Not for the first time in the past few days, the desperate nature of the need to reproduce hit me between the eyes. I said a small prayer to the goddess of infertility that it would continue to avoid taking up residence in my soul. ‘Right,’ I said, determined to move this along and keep the emotional level as low key as possible. ‘So Helen had her eggs frozen. How does that get us to murder?’
‘One morning a couple of months ago, Helen had a really strange letter in the post. It was from Manchester—’
‘I know about that too,’ I interrupted, partly to maintain control over events, partly to impress both of them with how much I’d already found out. ‘It contained a baby’s photograph and a lock of hair and a message of thanks.’
Helen’s composure showed a crack for the first time. ‘The baby was the spitting image of Sarah at the same age. I couldn’t believe the similarity. I’d heard Sarah talking about the technical possibility of making babies from two women’s eggs, and I realized that’s what she was probably doing. I work with cystics, so I have access to DNA-testing facilities.’
‘They were able to get DNA from the cut hairs?’ I asked.
There are always researchers who love a challenge and one of the women at St Hilda’s relished the chance to extract viable DNA from the hair shafts. I bribed one of my students to get a blood sample from Sarah. He told her it was for random testing in some experiment he was doing into some obscure aspect of blood chemistry, and she let him take it. The DNA test was very clear. Sarah was one of the parents of the child.’ She was smoking now like she’d made it her lifelong ambition to be a forty-a-day woman.
This time, it was Flora who reached out, gripping Helen’s free hand tightly. Helen continued, almost talking to herself. ‘It was all the more bitter because that was the issue that split us up. I wanted a child desperately, but Sarah didn’t. I knew subfertility treatment was close to the stage where it would be possible to make a child from two women. And she refused point-blank to do it with us. She said she wasn’t prepared to experiment with my body. That if the experiment produced a monster, or even a handicapped child, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself. Me, I thought it probably had more to do with the fact that she absolutely didn’t want to share her life with a child. I eventually came to the conclusion I’d rather have the possibility of a child than the certainty of life with her. You can imagine the kind of rows…’ Her voice tailed off into a quiet exhalation of smoke.
‘You must have been devastated to discover she was experimenting with other women,’ I said in the crass mode of television news reports.
Helen pulled a face. ‘I think if she had been in front of me when I got the DNA results through from the lab, I might have killed her. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was actually glad that I hadn’t had her child. That I didn’t want a daughter of mine to consist of half Sarah’s genes. Distance doesn’t lend enchantment, you know. It allows you to put things in perspective. I hadn’t stopped wanting a child, but I’d stopped caring about Sarah. I didn’t even hate her any more. Despised her, yes, because there wasn’t anything in her life she wouldn’t betray. So I didn’t actually want to kill her for very long.’
‘Long enough to tell Flora?’ I asked softly.
Flora turned on me then, eyes wide and angry. ‘Don’t try and blame Helen. She said nothing of the sort to me. It was my idea to go and see Sarah. Helen didn’t even know I was going.’
‘So why did you go, if it wasn’t to confront Sarah with her double-cross?’
‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘Why did you go to see her?’
Flora gave a weary smile. ‘I went to try to persuade her to do for us what she’d done for those other women. My eggs and yours. So we could share a child.’
There was a long silence, Helen’s eyes raking Flora’s face as if she was trying to scour any falsehood from her words by reading her features. Then her head dropped into her hands. She didn’t cry. After a few moments, she looked up, dry-eyed, and said, ‘That is an extraordinary thing to say.’
‘It’s the truth,’ Flora said. ‘Why else would I have gone to see her?’
‘I had no idea you felt like that.’
‘What? That I loved you that much, or that I wanted a child that much?’ Flora challenged, chin up.
‘Either or both,’ Helen said, her voice tired. ‘What did Sarah say?’
Flora looked away, her face clouding over. I was starting to feel seriously redundant here. ‘She laughed in my face. She said she wasn’t going to give a baby to a brainless bimbo and a compulsive obsessive. So I told her that if she wouldn’t cooperate, I’d go to the authorities and tell them exactly what she was doing.’
‘Not a clever move,’ Helen said, reaching for another cigarette. ‘Sarah and threats were never a comfortable mix.’ Her cool irony was starting to get to me. Sooner or later, an explosion was going to come. The longer she kept the lid on, the worse it was going to be. I hoped I’d be well out of the fallout zone when it did.
‘How did she react to your threat?’ I asked.
‘She grabbed me by the lapels and shoved me up against the kitchen counter,’ Flora said, still incredulous that someone in her world would do such a thing. ‘She kept banging me against the counter, telling me I was a dirty blackmailing bitch and that she knew a lot of women who’d happily kill to keep the children she’d given them. I was terrified. She kept twisting her hand in my coat, it was so tight it was strangling me. I was desperate. I groped about on the worktop behind me and my hand touched a knife. I just grabbed it and thrust it up into her. I wasn’t thinking, I just did it. And she sort of fell back onto the floor. I was standing there, holding the knife, watching her die. And I couldn’t do a thing about it.’
‘You could have called an ambulance,’ Helen said, her voice cold.
‘I did. I went straight to the phone box down the street and called an ambulance.’
‘Not then, you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You did one or two other things first. You cleared up any signs of a struggle. You unlocked the back door, leaving the key in the lock, went outside and smashed a pane of glass to make it look like a burglary. You took off your bloodstained mac and checked nobody was about, then you walked calmly out of the front door and up to the phone box on the corner. And then you phoned 999 and told the operator you’d just seen a black man running out of an open door on that street with a bloodstained knife. By which time Sarah Blackstone was dead.’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d phoned straightaway,’ Flora said desperately. ‘She died so quickly. Honestly, Helen, she was dead in seconds.’
‘Not that quickly,’ I said coldly. ‘She can’t have been dead for long otherwise the ambulance crew would have told the police there was a discrepancy between the time of death and the time of the call-out.’
The way Flora looked at me, I was glad there wasn’t a knife handy. ‘Let’s face it, Flora, you couldn’t really allow her to live, could you?’ Helen said bleakly. ‘Not after what you’d done. No wonder you said to me the next day that you’d give me an alibi if the police came asking. You wanted to make sure you had one, didn’t you? Just don’t you dare ever say you did it for me.’
Flora said nothing. Helen faced me. ‘I suspect there’s a tape recorder whirring away in your handbag.’