Black Widow (24 page)

Let me stress, it wasn't some ongoing state of attrition. In fact, I think it would have been easier if that were true: I would have seen what was really happening and not gotten sucked into the quicksand. But just when I found myself wondering if I had made the biggest mistake of my life, he would do something to remind me why I fell for him. And, of course, I was so determined to make this work, and therefore vulnerable to believing that we were merely enduring normal bumps in the road.

Tensions would simmer for days, before the dam would break and I would have it out with him. Then he would say precisely the right words and between us we would see a brighter future, immediately before or after some very intense make-up sex.

I hated how I sounded, always moaning about the same things, but that was because those same things didn't change. Peter worked late most nights, and when he was home, he was often too tired or distracted to notice that I lived there too. I went to great lengths to ensure we could at least sit down to a meal together instead of letting him flop out in front of the TV or laptop, but he seemed resentful of my efforts rather than grateful. I worried that he was drinking too much, so I tried to discourage the patterns that led to him cracking open a beer with every meal and then staying up drinking after I'd gone to bed. Sometimes he wouldn't come to bed until after two, then he'd sleep in the next morning and so I wouldn't get to have breakfast with him before I went to work.

My complaints about all of this were merely the low-level background hum of our relationship. The major bust-ups took something else to bring them to a head. Such as the time my laptop crashed, and he was absurdly reluctant to let me use his merely to pay some bills and check a few things online. He made such a fuss, and insisted on hovering at my elbow the whole time, sighing every time I surfed to a new site.

I had tried to get these things done while he was in the shower, but his laptop was password protected, with a lock screen that kicked in if he left it alone for a few minutes.

‘Why don't you go watch TV or play a game on your Xbox,' I suggested, irritated by his looming presence as I tried to answer some emails to my Doctors.net account. ‘What is it you think I'm going to do to your precious computer? Or is there something on here you don't want me to see?'

He responded testily, like I was being obtuse.

‘There's things on there that I
can't
let you see.'

‘Like what?'

‘Work stuff. What do you think?'

‘I wouldn't even know where to find it. And for God's sake, can't you trust me not to go looking?'

‘It's complicated.'

He sounded sheepish and yet huffy.

‘No, Peter, it's simple. Either you trust me or you don't, and having a password-protected screen saver kick in after two fucking minutes tells me you don't.'

‘Of course I trust you. But whether I do or not is immaterial. This is about the NDA put in place by the investors. The conditions dictate that I am not allowed to let anyone else use this laptop or any of my work computers unsupervised. The NDA also stipulates that any portable machine I remove from the office be password protected in sleep mode, and set to sleep after a maximum of two minutes' inactivity, even at home.'

‘But don't you see that this is our relationship right now in microcosm? It's like part of you is permanently behind a firewall and I'm not authorised to access it. You're at work all the time, and even when you do come home, either you can't talk to me because it's confidential or you
won't
talk to me because you just want to flop out.'

‘You're the one who told me to throw everything at this opportunity. After pissing my career up the wall half my life, I'm finally putting my shoulder to the wheel. Or would you rather have the waster I was before I met you? I'm trying to build something, Diana.'

‘And I thought
we
were trying to build something:
here
. A marriage. A family.'

We hadn't been using any contraception since before the wedding. Neither of us had used the expression ‘trying for a baby', but it was tacitly understood to be our shared intention. It had been four cycles now and nothing had happened. When my period last came, part of me was disappointed because I thought the prospect of a baby would focus things between us and bring us closer again. Another part of me was relieved, as I was beginning to wonder whether becoming pregnant would be the single worst way to compound a colossal mistake.

‘If you've got no time or energy for being a proper husband, how can you possibly expect to have the time and energy for being a father?'

‘But that's why I'm
doing
this. I'm trying to lay the groundwork and get the business running so that things will be simpler by the time a baby comes along. There's no way of staggering this: it's not like I'm painting a wall and I can pick up the pace or slacken off at will. There's no prize for second in the race for bringing this idea to market.'

He was pacing, his hands out in front of him like his frustration was an invisible object he was trying to crush between them.

‘I'm not the only one who works late and finds it hard to disengage,' he said. ‘That's why I thought you of all people would understand. I'm putting my heart and soul into this right now. I'm working harder than I've ever worked in my life, and I could use a bit of support and sympathy rather than being guilt-tripped because I don't feel like recreating how it was six months ago, sitting there at the dinner table making plans for our future. This is that future. I'm executing those plans.'

‘Well, maybe if you could even talk to me about what the hell you spend your days working on, I'd feel more like they were
our
plans and not just yours.'

Peter smashed his palms together, like the invisible object's outer resistance had suddenly given. The resultant slap echoed off the walls of the former spare room that had become his man-cave.

I felt a wave of something cold and instinctive pass through me. I wanted to tell myself that my reflexive response was mere startlement at the sudden sound, but deep down I knew that really I was bracing myself for violence.

I thought he was going to scream. His eyes flashed and a shudder ran through him. But then he was calm, as though something had defused the bomb that had looked primed to explode.

He closed his eyes for a second, then looked at me imploringly, a hint of a smile about the corners of his mouth.

‘I'm sorry. You're right. You're absolutely right, but that's why I'm finding this so frustrating. I want to be that husband, that father, but I don't think I can be either of those things if I fail at what I'm trying to create here. I want to become the person you made me aspire to be, but it seems the more I work towards it, the further I get from you. I was feeling so trapped right now, but then I suddenly thought: there is a way out of every box, a solution to every puzzle; it's just a matter of finding it. Things are only impossible until they're not.'

I melted when he said that. My fear was instantly forgotten, retrospectively absurd, even denied. Something else flooded through me: warm and passionate. His words made me feel like I
had
made the right decision. It made me feel that together we could overcome anything, that he was the man I had believed him to be. I wanted him to father my children, and I wanted that process to start right that moment, up against the wall of his den.

That was how it always went. We'd clear the air and it felt like everything was better: then after a few days, I would come to realise nothing was. All that happened was I cut him some slack and we had shagged a few times, but his own behaviour hadn't changed. He hadn't found a solution to any puzzle: he'd simply got me to stop bothering him for a few days.

I tried to make my peace with what he said: biding my time, hoping to see signs that he had ‘broken the back of the start-up stage' as he put it, and that our domestic arrangements would seem more like a married couple and less like flatmates with benefits.

Then one night I finished late at work – massive complications meant a case that ought to have taken forty minutes ended up taking three hours – and I had a bit of an epiphany. My own working day having been arduously extended, I was feeling a sense of solidarity with Peter, and I realised that I was guilty of what used to annoy me about so many of my male colleagues. They saw their own jobs as all-important, expecting their wives to tolerate late finishes, on-call and all the psychological effluent that went with it, but at the same time regarded their spouses' jobs as comparatively trivial.

He was right: I ought to know what it was like to be in a demanding job with no option to dial down the intensity. My classically arrogant medic assumption was that surely
his
work wasn't so important that he couldn't slacken off if he really wanted to.

I decided to surprise him at the office he had rented on my way home. I would show him that things could work differently by suggesting we go out for dinner. He could get a curry and a few beers, and I could get to sit down with him for a couple of hours.

As he was effectively a workforce of one, I had initially queried why he was paying rent for an office when he had his den at home, but as well as (inevitably) the demands of the NDA, he said he needed an environment that was solely about work, away from the comforts and temptations of the house. Also, he needed a business premises for lots of other practical reasons, not least the larger computer systems he was running. He needed space for all his kit, and the energy bills alone were something that demanded to be accounted separately from any domestic tariffs.

He got a cheap lease on a place in Sunflight House, an eighties-built block on the outskirts of a light industrial estate about ten minutes' walk from the city centre and a five-minute drive from the hospital. At one point it had been the regional admin office for a travel firm, but the internet had done for them and now it was subdivided into individual units for small businesses.

It was shortly before eight as I approached, but I could see no lights on in the building, and no cars in the car park. Typical: the night I decide to do this, he's already finished up and headed home. However, when I got back to the house, Peter's BMW was not in the driveway and the cottage was in darkness.

I called his mobile and got bounced to voicemail.

He showed up around eleven, with a pizza and a six-pack, the first can of which he had opened and was supping from even as he came through the door.

‘Where have you been?'

I tried to keep my voice as neutral as I could. I wanted to sound interested rather than accusatory.

‘Look, don't start tonight, please.'

His words were imploring though his tone was anything but.

‘I had a major headache with the servers and I've been firefighting for about nine hours straight. That's why my phone was off and why I didn't ring back when I saw I had a missed call from you.'

‘You've been stuck in the office all night?'

‘Yes. Which is why I just want to eat my pizza and chill out, and I'd appreciate not being given a hard time about it after the day I've had.'

The room seemed to alter around me. So much had changed in one small moment. Logic dictated that I challenge him with what I knew, but I said nothing, as I was reeling too hard from the implications of what had happened.

I felt my face flush, and worried that he would register my response, but there was no danger of Peter paying me enough attention to do that. Instead I took myself off to bed, where I lay in the darkness and didn't sleep.

Peter Elphinstone's black BMW 3 Series was sitting on its own inside the open-fronted workshop building at the far end of the depot, a few yards in front of a hydraulic lift. It looked like it was waiting to be worked on, but the whole point was that it
hadn't
to be worked on.

Lynne McGhee was in charge of examining it. She was waiting in the warmth of the workshop's back office when they arrived, spotting them through the grimy window. Lynne was a petrolhead who drove in forest rallies in her spare time, so Ali pitied any bloke who had tried to patronise the wee woman from Forensics with advice about examining a car.

Ali's role here was to be walked through the report on-site before signing off on the vehicle's release.

‘Isn't it technically a write-off?' Ali asked.

‘That's between the insurance company and the owner: or in this case the owner's wife. Theoretically it should run okay once it's had time to dry out, though it really depends on the electrics. They might need completely replaced. Freshwater means fewer long-term concerns over the bodywork, but if it was me, I'd want nothing to do with it.'

‘I can't see Dr Jager wanting to hold on to it,' Ali mused. ‘Any indicators as to what might have happened? Dodgy treads, worn brake-shoes?'

‘No. The car had passed an MOT a few weeks ago and appears to have been well maintained. The treads indicate the rear tyres have been replaced since the vehicle was purchased, as I'd expect a lot more wear going by the mileage on the clock. That's moot if there was black ice on the road that night, but I'm not led to believe that was the case. In fact I'm not inclined to think that skidding was an aspect of this.'

She squatted down next to the rear driver-side wheel and pointed to the outer rim of the tyre, drawing an imaginary circle all around it.

‘A major skid caused by going around a bend too fast would leave damage to the tyres – nothing huge, but visible if you know what you're looking for – and the lateral momentum would put particular stress on one side. I'm not seeing that.'

‘The witness said the car swerved on to her side of the road,' Rodriguez told her. ‘Then over-compensated and swerved again.'