Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,72

her, legs together and bent at the knees like a hockey goal¬keeper, and blocked her escape route. Jan picked her up without seeming to be aware of it and stepped back. "You'd better come in," she said.

The living room was chaos. If I'd ever considered motherhood for more than the duration of a movie, that living room would have put me off for life. It made Richard's mess look structured. And this woman was a qualified librarian, according to her medical record. Wor¬rying. I shoved a pile of unironed washing to one end of a sofa and perched gingerly, carefully avoiding a damp patch that I didn't want to think too closely about. Jan deposited the child on the carpet and sat down heavily on a dining chair with a towel thrown over it. I was confused; I couldn't work out what Jan Parrish's excessive reaction to my exposure of her doctor's real identity meant. It didn't fit my expectation of how a killer would react. I couldn't see Jan Parrish as a killer, either. She didn't seem nearly orga¬nized enough. But she had been horrified and panicked by what I'd said and I needed to find out why. Playing for time, I gave her the rigmarole about lesbian history. She was too distracted to pay much attention. "I'm sorry it's been such a shock," I said finally, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"What? Oh yes, her being murdered. Yes, that's a shock, but it's the other thing that's thrown me. Her not being who she said she was. Oh my God, what have I done?"

That's exactly what I was wondering too. It wasn't that I was too polite to say so, only too cautious. "Whatever it was, I'm sure it had nothing to do with her death," I said soothingly.

Jan looked at me as if I was from the planet Out to Lunch. "Of course it didn't," she said, frowning in puz¬zlement. "I'm talking about blowing her cover with the letter."

I knew the meaning of every word, but the sentence failed to send messages from my ears to my brain. "I'm sorry... ?"

Jan Parrish shook her head as if it had just dawned on her that she had done something so stupid that even a drunken child of two and a half would have held fire. "We were all paranoid about security, for obvious rea¬sons. Dr. Maitland always impressed on us the impor¬tance of that. She told us never to write to her at the clinic, because she was afraid someone might open the letter by mistake. She said if we needed to contact her again, we should make an appointment through the clinic. But we were so thrilled about Siobhan. When she had her first birthday, we both decided we wanted Dr. Mait¬land to know how successful she'd been. I'm a librarian, I'm back at work part-time, so I looked her up in Black's. The medical directory, you know? And it said she was a consultant at St. Hilda's in Leeds, so we sent her a letter with a photograph of Siobhan with the two of us and a lock of her hair, just as a sort of keepsake. But now you're telling me she wasn't Dr. Maitland at all? That means I've exposed us all to a terrible risk!" Her voice rose in a wail and I thought she was going to burst into tears.

"When was this?" I asked.

"About three months ago," she said, momentarily dis¬tracted by Siobhan's sudden desire to commune with the main electricity supply via a plug socket. She leapt to her feet and scooped up her daughter, returning her to the carpet but facing in the opposite direction. Showing all the stub¬bornness of toddlers everywhere, Siobhan immediately did a five-point turn and crawled back toward the skirting board. This time, I took a better look at her face. The hair might be Jan Parrish's but the shape of her face was unmistakable. I wondered whether Helen Maitland had also noticed.

"Well, if you haven't heard anything by now, I'd think you're all safe," I reassured her. "What did the letter actu¬ally say?"

She frowned. "I can't remember the exact wording, but something like, 'We'll never be able to thank you enough for Siobhan. You made a dream come true for us, that we could really share our own child.' Something along those lines."

"I wouldn't worry about it," I said. "That could mean anything. It certainly wouldn't make anyone jump to the conclusion that