Black Widow

by Chris Brookmyre

  She looked better, like she’d had a good night’s sleep, perhaps for the first time in a while. Sheer exhaustion must have overcome the wakeful effects of being wired and overwrought.

  Before he could ask how she was doing and whether she still wanted him to go ahead with this, she reached into her bag and produced an A4 envelope, from which she slid out a printed list.

  ‘I’ve typed out names and contact details for everybody I could think of: people who knew Peter personally or knew him and Diana as a couple. Anyone who might be able to offer more insight than I can into what was going on.’

  She came across as businesslike and purposeful, though he sensed that beneath this façade she was still struggling to keep herself together. He couldn’t decide whether she was sticking to her purpose despite her turmoil or whether having this purpose was the one thing staving off breakdown. Either way, there was more of a calmness about her, a quiet determination, rather than that slightly frantic neediness he had witnessed the previous day. He reasoned that if she had enjoyed a good night’s sleep, was feeling more centred, and yet she still held these suspicions, then it was worth looking into.

  She nudged the list towards him across the table. His hand hesitated before picking it up, conscious of what might be inferred from this simple act. It felt as though he was not merely being handed a lead or taking a job but somehow accepting responsibility for this woman and her emotionally fragile condition.

  ‘I looked up more about you too, while I was in research mode. I read that you were married to an anaesthetist, though I gather you’re not together any more.’

  ‘We’re recently divorced.’

  He had never said that out loud before, but he knew he had to get used to it. It felt easier saying it to someone who had worse shit to deal with: a matter of fact rather than some defining catastrophe.

  ‘I’m sorry. I only mentioned it because I assume it means you know a few surgeons. It’s just, I get the impression they’re a strange bunch and I reckoned it would help that you’re familiar with them. I’ve always found Diana to be somewhat cold and aloof, and I’m curious as to whether she is cold and aloof because she’s a surgeon or whether she’s cold and aloof for a surgeon.’

  ‘My wife called them clever psychopaths.’

  The words had come out before he could consider the implications. It was a familiar term that tripped off the tongue without thought: a joke that functioned as a cultural shorthand among anaesthetists. Unfortunately it had sounded very different spoken to a layperson, particularly in this context.

  Parlabane put his wipers on but the snow hitting the windscreen wasn’t melting on contact. It was like a hard, brittle dust, brushed aside by the blades, which scraped across the glass with a squeak. It wasn’t snowing, he realised: the wind was whipping the top layer off what had fallen a couple of days ago and scattering it like sand.

  The route would be clear after all, but it was a timely reminder, after recent costly lapses in his professional judgement, to always make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He was merely looking deeper than had so far been delved in this story: there was no hypothesis in play here.

  The biggest reason for Lucy’s suspicion was that Diana Jager had mentioned a prior incident at Widow Falls, but the most rational interpretation for this being more than a random coincidence was simply that she had identified a risk and that her husband had failed to learn from his near-miss. She had expressed her concern over the fact that the guy drove too fast when he was stressed and angry, and had mentioned that the previous occasion had followed an argument. That both incidents should happen at the same place sounded less dramatic when you factored in that it was an accident blackspot. Lucy said Peter was in a bad way mentally when she last spoke to him, so the most likely explanation was that his stress had led to a fatal accident, with a further outside possibility that it had led him to suicide.

  Nonetheless, he had been sure that Lucy had greater reason for her suspicion than she was prepared to let on. There was definitely something she wasn’t saying, but that wasn’t the hunch that was urging Parlabane north. It was the fact that they had found the car but not found a body: that part had triggered his suspicious-bastard reflex from the first second.

  TALE OF THE TAPE

  ‘Romeo Victor Four from Dispatch, do you read?’

  The radio seemed unusually noisy, breaking over the comparative silence inside the car. It was mid-morning, Rodriguez at the wheel. This was the first time Ali had been out with him since that initial prolonged shift, and she was patiently navigating as the Londoner attempted to develop his sense of the local geography. The reason for the quiet was that they were slowly making their way through the labyrinthine streets of the Silver Brae housing scheme, a recently built upmarket development where there was little traffic outside of rush hour. In fact, the only other cars they had encountered were learners under instruction, and she was wondering how many they would pass before Rodriguez worked out that she was taking the piss.

  He earned points for how he first got behind the wheel. Rodriguez had to be six inches taller than her, which was not an uncommon distinction among male officers. However, they often seemed to make a big deal about adjusting the seat if she had been driving a patrol car. The preferred tactic of such colleagues was to squash themselves in behind the wheel in order to emphasise how close to the dashboard her seat needed to be. Well woohoo, you’re tall, she would think. How long did you have to practise to achieve that?

  Rodriguez had simply slid the seat back a few notches without fuss and slipped into position. He’d been in the Met, though: maybe they got an awareness course.

  ‘Dispatch, this is Romeo Victor Four, go ahead.’

  ‘Reported break-in at Lower Mills industrial estate. Can you deal?’

  ‘Roger. On our way.’

  It took less than five minutes to reach the address: a printing and copying business in a single-storey unit on the outskirts of the estate where it bordered a residential area. The call had come from a woman who was hanging out her washing when she saw someone climb up on to the roof and disappear inside, presumably through a skylight.

  They got out of the patrol car and did a quick circuit of the perimeter. There was no sign of damage, and though the premises had been in darkness when they pulled up, there was a light on by the time they made it around to the front again.

  Rodriguez rang the bell and a few moments later a squat and slightly sweaty bloke opened the door. He was flushed about the face and breathing heavily. He looked mid-fifties, dressed in a grey suit and a blue tie that he had loosened as though his work day had just finished rather than begun.

  ‘We received a call about a possible break-in?’

  Rodriguez’s tone indicated that he had already sussed the situation.

  The guy rolled his eyes.

  ‘Aye, sorry. My wife’s away visiting her mother in Fochabers, and she’s gone off with both sets of keys.’

  He showed them his driving licence, identifying him as Stuart Preston. The business was called Presto-Print.

  He showed them inside to verify all was as it should be.

  ‘They say you only find out how secure your place really is when you lock yourself out of it. And the answer in this case is “not very”. Took me about two minutes from realising Audrey had the keys to gaining access through the roof, and I’m not exactly Spider-Man. Just needed to roll one of the rubbish hoppers against the wall and then pull myself up over the gutter.’

  ‘How did you get the door open for us?’

  ‘Spare keys in the office desk.’

  The place was well worth breaking into. There were four PCs, two with extra-large widescreen monitors, as well as an array of laser printing machinery.

  Ali clocked a photo on the wall of the guy with his wife, handing over an outsize charity cheque for funds they had raised for Cancer Research.

  They were done here.

  ‘It’s reassuring you got here so
fast, right enough,’ Preston said.

  ‘PC Rodriguez knows a few shortcuts.’

  ‘Can I offer you both a cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh no, we wouldn’t trouble you.’

  It was her stock answer. She always felt impolite about refusing. People didn’t know it wasn’t permitted.

  ‘It’s just boiled,’ he told them, indicating a kettle in the corner. ‘First thing I did. Well, I needed it after hauling myself in like that.’

  ‘That’s kind, but we have to get back on patrol,’ Rodriguez told him.

  The guy looked genuinely disappointed. Perhaps with his wife away he feared being starved of company.

  Preston glanced down at the newspaper on top of his desk.

  ‘Hell of a business that, was it not?’ he asked, thus confirming Ali’s hypothesis. Any excuse to engage them in conversation.

  She looked at what he was talking about. The paper was open at a story about Peter Elphinstone.

  ‘Terrible, yes.’

  ‘Not long married, as well. I never knew him, but his wife, she operated on me once.’

  He sounded quite proud of this, like it was an achievement. People over a certain age loved to tell you about their operations. Ordinarily, this would have been Ali’s cue to get out the door all the quicker, but curiosity got the better of her.

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘A bit of a cold fish, to be honest. Didn’t smile much, you know? Not a lot of chat. But very good. Very professional. She sorted me out grand. I had this problem in my…’

  They made their way back to the car about ten minutes later, Rodriguez giving her an admonitory look.

  ‘Jeez. We were almost out of there and you had to ask him a question. I now know enough about that man’s colon that it could be my specialist subject on Mastermind.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I suppose I’ll need to get used to everybody vaguely knowing everybody else.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Diana Jager doing that guy’s operation.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s Inverness for you. Still a village. Never assume your anonymity in this place.’

  It was something Ali felt most keenly at times like this, after a break-up. What made it homely and reassuring could also be oppressive. Everybody knew things about you, so when you suddenly realised you couldn’t rely on the discretion of someone you once trusted enough to be sexually intimate with, it could leave you feeling horribly exposed.

  In recent days she had wanted to melt into the background, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before she ran into Martin again, and into people who knew him. There weren’t any particular revelations he could bring to light: it was simply the unsettling knowledge that secret things they had once shared were no longer under joint ownership.

  Did guys feel this way too? She hoped so. Mutually assured destruction would be a reassuring threat.

  ‘You still got questions about Dr Jager, then?’ Rodriguez asked, putting the car into gear and accelerating with a slow, steady foot.

  ‘Only an open-minded curiosity.’

  Ali had left Jager’s home with a sharp, instinctive sense of suspicion, but the prospect of presenting her notion to CID showed up its paucity in an unforgivingly harsh light. She could picture that patronising git Bill Ellis smirking as she admitted that the sum of her evidence comprised a small bruise on Jager’s cheek and Ali’s personal impression that she didn’t seem sad enough.

  ‘How are things with that business?’ Rodriguez asked. ‘It’s kind of been off my radar.’

  ‘Slow and annoyingly grey. Still no body, but they’ve got the car out of the river and it’s being examined by our people down at the depot. I have to pop down there later, in fact.’

  ‘What’s grey about it?’

  ‘I don’t know, just that sense that I’ll never fill in all the blanks. For instance, we haven’t been able to trace the only witness.’

  ‘The woman who called it in?’

  ‘That’s right. Sheena Matheson. Her number was a pre-paid mobile, so there’s no details registered to it. When you dial it, it comes up as unavailable.’

  ‘And isn’t she listed in the usual …?’

  ‘We’ve found two Sheena Mathesons in the area, but neither of them admits to making the call. Neither of them live west of Ordskirk either.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible she only moved here recently.’

  ‘True. She said she had a ten-year-old daughter, so she would have to be enrolled in the schools register. Actually, there’s a thought. Hang right at the next junction.’

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘I listened to the recording of the call a couple of times. She said she was nipping out to get Calpol from the garage because her daughter had a temperature. If she was coming in from the west on that road, there’s only one place she could have had in mind.’

  A few minutes later they pulled up at the twenty-four-hour petrol station where she and Rodriguez had stopped for a late snack the night Elphinstone’s car went into the river.

  ‘This is where we were when the call came in. We probably drove right past her on our way to respond.’

  Ali recognised both of the people behind the counter: an adolescent called Grieg and the duty manager, Brenda. She was on first-name terms with most of the staff here, as it was a regular stop for nocturnal sustenance.

  ‘Ali,’ said Brenda with a smile. ‘What can we do for you? The usual?’

  ‘Aye, two coffees would be great. But we’re also hoping for a wee look at your CCTV tapes. I’m trying to track down somebody who was in here early hours of Friday morning.’

  ‘No bother. Come on through to the back.’

  Brenda led them to a cramped space, no bigger than a pantry, where the CCTV cameras fed into an ageing PC with a compact monitor.

  ‘I can never remember how to work this thing,’ she confessed, tapping the keyboard uncertainly.

  Ali braced herself for the possibility that she would have to come back later when someone else was on-shift. Nothing about this incident was proving easy or convenient to deal with.

  ‘Oh, no, I tell a lie. I just need to … here we go.’

  Brenda hit a combination of keys and the live image was replaced by a list of files, each denoting a date followed by start and stop times for the period it covered. They were broken into two-hour segments.

  ‘Early hours Friday?’

  ‘Yes. About three.’

  Brenda selected a file running from two until four, fast-forwarding under Ali’s instruction. Ali kept an eye on the time-stamp, telling her to slow to normal as it approached two forty-five. She wanted to be absolutely sure they were looking at the right file, and confirmation came as she watched herself enter the shop.

  ‘That’s one of our regulars,’ Brenda told Rodriguez as they watched Ali on screen lifting some sandwiches from the fridge. ‘If she’s shoplifting, we’ve never caught her.’

  Ali felt disproportionately conspicuous as she watched herself stop briefly in the toiletries section. She remembered pausing to stare at the pregnancy kits. Her cheeks flushed with heat. There was no way for Brenda or Rodriguez to know what she had been looking at, but it felt as though it must be obvious. Maybe it was displaced anxiety she was feeling. It was three days later and her period still hadn’t come.

  ‘Okay, speed up the playback again. And slow it down whenever anyone comes in.’

  Nobody did. The recording could have been a still image but for minor flickering, until the door opened shortly before four o’clock. It was a burly male in biker leathers, his helmet under his arm.

  ‘It’s like that some nights,’ Brenda said apologetically. ‘You need a good book.’

  Ali got her to run the file backwards until reaching her own appearance again, playing at half the speed of before to make sure they hadn’t missed even the briefest of visits. Still nothing.

  ‘Maybe she changed her mind and went home,’ Rodriguez suggeste
d. ‘The crash could have spooked her, especially knowing her kid was in the house alone.’

  This was true. On the tape, Matheson said she had told her daughter she would only be half an hour. Having seen the crash and stopped to make the call, had she decided she’d been away too long and turned around? But if her kid was sick enough for her to have ventured out in search of Calpol in the middle of the night, would she really go back empty handed?

  It was something else that wouldn’t sound like much if she was presenting it to Bill Ellis, but she couldn’t help thinking the wrong notes were starting to accumulate.

  OLD FRIENDS AND NEW LIES

  Parlabane strode up the driveway of a neat redbrick modern detached house in an upmarket estate on the western outskirts of Inverness. His phone had told him the address. It had also told him it would take five minutes to walk from the hotel, but after a brisk ten he checked again and saw that he had looked at the driving time estimate by mistake. He thought the walk would clear his head, but as he approached the front door, clutching a bottle of wine, he was still feeling anxious, awkward and slightly guilty.

  Lucy had given him as much information as she could collate with regard to Peter and Diana’s work and social circles. The theatre nurse quoted in a couple of press reports was not among the names she supplied, and nor had she ever heard the woman mentioned. It was Lucy’s suspicion that she was an attention-seeking busybody who had sought to insinuate herself into the story, but Parlabane had the more prosaic notion that she happened to be the one who answered the phone when a reporter called the hospital. Rather than exaggerate her own connection to Diana, it was likely she said as much as she knew and the reporter made it sound like she was a bosom buddy.

  Parlabane wanted to speak to the people who genuinely knew the couple, and the briefest scan of Lucy’s notes gave him his first break. The name Austin Waites leapt out at him from a list of Diana’s colleagues, as he used to work alongside Sarah in Edinburgh way back when they were both registrars. Parlabane and Sarah had socialised with Austin and his partner Lucas semi-regularly in those days, and had kept in touch at Christmas card level after their respective consultant posts took them elsewhere.