Authors: Val McDermid
‘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.
‘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.
I also got round to talking to Josh. He gave me a load of toffee about how he wanted to devote some of his capital to working with small businesses, and I told him to cut the crap and get to the horses. The deal we worked out meant he bought Bill’s share of the business, but in recognition of my sole contribution to the profits, my stake in the partnership was upgraded to fifty-five per cent. So I got an extra twenty per cent for nothing except running the agency and doing all the hard graft…Josh also promised me that when I can afford it, I can buy him out for what he’d paid plus the rate of inflation. I know a good deal when I see it. I nearly bit his hand off. The best part about it was that overnight I stopped wanting to rip Bill’s arm off and hit him with the wet end. That Sheila’s a really good laugh when you get to know her.
Alexis was happy with the way I sorted things out with Helen and Flora. With the single-mindedness of all parents-to-be, she didn’t much mind who’d killed Sarah as long as it wasn’t going to bounce back and wreck her happy little idyll. I never did tell her about Sarah Blackstone’s nasty little trick of dropping her own eggs into the mix. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything that would poison Alexis’s happiness.
It’s just as well I didn’t. When Chris gave birth six months later, there was no mistaking the genetic source of Jay Appleton Lee’s shock of jet black spikes. I swear the child cries with a Scouse accent.
I wish I could close the account there. Everything in credit, almost a happy ending. It’s never been that neat in my experience. About two months after the showdown in her kitchen, Helen Maitland turned up at my office one afternoon around close of business. I left Shelley in charge and took her up to the café at the Cornerhouse for a herbal tea and a flapjack. Sometimes it’s dead handy having an art cinema so close to the office.
Over a cup of wild strawberry she told me that Flora had just got a job in a university library in Wyoming. ‘I didn’t know they had universities in Wyoming,’ I said. Cheap, I know, but I never claimed to be otherwise.
‘Me neither,’ Helen said, smiling with the half of her mouth that wasn’t clamped around a cigarette.
‘You looking for jobs, then?’
‘You mean am I going with her?’
I nodded. ‘I wondered if this was goodbye, don’t worry, we’re out of your life.’
‘I suppose it is, in a way. Flora won’t be back, and the one thing I’d pray for if I had any religion left is to be allowed to forget the whole sorry mess. So you can rest assured you won’t be hearing any more of this from me. And Flora…well, she has too much to lose. The police never arrested anyone, never even seriously questioned them. The case is going to die now, just like Sarah did.’