Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,47

Maitland. While it wasn't impossible that she'd used an entirely fictitious name to do this, it would have been easier and safer to steal another doctor's identity. If she'd done that, uncovering the real Helen Maitland might just take me a step or two further forward.

Impatiently I ran my finger down the twin columns, past the Madisons, the Maffertys, and the Mahons, and there it was. Helen Maitland. Another Edinburgh gradu¬ate, though she'd qualified three years before Sarah Blackstone. Member of the Royal College of Physicians. She'd worked in Oxford, briefly in Belfast, as a medical registrar in Newcastle, and now, like Sarah Blackstone, she was also a consultant at St. Hilda's in Leeds, with research responsibilities. According to Black's, and the indexes of the medical journals I checked afterward, Helen Maitland had nothing to do with fertility treat-ment. She was a specialist in cystic fibrosis, and had pub¬lished extensively on recent advances in gene replacement therapy. On the surface, it might seem that there was no point of contact between the two women professionally; but the same embryologist who worked on Helen Mait¬land's patients' offspring in vitro might well be the same one who worked with Sarah Blackstone's subfertile cou¬ples. They'd certainly work in the same lab.

Even if I had all the files on the disks I'd recovered in the night, I still needed to make some more checks. The original computer files, of which I was sure these were only backup copies, had to be on a computer somewhere. And I needed to check out whether the real Helen Mait¬land was sufficiently involved in Sarah Blackstone's fertil¬ity project to be a potential threat to Alexis and Chris, or whether she was simply an innocent victim of her col¬league's deception.

Before I made the inevitable trip across the Pennine Hills to Leeds, I thought I'd make the most of being in the library. Replacing the medical directory, I wandered across to the shelves where the city's electoral rolls are kept. I looked up the main index and found the volume that contained the street where "Will Alien" and his part¬ner "Sarah Sargent" lived. I pulled the appropriate box file from the shelf and thumbed through the wards until I found the right one. I'd found them inside a minute.

It's one of the truisms of life that when people pick an alias, they go for something that is easy for them to remember, so they won't be readily caught out. They'll opt for the same initials, or a name that has some connec¬tion for them. There, in Flat 24, was living proof. Alan Williams and Sarah Constable.

If I played my cards right, maybe I could get them done for wasting police time as well as everything else. That would teach them to mess with me.
Chapter 12
I used the old flower delivery trick on the real Helen Maitland. A quick call to St. Hilda's Infirmary had established that Dr. Maitland was doing an outpatients clinic that afternoon. A slow scan of the phone book had revealed that her phone number was unlisted. Given the protective layers of receptionists and nurses, I didn't rate my chances of getting anywhere near her at work unless I'd made an appointment three months in advance. That meant fronting up at her home. The only problem with that was that I didn't know where she lived.

I headed for the hospital florist and looked at the flowers on offer. There were the usual predictable, tired arrange¬ments of chrysanthemums and spray carnations. Some of them wouldn't have looked out of place sitting on top of a coffin. I suppose it saved money if your nearest and dearest seemed to be near death's door; one lot of flowers would do for bedside and graveside. Gave a whole new meaning to say¬ing it with flowers. The only exception was a basket of freesias mixed with irises. When I went to pay for it, I realized why they only bothered stocking the one. It was twice the price of the others. I got a receipt. My client would never believe flowers could cost that much otherwise.

I've seen the tired garage bunches she brings home for Chris.

The price included a card, which I didn't write out until I was well clear of the florist. "Dear Doctor, thanks for everything, Sue." Every doctor has grateful patients; the law of averages says some of them must be called Sue. Then I toddled around to the outpatients clinic and thrust the arrangement at the receptionist. "Flowers