Black Widow (22 page)

She moved in expertly to shake my hand and offer a marginally less cursory greeting. I caught a whiff of her scent and immediately recognised it as Jo Malone Blackberry and Bay, the same fragrance I was wearing that day. Peter had bought me a bottle as a gift. I suspected it was going to be the only thing Cecily and I would have in common.

Even as she spoke her few platitudinous words, Sir Hamish was already looking beyond the two of us and silently beckoning his final two waiting guests. I had seldom been made to feel less significant or more dismissed.

Peter seemed to grow a couple of inches, deliberately blocking his father's view.

‘
I said
, this is my
wife
, Father.'

His voice remained low but there was anger thrumming in his tone.

‘I heard,' Sir Hamish replied sternly.

Then he turned to look at me once more, his tone sincere but not remotely warm.

‘You have my best wishes. And my apologies in advance.'

We walked by the river as Peter tried to calm himself following this encounter. It took a while, but the family estate would have accommodated a six-hour hike's worth of self-composure had he needed it. The discretion for which Sir Hamish was being quietly thanked by his late wife's relatives was partly guaranteed by a combination of geography and privilege. No reporter or photographer was getting anywhere near the house, which had to be at least half a mile from the nearest public road.

‘I'm sorry,' he told me when he eventually spoke. ‘I should have known better. I at least thought he would try to be pleasant to
you
.'

We had walked in silence for a long time, giving me ample opportunity to think of what tack to adopt. I had decided to nudge Peter towards the prospects of the future rather than the wounds of the past.

‘Forget about it. If you have to keep hold of that moment, then do it only so that you can think back to it when we rock up here one day in a Lamborghini.'

I thought that would earn a smile at least, but he was still simmering.

‘You don't understand him at all. No matter what I achieve, he'll take pains to convey that he's not impressed. He'll still act disappointed and still look down on me even though he did nothing to earn what he has, other than be squeezed out from the right cunt.'

When we got home to Inverness, we had sex for the first time in a while. It started as a hug, after we had got safely inside and closed the door: my desire to convey to him, physically, that this was his home and this was where he would be loved.

For the first time since his mother died, he let me hold him, and it quickly became something else.

I've heard that people often make love after a funeral. It's something instinctive, clinging on to each other amidst the darkness, having been starkly reminded of their mortality. Maybe even a circle-of-life thing, the subconscious desire to procreate.

This was not making love. It was not warm and tender or even hot and insistent. It was full of desperation rather than lust, fury rather than passion.

I felt something cold about it, like I was being used.

It took him ages to come. He pulled me to the edge of the bed and stood upright, bending my legs back, my heels against his shoulders, pounding away in a state more of frustration than desire. I felt like I was a proxy, and not for another lover, but for someone he wanted to hurt.

What he was doing wasn't painful, but when I looked into his face, into his eyes, for the first time I saw something in Peter that was dark, that was turbulent, that was dangerous.

I saw something in him that terrified me.

Parlabane inched his car cautiously along the forest track, equally mindful of his axles as of getting completely stuck out here. It wasn't so much potholed as honeycombed, with the few patches of flat ground just as treacherous for being slicked with an inch of ice that looked like Jack Frost had sent his apprentice down to give it a thorough polish. There was no danger of anybody ever skidding off this road and into a river: it was impossible to drive fast enough. It was one of the few thoroughfares on mainland Britain that justified the ownership of a four-by-four wank tank, yet here he was crawling along it in what had seemed like the only standard saloon car left in Edinburgh.

According to the dashboard display, the outside temperature was precisely zero. Far from ideal conditions for an interview that would be primarily conducted outdoors, he thought. Then he remembered that he could be tucked up in a nice cosy room, sat in front of his laptop ‘generating copy', at which point he told himself to quit whining. Heading out into the wilds in an inadequate vehicle to meet a guy who might be able to tell him bugger-all about a story that might add up to nothing nonetheless made him feel more like being a reporter than anything he had done in months.

One of the things he had told Lucas's students was that journalism is the art of finding something constructive to do with your time while you wait in hope for people to return your calls. Ironically, he had enjoyed an unusually high strike rate on this particular endeavour. Among the numbers Lucy had given him was that of a guy called Alan Harper, who ran an airsoft site that Peter had attended regularly for several years. He was one of the few friends Peter already had in the area when his job took him to Inverness. Lucy was under the impression that the meets only took place on a Sunday, but when Parlabane phoned, it turned out the guy worked for the Forestry Commission and so was on the site most days.

It vindicated something else he had stressed in his talk: the value of making contact behind the firewall. Direct phone numbers were worth a thousand email addresses, no matter whether they belonged to a CEO or an airsoft geek. Otherwise you were merely somebody else they could ignore, and if they had something to hide, they would ignore you fairly hard.

Having someone supply a few numbers, as Lucy had done, was extremely rare, and having someone vouch for you in advance was rarer still, which was why half the job was about finding ways to bypass the invisible cordons of corporate security or personal privacy. He didn't tell the students that an awful lot of this involved lying to decent people and then lying to yourself that this was okay.

Of course, they could still ignore you with some gusto even when you had their private number, but sometimes it was simply about letting them know you were out there. Parlabane did not expect a long conversation when he called the number Lucy had supplied him for Elphinstone House, and thus he had not been disappointed. It wasn't even Sir Hamish that he got to speak to, but his fiancée Cecily.

‘Oh, hi, is that Cecily? I was looking to speak to Hamish,' he said, trying to sound comfortably informal. Giving the impression that you expected to be put through was sometimes effective in making the person who answered believe you already had a relationship with the subject.

‘Hamish isn't home right now. Can you tell me who's calling?'

She sounded pleasantly polite but there was a firmness to her tone that immediately told him she was making no assumptions as to his access privileges.

‘My name is Jack Parlabane. I'm a freelance journalist.'

‘What is it regarding?'

The tone was stiffer now.

‘I realise it's a difficult time, and I am aware there's been a great deal of rather mawkish coverage regarding the accident, which is why I'm trying to put together a more in-depth piece about who Peter really was. His sister Lucy was good enough to give me this number, and I was hoping to talk to Hamish about what kind of son Peter was, the unusual paths he chose, that kind of thing.'

‘It
is
a difficult time. And so I don't imagine
Sir
Hamish will be particularly inclined to oblige you.'

Parlabane left his number anyway, and despite the edge of hostility in her voice, he was pretty sure she wrote it down.

Alan Harper had been considerably more obliging when Parlabane called him, but that was because he had been considerably less honest about his intentions. He told Harper he was working on a series of articles about ‘the alternative outdoors' for a travel website, and so the prospect of a puff-piece about his airsoft business had prompted him to accommodate Parlabane right away.

Harper was waiting for him in a clearing off to the left of the forest track. He had evidently got there in a flat-bed truck with wheels and suspension built for the underfoot conditions. Parlabane thought about how much easier it would have been had he arranged to meet in town and then had Harper drive them both here in the Land Cruiser, but it was never a good idea to be reliant upon your subject for a ride home when you were planning to ask them awkward questions.

He was a bearded bloke in his late thirties: tall and rangy, with the dark complexion of a man who spent a lot of time in the great outdoors. He wore an unzipped body-warmer and fingerless gloves, sturdy boots on his feet and shaded goggles hanging from his neck on an elasticated strap. The body-warmer bore the Forestry Commission badge, but Parlabane recognised a video-game logo on the T-shirt underneath. It spoke of indoor enthusiasms, as did the rows of holes on each earlobe, the rings themselves presumably left off for safety reasons.

They shook hands and Parlabane let him conduct the tour. He was cheerful and enthusiastic, but suffered from a slight stammer. Parlabane interpreted it as betraying a shy unease in dealing with strangers which he was trying hard to overcome. It was easy to picture him content on his own working out here in the woods, and yet being in charge of an airsoft site took strength of personality. There could be as many as a hundred participants on a busy day, Parlabane learned: predominantly male and sometimes fairly amped, given the nature of the game.

He led Parlabane along a narrow path into the woods, explaining how he had attended airsoft events at a place called Section 8 in Lanarkshire while staying with a cousin about a decade ago. The organisers had an arrangement with the Forestry Commission, so the first thing he did when he got back home was talk to his bosses about how they could make something similar work on their own turf. It had taken a while to grow, but now they had people travelling from all over the country for their Sunday meets.

Parlabane noticed that everywhere he stepped, there were tiny white balls – or fragments of tiny white balls – underfoot.

‘What do your bosses make of these?'

‘They're mostly biodegradable. The ammo
we
supply, anyway. Can't pat folk down for what else they might be carrying, but the type of people who come here tend to have an appreciation of the outdoors, so they know where we're coming from.'

‘I'm guessing they have an appreciation of gaming too,' Parlabane suggested, nodding at Harper's T-shirt. He was laying the groundwork for introducing the subject of Peter Elphinstone later. ‘You must have a lot of players who people would assume to be more comfortable in the great indoors.'

‘Aye, it would make an interesting Venn diagram, for sure.'

They came to a wooden hut, set back from the path. The trees had been selectively thinned out in the area around it, making it both sheltered and spacious.

‘This is the muster point. Where we organise the teams, get everybody kitted up and give the safety briefing. Have you done airsoft yourself?'

‘No. I did paintballing once,' he recalled with a shudder.

Harper assumed it was in remembrance of the impacts.

‘Airsoft is less painful.'

‘So I've heard. But without visible marking, how do you know who's been hit?'

‘We rely on people to be honest. You hold a hand up and say “Hit!”'

‘Does that work?'

‘Mostly. If you say “Hit”, people stop shooting you. I said it's less sore than paintball, but if you've got a couple of folk unloading on you with automatic fire, it's not wise to pretend they're missing.'

‘I see.'

‘Plus we have a marshal system. Me and my team know this place like nobody else. We can disappear, take position where no one realises. We see what goes on far more clearly than the players ever imagine. If somebody's cheating, we have a quiet word.'

Harper took out some keys and unlocked the hut. He swung one door open, revealing row upon row of weaponry. Parlabane estimated there were fifty or sixty replica machine guns lined up on wall racks, with several sniper rifles ranged in a separate stand.

‘Boy toys r us,' Parlabane remarked.

‘Yeah, that's the other thing we have over paintball. The kit is more fun. Greater variety too, which has tactical implications. Most of our walk-up guests get the standard HK G36.'

‘Heckler Koch?'

He wanted to establish some geek credentials and sound authentically interested. It didn't take much faking. Something about these perfect replicas being essentially toys spoke to his inner kid.

‘That's right. They're sturdy, durable, collapsible stock, ideal for the conditions out here.'

Harper grabbed one from the rack and offered it to Parlabane. It was heavy, mostly metal. His host picked up a sniper rifle too and lifted a canvas bag from the floor.

They walked past a makeshift fort: logs, boards and old doors fashioned into walls and barricades. Harper explained more about the rules of the various games they offered, as well as giving him a truncated version of his standard safety briefing. As much of it was about the underfoot conditions as about the weapons. It was a very easy place to break an ankle, and a less easy place to drive an ambulance into.

Parlabane pulled on a pair of safety goggles Harper produced from the canvas bag, then shouldered the HK. He flicked the safety to single shot and aimed into the trees. A light squeeze loosed a tiny white dot whose flight he was surprised to be able to follow. He fired off a couple more. They all pulled slightly to the right.

He flipped the lever to fully automatic and released a volley in a short burst. It was a bit like slowed-down tracer fire, the line of dots easy to track as it arced into the darkness of the woods. He noted minor variations in their flight, even though they were only fractions of a second apart.