Birth Marks by Sarah Dunant Page A

missing little dancer.’
    Like all families we don’t see enough of each other. I wondered how much to tell her. Downstairs there was the clink of cutlery and dishes. Colin would be expecting her. But blood was thicker than a couple of bottles of Saumur and I needed someone to talk to. We sat down together on the top of the steps, little sisters eavesdropping on the parents’ party down below. And hearing adult tales. She was more upset than I expected.
    â€˜Oh, Hannah, what a terrible story.’ She was silent for a moment, not looking at me. ‘My God, the poor girl. What do you think happened?’
    â€˜Who knows. Obviously she felt she just couldn’t go through with it.’
    â€˜At thirty-five weeks? I can’t believe that. It’s just too late by then. The baby’s ready to be born. You can feel it pushing its way into place, waiting. It wouldn’t be just killing yourself, it would be destroying someone else too. I don’t see how any woman could do it.’
    â€˜Well, this one did. She even left a note to prove it.’
    â€˜What did it say?’
    I told her. She was silent for a moment, but I noticed a flash of tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I still don’t believe it.’
    And I thought about sweet Kate, sitting in her Habitat house with her Habitat man bringing her cups of tea and wallpapering the baby’s room, while Carolyn sat nursing an eighth-month belly, her dancers’ legs lost beneath her and nowhere and no one to go home to. ‘Maybe it was different for her. She didn’t have anyone. She was on her own.’
    â€˜That’s not what I mean, Hannah, you don’t understand.’ And her voice was fierce. ‘Earlier maybe, yes, then I can imagine someone being desperate enough to let it all go. But not by then. That’s the whole point. By then it’s not up to you any more. You’re no longer the one in charge. I don’t mean you’re not scared, I’m sure everyone’s scared. But it’s not that kind of fear, and even if it is, it’s too late to do anything about it. I mean by then even the man is irrelevant. It’s just you and it. And it wouldn’t let you do it.’ She stopped, then shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to explain it, there’s a kind of lassitude that comes over in you in those last few weeks, like being in suspended animation. You’re just waiting, both of you. I can’t describe it any better than that. All I know is, however bad things were, I just don’t believe she would have done it, whatever her note said.’
    For Kate it was a long answer. I didn’t reply. I remember her telling me how, just after Amy was born, she had felt as if someone had stripped away a layer of her skin, so that now everything felt more, and hurt more, but that stories of mothers and children hurt most of all. I felt alienated by her pain. As if she had done all the feeling for me, leaving me no room to find my own thoughts. Elder sisters. Who needs them? But you listen to them all the same. And who was I to say she didn’t know more about Carolyn Hamilton than any policemen or male coroner. Or childless private eye. The great divide again.
    â€˜Kate?’ Colin’s voice rose up amid the babble.
    She let out a small sigh, and the spell was broken. ‘Yes, Colin, I’m here. I’m coming.’ She turned to me apologetically. ‘Sorry, I can see that instinct probably makes for lousy detective work. But you did ask.’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. Because she was right. I had.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    N ext morning I filed Kate’s thoughts filed away under ‘intuitive detection’ and I went back to British Telecom. This time Etienne answered the phone. Or rather Mrs Etienne. Not so much an employment agency more a private housewife who had never heard of Potential, Mrs Sanger or a personal assistant position. When I asked to speak