It seemed the whole room reached for their mobile phones and starting staring at their keypads.
'What sort of phone was it again?' Foster asked.
'One of those slim, dinky ones with the flip-up screen. Clamshell. Girl's phone. Khan's got one,'
Drinkwater added, with a smirk.
So had Foster. A murmur of amusement went round the room.
'Seven, eight and nine are on the same row,' said Khan, examining his own keypad. 'They easily could have been pushed accidentally. Where was the phone?'
Drinkwater looked into the middle distance; with his left hand he patted his left suit pocket, while his right tapped lightly on the right-hand side of his chest.
'Inside breast pocket, right-hand side,' he said eventually. 'If the key guard wasn't on during the struggle, if there was a struggle, or after he was killed and the body was being moved, the buttons might have been pushed. The dial button, too.'
'Sounds the likeliest option,' Foster agreed. 'But stick the number up on the whiteboard. Get back in touch with his wife and his bank; see if this number means anything to them. It may be the start of an account number, or a PIN number. We need to know.' Foster rubbed his face, then ran his right hand over his head. 'Darbyshire had drunk only four pints.
He would've been merry, not arseholed, so how did the killer get him off the street in the first place? A 31- year-old man isn't easy to lure into a car. Unless you're giving him a lift. We have to accept the killer may have had some help. How many hits did we get, Andy?'
Earlier that afternoon they had fed details of the murder into the computer to sift through suspects who had been cautioned, charged or convicted of stabbings and were out on the streets.
'About two thousand,' Drinkwater said.
Each of them would be checked out in the coming days and weeks. A fair bit of mystery surrounded the workings of a murder inquiry, but most of it was simply a long, methodical slog.
'Find out how many had, have had, or still have cab or minicab licences,' Foster ordered. He clapped his hands together. 'The rest of you know what comes next,' he added, winding things up. 'We need to crawl all over James Darbyshire's life: his movements, his habits, his daily routine. Scour his credit cards and bank details; interview his friends, relatives, girlfriends, boyfriends and colleagues; check his emails; look at what sites he visited. Any porn, anything a bit dodgy, then I want to know.'
The team got up, a few stretching, some starting conversations while others hit the phones.
'Can I say something, sir?'
The hubbub died down. It was Heather, her face still reddened from anger. Foster's first thought was that she may publicly challenge him for having slapped her down when she arrived late for the meeting.
But he knew she wouldn't be that stupid.
'Go on,' he said.
Everyone turned to look at her.
'I must have missed your discussion about the letters and numbers carved on the victim's chest,'
she explained. 'But I've got an idea about them. It's been bugging me ever since the post mortem.'
Foster realized the colour in her cheeks was not anger, it was excitement. 'Yes?'
'Have you heard of genealogy?'
He thought for a second. He knew it; old people filling the last few days before death came knocking by tracing their dead relatives.
'Yeah,' Foster said. 'Bloody stupid hobby.'
A few of the others laughed.
'Whatever,' Heather said, ignoring them. 'My mum traced our family tree a few years back. But -you sort of need to leave the house, and the best place to do it is in London, not Rawtenstall. She came down to see me and we went to this place in Islington where they have loads of indexes for birth, marriage and death certificates. Place was heaving; no room to swing a cat.'
Get to the point, Foster thought. 'Where does it fit with the Darbyshire killing?'
'When you want to order a certificate, you have to fill in a form. On that form you have to give the index number of the certificate you want. You follow?'
'Go on.'
'The index numbers are like the reference we found; a mixture of letters and numbers.'
Foster could see some of the others nodding their heads, murmuring assent. It sounded a better idea than the ones proposed in the meeting.
'How are you going to check it out?' he asked.
'My mum gave up on it. She thinks London is a den of iniquity and depravity and won't come down again. Anyway, she hired some guy who does it for a living and got him to do it for her. Turned out we come from a bunch of peasants. Nothing juicy. On the way over here, I gave her a call. She still has his number.'
'Give him a call, but don't spill any details over the phone. Arrange to meet.'
They had nothing, Foster thought. This might be the break they needed.
Nigel was sitting at a table for two in the canteen no one would ever be so bold as to describe it as a cafe -- of the Family Records Centre in London's Clerkenwell. He had chosen a small square table for two against the wall, rather than a large round one for four, so reducing his chances of being forced to share his personal space with a soap-dodging amateur keen to swap stories about an elusive ancestor who had lost a leg at the Somme.
Located in the basement of a modern, functional beige-bricked building tucked away apologetically at one end of Exmouth Market, rows of tables filled the room to one side, glass lockers and coat racks to the other. There were no black-clad baristas serving coffee seven different ways; only a few vending machines touting tongue-scalding, mud-coloured water. Another machine sold sandwiches, limp and curled inside their plastic wrapping. The average age of people who used the centre was probably twice that of any other meeting place, family history being the preserve -- with a few exceptions -- of those for whom death is no longer a distant possibility but an imminent certainty.
The Family Records Centre is a Mecca for genealogists and family historians, housing the indexes of almost every birth, death and marriage that has taken place in England and Wales since 1837, as well as copies of every census taken between 1841 and 1901.
Nigel used to love delving into the indexes, looking forwards to a day losing himself in the bureaucratic traces of the long departed, but now his presence there was a constant source of disappointment. Eighteen months ago he had left, vowing never to return, and adamant that he would never again spend a whole day researching the family tree of some middle-class dilettante who was not interested in the stories of the past, the narrative arc of their ancestors' lives, all the stuff that fascinated Nigel, but who simply wanted the information to help produce a chintzy, beautifully drawn family tree to hang on their wall. Eighteen months ago he had headed off to the sunlit uplands of academia -- real research. Now here he was back doing the bidding of others.
At three thirty on that chilly late-March afternoon, Nigel was idling away time that would have been better spent among the indexes. The day, he thought to himself, had not been a bad one. Even the elderly gentleman on the next table, who was peeling an apple so slowly that, by the time he had finished and was ready to eat it, the flesh had turned a rusty brown, was struggling to spoil it. He had phoned in the discovery of Cornelius Tiplady's grave to his client, much to her delight. Then, before coming to the FRC, he had stopped off to do a few hours' research for another client, a Mrs Carnell, at the National Archives in Kew. Now he was trying to work out, and keep the smile off his face as he did so, what he was going to tell her when he called her later that day to inform her that he had discovered the truth about Silas Carnell, an ancestor of hers, who had died at sea in the 1840s, and about whose heroic death she had paid to know more.
The thing was, Silas's death wasn't heroic. It was anything but. True, Nigel had unearthed naval records that confirmed the sailor had met his demise at sea. Though not in combat. Silas had been hanged as punishment. His offence? He'd had sex with one of the goats brought on board to provide milk. Any port in a storm, Nigel thought. Bizarrely, Silas was not the only one executed; the goat's throat had been slit.
Intending to waste more time by having a fag outside, he was just fishing out the rolling tobacco and papers from his pocket when his mobile phone startled him by coming to life. It was years old, the size of a small brick; he saw no need to trade it in, and his provider (or whatever name they gave themselves) had long since given up on trying to get him to upgrade. Given the choice, he'd downgrade -- to not having one at all.
