Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,69

made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I flicked back through the pages to check that I wasn't misunderstanding what I saw in front of me. But there was no mistake. If I'd been short of motives for Sarah Blackstone's murder before, I was awash with them now.

Women tend to assume that it's only male doctors who are sufficiently arrogant, overbearing, and insensitive to ride roughshod over their patients' lives. Wrong. Overexposure to these charming traits during training obviously rubs off on a lot of the women who go the distance too. However pleasant, supportive, and discreet Dr. Black-stone might have appeared to the women who consulted her, scratch the surface and she was as bad as the worst of her profession. The women who had trusted her hadn't so much been patients as the subjects of her experiments. That was the message that came through loud and clear from her notes.

It wasn't enough for her that she'd been breaking new ground by performing miracles that women had never had the chance to experience before. Like so many of her male colleagues down the years, she wanted a different kind of immortality. What her notes told me was that she'd been playing a kind of Russian Roulette to achieve it. She had been harvesting her own eggs for as long as she'd been treating other women. The notes were there; she'd persuaded one of her colleagues to do the egg collection, on the basis that Sarah was going to donate the eggs to women who couldn't produce fertile ones of their own. I knew now from my own research that because of the courses of fertility drugs involved in producing half a dozen eggs at once, she'd only have been able to harvest her own eggs two or three times a year. But that had been enough. Although she couldn't use her own eggs exclusively in the mix, she had been including one of her own eggs with each couple's batch. She'd have let four or five embryos develop for each couple, and returned three of them to the womb. For every woman she'd successfully impregnated, there was a one in four or five chance that the baby was not the child of the mother and her partner. Instead, it would be the result of a genetic mixture from the mother and Sarah Blackstone. And Chris was pregnant.

It was a nightmare, and one that I absolutely couldn't share with my client. And if I couldn't tell my best friend, there was nobody else I could dump on either. Certainly not Richard. After the recent rockiness of our road, the last thing he needed to hear about was the potential redundancy of the male. But it wasn't just the implica¬tions for Chris's pregnancy that bothered me. It was the long-term dangers within the gene pool. Judging by what I knew from Alexis, a lot of lesbian mothers in Manches¬ter formed a close-knit social group, for obvious reasons. Their kids played together, visited each other's houses, grew up together. Chances were by the time they were adults, two women making babies together would be accepted medical practice, not some hole-in-the-corner criminal activity. What would happen if a couple of those girls fell in love, decided they wanted to make babies, and they were half-sisters because they'd both come from Sarah Blackstone's eggs? Either they'd find out in prelim¬inary genetic tests, or, even worse, they'd start a cycle of inbreeding whose consequences could poison the future for children not yet imagined, never mind conceived. It was a terrifying thought. But it didn't surprise me that it was a possibility on the horizon. When society sets things up so that the only way people can achieve their dreams is to go outside the law, it automatically loses any opportu¬nity to control the chain reaction.

It was also an experiment that wasn't hard to unravel. Any of the couples who were looking at a child who didn't look a bit like either of them but had a striking resemblance to their doctor wasn't likely to be handing out the benefit of the doubt. It's not impossible to have private DNA testing done these days, and at around five hundred pounds, not particularly expensive either, compared to the cost of IVF treatment and the expense of actually hav¬ing a child. A few weeks and the couple would have their answer. And if the mother's partner wasn't the biological co-parent, you wouldn't have to