Ali didn’t have white fur or indeed white skin, but she was a native born if not bred. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, but she never got used to the cold.
‘I’ll take that as a warning,’ he said. ‘And I’ll be investing in some thermal undies tout de suite.’
She couldn’t help but wonder again what made someone swap a career in London for this. She certainly wouldn’t do it the other way around. There was definitely something different about this one, though: some vibe he was giving off that she couldn’t quite read.
He said he had shipped out for a completely new start after a bad break-up. That wasn’t something guys tended to confide, especially not so soon after meeting you. A male of the species being open about his feelings and crediting her with the vision necessary to respond appropriately? Pinch me, she thought. And wouldn’t it be typical if Mr Perfect came into her life right now.
She shouldn’t kid herself, though. It was as likely he was the one with the vision to read her as a potential shambles, and he was laying down a marker from the off to explain how he was on the rebound and therefore off limits.
Ali had a dismal track record when it came to reading the signals. Her problem was an over-developed sense of optimism, combined with a bad case of confirmation bias, resulting in a tendency to imagine guys to be a lot nicer and a lot more genuine than the evidence ultimately demonstrated.
Martin had seemed nice. Martin had seemed genuine. Her relationship with Martin, however, was definitely over, even though she might be pregnant by him. In fact it was over because she might be pregnant by him. It had been over since sometime around midnight two Saturdays ago, when she realised he had come inside her and that he had said nothing.
The condom had split or rolled off. That wasn’t something you failed to notice. And yet he had said nothing: just turned over and fallen asleep, leaving her to lie there horribly awake after she came back from the bathroom, contemplating awful possibilities.
He said nothing. Got up the next morning, acting like everything was normal, apart from an unusually pressing need to get out of her flat.
It was amazing how your perception of a person could change in a single crucial moment, with one glimpse of who they really were.
There was a surge of bubbles upon the surface, a black shape emerging from black water. One of the divers was hauling himself up the aluminium ladder they had temporarily anchored to the river bank. He signalled to Ali as he climbed, and she made her way across to where he stood dripping on the frost-dusted grass.
‘There’s a black BMW down there,’ he said, tugging off his mask. ‘No occupant. The driver-side door was partially open. I’m thinking when it hit the water he tried to get out before it sank by opening the door, which is actually the worst thing you can do. The water floods in rapid as soon as it’s unsealed, and the exterior pressure prevents you from opening it enough to get out. The window was gone, though, so he must have managed to smash it and climb through once the car was submerged.’
‘Could you read the plate?’
‘Aye, though I can do you better than that. His wallet and his phone were in his jacket. I reckon either he had slung it on the passenger seat while he was driving, or he wrestled it off to give him a better chance of making the surface.’
‘And what chance would you give him of doing that?’
The diver grimaced and glanced back towards the river.
‘It looks slow because it’s deep, but believe me: the current down there is bloody strong. I was kicking flat out against it just to stay in place. Put it this way, it’s strong enough to have pulled the car ten yards downstream from where it hit the water before it fully filled up. It jammed against some rocks on the bottom otherwise it would have drifted further.’
‘So we’ll have to drag for miles?’ Ali suggested.
‘Aye, but there’s nae guarantee that’ll turn up a result. If we get lucky, the body might have snagged on something, but it could equally be underneath the Kessock Bridge by now, on its way out into the Moray Firth.’
‘Where’s the wallet?’
He held up a damp fold of black leather.
‘My colleague will be up with the jacket and the phone in a wee minute. Found one of his shoes in there as well. Must have come off as he was trying to get out.’
Ali took it, flipping it open to reveal a driving licence inside a plastic window.
‘Hamish Peter Elphinstone,’ she said, reading aloud. ‘I’ve heard that name recently. Can’t think where.’
‘Elphinstone?’ the diver checked, suddenly gimlet-eyed. Clearly it was familiar to him too.
‘That’s right. Why does it ring a bell?’
‘Maybe because his family owns half of Perthshire.’
BACK TO THE FUTURE
One of the difficulties in listening to any trial unfold was trying to maintain a sense of the chronology. Multiple accounts of various incidents would accumulate further with each new witness, potentially making it very confusing to assemble a consistent timeline. Parlabane had no difficulty recalling precisely when his involvement in this sorry business commenced, having a fairly unmissable landmark with which to orient himself. It was the day he received official notice that his divorce was finalised.
He had opened the door to the postman in a state of bleary-eyed hangover, alleviated by as much anticipation as a man in his forties could feel over the prospect of receiving a mail-order purchase. The postman handed him the envelope then held up a gizmo for his signature. Parlabane scrawled illegibly on the miniature screen and stared at the object in his other hand with curious disappointment. When the postie rang the bell, he had thought it was the new Jimmy Eat World album being delivered. That was about as big an event as he had to look forward to in his life.
Wandering back to his desk, he ripped open the envelope with a ragged slide of his forefinger, thinking of a time when he would not have countenanced such a move for fear of razor blades or hypodermic needles sent in angry revenge for something he had written. He wasn’t even annoying anybody these days.
He picked up his mug of black tea from next to his laptop and shuffled towards the windows. He had been surfing in semi-darkness, but figured he should open the blinds in order to see the letter properly. As well as signalling to the world that his flat contained a conscious and functioning inhabitant who was ready for the day, it would be a sight quicker than waiting for the energy-saving bulbs to actually fire some photons. Honestly, some mornings the sun came up quicker.
‘Jesus.’
There it was, in black and white, all the more inescapably official for seeming understated. He thought the letterhead for something like this ought to resemble a metal band’s logo and the body text look like it was printed in blood on a Caxton press in some ancient dungeon.
Fifteen years of his life, and decades more that he had imagined in his future: this document was the line drawn under the former and through the latter. Truth was, it didn’t need anything gothic about it to seem like a headstone.
The death had been slow. It had taken years for his marriage to fall apart, and over that time he had experienced a lot of different feelings about what was happening: regret, anger, helplessness, despair, sorrow. It changed from day to day, hour to hour. Right then, though, the main one was of loss: of a precious thing he once had, and would never have again.
But as he had learned long ago, when life kicks you in the balls, it can always knee you in the face too while you’re bent over.
Parlabane looked up from the letter and out of the window, his gaze taking in the newly mown lawns in the centre of Maybury Square before alighting upon the less aesthetically delightful sight of the police station opposite. Aye. That was when he felt the unique emotional splat one experiences when fate decides to burst your nose as a follow-up to having already administered a full-blooded boot in the haw-maws.
He had always known this moment was coming. Admittedly, for a while he had almost convinced himself t
hat he could merely acknowledge how the wheel had brought him back around and that would be that. He’d been here a few days, after all. But this blow had been heading his way from the moment his mate Dunc offered to do him a favour.
He needed somewhere to stay, the short-term lease having run out on the flat he was in. He’d taken it as an interim measure, thinking opportunities might come up that would require him to move elsewhere. Wrong again.
Then Duncan McLean got in touch from New Zealand to say his tenants were moving out, so he had a flat up for grabs. Dunc had lent him it once before, shortly after purchasing the place, when it was halfway through being gutted for renovation. That accounted for the ‘wheel coming back around’ part. The skelp in the dish part was that this had been the very place where he first met Sarah.
The awareness of this had been lurking in a dusty corner of his mind, waiting to be unpacked like all of the boxes currently stacked out there in the hall. Looking out upon the square had suddenly broken it open, spilling its content of memories across his consciousness and reminding him of a time when the same window had offered a view of a better future.
Strictly speaking, he had first met her in the flat directly beneath, where her ex-husband had lived – and indeed died. Given that things post-Sarah had worked out even worse for Jeremy than they had for Parlabane, perhaps he should nip upstairs and warn whatever poor bastard lived on the top floor to steer clear in case she ended up going for a full house.
Christ, he thought, thinking of the phrase that had always been applied to Jeremy: ‘Sarah’s ex-husband’. Now that should be first ex-husband.
Parlabane sipped at the black tea, realising that the smell and flavour were playing their part in this assault by nostalgia. He’d been making do with black tea then as well. He remembered inviting Sarah into the kitchen and offering her UHT with her coffee. In those days, his excuse was that the flat didn’t have a fridge. The place was looking a lot more hospitable now, it was fair to say. There was indeed a fridge; a freezer too; even carpets. So his excuse for drinking black tea this morning was that he hadn’t gotten around to hitting the supermarket since moving in, but as his fuzzy head reminded him, he had managed to bring home a six-pack and a bottle of whisky. Priorities, priorities.
That was what happened when you didn’t have a wife around to explain yourself to. Or an office to show up looking respectable at, or a boss to please, or colleagues, or a proper job.
He kept seeing references to himself as a disgraced journalist, a description which was almost a tautology these days, but in his case he had to concede it was more apposite than most. He had once been an investigative reporter who made a name for himself uncovering corporate and institutional malfeasance, notching up a few notable scalps along the way. But then came the Leveson Inquiry, when his professional methods came to light and it emerged that he had employed hacking, burglary, subterfuge and all manner of inventive illegality in order to get stories. What really finished him off, though, was his subsequent desperation to get back to the top of the game.
Even after Leveson, some people may have retained a sneaking admiration for him on the grounds that the ends justified his means: he hadn’t been hacking dead schoolgirls’ phones or sniffing out tittle-tattle on soap stars, he was going after substantial issues. He knew he was still perceived to have a certain integrity, even if nobody wanted to hire someone so otherwise tainted. But then he made an almighty arse of himself before the whole country, when he became the useful idiot who ran with a hoax story that had been deliberately planted to flush out a leak. Someone in the intelligence services used him like a barium enema in order to expose security compromises within the MoD, and any remaining credibility he might have had evaporated quite literally overnight.
His marriage crashed and burned in parallel with his career, Sarah deciding her own reputation had suffered enough collateral damage from her association with him. Obviously there was a lot more to it than that, but the bottom line was that only a few years ago he had a wife and a career, both of which he loved, and now he had neither.
He sat back down at the laptop with a sigh. This wasn’t just his home now, it was his workplace, the boundaries of his world shrinking all the time. He wasn’t a journalist any more: he was a ‘content generator’ for various websites, churning out all manner of vapid filler one step up from lorem ipsum on everything from hotels he’d never visited, to TV shows he’d never watched, to consumer products he’d never laid hands upon.
Everything was virtual and remote. His life was becoming a digitised version of Plato’s cave: he was stuck here alone, describing a shadow of a reality that he couldn’t touch.
He missed working in a proper newspaper office; missed it more knowing how few journalists still were.
Nah, upon reflection that was bollocks. He had hated being stuck in an office as much as he hated being stuck in a flat. What he truly missed was the man he had been once upon a time, when he first stayed in this flat, when the world before him seemed boundless and when love had been waiting outside in the close.
Just then, the doorbell rang again. He shambled over to open it, and was confronted by a woman clutching a cardboard tray bearing two polystyrene cups. He assumed she had the wrong flat, but then she spoke.
‘Jack Parlabane, right?’
‘Yes.’
He was unable to keep the surprise from his voice. Her own tone was at once stern and tentative, which made him wonder if he was about to get served.
‘Sorry for the intrusion, but I’ve seen you around, so I knew you lived locally and I wanted to talk to you face-to-face. Someone gave me an address, but it turned out to be your old place. They directed me here. Can I come in?’
‘Sure. Who are you?’
‘Oh, sorry. My name is Lucille Elphinstone. People call me Lucy.’
He placed her around mid-thirties, maybe older. She was dressed in a rather sweeping black coat, opened to reveal a black blouse buttoned up to a frilly collar. It seemed at once prim and somehow fetishistic, though maybe the latter was in the eye of the beholder. He hadn’t been laid in a very long time.
Her black hair was swept back behind an Alice band marked with Celtic symbols. Between that and the garb, she looked like the headmistress had the Tories’ Free School programme allowed Marilyn Manson to set up an academy.
The one thing jarring against the overall impression was that she had a folded copy of the Daily Record tucked under her arm. She didn’t look like the normal demographic.
‘I brought coffee.’
There was a dourness in her tone as though she already regretted the gesture but had to go through with it now.
‘Thanks. Let’s grab a seat.’
Parlabane led her to the kitchenette, gesturing to the two stools at the breakfast bar looking out into the living room. The first time he lived here, the place had been literally twice the size. Edinburgh was getting almost as bad as London that way. They said you couldn’t divide zero, but property developers in Hoxton had to be getting pretty close.
‘What can I do for you?’
She had a few false starts, seemingly about to speak and then abandoning the attempt. It was as though she was composing and deleting various drafts of the opening line of a sensitive and important email. Up close he could see that she was a few years younger than he first estimated. She looked tired and she looked sad, both of which had aged her. Her eyes were bloodshot: from lack of sleep or from crying or from both.
Letting out a sigh of frustration, she unfolded the Daily Record and placed it on the worktop, spreading it open a few pages in. Parlabane noted that the edition was yesterday’s.
‘This was my brother.’
The headline stated:
TRAGEDY STRIKES NEWLYWEDS AS HUSBAND FEARED DEAD
The story was accompanied by a picture of a smiling couple and another showing a crane hauling a car from a snow-lined stretch of river. Parlabane quickly scanned the copy. He had seen the same story online al
ready. The Record was stretching the definition of newlywed to an outer limit of six months, but he couldn’t argue with the tragedy part.
HOPES FADED for Peter Elphinstone yesterday as police called off their search for the missing computer programmer, whose car plunged into a river near Inverness in the early hours of Friday morning.
Elphinstone had recently married consultant surgeon Dr Diana Jager, who hit the headlines five years ago over her controversial ‘Sexism in Surgery’ blog. The pair met at Inverness Royal Infirmary, where they both worked, and were married last summer.
Sources close to Diana say she is devastated.
‘They were perfect for each other,’ said theatre nurse Abigail Darroch. ‘From the moment they met they were barely out of each other’s sight. She used to talk about how she was worried she’d never find someone, so when she met Peter it was the answer to her prayers. It was like something from a movie: she had this high-profile feud with hospital IT guys and then fell in love with one.’
One friend of Peter’s told us tearfully how the IT whiz worshipped his wife. ‘He was so happy, he had everything to live for. He really couldn’t believe his luck in ending up with someone like Diana. If ever two people looked like being a happy ever after, it was them. It’s just so sad.’
Elphinstone is believed to have lost control of his car at Widow Falls, a notorious accident blackspot near Ordskirk, close to Inverness. He is the son of Perthshire landowner Sir Hamish Elphinstone. A spokesman for Sir Hamish issued a statement asking for privacy at this difficult time.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Parlabane, cringing as he always did when a complete absence of context meant he had nothing but platitudes to offer. On this occasion, he guessed context would be imminently forthcoming.
‘I came here because…’
She bit her lip and then got up from the stool.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘Hey, just take a moment, it’s okay.’
Black Widow Page 9
