The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  “I don’t want to say, for the moment. I’ll tell you, but not yet. I have to tell someone else first.” The notion of being fair to Proust was a new one for Simon. He didn’t know where it had come from, this idea that the Snowman had a right to hear the truth about his daughter first. Did he fear that the wound he was about to inflict might be too severe, that consideration around the edges would be needed to soften the blow? Or to minimize guilt?

  Guilt shouldn’t come into it. Telling someone the truth meant doing them a favor. Always.

  “Sam turned up at the house this morning, after I’d left,” Simon said. “If I’d been in, he’d have told me then, if I hadn’t known already. Charlie thinks that’s a point in his favor.”

  “You don’t?” Gibbs asked.

  “He should have told both of us, soon as he knew.” So what if he’d kept it quiet for less than twenty-four hours? Charlie had offered this as mitigation when she and Simon had spoken on the phone half an hour ago, as if it ought to count in Sam’s favor. It didn’t. “What if he’d rushed to tell you the second he found out?” she’d said. “It would have taken him at least forty seconds to get from the Snowman’s office to your desk. Would that have been forty seconds too long, in your book? Forty seconds of betrayal?” Simon didn’t like being mocked; he’d cut her off.

  “Where have Sam and Sellers been all day, apart from avoiding having to look the mates they’ve shafted in the eye?” he asked Gibbs.

  “Stepford’s at the Joses’, I think. Sellers is doing the rounds of Francine’s former colleagues and then Breary’s at Dignam Peacock, seeing if he can turn up anything worth looking into.” Gibbs smiled. “Let’s see if Breary’s colleagues describe him as quiet and normal, the only two adjectives anyone ever uses to describe their friend who went on to become a murderer.”

  “Breary’s neither,” said Simon. “Certainly not normal, whatever that is.”

  “It’s the way he talks that gets me. When you listen to the recorded interviews, he sounds . . . I don’t even know how to describe it. Scripted. Like his lines were written by someone. Like he’s starring in a film.”

  “Yeah, he’s got some kind of weird . . .” Simon stopped short of saying “star quality.” That would have sounded odd. “Listen, do us a favor, Chris. Only if you want to, if you don’t think I’m out of order to ask. Can you keep this quiet?” Simon hoped he’d got the tone right. He didn’t want it to sound like an order, or like begging. He’d never called Gibbs “Chris” before. “Gaby Struthers, the poem, The Carrier. Don’t tell the rest of the team.”

  Gibbs laughed. “You’re not serious? Tit for tat? They kept something from us, we keep something from them? In a murder inquiry?”

  “What if Proust was okay with it? What if he told you to report to me on the Breary case, not to Sam?”

  “Why would he do that? You’re not skipper. Stepford is.”

  “Stuff ‘why’ up its own arse. What if he did?”

  Gibbs tapped the top of his red-elastic-band ball with his finger. “I’d tell him I’d rather report to Stepford, who never says, ‘Stuff “why” up its own arse’ when I ask him a question.”

  Simon sighed and rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger, a pincer movement. Surprisingly, it helped: smoothed the tension away. “When they chose to keep quiet, Sam and Sellers declared war.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  Simon was glad he wasn’t a politician. Speeches like this were hard—ones designed to win people over. “I didn’t start the war, but I can win it,” he said. “Gaby Struthers and Lauren Cookson, their connection, that poem—they’re going to lead us to the answer, and soon. I can feel it. I want Sam and Sellers to look like dicks when we sort this, dicks who know fuck-all. I’m going to fucking show them. Sorry if you think that should be beneath me. It’s not.”

  “Liv hasn’t asked you yet, has she?”

  Of all the things he might have said . . .

  “Liv?” Simon injected his voice with as much incredulousness as possible. You’re thinking about your love life in the middle of the most important conversation we’ve ever had?

  “About reading at her wedding,” said Gibbs.

  “Charlie mentioned it. I said I’d read a passage from Moby-Dick. Apparently that wasn’t good enough.”

  “It’s not about good enough, it’s about right for the occasion. Moby-Dick isn’t.”

  Neither was Tim Breary’s sonnet that might or might not be about love.

  That was why Gibbs had reacted badly to the poem. His first thought had been Liv’s wedding, not Francine Breary’s murder, and he’d attributed the same order of priorities to Simon.

  “What are you and Charlie doing tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “Nothing, far as I know,” Simon told him.

  “Have dinner with me and Liv—tomorrow’s one of our nights. There’s something we need to ask you together. Our treat.”

  One of their nights. While Debbie stayed in and looked after the twins alone? And what did “our treat” mean? They couldn’t have a joint bank account, surely. Simon and Charlie didn’t; Charlie had told him while they were engaged that he could bog off if he thought she was going to fuse her finances with his.

  “You do me this favor, I’ll do whatever you want about work,” Gibbs said. “Tell, not tell, I don’t give a fuck—whatever you say.”

  “Deal.” Simon held out his hand for Gibbs to shake. Gibbs threw him the red ball instead.

  —

  “Hello, have I got the right number for the Incredible Sulk? It’s me. Can you stop being a baby and ring me? Thanks. Bye.” Charlie pressed the end-call button and balanced her phone across the top of her empty mug. “Voice mail,” she said. “Which means I’m being ignored. He’d have picked up if he’d forgiven me.” She shook her head. “Husbands—don’t they drive you mad?”

  “Mine doesn’t,” said Kerry. Her body had assumed the defensive hunch position.

  “You’re lucky, then. Mine’s in a strop. When I nipped out for a fag before, I dared to ring him and tell him that someone he’s furious with has put things right and is champing at the bit to apologize.” Charlie waited to be asked why any wronged person would object to the contrition of the offending party.

  Silence from Kerry.

  “There’s nothing my husband hates more than an instant apology,” said Charlie, annoyed not to be able to mention Simon by name; it would serve him right if the key witnesses in his case found out what a petty git he was. “He likes to indulge his anger, can’t stand to have his wallowing cut short by his enemy turning out not to be against him after all.” She smiled. “Relationships are weird, aren’t they? So, tell me about Tim Breary’s affair with Gaby. Or would you rather leave it till another time, when she’s not upstairs?”

  “She’s not anymore,” Kerry said. “Didn’t you hear the front door slam? That was Gaby leaving. Angrily, or in a hurry. Or both.”

  Charlie waited.

  Eventually Kerry said, “It wasn’t an affair, not in the usual way. Tim and Gaby never slept together as far as I know, and I think I would know. Gaby would have told me.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “Tim wouldn’t. He wouldn’t explain why, either to me or to Gaby, but I think I know: fear of Francine. He didn’t want there to be any evidence of his infidelity, which, if he hadn’t been unfaithful physically, there couldn’t be.”

  “Francine could have found evidence of a platonic relationship, couldn’t she?” Charlie asked.

  “Absolutely. I was surprised she didn’t, to be honest, the amount of time Tim spent with Gaby. I suppose he could always have said, ‘I’m not sleeping with her,’ and it would have been true. I reckon a lot of people salve their consciences in that way.”

  And a confident, successful woman like Gaby Struthers had put up with this no
n-physical affair, aka a total waste of time? Charlie tried to suppress her irritation. Why couldn’t someone tell men like Simon and Tim Breary that blokes were supposed to want sex? All the time, with anyone, irrespective of the consequences. What was the point of being a man if you couldn’t comply with that basic rule? Traitors to their gender, that’s what they were.

  “It was a weird time, and for sure the happiest Tim’s ever been,” Kerry said. “Gaby was like his parallel-track wife. For more than a year, Dan and I were part of two foursomes.”

  “Meaning?” Charlie prompted.

  “We still had our stilted, shoeless evenings with Tim and Francine, but we also went out with Tim and Gaby and had fun—even more fun because we were so aware of the contrast.”

  Shoeless? Charlie decided to let it pass.

  “The first time Tim invited us for dinner to meet his new friend, as he called her, I couldn’t work out what he was playing at. He was obviously head over heels, though he’d have died sooner than admit it, and I thought, why’s he involving me and Dan? I didn’t mind; I was glad he felt able to share it with us, but . . . most people planning an affair don’t invite their friends along to participate in the deception. They keep it as quiet as possible.”

  “Tim sounds unusual in lots of ways,” Charlie said.

  Kerry nodded. “Tim’s unique. I mean, everyone is, supposedly, but with Tim, you never know what he’ll say or do next. It’s . . . well, it’s exciting. Everyone he meets adores him—you can see it. You see them not being able to work out why they’re so drawn to him, and then they realize: they don’t know anyone else who can make a conversation so much like a . . . roller-coaster ride. Sorry, it sounds stupid, I know, but . . . it’s not just the unpredictability. Tim has a way of focusing all his attention on you when he’s talking to you—attention and admiration. He makes people feel as if he really sees them. Hears them. Every word you say matters when you’re talking to Tim. That’s so rare, isn’t it? And, if you’ve seen him . . . well, he’s incredibly good-looking.”

  “You’d better stop before I fall in love with a man I’ve never met,” Charlie interrupted the adoring monologue. “So why didn’t Tim mind you and Dan being party to his not-quite-affair with Gaby?”

  “I think he’d decided he could never allow himself to leave Francine, but he wanted to try out the other option,” Kerry said. “Dinners with me, Dan and Gaby—a simulation of the life he couldn’t have. That’s why it was important to him to have a little taste of it, more important than being discreet and keeping Gaby secret from us.”

  “But he left Francine eventually, you said?”

  “Yes. Shortly after things went wrong for him and Gaby. I don’t know what happened, before you ask. Neither of them would say a word about it. It nearly destroyed Tim. I think, at that point, he was so miserable, he couldn’t pretend with Francine anymore. He left me and Dan too, and his job—literally walked out of his life, left it all behind. I don’t think he’d have left only Francine, if you see what I mean. It had to be everything, so that she didn’t take it too personally. And, oddly, she didn’t—oddly for someone accustomed to thinking everything was all about her. She told me Tim must have had a breakdown: if he’d been in his right mind, he’d never have left her.”

  “Did she try and contact him?” Charlie asked. “I bet she wrote him off as damaged goods soon as he was out the door, didn’t she?”

  Kerry looked surprised. “How did you know? Dan and I were stunned by her reaction. It seemed so . . . not her. I still don’t get it.”

  “You’ve just described the most manipulative woman in the world,” Charlie told her. “Manipulators are as sensitive to their own fluctuating power levels as brokers are to the markets. They use that knowledge to ensure that they never look like losers. Once Tim did the unthinkable—threw off his chains and walked out—Francine would have known her spell was broken and there was nothing she could do to bring him back. It would have annoyed her massively, but her pride would have kicked in to conceal the defeat.”

  “So she set about portraying herself as the winner,” said Kerry, frowning. “The strong woman, better off without her mentally ill husband. Wow. I think you might be on to something there.”

  Charlie smiled. Would she repeat her insight to Simon later? It was always hard to predict what would impress him. Sometimes she shared details of what she imagined to be an achievement and he launched into a lecture about how wrong she was.

  “I said to Dan at the time, it’s lucky Tim broke off contact with us too when he disappeared. What if he hadn’t, and he’d asked how Francine was taking it?”

  Charlie waited, unsure where this was going.

  “We’d have had to lie. If I’d said, ‘She’s totally fine: going to work as usual, not falling apart at all, not asking after you—’”

  “He’d have kicked himself for not having left her sooner?”

  “Hard to say, Tim being Tim. I certainly would have, in his position. All those years, wasted.” Kerry shuddered. “Course, Francine couldn’t have been fine deep down, whatever gloss she may have put on it. And everything I heard was secondhand anyway, via our only mutual acquaintance, and she didn’t know Francine that well. I preferred to think of Francine as secretly falling apart. She deserved to be.”

  “Kerry, what happened here on the sixteenth of February?” Charlie asked, as if it were a natural continuation of what they’d been discussing. “From your point of view, not Tim’s. Tell me how it was. Everything you can remember. If you don’t mind, that is.” She made a point of looking at her watch. “And then I’ll have to go. Let me just”—she pulled her phone out of her bag and started to key in a text to Sam—“summon my chauffeur, DS Kombothekra.” That should be enough to put Kerry at her ease; if Charlie was making plans to leave, they couldn’t be about to have the most important part of the conversation. “Right. Done. Sorry, go on.”

  “I was in here cooking supper,” Kerry said. “I had some lovely white asparagus from the market. I was going to make crepes—spinach and asparagus, béchamel sauce. It’s one of my regular recipes, but I’d never used white asparagus before. I was excited. That must sound stupid.”

  “Not at all.” Rather a lot. Nothing bored Charlie more than people pontificating about food.

  “Tim was in Francine’s room. I knew that. He’d come in to tell me he was going to see her. He always told me and Dan beforehand, so that we wouldn’t come in and interrupt him. We’d tell Lauren, make sure she didn’t barge in either.”

  “Tim wouldn’t tell Lauren himself, then?” Charlie barged in verbally.

  Kerry shook her head. “No. We were his conduit. He’d talk to Jason, but not to Lauren if he could avoid it.”

  “Why?”

  “He found her irritating in all kinds of ways: mainly her lack of intelligence, I think. Also . . .”

  “What?” Charlie watched as Kerry silently debated whether or not to answer the question.

  “Tim and Lauren had a bit of a power struggle going on. Both wanted to be . . . sort of in charge of Francine.”

  “Did they share the day-to-day care?”

  “No, Lauren did all the intimate care. And any moving and lifting—with Jason’s help, usually, mine once or twice. Tim went in every day, though, to talk to Francine or to read to her.” Kerry looked up at Charlie suddenly. “Make sure everyone knows that, will you? The police, the press. The judgers and the haters. Whatever the problems in their marriage, even though he’d left her and thought he’d left for good, when Francine had her stroke, Tim was straight back here to look after her. That’s why we all came back.”

  From where? Charlie would ask later. “Going back to Tim and Lauren’s power struggle . . .” she prompted.

  “It wasn’t really a struggle.” Kerry shifted in her chair. “Nothing was ever said. It was a territorial thing more than anything. Dan and I hardly
ever went into Francine’s room. Jason never did, unless he was looking for Lauren, or she needed him to help lift Francine. Lauren and Tim both did, and each found it annoying when the other was in there. It wasn’t much more than that, really. One of them always seemed to be waiting outside the door, impatient for the other to come out so they could go in for a chat. Well, not a two-way chat, but . . . you know what I mean.”

  “So Tim still cared about Francine?” Charlie asked.

  Kerry looked distracted, as if she was thinking about something else. “No. Not in the way you mean, not at all. But . . . It’s hard to explain. Francine was his wife. He’d come back to look after her, and I don’t think he wanted Lauren taking her over.”

  Why not? Kerry’s explanation almost made sense, but not quite.

  “Going back to the sixteenth February,” said Charlie. “You were here in the kitchen. Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Kerry’s eyes glazed over. “I heard Lauren scream,” she said in a monotone. “It . . . it didn’t stop, the screaming. I ran to where the noise was coming from.”

  “Which was?”

  “Francine’s room. Jason was with me. He came out of the lounge as I came out of the kitchen. The doors are opposite each other. We nearly collided. We ran to Francine’s room together and, well, we saw her. She looked . . .” Kerry stopped, pressed her eyes shut. “We could tell straightaway.”

  “Go on,” said Charlie.

  “There were pillows on the floor. Tim was standing by the window, looking out, and Lauren was screaming, holding a pile of clean washing, clutching it against herself. Some had fallen on the floor. She’d been in the utility room when it happened, next door to Francine’s room. Tim went in there and told her what he’d done, and then—”

  “Kerry, sorry,” Charlie cut her off. “Just tell me what you saw and heard. Francine’s room: you, Jason, Tim, Lauren, clean washing. Pillows on the floor.”