The Blood Detective

9

The morning sun was too watery to cast more than a weary light into the sitting room of Nigel's flat in Shepherd's Bush. But even a blinding sun found it difficult to illuminate a room brimful with objects and books, occupying every corner and empty space.

The musty smell of old books filled the air; Nigel possessed few that weren't second-hand, used and yellowing, their covers and binding tattered and torn.

As well as being balanced in perilous, towering piles on the floor, volumes were scattered across his computer table and filled two floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, their titles rendered even more indecipherable for being hidden behind a mass of ornaments, knick-knacks and photographs. There was no method to it, which is why he was scrabbling on his knees to find a book of names.

'Well, at least you're not the sort who stores his books and CDs alphabetically,' he heard Heather mutter, though he did not reply, so intent was he on finding the volume he needed. Shining Light was the name Foster wanted. He felt certain Eleanor, taken from the Greek, bore that meaning and had told Foster that. But when Heather took him home, with instructions to rest from Foster, he was keen to find out for sure.

'Are these ancestors of yours?' Heather asked.

She was holding a photograph from Nigel's mantelpiece, a family portrait. Father was standing sternly at the back, beard bristling with pride. His left arm was cradled in the elbow of his wife, who was seated. Her hair was tied back, her eyes so bleached of colour by the print she looked almost ghostly.

Beside her was a serious-faced boy in a buttoned-up frock coat holding a hoop, while the two girls were seated; the elder, a mirror of her mother, holding a bunch of flowers, the younger mournfully staring with wide brown eyes at the camera, her frilly white shirt in joyous contrast to the monochrome solemnity elsewhere. All, apart from Father, looked as if they had just received the worst news of their lives. It was a picture Nigel loved.

'No,' he said.

'Then who are they?'

'The Reeve family.'

'And they are?'

'I have no idea.'

'So how do you know the name?'

'It's written on the back in pencil. It was taken in 1885.'

'So how come you have it?' Heather asked, gazing intently at it one more time. She was frowning.

'I like it. These people took their family portraits seriously.'

'I can see that. No saying "cheese" back then.'

'Most people wanted to convey an image of being serious, dependable and honest. You didn't do that by smiling.' He took the picture from her. 'I like to wonder what happened to them all. The younger girl with the sad face, especially. To be three or four, however old she is, and to seem so daunted by life.

It was a different world.'

'I suppose you don't know enough to have traced them.'

'Don't know where they lived, otherwise I would have. Without that detail it'd be impossible.'

Nigel returned the picture, conscious all of a sudden of the thick layers of dust that had accumulated on top of most of the surfaces in his flat.

'How did you get it?' Heather asked.

'It fell out of a book I bought. I got it framed.'

'What about this?' She was holding a picture of a football team. The men, all bar one, bore moustaches; their striped jerseys were woollen and heavy while their shorts reached their knees. The goalkeeper in the front row was enormously fat and held a ball so solid it appeared to have been fired from a cannon.

'That's the Sheffield United side from 1905,'

Nigel said.

'You follow them?'

'No, I hate football. I just love the fact the goalie is so fat. "Fatty Foulkes", they called him. Can you imagine him fitting into modern football?'

'He'd struggle to fit in the dressing room.'

Heather continued browsing while he carried on the search.

Nigel was glad of having something to do. It took his mind off the trauma of the previous night's events. He knew at some stage tiredness would engulf him but, at that moment, the adrenalin, the disbelief at what he had experienced served to heighten his senses.

'I'll make a brew,' Heather said. She weaved her way through to the kitchen, a small space to one side of the sitting room.

'Sorry about the mess,' Nigel said, wondering when it had last been cleaned.

'I'm a murder detective,' she said, popping her head around the door. 'I'm used to dealing with scenes of carnage.' She winked and disappeared back inside.

Nigel smiled. 'The kettle's on the hob. It's not electric, I'm afraid. The tea is in a metal tin next to the oven. The pot should be around there somewhere.

I can't remember where the strainer is.'

Heather's face appeared around the door once more.

'The tea cosy?'

'I don't have one.'

'I was winding you up.'

'Oh,' he said, feeling foolish.

'I'm not au fait with making tea with leaves,' she admitted.

'I thought you were northern,' he said.

'Funnily enough, we have tea bags up there now.

Electricity too.'

He smiled, realizing he was being teased once more. It felt good. Heather returned to the kitchen.

'You might find a box of some in a cupboard somewhere,' he shouted.

'Welcome to the twenty-first century.'

He smiled again and went back to his shelves.

Finally he found the book he wanted, lurking in an alcove under a treble volume detailing the development of land enclosure. A book he still intended to get around to reading, but which suddenly lost its lustre whenever he picked it up.

It was one of his newer books, a simple dictionary of first names. He flicked through to Eleanor and saw his hunch was correct. Good, he thought. He made a note of the other derivations of the name -- Ellie, Nell, Nella, Nellie - and variant spellings so that they could be passed on to Foster.

Heather emerged with two cups of tea. 'You might want to do the genealogy of the contents of your sink,' she said, smiling. 'Some of it looks like it goes back centuries.'

She stopped, trying to find a free space to put the cups down. Nigel quickly swept a pile of books and magazines off the table in the middle of the room and on to the floor. Heather sat down on the sofa and took a wincing sip of hot tea.

'I've made a note of the derivations of Eleanor,'

Nigel told her. 'I was right: it means "shining light".'

She took the piece of paper from him, looked at it and then put it in her jacket pocket. 'I'll phone it through to him,' she said, sighing. 'God, I'm knackered. How you doing?'

Nigel didn't know. He felt shaken, frayed, as if he needed to keep occupied, to have a task. He stood, cradling his tea, in preference to sitting down.

'OK.'

'Sure? Because we have people you can talk to about this. Good people. I've used them before.'

'I'll live,' he said, immediately regretting his choice of words.

Heather nodded and took another sip of her tea.

The details of the night before were still hazy -- it seemed a different age, not a matter of hours - but one episode seeped back into his mind. He needed to mention it. 'At the newspaper library, when I was waiting for some files, I did a search on DCI Foster on the computer.'

'Oh, yeah,' Heather said. 'Why?'

He shrugged. He didn't know. It was just something he did with people he'd met, whether on the Net or in the archives.

'Don't know. Something to do. I don't know anyone else who might have appeared in the national press during the last decade.'

'You found out about his dad, didn't you?'

'You know about it?'

'We all do. I wasn't on the team at the time, but I heard all about it. They didn't charge him, so he kept his job. It's that simple.'

Nigel was not convinced but saw no profit in prying further. Heather was looking at him.

'He makes no secret about it: he knew his father was going to kill himself and he didn't try to stop it.

That's not the same as killing him yourself. His dad wanted to die. Foster let him. For some people that's what any loving son would do; for others, it's tantamount to assisting suicide. Someone at the top took the former view. I think they were right.' She took another swig of tea then looked at him, her brow furrowed. 'So if I poked around in your past, what would I find, Nigel?' she asked, sitting back on the sofa.

'Nothing much,' he muttered.

'Well, you had a job at a university, then the next minute you're back in your old job as a genealogist.

Sounds interesting to me.'

This was the one subject he wanted to avoid. He felt that after Heather had been open about Foster, he could not clam up. But how much to tell?

'I met someone. It didn't work out,' he said.

' "Didn't work out" so badly that you left your job?

That's some "didn't work out".'

'Let's just say, all of a sudden, the past seemed a more inviting place,' he said.

She scanned the room, the teeming shelves, the old cases and chests on the floor, the sepia-tinted photographs, the array of vintage clocks and watches, none of which told the right time.

'Seems like it always has,' she said.