Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

I dumped my stale clothes in the laundry basket, left Richard’s jacket by the door so I’d remember to take it to be dry-cleaned, and dived into the shower. Needles of water stung my flesh on the borderline of pain, stripping away my world-weariness. By the time I’d finished with the coconut shampoo, the strawberry body wash and the grapefruit body lotion, I must have smelled like a fruit salad, but at least I’d stopped feeling like chopped liver.

While I was waiting for the coffee to brew, I booted up my trusty PC and took a look at the disks I’d raided from Helen Maitland’s consulting room. Each disk contained about a dozen files, all with names like SMITGRIN.DAT, FOSTHILL.DAT and EDWAJACK.DAT. When I came to one called APPLELEE.DAT my initial guess that the file names corresponded to pairs of patients was confirmed. I didn’t have to be much of a detective to realize that this contained the data relating to Chris Appleton and Alexis Lee. The only problem was accessing the information. I tried various word-processing packages but whatever software Helen Maitland had used, it wasn’t one that I had on my machine. So I tried cheating my way into the file, renaming it so my software would think it was a different kind of file and read it. No joy. Either these files were password protected, or the software was too specialized to give up its secrets to my rather crude methods.

I finished my coffee, copied the disks and sent Gizmo a piece of e-mail to tell him that he was about to find an envelope with three disks on his doormat and that I’d appreciate a print-out of the files contained on them. Then I went on a wardrobe mission for something that would persuade a doctor that I was a fit and proper person to talk to. Failing combat fatigues and a Kalashnikov, I settled for navy linen trousers, a navy silk tweed jacket and a lightweight cream cotton turtleneck. At least I wouldn’t look like a drug rep.

I raided the cash dispenser again and stuffed some cash in an envelope with the originals of the disks and pushed the whole lot through Gizmo’s letter box. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, not even Gizmo’s laconic variety. Next stop was Central Ref. It was chucking it down in stair rods by then, and of course I hadn’t brought an umbrella. Which made it inevitable that the nearest available parking space was on the far side of Albert Square down on Jackson’s Row. With my jacket pulled over my head so that I looked like a strange, deformed creature from a Hammer Horror film, I sprinted through the rain-darkened streets to the massive circular building that manages to dominate St Peter’s Square in spite of the taller buildings around it.

Under the portico, I joined the other people shaking themselves like dogs before we filed into the grand foyer with its twin staircases. I ignored the information desk and the lift and walked up to the reference room. Modelled on the British Museum reading room, the tables radiate out from the hub of a central desk like the spokes from a vast, literary wheel. Light filters down from the dome of the high ceiling, and everything is hushed, like a library ought to be. All these modern buildings with their strip lighting, antistatic carpets and individual carrels never feel like proper libraries to me. I often used to come and work in Central Ref. when I was a student. The atmosphere was more calm than the university law library, and nobody ever tried to chat you up.

Today, though, I wasn’t after Halsbury’s Statutes of England , or Michael Zander’s analysis of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. The first thing I wanted was Black’s Medical Directory , the list of doctors licensed to practise in the UK, complete with their qualifications and their professional history. I’d used it before, so I knew where to look. Black’s told me that Sarah Blackstone had qualified twelve years before. She was a graduate of Edinburgh University, a fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and she had worked in Obs & Gynae in Glasgow, then one of the London teaching hospitals before winding up as a consultant at St Hilda’s Infirmary in Leeds, one of the key hospitals in the north. It was clear from the information here plus the articles I’d taken from the consulting room that Dr Blackstone was an expert on subfertility, out there at the leading edge of an increasingly controversial field, a woman with a reputation for solid achievement. That explained in part why she’d chosen to operate under an alias.

Since the book was there in front of me, I idly thumbed forward. There was no reason why she should have chosen to use another doctor’s name as an alias, except that Alexis had told me that Sarah Blackstone had written prescriptions in the name of Helen Maitland. While it wasn’t impossible that she’d used an entirely fictitious name to do this, it would have been easier and safer to steal another doctor’s identity. If she’d done that, uncovering the real Helen Maitland might just take me a step or two further forward.

Impatiently I ran my finger down the twin columns, past the Madisons, the Maffertys and the Mahons, and there it was. Helen Maitland. Another Edinburgh graduate, though she’d qualified three years before Sarah Blackstone. Member of the Royal College of Physicians. She’d worked in Oxford, briefly in Belfast, as a medical registrar in Newcastle, and now, like Sarah Blackstone, she was also a consultant at St Hilda’s in Leeds, with research responsibilities. According to Black’s, and the indices of the medical journals I checked afterwards, Helen Maitland had nothing to do with fertility treatment. She was a specialist in cystic fibrosis, and had published extensively on recent advances in gene replacement therapy. On the surface, it might seem that there was no point of contact between the two women professionally; but the embryologist who worked on Helen Maitland’s patients’ offspring in vitro might well be the same one who worked with Sarah Blackstone’s subfertile couples. They’d certainly work in the same lab.

Even if I had all the files on the disks I’d recovered in the night, I still needed to make some more checks. The original computer files, of which I was sure these were only back-up copies, had to be on a computer somewhere. And I needed to check out whether the real Helen Maitland was sufficiently involved in Sarah Blackstone’s fertility project to be a potential threat to Alexis and Chris, or whether she was simply an innocent victim of her colleague’s deception.

Before I made the inevitable trip across the Pennines, I thought I’d make the most of being in Central Ref. Replacing the medical directory, I wandered across to the shelves where the city’s electoral rolls are kept. I looked up the main index and found the volume that contained the street where ‘Will Allen’ and his partner ‘Sarah Sargent’ lived. I pulled the appropriate box file from the shelf and thumbed through the wards until I got to the right one. I found them inside a minute.

It’s one of the truisms of life that when people pick an alias, they go for something that is easy for them to remember, so they won’t be readily caught out. They’ll opt for the same initials, or a name that has some connection for them. There, in Flat 24, was living proof. Alan Williams and Sarah Constable.

If I played my cards right, maybe I could get them done for wasting police time as well as everything else. That would teach them to mess with me.

I used the old flower-delivery trick on the real Helen Maitland. A quick call to St Hilda’s Infirmary had established that Dr Maitland was doing an outpatients clinic that afternoon. A slow scan of the phone book had revealed that her phone number was ex-directory. Given the protective layers of receptionists and nurses, I didn’t rate my chances of getting anywhere near her at work unless I’d made an appointment three months in advance. That meant fronting up at her home. The only problem with that was that I didn’t know where she lived.