Black Widow (33 page)

It was the last thing I remember before exhaustion forced me to sleep, and the first thought to greet me when I woke the next day. Had Peter once been married to this woman, and if so, why was he still seeing her around the time he proposed to Liz Miller? And why was his father so disparaging of the match?

In my angst and desperation I thought of a way I might find out more. Unfortunately it was as unethical as it was illegal. Even worse, these were the only two obstacles in an otherwise short and simple path, and I doubted I had the willpower to stop myself.

I could access Peter's medical records from the computer in my office. Nobody would ever question it, and in the unlikely event that they did, I could say that I was checking something on my husband's behalf; most importantly, there was no way he would ever know. Next of kin past and present might be on the system, depending on how much of his information was digitised and how recently the files had been updated. It was possible to look up patients' records and see them listed as being married to people they had divorced years ago, if they hadn't been seen by a doctor in the intervening time.

It was equally possible I would find out nothing. Deep down I don't think I seriously believed Peter was married before. I think what I was really looking for was the reassurance that he hadn't been.

I had a busy list that day, and didn't get to my office until after five. I knew Peter would be already waiting for me at home: his ‘flight' having been due in mid-afternoon. I had wrestled with the morality of my intended actions all day, but it was a catch-weight contest. None of the ethical objections was a match for the justifications I could stand against them. Peter had forced me to this. He had lied to me, and left me no other means of getting to the truth. I was trying to save my marriage, I even told myself. But accessing those records proved to be the action that effectively ended it.

I didn't find out whether Peter once had another wife. Instead I found out that my husband once had something even more devastating: a vasectomy.

The supermarket manager asked again if Ali and Rodriguez wouldn't like a cup of tea or coffee before they left. She was never sure whether it was better to explain that they weren't permitted to accept rather than politely declining as usual. The former at least assured people that it wasn't your choice to refuse, but it also took away a certain human element if they learned that you were restricted in terms of your normal interactions with the public.

They had been called out to take details and statements over some criminal damage outside the rear of the store, which appeared to be evidence of an attempted break-in. They had taken a look around the exterior and then been invited into the manager's office where they could chat further out of the blustery rain that was whipping around.

It was on their way back out through the store that Ali's eye was drawn to another batch of home pregnancy kits on a shelf in the toiletries section. It was irritating how her subconscious seemed to home in on these things that she had previously never noticed: in recent days she couldn't nip out for a pint of milk without catching a glimpse. It was like she was being stalked.

She knew why, though. Using one would answer the question, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know. It was Schrodinger's pregnancy right now: there were still two possible futures until she opened the box, meaning she could still cling to the possibility that it was a false alarm. And yet why didn't the confirmation that it was a false alarm strike her as an equally probable outcome? If it had, surely the peace of mind the test potentially offered would have driven her to take it by now.

She knew she couldn't run from it for ever, but she would rather run from it a wee while longer.

The rain had become torrential by the time they reached the front doors. They decided to stay inside for a few minutes to see if it would lighten. Ali's eyes strayed to the news and magazine stands nearby, which was when she was reminded of something from the last time they were on-shift together.

‘That guy outside Jager's house: Jack Parlabane. How did you know he was a reporter?'

She meant to ask Rodriguez this after she told the bloke to move along, but when they got back into the car, they had been called out to an emergency. There was an alarmed report from a motorist that it appeared a woman was about to throw herself off the Kessock Bridge. They had driven there, blue lights and sirens, but when they arrived it turned out to be an inflatable doll dressed up and tied to the rails. Someone had put it up as a jokey sign to mark a friend's fortieth birthday, knowing they would be driving past it in the morning.

‘I recognised the name. Think I'd seen his picture too. He was in the news around about the time I was going through the worst of my break-up. Irritating how things stick in your mind like that: you think you're cocooned in your problems but you're actually gathering little mementos.'

‘He was
in
the news?'

‘Yeah. Remember that business with Sir Anthony Mead, the MoD civil servant?'

‘Vaguely. A scandal, something about a leak. You're saying he's a political reporter? So what was he doing up here?'

‘At the time I assumed the usual: another tabloid tragedy angle. But now that you ask, I'm not so sure. He's best known for looking into criminal conspiracies.'

Ali looked out into the rain, which only seemed to be getting heavier. She reached for her radio.

‘Dispatch, this is Romeo Victor Four.'

‘Hello, Ali. What's up?'

‘A wee favour. That call we responded to the other night, report of a suspicious vehicle on Culloden Road. Do you have an ID on the caller?'

There was a pause, the clacking of a keyboard.

‘Here you go: the complainant is listed as Dr Diana Jager.'

Ali looked at Rodriguez to confirm he had heard.

‘The guy claimed he had only been there ten minutes,' he said. ‘I'm starting to think he was telling the truth. He was just sitting there when we arrived. Can't imagine he was doing anything conspicuous, to have drawn attention to himself. Jager knew he was out there and she wanted rid of him.'

‘Begging the question: what does he know that we don't?'

I sat gaping at the screen. My reaction would have been comical had what prompted it not been so heartbreaking. I remembered Peter showing me clips of people reacting to a gross-out video from the grim depths of the internet. That's what I must have looked like: aghast, horrified, disgusted, incredulous. My head was swimming and I had to scurry on unsteady feet across the office to the plastic waste-bin because I feared I was going to throw up.

My mind echoed with all the times Peter had talked about wanting to have kids, the earnest sincerity in his voice as he described the childhood he intended to give them. It was one of the things that sold me on the idea of marriage when I was worried it might be too soon. We both wanted children, and time was running out for me.

The lying bastard had his tubes tied the whole time.

I now had to go home and face this man. I had to pretend I didn't know this most grievous of secrets, had to pretend I didn't know
any
of the things I had discovered since his printer made its fateful intervention on Friday. Then I remembered it was far worse than that: we were supposed to be going to my colleague Suzanne's place for dinner, over at Kingsburgh. I would have to inhabit this role, play my part in this fiction, all evening.

Looking back, the hardest thing about that moment, and about my lonely and dread-filled short drive home from the hospital was that there was nobody I could talk to about this. Nobody to pour my heart out to, nobody whose wise counsel or mere sympathy would help me deal with it. Isn't that why you find a partner? A husband? So that you can share your worries, your fears and your woes with someone who knows you best and soon start to feel better merely from knowing you're not alone in this?

Instead, walking through my front door and standing in the presence of my husband, I had never felt so lonely, so utterly isolated. I had to stand there and listen to his lies about how his London trip had gone.

He was strategically heading off my enquiries by saying it was all boring business stuff and barely worth relating, so he wouldn't have to invent anything that might trip himself up. I could have pressed him for more details, but I knew he could always hide behind the NDA.

I couldn't challenge him about Courtney Jean Lang or the fact that I knew he had actually been in Glasgow, because I'd have to say how I discovered these things. It would all have to come out, and then he'd know precisely how much – and perhaps how little – I truly knew. I didn't have a hand that would force him to show his.

I thought many times about calling off dinner, but I didn't have a pretext. Suzanne had seen me in the corridor as I made my way to my office following my list, so she knew I wasn't ill. I had no option but to suck it down.

Somehow I got through the evening, as so many women before me must have done: acting as though there was nothing wrong, bizarrely press-ganged into a silent conspiracy to conceal the damaging lies that my husband had told me.

That would never be me, I had once promised myself: the cowed and meek wife, living out a lie for fear of public shame. But as I played my part, sipping wine and conversing, smiling and laughing, I saw how easily such fictions could become everyday reality. Maybe for some women the lines gradually became blurred until they started to forget the difference between the public ideal of their marriage and the tawdry truth they lived with.

If there was one crack in the façade, it was that I drank more than I normally would. More than I ought, for sure. Perhaps it wasn't noticeable to everyone else, or perhaps they put it down to the fact that Peter was driving for a change. I don't think my behaviour was conspicuously tipsy, but tipsy I most definitely was. At dinner it helped me hide my torment beneath a mask of bonhomie, but it was later, on the road out of Kingsburgh, that it got the better of me.

An intoxicated woman is vulnerable to seduction, and on this occasion it was denial that took advantage and got its hand up my skirt. The medical records had to be wrong, I told myself. I'd seen plenty of misfilings in my time: the wrong name keyed into a data field, an overburdened secretary mixing up cases. It simply couldn't be true. But I had to hear this from Peter, spoken from the same lips that had so often told me how he looked forward to us raising a family together.

I came up with a reason for why I had seen his records. It seemed plausible enough to me at the time, though my bar wasn't high: I just needed something that would embolden me enough to bring up the subject.

‘Peter, I need to ask you something important.'

‘Fire away.'

‘Have you had a vasectomy?'

I saw the tiniest of shudders pass through him, a flash in his eyes like when I asked him about the rail tickets.

‘Why would you ask that?'

His reply was defensive, agitated. Nothing he had done or said so far sounded like a denial.

‘I saw your medical records. I was thinking about you while I was looking up a patient's files and I absent-mindedly keyed your name into the search instead of his. Suddenly I'm looking at a page telling me you had a vasectomy in Edinburgh back in—'

‘You looked up my medical records?

‘It was an accident.'

‘Was it hell an accident. You've never done anything absentminded in your life, Diana. You're telling me you took advantage of your professional position to go snooping into my private—'

‘That's hardly the major issue, Peter, is it? Regardless of how I found out, I think the more relevant matter is that you told me you wanted to have kids when you've had a medical procedure to ensure you bloody well
can't
have kids. You lied to me about one of the most important things in our lives.'

I saw his knuckles whiten as his body tensed and he gripped the steering wheel tighter. His right foot became heavier too, gunning the engine in a surrogate growl.

He said nothing for a while, his silence confirming my discovery. I didn't feel any sense of vindication about having finally cornered him on one of my now many suspicions; I only felt anger doused in cold misery.

‘You're right.'

His voice was low, coming from somewhere deep and dark within him.

‘I misled you. But only because I didn't think you'd have me if you knew the truth. I wanted to be with you always, and I was afraid this would be a deal-breaker. I was planning to try having it reversed, and then you wouldn't need to know it ever happened, but everything has been so hectic.'

Only a few days ago, I might have fallen for this, a willing confederate in my own deception. Now every word he spoke was suspect, and the more solicitous it sounded, the less credence it deserved. Nonetheless, little as I could trust the answers, I still had questions, one above all:

‘Why the hell would you have a vasectomy in your twenties?'

Again the engine spoke his initial reply, accelerating incautiously until we were right on the tail of the car in front.

‘You don't understand. Before I met you … Things looked different. If you knew about my father … If people knew about my father…'

We hit a straight stretch of road. I could see headlights approaching, but Peter floored the pedal and overtook the slower car in front. The oncoming vehicle had to brake, I was sure, and sounded its horn in a sustained blare of rebuke.

‘Well, why don't you tell me? I'm your wife. You complain about me not trusting you, but you've never entrusted me with these things that I might be able to help you with.'

He shook his head grimly, eyes blazing. Ahead, the road curved and snaked as it hugged the course of the river. I started to get worried. I thought of my own autopilot drive the day before and realised how detached Peter might be from the task in his hands.