Black Widow (46 page)

‘I stood in that cupboard for what felt like a long time, conscious that my absence was becoming conspicuous. I had to compose myself before I could face them again, because I felt so rattled. I suddenly realised the true reason the police had returned was that they were starting to suspect me, and now I wouldn't be able to produce this knife they were asking about. That was also when it struck me that the first time these two had turned up, to tell me about the accident, there was a smell of bleach wafting through the place. Cops are trained to notice things like that.'

Parlabane reckoned this was a lot to hang her story on.

‘Is it possible you didn't put the display case where you thought?'

‘The case was still there. It was the knife itself that was gone, and as I stood staring at where it should have been, it hit me like a train. Somebody had killed Peter that night and was trying to frame me for the murder.'

She ran two hands through her hair, re-threading the ponytail.

‘As soon as the police had gone, I called Calum and told him not to come back. I didn't tell him why, but I knew that if the cops were starting to think I had done it, then having a lover in the picture was not going to look good.'

‘But presumably he knew Peter had hit you.'

‘Yes. I told him everything.'

‘So were you worried what Calum might think?'

She shot him a look, the closest she had come to a show of temper. Calum was clearly a sensitive area.

‘Calum would never think anything like that about me.'

‘What, not even after he read my exclusive?'

He didn't get to register a second hit. She had identified an area of her own vulnerability and reined in her reactions, reading his intentions when he prodded it again.

‘Agnes Delacroix smacked her head on a rock when our canoe capsized. I had already talked to Calum about how traumatic that was for me. That's why he understood how painful it was to have it cast up again by way of innuendo and accusation. Calum knows I'm innocent.'

‘So why are you asking me to help you? What is there that you think I can do that he couldn't?'

‘We'll come to that. First I have to make you understand something crucial. In my paranoid state I went looking for planted evidence, afraid that if the police came back and searched the place, they would turn up the Liston knife somewhere, with traces of Peter's DNA on it.

‘It was while I was rooting around that I began to find tiny drops of blood dotted about the floor and finely sprayed on walls and other surfaces. It was like someone had used an atomiser. That night, while your story was rolling off the presses, I was on my hands and knees, scrubbing the stone floor of the garage, the walls, the worktops. I'll never forget the sting of it in my eyes and the way it caught in my throat, but the hardest part was the fear that it might not be enough: I had no way of knowing where else Peter's blood might be found. I could wash the obvious places until my skin was raw, but I knew there was bound to be somewhere I missed.'

‘Your car.'

‘That's right. I was so fixated upon the garage being set up as the locus for the murder that I forgot that transporting the body would be part of the narrative too.'

‘But they found bone fragments. I get that someone might be able to transfer a blood sample, but…'

‘Powder: that's all they found. Just enough to be verified in a test and thus imply there must have been a lot more. You could obtain the quantity required for that from a deep cut to a finger.'

Jager remained silent for a few moments, the first hints of apprehension on her previously impassive face. Whatever she thought Parlabane could do to help, his involvement hinged upon him believing her, and perhaps she was beginning to think it had all sounded more convincing in her head. She had an explanation for everything, including all of the physical evidence against her, but nothing she had said could be independently verified. More problematic still, she had failed to answer the biggest question her story posed.

‘Why? That's the alpha and the omega here, the key to whether anybody should believe you. Why would someone do this? Who else has a motive? Who would go to these extraordinary lengths to frame you? And why would they plant tiny quantities of evidence? Why not plant your husband's body somewhere in the grounds of your house for the police to find, with your Liston knife still sticking in his back?'

She stared back across the table, a blank expression of defiance quickly betraying itself as a façade. She looked lost and scared, but trying not to show it. Or perhaps that was what she wanted him to see.

‘I don't know. But it has to be related to the project. Peter was under enormous pressure to the extent that he was stealing my money to buy himself time. He was so secretive about the whole thing that I've come to assume it can't have been all legal and above board. I think he was in business with some dangerous people, and I think they killed him and set me up to take the blame.'

She leaned forward again, her voice lower, as if she was concerned about being overheard.

‘Peter kept his laptop on a permanent lockdown, as I've told you, but he spent all his days at Sunflight House. I need someone to go and have a look around inside the MTE office, because I'm sure there must be something in that place that will tell us what's been going on.'

‘So why don't you put your lawyer on it, or your boyfriend? Give them the keys and let them crack the case. Why ask the reporter whose story helped put you in here?'

‘Because I have no keys, and from what Austin told me, you're no ordinary reporter.'

Parlabane rocked back in his chair.

‘Wait. You're asking me to break into a building – to commit a crime – on the off chance that it uncovers some evidence that supports this improbable cover story of yours. Why would I do that unless I already believed you?'

‘Because if I'm lying, what would it cost you? Just a wasted trip, and you still got this interview out of it. But if I'm telling the truth, Mr Parlabane, that's one hell of a story.'

Sunflight House was a two-storey office building on an industrial estate close to the dual carriageway that ran from the A9 to the centre of Inverness. According to Jager, it had been built as a single premises for a travel firm but was then converted into smaller units by a developer after the original owner went belly-up. She also said that it looked so dull and nondescript that its principal security measure was the fact that nobody would expect to find anything inside worth stealing.

Parlabane wasn't so sure about that. He noted that the welcome sign at the entrance to the estate, upon which all of the major resident companies were listed, also bore the logo for Cautela Security, warning that their personnel monitored and patrolled twenty-four seven. Whether this applied to all premises, including the care-worn office building, seemed unclear. Parlabane assumed it depended upon whether Peter's landlord had opted into a contract. Jager's scorn concerning how cheap the rent was suggested not, but he wasn't taking anything for granted.

He parked his car across the road in the lot outside a courier depot, hiding his vehicle from direct view of the Sunflight building behind an articulated lorry. If anything went wrong here, he didn't want his to be the only car in conspicuous vicinity at this time of night.

He still wasn't sure he was going through with this. He would just go and check it out, he had told himself as he drove north. Case the joint, then make a final judgement on the risk-benefit ratio.

He wished there was someone else he could talk to about this, though he took it as a sign of progress that this wasn't merely a symptom of missing Sarah. There would have been no need to talk to her regarding this kind of quandary, as her answer was always the same: don't. Mairi had been more of a willing confederate when it came to his more dangerous methods, but his welfare hadn't been her highest priority at the time. She might see it differently now.

The woman he most wanted to talk to was the last person he could tell. In fact, the potential impact upon Lucy was one of the things keeping him wary of Jager's motives. She was a woman who had in the past gone to extraordinary lengths to avenge herself upon those she felt had wronged her, and there had been no love lost between her and her sister-in-law. She had let Evan Okonjo sweat the possibility of HIV infection after stabbing him with a potentially contaminated hypodermic, and that was just for hacking her password. If she knew she was going down, then it was possible that she was striking back at the people who had brought her low in the only ways that were still available to her, such as giving Lucy the impression her beloved brother had been a criminal.

How she might be planning to punish Parlabane remained unclear, as sending him on a wild goose chase wasn't the most wrathful vengeance he could imagine. He kept thinking of those carefully quoted words:
You alone will discover the secret of what happened to my husband
. Something about how precisely that had been phrased made him uneasy.

There were plenty of reasons to distrust her, plenty of reasons to stick instead of twist. In that respect she had been wrong about the stakes: he had the interview whether he followed it up or not. But there were also a few reasons to gamble on the bigger jackpot.

The first was that there
was
something in Jager's account that could be independently verified. He had researched Liz Miller and quickly found that her story checked out. She had been jailed for stabbing her partner in a case sufficiently controversial as to have received widespread media coverage and consequently featuring high up the list of search results against her name. He wasn't sure what light it shed upon Elphinstone's dodgy business dealings, but there was definitely something odd about the haste with which he had proposed to two different women.

Secondly there was the involvement of Sam Finnegan as an unlikely major investor in a computer software project. According to Catherine McLeod, Finnegan was as greedy and resourceful as he was ruthless and sly. He was a man who went to brutal lengths to ensure his effete reputation didn't make anyone think they could ever get away with screwing him over, and it seemed Peter Elphinstone was struggling to deliver whatever he had promised.

It would be, as Jager suggested, a hell of a story, which was where the biggest reason kicked in: this was what Parlabane lived for.

He walked across the road and through the Sunflight House car park at a leisurely pace, not wishing to appear hurried or furtive to any CCTV cameras that might be trained on the site. The main entrance had a glass double door, further panes flanking either side. There was more glass above, through which he could see a return staircase leading to the first floor. Sunflight must have blown the architectural budget on this central vestibule, as the rest of the place was drab and dowdy, a grim testament to eighties capitalist functionalism.

Everyone was long gone for the night, only darkness visible beyond the glass. Nonetheless, the sodium glow from the streetlamps was sufficient for Parlabane to decide that he wouldn't be going in the main entrance. There was a keypad entry system, which Jager had neglected to mention, and he didn't have the code. There was also a conventional lock to override the automated system should the electronics fail, but picking it in full view of the street was not a risk he felt like taking tonight. Sometimes he could pop these things in twenty seconds, other times it might take five minutes, but he could never be sure until he started working.

He walked around the building and found another door at the rear, most probably an emergency exit. From the absence of cigarette butts he deduced that it didn't see a lot of action, which was borne out by the extended time it took him to open it. It was stiff from lack of use: metal parts expanding and contracting together over decades until the mechanism inside would be hard to turn even with the key. It took patience and a couple of sprays from the miniature can of WD40 in his kit, but he could feel it gradually loosen up, and eventually the tumblers clicked and the bolt slid back.

The door opened with a grudging creak, into a narrow stairwell that was almost pitch black. Parlabane twisted on a penlight and made his way up to the first floor as directed by Jager. At the top landing was a fire door with a mesh-reinforced window at head height. He shone his penlight through it and watched the beam play along a corridor that ran the length of the building, from the emergency exit at the rear to the glass-walled vestibule at the front.

The hallway was a hazard of office furniture. There were filing cabinets, bookcases and old desks pushed against the walls, suggesting somebody was in the process of moving in or moving out.

He could see the name MTE on a door to his right. That was good, because it meant Elphinstone's office windows were on the side away from the main road, should he need to turn on a light.

He pushed the fire door open gently, stepping through it on tender feet even though he knew the place was empty.

That was when the alarm went off.

Parlabane played the torch along the top of the wall, looking for the source and hoping not to find a camera. His beam only picked out the infra-red sensor he had tripped, positioned to detect movement if anyone came through the fire door. A Cautela logo was legible on the base of the unit, which reminded him he had also seen it printed on the keypad outside the main entrance.

Shit. How could he have been so fucking gullible?

Keying in the entry code automatically deactivated the security. Jager hadn't told him about the keypad and she certainly hadn't told him about the alarm.

In a matter of seconds, the allure of a bigger story had vanished like a mirage and he could suddenly see that he'd been played. Sure, he had found reference to Liz Miller's story online, but it struck him too late that he hadn't bothered to verify the rest of it, such as whether she had ever been in a relationship with Peter Elphinstone or even heard of Diana Jager. Jager could have simply remembered the case and thrown in Miller's name because it helped embellish her bullshit story.