eggs and then to transfer the resulting embryo into the waiting mother. Of course, we keep a close eye on what the embryologist does, but they’re essentially glorified lab technicians. I’ve no doubt I could do what they do in a pinch. God knows, I’ve watched them often enough. See one, do one, teach one.’ It’s hard to preen yourself while you’re scoffing curry, but he managed.
‘So, does the lab have to be on twenty-four-hour stand-by so you’re ready to roll the minute a woman ovulates?’ I’d been presuming that Sarah Blackstone did her fiddling with eggs and microscopes in the watches of the night when the place was deserted, but I needed to check that hypothesis.
‘We don’t just leave it to chance,’ Gus protested. ‘We control the very hour of ovulation with drugs. But big labs like ours do offer seven days a week, round-the-clock service so we can fit in with the lives of our patients. There’s always a full team on call: embryologist, doctor and nurse.’
‘But not constantly in the lab?’
‘No, in the hospital. With their pagers.’
‘So anybody could walk into the lab in the middle of the night and wreak havoc?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘What kind of article are you researching here? Are you trying to terrify people?’
Furious with myself for forgetting I wasn’t supposed to be a hard-nosed detective, I gave him a high-watt smile. ‘I’m sorry, I get carried away. I read too much detective fiction. I’m sure people’s embryos are as safe as houses.’ And we all know how safe that is in 1990s Britain.
‘You’re right. The lab’s always locked, even when we’re working inside. No one gets in without the right combination.’ His smile was the smug one of those who never consider the enemy within.
‘I suppose you have to be careful because you’ve got to account to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority,’ I said.
‘You’re not kidding. Every treatment cycle we do has to be documented and reported to the HFEA. Screw up your paperwork and you can lose your licence. This whole area of IVF and embryo experimentation is such a hot potato with the God squad and the politically paranoid that we all have to be squeaky clean. Even the faintest suggestion that we were doing any research that was outside the scope of our licence could have us shut down temporarily while our lords and masters investigated. And it’s not just losing the clinic licence that’s the only danger. If you did mess around doing unauthorized stuff with the embryos that we don’t transfer, you’d be looking at being struck off and never practising medicine again. Not to mention facing criminal charges.’
I tore off another lump of nan bread and scooped up a tender lump of lamb, desperately trying not to react to his words. ‘That must put quite a bit of pressure on your team, if you’re always having to look over your shoulder at what the others are doing,’ I said.
Gus gave me a patronizing smile. ‘Not really. The kind of people employed in units like ours aren’t mad scientists, you know. They’re responsible medical professionals who care about helping people fulfil their destiny. No Dr Frankensteins in our labs.’
I don’t know how I kept my curry down. Probably the thought of being tended by the responsible medical professional opposite me. Either that or the fact that I wasn’t paying much attention because I was still getting my head round what he’d said just before. If I was short of a motive for terminating Dr Sarah Blackstone, Gus Walters had just handed me one on a plate.
Chapter 15
A few days before, I’d have reckoned that as motives for murder go, the prospect of losing your livelihood was a pretty thin one. That had been before Bill’s bombshell. Since then, I’d been harbouring plenty of murderous thoughts, not just against a business partner who’d been one of my best friends for years, but also against a blameless Australian woman I’d barely met. For all I knew, Sheila could be Sydney’s answer to Mother Teresa. Somehow, I doubted it, but I’d been more than ready to include her in the homicidal fantasies that kept slipping into my mind. Like unwanted junk mail, I always intended to throw them straight in the bin, but every time I found myself attracted by some little detail that sucked me in. If a well-adjusted crime fighter like me felt the desire to kill the people I saw as stealing my dream, how easy it would be for someone who was borderline psychotic to be pushed over the edge by the prospect of losing their professional life. What Gus Walters told me handed motive on a plate to everyone Sarah Blackstone had worked with at St Hilda’s, from the professor who supervised the department to the secretary who maintained the files.
There was nothing I could do now about pursuing that line of inquiry. By the time I’d got home and driven to Leeds, it would be the end of the medical working day. I made a mental note to follow it up, which freed my brain to gnaw away at the problem which had been uppermost there since Bill’s return. Never mind murderers, never mind rock saboteurs, what I wanted the answer to was what to do about Mortensen and Brannigan. The one thing I was sure about was that I didn’t intend to roll over and die, waiting for Bill to find the buyer of his choice. As I walked back through the red-brick streets dotted with grass-filled vacant sites that lie between Rusholme and my home, I was plagued by the question of whether I could find a way to generate enough income to pay off a loan big enough to buy Bill out while managing to remain personally solvent.
The key to that was to find a way to make the agency work more profitably. There was one obvious avenue that might prove lucrative, but I’d need an extra pair of hands. Back when I’d started working for Bill, I’d done bread-and-butter process-serving. Every week, I’d abandon the law library and turn up at the office where Shelley would hand me a bundle of court papers that had to be served a.s.a.p. Domestic-violence injunctions, writs and a whole range of documents relating to debt. My job was to track down the individuals concerned and make sure they were legally served with the court documents. Sometimes that was as straightforward as cycling to the address on the papers, ringing the doorbell and handing over the relevant bumf. Mostly, it wasn’t. Mostly, it involved a lot of nosing about, asking questions of former colleagues, neighbours, drinking cronies and lovers. Sometimes it got heavy, especially when I was trying to serve injunctions on men who had been persistently violent to wives who took out injunctions one week and were terrorized, bullied, sweet-talked or guilt-tripped into taking their battering men back the next. The sort of men who see women as sexually available punchbags don’t usually take kindly to being served papers by a teenager who barely comes up to their elbow.
In spite of the aggravation, I’d really got into the work. I’d loved the challenge of tracking down people who didn’t want to be found. I’d enjoyed outwitting men who thought that because they were bigger and stronger than me, they weren’t going to accept service. I can’t say I took any pleasure slapping some of the debtors with bankruptcy papers when all they were guilty of was believing the propaganda of the Thatcher years, but even that was instructive. It gave me a far sharper awareness of real life than any of my fellow law students. So I’d quit to work for Bill full time as soon as the opportunity arose.
But I hadn’t joined the agency to be a process-server. In the medium to long term, Bill wanted a partner and he was prepared to train me to do everything he could do. I learned about surveillance, working undercover, doing things with computers that I didn’t know were possible, security systems, white-collar crime, industrial sabotage and espionage, and subterfuge. I learned how to use a video camera and how to bug, how to uncover bugs and how to take photographs in extreme conditions. I’d also picked up a few things that weren’t on the syllabus, like kick boxing and lock picking.
Of course, as my skills grew, the range of jobs Bill was prepared to let me loose on expanded too. The end result of that was that we’d been content to let most of the process-serving fall into the laps of other agencies in the city. Maybe the time had come to snatch back that work for ourselves.
What I needed was a strategy and a body to serve the papers.
Shelley sipped her glass of white wine suspiciously, as if she were checking it for drugs, and glanced around her with the concentration of a bailiff taking an inventory. She had only been in my house a couple of times before, since we tended to do our socializing on the neutral ground of bars and restaurants. That way, when Richard reached screaming point we could make our excuses and leave. It’s not that he doesn’t like Shelley’s partner Ted, a former client who opted for a date with her instead of a discount for cash and ended up moving in. It’s just that Ted has the conversational repertoire of a three-toed sloth and is about as quick on the uptake. Nice bloke, but…
