Black Widow (13 page)

‘What did he tell you?'

‘Do you know anything about Diana Jager?'

‘A little, as it happens. My wi— my ex-wife is an anaesthetist. I know Diana was Bladebitch, from the blog.'

‘Diana is a driven, obsessive person. That's what impressed Peter about her. He said he was inspired by her, and he was very taken that someone so driven should be so interested in him. She'd need to be driven and obsessive to do what she does and to have achieved all that she has achieved. But I think Peter became an obsession too.'

She turned the cup absently again, her gaze aimed in its direction but her focus elsewhere.

‘Peter said she kept complaining that he had changed. If you knew Peter, you'd know that's absurd. Anyone else would say Peter's problem is that he doesn't change. I think that when people marry so fast, when it sinks in that it's for keeps they suddenly realise what they're committed to. That's when they finally see all the things they were ignoring or in denial about. I get the impression Diana had this idealised version of Peter, the perfect man who had made her dreams come true, and she was not prepared to tolerate any deviation from that.'

‘So you're saying she was smothering him,' he suggested, hoping to hurry things along. ‘Is it your concern that he was feeling trapped, and that he…' Parlabane paused, allowing time for his meaning to get there in advance and thus permit his choice of words to be sensitively oblique. ‘…maybe did something desperate?'

‘That crossed my mind. But here's the thing. It only crossed my mind because of something Diana told me. She said a few weeks back that she was worried about Peter because they'd had an argument while he was driving, and he almost lost control of the car at Widow Falls. The exact same place his car went in the river.'

Parlabane sat up straighter, his story reflexes firing.

‘Diana blamed the argument and his state of mind on his work, said it was taking over. She told me about this as if she was confiding in me. Let me tell you, Mr Parlabane, my sister-in-law and I have never been close. She does not confide in me.'

She lifted both her hands, palms-up, in a stop gesture. Whether she was putting the brakes on herself or signalling to him not to press her was unclear. Either way, he could tell she was concerned she had gone too far, and yet Parlabane's instincts told him the opposite was true: that there was something more she wasn't telling him, some deeper reason she should be prepared to share these concerns with a stranger, and a journalist at that.

‘Look, I know how all this sounds, and I hate myself for even implying, but I know I'd hate myself more if I thought something was wrong and I never acted. Christ, maybe that's it, though, don't you think? I knew Peter was in a bad way and I did nothing, so now I'm projecting and transferring and God knows what.'

‘What is it you think I can do?'

He spoke delicately, aware that bringing things around to the practical was a good way of focusing people when they were upset like this.

‘I thought maybe you could look into it a little deeper than the tabloids have. I realise this might be a waste of your time; in fact, with apologies, that would be the preferable outcome for me. Ideally what I want is for you to come back and tell me there's nothing to this, and I'm simply crazy and paranoid and all messed up because I lost my brother. But if there's another story here, I want to make sure it gets told.'

While the memory of a first kiss can still be bittersweet, the thought of the sex now turns my stomach.

I was seduced. Peter seduced me.

I feel embarrassed saying that. I always thought women complaining that they had been seduced were self-deluding and pathetic. Oh, spare us, I would think. You're a grown woman, you abide by your decisions, you make them consciously and deliberately.

I believed I was too smart, too strong and frankly too cynical to be manipulated that way, but in practice I was stupid, weak and naive. I was easy prey.

When people talk about seduction in a relationship, they usually mean sex. They're wrong. The real seduction is not about sex: it's about trust. You don't need to be seduced into sex when you are in love with someone: you give yourself willingly because it is what you both desire. But you only believe it is your desire because the seduction has already happened.

It is an act of deceit, a misrepresentation of the self, and by it Peter seduced me into something far more intimate than sex. He made me love him. How angry would you be with someone who betrayed that?

We kissed for so long in that car, making out like a couple of teenagers as the rain pattered the roof and the wipers beat back and forth. It felt perfect, one of those moments when the world melted away, when the past and the future melted away. We weren't kissing as a prelude to anything else. I knew he wasn't going to ask me to stay the night. We both understood that this was all that was going to happen, and all that we wanted.

Eventually we broke off, both laughing self-consciously.

‘I'm light-headed,' I said.

‘Can I see you tomorrow?' he asked.

‘Apart from at work, you mean?'

‘Yeah. Oh shit. I forgot. Cobalt need me to go down to Edinburgh for a few days to help out on another project. I'll be back on Thursday, though.'

‘I'm on-call on Thursday,' I remembered with a grimace.

‘Friday then?'

‘Friday, definitely.'

Peter let out a sigh, his expression regretful enough for me to wonder what was wrong.

‘It's going to feel like a long week,' he said.

It was and it wasn't.

Every day that passed added disproportionately to what seemed a very long time since we were kissing in my car on Sunday night, longer still since we had first met in my office. Yet the individual days themselves passed quicker than normal. I feared my mind might drift off on daft girly feelings of longing but rather I achieved what Peter had referred to as a flow state in my work. I would watch my trainee finish suturing the patient and see from the clock that three or four hours had passed since I first scrubbed up. The minor and major irritations of the job didn't seem to get to me as much as usual, with only the delays between patients piquing my frustration.

On a couple of the lists I was doubled up with Calum Weatherson, or Hipster Jesus as I had uncharitably christened him back when we first met. He had shaved off the beard since then. I wondered whether I had made him self-conscious about it, but if so I wasn't going to censure myself for bullying. It was a massive improvement. He had a handsome face with a ruggedness about it that was actually lessened by the face-fuzz. When we got talking, I learned that it had been his wife Megan who had prevailed upon him to shave. It was particularly nice to be able to show him that I wasn't the scary nightmare who had pitched up and insulted a patient the day we first met.

He was a good prospect: solid and safe in his work, if somewhat slow and deliberate. We chatted about books as he stitched up, and it turned out we shared a love of Neal Stephenson, though I was keener on his historical stuff where Calum liked the SF.

Peter called every night. There were no games, no strategic posturing. He wanted to talk.

Late on the Tuesday night, he suggested we watch a movie together. We both cued up the same film on Netflix, Skype open in a minimised window in each of our laptop screens as we sat up in bed. We were able to share comments and see each other's reactions. I was going to say it was like a virtual date, but in fact it was more like virtual already living together, and it felt so right.

We did it again on the Wednesday too.

When the movie was over, he told me he had something for me that would make me laugh. He sent me over a file, though when I clicked on it, nothing happened.

‘Computer genius,' he chided himself. ‘Wrong format. This is why I'm not the next Bill Gates.'

He tried again and this time when I opened it, I saw a slide show of photographs from the airsoft games on Sunday. I hadn't even been aware of a photographer, which was why the shots were so natural. There I was, toting a machine gun; yomping through the trees; prostrate under fire; crouching to take aim; walking back towards the muster point.

I barely recognised myself even in the ones without the mask. I looked so happy.

The Thursday night was always going to be the hardest. I was there until around three in the morning. We had just enough cases to prevent me from going home, but the gaps between them were soul-crushingly drawn-out, rounded off with an emergency bowel repair coming in by ambulance all the way from Skye.

By the time Friday evening came around, it seemed like ages since we'd last spoken on Skype, and this was exacerbated by feeling as though we had been together – if you could call it that – for a lot longer than five days. I'm not too proud to admit I was clock-watching in the hours running up to when Peter was due to arrive, unable to distract myself with journals, papers or even an episode of something on TV.

It would be an understatement to say the date didn't exactly go according to plan. I had made a reservation at an intimate Italian place I'd heard good things about. Peter was going to pick me up and park back at his flat, then we'd walk to the restaurant via a bar where he said he'd had surprisingly decent mojitos.

In contrast to the previous Friday, he turned up about fifteen minutes early.

‘I was trying to think of a plausible pretext,' he explained, ‘but the truth is I just couldn't wait.'

I was kissing him before I had even closed my front door, and we were naked on top of my duvet by the time he was originally scheduled to arrive.

Between the second and third bouts I managed to make a giggly call to the restaurant to cancel the table. Sometime around nine we ordered in pizza.

We didn't have anything resembling a sensible discussion until after breakfast the following morning, sipping coffee and nibbling croissants in bed. I'd normally be uncomfortable with the flakes of pastry crumbling all over the duvet, but every stitch of these sheets was imminently going in the washing machine anyway.

He was content to listen, like no male I had ever met. He understood what it was to listen, too: i.e. just that, listening, no mansplaining or unsolicited advice.

I realised I was dominating the conversation, or at least the subject of me was dominating it, so I got him to tell me a little about his past. I asked about his family background, but he skirted around it. He mentioned a sister and I asked if they were close. He said ‘yes and no', but wouldn't elaborate. I got the impression there was something painful back there, but didn't press it.

Kind of like myself, he was more expansive on the subject of his job. He talked me through what he described as a non-glittering career in computers, in which he had barely succeeded in ‘scaling the middle'.

‘I could have climbed the ladder in a couple of companies where I was consulting, but I never felt sufficiently engaged with what they were doing or what I was doing for them. My interest would drift and my enthusiasm would get channelled into whatever side project I had going on in my spare time, and I should stress that these side projects were not works of wayward genius that simply needed the right mentor.'

‘But you do enjoy aspects of what you do?' I asked, as his manner on the previous Friday afternoon had not indicated a man who hated his job.

‘Absolutely. There are things I enjoy on a day-to-day basis, but it's not demanding the best of me. I was never sure whether the problem was that I never found something that truly engaged all of me, or whether I lacked the application and oomph that would make me truly engage. I'm envious of you because no matter what heartaches it brings, you at least know you found the thing you're
meant
to do.'

I had never appreciated what a blessing this was. When you have a vocation from such an early age, you don't give much thought to might-have-beens, and still less to what it must be like not to know what you want to do.

‘I like coding, tinkering,
hacking
in the original sense of the word, so people might assume that working in IT is what I'm meant to do, but I've never felt I had the right outlet. Not until quite recently.'

‘I take it we're not discussing hospital IT here?'

‘No. I've come up with that rarest and most precious of things: a simple idea that meets a need. I was thinking about how you've inspired me to knuckle down, so I wondered whether it was serendipitous to have met you now that I've got an idea I believe in, but maybe I'm harbouring this belief in an idea because of how you make me feel.'

‘Who knows? Maybe it's like the uncertainty principle, and being sure of one part of the equation means you can't know the other.'

‘I'm trying to be serious here,' he insisted, though he was laughing.

‘So what's your big plan?'

He laughed again, in a kind of exasperated self-reproach.

‘What's funny?'

‘Uncertainty. I can't tell you much about the project. Its value at this stage is very much contingent upon being first, getting it implemented before someone else has a similar idea.'

‘Can't you copyright it?'

‘It's more about how being first to market scoops the pot. Put it this way: can you name a competitor to PayPal?'

I got the idea, and I must have looked impressed.

‘Don't get excited. I'm not kidding myself this could make me a billionaire, but I do think it's worth pursuing. I'm simply trying to explain why it's confidential at this stage.'

‘And you don't trust me yet,' I teased. ‘Despite what we just did together. Six or was it seven times?'

He smiled but he did look a tad vulnerable.

‘Please don't push the issue, because this stuff is so hard for me. Believe me, I am not good at keeping secrets and I don't have a poker face. But I think I've been dealt a hell of a hand here, and so it would be the worst failure of my life if I didn't do whatever it takes to bring this off.'