Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,25

con¬trol now, and Alexis paused for effect. She couldn't help herself.

"So what happened to change that?" I asked, respond¬ing to my cue.

"There was a load of research done which showed that men didn't react well to having their wives inseminated with donor sperm. Surprise, surprise, they didn't feel con¬nected to the kids and more often than not, families were breaking up because the men didn't feel like they were proper families. Given that more men are having prob¬lems with their sperm production than ever before, the pressure was really on for doctors to find a way of helping inadequate sperm to make babies. A couple of years ago, they came up with a really thin needle that could be inserted right into the very nucleus of an egg so that they could deliver a single sperm right to the place where it would count."

I nodded, light dawning. "And somebody somewhere figured that if they could do it with a sperm, they could do it with another egg."

"Give the girl a coconut," Alexis said, incapable of being solemn and scared for long.

"And this doctor, whatever her real name is, has been doing this in Manchester?" I asked. I know they say that what Manchester does today, London does tomorrow, but this seemed to be taking things a bit far.

"Yeah."

"Totally illegally?"

"Yeah."

"With lesbian couples?"

"Yeah."

"Who are therefore technically also breaking the law?"

"I suppose so."

We looked at each other across the table. I didn't know about Alexis, but I couldn't help banner headlines flashing across my mind. The thought of what the tabloids would do with a story like this was enough in itself to bring me out fighting for the women who had gone underground to make their dreams come true, let alone my feelings for Alexis and Chris. "And the baby Chris is carrying belongs to both of you?" I asked.

"That's right. We both had to have a course of drugs to maximize our fertility, then Helen harvested our eggs and took them off to the lab to join them up and grow them on till she was sure they were okay. She did four altogether."

If I looked as aghast as I felt, Alexis's face didn't reflect it. "Chris is having quads?" I gasped.

"Don't be soft. Course she's not. There's a lousy suc¬cess rate. You have to transplant at least three embryos to be in with a shout, and then it's only a seventy percent chance that one of them's going to do the business. Helen transplanted three, and one of them survived. Believe me, in this game, that's a result."

"So what happened to the other one?" I asked. I had a horrible feeling I wasn't going to like the answer.

"It's in the freezer at home. In a flask of liquid nitrogen."

I'd been right. I felt slightly queasy at the thought and reminded myself never to go looking for a snack in Alexis's kitchen. I cleared my throat. "How do you know it works? How do you know the babies are... okay?"

Alexis frowned. "There was no way of proving it objec¬tively. We had to take Helen's word for it. She introduced us to the first couple she had a success with. Their little girl's about eighteen months now. She's a really bright kid. And yes, I know they could have been bullshitting us, that it could have been a racket to rip us off, but I believed those two women. You had to be there, KB."

I thought I could probably make it through the night without the experience. "I see now why you thought they'd take the baby off you," was all I said.

"You've got to help us," Alexis said.

"What exactly did you have in mind?" I asked.

"Helen Maitland's files," Alexis said. "We've got to get rid of them before the police find them."

"Why would the police be looking for them in the first place?" I asked. "Like I said, it's a straightforward bur¬glary gone wrong."

"Okay, okay, I know you think I'm being paranoid. But this is our child's future that's at stake here. I'm entitled to go a bit over the top. But there's two reasons why I'm worried. One, suppose it didn't happen like the YP says? Suppose the person who killed Helen Maitland wasn't a burglar. Suppose it was some woman whose treatment hadn't worked and she'd gone off her box? Or suppose it was somebody who'd found out what was going on and was blackmailing Helen? Once the cops start digging, you know they won't stop. They might not