Black Widow

by Chris Brookmyre

‘Hello, Ali. What’s up?’

  ‘A wee favour. That call we responded to the other night, report of a suspicious vehicle on Culloden Road. Do you have an ID on the caller?’

  There was a pause, the clacking of a keyboard.

  ‘Here you go: the complainant is listed as Dr Diana Jager.’

  Ali looked at Rodriguez to confirm he had heard.

  ‘The guy claimed he had only been there ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m starting to think he was telling the truth. He was just sitting there when we arrived. Can’t imagine he was doing anything conspicuous, to have drawn attention to himself. Jager knew he was out there and she wanted rid of him.’

  ‘Begging the question: what does he know that we don’t?’

  SELF-CONTROL

  I sat gaping at the screen. My reaction would have been comical had what prompted it not been so heartbreaking. I remembered Peter showing me clips of people reacting to a gross-out video from the grim depths of the internet. That’s what I must have looked like: aghast, horrified, disgusted, incredulous. My head was swimming and I had to scurry on unsteady feet across the office to the plastic waste-bin because I feared I was going to throw up.

  My mind echoed with all the times Peter had talked about wanting to have kids, the earnest sincerity in his voice as he described the childhood he intended to give them. It was one of the things that sold me on the idea of marriage when I was worried it might be too soon. We both wanted children, and time was running out for me.

  The lying bastard had his tubes tied the whole time.

  I now had to go home and face this man. I had to pretend I didn’t know this most grievous of secrets, had to pretend I didn’t know any of the things I had discovered since his printer made its fateful intervention on Friday. Then I remembered it was far worse than that: we were supposed to be going to my colleague Suzanne’s place for dinner, over at Kingsburgh. I would have to inhabit this role, play my part in this fiction, all evening.

  Looking back, the hardest thing about that moment, and about my lonely and dread-filled short drive home from the hospital was that there was nobody I could talk to about this. Nobody to pour my heart out to, nobody whose wise counsel or mere sympathy would help me deal with it. Isn’t that why you find a partner? A husband? So that you can share your worries, your fears and your woes with someone who knows you best and soon start to feel better merely from knowing you’re not alone in this?

  Instead, walking through my front door and standing in the presence of my husband, I had never felt so lonely, so utterly isolated. I had to stand there and listen to his lies about how his London trip had gone.

  He was strategically heading off my enquiries by saying it was all boring business stuff and barely worth relating, so he wouldn’t have to invent anything that might trip himself up. I could have pressed him for more details, but I knew he could always hide behind the NDA.

  I couldn’t challenge him about Courtney Jean Lang or the fact that I knew he had actually been in Glasgow, because I’d have to say how I discovered these things. It would all have to come out, and then he’d know precisely how much – and perhaps how little – I truly knew. I didn’t have a hand that would force him to show his.

  I thought many times about calling off dinner, but I didn’t have a pretext. Suzanne had seen me in the corridor as I made my way to my office following my list, so she knew I wasn’t ill. I had no option but to suck it down.

  Somehow I got through the evening, as so many women before me must have done: acting as though there was nothing wrong, bizarrely press-ganged into a silent conspiracy to conceal the damaging lies that my husband had told me.

  That would never be me, I had once promised myself: the cowed and meek wife, living out a lie for fear of public shame. But as I played my part, sipping wine and conversing, smiling and laughing, I saw how easily such fictions could become everyday reality. Maybe for some women the lines gradually became blurred until they started to forget the difference between the public ideal of their marriage and the tawdry truth they lived with.

  If there was one crack in the façade, it was that I drank more than I normally would. More than I ought, for sure. Perhaps it wasn’t noticeable to everyone else, or perhaps they put it down to the fact that Peter was driving for a change. I don’t think my behaviour was conspicuously tipsy, but tipsy I most definitely was. At dinner it helped me hide my torment beneath a mask of bonhomie, but it was later, on the road out of Kingsburgh, that it got the better of me.

  An intoxicated woman is vulnerable to seduction, and on this occasion it was denial that took advantage and got its hand up my skirt. The medical records had to be wrong, I told myself. I’d seen plenty of misfilings in my time: the wrong name keyed into a data field, an overburdened secretary mixing up cases. It simply couldn’t be true. But I had to hear this from Peter, spoken from the same lips that had so often told me how he looked forward to us raising a family together.

  I came up with a reason for why I had seen his records. It seemed plausible enough to me at the time, though my bar wasn’t high: I just needed something that would embolden me enough to bring up the subject.

  ‘Peter, I need to ask you something important.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Have you had a vasectomy?’

  I saw the tiniest of shudders pass through him, a flash in his eyes like when I asked him about the rail tickets.

  ‘Why would you ask that?’

  His reply was defensive, agitated. Nothing he had done or said so far sounded like a denial.

  ‘I saw your medical records. I was thinking about you while I was looking up a patient’s files and I absent-mindedly keyed your name into the search instead of his. Suddenly I’m looking at a page telling me you had a vasectomy in Edinburgh back in—’

  ‘You looked up my medical records?

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Was it hell an accident. You’ve never done anything absentminded in your life, Diana. You’re telling me you took advantage of your professional position to go snooping into my private—’

  ‘That’s hardly the major issue, Peter, is it? Regardless of how I found out, I think the more relevant matter is that you told me you wanted to have kids when you’ve had a medical procedure to ensure you bloody well can’t have kids. You lied to me about one of the most important things in our lives.’

  I saw his knuckles whiten as his body tensed and he gripped the steering wheel tighter. His right foot became heavier too, gunning the engine in a surrogate growl.

  He said nothing for a while, his silence confirming my discovery. I didn’t feel any sense of vindication about having finally cornered him on one of my now many suspicions; I only felt anger doused in cold misery.

  ‘You’re right.’

  His voice was low, coming from somewhere deep and dark within him.

  ‘I misled you. But only because I didn’t think you’d have me if you knew the truth. I wanted to be with you always, and I was afraid this would be a deal-breaker. I was planning to try having it reversed, and then you wouldn’t need to know it ever happened, but everything has been so hectic.’

  Only a few days ago, I might have fallen for this, a willing confederate in my own deception. Now every word he spoke was suspect, and the more solicitous it sounded, the less credence it deserved. Nonetheless, little as I could trust the answers, I still had questions, one above all:

  ‘Why the hell would you have a vasectomy in your twenties?’

  Again the engine spoke his initial reply, accelerating incautiously until we were right on the tail of the car in front.

  ‘You don’t understand. Before I met you … Things looked different. If you knew about my father … If people knew about my father…’

  We hit a straight stretch of road. I could see headlights approaching, but Peter floored the pedal and overtook the slower car in front. The oncoming vehicle had to brake, I was sure, and sounded its horn in a sustained blare of rebuke.

 
; ‘Well, why don’t you tell me? I’m your wife. You complain about me not trusting you, but you’ve never entrusted me with these things that I might be able to help you with.’

  He shook his head grimly, eyes blazing. Ahead, the road curved and snaked as it hugged the course of the river. I started to get worried. I thought of my own autopilot drive the day before and realised how detached Peter might be from the task in his hands.

  ‘You don’t have the first idea. My father has power and reputation, connections. There are people who can’t afford to … That’s why I can’t let anyone know. They’ll find ways to damage me. They’ll smear me so that my word counts for nothing. I’ve lived with this shit for years: you’ve only been in my life five minutes and you think you’ve got the right to start pulling it apart from the inside.’

  He was rambling: furious and increasingly incoherent. He turned it back to me, raging indignantly about my transgression in looking up his medical records. It sounded like deflection, a way of getting away from the subject he had strayed on to. Deflection or not, his anger was genuine, still gripping him as fiercely as his hands gripped the wheel.

  I asked him to slow down, but he responded by accelerating faster. I realised that he wasn’t detached: he was using the car as his instrument, his voice. Signs flashed past, warning of the S-bend we were approaching too fast.

  Suddenly the car began to drift, forward momentum taking it into the opposite lane as the road curved sharply left. We came within inches of skidding off altogether, and it was only luck that there was nothing coming towards us.

  He slowed right down after that, the terrifying moment of lost control having thrown off the demon that was possessing him. He looked shaken but still angry. He wasn’t the only one.

  When the initial fright had worn off, I was furious that this infantile abdication from self-control could easily have killed us both. I could have died due to nothing more than a temper tantrum.

  It shocked me to have such a stark perspective on how precarious life was when you were at the wheel of a car. A moment of anger and resultant carelessness – emotions that consumed Peter for a second or two and would ordinarily have receded again – could easily have snuffed out my life; both our lives.

  It stuck with me. A revelation like that takes a long time to fade.

  THE FRAGILE AND THE DAMAGED

  There comes a point when you realise that lying to yourself isn’t an act of self-defence but of self-harm: not a bulwark against hurt but a barrier to your potential happiness. Parlabane reached it when he came out of the shower, heard his mobile ring and saw Lucy identified as the caller. He caught himself trying to play down how this made him feel, to rationalise the surge of hope and excitement that thrilled through him merely at the sight of her name and the knowledge that she was getting in touch.

  This woman made him happy. He had to stop running away from admitting that. Merely by calling, before he even knew what it was about, she had improved his mood, inspired thoughts of pleasant possibilities. Was he so fucked up by Sarah that he couldn’t let himself enjoy that?

  He cradled the phone against his shoulder while he wrapped a towel around his waist, wondering what she would see in him if she walked in the door right now. He considered himself to be in good shape, but that was good shape for a guy in his forties. She had to be ten years younger than him.

  ‘Hi.’

  He tried to sound friendly but not over-eager, at the same time wondering what it said that he was concerned about how much might be inferred from his intonation of a single syllable.

  ‘Hi. Look, I’m calling about a couple of things.’

  She sounded anxious and rather businesslike. Now how much could he infer and project on to a few short words?

  ‘Firstly, I wanted to apologise for running out on you like that last night. It was nothing you did or said, and I’m sorry if I left you worried that it was. I was just freaked out by my own behaviour and I didn’t trust myself, so I thought I should leave before I did any damage. Then I started worrying that by leaving I was doing damage. What can I say: I’m a mess right now.’

  ‘I understand. But there’s nothing to apologise for. I freaked myself out too.’

  In a good way, he failed to say: in a way I enjoyed and would like to repeat.

  What was stopping him?

  Well, by her own admission, she was a mess. It wasn’t right. But then, by anyone’s reckoning, he was a mess too. Wouldn’t it be good for them to be a mess together?

  ‘It’s all been too intense.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  As he spoke he could see her slip away from him. Part of him felt this was the right thing to do. Another part wondered when that first part would ever grow a pair again.

  ‘You’ve been great, though,’ she added, and he felt something in him soar. ‘That’s the other thing I’m calling about. What you said last night, I’ve come to realise you’re absolutely right. I need to accept that I’m getting the preferred outcome and quit starting at shadows.

  ‘Walking back from the pub last night, I convinced myself there was somebody following me. I kept thinking there was someone there, then I’d look back and see there was nothing. I came to realise that I don’t want to live in that world, you know? I can stay in a dark place full of paranoia and suspicion or I can move forward into the light.’

  Whatever had been soaring in Parlabane crashed back to earth with no survivors. He had learned unequivocally that there was substance to Lucy’s suspicions, but to tell her that would be to take away the peace she had found. She was moving forward into the light, while it seemed the only way to be close to her would be to drag her back into the darkness with him.

  Equally, would it be right to hide the truth from her: particularly if ignorance might potentially put her at risk? At least it wasn’t her who had been physically attacked last night, but whoever had done it, she was in their sights. She was Diana’s sister-in-law, and she had also been the one who brought Finnegan into contact with Peter as an investor in his project. Lucy was directly connected to both Parlabane’s suspects for last night’s abduction, but the outstanding question was what connected Jager and Finnegan.

  He wasn’t letting this go, but he’d have to tread delicately.

  ‘That sounds wise,’ he told her.

  ‘I’m sorry for dragging you into this and wasting your time.’

  ‘I got a kiss out of it. Seems fair.’

  There was a tortuously long moment of silence, then finally she responded.

  ‘Are you saying we could maybe meet up again, under different circumstances?’

  He just about managed to keep his voice steady.

  ‘I’d like that,’ he replied.

  ‘Me too. Although I can’t promise I won’t stray into old territory. I said I’m moving towards the light: I think it’ll be a process of degrees. I mean, even lying awake last night, telling myself I was letting it go, stuff still kept bubbling up in my head.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, you mentioned Diana having some tragedy in her student days, and I remembered Peter saying there was a friend she was still in touch with from her time at Oxford. I think he only meant Facebook and the like: I don’t think she was at the wedding or anything.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘That’s just it: I don’t remember. All these fragments of useless crap are going to keep bothering me until I can get over this.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I’ve been living it for days, looking for the tiniest connections. Once your mind gets into the habit, it’s hard to shut it off. I even found myself wondering what kind of perfume Diana was wearing when I met her, and I couldn’t tell you why it struck me as remotely significant.’

  He was glad they were talking on the phone and not face to face. It was easier to make this sound like a matter-of-fact remark, and not the question in disguise that it surely was.

  ‘For what it’s worth, she wears Jo Malone: Blackberry and Bay.
I know because I asked Peter what he had got her for Christmas, and he went off and read me the label. That’s in case you thought I had encyclopaedic knowledge and a parfumier’s expert nose.’

  Parlabane wanted to tell her he liked how she smelled. He wanted to say he liked her nose too. However, he didn’t want to come on too strong. And his thoughts were already moving on to other things, following his own nose.

  A BESTED RIVAL

  As soon as he was dried and dressed, Parlabane began searching for Diana’s student-years pal, cross-referencing her Facebook friends with lists of contemporaries from the medical faculty at Oxford. He was allowing an overlap of four years either side to account for friends or flatmates who were on the same course but different year groups. If the person Lucy was talking about had studied something else, he’d be struggling, but he knew from Sarah that medics were phenomenally insular during their undergrad years and only became more so thereafter.

  After about ninety minutes of trawling archives and databases, he had a match: Professor Emily Gayle, senior anatomy lecturer at the University of Durham. They had both graduated in the same year, so if anybody could tell him first-hand about Diana Jager’s student days, it was her.

  Parlabane drove south early the next day, ahead of the Edinburgh morning traffic. It was probably the soonest he could be sure he was safe to get behind the wheel, given the after-effects of the sedative he’d been slugged with. The rest of Sunday had been a bust: after the rush of adrenaline following his conversation and subsequent web search, he’d been beset again by the sleepiness he was trying to shake with a shower when Lucy called.

  He had established that Professor Gayle was timetabled to lecture at ten thirty on Monday, and his plan was to buttonhole her after that. There were contact details for the department, but even if he was able to get past the bureaucracy, this was not a conversation he could risk to the vicissitudes and easy get-out excuses of a phone call. He would be a lot harder to ignore if he showed up in person.