Helen first encountered Mike Grundy in the context of a delicate series of child-abuse inquiries, and was initially quite comfortable with his friendship with Lisa. The rapid expansion of genetic counseling at the interface of medicine and social services provided them with a ready-made topic of conversation, although Helen never took aboard Mike’s certainty that Lisa was a ready font of infallible information regarding the fallout of the Human Genome Project. As Mike and Helen drew closer together, however, Helen made a concerted effort to draw their atom of community away from all rival attractions.

At first, Lisa had tried to defuse Helen’s anxieties, going out of her way to assure her that she was no threat to their partnership, but her attempts to form as close a friendship with Helen as she had with Mike were always doomed.

Helen was the kind of feminist that Morgan Miller deplored: a die-hard subscriber to the notion that science and technology were ideologically polluted with the worst kind of masculine ambitions. She was overfond of analogies representing contemporary ecological crises as the aftermath of a “rape of the Earth” that had begun with the Industrial Revolution. She also took far too much notice of propaganda that saw the entirety of genetic science, and the Human Genome Project in particular, as a “Frankensteinian bid” by the male of the species to usurp essentially female prerogatives of reproduction.

Lisa attempted to undermine these opinions with as much subtlety as she could muster, but she couldn’t entirely control the temptation to excoriate them with a Müleresque fervor. She even tried to soften that kind of blow by crediting the most scathing observations to Morgan Miller and delicately refraining from lending them her own wholehearted endorsement, but the tactic never worked.

“Your problem, Lisa,” Helen said to her with treacly concern, on the last occasion when Lisa attempted a full-scale conversion, in 2024 or 2025, “is that you’ve sold out. You know deep down that that’s what you’ve done, but you can’t bear to face it—so you cover it up with all these layers of dismissive arrogance and barbed sarcasm. You’ll never be happy until you can be reconciled with your own conscience, and you’ll never achieve that unless you can tear down the walls of false consciousness you’ve erected in your psyche.”

“It’s kind of you to lend me your expertise when I’m not one of your clients,” Lisa replied as mildly as she could, “but I’m happy as I am, and joining the police—for me as well as for Mike—was more a matter of buying in than selling out. We all have to do what we can, in our different but complementary ways, to hold society back from the brink of chaos.”

“I’ve heard you say many a time that nothing can stop us from going over that brink,” Helen pointed out sweetly. “Too many children in the world. Masculine science does love its simple explanations, doesn’t it?”

“Even if a fall is inevitable,” Lisa replied, “it still makes sense to delay it as long as possible. When the collapse begins, good policing will be even more essential than it is today—and science offers the only hope we have of getting the parachute open before the fall becomes a fatal crash.”

“The only remedy we’ll ever have against disaster is the capacity to treat one another with courtesy and charity,” Helen informed her.

There was no point in contradicting Helen’s ready assumption that courtesy and charity were essentially female virtues—or, indeed, in denying most of her other assumptions. She was not the kind of person to admit that she might be fundamentally mistaken, and for all her feminist philosophizing, she certainly couldn’t allow the possibility that a plainer and older woman might have the advantage of her. So Lisa gave up trying to be a friend to Mike and Helen alike, and contented herself with maintaining half a friendship with Mike alone. It was not so great a loss as all that, especially while she still had Morgan Miller, Ed Burdillon, and Chan Kwai Keung. Or so it seemed, until the day when everythingfell apart.

PART FOUR

The Miller Effect

NINETEEN

Mike Grundy had pulled the Rover off the road, blocking the driveway of a house on North Road. Lisa left her own car on the roadway, even though traffic was beginning to build up and she was sure to get in the way of vehicles filtering out of Hadley Road into the left-hand lane of North Road. As if suddenly uncertain of his purpose, the detective stopped in his tracks when he saw Chan emerge from the passenger seat, flattening himself against the fender as horns began to blare.

“It’s okay, Mike,” Lisa said.

Grundy waited by the Rover while they made their separate ways to stand side by side confronting him. The expression on his face was troubled, but the trouble was a mere mask pasted over a deep-seated exhaustion.

“Sorry, Mike,” Lisa said. “I needed to see you. Now I need you to take Chan in for me. Don’t expect any brownie points for it. Nothing we do from here on in is going to save either one of us. We’re too badly soiled. It’s not our fault, but we’re finished in the police force.”

Mike looked at her curiously, but all he said was: “Nice suit. Where’s your belt?”

“I had to put it in for cleaning,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve had that old wreck swept recently?”

“As a matter of fact,” he told her, half turning to look down at the roof of his car, “our noble leader ordered a check on all vehicles as soon as it was obvious that the station had become leaky. You can never be a hundred-percent certain, of course, but I think I’m clean. If you can say the same, no one is listening in on us.”

“Good,” she said. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference at this stage, but it would be nice to have the moment to ourselves. I’ve no time to spare so I’ll just say what I need to say. Helen’s involved in Morgan’s kidnapping. She probably thinks she’s in charge, but if she ever actually was, her authority must have grown pretty shaky by now.”

The disbelief inscribed on Mike’s features was a sight to behold, but he didn’t contradict her. Instead, he let the thought linger for a moment while he studied Lisa’s face for signs of insanity. He was shaking his head slightly, but it was as much confusion as denial. In the end, all he said was: “What makes you so sure?”

“It first occurred to me when Stella Filisetti referred to you as my ‘second-string boyfriend.’ There’s no way she could have got that from Morgan, or from university gossip—and Judith Kenna certainly didn’t tell her. It explained how the kidnappers got the passwords that blacked out our end of the ‘plex, and how the intruders got through my locks so easily, but I wasn’t absolutely sure until Smith told me about the contact search he ran on Stella and the Real Woman. If the threads leading to all three of the leading names had been planted, it would have been a meaningless joke. Two of the spoilers had to have been added to prevent the third name from standing out like a sore thumb—and I’m reasonably certain that the chief inspector didn’t do it. I’ll lay odds that you didn’t change your passwords to the police systems after the split, and that you wrote down the pass codes to the locks at my flat somewhere that someone who knew your habits very well could easily find.”

Mike considered the catalogue of clues for a moment or so, nobly refraining from making any comment on the circumstantiality of the evidence.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Why?”

“Stella found something, maybe in Mouseworld and maybe in one of Morgan’s computers. Whichever one it was, it made her check the other, and she found confirmation. She put those two together with a further two from Morgan’s trips to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, and made far more than five. She’d probably confided her suspicions to her radfem friends already, but the fact that Morgan was talking to Goldfarb and Geyer spooked them sufficiently to take action. They may have a handful of hobbyist terrorists along—that’s probably where they got the weapons, the accelerant they used in Mouseworld, and the idiotic posing—but they’re not really an organized gang. Even if they’ve managed to get Arachne West on the team, as seems probable, they’re still the rankest kind of amateurs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. When the computer team clears out all the disinformation, Smith and Kenna will move a whole task force against the couriers carrying Stella’s stolen mice, but I figure that I have at least a couple of hours to try to get Morgan out quietly before the shit hits the fan. That’s what I’m going to do, while you ferry Chan to the Renaissance.”