Black Widow (6 page)

‘Your gender aside, I've not made any assumptions. I'm in your hands.'

She stole a look while they were stopped at lights and his attention was fixed on the entrance to the railway station on Academy Street. His father had been generous with his genes: hazel eyes, thick black hair and olive skin. Stick a conquistador's helmet on him and he could have stepped out of a painting.

The brief moment it took to assess that – on a physical level, anyway – she fancied him was also enough to bring her mind back around to the thing she had managed not to think about for half an hour. Maybe he only looked so good to her because she was contemplating a possibility that would rule out dating altogether for the foreseeable future.

Ach, don't be hysterical, she told herself. There were always options. Difficult options, certainly; adult options: a decision that would be difficult to live with, but not as difficult to live with as the alternative.

It was twenty past midnight when Dispatch relayed that there had been reports of a drunk causing a disturbance on Union Street.

‘Dispatch, this is Romeo Victor Four. We are one minute away. Will deal.'

‘Romeo Victor Four from Dispatch, is that yourself, Ali?'

‘Roger, Cathy. Go ahead.'

She gave Rodriguez a knowing look, imagining how this exchange must sound to someone used to the legions of call-handlers at Central Communications Command.

‘Aye, well, seeing it's you, it's worth mentioning that, by the sound of it, we're talking Red Dougal here.'

‘Understood. Thanks, Cathy.'

Ali swung the car across Academy Street to execute a U-turn, though it turned into a three-point turn instead due to cars parked on the other side. Not that it was a blue-light job.

‘Red Dougal,' said Rodriguez. ‘Is that a local code?'

‘No, it's a local nutter. Mostly harmless. Just need to handle him right, so let me take the lead.'

‘You got it.'

Ali drove slowly along Union Street and brought the car to a stop roughly ten yards from where a grizzled old man with a beard like an upturned Afro was sitting on top of a bin, kicking his heels against it. As they climbed out, they could hear that he was singing to himself, thumping his heels in time to the song, though there was an aggression to his cadence. This could go either way. Ali knew him of old; knew him when most of the beard was still ginger, in fact, rather than grey.

They approached slowly. Rodriguez was tensed up, readying his reflexes. She patted him gently and held out her palm, signalling that he should stay behind her.

‘What are you singing, Dougal?'

He swung his head around to focus on her, like his eyes couldn't swivel independently.

‘Ali,' he slurred. ‘Bonny wee Ali. Will I sing for you?'

‘Not tonight, Dougal, it's late. Folk are in their beds.'

‘Are they?'

Dougal asked this like it was an astonishing revelation and, in his mind, two minutes ago it had been four in the afternoon.

‘It's after twelve.
You
should be in your bed. Will we give you a lift home?'

She didn't wait for a response, but put an arm out and helped him slide off the top of the bin.

Rodriguez looked at her like she was crazy, then seemed to work out what was going on. Wrongly, she'd wager.

They helped Dougal into the back, but gave up trying to put a seatbelt on him after a couple of futile attempts.

‘You're not going to spew in my car, are you, Dougal? Because that would upset me.'

He shook his head by way of a response, in a manner that left her in doubt as to how much he had understood or even heard the question.

‘Drunk tank?' Rodriguez asked quietly.

‘As good as.'

Rodriguez looked askance as they took a left at a roundabout. He hadn't been here long, but had evidently established his bearings enough to know that both the nearest station and the regional HQ were to the right.

Dougal began singing again in the back seat.

‘Ali, ali, ali bally be, sitting on your mammy's knee, asking for a wee bawbee…'

It was hellish, but he was in a world of his own, and they could talk.

‘Are we actually driving him home?' Rodriguez asked incredulously. ‘Why? I wouldn't even have lifted him. He was a bit pissed, that's all.'

‘Local knowledge. The nightclub fifty yards away will be chucking out in half an hour. When he's drunk Dougal sings for them on the High Street. Sometimes he's after money or just attention. Sometimes he's got a wee jag of aggression in him and he's after something else. All it takes is some young guy who's feeling a bit aggro and you've got a mess. Especially if the young guy has mates.'

‘So you take him out of the equation and all is calm.'

‘On a quiet night like this, why not?'

‘We're a long way from Kansas, Toto.'

They drove a couple of miles out of town and dropped Dougal in front of a cottage so ramshackle it looked in imminent danger of collapse. He made an epic journey of reaching his door, but eventually he disappeared inside and a light glowed in the front window, their cue to drive on.

‘Now you really are thinking you're in
Hamish Macbeth
.'

‘I'm thinking I can't believe that place has electricity.'

‘Angus Gourlay, one of the duty sergeants, has known Dougal for ever. Worked alongside him in the rig fabrication yards up at Nigg Bay. Back in the seventies Dougal lived in a decommissioned army pillbox on the Cromarty Firth. He's a rugged old soul: that's why you don't want him getting into any fights.'

‘Got you.'

‘Angus said that one time he turned up with a seal pelt he was wearing like a scarf. He had killed it for food.'

‘Jesus.'

‘Angus asked him what it was like, and Dougal told him: “It tastes a bit like badger.”'

‘All right, now you are making stuff up.'

She wasn't, but it amused her to let him think so.

Around two they were both hungry, so Ali swung by a twenty-four-hour petrol station where the coffee was passable and the microwaved steak-bakes hadn't poisoned her yet.

Rodriguez stayed in the car to monitor the radio while she went inside for the food. He was a veggie, he advised, calling out as an afterthought as she approached the sliding doors.

They were out of cheese pasties and vegetarian samosas, so she went to the fridges to grab him a sandwich. It was on the way there that she passed the toiletries section, stopping to take in the pregnancy test kits, almost mockingly positioned next to the tampons.

It might have made her laugh before, to wonder why the hell were they stocking home pregnancy kits in a twenty-four-hour garage. How could it possibly be something that couldn't wait until the shops had opened in the morning?

Because not knowing was something you never wanted to prolong if you didn't need to, she understood now. Knowing was better than not knowing: as long as the answer was the one you wanted, and not the one you were afraid of.

She wasn't at that stage yet, though. She was only a few days late, for God's sake.

She was brushing pastry flakes off her lap and out of the open door of the car when the call went out from Dispatch.

‘To confirm,' she replied, ‘it's a significant priority but not an emergency?'

‘Caller couldn't say for definite what she saw. It was in her rear-view and she had been shaken up. The car might have left the road but from the sounds of it, it might just have disappeared from sight around the next bend.'

‘Isn't this one for Traffic?'

‘Nobody available. Fat-acc on the A9 north of Carrbridge an hour ago.'

‘Roger. We'll check it out. Uidh Dubh, did she say?'

‘That's affirmative.'

The woman on the witness stand now was a senior manager at Alderbrook Hospital in north London. She was confident and clearly spoken, coldly neutral in her account of her trust's most controversial former employee. Her relaxed manner was a marked contrast to the preceding testimony of Calum Weatherson, but Parlabane knew it was always a different story when you had a dog in the fight.

She gave a detailed account of what had happened as a result of the ‘Sexism in Surgery' blog being hacked, though the relevance of it all was something the jury were going to have to take on faith at this stage. Parlabane remembered it well, one of those social media mini-storms that seemed so important to everyone following it at the time, but of which the outside world was blithely oblivious.

The first thing the hackers did was leak Diana Jager's name and place of work. Within seconds of these details going public, anyone who googled her was able to discover what she looked like.
That
was when the rape and death threats came flooding in, from what Jager called the ‘legions of the angry maggot thrashers: invisible tough guys who wouldn't have the nerve to say boo to me if we were the only two people in a locked room'.

To the first Twitter rape threats, all of which she re-tweeted, she replied with a photograph of a Liston knife, stating: ‘You say you'll rape me. I say I'll cut your balls off with this. Let's meet up and see who's bluffing.'

The knife photo was not a stock shot: she had taken it with her phone.

When Sarah showed him these exchanges, Parlabane was aghast. He remembered saying that either Jager didn't realise garnering such a reply would be like a trophy to these bastards, or else she was psychotic. Back then he had meant it as a figure of speech.

She learned the hard way that you don't get into a pissing contest with these people. In the days that followed, the rape and death threats escalated exponentially, but it wasn't only the proliferation that made it far worse. She was fully ‘doxed': her home address, landline and mobile numbers were published, then documents and personal photos stored online were posted on file-sharing sites. That was when the police got involved. Anonymous rape threats on Twitter are bad enough, but when you can be sure that they know where you live, it's a whole other thing.

However, it wasn't the threats that proved the most toxic fallout from ‘Bladebitch' being unmasked. After Diana Jager was named, there swiftly commenced a retrospective game of join-the-dots, and the picture it revealed was not flattering. With the hospital where she worked widely known, it soon emerged that a male consultant surgeon nicknamed Leatherface worked there too, as did a female consultant surgeon fond of telling colleagues how she had returned to work after the births of her children.

This unleashed a quite colossal shit-storm, as the identities of her disparaged colleagues were revealed and disseminated, with intolerable consequences for their personal and professional reputations. It wasn't only Jager getting hate mail now: Leatherface and Superwoman – named respectively as Terence Horgan and Holly Crichton – were pilloried and humiliated, their lives picked apart in online discussion like specimens on the dissection table.

The ensuing investigation threatened to get more serious still, as questions were asked as to whether patients might also be identifiable now that so much other information was in the public domain. This seemed unlikely, but the true significance of the questions was that they emerged from the Royal College of Surgeons, which had never come out well in the blog, and which presumably hadn't taken kindly to being described as ‘institutionally sexist'.

The scalpels were definitely out for her, but Jager stood firm in the teeth of the gale. No evidence emerged that patient confidentiality had been broken, intentionally or by extrapolation. And though she expressed solidarity with her colleagues for the harassment they received, she maintained that she had broken no rules and no laws. She had never named anybody in her blog, other than people who were already in the public domain, and had kept her own identity secret. The naming of Terence Hogan and Holly Crichton she described as collateral damage from an attack on herself.

This was very much in keeping with what Parlabane would later learn about her.

‘Diana is never in the wrong,' he was warned. ‘She can screw up sometimes, and she can accept responsibility for the consequences, but that's not the same thing. In her mind, Diana is never in the wrong.'

The distinction failed to help her on this occasion. Not having broken specific rules was not the same as being blameless, and there was little sympathy or goodwill on her side as a result of the underhand way in which she had got back at her colleagues.

The charge of gross professional misconduct did not stick, and officially she was not sacked, but only because the terms of her resignation were agreed between her lawyers and those representing the hospital trust. Not only did she lose her consultant post at the prestigious Alderbrook, but the damage to her reputation ensured that no major teaching hospital was likely to employ her again.

One of the conditions of the settlement was that she had to apologise in writing to Horgan and Crichton, which she did, but Parlabane had seen it, and the wording was as careful as it was revealing. She apologised ‘for the distress caused them'. She was acknowledging that it was resultant of her actions, but not accepting that it was her doing.

To be fair, the rest of the apology did seem genuinely heartfelt. She did not communicate in lawyerly platitudes, instead writing understandingly and at length about what they must have gone through and how angry they must feel towards her. She seemed acutely conscious of the hurt they had endured, and convincingly remorseful over what they had suffered. But that was something else Parlabane would later be told about her, by someone in this courtroom who had first-hand knowledge.

‘Just because you're a psychopath doesn't mean you can't have emotional intelligence,' she had told him. ‘And just because you have emotional intelligence doesn't mean you're feeling those emotions. Diana knows how to express the values that put people at ease. She knows how to come across as sympathetic and as empathetic. But what she tells you she's feeling and what she's actually feeling (never mind what she's actually thinking) can be two very different things. It is part of her predator's camouflage.'