Black Widow

by Chris Brookmyre

  She wasn’t up the duff, by the way. I could at least have got my head around that. I didn’t come along for a couple of years yet.

  My mother strove to get the A-levels she needed in order to get accepted for medicine, studied a further five pitiless years, passed her exams, graduated, then never practised one day as a doctor.

  Not one single day.

  It never made any sense to me. She didn’t seem cumulatively frustrated by this as the years went on. I mean, I could have related to it all better had she been hitting the gin by mid-afternoon in her late thirties as her kids needed her less and she wondered where her life had drained away to. Not that she seemed particularly contented either. She was just there. Smiling but not cheery, caring but not warm, dependable but not inspiring.

  I didn’t see it for a long time because I grew up with it and because it was a hard thing to accept, but at some time around my late teens I realised that my mother had almost no personality. As I matured into adulthood, what increasingly bothered me about this – and about the choice she had made in final year – was the question of whether my father had subjugated her, turning a bright young woman into a compliant drone; or whether he had in fact recognised that compliance, that lack of personality, and identified it as precisely what he was looking for in a life partner. For my mother’s part, I wondered was she happy to surrender her autonomy, to be annexed like some colonial dependency? Or had her natural timidity made her vulnerable to the manipulations of someone who turned out to be more domineering than she had initially apprehended?

  I didn’t even know which explanation I would prefer to be true.

  There certainly weren’t any clues on display in what I witnessed of their relationship. As a child I thought they were everything a married couple should be. My father would come home to find my mother in the kitchen calmly preparing dinner, and would peck her on the cheek and call her ‘Dearest Darling’, which was sometimes abbreviated to ‘Dee Dee’. There never seemed to be any strife, no raised voices, no unspoken words, no simmering tension. (No passion, no hunger, no chemistry, no spark.)

  ‘Dinner was beautiful, Dearest Darling. Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure, always.’

  Even as a child, something about their exchanges chimed wrong, though I was too young to identify what and why. It was only as I got older that I came to understand what my instincts were telling me was off about this. It was like a phoned-in performance, a cargo-cult imitation of intimacy by two people who had seen this behaviour elsewhere and sought to replicate it as a form of civil convention.

  Even once I had grasped this much, I still simply assumed that all married couples were like this with each other: that every husband and every wife behaved in a polite, friendly way they didn’t really mean, as we do in so many other areas of our lives.

  I was the Apple of his Eye. You should note the capitals: this noun was proper. It was not how he saw me, but what he called me.

  ‘How’s the Apple of my Eye this evening?’

  Or when he was feeling solicitous, merely Apple.

  ‘What’s wrong, Apple? Aren’t you feeling hungry this evening?’

  My younger brothers were proudly addressed as Number One Son and Number Two Son, except when they were in trouble. I always knew that there was mischief afoot and a spike in the domestic temperature if I heard my father address them directly as Julian or Piers.

  As a little girl I thought this meant my daddy was jokey, a man who had funny nicknames for everybody, this informality proof of how close we were to his heart. Later on I came to realise that this language of apparent intimacy was actually a way of creating distance. If we were Diana, Julian and Piers, then we had agency: we were autonomous entities with foibles that he had to negotiate, personalities that he had to get to know. But if we were the Apple of his Eye, Sons Number One and Two, then his children were adjuncts to him, defined only in terms of how he regarded us.

  Thus our primary role was to reflect well upon him, and we generally made a good job of it when we were young. After that not so much.

  Parents can pretend to themselves that their children suddenly change when they hit their teens: that the pubescent transformation caused their offspring to stop communicating with them the way they used to. The truth is that in such cases they never really communicated with them. It’s simply easier to project idealised versions on to your children when they are very young, before they start having opinions and making decisions for themselves.

  However, it was when we became adults that we seriously disappointed him, each in our different ways: the boys because they didn’t have the careers he wanted them to; me because I did have the career he wanted them to.

  I was the Apple of his Eye, his first child, his only daughter, but it was his sons who were supposed to be surgeons. I’m not sure what I was supposed to be, other than born later.

  It is said that every time a friend succeeds, a small part of you dies. I’ve seen it in the expressions of colleagues as they learned of someone else’s achievement, and I saw it on my father’s face whenever I told him of my latest progress. For a while I thought I was imagining it, but then it became impossible to miss. I could see it in his eyes, eyes that didn’t twinkle to match the awkward smile with which he greeted my news.

  Everything I achieved, each step I took up the ladder hurt just a little more because it was supposed to be his sons.

  So was this hollow imitation of marriage and parenthood the perfect environment in which to nurture a clever psychopath? I guess that’s for you to judge. But this much I know for sure: it was what made me determined that I wouldn’t be seeking fulfilment in life from being somebody’s wife or mother.

  THE CARING PROFESSION

  The young doctor identified himself to the court, his voice catching in his throat and prompting the fiscal to ask him to repeat.

  ‘Calum Weatherson,’ he said.

  ‘And you first started working with Diana Jager how long ago?’

  ‘A year and … no, sixteen … I think sixteen months, maybe a wee bit less.’

  He’d got his name right, even if it had taken two attempts to get it out there. That was a good start: harder than it looks. Now the nerves were really showing as the enormity hit home. As well as everything else that was at stake, he was acting like he was scared he was also going to get done for perjury if it turned out his estimate of how long he’d been at Inverness Royal Infirmary turned out to be a fortnight out.

  Jack Parlabane felt for him. He had seen a lot of court cases in his capacity as a journalist and sometimes as a consequence of exceeding his capacity as a journalist. He could tell it was young Mr Weatherson’s first time on the stand. There was a tremulous note in his voice, his hands slightly shaky too, and his eyes kept straying beyond his interlocutor, searching the gallery for someone whose approving look would tell him he was doing okay.

  Parlabane recalled being the friendly face among an indifferent crowd as a show of moral support when his wife Sarah was on the stand. She had been called several times as a medical witness, which could be an upsettingly adversarial experience when, for instance, the defence counsel decided that the best strategy was to imply that a murder victim may have died due to negligence on the part of an anaesthetist, rather than the fourteen hatchet blows rained down by his client a couple of hours earlier. Such grillings were a breeze, however, compared to the cross-examination to which she was humiliatingly subject during a case brought by Witnesses of the Jehovah’s variety. On that occasion his presence in the gallery had begun as a show of solidarity but ended up undermining Sarah’s cause when the court heard a typically intemperate newspaper column her husband had written on the subject of the serial doorsteppers and their bafflingly stupid objection to blood transfusion.

  It wasn’t the first time his professional conduct had the unforeseen consequence of raining shit down upon their marriage, and nor was it the last, which went a long way towards explaining why they weren’t ma
rried any more. That said, the Diana Jager case had given him a whole new perspective on quite how badly a marriage could end.

  ‘And can you tell the court what your respective positions were in January of last year?’

  ‘I had recently started as a, em, that is, I was already a registrar, but I had not long taken up the post after transferring from another hospital.’

  Weatherson’s voice faltered again. His mouth sounded dry. The fiscal urged him to take a drink of water. He would relax into his narrative in time, Parlabane knew, but those early moments were the most intimidating, especially as the stakes were so high. What Parlabane also knew, to his cost, was that it was when you were relaxed enough to become expansive that the sneaky bastards tended to ambush you.

  He had been on the witness stand plenty himself, one time ignominiously as the accused. He vividly recalled the feelings of isolation, vulnerability and impotence as he faced the court, and not merely because on that occasion he was guilty as sin.

  For all that the process of justice was supposed to be lucid, open and transparent, once a trial got underway it could seem as though your destiny was in the capricious hands of top-level initiates in some arcane secret order. You could walk in thinking that the evidence all but guaranteed a certain outcome. Then the high priests got into it: meanings became plastic, traps were sprung, and all sense of reality melted into something fluid that they could mould into any shape they liked.

  It was almost enough to make him feel sorry for the accused. Almost, that was, until he remembered what the woman in the dock had done: how sociopathically callous and brutally calculating her scheme (in particular how she had even manipulated Parlabane as a crucial plank in her strategy); and how chillingly close she and her secret co-conspirator had come to fooling everybody and getting away with it.

  This last was what truly tempered any sympathy he might have now that she was being put on display for the public’s revulsion: put simply, it wasn’t over. For the reasons he had just considered, he endured a nagging worry that this might not be the slam-dunk everyone assumed. Above all, he remained wary that she may yet have one killer trick left to play.

  ‘Mr Weatherson, can you describe your state of mind on the morning that you first worked with Dr Jager?’

  The fiscal asked this in an encouraging, reassuring tone of which Parlabane couldn’t help but be suspicious. He had learned the hard way that if a prosecutor asks you what time it is, the question you should be asking internally is: ‘Where are you going with this?’

  Weatherson remained nervy, talking too fast, tripping over his sentences.

  ‘I was apprehensive. I was new to the department. I had been a registrar for six months, but I had only been in this post for a couple of weeks, and when you’re working with a new consultant … I mean, when you’re working for the first time with a particular consultant, not a new consultant, you start off keen to impress, but then you sort of downshift your goals to simply hoping you don’t screw up, which can be surprisingly hard to avoid. Consultants tend to have very individual ideas about how they like things done. You have to tread lightly until you find out everyone’s likes and dislikes, not to mention their triggers.’

  ‘And was the prospect of working with Dr Jager in particular making you apprehensive, or was it merely the general anxiety you just described with regard to any new senior colleague?’

  ‘It would be fair to say I was anxious about working with her in particular.’

  ‘And to calibrate what constitutes such anxiety, were you as anxious as you first appeared here on the witness stand?’

  Weatherson stole a nervy glance at the object of their discussion. Jager gazed back impassively, as if nothing he could say would make any difference. Bring it on, she seemed to reply silently.

  ‘As I said, consultants have their idiosyncrasies, and surgeons in particular can sometimes be a little…’ He considered it a moment, choosing his description with care. He took another sip of water, giving himself time. ‘Combustible,’ he decided.

  ‘You mean explosive?’

  ‘Em, sometimes, yes. The hair-dryer treatment. The operating theatre can be a tense environment, which shouldn’t be a surprise given what is often at stake, so it’s not uncommon for surgeons to vent when things aren’t going as smoothly as they’d like.’

  Delicately put, Parlabane thought, if not outright apologism.

  What Weatherson was alluding to was that if you ever thought ex-Bullingdon Club cabinet ministers were among the most pompously self-important wankers on the face of the Earth, then you had clearly not been around many surgeons. Parlabane’s ex-wife was an anaesthetist, and had regularly regaled him with eye-popping accounts of their rampant inner-toddler behaviour, the most shocking aspect of which was how widely it was tolerated.

  Sarah had seen surgeons eyeball-to-eyeball with theatre staff, spittle-flying and their throats going rapidly hoarse as they bellowed their lungs out in fury at some perceived failing or transgression. She had described how instruments were thrown violently at walls or to the floor, equipment smashed and staff reduced to tears by the screaming harangues of individuals who had lost their self-control to such an extent that under any other circumstances they might be sedated, arrested or sent to bed without their supper.

  The most commonly cited explanation for indulging this misbehaviour had just been illustrated on the witness stand: that the stakes were high and thus fits of rage were inevitable when such brilliant individuals had to cope with the limitations of working with ordinary mortals. Weatherson was only a surgical registrar, but was already becoming inured to the point where he had ceased to question whether these ridiculous tantrums were perhaps a teensy bit unacceptable.

  Weatherson proceeded to avail the court of a few examples of the ‘combustible’ behaviour he had been at pains to avoid. He demonstrated unquestionably that he had served a few tours before reaching Inverness, and had been inside the blast radius a couple of times already in his new post. Given all of which, you’d have to be asking yourself what made Diana Jager a far scarier prospect than anything the young registrar had faced before.

  ‘And how did your first encounter with Dr Jager work out?’ asked the fiscal.

  Weatherson cleared his throat.

  ‘I suppose it didn’t get off to the best possible start. I had gone in early to do some final pre-op checks on the first patient on the list, and to confer with the anaesthetist in case she had any concerns. It was a bariatric case: the patient was in for a sleeve gastrectomy.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s a kind of drastic weight-loss procedure. The very big patients can be tricky for a general anaesthetic. Anyway, that was when I first saw Dr Jager in the flesh. She was heading into the ward as I was about to leave. I felt a degree of relief that I had gotten there first, as it wouldn’t have looked good to be coming in behind her.’

  The relief was reprised in his current expression. He seemed to relax a little now that he realised he wasn’t going to be asked anything he didn’t know the answer to.

  ‘How would you describe her manner?’

  ‘Fizzing, would have to be my description. It was eight in the morning but she looked like ten people had already annoyed her. I was concerned about what might happen to the eleventh.’

  ‘And was there an eleventh?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes, but to my relief it wasn’t me. She had come from surgical HDU – that is, the surgical high-dependency unit – and discovered that they had no beds, despite management having assured her otherwise the day before. It meant the first patient was going to have to be cancelled. At first I thought I was about to get both barrels for not having been the one who went to HDU and found this out first, but equally I reckoned that if I had been the one breaking it to her, she’d have shot the messenger too.’

  ‘But as you intimated, you weren’t the immediate target of Dr Jager’s ire.’

  ‘No. She had actually come to the ward to inform th
e patient that his procedure was cancelled, which she proceeded to do. Very politely, I should add, though she didn’t apologise, as it wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘And how did the patient respond?’

  ‘He said he wanted a second opinion. She tried to explain that it wasn’t a matter of medical opinion, but he was insistent.’

  Weatherson took a breath, like an emotion-memory response recalling how he must have winced at the time.

  ‘He said that what he meant was, he wanted to talk to her boss. He was looking at me.’

  Ooft, thought Parlabane.

  ‘I was mortified and made a flailing effort at correcting his misapprehension, but Dr Jager intervened and made it clear who was in charge. The patient then accepted that his procedure was indeed cancelled, which was clear from the fact that he began to complain about it, bitterly and at length. I could tell Dr Jager was keen to leave but he was on a rant, most of which seemed to be to do with his having fasted for the operation. He considered this a major sacrifice and clearly didn’t fancy having to repeat it. At that point Dr Jager suggested he ought to take a more optimistic perspective.’

  Again the remembered wince.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘She said that he had taken the first step, and if he fasted another two thousand days he wouldn’t need the procedure at all.’

  Ooft again.

  ‘Understandably, he didn’t take this too well, and later issued a formal complaint. To be fair, I could tell Dr Jager immediately regretted what she had said. She had clearly been at the end of her tether, but she was furious with herself. I still felt awkward about the patient having assumed I was her boss, and I tried to suggest it might have been to do with the beard I had at that time. I don’t know why I thought that would make her feel better, but I felt I ought to say something.’