The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  Is it possible that my self-righteous dressing-down scared her? I decide to put it to the test by picking up my pace. It’s not long before I’m level with her. She glances at me, speeds up. She’s panting. This is ridiculous. “You’re running away from me?” I say, hoping it will help me to believe the unbelievable. “What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

  She stops, hunches her shoulders: a terrified animal caught in the headlights of a car. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t say anything.

  I help her out. “You can relax. I’m relatively harmless. I only had a go at you to stop you laying into Bodo.”

  Her lips are moving. Whatever’s emerging from them could be meant for me. This is how a member of an alien species would look if it were trying to communicate with a human being. I lean in closer to hear her.

  “I have to get home tonight. I have to. I’ve never been out of the country on my own before. I just want to be home.” She looks up at me, her face white with fear and confusion. “I think I’m having a panic attack,” she says.

  You bloody fool, Gaby. You chased this girl. You initiated conversation. All she wanted was to avoid you—an arrangement that could have benefited you both—and you blew it.

  “You wouldn’t be able to speak if you were having a panic attack,” I tell her. “You’d be hyperventilating.”

  “I am! Listen to my breathing!” She grips my wrist, locking her fingers and thumb around it like a handcuff, pulling me toward her. I try to shake her off but she doesn’t let go.

  “You’re out of breath from running,” I say, trying to keep my cool. How dare she grab hold of me as if I’m an object? I object. Strongly. “You’re also a heavy smoker. If you want to improve your lung capacity, you should jack it in.”

  Anger flares in her eyes. “Don’t tell me what to do! You don’t know how much I smoke. You don’t know anything about me.”

  She’s still clutching my wrist. I laugh at her. What else can I do? Prise her fingers off one by one? If it comes to it, I might have to.

  “Could you let go of me, please? The profits from the sale of the cigarettes in your bag alone will see Lambert & Butler comfortably through the next twelve global recessions.”

  She screws up her forehead in an effort to work out what I mean.

  “Too complicated for you? How about: your fingertips are yellow? Of course you’re a heavy smoker.”

  Finally, she releases me. “You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you?” she sneers—the same thing she said to the bald man with the newspaper. I wonder if it’s an accusation she levels at everyone she meets. It’s hard to imagine the person who might encounter her and be beset by agonies of inferiority.

  “Um . . . yes, probably,” I say, in answer to her question. “Look, I was trying to help—bitchily, I suppose—but, actually, you’re right: I really couldn’t give a toss whether you continue to breathe or not. I’m sorry if I offended you by making a joke you’re too thick to understand. . . .”

  “That’s right, you’re so much better than I am! Little Miss Stuck-Up Bitch, you are!” She advances on me with her finger pointing, as if she plans to drill through my nose with it. “I saw you this morning,” she says accusingly. “Too up yourself to smile back when I smiled at you.”

  Little Miss? I’m thirty-eight, for Christ’s sake. She can’t be more than eighteen. Also, what’s she talking about? “This morning?” I manage to say. Was she on my crack-of-dawn flight from Combingham?

  “So much better than me,” she repeats bitterly. “Course you are! I bet you’d never let an innocent man go to jail for murder!” Before I’ve had a chance to absorb her words, she bursts into tears and flings her body against mine. “I can’t handle much more of this,” she sobs, wetting the front of my shirt. “I’m falling apart here.”

  Before my brain produces all the reasons why I shouldn’t, I’ve put my arms round her.

  What the hell happens now?

  2

  10/3/2011

  “So,” Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse said slowly. He was watching his wife, Sergeant Charlie Zailer, who wasn’t watching him back. She was staring at, but not really seeing, a program on TV, and trying to act naturally. Like someone who wasn’t keeping anything secret. The program was one in which celebrities experienced life in an African slum before hurrying home to Hampstead and the Cotswolds the minute the cameras were switched off.

  “So, what?” she asked. She hated keeping things from Simon; he’d successfully indoctrinated her over the years they had been together, instilled in her the conviction that it was his God-given right to know everything, always—even now that she had been transferred to a different team and no longer worked with him on murder investigations. To distract him, she pointed to the screen. “Look—are those living conditions any worse than ours? I mean, I know they are, but . . . we should go and buy some wallpaper next time we’ve both got a day off—or one of those roller thingies, at least, and a tub of white paint.” She was sick of the lounge walls being a hotchpotch of faded colors no one had wanted for years: a jagged crest of 1970s wallpaper here, a peek of old plaster there. The clashing, unevenly stripped collage effect looked like a psychedelic mountain range, and sometimes felt like a form of visual torture. The trouble, Charlie self-diagnosed, was that she put all her energy, on the home front, into keeping her and Simon together emotionally; she had none to spare for interior design sprees.

  “You’re staring at me,” she told Simon.

  He looked pointedly at his watch. “I’m wondering what time we’re expecting your sister.”

  “Liv?” Could Charlie be bothered to deny it? “How did you know?”

  “You’re on edge, and you keep picking up your phone.” He stood up. Great, thought Charlie. Another nice, relaxing conversation. “You’re obviously expecting something to happen. I know Liv’s in Spilling today, I know you met her for lunch . . .”

  “She’s late,” Charlie said, frowning. “She was supposed to be here between eight-thirty and nine.”

  Simon pulled open the curtains and leaned his back against the window. Drummed his fingers against the sill.

  If he wanted to look out for Liv, he was facing the wrong way. Charlie waited, certain that her sister was the last thing on his mind, grateful to be spared a rant about unexpected visitors. Simon saw no moral difference between a family member turning up unannounced to say a quick hello and grab a cup of tea, and an invading horde holding aloft burning torches as they battered down your front door, intent on razing your home to the ground.

  “Why’d you forgive her?” he asked.

  “Who, Liv?”

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t exactly forgive her. Well, I never told her I did. I just . . . slid back into seeing her.” Charlie hid her face in the neck of her favorite slobbing-around sweater. She’d stretched it so much over the years, it was probably now capable of being slipped over the heads of three or four people at once, if they stood close enough together. The roll neck, in particular, was badly prolapsed. Through its wool, Charlie said, “No formal absolution was ever granted.”

  “One minute you hate her because she’s started seeing Gibbs, the next minute you’re back to talking to her most days like nothing ever happened. And she’s still seeing Gibbs. Even planning her imminent wedding to another man hasn’t stopped her.”

  Charlie could feel her chest and shoulders stiffening. “Do we have to talk about this?” she said.

  “Gibbs is still married. We still work with him. I do, anyway—and you’re still in the same building. Liv’s still invading your territory—that’s how you saw it when they first got together, anyway. They still got it on at our wedding, she still hijacked a day that should have been about us and made it about her.”

  “Thanks for the reminder. When she turns up, I’ll spit in her face. Satisfied?”

 
; “I’m asking what changed.”

  “Well, let’s see. Gibbs is now the father of premature twin girls, as cute as they are fragile.”

  Simon looked impatient. “You know what I mean. Gibbs is a dad since last month. You forgave Liv last year.”

  “No. I didn’t.” Charlie walked over to the window, pushed him out of the way and pulled the curtains closed. “If she turns up now, tough. She’s missed her chance. What you call forgiving, I call burying my head in the sand and trying to pretend the past never happened. And let’s throw in the present for good measure. Pathetic, isn’t it—the lengths a person will go to in order to hang on to a sister?”

  Simon picked up the remote control. He flicked through the channels for a few seconds before pressing the off button. “You’re dodging the question,” he said. “Suddenly you’re prepared to bury your head and make the best of Liv in spite of her transgressions when you weren’t before. How come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t, but maybe I do.” He sounded pleased, as if he’d been seeking her uncertainty all along. “Was it because . . .” He broke off and started to turn in a small circle beside her, like a mechanical toy that was running out of battery power. His states of emergency always began in the same way: twitchy, erratic movements that dwindled to stillness as more and more energy was diverted to the racing brain.

  “Simon?”

  “Hm?”

  “Are you trying to guess why I started talking to Liv again?”

  “No. The opposite.”

  “What does that—?”

  “Shh.”

  Charlie had had enough. “Your pawn is going to the kitchen to consume alcohol while loading the dishwasher,” she said. “If you want to carry on playing, you’ll have to bring the game in there.”

  Simon beat her to the lounge door and slammed it shut, trapping her in the room. “The dishwasher can wait,” he said. “Did you forgive her because you realized your parents aren’t getting any younger, and when they die, Liv’ll be the only family you’ll have left?”

  “No. But, again, thanks for the cheery reminder. Maybe Gibbs’ and Liv’s relationships will both break up, they’ll marry each other, and I’ll get to be beloved auntie to the premature twins. Or at least tolerated sister of home-wrecking slapper stepmum.”

  “Stop dicking about. No? You’re saying that’s not the reason you forgave her? So what was?”

  “Oh, God, Simon, I don’t know.”

  “Was it because she had cancer when she was younger? You were worried it’d come back if you were too hard on her?”

  “No! Absolutely not.”

  “Two nos. Okay, so: why did you forgive her?”

  One, two, three, four . . . The trouble was, you could count to ten and still find yourself married to Simon Waterhouse at the end of it. “Is there a history of dementia in your family?” Charlie asked.

  “I know I keep asking, but please, can you try to think? Don’t let yourself off the hook so easily.”

  “If I don’t, who will? Not you. I could waste my whole life dangling from your hook. That wasn’t an innuendo, by the way.”

  “Think really hard. There must be a reason, and deep down, you must know what it is, or else . . .” He stopped. Bit his lip. He’d said more than he’d intended to.

  “Or else . . .” Charlie concentrated on trying to guess the end of his sentence instead of tackling his question, since she was almost certain he wasn’t really interested in her feelings toward Olivia. To ransack her brain for the right answer only to have him ignore its emotional content entirely would be too frustrating. “Ah, I get it,” she said. “This isn’t about me and Liv. It’s about one of your cases. Let me guess: someone’s been murdered. And . . . somebody’s confessed. But they’re saying they don’t know why they did it. You thought you’d worked out motive, but when you suggested it to them, they denied it—said no, that wasn’t why. You think if this killer knows why he didn’t do it, that must mean he knows why he did do it. You’re wrong.”

  “Is that what your sister told you?” Simon asked angrily. “What Gibbs told her?”

  “No. All my own work,” said Charlie. “I’ve banned Liv from talking about your and Gibbs’ cases since she stuck her oar in last year. She’s been pretty good about it.”

  “Then how—”

  “Because I’m tied to you by invisible chains. Because I’ve ditched all parts of my own brain that aren’t immediately necessary, in order to make space to carry around in my head a gold, glowing replica of your brain, so vastly superior.”

  Simon frowned. “What crap are you talking now?”

  Charlie shoved him out of the way, opened the door and headed for the kitchen, which, this evening, felt less like a room in its own right and more like unnecessarily elaborate packaging for a bottle of vodka. “I know how your mind works, Simon. I don’t know why that surprises you. Once the guinea pig knows it’s a guinea pig—much harder to surprise the aforementioned pig. What? What are you thinking?”

  “You really want to know?” He followed her into the kitchen: a new space to confine her in if she said the wrong thing. “I’m thinking, no one who isn’t a woman should ever have to talk to a woman.”

  Charlie grinned. She took a glug of Smirnoff straight from the bottle. “That’s funny,” she said. “You have no idea how most women talk, so you assume I’m representative. I don’t talk anything like a woman. More like a”—she cast about for an appropriate metaphor—“really badly treated disciple of an unhinged messiah.” She giggled at the horror on Simon’s face. “And whenever I can I talk like you, in the hope that you’ll hear me. Like now. You’re wrong: it’s perfectly possible not to know why you did something, but to know for sure that it wasn’t for reason X.”

  “I don’t believe it is,” said Simon. “Not unless you’ve got an inkling, deep down.” He knocked his closed fist against his chest. “Somewhere in here, you know why you forgave Liv. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to say that it wasn’t for either of the reasons I suggested, not for sure.”

  “Yes, I would.” Charlie put down the vodka bottle, pulled open the dishwasher. “Think of something you’ve done and not known why.” After a long silence she added, “And then tell me.”

  “I’ve tried it on me and proved myself right. If I don’t know why, then I don’t know why not.”

  “Really? What example did you use?”

  Simon hesitated. Obviously nothing that might exempt him from answering sprang to mind. “Proust,” he said eventually. “Why do I let him get away with it? Why do I never go to HR, tell them what goes on behind closed CID doors? I should. No idea why I don’t.”

  “Perfect.” Charlie rubbed the palms of her hands together. “Is it because there’s a Persian cat in the Human Resources office, and you’re allergic to cats?”

  Even in conversation with his wife, in the safety of his own kitchen, Simon hated the unexpected. His mouth set in a grim line. “You’re being deliberately unhelpful.”

  “Like you were, with the cancer idea? I’m supposed to believe my disapproval could provoke new cancer in my sister?”

  She watched Simon’s controlled exhalation with satisfaction. His turn to practice counting to ten. And when he got there, he would find himself still married to Charlie. “There’s no cat in the HR office,” he said. “And I know I’m not allergic to cats. You can’t claim that a known falsehood—”

  “I’ve just proved that it’s possible, in some circumstances, to know what your motivation isn’t without knowing what it is. I rest my case. Put these away.” She handed Simon two clean pasta bowls, steaming from the dishwasher. “There are some reasons we have that we know about, some we have that we don’t know about, and some we don’t have, which, when we hear them, we recognize as reasons we would never have because they’re not the sort of thing th
at would ever cross our minds.”

  “Let’s say you’ve killed someone, all right?”

  “Can you put those bowls away before you get distracted and drop them?”

  “You admit it.”

  “I admit it,” said Charlie. “It was me.”

  “I ask you why. You say you can’t tell me—there is no reason. You don’t know why. You just did it.”

  “Did I plan to do it?”

  “You say not. It was spur-of-the-moment. Imagine I suggest to you a reason why you might have done it, and it’s a reason that, if you confirm it, might get you a lighter sentence or even keep you out of prison if you’re lucky.”

  Charlie raised her eyebrows. “What, you mean that perfectly acceptable motive for committing murder that judges and juries are so lenient about?”

  “A motive that’d make it not murder, but a less serious crime. Maybe.”

  “But . . . it wasn’t my real motive?”

  Simon considered her question. “Either it was, and you’re pretending it wasn’t, or it wasn’t and you’re not willing to pretend it was to avoid jail time. In either case, why?”

  Charlie smiled. “Or . . .” she said. Simon stared at her expectantly. “You’re not going to like it,” she warned him. “It’s as devious as it is unlikely.”

  “Tell me. You know how I feel about Occam’s razor. The simplest answer isn’t usually the right one. Devious and unlikely is everywhere.”

  “You ought to launch your own theory: Occam’s beard, you could call it. Okay, let’s say your killer could halve the time he spends behind bars by confessing his true motive, the one you suggested to him. If he’s desperate or a pessimist he might go for that. But if he’s confident and a good liar, he might deny his real motive and insist as unconvincingly as he can that the crime he committed was full-on murder. Part of that implausibility might include pretending he has no idea why he did it.”

  Simon was nodding. “If he keeps saying he doesn’t know why, and I suspect him of lying, I start to think he’s not the killer, he’s covering for someone. Exactly what I’ve been thinking. If I find someone else to pin it on, then he doesn’t go to jail at all: he gets to be innocent of the greater crime rather than guilty of the lesser one.”