‘How may I help you?’ she asked, her voice the perfect match for the house-and-garden images of the decor.
‘I’d like to make an appointment with Dr Maitland,’ I said, deliberately lowering my voice so she’d think I didn’t want the other two women to overhear.
‘One moment,’ she said, leaning to one side to stretch down and open one of the lower drawers in the desk. If Helen Maitland really was the murdered Dr Sarah Blackstone, the news hadn’t made it to the Compton Clinic yet. The woman straightened up with a black A5 desk diary in her hand. She laid it on top of the larger diary that was already sitting open in front of her, and flicked through it to the following Sunday’s date. Even I could see that every half-hour appointment was already filled up. If Alexis was right, there were going to be a lot of disappointed faces on Sunday.
I watched as the receptionist flicked forward a week. Same story. On the third attempt, I could see there were a couple of vacant slots. ‘The earliest I can offer you is 3.30 on the twenty-fourth,’ she said. There was no apology in her voice.
‘Does it have to be a Sunday?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t I see her before then if I come during the week?’
‘I’m afraid not. Dr Maitland only consults here on a Sunday.’
‘It’s just that Sundays are a little awkward for me,’ I said, trying the muscularly difficult but almost invariably successful combination of frown and smile. I should have known it was a waste of time. Every medical receptionist since Hippocrates has been inoculated against sympathy.
The receptionist’s expression didn’t alter a millimetre. ‘Sunday is the only day Dr Maitland consults here. She is not a member of the Compton partnership, she merely leases our facilities and employs our services in an administrative capacity.’
‘You mean, you just make appointments on her behalf?’
‘Precisely. Now, would you like me to make this appointment for you, Ms…?’
‘Do you know where else she works? Maybe I could arrange to see her there?’
Ms Country House and Garden was too well trained to let her facade slip, but I was watching for any signs, so I spotted the slight tightening of the skin round her eyes. ‘I’m afraid we have no knowledge of Dr Maitland’s other commitments,’ she said, her voice revealing no trace of the irritation I was sure she was starting to feel.
‘I guess I’ll just have to settle for the twenty-fourth, then,’ I said, pursing my lips.
‘And your name is?’
‘Blackstone,’ I said firmly. ‘Sarah Blackstone.’
Not a flicker. The receptionist wrote the name in the half-past-three slot. ‘And a phone number? In case of any problems?’
I gave her my home number. Somehow, I don’t think she had the same problems in mind as I did.
I had time to kill before I headed over to South Manchester to pick up Debbie for our prison visit, but I didn’t want to go back to the office. I hate violence and I don’t like putting myself in situations where GBH seems to be the only available option. I cut down through Castlefield to the canal and walked along the bank as far as Metz, a bar and Mittel European bistro on the edges of the city’s gay village. Metz is so trendy I knew the chances of being spotted by anyone I knew were nil. I bought a bottle of designer mineral water allegedly flavoured with wild Scottish raspberries and settled down in a corner to review what little I knew so far.
I’d been taken aback when Alexis had revealed that she and Chris had been consulting Helen Maitland for six months. After all, we were best buddies. I had secrets from Richard, just as Alexis had from Chris. Show me a woman who doesn’t keep things from her partner, and I’ll show you a relationship on the point of self-destructing. But I was pretty certain I had no secrets from Alexis, and I’d thought that was mutual. Even though I understood her motives for not telling me about something so illegal, to discover she’d been hiding something this big made me wonder what else I’d been kidding myself about.
Alexis and Chris had been told about Dr Helen Maitland — in total confidence — by a close friend of theirs, a lesbian lawyer who’d been approached very cautiously by another couple who wanted to know the legal status of what they were planning to do. Because she knew about Alexis and Chris’s desire to have a child, their lawyer friend introduced them to her clients. I sincerely hoped the Law Society wasn’t going to hear about this — even two years of a law degree was enough for me to realize that what was going on here wasn’t just illegal, it was unethical too. And let’s face it, there aren’t enough lawyers around who act out of compassion and concern for the prospect of losing one of them to be anything other than bleak.
Alexis had phoned the Compton Clinic and made an appointment for her and Chris to see Dr Maitland the following Sunday. Obviously, the word had spread since then, judging by the delay I’d faced. She’d been told, as I had been, to go to the back door of the clinic, as the main part of the building was closed on Sundays. Alexis had told me that the initial consultation made interviewing bereft parents look as easy as finding a non-smoking seat on a train. Dr Maitland had offered nothing, instigated nothing. It had been Alexis and Chris who had to navigate through the minefield, to explain what they wanted and what they hoped she could do for them. According to Alexis, Helen Maitland had been as stiff and unyielding as a steel shutter.
In fact, she’d nearly thrown them out when she was taking their details and Alexis admitted to being a journalist. ‘Why did you tell her?’ I’d asked, amazed.
‘Because I wanted her to work with us, soft girl,’ Alexis had replied scornfully. ‘She was obviously really paranoid about being caught doing what she was doing. That whole first consultation, it was like she was determined she wasn’t going to say a word that would put her in the wrong if someone was taping the conversation. And then she was taking down all these details. Plus she insisted on leaving a three-week gap between the first and second appointments. I figured she must be checking people out. And I reckon that if what she found out didn’t square with what she’d been told, you never got past that second appointment. So I had to tell her, didn’t I?’
‘How come she didn’t throw you out then and there?’
The familiar crooked grin. ‘Like I always say, KB, they don’t pay me my wages for working a forty-hour week. They pay me for that five minutes a day when I persuade somebody who isn’t going to talk to a living soul to talk to me. I can be very convincing when I really want something. I just told her that being a journalist didn’t automatically make me a scumbag, and that I was a dyke before I was a hack. And that the best way to make sure a story never got out was to involve a journo with a bit of clout.’
I hadn’t been able to argue with that, and I suspected that Helen Maitland hadn’t either, especially since it would have been delivered with a hefty dollop of the Alexis Lee charm. So the doctor had agreed to work with them both to make Chris pregnant with their child. First, they each had to take courses of drugs that cost a small fortune and made both of them feel like death on legs. The drugs maximized their fertility and also controlled their ovulation so that on a particular Sunday, they’d both be at the optimum point for having their eggs harvested. Helen Maitland herself had carried out this apparently straightforward procedure. According to Alexis, who never forgets she’s a journalist, the eggs were then transferred into a portable incubator which Helen Maitland could plug into the cigarette lighter of her car and transport to her lab, wherever that was. Another small detail I didn’t have.
In the lab, one egg from Alexis would be stripped down to its nucleus and loaded into a micropipette one tenth the thickness of a human hair. Then one of Chris’s eggs would be injected with Alexis’s nucleus and hopefully the chromosomes would get it on and make a baby. This nuclear fusion was a lot less immediately spectacular than nuclear fission, but its implications for the human race were probably bigger. It was obvious why the doctor had chosen to use an alias.