Black Widow (51 page)

Then a male voice spoke up, loud and distinct, the accent ‘middle-class Scottish', as Diana had described it.

‘Yeah, stick a couple of slices on for me as well. I'll be through in a sec.'

He heard a door open down the hall, followed by footsteps. She was heading for the kitchen.

If he moved now, he could maybe get out before he was seen, though he wouldn't be able to close the door without it being heard. They had just had sex, though: they would never be more vulnerable or unsuspecting as this.

He held his ground. When she walked in here in about five seconds, he would get hard proof of Cecily Greysham-Ellis's secret alias, while down the hall lay incontrovertible evidence that Diana Jager was innocent.

Parlabane's phone was already recording everything, but for back-up he set his camera to video mode and placed it down on the table next to the letters.

That was when it struck him that he was in France, where Courtney and Jean were both men's names.

Parlabane felt a sudden lurching, like the floor was shifting beneath him.

Courtney Jean Lang wasn't his lover's alias: it was Peter's new identity, acquired no doubt with the help of Sam Finnegan. This meant Peter didn't need to trust the other beneficiary named on the insurance policy: he
was
the other beneficiary.

Parlabane's mind raced, trying to calculate the consequences. He couldn't see how this changed anything substantial, so why did he have the gut-wrenching sensation that he had missed something crucial, something that had been right in front of him the entire time?

Why did he have the horrible fear that he was about to be blindsided?

His heart began thumping and he involuntarily took a step back.

The door pushed open and she walked in wearing just a T-shirt, oblivious as she reached for the switch. The lights came on and she was revealed to him at last.

Peter's conspirator. Peter's lover. Peter's sister.

He had been sent to spend the night in the unused maid's quarters, a cold and largely unused little room containing only a bed and a nightstand. No books, no music, no television and definitely no computer. This was punishment for when his father discovered the phone bill he had run up. It was back in the dial-up days, and what did the tight-fisted bastard expect when he wouldn't spring for a deal on a dedicated ISDN line for the internet? Even paying at that per-minute rate, it was a drop in the ocean for a man of his means, who thought nothing of spending twice that on a single bottle of wine.

He had been sitting there on the bed, still tearful after the ferocity of the dressing-down: his father's words about him ‘never amounting to anything if he wasted his time on computers' seeping into his psyche like poison. Then there was a knock at the door, and Lucy came in. She put her arm around him. It started as a hug, really. But then it became something else, and in that moment how they saw each other changed for ever.

Yes, it was an aberration. Early on, they frequently forswore what they were doing and vowed it would never be repeated. Then a dam would break, and it never felt like it was only one of them who cracked first. It always felt mutual, almost telepathic, and it always went that bit further than the last time, until there were no barriers left to cross.

They started off being discreet to the point of paranoid, but gradually they came to realise what had developed between them was so out of the ordinary that no one ever thought to look for it. It seemed amazing to them: as though their relationship was invisible, a secret protected by an enchantment that meant nobody else could see what was right in front of them. But inevitably they took that for granted.

They got careless. They got caught.

Father acted as though they had done it specifically to hurt and offend him, like they had planned the whole thing as a personal affront. In his mind, of course, it was always about him.

That was when he told them they were getting nothing: that they were not only disinherited, but would be receiving no financial assistance once they left school. He dressed it up as something else when he was explaining it to other people – some bollocks about learning self-sufficiency – but it was his sulk, his vengeance.

He relented slightly with regard to their university careers, but only so that he could ensure the pair of them weren't staying in the same city, terrified of the shame if some rumour got out. Hence Lucy went to Edinburgh and Peter to St Andrews.

It wasn't a great distance, but the fact was that they could have gone to Aberdeen and Oxford and it would have made no difference.

They thought Father's rage would pass, that he would climb down if they gave the impression it had simply been a weird phase that was now over. And at that stage, for a while at least, they did try to convince
themselves
that it was over. Lucy even got married.

It had been painful for Peter, but they talked about how it might be for the best: that he would find someone too, and they would put all this behind them. Furthermore, they hoped that there would be fatted calf on the wedding menu for Sir Hamish's prodigal daughter, and both his heirs would be restored to his good graces; not to mention his will.

Unfortunately he remained immovable and unforgiving, though it didn't help that during Lucy's short-lived marriage, their attempts at abstinence ultimately proved as successful as their efforts at discretion. Lucy's husband Gordon discovered them. It cost Father money to cover up the mess, and they knew then that there was no way back.

Husband, wife. Brother, sister. These were only labels, definitions. You were defined by your actions and feelings, not by nomenclature. You might be married to someone, but that didn't mean you were in love with them. Not like the two of them were in love.

They didn't choose this: that was what nobody ever appreciated. Other people would be appalled by their breaking of this sacred taboo, but other people didn't have what they had: this kind of bond, this kind of unity. And that disapproval only forced them closer together. They understood quite implicitly that they didn't need anybody else, and that nobody else mattered.

Nor did other people know what it was like to be brought up so close to all of that wealth and never be allowed to enjoy the freedoms and pleasures it could unlock. They had been forced to endure all of the duty and responsibility that was drummed into them about their heritage, but now that they had come of age, they were being denied its privileges.

They had often talked about living abroad, starting a life together somewhere nobody knew them. Even then, they knew that one of them would need a new identity. That was when the idea of faking Peter's death first came up. That way, he could become somebody else, cutting off all ties to the past. They could even get married. He remembered discussing it one intoxicating night, Lucy telling him how this Finnegan bloke she once worked with had all kinds of dodgy contacts that might make this possible. As a joke, Peter said it was a shame he didn't have life insurance.

That was when their plan was born.

This time he was the one who would be getting married, living a lie and sleeping with someone else. It would take a lot of work and sacrifice, years in the planning and the execution, but they could both work all their lives and come nowhere close to earning this much money.

It took patience to find the right candidate. There were women who were perfect but to whom he couldn't get close, or who would never give him a second look; and there were women to whom he did get close, only to find their other credentials didn't seem as convincing as he had envisaged.

Liz Miller had been ideal, but he had blown it with his impatience. He had moved too fast at a sensitive stage and she had started to sense something was wrong.

Then his job with Cobalt had taken him to Inverness, where he found out that this scary surgeon the IT guys detested was none other than the infamous Doctor Diana Jager. Having worked in hospital IT in the past, he knew all about Bladebitch, so when Lucy delved deeper into her background, discovering the accidental death of her student flatmate, they realised they had a winner.

They stared at each other, mutually uncomprehending, mutually horrified.

She let out a startled gasp but she did not scream, because although he was an intruder, he was not a stranger. It took her a moment to place him in this context, to work out why he shouldn't be here, and then to realise the enormity of the fact that he was.

Parlabane felt like he was falling. That lurching beneath his feet had opened a chasm that was swallowing him.

Headlong into the abyss.

He had thought he was venturing into the darkness on Lucy's behalf, ever wary of dragging her down with him. But all the time, she had been the one leading him there, and he hadn't seen it.

She had been in the same position as Peter: raised with the trappings of great wealth but denied the privileges and freedoms to which she must have thought she would be one day entitled. She was the one who came to Parlabane with her doubts over the accident, and if she had never done that, then certain apparently damning evidence against Diana would never have come to light.

Follow me down.

Jesus, it was so obvious now. She had given him a list of names: some of them unknowingly primed by Peter to pass on just the right information. Now he understood why Alan Harper was puzzled that Peter should be reaching out to him of all people, confiding in him about his married life and depicting his wife as a controlling obsessive. It was so that Harper would feel the need to unburden himself later, troubled by the fact that Peter had left a distraught message on the night he apparently died, worrying about being in too deep.

Follow me down.

When Parlabane had begun to think there was probably nothing more to the story than how it appeared, he had gone for a drink with Lucy, at her request. She left before him, and shortly afterwards he was abducted, drugged, driven around in a van and then dumped back at his flat. All he knew about his assailant was her distinctive scent, which Lucy knew to be Blackberry and Bay, because Peter had given it to Diana as a present.

Follow me down.

Peter had primed Harkness by mentioning Diana's student-years tragedy, and then Lucy had subtly nudged Parlabane in the right direction so that he would track down Emily Gayle. She said there was a friend Diana was still in touch with from her time at Oxford, but pretended she couldn't remember the name, so that he didn't twig he was being manipulated.

She had been part of the insurance con from the start. She had recruited the money and assistance of Sam Finnegan, and it had then been her crucial role to drip-feed the story to some mug of a journalist who would think he was discovering all of this for himself.

Somewhere amidst the maelstrom he found his voice. He surprised himself by how calm he sounded. He surprised himself that he didn't scream with hurt and anger.

‘Hello, Lucy.'

He heard hurried footsteps, Peter having emerged from the bedroom to realise something was wrong. In a moment he was at his sister's side, his ashen face a mix of incomprehension, outrage and fear. Like Lucy he had pulled on a T-shirt, the kitchen being too cold for sitting around in the altogether. He had a bandage around his shin: a shallow place to cut to the bone.

‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing in our house?'

It was Lucy who answered, her voice low and broken.

‘Peter, this is Jack Parlabane.'

It was possible to see it in his eyes the moment he deduced what this meant: the flash of panic Diana had described.

‘Sounds like you shag pretty well for a deid bloke. But if you thought you were well fucked five minutes ago, I've got some difficult news.'

Peter looked around, frantic, calculating, like he was searching for a way out. Parlabane couldn't see one.

He edged past Lucy and lunged towards a worktop, hauling open a drawer and brandishing a carving knife.

‘Peter, what are you doing?' she asked, tremulous, afraid.

‘He's the only one who knows. If we get rid of him … if we…'

He couldn't even bring himself to name it. That didn't augur well for his ability to do it, but the guy was desperate, and right then he believed Parlabane was the only thing standing between him and several million pounds.

‘I'm not the only one, Peter. My associate knows where I am and knows everything else too. This phone has been uploading video of everything since I got here. It's being relayed straight to Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod of Police Scotland. Believe me: this is over.'

Peter began advancing. His eyes were wild, his hands shaking. He
needed
to believe there was still a way out of this.

‘Why did you come alone, then? You're lying.'

Parlabane held his ground. He knew the back door was still open, so flight remained an option, but he had a reason to believe it wouldn't come to that.

Peter stopped. His expression was aghast, haunted as he gripped the knife in front of his face. He wasn't coming any closer, but Parlabane knew he still needed to talk him down.

‘The hardest part of this was when you had to hit her, wasn't it?'

Parlabane saw that flash in his eyes again: an awareness of his own vulnerability.

‘It was crucial to the plan: on the night you disappeared, you had to provoke a final argument, and you had to hit her. Diana told me. She thought you were shaking because you were angry, but you were trembling because of what you knew you had to do. You had to hit her hard enough to leave a mark for the cops to see. Doing that took more guts than cutting yourself.'

Peter didn't have a brutal streak, cornered or otherwise: it was merely another of Lucy's lies, part of the narrative they had constructed.

‘It was only one punch, but it was harder than all the other stuff, wasn't it? Ruining Diana's life, pretending to be in love with her, setting her up for a murder conviction: you could do all that. It was a game: a real-life role-playing game. That's second nature to you, but violence is not. When you bundled me into that van with a sack over my head, it wasn't just so that I couldn't see your faces. It was so that you couldn't see mine.'