Val McDermid – Blue Genes (страница 12)

She looked blankly at me. ‘Because they’ll take the baby off us,’ she 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.’

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