gave up on the prospect of any rest shortly after six, less than three hours after going to bed, and fixed himself a pot of tea, as he re-scanned the photo over and over in his mind.
Twelve bodies in total, at least five children, all laid out in a line in readiness for burial, he presumed. At one end was the mournful face of a man, leathered and worn, holding a spade. Sarah Rowley had not wanted anyone to see this picture, to even know of its existence.
He stayed there for an hour, perhaps more. Outside the wind howled. On the radio, Naomi's disappearance had been relegated to second item on the news list. Instead, news reporters intoned dramatically from storm- tossed coastal towns, delivering, with lip-smacking glee, dire predictions of floods and mayhem, while others spoke gravely of disrupted travel for Monday morning commuters. It was only when he sat down that he saw he'd missed a call.
The ringing phone brought him back to the present.
Chris Westerberg. He had the results of the biogeographical ancestry test on Katie Drake's DNA.
'Bloody awful day outside, is it not?' the Irishman said after they had greeted each other. Nigel agreed it was. 'I managed to rush through the results of this test for you.'
'Really?'
'Yeah, six per cent of her genes are Native American.
Given her age, and using the thirty-year rule for each generation, I think we can say with certainty that a maternal Native American ancestor entered the bloodline circa 1850--1860's. You're looking at her marrying a white Anglo-Saxon man around that time. Hope that helps.'
Nigel dressed hurriedly, throwing on the mud-spattered trousers he'd worn the previous night, and ran to the street outside, ignoring the elements. He called Foster from his phone on the way. The detective was arriving at work. He explained what Westerberg had told him: that Sarah Rowley's mother was a Native American who married a white man around the mid-nineteenth century. While it would be almost impossible to trace every single marriage between a Native American and a settler in that time, if the man she married was a Mormon, and she became a Mormon -- and this at a time when the religion was still in a fledgling stage -- then there was a chance he might be able to pinpoint enough likely candidates, see how many children they bore, and whether any had a girl around the same time Sarah was born.
'But you said they would almost certainly have changed their name?' Foster replied.
'True. Their surname definitely. Their given name?
Maybe not. It's a long shot, but it may mean that I can pick up the paper trail and find out what it was that happened in the States back in 1890, why they fled.' He paused. 'And I think the reason they fled has something to do with the burned corpses on that photograph.'
'Do it,' Foster replied.
6
Nigel had often wondered how many people had lived and died since the first man stood upright thousands and thousands of years ago. He'd seen a few estimates: the most learned and reasoned ones putting the figure between around 70 and 120 billion. Creationists -- who think the human race began in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve six thousand years ago, and believe that an Almighty flood wiped out what there was of mankind apart from Noah and his next of kin a few thousand years before Christ was born -- are more conservative and pitch their estimates around the 50 billion mark. Of those dead billions, very few left any trace of their existence. Only those born since around 1500 or 1600 are even likely to have been recorded as they passed across the earth, which means tens of billions of people are, in the eyes of the Mormon Church, 'lost souls', unable to receive the Gospel because we can never know their names and therefore never baptize them by proxy.
Yet, as Nigel knew, that still left billions of men and women and children whose brief time on the planet did go recorded. It was the task of saving those souls that the ample resources of the Mormon Church were concentrated upon. Missionaries and representatives of the Church had fanned out across the globe, filming and copying the estimated six or seven billion names stored in archives and repositories in countries worldwide. More than one and a half billion of these names had been captured on roll after roll of microfilm and stored in climate- controlled conditions in a secure granite mountain lair near Salt Lake City: a catalogue of the dead.
These names were searchable on an online database. Yet Nigel knew that was no use. It could be searched by name only and he had no names. His only option was to visit the Hyde Park family history centre, the unassuming modern building alongside the chapel Foster had visited the day before. To be able to target his search, he needed more information, and he guessed the family history centre, run by Latter-day Saints, would be the best and quickest way.
It was Monday and the centre was sparsely populated.
He found a free computer and called up the i860 US
Federal Census, the first to contain the biographical information he was seeking. A quick scan of Mormon history told him that Mormons had made their great trek west to Salt Lake City by that time, escaping persecution from other sectors of American society who believed them to be a weird cult. So he narrowed his search to Utah. He knew that the enumerators had noted down whether the person was white, black or mulatto. He knew they entered other ethnicities, too. In the keyword field, he typed 'Indian'
and hit search.
112 results.
He scanned down the list. Most of the names were children, few of them older than eighteen and rarely more than one per household. They had taken on the surname of the head of the house, all of which suggested to Nigel that they were domestic servants, or farm labourers if they were males. However, there were a handful of Indian women who were married to white men, several of them based in Green River, which another Internet search revealed to be a trading post and river crossing through which the Mormons passed on their great western hike to their haven in the desert.
Nigel jotted down all the female names, their husbands and children if they were married. Then he called up the 1870 census. Made a note of the new additions, both to the families he was aware of and any new female names of interest. Numbers had swelled, mainly because of the inclusion of an Indian settlement at Corn Creek, led by a Chief named Kanosh who lived in Teepee Number One and whose wife, under the column outlining her relationship to the head, was described as 'Squaw 1'.
He moved to the 1880 census. Again, the number had grown. The first name on the list caught his eye immediately.
Temperance, Utah. Annaleah Walker. He clicked the link and there was a screenshot of the original census page. Annaleah was twenty-four. Her occupation was listed as 'Keeping house'. Despite her age, she already had three children: John aged seven, Nathaniel aged five, Sarah aged four. The last name made his heart beat a little faster. Could it be? It would mean she was fifteen when she married, and had lied about her age. A possibility. He ploughed on.
Annaleah's relationship to the head of the household was described as 'wife'. Yet there was no mention of a husband anywhere on the page. There was another family listed below with the same surname: Clara Walker, aged twenty, a wife, also keeping house, who had one child and a domestic servant. Sisters? Widows? But the census would say that, surely? Next door was another family, with a head this time and his wife and numerous children. Nigel clicked a link to the previous page.
All became clear. There was one man, Orson Walker, aged fifty-two. He had seven wives, of which Annaleah was the sixth, and twenty-five children, with the promise of more to come seeing as four of his wives were under thirty. His mouth gaping, Nigel continued to scroll through the pages. The same seemed to be the case throughout the town of Temperance. A man aged between forty and seventy living in a house with several wives and a whole brood of children. Temperance? Nigel could see there was one activity from which they did not abstain.
He went through the whole town. There must have been around 500 people. Many women, lots of children, a number of middle-aged men but few aged between twenty and forty. He scrolled through all the pages for the town.
There were some conventionally married couples but they were in the minority. In the last house in
