Chapter 7

 Research over the next few days consumed me almost completely. I carried it out in the quiet refuge of my study, shutting the door on the outside world and surrendering myself to the papers that seemed to multiply across my desk with every passing hour.

My earlier visit to the National Archives had laid the groundwork, but there had been gaps—frustrating spaces where names disappeared, dates contradicted one another, and whole branches of families seemed to dissolve into nothing. Now, at last, the certificates I had ordered began arriving through the post.

I handled each one carefully.

They were brittle sheets of history: birth certificates, marriage records, death registrations. Some were clear and precise; others contained handwriting so cramped and faded that I found myself leaning beneath the desk lamp with a magnifying glass, trying to decide whether a letter was an e or an i, whether a number was a three or an eight.

Yet each document gave me something.

A date.

An address.

An occupation.

A witness.

A name that had previously existed only as a possibility.

Piece by piece, details I had struggled to uncover were becoming facts.

Jane's family tree from Australia proved invaluable. Without it, I might have spent weeks following false trails. She had recorded names and relationships passed down through her side of the family, some of them accompanied by approximate dates or scraps of family recollection. On their own they would have meant little, but when I placed them beside the official records, patterns began to emerge.

I spread the tree across the desk and worked backwards and forwards through the generations, marking confirmed relationships in pencil and circling those that still troubled me.

The census returns were particularly revealing.

They told stories without intending to.

A child appeared in one decade and was absent in the next. Another was listed at the age of three, only to vanish completely from subsequent records. At first, such disappearances could mean anything. A child might have been staying with relatives on census night, sent away to work when older, or simply recorded under another household.

But death certificates and burial registers gradually provided darker explanations.

Several of the children had died young.

Their lives had been so brief that almost nothing remained of them beyond a name in one census and a line in a burial register. No photographs that I knew of. No letters. No stories handed down through the generations. Just ink on paper confirming that they had once lived.

There was something unsettling about it.

Genealogy had a habit of reducing lives to dates: born, married, died. Yet sitting there, surrounded by those records, I became increasingly conscious that every name represented someone who had occupied a room, spoken to their parents, played in a street, fallen ill, been mourned.

The documents were not the family.

They were merely what the family had left behind.

Joseph Simpson's immediate family gradually came into focus.

There were five siblings: three older brothers—John, Edmund and David—and two younger sisters, Emily and Agartha.

I wrote their names in a line across a fresh sheet of paper and began constructing separate timelines for each of them.

John proved relatively straightforward.

Edmund required more work, but the records eventually settled into a coherent pattern.

David was different.

Every time I followed him, another question appeared.

Addresses shifted. Occupations changed. Names associated with him appeared elsewhere in circumstances that did not immediately make sense. One record contradicted another just enough to make me wonder whether I was looking at clerical mistakes or something more significant.

I checked everything twice.

Then a third time.

By the end of the second day, I had uncovered details concerning the brothers that I knew I would have to share with Rachel. I was not yet certain what they meant, and I resisted the temptation to force them into a convenient explanation. Genealogical research punished assumptions. A plausible story could become irresistible, and once believed, every new discovery had a tendency to be bent until it fitted.

Still, David bothered me.

I underlined his name.

Whatever had happened within the Simpson family, I was beginning to suspect that David stood closer to the centre of it than anyone had realised.

It was in the midst of this work that the telephone rang.

For a moment I simply stared at it.

Very few people had the number. The phone had been given to me by Mr Anderson specifically for this investigation, which meant that every time it rang I felt an immediate tightening in my stomach.

I answered.

"Hello?"

"How's it progressing?"

Len.

There was no greeting, no attempt at conversation.

His voice was sharp and impatient.

"I'm working through it."

"And?"

"And these things take time."

A brief silence followed.

I could almost hear his irritation travelling down the line.

"Mr Anderson expected progress."

"I'm aware of that."

"Then give me some."

I looked at the desk.

Certificates lay open beside census transcripts. Photocopies of parish registers were stacked against a directory. A map had been pinned to the wall above me, covered with pencilled circles and lines.

"I've found something," I said.

His tone changed immediately.

"What?"

"I'm not ready to say."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what it means yet."

Another silence.

This one colder.

"Find out."

The line went dead.

I remained with the receiver against my ear for several seconds before replacing it.

Len's impatience irritated me, but it also reinforced something I had already begun to suspect.

Mr Anderson knew more than he had told me.

The question was how much.

Rachel's family history, complicated though it was, had at least provided a recognisable path. Parents led to grandparents, grandparents to great-grandparents. There were missing records and inconsistencies, but the underlying structure remained visible.

Mr Anderson's Italian ancestry was another matter entirely.

It was a labyrinth.

Names changed spelling from one record to another. First names were anglicised. Birthplaces were vague. Ages shifted by several years between censuses. Some individuals appeared under Italian names in one document and English equivalents in another.

Migration complicated everything further.

Families moved from village to village before leaving Italy. Men travelled ahead of wives and children. Some crossed borders more than once. Others appeared briefly in British records and then vanished again.

I spent hours comparing passenger lists, immigration records, parish registers and census entries.

Then, late one afternoon, I found it.

At first it seemed insignificant.

An address.

I copied it onto a piece of paper.

Then I looked at the map on the wall.

Something stirred in my memory.

I pulled open the Simpson file and searched through my notes until I found the address I wanted.

I compared the two.

Then checked the map again.

Mr Anderson's forebears had migrated to the United Kingdom and settled in the same district as the Simpson family.

Not merely the same city.

The same district.

I stood from the desk and approached the map.

The Simpson residence was already marked in pencil. I added the Italian address.

The distance between them was surprisingly small.

I stared at the two circles.

Two families.

Two histories.

Converging in one place.

For the first time, the investigation seemed to change shape.

Until then I had treated Rachel's research and Anderson's research as separate assignments—two genealogies that happened to occupy my desk at the same time.

Now I was no longer certain they were separate at all.

It felt less like coincidence and more like the beginning of an answer.

I returned to the records with renewed urgency.

That was when things became stranger.

Parish registers revealed baptisms involving unfamiliar sponsors. At first I paid little attention. Godparents and witnesses frequently belonged to neighbouring families, friends, employers or distant relatives.

But several surnames caught my eye.

I had seen them before.

I searched my notes.

Italian immigration records.

The names appeared there decades later.

I began making another list.

The same surnames surfaced in different forms, sometimes altered by clerks unfamiliar with Italian spelling. One name had three variations. Another had apparently been translated phonetically.

Coincidence remained possible.

But it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

Then came the marriage entry from 1893.

I read it once.

Then again.

The bride and groom were not the important part.

The witnesses were.

One surname matched a name appearing in the Anderson family material—a branch I had traced back towards Tuscany.

I sat back.

"That can't be right."

But the handwriting was clear.

I checked the original reference.

Then the index.

Then my notes.

The surname remained the same.

A Tuscan connection, appearing as a witness to a marriage associated with the Simpson network.

I drew another line on the page.

And another.

Soon my neat family trees had begun to resemble diagrams of conspiracy.

I forced myself to stop.

Evidence first.

Interpretation later.

Then I found the burial records.

Two deaths occurred during the same week.

One was a Simpson child.

The other was an Italian labourer.

They had been buried beside one another.

I searched for a relationship and found none.

The labourer did not appear in the Simpson family tree. He shared no surname with anyone I had identified. His occupation provided no immediate connection. His recorded address was different.

There was no obvious reason the two burials should matter.

And yet they did.

Or at least I felt they did.

Two graves.

Side by side.

Two deaths within days of one another.

I wrote the details in my notebook and placed a question mark beside them.

The proximity gnawed at me.

The directories added another layer.

In the 1910 edition I found a man listed as G. Abategiovanni, lodging in a boarding house scarcely three streets from the Simpson residence.

The surname immediately caught my attention.

I followed it backwards.

Then forwards.

In the 1911 census, he vanished.

There was no G. Abategiovanni at the address.

No obvious death.

No departure that I could establish.

No clear return to Italy.

Instead, among the occupants associated with the same small network of streets, another man appeared.

G. Anderson.

Occupation: jeweller's assistant.

I stared at the entry.

The age was close.

The birthplace was vague enough to be useful rather than conclusive.

I searched the directory again.

Abategiovanni disappeared at almost exactly the point Anderson appeared.

I wrote both names beside one another.

G. Abategiovanni.

G. Anderson.

A name change?

A mistranscription?

An attempt at assimilation?

Or something more deliberate?

I tried saying the names aloud, listening for some hidden connection in the sounds, but there was none that satisfied me.

Perhaps Anderson had been adopted.

Perhaps Abategiovanni had chosen an English name.

That was hardly unusual. Immigrant families frequently altered surnames to make them easier for employers, officials and neighbours to pronounce.

But something about the timing troubled me.

Especially because of the Simpsons.

I returned to the map.

Three streets.

That was all.

Three streets separated the boarding house from the Simpson home.

The deeper I went, the more the threads tangled.

Simpson.

Abategiovanni.

Anderson.

Their histories overlapped like a palimpsest—one story written over another, faint lines from an earlier truth still visible beneath the surface.

By the fourth day, my study had disappeared beneath the investigation.

Certificates covered the desk. Census returns were stacked on the floor. Directories lay open on chairs. Maps had been pinned to the walls, and sheets of paper connected names, addresses and dates in an increasingly elaborate web.

My handwriting deteriorated as the hours passed.

Questions accumulated in the margins.

Who was G. Abategiovanni?

Why Anderson?

Why this district?

Connection to David?

1893 witness?

Burials?

Outside, rain continued its relentless assault against the windows.

It had been falling for most of the day, sometimes softly, sometimes with enough force to drown out every other sound in the room. Water streamed down the glass, distorting the houses beyond it until the street seemed to belong to another century.

I barely noticed the fading light.

The desk lamp became the only illumination in the room.

I thought about calling Rachel.

Several times I reached for the phone.

Each time I stopped.

Not yet.

I had information, but not an explanation.

If I told her about David now, I would only give her questions I could not answer. And whatever connection existed between the Simpsons and Anderson's ancestors, I wanted something stronger than proximity and suspicious names before placing it in front of her.

Len was another matter.

I expected him to call again.

The thought irritated me more than it should have.

His impatience was becoming pressure, and the pressure was beginning to alter the way I looked at the records. I found myself wondering what Anderson expected me to discover.

That was dangerous.

Research should lead to conclusions.

Conclusions should never lead the research.

I pushed my chair away from the desk and stood.

The room smelled of paper, dust and coffee.

On the wall, the map waited.

I walked towards it.

The Simpson house.

The boarding house.

The church.

The cemetery.

The jeweller's premises where G. Anderson had apparently worked.

I had marked them all.

Individually, they meant little.

Together, they formed a surprisingly tight cluster.

I stepped closer.

Then I noticed something I had overlooked.

David Simpson's address from one of the later records.

I searched through the papers until I found it.

Checked the street.

Checked the directory.

Then placed another mark on the map.

For several seconds I said nothing.

David had lived closer to the Italian boarding house than the rest of his family.

Much closer.

I felt that familiar sensation—the sudden quickening that came when scattered facts began moving towards one another.

I pulled the 1910 directory towards me again.

Abategiovanni.

Then David's records.

Then Anderson.

Dates.

Addresses.

Occupations.

Witnesses.

Burials.

I arranged everything chronologically across the floor.

And there, for the first time, I could almost see it.

Not the answer.

The shape of the answer.

Something had happened between these families.

Something important enough for names to change and connections to disappear from the stories handed down to later generations.

Perhaps it had been deliberate.

Perhaps it had merely been forgotten.

But I no longer believed I was dealing with coincidence.

I sat back down and looked at the telephone.

Anderson had sent me searching for his ancestors.

Rachel had asked me to uncover hers.

Somehow, without either investigation intending it, both trails had brought me to the same handful of streets.

The same names.

The same years.

The same secrets.

I felt the weight of Anderson's expectations and Len's impatience, but beneath both was something more unsettling: the growing suspicion that this research was no longer merely genealogical.

It was personal.

Someone had hidden something.

Someone had changed something.

And someone, somewhere, had decided that I was the man who needed to uncover it.

I looked once more at David Simpson's name.

Then at Abategiovanni.

Then Anderson.

Outside, the rain struck the window harder.

I reached for a fresh sheet of paper and wrote one question across the top.

WHAT HAPPENED HERE?

For a long moment I stared at it.

The evidence was incomplete.

The connections were fragile.

But they were there.

The breakthrough was close.

I could feel it.