‘Chris?’ I asked, stepping back to let Alexis in.
She looked dumbly back at me, frowning, as if trying to call to mind why I should be concerned about her partner.
‘Has something happened to Chris?’ I tried. ‘The baby?’
Alexis shook her head. ‘Chris is all right,’ she said impatiently, as if I’d asked the kind of stupid question TV reporters pose to disaster victims. She pushed past me and walked like an automaton into the living room, where she subsided onto a sofa with the slack-limbed collapse of a marionette.
I left her staring blankly at the floor and turned off the bath taps. By the time I came back with two stiff drinks, she was smoking with the desperate concentration of an addict on the edge of cold turkey. ‘What’s happened, Alexis?’ I said softly, sitting down beside her.
‘She’s dead,’ she said. I wasn’t entirely surprised that somebody she knew was. I couldn’t imagine anything else that would destroy the composure of a hard-bitten crime reporter like this.
‘Who is?’
Alexis pulled a scrunched up copy of the
‘You knew her?’ I asked.
‘That’s the doctor who worked with us on Christine’s pregnancy.’
It was a strange way of expressing it, but I let it pass. Alexis clearly wasn’t in command of herself, never mind the English language. ‘I’m so sorry, Alexis,’ I said inadequately.
‘Never mind being sorry. I want you working,’ she said abruptly. She crushed out her cigarette, lit another and swallowed half her vodka and Diet Coke. ‘Kate, there’s something going on here. That’s definitely the woman we dealt with. But she wasn’t a consultant in Leeds called Sarah Blackstone. She had consulting rooms here in Manchester and her name was Helen Maitland.’
There are days when I’m overwhelmed with the conviction that somebody’s stolen my perfectly nice life and left me with this pile of shit to deal with. Right then, I was inches away from calling the cops and demanding they track down the robber. After the day I’d had, I just wasn’t in the mood for chapter one of an Agatha Christie mystery. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘I mean, newspaper photographs…’
Alexis snorted. ‘Look at her. She’s not got a face that blends into the background, has she? Of course it’s Helen Maitland.’
I shrugged. ‘So she uses an assumed name when she’s treating lesbians. Maybe she just doesn’t want the notoriety of being the dykes’ baby doctor.’
‘It’s more than that, KB,’ Alexis insisted, swallowing smoke as if her life depended on it. ‘She’s got a prescription pad and she writes prescriptions in the name of Helen Maitland. We’ve not had any trouble getting them filled, and it’s not like it was a one-off, believe me. There’s been plenty. Which also makes me worried, because if the bizzies figure out that Sarah Blackstone and Helen Maitland are the same person, and they try and track down her patients, all they’ve got to do is start asking around the local chemists. And there we are, right in the middle of the frame.’
All of which was true, but I couldn’t see why Alexis was getting so wound up. I knew the rules on human fertility treatment were pretty strict, but as far as I was aware, it wasn’t a crime yet to give lesbians artificial insemination, though if the Tories started to get really hysterical about losing the next election, I could see it might have its attractions as a possible vote winner. ‘Alexis,’ I said gently. ‘Why exactly is that a problem?’
She looked blankly at me. ‘Because they’ll take the baby off us,’ she said in a tone of voice I recognized as the one I used to explain to Richard why you can’t wash your jeans in the dishwasher.
‘I think you might be overreacting,’ I said cautiously, aware that I wasn’t wearing protective clothing. ‘This is a straightforward case, Alexis,’ I continued, skimming the story. ‘Burglar gets disturbed, struggle, burglar panics, pulls a blade and lashes out. Tragic waste of talented test-tube baby doctor.’ I looked up. ‘The cops aren’t going to be interviewing her Leeds patients, never mind trying to trace people she treated in a different city under a different name.’
‘Maybe so, but maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye,’ Alexis said stubbornly. ‘I’ve been doing the crime beat long enough to know that the Old Bill only tell you what they want you to know. It wouldn’t be the first time there’s been a whole other investigation going on beneath the surface.’ She finished her drink and her cigarette, for some reason avoiding my eye.
I had a strong feeling that I didn’t know what the real story was here. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to know what it was that could disconcert my normally stable best buddy as much as this, but I knew I couldn’t dodge the issue. ‘What’s really going on here, Alexis?’ I asked.
She ran both hands through her wild tangle of black hair and looked up at me, her face worried and frightened, her eyes as hollow as a politician’s promises. ‘Any chance of another drink?’
I fetched her another Stoly and Diet Coke, this one more than a little weaker than the last. If she was going to swallow them like water, I didn’t want her passing out before she’d explained why she was in such a state about the death of a woman with whom she’d had nothing more than a professional relationship. I slid the drink across the table to her, and when she reached out for it, I covered her hand with mine. ‘Tell me,’ I said.
Alexis tightened her lips and shook her head. ‘We haven’t told another living soul,’ she said, reaching for another cigarette. I hoped she wasn’t smoking like this around Chris or the baby was going to need nicotine patches to get through its first twenty-four hours.
‘You said a minute ago you wanted me working on this. If I don’t know what’s going on, there’s not a lot I can do,’ I reminded her.
Alexis lifted her eyes and gazed into mine. ‘This has got to stay between us,’ she said, her voice a plea I’d never heard from her before. ‘I mean it, KB. Nobody gets to hear this one. Not Della, not Ruth, not even Richard. Nobody.’
‘That serious, eh?’ I said, trying to lighten the oppressiveness of the atmosphere.
‘Yeah, that serious,’ Alexis said, not noticeably lightened.
‘You know you can trust me.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ she admitted after a pause. The hand that wasn’t hanging on to the cigarette swept through her hair again. ‘I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to tell you.’
I leaned back against the sofa, trying to look as relaxed and unshockable as I could. ‘Alexis, I’m bombproof. Whatever it is, I’ve heard it before. Or something very like it.’
Her mouth twisted in a strange, inward smile. ‘Not like this, KB, I promise you. This is one hundred per cent one-off.’ Alexis sat up straight, squaring her shoulders. I saw she’d made the decision to reveal what was eating her. ‘This baby that Chris is carrying — it’s ours.’ She looked expectantly at me.
I didn’t want to believe what I was afraid she was trying to tell me. So I smiled and said, ‘Hey, that’s a really healthy attitude, acting like you’ve really got a stake in it.’
‘I’m not talking attitude, KB. I’m talking reality.’ She sighed. ‘I’m talking making a baby from two women.’
The trouble with modern life is that there isn’t any etiquette any more. Things change so much and so fast that even if Emily Post were still around, she wouldn’t be able to devise a set of protocols that stay abreast of tortured human relationships. If Alexis had dropped her bombshell in my mother’s day, I could have said, ‘That’s nice, dear. Now, do you like your milk in first?’ In my Granny Brannigan’s day, I could have crossed myself vigorously and sent for the priest. But in the face of the encroaching millennium, all I could do was gape and say, ‘What?’
‘I’m not making this up, you know,’ Alexis said defensively. ‘It’s possible. It’s not even very difficult. It’s just
