The Singleton boys weren’t allowed to be upset or to cry, weren’t allowed to get angry or argue or make any kind of mess, weren’t allowed to have problems of any kind, couldn’t have friends round to play in case those friends created inconvenience, weren’t allowed pets. It was made clear to Tim, Stuart and Andrew every day that their presence would only be tolerated by Trevor and Veronica if it mimicked an absence. They were expected to be hassle-free shadow children.
For the eighteen years that Tim lived in his parents’ house, he was uncomplaining and compliant—the good son whose needs never inconvenienced his parents because he appeared to have none. Stuart suffered from all kinds of strange eating disorders as a child and was hospitalized several times with malnutrition because he couldn’t keep food down. When they visited him, Veronica and Trevor took with them files full of paperwork and whatever books they were reading, and looked up from their printed pages only occasionally, to tell Stuart he had to get better quickly because it was yet another problem for them when he wasn’t well.
The doctors could never find anything wrong with him. “That’s because membership in the Singleton family doesn’t show up on X-rays,” Tim told me and Dan. The three of us laughed about our appalling families quite often. What else could we do? I never told you, Francine, but my father is a convicted pedophile. He’s been to prison twice. My mother’s still with him, unbelievably. She stood by him, and now lives as the wife of a known sex offender. Last I heard, my sisters were still in touch with him intermittently, trying to make the best of a bad situation. I haven’t spoken to any of them for nearly ten years. It’s the only way I can cope, by shutting it out, getting on with my life, trying very hard to be the best person I can be. (Which you make difficult, Francine.)
I’m supposed to be telling you about Tim, not about me. His dreadful parents, not mine. His brother Andrew got heavily involved in the local drug scene as a teenager and ended up in a young offenders’ institute. Veronica and Trevor didn’t visit him, not once. Andrew’s attention-seeking criminal behavior mustn’t be rewarded, they said. Stuart visited once and was ignored by Trevor and Veronica for nearly six months as punishment, but Tim was unwilling to go against the parental line. “I couldn’t risk it,” he said. “Mum and Dad were forever debating whether it was worth stumping up the school fees for Stuart and Andrew when they were such pains in the arse. They never said that about me, but I knew they’d start if I put a foot wrong. School was the only place I liked.”
Tim did brilliantly at Gowchester and got a first in English from Rawndesley University. Then came the accountancy training, the good job, the rented flat overlooking the river—all part of his escape plan from the start. Finally, he had a home and an income of his own and no longer needed his parents for anything. He’d already changed his surname to Breary by this point, though his family didn’t know it. He also hadn’t told them about the flat, and he’d lied about which firm he’d be working for. He moved out without giving notice to the Singletons, and he’s had no contact with any of them since. As far as he knows, none of them has ever tried to find him.
How would you use that knowledge, Francine? If I told you the story I’ve just written down, and if you were fit and healthy, what would you do? Or perhaps I should ask instead: what would you make Tim do? Would it be all right with you that he’d opted out of the family and name he was born into? I don’t think it would be. Would you criticize him for abandoning his brothers? Most people would. Tim’s suffering as a child wasn’t Andrew’s fault, or Stuart’s. True, Francine, but they’re in touch with Trevor and Veronica, and that’s unlikely to change, Tim thinks—that’s why he can’t allow their presence in his life.
I don’t think you’d trust him to have made the right decision. You’d insist on meeting them all. That’s why Tim would never have risked telling you—you’d have tried to seize control.
This is why your helplessness is hard to regret, Francine. You can’t defend yourself, which means that, finally, Tim can. I hope he doesn’t kill you for his sake, but if he does, it’ll be the clearest case of self-defense there’s ever been. I don’t care if the law says otherwise.
16
12/3/2011
“Gaby wrote those tweets herself, about being attacked,” said Sean Hamer. He looked all wrong in relation to the room that contained him, which, Gibbs guessed, had had its color scheme and furnishings chosen by Gaby. There was a lot of pale pink and pale green, silk curtains, expensive-looking Chinese vases dotted about on the various flat surfaces. Or maybe Japanese. A tiny silk handbag with a long strap and a pattern of embroidered dragons hung from the doorknob that faced into the room. The odd ones out here were the TV in the corner that was transmitting silent football, and Sean Hamer in his shiny football shirt, faded jeans and battered trainers. And Gibbs, who had been wondering since he arrived if this lounge was anything like the way Liv would have a room done out. He knew he’d never ask her; she’d tease him. It’d be too depressing, anyway, since the two of them would never share any kind of living space.
Gibbs waited in case Hamer had anything to add. Was he aware of having left any gaps? No, it seemed not. His tone couldn’t have been more reasonable; he believed he was helping. His manner made Gibbs feel awkward about asking him for evidence to back up his claim. More than awkward; implicated. At first he couldn’t work out why, then he realized: Hamer was behaving as if he and Gibbs had jointly proved, to their mutual satisfaction, that Gaby was behind the tweets from Tim Breary’s Twitter account. There had been an unspoken “We’ve established that . . .” about what he’d said.
As far as Gibbs could see, nothing had been established.
“What makes you so sure it was Gaby?” he asked.
“Because I know she wasn’t attacked, and no one else would make up something like that,” said Hamer—again, as if they’d already covered all the ground necessary in order to reach this conclusion.
Strange.
“How do you know she wasn’t attacked, Mr. Hamer? How do you know no one else would make it up?” Do you know everybody on the planet?
“Seriously, wherever Gaby is, she’s absolutely fine. Gaby’s always fine. She makes sure of that.”
“Do you have any proof that Gaby sent those tweets?” Gibbs persisted.
Hamer nodded. “She’d have known this Tim Breary guy’s password for Twitter. Definitely. She’s probably been having an affair with him behind my back for years.”
“She would have known his password? Or she did?”
“Course she did.” Hamer glanced over his shoulder at the silent football on the television, then turned back to face Gibbs in slow motion, as if it required superhuman effort to persuade his head to move back in that direction.
“How do you know Gaby knew Tim Breary’s Twitter password? How do you know that she wasn’t attacked?”
“I’ve told you.” Hamer’s voice was a blend of impatience and confusion.
Gibbs could imagine it would be very confusing if you were logic-impaired and genuinely believed you’d offered ample proof, when in fact you’d provided none. “You’ve told me what you believe to be true, but you haven’t offered any evidence to back it up,” he said. “So I’m not sure why you think what you think.”
Hamer sighed. “Look, I’m the victim here, not Gaby.”
“Victim of what?”
“She left me. Just walked out—no notice, no trying to salvage anything. Nothing.”
“So you’re the victim of her leaving you,” said Gibbs. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t the victim of an attack last night.”
“Nothing happened to Gaby last night. I’ve said that.”
Jesus fucking Christ. “Yes, Mr. Hamer, you’ve said it. But without knowing what you’ve based your opinion on, I can’t agree or disagree with you. All I can say is, ‘Oh, yes, something did happen to Gaby last night.’ And then you’d say, ‘Oh, no, it didn
’t.’ That’d be a pointless conversation for us to have, wouldn’t it? We’d make no progress.”
“Nothing happened to her,” Hamer insisted. “Gaby looks after number one, always. She never slips up. She’s . . . what’s the word?”
Gibbs was tempted to say something random—“wheelbarrow”—in order to hear Hamer say, “No, that’s not the word I was looking for.”
Yes, it is. And let me “prove” it by saying once more: yes, it is.
“To be honest, I’ll be happy if I never hear the name Gaby Struthers again,” Hamer said.
“You’ll be deaf if you never hear the name Gaby Struthers again,” Gibbs told him. “You’re sure she’s not made contact since she left here yesterday evening?”
“We barely had contact before she left.” Hamer craned his neck again to check on the muted footballers. This time he didn’t turn back, but carried on talking with the back of his head facing Gibbs. “That’s why I’m not going to miss her. She was never here, and even when she was, her mind was on her next work trip, or . . . him, probably. Tim Breary. She’s only done this to worry me: faking this attack, making me think she’s been kidnapped or something.”
“Kidnapped?” The word leaped out at Gibbs. “Why do you say that?”
“That’s what she wants me to think, probably. Or worse: raped, murdered, chopped up into little pieces.” Reluctantly, Hamer turned back to Gibbs. He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You don’t seem worried,” said Gibbs.
“I’m not. From now on, I’ll be worrying about number one. I’ve been all about Gaby for too long. Not anymore.”
Gibbs didn’t believe for a second that Hamer’s air of “Why should I care about anyone but me?” was less than twenty-four hours old. If he’d been devoted to Gaby as recently as yesterday, he wouldn’t be casually talking about her being chopped up into little pieces today.
“Did you follow her when she left?” Gibbs asked him. “In your car, or on foot? Or maybe you phoned her.”
“No, I let her go.”
“Really? Your live-in girlfriend walks out on the relationship after years and years, and you don’t run after her?”
“I’d had lots of practice,” said Hamer. “I’ve been letting Gaby walk out on me since we first got together. She was always going away. I was used to it.”
“For work, you mean?”
Hamer nodded. “I don’t know many blokes who’d put up with it, to be honest.”
Gibbs found this idea interesting, being a bloke who both would and wouldn’t put up with it. From Debbie: no chance, but if he were married to Liv, or if they lived together . . . The way Gibbs felt at the moment, he’d willingly have accepted Liv being away six nights a week if he could spend one out of seven in the same bed as her. He wondered if he was only feeling this way because her wedding was coming up.
Could all women be divided into two categories: the ones who’d alter their behavior depending on what a man would or wouldn’t put up with, and the ones who wouldn’t?
“Where were you when Gaby left the house?” Gibbs asked Hamer.
“I was in here. I told you, we’d had words. It was clearly over between us. I left her upstairs, came in here, shut the door, watched the footie. When I heard the front door close, I knew what it meant and I thought, Good riddance.”
“You didn’t go out into the hall and look to see where she was going, then?”
“No. I stayed in here.”
Gibbs eyed the silky dragons on the bag that dangled from the doorknob. Shame they couldn’t corroborate.
“So you didn’t see if she had a suitcase with her?”
“No, but she’s taken a lot of her clothes. I had a look when I went up to bed last night.”
“You didn’t see if she did or didn’t drive off in her car?”
“I didn’t care.”
Gibbs was becoming increasingly convinced that Hamer cared about Gaby a lot, albeit in a sullen and counterproductive way. The way lots of men cared about women. Including him? No, he hadn’t been sullen with Liv for a long time. He spared her that side of himself, took it home to Debbie instead. It wasn’t fair, he knew that, but it was simpler for him to keep the light and dark separate; a relief, in an odd sort of way, to be two completely different people sharing a body instead of what he’d been for so long before he met Liv: a dickhead on permanent autopilot who never considered how he felt and wouldn’t have been able to work it out even if he had thought about it.
Liv had saved him. His biggest fear was that her marriage would change things between them, throw him back to where he’d been before.
“Did you hear Gaby’s car at all?” he asked Hamer. “Or any cars?”
“Nope. I turned the volume up and concentrated on the footie. Tried to, anyway. Your lot made that a bit difficult.”
“According to PC Joseph and PC Chase, you were the one who made things difficult for them,” said Gibbs. “They said you refused to answer their questions and wouldn’t let them in without a warrant. Both described your behavior and attitude as suspicious.”
Hamer shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Look, I just wanted rid of them as soon as possible, so I kept them on the doorstep.”
“That’s the part they found suspicious, given that they were trying to find your missing girlfriend.”
“Ex,” Hamer said.
“Know what PC Joseph said to me? I shouldn’t tell you, but I will. He said you were acting like you had a dead body propped up behind the door and couldn’t wait to get rid of him so that you could bury it in the garden.”
Hamer’s mouth twitched. Then he chuckled. “That’s funny,” he said.
“We’ll be applying for the warrant as soon as Gaby’s been missing twenty-four hours.”
“Search the house now if you like,” said Hamer. “And the garden. Be my guest. I didn’t have a dead body propped anywhere. I just didn’t want to miss any more of the football. That’s why I sent your copper mates packing. I’ve wasted enough of my life on Gaby—I didn’t want to waste any more. I’d have told them that, but . . . well, it sounds a bit harsh, doesn’t it? If you don’t know the context.”
Gibbs would have enjoyed updating Hamer’s definition of the word “harsh,” but that would have been unprofessional. He hoped that, wherever Gaby Struthers was and whatever had happened to her, she was at least able to appreciate not being here anymore.
He stood up. “I’ll start upstairs, then,” he told Hamer.
—
“We all knew Tim’s ID: @mildcitizen,” Kerry Jose told Sam. “It’s the title of one of his favorite poems, by a poet called Glyn Maxwell. His password’s ‘dowerhousetim.’ We all knew that too. Actually, we suggested it, when he was having trouble thinking of anything.”
“Who suggested it?” Charlie asked.
Kerry’s face reddened. “I can’t remember,” she said. “We were all here, together. In this room. Tim was sitting here, where I’m sitting now, with his laptop on his knees.”
Lauren Cookson—skinny, pale as a hologram and wrapped in a fluffy brown dressing gown—nodded along to Kerry’s words as if urging them on.
“Here?” Charlie made no attempt to hide her sarcasm. “Clustered round the fire, glasses of wine in hand, all discussing what Tim should call himself on a social media site, and what his password should be?”
“Yes,” Kerry half whispered.
“Was Jason here too?”
“Yes.”
Again, Lauren nodded vigorously in support of Kerry’s answer.
“How sociable that all of you were involved,” Charlie said in a flat voice. “How inclusive. Definitely not just one of you who knew Tim’s details, then.”
“So, any of you could have tweeted three times from his account last night,” said Sam. “We know he didn’t; we have a prison libr
arian’s witness statement telling us that. So which one of you did it?”
“None of us.” Kerry’s voice shook. “We were here all evening, together. From when Jason brought Lauren back from the airport at four-thirty until we went to bed. At eleven.”
“Safety in numbers,” Charlie muttered. “Okay, let’s try this: Kerry, you’ve proved you’ve learned all your lines—well done. You’ve had your turn as spokesperson. Lauren, why don’t you take over for a bit? Where’s Jason this morning?”
Sam was trying not to think about Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, in which all the suspects had committed the murder together. It was hard. The Dower House was exactly the sort of house that might turn up in an ITV Poirot adaptation, and, though Kerry and Dan Jose called the room they were sitting in “the lounge,” Sam couldn’t think of it as anything but a drawing room, with its ornately carved stone fireplace, shutters, deep wooden window seats and decoratively plastered ceiling. It was immaculately tidy, in startling contrast to the kitchen, which was the messiest room Sam had ever seen. It was rare to encounter the two extremes in the same house.
Charlie had walked over to the window, and stood facing the greenery beyond and the drizzle-grayed air. Was she also thinking about Murder on the Orient Express?
Tim Breary, Kerry Jose, Dan Jose, Lauren Cookson, Jason Cookson. Perhaps they weren’t jointly responsible for Francine’s murder, or for the attack on Gaby last night. In which case, why did they tell each new lie as a perfectly coordinated group? They also stared and turned away in unison, Sam had noticed. When he looked at them—at any of them—they all lowered their eyes, but whenever he averted his, he could feel three pairs boring into him. Two of them, Kerry’s and Lauren’s, had been red and swollen when Sam and Charlie had arrived this morning, and, though Dan Jose didn’t look as if he’d been crying, he seemed even more embedded in despair than the women. He’d hardly spoken, but Sam had noticed a stunned heaviness to his words and movements that suggested he couldn’t quite believe where he’d ended up and couldn’t see a way to get himself out. Like Lauren, he was wearing pajamas and a dressing gown; Kerry was the only one of the three who’d managed to get dressed, though Sam had given them an hour and a half’s notice.
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