Candleland by Martyn Waites

the report. All around him the lunchtime crowd were meeting, finding people, while he sat alone, searching, lost. The report was as Jackie Fairley said. The usual methods had been gone through – charities, institutions, hospitals, methadone treatment centres, social services, police, DSS – all blank.
    The elder of two sisters, youngest still living with her mother. Parents divorced when Karen was twelve, pressure of father’s work blamed. Father married to his job, policeman. Karen took the divorce hard. Father’s favourite, now forced to live with her mother who refused the girls any contact with him, persuading them he was to blame for everything. Karen began to believe he had never loved her .
    Her home life was unhappy – she and her mother had never got on. The mother remarried. Karen and the stepfather took a mutual dislike to each other. She began to run away, short jaunts at first, longer each time. Social Services brought her back, intervened, but were powerless to do anything. When she turned sixteen she left and didn’t go back. Her mother washed her hands of her. With one daughter and a new husband, Karen was more trouble than she was worth .
    Larkin had read Karen’s biography uneasily, the details of her life rendered in a just-the-facts-ma’am Joe Friday kind of way, a form of journalism he had never been able to master. It was both personal and impersonal, like trespassing in a house, close yet distant from someone. He tried to be as objective as possible, but he couldn’t help letting his imagination colour the heartache between the words.
    Details now become sketchy. Her father moved to Newcastle. Despite efforts on his part, Karen refused to contact him, still blaming him for everything. She drifted into drugs, heroin in particular, and began to mix with people who dragged her down. It was during this time that she became HIV positive .
    After a while she began to tell her peer group that she’d met someone and was going to London to make a new start. No one took much notice one way or the other. Junkies always talked like that. Then one day she was gone. At first her friends missed her, wondered where she was, but gradually began to forget she had ever been there as the need for the next fix took precedence .
    Larkin put the report down and looked round. Suddenly the pub seemed grim, oppressive. He knew it wasn’t really, that it was Karen’s story affecting him. He ordered another pint and picked up the pages again, scouring through for something – anything – that might give him a lead. His chest gave a sudden heart-gulp as his eyes fixed on a piece he’d somehow missed earlier. It wasn’t much, but it was the nearest thing to a clue he’d seen.
    Police had been called to a disturbance at 5 Cromwell House on the Atwell Estate in Shoreditch. A fight had been in progress, presumably a drug-related turf war, and everyone in the vicinity had been pulled in. Karen Moir was among the list of people questioned but never charged. She claimed she was just passing and had been drawn into it, and this couldn’t be disproved. Reluctantly the police had let her go. That was well over six months ago and that was the last time her name had been recorded anywhere. Slim, admittedly, but all Larkin had to go on. He stuck the report in his pocket, drained his glass, got out his A to Z and, excited to be doing something positive, made his way to Shoreditch.
    In conclusion, we failed to find Karen Moir. Whether she is still living under that name, or whether she is still out there at all, is a matter on which we can only speculate .
    To get to Shoreditch, Larkin had to walk through Hoxton, the hippest, most happening part of London. A charmless stretch between Old Street and Shoreditch High Street, a no-man’s-land where the City ends and inner city urbania starts, it had been overrun by artists, media folk and their attendant terminally hip