Sister: A Novel (32 page)

I met Professor Rosen, at his suggestion, at the entrance to the Gene-Med building, which was bustling despite it being Sunday. I was expecting him to escort me to his office but instead he led me to his car. We got in and he locked the doors. The demonstrators were still there - a distance away - and I couldn’t hear their chants.

Professor Rosen was trying to sound calm but there was a shake in his voice that he couldn’t control. ‘An active virus vector has been ordered under my cystic fibrosis trial number at St Anne’s.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Either there’s been a monumental cock-up,’ he said and I thought that he never used words like ‘cock-up’, that this was as extreme as his language would get. ‘Or a different gene is being tested out at St Anne’s, one that needs an active virus vector, and my cystic fibrosis trial is being used as a cover.’

‘The cystic fibrosis trial has been hijacked?’

‘Maybe, yes. If you want to be melodramatic about it.’

He was trying to belittle what was happening, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

‘For what?’ I asked.

‘My guess is that,
if
an illegal trial is happening, it is for genetic enhancement, which in the UK is illegal to test on humans.’

‘What kind of enhancement?’

‘I don’t know. Blue eyes, high IQ, big muscles. The list of absurdity goes on. But whatever gene it is, it needs an active virus vector to transport it.’

He was talking as a scientist, in facts, but beneath the words his emotion was clear. He was livid.

‘Do you know who is giving the injection of the CF gene therapy at St Anne’s?’ I asked.

‘I don’t have access to that type of information. They keep us very much inside our own pigeonholes at Gene-Med. It’s not like a university, no cross-pollination of ideas or information. So no, I don’t know the doctor’s name. But if I were him or her I would administer the genetic treatment for cystic fibrosis on foetuses who genuinely had CF and at the same time test the illicit gene. But maybe whoever it is became careless, or there just weren’t enough patients.’ He broke off and I saw the anger and hurt in him. ‘Someone is trying to make babies even more perfect in some way. But healthy is already perfect.
Healthy is already perfect.
’ I saw that he was shaking.

I wondered then if you’d found out about the hijacked trial - and the hijacker’s identity. Was that why you’d been murdered?

‘You must tell the police.’

He shook his head, not meeting my eye.

‘But you
have
to tell them.’

‘It’s still just conjecture.’

‘My sister and her baby are dead.’

He stared through the windscreen as if driving the car rather than hiding in it. ‘I need to get proof first that it’s a rogue trial that’s to blame. Once I have that proof I can save my cystic fibrosis trial. Otherwise my trial will be stopped in all hospitals until they’ve found out what’s going on and that could be months away, or years away. It may never be resumed.’

‘But the cystic fibrosis trial shouldn’t be affected at all. Surely—’

He interrupted. ‘When the press get hold of this, with their subtlety and intelligence, it won’t be a maverick trial that’s to blame for babies dying and God knows what else, it will be my cystic fibrosis trial.’

‘I don’t believe that’s true.’

‘Really? Most people are so poorly informed and poorly educated that they don’t see a difference between genetic enhancement and genetic therapy.’

‘But that’s absurd—’

Again he interrupted. ‘Mobs of imbeciles have hounded paediatricians, even attacked them, because they think
paedi
atrician is the same thing as
paed
ophile, so yes they will target the cystic fibrosis trial as wicked too because they won’t understand there’s a difference.’

‘So why did you investigate in the first place?’ I asked. ‘If you’re going to do nothing with the findings?’

‘I investigated because I’d told you I’d answer your questions. ’ He looked at me, anger sparking in his face, furious with me for putting him in this position. ‘I thought there’d be nothing to find.’

‘So I’ll have to go to the police without your support?’ I asked.

He looked physically intensely uncomfortable, trying to smooth out the sharp creases of his pressed grey trouser legs, which wouldn’t lie flat.

‘The order of the virus vector could well be a mistake; computer glitches occur. Administrative errors happen worryingly frequently.’

‘And that’s what you’ll tell the police?’

‘It’s the most credible explanation. So yes, that’s what I’ll tell them.’

‘And I won’t be believed.’

Silence hung between us like glass.

I broke it. ‘What’s this really about, curing babies or your own reputation?’

He unlocked the car doors, then turned to me. ‘If your brother were an unborn baby now what would you have me do?’

I did hesitate, but only for a moment. ‘I’d want you to go to the police and tell them the truth and then work like hell at saving your trial.’

He walked away from the car, not bothering to wait for me, not bothering to lock it again.

The woman with the spiky hair recognised him and yelled at him, ‘Leave playing God to God!’

‘If God had done his job properly in the first place we wouldn’t need to,’ he snapped at her. She spat at him.

The demonstrator with the grey ponytail shouted, ‘Say no to designer babies!’

He pushed his way through them and went back into the building.

I didn’t think Professor Rosen was wicked, but weak and selfish. He simply couldn’t bear to give up his new-found status. But he had a mental alibi for his lack of action; exonerating circumstances that he could plead to himself - the cystic fibrosis cure
is
very important. You and I both know that.

I reached the tube station and only then realised that Professor Rosen had given me a crucial piece of information. When I’d asked him if he knew who was giving the injection on the CF trial at St Anne’s, he’d said that he didn’t know; that he didn’t have access to that information. But he had talked about that person choosing patients, ‘
who genuinely had CF
and at the same time testing the illicit gene’. In other words the person giving the injection was the same person who was running the CF trial at St Anne’s. It had to be, if that person was responsible for choosing who was on it. And finding out who was in charge of the CF trial at St Anne’s was light years easier than finding the identity of someone giving a single injection.

It’s lovely out here, the sky a pure Wedgwood blue. As office workers straggle back to work, I remember at St Mary’s how we had lessons outside when it was hot, the children and the teacher all pretending to be interested in a book while soaking up summer and for a moment I forget how cold I am.

‘Do you think Professor Rosen meant to tell you?’ Mr Wright asks.

‘Yes. He’s far too clever and too pedantic to be careless. I think that he salved his conscience by hiding this titbit of information and it was up to me to have the intelligence to find it. Or maybe his better self won out at this one point of our conversation. But whatever it was, I now just had to find out who was administering the trial at St Anne’s.’

My legs are almost completely numb now. I’m not sure that when I try and stand up I’m going to be able to.

‘I phoned William and he said that he would find out who was in charge of the CF trial and get back to me, hopefully by the end of the day. Then I phoned Kasia on her mobile but she was engaged, presumably still chatting to her family - although by now her phone credit would have run out and it must be them phoning her. I knew that she was going to meet some Polish friends from church, so I thought I’d tell her when she got back. When we’d know who was behind it all and she’d be safe.’

In the meantime I went to meet Mum at Petersham Nursery to choose a plant for your garden, as we’d arranged. I was glad of the distraction; I needed to do something rather than pace the flat waiting for William to ring me.

Kasia had been on at me again to lay flowers at the toilets building for you.

She’d told me I’d be putting my ‘
odcisk palca
’ of love onto something evil. (
Odcisk palca
is fingerprint, the nearest translation we could find, and a rather lovely one.) But that was for other people to do, not me. I had to find that evil and confront him head on, not with flowers.

After weeks of cold and wet, it was the first warm dry day of early spring and at the nursery camellias and primroses and tulips were unfolding into colour. I kissed Mum and she hugged me tightly back. As we walked, under the canopy of old greenhouses, it was as if we’d stepped back in time and into a stately home’s garden.

Mum checked plants for frost-hardiness and repeat flowering while I was preoccupied - after searching for almost two months, by the end of the day I should know who killed you.

For the first time since I’d arrived in London, I felt too warm and took off my expensive thick coat, revealing the outfit underneath.

‘Those clothes, they’re awful, Beatrice.’

‘They’re Tess’s.’

‘I thought they must be. You have no money at all now?’

‘Not really, no. Well some, but it’s tied up in the flat until it’s sold.’

I have to own up that I had been wearing your clothes for quite a while. My New York outfits seemed ludicrous outside that lifestyle, besides which I’d discovered how much more comfortable yours are. It should have felt odd, and definitely serious, to be wearing your dead sister’s clothes but all I could imagine was your amusement at seeing me in your hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs; me who had to have the latest designer fashion, who had outfits dry-cleaned after one wearing.

‘Do you know what happened yet?’ asked Mum. It was the first time she’d asked me.

‘No. But I think I will. Soon.’

Mum reached out her fingers and stroked a petal of an early flowering clematis. ‘She’d have liked this one.’

And suddenly she was mute, a paroxysm of grief passing through her body that looked unbearable. I put my arm around her but she was unreachable. For a while I just held her, then she turned to me.

‘She must have been so frightened. And I wasn’t there.’

‘She was an adult, you couldn’t have been with her all the time.’

Her tears were a wept scream. ‘I should have been with her.’

I remembered being afraid as a child, and the sound of her dressing gown rustling in the dark and the smell of her face cream, and how just the sound of her and the smell of her banished my fears and I wished she’d been with you too.

I hugged her tightly, trying to make myself sound believable.

‘She wouldn’t have known anything about it, I promise, nothing at all. He put a sedative into her drink so she’d have fallen asleep. She wouldn’t have been afraid. She died peacefully.’

I had learned finally, like you, to put love before truth.

We carried on through the greenhouse, looking at plants, and Mum seemed a little soothed by them.

‘So you won’t be staying much longer then,’ she said. ‘As you’ll know soon.’

I was hurt that she could think I could leave her again, after this.

‘No. I’m going to stay, for good. Amias has said I can stay in the flat, pretty much rent free I think.’

My decision wasn’t entirely selfless. I’d decided to train as an architect. Actually, I needn’t put that in the past tense, it’s what I still want to do when the trial is over. I’m not sure if they’ll take me, or how I’ll fund it and look after Kasia and her baby at the same time, but I want to try. I know my mathematical brain, obsessed with detail, will do the structural side well. And I’ll search myself for something of your creative ability. Who knows? Maybe it’s lying dormant somewhere, an unread code for artistic talent wrapped tightly in a coiled chromosome waiting for the right conditions to spring into life.

My phone went and I saw a text from William wanting to meet, urgently. I texted back the address of the flat. I felt sick with anticipation.

‘You have to go?’ asked Mum.

‘In a little while, yes. I’m sorry.’