by Val McDermid
I moved my Rover on to the street that ran at right angles to Beaumaris Road and the alley so that I had a good view of the end of Allen’s car bonnet, though it meant losing sight of the front of the shop. I slid into the passenger seat to make it look like I was waiting for someone and took off the cap. I kept the glasses in place, though. I slouched in my seat and brooded on Bill’s perfidy. I sipped my coffee very slowly, just enough to keep me alert, not enough to make me want to pee. By the time I saw some action, the coffee was cold and so was I.
The nose of the silver Mazda slipped out of the alleyway and turned left towards Cheetham Hill Road. Just on five, with traffic tight as haemoglobin in the bloodstream. Born lucky, that’s me. I scrambled across the gear stick and started the engine, easing out into the road behind the car. As we waited to turn left at the busy main road, I had the chance to see who was in the car. Allen was driving, but there was also someone in the passenger seat. She conveniently reached over into the back seat for something, and I identified the woman who had been in Sell Phones talking to the Emporio Armani mannequin. I wondered if she was the other half of the scam, the woman who went out to chat up the widowers. They don’t call me a detective for nothing.
The Mazda slid into a gap in the traffic heading into Manchester. I didn’t. By the time I squeezed out into a space that wasn’t really there, the Mazda was three cars ahead and I was the target of a car-horn voluntary. I gave the kind of cheery wave that makes me crazy when arseholes do it to me and smartly switched lanes in the hope that I’d be less visible to my target. The traffic was so slow down Cheetham Hill that I was able to stay in touch, as well as check out the furniture stores for bargains. But then, just as we hit the straight, he peeled off left down North Street. I was in the right-hand lane and I couldn’t get across, but I figured he must be heading down Red Bank to cut through the back doubles down to Ancoats and on to South Manchester. If I didn’t catch him before Red Bank swept under the railway viaduct, he’d be anywhere in a maze of back streets and gone forever.
I swung the nose of the Rover over to the left, which pissed off the driver of the Porsche I’d just cut up. At least now the day wasn’t a complete waste. I squeezed round the corner of Derby Street and hammered it for the junction that would sweep me down Red Bank. I cornered on a prayer that nothing was coming up the hill and screamed down the steep incline.
There was no silver Mazda in sight. I sat fuming at the junction for a moment, then slowly swung the car round and back up the hill. There was always the chance that they’d stopped off at one of the dozens of small-time wholesalers and middlemen whose tatty warehouses and storefronts occupy the streets of Strangeways. Maybe they were buying some jewellery or a fur coat with their ill-gotten gains. I gave it ten minutes, cruising every street and alley between Red Bank and Cheetham Hill Road. Then I accepted they were gone. I’d lost them.
I’d had enough for one day. Come to that, I’d had enough for the whole week. So I switched off my mobile, wearily slotted myself back into the thick of the traffic and drove home. Plan A was to run a hot bath lavishly laced with essential oils, Cowboy Junkies on the stereo, the pile of computer magazines I’d been ignoring for the last month and the biggest Stoly and grapefruit juice in the world on the side. Plan B involved Richard, if he was around.
I walked through my front door and down the hall, shedding layers like some sixties starlet, then started running the bath. I wrapped myself in my bathrobe which had been hanging strategically over a radiator, and headed for the freezer. I’d just gripped the neck of the vodka bottle when the doorbell rang. I considered ignoring it, but curiosity won. Story of my life. So I dumped the bottle and headed for the door.
They say it’s not over till the fat lady sings. Alexis is far from fat, and from her expression I guessed singing wasn’t on the agenda. Seeing the stricken look on her face, I kissed Plan A goodbye and prepared for the worst.
6
‘Chris?’ I asked, stepping back to let Alexis in.
She looked dumbly back at me, frowning, as if trying to call to mind why I should be concerned about her partner.
‘Has something happened to Chris?’ I tried. ‘The baby?’
Alexis shook her head. ‘Chris is all right,’ she said impatiently, as if I’d asked the kind of stupid question TV reporters pose to disaster victims. She pushed past me and walked like an automaton into the living room, where she subsided onto a sofa with the slack-limbed collapse of a marionette.
I left her staring blankly at the floor and turned off the bath taps. By the time I came back with two stiff drinks, she was smoking with the desperate concentration of an addict on the edge of cold turkey. ‘What’s happened, Alexis?’ I said softly, sitting down beside her.
‘She’s dead,’ she said. I wasn’t entirely surprised that somebody she knew was. I couldn’t imagine anything else that would destroy the composure of a hard-bitten crime reporter like this.
‘Who is?’
Alexis pulled a scrunched up copy of the Yorkshire Post out of her handbag. I knew it was one of the out-of-town papers that the Chronicle subscribed to. ‘I was going through the regionals, looking to see if anybody had any decent crime feature ideas,’ Alexis said bleakly as she spread the YP out on the table. DOCTOR DIES IN RAID, I read in the top right-hand section of the front page. Under the headline was a photograph of a dark-haired woman with strong features and a wide, smiling mouth. I read the first paragraph.
Consultant gynaecologist Sarah Blackstone was fatally stabbed last night when she disturbed an intruder in her Headingley home.
‘You knew her?’ I asked.
‘That’s the doctor who worked with us on Christine’s pregnancy.’
It was a strange way of expressing it, but I let it pass. Alexis clearly wasn’t in command of herself, never mind the English language. ‘I’m so sorry, Alexis,’ I said inadequately.
‘Never mind being sorry. I want you working,’ she said abruptly. She crushed out her cigarette, lit another and swallowed half her vodka and Diet Coke. ‘Kate, there’s something going on here. That’s definitely the woman we dealt with. But she wasn’t a consultant in Leeds called Sarah Blackstone. She had consulting rooms here in Manchester and her name was Helen Maitland.’
There are days when I’m overwhelmed with the conviction that somebody’s stolen my perfectly nice life and left me with this pile of shit to deal with. Right then, I was inches away from calling the cops and demanding they track down the robber. After the day I’d had, I just wasn’t in the mood for chapter one of an Agatha Christie mystery. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘I mean, newspaper photographs…’
Alexis snorted. ‘Look at her. She’s not got a face that blends into the background, has she? Of course it’s Helen Maitland.’
I shrugged. ‘So she uses an assumed name when she’s treating lesbians. Maybe she just doesn’t want the notoriety of being the dykes’ baby doctor.’
‘It’s more than that, KB,’ Alexis insisted, swallowing smoke as if her life depended on it. ‘She’s got a prescription pad and she writes prescriptions in the name of Helen Maitland. We’ve not had any trouble getting them filled, and it’s not like it was a one-off, believe me. There’s been plenty. Which also makes me worried, because if the bizzies figure out that Sarah Blackstone and Helen Maitland are the same person, and they try and track down her patients, all they’ve got to do is start asking around the local chemists. And there we are, right in the middle of the frame.’
All of which was true, but I couldn’t see why Alexis was getting so wound up. I knew the rules on human fertility treatment were pretty strict, but as far as I was aware, it wasn’t a crime yet to give lesbians artificial insemination, though if the Tories started to get really hysterical about losing the next election, I could see it might have its attractions as a possible vote winner. ‘Alexis,’ I said gently. ‘Why exactly is that a problem?’
She looked blankly at me. ‘Because they’ll take the baby off us,’ sh
e said in a tone of voice I recognized as the one I used to explain to Richard why you can’t wash your jeans in the dishwasher.
‘I think you might be overreacting,’ I said cautiously, aware that I wasn’t wearing protective clothing. ‘This is a straightforward case, Alexis,’ I continued, skimming the story. ‘Burglar gets disturbed, struggle, burglar panics, pulls a blade and lashes out. Tragic waste of talented test-tube baby doctor.’ I looked up. ‘The cops aren’t going to be interviewing her Leeds patients, never mind trying to trace people she treated in a different city under a different name.’
‘Maybe so, but maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye,’ Alexis said stubbornly. ‘I’ve been doing the crime beat long enough to know that the Old Bill only tell you what they want you to know. It wouldn’t be the first time there’s been a whole other investigation going on beneath the surface.’ She finished her drink and her cigarette, for some reason avoiding my eye.
I had a strong feeling that I didn’t know what the real story was here. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to know what it was that could disconcert my normally stable best buddy as much as this, but I knew I couldn’t dodge the issue. ‘What’s really going on here, Alexis?’ I asked.
She ran both hands through her wild tangle of black hair and looked up at me, her face worried and frightened, her eyes as hollow as a politician’s promises. ‘Any chance of another drink?’
I fetched her another Stoly and Diet Coke, this one more than a little weaker than the last. If she was going to swallow them like water, I didn’t want her passing out before she’d explained why she was in such a state about the death of a woman with whom she’d had nothing more than a professional relationship. I slid the drink across the table to her, and when she reached out for it, I covered her hand with mine. ‘Tell me,’ I said.
Alexis tightened her lips and shook her head. ‘We haven’t told another living soul,’ she said, reaching for another cigarette. I hoped she wasn’t smoking like this around Chris or the baby was going to need nicotine patches to get through its first twenty-four hours.
‘You said a minute ago you wanted me working on this. If I don’t know what’s going on, there’s not a lot I can do,’ I reminded her.
Alexis lifted her eyes and gazed into mine. ‘This has got to stay between us,’ she said, her voice a plea I’d never heard from her before. ‘I mean it, KB. Nobody gets to hear this one. Not Della, not Ruth, not even Richard. Nobody.’
‘That serious, eh?’ I said, trying to lighten the oppressiveness of the atmosphere.
‘Yeah, that serious,’ Alexis said, not noticeably lightened.
‘You know you can trust me.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ she admitted after a pause. The hand that wasn’t hanging on to the cigarette swept through her hair again. ‘I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to tell you.’
I leaned back against the sofa, trying to look as relaxed and unshockable as I could. ‘Alexis, I’m bombproof. Whatever it is, I’ve heard it before. Or something very like it.’
Her mouth twisted in a strange, inward smile. ‘Not like this, KB, I promise you. This is one hundred per cent one-off.’ Alexis sat up straight, squaring her shoulders. I saw she’d made the decision to reveal what was eating her. ‘This baby that Chris is carrying—it’s ours.’ She looked expectantly at me.
I didn’t want to believe what I was afraid she was trying to tell me. So I smiled and said, ‘Hey, that’s a really healthy attitude, acting like you’ve really got a stake in it.’
‘I’m not talking attitude, KB. I’m talking reality.’ She sighed. ‘I’m talking making a baby from two women.’
The trouble with modern life is that there isn’t any etiquette any more. Things change so much and so fast that even if Emily Post were still around, she wouldn’t be able to devise a set of protocols that stay abreast of tortured human relationships. If Alexis had dropped her bombshell in my mother’s day, I could have said, ‘That’s nice, dear. Now, do you like your milk in first?’ In my Granny Brannigan’s day, I could have crossed myself vigorously and sent for the priest. But in the face of the encroaching millennium, all I could do was gape and say, ‘What?’
‘I’m not making this up, you know,’ Alexis said defensively. ‘It’s possible. It’s not even very difficult. It’s just very illegal.’
‘I’m having a bit of trouble with this,’ I stammered. ‘How do you mean, it’s possible? Are we talking cloning here, or what?’
‘Nothing so high tech. Look, all you need to make a baby are a womb, an egg and something to fertilize it with.’
‘Which traditionally has been sperm,’ I remarked drily.
‘Which traditionally has been sperm,’ Alexis agreed. ‘But all you actually need is a collision of chromosomes. You get one from each side of the exchange. Women have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y. With me so far?’
‘I might not have A level biology, but I do know the basics,’ I said.
‘Right. So you’ll know that if it’s the man’s Y chromosome that links up with the woman’s X chromosome, you get a little baby boy. And if it’s his X chromosome that does the business, you get a girl. So everybody knew that you could make babies out of two X chromosomes. Only they didn’t shout too much about it, did they? Because if they did more than mention it in passing, like, it wouldn’t take a lot of working out to understand that if all you need for baby girls is a pair of X chromosomes from two different sources, you wouldn’t need men.’
‘You’re telling me that after twenty-five years of feminist theory, scientists have only just noticed that?’ I couldn’t keep the irony out of my voice.
‘No, they’ve always known it. But certain kinds of experiments are against the law. That includes almost anything involving human embryos. Unless, of course, it’s aimed at letting men who produce crap sperm make babies. So although loads of people knew that theoretically it was possible to make babies from two women, nobody could officially do any research on it, so the technology that would make it possible science instead of fantasy just wasn’t happening.’ The journalist was in control now, and Alexis paused for effect. She couldn’t help herself.
‘So what happened to change that?’ I asked, responding to my cue.
‘There was a load of research done which showed that men didn’t react well to having their wives inseminated with donor sperm. Surprise, surprise, they didn’t feel connected to the kids and more often than not, families were breaking up because the men didn’t feel like they were proper families. Given that more men are having problems with their sperm production than ever before, the pressure was really on for doctors to find a way of helping inadequate sperm to make babies. A couple of years ago, they came up with a really thin needle that could be inserted right into the very nucleus of an egg so that they could deliver a single sperm right to the place where it would count.’
I nodded, light dawning. ‘And somebody somewhere figured that if they could do it with a sperm, they could do it with another egg.’
‘Give the girl a coconut,’ Alexis said, incapable of being solemn and scared for long.
‘And this doctor, whatever her real name is, has been doing this in Manchester?’ I asked. I know they say that what Manchester does today, London does tomorrow, but this seemed to be taking things a bit far.
‘Yeah.’
‘Totally illegally?’
‘Yeah.’
‘With lesbian couples?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who are therefore technically also breaking the law?’
‘I suppose so.’
We looked at each other across the table. I didn’t know about Alexis, but I couldn’t help banner headlines flashing across my mind. The thought of what the tabloids would do with a story like this was enough in itself to bring me out fighting for the women who had gone underground to make their dreams come true, let alone my feelings for Alexis and Chris. ‘And the baby Chris is carrying belongs to bot
h of you?’ I asked.
‘That’s right. We both had to have a course of drugs to maximize our fertility, then Helen harvested our eggs and took them off to the lab to join them up and grow them on till she was sure they were OK. She did four altogether.’
If I looked as aghast as I felt, Alexis’s face didn’t reflect it. ‘Chris is having quads?’ I gasped.
‘Don’t be soft. ’Course she’s not. There’s a lousy success rate. You have to transplant at least three embryos to be in with a shout, and then it’s only a seventy per cent chance that one of them’s going to do the business. Helen transplanted three, and one of them survived. Believe me, in this game, that’s a result.’
‘So what happened to the other one?’ I asked. I had a horrible feeling I wasn’t going to like the answer.
‘It’s in the freezer at home. In a flask of liquid nitrogen.’
I’d been right. I felt slightly queasy at the thought and reminded myself never to go looking for a snack in Alexis’s kitchen. I cleared my throat. ‘How do you know it works? How do you know the babies are…OK?’
Alexis frowned. ‘There was no way of proving it objectively. We had to take Helen’s word for it. She introduced us to the first couple she had a success with. Their little girl’s about eighteen months now. She’s a really bright kid. And yes, I know they could have been bullshitting us, that it could have been a racket to rip us off, but I believed those two women. You had to be there, KB.’
I thought I could probably make it through the night without the experience. ‘I see now why you thought they’d take the baby off you,’ was all I said.
‘You’ve got to help us,’ Alexis said.
‘What exactly did you have in mind?’ I asked.
‘Helen Maitland’s files,’ Alexis said. ‘We’ve got to get rid of them before the police find them.’