shrugged and moved away.
“So you think my paintings are ‘macho posturing’?”
“Using Tess’s body. Yes.”
I started walking back toward the display of your paintings, but he followed me.
“Beatrice …”
I didn’t turn.
“There’s a piece of news you may find interesting. We’ve had the results of the cystic fibrosis tests back. My wife isn’t a carrier of the CF gene.”
“I’m glad.”
But Emilio hadn’t finished. “I’m not a carrier of the cystic fibrosis gene either.”
But he had to be. It didn’t make sense. Xavier had cystic fibrosis so his father had to be a carrier.
I grabbed at an explanation. “You can’t always tell by a simple test. There are thousands of mutations of the cystic fibrosis gene and—”
He interrupted. “We’ve had all the tests there are, the whole works—you name it, we’ve had it and we have been told, categorically, that neither of us are carriers of cystic fibrosis.”
“Sometimes a baby can spontaneously have CF even when one of the parents isn’t a carrier.”
“And what are the chances of that? A million to one? Xavier was nothing to do with me.”
It was the first time I’d heard him say Xavier’s name—in the same expelled breath to say the words to disown him.
The obvious explanation was that Emilio wasn’t Xavier’s father. But you’d told me he was and you don’t lie.
“I knew that Xavier had never had cystic fibrosis.”
“Because both parents need to be carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene?” asks Mr. Wright.
“Exactly.”
“So what did you think was going on?”
I pause a moment, remembering the emotion that accompanied the realization. “I thought Chrom-Med had used gene therapy on a perfectly healthy baby.”
“What did you think their reason was?”
“I thought it must be fraud.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“It was hardly surprising Chrom-Med’s ‘cure’ for cystic fibrosis was so successful if the babies had never had it in the first place. And it was because of Chrom-Med’s supposed miraculous cure that their value had skyrocketed. They were weeks away from floating on the stock market.”
“What about the regulatory bodies who’d monitored the trial?”
“I couldn’t understand how they’d been so misled. But I thought somehow they must have been. And I knew that the patients, like Tess, would never have questioned the diagnosis. If you’ve had someone in the family with cystic fibrosis, you always know that you might be a carrier.”
“Did you think Professor Rosen was involved?”
“I thought he had to be. Even if it hadn’t been his idea, he must have sanctioned it. And he was a director of Chrom-Med, which meant he stood to make a fortune when the company floated.”
When I’d met Professor Rosen at Chrom-Med, I’d thought he was a zealous scientist who craved admiration by his peers. I found it hard to replace that image with a money-grabbing fraudster, that instead of being driven by that age-old motive of glory, he was driven by the even older one of avarice. It was difficult to believe he was that good an actor, that his speech about eradicating disease and being a watershed in history was no more than hot wind designed to throw me, and everyone else, off course. But if it really was the case, he’d been disturbingly convincing.
“Did you contact him at this stage?”
“I tried to. He was in the States giving a lecture tour and wouldn’t be back until the sixteenth of March, twelve days away. I left a message on his phone but he didn’t reply.”
“Did you tell DS Finborough?” asks Mr. Wright.
“Yes. I phoned and said I needed to meet him. He set up an appointment early that afternoon.”
Mr. Wright glances down at his notes. “And at your meeting with DS Finborough, Detective Inspector Haines was there too?”
“Very much so.”
A man who infringed the subtle boundaries of personal space, as if it were his right to invade.
“Before we move on, I just want to get one thing clear,” says Mr. Wright. “How did you think the fraud was linked to Tess’s death?”
