Birth Marks

by Sarah Dunant

  ‘Miss Wolfe, I have no idea if you can find Carolyn, but I need help and you are here, so I suppose I had better employ you. You will need an advance, I presume?’

  Hannah, I thought to myself as I took the money, you’ve got to stop dazzling clients like this.

  With cash in my pocket I took a taxi back to the station. It left me half an hour to kill. Why sit and daydream when you could work? The local directory yielded up a total of five Hamiltons. From the public phone booth I called them all. ‘I would prefer it if you didn’t disturb them, Miss Wolfe. She hadn’t seen her family in years. I am sure she wouldn’t go to them now. Not without telling me first.’ So said Miss Patrick. It was not that I didn’t believe her, it was more a question of being safe rather than sorry: no point in spending a fortune ferreting around London when the girl you’re looking for is sitting by the farm aga learning how to bake bread and re-establish family values. But when I found them, her father—at least I assume it was her father—didn’t seem that interested in his daughter’s where-abouts.

  ‘No, she doesn’t live here, she’s in London. I don’t know how you got this number, she’s not been here for years. What? I don’t know, you’d have to ask the wife. I suppose she’s got it somewhere. We really don’t keep in touch. If you want to see her you should speak to Augusta Patrick. She knows more about Carolyn than we do. What did you say your name was?’

  But I hadn’t, and there wasn’t much point in telling him now. Nothing like paternal affection to set a girl on the right road for life. Families. Either they love you too much or they don’t love you enough. No wonder they’re called nuclear. Maybe Carolyn was just trying to cut loose from all her apron strings. I thought about the pain and pleasure of leaving home. And how, of course, you never really succeed. Even if you stop writing the letters and picking up the phone.

  The train was twenty minutes late, and not interested in improving the situation. We crawled through the edge of daylight into a grey winter evening. I sat and watched till the sheep were eaten up by darkness, then turned my attention to the grey file.

  Carolyn Hamilton. Her life story in words and pictures. Not much really when you consider the effort that must have gone into it. A thin black scrapbook retold the news: a series of local cuttings celebrating a young girl’s success, first in provincial competitions then in winning medals and lastly in getting into the Royal Ballet School. A blurred news picture showed a delicate little fair-haired girl in costume, poised and posed. Then there was another, older, more confident Carolyn, staring straight into the camera, hair scraped tightly back, eyes bright and smiling. Closer to she was good looking, but in that long-haired high-cheekboned way that most dancers are. Maybe bone structure and nimble feet go together. Or maybe they just don’t eat enough. Either way I’d be hard pressed to pick her out of a corps de ballet at ten paces. I turned over a few more pages. Sure enough there were the line-ups, a bevy of adolescent swans all clamped into cute little white-feather headbands and stiff white tulle, flashing Colgate smiles. About as much help as a mug shot. The final picture was at least out of costume. This time the young woman had her hair down, a great shining wave of it, gushing over her shoulders and down her back, like an ad for conditioner. But the photograph had been taken into the sun and the face was all cheeks and mouth, the eyes screwed up and squinting. At a rough guess she could have been anyone. So much for the visuals.

  I moved on to the correspondence, although that proved altogether too grand a word for what turned out to be a stash of postcards. They dated back a year, to the time when, according to Miss Patrick, Carolyn had left her job without telling her patron. Mind you, if these were representative of their communication, then she could hardly have expected a full account. Postcards are usually the way people tell you they don’t want to write you letters.

  These particular haikus were all much the same, all in the ‘Dear Aunt Maud, thank you for the book token. Hope the cat is well, love Hannah’ mould. For a 23-year-old Carolyn had retained an alarmingly youthful style. Still, hers was a physical rather than a verbal talent. Why should one expect eloquence? But what about intimacy? Wasn’t she writing to the woman who had become her second mother? It must, I realized after I had read it, have been one of the last postcards Miss Patrick had received.

  ‘Dear Miss Patrick, This week I saw a marvellous production of the Romeo and Juliet at the Garden. Working hard on a couple of new pieces, music by Rodney Bennett. There is a possibility of a tour sometime in the spring. Will let you know. Yours, Carolyn.’

  I turned it over. A Degas dancer bent low over her shoes, the graceful curve of her back inviting admiration. Maybe the words were in the pictures. I flicked through the others. Consistently vacuous. Even the last, postmarked 6 December and sent from somewhere in the West End with a snow-scene stamp and a Christmas franking greeting, was the same anodyne diet of weather and ballet repertoires. Hardly the words of a girl about to disappear. But then that’s the point about clues, you have to go looking for them.

  Deeper in the folder I found the address and phone number of the last job, a company which I had never heard of. Given my Baryshnikov experience I wasn’t willing to stake my life on it, but the Cherubim Studios in the Walworth Road didn’t sound like the City Ballet or the Rambert. Could it be that Carolyn’s shoulders were flagging under the burden of Miss Patrick’s expectations? An image of sexual abandon returned to me, Carolyn seduced from adopted filial duty by orgasm. It didn’t quite fit with the identikit angel with the advert hair, but then some fantasies tell you more about the person doing the fantasizing, and it had been a long time. Rule number three. Don’t get carried away by your work. After this one I’ll take a holiday. After this one.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As with most jobs you begin at the beginning. Nothing glamorous or dangerous about that. Finding something or someone that is lost usually means checking that it hasn’t simply been mislaid.

  Miss Patrick was right about one thing. Carolyn wasn’t picking up the phone. Neither was she answering the door. It was a big rather shabby house off the Kilburn High Road, with six buzzers decorating the front door. I pushed a few. The woman in the basement was friendly enough, but she’d only been there three weeks and hadn’t met any of the other occupants. No one else was in. I looked at my watch. 10.15 a.m. You don’t need to be smart to be a private eye but it helps. Once again breakfast had triumphed over punctuality. Those that had work would be there already and those that didn’t were either on their bikes looking for it or under the bedclothes with their Walkmans turned up against the day.

  I went back to the car and sat it out for a while. I watched a woman with a young child manoeuvring a pushchair full of shopping up on to an uneven pavement. As she pulled it up, one of the wheels caught in a rut and a bag fell out of the underbasket, spewing potatoes on to the paving stones. The toddler whooped with delight and went scurrying off in pursuit, scooping single potatoes up in double hands and tottering back with them like spoils of war. A man in a donkey jacket hurried past, stepping over the child and the potatoes, eyes firmly somewhere else, but an elderly woman stopped to help, and soon all three of them were busy picking up and repacking. What had begun as a chore for the mother had now become a game for the young and the old. The whole operation must have taken five or ten minutes. Another world. I was so engrossed that I almost missed the surly young man in black who came tripping down the stairs of number 22, carrying a large portfolio case and a personal stereo round his neck. He was in an awful rush and didn’t have time to answer questions from Carolyn’s elder cousin Mary, just down from the north. However, he managed to carve out a little space when I told him I was a plain-clothes police officer. He, now revealed as one Peter Appleyard, student of art at Goldsmiths’ College, was even kind enough to look at the photograph which I stuck under his nose.

  ‘Yeah, she lived here. It’s a lousy photo though. She was much prettier than that.’

  ‘You say “used to”. Has she
moved?’

  ‘Search me. All I know is I haven’t seen her for a while.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since when I can remember. Four, five months, maybe longer.’

  ‘But you didn’t know her?’

  ‘You kidding? Nobody knows anyone round here. We’re just “neighbours”.’

  ‘So I’m right in thinking that you wouldn’t know where she might have gone?’

  ‘Dead right. So, is that it, or do you want to take me in for loitering in a public place?’

  Kilburn, obviously another splendid example of successful community policing, I thought as I watched him disappear round the corner. I closed my notebook on the apparently unpronounceable name of his landlord, given with even less good grace, and looked up at the house. Carolyn’s flat was on the second floor. No windows open in the front and to get to the back you’d have to go over a dozen back gardens. I could probably talk my way through the front door. On the inside one there’d be a Yale and if I was unlucky a Chubb. Not impossible, with the right tools, but a lot of time and trouble. And in daylight there was always the risk of being caught. I went back to the car. 12.30 p.m. I had already spent half of one of Miss Patrick’s crisp big notes and learned absolutely zero. Nothing like failure to give you an appetite.

  As punishment for my late rising I made myself wait for lunch. I headed south, through Marble Arch and Park Lane, then across Victoria and Chelsea Bridge into the hinterland of the south. I ate at a sandwich bar on the Walworth road, slap bang next to the headquarters of Cherubim.

  At 1.50 p.m., three young women and a guy came in, all Isadora scarfs and pumping-iron calf muscles. They ordered salads and yoghourt and cappuccinos. The young man paid. They sat themselves down near the window, laughing and giggling, neat lean bodies and bright expressive little hands. It’s a great feeling, being on top of your job. I felt giddy with success. Or maybe it was just the coffee. Once my balance returned I walked over to join them.

  ‘Excuse me.’ They looked up. And I’ve seen people more pleased to see me. But then they didn’t know how much fun I could be. ‘Do you, by any chance, belong to the Cherubim Company?’

  You could see they already thought I was a loony. A bag lady in training, or some girl who’d grown too large to dance and spent her days hounding others more fortunate. The Samaritan of the group, a girl on the end with long dark hair caught up in an elaborate French plait, smiled slightly.

  ‘The Cherubim Company? Yes, I suppose you could call us that.’

  ‘I’m a friend of Carolyn Hamilton. She told me she worked here. I hoped I might see her.’

  There was a small still silence in which everyone seemed to be looking at the young man without directing their eyes in his direction.

  ‘Carolyn Hamilton,’ said Miss Braid again. ‘Well, she used to work here, yes, but she’s not with us any more.’

  ‘Oh, what happened?’

  ‘I…’ She opened her mouth, then seemed to wince, as if someone had kicked her under the table. Which, if you come to think about it, must be one hell of a hint for a dancer.

  ‘She left about six months ago.’ It was the boy who interrupted. He had a lovely fawn-like face, with eyelashes that had been stolen from a beautiful girl. ‘We don’t know where she went.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Do you know why she left?’

  ‘No. I think she just got fed up with the company,’ he said, playing mischief with the last word. ‘Wanted a change, I expect. God knows it happens to most of us.’ And then they all laughed, as if he had said something enormously witty, which of course he hadn’t, unless perhaps you were a dancer. Another world. Would Carolyn Hamilton have found it funny? I had no idea. I stood on the edge of their group, not fitting in. Marginal, that’s what we private detectives are meant to be. It’s supposed to help us keep a sense of morality when all around are losing theirs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

  ‘Would someone in management be able to help me further? It really is very important that I get in touch with her.’

  The boy shrugged his shoulders. ‘You could try. But they’re not awfully good at keeping the ones they’ve got, let alone following up the ones that got away.’ And they all giggled again. Which is how I left them.

  You don’t have to be in analysis to know that humour is a defence against pain. Once inside Cherubim you could see what they had to be so funny about. Of course, I’ve read Penny of the Wells, or whatever her name was—I know dance studios are about work rather than glamour, but even without expectations Cherubim was a bit of a sleaze pit. Not so much a company as a second-rate dance school. No wonder they had taken me for a retard. On my way to the administration office I peered in through a couple of keyholes. The class of young women on points looked decidedly shaky and the rest of it was definitely more Fonda than Fonteyn. When I finally managed to find the woman behind the name on the door, she made the café boys and girls seem positively garrulous by comparison.

  ‘She was here, then she wasn’t.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means she came in January, taught a few student ballet courses. I booked her in for some spring and summer classes and she let me down. I never heard from her again.’

  She picked up a cigarette and held it between pink varnished fingernails. They matched her lipstick. And her track-suit top. Even her blonde hair had a certain strawberry tint to it. Maybe somebody had once told her that the colour suited her. People can be so cruel.

  ‘And that was when?’

  ‘I’d have to look it up. April or May, I think.’ I waited. ‘May,’ she said, having looked it up.

  Six hours on the case and I was wallowing in corroborations. Give or take the odd week Carolyn Hamilton had been missing from house and job for almost seven months, but had been writing home for another six. Interesting.

  ‘And you don’t know where she went?’ I was beginning to feel like a record that had got stuck.

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care.’

  I wondered if she had been this gentle with Miss Patrick. I was beginning to feel bad about the fifty quid I hadn’t earned. I hoped I wasn’t going to feel worse. I handed her a card.

  ‘Let me know if you see her again, all right? It’s important.’

  ‘“Hannah Wolfe, Private Investigator,”’ she read. ‘Funny. You don’t look like one.’

  ‘Yeah, well, disguise is a vital part of the job.’

  She turned the card over in her hands, feeling the embossed letters. You could see she was impressed. Just like I was when I first got them back from the printers. ‘So this is why everyone wants to know where she’s gone.’

  ‘Everyone?’ I echoed softly, just in case.

  ‘Yeah, you’re the second person I’ve had asking after her.’

  ‘Who was the first?’ Even though I already knew.

  ‘Some old lady who wanted to know if she was on tour.’ She laughed. ‘Wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  ‘Same as I told you. She’d gone and I didn’t know where. Why? Is that “important”?’ And you could tell she was thinking of all those movies where the detectives have more money than brains.

  I smiled. ‘Not important enough, I’m afraid. Unless of course you told her anything else.’

  It was her turn to smile. ‘How about somewhere she might get hold of her?’

  ‘Somewhere other than 22 Torchington Road, you mean?’

  And she stopped smiling. You see. Thrift in all things. My mother would have been proud of me. As I was going out of the door I thought of something else I didn’t want to pay for. Worth a try anyway.

  ‘One more thing. Who’s the young guy with the real fake eyelashes? He was in the café next door buying lunch for the girls.’

  But he who laughs last…She shook her head. ‘You’re the private investigator, Miss…’ By the time she’d glanced down at the card to finish the sentence I was gone.

  Outsid
e it was coming on to rain. Someone had snapped the car aerial, but at least the stereo was still there. I managed to dredge up a crackling version of Radio 3 and tuned into something that could have been Brahms but might have been Beethoven. It got me through the rest of the afternoon. Surveillance, Frank calls it. I always found it rather a grand word for waiting. But it has its pleasures. What other job pays you to sit and let your mind graze while your eyes do the working? I found myself thinking of an art teacher I had once had. And how she was so good at her job that for a whole six teenage months I had yearned to become an artist, just to be like her. Somewhere in an attic my mother still cherishes the fruits of my obsession, some dreadful lifeless portraits signed with an ostentatious flourish. Role models: as dangerous as they can be inspirational. It set me wondering how charismatic Miss Patrick must have seemed to a young farm girl driven by notions of grace and grandeur. I was wondering so hard I missed the back announcement of the symphony. But I caught the time check: 6.15 p.m. and still no sign of Eyelashes. Maybe he hadn’t come back to work after lunch. I gave up. Tomorrow, as someone much prettier than I once put it, is another day.

  The rain got harder as I drove north. I had to admit I’d felt more triumphant in my life, but then that was to be expected. It is always hard at the beginning: like finding yourself in a foreign country without the language, it takes time to acclimatize. Especially with missing persons. Who were they anyway but factual figments of another person’s imagination? When you did find them they were never the person you expected them to be. If I found Carolyn Hamilton she would be the same as all the others, just different in a different way, if you see what I mean.

  I got home and wrote out my report for the day. It didn’t take long. That left the evening. If London had been L.A. or Chicago, or even New York I could have hit the streets now and ended up in a dozen places where a private eye might feel at home. I saw myself propped against a bar sipping bourbon and swapping cocktail recipes with the bartender, or dipping French fries into a pool of ketchup while Kirsty, my waitress, refilled my coffee cup. Not exactly images to set the world alight but all part of the myth, and a good deal more convincing than the Holloway Road Chinese take-away where the beansprouts were welded together with MSG, or the local pub where a woman drinking alone after 8.00 p.m. was about as unobtrusive as a fish on a bicycle. And about as comfortable. I thought about going through my address book and inviting a friend round for a drink. But three months is a long time away. Reconnecting would mean recapping and I didn’t feel much like talking. To tell the truth there aren’t that many people I prefer to my own company, and in the dark, without the grease stains, the flat felt almost cosy. I made myself some pasta with a carbonara sauce and opened a bottle of Chianti. Then I retired to bed with schlock TV and wasted ninety minutes watching a Clint Eastwood movie where people slugged each other to the percussion of natty little fist cracks. The only time in my life someone had hit me in the face the overriding memory was of a thudding crunch of pain and chipped bone, echoing through the caverns of my mind. I couldn’t talk for a week and in the right light you can still see the dent. Clint, however, woke up in bed next to a blonde bimbo without a scratch on him. I fell asleep in disgust and had bad dreams.