The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  Even if he’s a killer?

  Was Tim Breary’s flattery, like his lack of motive, part of a carefully crafted campaign to avoid a murder conviction? Or to secure one?

  Simon was having trouble thinking straight. Was he, for once, not the cleverest person in the room?

  “Will you find Gaby and give her the poem?” Breary asked him.

  “Why should I?”

  “‘Should’ doesn’t come into it. You’ll give it to her because I need you to. Because you’d keep your wife alive, even if she was brain-dead. Because you can imagine.”

  Simon waited for Breary to tell him what he could imagine. When no more details were forthcoming, he turned to leave.

  “Simon, wait. When you give Gaby the poem . . .”

  “I haven’t said I will.” It was only at the beginnings and ends of his sessions with Breary that Simon was made vividly aware of their different circumstances: in a few minutes, he would step outside, gulp free air into his lungs and drive away, while whichever staffer was stationed outside the parlor would escort Breary to his cell. The idea activated Simon’s escape reflex every time. He only turned back because he’d heard more than words and didn’t want to miss the visual clues.

  Breary seemed to be chewing and swallowing air; his jaw and Adam’s apple were working frenetically. It was a few seconds before he was able to speak. “Don’t mention my name. Don’t tell Gaby the poem’s from me.”

  The request was so staggeringly inappropriate, Simon would have felt like a sadist if he’d pointed it out.

  He was still wondering if and how he should respond when Tim Breary said, “Tell her it’s from The Carrier.”

  POLICE EXHIBIT 1441B/SK—

  COPY OF POEM “SONNET” BY LACHLAN MACKINNON, HANDWRITTEN BY TIMOTHY BREARY. GIVEN BY TIMOTHY BREARY TO DC SIMON WATERHOUSE ON 11/3/2011 AT HMP COMBINGHAM, WITH REQUEST FOR IT TO BE PASSED BY DC WATERHOUSE TO GABRIELLE STRUTHERS

  “SONNET”

  Suppose there was no great creating Word,

  That time is infinite. Corollary?

  The present moment gives infinity

  An end, by coming after it. Absurd.

  Say the beginning of the world occurred

  In time, and call that moment moment T,

  Everything needed for the world to be

  Was, at the point T minus X. Absurd.

  Falling in love’s a paradox like this.

  Either it happens like a thunderbolt,

  So when it makes our lives make sense, it lies

  Or we had long been hoping for the kiss

  That changed us, and, aware how it would jolt

  Our beings, we could suffer no surprise.

  POLICE EXHIBIT 1433B/SK—

  TRANSCRIPT OF HANDWRITTEN LETTER FROM TIMOTHY BREARY TO FRANCINE BREARY DATED 25 DECEMBER 2010

  Dear Francine,

  It is Christmas Day. If you are the same Francine you have always been, then you will think that since I am your husband and since you are not dead, I ought to give you a Christmas present. I agree. In previous years I have not, but I have changed my mind. The poem in this letter is your present from me this year. It is one of my favorites.

  The old Francine would have regarded a transcribed poem as an inadequate gift. For all I know, New Francine might agree. All I can offer in my defense is that, in making my choice, I gave no thought to keeping cost or effort to a minimum. If the world contains a better gift than poetry, I have yet to discover it. (I am not talking about what passes for poetry these days—inert chopped-up prose that has no obvious point or inherent music to it. Not that you care about such distinctions, Francine.)

  I am not going to stuff this letter under your mattress as Kerry would like me to. I shall do what I have always done with the Christmas gifts I have bought you: put it into your hand. I will read it to you first, of course.

  “IN A DARK WOOD” BY C. H. SISSON

  Now I am forty I must lick my bruises

  What has been suffered cannot be repaired

  I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses

  A sickening garbage that could not be shared.

  My errors have been written on my senses

  The body is a record of the mind

  My touch is crusted with my past defences

  Because my wit was dull, my eye grows blind.

  There is no credit in a long defection

  And defect and defection are the same

  I have no body fit for resurrection

  Destroy then rather my half-eaten frame

  But that you will not do, for that were pardon

  The bodies that you pardon, you replace

  And that you save for those whom you will harden

  To suffer in the hard rule of your Grace.

  Christians on earth may have their bodies mended

  By premonition of a heavenly state

  But I, by grosser flesh from Grace defended

  Can never see, never communicate.

  I have to go downstairs now for Christmas dinner, but I will be back later to read the poem to you again and tell you what I think it means. “The body is a record of the mind.” Would you agree, Francine?

  Kerry is calling me for dinner. Never fear—I shall be back.

  Your husband, for worse and for worse, having given up all hope of better,

  Tim

  9

  FRIDAY, 11 MARCH 2011

  I pull up on the grass verge where the narrow road comes to a stop. Tim’s house is hiding from me: the Dower House, in the grounds of Lower Heckencott Hall. I can’t see it, but I know it’s behind these high wooden gates, thanks to a consensus of search results. The Hall is Grade I listed and featured on websites called things like Architectural Treasures of the Culver Valley and Britain’s Finest Historical Houses.

  Tim’s home, I correct myself. Not his house. One of my searches yielded a PDF of plans for an extension drawn up by Roger Staples Design Studios for Daniel and Kerensa Jose. That makes sense; Dan and Kerry are the ones with the money. Thanks to www.nethouseprices.com, I know they paid £875,000 for the Dower House in February 2009.

  Kerry never told me her name was short for Kerensa. Tim would have known. I hate myself for hoping that Francine didn’t. It makes no difference to anything, but I prefer to think of her as ignorant, an outsider.

  The conviction Kerry planted in my mind six years ago is still stubbornly, crazily there: Francine might have been married to Tim, but she didn’t belong in his life. “You’re the fourth quarter of our quartet,” Kerry told me once when Dan and Tim were late to meet us at Omar’s Kitchen. The idea took root, fast and firm. I believed her because I needed it to be true.

  I still need it to have been true when she said it. If it was true once . . . It must have been true. Kerry told me about her dad—something she, Dan and Tim had agreed never to tell Francine.

  Rain drums on the roof of my car like an angry reminder, chastising me for letting down my guard and admitting to weakness. It doesn’t matter that no one heard me apart from me. Life punishes the needy; admit you can’t live without something and it’s taken away.

  I don’t need Tim in the way that I used to. I’ve proved I can live without him. I want to help him, that’s all.

  If my scientist colleagues could hear me trying to talk Fate round, they’d think twice about ever working with me again.

  I understand that whatever this is, it is not Tim being returned to me. No one has invited me back into anything. Look at those closed gates.

  When I knew Kerry and Dan, they had no gates to hide behind. They lived on Burtmayne Road in Spilling, in a two-bedroom gardenless terrace that was all front; from the street it fooled you into thinking it was spacious, but it was only one room deep. Tim and Francine lived a two-minute walk away on Heron Close, in a three-bedroom det
ached new build with a garden so overlooked by other identical detached new builds that Tim referred to it as “the theater in the round,” though never in Francine’s presence according to Kerry.

  And now Tim lives here, with Kerry and Dan. And I live with Sean.

  DC Gibbs asked for my address; it was one of his first questions, a formality. 47 Horse Fair Lane, Silsford, I recited. It sounded like an address and nothing more. When I left the police station, I headed straight for the Dower House, uninvited and probably unwelcome. Coming here felt as accidental and incongruous as going home would have. I knew I needed to sleep, but couldn’t imagine doing it in my own bed. The idea that I have a bed, a home, a boyfriend, strikes me as something I might have wanted to believe even though it’s never been true: as if I found a collection of things all conveniently together in one place, pretended they were mine, and everyone else was too polite to object.

  Stop driving yourself crazy. Do something useful.

  I open the car door, close it again. The go-away gates are too off-putting. I tell myself that if Tim lives here then my feelings for him justify my being here. And there’s no “if” about it: the news websites all agree that this was where Tim and Francine were living at the time of Francine’s death. Rent-free: that’s the part I worked out on my own. Kerry and Dan would skip down the street naked before they’d charge Tim rent. He might have tried to insist on paying his way, but they wouldn’t have let him.

  The idea that I might see Kerry again—that she might be in her house now, behind these gates—makes my eyes water. I blink away the tears. I was so devastated when Tim walked out of my life, it was only months later that I was able to see past the loss of him to the smaller sadness of Kerry being gone too. I didn’t know her for long, but I missed her more than I’d expected to. She’d helped me in the most important way I have ever been helped: she explained Tim to me. Not completely—that would be impossible, given that Tim is Tim—but enough. Kerry made sense of my life for me when I’d lost my grip.

  I mustn’t allow myself to hope that she can do it again.

  The rain stops as suddenly as it started. I get out of the car, leaving my bag on the passenger seat but taking my switched-off phone with me. A compromise. If I suddenly decide I’m ready to talk to Sean, I can switch it on and lose no more time. Though before ringing him I’d probably want to listen to the eighteen angry messages he’s left, to gauge his mood, and after listening to them, I’d probably be even less keen to speak to him than I am now, so what’s the point?

  Which is also my gut reaction to the millionaire’s fortress in front of me: what’s the point of trying to get in, when so much design effort has gone into keeping people out? The sign says “Lower Heckencott Hall,” but it ought to say, “Abandon hope all ye who want to enter here,” a subtle but crucial variation on the well-known phrase. I try not to feel intimidated by the carved stone gateposts, the intercom system with its two buzzers, the high stone perimeter wall with even higher hedges forming an extra layer of protection above it. Now that I’m standing, I can see, in the distance, a repeating pattern of identical windows: the top two stories of a vast square building that must be the Hall. The long, straight driveway makes its presence felt while hiding out of sight—longer than a street with thirty families living on either side, judging by the position of the house in relation to the gates.

  Despite its trappings of privacy, Lower Heckencott Hall looks public and practical, with its rigid corners and inflexible lines. I picture a large dusty meeting room within its walls, full of men shouting and waving leaflets in the air. One of my search results described it as “the grandest example of vernacular architecture in the south of England.” Another called it a mansion, which strikes me as way off the mark; “mansion” implies a lavishness that’s absent here. There are no flourishes, no softening details, no decorative touches, just a stone cube with nothing but windows to break up the monotony of the façade. Not even a sloped roof; the Hall is a flat-top.

  The word jolts me back twelve years, to when I first met Sean in the gym at Waterfront Health Club. I don’t want to think about him, but he keeps invading my mind. Is it a guilt reflex, because I know I’m probably going to leave him?

  Not probably. Definitely.

  Probably.

  When he asked me out, instead of saying yes or no, I told him I had a confession to make and blurted out that for months I’d thought of him as Sexy Boiled Egg because his flat-top hairstyle created the illusion of someone having removed the dome of his skull. “Obviously that’s partly complimentary and partly not, and you might not want to have dinner with me now you know,” I said. Sean laughed politely. It was clear he found my admission neither funny nor charming nor offensive—merely an obstacle to him getting his question answered. When he saw that I was waiting for an answer too, he said, yes, he still wanted to take me out for dinner. He told me the venue, the date and the time as if it were a preexisting arrangement: The Slack Captain in Silsford, the following Saturday; he’d pick me up at seven-thirty.

  He arrived with a brand-new crew cut, looking a little thuggish and four hundred times sexier. I thanked him for coming to collect me and told him—in case it hadn’t occurred to him, and for future reference—that we could have met at the restaurant. I didn’t say that The Slack Captain wasn’t my idea of a restaurant. “We could have met there,” Sean agreed, “except that I invited you.” I asked what that meant and he said, “It means dinner’s my treat and my responsibility. I pick you up, and I drive you home afterward.” Still in the dark, I decided to drop it; his four-hundred-times-sexier appearance made perfect sense even if his words didn’t.

  I shunted aside my unease about his having fixed all the details of our date before I’d agreed to go out with him, decided his rapid hair response meant that he was flexible and open-minded, and told him so, making a joke about it being easy to keep an open mind if someone’s sliced off the top of your head. Sean gave me a flattening look and I stopped laughing.

  He asked for the bill while chewing his last mouthful of steak. I’d finished my main course a few minutes earlier, but I hadn’t realized our dinner was over. It didn’t occur to Sean that I might want pudding; he didn’t, so why would I?

  He doesn’t want a career that involves getting stuck overnight in Düsseldorf; why do I?

  I force the image of him out of my mind—horizontal on our sofa; gone—and am about to press the lower buzzer on the intercom, the one labeled “The Dower House,” when the gates start to open with what looks like great reluctance. I hear a car engine and picture a silver Mercedes, a chauffeur in uniform. He might die before there’s a gap wide enough to drive through.

  I stand to one side as a grubby blue Volvo S60 emerges. It stops at the gateposts. The driver’s tinted window slides open and I see a skinny man of about my age with a goatee beard and straggly shoulder-length brown hair with an indent, as if he’s recently worn it in a ponytail. He stares at me. There’s a dead Christmas tree lying across the backseat of his car and, on top of it, a bulging green garden refuse sack.

  I smile at him to thank him for opening the gates, and walk past the Volvo into the grounds of Lower Heckencott Hall. Here’s the long, ruler-straight driveway, exactly as I pictured it.

  “Oy!” the man calls out.

  Is he talking to me? I retrace my steps. He looks angry. “Who said you could go in there?” His accent is roughest Culver Valley.

  “I pressed the buzzer for the Dower House and they buzzed me in,” I lie.

  “No, they didn’t. I opened the gate. No one buzzed you in. They’re busy at the Dower House. They don’t want to be disturbed.”

  Busy? Not with stuff and things, by any chance? He must be so proud of his detailed, imaginative excuse. “Kerry buzzed me in,” I lie, determined to stand my ground. “She spoke to me through the intercom. I’m an old friend. My name’s—”

  “Gaby Struth
ers.” He says it as if he’s found me out, even though I was about to tell him.

  “How did you know?”

  “So it’s Kerry you’ve come to see, is it? Not Lauren?”

  “Lauren? Cookson?” We’re never going to get anywhere if we keep answering questions with questions. “Why would I come here to see Lauren? I know she used to work here, but . . .” I can’t bring myself to say, But Francine Breary’s dead, and dead people don’t need care assistants.

  He makes a noise that’s halfway between a laugh and a jeer, and leans his arm out of the car window. The movement pushes up his shirtsleeve to reveal a tattoo that would have made me think of Lauren if we hadn’t already been talking about her. Hardly anybody I know has a tattoo. Does she know anyone who isn’t covered in them?

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know Lauren lives here,” the man snaps, but I’m not listening. I stare at the blue words on his skinny arm: “IRONMAN.”

  Jason Cookson. Lauren’s husband, three-time survivor of the Ironman challenge. Gardener-cum-handyman-cum-remover-of-dead-Christmas-trees.

  Murderer of Francine Breary? Maybe.

  “Is Lauren back yet?” I ask. “I’d like to see her too, if she’s—”

  “She’s not.”

  “How did you know who I was?”

  “Lauren said you’d come looking for her.” He stares at the road ahead. The message is clear: he might have to speak to me, but he doesn’t have to look at me. “She doesn’t want you meddling in her life, so you’re wasting your time.”

  “I’m here to see Kerry. I had no idea Lauren lived here until you told me.”

  “You’re bullshitting,” Jason says to his steering wheel. “Word of advice: never bullshit a bullshitter. If I were you, I’d turn round and walk away.”

  So he’s a bullshitter, by his own admission. Interesting. “You’re not me,” I say.