Black Widow (45 page)

Ironically he was here ostensibly to assist with her defence, that being the reason given by Stroud in order to facilitate his accompaniment during this sustained period of access to her client. They sat in a drab but over-lit room, on ugly plastic furniture pocked by an acne of cigarette burns. Jager was in prison-issue sweatshirt and slacks, her hair pulled back carelessly into an untidy ponytail. She bore scant resemblance to the woman he had spoken to outside the hospital in Inverness, but he couldn't let that distract him from a vigilant awareness that he was dealing with a formidable intellect and a thoroughly dangerous individual.

He waited a few moments to be sure she had finished speaking, and to digest what he had learned. It was a lot to take in, and he remained as wary as he was unsure of where he fitted into it.

‘So,' he said. ‘What can I do for you?'

‘First things first. The initial story you wrote, about Agnes and Evan and your little adventure on the way home from the pub. I'm assuming that's how the police got all of that information. Was it also you who told them about the sex tape?'

‘Yes.'

She fixed him with a piercing look.

‘I thought so. In that case I would like to thank you for keeping that part out of the paper.'

‘The editor probably won't when he finds out, but I like to think I've still got some integrity. A crime was perpetrated against you and I didn't want to be party to worsening the damage. I only granted you a stay of execution, though. It will all come out in court.'

She angled her head, as though evaluating something. She didn't seem too disturbed. Maybe she had already made her peace with it. What difference does it make how many strangers see a thing like that?

He was wrong, though: that wasn't why she seemed sanguine.

‘This won't be going to court. You're going to see to that.'

‘I am? Why?'

‘Because I didn't kill my husband. There's a scoop for you.'

I pulled myself to my feet. I was shaking but there was something deep within me that had turned to steel. I recall being hyper-aware of my surroundings, as though everything was amplified. The light seemed brighter, the colour contrast enhanced. I could distinguish individual scents: diesel from my car, fabric conditioner from my clothes, the tang of Peter's sweat. I could hear both of our breathing, the distant sound of a train.

Peter was shaking too. He was looking at his fist like it didn't belong to him, as though it were some alien appendage.

I put a hand tenderly to my cheek, checking for blood. There was none: only a growing throb.

I turned around, raised myself up straight, and looked him in the face. From some chasmic depth inside I summoned my voice, and it came: firm, low and grave.

‘Nobody gets to do that to me twice.'

Peter stared, hollow, drained. It was like he'd woken up from a trance.

‘You leave now, and you never come back. You can collect your things another time when I'm not here, but right now, get out of my house. I don't care where you go. I never want to see you again.'

He stared at me a moment longer, fear and confusion on his face, then left without another word.

Jager folded her arms, holding Parlabane in her gaze, silently challenging him.

‘He left?'

‘It was the last time I saw him. The next morning, when I learned about the accident, I assumed something had happened like when we were on the road that night we argued about his vasectomy. I didn't think he had committed suicide, but I knew what that loss of control could have led to. While he might not have set out to kill himself, I thought maybe he had been consumed by that same reckless abandon that meant he didn't particularly care whether he lived either.

‘I was numb when the police came that morning. I was still so angry with him. At that point, I didn't have it in me to feel sorry for him, never mind bereaved. I was too churned up, too confused. I acknowledge I may have seemed a little cold to the police, because at that point I literally didn't know what to feel. I wasn't exactly distraught that he was dead, but I didn't kill him.'

‘Why didn't you tell the police this?'

‘Is it convincing you?'

‘No.'

‘There you go, then.'

‘And yet apparently you think I can help you. How? Have you got any evidence?'

‘Not on me here in this room, which is why I need your help. I can point you in the right direction, though. Let me start with your abduction that Saturday night, in case you're harbouring any personal resentment towards me over that. According to the report and to the police, you never saw your attackers. How did you deduce that it was me?'

‘I recognised your perfume. Jo Malone: Blackberry and Bay.'

She rocked her head back, considering.

‘I can't imagine I'm the only woman in the world who wears it. In fact, you may recall I mentioned that Cecily Greysham-Ellis smelled of the same perfume at Peter's mother's wake.'

‘Are you suggesting
she
abducted me?'

Parlabane tried to make it sound like he thought the notion absurd, but only to disguise the fact that wheels were turning in his head. He felt there was a possibility he had been missing, always just out of focus. He recalled Lucy talking about Peter having a crush on Cecily when they were teenagers, and of Jager's account of their awkward mutual blanking at the wake.

‘I honestly couldn't say. I only know that it wasn't me. I have an alibi.'

He reeled. He wasn't expecting this.

‘Seriously? Well how about you give me the name and I'll check it out.'

‘I can't.'

Parlabane couldn't help but let out an irritated scoff.

‘Patient confidentiality, you see. I can't give you his name, but I do have half a dozen witnesses that I was wrist-deep in his colon around the time you say you were being bundled into a van and stuck with a hypodermic.'

‘You were working?'

She nodded, a hint of a smile forming on her lips.

‘Okay, that would cover you for the Saturday night. But it's a previous date that's a bit more problematic, don't you think?'

‘My current situation would certainly suggest so.'

‘So if you weren't trying to warn me off, how come there was a guy tailing me around Inverness in a black Porsche? Or are you going to tell me you know nothing about that?'

‘No, I know everything about that, starting with the fact that it was a dark blue Porsche. Austin had warned me about you, which made me rather anxious, and then you suddenly turned up at the hospital. I don't think you appreciate how intimidating that feels.'

Parlabane found it difficult to imagine Jager feeling intimidated, but maybe that served to underline her point.

‘I asked a friend to keep an eye on you, for my peace of mind. And you can imagine what it did for my peace of mind when he called and told me you had parked yourself outside my house.'

‘So you called the police.'

Jager said nothing, as though there was no need to confirm. She leaned back in her seat and placed a foot up on the table.

‘What do you think of these trainers? Not really me, are they? Velcro straps, like I'm a kid. Do you know what that's about?'

‘They took your laces away.'

‘They took my
boots
away. I remember it struck me as such a strange and arbitrary act. At first I wondered if it was deliberately so, to rapidly convey my complete absence of agency, of free will in this place of confinement.'

‘They thought you were a suicide risk.'

‘That's right. I loved those boots. Peter bought me them. You remember I said before we were married he would surprise me with gifts that were closer to the taste I aspired towards rather than what I tended to buy for myself? They were a perfect example. He didn't always get it right, though. He bought me a faux leather biker-style jacket once that was way too young for me. Had to get a refund: there was no way I was going out the house in it.'

She set her foot down again carefully.

‘I put it out of my mind. But recently I noticed Annalise, one of our surgical trainees, wearing the same jacket. Annalise was up at the house shortly before Peter bought it for me. She lives out on the Nairn road, and she picked me up one time on the way to a department night out, so that I could have a drink. I wasn't quite ready when she turned up, and I remember her asking if she could use my laptop while she waited. She was planning a shopping trip to Glasgow that weekend and was surfing some clothing sites in advance. Can you see where this is going yet?'

‘He was spying on your browsing history to see what you were considering, get a handle on your taste.'

‘You're quicker than me. It was only when I was banged up in here that I managed to put it together.'

Parlabane was unable to see what Peter's great crime was here.

‘It's underhand, but some might call it solicitous.'

‘What you're forgetting is that this started before we were living together. He knew what I was browsing before he ever had direct access to my laptop. He sent me a file over Skype quite early in our relationship, remember? One that apparently didn't do anything when I opened it, so he sent another, full of photos from the airsoft meet. I think the first file did plenty. I think he had remote control of my laptop from that moment on, including access to my webcam. He was spying on me almost from the moment our relationship began.'

‘Ah.'

This changed things just a bit.

‘My life was probably open in a live feed on his laptop whenever he wanted to look, which would be icky enough if this was merely about voyeurism, but that's only where it begins. Take a moment to consider what a research job he was doing on me. He had access to all the information he could possibly need in order to make himself appear the perfect man. In order to
make me fall in love with him
.'

She swallowed, the only time so far he had seen her feelings rise to the surface.

‘That's cold. Clinical. Like there was a contract out on you.'

Parlabane offered a smile. He could tell she was hurting, and though he was stepping cautiously, he couldn't keep too much of an emotional distance. He needed a reading on her at all times, some kind of a connection.

It worked. She loosed a tear from her left eye with a gentle nudge of a knuckle.

‘Quite,' she said. ‘One minute he's using this covert surveillance to seduce me, and a few months later he's moving money out of my accounts. The police don't know about that, by the way. I thought if I told them it would only further support the motive in their existing theory. They would think that Peter's greatest crime was stealing from me. How could that even come close to the crime of
marrying
me?'

She looked at him pleadingly, like she needed him to understand. He did, but only her pain.

‘See, that's where it breaks down for me,' Parlabane told her. ‘It's a hell of a long haul for forty grand, or for however much more he might have taken before being caught. And he would have been caught: there was no mystery about where the money was going. But the main thing that I don't get is the same one that's burning you: why would he marry you? If he was scamming you, he could have done that way back, without moving in, never mind proposing. I don't see what his endgame could have been.'

She was nodding her acknowledgment, her expression still appellant.

‘I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There are so many things I simply don't understand about what happened between Peter and me.'

‘So what exactly am I doing here? Your lawyer sold me this visit on the promise that you would tell me what happened to your husband.'

‘No, you were told
you alone would discover the secret of what happened to him.
You're here so that I can tell you where you might find it.'

Parlabane reined in a sigh, masking his exasperation. Despite a few minor shocks, he was developing a strong suspicion that she was manipulating him, and it would require something pretty solid to dispel that.

Jager sat up straighter, hands clasped on the table in front of her.

‘The police are working on the theory that my husband didn't die in that car crash. They think I killed him, disposed of the body and then faked the accident to cover up my crime. They're right to think that, on the basis of all the available evidence. But only, Mr Parlabane, because somebody has gone to a great deal of trouble to make it appear so.'

‘Looking back, I realise that my first clue came on the morning after Peter disappeared. I hadn't slept well, and I recall stumbling into the kitchen in my dressing gown and noticing a smell of bleach. I didn't remember putting any in the sink, and then I worked out it was coming from the garage. I wondered if something had been knocked over during the previous evening's unpleasantness. I was going to investigate once I'd had a shower and some breakfast, but then the doorbell rang, and of course, it was the police.'

Jager spoke calmly, with a hint of self-reproach. It didn't sound like an impassioned plea to be believed, more a dispassionate laying out of the facts as though double-checking them for herself.

She was precise in what she was saying now, markedly less discursive than before. Parlabane was aware that liars tended to over-embellish; but equally that
good
liars knew the value of concision.

‘Your first clue to what?'

‘That I was being set up. I couldn't have realised it at the time, but I soon came to see where it fits in.'

‘That's more than I can see.'

‘Then allow me to fast-forward to when those two police officers returned to the house. You will remember Rodriguez asked me why the Liston knife was no longer on the mantelpiece. Peter did hate it: that part is true. He asked me not to have it on display, so I put it in the hall cupboard, on top of a stack of files full of notes from my research papers. When I went to retrieve it, it was gone.