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He need not have worried. She was asleep on the sofa, the Braille book lolling open on her lap.

Slumber had made her serene, softening the spiky edges of her feral energy. He could have watched her like that for hours, but when she woke up Herbert knew she would have been angry that he had not immediately shared his discovery with her.

So he nudged her shoulder, stroked her hair with trembling hands while she slowly kicked her way up from under the surface of sleep, and told her what he had found.

He described the image to her, read her the text, pointed out where one fit the other, and explained the key Stensness had used.

She had no better ideas than he did, which made him feel that perhaps he was not being that stupid after all.

“Your cane,” Herbert said to Hannah. “Is it solid?”

“No. Is hollow.”

“And is there a top to it, or something?”

“Yes. The end come off.”

He took the Coronation article, rolled it tight, took Hannah’s cane, unscrewed the top, wedged the article
inside the tube, replaced the top, and returned the cane to Hannah. It was a token gesture, no more, but he felt safer that way. If this thing was sufficiently valuable for men to have killed each other, then it was sufficiently valuable to merit a hiding place, no matter how inadequate.

It could be argued, of course, that he was putting Hannah in potential danger, but Herbert knew her well enough by now to know that she would never have entertained such a notion.

And nor did she; she simply nodded and said, “Good thinking.”

The tube again, where there would usually have been a smattering of people in their Sunday best, on their way to or from church, but the fog was clearly keeping almost everyone at home.

One couple who had braved the conditions were in the same carriage as Herbert and Hannah, and the woman of the pair was not impressed.

“Did you count how many people there were there today, Jerry?” she said. “I’ll tell you. Twenty-six.
Twenty-six!
They usually get a thousand, you know. It’ll have played havoc with the collection, that’s for sure.”

Herbert had rung Tyce before leaving Hannah’s flat, to let him know where he was going. There was still no word about de Vere Green.

Hannah and Herbert disembarked at Gloucester Road, where Sherlock Holmes had once wandered the tracks in search of the Bruce-Partington plans, and found their way slowly and cautiously to Drayton Gardens; more specifically, to Donovan Court, where Rosalind Franklin lived.

She had given Herbert her address on the Friday morning, several lifetimes before, when he had first told her about Stensness. If he needed more information, she had said, all he had to do was ask.

He needed more information now, that was for sure.

Drayton Gardens was a not unpleasant tree-lined street, and Donovan Court was a not unpleasant thirties block on the east side. Not that Herbert could see much of either, of course. He rang the bell to number 22.

It would be just his luck if Franklin was not in, he thought.

Yes, there were others who could explain what all the palaver with helices and diamond structures was about, but something atavistic in Herbert had warmed to the outsider in Rosalind, and it was her with whom he wanted to speak.

Minutes passed. The fog eased tendrils of clammy cold around them.

Herbert stamped his feet and muttered billowing plumes of nonsense, before stabbing at the bell again in irritated, disbelieving desperation; and suddenly the block’s main door opened, and there she was.

“Inspector Smith,” she said. “Have you found the killer?”

“Yes. I mean, I think so.”

Hannah raised a sardonic eyebrow, and Herbert remembered; actually, he hadn’t.

He had found various layers of truth about de Vere Green, and Papworth, and Kazantsev, but he had yet to prove conclusively which one had killed Stensness.

“Excellent. Come in, come in. You must be freezing.”

Rosalind ushered them through the door, appraised Hannah quickly up and down, and introduced herself to
her. Rosalind did not offer Hannah any more help than that, Herbert noticed—indeed, she had not batted an eyelid at anything to do with Hannah’s blindness—and he thought with quick unease of his own gaucheness when he had first met Hannah, and the ways in which he had attempted to aid her progress.

Rosalind Franklin clearly understood an awful lot about pride, Herbert thought.

Rosalind led them up the stairs; she did not seem the kind of person to have taken a lift, whether there was one available or not.

Herbert wondered briefly who this reminded him of, and realized that it was Hannah herself.

Number 22 was a four-room flat, and it was clear that Rosalind lived alone. The décor and possessions were too consistent in theme and appearance to have belonged to more than one person, though the effect did not feel contrived. The flat, while neat, was not obsessively so.

Rosalind went into the kitchen and came back with tea for three; a peculiarly British reaction, Herbert thought. There were few ills in the British world that could not at least be alleviated by a good old cuppa.

“Well,” Rosalind said, when she had poured, “what can I do for you?”

Herbert told her briefly of what he had found at her laboratory earlier.

Then he took Hannah’s cane, unscrewed the top, tipped the contents into his hand, and laid them out on the table in front of Rosalind, explaining what was what, where the microdots were, how she could see them, and what he had deciphered.

He had thought that Rosalind would start with the
decipher, but she went instead for the microdot viewer, and he saw the scientist’s logic: begin at the beginning.

It took her a moment to get comfortable with the viewer and find the right place on the map. She homed in on the first dot and looked at it for no more than half a second before speaking.

“Goodness me,” she said. “That’s DNA.”

“What’s DNA?” Herbert asked.

Rosalind lowered the viewer, looked squarely at Herbert, and allowed herself a single moment of melodrama.

“DNA, Mr. Smith, is the meaning of life.”

*  *  *

Rosalind explained, in concise but comprehensive terms.

The quest for the structure of DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—was the Holy Grail of genetics, and therefore of all contemporary science. Whereas lightning, plague, famine, or even the atomic bomb affected some people some of the time, heredity was something that affected all people all of the time.

It was mankind’s destiny; intimate, inborn, inescapable, but thus far inexplicable.

DNA held the very key to the nature of living things. There were ten trillion cells in the human body, and DNA was in the nucleus of every single one.

It orchestrated the incredibly complex world of the cell, and stored hereditary information which was passed from one generation to the next.

DNA distinguished man from all other species on the planet; it was what made man the creative, conscious, dominant, and destructive creature that he was.

In short, DNA was the human instruction book,
previously known only to God himself. It was the Rosetta stone of life.

The problem, however, was this.

Even though the molecule had been discovered two-thirds of the way through the last century, when it had been isolated from pus in the bandages of wounded soldiers, still no one knew for sure what its structure was.

And without the structure, everything else was irrelevant, for the structure held within itself the methods of reproduction and organization.

It would be like trying to drive from London to Edinburgh without the slightest idea of which direction one should be heading in, let alone anything as precise as a map; no guide whatsoever beyond the knowledge that there was a place called Edinburgh.

DNA was the secret of life, four billion years old and being unpicked every day.

It was already known that the DNA molecule consisted of multiple copies of a single basic unit, the nucleotide, which came in four forms: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine.

Adenine and guanine were purines, bicyclic compounds.

Cytosine and thymine were pyrimidines, hetero-cyclic compounds.

Adenine and thymine were found in identical quantities within DNA, as were guanine and cytosine.

That was, in essence, all that was beyond doubt.

The rest was guesswork, and there was a lot of
that
around, because of all the people trying to find the structure.

Pauling was the most famous of them, and the topic
was to have formed his keynote speech at the conference, before he had been taken ill and forced to cancel.

“A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids,” it had been titled, and would have been Pauling’s public shot at immortality, the greatest chemist in the world taking on the most golden of all molecules.

Pauling and his colleagues at Caltech aside, the hunt was centered around two other institutions: Rosalind’s own King’s College, and Cambridge University.

Herbert saw the pattern at once.

King’s was a notorious communist hotspot, even more so than Cambridge, where de Vere Green went on a regular basis, and which had supplied the bulk of Britain’s spies for a generation.

A neater correlation of institution and intelligence service—the MGB at King’s, Five at Cambridge, and the CIA at Caltech—would have been hard to imagine.

De Vere Green, Kazantsev, and Papworth; they must all have known exactly what Stensness had been offering. Perhaps Stensness’ boast of something that would change the world had been a sort of password as well as a promise.

But by God, he had been right. This thing
would
change the world, in every way and forever.

“Is it a race?” Herbert asked.

“It’s valuable,” Rosalind replied. “But racing’s vulgar.”

“Only if you lose,” Hannah said.

Rosalind smiled to concede the point. “Most scientists spend their careers contributing to the long, slow accumulation of dates and ideas,” she said. “To be involved in a dramatic victory is a rare privilege.”

But it
was
a race; Herbert could see that full well. The structure of DNA remained unknown, Everest was
yet to be climbed, the four-minute mile was yet to be run, the moon was yet to be walked on. History would remember only those who were first. Scientists who had theories named after them—Darwin, Newton, Einstein—were not just geniuses; they were pioneers.

If Beethoven had not written his Ninth Symphony, no one else would have done so. But if Pauling did not discover the structure of DNA, then someone else would, and sooner rather than later.

Herbert remembered the Einstein quote above Rosalind’s desk, and thought that she had no idea of the magnitude of what she was working on—politically, that was, not scientifically. No matter her brilliance as a scientist, it simply would not have occurred to her that governments would kill for the secret.

For Rosalind and her ilk, knowledge was key, its application to be aimed at the greater good, irrespective of nation or creed. Science was science, they believed; it was no one’s property.

The world would be a better place with more Rosalind Franklins, Herbert thought.

He handed Rosalind his transcription of the deciphered code, and she read it with annoyance. “Unsound … premature … conjecture …
wrong,”
she said, half to herself, and then looked up. “This is what Max was killed for?” she said.

“Yes.”

“What an
idiot,”
she snapped. “Stupid, stupid fool. What a waste.”

“What is that, anyway?” he said.

“The X-shape?”

“Yes.”

“It’s photo 51, a photograph I took last May.”

Herbert must have looked surprised, for Rosalind smiled. “Not a photograph as the layman understands it; an X-ray photograph. What you see on the microdot was originally about three or four inches in diameter. Wait, I’ll show you.”

She left the room again, and came back a minute or so later holding a metal contraption and a stoppered glass bottle with some white fibers sitting at the bottom.

“This is a Phillips microcamera,” Rosalind said, setting the metal apparatus down on the table in front of Herbert.

It looked like something from a science fiction movie; a more or less flat circle with a knurled edge, a pipe sticking diagonally out of its shoulder, and a lens in the middle, all supported vertically above a base plinth.

“I use it for recording X-ray diffraction patterns,” Rosalind added.

“What
kind of patterns?”

“Diffraction patterns. Imagine an object that’s invisible in every way. You can’t see it, smell it, hear it, touch it, or taste it. The only way to study this object is to shine light through it, or reflect light off it. By observing the patterns formed by the light, and matching them up with what you know of patterns caused by different kinds of diffraction gratings, you can get a great deal of information about the object’s structure.”

She held up the glass bottle. “This is DNA, from a calf’s thymus. It’s dry now, but it photographs much better when it’s wet; it’s longer, thinner, and easier to see. As far as I know, we at King’s were the only ones to have realized this.”

“Which means Max was selling the others something he knew they didn’t have.”

No wonder Stensness had been trying to sell photo 51 when he had. The conference had brought together all the main players on each of the three teams hunting for the molecular structure. It was one of the few occasions—perhaps the only one for many moons—when everyone involved in the race would be in one place.

Rosalind dropped her gaze, and Herbert realized that, for her, Max’s treachery bit deep. “Yes. Of course, the clearer the photograph, the easier it should be to discern the molecular structure. So … dry DNA, crystalline, we call the ‘A’ form; hydrated is the ‘B’ form, paracrystalline.

“We smear some ‘B’ into fibers, like those in a spider’s web. We insert it in the camera here”—she indicated the rear—“in front of a piece of film. The X-rays come in through the pinhole here”—tapping the small lens—“and the pipe at the top right is to allow humidified gas to be passed through the camera to control the water content of the fiber. We concentrate on one strand of fiber, about a tenth of a millimeter across.”