The Empty House Read Online Free Page A

trailed round after him.”
    Peter stared at her. He thought of his mother. Surely not a second case of persecution mania?
    Miss Wolfe was looking at him over the top of her glasses, which were still perched on her nose. She said, “You don’t know a great deal about my brother, I can see.”
    “Practically nothing. I’d be very grateful for anything you can tell me.”
    “I don’t know the details of the work he was doing. Except that it must have been connected with biological warfare, or he wouldn’t have been at that Hell’s Kitchen in Devonshire. I’m sure he hated it as much as I did.”
    “Then why did he work there?”
    “He was blackmailed into doing it.”
    “Blackmailed? Who by?”
    “By the government. And if you keep looking at me in that unbelieving way, I shan’t say a single word more.”
    “I do apologise. I do, really. It’s just that I was startled. Somehow one doesn’t associate governments with blackmail.”
    “All governments use blackmail. Some openly. Some more discreetly. This was a particularly unpleasant form of blackmail because it was disguised as charity. What my brother specialised in was genetic research, but jobs in that line were few and far between. When he left Oxford, he filled in time for a year or so teaching science at a public school, but always with his chin on his shoulder. Finally he got what he wanted. It was a junior post at the Molecular Biology Research Unit at Cambridge. While he was there they arranged for him to do a spell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he went, on attachment, to Bart’s Hospital. They’ve got a Medical Oncology Unit. He was beginning to be interested in the connection – everyone knows it must exist – between the normal processes of growing older, and the abnormal ones.”
    “Cancer?”
    “Cancer and leukemia are the vicious ones. There are plenty of others. All the knobs and spots and blotches that accumulate as your system gets tired. Like trees.”
    “It sounds fascinating.”
    “It certainly fascinated him,” said Miss Wolfe. “Do you know anything at all about molecular biology?”
    “Not a scrap.”
    “Well, I don’t know much. But some years ago, Alex and I had a holiday together on a farm in Wales. Considered as a holiday, it was a dead loss. It rained almost every day. Alex did a lot of talking and 1 remembered some of it. It seems that everyone has got a personal genetic code. It’s carried by his own private arrangement of biochemicals in cells called nuclei, and the important thing is to find out how the chromosomes are packed into them and then to try and read the pattern of information carried by them. Stop me if I’m boring you. This is nothing to do with insurance policies.”
    “You’re not boring me,” said Peter. He noticed that, now that Miss Wolfe was talking about something that interested her, she had dropped all affectations.
    “I gather that it was like the code-breaking we did during the war. Only, the code they were trying to read was more complicated than anything the Germans ever thought up. It was there that Alex finally lost me. All I can remember is that it was something to do with a submicroscopic thread called DNA. It is chemically the most complex of the five substances which make up a chromosome, and seems to be their intelligence unit. To date, it’s been cleverer than any of the people trying to unravel it. There was a woman – I can’t remember her name – who Alex said got closest to it. Then she died, and the whole research was put back by years.”
    “Didn’t she leave notes of where she’d got to?”
    “You say that as though she was travelling on the Underground and could tell them what station she’d arrived at. When you get to that point in pure research, you’re on your own. You’re pushing out into the dark. No maps. Not even a star to guide you. It must be the most terrifying and the most exciting thing imaginable.”
    The terrier on Peter’s