She paused for a second.
“She also found a request from Croydon University Hospital for her records. They were requested by the Ante-Natal unit there, so I’m guessing your girl probably had a baby there, the ages are about right; she was thirteen when she was treated at George’s, and almost 21 when her records were requested, so she’d be 23 or so now. Does that sound right?”
I thanked Georgie for her help, but she passed it off as nothing.
“If that doesn’t pan-out, call Teddi Akonwande at Croydon Univ Hospital and give her my name; she’s the Paediatric Registrar there, and she’s a nice girl, a very nice girl, she should be able to dig something up on the QT.”
I couldn’t resist it.
“So Georgie, were you and this Teddi ever…?”
I could hear the grin in her voice.
“Many, many times, Dar, as you well know, you grubby little voyeur; I like to keep my bow well-strung, and she knows which bits to pluck…”
I feigned shock.
“You are such a dirty girl! There are places for people like you! Thanks for the assist, Georgie, I knew you’d come through for me.”
“Glad to help, Dar, you and that yummy little wife of yours! If you really want to thank someone, send mum a box of cherry liqueurs and a bottle of Tokay, she did all the work, or you could send Lena over…?” she finished hopefully.
I laughed and rang-off, and a few seconds later my phone beeped as a text arrived. When I opened it, it listed the address Mrs. Patterson had found, which came as a slight shock; I knew that road, I knew it well; it was only a short drive from Tooting Broadway, where I’d lived as a medical student; I used to park on that road when I went to ‘The Windmill’ pub at Clapham Common some evenings! To think, I might even have walked past Julie, or her brother, once, or maybe dozens of times. I was almost humming with excitement; all I could think was that we might have just made a breakthrough…
It was late the following afternoon before I had a chance to call Emma and ask her to come over, what with kids, meals, hunting for lost pacifiers, and generally trying to restore order to the turmoil and chaos that results when a three year-old boy and a toddler live with you, and require you have three pairs of eyes and reserve 500% of your time free solely for them; having mum there was a Godsend; the kids love their nana, so they mob her instead, leaving Lena time to shop, clear-up, clean, cook, do laundry, and try and have a rest in the midst of it all.
Emma lives in a place called Sea Mills, on the outskirts of Bristol, so it took her an hour or so in the Saturday traffic to get to us, but when I told her what Georgie had told me, and showed her the address she’d sent me, she was almost jumping with excitement; the last time she’d gone to London to try and find Julie and Mark, she’d gone to their old address in Acton; the address I now had was in Streatham, miles from there, in another part of London altogether.
She was all for charging off there immediately, but I had to decline; I wanted to spend my first free weekend in several weeks with Lena and the kids, so we compromised; the next free weekend I had, which would hopefully only be a couple of weeks away, we’d go together and knock on the door. Emma agreed, happy that we were finally following a real lead. Even if it came to nothing, at least we’d tried.
*
It took another two weeks before my conscience finally got the better of me; not that I was trying to dodge this or anything, it was just that we were still short-handed on the Surgical team, and I hadn’t exactly objected too loudly when I was rostered-on to do additional shifts with the promise of time-off in lie. It was late June before I was able to take that accumulated time-off, make some hotel reservations, and collect Emma for our fishing-trip to London, to see if the address I had from Georgie was still valid. Lena declined the trip; Mo-Mo was teething, and Lena wanted to be close to her, so it was just Emma and me who made the journey.
When I parked-up I looked around in wonder; I hadn’t been here for over four years, but nothing had changed: same hedges and gates, same massive old London Plane trees lining the pavement, same huge red double-decker buses; it was like I’d never been away, and for a second, a wave of homesickness for London swept over me as the place that had been my home for almost seven years unfolded in my mind again.
We found the house easily enough, a large red-brick Victorian detached town-house, four storeys high, a sign of the affluence in days gone by of this part of London. At first I was reluctant to knock on the door, but common sense prevailed; wasn’t this what we were here for? So I rapped on the door, and stood back, conscious that in a few seconds we’d find Julie, or discover we’d made the journey for nothing.
After a few seconds, the door opened, and there was a beautiful Eurasian girl, almost as tall as Lena, and a few years younger, pale-skinned and with long, curly, blue-black hair, and the most vividly blue eyes I’d ever seen, even more striking than my Lena’s.
“Can I help you?” she asked, looking quizzically at Emma, then, as her gaze fell on me, her eyes widened.
This was it, show time.
“I wonder if you can help me,” I began. “I’m trying to locate a Julie Jameson; the last thing I know about her was that this was her address, but that was over ten years ago now; do you know of her, or perhaps have a forwarding address, anything like that?”
The girl looked me up and down, seemingly fascinated with me, and seemed to come to a decision.
“Please, come in and take a seat.”
We filed in after her, and sat in the comfortable sitting room in the chairs she indicated.
“I’ll need to get my mother; I’ll only be a moment,” she said, once more looking strangely at me. She was only gone for a few minutes, before she came back with a tiny Asian lady, Thai or Vietnamese, obviously her mother. She was carrying a tray with teapot, cups and saucers, and a plate piled high with warm brioche fingers. She smiled at us and sat down on an easy chair, perched on the edge as she looked intently at us.
“Please to have tea, drink, please, be careful, it hot. Eat, too, fresh brioche, I make just now, you have some, please!”
After the pouring of tea and a nibble of the really quite exquisite sweet brioche fingers, the Asian lady spoke to us again.
“My daughter tell me you looking for someone called Julie Jameson?” she ventured. “Why you come looking here? She not live here.”