Fresh Flesh

by Stella Duffy

  Saz blinked, as if clearing her eyes might make comprehension easier. It didn’t. She felt sick. Shocked and very sick. “What?”

  “Sleeping partner. Silent partner. He started the practice twenty years ago, though he retired from any actual involvement after the first couple of years. But he’s still named as one of the directors of the practice.”

  Saz finally managed to stutter out, “Our Barbara?”

  “You really thought I was in a shit mood just because you hadn’t been around? Fuck, Saz, you’re never around. That’s hardly news. I’ve been trying to think how I could tell you this for half a day now. I had to sit here with this by myself for the past twelve hours.”

  “No, look, it can’t be, Moll. This is ludicrous. That sort of coincidence is just too freaky. It’s too bloody unlikely.”

  Molly shook her head, “Not really. You know there aren’t actually that many places to go to for fertility treatment. Sure, there’s plenty of clinics setting up; it’s a great money maker, especially with the failure rate. And all that hormonal desire. But there simply aren’t that many places with a really good reputation, not many recommended by other medics. Yes, it’s a coincidence that we ended up going to a clinic that he’s been involved in, but it’s not a huge one. It’s really not that unlikely. His clinics are known for being positively undiscriminating in who they help to procreate. Lees has helped set up four other clinics in London and a couple in other parts of the country. Chances are, with so many refusing to help ‘non-traditional’ couples, we would have wound up at one of them. It’s what he does.”

  “What he does?”

  “He cares about people having babies.”

  “Cares about?”

  “Saz, please, you’re just repeating me. It doesn’t help.”

  Saz raised her head from her hands, “Yeah, well, funnily enough, Moll, I didn’t exactly have him down as a good guy.”

  “No, I know.” Molly shrugged, “Maybe he was selling babies forty years ago, perhaps it was the closest he could get at the time, but the man’s always been interested in fertility issues. Even when he was at college, he turned out some specialist thesis on it: ‘Procreation for the Traditionally Infertile’. It’s his baby, so to speak.”

  Saz still didn’t get it. Didn’t want to get it. “How the hell do you know so much about him?”

  “Once I’d realized who he was, I stayed up half the night on it. Luckily his website doesn’t keep normal office hours.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “I don’t feel too hot about it myself. I wanted to tell you face to face. I wanted to have you here when I told you, so you could make me feel less awful about it.”

  Saz knew that was exactly what she would have to do. Molly was the pregnant one after all, but she had no idea how she could make either of them feel less shocked, less disturbed.

  Molly handed Saz a printed sheet of paper, “Here’s your man, babe. Samuel Lees is seventy-four. He lives in Maida Vale and has a country house in Dorset. He’s been officially retired for the past nine years, though he’s often called on to speak at embryology and fertility conferences. Even though loads of people think of him as a maverick, he’s still highly respected in the profession. He’s been married twice, single since the mid ’70s. He’s got three grownup children of his own, all created in the traditional method and, most importantly, he’s a fierce proponent of the fertility-on-demand school. All of which means, well …”

  Molly faltered and Saz finished her sentence, “It means Samuel Lees is why you’re able to have our baby.”

  “Yeah, indirectly. He is.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  As they lay in bed together, Saz and Molly talked briefly about Chris and decided it would probably be best not to share the disquieting news with him. Not yet. There was an unspoken awareness that they did not really want to discuss Lees’s influence, that perhaps by acknowledging his involvement in their pregnancy, the unpleasant sense of his presence would become more tangible. They did, though, need to decide what to say to Patrick. Saz had told Molly of his furious rant about Lees and they both agreed the last thing Saz wanted now was Patrick charging over and confronting him directly.

  “Moll, he wants to kill him and maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

  “You can’t mean that?”

  “Of course not. But I hate this, hate how it taints our baby.”

  “No, it doesn’t, Saz. Nothing’s touching the baby. What we need to do is protect Chris from this for now and protect Patrick from himself as far as your Doctor Lees is concerned.”

  “He’s not mine, thanks. But you’re right. We can’t let Patrick go crazy on this one. I mean, it’d be shit to have to take Lillian over to Wandsworth every Saturday.”

  “Traffic’s terrible over that way.”

  “Terrible.”

  “You’d better not tell him then, babe.”

  “No. Best not.”

  For most of the past week Saz had been craving time with her partner. In her state of permanent tiredness, it was all she wanted. Easy hours, a meaningless evening together, time that looked like nothing at all – dinner and a bottle of wine, an evening out, even a night in, just watching TV or a video. Being at home together, just the two of them and the bump. Hours available to simply hand-hold, to be the kind of easy physically close that might then lead on to still further physical closeness. But Molly’s revelation allowed none of that. An image of Lees sat between them on the squashy sofa, pushing apart their warmth-inclined shoulders. The thought of Lees as their true progenitor kept their usually-entwined legs from each other as Molly slept fitfully on her edge of the bed and Saz lay wide awake, uncomfortable and agitated.

  Six-thirty on Monday morning and she was exhausted. Already. Again. Exhausted when she’d lain down and tried to sleep and exhausted when she’d dragged herself from bed an hour ago. The first night for the past six days that she’d been able to just be at home and there was no rest to be had. The worry genie had been released when Molly coupled their baby with Lees’s name and now Saz couldn’t forget about him until she could investigate further. Though Molly made dinner and they did share a bottle of wine – Molly had one glass, Saz the other four – she wasn’t able to relax at all. Working on a case about someone else, no matter how deeply she became personally involved – and Saz usually got in too far – there had always been home to hide away in, Molly to run to for succour and relief. Home was security. Not now. Without the clinic Samuel Lees had founded fifteen years ago, Molly and Saz would not be having their baby. They had undertaken a serious search to find somewhere that would help them achieve their goal. Not merely for Chris to be a donor for Molly’s baby – that would have been easy, they could probably have done it themselves, at home – but to actively make it possible for Molly to carry Saz’s and Chris’s baby to term. To do something they knew the traditionalists would find horrendous, to do something they themselves had only imagined and talked about, hoped for. It was all too close.

  And the running didn’t help. It often did make a difference, giving emotional as well as the expected physical benefits. At the least, the morning three miles usually cleared her head of the fear-detritus, of the unfounded imaginings, but not today. The running didn’t help and Saz couldn’t stop anyway. She’d started with her usual route and had then counted down another circuit and now found herself hitting yet another round. Slower now, of course, but still moving on, she’d looked at the track that wound through the trees to the path that led back to their road and, before she’d had time to clearly acknowledge what she was doing, had thrown herself on again, back to the main track of the open ground.

  Breath coming in sharp bursts, warm early morning air stabbing sharp at the back of her throat, raw now with the exertion of forced breath for too long. Oxygen dragged into her lungs by a hungry diaphragm, snapping back with each breath determined this should be the last it strained so hard for, disappointed each time as Saz ran on. Ran on anyway. Desp
ite the scream of her pounding heart, forced to beat at far more than the healthy target rate, the seventy per cent of maximum Saz could usually hear within herself without bothering to count beats. It felt like she was now far closer to eighty-five or ninety this morning. She ran on. Disregarding the cramp in her left calf, acknowledging the pain and then running right through the stitch in her right side, beating her body into a submission she could never wholly claim from her mind. Not a happy Saz.

  She knew she’d have to get on with this by herself. Not that she could have relied on Patrick for much more anyway. They now had all the information that could usefully be expected to come from his parents’ files. In fact, she’d actually completed the job she’d set out to do for Patrick. And as Lillian refused to go to the authorities with their DNA information, it no longer needed to concern either mother or son directly. Not for the moment anyway. Saz would have to pay a visit to Georgina Leyton by herself and see if she couldn’t get something closer to the truth. Another chance to visit the lair of the designer-clad harpy didn’t exactly thrill her to the core. She might just have to take Carrie with her as a distraction against the sleek wealth, if nothing else.

  Saz was having to acknowledge that the one she’d assumed was the bad guy was not solely bad. It wasn’t easy. Lees had also, albeit indirectly, made it possible for her and Molly to have the family they craved. Saz could just have chosen to accept that she’d found Patrick’s mother for him and therefore she was quite at liberty to now leave the matter. Tell Chris she didn’t know where else to go, that he was going to have to talk to his adoptive mother about it. But it wasn’t that simple. The dividing line between right and wrong was even less clear than she usually found it. Much as part of her wanted to run away, to just play happy families and refuse to look at any of this, Saz had no choice. China shops and blind bulls came to mind. But so did another image. The unstoppable process of birth. There was nowhere to go but on.

  And home. For a long shower and a brief opportunity to rest her overworked body. Her hamstrings would be hell by the afternoon and she didn’t want to be tripping over her high heels when she took Carrie to visit Georgina. At least one of them needed to be presentable, and Saz feared that if Carrie had spent the past week in bed with the new brunette, it was more than likely going to have to be her.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Walking into Georgina Leyton’s offices with Carrie beside her gave Saz a strange sense of power. If she herself wasn’t quite able to break through the well-built defences, she was sure that the added weapon of Carrie’s highly sensitive bullshit detector would be a valuable adjunct to her plan of attack. Except that she didn’t yet have anything quite so comprehensive as a plan. But there was the disquieting sense that she couldn’t simply wait for matters to run their course now. She was going to have to be proactive, if only because it might give her some small measure of peace of mind to feel as if she had a little influence over what was happening to her family. She was aware that a semblance of control wasn’t anything like the actual thing, but it was going to have to do. She couldn’t go on with no sleep for another week.

  Saz intended to introduce Carrie to Georgina as another person Richard Leyton had arranged to be adopted. She hoped that Georgina would know enough about her father’s involvement with Lees to be confused by Carrie’s story. Either she would know Carrie couldn’t possibly be one of Lees’s sold babies, or she would be surprised to be confronted by a child she didn’t yet know about. Either way, they were hoping that in her confusion she might give something away. Saz planned to then demand that Georgina tell them anything she’d found out about Lees and her father’s involvement with him. From their meeting the week before, she had convinced herself that Georgina actually knew much more about her father’s affairs than she’d been prepared to reveal. Saz hoped she might manage to shock Georgina – maybe even prompting the odd revelation or two. But she was also fairly certain that all those years of good breeding and training in cold confidence would come into play pretty quickly and Georgina’s perfectly shaped mouth would close on any further revelations – which was when Carrie’s other uses came into play. With her finely-honed wheedling skills, Saz figured that if anyone could get around the officious receptionist, it would be Carrie. The plan was to leave the younger woman alone with him for as long as possible – Saz expected Georgina would want to talk to her by herself anyway – and any information Carrie could get from him was bound to be useful when they came to analyse what they’d learnt and work out the next step. Carrie, with no real concept of a career having made it into her adult life, had become the temping queen in the past couple of years. Whenever she could be bothered to work; on the occasions Saz’s demands for rent became too pressing; or she couldn’t get a chunk more cash from her childhood-absent-therefore-guilty-as-hell-daddy.

  People loved Carrie in their offices – all they ever wanted from a temp was someone willing to get on with the job and, if she didn’t really know what she was doing, to at least pretend that she did. Pretence of competence kept the office managers happy and the bosses soothed. And pretence of competence was Carrie’s forte. Her vast experience in a wide variety of offices meant she could assure Saz that a quick once-over of the reception area would furnish them with all she needed to know about whatever computing system the firm was using. It might also, if they were really lucky, even provide them with information on the alarm system. Carrie could never be held back for long from a good cops and robbers fantasy and Saz’s story of Georgina’s behaviour had Carrie fuming long before she met the woman, which is what Saz had hoped would happen. While she didn’t intend their day’s work to go as far as actual breaking and entering, Saz had known there was no way Carrie would refuse to help once she’d heard the description of Georgina, let alone what else Saz suspected Georgina knew. There was little Carrie hated more than a posh girl in designer clothes, primarily because she knew she would always look better in whatever they were wearing than they could manage themselves, genetic predisposition to Knightsbridge shopping or not. Carrie, then, had already determined she would use her time at the offices as efficiently as possible. To her, this meant getting the alarm combination out of the pompous receptionist at the least. Saz wasn’t sure that even Carrie could achieve quite such a feat of deceit, but then again, she wasn’t going to discount anything that might help in the end.

  When Saz called Georgina’s office to make an appointment to see her, she was surprised to be put through without demur. She had expected a polite brush-off at the very least. Georgina told Saz that she had been through some of her father’s things and, while she’d found nothing that pertained directly to Patrick’s adoption, she did think that perhaps they should have a clear talk about the matter. The threat in Georgina’s voice was so thinly veiled as to be practically naked, but Saz ignored the tone, took several deep breaths, clenched her fists and then awarded herself a row of shiny medals for not taking the bait. She accepted the offer of a meeting as graciously as possible. Not an easy acceptance, forced out between gritted teeth, but at least her words managed to stay perfectly polite.

  Saz had arranged to meet Carrie outside the office building at two-thirty. Two twenty-five came and she had to look twice at the woman crossing the road towards her before she knew for definite that it was Carrie. The woman was Carrie, but it wasn’t a version she’d seen before. Saz had made an effort to dress up a little herself as she had no intention of repeating the last two disastrous meetings when Georgina had easily claimed the high ground in cool ice-maiden pose. But while Saz was now wearing a perfectly respectable summer linen suit, Carrie had outdone herself. The woman crossing the road towards Saz was dressed in white – all white, all silk. Long flowing trousers, a shirt so fine it was almost transparent and a soft white jacket that did up with a single button to cover both Carrie’s modesty and the three tattoos on her left arm. Her hair was scraped back into a smooth chignon, she wore only one earring in each ear, her nose and eyebrow rings were go
ne, her makeup was understated and pretty pink soft, and even her trademark purple diamanté sunglasses were missing. On her head was perched a traditional pair of Ray-Bans.

  “Bloody hell, what the fuck happened to you?”

  “Thank you, Saz, you look lovely too.”

  “But … Christ … I told you to dress up, not look like you’d just stepped off a yacht in Monaco.”

  “Posh people always wear white, don’t they? Just to show they don’t care about having to wash everything after wearing it for half an hour. Or getting someone else to wash it for them. You think this is too much?”

  “Fuck no, you look fantastic. It’s just … well, where on earth did you get this lot? I wouldn’t have thought you’d have the money.”

  Carrie laughed, “Saz, you’re such an innocent sometimes. That’s the whole point of M&S.”

  “This lot is from Marks?”

  “They’re almost interesting these days, darling.”

  “Yeah, but it still must have cost a hell of a lot.”

  “Saz, you’re not listening. I got this all from Marks. So, assuming your bastard receptionist doesn’t tip a pot of coffee all over me this afternoon, it’ll all be back on the returned racks at Marble Arch by six o’clock this evening. Sort of costume hire, really.”

  “Only without the money bit?”

  “That’s right.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  While Saz had expected stonewalling from Georgina, she hadn’t known anyone could be so good at it. And still smile. Offer coffee. And cake from Fortnum’s. Compliment Saz on her suit, her healthy tan, her lovely new shoes. Be really bloody nice, beautiful, charming, and far too damn clever. Saz said again that she believed Richard Leyton had been involved in Patrick’s adoption by the Freemans. Georgina insisted that she had been through all her father’s papers and found nothing. Saz showed her a copy of Leyton’s letter confirming the adoption. Georgina acknowledged it was definitely her father’s letterhead and even more definitely her father’s signature – “That little loop on the R, that’s Daddy, certainly.” But no, of course she hadn’t found the original of the letter herself, in fact nothing else about the matter at all. “Obviously my father and Gerald Freeman wanted to keep this business about Patrick a secret. I suppose, Ms Martin, my father must have had a few things he wanted kept secret. Even from me. It’s been quite a disappointment, I can tell you. I was so certain I was Daddy’s little girl. But I guess we all get it wrong sometimes, don’t we?”