Birth Marks

by Sarah Dunant

  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?’

  Only now did she allow herself to grin. ‘I know you don’t believe me, Hannah, but it isn’t as bad as it seems.’

  It’s an extraordinary thing about motherhood. Like drug addiction. Once you’re hooked you want to see others in the same state.

  ‘Don’t tell me, you’re completely used to living alone amid a wall of noise and constant lack of sleep.’

  She pretended to think about it. ‘The noise I can live with, the lack of sleep’s not so great. Colin says we ought to let him scream, but I can’t do it.’

  ‘So let Colin get up.’

  There was a small pause. ‘Well, he has to go to work. At least I can grab a nap in the day.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Yes…sometimes.’

  ‘My God, don’t you ever want to kill him?’

  She laughed. ‘Who? Colin or Benjamin?’

  I shrugged. ‘Either. Both.’

  ‘Sure. But it passes.’

  ‘So much for the pluses. What about the minuses?’

  ‘How about a stomach like an empty potato sack and a brain like a sieve? You should be grateful to me, Hannah. I’ve taken the pressure off you, remember. Carried on the family tree leaving you to go for the career.’

  Big deal. Aren’t I just what every parent wanted for a daughter—an over-educated private eye who could be earning better money teaching juvenile delinquents how to spell the word ‘crime’? Certainly not what I had planned for myself as I burst out of academic training, all shiny with energy and idealism. But then we all get our edges rubbed off sooner or later. Even so I had never intended to stay with Frank. It had just been a temporary job in between the career I had left and the one I had yet to decide on. At the time it was what I thought I needed, thinking about other people’s problems rather than my own. Except here I was, two years down the line, still looking for shoplifters and missing persons: power without responsibility, or maybe it was the other way around. No wonder my mother had turned grey. For Kate it ought to have been a tougher decision. She’d spent thirteen years in public relations with a large management consultancy: a good, well-paid job and she’d enjoyed it. They even offered to keep the job open for her. But it was always this that she’d wanted: the man, the home and the patter of tiny feet.

  ‘How’s Joshua, by the way?’ Good old Kate. Just a little research for the monthly letter home. ‘Do you ever see him?’

  ‘Occasionally. He’s OK.’

  Joshua—otherwise known as the great white hope of Hannah’s love life: dependable, solvent and tolerant of unsociable working hours. To be honest I can hardly remember what he looks like. We were, as the saying goes, just good friends who made the mistake of sleeping together and let it become a habit. When it ended it was not so much with a bang as a slow freeze-out: familiarity causing a gradual hardening of the emotional arteries. Almost as soon as he walked out it felt like a long time ago. Once in a while we still see each other, go to the occasional movie together, for old director’s sake. And my mother still sends him birthday cards, but then that’s hardly my fault. His disappearance completed her vision of daughter Hannah as a surrogate man—a few wild oats and a lady at the laundromat to do her washing. Since it keeps her off my back I have done nothing to disillusion her. And as for the patter of tiny feet…of course I think about it. Doesn’t everyone? But the older I get the more I realize I’m too young for it. I don’t trust my ego. I’m afraid I’d come home one day and find that it, like the cat, out of a mixture of jealousy and the need for more room, had smothered the baby. Kate says I probably just haven’t found the right man yet. But then she would, wouldn’t she?

  After their meal while Benjamin slept I took Amy for a walk in the park and we fed the ducks. She chattered away with all the fervour of a three-year-old for whom conversation is the newest and best toy, and I listened to some of it while the rest of me re-read Carolyn Hamilton’s postcards in my mind and thought about how a mother would feel about giving up her child to a dancing teacher, or how the child might feel about being given. And how none of them seemed to know each other well enough to stop eight thousand pounds coming between them. Then I took Amy back in time for tea and when portions of premasticated bread started to catapult around the kitchen I went home and made a list for Monday.

  It didn’t take me long to get through it. The City Ballet were somewhere in Europe on tour. If I wanted to talk to them I’d have to wait until they got back. The woman who answered the phone at Left Feet First told me that Carolyn Hamilton had left because of a disagreement with the management and that was all she was willing to say. When I told her I was a private investigator looking into Carolyn’s disappearance she softened up a bit, but still couldn’t help much. Carolyn had been with them for only six months or so. She was a talented dancer who probably could have carved out a successful career in contemporary dance except she just didn’t seem to have the motivation. A shame, but there it was. I thought again of those slender little ankles buckling under the pressure of Miss Patrick’s unfulfilled dreams. Obviously becoming a female Wayne Sleep wouldn’t have sufficed. Or maybe she just got tired of trying. I moved on to her finances, but her building society and the credit-card companies would say nothing at all.

  By early afternoon I was reduced to the Polish landlord again, but however much I tweaked he still didn’t have a name that directory enquiries recognized. Hardly an encouraging sign, having to go back to pushing doorbells, but then somebody somewhere in that house must have a contact number for the man they paid rent to. And who knows, maybe fate would really smile on me. Maybe this time she’d be there herself, home on a flying visit to pick up the mail and unable to resist the temptation of answering the doorbell just this once. Bingo, case solved thanks to Hannah Wolfe, private investigator extraordinaire.

  As fantasies go it didn’t last long. I knew it was a police car even before I spotted the other one parked on the opposite side of the road with its Dayglo go-faster stripe. Two police cars in a sleepy residential street on a Monday afternoon? Too bad to be true. I drove past them and parked about fifty yards further down. Then I walked back. The front door was open. And the girl from the basement was standing talking on the step to a patrolman. I walked on, not willing to risk being recognized, then doubled back along the other side of the road. I sat for a while in my car, but the police showed no sign of moving.

  Whatever it was it didn’t make the news that day. I was beginning to think I had over-reacted and that maybe someone had just complained about the reggae rousers upstairs when Tuesday morning’s breakfast TV went local. A young man, well scrubbed and radiating ambition, sat in a studio by a miniature model of Big Ben and told of a threatened strike on London underground, a fire in a children’s home in Uxbridge and a body found in the Thames. Then the picture came up. Even then I didn’t know her. The blurred smile and bright eyes squinting through from a curtain of hair were still the features of a stranger. I was so busy looking at her that I missed the first few words.

  ‘…near Barnes bridge early yesterday morning. She was named by police today as Carolyn Hamilton, a 23-year-old dancer who had studied at the Royal Ballet School and performed with the City Ballet and the modern company Left Feet First. She lived in North London. Police do not suspect foul play.’

  I sat
for a while watching the weather man count the clouds on his sweater. I thought about the colour of the water in the park where Amy and I had thrown the bread. And the cold. And doctors. I’ve always had this recurring thought about doctors—how they must feel when they lose a patient, and how you’d have to be a truly arrogant bastard to believe that it really wasn’t your fault. It’s probably good I didn’t go into medicine. From the mantelpiece where I had stuck the pictures, a dead girl grinned out at me, all past and no future. I felt like talking to someone who’d known her. But Miss Patrick wasn’t answering the phone. Some cases just never get off the ground.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Eventually the client gets in touch. If only to tie up loose ends. I could see how she wouldn’t much want to talk to me, so it was nice of her to let me off the hook.