Sister

Mr. Wright is waiting. “Yes. The other was Professor Rosen.”

Although most people at your funeral were blurred by grief and rain, I noticed Professor Rosen, maybe because he was a known face from television. He was among the crowd who couldn’t fit inside the church, holding an umbrella with vents, a scientist’s umbrella, letting the wind through while other mourners had their umbrellas turned inside out. Afterward he came up to me and awkwardly stretched out his hand, then let it fall to his side, as if too shy to continue with the gesture. “Alfred Rosen. I wanted to apologize to you, for the e-mail that the PR woman sent you. It was callous.” His glasses were misted and he used a handkerchief to wipe them clean. “I have e-mailed you my personal contact details, should you want to ask me anything further. I’d be happy to answer any questions that you have.” His language was starched and his posture tense—I noticed that much—but nothing else because my thoughts were with you.

“I phoned Professor Rosen on the number he’d given me, about a week after the funeral.”

I gloss over that week of emotional turmoil after your funeral, when I didn’t think straight, couldn’t eat and barely spoke. I continue briskly, trying to blot out the memory of that time.

“He said he was going away on a lecture tour and suggested we meet before he left.”

“Were you suspicious of him?” asks Mr. Wright.

“No. I had no reason to think either he or the trial were connected to Tess’s death. By then I thought the payments to the women were probably innocent, as the people at the hospital had said, but I hadn’t directly asked him, so I wanted to do that.”

I thought I had to question everything, be suspicious of everyone. I couldn’t afford to go down just one avenue, but had to explore all of them until at the end of one, at the center of the maze, I would find your killer.

“Our meeting was at ten o’clock, but Chrom-Med runs information seminars starting at nine-thirty, so I booked a place.”

Mr. Wright looks surprised.

“It’s a bit like the nuclear industry used to be,” I say. “Wanting everything to look open and innocent. ‘Visit our nuclear processing facility and bring a picnic!’ You know the kind of thing.”

Mr. Wright smiles, but the strangest thing has happened. For a moment, as I was speaking, I heard myself talking like you.

It was the morning rush hour and the tube was packed. As I stood squashed up against other commuters, I remembered, appalled, the note I’d put up on the college notice board asking your friends to meet me. In the turmoil after your funeral I’d somehow forgotten. It was at twelve that day. I felt far more apprehensive about that than my meeting with Professor Rosen.

At just before 9:30 a.m. I arrived at the Chrom-Med building—ten stories high in glass with transparent lifts going up the outside like bubbles in sparkling mineral water. Light tubes encircled the building with purple and blue bolts of light shooting around its circumference; “science fiction becomes science fact” seemed to be the message.

The sparkling fantasy image was tarnished by a knot of around ten demonstrators holding placards, one saying NO TO DESIGNER BABIES! Another, LEAVE PLAYING GOD TO GOD! There were no shouts to go with the placards, the demonstrators yawning and lackluster, as if it were too early to be up and about. I wondered if they were there to get on the telly, although media coverage had tailed off in the last few weeks with the TV using library footage now. Maybe they’d turned out because it was the first day in weeks it wasn’t snowing or sleeting or raining.

As I got nearer I heard one demonstrator, a multipierced woman with angrily spiky hair, talking to a journalist.

“…  and only the rich will be able to afford the genes to make their children cleverer and more beautiful and more athletic. Only the rich will be able to afford the genes that will stop their children getting cancer or heart disease.”

The journalist was just holding the Dictaphone, looking a little bored, but the spiky-haired protester was undaunted and furiously continued. “They will eventually create a genetic superclass. And there won’t be any chance of intermarrying. Who’s going to marry someone uglier than they are, and weaker, more stupid and prone to illness? After a few generations they will have created two species of people: one gene rich and one gene poor.”

I went up to the spiky-haired demonstrator. “Have you ever met someone with cystic fibrosis? Or muscular dystrophy? Or Huntington’s disease?” I asked.

She glared at me, annoyed I’d interrupted her flow.

“You don’t know what it’s like living with cystic fibrosis, knowing that it’s killing you, that you’re drowning in your own phlegm. You don’t know anything about it at all, do you?”

She moved away from me.

“You’re lucky,” I called after her. “Nature made you gene-rich.”

And then I walked into the building.

I gave my name through a security grill on the door and was buzzed in. I signed my name at reception and presented my passport as I’d been instructed. A camera behind the desk automatically took my photo to make an identity card and then I was allowed through. I’m not sure what they were scanning for, but the machines were far more sophisticated than anything I’d been through at airport security checks. Fifteen of us were then shown into a seminar room, dominated by a large screen, and were welcomed by a young woman called Nancy, our perky “facilitator.”

After an elementary lesson in genetics, Perky Nancy showed us a short film of mice that had been injected as embryos with a jellyfish gene. In the film, the lights went off—and hey presto!—the mice glowed green. There were many oohs and aahs, and I noticed that only one other person, a middle-aged man with a gray ponytail, wasn’t