The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  “Lauren?” Charlie prompted.

  Lauren burst into tears and buried her face in the brown collar of her dressing gown. “Why can’t you lot fucking leave us alone?” she said through its material.

  “Jason’s working on a friend’s house renovations today,” said Kerry. “He’ll be out all day.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Charlie. “You can just tell us what he would have said if he’d been here. Or is there a script somewhere, with his lines highlighted?”

  “No, there isn’t,” Kerry answered as if it had been a serious question.

  “Any questions you’d like to ask us?” Sam said, looking at Dan.

  “I thought you were here to ask us stuff, not the other way round!” Lauren snapped. Sam was swiftly coming to the conclusion that she wasn’t as helpless as he’d assumed when he’d first seen her.

  “I’m just wondering why none of you’s asked what was in the tweets sent from Tim’s Twitter account last night,” he said. “Unless you already know?”

  Dan gripped the thin upholstered arms of his chair. Kerry recovered quickest. “I would have asked, but I didn’t think you’d be willing to tell us,” she said.

  Sam produced a folded piece of paper from his pocket, spread it open on his lap. “Tim’s only tweeted six times, and three of them weren’t him. Numbers one to three were from May last year. The first two were a quote from a poem that wouldn’t fit into one tweet. No mention of the title or who wrote it: ‘I have portrayed temptation as amusing. / Now he can either waver or abstain. / His is a superior kind of losing / And mine is an inferior brand of gain.’ The third one’s also a quote. No title this time, but the poet’s C. H. Sisson: ‘The best thing to say is nothing / And that I do not say / But I will say it, when I lie / In silence all the day.’”

  “Tim loved that poem,” Kerry said. She and Dan looked at each other, exchanged a silent message that Sam couldn’t interpret. He caught the emotional charge, though: pain.

  “Tweets four to six are from last night,” he said. “They’re a bit less poetic. ‘Call police urgent women being attacked outside her house horse fair lane spilling dont no number please dont ignore’—that’s the first one. Then ‘URGENT women Gaby Struthers being attacked in drive back of house he will rape kill her if someone doesnt call police.’ And the last one: ‘help Gaby Struthers ring police NOW I cant do anything freekin out THIS NOT A WIND UP!!!’”

  “Any of you know anything about those last three tweets?” Charlie asked.

  Lauren and Kerry shook their heads. Dan stared down at his lap.

  “Dan?” Sam asked.

  “No. Nothing.” He couldn’t have sounded more defeated.

  “Is that true?” Sam asked. “Because we don’t know where Gaby is. Anything you can tell us might help us find her.”

  “You don’t know where she is?” Lauren erupted, flying up out of her chair like a wild animal. “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” She stood in front of Sam, shaking with rage, as if it was his fault—as if he’d deliberately mislaid Gaby Struthers out of spite.

  “Lauren, calm down,” Kerry warned.

  “She means ‘Be quiet,’ Lauren,” said Charlie. “She’s worried you’re going to say something by mistake that isn’t a lie.”

  “Why aren’t you out looking for her?” Lauren sobbed. “Why are you pissing about here when you should be out finding Gaby?” She turned to Kerry. “What if she’s done something stupid? She wouldn’t, would she? Gaby’s the last person to do anything stupid, someone as clever as her?”

  Kerry closed her eyes.

  “We’re doing everything we can to find her,” Sam said.

  “No, you’re not! You’re sitting in a fucking chair, doing fuck all!”

  “We’re not the only two police officers in the Culver Valley,” said Charlie.

  “I never said you were, did I?”

  “Other detectives are doing everything they can to find Gaby, before she’s even officially missing,” Sam explained. “The hotels nearest to HMP Combingham are the first port of call. If we have no luck there, we’ll contact her family, friends—”

  “You could be doing that now,” Lauren said accusingly. “Instead of sitting on your arse in a big posh house!”

  “Sam isn’t here to improve his social standing,” Charlie told her.

  “I’ve already spoken to some of Gaby’s closest colleagues this morning, including the one who rang in about the tweets, Xavier Salvat.” Sam had been suspicious of Salvat’s explanation at first—that he’d found the tweets while searching for Gaby’s name on Twitter for no particular reason. He’d claimed he did it often, out of curiosity, to see if there was any mention of Gaby, Rawndesley Technological Generics, the work they were doing. Sam had found the randomness of this rather implausible, but he knew Charlie disagreed. Her sister, she’d told him, was always searching Twitter for mentions of her own name and the names of people she knew, to “keep up with the gossip,” apparently.

  Lauren had appeared right in front of Sam’s face. She jabbed her finger at him. “Stop talking and start doing,” she ordered him. “If Gaby’s done something stupid . . .”

  “Just hold on a second, Lauren,” said Charlie. “However convenient it might be to blame us, what about your own role in this? If Gaby’s in danger—any kind of danger, from herself or anyone else—do you really think you’re helping her by lying to us? I know you want to help her, and I understand that you’re scared—”

  “I’m not!”

  “You are. You’re terrified of the truth, whatever it is.” Charlie started to walk toward her. “That’s why you went all the way to Germany to talk to Gaby, isn’t it? You wanted to tell her what was happening to Tim—you wanted to tell her he was innocent, so she could do something about it—and you knew the only way you could bring yourself to go through with it was in another country, thousands of miles from home. A different world, nothing to do with the rest of your life. Even then, you couldn’t do it, could you? You ran away.”

  Lauren was biting her nails, staring down at the polished wooden floorboards.

  “If you care so much about Gaby—”

  “I do!”

  “Then why did you only get upset when you heard she was missing?” Charlie asked. “Why didn’t you get upset when Sam read you three tweets about her being attacked, maybe raped and killed? Do you want me to tell you why you didn’t?”

  “I want you to fuck off!” Lauren yelled in her face.

  Sam jumped. He wished he could emulate Charlie’s composure in the face of aggression.

  “You didn’t get upset by the tweets because you already knew about the attack on Gaby, didn’t you?” Charlie turned to Kerry and Dan. “You all knew—that’s why the red eyes this morning. But you thought Gaby was all right after the attack: alive, in one piece, not too badly harmed. How do I know that? Because when you heard she was missing, Lauren, you asked Kerry if she might have done something stupid. Even though you knew from the tweets that there was a good chance Gaby had been attacked outside her house, you knew her attacker wasn’t responsible for her going missing, didn’t you? Maybe you were there, watching—one or all of you. Maybe one of you was the attacker. Maybe all of you were.”

  “How can you think that?” Kerry’s voice shook. “That’s . . . disgusting. I love Gaby. I’d never hurt her.”

  “So was it Jason who hurt her, then, the one you’re covering for by pretending he was here when she was attacked? By the way, before we leave we’re going to need the name and address of the friend whose house he’s helping to renovate today. Will that be a problem?”

  “I don’t know the name!” Lauren stared at Charlie, wide-eyed. “Jason doesn’t tell me stuff like that. He just said a friend, a house. That’s all I know.”

  Convenient, thought Sam.

  Kerry started to weep. Da
n looked away.

  “Was the attack to warn Gaby off investigating Tim’s possible innocence?” Charlie asked, looking around the room. “In which case, you wouldn’t have needed to hurt her that badly, or Jason wouldn’t have. Scaring her might have been enough. Was that what you all agreed, since you love Gaby so much? Just a little attack, nothing too serious? And then someone broke ranks, someone watching the attack thought it was getting out of hand, didn’t know where it might end. That someone panicked. Was it you, Lauren? Couldn’t say anything, couldn’t risk running or screaming in case Jason turned on you, so you used your phone to tweet for help, while he was busy attacking Gaby?”

  Lauren was shaking her head as if to get the weight of it off her skinny neck. Sam wondered if she was borderline anorexic. Maybe not even borderline.

  “Detectives are working on tracing the three tweets,” said Sam. “We’ll find out which of your phones or computers they came from within a day or two, so you might as well tell us now.”

  Lauren let out a loud wail. “Are you fucking stupid?” she yelled at him, nearly stopping his heart. “I don’t give a fuck what you do with my phone, you can stick it up your scabby arse for all I care! Just find Gaby!” She rummaged in her dressing-gown pocket, pulled something out of it. Sam saw a flash of silver and tensed.

  “Put that down!” shouted Charlie.

  “It’s okay,” Sam told her. He could see now: it wasn’t a knife, it was only Lauren’s phone. She threw it into his lap and ran from the room.

  17

  SATURDAY, 12 MARCH 2011

  The woman in front of me in the queue has dandruff on the shoulders of her black jacket. She is more upset than I am. Like Lauren at the airport. The name Lauren in my head makes it harder for me to stay here, where I need to be, though logically I know it’s not possible for me to attract another attack simply by thinking about her.

  I can be rational, still. I’ll prove it by staying put. If I run away, my thoughts will come with me. If I run from a man who’s not here, how will I know I’m not running toward him? He could be anywhere.

  Like Lauren at the airport, the woman in front of me is shouting. I can’t see the face of the man she’s yelling at, only part of his body in its police uniform behind the glass barrier. I picture Bodo Neudorf’s face; he is safely far away from this tirade, in Germany. “Tell you what, don’t bother having my driving license sent back to me this time. Keep it! Save me the trouble of having to bring it in every five minutes!”

  I fix my eyes on a large gray sticker on the wall and try not to listen. The palms of my hands are damp and itchy. The sticker has curved corners and says, “An induction loop system is available on these premises.”

  “Would I have been pulled over if I’d been consulting a map?” the woman demands to know. “I don’t have a SatNav—I would do, except I’ve got no time to buy one or even think about buying one. I do have a knackered, torn road atlas, but for the past year it’s been in the boot, covered in mud from my sons’ football shoes! I use my phone while I’m driving only to read the directions I’ve e-mailed to myself. I wouldn’t get done for looking at a map, would I, so I shouldn’t be fined for looking at directions on my phone!”

  She is the victim of an imaginary injustice, envious of phantoms: those who cruise along the M25 leafing through their untorn mud-free road atlases, cheered on by the police.

  You’re supposed to look at the road and your mirrors and nothing else.

  I don’t tell the angry woman this because I’m scared of her—also of the man she’s haranguing and the two women sitting behind me in the waiting area. I’m frightened of them all. I’ve been monitoring my feelings carefully since yesterday and the one blocking out all the others is fear. Of everything: my surroundings, myself, noise, silence, any person I see or hear or pass on the street. Predictably, I’m scared of the man who terrorized me, because I can’t see him and so don’t know where he is, how close he is, but I seem to be equally scared of everybody who isn’t him, which I wouldn’t have expected. Alone and locked in my car, I’m afraid I won’t be able to unlock the doors and get out if I need to; outside, I fear that something horrible is about to happen, something even worse.

  I thought my panic would start to die away once the attack was over. When that didn’t happen, I assumed I’d misjudged how long it would take. That could still be true, I suppose. It’s less than twenty-four hours later, too early to decide that I will feel as I do now for the rest of my life.

  That’s what I dread most: that I will be stuck like this forever, in a silent scream of panic. He untied my wrists before he walked away—slowly, complacently, not even bothering to run—but he didn’t release my mind. That’s the part I really needed him to free; I can still feel his plastic wrapped tight around it.

  Should I give myself more time? Do I have a choice?

  I refuse to sacrifice the rest of my life to this. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d refuse to sacrifice the rest of the day. There are important decisions and negotiations looming at work: we have to refine our value proposition, convince Sagentia that the significant markup has to be on the disposables, which must be kept as simple as possible. I have to take care of all that and appear normal, make sure no one can see what’s going on underneath.

  I have to get Tim out of prison.

  The woman in front of me turns away from the reception desk in disgust. Our eyes meet. “Sorry for the holdup,” she says. “I should be embarrassed, but I’m too angry. ‘“I was at the end of my tether,” said mother of two’—that’ll be the headline if I end up strangling this guy.”

  She’s only talking. She won’t do anything to you here, in front of witnesses. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, closing my hand around my Saint Christopher in my jacket pocket. It’s all I can think of to say.

  “My relationship with the UK traffic police isn’t a happy one,” the woman explains. When she isn’t yelling, she has a nice voice. What would I have thought of her if I’d met her before? What if I tell myself there’s no reason to be scared of her and I turn out to be wrong? She was yelling at someone who didn’t deserve it. If I blame what happened yesterday every time I feel fear, how will I be able to differentiate between harmful and harmless? If I can’t make that basic distinction, how will I manage in the world?

  More than anything, I would like to know if my reaction is normal. I don’t think it can be. I wonder if it’s happened to anyone else. I’ve heard of post-traumatic stress, but never of the terror not subsiding at all, even long after whatever caused it has finished.

  “Gaby?”

  It’s Charlie Zailer. Next to me. Where did she come from? Human beings don’t have eyes in the backs or sides of their heads, but it must be possible to design a device that’d do the same job. Maybe that’s what I’ll work on next.

  I order myself not to turn and run. When I met Charlie yesterday, before I was attacked, I wasn’t scared of her. I remember not being scared of her. I approved of her; she wanted to find out the truth and so did I. She listened to me.

  “Gaby, are you okay? You don’t look as if you are.”

  “Yes, I do. I look fine.” I’ve washed every inch of myself and put on clean clothes. I’m able to speak and say what I mean. I’m not falling apart, not drawing attention to myself by shouting in public like the woman in front of me. I am looking better than okay, given the circumstances. “Can I talk to you as soon as you’re free?” I say.

  “I can be free now.”

  Lucky you.

  “Gaby, do you know there are teams of police out looking for you?”

  “No. Why? I’m here.”

  Charlie Zailer smiles. “You do seem to be,” she says. “What have you got in your pocket?”

  “You’re not taking it.” I no longer have a home. I need it wherever I go.

  “I’m only asking what it is. I’m sure it’s fine
. What is it?”

  Inside my pocket, I unclench my fist. “It’s a Saint Christopher medal on a chain.”

  “Can I see? I won’t take it away. I just want to look at it.”

  I show it to her.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says. “Shall we go somewhere private where we can talk properly?”

  “No.” What does she mean, “somewhere private”? Why?

  “You’d rather talk here?” She looks over at the chairs in the waiting area. The man on reception is telling the shouter to go and sit there.

  “No,” I say. “Not here.”

  “We have a very nice private consultation room,” says Charlie. “We can leave the door open if you’d like.”

  The idea of an open door bothers me. And a closed one. I say nothing.

  “Gaby? I’m happy to do whatever you’d like to do. Where shall we talk?”

  Somewhere I’ve been before. A place I know I’m not scared of. I’ll be okay away from the police station if I have Charlie with me.

  “The Proscenium.”

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “No, it’s too far.” I’m not thinking straight. “It’s a private subscription library in Rawndesley. Where I met Tim. It’s got the best collection of out-of-print poetry books anywhere in the country. All first editions, some signed by the author.”

  “I’ll drive us to Rawndesley if that’s where you want to go to talk.”

  “They do lunches for members. Tim’s a member. So am I. I could take you in as a guest, but I’m not hungry.” I am taking too long to make up my mind. If yesterday hadn’t happened, I would know what I wanted to do by now.