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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