Birth Marks (23 page)

I shook my head. ‘Maybe not.'

‘So take a spare set of keys. You'll need our car anyway. The tubes are buggered and there are no taxis to be had.'

‘Colin'll go mad.'

She smiled for the first time. ‘Why do you think I'm offering it? The keys are hanging up by the door.'

We looked at each other. I gave her a quick hug. ‘Thanks, Kate. You're a real older sister.'

‘I know. That's what worries me. Should I ask you if you'll be all right? On second thoughts just do me a favour, will you? Have an adventure for me while you're at it.'

As I closed the door she was heading upstairs to the sound of fury.

F
insbury Park doesn't make a great impression at any time of the day, but it's at its worst around the time when the pubs close and people realize there's nowhere to go but home, even though it's the last place most of them want to be. No wonder he hadn't wanted to invite me back to his flat that night in February. Just as well I'd found an address anyway. He wasn't in. But that was hardly a surprise. If he was dancing, then the show had either just come down, or not yet gone up, depending how bad a job it was. I was willing to wait.

I stayed in the car. It was warmer that way and more of a deterrent for people who might feel tempted to run their pound coins along the side for a lark. Good thinking, Batwoman. Good strategy too. Start with the questions you can answer and maybe the others will give themselves up in gobsmacked admiration. OK, so on the surface Eyelashes might be an outside choice, but he wouldn't be the first man to swing both ways, and if he didn't want me to know, how better than to play it more camp than he really was. That he had been fond of her had shone through even his exaggerated cynicism. When it became clear, after three months of trying, that the Belmont sperm wasn't capable of making babies, why not go to him? Certainly it had been his number she had called eight months later when she'd really needed help, even though she'd never arrived at his door to collect it. The taxi pulled in at 11.45 p.m. I had to move to get to the door before he was inside it. I caught him by the gate. He whirled round. I think, for a second, he thought I might be a mugger hiding in the bushes. I put my hands in the air to show him I had dropped my knife.

‘Hi. Remember me?'

It took him a few seconds. ‘Yes. Wish I could say I didn't.'

‘I need to talk to you.'

‘Don't you always? Well, sorry to disappoint you, dear, but much as I'd love to invite you in I've got an audition in the morning and I must get my beauty sleep.'

‘Don't worry, it won't take long, if need be we can do it out here. Just a couple of questions. Tell me, are you exclusively gay or do you sleep with girls?'

‘We-ell…Now is this meant as an offer or an insult?'

‘Or maybe that's not the right way to put it. Maybe I should ask if you're bi-sexual?'

‘ACDC, darling. Get the jargon right.'

The camper he got the more I was sure. ‘Next question. Where were you between the nights of 29 April and 2 May? Your bed or hers?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Oh come on, Scott. I wasn't born yesterday. And I know a good deal more than I did when you last lied to me. What happened? Did she ask you or did you offer?'

He seemed so well protected that I was almost surprised when it hit home. Even in the street light I could see the face crumple. If this had been a happy-ending type of story I would have thrown my cap in the air and yelped for joy. As it was, I just closed my eyes for a second. ‘OK. At last. Now I've got some things to tell you. Do you want to hear them out here or invite me inside?'

It wasn't big, but it had style—Habitat filtered through a couple of interiors magazines, ideas rather than money. You could see he had put a lot of energy into it. The drinks cabinet was an old safe painted matt black. He clicked the code while I made myself comfortable in a tubular chair. He hadn't looked at me since that moment on the street. I decided not to rush him.

He poured a generous measure. Among his many jobs he'd probably been a bar tender. I waited. He sat down on the sofa and put his elbows on his knees cradling the glass between his hands. He still wasn't looking.

‘It was no big deal. I mean we'd messed around the odd time before. It was just a nice way to spend a night, that's all. She was a good-looking girl. And yes, I like them both. There's no crime in that.'

‘Except when you're setting out to deceive and defraud.'

‘Listen, I don't know anything about that. She just came round one night and offered. I accepted.'

‘Bullshit, Scott. And I tell you I'm getting tired of coming back to hear the things that you don't tell me first time round. Except now I'm not the only one who wants to know, and I can always flash my address book open on your page. My suspicion is they won't be as understanding as I am.'

He looked up and you could see he was frightened. It was a bit cruel really, but fuck it, I had enough of him getting away with it. ‘I swear that was all she said. Of course I had a good idea it wasn't the truth, but when I asked, she told me it was better if I didn't know. She just wanted a favour. If I didn't give it she could always go elsewhere.'

‘And if you did?'

‘She said when she was rich she'd take me on a Mediterranean cruise.' He laughed even though we both knew it wasn't funny. ‘I always knew she'd find some way of getting out of it.'

Boy, if I'd known then what I knew now. ‘So why didn't you tell me, Scott?'

He lifted his glass to take a drink but it was too fast a gesture and Scotch splashed on to the carpet. He scowled. ‘I don't know. I was scared, I suppose.'

‘Of what?'

‘That she'd done something wrong and that they'd come looking for me. She sounded pretty freaked out on the phone. I've thought about it a lot since.' He looked up. ‘It was some kind of surrogacy deal, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, some kind. Only it was the sperm that was the really important bit.'

He nodded. ‘So what happened?'

‘It's a long story. And most of it I don't think you'd want to know.'

He looked at me for a moment, then dropped his eyes. ‘They found out.'

‘Of course, they found out. Jesus, Scott, what did you think? Come to that what did she think? That someone was going to just hand over sixty thousand pounds and not check the merchandise?'

‘Sixty thousand?' he whistled through his teeth.

‘If they hadn't discovered it when they did, they would have found out later, after the baby was born. They would have tested for paternity. She must have realized that.'

He was silent for a moment. Then he said quietly, ‘I think she thought she could get away by the time that happened. Or that they would want it so much it wouldn't really matter.'

At last, after all this time, I could hear it, Carolyn's voice secondhand in my ear. So, I had been right. She wasn't just a victim. All along she had had her own scam going, her own game plan. Except in the end she just hadn't been smart enough, had only been one jump ahead when she should have been three. Still, you could see how it had happened. Such a lot of money. How could she not have been tempted? ‘Yeah, well, under other circumstances she might just have been right. But not with this family. This guy wasn't looking for
any
child. He was looking for his. Nothing else would do.'

‘So he checked it out while she was still pregnant?'

‘In a manner of speaking, yes.' Why tell him? He'd thought he was being a friend to her. Wasting my time wasn't really crime enough to deserve carrying this one around with him for the rest of his life.

We were both silent. I imagined her sitting here, that long shower of hair cascading down a slender naked back. Had it been a quick fuck, duty over passion, or had they squeezed some long slow pleasure from it? Maybe it made you a better lover, knowing how to be the woman as well as the man. He had a good body. Let's hope for her sake it was one when the earth moved. That was one secret he could keep for himself.

‘Listen, I know you think I lied to you about the baby, but she never told me, I swear. She didn't say anything that morning on the phone. Just that she needed a place to stay and she'd be coming soon. That was all. When she didn't turn up I suppose I knew that something had gone really wrong. I kept calling her flat, just on the off chance. Late on Saturday night someone picked it up. But it wasn't her.' He looked up at me. I nodded. ‘Yeah, that's what I figured. Bet it scared the shit out of you too. Christ, I wish she'd told me. I mean I'm not that much of a shit. I would have helped her, you know. I would have looked after her.' I let him play with it for a bit. There was nothing I could say to help anyway. Eventually he let it go. ‘What happens now?'

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.