The Blood Detective

3

All promise had bled from the day. It was just after three p.m. when the investigating team gathered for their first briefing, and already the lights were on at West London Murder Command - officially known as Homicide West - an anonymous building next door to Kensington police station. Inside, the mood was grim but determined. Foster was standing at the front, beside the whiteboard. The victim's name was written on it; beneath that were pictures of his body.

The top of Foster's giant, close-shaven pate shone in the strip light.

The team had been speaking to friends and family of the deceased. Some were still out, though not Heather. At least, as far as he knew. He couldn't explain her absence.

A few more details had emerged. Darbyshire was a trader who worked at a bank in the Square Mile.

He lived out in Leytonstone, the city commuter belt, with his wife and two kids.

'This is what we know,' Foster declared slowly and deliberately in his rich molten croon that demanded, and always got, attention. 'Darbyshire goes to the pub with three men at five thirty. An hour earlier, he called his wife and said he was going out with clients, but that was probably a white lie because all three were colleagues. They have four pints. One of them goes to buy a fifth. Darbyshire says he feels hot, faint. The pub is packed, cheek to jowl, so perhaps no surprise there. But he's only thirty-one and, apart from being a smoker, he's fit; he plays football every Sunday. Doc Carlisle tells me the heart looked healthy.

'We've interviewed his mates and he seems like a happy family man. His life revolved around his job, his friends, his family and West Ham United. He was liked at work, and he had no particular worries, financial or otherwise, as far as we can tell, so not much stress.'

Looking at Drinkwater, 'Andy, chase up toxicology and tell them to get their arses in gear. I want to know what was in his bloodstream as quickly as they can. Any medication, anything at all.'

Turning back to face the others, 'He told one of his mates he was going outside for a fag - which, if he was feeling hot and claustrophobic, is fair enough. He leaves. Then he disappears. It's almost seven p.m. The next time anyone sees him, he's dead and mutilated in a churchyard across the other side of London.'

Foster let his words sink in before continuing, 'At some point after leaving that pub, he comes into contact with his killer. The killer then either persuades him or forces him into a vehicle or a building, removes his hands and stabs him. Our killer is very strong, has help, or Mr Darbyshire is so incapacitated that our killer can sever his hands without too much of a struggle. He then does one other thing.' From the desk in front of him Foster held up a picture showing what had been carved on Darbyshire's chest.

'He shaves his chest and then carves a series of letters and numbers. Look closely and you'll see it says 1 A 1 3 7.

Now the obvious question is: what does this mean?'

The question was met by silence.

'A reference,' someone suggested at last.

'A crossword clue,' came another.

This loosened them up, and a few ideas were floated.

'A chess move,' said one; 'a map reference,' said another.

'Hang on,' said DC Majid Khan, a young detective who fancied himself as a comedian. 'I think that's the order for a vegetable pakora and a chicken dhansak at the Taste of the Raj in Thames Ditton.'

The rest laughed.

'We need to investigate all of those,' Foster went on, ignoring Khan's attempt at levity. 'Our killer is trying to tell us something. When we work out what, we move a damn sight closer to catching him or her.'

He cleared his throat. For the first time that day he was hit by a sudden feeling of exhaustion, but he repelled it. 'The kids who found the body say there's a tramp who lives in the churchyard. Ciderwoman, or whatever. Have we managed to find her?'

The answer was negative. They knew her real name was Sheena but she had not been seen around her usual patch lately.

'She's got to be somewhere. Probably on an alcoholiday, swigging Strongbow outside Camden Town tube. Let's keep on it. Any news on witnesses in or around the church?'

Again he got a shake of the head. That surprised him in one sense: the churchyard was by no means secluded. It was on the top of a hill on a busy thoroughfare, enclosed by tall residential buildings.

On paper, a terrible spot to dump a body.

So why choose it?

'I want us to go through every single piece of CCTV footage from every camera in Liverpool Street from seven p.m. last night. That's where he usually got the tube home. Who knows, maybe he made it on to one. And let's go through all the footage from Ladbroke Grove, too.'

Suddenly Heather burst through the door, breathless.

Foster looked for some sign of contrition, yet saw none.

'Sorry, sir,' she said. 'Tying up the loose ends on the suicidal tramp.'

The fate of the tramp found dangling from the frame of a park swing the previous Sunday morning had long since been superseded in Foster's mind by the Darbyshire murder. He felt a wave of anger.

'Give that bleeding heart of yours a rest. Put the tramp to one side and concentrate on this, please.'

'The least we can do is find out who he is, and who his family are. He has every right to . . .'

'Yes, he's got every right to equal consideration.

But that doesn't mean he's going to get it. I wish I could find the fool who invented the concept of rights, and deprive him of them. Violently.'

Heather's eyes, never docile, blazed bright with anger. Her face was always quick to express emotion, but Foster knew she would soon calm down. Having a go at her in front of the others was not the most politic thing to do, but her mission to turn detective work into another arm of the care services occasionally grated with him.

The discussion moved on to the missing hands. A search of the scene had failed to find them, or a murder weapon. The team split into camps: those who thought they might be trophies; those who thought it was a way of avoiding detection; and a third camp who thought it was neither, that there was perhaps more to it than the obvious explanations.

'What forensics do we have?' Foster asked.

'Initially, nothing really,' said Drinkwater. 'So far, the scene tells us nothing.'

The room fell silent. It was rare for forensics to fail to provide them with a few leads. Foster nodded slowly. It was as if the body had fallen from the sky.

But the lack of evidence or clues wasn't insignificant.

'What the crime scene tells us is that our killer worked very carefully, thought it through beforehand.

And it confirms that our victim was killed elsewhere.'

'Do we have any idea about motive?' someone asked.

Foster spread his hands wide; he had been giving this some thought. 'We can rule out mugging because there was still a fair bit of money on his body. And his mobile phone, too. Of course, we don't know the full story of his private life so there could be something there . . .' His voice tailed off. Foster already knew that the motive for this was one his mind had not yet considered. Something told him it was beyond the usual mundane language of murder: drugs, money, rage and envy. 'Have we got mobile phone records?' he said, changing tack.

Drinkwater told him they had retrieved the last ten calls dialled, received and missed from Darbyshire's mobile phone. Most of them had been identified as friends, family or work-related. The only call made or received after seven p.m., when Darbyshire was last seen in the pub, was to a number: 1879. The time dialled was 23.45.

'Have you spoken to pathology?' Foster asked.

'Carlisle reckons that Darbyshire was dead by then.'

'Any theories about that number?' It sounded to him like it could be for message retrieval, or the number for the network.

'We rang it, from several different networks. All of them went dead,' Drinkwater said.

It seemed the whole room reached for their mobile phones and starting staring at their keypads.

'What sort of phone was it again?' Foster asked.

'One of those slim, dinky ones with the flip-up screen. Clamshell. Girl's phone. Khan's got one,'

Drinkwater added, with a smirk.

So had Foster. A murmur of amusement went round the room.

'Seven, eight and nine are on the same row,' said Khan, examining his own keypad. 'They easily could have been pushed accidentally. Where was the phone?'

Drinkwater looked into the middle distance; with his left hand he patted his left suit pocket, while his right tapped lightly on the right-hand side of his chest.

'Inside breast pocket, right-hand side,' he said eventually. 'If the key guard wasn't on during the struggle, if there was a struggle, or after he was killed and the body was being moved, the buttons might have been pushed. The dial button, too.'

'Sounds the likeliest option,' Foster agreed. 'But stick the number up on the whiteboard. Get back in touch with his wife and his bank; see if this number means anything to them. It may be the start of an account number, or a PIN number. We need to know.' Foster rubbed his face, then ran his right hand over his head. 'Darbyshire had drunk only four pints.

He would've been merry, not arseholed, so how did the killer get him off the street in the first place? A 31-year-old man isn't easy to lure into a car. Unless you're giving him a lift. We have to accept the killer may have had some help. How many hits did we get, Andy?'

Earlier that afternoon they had fed details of the murder into the computer to sift through suspects who had been cautioned, charged or convicted of stabbings and were out on the streets.

'About two thousand,' Drinkwater said.

Each of them would be checked out in the coming days and weeks. A fair bit of mystery surrounded the workings of a murder inquiry, but most of it was simply a long, methodical slog.

'Find out how many had, have had, or still have cab or minicab licences,' Foster ordered. He clapped his hands together. 'The rest of you know what comes next,' he added, winding things up. 'We need to crawl all over James Darbyshire's life: his movements, his habits, his daily routine. Scour his credit cards and bank details; interview his friends, relatives, girlfriends, boyfriends and colleagues; check his emails; look at what sites he visited. Any porn, anything a bit dodgy, then I want to know.'

The team got up, a few stretching, some starting conversations while others hit the phones.

'Can I say something, sir?'

The hubbub died down. It was Heather, her face still reddened from anger. Foster's first thought was that she may publicly challenge him for having slapped her down when she arrived late for the meeting.

But he knew she wouldn't be that stupid.

'Go on,' he said.

Everyone turned to look at her.

'I must have missed your discussion about the letters and numbers carved on the victim's chest,'

she explained. 'But I've got an idea about them. It's been bugging me ever since the post mortem.'

Foster realized the colour in her cheeks was not anger, it was excitement. 'Yes?'

'Have you heard of genealogy?'

He thought for a second. He knew it; old people filling the last few days before death came knocking by tracing their dead relatives.

'Yeah,' Foster said. 'Bloody stupid hobby.'

A few of the others laughed.

'Whatever,' Heather said, ignoring them. 'My mum traced our family tree a few years back. But -you sort of need to leave the house, and the best place to do it is in London, not Rawtenstall. She came down to see me and we went to this place in Islington where they have loads of indexes for birth, marriage and death certificates. Place was heaving; no room to swing a cat.'

Get to the point, Foster thought. 'Where does it fit with the Darbyshire killing?'

'When you want to order a certificate, you have to fill in a form. On that form you have to give the index number of the certificate you want. You follow?'

'Go on.'

'The index numbers are like the reference we found; a mixture of letters and numbers.'

Foster could see some of the others nodding their heads, murmuring assent. It sounded a better idea than the ones proposed in the meeting.

'How are you going to check it out?' he asked.

'My mum gave up on it. She thinks London is a den of iniquity and depravity and won't come down again. Anyway, she hired some guy who does it for a living and got him to do it for her. Turned out we come from a bunch of peasants. Nothing juicy. On the way over here, I gave her a call. She still has his number.'

'Give him a call, but don't spill any details over the phone. Arrange to meet.'

They had nothing, Foster thought. This might be the break they needed.

Nigel was sitting at a table for two in the canteen no one would ever be so bold as to describe it as a cafe -- of the Family Records Centre in London's Clerkenwell. He had chosen a small square table for two against the wall, rather than a large round one for four, so reducing his chances of being forced to share his personal space with a soap-dodging amateur keen to swap stories about an elusive ancestor who had lost a leg at the Somme.

Located in the basement of a modern, functional beige-bricked building tucked away apologetically at one end of Exmouth Market, rows of tables filled the room to one side, glass lockers and coat racks to the other. There were no black-clad baristas serving coffee seven different ways; only a few vending machines touting tongue-scalding, mud-coloured water. Another machine sold sandwiches, limp and curled inside their plastic wrapping. The average age of people who used the centre was probably twice that of any other meeting place, family history being the preserve -- with a few exceptions -- of those for whom death is no longer a distant possibility but an imminent certainty.

The Family Records Centre is a Mecca for genealogists and family historians, housing the indexes of almost every birth, death and marriage that has taken place in England and Wales since 1837, as well as copies of every census taken between 1841 and 1901.

Nigel used to love delving into the indexes, looking forwards to a day losing himself in the bureaucratic traces of the long departed, but now his presence there was a constant source of disappointment. Eighteen months ago he had left, vowing never to return, and adamant that he would never again spend a whole day researching the family tree of some middle-class dilettante who was not interested in the stories of the past, the narrative arc of their ancestors' lives, all the stuff that fascinated Nigel, but who simply wanted the information to help produce a chintzy, beautifully drawn family tree to hang on their wall. Eighteen months ago he had headed off to the sunlit uplands of academia -- real research. Now here he was back doing the bidding of others.

At three thirty on that chilly late-March afternoon, Nigel was idling away time that would have been better spent among the indexes. The day, he thought to himself, had not been a bad one. Even the elderly gentleman on the next table, who was peeling an apple so slowly that, by the time he had finished and was ready to eat it, the flesh had turned a rusty brown, was struggling to spoil it. He had phoned in the discovery of Cornelius Tiplady's grave to his client, much to her delight. Then, before coming to the FRC, he had stopped off to do a few hours' research for another client, a Mrs Carnell, at the National Archives in Kew. Now he was trying to work out, and keep the smile off his face as he did so, what he was going to tell her when he called her later that day to inform her that he had discovered the truth about Silas Carnell, an ancestor of hers, who had died at sea in the 1840s, and about whose heroic death she had paid to know more.

The thing was, Silas's death wasn't heroic. It was anything but. True, Nigel had unearthed naval records that confirmed the sailor had met his demise at sea. Though not in combat. Silas had been hanged as punishment. His offence? He'd had sex with one of the goats brought on board to provide milk. Any port in a storm, Nigel thought. Bizarrely, Silas was not the only one executed; the goat's throat had been slit.

Intending to waste more time by having a fag outside, he was just fishing out the rolling tobacco and papers from his pocket when his mobile phone startled him by coming to life. It was years old, the size of a small brick; he saw no need to trade it in, and his provider (or whatever name they gave themselves) had long since given up on trying to get him to upgrade. Given the choice, he'd downgrade -- to not having one at all.

He debated whether to ignore it. The number was unfamiliar. And, quite righdy in his view, speaking on mobiles was frowned upon in the FRC; those who did were at risk of being assaulted by fuming septuagenarians armed with half-peeled fruit. But the only other person in the room had just disappeared into the toilets, so Nigel decided to risk it. He needed all the business he could get.

'Nigel Barnes,' he said.

'Hello, Mr Barnes.'

The voice was female, the accent broad but not one Nigel could place.

'This is Detective Sergeant Heather Jenkins of the Metropolitan Police. Sorry to ring out of the blue like this.'

The police? What did they want? He scanned the last few weeks of his life in a millisecond and failed to come up with any misdemeanours. He felt his throat constrict. Surely not. . .

'Not at all,' he whispered eventually.

'We're wondering if you could help us with a case we're investigating.'

He felt a sense of relief mingled with excitement, undercut by the suspicion that this was a wind-up.

'What sort of case?'

'Murder.'

Nigel's mind scrambled as he sought the appropriate response. 'Yes,' he managed to blurt out.

'Good. Look, it's not something I'm comfortable talking about over the phone. Is there any chance I could come to see you? Maybe at your office?'

This presented Nigel with a dilemma. His 'office'

was the crowded sitting room of his flat in Shepherd's Bush.

'I'm currently away from my office for the day, Detective Sergeant,' he lied.

'Oh,' came the disappointed response.

'I'm at the Family Records Centre.'

'Oh, I know that,' the detective said.

Lancashire, Nigel thought to himself. Her accent's definitely Lancastrian.

'Is there a discreet place where we could meet?'

Nigel's brain kicked in at last. The canteen was a no-no: in thirty minutes it would be four o'clock and time for afternoon tea. The place would be crammed with the cardigan-wearing hordes wielding thermos flasks and potted-meat sandwiches. There was only one place he could think of.

'There's a coffee shop on Exmouth Market. I know the owner and I'm pretty sure he'll let me use the downstairs for an hour or so.'

There was a pause at the other end of the phone.

When the detective's voice returned it was stripped of its courteous veneer.

'Well, if you can guarantee us some privacy, then OK. Does four thirty suit you?'

Nigel said it did, and the detective hung up. He swept his documents into his bag and left the canteen, praying that Beni would be willing to close half his cafe -- or he'd look a complete fool.

Foster and Heather drove to Exmouth Market in his car. The interior still bore the leathery smell of the showroom. It was an aroma he loved, and one of the reasons he had managed to come up with a scam that persuaded the Met to give him a new set of wheels annually. From one of the many car magazines he bought each month, he'd learned that almost every solid surface in a car was held together by adhesives and sealant. Research suggested that the gases given off by the compounds may even be addictive, and every time he sat behind the wheel of that year's model, he could well believe it.

On the way across London they spoke about genealogy.

Heather said she wanted to know more about her family, how they lived, the struggles they endured; Foster just sneered. To him, it was a bit like stamp collecting, or grown men building a train set in their attic with hills and signals and sheep and stuff.

He couldn't care less who his ancestors were; all you needed to know was that your greatgreat-greatgrandfather wasn't firing blanks.

Foster found a meter near Exmouth Market and parked. He completed the entire manoeuvre one handed, spinning the steering wheel furiously first one way and then the other with an open palm. He could sense Heather looking at him, not without disapproval. But she drove like a vicar, as he often told her. Hands at ten-to-two, like a seventeen-year old out with her dad for her first drive.

They found Beni's almost immediately. It was a spartan, wooden-fronted coffee shop that thrived on the lunchtime trade, but was in the process of winding down for the day.

'Can I have a decaf latte please?' Heather asked.

'God's sake,' Foster muttered, but she failed to hear. Or ignored him again.

The jovial, rotund man with thick hairy arms nodded. 'And you, sir?' he asked Foster.

'Black coffee, please. Hot as you can make it.'

'We're looking for Nigel Barnes,' Heather said to the barista.

'Downstairs,' he replied, motioning towards a narrow staircase in one corner of the cafe. 'The smokers always sit downstairs.' He looked them up and down, clocking their suits and demeanour. His eyes narrowed. 'You're not police, are you?'

'God forbid,' Foster muttered.

Nigel was waiting, wondering if he'd picked a good place to meet. When he'd spoken to DS Jenkins on the phone, the only discreet place he could think of was the sparsely populated room beneath Beni's cafe.

The handful of people who used it were smokers, allowed by Beni to continue feeding their habit out of sight, if not smell, of the other clientele. He came here every morning on his way to the FRC for a cig and a scan of the newspaper. But now he was wondering if a windowless dungeon filled with the scent of stale smoke was not, after all, the best place to meet a female detective. All of a sudden the place seemed seedy.

She will have experienced worse, Nigel thought.

He shifted nervously in his seat, nursing his coffee, waiting for the arrival of DS Jenkins. He had tried to imagine what she might look like -- she had sounded young, perhaps around his age, early thirties - but he'd given up when all he could muster were images of sour-faced ball-breakers whose femininity and softness had been eroded by years of work in the brutal, relentlessly male world of crime and detection.

Two people descended the stairs, something in their bearing marking them out as police officers. The female was wearing a tight-fitting black trouser suit.

Her black corkscrew hair was tied back, her kohl lined eyes suggested chilliness, and his fears appeared to be founded. Her aquiline nose wrinkled on meeting the polluted air. But on seeing him, and realizing, as the only person in the room, he must be the person she wanted to see, she broke out into a beaming smile that breathed life and warmth into her entire face.

The smile was genuine, not forced. He felt himself smiling back.

Ms Nice, he concluded. Presumably that meant the tall, thickset figure, bored and looming at her shoulder, holding their drinks, was Mr Nasty. DS

Jenkins introduced him as DCI Grant Foster and, once he had put down their coffee, Nigel felt his enormous paw grasp his own less-weathered, perspiring hand and grip tightly. The detective was over six feet in height, his head closely shaved, he guessed in response to a receding hairline, with a face that looked like it had seen a few fights. Unlike his female colleague's, the smile was fleeting and perfunctory.

Nigel sat down, both officers facing him.

'Bit airless down here,' DS Jenkins said, wrinkling her nose once more. 'The smoking room, I presume.'

Nigel nodded. 'Beni realizes there's a few of us desperate souls who like to combine . . .'

Nigel realized his unease over meeting here was not only caused by chivalry. Beni sold sandwiches, so the existence of this room was against the law.

The DS saw the penny drop.

'Don't worry,' she reassured him. 'Secret smoking dens are the least of our worries.' She looked around, taking her bag off her shoulder and laying it on the floor beside her feet. 'Actually, I like it,' she said. 'It's got character. I'd rather have places like this than one of those soulless chains any day.'

'There's been a coffee shop on this site since the seventeenth century, give or take a few decades,'

Nigel said.

'Really?'

'Yes. I mean, don't get me wrong, the coffee isn't that great, but at least it tastes like coffee. And it rather lacks for comfort in here, but it makes me feel better to know I'm supporting an independent place with a bit of history, rather than some faceless, corporate monolith.'

She smiled at him once more. 'Hear, hear.'

'You're a genealogist, then?' DCI Foster asked, cutting in impatiently, as if he hadn't heard the preceding exchange.

'More of a family historian,' Nigel replied.

'There's a difference, is there?'

'Only a bit. But you wouldn't believe how offended some people feel if you get it wrong.'

'Much money in it?'

Nigel shrugged. No, he thought. 'It's a living.'

'How do you get into something like that?'

'It depends,' Nigel answered. 'I did a history degree at uni, and during the summer holidays I did some research for a guy who traced people's family trees.

I did it full time for a while. Then he dropped dead of a heart attack while giving a talk at a conference on early medieval finance, so I took over the business.'

Last year I tried to get out of it, he thought. But, like the Mafia, I was sucked back in.

'And enough people actually pay you to trace their ancestors?'

'Yeah. Genealogy's a very popular pursuit. The third most popular on the Internet. Behind porn and personal finance.'

Foster's face showed surprise.

'Or wanking and banking,' Nigel added. His face reddened immediately, unaware of how police officers reacted to smut.

DS Jenkins stifled a laugh; Foster smiled weakly.

Nigel felt the urge to smoke. The craving was too strong to ignore. He picked up his cigarette papers from the table. 'Mind if I... ?'

Heather gave her head a quick shake. He thought maybe she did mind. He felt a twang of disappointment for inciting her disapproval. But it would look pathetic to put away his fixings now, so he looked at Foster, who was staring intently at Nigel's pack of tobacco. In the absence of a complaint, Nigel plucked a paper from the packet.

'You ever traced your family tree at all?' he said as he placed a wad of tobacco in the crease and started to roll it out expertly between the forefinger and thumb of each hand.

Foster shook his head.

'My mum did,' DS Jenkins said. 'She hired you to do it for her.'

Nigel's eyes shot up from the cigarette he was rolling. 'Really? When?'

'Two or three years ago. That's how I got your number.'

Funnily enough, the reason they had chosen to call him, and not someone else, had simply not crossed his mind.

'Jenkins,' he said to himself. He could not remember and wondered whether he should pretend to, but realized she was sharp enough to know instantly whether he was bullshitting.

'It's all right. I don't expect you to recall my family tree,' she said, helping him out. 'I bet you've traced your family tree back to the Domesday Book or something, haven't you?' she added.

He shook his head. 'I can't trace my own father.'

'Your father?' Heather said, eyes widening.

'It's a long story.'

'Your mother's side?'

He shook his head once more. 'As I said, it's a long story.'

'Oh.' A waty look crept across her face.

'History has a habit of putting obstacles in your way,' he explained. 'It's one of the reasons I liked the job.'

Neither Heather nor Foster appeared to notice his use of the past tense.

'You get a real sense of achievement from helping people overcome those obstacles, track down relatives and ancestors they knew nothing about.'

Heather smiled at him. 'I can imagine you do.'

'I'm also interested in surnames: their origins, their meanings.'

'Really? What does Jenkins mean?'

'Kin of John. Or Jones, perhaps. "Kin" is Flemish in origin, but it's one of those names that doesn't really indicate an area or locality. Too popular, really. It was the forty-second commonest surname in America in 1939.'

'What about him, then?' she said, indicating Foster.

'What does his surname mean?'

Nigel pulled a face. 'Literal meaning is difficult to pin down, as is origin, the study of surnames being inexact, to say the least.'

'Fair enough,' Foster said, sitting forwards. 'About why we're here

'Oh, go on,' Heather interrupted. 'What about the name Foster?'

'There are several possibilities. It could be derived from a forester, a man who is in charge of a forest.

Or someone who lived near a forest, or worked in a forest.'

Nigel thought it politic to leave out another explanation: one of Foster's ancestors was either a foster child or a foster parent.

'Fascinating,' Foster said, as if it was anything but.

'Now can we get on?' He looked at his colleague.

She spread her arms wide, as if to say, 'It's your show.'

'This morning we discovered a man's body. He'd been murdered. At the scene we discovered a reference written by the killer. We believe it refers to a birth, marriage or death certificate. We thought you could help us out.'

Nigel lit his roll-up and inhaled deeply. 'Could I see the reference?'

Foster shook his head slowly. 'No. But I can tell you what it was: 1 A 1 3 7.'

'Small "a" or capital?' Nigel asked.

'Capital'

'Should strictly be a small "a". But it could be the reference for a birth, marriage or death certificate for central and west London issued between 1852

and 1946.'

'Why those specific areas? And why those dates?'

'Every district was given an index reference.

Between the dates I mentioned 1 a was assigned to Hampstead, Westminster, Marylebone, Chelsea, Fulham and Kensington.'

'The body was found in Kensington,' Heather said, looking across at Foster. 'Think there's anything in that?'

Foster rubbed his chin slowly. 'I don't think we can ignore it. Is there any way you can tell whether it's a birth, marriage or death certificate?'

'It could be any one of them,' Nigel replied.

'So could you go off and locate the certificate with this reference?'

'Yes, no problem. But we'd get thousands of results. This is simply a reference to a registration district and a page number. If I'm going to have any chance of finding the certificate quickly then I need to know an exact year, preferably a name. The Family Records Centre has indexes going back as far as 1837.'

Both detectives sat back, frustrated. Heather took a sip of her coffee, while Foster stared at Nigel. The DCI sat forwards once more.

'We found the victim's mobile phone,' Foster said.

'The last-dialled number wasn't a telephone number; it was punched in after his death. We thought it might have been pressed by accident, when the body was moved. But perhaps it was put there intentionally.'

'What was the number?'

'1879'

'1879,' Nigel said thoughtfully.

'Is that enough for you to go on?' Foster asked.

Nigel grimaced. 'Yes, but it won't be quick. A lot of people will have been born, married or died in 1879 m central and west London.'

'How long will that take?'

'A day. But then you have to order the certificates and wait for them to be copied and posted.'

'Can't we just go to the local register offices?'

'That reference is a General Register Office index number, not a local office one. It would be of no help there. If this is a reference to a birth, marriage or death certificate, then it was discovered through the central index.'

'Who handles that?' Foster asked.

'The General Register Office in Southport.'

'Southport? What the hell is it doing there?'

'London isn't the centre of the universe, sir,'

Heather said.

'It is when you work for the Metropolitan Police.'

There was a pause while Foster thought. Nigel watched him earnestly. The DCI drummed his right finger on the table.

'Heather, get on the phone to headquarters. Get them to ask Merseyside Police to send a couple of officers to the GRO.' He turned to Nigel. 'What do they need to do?'

'Commandeer a couple of staff to pull the full certificates - once you've identified the ones you need -- and pass the information on to you as quickly as possible.'

'Got that, Heather?' Foster asked.

She went upstairs to make her call. Both men watched her go.

'How busy are you at the moment?' Foster said.

'Relatively.'

'Well, can I hire you and your staff to hunt down these references for me?'

Nigel's cheeks flushed. 'There's a problem with my staff.'

'What?'

'I don't have one. Not at the moment. I. . .'

Foster held his hand up to stop him. 'Don't worry, Mr Barnes. I'll get you some help. They'll be with you first thing. What time does this records centre let people in?'

'Nine a.m.'

'They'll be waiting for the doors to open.'

Nigel experienced a feeling denied him for some time: excitement. For the first time in months, he couldn't wait to start a day's work.