‘How do you know this stuff?’ Paula asked. ‘You just said, you’ve never worked for Mrs Levinson.’
‘I wrote a dissertation about medical information sharing in a digital age for my BSc,’ Elinor said. ‘I’m an ambitious junior doctor. I’m addicted to qualifications.’
‘There must be a back-up,’ Paula said. ‘You wouldn’t rely on just one computer for that.’
‘I’m sure there must be. But I have no idea where it is and I don’t imagine anyone outside the ICT team at the HFEA would know.’ Elinor stirred her coffee thoughtfully.
‘She could have told us all that, but she didn’t,’ Paula complained. ‘She just sent us off with a flea in our ear. She wouldn’t even tell us how the same sperm ended up in Birmingham.’ Paula bit into her panini savagely.
‘I can tell you that. It’s no big secret. We’ve got guidelines that say we should avoid producing more than ten live births from the same donor. The reason being that you don’t want to compromise the gene pool with hundreds of kids running around with the same gametes. But you don’t necessarily want ten kids of approximately the same age and with the same father in the same town. Because the psychologists tell us we’re more likely to fall in love with an unknown sibling than a stranger.’
‘Really? That’s wild.’
‘Wild but true. So if you’ve got a particularly fertile donation, it’s common after half a dozen successful pregnancies to swap sperm with a clinic in another city. I imagine that’s what happened here.’
‘That makes sense.’ Paula gave Elinor a frank look. ‘You’re doing quite a job of making yourself indispensable.’
‘What I live for.’ She was still looking pensive. ‘I know this might sound a little off the wall . . . But are you guys thinking that the sperm donor might be the killer?’
Wondering where she was going with this, Paula said, ‘Our profiler thinks that’s a possibility.’
‘I don’t know much about these things, but it seems to me that someone who’s going around killing people might have come to your attention before,’ Elinor said. ‘If he has, wouldn’t he be on the national DNA database?’
‘I suppose so,’ Paula said. ‘But their DNA is different.’
‘I know. But I vaguely remember reading about a cold case where they got the killer after twenty years because his nephew was convicted of something and the database flagged it up.’ Elinor pulled out her iPhone and connected to the internet, turning the screen so they could both see it.
‘So how do you know this? Another dissertation?’ Paula teased as Elinor navigated to Google and typed dna murder relative cold case into the search terms box.
‘Dustbin mind. I have a desperate accumulation of trivia in my head. I’m your girl on pub quiz night.’ She scrolled through the results. ‘There, that’s it.’
‘“Man convicted fourteen years after crime by relative’s DNA sample,”’ Paula read. As she read on, she grinned. ‘Good to see you’re not infallible.’
‘So it was fourteen years, not twenty.’
‘And rape, not murder,’ Paula said. ‘But I take your point.’ She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Now I have to go and talk to Stacey.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And meet a colleague from Worcester.’
Elinor walked her to the door. ‘My twenty minutes are up too. Thank you.’
‘What? For mercilessly picking your brains?’
‘For getting me off the ward and reminding me there’s life out here.’ She leaned into Paula and kissed her, warm breath tickling her ear. ‘Go and catch your killer. I have plans for you when this is all over.’
A delicious shiver unsettled Paula. ‘There’s an incentive, if I ever heard one.’
When Carol finally made it back to her squad room, she found Tony sitting in the visitor’s chair in her office. He was leaning back, fingers interlocked behind his head and feet on the wastepaper bin, eyes closed. ‘I’m glad someone’s got time for a nap round here,’ she said, shrugging off her coat and kicking off her shoes. She snapped the blinds closed, opened her desk drawer and took out a miniature of vodka.
Tony straightened up. ‘I was thinking, not napping.’ He watched her open the vodka, look at him, then screw the cap back on and throw it back in the drawer. She glared at him and he held his hands up in a gesture of appeasement. ‘I didn’t say a word,’ he protested.
‘You didn’t have to. You can do sanctimonious without moving an eyebrow.’
‘How did it go with Blake?’
‘No secrets round here, are there?’ Carol fell into her chair. ‘This job sometimes offers moments of pure pleasure. It was a beautiful thing to watch him wrestle between his smouldering desire to save money and his burning desire to kick off his time here with a brilliant coup. Even more beautiful because he made the right decision. If we can identify the next victim, we get to go with full surveillance.’
‘Well done. I also hear that DS Ambrose has found us a suspect. ‘
Carol had had more time to think about Patterson’s phone call. ‘Well, he’s found a possibility. It’s based on a lot of assumptions. First, that Fiona Cameron’s geographic profile is on the money. Second, that the killer used his own vehicle. And third, that Warren Davy isn’t just off having a jolly with his mistress.’
‘Good points, all of them. But I still think Davy’s a strong possible. If Stacey can identify the next victim, that’s likely to be a more definite way to go. Do we know anything about Davy yet?’
Carol brought her monitor to life and clicked on her message queue. There was a brief from Stacey. ‘He’s got no form. He’s got one credit card which he seems to use for business only. No store cards. No loyalty cards. She says it’s a typical profile for someone in his field. He knows how easy it is to breach security so he keeps his presence to a minimum. His phone hasn’t been switched on for days. The last time it was on was when Seth disappeared on Central Station. And it pinged the nearest tower to . . . Care to guess?’
‘Central Station,’ Tony said.
‘Got it in one. So he’s definitely elusive.’
‘Has anyone spoken to the girlfriend about him?’
Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t want to spook her into warning him off. He’s perfectly placed to fake or steal an identity. If he chose to run now, we’d struggle to find him. He could go to ground anywhere. Here or abroad.’
Tony shook his head. ‘He’s not going to disappear. He’s got a mission and he’s not going to stop until he’s finished. Unless we stop him, that is.’
‘So what’s his mission?’
Tony jumped out of the chair and began to pace in the confines of the office. ‘He thinks he’s the bad seed. Something’s happened to fill him with fear and self-hatred. Something that he thinks is passed on through the blood. I don’t think it’s as straightforward as a medical condition, although that is possible. But he’s determined to weed out the bad seed. To be the end of the line. He’s going to kill all his biological children. And then he’s going to kill himself.’
Carol stared at him, horrified. ‘How many?’
‘I don’t know. Can we find out?’
‘Apparently not. According to the extremely unhelpful consultant at Bradfield Cross, all information about anonymous donors is totally off limits. So bloody off limits that, frankly, you wonder why they keep it. If they’re never going to use it, why not just destroy it? Then nobody could ever abuse it.’ Carol took the vodka from her desk drawer again. She also took out a small can of tonic water. She poured them both into the empty water glass on her desk. ‘You want a drink?’ she said defiantly.
‘Oh no, not me. I’m high enough with all that’s buzzing in my brain right now. Because there’s something not quite right with this picture,’ he said.
‘But it makes sense of everything we know. I can’t think of another theory that fits the facts.’ She sipped her drink and felt some of the tension in her neck start to ease.