‘Oh yeah? And that’s really made a difference to the amount of drugs rattling around the streets of Manchester.’
‘What about that case you were working when I first met you? The land fraud? If it hadn’t been for your work, Alexis and Chris would have been comprehensively ripped off and they wouldn’t be living in their dream home now. You’ve made a real difference in their lives,’ Della insisted.
Her mention of Alexis and Chris reminded me forcibly of one job I still had to finish. Even if I was going to throw the towel in and sell my share of the business along with Bill, I couldn’t walk away from Sarah Blackstone’s murder.
When I failed to respond to Della, she gave my arm a gentle punch. ‘You see? It breaks my little police heart to say it, but this city needs people who don’t carry a warrant card.’
I swallowed my coffee. ‘You sound like Commissioner Gordon,’ I said acidly. ‘Della, I’m not Batman and this isn’t Gotham City. Maybe I could make just as much difference as a lawyer. Maybe Ruth would take me on.’
Della snorted. ‘Listen to yourself. You want to go from cutting the feet from under the villains to defending them? You couldn’t be a criminal lawyer. It’s not possible only to defend the innocent, and you know it.’
‘I sure as hell couldn’t be a Crown Prosecutor either,’ I growled.
‘I know you couldn’t. It’s just as impossible only to prosecute the guilty. The trouble with you, Kate, is you understand the moral ambiguity of real life. And you’re lucky, because the job you do lets you exercise that. You decide who your clients will be. You decide to defend the innocent and nail the guilty. You’re too moral to be a lawyer. You’re a natural maverick. Exploit it, don’t ignore it.’
I sighed. Now I knew why Philip Marlowe didn’t bother with buddies.
Chapter 23
I’d got as far as Leeds before my determination ran out. It wasn’t entirely my fault. Sherpa Tensing would have a job unravelling the roads in the centre of Leeds fast enough to take the right turning for the police admin building where I’d find the press officer I needed. Since I found myself inevitably heading for Skipton, I pulled off at Hyde Park Corner and killed some time with a decadent fruit shake in the radical chic Hepzi-bahz café while I reviewed where I was up to on the case that stood between me and a new life.
The more I looked at Sarah Blackstone, the more I grew convinced that this murder was about the personal, not the accidental or even the professional. Sure, one of her patients might have her suspicions about the biological co-parent of her daughter, but to confirm even that much wouldn’t be easy for a lay person. And even if it were confirmed, it was still a long way from there to murder, given that her patients didn’t even know her real name. Logically, if a patient had killed her, the body should have been in the Manchester clinic, not the Leeds house.
That thrust Helen Maitland into the position of front runner. I knew now that she had wanted a child but that Sarah Blackstone had refused her. God only knew why, given what she’d been doing for two of the three years since they split up. But since that separation, Helen had lost the capability to have children. If I’d learned one thing from Chris’s relentless drive towards pregnancy, it was the overwhelming, obsessive power of a childless woman’s desire for motherhood. Chris once described the feeling as possession. ‘It’s there as soon as you wake up, and it’s there until you go back to sleep,’ she’d explained. ‘Some nights, it even invades your dreams. Nothing matters except being pregnant. And it stops as soon as your body realizes it’s pregnant. Like a weight lifting from your brain. Liberation.’
If Helen Maitland had been feeling like that before her cancer was diagnosed, the arrival of a card from Jan Parrish with a photograph of a baby girl and a lock of silky hair must have seemed a grotesque gift, cruel and gratuitous and, at first glance, bewildering. But when she’d examined it more closely, she couldn’t have failed to see the child’s undoubted resemblance to Sarah Blackstone. Helen was nobody’s fool. She must have known Sarah’s work was at the leading edge of human fertility treatment. Seeing a photograph of a baby who looked so like Sarah must have set her wondering what her lover had done now, especially coming so soon after the final dashing of her own hopes.
For a doctor involved in research, tenacity is as necessary a virtue as it is in my job. Faced with a puzzle, Helen would not simply have shelved it any more than I would. Given her specialism in the area of cystic fibrosis, she would have routine access to DNA testing and to researchers working in the field. I knew it wasn’t standard practice to obtain DNA from hair shafts — it’s difficult, technically demanding and often a waste of time because the DNA it yields is too poor in quality to be meaningful. But I knew that it was possible. It was the sort of thing some eager-beaver researcher would doubtless be happy to do as a favour for a consultant. Having met Helen Maitland, I didn’t doubt she could be both charming and terrifying enough to get it done.
Getting a comparison sample of Sarah’s DNA wouldn’t have been so difficult either — a couple of hairs from the collar of her lab coat would be enough, and probably easier than cut hair, since they would have the roots still attached. Checking the two DNA profiles against each other would tell Helen a truth that for her in particular was a stab to the heart.
Given her probably fragile state, who knew how she might react? She could easily have stormed round to Sarah’s, determined to have it out with her ex-lover. It didn’t take much to imagine a scenario ending in Sarah’s heart pumping her blood out on to the kitchen floor instead of round her arterial system. Now I had two problems. The first was proving it.
The second was what I did with that proof.
When the Yorkshire TV crowd started to pile in for lunch, the women in striped men’s shirts and tailored jackets, the men in unstructured linen and silk, I decided it was time to go. I still had no idea how to deal with the second question, but it was academic if I couldn’t answer the first.
This time, I decided to abandon the car in the Holiday Inn car park and make for the police station on foot. I hoped I wasn’t going to be there long enough to be clamped. Just in case, I stuck my head into the restaurant, spotted a table where the half-dozen business lunchers included a couple of women. Then if I came back and the car was clamped, I could pitch the hotel into setting me free on the basis that I’d just had lunch, that table over there, no I didn’t have the receipt because one of the others had paid for me. Usually works.
After I’d left Hepzi-bahz, I’d called ahead to warn the press officer I wanted to see not to go to lunch until I got there. At the front desk, I presented my official press card to the officer on duty, who gave it a cursory glance. It was, of course, a complete fake, based on a colour photocopy of Alexis’s card plus a passport photograph of me, all shoved through the office laminating machine. Must have taken me all of ten minutes to cobble it together, and it would take close comparison with the real thing to tell the difference. I’d never try to get away with it in a police station in Manchester, where my face is too familiar to too many coppers, but over the Pennines it seemed a chance worth taking.
Ten minutes later, Jimmy Collier and I were nursing glasses in a busy pub which was a rarity in northern city centres in that it preferred customers to hear the sound of their voices rather than loud music. Jimmy was a dapper little man who could have been any age between thirty and fifty and dressed like he thought men’s magazines had to have dirty pictures in them. He looked a bit like a penguin and walked like a duck, but there was nothing birdlike about the appetite with which he was attacking a cheese and onion barm that was approximately the size of a traditional Yorkshire flat cap. Along with his lunch, I fed him a story he swallowed as easily as the sandwich.