Nigel moved on. As he drifted towards the indexes, he heard Phil start up once more. This time he couldn't make out the tune at all.
He went straight to the marriage indexes and hunted down the reference for Hannah Fairbairn, to a carpenter named Maurice Hard
Next he was faced with a familiar problem. They simply vanished from the census. The death indexes told him that Maurice and Hannah died a day apart in 1889. A call to the General Register Office revealed influenza had claimed them both. They had been reduced to poverty, clinging on to the bottom rung of Victorian existence inside Bermondsey Workhouse.
Two days later, their younger son, David, succumbed to the disease in the same desperate place.
That left two children: Clara, who would now be almost seventeen, and Michael, two years her junior. There was no record of their deaths so Nigel presumed they must have survived, but subsequent census returns proved fruitless. Neither was there a record of either getting married before the turn of the century.
He left the FRC, walked down Myddelton Street, through Exmouth Market, taking a left down Rosoman Street until he reached the London Metropolitan Archives on the corner of Northampton Road. Here were seventy-two kilometres of records, dating back to 1607, about the capital, its inhabitants and their lives. More pertinently, it held the records for the city's Poor Law unions, who oversaw the running of the individual workhouses, in this case the St Olave Poor Law Union.
He ordered the admission and discharge register.
In 1886 all five of the Hardie family were admitted.
They had come voluntarily. The two young boys were malnourished, Michael awarded the stark description 'imbecile'. Nigel knew exactly what had happened.
Like many of the poor, they had chosen institutionalized grind and servility in order to survive.
Maurice and Hannah would have slept in separate dormitories, the children too. There would have been minimal contact with each other. Wearing a uniform, woken at six, a day of menial work, in bed by eight; only the lack of bars and locks distinguished these places from prisons. People were free to leave at three hours' notice, but to what? To starve, to freeze on the streets? They were imprisoned by circumstance.
Nigel wondered what events had led Maurice to abandon any hope of providing for his family and to seek the charity of the authorities. An injury perhaps?
The boys were not yet old enough to support the family, and there was not enough work for young women like Clara to provide for them. In 1888 she had discharged herself, to try and lead a life beyond the workhouse walls. Maybe she believed she might even be able to reverse her family's fortunes. Yet a year later, her parents and elder brother were dead, probably interred in the cheapest coffins possible and buried in the same unmarked grave. The day after David's death, Clara came to collect her surviving brother, 7th September 1889.
Where had they gone? Nigel spent two hours searching through the registers of every asylum in London. Michael did not show up; he must have gone to live with Clara. But then the pair had slipped through a crack in time.
Outside he blinked against the late-afternoon spring sunshine. Time had spun away, hours lost as he buried himself in the past.
Then it struck him. An idea. He did not know what prompted it, but he had learned in his career as a genealogist always to follow a hunch. He returned to the FRC and went straight to the 1891 census. He typed in Clara Fairbairn and her date of birth.
There she was: same age. She had taken her mother's maiden name. Why? He could only guess.
To shake off the stigma of the poorhouse perhaps?
He clicked the link to reveal other members of the household. Michael Fairbairn. He was living with her in a house in Bow, east London. All the other occupants of the house, Michael aside, were young women: all between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.
Clara was the eldest. Nigel guessed it was some sort of boarding house. Her occupation was given as matchworker. That and the location explained everything: she was working at the Bryant and May factory.
She had found work, albeit of the most arduous and dangerous kind: working fourteen hours a day, prohibited from talking, punished for dropping matches, and at risk of contracting disfiguring and fatal cancer from the ever- present yellow phosphorus used to make the matches.
On the 1901 census Clara, aged twenty-nine, was listed working as a domestic servant at an address on Holland Park. Michael was not at the same address.
Instead, he was living and working as a groom at stables on Holland Park Mews. It seemed a reasonable assumption that Clara had somehow inveigled Michael into the job when she got hers. A year later, Michael was dead of heart failure. A year after that, Clara was married, to a clerk named Sidney Chesterton, three years her junior. Nigel felt sure the two events were related; only now that her brother was dead was she able to forge a life of her own.
She and Sidney had four children, two of each sex.
The first-born, a boy, had been named Michael. They settled in Hammersmith, at that time a semi-rural London satellite. On each birth certificate Sidney's occupation grew grander so that, by the birth of his fourth child, he was a manager. What he managed wasn't clear, but the Chestertons were middle class.
Clara had come a long way from the workhouse steps.
She eventually died in 1951. She was seventy-nine, an amazing age given the deprivations of her early life.
He shook his head at her indomitability, wondering whether her descendants knew of her sacrifice; did they realize how this woman, who probably appeared to them only in sepia-tinted photographs at the bottom of a drawer or a box, had altered the path of their family, hauled it from the shadows and preserved a bloodline?
The centre was empty, the last remaining member of staff alternately glancing at Nigel and the clock on the wall, closing on seven o'clock. There was no way Nigel could complete the job that night, and his eyes ached. He called Foster and told him how far he'd reached. The detective was barely lucid, distracted by the looming deadline and the awful, impending prospect of a fourth victim.
Foster gazed up at the tower block, like a climber contemplating an unconquerable face. In the dusk light it seemed less ugly, yet still inscrutable. People had come and gone throughout the day, and he and Heather had watched them all: every delivery was checked, each workman questioned, each resident who left and arrived cross-referenced against the list they had. Nothing appeared different, or out of the ordinary.
At intervals Foster went and checked each and every bin, alley and scrap of wasteland around the block. Each time there was nothing to see; but while he could tell himself that he had been watching, and no one had slipped in without his knowing, he still expected to lift a lid or peer around a corner and see the sight he dreaded most of all.
As night fell there seemed little option but to sit in the car with Heather and wait. The lights of the flats flicked on one by one and the stream of people in and out became an intermittent drip. Gangs of youths congregated on a street corner, drinkers weaved their way to the pubs and late stragglers made their way back from work. Shouts, pounding bass and the feed-me screams of babies wafted through the air, mingling occasionally with the irregular sound of sirens hurtling along the Westway. He got out only once, to shoo away a mongrel threatening to piss on his offside rear tyre.
Foster had never felt so helpless. He ticked off the hours as they passed: ten, then eleven, midnight. The anniversary of finding the fourth victim in 1879 had begun. The first three had been found in the hours between the middle of the night and dawn. He saw no reason why this might be different.
The city noise abated, the streets cleared, though the sirens never stilled. One by one the lights of the block vanished, a few remaining illuminated as the wee small hours came and went, insomniacs staring numbly at screens. He and Heather barely spoke.
There was nothing for it but to see how this would play out.
Dawn came. He let Heather doze. Foster had passed the point of tiredness, when sleep could come easily, and lapsed into a wired, restless exhaustion, unable to stop his leg from bouncing manically as he sat still. His mum used to call it St Vitus's dance, he remembered through the fog in his brain. He had not done it in years.
As the sun rose, the tower block woke from slumber.
