Birth Marks Read Free Page B

Miss Patrick’s expectations? An image of sexual abandon returned to me, Carolyn seduced from adopted filial duty by orgasm. It didn’t quite fit with the identikit angel with the advert hair, but then some fantasies tell you more about the person doing the fantasizing, and it had been a long time. Rule number three. Don’t get carried away by your work. After this one I’ll take a holiday. After this one.

CHAPTER TWO
    A s with most jobs you begin at the beginning. Nothing glamorous or dangerous about that. Finding something or someone that is lost usually means checking that it hasn’t simply been mislaid.
    Miss Patrick was right about one thing. Carolyn wasn’t picking up the phone. Neither was she answering the door. It was a big rather shabby house off the Kilburn High Road, with six buzzers decorating the front door. I pushed a few. The woman in the basement was friendly enough, but she’d only been there three weeks and hadn’t met any of the other occupants. No one else was in. I looked at my watch. 10.15 a.m. You don’t need to be smart to be a private eye but it helps. Once again breakfast had triumphed over punctuality. Those that had work would be there already and those that didn’t were either on their bikes looking for it or under the bedclothes with their Walkmans turned up against the day.
    I went back to the car and sat it out for a while. I watched a woman with a young child manoeuvring a pushchair full of shopping up on to an uneven pavement. As she pulled it up, one of the wheels caught in a rut and a bag fell out of the underbasket, spewing potatoes on to the paving stones. The toddler whooped with delight and went scurrying off in pursuit, scooping single potatoes up in double hands and tottering back with them like spoils of war. A man in a donkey jacket hurried past, stepping over the child and the potatoes, eyes firmly somewhere else, but an elderly woman stopped to help, and soon all three of them were busy picking up and repacking. What had begun as a chore for the mother had now become a game for the young and the old. The whole operation must have taken five or ten minutes. Another world. I was so engrossed that I almost missed the surly young man in black who came tripping down the stairs of number 22, carrying a large portfolio case and a personal stereo round his neck. He was in an awful rush and didn’t have time to answer questions from Carolyn’s elder cousin Mary, just down from the north. However, he managed to carve out a little space when I told him I was a plain-clothes police officer. He, now revealed as one Peter Appleyard, student of art at Goldsmiths’ College, was even kind enough to look at the photograph which I stuck under his nose.
    â€˜Yeah, she lived here. It’s a lousy photo though. She was much prettier than that.’
    â€˜You say “used to”. Has she moved?’
    â€˜Search me. All I know is I haven’t seen her for a while.’
    â€˜Since when?’
    â€˜Since when I can remember. Four, five months, maybe longer.’
    â€˜But you didn’t know her?’
    â€˜You kidding? Nobody knows anyone round here. We’re just “neighbours”.’
    â€˜So I’m right in thinking that you wouldn’t know where she might have gone?’
    â€˜Dead right. So, is that it, or do you want to take me in for loitering in a public place?’
    Kilburn, obviously another splendid example of successful community policing, I thought as I watched him disappear round the corner. I closed my notebook on the apparently unpronounceable name of his landlord, given with even less good grace, and looked up at the house. Carolyn’s flat was on the second floor. No windows open in the front and to get to the back you’d have to go over a dozen back gardens. I could probably talk my way through the front door. On the inside one there’d be a Yale and if I was unlucky a Chubb. Not