Black Widow (12 page)

Then Duncan McLean got in touch from New Zealand to say his tenants were moving out, so he had a flat up for grabs. Dunc had lent him it once before, shortly after purchasing the place, when it was halfway through being gutted for renovation. That accounted for the ‘wheel coming back around' part. The skelp in the dish part was that this had been the very place where he first met Sarah.

The awareness of this had been lurking in a dusty corner of his mind, waiting to be unpacked like all of the boxes currently stacked out there in the hall. Looking out upon the square had suddenly broken it open, spilling its content of memories across his consciousness and reminding him of a time when the same window had offered a view of a better future.

Strictly speaking, he had first met her in the flat directly beneath, where her ex-husband had lived – and indeed died. Given that things post-Sarah had worked out even worse for Jeremy than they had for Parlabane, perhaps he should nip upstairs and warn whatever poor bastard lived on the top floor to steer clear in case she ended up going for a full house.

Christ, he thought, thinking of the phrase that had always been applied to Jeremy: ‘Sarah's ex-husband'. Now that should be
first
ex-husband.

Parlabane sipped at the black tea, realising that the smell and flavour were playing their part in this assault by nostalgia. He'd been making do with black tea then as well. He remembered inviting Sarah into the kitchen and offering her UHT with her coffee. In those days, his excuse was that the flat didn't have a fridge. The place was looking a lot more hospitable now, it was fair to say. There was indeed a fridge; a freezer too; even carpets. So his excuse for drinking black tea this morning was that he hadn't gotten around to hitting the supermarket since moving in, but as his fuzzy head reminded him, he had managed to bring home a six-pack and a bottle of whisky. Priorities, priorities.

That was what happened when you didn't have a wife around to explain yourself to. Or an office to show up looking respectable at, or a boss to please, or colleagues, or a proper job.

He kept seeing references to himself as a disgraced journalist, a description which was almost a tautology these days, but in his case he had to concede it was more apposite than most. He had once been an investigative reporter who made a name for himself uncovering corporate and institutional malfeasance, notching up a few notable scalps along the way. But then came the Leveson Inquiry, when his professional methods came to light and it emerged that he had employed hacking, burglary, subterfuge and all manner of inventive illegality in order to get stories. What really finished him off, though, was his subsequent desperation to get back to the top of the game.

Even after Leveson, some people may have retained a sneaking admiration for him on the grounds that the ends justified his means: he hadn't been hacking dead schoolgirls' phones or sniffing out tittle-tattle on soap stars, he was going after substantial issues. He knew he was still perceived to have a certain integrity, even if nobody wanted to hire someone so otherwise tainted. But then he made an almighty arse of himself before the whole country, when he became the useful idiot who ran with a hoax story that had been deliberately planted to flush out a leak. Someone in the intelligence services used him like a barium enema in order to expose security compromises within the MoD, and any remaining credibility he might have had evaporated quite literally overnight.

His marriage crashed and burned in parallel with his career, Sarah deciding her own reputation had suffered enough collateral damage from her association with him. Obviously there was a lot more to it than that, but the bottom line was that only a few years ago he had a wife and a career, both of which he loved, and now he had neither.

He sat back down at the laptop with a sigh. This wasn't just his home now, it was his workplace, the boundaries of his world shrinking all the time. He wasn't a journalist any more: he was a ‘content generator' for various websites, churning out all manner of vapid filler one step up from lorem ipsum on everything from hotels he'd never visited, to TV shows he'd never watched, to consumer products he'd never laid hands upon.

Everything was virtual and remote. His life was becoming a digitised version of Plato's cave: he was stuck here alone, describing a shadow of a reality that he couldn't touch.

He missed working in a proper newspaper office; missed it more knowing how few journalists still were.

Nah, upon reflection that was bollocks. He had hated being stuck in an office as much as he hated being stuck in a flat. What he truly missed was the man he had been once upon a time, when he first stayed in this flat, when the world before him seemed boundless and when love had been waiting outside in the close.

Just then, the doorbell rang again. He shambled over to open it, and was confronted by a woman clutching a cardboard tray bearing two polystyrene cups. He assumed she had the wrong flat, but then she spoke.

‘Jack Parlabane, right?'

‘Yes.'

He was unable to keep the surprise from his voice. Her own tone was at once stern and tentative, which made him wonder if he was about to get served.

‘Sorry for the intrusion, but I've seen you around, so I knew you lived locally and I wanted to talk to you face-to-face. Someone gave me an address, but it turned out to be your old place. They directed me here. Can I come in?'

‘Sure. Who are you?'

‘Oh, sorry. My name is Lucille Elphinstone. People call me Lucy.'

He placed her around mid-thirties, maybe older. She was dressed in a rather sweeping black coat, opened to reveal a black blouse buttoned up to a frilly collar. It seemed at once prim and somehow fetishistic, though maybe the latter was in the eye of the beholder. He hadn't been laid in a very long time.

Her black hair was swept back behind an Alice band marked with Celtic symbols. Between that and the garb, she looked like the headmistress had the Tories' Free School programme allowed Marilyn Manson to set up an academy.

The one thing jarring against the overall impression was that she had a folded copy of the
Daily Record
tucked under her arm. She didn't look like the normal demographic.

‘I brought coffee.'

There was a dourness in her tone as though she already regretted the gesture but had to go through with it now.

‘Thanks. Let's grab a seat.'

Parlabane led her to the kitchenette, gesturing to the two stools at the breakfast bar looking out into the living room. The first time he lived here, the place had been literally twice the size. Edinburgh was getting almost as bad as London that way. They said you couldn't divide zero, but property developers in Hoxton had to be getting pretty close.

‘What can I do for you?'

She had a few false starts, seemingly about to speak and then abandoning the attempt. It was as though she was composing and deleting various drafts of the opening line of a sensitive and important email. Up close he could see that she was a few years younger than he first estimated. She looked tired and she looked sad, both of which had aged her. Her eyes were bloodshot: from lack of sleep or from crying or from both.

Letting out a sigh of frustration, she unfolded the
Daily Record
and placed it on the worktop, spreading it open a few pages in. Parlabane noted that the edition was yesterday's.

‘This was my brother.'

The headline stated:

TRAGEDY STRIKES NEWLYWEDS AS HUSBAND FEARED DEAD

The story was accompanied by a picture of a smiling couple and another showing a crane hauling a car from a snow-lined stretch of river. Parlabane quickly scanned the copy. He had seen the same story online already. The
Record
was stretching the definition of newlywed to an outer limit of six months, but he couldn't argue with the tragedy part.

HOPES FADED for Peter Elphinstone yesterday as police called off their search for the missing computer programmer, whose car plunged into a river near Inverness in the early hours of Friday morning.

Elphinstone had recently married consultant surgeon Dr Diana Jager, who hit the headlines five years ago over her controversial ‘Sexism in Surgery' blog. The pair met at Inverness Royal Infirmary, where they both worked, and were married last summer.

Sources close to Diana say she is devastated.

‘They were perfect for each other,' said theatre nurse Abigail Darroch. ‘From the moment they met they were barely out of each other's sight. She used to talk about how she was worried she'd never find someone, so when she met Peter it was the answer to her prayers. It was like something from a movie: she had this high-profile feud with hospital IT guys and then fell in love with one.'

One friend of Peter's told us tearfully how the IT whiz worshipped his wife. ‘He was so happy, he had everything to live for. He really couldn't believe his luck in ending up with someone like Diana. If ever two people looked like being a happy ever after, it was them. It's just so sad.'

Elphinstone is believed to have lost control of his car at Widow Falls, a notorious accident blackspot near Ordskirk, close to Inverness. He is the son of Perthshire landowner Sir Hamish Elphinstone. A spokesman for Sir Hamish issued a statement asking for privacy at this difficult time.

‘I'm so sorry,' said Parlabane, cringing as he always did when a complete absence of context meant he had nothing but platitudes to offer. On this occasion, he guessed context would be imminently forthcoming.

‘I came here because…'

She bit her lip and then got up from the stool.

‘I'm sorry. I don't know what I was thinking.'

‘Hey, just take a moment, it's okay.'

He spoke in a register learned from two decades of coaxing nervous sources who either thought they weren't going to be believed or feared he might think them crazy. Putting them at ease was a vital skill of his profession, because very occasionally neither of these things turned out to be the case. ‘You might as well finish your coffee seeing as you went to the bother.'

She took a sip, nodding nervously.

‘Sorry. I'm a mess at the moment.'

‘I can imagine. Were you and your brother close?'

‘Yes. I like to think so.'

Her tone indicated someone else might think otherwise.

‘We weren't living in each other's pockets, but we were the first person the other called whenever one of us had news, you know?'

Parlabane nodded, thinking of the one person in his life with whom he ever had that kind of relationship. Now there was a letter from her lawyer in his living room.

‘I realise you might think that I'm not dealing with this well, that I'm looking for something that's not there because I can't accept it, and you'd most probably be right. In fact I'd hope you were right. But I need to talk to somebody about this and I don't know where else to turn.'

Parlabane said nothing, just lifted the cup she had brought for him, a gesture of complicity.

She looked suddenly apprehensive.

‘This is completely confidential, right?'

‘It's better than that. Nobody believes anything I say these days anyway.'

She didn't smile, but she seemed reassured by the sentiment.

‘I know you've a reputation for looking for the story that might lie beneath the mainstream narrative everybody else accepts.'

‘That's a flattering way of putting it.'

He omitted to add that a more common description in the modern parlance tended to invoke hats made of tinfoil.

‘I came here because I don't recognise this tabloid version of my brother's marriage, but it seems disloyal or inappropriate to say that out loud to anyone who knows him and Diana.
Knew
, I should say.'

It wasn't unusual for people to feel insulted by the simplistic way in which the press reduced complex lives to fit large-font headlines, but Parlabane didn't see what he could offer her beyond sympathy.

‘Nuance isn't exactly their stock-in-trade. What is it that you think they're missing?'

She had another false start, then bought herself a moment's preparation for take two with a mouthful of coffee.

‘I don't know how to say this. I'm not sure I can even give voice to this because of what it says about me, but … I was worried about Peter before this happened. Peter never likes to admit he's in trouble, or that he's got himself in over his head, so he makes out nothing's wrong – or nothing's all
that
wrong – but something was. A lot was wrong.'

‘Like what?'

‘The last time I spoke to him, I could tell he was unhappy. Seriously unhappy. I've never heard him sound so stressed. I know he was under a lot of pressure to do with his work, but I'm sure the business was only part of it.'

She reached to her coffee cup again but didn't drink. Instead, she turned it gently on the spot as she spoke, a few degrees at a time, like she was opening a safe.

‘Nobody sees what's truly going on in a marriage behind closed doors. It's a partnership, and even when the partnership is failing, the one thing they'll still cooperate in is putting on a united front. You can never know the truth from the outside, but I got a few smuggled dispatches, and it was not the fairytale everybody keeps talking about.'

Parlabane eyed her cautiously. He was curious as to where this might be going, and already worrying about how he was going to let a bereaved but crazy person down in a manner sufficiently diplomatic as to get her out of his flat without incident.

‘They had only known each other a few months before they got married. I think that increases the complicity in a united front because they share the embarrassment of people thinking they were foolish. Add to that Peter's aforementioned reticence to admit when things are going wrong and you'll understand why everybody else thought they were blissful. But I know him better than anybody, and he knew there was only so much he could hide from me.'