Black Widow

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Black Widow Page 22

by Chris Brookmyre


  He spent much of the time complaining about his lot, and a vast proportion of this involved framing his plight as the wise old hand surrounded by idiots and incompetents who didn’t appreciate his genius. It seemed everything was particularly awful since the IT department got swallowed up by outsourcing firm Cobalt Solutions, and he’d been forced to transfer into their employ. Before that, everything apparently hummed like clockwork in his wee IT fiefdom, which he ran with judgement and precision in the face of the chronic stupidity of the doctors, nurses, managers and indeed anybody who was not Craig Harkness.

  Making it worse was the fact that Parlabane was on Irn Bru to keep his options open, while this guy was happily necking free pints. He had been leaning towards driving home tonight, and sitting with this fud was cementing his decision. On the strength of what he had heard so far, he was already looking forward to being in his own bed in a few hours; his own home, such as it was.

  The fact that Lucy had put this guy’s name on the list showed that there wasn’t much to find. He hadn’t even worked with Peter for long: only a few months either side of the marriage. She was grabbing at air, hoping rather than expecting Parlabane to find anything.

  He would call her from the car on the drive south later, once he had decided what it would be kindest to share. It was possible her brother had killed himself or had a stress-related fatal accident. Whether the pressure he’d been feeling was related to work, his marriage or a combination of the two, it didn’t alter the fact that his death was not suspicious. Maybe it would be best if she made her peace with it and stopped looking for someone or something to blame.

  ‘So, did you have a lot of dealings with Peter’s wife?’ Parlabane asked, opting to go direct. There was no need to pussyfoot around the point of interest with someone so self-obsessed, and he had already decided he wanted this wrapped up. He certainly wasn’t buying this sphincter-lozenge another pint.

  ‘Did I ever.’

  Harkness gave a dry chuckle.

  ‘Snootiest bitch in the whole place. One of those smart-arsed cows who can’t take the fact that they need your help. She really thinks she’s something, that one. Acts like it’s beneath her to even have you in her office when she’s got a problem needing fixed.’

  ‘I gather hospital IT guys weren’t her favourite people in the world. Apart from the one she married, obviously.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock. Do you know about the blog she wrote?’

  ‘I heard about it, yeah.’

  ‘The cheeky cow said that if we were any good we’d have a job somewhere else. Well, what does it say about Vinegar Tits that she ended up here in Inverness? If she was hot shit like she makes out, she’d be at Barts or wherever, wouldn’t she?’

  He knew it was best practice to let the guy talk, but there was only so long he could listen to a blowhard puffing himself up. Parlabane hadn’t approved of Scalpelgirl’s scattergun disparagement but he suspected Harkness’s own outrage – and conspicuously insecure self-praise – was rooted in the fact that in his case deep down he knew she was right.

  ‘I believe her previous consultant post was at the Alderbrook, in an internationally leading surgical department. It’s my understanding that she had to leave that position due to the fallout from her being hacked: not only was she identified as the author of the blog, but as a consequence so were some of the colleagues she had alluded to. I assume that’s why she was uncomfortable with anyone else working on her PC.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? She was tarring us all with one brush in her blog, and then doing the same when she got here. Never gave us the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t know how Peter could stick her, to be honest, but they do say love is blind. Deaf as well, it would seem.’

  ‘So Peter was aware you didn’t have a high opinion of her? And presumably she let him know that it was reciprocal.’

  From the brief moment of doubt and injury on Harkness’s previously smug face, it hadn’t even occurred to him that his colleague and his wife might ever have been comparing notes on what a wanker he was.

  ‘Peter was always making excuses for her being such a torn-faced midden. If someone moaned about how snippy she was, he would tell us she’d been through personal tragedy, blah blah blah, not to mention the hacking thing, like that was our fault.’

  ‘What personal tragedy?’

  ‘He never said and I never asked. What do I care? Don’t see what difference it makes. I know plenty of people working in that hospital who’ve been through bad shit in their lives, but they can still manage a fucking smile. And as for the hacking thing, yeah, okay I get that it was out of order, but let’s face it, it was nothing compared to what could have happened.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Harkness gave him a knowing and approving grin.

  ‘Don’t stick your dick in a hornet’s nest. Or in her case, your tit.’

  Harkness had chosen his words precisely. He was referring to internet security firm HBGary’s deliberate provocation of Anonymous and the hacker collective’s entertainingly punitive response. In online lore, the firm’s actions had been described as above.

  ‘She pissed off the wrong people. She should be grateful all that happened was she had her personal details leaked. Just as well she didn’t have a sex tape back then, or it would have been public domain.’

  He looked smugly satisfied about this notion, and the worst thing about it was that he clearly assumed Parlabane shared his satisfaction.

  ‘You know, what has always confused me about these kinds of leaks is why guys are so desperate for porn of women they claim to detest.’

  Harkness looked at him with amused confusion, as though Parlabane was thick or Harkness was expecting an imminent declaration of homosexuality.

  ‘Because it knocks them off their high horse. Especially someone like Dr Diana: she acts like she’s so superior, like she’s above mere mortals, and definitely above the male of the species. Sex tapes prove women like that still love a good hard cock when it comes right down to it.’

  There was that nasty grin again, like he knew a secret. Amazing, mate: women like sex too. What a scoop. Right enough, it probably did seem like a revelation to Harkness, as Parlabane couldn’t imagine women had ever provided any evidence that they liked sex when he was around.

  ‘So had you heard about her before she pitched up here in Inverness?’

  ‘Course I had. Everybody in hospital IT knew about her: that’s how the hacking thing came about. Not that I was involved, you understand.’

  He gave a throaty chuckle and touched the side of his nose in a hush-hush gesture. He was inviting Parlabane to think he was involved, but Parlabane saw the obvious truth. This helmet wouldn’t have had a clue where to begin but he wanted to make out he was badass and connected. It was frankly pathetic.

  ‘How did everybody know about it?’

  ‘Her blog first got mentioned on a support forum for one of the big database management packages we use. A lot of hospital IT folk are on there, as well as sys-admins from firms using the same software. There’s the main support bulletin board and there’s more informal sub-forums for general moaning and gossip. It went viral from there.’

  ‘So Peter knew all about this stuff before he met her?’

  ‘No. It’s probably significant that Peter was the only guy in our department who didn’t know about it. I guess that gave him the chance to make his own impression, or for his dick to take control before his brain found out what kind of cunt he was dealing with.

  ‘Peter wasn’t part of hospital IT before Cobalt brought him here, and the blog-hacking thing was four or five years ago, so I don’t know what he was working on back then. Also, Peter was kind of unto himself: a bit unworldly sometimes, you know? If you’d asked him about Bladebitch, he’d have probably thought you were talking about someone in a comic book.’

  ‘Did he tell you what he went off to work on?’

  ‘He was designing some kind of
app, to do with small-value transactions, I think. He wasn’t giving much away: coy to the point of shifty. One time I asked him about it and he said: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”’

  Harkness rhymed this off with an admiration indicative that he thought this was a hell of a line, one his audience would surely never have heard a thousand times before.

  Parlabane decided he’d heard enough. He drained his Irn Bru and got up. Harkness remained where he was, still nursing half a pint. Parlabane wished he’d been running a tab. He’d have no qualms about fucking off after telling the barman that the sweaty flange sitting opposite had agreed to pick it up.

  ACCESS PRIVILEGES

  Starfire.

  That was the name of the videogame whose logo was depicted in the coloured-plastic buckle Peter was wearing when he left the house that Saturday. I mention it because I came to realise how much it bothered me that I knew. When I first met Peter, I thought it was refreshing that I was becoming exposed to things that were outside of my over-serious bubble, vicariously appreciating passions and enthusiasms that didn’t begin and end with work or research.

  In time, I became resentful that I knew about all this crap. I could recognise the logo of a nineties videogame, same as I could name minor characters from superhero comics and recite the lyrics to juvenile Blink-182 songs about prank calls and blowjobs. It was like there was this sacred canon of Peter’s personal culture in which I had immersed myself in order to become closer to him, in order to share something with him, and now I was seeing it for the worthless trash that it was.

  There’s nothing makes the scales fall from your eyes quite like realising you’re being lied to by your husband.

  I was still reluctant to accept this, of course. After I finished speaking to the cab driver, I immediately began constructing other explanations; or at least explanations that didn’t involve the faceless woman in the photographs and videos. None of them were convincing, or even particularly plausible. When I started speculating that maybe the ex-Inverness flights were full and Peter was actually flying out of Glasgow, that was when I knew I was reaching.

  I felt sick: physically sick. I was light-headed and my stomach was churning. I had to sit down. I made myself a cup of tea and sat numbly sipping it in the kitchen, beginning to confront the reality I had been presented with.

  I read an email from Piers on my phone, telling me that his daughter Ellen had won a karate tournament on the Gold Coast. Ordinarily this would make me feel a warmth at the thought of my niece and a tang of regret that I saw so little of her. Right then I was too numb to feel anything.

  Mercifully, my bleep didn’t go off. At other times, my ability to shut out all distractions as I concentrated upon a procedure had offered me valuable respite, but on this occasion, if I had been called back into the hospital, it would have been torture. I felt the need to take action, to engage physically in dealing with what I had learned.

  I went to Peter’s den. I had been increasingly tempted in recent weeks to go rooting through his things, looking for clues to what he might be keeping from me. There had been other overnight stays, all-day airsoft meets and oh so many evenings when I knew he wouldn’t be home until late. I had not wanted for opportunity. But it was as though there had been an invisible forcefield in place, preventing me from entering: a line I could not bring myself to cross because of the person I would be – and the marriage we would have – on the other side of it.

  It would be fair to say that on this particular on-call Saturday, the shields were down.

  Principally I was looking for documentation of where he was staying in Glasgow. He wasn’t due back until Monday, so if I could find out what hotel he was booked into, I could drive there the next day, as soon as my on-call was over.

  I didn’t go indiscriminately wading through the place like an inquisitive toddler. I took my phone with me and photographed anything I was planning to touch. I didn’t want to tip him off that I was on to him, because if he still thought I was swallowing his lies, he might let his guard down further.

  I went through his desk and every drawer in his plastic filing stack without finding anything remotely suspicious, which made me realise that Peter wasn’t relying upon an invisible forcefield to protect damning evidence from his wife’s discovery. Chances were he was keeping anything he didn’t want me to see in his office at Sunflight House. Accomplished deceivers are naturally suspicious, so my enthusiasm for the task diminished as my fruitless search endured. Nonetheless, I needed to stay occupied, and right then I had nothing better to do.

  I opened the big double-door wardrobe that stood against the wall at the far end of the room. It had come with the house, an ancient and ugly built-in affair the vendors couldn’t be bothered ripping out and moving. Peter kept his airsoft gear inside it, but I was sure I had seen him stick a concertina file in there once as well.

  I spotted it near the bottom beneath a shelf, stashed sideways on top of a lever-arch file and behind a sun-faded blue cardboard box that must previously have been stored in direct sunlight. The blue box was considerably heavier than I expected, its weight being used to keep the over-stuffed concertina file from springing open. It was when I placed it down carefully on the carpet that I noticed the logo and text on the lid: it was an old laptop, held on to and lovingly stored like I had learned Peter did with anything electronic.

  I flipped it open and pressed the on switch, but there was no response. Typically, an old machine being dead was no reason for Peter to throw it out. But then I noted the power cord and transformer tucked neatly into their polystyrene housing and realised that the battery might merely have run down in storage.

  I plugged it in and tried again. It hummed into life and booted up, so tantalisingly slowly as to suggest the thing had a sense of the dramatic and was milking the moment.

  It was worth waiting for.

  There was no password screen, so I had carte blanche.

  The first thing I did was search for files created around the dates of the images and videos I had seen previously, as they were old enough for earlier copies to have been stored on this machine. Sure enough, I found the same photos and clips, as well as more featuring the same woman: always with her head out of shot. I was hoping to find others taken by Peter, less explicit and therefore more revealing. There was nothing, though: only a few phone shots taken at airsoft meets and what I resented recognising as a Star Trek convention.

  I fared better when I booted up his email client. The most recent email was from eighteen months ago, when presumably he had moved on to a new laptop. I had access to all messages, sent and received, going back almost two further years.

  I moved the laptop through to the kitchen table and scrolled patiently, opening messages whenever I came to a female name. These were conspicuously rare among Peter’s contacts list, and I struck gold when I discovered his correspondence with a woman named Liz Miller. Reading through these emails and others that they were both copied into, it was clear that these messages marked the early days of a relationship. The exchanges dated from a little more than two years ago, and were therefore concurrent with the time the videos were taken.

  I launched the old laptop’s browser and scoured his favourites until I found his Facebook page. Unfortunately it didn’t automatically log me in, so without his password I couldn’t access his Friends lists. I was hoping for a photo, any nugget of information about who she was, but with her first name and surname being so common, there was no point in putting them into Google.

  I decided to copy her email address so that I could try a search using that. It was when I clicked on the contact details that I saw that her mobile and landline numbers were listed also.

  I felt the hairs on my neck rise in primal response, and watched gooseflesh form on my forearm. I knew that I could dial one of these numbers right now and that Peter could be sitting feet away from the woman who answered.

  I glanced again at the landline. It wasn’t a Glasg
ow number: the area code was 01382. I looked it up: Dundee.

  I felt a surge of relief, then realised it meant nothing. If this was a dirty weekend, they might both be away from home.

  My fingers trembling, I dialled the number and it began to ring, my heart thumping as I heard the syncopated electronic purr. I had no idea what I would say if she picked up, or indeed whether I could bring myself to say anything. I just needed to know.

  CAMOUFLAGE

  He called Lucy first thing that morning, having got home from Inverness late the night before. The flat might be half the size it used to be, but it felt all the more empty, despite all the crap he had in boxes he was unlikely ever to open. They were like unexploded memory mines dotting the floor. He felt a compelling need to talk to somebody, and in her case he had an excuse to call.

  It was almost a week since her brother’s accident. She sounded brighter than at their meeting at the café, though there was an underlying sincerity to her voice that didn’t indicate she would be cracking jokes any time soon.

  ‘Mr Parlabane. I was just thinking about you,’ she told him, which he had no intention of misinterpreting. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Busy. I was calling to update you on what I’ve been finding out.’

  ‘I’m actually going to be in a meeting in about, let me see, seven minutes. How about we catch up this evening when we can talk at a bit more length.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And how about we make it a bar. I think I owe you a drink.’

  ‘You don’t really, but I won’t say no.’

  Parlabane reckoned it might not be a very large drink if she was buying on the basis of what he had discovered, but it might make things less tense and awkward if they were talking in more sociable circumstances.

 

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