me wonder what else I’d been kidding myself about.
Alexis and Chris had been told about Dr Helen Maitland — in total confidence — by a close friend of theirs, a lesbian lawyer who’d been approached very cautiously by another couple who wanted to know the legal status of what they were planning to do. Because she knew about Alexis and Chris’s desire to have a child, their lawyer friend introduced them to her clients. I sincerely hoped the Law Society wasn’t going to hear about this — even two years of a law degree was enough for me to realize that what was going on here wasn’t just illegal, it was unethical too. And let’s face it, there aren’t enough lawyers around who act out of compassion and concern for the prospect of losing one of them to be anything other than bleak.
Alexis had phoned the Compton Clinic and made an appointment for her and Chris to see Dr Maitland the following Sunday. Obviously, the word had spread since then, judging by the delay I’d faced. She’d been told, as I had been, to go to the back door of the clinic, as the main part of the building was closed on Sundays. Alexis had told me that the initial consultation made interviewing bereft parents look as easy as finding a non-smoking seat on a train. Dr Maitland had offered nothing, instigated nothing. It had been Alexis and Chris who had to navigate through the minefield, to explain what they wanted and what they hoped she could do for them. According to Alexis, Helen Maitland had been as stiff and unyielding as a steel shutter.
In fact, she’d nearly thrown them out when she was taking their details and Alexis admitted to being a journalist. ‘Why did you tell her?’ I’d asked, amazed.
‘Because I wanted her to work with us, soft girl,’ Alexis had replied scornfully. ‘She was obviously really paranoid about being caught doing what she was doing. That whole first consultation, it was like she was determined she wasn’t going to say a word that would put her in the wrong if someone was taping the conversation. And then she was taking down all these details. Plus she insisted on leaving a three-week gap between the first and second appointments. I figured she must be checking people out. And I reckon that if what she found out didn’t square with what she’d been told, you never got past that second appointment. So I had to tell her, didn’t I?’
‘How come she didn’t throw you out then and there?’
The familiar crooked grin. ‘Like I always say, KB, they don’t pay me my wages for working a forty-hour week. They pay me for that five minutes a day when I persuade somebody who isn’t going to talk to a living soul to talk to me. I can be very convincing when I really want something. I just told her that being a journalist didn’t automatically make me a scumbag, and that I was a dyke before I was a hack. And that the best way to make sure a story never got out was to involve a journo with a bit of clout.’
I hadn’t been able to argue with that, and I suspected that Helen Maitland hadn’t either, especially since it would have been delivered with a hefty dollop of the Alexis Lee charm. So the doctor had agreed to work with them both to make Chris pregnant with their child. First, they each had to take courses of drugs that cost a small fortune and made both of them feel like death on legs. The drugs maximized their fertility and also controlled their ovulation so that on a particular Sunday, they’d both be at the optimum point for having their eggs harvested. Helen Maitland herself had carried out this apparently straightforward procedure. According to Alexis, who never forgets she’s a journalist, the eggs were then transferred into a portable incubator which Helen Maitland could plug into the cigarette lighter of her car and transport to her lab, wherever that was. Another small detail I didn’t have.
In the lab, one egg from Alexis would be stripped down to its nucleus and loaded into a micropipette one tenth the thickness of a human hair. Then one of Chris’s eggs would be injected with Alexis’s nucleus and hopefully the chromosomes would get it on and make a baby. This nuclear fusion was a lot less immediately spectacular than nuclear fission, but its implications for the human race were probably bigger. It was obvious why the doctor had chosen to use an alias.
I couldn’t help wondering what would happen when men found out what was going on. If there was one thing that was certain, it was that sooner or later the world was going to know about this. It didn’t seem possible that Helen Maitland was the only one who had worked out the practical means of making men redundant. I had this niggling feeling that all over California, women were Making babies with women and doctors with fewer scruples than Helen Maitland were making a lot of money.
That was another thing that had become clear from Alexis’s story. In spite of their desperation, Helen Maitland wasn’t bleeding her patients dry. The prescriptions were expensive, but there was nothing she could do about that. However, her fees for the rest of the treatment seemed remarkably cheap. She was charging less per hour than I do. If the medical establishment had found out about that, she’d have been struck off a lot faster for undercharging than she ever would have been for experimenting on humans.
There was no other word for it. What she had been doing was an experiment, with all the attendant dangers. I didn’t know enough about embryology to know what could go wrong, but I was damn sure that all the normal genetic risks a foetus faced would be multiplied by such an unorthodox beginning. If I’d been the praying sort, I’d have been lighting enough candles to floodlight Old Trafford on the off chance it would give Chris a better chance of bearing a healthy, normal daughter. Being the practical sort, the best thing I could do would be to find Helen Maitland’s killer before the investigation led to my friends. Or worse. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that someone had killed Helen Maitland because they’d discovered what she was doing and decided she had to die. Anyone with so fundamental a set of beliefs wasn’t going to stop at seeing off the doctor who had set these pregnancies in motion. There was a lot to do, and the trouble was, I didn’t really know where to start. All I had was an alias and a consulting room that I hadn’t been able to get near.
I finished my drink and stared moodily at the dirty grey water of the canal. The city has screwed so much inner-city renewal money out of Europe that the banks of our canals are smarter than Venice these days. The water doesn’t stink either. In spite of that, I figured I’d be waiting a long time before I saw a gondola pass. Probably about as long as it would take me to raise the money to buy Bill out of the partnership.
I couldn’t bear the idea of just throwing in the towel, though. I’d worked bloody hard for my share of the business, and I’d learned a few devious tricks along the way. Surely I could think of
I walked out of Metz and set off across town to where I’d parked my car. On my way through Chinatown, I popped into one of the supermarkets and picked up some dried mushrooms, five spice powder and a big bottle of soy sauce. There were prawns and char siu pork in the fridge already and I’d stop off to buy some fresh vegetables later. I couldn’t think of a better way to deal with my frustrations than chopping and slicing the ingredients for hot and sour soup and sing chow vermicelli.
At the till, the elderly Chinese woman on the cash register gave me a fortune cookie to sample as part of a promotion they were running. Out on the street, I broke it open, throwing the shell into the gutter for the pigeons. I straightened out the slip of paper and read it. It was hard not to believe it was an omen. ‘Sometimes, beggars can be choosers,’ it said.
Chapter 8
