I had never been unfaithful, in any of my relationships. I wasn’t used to deceit; wasn’t used to wanting someone else. I didn’t know yet what I felt for Calum, but I was sure what I felt for Peter. It had come out in that on-call room: something I was able to tell another person but had been previously unable to admit to myself.
It’s not merely that I think our marriage is finished: it’s that I don’t think it was ever real in the first place.
I thought back to the man I fell for. Where did he go? My mind kept returning to my irrational suspicions that he had always known I was the detested Bladebitch, and his interest in me had stemmed from that. I knew this still sounded crazy: who would be so hell-bent on payback over some internet postings that they would make it their whole life to punish the perpetrator? But I couldn’t escape the notion that the Peter I had met and married was a fiction. In which case this meant I was lying in bed every night with an impostor, and anyone prepared to engage in that level of deceit had to mean me harm.
I must have nodded off eventually, and as my bleep didn’t go off, I slept so long that Peter was awake before me. He was sitting up in bed fiddling with his mobile when I came round.
He scrutinised me as I blinked into consciousness.
‘So, anything exciting happen last night?’ he asked, his gaze intent and curious.
It took me a bleary moment to recall the events of the previous evening, but when I hit the highlights I felt my cheeks flush and I sharpened up fast. I suddenly feared he knew something about last night; that he could somehow see through me. I knew this was ridiculous and that he was only making conversation by enquiring as to whether some dramatic case had kept me at the hospital, but the impact of my initial fright was already manifest.
I realised I would have to get better at lying. I intended to get practice. I intended to give myself reason to lie more often.
I had no lists the next day, the rota allocating me two non-clinical admin sessions, so I didn’t need to go into the hospital. This was for the best, as it was the last place I wanted to speak to Calum. I did desperately want to speak to him though, and I guessed he would feel the same. We couldn’t let this hang.
I knew I could be wrong, however. He might be freaked and mortified by what had happened, and in need of a few days’ distance before he could possibly face me. Ordinarily I might have let this kind of worry tether me, but that evening, when Peter rang to say he’d be home late, I acted immediately.
In the recent past I’d have consumed myself with wondering what Peter was really up to; instead I didn’t care. I was too occupied by plans of my own.
I got Calum’s mobile number from switchboard at the hospital.
‘Are you at home?’
‘Not long in, yes,’ he replied cautiously. ‘Why?’
‘I need to talk. We need to talk.’
‘I can meet you in town whenever. I’m just out the shower, so I’ll throw some clothes on. Name a pub.’
Yes, I was picturing him. And why would he offer that detail, if he didn’t want me to. I think we understood each other.
‘No, I’ll come to you. This is delicate and I don’t want to risk being seen by prying eyes.’
It sounded like a plausible reason for coming to his flat. Much like there was no subtext to him saying he was just out of the shower.
I’ve never had sex like I did with Calum that night. I frightened myself. It reminded me of whatever Peter had been doing to me when we had sex after his mother’s funeral. I was lost, consumed by a mix of lust, abandon and ecstasy, but there was rage, hatred and violence in it too. However, unlike what I felt when Peter was doing it to me – used and alienated from whatever was going on in his head – Calum was as consumed by it as I was.
After sex like that, when the passion is spent and the clouding mists of need and desire have cleared, that’s when there comes shame, embarrassment, regret. I felt none of these things. I felt this had been my right. I felt this was right.
We found something in each other. We unleashed something in each other.
We did it in my office – in my office – late on a Friday afternoon when there were still people working nearby. We started kissing, pressing into each other as we stood next to my desk. I could feel his erection through his trousers, pushing against my stomach. I reached inside his waistband and—
‘Jesus. You can’t do that here.’
‘Never tell me what I can’t do.’
Giggling, I made him shag me at my desk, next to the computer that had been the occasion of my first meeting Peter. We heard voices in the corridor, which spooked Calum more than a little, but I made him do it: as much as you can, I insisted. I told him I wouldn’t let him do this again if he didn’t do it right there, right now. We both knew I didn’t mean that, but it added something. My command, his compliance.
I had to bite my arm to keep the noise down as I came. I came so intensely I wanted to scream down the building.
Does it need to be said how un-me this all was? I guess not. After what Peter had duplicitously brought out in me, I had learned to be analytical of my own behaviour.
Was I ambivalent about getting caught? Perhaps I was looking for a way to precipitate a blow-up, to bring things to a head because I couldn’t prove any of Peter’s deceptions. Perhaps I reckoned that if I had an affair, it would help bring our marriage crashing down. Was I just angry, just needy?
But what did it matter? Even if my reasons were wrong, I could never have believed the outcome would be so right. However I fell into this, it caused me to finally discover something that had been in my sights the whole time. And that is why I wasn’t lying when I told you how that dreadful, fateful Friday was the day I first met the man who would change my life for ever.
It’s just that the man concerned was not Peter.
A LETHAL INSTRUMENT
Ali stopped the car right in front of Jager’s cottage this time. She glanced towards the photograph Rodriguez was holding delicately in two hands and told him to pocket it. It was cover for why they were there, but they didn’t need to simply walk up and hand it over.
There was a car in the drive that she didn’t recognise from before: a black two-seater Porsche 911 with nineties plates. Jager drove a silver Audi A5, which was presumably in the garage.
As they stepped through the front gates a man emerged from the house, pulling on his jacket as he made for the Porsche. He was saying polite cheerios to Jager as she stood on the doorstep but there was something flushed about him that gave Ali the instinctive feeling that he was leaving in a hurry. This was compounded when Jager strode forward to engage them, as though distracting the cops while her visitor got away.
‘It’s PC Kazmi, isn’t it? And PC Sanchez, right?’
‘Rodriguez, ma’am.’
‘Sorry. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s just a routine follow-up, Dr Jager,’ Ali told her. ‘Do you mind if we come in? Or is this a bad time?’
‘No, not at all.’
She led them to the living room again. All the other doors in the hall were closed, but Ali could smell roast potatoes, pastry and something dark and rich, like a wine sauce, wafting from the kitchen. She doubted Diana was cooking for one.
‘Who was that?’ she asked casually.
‘Oh, that was Calum. He’s one of the surgical trainees. He popped in to ask how I was doing. All of my colleagues have been very supportive.’
Some more than others, Ali thought. The bloke who just left had smelled of shower-gel and aftershave. He was all scrubbed up as though for an evening out, but maybe it was an evening in that she and Rodriguez had interrupted.
They sat opposite her on a sofa, Rodriguez with his notepad out. He had the photo tucked underneath it, sitting on his left knee.
‘We want to bring you up to speed on our investigation,’ she said, then went through a deliberately dull breakdown of procedure since the futile search-and-rescue operation. Jager nodded with stoic patience throughout, like this
was some kind of mourning rite she was obliged to observe but wasn’t feeling.
‘Obviously we’re still fumbling in the dark for an explanation. And I’m sure the uncertainty’s been a source of much difficulty for yourself. If it’s not too painful, can you maybe give us some insight into your husband’s state of mind in the days preceding the accident?’
‘Sure. He was stressed. That’s the one thing there’s no uncertainty about. He was under pressure from work, putting himself under pressure. He had his own company: it was a one-man show, but there were investors and he was always fretting about them. He was working extremely long hours. I was getting worried about him, to be honest; though in retrospect maybe not worried enough.’
‘How about your own relationship with him? Was he happy at home?’
‘When he was home, sure. When we actually saw each other and he wasn’t exhausted, it was fine. His work was a major source of tension, though. That was the only thing we ever really argued about, if you could call it arguing. Neither of us was much good at confrontations.’
As Jager spoke, Rodriguez subtly drew Ali’s attention to what he had written, lifting the notepad and thus bringing the photograph into view. It said: ‘Spot the difference.’
Ali glanced at the fireplace then back to the picture. In the photo, there was a large knife in a glass case sitting right in the centre of the mantelpiece. She couldn’t remember whether she had seen it there on their last visit, but it definitely wasn’t there now.
‘We’ve brought back your photograph,’ Ali said. ‘Thank you for the use of it.’
‘No problem.’
Rodriguez stood up and walked a short few paces across the carpet to hand it to her.
‘Out of interest, what was the knife in the display case?’ Rodriguez spoke with deliberately boyish curiosity. ‘Was it a surgical thing?’
‘It’s a Liston knife. It was named after the nineteenth-century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, whose proficiency with it was such that he could amputate a leg in two and a half minutes, and was said to have once amputated an arm in twenty-eight seconds.’
‘Sharp, then.’
‘Indeed. Given that anaesthetics at the time usually consisted of a stick to bite on and a bottle of whisky if you were lucky, the speed facilitated by this implement’s sharpness was quite a mercy.’
Jager lit up as she warmed to her subject, eyes twinkling with enthusiasm.
‘That said, the combination of speed and sharpness wasn’t always so merciful. Liston once operated on a patient who subsequently died of gangrene, and during the procedure managed to lop off two fingers from his young assistant. He died of gangrene too, these being the days before antiseptic. But to round it off, Liston also sliced through the clothing of a spectator who was observing the operation. The poor chap thought he’d been stabbed and in his mortal terror had a heart attack. He died too. It went down in surgical legend as the only operation to have a three hundred per cent mortality rate.’
Ali didn’t know any surgeons, but she was troubled by how much pleasure this woman appeared to be taking in talking about death and dismemberment.
‘I can see why you would keep it in a glass case Where is it now?’
Jager paused, apparently needing time to think about it.
‘Peter hated it, so I stuck it away in a cupboard. I suppose I can put it back now.’
Was Ali imagining it or did she say this with a certain satisfaction? She certainly didn’t sound regretful about the notion.
‘Can I take a look at it?’ Rodriguez asked with eager enthusiasm.
‘Em, sure. I’ll just go and look it out.’
Jager was gone for several minutes. It felt like a long time to retrieve an object from another room in a house this size.
When she returned she was empty-handed.
‘I’m terribly sorry. It doesn’t appear to be where I thought I’d put it. Another time, perhaps.’
Count on it, Ali thought.
VOICES AND ECHOES
Clever psychopaths: that was how Sarah and her anaesthetist colleagues often referred to the surgeons. Admittedly, professional tensions played a part in this jaundiced impression, an element of Sarah letting off steam after being forced to bite her tongue in theatre throughout temper tantrums and other histrionics, but Parlabane got the impression she was only ever half joking.
‘They love to cut,’ she told him. ‘They live to cut. Some of them look so crestfallen when a non-surgical solution gets the nod. The reason we put up with so much shit from them is that we’re worried if they couldn’t do it in theatre, they’d be doing it elsewhere.’
Diana Jager had even blogged about it, directly referencing the ‘clever psychopaths’ slur in the posting’s headline. She talked about how it was normal for people to be horrified by the prospect of slicing open another human being, and thus not everybody was capable of it. Do we learn to cut, she asked, or are we born to cut?
Either way, those of us who practise surgery are afforded a transformative perspective upon the human condition. We see human beings differently when we are so tangibly familiar with what is under the skin. We feel overwhelming responsibility when it is in our gift to cut out disease, to repair damaged tissue, to preserve life. And yet to be in the position to act upon that responsibility requires us to be given enormous power over that life, life that is literally in our hands.
Once you have operated, there is no going back to how you used to regard your fellow human. Seeing a patient opened up by one’s own hands, it fills one with awe at both the complexity and the fragility of our form, and even more so at how we have transcended it. It seems astonishing that something so easily damaged can have survived so long and built so much. And yet at the same time one can’t escape the awareness that the greatest minds and the most remarkable individuals – be they kings, popes, poets, lovers – are nonetheless reducible to so much meat.
She seemed aware there was something abnormal about the way she looked not only at the human body, but at people generally. How abnormal, was the question. Parlabane was contemplating the possibility that this was a woman who had got rid of someone during her student years by killing her and making it look like an accident. Same as Peter Elphinstone, Agnes Delacroix had apparently died from drowning.
Delacroix had been an intolerable flatmate and an academic rival. Parlabane could see the psychopath logic in deciding to get rid of her, but was still struggling for a motive as to why Jager would kill Elphinstone. In their different ways, Lucas Tudek, Alan Harper and Craig Harkness had depicted a woman who was obsessive in her behaviour towards a husband who was not living up to her love-blind or deluded ideals. Psychopath or not, it seemed a stretch to think she would escalate from nagging him about his diet to murdering the guy.
These things more typically turned out to be crimes of passion, Parlabane reflected, which was when his thoughts instinctively flashed to the second party in his unexpectedly eventful trip home from the pub. The perfume on his business card told him Jager had been present, but he knew she had enlisted the help of an as-yet-unidentified male in pulling it off. So far, his prime candidate for this had been Sam Finnegan or someone working on his behalf, but truth was he couldn’t see how Jager and Finnegan’s paths crossed, far less how the pair of them fitted together.
So what if it was nothing to do with Finnegan? Whoever her accomplice was, she didn’t need to tell him what motivated the stunt: she could have made up some story about press harassment. Therefore it didn’t follow that he had been in on Elphinstone’s death, but nonetheless there were huge levels of trust and commitment required. Regardless how she coloured it, what they had done to Parlabane on Saturday night could bring down charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment. You’d have to be pretty close before you asked someone to come on board for something like that. Very, very close indeed.
Jesus, could it be that simple?
He was driving north, having just left Durham. His original destination was
a return to his flat in Edinburgh, but this latest deduction meant he might be heading to Inverness again, for an old-fashioned stake-out-and-follow job.
Diana Jager had a lover, and Parlabane intended to find out who.
On the trip down he had begun playing back the conversations he had recorded since commencing this investigation. It was partly to refresh his memory and partly an opportunity to re-evaluate everything he’d been told, in case previously insignificant details took on new meaning in the light of subsequent disclosures. So far it hadn’t thrown up anything dramatic, other than a guilty feeling at his own creepiness in recording Austin and Lucas without them knowing, particularly as he had done so even as they extended their hospitality. He had relived his evening at their house and his morning on the airsoft site with Alan Harper, their voices booming through the speakers so crisp and clear he could picture all of them as though they were sitting in the car.
It made him think of the voice he most wanted to hear right then, and not recorded, but live. Lucy: talking, confiding, sharing and especially laughing. She hadn’t done much of that when they were together; and neither had he of late, for that matter. He wanted to change that. Together they might change that.
Parlabane wished he could call her but he didn’t have an excuse. He had some new information, granted, but he wasn’t sure of its worth, and he didn’t want to haul her back into the darkness unless he knew for sure it was where the truth lay.
That said, he continued to wonder about what had been behind Lucy’s earliest suspicions, what had driven her to such dreadful unknowing that she would seek out a washed-up journalist in her desperation to find out more. The sudden loss of a brother she felt responsible for was a powerful blow, but it was a hell of a leap to so quickly suspect foul play.
When Lucy first came round to the flat, he had got the impression there was something she was holding back. There had to be a specific fear that underpinned her paranoia. He recalled how she had sounded on the phone when she told him she ‘didn’t want to live in that world’. She was relieved and yet still wary. There was a reason Lucy was still afraid her suspicions were true.
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