by Val McDermid
When I returned nearly an hour later, there were lights showing in Helen Maitland’s house. When she opened the door to see me on her doorstep, she looked momentarily annoyed, then resigned. ‘The return of Sherlock Holmes,’ she said wryly.
‘I have things to say you should listen to,’ I said.
Her eyebrows quirked. ‘And they say etiquette’s dead. You’d better come in. Ms Branagh, wasn’t it?’
‘Brannigan,’ I corrected her as I followed her indoors. ‘Branagh’s the actor. I do it for real.’ Sometimes I hear myself and think if I was a punter I’d laugh at me.
‘Sorry, Ms Brannigan,’ Helen Maitland said. ‘Have a seat,’ she added as we arrived in the kitchen. I ignored her. She leaned against the worktop, facing me, one hand absently stroking a tortoise-shell cat sprawled on the draining board. ‘Well, you have my undivided attention. I presume this is to do with Sarah?’
‘I know you were lovers,’ I said bluntly. ‘I know you wanted children and she refused to go along with you. But after you split up, the technology was perfected that allowed Sarah to build babies from the eggs of two women rather than using sperm. But the immortality of being the first to do it wasn’t enough for Sarah. She wanted her genes to carry on too. So she started mixing her own harvested eggs in with the patients’. And one of those patients was so grateful that she broke the injunction of secrecy and sent a photograph with a lock of hair to the doctor who’d helped her make her dream come true. To nice Dr Helen Maitland. How am I doing so far?’
Her face had remained impassive, but the hand stroking the cat had stopped, fur clenched between her fingers. She tried a smile that came out more like a snarl. ‘Badly. I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Somewhere there will be a record of the DNA tests you ran on that lock of hair and on Sarah’s DNA. You can’t lose something like that. The police would have no trouble finding it. A lot of legwork, perhaps, but they’ll get there in the end.’
Her eyes were cautious now, watching me like a hawk’s, hardly blinking. ‘I’m sorry, I must have missed a turning somewhere. How did we get to the police?’
‘Don’t, Dr Maitland. Neither of us is stupid, so stop acting like we both are. I can imagine how distressed you were when you discovered what Sarah was doing, especially after she had denied you the chance to be the first to try the treatment. Even more so since your own operation. You went round to see her, to confront her with the outrage she’d perpetrated against you. And she dismissed you, didn’t she? She didn’t take your emotions seriously, just like before when she’d dismissed your desires for motherhood.’
Helen Maitland shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I thought you said you were for real, Ms Brannigan. Sounds to me like you need treatment.’
‘I don’t think so. I think you’re the one with the problem, Dr Maitland. You might give the impression of being cool, smart and in control, and God knows, you’re good at it. But then you’d have to be, to kill your ex-lover and get away with it.’
She pushed off from the worktop and stood bristling at me, like one of her cats finding a strange tom on the front step. ‘You’ve gone too far. It’s time you were leaving,’ she said, her voice low and thick with anger.
‘I knew there was a temper lurking in there. It’s the same temper that flared when you confronted Sarah and she dismissed your pain. It’s the same temper that made you grab the nearest knife and thrust it under Sarah’s ribs right into her heart.’
‘Get out,’ she said, anger and incredulity fighting in her. ‘I don’t have to take this from you.’ She took a step towards me.
‘You can’t get away with it, Helen,’ I said, my hands coming up automatically, palms facing her. ‘Once the police start looking at you, they’ll find the evidence. It’s all there, once you accept that Sarah wasn’t killed by a burglar. As soon as they match your voice against that 999 call, you’re right there in the frame.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’ The voice wasn’t Helen Maitland’s. It came from behind my right shoulder. I whirled round, straight into fighting stance, poised on the balls of my feet.
It was Flora. And in her hand was a shiny long-barrelled revolver.
24
Her small pale hands looked too fragile to wield a big cannon like that, but the barrel wasn’t trembling. Whatever was driving Flora, it was powerful stuff. ‘Flora,’ Helen said calmly.
‘It’s all right, Helen,’ Flora said, not taking her eyes off me.
Not with me it wasn’t. I’d had enough of people waving guns at me. And frankly, I didn’t think Flora was in the same league as Peter Lovell’s gunmen. I glanced over at Helen Maitland and let my jaw go slack.
‘My God!’ I exclaimed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Flora’s hand jerk as her eyes swivelled towards Helen. On the instant, I launched myself, right leg jabbing up and out at shoulder height, my own voice roaring in my ears like Bruce Willis on heat. Everything suddenly seemed to be in slo-mo: my foot connecting with her shoulder, Flora toppling towards the floor, her gun arm flying out to one side, her finger tightening on the trigger as I landed on top of her, my body tensing against the expected blast of the gunshot.
A tongue of flame spurted from the gun barrel, then died as Flora released her pressure on the trigger.
I’d been scared shitless by a cigarette lighter.
I’d been scared, no two ways about it. But now I was really, really cross. When I’d walked through the door, I’d been feeling sympathetic. My instincts had all been to find a way out of this situation that didn’t mean Helen Maitland spending the rest of her useful life behind bars. Now I wasn’t so sure that was what I wanted.
‘That was really silly, Flo,’ Helen remarked in an offhand tone I’d never have been able to manage in the circumstances.
I disentangled myself from Flora’s hair and limbs and pushed myself back to my feet. ‘It was a lot more than silly,’ I said. ‘For fuck’s sake, I could have really hurt you, you pillock.’
Flora threw the gun across the room. It clattered into the kitchen unit next to Helen. Then she curled up into a ball and burst into tears.
Helen picked up the lighter and laid it on the kitchen table, then moved to Flora’s side. She crouched down and put her arms around her. It felt like Flora wept for a very long time, but it was less than five minutes by the kitchen clock. I didn’t mind. It gave my heart time to return to its normal speed and rhythm.
Eventually Helen steered Flora into a kitchen chair and sat down beside her. ‘Even a real gun wouldn’t stop the police running those voice comparisons,’ I said. ‘I’m not daft enough to embark on a confrontation like this without leaving a bit of insurance behind in case some idiot pulls some brainless stunt where I actually do get hurt.’
‘Then it’s all over,’ Flora said dully.
‘How can you say that?’ Helen demanded, pulling away. ‘How can you think that I…That’s crazy.’
‘It’s not crazy, actually.’ Flora’s voice was shaky. ‘You see, if the police did start to run comparisons on that 999 tape, they would find a match.’
‘Look, Flora, I don’t know where you’ve got this idea from. I didn’t kill Sarah,’ Helen protested. ‘I’m appalled you could think so.’
‘I don’t think so. No one knows the truth better than me.’
There was a silence as Helen and I digested the implications of Flora’s words. Then the enormity of my second screw-up in two days hit me. I’d been right about the obsessive power of love being responsible for Sarah Blackstone’s death. But I’d picked the wrong candidate for the killer. I’d been so convinced that Helen was the killer I hadn’t even paid attention to Flora.
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’ Helen asked. There was an edge of horror in her voice.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I asked. Flora said nothing. She didn’t have to. We both knew the truth now. ‘So tell me. Was I close? The scenario I painted
? Was I on the right lines?’
Flora pushed her hair back with her free hand. ‘Why are you so keen to know the details? So you can run to the nearest police station and turn me in?’
I sighed. ‘The reason I became a private investigator was because I like to know the reasons why things happen. I understand the difference between the law and justice. I know that handing people over to the police isn’t always the best way of ending things. If you want to prevent me going to the police, you’ve got more chance talking to me than you have trying to terrorize me. I have a client who has an interest in Sarah Blackstone’s death. She has her own, very pressing, reasons for wanting to know the truth here.’
While I had been speaking, Helen Maitland had been rummaging through a drawer in the kitchen table. As I got to the end of a speech that owed more to the British commanding officer in The Great Escape than any innate nobility of spirit, she pulled out a bashed packet of Silk Cut. ‘I knew there was a packet in here somewhere.’ She ripped the cellophane off, flipped the top up, tore out the silver paper, shoved a cigarette up with her thumb and drew it out with her lips. She picked up the gun and lit the cigarette. Pure bathos.
‘I think we’re in deep shit here, Flora,’ she said through a sigh of smoke, ‘but from what I’ve seen of Ms Brannigan, it seems to me she’s the person who can best deal with that. I think you should tell us what happened.’
Flora started crying again. I still wasn’t impressed. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ she said through a veil of hair and tears.
‘I know that,’ Helen soothed in her practical, no-nonsense way. There was going to be a reckoning between these two, I could see that in her eyes. But Helen Maitland had the sense to realize this wasn’t the time or the place. ‘It’s not your style, Flo.’
Flora did a bit more weeping, and Helen just sat there smoking, her eyes never leaving her lover. It was impossible even to guess at what was going on behind that blank stare. Finally Flora sat back, pushed her hair away from her face and scrubbed her eyes with her small hands, like a child who’s been crying from tiredness. She took a deep breath, gave Helen a pleading look, then turned to face me. ‘I really didn’t mean to kill her,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go there with that intention.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. Helen only crushed out one cigarette and lit a second.
Flora breathed out heavily through her nose. ‘This isn’t easy,’ she complained.
‘Easier than killing someone,’ I remarked.
‘Not really,’ Flora said tremulously. ‘That happened in the heat of the moment. Before I even knew I had the knife in my hand, she was dead. Telling you is a lot harder, you have to believe that, Helen.’
Helen nodded curtly. ‘So what happened, Flora? I want to know just as badly as Ms Brannigan does.’
Flora pushed her hair back from her face and adopted a beseeching expression. I couldn’t get a handle on this woman at all. The image she projected was of a fairly timid, vulnerable innocent. Then I’d get a flash from those dark eyes and I’d feel like an entire brigade of dark, supernatural nasties were dancing on my grave. I realized exactly what Maggie had meant about the dragon and the maiden. I could see that it might be a powerful erotic mixture, but it left me feeling pathetically grateful that the gun hadn’t been for real. Flora was a woman who could easily have pulled the trigger then pulled the same ‘I didn’t mean it’ routine over me that she was giving us now over Sarah Blackstone.
‘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 h
alf 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.’
