Black Widow (42 page)

‘That's bullshit. That's utter bullshit. If that were true, why wouldn't you tell me that's where you had been when we were having that argument about it? Instead you said you'd been meaning to reverse it but hadn't gotten around to it. Or is the problem that you can't remember which lie you told when?'

His head drooped, gaze flitting back and forth, unable to look me in the eye. Finally it appeared he was out of lies.

‘Shall we try again, from the top? Don't I deserve an explanation as to why, as well as an Oxford medical graduate, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, the author of a dozen papers and a consultant of ten years' standing, I am now also an amateur porn star? Do tell me how you were planning to, as you put it, “retrieve the situation”? What, were you going to track down everybody who has downloaded the video and ask them politely if they wouldn't mind deleting it?'

Even as I said this I realised that its sheer impossibility was too absurd for even Peter to offer up as an excuse. That was when it struck me that this was not what he meant.

‘Oh my God.'

My words were a mere breath. This was, incredibly, about to get worse.

When
I had first confronted him, he thought I was talking about something else. He had looked shocked, really shocked, when he walked in and found me sitting there. He knew I had discovered something quite disastrous, but this was before he learned it was the sex tape.

‘This isn't what you thought you could retrieve.'

I caught him glancing anxiously at the laptop, unable to prevent himself.

‘What did you think I was talking about? What were you trying to sort?'

He strode forward and made to grab for the computer. I was closer, though. I snatched it up from the table and clutched it to my chest, backing away.

‘It was only temporary,' he said, pleading. ‘I was going to pay it back.'

‘Pay what back? What have you done, Peter?'

I was barely able to speak above a whisper as my mouth was suddenly so dry.

‘Give me the laptop, Diana,' he commanded.

He was chillingly calm now, like the ocean is calm before a tsunami.

Peter was standing between me and the kitchen door. I had to get away from him and I had to be alone with the laptop so that I could confirm whether this was as bad as I feared.

‘Stay away from me.'

I opened the door that led down three concrete steps into the garage, grabbing the keys that were dangling beneath the handle. Glancing back to see Peter was already following, I slammed the door behind me, locking it with my right hand as I clutched the laptop with my left.

The Wi-Fi signal wasn't great out there, but it was enough. I didn't have the remote for my car with me, so I couldn't sit inside it. Instead I placed the laptop on the bonnet and launched my banking app.

It rejected my password and PIN combination. For a moment I worried I really had been hacked by Russian gangsters, but I realised it was more likely down to my fumbling fingers mistyping in my tremulous anxiety. I logged in at the second attempt, impatiently navigating past an annoying service announcement to reach the accounts summary.

When I saw the numbers, it was as though I began to drift out of myself. Even remembering it now, my recall is of watching the scene from above, like the emotions were so overwhelming that some defensive system had kicked in and detached me from feeling their full impact.

Forty thousand pounds had been transferred from my accounts into MTE. He had moved the money into his company in four instalments over the past week. To do that he didn't merely need my password and my PIN: in order to set up and approve a new payee he would have needed access to my bank cards and my card reader too. He must have done it while I slept.

This man I had loved and trusted above anyone else on this earth, this man with whom I shared a bed: this man had filmed me having sex on that bed, and had then robbed me while I slept in it.

It seems bizarre, but one of the first rational thoughts that came into my head was that I had been remiss in letting so much money accumulate in those accounts. That was where my salary went, and I had been meaning to deal with the surplus, but had never gotten around to it. It's what happens when you're well paid for an all-consuming job. You end up with no life outside of work and no time to spend the money you're making. I only had to look at my surroundings for an illustration of how dominant my work had been. When I bought this place, I had all kinds of plans for renovating the garage, turning it into an extension maybe. Four years on I hadn't even gotten around to throwing out the ancient tools rusting on the wall-rack alongside the car.

After the financial crash, I had been wary of letting too much build up in one place, having heard that it was only guaranteed up to a maximum of fifty K. So in those first few moments of shock, part of me was giving myself a hard time for my negligence in letting the pot fill up. But then the garage door opened and this weird reflex of self-recrimination was blown away in the icy blast of air that whipped in from outside.

Though it could only have been a couple of minutes, it was as if I had been cocooned in there, alone with my laptop and its revelations, deluded as to its sanctity. I forgot Peter could come around the front, or maybe I simply hoped he would be too ashamed to disturb me.

I heard the scrape of wood catching on the uneven concrete, an undulation caused by a creeping tree root, and saw Peter step through the gap. The night was black behind him, freezing and blustery.

He had followed me in here, but he was the one who looked cornered. He seemed wracked, in a state of torment like he was suffering a slow electrocution.

‘You have to let me explain. I know I was stupid and I should never have gone behind your back like this.'

‘You didn't go behind my back, Peter. You fucking stole my money.'

His eyes were bulging, his expression simultaneously haunted and insistent.

‘I'll put it back. I mean, I can't put it back now, but I'll pay you back, everything and so much more. I'm getting squeezed by my investors. The project is behind schedule and over-budget, and they'll only front more money if they can get a bigger slice of the back end. I'm so close to delivering something amazing, and the more of the company I can keep in my own hands at this stage, the more money we'll have when the product starts to roll out.'

‘The more money
we'll
have? There is no “we”, Peter. If there was,
we
would have talked about this.
We
would have agreed on how to deal with it. Instead there is me, a victim, and you, a criminal. I should go to the police, and you should start praying that it's only the theft I tell them about, because you could end up on the sex offenders register for what you did.'

I was thinking out loud with this, and on reflection I should have kept my thoughts silent and let my actions speak later, but I wanted to see him reel, like I had been reeling from blow after blow since I got home and heard that fateful email ping.

The slow electrocution seemed to jack up a few hundred volts.

‘NO!'

Peter balled his fists as he yelled, his spine straightening out of its previously craven posture.

‘I was desperate because I've come this far and I can't afford the whole project to fail. Don't you fucking understand? I only did this for you. I only did any of it for you. Perfect fucking you who never screws anything up, perfect fucking you for whom nothing's ever good enough. I wanted to be good enough, Diana. I needed to pull this off so that you'd respect me, so that I'd be the husband
you
wanted.'

His eyes were blazing: they were fixed upon me and yet it felt like he was looking at something else. It reminded me of how he had been when we argued in the car: consumed by his emotions and increasingly detached from awareness of his circumstances, of his actions.

We weren't in the car now, and I was in no state to mollify him. I wasn't letting him have his tantrum. I wasn't letting him justify himself. I yelled back, right in his face.

‘I wanted a husband I could trust. I didn't want a pervert. I didn't want a thief.'

That was when he hit me.

Parlabane hung up the call and placed the mobile down next to his laptop, a long sigh breezing between his lips. The final version of the copy had been cleared, and they weren't merely running the story: they were leading with it.

He felt drained, the tension and frantic effort of the past couple of days finally spent.

He already had Professor Emily Gayle on tape, and a few calls to local papers in Oxford and Yorkshire provided him with details of what was documented regarding the death of Agnes Delacroix.

He had recorded the Skype conversation with the individual he had been able to identify as Evan Okonjo. Given that he knew when the guy had worked at Alderbrook, a bit of digging had thrown up a limited number of possibilities as to his name, after which it was a lot easier to sift those thirty thousand forum posts for relevant details. As promised, he wasn't going to name him in the piece, but confirming who he was and where he worked meant Parlabane could stand up that part of the story.

After that it was a question of sounding out who might want it, and he wasn't short of takers.

He thought back to what a patronising cop had said to him a few months back, when he had made a nationwide arse of himself chasing a story that had turned out to be a flushing-out exercise waiting for a useful idiot to take the bait.

‘You were trying to get back in the game with one swing.'

Well, it had taken a sight more than that, but he was back in the game for sure, and not with a swing, but with a splash: a front-page splash.

He had given Catherine McLeod advance notice, in case she wanted to move on the information before it went to press. She told him he had banked another favour, and it always felt good to know he was in credit with a senior poliswoman.

He ought to be elated, but as he sat staring at his laptop, at the copy that was now out of his hands and soon to be landing on newsstands up and down the country, he felt torn. There was one call he still had to make, a warning of collateral damage to the person who had called in the airstrike.

Lucy.

She had come to him seeking answers, though really, he knew, she had been seeking peace. She even thought she had found it. But then he had delved into the darkness at her request, and now he had to tell her that her fears had been right on the money all along.

He had tried to call her earlier, before he filed, but her phone was off. It wasn't like he was going to hold the story if she had an issue with it, but he would have felt better about it had she been given the heads-up before he was talking details (not to mention money) with the news editor he sold it to.

He tried again, and this time it rang more than twice without being cut off for a voicemail message.

‘Jack. What's up?'

She sounded bright. He could hear a hubbub of voices and the echoing tones of a PA in the background.

‘Where are you?'

‘London. I just got off a plane. Heading for the Heathrow Express.'

‘Look, I need to let you know: you were right about Peter. I don't believe his death was an accident. I've discovered some things. There's going to be a newspaper story.'

‘A newspaper story. About Peter.'

Her voice was blank, neutral, drained of its previous emotion.

‘You okay?'

‘I need a seat. What did you find out?'

Parlabane told her about Agnes Delacroix and Evan Okonjo, about his abduction on Saturday night, and finally about the sex tape.

‘Oh Jesus.'

He could hear her breathing, the phone pressed close to her cheek. He could imagine her feeling exposed, sitting in a public space when she most needed somewhere private to speak and probably to cry.

‘Oh Jesus. Peter.'

‘Look, I know this is awful, and I wish I was with you rather than doing this over the phone, but there's something I need to ask you.'

‘It's okay, Jack.'

Her voice was dry and croaky.

‘I mean, it's not okay, it's fucking awful, but you know what I mean. What do you need to know?'

‘When you first came to my flat with this, and a couple of times since, I got the impression there was something you weren't telling me. Maybe because you didn't want to believe it or … I don't know. But everything is coming out now, Lucy. This is going to press tonight, so if there is something that I ought to know, you need to tell me.'

He heard only breathing again for a few seconds. Then she spoke.

‘Okay. Okay. There was something. You're right. I didn't want to admit it might be relevant, but that's not the only reason. It's not something you ever want to admit about someone you love, even when he's gone.'

She paused again, this time like she was holding her breath. He could hear a tannoy announcement in the background warning about unattended luggage.

‘Peter could be violent.'

‘I see.'

‘I don't want to overstate that. I don't mean frequently or uncontrollably, and I don't mean he was remotely dangerous, except to himself. It was an impotent rage, really. As a kid, he would sometimes strike out when he felt cornered or under too much pressure. I think subconsciously it was a form of surrender. He would only do it to someone he considered stronger, and who he knew would hold back from retaliating too much, whether that be his parents or his big sister.

‘I thought he would grow out of it, but he's done it in adulthood too. He hit me once a few years back when we were arguing, and it was like he forgot he was stronger than me. In his head I was still his big sister. There was an incident at work too, in one of his previous jobs. He was being serially got at and he felt trapped. He got suspended and ended up leaving soon after. My concern was that it could have been much worse. The guy he hit read the situation for what it was and didn't over-react. But I always had this fear that one day Peter would lash out at the wrong person, and it would cost him dear.'