He regretted the fact that he couldn’t finally feel good about having paved the way for John Palmer’s release against what had been tremendous odds by any standards, but the things that were coming to light were eclipsing any such feelings with dark foreboding.He had not been looking forward to telling Lucy and John that Anne-Marie had not actually been their daughter in strictly biological terms, although they had obviously loved her as if she had been. Now he was faced with the possibility that Anne-Marie might not even be dead … but there again, she still might be. It all depended on why she had been cloned in the first place. He was reminded again of the words of the American scientist at the symposium. A successful cloning, done for whatever reason, will result in a baby being born. If Anne-Marie had been cloned to provide spare parts then she might well already be dead. How would anyone who had loved her cope with that kind of revelation, he wondered? For Lucy, at least, he reckoned that might be the final straw, a nightmare too far: one she might never recover from.The chances of discovering anything about the motives behind the cloning seemed to depend entirely on finding out who had commissioned it in the firstplace and his best chance of doing that still seemed to rest with the investigation of Dawes’ finances.
