The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  Breary frowned. “Do we need to concern ourselves with that?” He said it as if it was Simon rather than himself who he was tactfully trying to spare.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “I did it and shouldn’t have done it for the same reason: the world is better off if I have no influence on anything or anybody in it. That’s the dilemma of those of us who know we don’t matter. Are we more influential if we commit an act of violence to remove ourselves once and for all, or if we do our best to fade into the background?”

  Simon tried to picture the foreground capable of making Breary fade. He failed. There weren’t many people whose conversation was so unpredictable, or so dramatic.

  “‘You send an image hurrying out of doors / When you depose a king and seize his throne,’” Breary said, proving Simon’s point. “‘You exile symbols when you take by force.’”

  “What’s that?”

  Breary held up a finger to indicate that he hadn’t finished. “‘And even if you say the power’s your own, / That you are your own hero, your own king, / You will not wear the meaning of the crown.’”

  “Did you write that?”

  “I don’t have that kind of talent. A poet called Elizabeth Jennings wrote it.”

  “What does it mean? Not about kings,” Simon clarified. “About you. What made you think of it, in connection with cutting your wrists?” The suicide attempt was something new and solid, he told himself: consolation for the stalemate on Francine’s murder. He made a mental note to ask Dan and Kerry Jose about it.

  “It means what I said before,” said Breary. “Let nature take its course. Take no lives—your own or anyone else’s. Don’t force the world to do your bidding, don’t unseat a monarch and try to take his place. ‘You will not wear the meaning of the crown.’”

  “Like you aren’t wearing the meaning of HMP Combingham?” said Simon. “You’ve deposed a murderer and seized his throne. Or hers. Was that what you meant? That you might get a life sentence, but it’ll be easy for you to serve the time, knowing that its meaning—the punishment aspect—doesn’t apply to you?”

  Breary threw back his head and laughed. “Simon, that’s brilliant. Wrong, but brilliant.”

  Praise was the last thing Simon wanted, and he couldn’t remember asking to be called by his Christian name in this interview or any of its predecessors. He was fighting the uncomfortable feeling that he and Tim Breary weren’t part of the same reality and that there was nothing he could do to change that. “When my colleague DC Sellers interviewed you, you said that people often don’t know why they commit murder.” That’s what I’ve heard secondhand from a woman called Regan. Let’s hope it’s true. “Did you research what real murderers do and don’t say? You must have wanted to make sure you got it right, not being a murderer yourself.”

  “I didn’t research anything,” said Breary. “And if I had, would that prove I didn’t kill Francine?”

  Simon thought so, but sensed he was about to be told why he was wrong.

  “Haven’t you ever had an experience and wondered if anyone else has had the same experience? Looked into it, maybe, to see if you have company in your predicament?”

  “No,” Simon said truthfully. “Why would what’s happening to me have anything to do with anyone else and their life?”

  Breary sat forward. “Are you being serious?”

  A dangerous question when asked in that half-amused, half-shocked tone. Simon knew it well: less a genuine inquiry than a recommendation that you abandon your seriousness because the asker finds it inappropriate. The best answer, always, was “no,” unless you wanted to embarrass yourself, and Simon didn’t. He let the silence run on.

  “Sorry,” Breary said. “I’m starting to want to work you out, just as you’re probably about ready to give up on me. The question is, would I rather understand or be understood?”

  “And the answer?”

  “Understand.”

  Same here. Every time.

  “I’m not giving up on anything,” Simon told him, aware of a tightness in his chest that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier. Why was it so hard to keep people on the right side of the barrier? Strangers turning up at his door wanting to talk about shared bullying trauma, murder suspects wanting to solve him as if he were a puzzle . . . That was life, when you boiled it down: one human puzzle trying to solve another. Simon wished he could resign himself to not knowing, and that everyone he met would be content not to know him.

  “You’ll have to settle for second best and help me to understand you,” he said. “You killed your wife, you tried to kill yourself. Yet you disapprove of killing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Except sometimes it’s necessary, for the avoidance of pain, isn’t it? Lying there in that bed was no kind of life for Francine, so you helped her end a life you knew she didn’t want to live anymore. A mercy killing.”

  “How kind of me, if only it were true,” Breary said with sudden bitterness.

  “Why not pretend it’s true and maybe avoid jail?”

  “Why plant the possibility in my head? Don’t you think murderers deserve to be locked up?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “I want to be punished so that I can move on with a clean conscience.”

  “The only place you’ll be moving to if you keep pretending you murdered your wife is one prison cell after another.”

  “Metaphorically, I meant.” Breary didn’t challenge the part about pretense.

  “I had an idea, on my way here,” Simon said. “I kept thinking, why wouldn’t he take the euthanasia lifeline I threw him?”

  “You haven’t been listening. There are other goals in life aside from getting away with as much as you can.”

  Simon was uncomfortable with those thoughtful eyes on him. He stood up and walked over to the window. Out of reach. “You’re a good liar, but I don’t believe you. All other things being equal, you don’t want to be here, locked up.”

  “I don’t know why anyone bothers with that expression,” Breary said.

  “Neither do I. All other things never are equal.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ve been trying to think of a motive for you,” said Simon. “For a murder that wasn’t a mercy killing.”

  “Thank you, but I didn’t have a motive. I didn’t need one. I was able to kill my wife without one.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Simon pressed on in spite of Breary’s courteous discouragement. “One person’s need or fear can turn into another person’s obligation all too easily.” It might not have happened with Francine and Tim Breary, but it happened often, and it was wrong. All those people who’d give anything to turn and run in the opposite direction as they wheeled their sick partners through the doors of the Dignitas clinic, wishing for just one more month together, even in pain—one more week, one more day . . .

  Simon was jumping ahead. He needed to create the scenario for Breary instead of reacting to it in his mind. As he did so often, he had to remind himself that he wasn’t alone in the room. “Plenty of couples have the conversation while both of them are fit and healthy,” he said. “One of them says, ‘If I’m ever not able to look after myself, if my quality of life’s shot to shit and I can’t end it . . .’ and so on.” Simon didn’t like to think about the details of what might be said. It was too distressing. “Did you and Francine have that discussion? Did she make you promise that if she was ever so incapacitated that she couldn’t take her own life, you’d do it for her? Maybe she found a way to communicate with you, even though she couldn’t speak.”

  “Not possible,” said Breary. “Francine had a left cerebral hemisphere stroke that left her with Broca’s aphasia. She couldn’t communicate at all. Before you ask the question everyone asks: no, she couldn’t pick out letters on a board by blinking. Not all stroke victims can. Only the on
es that make the headlines.”

  “All right, so you talked about it before she had her stroke,” said Simon.

  “Except we didn’t.”

  “Francine made you promise to kill her if the choice was to let her lie there like a vegetable day after day, year after year, with no self-control and no dignity. How did you feel when she made you promise to do that? Perhaps you said you weren’t sure, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Which would mean what?” Breary asked.

  “I know how I’d feel if my wife asked me. Not that she would. She wants the opposite: ‘Leave me to vegetate,’ she says. ‘Sit by my bed and read—’” Simon broke off. He’d been about to say Moby-Dick, and was glad he’d stopped himself. Tim Breary didn’t need to know the name of his favorite book.

  “Read . . . ?” Breary prompted.

  “Read a book next to her, keep her company, but not kill her. She’d never ask me to do that. It wouldn’t be fair. I wouldn’t ask her, for the same reason.”

  Breary nodded. “You’re well matched, then. Francine and I weren’t so well matched, but we never had the discussion you’re describing.”

  Simon knew his favored theory was crazy, but he wanted to get it out there, see how Breary responded. “Maybe Francine asked you to do it, and maybe you felt it was unfair. It’s too much to ask of anybody, that they kill you—especially the one person who’d be lost without you, the person who’d want you to live no matter what. I’d want my wife alive whatever state she was in, even if she was brain-dead and machines were breathing for her and doing everything for her. Having her there’d still be better than not.”

  It was only when Breary said, “You obviously love her very much,” that Simon realized he’d let his focus slip and allowed his private business to get mixed up in what he was trying to achieve here. His satisfaction at having avoided mentioning Moby-Dick was canceled out. “She’d feel the same about me,” he said. “It’s not an unusual way to feel. Is it how you felt? Did you agree to kill Francine, or help her kill herself if that terrible moment ever came? Did you feel forced into agreeing? Because that’s what it is, all that it’s-your-duty-to-kill-me-and-end-my-suffering bullshit: blackmail, plain and simple. And blackmail’s been known to trigger murder.”

  “Never when I’ve been the murderer.” There was nothing flippant about Breary’s delivery. He looked and sounded serious about making Simon understand. “Others might, but I would never kill for that reason. I’d never kill for any reason. The minute a motive reared its head, I’d question it. I’d end up tearing it to pieces. I could only kill in the way that I killed Francine—for no reason, because it just happened, because I just did. I just did,” he repeated quietly.

  What the fuck was going on here? Was Breary implying that only crass, inferior murderers would act on something as hackneyed as a motive, that he was somehow more organic and intellectually modest for letting it happen without knowing why? Confused, Simon returned to his far-fetched theory, which was less outlandish than the reality of Tim Breary and every statement that came out of his mouth. “How hard was it, seeing Francine lying there, incapable of moving or speaking, knowing what you’d promised her—knowing she knew it too? She wasn’t brain-damaged.”

  “Of course she was.” Breary looked surprised. “What do you think caused her Broca’s aphasia and loss of mobility?”

  Simon waved his words aside impatiently. “I mean, she wasn’t brain-dead. She could think, even though she couldn’t speak.”

  Breary ran his tongue back and forth along his lower lip. Eventually he said, “If the experts and their endless tests can be trusted, Francine’s brain still worked. She could listen, she could hear. I talked to her, played her music, read her poetry . . .” He blinked a couple of times, then looked straight at Simon, as if he’d said to himself, “That’s enough of that.” “And then, on the sixteenth of February, I killed her.”

  “You read her poetry because you wanted her to want to live. Why else would you bother?” Simon snapped, annoyed in advance because Breary was going to shoot down his theory, and it was a good one. “You didn’t want to do what you’d sworn you’d do. You thought if Francine could listen and think, there was a point to her staying alive. But you knew she disagreed. She couldn’t say so, but she didn’t need to: she’d made her views clear in the past. You knew she’d hate to be helpless, and you knew she’d be remembering what she’d made you promise. Every time you read her a poem, you heard her unspoken accusation as loud as if she’d screamed it: ‘How can you let me down so badly? How can you betray me? You promised to kill me if I ever ended up like this.’”

  Breary cleared his throat. “Go on,” he said quietly.

  “Why, so you can tell me I’m wrong? Fine. I think maybe you started to feel some rage of your own. Defensive fury. Yeah, you were letting Francine down, but what about what she was doing to you? Lying there silently begging you to turn yourself into a killer, to do something that would haunt you forever—something illegal, apart from anything else. To risk your freedom. You couldn’t stand it. Every time you went into her room, it was harder for you. Did you grow to hate her? Feel as if there was no way out?”

  Silence from Breary. His eyes flitted about the room, as if trying to locate the source of the words he was hearing. He’d started to tap the floor with his right foot, repetitively.

  “If it were me in that situation, I’d have felt the pressure building,” said Simon. “What can you do? You have to kill her. You’ve promised; you know she wants it. She’s trapped. Relying on you. You can’t handle the blame you’re sure you can see in her eyes every time you look at her, but you’re furious too: she’s got no right to impose such a . . . destructive obligation on you, destructive not just of her, but of you too—you more. The duty to kill her, your wife, of all people. To rip up your own heart and soul, ignore what you know’s right and do the worst thing a person can do. So you have an idea. It’s nearly as bad as what you’re trying to avoid—maybe it’s worse, even—but it’s all you can think of, the only escape route: you murder Francine.”

  Simon was less convinced this was a possibility now that he was saying it out loud. It sounded deranged. It was deranged. But the effect on Breary was remarkable. He was completely still suddenly, staring at Simon, giving the hypothesis his full attention. That made it worth carrying on.

  “You want to kill her for what she’s forced you to agree to, so you do,” Simon said, feeling the desire to obliterate as he described it. Charlie had once accused him of saving all his passion for situations that existed only in his mind; was she right? “Francine expected you to put your principles and your free will into cold storage and do her bidding—something no human being should ever ask of another. When you thought about that, you decided she deserved murder, not mercy. You were pleased to get one over on her. When she saw that pillow coming toward her, she misunderstood. She thought you were keeping your promise, for her sake. At last, she thought. She had no idea you were murdering her—but you knew, and that was enough. You were taking your revenge.”

  Simon wiped sweat from his upper lip. “That’s why I’d have done it if I were you,” he said, trying to find a way back to normal interview mode after his outburst. “You dealt with your obligation to your wife, your guilt and your anger in one easy action: a pillow over the face. And it’s why you’ll never tell me that what you did was assisting a suicide, no matter how it might help you—because if it was that, if you say even once that that’s what it was, then Francine’s won, hasn’t she? She’s the boss, even in death, and you’re weak.”

  Breary stood up and pulled something out of the elasticated waistband of his prison-issue trousers; the speed of the movement made Simon take a step back, but it was only a folded piece of paper, not a weapon. “Take it,” Breary said.

  “What is it?”

  “Give it to Gaby—Gaby Struthers, Rawndesley Tec
hnological Generics. Don’t do it when Sean’s around, the man she lives with. Make sure she’s alone.”

  Simon unfolded the page and saw a handwritten poem, a sonnet. The words “falling in love” leaped out at him; he was too distracted to take in any more. There was nothing to indicate who had written it.

  “I’m sorry to ask a favor when I’ve given you nothing,” Breary said.

  Was he serious? One look at his face told Simon he was: he wanted Simon to deliver a love poem to a woman. Was it his way of hinting at a motive that so far hadn’t been suggested? The name Gaby was a new one to the investigation.

  “She might be able to help you,” Breary murmured. Simon could only just hear him.

  “How?”

  “Your answer to that question will be better than any I could give.”

  Except that Simon didn’t have an answer. Will be better, future tense: once he’d met Gaby Struthers and found out . . . what? In the meantime, he would happily have settled for Breary’s inferior explanation, the one he knew he wouldn’t be getting.

  “I haven’t got much imagination, but I recognize and admire it in others,” Breary said. “Yours is superhuman. I fooled Francine into believing I was helping her to die while privately, in my mind, I was murdering her? I wouldn’t have thought of that if I’d tried for a thousand years. And since you’re no closer to knowing what I did or didn’t do, or why, or why not, you’ll need to come and see me again and think up more theories. Which will give me something to look forward to.” Breary looked away, sighed. “Listen, I know this might be the last thing you want to hear and I’m sorry, but . . . I feel irrationally proud to be the subject of your brilliant ideas. And all the more guilty for not being able to help you.”

  Simon didn’t often find himself on the receiving end of admiration. When other people talked about his amazing theories—and, yes, he couldn’t deny that he usually turned out to be right—they tended to load their voices with exasperation. Correct, inspired, but still a pain in the arse; would be more palatable if he were more ordinary and wrong more often. That was most people’s take on Simon. It felt good to meet the exception.