Birth Marks (7 page)

He shook his head and almost smiled. ‘Carolyn didn't commit suicide.'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘Because it's what I think.' He paused and I counted the empty glasses in front of him again. Seven including the one he had almost finished. It didn't seem to have affected his powers of thought up until now.

‘What else do you think?'

‘I think that in the end it was nothing to do with us. Me, you, her. Any of us. I think it was the old bitch that pushed her into the river. With her stupid ambitions and pressures and fairy stories. All the parental expectation. That's what killed her.' And he grinned. ‘Better than the butler, eh?'

A
ll the way home I had this image of her, standing by the river in the dark with so much weight on her shoulders that she had no need for stones in her pockets: Miss Patrick's expectations, her debts and someone else's baby. Which had proved the heaviest? The eight-month-old foetus? Except that was something else that didn't make sense. If Carolyn couldn't hack it with a baby then why had she left it so long to find out? It's not as if she didn't have any option. She was exactly the kind of girl a generation of feminists had worn out their shoe leather for, marching their way to abortion amendments and the right to choose. If she didn't want her career stopped by one renegade sperm there were places she could have gone, people who could have helped her. She may have been a country girl, but she wasn't a bumpkin. She had partied and played. She knew the score. Which meant either she had ideological objections to abortion (did the animal rights poster on her noticeboard automatically make her a member of LIFE?) or she started out wanting it but changed her mind. Or something had changed it for her.

I was so busy trying to feel what she might have felt that it kept me awake when I should have been asleep. It would have been easier if I could have gone straight from the restaurant to Colindale newspaper library. Searching out one particular newspaper ad from a dozen possible daily and Sunday papers over a period of two or three weeks is not the sexiest part of the job, but it keeps the mind occupied. As it was I got home just past 1 a.m., shattered and with an acute case of insomnia. I dutifully went through the old routine: the milky drink lying in the hot bath with a little night music. It relaxed me, but it didn't put me to sleep. In homage to Carolyn I resorted to drugs.

I rolled a joint and lay on the bed. Old hippies never die they simply go up in a puff of smoke. I could see Frank shaking his head in disgust. What the hell? It's healthier than booze and anyway, how can you uphold the law if you don't know what it feels like to break it? After a while I began to let go. I got up to switch off the light and caught sight of a naked woman in the full-length mirror. I turned to face her to make sure she was me. Yep, there she was, Hannah Wolfe, instantly recognizable from the spiky brown hair and boyish face.
Gamine
, that's what the French call it, except I'd probably be disqualified by the size of my tits. Had the left one really grown larger or was it just a trick of the dope? No problem with the stomach, though, that was definitely mine, a gentle hillock about the size of your average Chinese take-away. And they were my legs too. Not exactly the kind to sell swimsuits but pretty good for walking, sitting and even the occasional sprint. Now we were all gathered together and concentrating I thought about feeling my breasts for malignant lumps but couldn't be bothered. Do men do this, I wondered? Give themselves the quick once over, like cleaning the car and then checking the petrol and the oil? What do you do if you discover you need a respray? If women were cars, what would I be? A Fiat Uno with the road manners of an Audi. Ideas above my station. Kate would be, what, a Sirocco, Mrs Patrick a well kept Bentley, and Carolyn Hamilton…? Well, I suppose Carolyn would have started out as a sleek saloon and grown into a Volvo estate.

I tried to imagine what it must be like, blowing up slowly like a ripe melon. When does it start to feel like a baby and not an acute case of indigestion? And when do you start loving it enough to accept the havoc it's wreaking on your body? Especially Carolyn. It must be a particularly weird journey for her, a dancer, someone trained in the ways of malnutrition and boy-like body lines, to have to watch their female curves expand and fill until they become the earth mother with another set of feet practising point work on the inside of their stomach. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she'd welcomed it, had been tempted by the power of change, a chance to get away from failed ambitions and parental expectations. She might even have been enthralled by the prospect of her own tiny Markova pirouetting around her feet. Why not? What did dancers have ahead of them but old age and aching limbs? Or private eyes for that matter. What would I do when I was sixty, with no one to invite me to Sunday lunch or feed my canary when I went off for my annual fortnight in the geriatrics Club Meditérrané? Put like that it sounded pretty dismal. But then I was stoned and we all know how paranoia stalks those who smoke alone. Just as well Miss Patrick didn't indulge. The picture of her sitting amid her china and sepia prints, out of her skull on dope, did a lot to restore my sense of humour. I fell asleep to images of Paris filled with pregnant women, old dancers and fish that looked like Tab Hunter. I took it as an omen.

 

Colindale newspaper library is a long way from anywhere, except Colindale. The chairs are uncomfortable, the staff are even more bored than you are and the cheese sandwiches from the café down the road taste like they've been made of old copies of the
Sunday Express
. It does, however, have some things going for it, most particularly its newspapers. I had, of course, no guarantee that tracking down the Paris job would answer anything, particularly since Carolyn's postcards had all been postmarked London. But she had obviously been to France, more than once if Eyelashes was to be believed, and since it was the only lead I had I really didn't have much option. I had a hunch I'd find what I was looking for in the London
Evening Standard
, but hunches come in varying forms of strength, and this one was a little too pasty to risk. In the end it was just slog. A morning and into the afternoon. There were a number of candidates, but when I found it I knew it was the one. First in the
Guardian
on Friday 4 February, then in the
Evening Standard
7 February through to the 11th.

I called first, but only to check they were still at the same address. Nobody tells you anything on the phone, and I always think of myself as more impressive in the flesh.

The girls manning the Potential desks were a little less stylish than the decor, but they had that air of confidence that comes from one day personnel management courses and operating on commission. There were two ways to play this, the truth or deceit. Why pick one when you could have them both?

‘Well, I really don't think I can help you. You'd better see Mrs Sanger, the manager.'

Mrs Sanger was a little older, a little more haute couture and a lot more on the ball. ‘I'm sorry, but I've certainly had no communication with the police over this matter.'

‘Of course not. I'm just doing some preliminary work to help them with their inquiries.'

‘But you're not a policewoman.'

‘No, I'm a private investigator.'

‘Then I'm afraid I can't help you, Miss Wolfe. All our records are confidential.'

Oh well, brick wall. I thought about all the other ways I could try and get around it. Like joining the police or coming back after dark and breaking in to search the files. Crime had already got me a long way in this case, but Potential would almost certainly have better locks on their doors, not to mention an alarm system. I decided to stick with the verbals. ‘You do realise, Mrs Sanger, that this is a murder inquiry we're talking about.'

‘But I thought the papers said it was suicide.'

Gotcha. ‘The police have reason to believe otherwise. There were certain, how shall I put it…“suspicious circumstances”.' And I made the last two words positively tactile, like a twirl of the villain's moustache.

‘I see,' she said, quietly, meaning, of course, that she didn't. I left a pause.

‘So you do remember the girl?'

‘Yes, well I read something about it, of course.'

‘And she did answer the advertisement.'

‘Er…yes, I seem to remember she may have done.'

‘And it didn't occur to you that the police might be interested in knowing that?'

‘It was a long time ago. Almost a year now. Quite frankly, I didn't think it was relevant.'

‘Even though she got the job.'

All right, so it was just a flashy hunch. According to Scott, Carolyn hadn't got past the first interview, but then she'd spent years lying to Miss Patrick, why not a few white whoppers to others? There was a small silence. Probably Mrs Sanger's course had been longer than the others. She smiled. ‘I still don't see what difference that would have made.'

‘Mrs Sanger, according to the pathologist's report it is clear that Carolyn Hamilton conceived the child she died carrying during late April. Obviously any connections she would have made around or before that time are important. I appreciate the rules of confidentiality, but in the circumstances…'

Without the make-up and the fancy clothes I would have put her at about thirty-two or thirty-three. Younger than me and less used to this kind of encounter. I wouldn't say that was the deciding factor, but it probably helped.

‘All right, Miss Wolfe, what do you need to know?'

‘A description of the job and some kind of contact address for the client.'

She tried to look as if she was still making up her mind. Then she nodded slightly.

‘As for the job, I seem to remember that it was a temporary post, some kind of personal assistant to a French businessman. We were given a questionnaire to ask the girls, and after some basic vetting we faxed the best results along with photographs of potential applicants to an office in Paris. That was the end of our involvement.'

‘And Carolyn was one of the girls whose particulars you faxed.'

‘Yes.'

‘And did she get the job?'

‘I have no idea. We put in the ad, saw the girls and passed on a short list. I don't believe we had any further contact with the client.'

So much for the day's second hunch. ‘Isn't that rather unusual? I mean, aren't you usually paid for finding the right girl?'

She shrugged. ‘Not always. Different clients use different methods. In this case we were paid for vetting the applicants, not filling the post itself.'

‘And you weren't at all suspicious?'

‘Of course not. We were employed to do a job and we did it.'

You could see she thought we had reached the end of our conversation. I wasn't sorry to disappoint her. ‘Were you given any idea of what the job involved? I mean the ad read a little vaguely for a personal assistant post.'

She looked at me for a moment, then smiled. ‘Business is a complex industry these days, Miss Wolfe. A high-powered head of an important firm may have more than one personal assistant, you know; someone geared to office work, another to managing his social calendar, entertaining overseas visitors, the press, that kind of thing.'

She made them sound more like heads of states than producers of steel or sanitary towels. As a child of the seventies I still have trouble adjusting to this new capitalist utopia, where it's not what you do but how much you earn doing it that defines status. Speaking of which…‘The advertisement also mentioned “exceptional money”. Is that true?'

‘I seem to remember it was very well paid, yes.'

‘You seem to remember a lot of things about it.'

‘It was just before I became manager. I was the person who handled it.'

‘So you interviewed her?'

And she frowned slightly, ‘Yes.'

‘How was she?'

She thought about it. ‘She was a good candidate. Very attractive, bright, nice personality, a sense of adventure.'

Carolyn Hamilton redrawn as
Cosmo
woman of the nineties: gorgeous, self-confident and afraid of nothing. It has to be said, some people really let their jobs get to them. Still you can't be too careful. I filed this character description along with the rest of them.

‘The perfect woman for the job, in fact?'

‘I don't know. My memory is that the advertisement attracted a lot of attention. She wouldn't have been the only one they might have seen.'

‘So can you give me the Paris contact?'

She nodded and stood up. ‘It'll take a minute or two.'

Out through the glass wall Potential was hard at work, busy fitting square workers into round holes. I had been a temp once, pouching money during long winter months so I could spend the summer footloose and fancy free on some exotic Greek island. At least that had been the fantasy. In reality the money earned was never enough and I ended up typing chemical reports for a multi-national while London sweltered outside my window. I watched a middle-aged woman struggle with the plate-glass door, then hesitate in the entrance, wondering which bright young thing to approach. She looked in need of a job and therefore probably wouldn't get one. I tried to imagine Carolyn Hamilton in her place. A personal assistant to a French businessman. It didn't seem quite the thing for a dancer who went to animal rights rallies. Still, she had her own national debt to think about. The need to find eight thousand pounds can affect anyone's choice of career. Was it my imagination, or did Mrs Sanger look a little less poised on her return?