The techs had done as he’d asked. They had re-run the testing, which should have confirmed that the M sample was contaminated. That would have been the simplest explanation for the anomalous results.
But it hadn’t. So next the lab had swapped the M and P DNA swabs and subjected M – the sample originally intended to examine the boy’s maternal ancestry – to Y chromosome sequencing instead, to look at the boy’s paternal ancestry. The new result matched the earlier result from the P swab, both clearly showing the genes the boy had inherited from his father to be characterized by the classic (and frankly commonplace) M269 marker. That wasn’t the weird part.
Will sat down, still wearing his Berghaus jacket.
What he was reading strongly suggested that the M sample had not been contaminated after all. On the other hand, the P sample, which had caused no problems during the initial Y chromosome work, had now been subjected to mitochondrial analysis to identify the boy’s maternally inherited genes, and it had given the same results M had: results surely too bizarre to be believed.
Will massaged the bridge of his prominent nose. Although he had long since grown fluent in the mathematical language of nucleotides, the clustered ranks of digits and letters arrayed across the on-screen spreadsheet refused to coalesce into any sense.
Then again, if he were honest with himself he had already suspected that the strange data were correct, that they could not be explained away as the fuzzy product of botched lab work, nor as the confused slur of a contaminated DNA sample. To Will’s practised eye, the alphanumeric listings were crisp, clear, and perfectly accented in what they were saying. It was just that what they were saying didn’t come close to anything else on record.
If these results were to be believed then young Daniel had a very interesting ancestry indeed.
‘Hey, Stringbean. Good of you to join us at last.’
Will pushed the data to the back of his mind. If they meant what he was starting to believe they did then he wanted to keep the findings to himself for the time being. He swallowed down his building excitement and arranged what he hoped was a relaxed grin on his face before swivelling the chair around.
Mei stood in the doorway, clasping an enormous mug of fresh coffee with both hands. She wasn’t naturally a morning person.
‘What can I say?’ Will spread his hands wide in modest acknowledgment of his own magnificence. ‘I’m a popular guy. Everyone wants me to stop and chat.’
Mei tried to glare, doing her best not to be charmed by his (as she’d often told him, misplaced) self-confidence.
‘You’re in my seat,’ she said.
Will unfolded his lanky body from her chair. He barely got out of her way in time as she stepped smartly across the small room, sat and rolled into position at her screen. She didn’t spill a drop of her precious coffee.
‘I’m sure you coped just fine without me,’ Will said. He finally took off his jacket and hung it on a peg. ‘Doesn’t look like I missed any huge orders this morning anyway.’
Mei’s derisive snort said it all. It had been months since the last major order, and each week it seemed more certain that the company’s short-lived glory days were already over.
* * * *
The success that came fast to YourGeneticRoots evaporated almost as quickly. After the original pioneering work in the last years of the 20th Century, what became known as genetic genealogy swiftly established itself in the popular marketplace. It was an astonishing method of delving deep into a person’s ancestral heritage, using molecular science in a way few would have suspected possible even a few years earlier.
Journalists struggled to explain the science in simple terms. Broadly speaking, every human being is a biological mash-up of two sets of DNA: one set from their father and the other from their mother. During the process, most of the DNA in those sets gets shuffled around but some parts are passed along almost unchanged from one generation to the next. This applies, for instance, to the Y chromosome each son inherits from his father, and to the mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, each son and daughter get from their mother. If that son goes on to have sons of his own, he will pass along almost unchanged another copy of his father’s Y chromosome, and both sons and daughters will pass along near-perfect copies of their mothers’ mtDNA to their own children. People thus embody two genetic lines running through time: the genetic information in their Y chromosome charts their paternal line, and that in their mtDNA charts their maternal one.
The key – the genius flash of insight that unlocked the potential of this biological database – was that it was possible to extrapolate this process backwards through time. Doing so revealed an effectively unbroken chain of biological information preserved inside everyone’s bodies, physically connecting every individual to the prehistoric roots of his or her personal family tree.
This was possible because the DNA in question does not get passed along completely unchanged. Over time, it picks up tiny random mutations and these become preserved in the record as they pass onto the succeeding generation. Family lines diverge, becoming ever more individual and identifiable.
By collecting and analysing genetic information from hundreds of thousands of men and women from populations across the planet, scientists were able to map (and through ongoing work to continue to refine their knowledge of) the routes taken by the earliest human beings as they populated planet Earth. A family tree of humanity was created, with the different branches identifiable by particular genetic markers.
It was amazing stuff really.
A handful of entrepreneurs were quick off the mark. They saw the potential and were keen to exploit an intriguing new product. Companies like YourGeneticRoots popped up seemingly overnight, offering DNA analyses to anybody prepared to pay for them. For a few hundred pounds YourGeneticRoots would reveal your personal deep ancestry, using the information encoded within the very essence of your body to identify where your prehistoric ancestors had once lived and loved, and to track the epic journeys your long-dead great-great-great-to-the-nth grandfathers and grandmothers made over millennia as early human beings left their shared African motherland and blazed their trails across planet Earth.
For a short time, such products fired the public imagination. But then the economy dipped, and most would-be customers decided it was a product they could live without for the immediate future, thank you very much.
YourGeneticRoots was still afloat but only barely, and increasingly keeping itself above water only by offering discounted bulk deals to schools and colleges, squeezing out thin profits by balancing the expense of the lab work against the extra orders.
Times were tough, but Will loved this subject! Okay, the wages were nothing to shout about, and as for the company’s threadbare office – three floors up behind a plain brass plaque in a Carshalton trading estate – well, he’d enjoyed greater luxury in the damp-ridden squalor of his undergraduate days. (Thank Christ the lab work was farmed out to a commercial outfit – the swabs wouldn’t survive five seconds in here!) But he was intoxicated. There were days when Will could almost hear the cries of humanity’s long-dead ancestors calling to him, urging him to listen, to learn their stories and pass them on, and in so doing to grant some measure of immortality to those whose earthly remains had crumbled into dust unimaginable aeons before.
He was obsessed; he knew it and he didn’t care. YourGeneticRoots wouldn’t survive forever – nothing did – but that didn’t matter. Offering his expertise to the company – telling them what the lab results meant, helping them prepare the colourful explanatory packages they gave to their customers, visiting schools to help teachers collect DNA samples from pupils – all of that merely constituted a stepping stone for Will. It was a temporary way of using his expert knowledge, as well as his academic contacts and (turning a blind eye to the ethical question mark) his privileged access to the very latest research findings, to pay the bills until he gained his doctorate. Then he’d really begin to build his career.
Im
agine, though, if he could start that career with a ground-breaking discovery, one that would enshrine his name in the annals of science for all time!
Most genetic scientists had come to believe that every human alive today is descended from ancestors who lived in Africa. Examine anybody’s DNA and you can find biological information showing just how that person’s ancestral chain linked them back to the African cradle of all humanity. It was the same for everybody. It didn’t matter where they lived today: in the frozen wastes of Siberia, the stifling humidity of the rainforests, in the awesome isolation of the Australian interior, or in the teeming madness of a hi-tech city. Everybody carried an incredible truth within their very essence, that human beings really are just one global family. Everybody.
Everybody, it seemed, but the family of a single 10-year-old boy who attended St Margaret’s school. Daniel Sellis’s maternal ancestry appeared to bear no similarity whatsoever to any family line ever recorded.
‘Earth to Stringbean.’ Mei slurped her coffee. ‘What’re you smiling at, weirdo?’
Will started to fling back a witty retort, then realized he didn’t know what he was going to say. His brain faltered, tripping over the realization that he was standing there like a lost village idiot. By the time he thought to close his mouth again, the damage had been done.
‘Whatever,’ said Mei. Shaking her head, she turned back to her keyboard.
But there had to be a simpler explanation, thought Will. How likely was it really, that he’d just stumbled across something several degrees of magnitude more amazing than the mythical ‘missing link’: a previously unsuspected chapter in the history of the human species? No, he was getting carried away. There had to have been a problem with the M sample. It had to have been contaminated.
Except, how then could the repeated results be explained? Had the lab messed up and not swapped the samples as instructed? The swabs had been clearly labelled and coded in different colours, so it would have been difficult to muddle them up, but the possibility had to be acknowledged. Unfortunately, ruling out said possibility would require a third analysis, and there was no way Will would be able to arrange that without drawing the unwelcome attention of the company’s absentee boss.
Guy Melton was a pretty cool dude in Will’s opinion. He was more than happy to stay away from the office and leave the day-to-day operations to his ‘Office Manager’, Mei, while Will, his part-time ‘Scientific Advisor’, popped in for a few hours each week to handle the technical stuff. Guy readily admitted that he had no real interest in the science and he kept out from under his team’s feet as much as possible. He did, however, keep a close eye on the costs. ‘Two tests tops,’ he had told them often enough. Customers didn’t always follow instructions and didn’t always care that smoking or eating before their sample was taken could make the lab work impossible, and Guy knew only too well that Will and – because of Will’s infectious enthusiasm for the subject, Mei – would merrily run and re-run tests on poor-quality samples while the company nosedived into financial ruin.
Moreover, young Daniel Sellis was not a paying customer. He and four of his classmates had been the lucky winners in a competition arranged by their school as part of a class project, and Guy had already given St Margaret’s a substantial discount on the prizes. He had also made it clear to the school from the outset that because the science involved was by its very nature delicate it was inevitable that problems would occasionally arise with the lab work; thus, while the winners would hopefully find out about their ancient ancestry on both their fathers’ and their mothers’ sides, the company would only undertake to guarantee a successful result from at least one or the other side of their family. If anyone wanted to supply further samples for analysis at a later date then of course Guy would be happy to oblige – so long as they paid.
Will’s choice was clear. Either he could ignore Daniel Sellis’s anomalous mtDNA results and pass up the opportunity to make what could be the discovery of a lifetime, or he could find some way to run further tests. To do the latter, he would first need to obtain new DNA samples from the boy and he would need to do that without Guy finding out. Once he had the samples, the lab work would be relatively easy to slip through the system: he’d simply invent a client whose promised payment would never arrive. The lab monkeys would carry out the analyses and send the results through to the office where Will would be keeping an eye out for them, ready to copy the details when they arrived. Assuming the samples returned the same anomalous results, Mei wasn’t knowledgeable enough to notice anything unusual about them and after she made one or two fruitless attempts to extract payment from the non-existent client she’d never look at the data again. The only tricky part would be getting the new samples, but an idea was forming.
‘Are these all the outstanding results for St Margaret’s now?’ Will indicated Mei’s screen.
‘Yep. That’s the lot. We sent most of the stuff to them on -,’ she scrolled up the page: ‘Tuesday. These are just a few stragglers that needed retesting. Altogether it looks like we got a full house in the end. Ah, apart from one – the mitochondrial work for Sellis-M5068. There’s a note here from the lab about that one – says it looked like a fail again.’
‘It was,’ said Will. A little sharply, perhaps, because Mei looked up.
‘Well,’ she said, giving Will a funny look, ‘Sellis’s Y chromosome work was good so he should have got his patrilineal details already. “Two tests tops”, eh? Guess he’ll just have to be satisfied with the paternal stuff.’
Will nodded. ‘So, when are you planning on sending the rest of these?’
‘I could get the packages ready pretty much straightaway. If, that is, you ever decide to actually start decoding this crap for me.’
‘Yeah, yeah, no worries. I’ll get onto it right away. It’s just that, well, I was wondering whether it would be all right if I took them to the school myself. This afternoon?’
Mei’s brow furrowed. ‘What’re you up to?’
‘Nothing. Just thought I’d save Guy a bit of postage.’ That sounded lame, so he thought he’d better bolster his story. ‘I was going to be heading that way later anyway, and thought it might be a nice touch, seeing as how it was me that gave the initial presentation to the class in the first place. Good for customer relations, you know?’
‘Mmm. And remind me, would this be the same school where a certain Alice Kennedy just happens to be the teacher?’
Mei’s beartrap of a memory had gotten Will into trouble before. This time, though, he was grateful for the unexpected excuse.
‘Well?’ she prompted. ‘I seem to recall you spoke … very highly … of her the other week.’
‘That would be Miss Kennedy to you,’ he sniffed. ‘Show the lady some respect.’
‘Righhht. And you’re just going to hand deliver the parcel to her out of the goodness of your heart, are you? Her knight in shining armour?’
‘Exactly.’
Mei smiled. ‘Okay, Stringbean. Just tell me what packages I need to prepare and I’ll have them ready for you by lunchtime.’
She turned back to her screen. ‘You don’t stand a chance with her anyway.’
* * * *
Getting to the school took a little under an hour and a half.
St Margaret’s was a crumbling hulk of red Victorian institutionalism that stood a long and lonely bus journey from the southern tip of the Underground’s Northern Line. What was now the main entrance lay through an old brick arch above which the word ‘GIRLS’ had more than a century earlier been carved into the smoke-blackened capstone.
The glass doors were modern, though. Inside, Will was surprised to discover Mei had phoned ahead to explain why he was visiting. The same severely attired receptionist that had greeted him on his initial visit was waiting for him to arrive and she motioned to him to follow her through the maze of locker-lined corridors to Class KA3. He had lost all sense of direction by the time the pinch-faced woman stopped outside a vaguely famili
ar door, rapped on its glass window and waved to somebody inside, presumably Miss Kennedy. The door opened.
‘Will. How lovely to see you again. Please, come in. Thank you, Judy.’
The receptionist faded back into the maze as Will stepped into the classroom. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the cheery brightness after the corridors’ gloom. There was a raucous scrape of chairs as thirty-odd Year Fives stood to attention. (Mei hadn’t believed him when he’d told her they still did that.)
‘Class, you remember Mr Banner, don’t you?’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Banner,’ chorused the children.
Will nodded back, intimidated by so many curious young eyes gazing at him.
At a gesture from Miss Kennedy the children sat again, and when the pretty redhead instructed them to turn to page 32 and copy the map they found there into their books they did so quietly, with subdued enthusiasm. As on his first visit, Will was struck by how well disciplined the class seemed to be. Mei was right: Alice Kennedy would have been way out of his league.
The cavernous classroom had obviously been intended for older and larger pupils at one time, and the tiny desks and plastic chairs clustered in the centre were dwarfed by their surroundings. Even so, the remaining space overflowed with tables and cabinets, cluttered shelves and stuffed boxes, and it was impossible to tell what colour the walls had been painted, so completely were they covered with posters, photographs, charts, children’s artwork, and countless neatly handwritten sheets of A4 paper. The room smelled of whiteboard markers, pencil shavings and Blu Tack.
Miss Kennedy (Will found it impossible to think of her as Alice) indicated that she would be with him in just a moment. She glided with smooth efficiency among the desks, offering pupils a few additional words of advice where necessary. Will took the opportunity to look more closely at the papers decorating the nearest wall, thrilled to see that many related to the genetic genealogy talk he had given here a fortnight before.
Apparently, the DNA aspect had been just the sparkling tip of a multi-disciplinary project the children were working on this term. They were exploring their local and family histories, it seemed, and seeing how they all fitted as individuals into the larger world around them.
Strangers at the Door: Twelve unsettling tales of horror Page 7