His quarry crossed the road, away from the track, to the verge beside the underground line. There was dark sodden earth. Away from the light, he found it hard to find him, but his eyes adjusted and he could see why the drunk had listed towards the dark: he needed to urinate. He stopped and looked behind: nothing not a peep. The drunk was staggering over the verge, up a dirt track that would soon be a road. The empty husks of a few houses were around them, silhouettes in the pitch-black night. He watched the man stop near a wall and could hear the drill of urine hit the sopping ground.
From his pocket he pulled the knife, clutching it tight in his hand. His last few steps were bounding and cat- like, swallowing the ground between them. The drunk was shaking himself dry, unaware of danger, lifting his head to drink in the night air. As he did so, his pursuer wrapped his left arm around his throat, dragging him back, and the knife was plunged deep into his chest. He barely made a noise, other than a grunt, before he sank to the ground.
His night's work done, he slipped back into the tar-black night. . .
By the time Nigel left the station on Friday, the Family Records Centre was closed. When the doors opened on Saturday morning he was waiting outside eagerly. He was relishing the day ahead, wondering what secrets and lies would be disinterred. The new guy -- Phil, Nigel thought his name was -- was behind the customer inquiries counter, whistling the tune to 'One Day At A Time' by Lena Martell. Nigel nodded as he walked past.
'Made quite a stir yesterday,' Phil said.
'Who did?' Nigel answered innocently, even though he knew exactly what Phil was referring to.
'Your friends from the Met. What's the crime?'
'Nothing much,' Nigel lied. 'Just helping them out with a bit of research.'
Phil nodded while leafing through a pile of documents.
He still hadn't looked at Nigel.
'Good work if you can get it, eh?' he said, finally making eye contact, his face round and friendly.
'I suppose,' Nigel said, wondering if Duckworth had been his less than reticent self.
Phil went back to sorting his pile of documents.
As he wandered over to the birth indexes, Nigel could hear Phil begin whistling the first few bars of'Coward Of The County' by Kenny Rogers.
He was looking forward to the search, intrigued by what he might discover. It was this sense of expectation that he enjoyed most about the job. Like a potato plant, the best part of family history lies beneath the surface. By digging deep, the stories of the dead, silent through the years, could be told once more.
Yet immediately he faced a problem. Given his age on the death certificate - thirty-two - Nigel thought Beck might have been born in 1846 or 1847. Yet he could not find the birth of a single Albert Beck during those years. This was no surprise; it was not compulsory to register births, marriages and deaths until 1865, so not everyone did. Scanning the marriage indexes from 1865 onwards, Nigel had better luck. In September 1873 ne na^ married. A call to the police hotline at the GRO revealed his wife was named Mary Yarrow.
Nigel used this information upstairs at the FRC.
The 1881 census is held electronically on a database on one of the terminals in the census room, which houses all the censuses from 1841 to 1901. He knew that Beck, being dead, would not be listed, but he hoped that his widow, and whatever children the couple had, would still be at the Clarendon Road address. He could then acquire the ages of their children and track them through the following census returns, discover who they married and whether they had any children of their own.
'Where are you, where are you?' he muttered to himself as he keyed in the search terms, a familiar refrain of his at the beginning of a quest. He was waiting for that one discovery, the detail, the name, the entry that would help him unravel the past.
There it was, on Clarendon Road. Mary was listed as head of the household. There were two children: a daughter, Edith, who was five on census night 1881; and a son, Albert (at least the name lived on), who was three. Interestingly, a John Arnold Smith, thirty-four, was listed as a lodger. Nigel guessed he might be the new man in Mary's life. Life as a widow with two children in mid-Victorian England would be tough, almost impossible to survive without the mercy of the parish, the looming gothic turrets of the workhouse casting a shadow over every step. A man around the house was essential. However, living in sin was not a fact you wished to advertise, hence the reason they would have neglected to tell the census numerators.
Part of Nigel hoped his hunch was wrong; if Mary was living with, and then chose to marry, her 'lodger', her surname and that of her children would have changed to Smith, making tracing their descendants virtually impossible because of the millions and millions of Smiths who would have been born, married or died in the next 125 years.
Back downstairs he searched the indexes of 1881
onwards for the marriage of a Mary Beck and John Smith. Unfortunately, he found it, in the summer of 1882. A new address was given for the couple, in Kensington. Nigel went back upstairs to the 1891
census and managed to track down the Smiths. The couple appeared to have had two children of their own, but one of the Beck children seemed to have disappeared. Edith was there, aged fifteen; yet there was no mention of Albert junior. Nigel managed to solve that mystery with a quick check of the death indexes: young Albert had died of tuberculosis in 1885, aged six, leaving only Edith from her first marriage.
Life was not proving kind to Mary. Nigel could picture her, weatherbeaten face drawn, aged before its time, the misery of losing first her husband then her only son etched across her features in the downward turn of her mouth and the dullness of her eyes.
But she would have borne her tragedies and her life of quiet desperation with dignity and without self-pity, because so many like her did. These people did not parade or exhibit their emotions; nor did they seek to blame anyone for their misfortunes. Stoicism, forbearance, sobriety -- these were often the words that sprang to his mind when he was blowing the dust off long-forgotten lives, in sharp contrast to the emotional incontinence he perceived in the modern world.
Only Edith was left of Albert's offspring. At least it narrowed his options. Given she was fifteen in 1891, he calculated that she would be twenty-five in 1901 and there was every chance she would be married by then. Before he searched the marriage indexes -- and the idea of dredging through hundreds of thousands of Edith Smiths to find the right one made his heart sink -- he gambled on her not being married by 1901. He typed in the Kensington address and there they were: Mary Smith, John Arnold Smith, Edith Smith. Perhaps Edith was not marriage material, Nigel thought. He pictured a plain, dowdy young woman, lonely and unloved. He hoped he was wrong and that eventually she had married, and not simply because it would prolong the search.
His only option was to trawl the marriage indexes for the next twenty years, until 1921, when Edith would have been forty-five and too old to bear children.
It took him two hours to list the details of the nineteen Edith Smiths who were married in the Marylebone district between the Aprils of 1901 and 1921. He went outside and phoned these to the GRO, and mentioned that he was looking only for an Edith Smith whose father's name on the marriage certificate was given as either Albert Beck or John Smith, a railway signalman. They said it would take some time to pull nineteen marriage certificates.
Three-quarters of an hour later he got the call to tell him that neither of the two possible fathers' names was recorded on any of the certificates. Edith Smith was almost certainly a spinster; the pitiful picture he had created in his mind wasn't fanciful.
He went down to the canteen to clear his head of the names and the dates before ringing Foster. He got himself a plastic cup of scalding brown water and sat down.
'Hello, Nigel,' a voice said hopefully.
Nigel turned and was greeted by a man in a brown suit with slicked-back hair. He knew him. Gary Kent, a reporter from the London Evening News. He'd hired Nigel a few times to poke around in people's pasts.
He expected to bump into Duckworth, unsavoury as the prospect was: but he'd hoped never to encounter Kent again.
'Hello, Gary,' he said suspiciously.
'Been a while, hasn't it?'
'It has.'
'I hear the job at the university fell through.'
'Been speaking to Dave, then?'
