The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  Smart-arse. “He told me,” I say irritably. “I asked him. I wanted to check that what he was recommending for me was something he’d done himself. I always do that. Never spend money unless the person advising you thinks it’s worth his money too, right?”

  Gibbs isn’t listening. Or rather, he’s listening to the voice in his head that’s whispering, “She’s in love with Tim Breary, and she knew his wife’s death would be profitable.”

  I refuse to think like a guilty person when I’ve got nothing to hide. I didn’t murder Francine, and if anyone tries to suggest I did, I’ll simply ask when she was killed and then direct DC Gibbs to whatever flight I was on at the time and the many airline operatives and passengers who will be able to confirm my whereabouts. One advantage of being a workaholic with a packed schedule is that alibis are easy to come by.

  Under Gibbs’ incisive gaze, my bravado wears off quickly. Have I put my foot in it and made things worse for Tim? How can I have, when he’s confessed to Francine’s murder? For all I know he’s sitting in a prison cell right now, holding up a banner that says in capital letters, “I DID IT FOR THE MONEY.”

  Except that wouldn’t have been his motive. Not in a million years.

  I straighten up in my seat. “If Tim were ever to commit murder, it would be for someone else’s sake, not his own,” I say. “He wouldn’t be the beneficiary.”

  “That’s an unusual character trait to have,” Gibbs says woodenly. “Most of the murderers I meet aren’t so public-spirited.”

  “It’s true. Tim wouldn’t think it was worth the fuss, just for him. Even for someone else, he wouldn’t do it. It’s too extreme. Tim hates extreme . . . expressions, extreme actions, more than anything, because they make people vulnerable. They allow others to control you and . . . know you too intimately. Tim likes to glide along the surface. He likes controlled and ironic, letting things happen, pretending nothing matters even when it does.”

  I see that I have lost Gibbs somewhere along the way. Keep it simple. “Tim’s no more a killer than Lauren is,” I say.

  “Have you ever met Jason Cookson?”

  “No. You’re right. I know nothing about him. If I could take back what I said about him, I would.”

  “It’s always easier to believe that the people we don’t know and don’t care about are the evil ones,” says Gibbs.

  “I don’t care about Lauren,” I say indignantly. “Saying she can’t be a killer is hardly a declaration of undying love.”

  “‘Undying love.’ That’s an interesting phrase.” Gibbs leans back in his chair. “What made you think of it?”

  “My ambition to find new and inventive ways of being sarcastic,” I say flatly.

  “Tell me about your relationship with Tim, aside from him being your accountant.”

  i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)

  Tears flood my eyes, spill over. “I can’t,” I whisper.

  “You said Lauren seemed frightened of you at Düsseldorf Airport, when you first spoke to her.”

  Did he mean to help me out with that swift change of subject? I’m grateful for it either way. “Yes. I gave her a fairly ruthless pep talk at the boarding gate. She was yelling at the airport staff, yelling at other passengers, at anyone who told her something she didn’t want to hear. Except me. Soon as I weighed in, the fight went out of her. It was instant. She just stood there and looked at me as if she couldn’t believe I was talking to her. I don’t know if it was surprise or horror or what, but direct contact with me was a problem for her. It makes sense now, but it didn’t at the time. Then later, when I bumped into her in a corridor, after . . .” I break off.

  “After what?”

  He doesn’t need to know about the pregnancy test. “After we’d been told to go to Departures and wait for the coach,” I say. “She ran away from me as if I was chasing her, which I then did.”

  Gibbs frowns and looks at his notes again. “She ran away, but then a few minutes later she threw herself into your arms, told you she’d helped to frame a man for murder, and ordered you to look after her all the way back to Combingham.”

  “Yes. It makes no sense.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” Gibbs stands, walks over to the window. He balls his hands into fists and presses them against the glass as if he’s getting into position for smashing it. “It makes sense if her feelings about you are mixed. She wants to get near you, or else why’s she there?”

  He must be right. But why? Why shadow me all the way to Düsseldorf and back? How did she know about me? Did she hear Tim mention my name?

  “She’s on that flight because of you, and frightened in case you find out her reason for being in Germany, which is that you’re in Germany. Last thing she wants is a confrontation.”

  “Then what does she want?”

  “Let’s stick to questions we can answer,” says Gibbs. “Was she on your morning flight as well?”

  “That was the impression I got. She had no suitcase with her, so she hadn’t been away overnight, and she mentioned having seen me in the morning. There’s only one Combingham-to-Düsseldorf flight on a weekday morning—the one I was on, the seven a.m.”

  “Can you think, off the top of your head, how she might have known you were planning to go to Germany yesterday, and your flight times?”

  “I have a blog,” I say, embarrassed. That’s right: I can’t communicate with the man I live with, so I compensate by oversharing on the Internet. “It’s mainly about sciencey, techy stuff, but it has my schedule on it.” So that Tim can keep track of what I’m doing. So that one day, if he ever wants to, he can be waiting for me at the airport when my plane lands. “And for light relief, and because it’s become a thing now and my regular readers like it, it also has a lot of me exaggeratedly moaning about having to get up early in the morning to fly to various places. Including Düsseldorf.”

  “Name?”

  “You know my . . . oh, right, the blog. Gaby Struthers dot com forward slash blog.”

  “What line of work are you in?” Gibbs asks.

  I hate answering that question unless I can do it properly. It’s difficult to summarize, and I’m too passionate about my work to skirt over any of the details. “At the moment I’m part of a company called Rawndesley Technological Generics. We’re working with a German company on a new product. Hence yesterday’s trip.”

  “New product as in something you’ve invented?”

  “Something we’re trying to invent.”

  Gibbs walks back to the table and sits down. “What?” he asks.

  “Is it relevant?”

  He shrugs. “I’m interested in people who invent things. I’ve never had the urge myself. Everything I want exists already.” Something flickers across his face: a problematic or unhappy thought. His strained smile immediately afterward convinces me that I didn’t imagine it. “I’ve always reckoned people who invent things are trying to make life too complicated, but that’s probably just me.”

  “Lucky the person who dreamed up the wheel didn’t agree with you,” I say.

  “That’s different. I’m not saying nothing ever needed to be invented. It was different in the old days, before we had everything we needed.”

  Is he being serious? “So you wouldn’t bother to invent intelligent string, then?” As if you’d have a hope in hell of succeeding.

  “What’s that?” Gibbs asks.

  “What it sounds like. Imagine being able to wrap one piece of string around a box, say, and have the string measure the dimensions of the box.”

  “Is that what your company makes? Intelligent string?”

  “We’re trying. We’re not quite there yet.” We need another twenty million pounds’ worth of investment. Fancy chipping in?

  Gibbs looks annoyed. “I’ve seen string,” he says. “How d’you make it intelligent?
It’s just string.”

  I’m too tired to explain that what my colleagues and I are struggling to create is not the kind of string he’s picturing, that you buy in a ball from the hardware shop. If I did, he’d probably ask me why I call it string when it isn’t. “I need to sleep,” I say. “Can I . . . How soon can I talk to Tim?”

  “That’s for HMP Combingham to decide,” says Gibbs. “That’s where he’s remanded.”

  The word makes my heart thud like a dropped lead ball.

  Tim. In jail. Because Francine’s dead. If I could get in, I would: live there with him forever if I had to.

  Where are these thoughts coming from? Who is the person having them, this doormat who would sacrifice everything she’s worked for to live in prison with a man who rejected her? I don’t recognize myself as me anymore.

  Gibbs hands me a hanky from his trouser pocket. “What are you thinking about that’s made you start crying?” he asks.

  I don’t need to tell him about the red whirlwind, which isn’t really red, or made of wind. He’s not my shrink, or my friend. I’m thinking that I was doing so well. I’d done an expert job of flattening everything down, sweeping it out of the way. And now it’s ruined. Lauren Cookson ruined it, and I hate her. I hate her for making me feel like this again, when I thought I’d beaten it.

  I am not, in fact, thinking at all. Things are crashing through me: that would be a more accurate way to describe it. “What’s the nearest hotel to the prison?” I ask, standing up. I suddenly can’t bear to be in this cramped room for another second.

  “Aren’t you going home?” Gibbs jolts to his feet. Is he about to grab me and force me down into my seat?

  “Yes. Right.” I dab at my eyes with the hanky. “I have to go home first.”

  I have to go home so that I can tell Sean I’m leaving.

  8

  11/3/2011

  “There’s no need to visit me as often as you do,” Tim Breary said to Simon.

  “From your point of view.”

  “I wouldn’t presume to speak from yours.” Breary smiled. He and Simon were in the room at HMP Combingham known unofficially as “the parlor.” It was spacious, newly decorated, comfortably furnished, and only ever used by top-ranking prison staff for important meetings—apart from now. Simon had asked for it for this interview, and been surprised to get it. He was hoping that a change from the usual gray dingy backdrop to his standoffs with Tim Breary would make all the difference.

  Breary seemed not to have noticed the new setting. “I’m not bored or lonely in here, and I won’t be, however long I stay,” he said. “I’ve made a couple of friends and I’m reading a lot, even for me. Dan and Kerry have very kindly donated more books to the library than the poor orderly in charge knows what to do with.” If Breary was trying for a neutral expression, he was failing. He looked pleased with himself. “A handful of recidivist offenders have been introduced to the early works of Glyn Maxwell that otherwise might not have been,” he said.

  Simon assumed Glyn Maxwell was a poet. Everyone Breary mentioned who wasn’t his dead wife or Dan or Kerry Jose was a poet.

  “‘Don’t forget,’” Breary said in his quoting voice, which was both louder and gentler in tone than the voice he used to admit to killing Francine. “‘Nothing will start that hasn’t started yet. / Don’t forget / It, its friend, its foe and its opposite.’”

  “I’ll bear it in mind.” Simon was determined not to become impatient. Suspects often talked nonsense as a way of warding off questions they didn’t want to answer, but Breary didn’t have the standard bad attitude. His manner toward Simon was almost . . . “caring” had to be the wrong word, but it was close to that. Simon was becoming increasingly convinced that Breary’s aim was not to obstruct but to entertain and communicate—to make a connection of some kind. And his nonsense wasn’t nonsense, though it risked sounding as if it was. Simon found he wanted to dismantle each interview once it was over, analyze it line by line. Was Breary’s cryptic approach a way of denying or disguising the need to connect?

  Don’t forget / It, its friend, its foe and its opposite.

  Everything about the man sitting opposite him puzzled Simon and had from the start. Breary was a comfortable actor, reveling in the ongoing performance that was his everyday behavior, yet he seemed entirely genuine at the same time. How was that possible? His articulate charm wasn’t smarmy in the way that it easily might have been. There was something restful about being in a room with him. Even when he was determinedly withholding information, there was still the sense that, in his presence, what you were hoping for might happen. Totally false, based on nothing. Simon could well believe that Breary had persuaded some of the more easily led scrotes that they were as interested in the early poems of Glyn Maxwell as they were in where their next heroin fix was coming from.

  Today, Breary’s projected bonhomie was more palpable than usual. He seemed less guarded than when Simon had spoken to him previously. Was it the room, with its chairs arranged in a friendly semicircle? Simon was glad he’d requested it. He wanted Breary relaxed and expansive, imagining he’d got away with pretending to be a murderer.

  Simon was certain he was nothing of the sort, and he was prepared to sit here all day—all night too, if he had to—in order to hear Breary admit as much. He’d switched off his phone, and relished the idea that Sam Kombothekra would by now have contacted Charlie to ask why Simon hadn’t turned up for work and discovered that, as far as Simon was concerned, Sam’s perfidy had released him from his contractual obligations to Culver Valley Police for as long as he wanted that release to last. Proust wouldn’t see it that way, but Simon had another trump card lined up for that round of the game.

  “I’ve been doing a bit of writing myself,” Breary said. Then he smiled. “Don’t worry, I make sure to tear up all my creations once they’re finished. That would really be inflicting violence on the world, if I were to unleash my mediocre words.”

  When Simon didn’t answer, Breary looked at the empty armchairs that dotted the space between them, as if he might get a reaction from them instead. Three empty green chairs. Francine Breary, Dan Jose, Kerry Jose. The other players, the absent ones. Simon wondered about the peripherals, Lauren and Jason Cookson. They lived with the Joses, had both been in the house when Francine was killed. No empty chairs for them.

  All five—Breary, the Joses and the Cooksons—had separately said, when asked, that it was unusual for the five of them and Francine all to be at home at the same time. Tim Breary, by his own account, had chosen a moment when the house was at its fullest to murder his wife, except his story was that he hadn’t chosen, hadn’t thought about it at all; he’d found himself doing it, without warning or anticipation, for no reason he was aware of.

  “What have we done to deserve so much extra visiting time?” he asked Simon. “Is it you or me that’s getting special treatment? Ah, that’s your shy face. That means it must be you. Are you going to let me in on your secret?”

  “If you let me in on yours,” Simon deflected. He hated the idea that he had a “shy face,” and that Breary recognized it. He was embarrassed by the preferential treatment he received from HMP Combingham, and a couple of other prisons too. When Charlie teased him about what she insisted on calling his celebrity status, he usually left the room. It didn’t stop her. Next time she tried it, Simon would tell her Tim Breary had never heard of him, so his reputation couldn’t be as powerful as she liked to pretend it was.

  “Why did you kill your wife?”

  “I’ve already told you: I don’t know. I wish I did. I’d like to be able to help you, but I can’t.”

  Prison wasn’t normally good for anybody, but Breary looked no more undernourished or sunken-eyed in here than he had as a free man. Odd. Usually, the skanky estate lowlifes held up better; it was less of a change for them. Upper-middle-class professionals tended to deteriorate rapidl
y, mentally and physically.

  Not Tim Breary. His eyes glowed with what Simon wanted to call anticipation, though he wasn’t sure he could justify the choice of word; it was no more than a half-formed impression. Breary’s skin too looked particularly buffed today, as if whatever gave skin its nourishment had spruced it up from within. It was frustrating not to be able to reach inside the man’s head and uncover the cause of his well-being, drag it out into the light.

  “Are you pleased Francine’s dead?”

  “A new question. Excellent.” Breary seemed to be giving the matter some thought. “No,” he said eventually. “No, I’m not pleased.”

  “You seem it.”

  “I know,” Breary agreed. His smile faded, as if the discrepancy bothered him as much as it did Simon. “Maybe . . . maybe one day I will be, but at the moment I’d rather . . .” His words trailed off.

  “Rather someone hadn’t killed her?”

  “I’d rather I hadn’t killed her. Death should happen naturally. And I say that as someone who once cut his wrists and ankles open.”

  This was news to Simon. He made sure to show no shock. “And as someone who, more recently, murdered his wife?”

  “Yes. I didn’t think that worth adding because you know about it already.” The first hint of irritation from Breary. “There’s no point trying to catch me out. You won’t succeed.”

  “You say death should happen naturally, yet you took a pillow, put it over your wife’s face and smothered her.”

  “No mystery there. I acted in a way that was out of kilter with my beliefs, as I’ve been doing for most of my life. I’ve always thought it polite: a way of showing courtesy toward the dearly held principles of others, if I deny my own. The spirit of family-hold-back, rolled out across the plain of ethics, if you like.”

  Simon didn’t. Was Breary crazy? No, that was too easy. “Why did you cut your wrists and ankles open?”