Black Widow (34 page)

‘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.

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.

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.

His phone rang somewhere around Berwick, Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod of the Glesca Polis getting back to him from a couple of days ago. He wouldn't go so far as to say she owed him a favour, but he had pissed off a few of the right people, as far as she was concerned, so they were on good terms. For now.

‘I'm sorry I missed you Saturday. I just got back on duty. Wasn't urgent, I hope?'

‘Aye, someone said my pants were smelly on Twitter, and I was wanting the cyber-crime team to get right on it.'

‘So not urgent.'

Her tone indicated she was precisely as much in the mood for levity as one might expect of a Monday morning.

‘I was wondering what you could tell me about a gentleman by the name of Samuel Finnegan. Is he “known to the police”, to use a favourite euphemism?'

‘Yes and no. We know what he's all about, but he's not the kind of guy we'd ever be hauling in for selling tenner bags in a club toilet.'

‘Yeah, I get the impression he's management rather than floor staff. I gather he fancies himself as a man of the arts.'

‘Snobby Sam, he's nicknamed. Most Glasgow drug dealers have aspirations towards respectability: he's got aspirations towards something higher yet. He cornered a niche for himself selling to the luvvie market because he was able to move in their circles and speak their language. Now he has an art dealership and a controlling interest in an auction house. He's got a lot of friends among artists, but his eye for fine talent extends to forgery and counterfeiting. Why is he on your scope?'

‘Maybe something, maybe nothing. He's an investor in a software company whose programming visionary was Peter Elphinstone.'

‘Why do I know that name?'

‘His car ended up at the bottom of the river outside Inverness the other week. His body was never recovered.'

‘Well, ca' canny in dealing with him. Don't assume a sense of refinement precludes more brutal proclivities. There's a reason nobody calls him Snobby Sam to his face.'

Parlabane had trouble getting parked anywhere near the building he needed, and had completely lost his bearings in a one-way system in his increasingly frantic search for a space. He consequently found himself roughly quarter of a mile away from where he needed to be at the time Gayle's lecture was scheduled to end, and by the time he was watching her stride briskly away from the building, he was flushed, sweaty and breathless: maximising the sleazy reporter look.

‘Professor Gayle,' he implored, pulling alongside her.

‘Yes?'

She regarded him with bemused curiosity. She was six inches taller than him and way ahead in the gravitas stakes too. At this point he reckoned his best hope was that she took pity on him.

‘My name is Jack Parlabane. I'm a journalist. I was hoping you could spare some time to talk to me about Diana Jager. I gather you were at Oxford together.'

He could see the barriers go up the second he mentioned her name. He wasn't so downhearted, however. These days a frequent problem was them going up when he mentioned his own.

‘I'm not prepared to talk to reporters about—'

‘No, no, please understand. I'm not here to intrude and I'm not pursuing some mawkish human-interest angle regarding what happened recently. But the story did rekindle my enthusiasm for Diana's “Sexism in Surgery” blog of a few years ago.'

She looked at him with continuing scepticism, but she was listening, at least.

‘Believe me, after fifteen years married to an anaesthetist, I can assure you I get where she was coming from, one hundred per cent. So when the subject of the blog inevitably pops up again in the wake of the tragedy, I'd like to be able to set the agenda and make sure it's about the issues and not the hacking.'

He could tell she was softening. Perhaps the red-faced sweatiness had worked for him, lending an air of sincerity through his desperation. He wondered why he was so careful in the wording of his vicarious medical credentials, though. He was reluctant to misrepresent his marital status, yet had no problem misleading her as to his overall agenda.

It was the sense of shame, he realised. Not being married to Sarah any more felt like a failure, a huge debit in his credibility as a human being. He didn't want to admit to Professor Gayle that he only had an ex-wife in her profession, and yet he couldn't bring himself to lie about it either, because for some reason that seemed like it would hurt all the more.