nothing except a few battered, obsolescent white goods.
He returned to the small entrance hall. Opened one door and was hit by the smell of pervasive damp.
The bathroom. Nothing except the drip from a scaled bath tap. Closed the door, tried the next one.
The smell hit him first. One he knew well. It emanated from the only thing in the room. The body of a woman. From the stench, he knew she had been here longer than twenty-four hours. She was on her back in the middle of the floor, dressed in a pair of jeans and a brown sweater. A few flies buzzed around her. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and put it over his nose, then leaned down for a closer look. It was the hair he noticed. There was none.
From the brow to beyond the crown was only a fleshy mass and the white dome of her skull.
She had been scalped.
16
Edward Carlisle shook his head.
'This is like something from the Wild West,' he said, peering at the exposed scalp. 'I think what he's done is lifted up the hair -- from what's left at the back it was brown, about shoulder-length. Then twisted, used the point of the knife to slice around the parting, and then pulled the whole thing off.
Must have taken some doing. I'll tell you one thing, though.' He looked up grimly. 'From what I see here, I believe she was alive when he scalped her.'
Foster couldn't imagine what that was like. Didn't want to. 'How long she been dead?' he asked.
'Around sixty hours or so.'
Monday, he thought.
'And from the lividity on her back I'd guess she's been lying here all that time, maybe a few hours less,'
Carlisle added. 'Again, she did not die here, she was moved postmortem. Again, there's a single stab wound to the heart that probably killed her. You can survive being scalped, particularly when as much care has been taken as this.'
The killer knew they might be hanging around, Foster thought. So he got her up here before the place was surrounded. One step ahead again.
Detective Superintendent Harris walked into the room, his long face leached of colour and rigid with concern. 'What's the preliminary verdict?' he said, hands on hips.
'She was stabbed and scalped,' Foster said.
'Scalped? Jesus Christ.'
'She's been here since Monday night. She was probably killed then.'
Harris stared down at the floor. 'You sure about those timings?' he said to Carlisle.
'About as sure as I can be.'
'Cable's innocent, Brian,' Foster said. 'You pulled him in Monday afternoon. He couldn't have done this.'
Harris nodded slowly. Foster knew he would be playing this out in his mind, how it would go down with the press and the upper echelons of the Yard.
'Of course, you've got the knife,' Foster added.
Harris rubbed his chin ruefully. 'Not the knife involved in the killings. Forensics confirmed that this morning.' He let out an enormous sigh. 'OK, he's still out there. I accept that. I should have given you more cover here. I accept that, too.'
Foster held his hands up. 'Would have been too late, Brian. He was ahead of us. We may have found the body sooner, that's all. But the fact remains that we have one person to try and save, one last chance.
The fifth victim will be killed before one a.m. Sunday morning.' It passed through his mind that they might already be dead. 'The body will be found in Powis Square. We have two days, perhaps less.'
'How do you want to play it, Grant?'
He was back in favour. Back in charge.
'I'm waiting on a phone call that will help me decide,' he said.
Carlisle interrupted. 'There appears to be no identification on her, but the killer missed this in her back pocket.'
He held a tightly balled piece of paper in between forefinger and thumb. Foster took it and peeled it open carefully. It was a receipt.
'Supermarket. Monday morning. She paid by credit card.'
Harris summoned a detective and asked him to get an ID as soon as possible. Heather entered the bedroom, her hair still wet from a shower. Through the open door, Foster could see forensics working the clock radio. She glanced at the victim, then looked at him.
'Nigel's been on the phone. He's been at it since first thing this morning. He's already traced a number of Fairbairn's living descendants and hopes to have them all by the end of the day.'
'Someone going to fill me in?' Harris asked impatiently.
'In 1879 me police arrested a man in connection with the murders in Notting Dale and North Kensington.
He was charged with two of them, tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty and hanged.'
'I see.'
'Except for one thing: he almost certainly didn't do it. He was convicted on the evidence of a single witness, who claimed to have seen him following one of the victims.' He wasn't sure how Harris would react to the next detail. 'But the police also conveniently found a knife at his lodging house, although the suspicion was that it was planted.'
Harris flinched. 'We didn't plant that knife in Cable's garden, Grant.'
'I didn't say you did. But the similarities are there.
My guess is the killer planted it. Maybe he wanted to make a point.'
'What point?'
'Fairbairn was treated like a punchbag. The investigating team beat the shit out of him, broke almost every major bone in his body to try and get him to confess. He had the mental age of a child, barely able to finish a sentence, but they still hanged him. For a crime he didn't commit. And then they ballsed up the hanging and he choked to death at the end of a rope.'
He paused.
'The killer is seeking to avenge that injustice. And they were seeking to frame an innocent man to make the point that the police never change. Our family historian is tracing every living descendant of Eke Fairbairn, the wrongly accused. We need to feed all their names through the computer and see if any of them set alarm bells ringing. Then we still need to track down each and every one of them in the next twenty-four hours and see if they can explain their actions during the last few weeks.'
Harris's expression changed from interest to incredulity. 'You're telling me that a descendant of this man has copied the killing spree his ancestor didn't do in order to prove his innocence?'
Foster nodded. 'It's the best theory I have. Whoever did this knows their way around the world of family history. What's to say they weren't researching their genealogy and found this dark secret? For someone already on the edge, that's the sort of thing that could tip you over. What I can't answer is why he chose these victims. Perhaps they were just selected at random: wrong place, wrong time.'
Harris did not look convinced.
'Where are these names Nigel's compiling?' Foster asked Heather.
'Nigel's faxing them through to the office,' she said. 'So far, they're scattered all over the country, as you'd expect. We can arm everyone who goes out on the doorstep with the sketch of the man seen drinking with Nella Perry at the Prince of Wales, see if anybody we track down matches it.'
'I'll get back to the incident room and get on to it, make a few calls,' Harris said. Cable's name went unmentioned. Foster knew he would be let go, perhaps charged with possession. The press would be told that no charges related to the case would be made. When they discovered there had been a fourth victim, put two and two together and realized she was killed when Cable was in custody, the bad press of a few days ago would seem like
