Black Widow

by Chris Brookmyre

  Peter rationalised it, though.

  ‘Maybe it’s more balanced than we think. Maybe when it comes to relationships, we’ve both had more bad luck than is average, and it’s skewed our sense of what is normal. Or, what’s thrown us is that our good luck has been disguised as bad luck.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if we are each as adorable as the other believes, then we must have had bad luck in order to both still be single when we met each other, so our bad luck then is our good luck now.’

  Amazing how bullshit circular logic seems like mystic truth when you’re blinded by love.

  I used to hate it whenever I heard women say of their latest beau, ‘he totally gets me’. But I soon came to understand what they meant, even if that wasn’t how I would choose to express it.

  I’ll never forget the first time he handed me a present, feeling touched and yet almost shaking with apprehension as I clutched what was unmistakably a soft parcel. Clothing gifts were tricky territory in a burgeoning relationship, so it felt like a far more tense moment than he might have anticipated. I unwrapped it slowly, preparing myself, afraid I was about to be confronted with inappropriate underwear, some garment that was far from my taste, or worse: something that indicated he wanted me to look different, with all that implied for what he really thought of how I looked now. Basically it was an unexploded awkward-bomb that had been dropped into my hands.

  When I pulled away the wrapping, I uncovered this gorgeous purple dress that was quite similar to one I had eyed up in a department store, and even pored over a few times on the shop’s website without ever clicking Buy. I liked it but didn’t think I could pull it off. I thought it was for someone more glam than me.

  ‘Oh my God, that’s beautiful.’

  I teared up, my relief giving way to gratitude and delight, touched by his solicitude.

  Peter wasn’t with me when I saw it in the store; in fact at that stage I wouldn’t have dragged him around the shops for fear of wasting a day better spent doing other things together. Which made it all the more lovely that when he had gone out looking for a present, he happened upon a similar item and, as he put it: ‘I pictured you in that and thought it was perfect for you. I might be way out, though, so I’ve kept the receipt.’

  It happened a few times: he would surprise me with gifts that were closer to the taste I aspired towards rather than the taste my more cowardly instincts told me to settle for. Nothing inappropriate, nothing outrageous: just the kind of thing I might consider and then chicken out of. It was as though he saw this better version of me, and helped me become it.

  I did the same for him too, though not so much in terms of wardrobe. I kept him to his good intentions with regard to working on his project, even when the selfish part of me would rather have him dedicating all of his spare time and attention to me. I believed in his potential, and the exciting thing was watching him start to believe in it too.

  Not that everything simply clicked into place without a hitch. We were proving good for each other, but we couldn’t be the solution to all of each other’s problems. One of the great markers on the road to serious in any relationship is meeting the folks, but neither of us was in a hurry to introduce the other to their family.

  In my case, geography proved a convenient means of avoiding the issue. My parents still lived in Huntingdon, so it wasn’t as though they were likely to drop by one afternoon and require an introduction to the young man whose shaving kit was sitting by my sink. Besides, they regarded what happened to me over the blog as a family disgrace and had never once blessed me with a visit in my penitential northern gulag. Christmas aside, I rarely went home, and even then I often volunteered for on-call so that I’d have an excuse why I couldn’t come. My brothers Julian and Piers lived in Brisbane and Dunedin respectively (only living off-planet would have further satisfied their need for distance from our loving family hearth), so we weren’t going to run into them either.

  This mutual reluctance was no surprise to either of us. I deduced early on that Peter didn’t want to talk about his family, and I had explained a bit about mine when inevitably the issue came up regarding why I was Doctor Jager.

  ‘Aren’t surgeons usually Miss or Mrs?’

  ‘Statistically speaking, they’re usually Mister.’

  ‘You know what I mean. They’re not usually Doctor.’

  I told him all about my doll’s house, and about my mother, who qualified but never practised, merely married my father and became Mrs Jager. In fact, throughout my life I seldom heard my father call her Veronica. I told Peter how my father addressed her directly as Dearest Darling, and to us in the third person as Mummy, but here’s the weirdest part: in front of other people he always referred to her as Mrs Jager.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Jager did enjoy our holiday … Mrs Jager has a head cold and won’t be joining us … Sorry, I’ll have to discuss that with Mrs Jager and get back to you.’

  It was as though she was defined so entirely on his terms that she had even lost her given name.

  That was why, when I went into surgery, I insisted on remaining Doctor Diana Jager. I spent my entire youth longing for that title and all that it signified, so I wasn’t giving it up for the sake of convention.

  Nevertheless, despite our shared reluctance to inflict our families upon each other, I did meet Peter’s sister after we had been going out for about two months. I didn’t like her then, and given her squirrelly role in all of what transpired subsequently, it would be quite the understatement to say I fucking despise her now.

  We were down in Edinburgh for our first Saturday night away together when we bumped into her on Broughton Street. I noticed Peter slow down alongside me and thought he was about to look in a shop window. He glanced uncertainly at me for a moment, as though he was preparing to say something, and then I heard a voice and saw that a rather prissy-looking female had stopped right in front of us.

  Upon first seeing them together, I would never have guessed they were brother and sister. She seemed so buttoned-up, quite literally, while Peter’s appearance was always as laid back and understated as his demeanour. He had an effortlessness about how he dressed that sometimes skirted the borders of scruffy and yet always looked right on him. His sister, by contrast, looked like she must take a lot of time and regimented effort about presenting herself, and yet the result was strangely incongruous, like an ageing goth who these days only shopped in M&S but couldn’t help resorting to certain instincts.

  ‘Peter, you didn’t tell me you were going to be in town this weekend.’

  There was pleasant surprise in her tone, but a hint of accusation too. I quickly inferred that she was not merely chiding him over how infrequently they spoke: they had spoken recently and she was annoyed that he hadn’t let on he would be on her turf.

  ‘Well, it was kind of a last-minute thing. A cheap hotel deal on the internet.’

  This was a lie. We had planned it a fortnight back, once I got my latest on-call rota and knew which coming weekend I would be free.

  ‘Lucy, this is Diana. Diana, this is my sister, Lucy.’

  I once met a boyfriend’s sister who was unsettlingly gushy: hugging me upon introduction and acting as though we were going to be instant best friends, which paradoxically made me instantly dislike her. I had little fear that such effusiveness was going to be reprised here, but the end result looked certain to be the same.

  She gave me the most thin-lipped smile and didn’t offer a hand to shake.

  ‘Oh, yes. Peter’s told me about you.’

  Not Peter’s told me all about you. It’s one tiny word, but in this context it makes a very big difference.

  ‘Why don’t we grab a coffee?’ Peter suggested. ‘Give us all the chance to talk. We were only out for a wander anyway.’

  She seemed to think about it for long enough that I believed she might be weighing up whether to fabricate an excuse. I might have been relieved if she had, except that I could already sense how
keen Peter was that we should all spend some time together.

  ‘Yes, I’m not doing anything urgent.’

  We went to a place in a basement down some steps from where we had met Lucy. I thought it would seem gloomy and claustrophobic, with its windows showing only the brick walls of the stairwell, but it was brightly lit and the décor made it seem airy.

  That didn’t prevent the atmosphere from becoming oppressive, but it was nothing to do with the location. It was the company.

  When I was able to look at them sitting side by side at the same table, there was no mistaking the sibling resemblance, or that there was a complex family dynamic at work. I gathered that she was older by eighteen months, but she seemed somehow more grown-up. Her features were softer, and she might have been pretty if there wasn’t a certain severity about her. With the right look, facially she could have passed for the younger of the two, but from her demeanour she could have been ten years his senior.

  And despite the palpable awkwardness over Peter not having told her we would be in Edinburgh, now that we were in each other’s company, little brother was keen to impress. He seemed almost over-anxious that she should like me. He was talking up my CV like he was my agent, and saying what a positive effect I was having on him. This vicarious immodesty was most unlike him. It was as though he was showing off, proud of how well he had done, seeking an attaboy.

  It was not forthcoming. Lucy seemed quite determined to remain politely unmoved. I don’t expect everyone to go: ‘Ooh, you’re a consultant surgeon’, but equally I can tell when someone is making a point of not being impressed. I suspected this would still have been Lucy’s response had her brother presented a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and supermodel as his girlfriend. It was all about laying down a marker, of sorts, though I had to wait a while for its nature to become clear.

  They struck me as a brother and sister who had a close bond but who nonetheless would rather not be in each other’s company. I got my first hint as to why when Peter went to the toilet and we were left alone together.

  ‘Peter is very taken with you.’

  She wore that thin-lipped smile again, a flimsy mask of politeness. I knew that whatever was coming next, she meant business.

  ‘I’m happy for him. But I’m concerned too. There have been women before you. They’ve taken advantage of his nature and he’s been hurt. He’s more fragile than he’d ever let you see. He’s open with people and he assumes they’re being open with him. He wants to believe you’re perfect, that you won’t suddenly decide he’s not what you’re looking for and dump him like they did. So if you’re not in it for the long haul, get out now, and let him down gently. Because if you lead him on and then break his heart…’

  She stopped herself there. I thought she was letting it hang unspoken as a threat, but as I searched, flabbergasted, for a response, she recanted slightly.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was inappropriate. I don’t know you and all I’ve heard about you are good things. But I’ve only heard them from him, and let’s just say it’s not the first time I’ve heard good things from Peter about a girlfriend. I’m only saying … I don’t know. He’s my little brother. I can’t stop myself looking out for him.’

  Before I had a chance to assure her of my intentions, or maybe tell her she had no right to be demanding such assurances, I saw Peter coming back from the bathroom. I put on a polite smile, both Lucy and I pretending nothing contentious had been said.

  WHIFF OF SUSPICION

  Ali sat behind the wheel, her fingers resting on the ignition switch, but she didn’t turn it. She stared back towards the cottage, her lips pursed in what her mum always called her thinking frown. She’d been doing it since she was about four.

  ‘Something up?’ Rodriguez asked.

  ‘Not sure. Just a feeling, you know?’

  ‘Regarding the good Doctor Jager?’

  ‘Yes. I generally like my grieving widows to have a bit more grief on them.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, we don’t know for sure yet that she’s a widow.’

  ‘Quite, but I can’t help getting the notion that maybe she does.’

  Rodriguez cast a glance towards Jager’s house. It seemed almost incredible how a building remained unaltered when an emotional bombshell had been dropped upon it, offering no clue to the outside world of the damage that had been inflicted. In this instance, there had been scant evidence inside either.

  ‘Playing doctor’s advocate, if there was more to this than meets the eye, wouldn’t she be hamming up her response to the news, chewing the scenery a bit?’

  ‘True,’ Ali conceded. ‘Something just feels off, though. Her eye, for one thing: she didn’t want us noticing that. Her explanation was odd too. Not the substance of it, the way she said it. It seemed rehearsed, as though she’d run through it in her head and then delivered the lines on cue.’

  ‘I got that too. It could have happened like she said, though. If she was worried about what people might assume when they saw it, it’s possible she’d think through how she would tell them.’

  ‘Yeah, fair enough if she was talking to work colleagues on a normal day, but we had just told her that her husband is most probably dead. It seemed bizarre to give us a story about opening a parcel. People elaborate when they’re lying, because they’re never sure they’ve given enough detail to convince you.’

  ‘Or when they’re reeling and flustered,’ he countered. ‘Like if you’ve just been told your husband is missing and realise that an accidental mark on your face might suddenly look rather suspicious.’

  ‘True. But we haven’t even touched on the two things that bothered me most.’

  ‘I’m guessing the fact that she couldn’t get us out of there fast enough piqued your curiosity. The words “unseemly haste” come to mind.’

  ‘Damn right. That’s one. The other was the odour. You might not have picked it up, though: I’ve always had a super-sensitive nose. Used to freak my mum that I could tell which of her friends had been round while I was out because I could identify their perfume hours later.’

  ‘I’m recovering from a cold. I got nothing. What did you smell?’

  Ali turned the ignition and the engine growled into life.

  ‘Bleach.’

  THE QUESTION

  If I was inclined to be generous (which it goes without saying I’m not), I would have to credit Lucy with her part in turning Peter’s project into a viable business vehicle, and thus indirectly laying the grounds for him proposing to me. It was the one instance in which her preferred role of interfering busybody had an unintended benefit.

  I met her again a couple of times after our chance encounter in Edinburgh – both times when she was passing through Inverness – and on each occasion we seemed to instantly resume the tension of that moment. Peter was oddly restless around her too, which always made me fear what poison she might have been dripping in his ear down the phone.

  ‘I know so little about Lucy,’ I said to him, the second time he told me she would be in town. ‘You never talk about her.’

  We were driving back from Cromarty, where we had gone for a wander and some lunch one Sunday.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  His tone wasn’t exactly encouraging. I could tell by this stage when he was trying hard to be patient.

  ‘The usual things. What does she do, what’s her story, is she in a relationship.’

  ‘You mean girl things?’

  ‘As opposed to what music and TV shows she likes, yes.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s seeing anybody these days. That’s not the kind of subject we talk about, to be honest. She’s a big sister, so she sees her younger brother as too trivial to want to confide in about her love life. Which suits me, to be honest.’

  ‘So what do you talk about?’

  ‘Music and TV shows.’

  ‘You must know what she does for a living, at least.’

  ‘Vaguely. She works in finance: these days at any rate.
She’s had as much of a chequered career as me, though the chequers include greater instances of dynamism mixed in with the rudderless drifting. She worked for an art dealership for a long time, and she worked in a museum too. Scaring children away from priceless exhibits, mostly. She did a degree in art history.’

  Peter changed the subject after that, as he always did when the conversation threatened to open a route towards my asking about his parents. He seemed no closer to telling me about them, and I had learned it was counter-productive to ask. I appreciated that he indulged me in letting off steam about my parents, but his remained a complete blank. I didn’t know what they did for a living or even where they lived, more specific than ‘a place in the middle of nowhere out in Perthshire’.

  Peter gave the impression that he and his sister seldom talked about anything substantial, but clearly he had gone to her for advice and assistance in setting up his company, perhaps in the same way she might have come to him if her computer was on the fritz. Due to her multifarious connections, Lucy was able to introduce Peter to potential investors, though introductions were the extent of her involvement. I didn’t need to worry about becoming jealous that she was party to more information than me, as Peter complained that she had limited comprehension of the mechanics of his plan. The only data she understood was that pertaining to development budgets and potential returns, but her command of that proved sufficient to attract solid investment from people who did grasp what Peter was hoping to pull off. As a result, he was able to form a company and give up his job with Cobalt, allowing him to work full-time on developing his breakthrough software.

  He was nervous as a kitten throughout all of the contractual red-tape stuff, terrified of the real and constant possibility that the opportunity opening in front of him could suddenly vanish due to any number of uncontrollable variables. So when the documents were signed and the venture became an official, listed reality, honestly, I watched him grow a foot before my eyes. It seemed like a landmark moment in his life, one for which he was keen to heap credit upon me as the person who had ‘inspired him to get serious’.