Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I asked. Flora said nothing. She didn’t have to. We both knew the truth now. ‘So tell me. Was I close? The scenario I painted? Was I on the right lines?’

Flora pushed her hair back with her free hand. ‘Why are you so keen to know the details? So you can run to the nearest police station and turn me in?’

I sighed. ‘The reason I became a private investigator was because I like to know the reasons why things happen. I understand the difference between the law and justice. I know that handing people over to the police isn’t always the best way of ending things. If you want to prevent me going to the police, you’ve got more chance talking to me than you have trying to terrorize me. I have a client who has an interest in Sarah Blackstone’s death. She has her own, very pressing, reasons for wanting to know the truth here.’

While I had been speaking, Helen Maitland had been rummaging through a drawer in the kitchen table. As I got to the end of a speech that owed more to the British commanding officer in The Great Escape than any innate nobility of spirit, she pulled out a bashed packet of Silk Cut. ‘I knew there was a packet in here somewhere.’ She ripped the cellophane off, flipped the top up, tore out the silver paper, shoved a cigarette up with her thumb and drew it out with her lips. She picked up the gun and lit the cigarette. Pure bathos.

‘I think we’re in deep shit here, Flora,’ she said through a sigh of smoke, ‘but from what I’ve seen of Ms Brannigan, it seems to me she’s the person who can best deal with that. I think you should tell us what happened.’

Flora started crying again. I still wasn’t impressed. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ she said through a veil of hair and tears.

‘I know that,’ Helen soothed in her practical, no-nonsense way. There was going to be a reckoning between these two, I could see that in her eyes. But Helen Maitland had the sense to realize this wasn’t the time or the place. ‘It’s not your style, Flo.’

Flora did a bit more weeping, and Helen just sat there smoking, her eyes never leaving her lover. It was impossible even to guess at what was going on behind that blank stare. Finally Flora sat back, pushed her hair away from her face and scrubbed her eyes with her small hands, like a child who’s been crying from tiredness. She took a deep breath, gave Helen a pleading look, then turned to face me. ‘I really didn’t mean to kill her,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go there with that intention.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said. Helen only crushed out one cigarette and lit a second.

Flora breathed out heavily through her nose. ‘This isn’t easy,’ she complained.

‘Easier than killing someone,’ I remarked.

‘Not really,’ Flora said tremulously. ‘That happened in the heat of the moment. Before I even knew I had the knife in my hand, she was dead. Telling you is a lot harder, you have to believe that, Helen.’

Helen nodded curtly. ‘So what happened, Flora? I want to know just as badly as Ms Brannigan does.’

Flora pushed her hair back from her face and adopted a beseeching expression. I couldn’t get a handle on this woman at all. The image she projected was of a fairly timid, vulnerable innocent. Then I’d get a flash from those dark eyes and I’d feel like an entire brigade of dark, supernatural nasties were dancing on my grave. I realized exactly what Maggie had meant about the dragon and the maiden. I could see that it might be a powerful erotic mixture, but it left me feeling pathetically grateful that the gun hadn’t been for real. Flora was a woman who could easily have pulled the trigger then pulled the same ‘I didn’t mean it’ routine over me that she was giving us now over Sarah Blackstone.

‘Can’t it wait till we’re alone?’ Flora pleaded.

‘Ms Brannigan already knows too much for us to throw her out now,’ Helen said. Somehow her words didn’t scare me like Flora did. ‘I suspect that telling her the whole story is the best chance we’ve got of salvaging something from this mess.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Flora looked as if she was about to protest, then she registered the determination in her lover’s face. ‘It all started when Helen was diagnosed with cervical cancer,’ she said.

‘I know about that,’ I interrupted her, not wanting to let her get into a flow of pathos too early in her narrative. ‘It resulted in a complete hysterectomy What had that to do with the murder of Sarah Blackstone?’

Flora darted me a look of pure malice. It wasn’t lost on Helen Maitland. This time, when she spoke, her voice was more brisk. ‘Helen was desperate to have a child, and as soon as she was diagnosed, she got a gynaecologist friend of hers, not Sarah, to harvest her eggs for the next three months.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

Helen stared at the table and spoke rapidly. ‘Part of me hoped that a full hysterectomy wouldn’t be necessary, that even if I couldn’t produce fertile eggs any more, I might just be able to have a child by artificial insemination, or even surrogacy. You know, get someone else to carry my child. So we took what eggs we could harvest before my surgery and froze them. It’s dodgy, freezing eggs; nobody really knows yet how successful it is. But I had this crazy idea that even if I couldn’t have a child myself, at least my genes might continue. And if all else had failed, at least I could have made an egg donation to someone who needed it.’

Not for the first time in the past few days, the desperate nature of the need to reproduce hit me between the eyes. I said a small prayer to the goddess of infertility that it would continue to avoid taking up residence in my soul. ‘Right,’ I said, determined to move this along and keep the emotional level as low key as possible. ‘So Helen had her eggs frozen. How does that get us to murder?’

‘One morning a couple of months ago, Helen had a really strange letter in the post. It was from Manchester—’

‘I know about that too,’ I interrupted, partly to maintain control over events, partly to impress both of them with how much I’d already found out. ‘It contained a baby’s photograph and a lock of hair and a message of thanks.’

Helen’s composure showed a crack for the first time. ‘The baby was the spitting image of Sarah at the same age. I couldn’t believe the similarity. I’d heard Sarah talking about the technical possibility of making babies from two women’s eggs, and I realized that’s what she was probably doing. I work with cystics, so I have access to DNA-testing facilities.’

‘They were able to get DNA from the cut hairs?’ I asked.

There are always researchers who love a challenge and one of the women at St Hilda’s relished the chance to extract viable DNA from the hair shafts. I bribed one of my students to get a blood sample from Sarah. He told her it was for random testing in some experiment he was doing into some obscure aspect of blood chemistry, and she let him take it. The DNA test was very clear. Sarah was one of the parents of the child.’ She was smoking now like she’d made it her lifelong ambition to be a forty-a-day woman.

This time, it was Flora who reached out, gripping Helen’s free hand tightly. Helen continued, almost talking to herself. ‘It was all the more bitter because that was the issue that split us up. I wanted a child desperately, but Sarah didn’t. I knew subfertility treatment was close to the stage where it would be possible to make a child from two women. And she refused point-blank to do it with us. She said she wasn’t prepared to experiment with my body. That if the experiment produced a monster, or even a handicapped child, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself. Me, I thought it probably had more to do with the fact that she absolutely didn’t want to share her life with a child. I eventually came to the conclusion I’d rather have the possibility of a child than the certainty of life with her. You can imagine the kind of rows…’ Her voice tailed off into a quiet exhalation of smoke.