was at his side.
He waited for him to remove the tape so he could use his anger, all the pain, to let out a roar.
Nothing. The tape remained. He lost consciousness once more. He came round, the tape removed, opened his mouth but the noise was weak. He licked his parched lips. Through the haze he thought of another tactic.
'This can be done another way,' Foster whispered hoarsely. 'I know about Eke Fairbairn. I know about the injustice.' He stopped to grimace, catch his breath.
'I know about the beating, Stafford Pearcey's statement, the knife being planted, the judge's summing up. What happened was a travesty. But there is such a thing as a pardon. The case can be reopened. Your ancestor's name can be cleared.'
Karl was back out of sight.
'Eke Fairbairn is not my ancestor,' he said.
Nigel headed for the national newspaper library, making it there in less than half an hour. Inside he ordered the 1879 editions of the Kensington News. The story he wanted he'd first seen on Monday, in the issue of The Times on the day following Fairbairn's conviction. But it was only a few paragraphs. He needed more detail. When the volume arrived he flicked through to the edition for the third week of May, the first following the trial. A report of the events in court shared the front page with the story he was looking for.
MAN SLAYS WIFE AND DAUGHTERS
Yesterday morning, shortly after seven o'clock, Mr Inspector Dodd of Kensington Division received a report from a neighbour of blood washing under the front door of a house on Pamber Street. The abode was the home and business of Segar Kellogg, chandler shop owner.
Inspector Dodd proceeded to Pamber Street to find no little excitement in a neighbourhood already in foment over the appalling exploits of the so called Kensington Killer. He went to the door and indeed saw what appeared to be blood on the top step.
He knocked and received no answer. Then he tried the door and found it open. To his horror, behind it he found there a boy, unconscious yet still alive.
His body was awash with blood. Behind him was a trail leading to the entrance to the cellar, from where it seemed the stricken boy had dragged his wounded, mutilated frame along the cold wooden floor before passing out. The detective followed the bloody path down to the depths, where he was met with a scene of utter carnage.
The woman was quite dead, her throat carved open.
Alongside her he found the cold and rigid bodies of two children. A short distance away, on the floor, was the corpse of a man with a knife protruding from his chest.
On removal of the body the surgeon's surmises received their confirmation. Mr Kellogg had most likely murdered his wife, stabbed his son in the neck and then smothered his poor little ones before turning his own instrument of murder on himself. No other suspect is being sought.
Neighbours said Mr Kellogg was a devout Christian and abstainer. Detectives have not ruled out the suggestion that he was in the grip of religious mania.
Nigel needed to find Duckworth.
'Then why?' Foster asked, straining now to make himself heard. 'If you have nothing to do with Eke Fairbairn, why are you doing all this?'
There was a sigh.
'The police arrested an innocent man for a crime he didn't commit to save themselves from criticism. On the day that Fairbairn was convicted, the real killer, a man named Segar Kellogg, murdered his wife and two of his children. He slit her throat, stabbed his own son in the neck and smothered two seven-year-old girls. If he had been in the dock - if the police, if your ancestor, had done their jobs correctly - then that family would have lived. An evil man would have swung.
'The son survived. His vocal cords had been severed.
He never spoke again. Never recovered from what he had seen. There was some semblance of a life for a short while. He changed his name to Hogg, which has been our family name ever since, got married, had two kids. But it never went away. Eventually he decided he couldn't live with what had happened, the horror of what he remembered. Before he died, he wrote down everything he had seen but had never been able to speak about. How he had followed his father at night and watched him slaughter two men.
How fear of his father had prevented him from telling anyone. His regret at obeying that fear and how he hated the forces of law and order for getting the wrong man.'
'Have you heard of forgiveness?' Foster asked.
Hogg ignored him. 'You don't know what it's like living with that mark on you. Knowing those genes course through your veins. That your blood is polluted.
The stain has always been with us. I knew that, the day I read the letter written by Esau Hogg. I turned thirty-five in January this year, the same age Segar Hogg was when he murdered his wife and two daughters, and Esau's age when he decided he couldn't take living with the pain any more and hanged himself. I knew then that it was time to finish it all. It ends here with me. There is no one to follow.'
'But what about other members of your family?
Presumably they lived a decent life if you're here today. For God's sake, we're more than a bunch of genes; they don't define us.'
'Coming from someone who's merely the latest in a long line of policemen, that's pretty rich. You've never thought there may be something genetic about that?'
Foster clenched his teeth against the pain. He found that if he didn't move, then it was possible to ignore it; helped, he thought, by whatever drugs were still swimming in his system.
'My ancestor may have stitched up Fairbairn. But that doesn't mean the rest of us are bent cops. There is such a thing as free will. These things aren't preordained.'
'You heard of psychogeography?'
Foster vaguely remembered Nigel Barnes mentioning it. Some bullshit about how a place affects the way people act.
'The theory is that the environment in which you live has an impact on people's emotions and behaviour. I walked the same streets where my ancestor preyed on his victims. I was born a street away from where he slaughtered his family. I learned of what he did and how he escaped justice. How my family has been stained with this ever since.'
'Sounds like an excuse not an explanation.'
Hogg snorted derisively. 'I'd expect little else from a policeman. Funny, the very people you would think might pay attention to theories like this, theories that might help explain the behaviour they have to deal with every day, are the most dismissive.'
Foster dry-retched. Composed himself. 'I don't go in for theories.' He drew a deep breath; he felt himself starting to drift, but steeled himself. 'There are people who live decent lives, there are criminals . . . and then there are weak-minded sadists like you.'
Hogg laughed falsely, almost condescendingly.
'That's enough conversation for now,' he said.
Foster heard him pull a line of tape from the roll.
He tried to turn his head but couldn't prevent it being strapped over his mouth. He felt a hand on his chest.
He watched as the killer pulled back his fist and slammed it into his side. He felt the air escape from him in a rush, a stabbing pain in his ribs. His body, acting on instinct to protect itself, attempted to twist away, aggravating his other wounds. Another punch landed on the same area as the first. It felt like a hot knife was being thrust between the muscles of his ribs. The area burned.
Make this end, Foster said silently, plaintively to a God in whom he had never believed.
Nigel discovered that Esau Kellogg had changed his surname to Hogg. He'd got married and tried to forge a new life at a house in a notorious slum on the outskirts of Kensington. The couple had two children but, two years after the second was born, Esau ended his life at the end of a rope.
Nigel traced the bloodline, spinning through the generations as fast as possible. The line was weak, but it survived. He reached the present day. Only two descendants remained: a man, who would now be thirty, named Karl Hogg; and a woman of seventy-six named Liza. He had no address for Karl other than the house his parents
