Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

‘Move one of the team and sit down,’ Dr Maitland said, waving a hand at the pine chairs surrounding the table. I pulled one back and found a large tabby cat staring balefully up at me. I decided not to tangle with it and tried the next chair along. A black cat looked up at me with startled yellow eyes, grumbled in its throat and leapt elegantly to the floor like a pint of Guinness pouring itself. I sat down hastily and looked up to find Helen Maitland watching me with a knowing smile. ‘Tea?’

‘Please.’

She opened a high cupboard that was stuffed with boxes. I remembered the filing-cabinet drawer in the consulting room. ‘I’ve got apple and cinnamon, licorice, elderflower, peach and orange blossom, alpine strawberry…’

‘Just plain tea would be fine,’ I interrupted.

She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I’m caffeine free. I can do you a decaff coffee?’

‘No thanks. Decaff’s a bit like cutting the swearing out of a Tarantino film. There’s no point bothering with what’s left. I’ll try the alpine strawberry.’

She switched on the kettle and leaned against the worktop, looking at me over the rim of the cup she’d already made for herself. Closer, the youthful impression of her stride and her style was undercut by the tired lines around the eyes. There was not a trace of silver in her hair. Either her hairdresser was very good, or she was one of the lucky ones. ‘Dr Blackstone’s death came as a shock to all her colleagues,’ she said.

‘But you weren’t really colleagues,’ I pointed out. ‘You worked in different departments. You’re medical, she was surgical.’

She shrugged. ‘Hilda’s is a friendly hospital. Besides, there aren’t so many women consultants that you can easily miss each other.’

The kettle clicked off, and she busied herself with tea bag, mug and water. When she slid the mug across the table to me our hands didn’t touch, and I had the sense that this was deliberate. ‘She must have known you reasonably well to feel comfortable about pretending to be you. She was even writing prescriptions in your name,’ I tried.

‘What can I say?’ she replied with a shrug. ‘I had no idea she was doing it, and I have no idea why she was doing it. I certainly don’t know why she picked on me.’

‘Were there other doctors she was more friendly with? Ones who might be able to shed some light on her actions?’ I cut in. It was the threat of going elsewhere that had got me across the threshold, not the rain. Maybe repeating it would shake something loose from Helen Maitland’s tree.

‘I don’t think she was particularly friendly with any of her colleagues,’ Dr Maitland said quickly.

That was an interesting comment from someone who was acting as if she were on the same footing as all those other colleagues. ‘How can you be sure who she was and wasn’t friendly with? Given that you work in different departments?’

She smiled wryly. ‘It’s very simple. Sarah lived under my roof for a while when she first came to Leeds. She expected to sell her flat in London pretty quickly, so she didn’t want to get into a formal lease on rented property. She was asking around if anyone had a spare room to rent. I remembered what that felt like, so I offered her a room here.’

‘And she was here long enough for you to know that she didn’t have particular friends in the hospital?’ I challenged.

‘In the event, yes. She was here for almost a year. Her London flat proved harder to shift than she imagined. We seemed not to get on each other’s nerves, so she stayed.’

‘So you must have known who her friends were?’

Dr Maitland shrugged again. ‘She didn’t seem to need many. When you’ve got a research element in your job and you have to work as hard as we do, you don’t get a lot of time to build a social life. She went away a lot at weekends, various places. Bristol, Bedford, London. I didn’t interrogate her about who she was visiting. I regarded it as none of my business.’

Her words might have been cool, but her voice remained warm. ‘You haven’t asked what she was doing with your identity,’ I pointed out.

That wry smile again. ‘I presumed you’d get round to that.’

There was something irritatingly provocative about Helen Maitland. It undid all my good intentions and made my interview techniques disappear. ‘Did you know she was a lesbian when you offered her your spare room?’ I demanded.

A small snort of laughter. ‘I presumed she was. It didn’t occur to me she might have changed her sexuality between arriving in Leeds and moving in here.’

She was playing with me, and I didn’t like it at all. ‘Did she have a lover when she was living here?’ I asked bluntly. Games were over for today.

‘She never brought anyone back here,’ Dr Maitland replied, still unruffled. ‘And as far as I know, she did not spend nights in anyone else’s bed, either in Leeds or elsewhere. However, as I have said, I can’t claim to have exhaustive knowledge of her acquaintance.’

‘Don’t you mind that she was using your name to carry out medical procedures?’ I demanded. ‘Doesn’t it worry you that she might have put you at professional risk by what she was doing?’

‘Why should it? If anyone ever claimed that I had carried out inappropriate medical treatment on them, they would realize as soon as we came face to face that I had not been the doctor involved. Besides, I can’t imagine Sarah would involve herself, or me, in anything unethical. I never thought of her as a risk taker.’

‘Why else would she be using your identity?’ I said forcefully. ‘If it was all above board, she wouldn’t have needed to pretend to be someone else, would she?’

Dr Maitland suddenly looked tired. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘So what exactly was she doing that was so heinous?’

‘She was working with lesbian couples who wanted children,’ I said, picking my words with care. If I’d learned anything about Helen Maitland, it was that it would be impossible to tell where her loyalties lay. The last thing I wanted was to expose Alexis and Chris accidentally.

‘Hardly the crime of the century,’ she commented, turning to put her cup in the sink. ‘Look, I’m sorry I can’t help you,’ she continued, facing me and running her hands through her curls, giving them fresh life. ‘It’s three years now since Sarah moved out of here. I don’t know what she was doing or who she was seeing. I have no idea why she chose to fly under false colours in the first place, nor why she chose to impersonate me. And I really don’t know what possible interest it could be to anyone. According to the newspapers, Sarah was murdered by a burglar whom she had the misfortune to interrupt trying to find something he could sell, no doubt to buy drugs. That had nothing to do with anything else in her life. I don’t know what your client has hired you to do, but I suspect that he or she is wasting their money. Sarah’s dead, and no amount of raking into her past is going to come up with the identity of the crackhead who killed her.’

‘As a doctor, you’ll appreciate the burdens of confidentiality. Even if I wanted to tell you what I’ve been hired to do, I couldn’t. So I’ll have to be the judge of whether I’m wasting my time or not,’ I said, staking out the cool ground now I’d finally raised Helen Maitland’s temperature a degree or two.

‘Be that as it may, you’re certainly wasting mine,’ she said sharply.

‘When did you see Sarah last?’ I asked, taking advantage of the fact that our conversation had become a subtlety-free zone.

She frowned. ‘Hard to say. Two, three weeks ago? We bumped into each other in the lab.’

‘You didn’t see each other socially?’

‘Not often,’ she said, biting the words off abruptly.