the Third Twin (1996)

by Ken Follett

  She had an entry phone. He pressed the bell and stared at the Speaker, willing it to make a noise. Nothing happened. He rang again. There was a crackling noise. His heart leaped. An irritable voice said: “Who is it?”

  “It’s Steve Logan. I came to cheer you up.”

  There was a long pause. “Steve, I don’t feel like having visitors.”

  “At least let me give you these flowers.”

  She did not reply. She was scared, he thought, and he felt bitterly disappointed. She had said she believed he was innocent, but that was when he was safely behind bars. Now that he was on her doorstep and she was alone, it was not so easy. “You haven’t changed your mind about me, have you?” he said. “You still believe I’m innocent? If not, I’ll just go away.”

  The buzzer sounded and the door opened.

  She was a woman who could not resist a challenge, he thought.

  He stepped into a tiny lobby with two more doors. One stood open and led to a flight of stairs. At the top stood Jeannie, in a bright green T-shirt.

  “I guess you’d better come up,” she said.

  It was not the most enthusiastic of welcomes, but he smiled and went up the stairs, carrying his gifts in a paper sack. She showed him into a little living room with a kitchen nook. She liked black and white with splashes of vivid color, he noted. She had a black-upholstered couch with orange cushions, an electric-blue clock on a white-painted wall, bright yellow lampshades, and a white kitchen counter with red coffee mugs.

  He put his sack on the kitchen counter. “Look,” he said, “you need something to eat, to make you feel better.” He took out the pizza. “And a glass of wine to ease the tension. Then, when you’re ready to give yourself a special treat, you can eat this ice cream right out of the carton, don’t even put it in a dish. And after the food and drink is all gone you’ll still have the flowers. See?”

  She stared at him as if he were a man from Mars.

  He added: “And anyway, I figured you needed someone to come over here and tell you that you’re a wonderful, special person.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Fuck you!” she said. “I never cry!”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. Tentatively he drew her to him. She did not resist. Hardly able to believe his luck, he put his arms around her. She was nearly as tall as he. She rested her head on his shoulder, and her body shook with sobs. He stroked her hair. It was soft and heavy. He got a hard-on like a fire hose, and he eased away from her a fraction, hoping she would not notice. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “You’ll work things out.”

  She remained slumped in his arms for a long, delicious moment. He felt the warmth of her body and inhaled her scent. He wondered whether to kiss her. He hesitated, afraid that if he rushed her she would reject him. Then the moment passed and she moved away.

  She wiped her nose on the hem of her baggy T-shirt, giving him a sexy glimpse of a flat, suntanned stomach. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a shoulder to cry on.”

  He felt let down by her matter-of-fact tone. For him it had been a moment of intense feeling; for her, no more than a release of tension. “All part of the service,” he said facetiously, then wished he had kept quiet.

  She opened a cupboard and took out plates. “I feel better already,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

  He perched on a stool at her kitchen counter. She cut the pizza and took the cork out of the wine. He enjoyed watching her move around her home, closing a drawer with her hip, squinting at a wineglass to see if it was clean, picking up a corkscrew with her long, capable fingers. He remembered the first girl he ever fell in love with. Her name was Bonnie, and she was seven, the same age as he; and he had stared at her strawberry blond ringlets and green eyes and thought what a miracle it was that someone so perfect could exist in the playground of Spillar Road Grade School. For some time he had entertained the notion that she might actually be an angel.

  He did not think Jeannie was an angel, but there was a fluid physical grace about her that gave him the same awestruck sensation.

  “You’re resilient,” she commented. “Last time I saw you, you looked awful. It was only twenty-four hours ago, but you seem completely recovered.”

  “I got off lightly. I have a sore place where Detective Allaston banged my head on the wall, and a big bruise where Porky Butcher kicked me in the ribs at five o’clock this morning, but I’ll be okay, so long as I never have to go back inside that jail.” He put the thought out of his mind. He was not going back; the DNA test would eliminate him as a suspect.

  He looked at her bookshelf. She had a lot of nonfiction, biographies of Darwin and Einstein and Francis Bacon; some women novelists he had not read, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates; five or six Edith Whartons; some modern classics. “Hey, you have my all-time favorite novel!” he said.

  “Let me guess: To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  He was astonished. “How did you know?”

  “Come on. The hero is a lawyer who defies social prejudice to defend an innocent man. Isn’t that your dream? Besides, I didn’t think you’d pick The Women’s Room.”

  He shook his head in resignation. “You know so much about me. It’s unnerving.”

  “What do you think is my favorite book?”

  “Is this a test?”

  “You bet.”

  “Oh … uh, Middlemarch.”

  “Why?”

  “It has a strong, independent-minded heroine.”

  “But she doesn’t do anything! Anyway, the book I’m thinking of isn’t a novel. Guess again.”

  He shook his head. “A nonfiction book.” Then inspiration struck. “I know. The story of a brilliant, elegant scientific discovery that explained something crucial about human life. I bet it’s The Double Helix.”

  “Hey, very good!”

  They started to eat. The pizza was still warm. Jeannie was thoughtfully silent for a while, then she said: “I really messed up today. I can see it now. I needed to keep the whole crisis low-key. I should have kept saying, ‘Well, maybe, we can discuss that, let’s not make any hasty decisions.’ Instead I defied the university, then made it worse by telling the press.”

  “You strike me as an uncompromising person,” he said.

  She nodded. “There’s uncompromising, and then there’s dumb.”

  He showed her The Wall Street Journal. “This may explain why your department is oversensitive about bad publicity at the moment. Your sponsor is about to be taken over.”

  She looked at the first paragraph. “A hundred and eighty million dollars, wow.” She read on while chewing a slice of pizza. When she finished the article she shook her head. “Your theory is interesting, but I don’t buy it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was Maurice Obeli who seemed to be against me, not Berrington. Although Berrington can be sneaky, they say. Anyway, I’m not that important. I represent such a tiny fraction of the research Genetico sponsors. Even if my work really did invade people’s privacy, that wouldn’t be enough of a scandal to threaten a multimillion-dollar takeover.”

  Steve wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and picked up a framed photograph of a woman with a baby. The woman looked a bit like Jeannie, with straight hair. “Your sister?” he guessed.

  “Yes. Patty. She has three kids now—all boys.”

  “I don’t have any brothers or sisters,” he said. Then he remembered. “Unless you count Dennis Pinker.” Jeannie’s face changed, and he said: “You’re looking at me like a specimen.”

  “I’m sorry. Want to try the ice cream?”

  “You bet.”

  She put the carton on the table and got out two spoons. That pleased him. Eating out of the same container was one step closer to kissing. She ate with relish. He wondered if she made love with the same kind of greedy enthusiasm.

  He swallowed a spoonful of Rainforest Crunch and said: “I’m so glad you believe in me. The cops sure don’t.”

>   “If you’re a rapist, my whole theory falls to pieces.”

  “Even so, not many women would have let me in tonight. Especially believing I have the same genes as Dennis Pinker.”

  “I hesitated,” she said. “But you proved me right.”

  “How?”

  She gestured to indicate the remains of their dinner. “If Dennis Pinker is attracted to a woman, he pulls a knife and orders her to take off her panties. You bring pizza.”

  Steve laughed.

  “It may sound funny,” Jeannie said, “but it’s a world of difference.”

  “There’s something you ought to know about me,” Steve said. “A secret.”

  She put down her spoon. “What?”

  “I almost killed someone once.”

  “How?”

  He told her the story of the fight with Tip Hendricks. “That’s why I’m so bothered by this stuff about my origins,” he said. “I can’t tell you how disturbing it is to be told that Mom and Dad may not be my parents. What if my real father is a killer?”

  Jeannie shook her head. “You were in a schoolboy fight that got out of hand. That doesn’t make you a psychopath. And what about the other guy? Tip?”

  “Someone else killed him a couple of years later. By then he was dealing dope. He got into an argument with his supplier, and the guy shot him through the head.”

  “He’s the psychopath, I figure,” Jeannie said. “That’s what happens to them. They can’t stay out of trouble. A big strong kid like you might clash with the law once, but you survive the incident and go on to lead a normal life. Whereas Dennis will be in and out of jail until someone kills him.”

  “How old are you, Jeannie?”

  “You didn’t like me calling you a big strong kid.”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “I’m twenty-nine. It’s a big difference.”

  “Do I seem like a kid to you?”

  “Listen, I don’t know, a man of thirty probably wouldn’t drive here from Washington just to bring me pizza. It was kind of impulsive.”

  “Are you sorry I did it?”

  “No.” She touched his hand. “I’m real glad.”

  He still did not know where he was with her. But she had cried on his shoulder. You don’t use a kid for that, he thought.

  “When will you know about my genes?” he said.

  She looked at her watch. “The blotting is probably done. Lisa will make the film in the morning.”

  “You mean the test is completed?”

  “Just about.”

  “Can’t we look at the results now? I can’t wait to find out if I have the same DNA as Dennis Pinker.”

  “I guess we could,” Jeannie said. “I’m pretty curious myself.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  25

  BERRINGTON JONES HAD A PLASTIC CARD THAT WOULD OPEN any door in Nut House.

  No one else knew. Even the other full professors fondly imagined their offices were private. They knew the cleaners had master keys. So did the campus security guards. But it never occurred to faculty that it could not be very difficult to get hold of a key that was given even to cleaners.

  All the same, Berrington had never used his master key. Snooping was undignified: not his style. Pete Watlingson probably had photos of naked boys in his desk drawer, Ted Ransome undoubtedly stashed a little marijuana somewhere, Sophie Chapple might keep a vibrator for those long, lonely afternoons, but Berrington did not want to know about it. The master key was only for emergencies.

  This was an emergency.

  The university had ordered Jeannie to stop using her computer search program, and they had announced to the world that it had been discontinued, but how could he be sure it was true? He could not see the electronic messages fly along the phone lines from one terminal to another. Throughout the day the thought had nagged him that she might already be searching another database. And there was no telling what she might find.

  So he had returned to his office and now sat at his desk, as the warm dusk gathered over the red brick of the campus buildings, tapping a plastic card against his computer mouse and getting ready to do something that went against all his instincts.

  His dignity was precious. He had developed it early. As the smallest boy in the class, without a father to tell him how to deal with bullies, his mother too worried about making ends meet to concern herself with his happiness, he had slowly created an air of superiority, an aloofness that protected him. At Harvard he had furtively studied a classmate from a rich old-money family, taking in the details of his leather belts and linen handkerchiefs, his tweed suits and cashmere scarves; learning how he unfolded his napkin and held chairs for ladies; marveling at the mixture of ease and deference with which he treated the professors, the superficial charm and underlying coldness of his relations with his social inferiors. By the time Berrington began work on his master’s degree he was widely assumed to be a Brahmin himself.

  And the cloak of dignity was difficult to take off. Some professors could remove their jackets and join in a game of touch football with a group of undergraduates, but not Berrington. The students never told him jokes or invited him to their parties, but neither did they act rudely to him or talk during his lectures or question his grades.

  In a sense his whole life since the creation of Genetico had been a deception, but he had carried it off with boldness and panache. However, there was no stylish way to sneak into someone else’s room and search it.

  He checked his watch. The lab would be closed now. Most of his colleagues had left, heading for their suburban homes or for the bar of the Faculty Club. This was as good a moment as any. There was no time when the building was guaranteed to be empty; scientists worked whenever the mood took them. If he were seen, he would have to brazen it out.

  He left his office, went down the stairs, and walked along the corridor to Jeannie’s door. There was no one around. He swiped the card through the card reader and her door opened. He stepped inside, switched on the lights, and closed the door behind him.

  It was the smallest office in the building. In fact it had been a storeroom, but Sophie Chapple had maliciously insisted it become Jeannie’s office, on the spurious grounds that a bigger room was needed to store the boxes of printed questionnaires the department used. It was a narrow room with a small window. However, Jeannie had livened it up with two wooden chairs painted bright red, a spindly palm in a pot, and a reproduction of a Picasso etching, a bullfight in vivid shades of yellow and orange.

  He picked up the framed picture on her desk. It was a black-and-white photograph of a good-looking man with sideburns and a wide tie, and a young woman with a determined expression: Jeannie’s parents in the seventies, he guessed. Otherwise her desk was completely clear. Tidy girl.

  He sat down and switched on her computer. While it was booting up he went through her drawers. The top one contained ballpoints and scratch pads. In another he found a box of tampons and a pair of panty hose in an unopened packet. Berrington hated panty hose. He cherished adolescent memories of garter belts and stockings with seams. Panty hose were unhealthy, too, like nylon Jockey shorts. If President Proust made him surgeon general, he planned to put a health warning on all panty hose. The next drawer contained a hand mirror and a brush with some of Jeannie’s long dark hair caught in its bristles; the last, a pocket dictionary and a paperback book called A Thousand Acres. No secrets so far.

  Her menu came up on screen. He picked up her mouse and clicked on Calendar. Her appointments were predictable: lectures and classes, laboratory time, tennis games, dates for drinks and movies. She was going to Oriole Park at Camden Yards to watch the ball game on Saturday; Ted Ransome and his wife were having her over to brunch on Sunday; her car was due to be serviced on Monday. There was no entry that said “Scan medical files of Acme Insurance.” Her to-do list was equally mundane: “Buy vitamins, call Ghita, Lisa birthday gift, check modem.”

  He exited the diary and began t
o look through her files. She had masses of statistics on spreadsheets. Her word-processing files were smaller: some correspondence, designs for questionnaires, a draft of an article. Using the Find feature, he searched her entire WP directory for the word “database.” It came up several times in the article and again in file copies of three outgoing letters, but none of the references told him where she planned to use her search engine next. “Come on,” he said aloud, “there has to be something, for God’s sake.”

  She had a filing cabinet, but there was not much in it; she had been here only a few weeks. After a year or two it would be stuffed full of completed questionnaires, the raw data of psychological research. Now she had a few incoming letters in one file, departmental memos in another, photocopies of articles in a third.

  In an otherwise empty cupboard he found, facedown, a framed picture of Jeannie with a tall, bearded man, both of them on bicycles beside a lake. Berrington inferred a love affair that had ended.

  He now felt even more worried. This was the room of an organized person, the type who planned ahead. She filed her incoming letters and kept copies of everything she sent out. There ought to be evidence here of what she was going to do next. She had no reason to be secretive about it; until today there had been no suggestion that she had anything to be ashamed of. She must be planning another database sweep. The only possible explanation for the absence of clues was that she had made the arrangements by phone or in person, perhaps with someone who was a close friend. And if that were the case he might not be able to find out anything about it by searching her room.

  He heard a footstep in the corridor outside, and he tensed. There was a click as a card was passed through the card reader. Berrington stared helplessly at the door. There was nothing he could do: he was caught red-handed, sitting at her desk, with her computer on. He could not pretend to have wandered in here by accident.

  The door opened. He expected to see Jeannie, but in fact it was a security guard.

  The man knew him. “Oh, hi, Professor,” the guard said. “I saw the light on, so I thought I’d check. Dr. Ferrami usually keeps her door open when she’s here.”