There were three of us at the table. The waiter recommended the Chablis, fetched a bottle and poured out two glasses. Lady Antonia and I savoured the bouquet, took an approving sip and raised a glass to my other guest, the small crimson leather casket lying in the middle of the table. Harold had always disapproved of this place. He had always hated ties and only tolerated wearing them at funerals (black) and for watching cricket at Lord's (orange and yellow, the colours of the MCC). That gentlemen must wear ties was the club's unwavering rule. So, despite numerous invitations, Harold rarely came to the Athenaeum during his lifetime. Today he had no choice. You see, Harold had died two years before and the crimson casket in the middle of the table contained a lock of his hair, within which were hidden a few molecules of his biological essence, his DNA. It might have been a scene from one of his own plays.
After our lunch, Lady Antonia opened the casket and took out the small plastic wallet within which were curled twenty or so dark brown hairs. I took the packet and examined it. Inside was a handwritten note ‘HP 10 Jan 2002 – cut by Delilah. AF’. Lady Antonia explained that she had cut the lock from her late husband's head just before he went into hospital for his first course of chemotherapy to treat a recently diagnosed cancer. Harold Pinter died six years later in 2008.
A few weeks before our meeting, Lady Antonia Fraser, Pinter's widow, had asked me during a chance meeting whether, even after his death, I could link Harold to one of the seven maternal European clan mothers that I had identified and who became the heroines of my first book, The Seven Daughters of Eve. That would have been an easy task had Pinter been alive. A simple mitochondrial DNA analysis from a cheek swab would have done it. I was curious to see if I could still fulfil her request, knowing that all I had to work with was a few hair shafts that were last truly alive ten years before. Until this time I had only ever tried to retrieve DNA from hair roots, the follicles containing thousands of cells. Hair shafts, extruded by the follicles, are strictly speaking dead, but I was aware that new forensic techniques had often managed to find traces of DNA even within these lifeless strands.
Rather than attempt to apply these demanding new techniques in my own laboratory, I called one of my former colleagues, Dr Terry Melton. From her time in my laboratory, where she was working on genetic links between Polynesians and the indigenous people of Taiwan, I knew Terry to be an extremely careful and professional scientist. I also knew that after she left my lab, Terry had set up a company specialising in the forensic genetic analysis of hair samples. By the time I spoke to her, she had built up a good reputation among the forensic community with all the necessary accreditations and a string of clients from law enforcement agencies around the world. I asked Terry whether she would take on the task of analysing Harold Pinter's hair and she agreed.
Though I had twenty strands of Pinter's hair, Terry only needed two, and even then the second hair was only a backup in case the first analysis failed. The lab report gave me a DNA sequence that identified Pinter as a member of the clan of Katrine. The fine details of the sequence were enough to place his ancestry somewhere in the Ukraine and to show that his genetic fingerprint was of a type commonly found among Ashkenazi Jews. When I relayed the results to Lady Antonia, she told me that on his mother's side Harold had indeed come from a Jewish family from Kiev.
That was a fantastic outcome in itself. Lady Antonia was delighted to have proof of her late husband's connection to his Eastern European roots. It also meant that the technology was now advanced to a point where I could expect to recover DNA from hair shafts alone, with no need for roots, as well as in samples that were not fresh but several years old. Just as importantly, the experiment with Harold's hair had shown that it was possible using this protocol completely to remove surface contamination. At our meeting, I had taken a DNA sample from Lady Antonia Fraser and found she was a descendant of Jasmine, one of the other European clan mothers. Though she had cut and handled Harold's hair herself, there was no trace of Taran DNA in her husband's sample after the forensic clean-up.
My analysis of Harold Pinter's hair had been carried out with no thoughts of yetis. When I did begin to think seriously about the current project I was immediately aware of the possibilities the Pinter result opened up for identifying hairs that had been attributed to anomalous primates. While I may have been lucky enough to obtain a fresh specimen from a current expedition, I reckoned that most yeti and Bigfoot hairs were already in museums or private collections. They had probably been handled, so were almost certain to have human DNA contamination on their surface. That was only to be expected, even with fresh samples. The results from Pinter's hair, which was a decade old when I tested it in 2012, promised that there was a good chance of success with much older material and, crucially, that the curse of contamination could be overcome.
Even so, I wanted to be quite sure that the protocol that Terry had used on Pinter's lock also worked on animal hair. To prove that, I began to look out for suitable material to test. I soon found what I wanted in the University Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Just inside the door stands a stuffed Shetland pony. Its label told me that ‘Mandy’ had died in a Yorkshire zoo in 1980, over thirty years before. More significantly, the same label also invited visitors to touch and stroke the pony, and even as I looked on a group of schoolchildren were doing just that. Mandy was the perfect specimen for my purpose, decades old and coated in human DNA from hundreds, if not thousands, of schoolchildren. If I could recover DNA from this sample and, despite the human surface contamination, correctly identify it as coming from a pony, then I would feel confident enough to launch an appeal to museums and cryptozoologists worldwide to send me a little of what they had.
It proved to be even easier than I had thought. From just a two-centimetre length of a single hair shaft, Terry managed to extract enough DNA to generate a fingerprint which, when compared to the thousands now available on published databases, came back with just one unequivocal match: Equus caballus, the domesticated horse. There was, as I had hoped, absolutely no sign of any DNA from the generations of children who had stroked Mandy's flowing mane.