The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall Page A

fashions of the late 1960s, in the shapes of suits and cars; and understated store fronts of the kind that made you wonder what made anyone buy anything in those days. Nothing remarkable, except…
    I froze the image. Over on the right side of the road was a small department store, opposite a grassy square. I could just about make out a name — Hannington's.
    Ten minutes on the web told me there were no department stores by that name still in operation in the US, or at least none who'd made their existence known to the internet. So I had to let scientific detection methods go hang, and work back from the conclusion.
    I tracked down a selection of 'San Francisco of Yesteryear' sites and spent a while dredging through evocations of the city's days of yore. My eyeballs were beginning to melt by the time I found a reference to a Saturday morning ritual for one little girl, now grown old, whose long-dead mother used to take her to look at fancy haberdashery in a store called Harrington's. They couldn't afford any of it. They just went to look.
    I flipped back to the freeze frame. I had misread the sign. The angle wasn't good, and sun was hazing out the film in a way that would have been difficult to predict when it was being shot. A quick check said there was no Harrington's still in business either, on the West Coast or anywhere else. Further web-mining with the new spelling established that the store had once sat on Fenwick Street, and been a big deal in its day. Big enough of a deal, probably, that my father might have assumed it would be there forever.
    So. San Francisco was confirmed. My brother was evidently capable of telling the truth.
    —«»—«»—«»—
    Fenwick was ten minutes' walk from the hotel. The streets were crowded, flocks of end-of-the-afternoon strollers and shoppers casting long shadows on clean grey pavements. Though the road had been widened, and just about every ground-level aspect of the architecture had been altered, it wasn't hard to see I was in the right area.
    When I drew opposite to the huge building that had once housed Harrington's, I ground to a halt. People cruised around me like leaves skirting a rock in a steady stream. The old store front had been split into two, and now held a Gap and a vast make-up emporium from which women of all ages were emerging with expressions of glee and very, very small bags in each hand. The floors above appeared home to the lairs of attorneys.
    I found my eyes drawn to the sidewalk in front of my feet. I didn't remember having trodden this precise spot, but I had. I had walked here holding my mother's hand. My father had filmed us. They were gone but the place was still here, and me along with it. I was older now than they had been then, but at the time I had been about the same age as a toddler I saw being pushed past me in a stroller, a small being so different from me that I found it hard to believe I had once been one.
    Time is strange.
    'You in a fucking coma, man?'
    I turned round to see a shithead in a suit standing behind me, unable or unwilling to do as everyone else had and step around me. I was about to explain how stupid this was but then realized I didn't want to get into another fight, even a verbal one.
    I apologized, moved aside. 'Asshole,' he said.
    A woman's voice said, 'Oh grow up.'
    I turned and saw it was the woman with the stroller, who had stopped to deliver this advice to the other man.
    He glared at her, then stormed off up the street. The woman winked at me and went her own way. In the trivial way cities sometimes do to you, I felt I had been taken inside.
    I glanced across once more at the corpse of Harrington's, then set off up around the other side of the square and headed west. I had a print-out of several frames from the final part of this section of the video, which showed the area where the child had been abandoned. I didn't have much hope of finding the actual spot, or even the street. But Chinatown lay in that direction,