“Nothing gets past you, does it?” sighed Jean, helping herself to a cigarette from the packet on his desk.

He shook his head complacently. Years ago, during the very worst time of Jean’s life, he had come across her weeping in the mailroom at the end of the day. He had put his arms around her in a fatherly way (though he was not quite old enough to be her father) and without showing any curiosity or distaste, said, “Come on, old girl.” In the absence of any other comforter she had found his kindness deeply touching. They had never mentioned it again, but it was always there as a thread between them.

“But it can’t really be true, can it?” Roy said.

“There have been instances of spontaneous parthenogenesis in fish and invertebrates, not mammals. But experiments on rabbits have proved that it’s possible to induce it artificially in a laboratory.”

Roy raised his eyebrows. “Rabbits? If one mammal why not another?” He had finished with the plants now and spun back to face her in his leather chair.

“It involved quite a high degree of interference—freezing the fallopian tubes—and the failure rate was very high.”

“Poor creatures.” Roy pulled a face. “How do you know all this?”

“I’ve contacted the doctor whose article started all this—Hilary Endicott—and she sent me some of her research papers. They weren’t an easy read, so I asked her whether or not in her opinion a virgin birth was scientifically possible, yes or no. She got on her high horse and said science wasn’t in the business of declaring what was or wasn’t possible. All that could be said was that there had been no verifiable instances of spontaneous parthenogenesis in mammals so far.”

“That sounds like no to me.”

“Well, she conceded that she thought the chances vanishingly small, but many new scientific discoveries were once thought impossible and she was interested in seeing what the tests showed.”

“And yet you find her less persuasive than Mrs. Tilbury?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Do you think it’s possible to hold two contradictory views at the same time?”

“Perfectly. Religious folk do it all the time.”

“So let’s say I think Mrs. Tilbury is telling the truth, but I still don’t believe in virgin birth, and I see it as my job to close that gap.”

“How do we want to proceed then?”

“Cautiously. I don’t want anything to go in the paper until we’ve got all the test results. If it turns out to be true, it’ll be massive, and it’s ours. I don’t want one of the nationals to steal it before we even know whether there’s a story. There’s no rush, is there?”

“None at all.”

“I wish you could meet her. She looks a bit like Deanna Durbin.”

Roy clutched his heart. “Now I really am interested.”

“And the little girl is a treasure.” Jean took the silver-framed photograph from her bag and propped it on the desk.

“Is this the daughter?”