Black Widow (7 page)

One charge she couldn't escape was her dishonesty over the imaginary correspondents to her blog, because that one was heard in the court of public opinion. She had lied about these accounts coming from third parties in order to conceal that these early articles were little more than score-settling. It was a form of what the French call
l'esprit d'escalier
: the things we wish we had said as we descend the stairs after an argument. Rather than argue her case directly, she had hit back in a way that was cowardly and anonymous, and a few observers noted that these were precisely the qualities she subsequently disdained in the trolls who attacked her.

Sly, underhand, scheming and ruthless – that was her MO. If you had made an enemy of her, you didn't know you were under threat until it was too late.

Parlabane glanced across the courtroom to where she sat, her face impassive but oh so much going on behind those piercing blue eyes. He knew from experience that if you were going to go up against this woman, you'd better make sure you didn't leave her standing. She didn't forgive and she didn't forget.

A few weeks after leaving Alderbrook, she quietly slipped back into employment, finding a new start in Inverness, far from the glare and glamour of the bright lights and the big city. Despite the baggage she brought, she was too valuable a prospect for them to pass up, like a provincial football team happy to take on a flawed talent who had fallen from grace at one of the major clubs.

Parlabane didn't doubt she was grateful for the new chance, and she fairly knuckled down when she got there, but nor was there any doubt that she still had a substantial conceit of herself. A couple of years later she gave an interview to a less contentious medical blog, in which she conveyed enduring bitterness about the position she had lost and the circumstances in which she had been forced to give it up.

She had been the principal victim of a crime, she still insisted, and none of the subsequent wider damage would have happened had her computer security not been illegally compromised. She still blamed IT personnel at Alderbrook for the breach, and after the monstering she received as a consequence, it was clear she was harbouring precisely no conciliatory thoughts towards hospital IT personnel in general.

This was why it came as a very big surprise to many people that she ended up marrying a hospital IT tech. And perhaps less of a surprise that six months later he was dead.

Peter proposed marriage within a few hours of meeting me. He wasn't serious, but given how things transpired between us, it's worth dwelling upon for a moment; though I'll let you infer your own significance.

‘I'm in the right place?' he enquired skittishly, remaining in the doorway. ‘You are Dr Jager? And you put in a request for IT support?'

‘Yes,' I confirmed. ‘I'm locked out of the system. Have been since this morning.'

‘Okay. Sorry about that. I'll see what I can do.'

The first thing that struck me about him was the thought that he seemed vulnerable and yet shouldn't. Actually, being completely honest, that was the second thing that struck me, but it was directly related to the first. Maybe it was a reaction to bracing myself for the presence of Creepy Craig, but I remember finding him attractive, a rust-stuck part of my psyche still responding at a primal level to the sight of something that pleased me, if only on a superficial level.

He looked early thirties but possibly younger; my judgement on these things was not the best. I had recently got into the consoling habit of trying to convince myself that people were actually older than they appeared. It was my desperate way of making myself believe forty was still young.

Certainly he wasn't someone striving to present an air of grown-up gravitas. His hair was down to his neck, thick and black and shiny, falling across his face when he leaned one way or the other. Though he was dressed in regulation suit and tie, I pegged him for the trendy tech geek sub-genus, lesser spotted in these parts, as opposed to the basement-dwelling pasty-skinned goblin I'd been expecting. And yet, as I say, I got this meek and fragile vibe from him, something setting off my instinctive damage sensors. It was like coming across an item on sale that may look fine on the outside, but at that bargain price you know there has to be something wrong with it.

‘Do you mind?' he asked, and sat at my desk. I was the one looking over
his
shoulder.

He didn't ask me to walk through the process, but started running commands, though his expression suggested he didn't like what he saw.

‘Where's Craig?' I asked.

I was concerned that if this guy couldn't fix it, he'd have to call in the boss and I thus wouldn't be spared an encounter with him after all. Yet at the same time, if that's what it took, I wanted it done, and quickly. I needed this sorted, otherwise I'd be back to square one first thing on a Monday morning, because nothing would get fixed over the weekend.

Mainly I wanted to go home. I was feeling so exhausted and emotionally strung out that I had reached the stage where I suspected I would cry if someone said the wrong thing to me. Losing it in front of Craig because he told me my computer access couldn't be restored until next week would be the final humiliation. And what was making me doubly anxious was that ‘the wrong thing' might not necessarily be something negative. I feared if someone was solicitous towards me, it might actually be worse.

‘Craig? Is that who you normally get? He'll have gone by now. I was the one who drew the short straw.'

Something occurred to him and he looked faintly concerned.

‘I don't mean as in dealing with you specifically,' he clarified. ‘I just mean it was last thing Friday and everybody wanted to leave.'

He reprised the uncomfortable look, perhaps realising he was only digging himself deeper by implying that there was a reason why I might think this the case.

‘Quite,' I said. My tone would have been more acidic had I not been clinging on by my fingernails and trying to neutralise my emotional responses lest the dam burst. ‘Why ever would I think otherwise.'

I guess my tone wasn't quite as neutral as I was pitching, because he picked up on it right away. He looked anxious but good-humoured, as though trying to be tolerant of the fact that there was something going on that he couldn't possibly understand.

‘Look, I don't want to put my foot in anything here, but they were a bit coy back at the IT hub when I told them the job. Is there something I should know? Have you had a run-in with hospital IT before?'

There was a brightness in his eyes that I couldn't read: either it was innocence openly appealing for a fair shake or it was malice disguised as the first. I was instantly reminded of walking back from one of the few football matches I ever attended with my brothers, the pair of them draped disconsolately in their blue-and-white scarves. A man stopped us to ask the score, and somehow I sensed he already knew, but wanted these young boys to tell him how their team had lost. He had a nasty little smirk as he said: ‘Oh dear. Too bad.'

‘Are you trying to be funny?' I asked.

He took his hands off the keyboard in a supplicatory gesture.

‘I'll interpret that as a yes,' he replied. ‘I take it we didn't cover ourselves in glory.'

‘You're saying you don't know?'

His hands rose higher, now more like a surrender.

‘Don't know, happy to remain in the dark, happy to hear your version of it if you feel the need to vent. The latter might slow down my diagnostic efforts here, but it's your dime.'

I stared at him, still trying to read whether he was bluffing. I decided that if he was, he was very good.

‘Does the name Bladebitch mean anything to you?' I asked.

He shook his head apologetically.

‘No. Sounds like something out of an MMO.'

‘What's an MMO?' I asked, momentarily derailed by his guileless sincerity.

‘Short for MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Like Warcraft, Sacred Reign, that kind of thing. Do you play?'

‘Do I look like I play?'

‘I honestly couldn't say. Maybe if I saw you in civvies, though even then it's not good form to judge on appearances. So who is Bladebitch?'

‘It really doesn't matter. I'd rather not distract you from the task in hand. It's been a very long day and this is the one thing preventing it from being over.'

‘I hear you,' he said, his fingers tapping away as he brought down menus and opened windows I had never seen on my system before. ‘This job is the last thing keeping me on tie-time.'

‘Tie-time?'

‘The dress code. They insist. Yeah, I was drawn to computers because I'm naturally comfortable looking like an office drone. I mean, are they afraid of what IT guys would look like if we were left to dress ourselves? Actually, come to think of it, the dress code kinda makes sense now.'

I didn't laugh politely, didn't smile, but I was at least aware of suppressing the latter, though I wasn't entirely sure why.

Despite my reputation, I wasn't immune to male charm, but I certainly could be resistant to it, especially from an experienced practitioner. When I got the impression someone expected women to find him charming, it was shields up. Peter baffled my defences. On a certain physical level he looked like he ought to be boyishly cocky, and that was what initially triggered my resistance. He was not cocky, however, nor even particularly confident, but there was something affected in his manner; just not affected in the way I was on-guard against. Instead his friendly chat seemed like someone putting on a persona in order to overcome shyness. The friendliness was genuine: it was the ability to express it that seemed an effort.

I felt bad about being barely civil to him. After all that had happened that day, it was almost like I needed to be nice to someone even more than I needed to rip someone's head off. I don't know, maybe it was simply because a pathetic part of me needed someone to be nice back. Either way, I tried to be warmer.

‘Did you start here recently?' I asked. His accent didn't sound local. I guessed Edinburgh, but I wasn't good at judging. Middle-class Scottish was as much as I could confidently narrow it down.

‘Depends on how you define recently. I've been here about three months. I work for Cobalt Solutions, which the hospital trust now outsources its IT to. I got rotated here for the transition.'

‘So what's happening to Craig and his team?'

I tried not to betray excitement at the possibility of him no longer being here.

‘Their jobs get transferred over to Cobalt, or they can take redundancy. I think Craig is opting for transfer.'

I'll bet, I thought, unable to imagine him getting hired anywhere else.

‘So are you into, you know, MORs?' I asked. I felt like a middle-aged auntie trying to strike up conversation with her teenage nephew.

‘No. I've dabbled, but there's so much commitment required to reach a level where you're any good. I struggle enough with that in real life.'

‘I know what you mean.'

I had often considered how concentrating so much time and energy into one aspect of my life came at a cost to everything else, and I don't only mean family or relationships. I once blogged about it, in fact: how I had failed to take up any hobbies other than a bit of running to stay fit. Part of the problem, I wrote, is the surgeon's mindset, which is hyper competitive. We don't dabble: unless we think we can be brilliant at something, there seems no point in even beginning. And though I am utterly single-minded once I have decided to pursue something, time is always going to be the big stumbling block. They say that in order to master something – a language, a sport, a musical instrument – it takes ten thousand hours. Subtract work, sleep and the basics of subsistence and it might take me decades to accumulate that quantity of free time. I'm not sure I could commit so expressly to one pursuit. I already did that once in life and I was starting to wonder whether it was a mistake.

‘I realise how boring this sounds,' I acknowledged, ‘but I couldn't imagine pouring in hours and effort to obtain skills that I couldn't utilise in the real world.'

‘Yeah, but all your effort has given you amazing skills
in
the real world. I mean, why would you want to hack and slash online when you can hack and slash for real?'

‘It's not as exciting as you make it sound. In fact, if it's exciting, that's usually a bad sign.'

‘Not exciting, but still pretty amazing. I mean, what other job lets you cut people open without serious jail-time?'

‘I must confess I've never looked at it that way,' I said, trying not to sound withering.

‘No, I don't suppose you would. But you must still occasionally catch a glimpse of yourself from the outside and secretly think: I am awesome.'

I had been doing well up until then. The conversation seemed sufficiently lightweight and pointless to serve as a distraction from what had previously been building up, but then he went and said that and something inside me gave.

As I had feared, it was him being solicitous that was my downfall, and the fact that he wasn't even trying to
be
solicitous was what slipped through my barricades. I did frequently catch a glimpse of myself from the outside, and it had been a long time since I liked what I saw. The thought of this pleasant and gentle-spirited young man seeing something better, something impressive, suddenly overwhelmed me.

There was nothing I could do to stop the tears from falling. I didn't let out a sob, but my eyes filled and overflowed with irresistible rapidity. His focus was back on the screen, but he noticed before I could reach for a tissue. Besides, there was no way of covering it up.

‘Is everything okay? I mean, obviously it's not, but…'

‘Yes,' I said, waving a hand dismissively as I dabbed at my cheeks with the other.