Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

‘And that’s all tied in to Bill’s name, right?’ Richard chipped in, shoving me back on track.

‘Give the boy a coconut,’ I said. ‘Most of the people Bill deals with don’t even know who Brannigan is. They’re fully paid up members of the laddish tendency. Not the sort of men who are going to be convinced that a woman knows her RAM from her ROM.’

‘Least of all a cute redhead with the best legs in Manchester,’ Richard said, reaching round me to check the accuracy of his comment with the hand that wasn’t holding me.

‘So the problem is twofold,’ I continued, trying to ignore the sensations his touch was triggering off. ‘First, I don’t have the credibility. Secondly, if I’m being brutally honest—’

‘Be brutal, be brutal,’ Richard interrupted with a mock moan.

‘—I don’t have the expertise either,’ I said firmly, wriggling away from his wandering fingers.

‘You could learn,’ he murmured, refusing to be evaded. ‘You’re a very quick learner.’

‘Only when I’m motivated,’ I said sternly, squirming down and away. ‘I can’t get excited enough to put in the hours it takes to develop the skills. And I haven’t got the patience to devote days to finding a leak and plugging it.’

‘So don’t. Do what you’ve done with Don. GSI.’

‘GSI?’

‘Get somebody in.’

‘Like who?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘People with those kind of skills don’t grow on trees. If they’re straight, they’re already earning far more than I could afford to pay them. And if they’re dark-side hackers, they don’t want to do anything as straight as work for me.’

‘Set a thief to catch a thief, isn’t that what they say? Didn’t you mention that Telecom had just given Gizmo the “Dear John” note?’

I could have kissed him. But frankly, he didn’t need the encouragement.

Private eyes should have the same motto as boy scouts: ‘Be Prepared’. If I had to pass on one secret to any aspiring PI, that’s what it would be. With that in mind, I settled down in my half of the conservatory with breakfast and the printed version of Sarah Blackstone’s case notes. I needed to look more closely at the idea of her former colleagues having a motive for murder. If I was going to grip them by the lapels of their lab coats, thrust them against the wall and apply the red-hot pincers to treasured parts of their anatomy, I wanted to be sure I was asking the right questions.

Armed with the background information I’d picked up from the boy wonder of St Mary’s, this time I was able to make a lot more sense of what I was reading. And it was the kind of sense that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I flicked back through the pages to check that I wasn’t misunderstanding what I saw in front of me. But there was no mistake. If I’d been short of motives for Sarah Blackstone’s murder before, I was awash with them now.

Women tend to assume that it’s only male doctors who are sufficiently arrogant, overbearing and insensitive to ride roughshod over their patients’ lives. Wrong. Overexposure to these charming traits during training obviously rubs off on a lot of the women who go the distance too. However pleasant, supportive and discreet Dr Blackstone might have appeared to the women who consulted her, it seemed they hadn’t so much been patients as the subjects of her experiments. That was the message that came through loud and clear from her notes.

It wasn’t enough for her that she’d been breaking new ground by performing miracles that women had never had the chance to experience before; she wanted a different kind of immortality. What her notes told me was that she’d been playing a kind of Russian roulette to achieve it. She had been harvesting her own eggs for as long as she’d been treating other women. The notes were there. She’d persuaded one of her colleagues to do the egg collection, on the basis that Sarah was going to donate the eggs to women who couldn’t produce fertile ones of their own. I knew now from my own research that because of the courses of fertility drugs involved in producing half a dozen eggs at once, she’d only have been able to harvest her own eggs two or three times a year. But that had been enough. Although she couldn’t use her own eggs exclusively in the mix, she had been including one of her own eggs with each couple’s batch. She’d have been growing on four or five embryos for each couple, and returning three of them to the womb. For every woman she’d successfully impregnated, there was a one-in-four or-five chance that the baby was not the child of the mother and her partner. Instead, it would be the result of a genetic mixture from the mother and Sarah Blackstone. And Chris was pregnant.

It was a nightmare, and one that I absolutely couldn’t share with my client. And if I couldn’t tell my best friend, there was nobody else I could dump on either. Certainly not Richard. After the recent rockiness of our road, the last thing he needed to hear about was a testosterone-free tomorrow. But it wasn’t just the implications for Chris’s pregnancy that bothered me. It was the long-term dangers within the gene pool. Judging by what I knew from Alexis, a lot of lesbian mothers in Manchester formed a close-knit social group, for obvious reasons. Their kids played together, visited each other’s houses, grew up together. Chances were by the time they were adults, two women making babies together would be accepted medical practice, not some hole-in-the-corner criminal activity. What would happen if a couple of those girls fell in love, decided they wanted to make babies and they were half-sisters because they’d both come from Sarah Blackstone’s eggs? Either they’d find out in preliminary genetic tests. Or even worse, they’d start a cycle of inbreeding whose consequences could poison the future for children not yet imagined, never mind conceived. It was a terrifying thought. But it didn’t surprise me that it was a possibility on the horizon. When society sets things up so that the only way people can achieve their dreams is to go outside the law, it automatically loses any opportunity to control the chain reaction.

It was also an experiment that wasn’t hard to unravel. Any of the couples who were looking at a child who didn’t look a bit like either of them but had a striking resemblance to their doctor wasn’t likely to be handing out the benefit of the doubt. It’s not hard to have private DNA testing done these days, and at around five hundred pounds, not particularly expensive either, compared to the cost of IVF treatment and the expense of actually having a child. A few weeks and the couple would have their answer. And if the mother’s partner wasn’t the biological coparent, you wouldn’t have to be a contender on Mastermind to work out that the chances were that the other egg had come from the person most concerned with the procedure.

The more I found out, the more the idea of a random burglar sounded as likely as Barry Manilow duetting with Snoop Doggy Dog. Forget her colleagues in Leeds. They’d still be there tomorrow. Right now, I needed to check whether there was a murderer on my own doorstep.

• •

Lesley Hilton was Sarah Blackstone’s first experimental mother. According to the files, she lived with her partner on the edge of the Saddle worth moors, where the redbrick terraced slopes of Old-ham yield to the Yorkshire stone villas built by those of the Victorians who managed to get rich on the backs of the ones toiling in the humid spinning mills. It was far from the nearest address to me, but Lesley’s daughter Coriander must be around eighteen months old by now, and if she was Blackstone’s baby, it might be obvious. It was as good a place to start as any, and better than most.