He had honestly thought this secondment would involve easy days policing a community where he was respected—more so than his previous posting at least—breathing glorious mountain air, and weekends spent climbing.

So much for that.

*

It was pitch dark when Jake’s phone rang at stupid o’clock the next morning.

‘’Lo?’

‘Oh, sorry. I thought you might have been an early riser.’

‘Meena?’

‘Some results came in overnight that I thought you’d want as soon as possible.’

‘K?’

‘There’s a significant level of consanguinity here.’

Jake could not handle that many polysyllabic words before coffee. ‘Take a step back for me?’

‘The DNA I have for Lilith Haverstock’s child from the cord …’

‘Yes …?’

‘The results I have indicate a high level of consanguinity.’

Jake fought to kick his brain into gear … together blood … ‘Do you mean inbred?’

‘For want of a better term, yes.’

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Dunton, Tasmania

Thursday, 6.32 a.m.

‘How good’s your understanding of this kind of evidence?’ Meena asked.

Despite his aptitude for statistics, Jake had never come to grips with the results of DNA analyses. ‘Not fantastic.’

‘I’ll start at the beginning—you tell me if I’m going too fast or slow.’

Jake pulled the covers up tighter around his neck. ‘Okay.’

‘First, we have XY chromosomes.’

So, Lilith had given birth to a son. Jake wondered how she would react to the news.

‘Usually, people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on,’ Meena said.

‘And in this case?’

‘I’m seeing signs of fewer ancestors than normal.’

‘How few?’

‘If a woman has a child with her first cousin—meaning they share a set of grandparents—their child will have two parents and four grandparents, but only six great grandparents instead of the usual eight.’

Jake switched on his bedside lamp, then squinted in the harsh glare. ‘So?’

‘So that’s not great for the child, given that doubling up of the same DNA increases the risk of genetic diseases. But it’s also not too risky if it only happens every now and then in any given family tree. At the severe end of the scale—where the parents are brother and sister—they’d be down to just the one set of grandparents and that could have dire consequences for them genetically.’

‘Always?’

‘It’s a roll of the dice. One child in those circumstances could be fine; the next might suffer horribly.’

‘What are we looking at here?’

‘It looks to me like there’s a greater degree of inbreeding going on than first cousins, but not as severe as siblings for parents.’

‘Something as close as a father and daughter?’

‘No … more like uncle and niece.’

Geez, poor Lilith. She had no idea who her blood parents were—nor who had fathered her child—but it was someone closely related to her nonetheless.

‘Liam O’Brien isn’t in the mix at all?’