Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,46

coffee to brew, I booted up my trusty PC and took a look at the disks I'd raided from Helen Maitland's consulting room. Each disk contained about a dozen files, all with names like SMITGRIN.DAT, FOSTHILL.DAT and EDWAJACK.DAT. When I came to one called APPLELEE.DAT my initial guess that the file names corresponded to pairs of patients was con¬firmed. I didn't have to be much of a detective to realize that this contained the data relating to Chris Appleton and Alexis Lee. The only problem was accessing the information. I tried various word processing packages but whatever software Helen Maitland had used, it wasn't one that I had on my machine. So I tried cheating my way into the file, renaming it so my software would think it was a different kind of file and read it. No joy. Either these files were password-protected, or the software was too specialized to give up its secrets to my rather crude methods.

I finished my coffee, copied the disks, and sent Gizmo a piece of e-mail to tell him that he was about to find an envelope with three disks on his doormat and that I'd appreciate a printout of the files contained on them. Then I went on a wardrobe mission for something that would persuade a doctor that I was a fit and proper person to talk to. Failing combat fatigues and an Uzi, I settled for navy linen trousers, a navy silk tweed jacket, and a light¬weight cream cotton turtleneck. At least I wouldn't look like a drug rep.

I raided the cash dispenser again and stuffed some cash in an envelope with the originals of the disks and pushed the whole lot through Gizmo's letter box. I wasn't in the mood for conversation, not even Gizmo's laconic variety. Next stop was the central reference library. It was chuck¬ing it down in stair rods by then, and of course I hadn't brought an umbrella. Which made it inevitable that the nearest available parking space was on the far side of Albert Square down on Jackson's Row. With my jacket pulled over my head so that I looked like a strange, deformed creature from a Hammer Horror film, I sprinted through the rain-darkened streets to the massive circular building that manages to dominate St. Peter's Square in spite of the taller buildings around it.

Under the portico, I joined the other people shaking themselves like dogs before we filed into the grand foyer with its twin staircases. I ignored the information desk and the lift and walked up to the reference room. Mod¬eled on the British Museum reading room, the tables radiate out from the hub of a central desk like the spokes from a vast, literary wheel. Light filters down from the dome of the high ceiling, and everything is hushed, like a library ought to be. All these modern buildings with their strip lighting, antistatic carpets, and individual carrels never feel like proper libraries to me. I often used to come and work in Central Ref when I was a student. The atmosphere was more calm than the university law library, and nobody ever tried to chat you up.

Today, though, I wasn't after Halsbury's Statutes of En¬gland, or Michael Zander's analysis of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. The first thing I wanted was Black's Medical Directory, the list of doctors licensed to practice in the U.K., complete with their qualifications and their professional history. I'd used it before, so I knew where to look. Black's told me that Sarah Blackstone had qualified twelve years before. She was a graduate of Edinburgh University, a fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and she had worked in Obs & Gyn in Glasgow, then one of the London teaching hospitals before winding up as a consultant at St. Hilda's Infirmary in Leeds, one of the key hospitals in the north. It was clear from the information here plus the articles I'd taken from the consulting room that Dr. Blackstone was an expert on subfertility, out there at the leading edge of an increas¬ingly controversial field, a woman with a reputation for solid achievement. That explained in part why she'd chosen to operate under an alias.

Since the book was there in front of me, I idly thumbed forward. There was no reason why she should have cho¬sen to use another doctor's name as an alias, except that Alexis had told me that Sarah Blackstone had written pre¬scriptions in the name of Helen