manually evict the contents. Being averse to any form of waste, he grabbed a knife and flipped open his bin, attempting to render the pieces edible by scraping off the bits that were burned beyond repair. It soon became clear they were beyond saving. Nigel cursed to himself. Must get a new toaster, he thought. Or get the grill in the oven fixed so he could make proper toast. Of course Agas made the best toast, but they were hardly compatible with cramped London kitchens. Whatever, there was no point spending his hard-earned cash on freshly baked bread while his toaster was so temperamental. The two blackened shards in his hand could have been two stale pieces of sliced white. Only the gourmet equivalent of a DNA test could have revealed their true identity. He laughed to himself. Then stopped.
Now there was an idea.
Ethnoancestry was based in Ealing, in a nondescript redbrick hutch down an anonymous side street.
Nigel announced himself to a security guard doubling as a receptionist and was told to wait. Five minutes later Dr Chris Westerberg, bearded and blue-eyed, greeted him with a vigorous handshake.
'Good to see you again, Nigel,' he said warmly in a soft southern Irish lilt.
'You too, Chris. How's tricks?'
'Mustn't grumble,' he mumbled. 'Find it OK? Come by car, did you?'
'I came by tube. I don't drive.'
A look of amusement spread across the scientist's friendly face. 'Yes, I forgot. The man with no car and no credit card. The last of the bohemians. Ideal - you can carry on drinking because you don't have to drive and someone else picks up the tab. Let no one say you're not a canny man, Nigel.'
He smiled. He'd forgotten how much he enjoyed the Irishman's company and good humour.
'It's been a while, hasn't it?'
'It certainly has,' Nigel replied. He guessed eighteen months, at a drab family history convention in a provincial northern town whose name Nigel couldn't even remember. Westerberg was there touting his company and their DNA tests and kits. For two nights they drank well into the night, arguing furiously and drunkenly over the role of DNA testing in family history, both of them enjoying every second of it. Westerberg had been among the vanguard of those arguing that a genetic approach could revolutionize genealogy and family history. Nigel was a sceptic.
Westerberg led him to a lift, up one floor and down a sterile corridor to a small, cluttered office. 'I share this with a colleague, so apologies for the mess. He's from Scotland, that's all I can say. Coffee?' Nigel murmured his assent and Westerberg disappeared for a few minutes before returning with two steaming mugs. 'Instant not filter, I'm afraid,' he explained.
He sat down behind the desk and gave Nigel another friendly smile. 'So how's it going back at the coalface?'
Nigel pulled a face. 'It's improving.'
'You're joking me, aren't you?' he said, incredulously. 'I saw you all over the papers. Helping police catch a serial killer.' He let out a low whistle.
'Certainly was a break from the norm.'
You're the master of understatement, Nigel. That wasn't a break from the norm; that was some fucked-up shit.'
'I suppose it was,' he said, inwardly rather pleased that his work and the publicity had been noticed. 'Listen, I was wondering: can you help me catch another killer?'
Westerberg's eyes widened. 'Jaysus, what now? You turned into Travis Bickle, cleaning the scum off the streets?'
'The police have asked for my help once more,' he explained, trying to remain modest.
'Who's been killed?' Westerbeg asked.
'That has to remain confidential, I'm afraid,' Nigel said.
'Part of the deal in the police allowing me to come here and explore this with you.'
'I suppose that makes sense. What's the deal?'
'Bear with me on this,' Nigel said. 'I'm a layman, after all. The police have a mtDNA sample that was found at the scene of a murder -- from a strand of hair, I believe. It turns out that it's the same type as the victim, except it came from a male while the victim was female. According to the police's forensic people, the victim and whoever left this hair -- who may or may not be the killer -- shared a common maternal ancestor.'
'Well, we could verify that for you,' Westerberg said.
'Thanks. But that's not why I'm here. The police are, in the original sense of the word, clueless. All they have at the moment is this hair and the mtDNA sample and the fact of the shared maternal ancestry. They've asked me to research the victim's family tree and find out all the people extant who share this mtDNA.'
Westerberg's face clouded over. He leaned forward across the desk. 'Nigel, you do realize that the maternal ancestor you speak of could have lived thousands of years ago? It may not be confined to five or six branches of the family. It may be confined to five or six per cent of the population.'
Nigel nodded. 'That's where you come in. Is it possible from the test you've devised to discover when this ancestor was shared?'
Westerberg shook his head. 'No.'
Damn, Nigel thought. I've wasted my time.
'Unless.'
'Unless what?'
Westerberg sat back. 'Do you have any details about the type extracted from the strand of hair?'
Nigel had. After employing all his powers of persuasion, Heather had agreed to ask Foster whether Nigel could have details of the type of mtDNA extracted from the hair strand. The DCI had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and an hour later an e-mail containing an impenetrable sequence of numbers had arrived in Nigel's in-box:
16111 16290 16319 16362
Second hypervariable segment 64 146 153
He produced the printout from his jacket pocket and handed it to Westerberg. The scientist stared at it for several seconds. Put it down and stroked his beard.
'You might be in luck,' he said.
'Might I?'
'The group this sample belongs to is a relatively rare one. Which means you won't have vast amounts of people sharing it.'
'How many?'
'I can't answer that. But that's not the only reason you're lucky. Let me check something out.' He tilted the screen of his computer to face him and tapped in a few details.
Studied the screen carefully and then punched in some more data. He started to nod. 'The person to whom this belonged had a maternal ancestor that was Native American.'
'You
can tell that from the piece of paper?'
'It gives the mtDNA haplotype, which means I can assign it to a haplogroup, which means I can work out its biogeographic ancestry.' Westerberg paused, taking a slurp of lukewarm coffee. Nigel noticed the mug. It had a crude drawing of a banana. Written inside were the words 'I share half my DNA with a banana'. He wondered if it was true, making a mental note to check it on the Internet when he got home. 'By examining a person's mtDNA and the mutations it carries, we can follow their ancestor's footprint and their lineage. The ancestor of whoever owned this DNA left a print in North America and it's one we know is shared by other people with Native American ancestry. Give me a day or two to check a few databases and I might even be able to tell you the tribe to which the maternal ancestor may have belonged.'
Nigel was amazed. 'You can tell me whether the victim's ancestor was a Cherokee or a Sioux or an Apache?'
Westerberg smiled. 'Not that specific. Most haplotypes are shared across tribes or are maybe restricted to a related group of tribes, but we could certainly narrow it down.'
He could see Nigel was still impressed. 'I told you genetic genealogy was the future.'
While he found this revelation thrilling, Nigel knew the Native American population was not renowned for keeping records. There was no way he could use this information. Unless . . .
