The Blood Detective

18

Nigel allowed himself four hours' sleep and was back at the FRC within five, after being scooted across early-morning London by a cab driver eager to make use of the empty roads. With no one around he took the liberty of smoking a string of roll-ups in the canteen, to give him the energy rush the scalding machine-dispensed coffee failed to do.

From his notes on the investigation and trial, he worked out there were three other key figures whose descendants remained untouched: the ham prosecution barrister John J. Dart, QC, MP; Joseph Garrett, who conducted Fairbairn's defence; and Detective Henry Pfizer of Scotland Yard.

Dart first. Nigel wondered darkly if one of his descendants was about to lose their tongue as well as their life in retribution for his verbosity. He found him immediately on the census of 1881, his age forty-seven, living in Bexley Heath, his constituency.

Heather

joined him; her smile was warm. Silently, he sighed with relief. He was not sure what the previous evening had meant, if anything, but the thought of seeing her again made him anxious. Would she act as if nothing had happened? Her smile had indicated she would not, though the tense look on her face betrayed the fact that time was running out and it was paramount they work fast. His mind returned to the task.

Dart's prominence made tracing him and his family straightforward. The entire clan shared their time between houses in the country and central London.

It took the whole morning, but he had soon drawn up a list of descendants. Heather faxed it through to the incident room so the names could be checked and their whereabouts noted.

Nigel took a break. Heather went off to make a phone call. In the canteen he was accosted by Dave Duckworth.

'So, Mr Cable was innocent,' he said, plunging his hands into his pockets and rocking back and forth on his heels.

'Seems so.'

Duckworth stared at him. 'A pain in the proverbial, because the background research was shaping up to be a well-paid little piece of work.' Duckworth put his hands in his pockets and sighed, then looked back at Nigel. T saw your female amanuensis was back at your side this morning.'

Nigel took a sip of his coffee. 'You should be the detective with those levels of observation.'

'Interesting work, is it?' Duckworth said, ignoring the sarcasm.

'Just doing some bounceback.'

'Ah, like I did. It keeps body and soul together,'

Duckworth replied.

Nigel looked at him. 'Not as much as lifting your skirt for the tabloids, though?'

Duckworth ignored the slight. 'Sometimes one can have enough of finding the ancestral skeletons in the closets of the rich and famous. The work was a pleasant piece of research. And surprisingly lucrative, too. In fact, I'm hoping to make more money out of it. Not that the client, an intriguing fellow named Kellogg, knows that yet.'

Nigel nodded absent-mindedly - he'd switched off, wanting to be left alone to plan the rest of his research. He looked up and saw Heather weaving her way through the lunch crowds. Duckworth spotted her, too, and scuttled away. She watched him leave, lip curled.

'What did that creep want?' she asked.

'Just poking his nose in,' Nigel replied. 'Goes with the job.'

'He's an oil slick,' she shuddered. 'The team have the Dart list. They've started working down it one by one.'

'What about the Fairbairn list?'

'Nothing so far. Couldn't get much sense out of Foster. He sounds knackered. Told me he managed to grab a few hours' sleep at his desk last night, first he's had in three days. I told him to go home and get some rest, but he blustered. At this rate he'll probably end up keeling over.'

Back at the indexes, Nigel turned his attention to Detective Henry Pfizer. The surname was soon explained: he was born in Berlin, then part of Prussia.

It seemed he left the country of his birth as a young man, escaping the turmoil and upheaval that permeated many parts of Europe in 1848. England was a safe haven. Henry had met and married a London girl, Maria, and they had a son, Stanley. Much of this he gleaned simply from the 1881 census. He turned next to the 1891 census, but there was no sign of the family. A glance at the death indexes yielded no explanation either.

Nigel pulled a battered address book from his bag and found a number for a German genealogist he'd asked to carry out research for him in the past, usually tracing the roots of those who had emigrated from what was now Germany. He made the call, asked him to check records from 1881 onwards for Henry or Heinrich Pfizer and his English wife and child, making it clear that he would pay well for a prompt response.

The dead end frustrated him. They always did. The challenge came in overcoming such obstacles. You needed to think laterally, follow a hunch. He would return to Pfizer later; first there was Joseph Garrett.

This one was straightforward. He managed to tear through the generations. The two World Wars took their toll on the males in the Garrett line, and the name almost died out in the 1960s. But he managed to locate five living descendants.

He was listing their names when the call came through from Germany with results of a preliminary census search. No records of any Pfizer of that age, or any with an English wife, on German censuses.

He had not returned to the land of his birth.

Foster was dying on his feet as the day wore on. He stalked up and down the incident room, manically running his hand back and forth over his head. Coffee no longer had a galvanizing effect. All it did was make his head and eyes ache. He felt the old craving for nicotine. During times like this, when sleep was in scarce supply, he would chain-smoke his way through the exhaustion. Now there seemed to be no repelling it. Harris had told him to get some rest, but there were a few things he needed to do first.

Patricia MacDougall, the fourth victim, had last been seen on Sunday afternoon, walking her dog in Holland Park, something she did every day, though usually in the evening. She had been seen drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette outside the cafe mid afternoon. She paid and left. No one had seen her since. A team had been blitzing the park since yesterday, accosting every parkgoer with pictures of her and the artist's depiction of the man seen drinking with Nella Perry in the pub. But no one had seen her leave and no one had recognized the suspect. The dog had also vanished. Foster didn't bet against it turning up dead on someone's doorstep at any second.

Nigel Barnes had begun filing the first batches of descendants' names. With the help of Andy Drink water, Foster had sketched out a condensed family tree for the Fairbairns, Darts and Garretts on the whiteboard, their names on the top, lines leading down to each of their living descendants. Those who had been spoken to on the Fairbairn list were marked, as were those whose movements were deemed worth following for the next twenty-four hours. There were still seven descendants to be contacted. None of those they had located matched the fingerprints found at the scene.

As for the descendants of John J. Dart and Joseph Garrett, Foster had decided to put a car outside the house or place of work of each likely victim and follow them for twenty-four hours, without them knowing. Informing them there was a possibility they might be the next victim of a serial killer would create understandable panic. The whole operation yoked together hosts of officers from other investigations and other departments, but Detective Superintendent Harris, scared witless by the mocking of that morning's press, was willing to offer Foster all the support he needed.

As Foster scratched an innocent Fairbairn name from the list, Drinkwater approached him.

'Another one bites the dust,' Foster said, wearily.

Only six Fairbairns were left outstanding. Was the killer among them or was Foster heading down a cul-de-sac?

'What do you want, Andy?'

'Sir, forensics say they've found some DNA on the last victim. On her clothes. Seems the effort of getting her up the stairs to the flat caused him to sweat. They found drops on her shirt.'

This perked Foster up immediately. The pace was beginning to tell; the killer was getting sloppy. Making mistakes he had avoided earlier in his spree, becoming too ambitious.

They had a link. He got in touch with forensics and asked someone to get along to the Hunterian Museum and get a sample from the skeleton of Eke Fairbairn. If it matched the killer's, then the theory that it was one of his descendants was on the money.

His phone went. Heather Jenkins, filling him in on what they had discovered that morning at the FRC.

'Pfizer has disappeared from the records,' she told him. 'Every mention of him and his wife and child.'

Foster cursed their luck. Of all the protagonists in the 1879 case, he felt fie was the one who deserved the most opprobrium; perhaps the killer felt the same.

Part of Foster hoped the bent bastard's conscience had got the better of him, that he'd left his clothes on the beach and walked into the sea, never to be found. But that didn't explain why his family had vanished, too.

'Tell Nigel to keep working on it,' he told her.

'Wherever he wants to go, whichever archive, it's open for him.'

Foster and Drinkwater arrived at a draughty community hall in Hounslow as the light started to ebb from the day. Foster felt so tired that putting one foot in front of the other was an effort. After paying a visit to the West London Family History Society he vowed to get some sleep. Everyone was in place; they would watch the suspects and their potential victims all night. Each inch of Powis Square had already been searched and was under surveillance. For the first time they appeared to be a step ahead of, not behind, the killer, though it made Foster feel uneasy. Did he have one final sleight of hand?

Inside the hall the air was cool, wintry even. Yet there were rows and rows of people sitting down, a sea of white hair bearing out John Fairbairn's claim that few of his fellow members were below retirement age. Fairbairn, seated in the middle, saw them enter and gave a wave. Foster nodded back. At the front a tall, elderly gentleman in a knitted cardigan was giving a talk, referring to diagrams on an overhead projector.

He and Drinkwater stood at the back and listened, waiting for the man to finish so they could begin the task of collecting everyone's prints.

The voice was flat, without tone. Just listening made Foster's head feel heavy. At first, the words washed over him. But then, to keep himself awake, he tuned in to what the man was saying.

'Those who know nothing of history, who are ignorant of the sacrifices made by others to build their country and their family, have no appreciation at all of the struggles and sacrifices involved in making and building something that will last. History gives us a sense of proportion, of the longer view of things.

We are self-centred beings at our core. The world revolves around us, around our individual needs. If we do nothing, if we study no subject outside ourselves, we cease to believe that anything else matters.

And nothing could be further from the truth.'

Foster was reeled in. He's talking about people like me, he thought. I have studied no one. I have cared about no one but myself. All that matters to me is work, the here and now. I have no sense of the past and no sense of the future. I don't know where I came from, who my people were.

I don't know who I am.

He was roused from this bout of introspection by his vibrating phone. He took it outside. It was the barman from the Prince of Wales, calling from a payphone. He had more information on the man seen drinking with Nella Perry the previous Friday.

He wasn't working that evening, but would be at the pub. Foster decided to head straight there. He told Drinkwater something had come up and left him to handle the family history society.

As he left, he checked his watch. It was six in the evening. He remembered the newspaper account he had read of the fifth killing, in which it stated the victim's body had been found as 'the bell of All Saints Church tolled for the first time after midnight'. One a.m. They had thirty-one hours before the killer ended his spree and retreated into the crowd.

Nigel sat in the back of a black cab as it edged forwards with the mass of central London traffic that choked the city every Friday night. The great escape. People watching precious seconds of their weekend tick away as they crawled along congested roads.

The National Archives were his destination. At Kew Bridge the traffic formed a bottleneck to cross the river, and his patience broke. He got out and walked the last half-mile. A soft rain began to fall.

The lights of the archives were on, casting a glow across the shadowed lake. As Nigel approached a security guard unlocked the door, checked his bag and allowed him through. He headed straight upstairs to the main reading room. A young staff member, a pale, pencil-thin PhD student, who looked as if he saw daylight by accident, was waiting to fetch and retrieve. As Nigel had requested, he had laid out a series of ledgers and documents on a reading table.

Service records for the Metropolitan Police.

Nigel recognized a problem immediately. In 1881

Pfizer was forty-three. There was a gap in the record of new recruits between 1857 and 1878, almost certainly the era in which Pfizer would have signed up.

So he went first to the Register of Leavers, which began in 1889. Pfizer would have been in his fifties by then; he would have done his time. Nigel hunted through several volumes of dry pages for his name, taking his search up until the turn of the century, well beyond the date he would have retired. No sign of any H. Pfizer. If there were no records of him leaving, there would be no record of any pensions, ruling out yet another source. He checked the lists detailing the deaths of serving officers, which expired in 1889. No Pfizer in there. These records would not solve the mystery.

Foster pulled up outside the pub and parked on a single yellow. He could see through the large glass windows that the Friday-night crowd was out in full, braying force. Inside there was barely standing room.

He fought his way to the bar. No sign of the barman behind the counter. In fact, he didn't recognize any of the staff from the previous Sunday.

He tried to recall the barman's name through the fog of exhaustion. He'd said it on the phone. Karl, that was it. He asked one of the other staff, a tall blonde with her hair tied back in a bun.

She motioned towards the door with her head.

'He's not working tonight. But he was here.'

'He's gone to get some money out,' added another member of staff, passing by with two brimming pints in her hand.

Nothing to do but wait, Foster thought. A couple vacated two bar stools next to where he stood. After hearing what Karl had to say, unless it was so significant that it required immediate action, he was going home, so he ordered a pint. The pub was loud but, given his weariness, it felt good to be surrounded by people, by music, by conversation, by life.

The pint came. He took a long slug, feeling the tension ebb. There was a tap on his shoulder. Karl.

He was dressed in denim, jacket and jeans.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Cash crisis.'

Foster said he didn't mind. Karl ordered a bottle of lager Foster had never heard of and took the stool next to him. Foster began to feel hot, as if all the blood was running to his head. Tiredness, he thought. His system was fusing; his body struggling to regulate his own temperature. He yawned, unable and unwilling to stop himself.

'Hard week?' Karl asked.

'You could say that,' Foster muttered.

Karl cast a look over his shoulder at the teeming pub. 'Busy in here tonight,' he said.

Foster noticed his right leg danced as he spoke, unable to keep still. He took another sip, not in the mood for small talk.

'What's funny is, that this place is full of young rich kids,' Karl said. 'Princedale Road used to be the epicentre of the counter-culture and political protest of the 1950s and 60s.'

'Really?' Foster said, interest awoken.

'Yeah, just up the road at number 5 2 is where they founded 0% magazine. You know, the one that urged people to "Turn on, Tune in and Drop dead"? Got closed down; the publishers were sent to Wormwood Scrubs on obscenity charges. Then, at number 74, you had the opposite side of the coin in the 50s, the White Defence League, who wanted to keep out the blacks. And, at number 70, there was Release, the first drug-awareness charity. Now we've got two gastropubs and not a lot else.'

'You know your stuff,' Foster said.

'Local history is a bit of a hobby of mine. This area has a lot of stories in its past.'

Tell me about it, Foster thought. 'So what is it you wanted to tell me? Something about Dammy Perry?'

Karl nodded. From the back of his jeans pocket he pulled a pack of cigarettes, lit one and inhaled deeply, as if sucking all the goodness out of it. Foster felt the familiar pang.

'Want one?'

Sod it, Foster thought. Once a smoker always a smoker. He nodded. Karl pulled a cigarette out and handed it to him. Foster took it, enjoying the feel of it between his forefinger and index finger, rolling it back and forth. It was the sensuousness of smoking he missed as much as the nicotine; the pack in his pocket, tapping the cigarette on the pack, sliding it between his lips, watching the smoke curl in the air.

He leaned forwards. Karl sparked his lighter and lit the cigarette for him.

'Yes, it dawned on me this morning. Don't know why it didn't earlier.'

Foster drew long and hard, taking the smoke deep into his lungs where he held it, filling every space.

'Not sure how significant it is . . .'

Foster exhaled. The world in front of him swam.

He felt a firm hand on his shoulder. Karl's, he presumed.

He was about to ask what he was doing, but his head felt hot, hotter than before, then like it was filling with water. His chin lolled on to his chest. His body weight went with it, making him lurch forwards.

He would have fallen off the stool but for Karl's hand.

'Easy,' he heard a voice say.

Noises swirled; his vision blurred.

'What's wrong?' a woman's voice asked.

'It's OK. He's a mate. Had a bit too much. Don't worry, I've got him.'

The voices sounded miles away.

Then the world went white.