Black Widow (32 page)

I felt my breath stop, the world stop. Was this what Sir Hamish had been alluding to?

She flashed a wistful smile, recollections of happiness mixed with regret. The big question was
what
she had regretted: saying yes or saying no?

‘I thought about it a long time. It was one of the longest sleepless nights of my life, and believe me, the bar is pretty high when you've had my life. But in the end I turned him down. It felt too soon. I said let's wait.'

Sensible you, I thought bitterly.

‘How did he take it?'

‘He said how about we move in together, see how it goes. I wasn't so sure, but he was quite pushy about it; uncharacteristically so. I think he was also quite hurt, and that's probably why I caved in. That proved to be the beginning of the end, though: vindicated my decision and then some.'

I had this slight sense of relief that maybe I had found an explanation for Peter's behaviour. If he was still looking at the videos they made together, then maybe he was dealing with how marriage closed the door for ever on past might-have-beens. Marriage is about choosing one path, one possibility, and when you did it as quickly as we had, the implications could be a while catching up.

Nonetheless, this didn't address the far bigger question of why he was in Glasgow, and lying to me about it.

I leaned forward, dropping my voice. There was a mother and baby at the table nearest us, and she seemed entirely captivated by the process of spooning puree into the tot's uncooperative mouth, but as I could hear every shriek and gurgle I couldn't assume the woman wasn't paying us any heed.

‘This is going to sound a little inappropriate, so forgive me. But did Peter ever take intimate photographs of you?'

She bridled less than I might have expected, but then she knew she was talking to Peter's wife, so there was a sorority of sorts that excused me.

‘He asked, but I wasn't comfortable with it. My ex leaked intimate images of me while I was in prison. There was no way I was going to put myself in that position again.'

I barely heard the end of her explanation, as I was already calculating the implications.

She stared hard at me across the table. Finally I felt like the one who knew something.

‘Why do you ask?'

‘He asked me too.'

I said it as though that ought to suffice. I couldn't tell her the truth: not yet, because if she didn't know, I had no right to bring it to her door.

‘Why did you end it?' I asked, preventing her from further pursuing the issue.

She took a moment, eyeing me with that same scrutiny as when we first started to talk.

‘I discovered he was seeing someone else.'

She fixed me in her gaze, analysing my reaction. I tried to remain impassive, but I don't know whether I carried it off.

‘How did you find out?'

‘There were signs that I tried to explain away, but eventually I stopped kidding myself. He had always seemed so open before, but once we moved in together he seemed, I don't know, furtive, secretive about things that there seemed no reason to be secretive about. Then one day I saw travel documents – a boarding pass and a hotel reservation – that he had booked in the name of another woman. I looked up his computer. She was all over it. No emails, but he had her Facebook page bookmarked, as well as blogs she had posted.'

‘Facebook? So you saw what she looked like?'

‘No. She posted lots of photos, but never any of herself. Her profile picture was a cartoon character. I didn't recognise it. It could have been a caricature of her, I suppose. I'm pretty sure she lived abroad. France, I think.'

‘How did you get access to his computer?'

She shrugged, like she didn't understand the question.

‘I looked through his laptop when he was out.'

Clearly he had learned since then. Now he had the NDA as a cover for his secrecy, otherwise it would have been more suspicious to be password-protecting his laptop from the woman he lived with.

‘I felt so angry. I had this huge sense of betrayal because of everything he had made me believe about him, and about myself. He had made me trust again.'

I watched her knuckles whiten as she squeezed her fists. This was still sore, still raw. And this was why she had agreed to meet me.

‘For a long time I worried Peter was too good to be true. It turned out I was right. He's cheating on you too, isn't he?'

‘I found some … intimate images. They were taken around about the time you and Peter would have been together. I think he's still in a relationship with this woman, or at least still obsessed with her.'

Our eyes met in a moment of acknowledgment: we were allies here. Sisters.

‘I used to think I was damaged,' Liz said. ‘And that I would never be put back together. Peter helped me repair myself, and I'll always be grateful for that. But he also helped me realise what a truly fractured soul looked like. I came to realise that
he
was the damaged one. He's not a bad person, but he's not a whole person either.

‘He gives the impression he's there for you, that he's the most kind and giving person you've ever known. Then you realise that giving is not the same as sharing. You realise you know almost nothing about him, apart from trivia, superficialities. I couldn't tell you who Peter really is, but what's always troubled me is that I'm not sure Peter could either.'

I had one last, obvious question. The fact that she hadn't already mentioned it made me fear she didn't know, but I needed to ask.

‘Do you remember what this other woman was called?'

‘Remember? It's burned into my memory like a scar. Her name was Courtney Jean Lang.'

As the van had accelerated and he felt the injection begin to take effect, Parlabane had spent a horrifying few moments imagining the places he might find himself when – and if – he woke up again. He would have to admit that his own bed did not feature on the torture-dungeon playlist.

He came round in instalments, his eyes opening the window into consciousness several times only for it to fall shut again. He had no gauge for how much time elapsed between these glimpses: it could have been seconds or it could have been hours.

As he approached a waking state, he struggled to focus on two consecutive thoughts, like all the lines of connection in his brain were temporarily disabled. Even the eventual awareness of his location took a while to register its significance. This wasn't his bedroom, he thought: this was his bedroom from years ago. His current bedroom was in Glasgow, with his wife Sarah. Why was he back in this one? Was he dreaming this? Or was it still the nineties and he had dreamed everything that happened since?

Fragments began to coalesce. Shit. He knew where he was. The location made sense. Other things did not. He was cold. He was face-down on top of the duvet, naked. Why had he gone to sleep like that?
How
could he have gone to sleep like that?

He wasn't ready to physically move yet. His body felt too heavy. Memories were starting to form, but they were blending into each other. One stood out, though, jarringly distinct: pain and fear. He had been attacked. There had been a van, a sack, a needle. Must have been an intravenous sedative.

There had been a woman, a smell of spice, a kiss. Why had she attacked him? No, he realised: the woman with the spice smell was earlier, at the pub. A different woman attacked him. A different smell: one he had smelled before. There were two of them bundling him into the van. Why did he think one of them was a woman? He wasn't sure yet. Maybe he was still confusing moments, blending time.

Neither of them had spoken, not a word. If you abduct somebody, even if you dump him back in his own bed, it's got to be to send a message. Why would they say nothing when they were sending a message? It had to be to conceal their identities, going a stage further than the sack. They were worried he would recognise their voices, or maybe in one case their gender. Yes. One of them was definitely a woman. It was the smell. Not the spice smell, another smell: a smell that had been familiar to him. He just couldn't remember from where.

He tried to open his mouth and discovered with some alarm that he couldn't. There was a tugging upon his upper lip and his chin: tape. He reached a delicate hand to his face and found the corners of a strip of duct tape. Why had they gagged him if he was going to be rendered unconscious?

His head still swimming, he slowly sat up and braced himself for the act of pulling off the tape; childhood memories of Elastoplast removal bubbling up unhelpfully. He loosed enough to get some purchase then pulled steadily but not too fast: if some skin began to tear, he still wanted to be able to apply the brakes. The action was swifter than he anticipated, suddenly accelerating at the stretch immediately covering his mouth. Less of the tape there was in direct contact with skin because there had been a small object fixed over his lips.

He looked down at what he had removed. Even with his bleary vision he recognised it as one of his own business cards. Somebody had used it to stop his mouth.

The message wasn't subtle.

But who was sending it? He couldn't think straight enough yet. Then he recalled handing a card to Sam Finnegan earlier the same day. He remembered the heavy who had been in tow, and Finnegan's quiet but determined words:

I don't discuss my businesses with anybody not directly involved
.

There had been a woman involved too, though. Hadn't there?

He wished his memory would clear. This was worse than any hangover. No matter what anyone said, even with the heaviest of those, you could always remember what happened: it was just a good excuse not to.

Parlabane screwed up the tape and card into a ball and threw it to the floor, which was when he noticed that there were loads of them scattered on the carpet, next to his discarded clothes. The intruders had contemptuously emptied a whole box of the things. As he drew his hand back, an unexpected scent wafted from his fingers.

Perfume, transferred from the card. The one he had smelled last night, in the back of the van.

It struck him that in the multiverse of parallel worlds, he was surely only a few short removes away from having had one hell of a good night. Here he was, woozy on a Sunday morning, with vague memories of an evening involving booze and drugs that had left him naked in bed with evidence that a fragrant-smelling woman had ministered intimately to his lips. Tweak a couple of those things and he'd have few complaints, though his drug of choice wouldn't be Benzodiazepine.

That was when he worked out where he knew the perfume from.

He had smelled it outside a hospital, in the presence of a woman who would have no problem getting hold of sedatives or hypodermics.

He had given her a card too.

Diana Jager had more letters after her name than in it, had published umpteen papers in a dozen different journals and was an undisputed expert in her surgical speciality. However, in keeping with the tunnel vision surgeons tended to exhibit with regard to other fields, she had just demonstrated that she understood bugger-all about psychology.

I couldn't even wait until I reached home to start googling her name. I tried to centre myself and let the journey calm my spirit. Having part of my brain occupied with the business of driving usually filters the flurry of agitated thoughts and lets the subconscious work silently on what is truly germane. On this occasion, however, my brain was in overdrive, churning through every permutation of the available data and impatiently demanding more.

I pulled into a layby after less than an hour and keyed ‘Courtney Jean Lang' into my phone. There was a Facebook page, but the account was private so I couldn't see any of her details as she hadn't friended me. Simply seeing the page, even with its cartoon placeholder instead of a headshot, was an unsettling jolt: providing a tangible – if digital – corroboration that what Liz Miller said was true. I had no reason to doubt her, but mere words were never the same as confronting the undeniable and inescapable fact of this woman's existence.

I found a WordPress blog too, the most recent entry linking to a local news story about a school in Bordeaux being demolished. It might have been due to my French consisting of little more than remnants from my own schooldays, but I couldn't work out from the blog whether she had been educated there or had taught there: it just said something about ‘all the years I had toiled in the place'.

She was on Twitter too, most recently a flurry of tweets during Saturday's rugby international, bemoaning the French side's performance against Wales as it unfolded. I wanted to follow her, but I would need to create a new anonymous account to do so, which would have to wait until I got home.

By the time I reached Inverness I had no recollection of the rest of that journey, which truly frightened me. I had been almost literally on autopilot, my thoughts so dominated by the mystery woman that I was taking in nothing else. I told myself that my instincts would have responded had there been the need, but I felt as though I had been asleep at the wheel.

As I lay alone in the dark that night, I was haunted by the question of where Peter was lying right then, and who with. Had she flown over from France for the weekend? Was she in Inverness the night Peter claimed to have been out at PC World when I drove by the office?

These thoughts offered nothing but pain, so I endeavoured to banish them by trying to further analyse what I knew for sure, organising the evidence in my mind and cross-referencing it, searching for connections. I came up with nothing new, but one unanswered question taunted me more than the rest. I kept hearing Sir Hamish's sneering tones towards Peter as I eavesdropped on their telephone conversation.

This doesn't change anything, you being with this woman: you being
married
. It didn't work the last time and it won't work now.