Black Widow (2 page)

Let me tell you, once they've doled out tragedy points, you'd really better conform to their expectations, because the widow pedestal is a high one to fall from. She denied them first a happy ever after and then a poignant end to a tale of doomed romance. She desecrated their church, and so she had to face their judgement.

What else
would
they see? What else
could
they see?

Only one person looked closer, and he was my undoing. I know I'm not the first person to curse the day I heard the name Jack Parlabane, and I sincerely doubt I'll be the last. In my case I don't simply regret what he did to me. I regret what I did to him too. I know that in the eyes of this court, I am an abomination, but I am not the monster I will be painted.

I regard the police officers standing next to me. There are no cuffs on my wrists but I can still feel the cold steel like I can still feel the sting of humiliation that comes with wearing them. It clings to me every second I remain in the dock. There is a burning coal of moral opprobrium in the black pupil of every eye focused on me.

As the trial proceeds, the court will hear how a driven woman acted out of the oldest and sincerest of motives: to be with the man she was destined for. My crime and my actions will seem cold and heinous to everyone else because they can never know what I felt.

I think of all the anger and hate I have gone through since my arrest. It has taken time, but I have come to realise I must make my peace with what I have done. I need to take ownership of it. I need to forgive myself, because nobody else's forgiveness matters.

In the end, regardless of how my actions are judged, I know that this is about love.

A handsome, loving husband and a minimum of two apple-cheeked children of your own: that's what you're supposed to want first and foremost in life, isn't it? That's the paradigm you're offered as a little girl, the playtime template that's intended to shape your aspirations for future happiness.

Sometimes the paradigm doesn't take, however. Sometimes the template is damaged. Such was the case for me, Diana Jager.

I had a doll's house when I was a child. I think it came from a relative, because it was old and wooden and hand-painted; nothing like the mass-produced moulded-plastic ones I saw in the big thick mail-order catalogue with its treasured and much-thumbed toy pages at the back. It had ivy picked out in oil on the outside, climbing the walls to the steeply pitched roof. It didn't look like any house in my neighbourhood but seemed to belong to an older, grander world, one that belonged in my parents' past rather than my own future. The front swung open on hinges, revealing three storeys of also hand-painted rooms. It didn't come with furniture, but my parents bought me a set intended for one of the aforementioned plastic affairs. It always looked wrong.

That wasn't the real problem, though. There was a scale mismatch. None of my dolls would fit inside it: they were all too big. Not that a better size compatibility would have made it ideal for playing happy families, because here's the thing: who was going to be the husband? All the dolls I owned were girls or babies, and all the dolls I ever saw in my friends' bedrooms, notably the ones that matched those modern plastic houses, were girls or babies.

This reflected the reality of my home. It was Mummy and the babies who were round the house most of the time. Daddy was out having a career, and what little girl needs a doll to represent that?

My doll's house was never a home. Why would I want a toy version of a home? I already had a full-size one. I didn't get the mini-figure set that went with the plastic furniture: didn't ask for it. Instead I asked for a hospital playset, so that's what my doll's house became, most of the time. Sometimes it was a school, sometimes it was a museum, but mainly it was a hospital. My playset comprised ten figurines: two of them were doctors, six of them were nurses and two of them were patients.

Both of the doctors were men. All of the nurses were women.

I tried making a little green tabard out of crepe paper to drape over one of the nurses so that she could be a doctor too: a surgeon like my father. It looked rubbish and it kept tearing and crumpling, so eventually I gave up and made the female patient the surgeon, and put both of the male doctors in beds.

I remember one day asking my mother why women couldn't be doctors too. I must have been about six. That was when she told me that she
was
a doctor.

Let me warn you now that this was not the inspirational epiphany you might be anticipating.

My parents met at university, where they were both studying medicine. Early in their final year, they decided to get married, arranging to have the ceremony a couple of weeks before graduation. Sounds quite romantic, you might think: tying the knot before striking out together on this path they had both aspired towards, the shared ambitions they had studied so hard to realise. But here's the thing: somewhere along the path of that final year, they decided that my father would pursue his medical career, and my mother would be a housewife.

She wasn't up the duff, by the way. I could at least have got my head around that. I didn't come along for a couple of years yet.

My mother strove to get the A-levels she needed in order to get accepted for medicine, studied a further five pitiless years, passed her exams, graduated, then never practised one day as a doctor.

Not one single day.

It never made any sense to me. She didn't seem cumulatively frustrated by this as the years went on. I mean, I could have related to it all better had she been hitting the gin by mid-afternoon in her late thirties as her kids needed her less and she wondered where her life had drained away to. Not that she seemed particularly contented either. She was just
there
. Smiling but not cheery, caring but not warm, dependable but not inspiring.

I didn't see it for a long time because I grew up with it and because it was a hard thing to accept, but at some time around my late teens I realised that my mother had almost no personality. As I matured into adulthood, what increasingly bothered me about this – and about the choice she had made in final year – was the question of whether my father had subjugated her, turning a bright young woman into a compliant drone; or whether he had in fact recognised that compliance, that lack of personality, and identified it as precisely what he was looking for in a life partner. For my mother's part, I wondered was she happy to surrender her autonomy, to be annexed like some colonial dependency? Or had her natural timidity made her vulnerable to the manipulations of someone who turned out to be more domineering than she had initially apprehended?

I didn't even know which explanation I would prefer to be true.

There certainly weren't any clues on display in what I witnessed of their relationship. As a child I thought they were everything a married couple should be. My father would come home to find my mother in the kitchen calmly preparing dinner, and would peck her on the cheek and call her ‘Dearest Darling', which was sometimes abbreviated to ‘Dee Dee'. There never seemed to be any strife, no raised voices, no unspoken words, no simmering tension. (No passion, no hunger, no chemistry, no spark.)

‘Dinner was beautiful, Dearest Darling. Thank you.'

‘My pleasure, always.'

Even as a child, something about their exchanges chimed wrong, though I was too young to identify what and why. It was only as I got older that I came to understand what my instincts were telling me was off about this. It was like a phoned-in performance, a cargo-cult imitation of intimacy by two people who had seen this behaviour elsewhere and sought to replicate it as a form of civil convention.

Even once I had grasped this much, I still simply assumed that all married couples were like this with each other: that every husband and every wife behaved in a polite, friendly way they didn't really mean, as we do in so many other areas of our lives.

I was the Apple of his Eye. You should note the capitals: this noun was proper. It was not how he saw me, but what he called me.

‘How's the Apple of my Eye this evening?'

Or when he was feeling solicitous, merely Apple.

‘What's wrong, Apple? Aren't you feeling hungry this evening?'

My younger brothers were proudly addressed as Number One Son and Number Two Son, except when they were in trouble. I always knew that there was mischief afoot and a spike in the domestic temperature if I heard my father address them directly as Julian or Piers.

As a little girl I thought this meant my daddy was jokey, a man who had funny nicknames for everybody, this informality proof of how close we were to his heart. Later on I came to realise that this language of apparent intimacy was actually a way of creating distance. If we were Diana, Julian and Piers, then we had agency: we were autonomous entities with foibles that he had to negotiate, personalities that he had to get to know. But if we were the Apple of his Eye, Sons Number One and Two, then his children were adjuncts to him, defined only in terms of how he regarded us.

Thus our primary role was to reflect well upon him, and we generally made a good job of it when we were young. After that not so much.

Parents can pretend to themselves that their children suddenly change when they hit their teens: that the pubescent transformation caused their offspring to stop communicating with them the way they used to. The truth is that in such cases they never really communicated with them. It's simply easier to project idealised versions on to your children when they are very young, before they start having opinions and making decisions for themselves.

However, it was when we became adults that we seriously disappointed him, each in our different ways: the boys because they didn't have the careers he wanted them to; me because I
did
have the career he wanted them to.

I was the Apple of his Eye, his first child, his only daughter, but it was his sons who were supposed to be surgeons. I'm not sure what I was supposed to be, other than born later.

It is said that every time a friend succeeds, a small part of you dies. I've seen it in the expressions of colleagues as they learned of someone else's achievement, and I saw it on my father's face whenever I told him of my latest progress. For a while I thought I was imagining it, but then it became impossible to miss. I could see it in his eyes, eyes that didn't twinkle to match the awkward smile with which he greeted my news.

Everything I achieved, each step I took up the ladder hurt just a little more because it was supposed to be his sons.

So was this hollow imitation of marriage and parenthood the perfect environment in which to nurture a clever psychopath? I guess that's for you to judge. But this much I know for sure: it was what made me determined that I wouldn't be seeking fulfilment in life from being somebody's wife or mother.

The young doctor identified himself to the court, his voice catching in his throat and prompting the fiscal to ask him to repeat.

‘Calum Weatherson,' he said.

‘And you first started working with Diana Jager how long ago?'

‘A year and … no, sixteen … I think sixteen months, maybe a wee bit less.'

He'd got his name right, even if it had taken two attempts to get it out there. That was a good start: harder than it looks. Now the nerves were really showing as the enormity hit home. As well as everything else that was at stake, he was acting like he was scared he was also going to get done for perjury if it turned out his estimate of how long he'd been at Inverness Royal Infirmary turned out to be a fortnight out.

Jack Parlabane felt for him. He had seen a lot of court cases in his capacity as a journalist and sometimes as a consequence of exceeding his capacity as a journalist. He could tell it was young Mr Weatherson's first time on the stand. There was a tremulous note in his voice, his hands slightly shaky too, and his eyes kept straying beyond his interlocutor, searching the gallery for someone whose approving look would tell him he was doing okay.

Parlabane recalled being the friendly face among an indifferent crowd as a show of moral support when his wife Sarah was on the stand. She had been called several times as a medical witness, which could be an upsettingly adversarial experience when, for instance, the defence counsel decided that the best strategy was to imply that a murder victim may have died due to negligence on the part of an anaesthetist, rather than the fourteen hatchet blows rained down by his client a couple of hours earlier. Such grillings were a breeze, however, compared to the cross-examination to which she was humiliatingly subject during a case brought by Witnesses of the Jehovah's variety. On that occasion his presence in the gallery had begun as a show of solidarity but ended up undermining Sarah's cause when the court heard a typically intemperate newspaper column her husband had written on the subject of the serial doorsteppers and their bafflingly stupid objection to blood transfusion.

It wasn't the first time his professional conduct had the unforeseen consequence of raining shit down upon their marriage, and nor was it the last, which went a long way towards explaining why they weren't married any more. That said, the Diana Jager case had given him a whole new perspective on quite how badly a marriage could end.

‘And can you tell the court what your respective positions were in January of last year?'

‘I had recently started as a, em, that is, I was already a registrar, but I had not long taken up the post after transferring from another hospital.'

Weatherson's voice faltered again. His mouth sounded dry. The fiscal urged him to take a drink of water. He would relax into his narrative in time, Parlabane knew, but those early moments were the most intimidating, especially as the stakes were so high. What Parlabane also knew, to his cost, was that it was when you were relaxed enough to become expansive that the sneaky bastards tended to ambush you.