems.'

'Her brother's a chinless fool.'

'Who sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee.'

Foster said nothing; he was prepared to weather Harris's public relations paranoia.

'What about the first victim? How come nobody realized he'd been murdered until almost a week after his body had been found?'

Foster explained the story of the tramp who wasn't. The severity of Harris's expression did not alter. He had been in the army in his younger years and, with his ramrod straight back, salt-and-pepper hair and overweening pomposity, Foster guessed he might have made a good officer.

'We need more manpower,' he said, when Foster had finished.

'I agree.'

'I'm bringing Williams's team in from South.'

That wasn't what Foster had in mind. They needed more infantry, not another general. He started to protest. The room, lit only by the thin sunlight of the early morning, darkened perceptibly as two masses of grey cloud met and became one.

'I'm taking charge,' Harris said. 'And you won't like my first decision.'

Foster said nothing; he could feel the tension bulging in the back of his arms.

'DO Williams's team, and most of yours, are going back out on the streets, finding witnesses, digging up all they can on the victims - their lives, their enemies, every single thing they can find. They will show the sketch you've got to everyone who's ever known these victims. I'm also releasing it to the media. We're going to shake down every single ex-con in London who's ever picked up a knife. Williams will coordinate the investigation on the ground and report back to me. You will concentrate on the past. Find out what the hell happened in 1879.'

'Sir . . .'

'Grant, there is a man out there murdering at will,'

he said, his finger jabbing towards the window. 'The press are all over it. They're saying it's the biggest manhunt since the Yorkshire Ripper.'

'So you're going to turn it into one?'

'Yes, if it means we catch the murderer,' he barked back.

'We've been behind the eight ball all the way through this investigation and now when, if we haven't yet got a foothold, at least we've got a bit of purchase, you're standing me down?'

'Not standing you down, Grant. Asking you to oversee a different part of the investigation.'

The one that involves being shut away in dark rooms poring over documents, books and maps, Foster thought.

'We need to understand everything that happened back then. What is it someone once said, "The past is another country"?'

'So is France. Never wanted to go there either.'

Harris simply shook his head. 'My mind is made up.'

In one respect Foster knew Harris was right; to solve the present they needed to solve the past. But the killer was to be apprehended in the present, and that was the task he wanted to see through himself.

Instead, he would be stuck in some archive with Barnes when they finally caught this creep.

'The ex-wife of Graham Ellis is coming down today to identify the body. I fixed it up.'

'I'll handle it,' Harris said immediately, rising from Foster's seat. He picked his papers up from the desk, uncurled his wiry frame and walked out without another glance.

Foster picked up a pen and hurled it against the wall.

Nigel was standing outside the newspaper library, puffing on a roll-up, when Foster screeched to a halt in his car, then reversed at speed into a space. He and Heather got out, Foster striding three yards ahead of her. As he reached the door, he did not meet Nigel's eye, muttered no greeting, merely brushed past and went into the small reception area.

'Don't ask,' Heather murmured to Nigel, who flicked his cigarette stub to one side with forefinger and thumb, then followed her in.

The security guard on reception was waiting to take them to their room. They went through a set of double doors into the small 'cafe' area, which was nothing more than a collection of chairs, tables and vending machines. They headed left through more double doors into an area that Nigel knew was for staff only, then straight across the staff canteen into a small room that smelled as if it had lain unused for some time. The walls bore the shadows of long-gone pictures and calendars. It was windowless and, when Nigel absent-mindedly ran his finger along the only table, it was thickly coated with dust. Two swivel chairs and a battered wooden chair had been put in there for their use.

Foster shut the door behind them. 'We're working here,' he barked.

Nigel didn't understand why, but sensed it would be unwise to ask. Foster detected his bemusement.

'If we work upstairs, or wherever the main bit is, what's to say Joe Public doesn't have a look at what we're doing? Or your mate Gary Kent, or some other enterprising hack, doesn't slip a few quid to one of the staff in exchange for having a glance at the same papers we've been looking at? Here we know we can get some privacy.'

'But that doesn't solve the problem of the staff being bought off,' Heather interjected.

'No, but I've asked for copies of every single national newspaper that was published in the 1870s to be brought here.'

'Every one?' Nigel asked incredulously.

'Yeah. So if they want to work their way through that lot, they can. By the time they reach 1879 Well, they won't. They're too lazy,' he said.

There was a knock on the door. Foster opened it, mumbled a few words and then closed it. In his right hand Nigel recognized the 1879 volume of the Kensington News and West London Times from which he had located details of the third murder on Saturday night.

'I asked the duty manager to personally bring me the Kensington News for 1879 an<^ mentioned that, if word got out, I would know exactly where it came from.'

He tossed the book on to the table. Dust billowed from between the pages as it landed with a thumping slap.

'We look in here first,' Foster said. 'When the other stuff arrives, we look through that. We build up as much information about these murders as we possibly can.'

'Most of the national newspapers will be on microfilm,'

Nigel said. 'We need . . .'

'A microfilm reader is on its way down, Mr Barnes,'

Foster said.

Nigel could see that when Foster got his teeth into something, it came away in chunks.