Birth Marks (4 page)

‘And you're sure she never said a word when she left?'

He put up his hands in mock defence. ‘Honest injun. I was off for a week with the flu. When I left she was there, when I got back she'd gone.'

‘So yours wasn't a close relationship?'

He smiled. ‘What do you think?'

I smiled back. ‘I think yours wasn't a close relationship.'

‘Well, there you go. You are in the right profession after all. Mind you, it wasn't that hard was it?' And he blew out another spiral of smoke. ‘Anything else you want to know?'

I thought about it. Most gays don't like talking to private detectives. But then since most private detectives are ex-coppers you can understand why. Bearing that in mind we hadn't done badly. In the paint-by-numbers picture Carolyn had a good deal more colour than before, and I had a few leads to go on. Not bad at all. So how come I was feeling there were still things he hadn't told me? I let the silence hang between us for a while, but it yielded nothing but an absence of words. I took out another card and handed it to him.

‘Maybe you could just push it around a bit more. Give it a little thought. You never know—memories.'

Think fast, never take no for an answer and have a good exit line—that way they'll remember you. Comfort by name, Frank by nature, that's him. Some bits of advice were worth following. This time Eyelashes took the card and kept it.

 

By the time I got back to the car it was nearly 7.00 p.m. and a passing traffic warden had shat on the windscreen. At times like this you have a choice. You can either get depressed or more determined. I decided to see it as an expensive way of parking for the night. From a phone booth in Covent Garden I tried to get a number for Carolyn's landlord. But either I hadn't spelt it right, or the art student had sewn me up. Either way there were no Prozhaslacks in London, let alone in Finchley. On the grounds that there might be a movie playing that I wanted to see I walked through Covent Garden to Leicester Square. But it was Saturday night and a quiet stroll turned into a rush hour of buskers, beggars and fun lovers up from Surbiton. Only tourists could be fooled into thinking London is a cosmopolitan city. Outside one of the larger cinemas a girl was eating fire to the accompaniment of a small string quartet. She had long fair hair scooped up in a ponytail and was wearing a sequinned dress with a black woolly cardigan over it. She looked a little like Carolyn Hamilton, I thought. But then so did a girl in the cinema queue and a young woman standing by the entrance to MacDonald's, waiting for her date for the night. Let's face it, London was full of Carolyn Hamiltons. Most of them happy to be lost in a crowd. My mind was tired with thinking about all the places she could be. I decided to stop thinking and do something.

So I drove to Kilburn and broke into her flat. Why not? After all, it's the kind of thing that goes on all over London on a Saturday night: people talking their way in through the street doors and prising their way in through the top ones. It wasn't even that hard. When I told her I was a friend of Peter, the art student, delivering a canvas which I was frightened to leave outside in case it got nicked, the girl in the basement buzzed me in without a qualm. More fool her. Once in, the other door was amateur's night out; no mortice, just a Yale. I was surprised I was the first.

Inside, a cold little corridor led to two rooms. There was music coming in from the floor above, waves of reggae and the occasional thump as someone provided foot percussion. I took a pair of thin plastic gloves out of my bag and slipped them on. Better to be safe than arrested, even if they did make me feel more like a dentist than a burglar. To the right was a bedsitting-room, off it a small kitchen and to the left a bathroom. I used a torch until I was sure the place was empty, then switched on a few lights. The main room leapt into focus. I had time to register built-in cupboards, bare floorboards, a rug, a sofabed, a couple of chairs and a battered old dining-table with a vase when the overhead light pinged off again. Dead bulbs. How come they always pick me? Still, an impression remained which the torch recreated in segments: an exceedingly sparse and tidy space, no clutter, no excess. Not so much a home as a removals van that hadn't been unpacked yet. Minimalism meets poverty? And cold. That was the other thing. Winter had been allowed to grow here, seeping its way into the walls and up through the floor. I breathed out into the air and watched the smoke curl. One thing was for sure: Carolyn Hamilton hadn't lived here for a long time. Yet her name was still on the bell, which meant that she must be somewhere doing something to pay the rent. But where and what?

I started with the kitchen, where the silence told of a fridge long disconnected. The only sign of life was a small pinboard above the work surface with a few yellowing notices. A milk bill dated 14 April (unpaid?), a poster for a demonstration against animal vivisection in May and another Degas postcard, this time the full face of a young girl gazing out at the artist, passive and lost. I stared at it for a moment. Was this the self-portrait I had been looking for? I took it down and carried it with me into the bathroom where I found a toothbrush but no toothpaste, a tube of hair-removing cream and a half-empty bottle of Valium. I remembered Eyelashes' description of Left Feet First, partying until they fell over. Was this the stash of downers to counteract the uppers or a more sinister way of coping with stress?

Back in the main room a side light cut through some of the gloom. I worked systematically, starting with the cupboards. I had expected clothes. But not so many labels. Certainly not so many that I couldn't afford. Underneath the racks were shelves: blouses, T-shirts, silk scarves and some very classy designer knitwear. Interesting. Clothes may maketh the man, but in my experience they often bankrupt the woman. I thought back to Eyelashes' tale about a girl who had given everything to be Margot Fonteyn, only to discover it was the one thing she couldn't have. Maybe shopping had become a form of depression therapy. As an Oxfam girl myself it was hard to see the attraction, but then I didn't have her body. Or her sense of despair. I went on looking. There was something else. Coats, jackets, woollen skirts and a lot of knitwear, but not much in the summer frock line. In May, of course, when she'd gone she would have needed and taken them. But now summer had gone to Australia and it was time for thermals. Either she had emigrated with the sun (in which case who'd been posting the postcards in London?) or she'd had to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. I felt a frisson of detective triumph.

Underneath the shelves there was only darkness. I went to work with the torch and fingers and unearthed a shoebox. Inside was a set of ballet pumps wrapped in tissue paper. To the untrained eye they looked new and untouched: just the kind of thing to drive a private eye towards conclusions. Surely these were symbolic of a change of career? Breaking and entering: people only do it because they get so much out of it. Like tomb robbing. As a little girl I had always wanted to be an archaeologist-there was something about the licensed snooping that appealed to me. And that feeling of there always being another layer to uncover. Even with the shoes out it was clear the box was not empty. There it was, underneath the tissue paper, a fat bulging envelope full of papers. Using the torch at close quarters it took only a few minutes to rate the findings. Maybe not the death mask of Agamemnon, but enough economic history to tell you what had made Carolyn Hamilton tick. Bills, bank statements and finally solicitors' letters, the logical conclusion of taste without money. They made painful reading. Her main strategy, it seemed, had been plastic. There were statements from three credit-card firms stretching back for almost a year until last April. Cash withdrawals—a lot of them—clothing and bills that could well have been medical expenses made up the bulk of the expenditure. The statements marked April were for £2300, £1800 and £3000 respectively. By then all the cards had been cancelled and two put into the hands of debt collectors. If you added to those a clutch of outstanding telephone, electricity and gas bills it worked out that at the point when she disappeared Carolyn Hamilton had been in debt to the tune of something like £8000. It made my Hong Kong homecoming look like a celebration. Maybe I was being too subtle. With bills like this maybe I should be looking for her in Newgate debtors' prison. Except nobody had repossessed the flat. I glanced up at the light. And certainly something had mollified the electricity board.

I was on my way to check out the telephone when someone did it for me. The first ring was a bit like Norman Bates' mother coming through the shower curtain with a knife. It took me a while to get my heart back inside my body and realize it was just the telephone. Then I had to decide what to do about it. Seeing as I wasn't meant to be here there was a lot to be said for not answering it. On the other hand anybody who knew Carolyn Hamilton was somebody I needed to talk to.

On the other end of the line there was a lively silence.

‘Hello,' I said as quickly and indistinctly as possible.

‘Carolyn?' It was a man's voice. Dark, quite rough, even a little forced. It could have been anyone.

‘Mmmm,' I murmured, but even as I did I knew I'd blown it. There was a small shocked silence, then the line went dead. I sat for a moment cradling the receiver in the half light of the room, and then for the first time, with my fingers growing numb from the cold, I started to feel a little nervy, as if trespassing on someone else's life might lead you to have doubts about your own.

I stuffed the papers back into the envelope, the envelope into my bag and the shoebox back into the cupboard. Then, casting one last torchbeam around the room, I turned off the other lights and went out. Above me reggae had turned to funk and the house was vibrating. I could probably have broken down her door with a sledgehammer and still not been caught. Back in my car I sat with the engine running, trying to pump some heat into my hands. Across the street a tall man in a grey raincoat and hat was walking in the direction of the house. He turned in through the gate and went up to the front door. He stopped for a second, then took out a key and opened it. The music sucked him inside. Poor guy. Maybe he was thinking about sleeping. I looked at my watch. It was 10.27 p.m. I had been in her flat for nearly an hour. Funny how time flies when you're breaking the law. Back home I stuck the Degas postcard next to Miss Patrick's blurred snapshot. I thought they made a good pair. I wished them both good night and went to bed. I was feeling good.

Sunday. And since there wasn't much I could do to earn my living I took the day off. Carolyn Hamilton had been missing since May. Another twenty-four hours wasn't going to make that much difference. I dedicated myself instead to the domestic: hearth, home and sibling duty. I spent the morning cleaning the grease off the cooker and after lunch I went to see Kate.

It was usually that way round—me visiting her—but then sisters are to be forgiven most things, especially two children under three and a husband who thinks he's a newer man than he is. It was a bright freezing day. Islington sparkled, all spruce and upwardly mobile. There were new windowboxes on the two upper floors of the house, I noticed, as I stood with my finger on the doorbell. No doubt come spring there would be daffodils and tulips. Just as when we were kids. Like mother like daughter. If Kate was the chip off the old block I was the sawdust. Who knows, maybe I'd only rebelled because she'd conformed. The door, with its carefully restored Victorian glass, swung open to reveal Kate in a track suit, one arm full of chubby child. My first thought was how tired she looked, my second how lovely she still was, with her thick jet black hair in a long loose cut, and blue-black eyes, against a fair skin. The Irish side of the family. There had been a time when I minded that mine was the English legacy, all mouse-brown and freckles. As the younger it had taken me a while to get out from under her reflection and find my own sex appeal. But you can't really blame your own sister for a trick of the genes, and to her credit she had never used it against me. Maybe I had things she wanted, like eighteen months in hand and a natural mistrust of the world. She grinned and it momentarily chased away the shadows under her eyes. Inside, the baby, who still seemed far too young to be called Benjamin, was exercising his lungs.

‘Hannah. My God, when did yot—'

‘A few dAnd you?ays ago. I tried to call you but you were always engaged.'

She made a face. ‘Amy. She's obsessed with the telephone. Carries it around with her most of the day. We've bought her a toy one but she isn't fooled.'

Amy, in her arms, squirmed with pleasure at being the centre of the universe. ‘Hi, Amy, how are you doing?'

‘I'm bigger now,' she announced proudly. Obviously a lot of people had been telling her. ‘Wanna see my toys?'

After the obligatory introduction to three dolls and a duck called Malcolm I settled myself in the kitchen, making coffee while Kate changed the baby, and fed Amy, who in turn fed the dog. Domestic bliss. Like living in a circus. I thought about the silence of my own apartment and the empty spaces that made up Carolyn Hamilton's. Single girls of slender means. At least Kate had someone to pay the credit-card bills for her. Even if it did mean he spent most of every weekend working.

‘It's a sales conference. In preparation for the 1992 penetration of Europe,' she said with an admirably straight face. ‘Apparently it's terribly important.'

‘I'm sure. Do the kids still remember what he looks like?'