Black Widow (39 page)

As the sergeant laid out the extent of the emotional trauma the woman had already been through, only to have her suffering exacerbated by the suggestion that she might be under suspicion, Ali felt doubly awful for having let her down. Hazel had been so supportive of Ali since the moment she first showed up as an eager but anxious probationer, always taking an interest in her progress and offering a sympathetic ear when she was feeling insecure.

Thus her shame stung all the more for it being Hazel who had been put in the position of doling out the lashes, but that wasn't even the worst thing about this. That distinction went to the horrific realisation that Bill Ellis was right. She had looked only for evidence that supported her theory and willingly interpreted it in ways that fitted her take on the story.

Suddenly she could see alternative interpretations not merely of Jager misplacing the knife, but of everything that had previously pointed only to one explanation. The black eye, the position of the car seat, even Jager's muted emotional response to the news. Doctors dealt with horrendous stuff every day: as a police officer, Ali should have appreciated that. A practised impression of calm or detachment didn't mean she wasn't silently screaming with despair beneath the surface. And now Ali in her naivety and inexperience had gone and made it so much worse.

Ali could see all of her accumulated career progress and future ambitions disintegrating before her eyes. She was looking at disciplinary action, and she'd deserve it; even worse, she had dragged the sensitive, charming and all-round lovely new guy into the mire with her.

In case she needed another lesson in how things didn't always turn out to mean what they appeared on the surface, suddenly there was a knock at the door before Bill Ellis barged in without waiting for a response from the sergeant. Ali thought that it was proof no situation was ever quite so bad that it couldn't get worse.

It was actually her salvation.

‘Sorry to interrupt, Sergeant, but I'm just off the phone to Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod down in Glasgow. I think you'd better dial back on the bollocking until you hear what she said will be in tomorrow's paper.'

Parlabane pulled off the A1 at Morpeth and drove around until he found a café with Wi-Fi. He ordered a coffee and booted up his laptop in a corner booth, where he sat with his back to the wall. If he found what he was looking for, then he didn't want anybody catching a glimpse over his shoulder.

A call to Cobalt got him the name of the database management system used in Inverness Royal and at a large number of hospitals around the country. It was called Holobase, and as Harkness indicated, it had a large and busy support forum where system administrators and other IT staff could search for solutions, give feedback, trade tips and less formally shoot the shit on everything from TV shows to recipes.

Parlabane keyed the names Diana Jager and Bladebitch into the search field, already thinking ahead to the filters he would have to apply in order to narrow the results. Instead he found himself disappointed by the paucity of the response. There was only a handful of posts, all of them returned due to the inclusion of the word Diana. There were none for Jager or Bladebitch.

Parlabane noted that all of the Diana results dated from the past couple of years. He tried searching for what he anticipated to be universal terms, such as Windows and Android, reverse ordered by date. The earliest posts were from no further than five years ago. Evidently there had been a purge of forum content around about then, and he didn't think the time frame was coincidental.

According to Harkness, this had been where the feeding frenzy over Jager's blog got started, and Parlabane suspected the admins had been busy cleaning up the aftermath, protecting Holobase itself from any fallout.

He had a trawl through the more gossipy sub-forums, from where it was clear that, like any bulletin board with a long history, it had evolved its own in-jokes and arcana among regular users, including contextually baffling terms employed to get around content filters. They could be posting about Jager in the thread that was open in front of him now and he wouldn't know that was who they were referring to.

There was a list of users currently online at the bottom of the page, one of which jumped out at him: Kickstart_My_Heart. It had never sullied Parlabane's turntable, but he recognised it as a Motley Crue song. He checked his watch. It was early afternoon on a weekday, meaning there was a strong chance that this was Harkness.

The forum had an automated registration system, so in a couple of minutes Parlabane had created an account under the name Theatre_of_Pain and validated it from a disposable email address.

He was then able to send a direct message to Kickstart_My_Heart.

Hey Craig, got locked out my account due to a server glitch so I'm on a temp log-in. Can you hook a brother up with a link to those Dirty Diana goodies? It's for a thing. There's a pint in it for you.

Parlabane sipped his coffee and waited, hitting the refresh button every few seconds, though he wasn't sure that was necessary.

A few minutes later he got a reply.

For a thing? Well seen there not for a wank, because she isn't worth one. Anyhoo, here ya go m8.

Parlabane followed the link pasted beneath the sub-literate message. It took him to the first post on a thread entitled ‘An old friend like we've never seen her before [NSFW]'.

The post consisted of another link to a file-storage site preceded by a single line of text, stating simply: ‘Bookmark this for home viewing, peeps!' Its author went by the online handle of KwikSkopa.

Parlabane right-clicked on the link and saved the target to his laptop. It was a video.

He glanced up briefly, taking in the café. It was busy, people sitting at the tables adjacent and opposite. They couldn't see his screen but he felt as self-conscious as he did shifty about doing this here. Nonetheless, the alternative was to wait until he got home, which would be a couple of hours at least, and he was damn sure he couldn't do that.

He launched the playback. Immediately he was looking at Diana Jager performing oral sex. The angle was roughly level with her head, taken a few feet away from the bed she was lying on. The recipient was lying flat, roughly perpendicular to her, the camera positioned so that his face was out of shot.

Parlabane quickly muted the sound, glancing over the screen in case a waitress might be approaching the table. He felt a disorienting mix of arousal, curiosity, anxiety and shame.

The video cut crudely to show Jager straddling the guy, rocking back and forth on her haunches. The angle was the same, taken from a position a few feet to the left of the headboard. Again it showed a clear view of her from head to groin, but kept her lover's face out of shot.

He had to turn it off. Parlabane knew nobody would ever describe him as prudish, but he couldn't watch any more. He felt party to a violation. This was not merely a stolen, hacked or revenge-leaked sex tape. There was no movement of the camera to indicate the use of a phone, no glances into the lens. Jager was being filmed without her knowledge, and the only person who could have done that was her husband.

This represented a double violation, of which the hacking and posting was the lesser second part. It was a despicable combination of intrusion and malice, but it was only made possible due to the greater crime that preceded it, which was a betrayal of the most sacred trust.

The big question was whether Jager had become aware of it, because if so, Parlabane might have his motive.

He tabbed back to the forum and checked the date KwikSkopa started the thread. The video had been posted the day before Elphinstone's crash.

Parlabane clicked on KwikSkopa's profile. He had been a member of the forum for three years, and a search of his content showed that he had posted sporadically over that time, mostly technical stuff. There was nothing to indicate any connection to Jager, but clearly he was aware of her significance to the forum, so perhaps he had previously been a member under another alias. As far as background details Parlabane might glean, he offered slim pickings: only a few posts griping about the traffic in Birmingham, and an offer of spare tickets for an air show in Shropshire.

Predictably he was scoring lots of kudos for having delivered this scoop, but scrolling down the thread Parlabane noticed that after the initial flurry of congratulations, he was starting to receive jokey warnings about reprisals. The content of these was oddly consistent. Many respondents made allusions to KwikSkopa imminently requiring blood tests, others posting images of hypodermic needles. Several recommended he speak to a poster called BoA for safety tips.

Parlabane wasn't the only one late to this party. A few baffled posters enquired as to what they were missing, but they were evidently unfamiliar with bulletin board psychology. Asking for such information was to self-identify as a hapless newbie and thus condemn oneself to be toyed with until the trolls got bored, with no prospect of ever getting closer to the answer.

He scanned the online users list again but failed to spot the name BoA, and putting the term into a member search delivered no results either.

It was possible the name was an abbreviation. He tried listing all members alphabetically and began scrolling down through the Bs, which was when he found it: Ball_or_Aerosol. It was a reference to an old gag about buying deodorant in a Swedish chemist shop.

Ball_or_Aerosol had been a member of the forum for seven years. He was offline right now, but had last logged in an hour ago. According to his profile, he had racked up thirty thousand posts. There was no time to sift through that kind of volume, but Parlabane was confident he didn't need to. This, he was sure, was the guy who hacked the Sexism in Surgery blog, and he might not have gotten away with it quite as scot-free as most people assumed.

I got better at lying, though the sad truth was I didn't need to. I came to learn that it is easy to keep an affair secret from a spouse who is paying you so little attention. Granted, I had the excuse of being on-call (even when I wasn't) to explain my being out overnight, but at some point I stopped telling him and he never asked.

When you say ‘affair', people assume it's all about sex, but it wasn't. Not even at the start. It was about companionship. It was about two people who had everything in common, two people who appreciated the preciousness of this second chance they had been unexpectedly gifted, and who would do whatever it took to nurture it. But chief among the things we understood it would take was patience.

I recall lying on Calum's couch, resting my head in his lap as I read a book. He was sitting up straight, idly stroking my hair with one hand while he scrolled a tablet that was lying on the arm of the settee. It felt like we were living together, that we had been for years.

‘This is bliss,' he said, as if he'd read my mind. ‘Simply this.'

‘Except that I have to go home again in the morning.'

I didn't want to ruin the moment, but until the thought occurred to me, I realised I had actually forgotten. Reality crashed back down so hard that I had to vocalise it.

‘You don't, though. You can leave him any time. Or you can tell him to leave. Either way, you don't need to keep living out this charade.'

I sat up.

‘It's a lot different for you, Calum. Your wife is in Bristol. Your marriage has been on life support for two years and is just waiting for one of you to switch off the ventilator.'

‘Whereas by your own admission, yours was never alive in the first place. You're living with a stranger to whom you owe nothing. Why don't you tell him it's over?'

‘Because it's … delicate,' I told him. ‘I need time.'

I'll admit among the things that held me back was a mixture of cowardice and shame. I didn't want to admit to anybody that my marriage had failed. I couldn't face my friends and colleagues finding out: couldn't face their solicitude and sympathy; couldn't face the idea of the secret vindication they might be feeling for the doubts they had always held. I felt foolish and embarrassed. I was the proud and haughty woman who wrote all those uncompromising things as Scalpelgirl, then went desperately and blindly chasing a dream of love and marriage only for it all to fall apart within a matter of months. I wasn't yet strong enough to cope with that, so the truth is I hid: living apart together with Peter in a state of limbo, waiting for something to give.

There was also the practical consideration that I couldn't simply tell Peter to move out. For one thing, he had nowhere immediately to go, but more importantly, he was in a fragile state of his own, and he seemed to be unravelling in front of me.

I came in close to eleven one night, after a major case ended up taking nine hours. I was exhausted, stressed and hungry, and when I opened the fridge, there was nothing to eat: not even any fresh milk for me to make myself a cup of tea.

Peter was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, playing some game on his Xbox.

‘There's no milk,' I said, and admittedly I made it sound like an accusation.

‘Yeah, I just had take-away and a beer.'

‘But I said to you this morning I would be working all day and into the evening.'

‘I was working too. I didn't get back until nine.'

‘You couldn't have popped into Tesco on your way home?'

‘I forgot, I was tired.'

‘And you couldn't have nipped out again when you saw there was nothing in the fridge for me to eat? Instead you're sitting here playing games?'

This last seemed to trigger something. He put down the controller and stood up, the look of huffy resentment replaced by something more animated. More worrying.

‘The supermarket's open twenty-four hours, Diana. You could have gone in on
your
way home. You could still go now.'