The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  But there was more to it than that, Kerry says. In contrast to Gaby Struthers, who adored Tim and believed he was special (and therefore couldn’t be trusted), you behaved as if you thought he was a useless piece of rubbish, which tallied with how he saw himself. You were forceful too—determined to impose your will. Kerry thinks that’s why Tim married you and stayed with you. You always seemed so intent on improving him. Maybe he hoped you’d succeed.

  “But she’s so relentlessly horrible to him,” I pointed out. “He has zero freedom. I’d give up all hope of improvement and reclaim my life at this point, I think.” Kerry told me I didn’t understand. “Tim has no interest in self-ownership,” she said. “Who’d want to own a product that they perceive as among the most flawed on the market? Francine convinced him early on that his life was more her project than his. He doesn’t think sufficiently highly of himself to treat himself to a second chance.”

  She said a similar thing on the way to Bath, about Tim having phoned us out of the blue, five months after writing to us to say he was exiting our lives forever. “I’m sure he knew within days that banishing himself was a bad choice, but this is Tim. He believes that if he forces himself to live with the consequences of his screw-ups, he’s at least keeping himself in line. Only utter desperation would provoke a U-turn on this scale—a late-night phone call, a summons halfway across the country, with no notice.”

  I sort of knew she was right. Or maybe that’s hindsight. I think I can remember being on the verge of saying, “But he’s U-turned before, when he left Francine,” and then stopping myself when it occurred to me that in his farewell letter to us, Tim had written, “Francine might contact you with a hysterical and asinine account of my having left her. If she does, do your best to impress upon her that I’ve done no such thing. What I am doing is no reflection on anybody else, nor is it something I am doing ‘to’ anyone, as all but the most ego-ridden will appreciate. I decided it would be beneficial for me and for those close to me if I were to isolate myself, and so that’s what I’ve done. And, more important, it’s all I’ve done. I have not left my wife.”

  “Only Tim,” I said to Kerry. Or perhaps she said it to me. We said it to each other all the time, and still do. “Only Tim would leave his wife, then claim emphatically that he hasn’t left her, and mean every word of it.”

  We arrived at Tim’s flat at two-thirty a.m. on the night of the surprise phone call, having done most of the journey at an illegal ninety miles an hour. Kerry put her hand on my arm as we pulled up outside number 8 Renfrew Road. “Prepare yourself,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to find, but it’s going to be bad.” The house was a shabby Georgian carve-up on a street that was basically a hill, nearly too steep to park on. The front door was standing open, but the effect was the opposite of welcoming. It was more suggestive of none of the residents caring enough to shut it properly. The communal areas were disgusting. The threadbare carpet was every shade of stamped-in mud, the walls were cracked and damp-stained. The place smelled of a mixture of stale urine and wet dogs. Kerry and I tried not to touch the banister as we walked up the stairs. Tim had one of the two rooms on the top floor, he’d told us on the phone. We assumed it was the one with the open door, from which music was drifting out onto the windowless uncarpeted landing: classical. Songs, in German, a male voice. I looked at Kerry. I probably raised my eyebrows somewhat optimistically. Tim used to listen only to classical music before he met you, Francine—before you called it depressing, and banned it. Kerry shook her head: no cause for optimism. That was when I realized that the guy singing sounded pretty desolate. “Tim,” Kerry called out.

  “Come in,” he called back cheerfully. The music was turned right down, as if to make way for friendly conversation. Once again, I started to doubt Kerry’s take on the situation. It would be exactly like Tim, I thought, to make us drive for three hours in the middle of the night and then greet us with ordinary banter, taking up where we’d left off as if we all still lived round the corner from one another.

  I saw how wrong I was when Kerry and I walked into the bedsit. Tim was sitting on the bed wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Next to his feet were pools of blood and a small knife, the sort you’d use to chop garlic. The puddles weren’t huge but they weren’t small. It was a slow-drip-from-the-ceiling volume of liquid, I remember thinking at the time, as if the roof of Tim’s building had a few broken tiles and had leaked red rain in several places.

  I freely admit, Francine: I was useless. I froze. Did nothing, said nothing. Well, not quite nothing: I did a lot of looking, staring. So much that I can see the scene clearly now, years later. There were cuts to Tim’s wrists, bloodstains and streaks all the way up to his elbows. His skin had a green tinge to it. He’d also cut at his ankles and heels, hence the blood on the floor. The room that contained him was in as sorry a state as its occupant. There was mold growing up the walls, and several of the windowpanes were cracked. Two corners of the ceiling were sporting spiderwebs the size of hammocks, or fishermen’s nets: thick, gray rope-like constructions that must have been there for years. It horrified me to think that Tim had rented the room in this condition, that he hadn’t even cleaned away those enormous cobwebs. “Because he planned to do nothing in that bedsit but decline and die,” Kerry explained later.

  “Don’t come near me,” Tim ordered us, picking up the knife. “You’ll get wet and sticky.” It looked and sounded to me as if he was threatening to harm himself further if we approached him physically, but I could have been wrong about that.

  Kerry was brilliant, Francine. Acted as if nothing remarkable or upsetting had happened, as if this was just a practical issue that we could easily deal with. “I can tell you now that none of those injuries is fatal,” she said matter-of-factly to Tim, striding away from him and over to the table where his laptop sat open. There was a pen and a notepad next to it, with something that looked like a list on the pad, dotted with flecks of red where Tim had bled as he wrote. Kerry fiddled with the keyboard and the screen came to life. “Were these your instructions?” she asked.

  “They’re rubbish,” Tim said. “If they were any good, I wouldn’t still be here.” The sickly greenness of his skin became more pronounced every second. How did Kerry know he was in no danger of dying? I wasn’t so sure. The blood was flowing, there was no doubt about that. Kerry had her phone out. “Don’t phone an ambulance,” Tim snapped at her. “I’m sure it’s going to happen soon.” I remember feeling as if someone had poured a bucket of icy water into my stomach. Was that why Tim had summoned us: to watch him die? Did he want us there for moral support? Didn’t it occur to him to wonder about the effect it might have on us?

  Kerry snapped back at him, “I will phone an ambulance, and you’ll shut up.” And she did. And Tim let her. She asked him when he’d done it. “Half past ten?” he said speculatively. Every few seconds he gripped his knees as if they were the part of his body that hurt most. “‘Happy slashing’?” Kerry read aloud from the website. I shuddered when I heard those words—literally, a whole-body shudder. I wished the Internet had never been invented, and hoped that everyone who put suicide instructions on it would practice what they preached and die, in pain and soon. I knew the second I heard the words “happy slashing” that I’d never be able to get them out of my head, and I was right: I never have been able to.

  Kerry told the ambulance people it was urgent: a man had cut his wrists and ankles and was losing blood. “I’m glad you didn’t tell them I tried to kill myself,” Tim said. “Didn’t you?” I asked him. He dodged the question, saying, “Spilled blood is visible, cuts are visible. Intentions are not visible. Better to stick to the facts.” Kerry told him again to shut up, and that there was no way he’d done this to himself at half past ten. “You did it half an hour ago, after I rang you to say we were twenty miles away. Didn’t you?”

  Do you think that’s what happened, Francine? Has Tim told you? No
t that you’d be able to tell me if he had. I’d love to know, though. Did he do it as late as possible, so that we’d be in time to save him? Was that his plan all along? If he wanted to live, why not skip the wrist- and ankle-slashing altogether? Wouldn’t someone like Tim have chosen a more dignified way to cry for help? Or did he mean to kill himself and fail? In which case, why not admit it, say, “I can’t even kill myself properly, I’m so useless”? Rubbishing himself has been one of Tim’s favorite hobbies for as long as I’ve known him. I said that to Kerry, and she said, “But he’s also proud. You’ve heard him insist that he doesn’t miss Gaby. He rubbishes himself in the abstract—‘I’m third-rate, I’m unoriginal’—while defending his craziest behavior like a zealot and insisting he’s never made a wrong decision.”

  While we waited for the ambulance, Kerry interrogated Tim, trying to get a coherent account out of him, her tone strongly implying that she didn’t believe a word he said. She sounded almost like Francine, and told me later that she’d hoped to increase Tim’s chances of survival by forcing him to use his brain to defend his story. “Why did you write out your wrist-slitting instructions by hand, on paper?” she asked him. “Why not just read them off the screen? You wanted to kill time, didn’t you? Kid yourself you were working toward your goal. You’d made a few tentative cuts and you were putting off making any more.” Tim’s responses were inconsistent. He strenuously denied putting anything off, but also wouldn’t admit to having tried to take his own life. When the ambulance pulled up outside, siren wailing, he said, “Why am I being saved, exactly? ‘I do not approve, and I am not resigned,’ as a poet once said. That poet was Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  You never approved of Tim’s love of poetry, did you, Francine? You thought it was effeminate. When he joined the Proscenium Library, he didn’t tell you. He knew you’d say it was a waste of money and sulk until he “decided” to give up his membership.

  Tim was furious with Kerry and me, once he heard the footsteps of the ambulance team running up the stairs and realized he was unlikely to die. “Why all this effort and fuss for me?” he demanded. “Does someone in Spilling have some VAT they need to claim back? Are all the other accountants busy? I’m not going back there, you know. It’s not safe for me to go anywhere near Francine. You’re deluding yourselves if you think you can move me in with you, unless you have a house I know nothing about that’s nowhere near the Culver Valley.” After saying this, his eyes started to close and he seemed to be drifting off. Kerry burst into tears. I wondered what Tim had meant about it not being safe for him to go near Francine: safe for him or safe for her? The ambulance people rushed into the room and started to do their stuff, and it was a huge relief not to be responsible anymore. I put my arms round Kerry, but she was too busy to be comforted—she was already planning. “We have to leave Spilling,” she said. “We’ll sell up, buy a house miles away from Francine.”

  Well, we did. And we took Tim with us. We didn’t think we’d ever come back, but then you had your stroke and here we are. Tim claims we’re here because of you—another of his convenient distortions. You could be anywhere, couldn’t you? We could all tell you that you were in the bedroom of a house in Spilling and you wouldn’t know any different. The move back was nothing to do with you, Francine. It was all about Gaby Struthers.

  Signing off for now,

  Dan

  6

  11/3/2011

  The rain from the night before had stopped. Charlie opened the door to a few unconvincing patches of sun and a twitchy Sam Kombothekra, whose nervousness and guilt couldn’t have been more obvious. “I wanted to catch Simon,” he said. No one who observed his “nervous supplicant” facial expression would have dreamed he was Simon’s boss; indeed, Sam himself tended to give the impression of being baffled to find himself in charge of a team of detectives, all of whom were more opinionated and assertive than him.

  So Regan hadn’t lied. And Sam was here to do the right thing. “You’re too late,” Charlie told him.

  “He’s not due in till midday. He’s set off already?”

  If she said yes to this, she’d be giving a false impression: that Simon was on his way into work. He’d left clear instructions: she wasn’t to reveal his whereabouts or plans, but she also wasn’t to lie. “He’s not here,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you. Just don’t expect him to turn up for business as usual. Don’t expect his cooperation or respect from now on, either.”

  Sam sighed heavily, rubbing a hand across his face.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Sam? Scheming with Proust and Sellers against Simon? And Gibbs.” About whom Charlie didn’t care because her sister cared too much, but still. “Doctoring interview transcripts, leaving out—”

  “Hold on a minute, Charlie. That’s not—” Sam broke off and shook his head. Laughed. “Proust told Simon, didn’t he?”

  “No. Sellers? No. You won’t guess who told us if you try for a million years. And now I’m going back to bed. I’ve got the day off, I didn’t get to sleep till five, so . . . bye.” Charlie tried to close the door.

  Sam grabbed it and held it open.

  “Is that your I-expected-better-of-you disappointed-parent face?” Charlie asked him. “If so, it’s only a matter of time before your boys develop a crack habit, let me tell you.” She tried again to close the door; Sam stopped her a second time. He looked confused: she couldn’t possibly really want to shut him out, could she?

  He’s a good person. You’ve always thought so.

  Is that how it works? Charlie wondered: first build up a reputation for goodness, then behave however you like, confident that no one will recognize any behavior that belies your label and assigned category? She wasn’t sure she had the energy to redefine Sam, not after she’d gone to the trouble of defining him once already. Who had time to reevaluate these things? Forming judgments about people wasn’t supposed to be like dusting or stocking the fridge: something you had to do over and over again.

  Sam turned and looked at his car, parked on the road, then back at Charlie. “Come with me,” he said. “You’d be a huge help. I could do with talking things over with someone who’s coming at it afresh.”

  Go with him where? He’d hardly invite her into CID, her former workplace. So where? Curiosity was an unfortunate character trait for a police sergeant who was no longer a detective and had the day off.

  “Thanks for remembering to mention what’s in it for me,” Charlie said. Though she could see one advantage of going with Sam: she’d be able to make sure he wasn’t headed for the same destination as Simon: HMP Combingham, to talk to Tim Breary. Unlikely. Prisons didn’t admit visitors without notice, unless those visitors were called Simon Waterhouse. Charlie knew, and Sam would know, that he wouldn’t be able to get her in. Which meant that today wasn’t her day for meeting Tim Breary, the Don’t Know Why Killer.

  Charlie heard herself say, “I regret walking out of my job in CID and leaving it wide-open for you to walk into.”

  Sam smiled. “You’ve never told me that before. But I’ve always known.”

  “I could live with it when I thought you were saintly and more deserving than me, and a good balance for Simon, but now?” She shook her head, knowing she’d regret giving voice to the secret she’d kept carefully locked inside for years. Already, she could feel her resentment swelling, taking shape in the world outside herself. It was like the little pickle pots at Samir’s, her and Simon’s favorite Indian restaurant in Rawndesley: once you’d removed the raita pot from the bigger tray, there was no squeezing it back in with the onions, the mango chutney and the lime pickle, even though the four had arrived perfectly slotted in together.

  “Nothing’s changed,” said Sam. “Get dressed. I’ll explain on the way.”

  “On the way to where? I haven’t agreed to come with you,” Charlie pointed out. “I’m more fucked off with you than I’ve ever been, and you
’re inviting me for a day out?”

  “The Dower House, home of Kerry and Dan Jose. Wear something . . .” Sam changed his mind about whatever he’d been planning to say. “Doesn’t matter. Wear anything. Not too smart, though. Nothing intimidating or policey.”

  Charlie knocked on his forehead as if it were a door. “I’m angry with you, Sam. I don’t want to go for a drive, and I don’t want to spend my day off doing your work. Fuck, you’re as bad as Simon.” Didn’t Sam used to listen to what people said to him? A sharp chill scooped a hollow in Charlie’s stomach. Was that it? Had working with Simon changed Sam? She felt treacherous considering the possibility. Simon broke rules, but only . . .

  Only when the rules were wrong?

  “If you’re still angry fifteen minutes after we set off, I’ll stop the car, ring a cab to bring you back, and pay for it myself,” said Sam. “Deal?” It was a deal Simon wouldn’t have offered and wouldn’t have honored, and was therefore irresistible.

  Charlie groaned as she headed upstairs. “Pushover,” she muttered. “Doormat.”

  “Reasonable and flexible,” Sam amended.

  “Hah! We both know that’s not true. Clothes: lefty-liberal caring?”

  “Do you have anything like that?” Sam sounded doubtful.

  “No. Only chain mail with torture instrument accessories,” Charlie called down from upstairs. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and put on her favorite bright red lipstick too quickly, so that it looked as if her mouth had brushed against an open wound. She swore under her breath—a calming mantra—as she removed the red smudges with water and a tissue. She wondered if Sam was hoping somebody would confide in her today, someone who wouldn’t in him, or hadn’t so far.

  The Dower House. Kerry and Dan Jose. Charlie had attended a conference at a hotel called the Dower House once, during her former life as an academic. In Yorkshire—she couldn’t remember where exactly, but she thought it might have begun with a “K.” She’d asked a member of staff about the hotel’s name, and ended up on the receiving end of a social history lecture that was long, tedious and mildly offensive in that it took for granted that everybody came from a wealthy country-estate-owning family, though both the woman delivering the lecture and Charlie, the only two participants in the conversation, quite clearly did not. Still, it was thanks to that woman’s memorable pretentiousness that Charlie now knew that a dower house was where an estate owner’s wife moved when she was widowed, once the estate owner had died and the larger manor house had to be passed on to the son and heir.