“Since when?” said Charlie. “No one notified me.”
“Very funny.”
“It isn’t and it wasn’t meant to be. All right, since you’re full of surprises tonight: Liv also wanted me to ask you if you’d read something. At the wedding. I told her there was no way you’d stand up in front of a crowd of media luvvies and lawyers . . .”
“I’ll read,” said Simon.
“You will?”
“Why me, though? She’s got plenty of people to choose from who love the sound of their own voices—all her friends.”
“She came over all coy when I asked her why you. I think she wants to show you off: her brother-in-law, the brilliant detective.”
“As long as I don’t have to introduce myself, say my name, any of that shit. If all I have to do’s walk up to the front, read, go and sit down, I’ll do it. I’ll read a passage from Moby-Dick.”
He sounded enthusiastic, for Simon. Charlie felt guilty. “Not quite,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“She wants you to read something else. And I’m not telling you what it is.”
“Why not?”
Because I’m incapable of relaying the information in a neutral tone of voice. Because I think it’s utterly ridiculous, and I don’t want to influence you. Apart from attending it, which she didn’t feel she had a choice about, Charlie wanted no part of her sister’s wedding. She didn’t want to be influential in spoiling Liv’s plans in any way, though she’d be happy to see them spoiled if it had nothing to do with her.
“Well?” said Simon. “I’m waiting.”
He wasn’t the only one. Charlie glanced at the closed kitchen door. She was starting to feel jumpy. “Can we discuss this later?” she said. “Don’t you want to know what our intruder wants?”
Simon turned away. “Why’s she got two names?” he said.
“You’re asking the wrong person, Simon. She’s sitting just through there. I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you.”
“How does she know our address? What’s she doing here, ten o’clock on a Thursday night?” He often referred to particular hours of particular days in a way that implied they were only acceptable if nothing at all happened in them. He could be alive, awake, bored out of his skull, but still nothing was allowed to fill those prohibited zones. Other, more fortunate diary slots—nine on a Monday morning, say—were allowed to contain events. Charlie had never got to the bottom of this peculiar time apartheid, and now wasn’t the moment.
“If I’m reading, I’m reading what I want to read,” Simon said quietly.
“What? Oh.” He was back to Liv’s wedding. At which there was zero chance of his being allowed to read any part of Moby-Dick.
“She looks like him. It’s like having a piece of him in the house.”
Back to Proust’s daughter again. Switching between subjects so quickly wasn’t like Simon. Nor was it like him to be diverted from obsessive thoughts about an ongoing case. He was more anxious than he was willing to acknowledge, and there was no need for it. “Tell her you’re not prepared to talk to her and ask her to leave,” Charlie suggested.
The kitchen door swung open. Regan Murray stood on the threshold. “Please don’t,” she said. “However much you might want to.”
“Our mistake was to let you in,” said Charlie, putting herself between Simon and the spawn of the Snowman: a protective barrier. “There’s no reason for you to be here. Any communication that needs to take place between Proust and Simon can happen at work. They have no personal relationship outside work, and I’m pretty sure whatever you want to say is something personal, which makes it something we don’t want to hear.”
Regan stepped sideways so that she could see Simon. “You asked why I’ve got two names, and how I knew your address.”
“Did you have your ear pressed against the door?” Charlie asked.
“Yes. I got your address from my mum’s address book. I have two names because—” She broke off with a sigh. “Well, the surname part’s obvious. Murray is my married name.”
“That makes a good tongue twister,” Charlie told her. “You could even add a bit: “Murray is my married name; I married Mr. Murray.” Did you know opera singers repeat tongue twisters before concerts, to make their lips more flexible? I heard it on the radio.”
“I changed my first name to Regan two years ago. Dad doesn’t know. Neither does Mum. I didn’t want to be Amanda anymore because my father chose that name for me, so I changed it. It’s easy enough to do. Not so easy to tell my parents.” She smiled at Simon, who was resolutely not looking at her. He’d been staring at Charlie since Amanda-Regan had walked in, as if he wanted her to take care of the situation. Not, obviously, by prattling on about tongue twisters, though Simon would have been the first to admit that it was impossible to get to the good ideas unless you went via the bad ones.
“Is that my coffee?” Regan asked, pointing to the mug.
Charlie handed it to her.
“Thank you. Are you familiar with the name Regan?” she asked. “From King Lear?”
“And from every council estate in the Culver Valley,” said Charlie.
“Regan is Lear’s spineless traitor daughter who doesn’t love him but pretends she does.”
“You chose Regan over Goneril?” Yes, this is really happening. You are standing in your kitchen, beside a statue of your husband, debating King Lear’s baby name choices with Proust’s daughter.
“I’m too spineless to tell my father I’ve changed my name,” Regan said to Simon, ignoring Charlie completely. “He’d ask me why, and I’d be too frightened to tell him the truth. I’d end up hating myself more for creating another opportunity for him to win.”
The thing about people who hate themselves, Charlie thought, is that you totally identify and sympathize but at the same time you in no way want them as houseguests. “Don’t you think it’s weird that the expression ‘son of a bitch’ is so well known, but no one ever calls anyone a ‘daughter of a bastard’?” she asked, looking around. All responses welcome. The more the merrier. “Is it some kind of odd sexism, do you think?”
“I’m terrified of him,” Regan went on. “Have been for forty-two years. And if I don’t want him to know I’ve changed my name, I can’t tell Mum either. She’s his faithful lackey. They both want me to carry on being scared of Dad. It suits them fine. If I weren’t scared, I might start telling the truth about my childhood.”
Charlie tried, subtly, to fill her lungs with plenty of oxygen for the ordeal ahead. This was potentially worse than anything she could have imagined, in that it threatened not to finish soon. Childhoods, typically, were eighteen years long.
“I grew up in a totalitarian regime,” said Regan. “There’s no other way to describe it. I don’t think I need to describe it, not to you two.”
Thank you, Lord.
“I’m sure you can imagine what I went through. You know what my dad’s like.” Regan took a sip of her coffee, winced, then tried to hide it. “The reason I’m here—and I’m sorry it’s so late on a weeknight, I’m sorry I didn’t write or ring first to ask if it was okay. For weeks I didn’t think I’d be brave enough to contact you at all, and then tonight, when I realized I was, I knew I just had to do it, before I woke up and found I’d turned into a coward again.”
“The reason you’re here?” Charlie prompted.
Regan rewarded her with a small smile, for saying something sensible, finally. “I’m trying to come out from under the shadow. You know? With the help of a good therapist, I’m trying to build myself a proper life, build myself into a proper person.”
“That’s been on my to-do list for years,” said Charlie. “It’s making the time, though, isn’t it?”
“Can you give the mockery a rest?” Simon muttered.
“It’s okay,” Regan told him. “
I know I’m putting you both in an awkward position by sharing this with you. You have to say something, and what can you say?”
Charlie could think of lots of things. They all had the word “fuck” in them.
“Go on,” said Simon.
Regan looked stunned by this encouragement to speak. It took her a few seconds to recover from it. “Thanks,” she said. “Well . . . it’s still early days. I’m nowhere near ready to confront my dad, but I’m taking steps in that direction. Important steps, my therapist says. Choosing a name for myself that isn’t the name he gave me was the first one.”
“Regan’s a baddy in King Lear,” Charlie pointed out.
“When you’re brought up by someone like my father, you feel like a baddy every time you have a thought or feeling about him that isn’t hero worship. Like a traitor. Regan is who I am at the moment. When it no longer feels like me, I’ll change my name again.”
Charlie laughed. “And your shrink’s given this her stamp of approval? I’d get a new shrink.”
“Will you shut up?” said Simon. “You know nothing about it.”
Not quite true. Last year, thanks to one of Simon’s cases, Charlie had met a psychotherapist she believed to be good, especially in retrospect: a woman named Ginny Saxon. Ginny had offered an interpretation of Simon: why he was like he was. Charlie had never told him. She didn’t know if she ever would. She couldn’t decide if it would be helpful or harmful to pass on Ginny’s theory about the psychological syndrome he might be suffering from. She’d have liked to ask someone’s advice, but if she couldn’t tell Simon, she certainly couldn’t tell a third party. For several months, she’d been wishing she didn’t know anything about it herself, as if wishing could make the knowledge go away.
“Step two is this,” Regan was saying. “Coming here, meeting you, Simon. I know it sounds mad, but . . . you matter to me. You’re my symbol of courage, in my head—the only person who’s ever stood up to my dad. Openly, I mean. Lots of people loathe him and do nothing about it—everyone he knows, apart from my mum—but no one’s ever told him what they think of him to his face apart from you.”
Simon cleared his throat. “How do you know I’ve done it?”
“Dad talks about you a lot,” said Regan. “Mainly to Mum, but also to me, sometimes. He always says the same thing: that he’s only ever been loyal and supportive and encouraging to you. That you throw it back in his face every day, betraying and insulting him whenever you can.”
“That’s not how it is. Or how it’s ever been,” Simon said woodenly. Charlie wanted to help him, but she could hardly advise on how best to conduct the conversation while it was still in progress, and once it was over it would be too late. He needed to decide: either not to engage at all, or to immerse himself wholeheartedly and in the manner of a human being.
“He doesn’t understand why you’re so ungrateful,” Regan said. “He thinks he couldn’t possibly have been a more nurturing, fairer boss.”
“He’s lying.”
“No,” Regan said vehemently. “It’s what he believes. He also believes he couldn’t have been a better father to me. Want to hear what his idea of good fathering involved?”
“No.” Simon’s voice was uneven. “I want you to leave and not come back.”
Charlie watched the color drain from Regan’s face. “Simon, don’t be a twat,” she said.
“Don’t worry, Charlie. I’m not going to fall to pieces. One good thing about being Giles Proust’s daughter is that, when someone else savages me, it has next to no effect. It seems so . . . watered down.”
“He doesn’t mean to be so . . .” “Nasty” wasn’t the right word, not when Simon was frozen solid with shock and embarrassment. There was no right word. “I meant what I said before,” Charlie told Regan. “I’d be suspicious of any shrink who thinks that changing your name every time you reach a psychological milestone is a good idea. If you call yourself something stupid for no other reason than to spite your dad, he’s winning. Don’t pretend you’re not you. Develop, make progress, but maintain continuity. Be Amanda: the person who went through whatever shit you went through and came out the other side of it.”
Looking at Simon but speaking mainly to her own ego, Charlie added, “I do know a bit about this kind of thing. I’m part of a regional suicide prevention forum. I talk to a lot of counselors and therapists.” Charlie remembered too late that many of these people had, at one time or another, stressed the importance of never uttering the word “suicide,” not unless an at-risk nominal said it first. The word “nominal” was overused in the suicide prevention literature that Charlie frequently had to plow through. It meant “person.”
To Regan she said, “I understand that you admire Simon because he stands up to Proust, but what do you want from him, other than to tell him that?”
“Only to talk. About what we’ve both been through, if that doesn’t sound too dramatic.” She made it sound like the humblest request in the world. Poor woman. She wasn’t to know that Simon would rather hand over all of his vital organs and his much-loved and much-Sellotaped copy of Moby-Dick than admit to a stranger that he had “been through” anything.
“I’m still at the stage where I need to prove to myself, every day, that I’m not an evil defector,” Regan said. “It would really help me to hear you describe what working with my dad is like—both of you. Maybe it would help you too. We’ve all been bullied by the same bully, right? For years.”
“I don’t mind swapping Proust horror stories,” said Charlie, wondering if her willingness would make any difference to Simon. It might be fun, she thought, though she knew Regan was seeking a far less frivolous commodity: confirmation of the most important truth in her universe.
“It’s not happening,” Simon said. “You’ve got twenty seconds to get out.”
To Charlie’s surprise, Regan nodded. “That’s the reaction I was expecting,” she said. “If you change your mind, you can contact me at work: Focus Reprographics in Rawndesley.”
“He won’t change his mind,” Charlie told her.
“He might once he understands I’m on his side,” Regan said, talking to Simon about himself in the third person. “You’ve got a case at the moment: Tim Breary. Wife Francine, had a stroke that left her bedridden? And he’s confessed to murdering her, and claims he doesn’t know why he did it?”
Fuck, did this woman have a death wish? Simon’s face had turned dark and stiff with fury. And Charlie knew the name of the Don’t Know Why Killer: Tim Breary.
“There’s something you should know that you don’t,” said Regan. “When Breary was first interviewed, you weren’t there, were you? Sam Kombothekra and Colin Sellers interviewed him. Dad said it wasn’t complicated enough for you: no mystery, an immediate confession.”
Interesting, Charlie thought, that Proust, like Simon and Gibbs when it suited them, shared confidential details of cases with non-colleagues: his wife and daughter, and God only knew who else. Funny that he’d neglected to mention this on the many occasions that he’d threatened Simon with disciplinary action for telling Charlie too much.
“You only started to take an interest when you found out the motive had gone missing,” Regan went on. “Dad’s not happy about your newfound enthusiasm for the case. He’s got his confession and he wants it off his desk, so he ordered Kombothekra and Sellers to leave you and Gibbs out of the loop. Or rather, to alter and deliberately falsify the loop. And here I am: telling you something that could land him in prison.” Regan exhaled slowly.
“Your shrink would be proud of you,” said Charlie. There was something wrong with the story, in spite of the convincing detail about Gibbs also being excluded. Yes, Proust would know that Gibbs would go straight to Simon with the truth. But Sam would too, Charlie was sure. And Proust was far too canny to give Sam and Sellers that kind of power over him—the power to end his career. Was Simon th
inking all this as well?
“That first interview with Tim Breary—the transcript in the file isn’t the one that was there originally,” Regan said. “Less than two hours ago, I heard Dad boasting to Mum about knowing when to have the guts to bend the rules. It was pretty sickening, though no more so than all the other conversations my parents have. They’re all about her reflecting him back to himself in the most flattering way possible.” Regan put her mug down on the worktop. “I’m no detective, but if Dad cares that much about you not finding out, it must be important, right?” She turned and left the room: the woman who was so terrified of her father that she would give two people who hated him the chance to destroy him and explain that it was all his daughter’s idea. Charlie wasn’t sure she believed it.
The front door slammed shut.
“She’s lying, Simon. She wants you to go after her so that she can lie a bit more.”
Simon picked up the cup Regan had been drinking from and hurled it at the wall. He was out of the house in seconds, leaving the front door swinging open and cold air and rain blowing in. Leaving Charlie covered in cold coffee, surrounded by pieces of broken mug. Not that she cared about that. She tried not to care also, as she heard him yelling hoarsely into the night, that he had never once chased after her while calling out her name as if his life depended on finding her again.
5
FRIDAY, 11 MARCH 2011
There is only one bed in this airless attic room. It’s a small double, the size of a sofa bed, and partly covered with a single duvet. Only one pillow. No cupboards or drawers, just open shelves, on which I see no spare blankets, no cushions, nothing useful. I conduct an anti-inventory: no minibar, no kettle, no sachets of tea or coffee, no telephone, no bedside tables, no reading lamps, no television, no room service menu. In the far wall, there’s a door that has had one of its corners shaved off and been squashed in under the eaves. I assume and hope this means we at least have an en suite shower room. I know without looking that if we do, it will be roughly the same size as Lauren’s brain.
The Carrier Page 6