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 pulled, 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.
15
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.
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 phosphorus 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.