Black Widow

by Chris Brookmyre

  The only down side, ironically, was that a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement insisted upon by the investors meant that he still couldn’t give me any specifics regarding what the software was ultimately for. There were people I had never met who knew more about this than I did, which I will admit annoyed me, but I wasn’t so precious as to miss what the bigger picture was here. These people believed in Peter’s idea and in his ability to make it happen, which was why they were backing him with hard cash.

  ‘You have to give me some kind of vague hint,’ I pleaded, as he was showing me the sheaves of paperwork that would make the venture official. They were covering all the worktops in his flat’s tiny kitchen.

  ‘It’s only fair,’ he conceded. ‘You’ve put up with me being preoccupied over all this recently, and there’s only so many leaps of faith I can ask from one woman.’

  He slipped a thick document into a plastic wallet and turned to face me.

  ‘Have you ever thought it would be handy to be able to pay for small purchases, like under a pound, without clicking through Paypal or entering your credit card?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Well, it’s a way of doing that. Loose change for the internet. And it wouldn’t only be convenient for customers – it could change subscription models. For instance, you might want to see one edition of a newspaper or magazine online, and instead of paying for a month’s sub, you could pay fifty pence for one day or ten pence for a single article, but without filling in details forms and signing yourself up for spam.’

  ‘God, that could be huge.’

  ‘Exactly. But only if I’m first. Hence…’

  He mimed locking his lips. I kissed them.

  When the company was launched, Peter took me away for a surprise weekend to celebrate. At least, I thought that’s what we were celebrating. On the Thursday night he told me to pack a bag for the following day. Unbeknown to me, he had spoken to the clinical director for surgery and got me swapped from a full-day list on the Friday to a morning only, meaning we could make a late-afternoon flight to Bristol.

  ‘It’s not a weekend in Paris,’ he said, ‘but when it comes to flights from Inverness, you take what you can get.’

  The destination didn’t matter. I was so moved that he had quietly gone to this trouble when he had so much else to deal with in the chaotic early days of setting up the firm. I had been resigned to an ordinary weekend at home, probably seeing less of Peter than I could normally look forward to due to his new commitments, and instead he had delivered this lovely escape.

  He had booked us into a suite at the Hotel du Vin. It was a converted sugar warehouse: all bare redbrick and black metal pillars. Our room was about twice the size of the flat I lived in when I was working in London, with a private roof terrace, a luxuriantly vast bathroom and the most sprawling bed I have ever slept in.

  He seemed a little distracted on the Saturday. We took a train to Bath and wandered around the place. Peter could often be quiet that way, lost in his thoughts, but I sensed his mind was drifting somewhere specific: whirring away with the details of his great opportunity and equally great responsibility. I was completely, magnificently wrong.

  We were having a bath together late afternoon. The taps were in the middle – a deal-breaker for such things – and we had a bottle of champagne open. I made a crack about finally having his full attention.

  ‘I’m sorry. I guess you noticed my thoughts have been elsewhere.’

  ‘It wasn’t a dig. I’m trying to acknowledge how much I appreciate you doing this, taking so much time for me, for us, right now.’

  ‘Except, I have to confess that my distractedness was nothing to do with the project. I’ve been anxious about something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember when I said I wanted to kiss you, but I was afraid of breaking the spell?’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘Well, that feeling has never quite gone away. I can’t believe everything that has happened for me since I met you, where I am now compared to only a few months ago. So here I am again, worried that I’m about to make a misstep and lose it all.’

  ‘Peter, what kind of misstep could change how I feel about you?’

  As I said it, I was conscious that he looked vulnerable and sincere: very much like he had when he first asked me out to the Ironworks. Suddenly I had my answer, and I knew why he had been talking about my making a leap of faith.

  I don’t know whether he noticed, but my eyes were already filling up before he spoke.

  ‘The kind where I ask you to marry me.’

  FULL DISCLOSURE

  We were lying in the afterglow, his proposal in the bath having led to us chucking towels down on the bed so that we didn’t get the sheets too damp in our impatience to have sex. Neither of us had said anything for an unusually long time, certainly enough for us both to be aware the other was feeling the gravity of the moment.

  ‘They say it ought to be the easiest question you ever get asked,’ Peter said, ‘because you should already know the answer.’

  ‘I didn’t need to write down my working.’

  ‘But they also say that the question shouldn’t come as a surprise. I realise I sprung this on you, which put you under pressure, especially after me saying how worried I was about the possible consequences of asking it.’

  ‘As I was lying there just now, I will confess my thoughts had turned to whether this is all too fast, too soon. That’s how my mind works: as a surgeon, my life has been dominated by risk-averse judgement. And yet, the moment you asked the question, I had no doubts whatsoever. None.’

  ‘Maybe it’s all the business stuff I’ve been reading, but I feel like I should offer you a cooling-off period. Give your risk-averse mind time to do its full due diligence.’

  ‘Do you need a cooling-off period?’

  I was suddenly anxious that he was projecting here.

  ‘No. I’ve never been so certain of anything. I realise some people might think it’s too soon, but I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, so now that it’s finally in front of us, why delay?’

  That was how I felt too. I knew that if I looked hard enough, I would see lots of reasons to wait, but was this about reason? I knew there would be obstacles and difficulties ahead, but marriage wasn’t about finding someone with whom you would never have problems, it was about finding someone you could better tackle your problems with. You appreciate what you have built in a relationship rather than what is given to you easily. Anything is possible when you both want the same thing, and I sincerely believed that we did.

  There was also, of course, the issue of my biological clock, which we had already wordlessly broached half an hour ago when I pulled Peter back from getting a condom and he came inside me for the first time. There was a significant unspoken conversation in that, about our mutual desire to be parents, and about how we wanted – and pragmatically needed – that to happen as soon as possible.

  We had dinner in a restaurant down at the quayside. I think I floated there. I don’t remember walking. The food was divine, but I think we could have sat on the plastic benches in the nearest kebab shop and it would have been divine. I do remember Peter had a risotto with a quail parked in the middle of it. I think I had linguine.

  Peter sat up straighter once we had both finished eating.

  ‘In the interests of full disclosure, now that you’re my fiancée, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  ‘Full disclosure? Doesn’t that describe something you should have told me before I agreed to marry you?’

  My tone was jocular, but Peter’s expression indicated this was serious; or at least sensitive.

  ‘On this occasion it works the other way round. I needed to know you wanted to marry me before I could tell you this.’

  I sat up straighter also, intrigued and, it must be said, a little nervous.

  ‘My real name is Hamish. Peter is my middle name.’

  I l
aughed, thinking the sudden shift to seriousness had been the build-up to a joke, and this the punchline. But Peter wasn’t finished.

  ‘Do you know anyone else with my surname? Apart from Lucy, obviously.’

  I gave it some thought. It was unusual but not unique.

  ‘I haven’t met anyone else with your surname, but I have heard of it. I’m pretty sure there was a Professor Elphinstone who authored a physiology textbook. Oh, and come to think of it, there’s that Sir Hamish Elphinstone who was in the news a couple of years back, to do with protests against wind farms on his estate.’

  That was when it hit me.

  ‘Hamish Elphinstone, with an estate in the middle of nowhere out in Perthshire. Oh my God. Is this where I find out that, as well as everything else, you’re secretly rich?’

  Peter swallowed.

  ‘I’m not rich: that’s the crucial part. And nor am I going to be rich unless it’s off my own back. My father said that Lucy and I had to learn to stand on our own two feet – just like he didn’t.’

  His face briefly flashed a sneer as he said this last, perhaps the first time I had seen bitterness etched upon it.

  ‘We weren’t given any financial support once we left home, and nor will we inherit anything. He told us that this was the greatest thing he could pass on to us. The irony is that he now couldn’t give me his money, because I wouldn’t take it. I want nothing to do with him. Neither of us even uses the names he gave us. Lucy’s real name is Petronella Lucille Elphinstone.’

  He took a mouthful of his wine, like he needed it to wash away a bad taste.

  ‘I had girlfriends before: women who affected not to know about my background, but who buggered off sharpish once they found out I was neither rich nor in line to become rich. Please understand: I’m not saying I didn’t tell you this until now as some kind of test. Nobody chooses the life you did because they’re after an easy route to riches. This is kind of the opposite: I needed to know you wanted to marry me for who I am before you found out about this baggage, because this baggage is not who I am.’

  I reached a hand across the table to his and squeezed it.

  ‘My father is not a nice man. In fact he’s a truly horrible human being. He has this utterly utilitarian view of people that comes from generations of aristocratic privilege: anyone he perceives as beneath him exists only to be used and discarded, and there are precious few people he doesn’t perceive to be beneath him.

  ‘You wouldn’t know that if you met him. He is polite to a fault and can be charming when it serves him, but you’d be conned if you believed that his seeming friendly meant he would lift a finger to turn on a hose if you were burning right in front of him. Not unless this action would benefit him in some way.’

  ‘And what about … your mother?’

  I kept my tone apologetic in anticipation of the answer.

  ‘An expensively dressed and thus elegantly disguised alcoholic. I’ve never been sure whether she took to drink because she couldn’t stand up for us against him, or whether she would have been able to stand up for us if she hadn’t been a drunk.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  The parallels with my own upbringing were not proving hard to find.

  ‘You remember you asked whether Lucy and I were close, and I answered yes and no?’

  I nodded.

  ‘This is what I meant. We are close on one level, and yet on another we crave our distance. We were allies: we grew up under the same tyranny but being around each other reminds us of it. People assume we must have had this lovely privileged childhood. It was financially privileged by anyone’s measure, but deprived in many other ways. That’s why I’m still so much of a child now, and why I want my kids to have a childhood in which they are allowed to be childish.’

  I gripped his hand tighter and offered a smile.

  ‘I suppose, then, that we won’t be needing a long lead-in to plan a big family wedding?’

  So it was never going to be a grand traditional affair with a marquee on the lawn, speeches and favours and catering staff offering champagne flutes from silver salvers. That was okay by me. I never had little-girl dreams of ‘my special day’: I always thought that was for women prepared to settle for being worthy of notice merely for an isolated few hours of their entire lives.

  Peter didn’t see the occasion as an opportunity to mend relations with his parents. I made the suggestion as gently as I could, in case some part of him wanted and needed the nudge to offer an olive branch, but his response was unequivocal.

  ‘I don’t want his presence ruining this. And his presence would be all it took.’

  He didn’t mind the conspicuous imbalance of me inviting some of my family, but I didn’t want some god-awful jamboree with great-aunts whose names I couldn’t even remember being wheeled out of nursing homes, or second cousins’ children I’d never met scoffing cake and barfing on a hotel dance floor. So it was only my parents, whose collective response (i.e. that of my father, with my mother contributing meek agreement) was typically graceless. Stiffly polite congratulations were offered initially, but the suddenness of the announcement (I hadn’t told them about Peter) and the short notice ahead of the event was interpreted as an indication of some further indistinct shame I was attempting to conceal. They gave the impression that their attendance would be more of an obligation than a pleasure, but to their credit at least they did finally make the trip to see me, and it saved me from my plan of lying to people that they were dead.

  I missed having my brothers there. It was too big an ask for them to come so far, especially with kids, but I must confess I harboured a secret fantasy that they would show up as a surprise.

  Emily was supposed to be there, but she got flu. Not man flu, but the real deal. She was in her bed for a fortnight and later told me she lost a stone. She was skinny enough to begin with, so she must have looked like a corpse.

  I remember feeling a little sad when I saw how few names were on the invitation list. Not, as I have explained, because I wanted a big wedding, but because it brought home how small my life had become, how limited my circles. I had almost no friends outside the realm of medicine, and even among that constituency, the list was never going to be long. I had burned a lot of bridges over the years, I realised.

  I was sad, but I was also feeling emboldened. This was a new beginning in lots of ways: a chance to make new friends, to live a new kind of life.

  What surprised me was that Peter had so few friends on his list also. He was such an easy person to get along with, and had worked in so many places, that I assumed he would have a huge network of old mates who would come out of the woodwork for a thing like this.

  I remarked as much to Lucy on the day.

  ‘Peter is far more shy than you perhaps realise. With you he makes a special effort to seem confident and gregarious. You bring that out in him.’

  It was the only thing she ever said to me that could be interpreted as a compliment, though she managed to make it sound like an accusation.

  It was a modest and intentionally unspectacular affair: a registry office ceremony followed by a meal at a restaurant and then drinks at the adjoining bar for anyone who still wanted to hang around. Inauspicious circumstances for a thoroughly auspicious rite of passage: so began my new life, both of our new lives.

  But let’s be honest: nobody’s here to talk about how my marriage began. We’re here to talk about how it ended.

  PART TWO

  STORM CHASER

  Parlabane watched dusty flurries of snow zip from left to right across the A9 north of Pitlochry. The sight gnawed at him, nagging like a disapproving voice as to the wisdom of pursuing this journey, and the voice wasn’t only talking about the possible road conditions around the Drumochter Pass.

  He was chasing a flyer here, and if he was chasing it through a blizzard in a recently purchased second-hand car of unproven reliability, then desperation was edging towards suicidal recklessness. What was worse was that
it wasn’t the promise of a story that had set him on the road: it was the alternative. While he was undoubtedly intrigued by Lucy Elphinstone’s visit, in truth he wanted a reason not to be in the flat right now. He was feeling boxed in by memories everywhere he looked. Even a trip out to the back court had got him in the gut, when he looked up at the rear of the building and saw the drainpipe he had once scaled when he fatefully locked himself out. Add to that the fact that the place was half the size it used to be and it completed the sense that a big part of himself was missing.

  He knew it would pass, but for the meantime it was best to be somewhere else, and besides, he could rattle out filler on his laptop anywhere.

  He had called up and agreed to meet Lucy Elphinstone for coffee around the corner on Broughton Street that morning. He told her he wanted to talk things over more in-depth, but mainly he wanted to see if she still felt the same having had twenty-four hours more to mull things over and deal with her grief.

  It was a bright airy cafe up the hill from the Barony, the morning sun through its big windows warming the place despite the frost still sparkling where the pavement was in shade. Parlabane had waited for her close to fifteen minutes after their appointed time, and was about to interpret her no-show as a change of heart when she came through the door. She had an air of flustered apology as she took a seat, explaining how an important work-related call came in just as she was about to leave the flat.

  She ordered a pot of Earl Grey which she sipped black. She leaned over the cup and breathed in the fumes much as Parlabane recalled breathing menthol vapour to alleviate childhood colds. The fumes alone appeared to have a restorative effect. The flustered air dissipated and she visibly relaxed in her seat. Parlabane felt his own tensions ease, as he was braced for a degree of amateur bereavement counselling and it didn’t look as though that would be necessary.