Birth Marks Read online

  I stared into my glass. It was a good question. I had a frightened woman carrying an ailing foetus on the run from the man who had just lost his last chance to buy shares in earthly immortality. I had a nephew who could pilot his own plane to London, but had a flight report that said he couldn’t have got here in time, a wife who probably took too many anti-depressants to care one way or the other and a housekeeper, a doctor and a chauffeur, all of whom were being paid to keep their mouths shut. I also had an anonymous client, and—and this wasn’t just coincidence any more—a set of medical notes that one of the aforementioned five people had decided I needed to see. And just to really screw things up I had a suicide note that claimed full responsibility. None of it made any sense at all. Back in the car I tossed a coin. Tails I give up and go home for the night. Heads I keep on trying. Queen Elizabeth as a young girl stared up at me in profile. I decided to behave like a policeman.

  According to Frank, some of his greatest triumphs had come from getting inside the criminal’s head. ‘Imaginative reconstruction, Hannah. You go where they would have gone, do what they would have done, think what they would have thought, and eventually fuck up where they fucked up. And in the end they do, you know. There’s always something that gives it away, it’s just a question of finding it.’ It was the kind of Frankism that was probably only half bullshit, but it had always sounded too like a TV cop show for me. Still, when you’ve got nothing else to do…She wasn’t exactly a criminal, but she was all I had got.

  It took me just under an hour to get to Kew. I passed through Kilburn on the way, just to double-check the time from her house. Of course she might have taken public transport (certainly no cab driver had come forward to give evidence, but then neither had any bus or train driver) and the traffic would have been a lot heavier. Let’s call it an hour and half door to door. It was getting on for 2 a.m. when I got there. Anyone still up was certainly not on the roads. I drove over Kew bridge, parked the car on the other side, then walked back. At the middle of the bridge I hoisted myself up on the side and sat there, staring down at the black water below. The place was deserted, not a soul to check if my solitude was pain or pleasure. Not at all as it would have been at five o’clock of a Saturday afternoon. Then it would have been jumping. She would have had to pick her way down to the river bank and walk until she found a spot where the people and the lights had died away. And while the rest of the world was using its credit cards and making restaurant reservations for the evening she would have been loading the stones in her pocket and searching for the right place to throw herself in. Returning to the scene of the crime. I looked up river to where the towpath lights ended and the darkness began. But where exactly? Maybe Frank would have gone to look. But not me. This story had already seeped its way in through the cracks of my defences. No point in scaring the shit out of myself for nothing. Or maybe there was a point. I swung my legs over the outer edge of the parapet and edged forward until there was just a few inches between me and the drop into the water. The bridge lights dappled the surface, picking out veins of running silver. Pretty in a cold kind of way. I thought about the times in my life when failure had far outstripped success, when I had been alone and feeling as bad about myself as I did about the rest of the world and when there hadn’t been any practical, let alone any philosophical, reason for getting up the next morning. But it wasn’t enough. The water still looked cruel, not at all like any kind of way out. Maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough. Once again I tried to slide my way under her skin, burrow into her brain. Whatever her spirit she was still just a young girl in deep financial trouble who’d taken one hell of a gamble and lost. Having set out to save herself from debt she had ended up even worse, as a thief taking money under false pretences and not able to give it back. And not just a thief: very possibly a kind of murderer also. Her own child. Even if she hadn’t wanted it, how could she let it die and stay alive herself afterwards? It or her. Her or me. Fifteen feet below, the water winked at me. I took one hand off the parapet. Then the other. Then I put them both back. She must have been braver than I. Or driven stupid by more despair. If I had been her I might have just come here to torment myself, but I would never have followed through. Instead I would have hailed the first cab and fled to a hospital, saved both it and me and faced up to everything else when it came looking for me.

  Which, of course, is what she must have been planning to do when she had called Scott that Friday. Otherwise why bother to get in touch? Needing somewhere to stay presupposed being alive long enough to stay in it. And choosing the father of your child as your host showed at least some sense of coherence in the midst of despair. Coherence and strategy. She had been careful enough to warn him that someone might come looking for her, had told him to keep quiet about it. As late as twenty-four hours before her death she had been ready to fight to keep them off her back. Did it really change everything when she realized they had found out? It was still the same baby, still hers, still slowly sliding into unconsciousness. Despite or more likely because of that she’d still been plucky enough to get the hell out of there and make her way to London. It just didn’t make sense to get this far only to give up. What she needed was a doctor whose first oath was to medicine rather than Belmont, someone who would help first and ask questions later. Except who and where? When the police had plodded their way around the emergency clinics and gynae wards nobody had remembered a long-haired young beauty, eight months pregnant, coming in off the streets that afternoon in the kind of trouble you wouldn’t forget. And one thing was certain: once she’d got in there no doctor in their right mind would have let her out. So she hadn’t gone for help. Could she really have been too scared even for a hospital? But in which case why go all the way home just to write a suicide note? If she was looking for the nearest piece of river why not come straight here from the airport? Equally, if she was at home why the hell travel all the way here when she had her own perfectly good black water just down the road at Westminster or Waterloo.

  Welcome home to the old problem. What was Frank’s resident cliché? If you can’t find the answer then you’re not asking the right question. Back to the facts. Even a slipshod pathologist can tell fresh from sea water diatoms, and the contents of her stomach showed only one sort. She had died swallowing water which had not come into contact with the sea. Given that and given how long she’d been in the water she must have gone in somewhere around Kew or Hampton Court. Science doesn’t lie. Her stomach proved she’d gone in up river. Her note proved she’d been home first. But as Daniel had said, home was the first place they would go looking for her. And home, was indeed where he had gone. He had arrived at Heathrow at 8.40 p.m. From there, according to him, he had driven straight to her house. Assuming VIP treatment through airport bureaucracy and customs and Saturday night traffic, Heathrow to Kilburn would have taken what—an hour, hour and half. Let’s say 10.00 p.m. No, let’s say later. Let’s say it took longer and that he arrived nearer 10.30 p.m. By which time I was sitting back in my car thawing my hands back to life after the ice of her living-room. And, as I sat, I was watching the figure of a tall man in a trench-coat walk in through the front gate and up to her door. Except he didn’t need to ring the bell, or even fiddle the lock. Because he had a key. Of course. How else could they have collected her mail over the last eight months? And then I saw the empty table in her room as it had been half an hour before, illuminated by the brief light of a naked bulb and then the more methodical sweep of my torch beam. And last of all I thought of the suicide note, that sad little litany of words. With the rumble of the river in the background I recited it out loud, the prelude to a final act of contrition. Holy Mary, mother of God, forgive me for I have sinned…‘By the time you read this you will know the truth. I am sorry for all the deceit and the trouble I have caused. Also for all the money which I cannot repay. It seems the only thing I can do is to go. Please, if you can, forgive me.’

  …For these and all the sins of my life I am very sorry. But
most of all for the sin of stupidity, Hannah. ‘The only thing I can do is go.’ But a debt to Miss Patrick isn’t the same thing as the money owed to the Belmonts, and the deceit of a concealed pregnancy isn’t the same thing as deliberately picking the wrong father for the child. And most of all, leaving France isn’t the same as leaving life, although, given the circumstances, you can see how a coroner might just have been fooled into believing it was.

  I got down from the bridge and walked slowly back to my car. She had written the note and left it in the summerhouse. Which meant they must have found it after she’d gone. But for Daniel to bring it with him to England they must already have appreciated its ambiguity. Yet facts are still facts and forensics is still a science. According to the pathologist she had died between 4.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. Daniel touched down two hours later. So let’s say for the sake of argument that death was the automatic punishment for betrayal in Belmont’s post-resistance world. Let’s even assume, however much it hurt, that Daniel had the stomach as well as the strength to drown an eight-months pregnant woman just because his uncle asked him to. The question remained—how could he possibly have thrown Carolyn Hamilton into the Thames at a time when he was still on the other side of the Channel? And if it wasn’t him then who the hell was it? How many times do I have to tell you, Hannah, it’s not the answers but the questions…I tried again. And again. And eventually I got somewhere. This time I drove to Kilburn via Heathrow, just to check the time. It worked. Shame it was too late to thank Frank personally.

  If it hadn’t been for Colin’s car I would probably have gone straight back to the airport. It was nearly four when I got to Islington. In the kitchen the only paper I could find had Amy’s abstract doodling on one side, but sometimes art has to suffer for the sake of history. It took me the best part of two hours to write the report out twice. By that time Benjamin had decided it was time to get up and Kate didn’t have much option but to agree. When she came down to fill up his bottle she looked more weary than I did and I’d been up all night. He on the other hand was radiant, all smiles and top-o’-the-morning-to-you. She slumped in the kitchen chair and plugged him in, while I made a pot of tea. We sat together and chomped our way through a plate of custard creams and chocolate digestives—midnight feasts postponed from childhood.

  I think now that most of my childhood had been spent trying to catch up with Kate, trying to narrow that eighteen-month gap that meant she did everything before I did. And even when I’d managed it, had gone more places, done more things, slept with more men, I could still look back and find her in front of me. Three weeks ago I had sat on her staircase, hearing her lecture me about how it couldn’t have been suicide, regardless of what any note might have said. If I’d listened to her right from the start, I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.

  ‘I went to Finsbury Park,’ I heard myself say, ‘to see a dancer she used to work with, the father of her child. Then I went to the river. And now I have to go back to France.’

  She studied me for a moment, then said, ‘You don’t have to tell me, you know. I didn’t ask.’

  I nodded, then pushed one of the small piles of Amy’s drawings across the table towards her. ‘Maybe if you get a moment you could read this before you stash it in the airing cupboard.’

  ‘What is it—a whodunnit?’

  I shook my head. ‘More a how than a who. It’s gripping stuff as far as it goes. Unfortunately it doesn’t have an ending.’

  ‘Is that why you’re going to France?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  She smiled. ‘What happened? Did you fall for the bad guy?’

  Yesterday it would have made me mad. Today I allowed myself to give it some thought. Without the luxury of sleep to fortify my defences it was a little easier. She was right, of course. Something had gone down between us. I could continue to dismiss it as the attraction of dress sense, adrenalin over vocation, or I could look at it for what it was: the break-up of the iceberg, even the first sign of spring. Hannah ‘Self-Sufficient’ Wolfe comes out of hibernation to test the air. Admirable stuff if it wasn’t for the timing. And the man. Still, it never stopped Humphrey Bogart from shopping Mary Astor. But then she really was one of the bad guys. Whereas Daniel…well, not one of the good guys, certainly, but further than that…

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, after a while. ‘I think that’s one of the things I’m going to find out.’

  She nodded and shifted Benjamin to her other arm. She looked down at him for a second, then back up at me. ‘You know the first six months after Amy was born I used to have this recurring nightmare. I was locked in this room. I had gone in there voluntarily and closed the door behind me. But then I couldn’t get out. There was a tiny window up high. If I climbed up I could just see out of it to a long stretch of road. And there was this figure walking along it, away from me. It was you.’ She laughed. ‘Pretty basic stuff, eh? I was so ashamed of its literalism that I could never tell you. Well, that and other reasons. After a while it faded. Amy got bigger, I found I could cope better, found that, as well as loving her so much it scared the wits out of me, I even quite enjoyed it. And now it seems altogether possible that having children doesn’t end your life. So now I only envy you some of the time.’ She paused. ‘Funny thing is I get the impression you could say the same about me.’

  I thought about the witty things I could say to deflect her, about how it was hardly the kind of thing a private investigator could admit to, undermining, as it did, the image. But in the end I didn’t say any of it. In fact in the end I didn’t speak for a while. I think it took me more by surprise than it did her. Eventually she dug a tissue out of her dressing gown pocket and pushed it across the table. It smelt of baby. I blew my nose. ‘I haven’t slept,’ I said after a while, maybe by way of an apology.

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll find it good practice.’

  I shook my head. ‘I might not want a child, you know. Not every woman does.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said gently. ‘I just think you should give yourself the chance to choose. Isn’t that what you would have wished for your little dancer?’

  And, of course, she was right. On the wall the kitchen clock read 5.45 a.m. I stood up. ‘I have to go.’

  She nodded. ‘So, back to criminal proceedings. Do you want me to leave this thing in the airing cupboard after I’ve read it or what?’

  ‘No. Maybe you should duplicate it and send it to Frank under my name.’ I screwed up my mouth into my James Cagney impersonation. ‘And if you don’t hear from me within twenty-four hours, kid, tell him to open it.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I was lucky. At Heathrow the Duty Operations Manager was the same guy who’d been on shift that Saturday night. Of course he didn’t want to tell me anything, but a bit like Deep Throat he was willing not to deny it. I caught the 9.00 a.m. flight. No messing this time. I had hired a car from London and it was waiting at Charles de Gaulle. The trip to Villemetrie lasted 34 minutes on the autoroute, but then I wasn’t sure of the road and it wasn’t the latest model. In a private plane Daniel would have flown out of le Bourget, but he would have been in the BMW and could easily have made up the extra distance in speed. My whole journey took under three hours, or two, discounting British summertime. For Daniel it would have been shorter. I parked fifty yards or so from the main gate, in the entrance to a field. Outside the house two big black cars were waiting. I thought about leaving it until after lunch, but to be honest I couldn’t wait. I went in over my favourite piece of wall, on through the forest and parallel to the polluted little river that ran along the edge of the garden. It was six days since I’d been here. Spring had already made a difference. The grass had sprung up and the foliage was denser. I crossed the dirty brown river at the same point, the lake on my right. On the long patio at the back of the house a trestle table was set up covered in a white tablecloth with a few round smaller tables near by, with chairs. Not so much a business lunch as a party: a birthday or c
elebration of a young/old marriage and a golden position in French society? I made my way across the lawn not bothering to conceal myself. Even if they threw me out now they would have to let me back in again. I was halfway to the house when a figure appeared on the terrace, tall and willowy, dressed in black with that shining cap of fair hair. If I could see her, then she must also be able to see me. I kept on walking. She stood there for a moment, very still, looking towards me, then turned and sat herself at one of the tables. She opened her bag. I caught sight of a red spark and then watched her settle herself in the chair, cigarette gracefully in hand. She made an elegant figure, silhouetted against the rich brickwork and symmetry of windows. Is that what Belmont had seen ten years ago, an aesthetic complement to an architectural folly? It was more convincing than the image of Mathilde as a child-breeder, a torrent of ruddy-faced babies gushing forth from those slender loins.

  The last twenty yards was pure theatre, or rather film. The prop girl had placed a chair at right angles to her, the sun slicing on to it. I sat down. She let her head fall back into the warmth of the sun. Close to she looked particularly stunning, the cream skin against soft black crêpe and a single row of pearls around her neck, sheer stockings and shiny black shoes. Six days ago I might have labelled her silence as some kind of damaged eccentricity. Now I was pretty sure it was confidence.