Black Widow (38 page)

Jager lit up as she warmed to her subject, eyes twinkling with enthusiasm.

‘That said, the combination of speed and sharpness wasn't always so merciful. Liston once operated on a patient who subsequently died of gangrene, and during the procedure managed to lop off two fingers from his young assistant. He died of gangrene too, these being the days before antiseptic. But to round it off, Liston also sliced through the clothing of a spectator who was observing the operation. The poor chap thought he'd been stabbed and in his mortal terror had a heart attack. He died too. It went down in surgical legend as the only operation to have a three hundred per cent mortality rate.'

Ali didn't know any surgeons, but she was troubled by how much pleasure this woman appeared to be taking in talking about death and dismemberment.

‘I can see why you would keep it in a glass case Where is it now?'

Jager paused, apparently needing time to think about it.

‘Peter hated it, so I stuck it away in a cupboard. I suppose I can put it back now.'

Was Ali imagining it or did she say this with a certain satisfaction? She certainly didn't sound regretful about the notion.

‘Can I take a look at it?' Rodriguez asked with eager enthusiasm.

‘Em, sure. I'll just go and look it out.'

Jager was gone for several minutes. It felt like a long time to retrieve an object from another room in a house this size.

When she returned she was empty-handed.

‘I'm terribly sorry. It doesn't appear to be where I thought I'd put it. Another time, perhaps.'

Count on it, Ali thought.

Clever psychopaths: that was how Sarah and her anaesthetist colleagues often referred to the surgeons. Admittedly, professional tensions played a part in this jaundiced impression, an element of Sarah letting off steam after being forced to bite her tongue in theatre throughout temper tantrums and other histrionics, but Parlabane got the impression she was only ever half joking.

‘They love to cut,' she told him. ‘They
live
to cut. Some of them look so crestfallen when a non-surgical solution gets the nod. The reason we put up with so much shit from them is that we're worried if they couldn't do it in theatre, they'd be doing it elsewhere.'

Diana Jager had even blogged about it, directly referencing the ‘clever psychopaths' slur in the posting's headline. She talked about how it was normal for people to be horrified by the prospect of slicing open another human being, and thus not everybody was capable of it. Do we learn to cut, she asked, or are we born to cut?

Either way, those of us who practise surgery are afforded a transformative perspective upon the human condition. We see human beings differently when we are so tangibly familiar with what is under the skin. We feel overwhelming responsibility when it is in our gift to cut out disease, to repair damaged tissue, to preserve life. And yet to be in the position to act upon that responsibility requires us to be given enormous power over that life, life that is literally in our hands.

Once you have operated, there is no going back to how you used to regard your fellow human. Seeing a patient opened up by one's own hands, it fills one with awe at both the complexity and the fragility of our form, and even more so at how we have transcended it. It seems astonishing that something so easily damaged can have survived so long and built so much. And yet at the same time one can't escape the awareness that the greatest minds and the most remarkable individuals – be they kings, popes, poets, lovers – are nonetheless reducible to so much meat.

She seemed aware there was something abnormal about the way she looked not only at the human body, but at people generally. How abnormal, was the question. Parlabane was contemplating the possibility that this was a woman who had got rid of someone during her student years by killing her and making it look like an accident. Same as Peter Elphinstone, Agnes Delacroix had apparently died from drowning.

Delacroix had been an intolerable flatmate and an academic rival. Parlabane could see the psychopath logic in deciding to get rid of her, but was still struggling for a motive as to why Jager would kill Elphinstone. In their different ways, Lucas Tudek, Alan Harper and Craig Harkness had depicted a woman who was obsessive in her behaviour towards a husband who was not living up to her love-blind or deluded ideals. Psychopath or not, it seemed a stretch to think she would escalate from nagging him about his diet to murdering the guy.

These things more typically turned out to be crimes of passion, Parlabane reflected, which was when his thoughts instinctively flashed to the second party in his unexpectedly eventful trip home from the pub. The perfume on his business card told him Jager had been present, but he knew she had enlisted the help of an as-yet-unidentified male in pulling it off. So far, his prime candidate for this had been Sam Finnegan or someone working on his behalf, but truth was he couldn't see how Jager and Finnegan's paths crossed, far less how the pair of them fitted together.

So what if it was nothing to do with Finnegan? Whoever her accomplice was, she didn't need to tell him what motivated the stunt: she could have made up some story about press harassment. Therefore it didn't follow that he had been in on Elphinstone's death, but nonetheless there were huge levels of trust and commitment required. Regardless how she coloured it, what they had done to Parlabane on Saturday night could bring down charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment. You'd have to be pretty close before you asked someone to come on board for something like that. Very, very close indeed.

Jesus, could it be that simple?

He was driving north, having just left Durham. His original destination was a return to his flat in Edinburgh, but this latest deduction meant he might be heading to Inverness again, for an old-fashioned stake-out-and-follow job.

Diana Jager had a lover, and Parlabane intended to find out who.

On the trip down he had begun playing back the conversations he had recorded since commencing this investigation. It was partly to refresh his memory and partly an opportunity to re-evaluate everything he'd been told, in case previously insignificant details took on new meaning in the light of subsequent disclosures. So far it hadn't thrown up anything dramatic, other than a guilty feeling at his own creepiness in recording Austin and Lucas without them knowing, particularly as he had done so even as they extended their hospitality. He had relived his evening at their house and his morning on the airsoft site with Alan Harper, their voices booming through the speakers so crisp and clear he could picture all of them as though they were sitting in the car.

It made him think of the voice he most wanted to hear right then, and not recorded, but live. Lucy: talking, confiding, sharing and especially laughing. She hadn't done much of that when they were together; and neither had he of late, for that matter. He wanted to change that.
Together
they might change that.

Parlabane wished he could call her but he didn't have an excuse. He had some new information, granted, but he wasn't sure of its worth, and he didn't want to haul her back into the darkness unless he knew for sure it was where the truth lay.

That said, he continued to wonder about what had been behind Lucy's earliest suspicions, what had driven her to such dreadful unknowing that she would seek out a washed-up journalist in her desperation to find out more. The sudden loss of a brother she felt responsible for was a powerful blow, but it was a hell of a leap to so quickly suspect foul play.

When Lucy first came round to the flat, he had got the impression there was something she was holding back. There had to be a specific fear that underpinned her paranoia. He recalled how she had sounded on the phone when she told him she ‘didn't want to live in that world'. She was relieved and yet still wary. There was a reason Lucy was still afraid her suspicions were true.

As though to underline Parlabane's distance from hearing the voice he truly desired, the next recording his phone skipped to was of Craig Harkness, the IT guy from Inverness Royal. It was tempting to shut it off and trade it for some music, but a grim sense of duty stayed his finger from the button.

Peter was always making excuses for her being such a torn-faced midden.

As his braying and bumptious voice filled the car, all bass tones and self-satisfaction, Parlabane was forced to picture him again, sitting across that table, belly stretching his Motley Crue T-shirt.

Don't stick your dick in a hornet's nest. Or in her case, your tit.

Harkness really was a silver-tongued devil.

She should be grateful all that happened was she had her personal details leaked. Just as well she didn't have a sex tape back then, or it would have been public domain.

Parlabane listened to himself respond by asking why guys were so desperate for porn of women they claimed to detest, and was amazed at his own professionalism in remaining so calm. Part of him wished he had chucked the bastard's drink all over him.

Something nagged at him though. He vaguely remembered it nagging him in the pub too; he couldn't quite isolate what it was. Reluctantly, he skipped back a few seconds and listened again.

Just as well she didn't have a sex tape back then, or it would have been public domain.

Hang on, he thought. Was that what he thought it was?

He played it one more time.

Just as well she didn't have a sex tape back then.

It was subtle, but he was sure Harkness's tone placed the slightest emphasis on those last two words:
back then
.

Parlabane remembered the smug grin as Harkness had said this, the cat who creamed his trousers.

Diana Jager had a sex tape
now
. And Harkness had seen it.

They had a quiet time of it after leaving Jager's place. It was about two degrees outside, with a blustery wind whipping the steady downpour about the almost deserted streets. Consequently the evening passed slowly, the highlight being their rescue of a damp, shivery and thoroughly confused American tourist who couldn't find his hotel. Ali couldn't find it either, until it became apparent that the bloke thought he was in Fort William, where his whistle-stop tour party had been staying the previous night.

Ali spent much of the shift mulling over their visit to the perhaps not so good doctor, and was nursing a growing sense of frustration. There was nobody she could approach regarding her suspicions, even as the clues began to mount up. The only option would be to go over Bill Ellis's head, but that would backfire disastrously unless she came up with evidence that made the case look 100 per cent nailed-on. The catch-22 was that there was no way of amassing that kind of proof without enlisting greater police resources, and that would require going over Bill Ellis's head. Plus, she knew that even if her instincts were proved right, by doing that she'd be making an enemy for life.

The shift finished at ten. Ali and Rodriguez were walking in the rear entrance when she noticed the duty sergeant, Hazel Glaister. She was hovering beyond the vestibule, arms folded and a face like thunder. Ali was wondering what fun and games they'd missed while out on patrol when the sergeant sent a searing gaze her way.

‘Hey. Mulder and Scully.' She jerked a thumb. ‘My office. Now.'

Glaister said nothing on the short walk, Ali feeling that burning sensation restored to her cheeks, like she had left it here earlier and it had resumed its effects upon her return. She told herself she had no idea what this might be about, but she wasn't buying it.

The sergeant shut the door with a bang then rounded on the pair of them.

‘I've had the Assistant Chief Constable on the phone.'

The words instantly turned Ali's insides into cement.

‘He was called at home –
at home
– by Dr Diana Jager, who is not only a consultant colleague of his wife's, but who also performed his gall bladder op two years ago. Jager was phoning to ask him if she was under investigation, because she just had two officers round the house asking her questions about the state of her marriage and the psychological condition of her husband prior to his recent death.'

Ali could feel the walls in the office moving closer, like they were theatre flats. Hazel was only a couple of inches taller than Ali, but right then she looked like a giant.

‘I have subsequently learned from DC Ellis that you pair have been busy convincing yourselves of some far-fetched nefarious murder plot, despite the absence of a body, a motive, or indeed any substantial evidence whatsoever, not to mention the absence of ANY REMIT TO BE DOING SO. DC Ellis has also informed me that you were directly instructed not to pursue this theory any further only a matter of hours ago, and yet the first thing you did was go round to Dr Jager's house and harass a woman who has recently and suddenly lost her husband in a road accident.'

Some defensive instinct in Ali prompted her to counter with the revelation of what they had discovered as a result of this visit, but even as she thought of it, its previously profound significance seemed to evaporate. Was she going to stop Sergeant Glaister on the warpath by telling her how a bereaved woman couldn't find a presentation case containing an antique knife? A knife she had been only too happy to tell them all about, describing its capabilities with helpful enthusiasm. If the knife had been used for the reasons Ali was imagining, surely Jager would have been less openly chatty on the subject.

What was the more likely explanation, she belatedly asked herself: that Jager simply couldn't remember where she had put it, having stored it elsewhere some time ago because her husband didn't like it; or that she had recently used it to kill her husband and consequently needed to dispose of it? She was a surgeon, after all: if it was a murder weapon, wouldn't she know how to perfectly clean the thing, then put it back in the display case and thus beyond anyone's curiosity?