Birth Marks

by Sarah Dunant

  I walked back via the all-night pizza joint and jogged the last two hundred yards with a Four Seasons balanced in my hands. Despite myself I felt OK. The power of escapism. It lasted all the way home.

  In retrospect I was surprised they’d bothered with the frontdoor lock. I had put a good deal of thought and professional advice into that one and it must have taken them some time. As we all know, if they’d come in through the back it would have been easy to force the loo window. Of course, girls with garden flats spend their lives waiting for this to happen. You either slap bars on every gap where the light comes in or do what you can and pray that they come when you’re out and don’t jerk off into your undies drawer. Up until now I’d been lucky. But this one, of course, had nothing to do with luck. I left the pizza on the step and went in slowly, just in case.

  The air reeked of it, that sharp, static quality of intrusion. But atmosphere was all that remained. No one was there. Neither, I realized as I turned on the living-room light, was the video or television. Give unto the insurance people what is insurable. I hit the bedroom. The report had been in the bottom drawer of my desk, tucked away amid tax returns and National Insurance records. It was still there. I sat down on the floor and held it in my arms. Hannah with her unharmed baby. Kate would have found it poignant. When the relief had subsided my brain came back. I checked the answering machine. Nothing. Then I went into the bedroom. On closer inspection the desk didn’t even look as if it had been disturbed. Certainly there was nothing to suggest a burglar with one aim and not a lot of time. Was I really looking at a piece of pure amazing coincidence? What do you think?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The police took most of the next morning and the locksmith the rest of the afternoon. I stayed in and watched the traffic go by. As far as I could tell no one was looking back up at me. Except someone had to have been there the day before, watching, waiting until I closed the door and disappeared off down the end of the street. The question was, had they also been at the station, or on the train north to Miss Patrick’s? The fact that I hadn’t spotted them didn’t mean they weren’t there, just that I wasn’t looking. This time, though, I was. After the locksmith had been I went out to the local post office. Halfway up the street a man got out of his car and started walking behind me. When I went into the building he carried on walking. He was nowhere to be seen when I came out, but that didn’t prove anything. In the time in between I had duplicated my report, sent the original to myself via Frank’s office and the other to Kate’s home. The car was still there when I got back. I took a note of the number. I had been away for only an hour. When I got back the little light on the message machine was winking joyfully at me. The cultured-pearl voice was Greville’s.

  ‘Miss Wolfe, I am sorry not to find you in. I have spoken to my client about your “conditions” and they have said they will think about it and get back to me. Obviously I can’t predict when. Perhaps you’d be so good as to keep the report somewhere safe until we can discuss the matter further.’

  Answering machines: a singularly great invention, except for the fact that they make everyone sound as though they’re lying—something to do with trying to have a conversation with a piece of tape. This time the number he’d left was not a paging service. Instead I got a machine. Please leave a message. I didn’t bother.

  The evening passed without incident. Kate rang to welcome me home and tell me she had sent Dad a cashmere scarf on my behalf. If need be I could pretend it was a second present. I thanked her, omitting to tell her how pissed off I was that she always assumed the mother role, leaving me as the eternal child.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘OK, don’t bite my head off, I’m only asking. You want to come for Sunday lunch? Colin will be away. If it doesn’t rain I thought I’d make a picnic and take the kids to the zoo.’

  ‘Sounds great. I’ll let you know.’

  I had put the phone down before I realized I hadn’t told her about the envelope due to drop through her letterbox next morning. She was engaged when I called back, probably talking to the family. I’d tell her tomorrow. I went to bed with a can of Mace, but it was more precaution than fear. You’d need to be a pretty dumb burglar to try again the very night after. I slept well. Next morning I woke up to the realization that, as far as the case was concerned, I was becalmed at sea and that until his or her client lordship decided to call me there was nothing else I could do. It just goes to show how wrong you can be.

  It arrived through the door just after breakfast, plopping on to the mat along with a catalogue for bulbs and a chance to win £200,000 by opening the envelope. It had come first-class, franked West London last post the day before. Inside there were two pieces of paper folded neatly. I opened them up. They were photocopies, forms of some kind with dates on one side and comments and the odd figure on the other, all handwritten in a small cramped style and all in French. I had to put them down on the table to stop my hands shaking. It didn’t help. The writing was appalling and even when the letters made sense the words they spelt often didn’t. Jargon? Technical stuff? At least the dates were readable. Starting in May and going through to January. No, not technical stuff. Medical stuff? A doctor’s report. On the other side of the dates one set of figures stood out: 130/90. What could it be but blood pressure? I sat down. What I was looking at was a copy of Carolyn Hamilton’s pregnancy record that someone had sent me in the post from West London. A report that according to Belmont had gone up in smoke. So what had happened? Did he change his mind (so how come no compliments slip?) or was this someone else’s billet doux? In which case—and let’s hear it in chorus now—whose? For somebody who had this case all buttoned up and ready to go, I was becoming severely unravelled.

  When in pain call a doctor. His wife gave me an office number. When I got through, his secretary said he was busy but then I knew that. When he called back he said he would make time. I knew that too. He’d meet me in an hour and a half at his office. I thought about ways of killing time constructively. Then I rang Frank. Funny. Half the time I’m not even sure I like him very much, yet when things get rough his is always the number I call. What does that tell you about my relationships to men? Kate would have a field day. Being Frank, of course, he wasn’t exactly sympathetic.

  ‘See what you get for not telling uncle what you’ve been doing. I could have you for moonlighting, you know.’

  ‘Come on, Frank. I resigned, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but indirectly you got this job through me. I could be asking for a commission.’

  ‘You’re on. Ten per cent of the money for ten per cent of the work.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t know if I can make it. I’ve got to see a man about a crime.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘OK. I can probably get there by twelve o’clock. What’s the name of the pub? Yeah, I think I know it.’

  The car was still there when I came out. A guy with a peaked cap was standing on the corner looking in a shop window. I saw him again on the tube. He got out at Goodge Street. I let him take the lift, while I used the stairs. By the time I got to the top he had gone. I didn’t see him again, but it was still the tail end of the rush hour and there were lots of people he could be hiding behind. I decided not to worry about him.

  The entrance to the Middlesex hospital brought back broken nights. Hugh Galton, not so much a physician, more an old flame, where the embers had never quite gone cold. It was a long time ago, but I like to think of myself as the one who encouraged him towards his specialty, gynaecology. We were amateurs then, of course, relying more on enthusiasm than skill: altogether too young and too raunchy for true love. When the real thing happened she was prettier than I and much more dedicated to medicine. Doctors and nurses; a professional coupling, bringing forth a brood of anatomically perfect children and a rapid rise to a consultancy in one of London’s best teaching hospitals. The teacher returning to the place where he had been a student. Bu
t for me it would always be associated with sex: sneaking myself in past white coats and black stockings to a bedroom like a monk’s cell where we lay crushed together in a single bed, till the bleeper separated us and I was left keeping the sheets warm while he was off to resuscitate the dead. Sex was our way of being alive. We couldn’t get enough of it.

  From the look of him he still couldn’t. Either that or his children had sleeping problems. It was good to see him. Over the years we had gradually lost touch, neither of us being the Christmas-card sort, but there are some memories that time doesn’t wither. I still thought he was cute, but I got the impression he wouldn’t appreciate hearing it. Maybe he was just a smidgeon embarrassed, being reminded of so much illicit past in the building of his official present.

  ‘So, Hannah, what can I do for you?’

  I smiled. Doctor-patient games. Didn’t everyone play them once? ‘I have something I need you to look at. A set of medical notes from a certain patient.’

  I took them out of my bag and handed them to him. He drew them out of the file, glanced at them, then back at me.

  ‘They’re in French.’

  ‘Yeah, I seem to remember you used to speak it quite well.’

  ‘Yes, but that was a long time ago.’ He glanced at them again. ‘Hmmn. Should I ask where you got them?’

  ‘Someone sent them to me through the post.’

  ‘What about the patient?’

  ‘She was a missing girl I’d been employed to find. She’s dead now.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She died a few days after the last entry, when she was eight months pregnant. I need to know if there might have been any medical reason for her death.’ I paused. ‘I’m not asking you to do anything unethical.’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking at me, then looking down at the pages.

  I waited. On his desk was a portrait of three little girls, giggling together on a beach somewhere. They looked cute too, although not in the same way. He was studying the last page, then he went back to the beginning. I could feel my palms getting sticky.

  ‘Now I know how my secretary feels when she tries to decipher my handwriting. Let’s see.’ He shook his head. ‘From what I can work out—and I must say that’s not a lot—I can’t see any immediate major problem. Though her blood pressure was on the high side towards the end. How did she die?’

  ‘She fell in a river. The suggestion is she might have had some kind of fit and lost her balance.’

  ‘Eclampsia?’ He made a face. ‘On first glance hard to confirm that one way or the other. The blood pressure would fit, but there would have to have been other signs. I think there may be a couple of urine tests here, though I’d need to translate the results to be sure of a protein reading. But you know the symptoms of pre-eclampsia are pretty hard to miss. Most doctors spot it long before it gets to the serious stage, make their patients rest, even take them into hospital if necessary.’

  ‘Yes, well, in this case hospital would have been very much a last resort and she might just have disobeyed advice.’

  ‘Silly girl. Hmmn. Eclampsia? I assume the fact that you’re here at all means that the PM didn’t show up anything.’

  ‘No, although they didn’t have the medical report.’

  ‘No, but they had the corpse. Chronic eclampsia would probably show up in the foetus. Still, I suppose it depends on how hard they were looking.’

  ‘Probably not that hard. She left a suicide note.’

  ‘I see. Or rather I don’t. Curiouser and curiouser, eh? Well, all I can say is if eclampsia was the problem it’ll be in here somewhere. Let’s see. Otherwise everything seems pretty normal. Except, of course, for the blood type. She was Rhesus neg.’

  ‘Rhesus neg? What does that mean?’

  ‘Not a lot, normally. It’s not exactly rare—something like fifteen per cent of the population are negative. But under certain conditions if the father is Rhesus positive, well, you want the long explanation or the short?’

  ‘Let’s start with the short.’

  ‘Basically it can cause problems for the baby. If the foetus is also rhesus positive, of which there’s a good chance, and the woman has developed antibodies either from a previous pregnancy or a termination or a mixed-match blood transfusion, those antibodies will start to attack the baby’s blood. In the old days in extreme cases a baby could die in utero from erythroblastosis foetalis—sorry, anaemia and heart failure. If it was born alive it would be badly jaundiced and have to be given an immediate exchange transfusion to get the antibodies out of its system. Fifty years ago, before it was properly understood, rhesus disease was a killer. But now it’s no big deal. Here in Britian most rhesus-negative women are given a shot to prevent antibodies anyway. And if not we can do safe blood transfusions in utero after 22-23 weeks.’

  I wondered vaguely what the long explanation would have been. ‘And what about in Carolyn’s case?’

  ‘Well, as I say, it doesn’t seem to have been a problem. At least not as far as I can tell. She was young. If this was her first pregnancy the chances are it wouldn’t have been relevant anyway since she would never have developed the antibodies. And they would have monitored her throughout anyway. But this is all off the top of my head, you understand. If you want me to confirm it you’d have to give me time to study the notes properly, get to work with a medical dictionary.’

  ‘One more question. Would it have made any difference if the child had been conceived by artificial insemination?’

  ‘None at all. Of course since the process is anonymous they wouldn’t know the blood type of the father—’

  ‘Actually in this case it wasn’t anonymous. She knew him.’

  ‘Really? Well, maybe his blood type is in here somewhere too. AID but not anonymous, eh?’ I nodded. ‘Well, I don’t suppose I should ask what the story behind this was.’ He smiled. ‘I seem to remember you always got very hot under the collar about secrecy. What was it?—“the public’s right to know”. You must have changed your mind about some things.’

  ‘Oh, you know, growing older.’

  He shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’

  I used to love his sense of humour. It had been one of the most attractive things about him. That and the touch of his body in the cold young hours of the morning. Across the desk my old lover smiled at me, the same crooked smile I remembered as being such a turn-on. For years after we split up I’d harboured this fantasy that we had unfinished business, him and I, and that some time in the future we might share a moment of erotic reminiscence, powerful enough to make us think of getting back on the couch. But sexual memory can do strange things to the psyche and like most things anticipation is often all the pleasure. When it came to it, we were no longer twenty-two any more. I was neither as invincible nor as invulnerable as I had been and he, alas, was no longer as irresistible. The moment slipped away. I don’t know whether he even noticed it. He leant forward in his chair, gathering up the notes. ‘I’m sorry to rush you, Hannah, but I have a ward round with second-year students in ten minutes.’

  I wondered if they looked younger than traffic wardens, but didn’t ask. He walked me to the door. I held out my hand for the file. ‘Leave it with me. I’m at the Hammersmith later today. There’s a consultant there whose wife is French, he worked in Paris for a couple of years. I’ll see what he says. Maybe I can come up with something a bit more useful.’

  I had remembered the name of the pub on the corner perfectly. Frank wasn’t there, but then it was only 11.15 a.m. At the bar a young man in a houseman’s coat was sitting propped in front of a pint of beer smoking a cigarette. The end of the day and the night shift. Poor things. No wonder nurses want to look after them. I ordered a Bloody Mary and a cheese roll. Elevenses. Frank would be proud of me. As he’s only too eager to tell you, the new licensing laws have done a lot for the image of private investigators in Britain. In the old days when you had something to thrash out you had to go to a café and sit playing with your teaspoo
n and rock cake. I took a swig of the drink. Too much Worcester sauce and not enough lemon. I decided to leave it for Frank who probably wouldn’t notice.

  He called an hour later. The place was already filling up for lunch as I made my way to the phone. The barmaid told me not to be long. ‘You know, Frank, people are going to think you’re just a figment of my imagination.’

  ‘Listen, there’s nothing I can do. He’s doing me a favour, all right. If I’m not here when he gets back I won’t get another chance. You I can do on the phone. Come on, tell me what you’ve got.’

  So I did. He listened carefully all the way through. And to give him credit he thought a bit before he went to work on it.

  ‘So where’s the report now?’ I told him. ‘Good. And the medical records?’

  ‘Copy with me, copy with Hugh.’

  ‘You think he’ll find anything?’

  ‘I don’t know. Except why else would someone send them to me?’

  ‘How about if Belmont was looking for a way to convince you he kept his side of the bargain: a couple of sheets on care and concern of the pregnant wouldn’t go amiss.’

  ‘So why not give them to me then, why go to all the trouble of having them posted in London three days later?’

  ‘Maybe he changed his mind. Got worried that you might not see it his way after all.’

  ‘Maybe. But that still doesn’t help explain who the client is. And who broke into my house two nights ago.’

  ‘Yeah, well there you gotta decide whether it’s coincidence with a big C or a little one.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning you could be making it more complicated for yourself than need be. You know how it pains me to kick you when you’re down, but you know it wouldn’t be the first time. Remember the Pollack case.’

  ‘Frank, I was wet behind the ears. And I still say the car could have belonged to his wife.’