Black Widow (35 page)

‘Would you be prepared to talk to me, maybe give me some background on Diana's early career?'

She made a face.

‘You're catching me on the hop. Perhaps later in the week, I might be—'

‘I've come out of the blue, I know. I wanted to call ahead but it was the weekend and I knew your department would be closed. See, the thing is, I took a chance and diverted here because I'm en route to an interview on another story later today. I'm only asking half an hour over a coffee.'

She glanced at her watch and let out a sigh. Then she nodded.

‘Okay.'

She told him he had roughly forty minutes as they sat down in a noisy and bustling campus café. This was as honest as it was generous, he appreciated. She had another lecture coming up at twelve and she was giving him all the time left in between. He watched the clock carefully as he got her talking, partly to ensure he got to the goods before time ran out, but also in order to bring up the crucial subject just as things were drawing to a close. People tended to let their guard down most when they were mentally packing up to leave. They felt less defensive when they knew they were about to get rid of you.

He teased her out from guarded generalities into a warmer expansiveness on the subject of Diana's character and personality during her student days.

‘There aren't a lot of war stories to tell. Not much in the way of student high jinks or adolescent excess. We were both monastically studious to the point of being pathologically boring. It's why we got on, to be honest. We were outside all the cliques, both of us terribly serious about our studies: driven, ambitious and occupying a dizzyingly exclusive percentile of the no-fun scale. Looking back I alternate between feeling sorry for my younger self and feeling embarrassed for her. It's why I look out for students now who are showing signs of the same, and I tell them that university is about learning to live a well-rounded life as well as getting your degree. Doctors aren't going to be much good at relating to patients if they don't know what a normal life looks like. Diana still bemoans her tendency to become consumed by the job. That's why I was so happy about her getting married.'

‘These were themes the blog touched on,' Parlabane observed. ‘Work-life balance. Were the two of you similar in personality back then?'

‘In a lot of ways. The main difference was that Diana has always been more driven. Smarter too, to be absolutely honest. And fiercely, fiercely competitive. She always had a robust sense of her own worth, which is why she kicked back hard later on whenever she got the sense she was being slighted: whether for her gender or anything else. Let me stress, I don't merely mean competitive with regard to her studies – though she was always in the running for prizes – I mean everything. She's a bit calmer now, but in those days Diana turned into a different person when pride was at stake: she seldom came second at anything, which was just as well, because she was a nightmare afterwards when she did.'

‘What kind of thing are we talking about? Sport?'

She smiled, amused by the memory.

‘Honestly, if it was a pub quiz, that would be enough to put her in the zone. But she was into sports, yes. Quite outdoorsy. She did orienteering and rowing. And, well, canoeing.'

Gayle made a strange face as she said this last. Odd phrasing too, Parlabane noted. There was something there.

He saw that he had about ten minutes and began winding it down, thanking her for her time and calling for the bill. Then he made his play, speaking like it was an afterthought.

‘Oh, one last thing. Can you think of anything that would maybe show how resilient Diana was in her student days? Did she have to fight any battles back then, overcome any barriers?'

‘God, did she ever.'

Gayle's expression was a mixture of pride and indignation.

‘I suppose we both did, really, but the impact was much greater on Diana because she was directly involved. Our flatmate was killed in a canoeing accident in our third year: third term, not long before the exams.'

‘Jesus. What was her name? Or was it a he?'

‘Her name was Agnes: pronounced Ann-yes. She was Belgian. Agnes Delacroix. The three of us shared a flat when Diana and I both moved out of halls at the end of second year. Diana knew her through the canoeing club. She was studying medicine too, but it was a big year group, so I didn't know her before that, apart from seeing her name, usually up at the top of results lists. She was very clever. She'd have done great things, I'm sure.'

Gayle looked sorrowful at the memory, but Parlabane surmised that her regret seemed more nuanced. Something about this was complicated.

‘What happened to her?'

‘She and Diana were away at a river event one weekend, up in Yorkshire. Some white-water thing. They were sharing a canoe: I don't recall what you call the discipline. Anyway, there was an accident. The canoe flipped over and Diana managed to get out like they practise and swim to shore, but it turned out Agnes had hit her head on a rock.'

‘Jesus. What a thing to deal with. Were you all close?'

Gayle swallowed, a strained look on her face.

‘The difficult thing is, Agnes wasn't a very nice person. She was extremely clever, but these days she'd probably be diagnosed as being on the Asperger's spectrum. I'd have said she was Diana's principal rival for academic prizes, but rivalry has to be a two-way thing. Agnes wasn't competitive, in the same way robots aren't competitive: you need to have emotions first. She was like a machine.'

‘Not an easy flatmate?'

‘A nightmare. I won't dredge up what would only sound like petty incidents, and even more churlish given what happened, but believe me, she had the morality of an insect: function and survival, nothing else. Diana and I wanted to leave after a few weeks, but we were stuck with this lease we couldn't get out of.'

She sighed.

‘I felt so guilty. When someone you don't like, someone you wanted rid of suddenly dies, it's a dreadful and confusing thing to cope with. Worse for Diana, of course. Not only was she there when it happened, but people started making nasty jokes because they knew there had been tensions between her and Agnes. Don't get on the wrong side of her, they'd say, or she'll take you canoeing and you'll never come back.'

‘And how did she respond to that?'

‘Damn well, if you ask me. She never let the bastards see it was getting to her. I'm sure she was in turmoil underneath, but from the surface you'd never know she was giving it a second thought. The accident itself bothered her, though. Diana has always been fastidious about safety and planning.'

‘So what went wrong?'

‘It was simply a freak accident. All the safety protocols were followed, the inquest said. Agnes had a helmet on, but when the canoe got tossed in a section of rapids, it was her face that got smashed into the rock. She fell out, lost consciousness and drowned. It was just Sod's Law that it happened on a stretch of the river where there was nobody else around to intervene.'

Quite, Parlabane thought.

Or to witness.

It might have had something to do with the fiscal holding up a lethal-looking blade for the jury to examine, but Parlabane felt an acute sense of vulnerability on behalf of the witness for the prosecution who was currently sitting cross-legged on the stand. She seemed so small from his perspective in the gallery, certainly smaller than when their paths first crossed up in Inverness; though on that occasion her professional stature and the advantage of being on her home beat meant she had loomed larger as she sent him on his way.

Perhaps it was what she represented that heightened his anxiety: they both wanted to see a guilty verdict, they both had played their crucial parts in bringing the accused to trial, and they both knew to take nothing for granted, ever wary of who they were up against.

The showy bastard waving that blade about wasn't helping. The fiscal had important points to make, but all Parlabane could see was the juxtaposition of a deadly weapon and this woman seated only feet away, one hand resting protectively on her little round belly. She had to be four or five months pregnant, he estimated, meaning she must have conceived around the time that this all went down.

Right then she was regarding the fiscal with studied calm as he asked about the object in his hand, which he had identified to the court as a Liston knife.

‘Would it be fair to say that a blade such as this would be ideal for the swift and efficient dismemberment of human limbs?'

‘In the event that you had a body you needed to render more easily portable, if you happened to have one of these sitting around the house, I imagine it would get the job done.'

Parlabane could tell he was not the only one who felt slightly woozy at the mere thought of this. Indeed, the court had been learning all about the history of this type of blade. More pertinently, the court had also been learning how Diana Jager received just such a knife in a presentation case as a gift from her father, to mark her passing the post-graduate exams that conferred her Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. It had taken pride of place on her mantelpiece for many years, before being more recently pressed towards defeating the ends of justice.

That this hadn't been achieved was largely down to the determination of the pregnant woman on the witness stand. Thus it wasn't merely the fragile life growing in that womb that gave Parlabane a sense of the precarious, but the thought of how one misstep by the mother-to-be might have prevented the truth from coming out.

Ali spotted Tom Chambers walking towards her as she and Rodriguez made their way in from the car park. It looked like he was coming from the interview rooms. He had a plastic cup in his hand and didn't appear to be in any particular hurry. He lifted his head to acknowledge her as they passed, which was when she decided to seize her moment. Tom was an affable sort and more likely to give her a fair hearing. Ideally she'd have given herself time to mentally marshal her resources, but sometimes opportunity trumped preparation.

‘Tom, have you got a moment? There's something I think we ought to be taking a closer look at. It's Peter Elphinstone. I'm not sure his accident is everything it first appeared.'

Tom looked ambushed, like this was way more than he expected to be processing on this short trip between the interview suite and the vending machines.

‘Eh, that sounds intriguing. But I've got a wee chancer in Three who's about ready to give up his mates in a car-ringing op. Just letting him simmer a minute. Can you come and see me in a couple of…'

He glanced behind her, over her head, giving someone a beckoning nod.

‘Oh, no, tell you what. Here's Bill Ellis. Bill, you're free to talk to Ali here about something, aren't you?'

‘For lovely young Alison, I'm always free.'

Fuck.

Ellis sat leaning back in his chair as Ali laid out what she had. His eyes kept gazing upwards, flitting back and forth as though there was something fascinating about the ceiling. She couldn't decide whether he looked like he was evaluating what she was telling him or distracting himself from a growing irritation, though the most likely interpretation was that the former was necessitating the latter.

When she was finished he let a silence hang for a few moments then leaned forward, clasping his hands with his elbows on the table. He looked at Rodriguez.

‘So, do you reckon there's something to this?'

It was like she wasn't even there. Yeah, why not defer to the less experienced officer, who is only in the door a fortnight, because he's a guy.

‘Absolutely.'

Ellis nodded.

‘Aye, that figures,' he said wearily. ‘These things are always worse when there's two of you reinforcing each other's daft notions. I mean, correct me if I've missed anything, but you're telling me what you've got is a woman with a black eye that apparently constitutes motive enough to kill her husband of only a few months, hide his body and fake his death in a car crash. Your primary evidence for this consists of the fact that she seemed insufficiently upset when you broke the news and that her house smelled a wee bit of bleach, the latter being particularly pertinent because clearly there could be no other explanation for it. Is that about the size of it? Oh, no, hang on, I'm forgetting about the first ever instance of uniform not being able to trace a witness, a state of affairs so conspicuously anomalous as to make anybody suspicious.'

‘You're forgetting about the position of the driver's seat,' Rodriguez protested, though Ali knew Ellis had made up his mind and further engaging him was only going to make things worse. ‘It couldn't have been Elphinstone who was driving.'

‘Couldn't it? Did you ask Lynne McGhee about the elevation of the seat or just the horizontal position? Some people like to stretch their legs out low to the floor, others sit higher and bend their knees. And you've completely missed the other possibility, which is that someone else was driving while Elphinstone was in the passenger seat, in which case we've actually got another death we never knew about.'

‘The witness didn't say she saw two people in the car,' Rodriguez reminded him.

‘You mean the witness who appears to have vanished from the face of the earth? The witness whose testimony you were suspicious of five minutes ago? See, what we've got here are classic symptoms of frustrated CID-wannabe syndrome. You're seeing crimes that aren't there because you've already got the story mapped out in your head, and you're looking for evidence that fits it instead of a story that fits the evidence.'

‘Surely the ambiguities here at least warrant further investigation?'

Ali felt there was something to be salvaged if she could justify herself in terms of procedure.