Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

‘You must have been devastated to discover she was experimenting with other women,’ I said in the crass mode of television news reports.

Helen pulled a face. ‘I think if she had been in front of me when I got the DNA results through from the lab, I might have killed her. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was actually glad that I hadn’t had her child. That I didn’t want a daughter of mine to consist of half Sarah’s genes. Distance doesn’t lend enchantment, you know. It allows you to put things in perspective. I hadn’t stopped wanting a child, but I’d stopped caring about Sarah. I didn’t even hate her any more. Despised her, yes, because there wasn’t anything in her life she wouldn’t betray. So I didn’t actually want to kill her for very long.’

‘Long enough to tell Flora?’ I asked softly.

Flora turned on me then, eyes wide and angry. ‘Don’t try and blame Helen. She said nothing of the sort to me. It was my idea to go and see Sarah. Helen didn’t even know I was going.’

‘So why did you go, if it wasn’t to confront Sarah with her double-cross?’

‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘Why did you go to see her?’

Flora gave a weary smile. ‘I went to try to persuade her to do for us what she’d done for those other women. My eggs and yours. So we could share a child.’

There was a long silence, Helen’s eyes raking Flora’s face as if she was trying to scour any falsehood from her words by reading her features. Then her head dropped into her hands. She didn’t cry. After a few moments, she looked up, dry-eyed, and said, ‘That is an extraordinary thing to say.’

‘It’s the truth,’ Flora said. ‘Why else would I have gone to see her?’

‘I had no idea you felt like that.’

‘What? That I loved you that much, or that I wanted a child that much?’ Flora challenged, chin up.

‘Either or both,’ Helen said, her voice tired. ‘What did Sarah say?’

Flora looked away, her face clouding over. I was starting to feel seriously redundant here. ‘She laughed in my face. She said she wasn’t going to give a baby to a brainless bimbo and a compulsive obsessive. So I told her that if she wouldn’t cooperate, I’d go to the authorities and tell them exactly what she was doing.’

‘Not a clever move,’ Helen said, reaching for another cigarette. ‘Sarah and threats were never a comfortable mix.’ Her cool irony was starting to get to me. Sooner or later, an explosion was going to come. The longer she kept the lid on, the worse it was going to be. I hoped I’d be well out of the fallout zone when it did.

‘How did she react to your threat?’ I asked.

‘She grabbed me by the lapels and shoved me up against the kitchen counter,’ Flora said, still incredulous that someone in her world would do such a thing. ‘She kept banging me against the counter, telling me I was a dirty blackmailing bitch and that she knew a lot of women who’d happily kill to keep the children she’d given them. I was terrified. She kept twisting her hand in my coat, it was so tight it was strangling me. I was desperate. I groped about on the worktop behind me and my hand touched a knife. I just grabbed it and thrust it up into her. I wasn’t thinking, I just did it. And she sort of fell back onto the floor. I was standing there, holding the knife, watching her die. And I couldn’t do a thing about it.’

‘You could have called an ambulance,’ Helen said, her voice cold.

‘I did. I went straight to the phone box down the street and called an ambulance.’

‘Not then, you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You did one or two other things first. You cleared up any signs of a struggle. You unlocked the back door, leaving the key in the lock, went outside and smashed a pane of glass to make it look like a burglary. You took off your bloodstained mac and checked nobody was about, then you walked calmly out of the front door and up to the phone box on the corner. And then you phoned 999 and told the operator you’d just seen a black man running out of an open door on that street with a bloodstained knife. By which time Sarah Blackstone was dead.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d phoned straightaway,’ Flora said desperately. ‘She died so quickly. Honestly, Helen, she was dead in seconds.’

‘Not that quickly,’ I said coldly. ‘She can’t have been dead for long otherwise the ambulance crew would have told the police there was a discrepancy between the time of death and the time of the call-out.’

The way Flora looked at me, I was glad there wasn’t a knife handy. ‘Let’s face it, Flora, you couldn’t really allow her to live, could you?’ Helen said bleakly. ‘Not after what you’d done. No wonder you said to me the next day that you’d give me an alibi if the police came asking. You wanted to make sure you had one, didn’t you? Just don’t you dare ever say you did it for me.’

Flora said nothing. Helen faced me. ‘I suspect there’s a tape recorder whirring away in your handbag.’

My jacket pocket, actually, but I wasn’t about to tell them that in case either of them got any clever ideas. ‘Technology’s got a bit smarter than that these days. I wouldn’t still be alive if I didn’t believe in insurance,’ I said.

‘So now you go to the police, is that it?’

‘Helen!’ Flora wailed. ‘I can’t go to jail!’

‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ I said. ‘The way Flora tells it, it sounds pretty much like self-defence that got out of hand. I don’t think she’s a risk to anyone else. I don’t see a need for this to come out into the open.’

A cynical smile curled Flora’s lip. ‘You mean you don’t want the world to know what that bitch Sarah was doing. I bet your client’s one of those women she gave a baby to. She won’t want that can of worms opened, will she?’

‘Don’t push your luck, Flora,’ Helen said. ‘Ms Brannigan holds your freedom in her hand. Or wherever she has her tape recorder stashed.’

I nodded. ‘There are conditions to my silence,’ I said. ‘If anyone else is charged with Sarah’s murder, I can’t stand idly by. And if Sarah’s secret work becomes public knowledge and I think it’s anything to do with you, the tape goes to the police. Is that a deal?’

The cops picked up Peter Lovell’s thugs a couple of weeks later in a routine raid on an after-hours shebeen in Bradford. They charged them with Tony’s murder. The Crown Prosecution Service, who love bent coppers about as much as the police do, also added murder to Lovell’s list of charges under the ‘joint enterprise’ principle. According to Della, who was on the point of giving up the elbow crutches and moving back into her house, it looks like they’re all going to go down for a very long time. Oh, and Dan Druff and the Scabby Heided Bairns signed a deal with an indie record company on the strength of their first Nazi-free gig. They’ve promised me the first pressing of the first single to roll off the production line. I can hardly wait. It’ll look great framed on my office wall. Not.

The law on fraud being what it is, Alan Williams and Sarah Constable probably thought they were unlucky to do any time at all. But the police did a good job, tying them into ripping off the bereaved in Birmingham, Durham and Plymouth. They each got eighteen months, which they’ll do easy time in an open prison. It probably won’t stop them dreaming up another nasty little scam when they come out, but at least it’s got them off the streets for a few months. Their boss at Sell Phones did a bit better; all they could get him on was obtaining phone calls by deception, on account of the laws in this country affecting telecommunications are so archaic it’s hard to nail anybody on anything to do with cellular phones. And since nobody much likes phone companies, he only got a suspended sentence. He lost the business, though, which is a kind of rough justice.