Black Widow (52 page)

Parlabane watched him crumble as he spoke. His eyes closed, wincing in remembrance of the punch, then tears fell as he let the knife slip from his grasp.

Lucy ran to him, putting her arms around his shoulders as he fell to a crouch. Down on the cold tiles they clung on to each other, helpless and broken. They flinched from Parlabane's gaze, as though in his eyes they saw how they would be regarded when the world found out. They were wretched, naked in their shame. In that moment, he understood that not everything they had told him and Diana about their upbringing was a lie. He could see that they didn't choose this, and for that he felt a brief moment of sympathy.

But they did choose what they had done to Diana, and what they had tried to do to Liz Miller. They did choose what they had done to him.

Eventually, Lucy looked up at Parlabane.

‘What was the hardest part for you?' he asked her. ‘Faking that you liked me?'

She looked away again, said nothing.

Ali was coming out of the toilets when she saw Diana Jager making her way through the station, heading for the exit. Ali knew she was in the building: she had come in to give some more statements, this time helping shape the prosecution. They made eye contact before Ali had a chance to scope the passageway and pretend not to see her.

She wasn't feeling so great, and she had eight hours to get through. Kicking off the shift with a dollop of awkward mixed in with a ladle-full of guilt and regret was not going to make it pass any quicker.

Jager didn't scowl or indeed visibly emote in any way, but that wasn't going to stop Ali projecting.

The good (and innocent) doctor's attention was principally fixed on the reception area ahead, where Calum Weatherson was ready to take her home. He was the guy they had seen getting into his Porsche outside the cottage that time. Turned out she was having an affair with him before all this kicked off, so maybe that explained
some
of why Ali had thought she was acting suspicious.

Rodriguez was waiting for her, a newspaper tucked under his arm as he stood against a wall, all set to begin his shift. She was particularly pleased to see him on a day like this. He always had an energy and positivity about him that she could leech off of when she was running low.

The newspaper was folded but Ali could see Jager's eyes staring out at her from the front page, and couldn't help but feel a stab of accusation.

‘You all right,? You look a bit, well, like you'd be pale if you were, you know.'

‘I'm okay. Just had a mutual eyeball with Diana Jager, that's all.'

‘Bet you wish we'd kept quiet for two minutes and let somebody else take the call that night. I've heard CID are requesting we get banned from responding to an RTA ever again.'

He looked like he was only half joking. Ali knew that they'd be getting grief over this for about a decade, but that was polis for you. They never forgot.

‘I felt awful, though: seeing her, knowing what I put her through. I feel like I ought to write to her and apologise.'

‘Absolutely not. That's not how it works, and you know that. It wasn't you who put her through anything.'

‘I played my part, though. I was suspicious of her from day one, and I was completely wrong.'

‘No. You were suspicious from day one because something about the situation
felt
wrong, and it turned out you were right about that. You've got good instincts, Ali.'

‘So I was wrong but for the right reasons. I'm afraid that doesn't feel reassuring.'

‘Well, it should. It's better than being right for the wrong reasons, because that just means you were lucky. Being wrong for the right reasons will serve you better in the long run.'

Ali nodded. She knew he was right, but that didn't make her feel any better in the here and now.

They began walking out to their car. She thought back to their first shift together, which felt like months ago. It had been less than a fortnight.

‘Hell of a way to christen your new post,' she said.

‘Christ, you're not wrong. My days at the Met already seem like another lifetime. I'm starting to get a handle on this place. I feel like a different person up here.'

‘Aye, you'll be fighting off the girls with a taser, soon enough. I mean, when you're ready for all that,' Ali added, realising it might have been inappropriate.

‘No doubt,' he said.

Rodriguez smiled, that strange wee look on his face that he wore whenever she skirted this area.

‘Except, they won't be girls.'

It took her a second, then a lot of things belatedly clicked into place. He'd even asked her about being religious, sounding her out in case she was going to have a problem with it if he told her. Bloody hell, how had she missed it?

‘Some poliswoman I am. Can't see what's right under my nose.'

Ali burst out laughing. She couldn't help it. A whole host of different tensions gave way and she simply lost it. Rodriguez began laughing too, the pair of them ending up like a couple of hysterical kids.

Eventually she managed to compose herself enough to suggest they get in the car and actually get to work. Rodriguez asked if he could drive, eagerly skipping around to the other side of the car when she acquiesced.

Ali climbed into the passenger side a little gingerly, wincing at another twinge of discomfort as she slid into the seat.

Rodriguez noticed it. His tone was sincere and concerned.

‘You sure you're all right? You're clutching your tummy there like John Hurt in
Alien
.'

‘I'm fine. Just my time of the month.'

Nothing transpired the way we intended, and yet as the jury files out to consider its verdict, I can't escape the feeling that it worked out the way it should.

This was not meant to be my trial. Diana was supposed to be in the dock, and I was supposed to be the one watching from the gallery: looking on in anger and outrage at the crime that had been perpetrated against my brother, against me. But as Jack Parlabane once said to me, it is what it is.

I wanted to plead guilty, but I couldn't convince Peter to join me, so I knew that if I confessed everything, I was throwing him under the wheels. This was all largely my idea, after all. Pleading guilty would have spared us a trial and resulted in a smaller sentence, but Peter convinced himself we could cast enough confusion over everything as to get a not proven verdict at least.

We came up with this bullshit about Peter having some kind of breakdown over his business and his marriage, faking his death so that he could drop out of his life and run away. We told the court that when Jack found me in France, it was because Peter had suddenly got in touch and I had rushed over to help him get his head together, having been pledged to secrecy. We claimed that Courtney Jean Lang was a real person, who had promised investment and then absconded, resulting in the pressure Peter found himself under. Peter therefore knew Lang's place in France would be deserted, which was why he decided to lie low there.

It made just enough sense to cast doubt on the conspiracy theory, we hoped. But it all relied upon nobody believing the single worst truth about us.

That was the thing I was always most afraid of, and yet now that we can't hide it any more, I am relieved. It is amazing how a secret loses its power, how the burden sheds its weight once it is out there in the open. I might be going to jail, but in other ways I have been liberated. For the first time, I feel truly free.

I have come to realise the ways in which I was trapped. I felt trapped when I married Gordon: partly deluding myself that it was real, all the time aware that it was a charade to fool my father. Father paid him off, but I lived permanently under the shadow of him some day revealing what he had discovered when he came home one night after a cancelled business flight.

At the time, when I regarded what I did to Gordon Holman, what I was doing to Jack Parlabane and Diana Jager, they were like pieces on a board, and I prevented myself from seeing them as human beings. It reminded me of my father, and I hated myself for that. I knew it was wrong, but it was as though I refused to acknowledge any reality other than the one I was constructing.

When Jack asked me if the hardest thing was pretending I liked him, something inside me screamed. I wanted to tell him it was the easiest thing. The hardest thing was knowing that I had to use and discard him, pretend he was nothing.

Peter can do that. He's more like our father that way. I couldn't fake it: I had to live it.

At times when I was with Jack, like that night in the bar, it was as though I could simply step over a line into a world where our growing closer was real. I could choose to live in that world instead. But I loved Peter, and everything was already in train by the time I even approached Jack at his flat.

I still love Peter, but what happened has freed me, shown me that I have been in pursuit of a single notion for so long, I had stopped seeing the wider world around me. I was so full of anger, full of resentment at what I felt I couldn't have, that it blinded me to all that I could.

I actually liked Diana. I admired her. Now I can admit that. I couldn't before, because of what I was complicit in doing to her. I told myself she would only get a few years in prison: she ought to be able to argue self-defence, given that Peter had hit her. But these were merely lies I told myself so that I didn't have to think about what this was ultimately costing an innocent woman.

I look across the courtroom at her now and I see her take her partner's hand, excitedly placing it upon her swollen belly. I don't need to be a lip reader to know what she is saying to him:

‘It's kicking.'