Blue Genes (21 page)

‘Will that be enough?’ Richard asked dubiously.

‘No,’ I said. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have such a strong streak of realism. There are times when it would be a blessing to be afflicted with blind optimism.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked, gently stroking my back to show there was nothing aggressive in the question.

‘I’m not entirely sure yet,’ I admitted. ‘Hiring Don is just a starting point. What I’m really worried about is if Bill goes we’re going to lose a lot of the computer-security business. He’s spent a lot of time and energy playing games with the big boys to establish his credentials in the field of computer security. Now, when it comes to making your system secure in the first place, or tracking down the creeps who are trying to steal your secrets or your money via your computer, Mortensen and Brannigan is right up there alongside some of the really big companies,’ I said proudly.

‘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 red-brick 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.

The house was one of a group of three cottages set at the foot of a steep field where sheep did the job I’d have cheerfully paid a gardener to do. Any-thing’s preferable to having a herd of wild animals at the back door. The original tawny colour of the stone was smudged with more than a century’s worth of grime. So much for the clean country air. I yanked an old-fashioned bell pull and heard a disproportionately small tinkle.

The woman who opened the door looked like a social worker in her fisherman’s smock, loose cotton trousers and the kind of sensible leather sandals that make Clarks Startrite look positively dashing. She was short and squarely built, with dark blonde hair cut spiky on top. She peered at me through granny glasses, her chubby face smiling tentatively. ‘Yes?’ she said.

I’d been working on a decent cover story all the way out along the Oldham Road. What I had was pitifully thin, but it was going to have to do. ‘I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes?’ I started. ‘This isn’t easy to talk about on the doorstep, but it concerns a Dr Sarah Blackstone.’

Either Lesley Hilton had never heard the name before, or she had more acting skills than a family outing of Redgraves. She looked blank and frowned. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right house?’

‘You are Lesley Hilton?’

She nodded, her head cocked in what I recognized as the classic pose of a mother listening for a toddler who is probably dismantling the TV set as we speak.

‘I think you probably knew Dr Blackstone as Dr Helen Maitland,’ I said.

This time the name got a reaction. Her cheekbones bloomed scarlet and she stepped back involuntarily, the door starting to close. ‘I think you’d better go,’ she said.

‘I’m no threat to you and Coriander. I’m not from the authorities, I swear,’ I pleaded, fishing out a card that simply said ‘Kate Brannigan, Confidential Consultant’, with the office address and phone number. I gave her the card. ‘Look, it’s important that we talk. Dr Blackstone or Dr Maitland, whatever you prefer to call her, is dead and I’m trying to—’

The door closed, shutting off the expression of panic that had gripped Lesley Hilton’s features. Cursing myself for my clumsiness, I walked back to my car. At least I hadn’t blown it with someone who knew that Dr Helen Maitland was really Sarah Blackstone. I’d have put money on that. And if she wasn’t aware of that, chances were she hadn’t killed her.

I fared better with Jude Webster, another of the early births. According to the files, she’d been a self-employed PR copywriter when she became pregnant. Judging by the word processor whose screen glowed on the table next to the pack of disposable nappies, she was still trying to earn some money that way. She had glossy chestnut hair which, considering the depth of the lines round her eyes, owed more to the bottle than to nature. Even though little Leonie was at the child minder, the buttons on Jude’s cardigan had been done up in a hurry and didn’t match the appropriate buttonholes, but I didn’t feel it would help our rapport if I pointed that out.

The news of Sarah Blackstone’s real identity and her death had got me across the threshold. I hadn’t even needed a business card. Maybe she assumed I was another of the lesbian mothers come to bring the bad news. ‘I’m sorry,’ she now said, settling me down with the best cup of tea I’d had in weeks. ‘I didn’t catch your connection to Dr Maitland…Dr Blackstone, I mean.’

Time for the likeliest story since Mary told Joseph it was God’s. ‘As you know,’ I started, ‘Sarah was a real pioneer in her field. I’m representing women who are concerned that her death doesn’t mean the end of her work. What we’re trying to do is to put together a sort of case book that those who follow in her footsteps will be able to refer to. But we want it to be more than just her case notes. It’s an important piece of lesbian history. The experience of the women who led the way mustn’t be lost.’

Jude was nodding sympathetically. She was going for it, all the way. Pity she had acted totally blankly when I’d first mentioned the name Sarah Blackstone. ‘You’re so right,’ she said earnestly. ‘So much of women’s achievements and contributions just get buried because the books are written by men. It’s vital that we reclaim our history. But—’

‘I know, you’re concerned about confidentiality,’ I cut in. ‘And let me tell you, I can fully appreciate why. Obviously, the last thing my clients want is for people’s privacy to be compromised, especially in circumstances like these. It wouldn’t serve anyone’s interests for that to happen. But I can assure you that there will be nothing in the finished material to identify any of the mothers or the children.’

We danced around the issue of confidentiality for a bit, then she capitulated. My Granny Brannigan always remarked that I had an honest face. She said it made up for my devious soul. Within an hour, Jude had told me everything there was to tell about the consultations that she and her partner Sue had had with Dr Blackstone. And it was all a complete waste of time. The first two minutes with the photograph album revealed a child that was the image of Sue, right down to an irrepressible cowlick above the right eye that wouldn’t lie down and die. This time, Sarah Blackstone had missed.

By late afternoon, I knew the laws of probability had been on the doctor’s side. But then, aren’t they always? Ask anybody who’s ever tried to sue a surgeon. At least two of the kids I’d seen bore more than a passing resemblance to the dead doctor. I was astonished the parents didn’t seem to notice. I suppose people have always looked at their children and seen what they wanted to see. Otherwise there would be even more divorces than there are already.

At ten to five, I decided to hit one more and then call it a day. Jan Parrish and Mary Delaney lived less than a mile away from me in a redbrick semi on what had once been one of the city’s smarter council housing estates. When the Tories had introduced a right-to-buy scheme so loaded with inducements that anyone in employment would have had to be crazy to say no, this estate had fallen like a line of dominoes. Now finding a resident who still paid rent to the council was harder than finding food in Richard’s fridge.