“In what context?” Charlie asked mock innocently. “You mean when they’re in the supermarket? Or when they’re in a restaurant?” She grinned to herself. She wasn’t going to worry about death. At some point—when she was in her late fifties, maybe—she would find a way round it, even if that meant making herself believe in something preposterous.
“You know what I mean,” said Simon. “In bed.”
There was a time not all that long ago when he wouldn’t have been willing to utter those words. As a couple, they were making progress. Amazing progress, actually. Charlie knew she ought to appreciate every step in the right direction, instead of wanting more from him than he could give. “I wish I could tell you I’ve no idea, but sadly I know the answer,” she said. “Liv’s tried pretending, but it doesn’t work. Dom and Gibbs are too different, technique-wise. I can provide more detail if you’d like me to, but I’d advise against. Spare yourself. It’s too late for me, but you can still escape.”
“I pretend,” Simon said almost inaudibly.
Charlie was in no doubt about what she’d heard. “Is that why we’re sitting in a dark car?” she asked evenly. She was getting good at keeping her feelings out of her voice. “So you can’t see me? Will that make the pretense easier, when we get into bed?”
“Don’t be stupid. I didn’t mean that. It came out wrong.”
Ah. My entire life knows how that feels.
“I don’t mean I pretend you’re someone else. Why would I? There’s no one else I want to be with.”
Charlie waited. Was this going to be another brilliant/shit thing, in the tradition of “I love you but we’re both doomed to die”?
“I’m talking about me,” he said.
“You mean . . .” Charlie stopped to check: insane, yes, but there were no other possibilities. “You mean you pretend you’re someone else?”
Simon said nothing.
“Who?” Fucking fuck fuck. Was that a crass question? Charlie knew Simon well enough to know that no name would be forthcoming.
Gordon Ramsay? Nick Clegg? Colin Sellers? Ugh, please not.
“No one real, just . . . I don’t know. A physical manifestation of no one or nothing. A symbolic figure without an appearance, standing in for me. I can only carry on if I never think about it being me. If I let myself see it as a scene I’m part of, that’s when it doesn’t go well.”
This is where you tell him that a shrink he once met has a theory that neatly explains everything that’s wrong with him: it’s the perfect opportunity.
“Do you think that makes me a freak?” Simon asked.
“No.” I think it makes you someone with a common but rarely diagnosed psychological condition. If I tell you its name, you’ll never be able to get it out of your mind. Trust me, I know. Emotional incest syndrome. You can call it EIS if you prefer, or CIS: covert incest syndrome. Can you cure it, though? If not, what’s the point of knowing you suffer from it? What if it only makes you feel more like a freak?
To prove to herself that she was nothing like Lizzie Proust, Charlie said, “You need to tell Sam everything you haven’t told him. The sonnet, everything Gaby Struthers told Gibbs, the lot.” There, see? I’m not scared of telling my husband things he doesn’t want to hear if I’m sure he needs to hear them.
“What?” Simon sounded surprised. Not angry, thankfully. “Where’s that come from?”
“I’m not preaching forgiveness,” said Charlie. “This is about the proper rules of competition. Getting there first only counts for something if you’re both starting from the same point. Why don’t you blindfold Sam and lock him in a cupboard? That way you’ll definitely find the answer before he does.”
“That’s how you see it?”
“It’s how it might look to others, definitely.”
Simon swore under his breath. Then some more. It was what he always did when he realized he was wrong and Charlie was right.
—
It might as well be the middle of the night, Sam thought as he walked out through the double doors of the police station into the car park. Spilling was well known for being silent and deserted even on weekend evenings; people who wanted nightlife went to Rawndesley. And tended not to live in staid, respectable Spilling in the first place.
Sam loved the silence and the calm, though in certain company he pretended to find it stifling. He looked at his watch: ten o’clock. His wife, Kate, would be pleased to see him home before eleven, when he’d told her to expect him. Privately, he had hoped to be home by ten and therefore assumed he’d never manage it. “Rounding up to the nearest disappointment,” Kate called it.
Exchanges like the one he’d just had with Proust were eroding Sam’s spirit. He would hand in his notice as soon as he’d sorted things out with Simon. He couldn’t leave with the situation as it was between them. He hadn’t admitted to Kate how bad he felt about Simon’s unsubtle and wholehearted rejection of him as a friend and colleague. How could he explain it? It was as if his heart had something heavy pressing on it. Kate would laugh at him if he told her how empty and insubstantial Simon’s disdain made him feel—that’s if he was lucky. The scarier possibility was that Kate would ring Simon and yell at him, which Sam couldn’t risk. If that happened, he’d have to resign from the planet Earth, not merely from Culver Valley Police.
“Resignation season again, is it?” Kate had been saying lately, as if it were all a big joke. Sam didn’t mind her teasing him. He found it comforting; how bad could things be if she was giggling about it? She didn’t believe he’d ever hand in his notice; soon she would see how wrong she was. Sam resolved never to tell her that it was a helpful hint from Charlie this afternoon that had finally made up his mind.
He knew what she’d say: “For God’s sake, Sam, you’re playing right into her hands. She wasn’t trying to help you at all. She’s done this deliberately to undermine your confidence and make you think you need to slink off in disgrace because you’re such a rubbish detective. You’re not, by the way, and I can’t believe you’d trust Charlie’s motives further than you can throw them. Yesterday she told you she regretted walking out of her job and leaving it open for you; now she’s hoping you’ll be good enough and spineless enough to return the favor. Which is exactly what you mustn’t do. You don’t even know she’s right. It’s a hunch, that’s all. Like all hunches, it’s more likely to be wrong.”
Sam felt his face heat up as he realized he’d been talking to himself inside his head, writing Kate’s lines in their imaginary dialogue, the words he desperately wanted and needed to hear. Pathetic. And unfair to Charlie, who, Sam believed, had genuinely been trying to help him: not to rescue his lackluster career as an also-ran, but to heal the rift with Simon. “I shouldn’t be giving you this,” she’d said, pressing a folded sheet of white A4 paper into Sam’s hand. “I’m on a mission to persuade Simon to stop being a knob and start talking to you again, but in the meantime . . .”
“What is it?” Sam had asked.
“A poem. Simon went to Combingham to see Tim Breary yesterday. Breary gave it to him, asked him to pass it on to Gaby Struthers. Breary and Struthers are both members of the Proscenium Library in Rawndesley—a library that has the biggest and best collection of poetry books, past and present, in the Western Hemisphere. Apparently.”
“What?” Sam had asked. Charlie was staring at him in a peculiar way, as if waiting for him to realize something.
“That poem might be in a book in the Proscenium, don’t you think?” she’d said eventually. “Given their exhaustive collection.”
“I suppose so. What are you getting at?”
“Read the poem,” Charlie said. “It’s very ambiguous—no clear message. I can’t see why Breary would want it passed on to Gaby Struthers. On the surface, it reads like a love poem, but it’s not, not really. So maybe it’s not about the poem itself and what it’s saying—maybe
that’s not the intended message. What if Breary wants Gaby to go to the library and find the relevant page of the relevant book? Obviously it’s a long shot, but—”
“You think he’s left a message for her in the book?” Sam asked.
“Not really,” said Charlie cheerfully. “But if you have that idea in front of Simon, he’ll be impressed, and more likely to forgive you. Just don’t tell him I gave you the poem, if you can possibly avoid it, or he’ll have my head on a spike.”
Sam had been excited until he’d realized how utterly humiliating it was: Charlie giving him ideas that he could pretend were his own. It had been the signal he couldn’t ignore that it was time for him to move on.
Before he went, he would do a version of what she’d suggested: he would have her idea in front of Simon if and only if he could prove it to be worth having. First thing Monday, he would go to the Proscenium and see if he could track down the sonnet, even though he was certain that the successful closing of this case wasn’t going to depend on clues hidden in books, but, rather, on successfully interpreting the complex web of relationships and secrets at the Dower House.
Sam would have loved to hear Simon’s angle on it. Alone, he couldn’t work it out. No, it was more than that: he couldn’t work out whether there was anything to work out. Maybe the story of the Brearys, the Joses and Gaby Struthers was no more abnormal than most people’s life stories. Look at Gibbs and Olivia Zailer; look at Sellers and his one-hour stands in cheap B&Bs with any woman under the age of sixty who’d have him. And Simon, who’d asked Charlie to marry him when they were no more than colleagues—ones who had never dated, never slept together. And Charlie had said yes. Crazy, all of it.
So perhaps it wasn’t so remarkable that Tim Breary had been unhappy with his wife, and in love with Gaby Struthers, but had decided to stay in his miserable marriage despite there being no children to keep him there. Sam reminded himself that he only knew what Dan and Kerry Jose had told him. Mainly Kerry; she did most of the talking for the two of them. Knowing firsthand how bad a liar she was, Sam had believed her on this occasion. She’d told the story naturally and effortlessly.
After ordering Gaby to give up on him, Tim Breary did exactly what he’d insisted he never would or could: he left Francine, didn’t tell Gaby, jacked in his job, abandoned the Joses and the Culver Valley and moved to a squalid bedsit in Bath. Several months later he tried to kill himself, except he undermined his suicide attempt by summoning Dan and Kerry to rescue him. Which they did, both locally and more generally: they rang an ambulance and got Tim the medical attention he needed, and shortly afterward they abandoned their jobs in order to look after him practically, emotionally and financially. They were happy to do it, Kerry said—all of it. They no longer needed their salaries; thanks to Tim, and to Gaby Struthers, they had recently become extremely wealthy.
Tim was adamant that he wouldn’t go back to the Culver Valley because it contained Francine, so Kerry and Dan bought a barn conversion near Kemble, in the Cotswolds. Kerry had shown Sam photos, pressing her hand against her heart and becoming tearful as she talked about her former home and how she’d hated having to leave it.
So why had she? Sam had asked and she’d answered, but he hadn’t understood, and had been too polite to tell her that her explanation clarified nothing. Why were the Joses so willing to relocate every time Tim Breary changed his mind about where he needed to be? Kerry had found work in the Cotswolds, helping out on a nature reserve—“the only genuinely fulfilling job I’ve ever had,” she’d called it—and Dan had been in the middle of a Ph.D., which required him to go to London once a week during term time. By car or by train, Kemble was half an hour nearer to London than Spilling was. This was the part Sam didn’t get: having moved once for Tim’s sake, why did the Joses agree to do it again? When Francine had her stroke and Tim decided he wanted to go back to the Culver Valley to look after her, why didn’t Kerry and Dan say, “Sorry, but we can’t come with you this time”? Instead, Kerry gave up her dream job and the home that she loved, and uprooted herself a second time.
Did she think that Tim wouldn’t survive without her and Dan close by? Was it as simple as that? That was the only explanation that satisfied Sam, who knew he would willingly move to somewhere inconvenient, dragging his complaining family behind him, to save Simon’s life. Or he would have.
No, he still would. Another thing never to mention to Kate, who was a firm believer in the rule of reciprocity, and took great pleasure in deleting from her Christmas card list the name of any friend or acquaintance who dared to send an e-card instead of a real one. “It’s worse than sending nothing at all,” she’d said when Sam had challenged her, without offering a reason for her declaration.
Reasons were important. For many aspects of Tim Breary’s behavior, Sam could find none: why did he tell Gaby he would never leave Francine, then change his mind almost immediately afterward and leave her? Why, having done so, did he not contact Gaby to tell her things had changed and he was available? And why, suddenly, after her stroke, was Tim prepared once again to share a home with Francine, when previously he’d been unwilling to share a county with her?
Actually, Sam could see himself doing that: if he’d left a wife—any wife, however ill-suited and unappealing—he would return and do his husbandly duty in the event of illness or disaster. And he could all too easily imagine himself married to a woman he didn’t love, but too scared of change to leave her.
He sighed, and wished not for the first time that he had less self-knowledge. It was depressing to be so aware of his own shortcomings. He’d rather be clueless like Sellers, who believed he was a sex god poised for the greatest adventure of his life every time he checked into the Fairview Lodge B&B with a woman too drunk to know who he was or feel much of what he did to her.
Sam unlocked his car, shielding his eyes as another car turned into the police station car park, its headlights on full beam. In spite of the glare, Sam could see that there was no registration plate at the front; someone had removed it. Before coming to the nick? Most scrotes in the Culver Valley weren’t quite so brazen.
Nothing happened, for too long. Sam felt a tightening in his gut. He could think only of guns, and took a step back as one of the car’s back doors opened. Something started to come out horizontally. A person, climbing out? No, no feet touched the floor. More like . . . a big parcel, inclining downward as more of it emerged.
It fell to the ground with a thud. Once it was out, the door slammed shut and the car reversed out of the car park and screeched away at speed. No number plate on the back either.
Sam was aware of how still he was standing, holding his breath. No more than a second had passed between the shutting of the back door and the car swerving out onto the street again: not enough time for one person to jump from the backseat to the front. So, a driver and at least one passenger.
It couldn’t be what it looked like from where Sam was standing. Not delivered to the police station. Who would do that?
What else could it be? Just because it had never happened before didn’t mean it wasn’t happening now.
Sam walked over to where the large, heavy thing had landed. Oh, Jesus Christ. It was; there was a foot sticking out of the end of the wrapping. Bubble Wrap, lots of it, around a bulky, unevenly covered tubular package.
A whole human body. A dead one.
POLICE EXHIBIT 1436B/SK—
TRANSCRIPT OF HANDWRITTEN LETTER FROM KERRY JOSE TO FRANCINE BREARY DATED 10 FEBRUARY 2011
Hello, Francine.
Do you know what day it is? Probably not. You don’t need to know about dates and times anymore, so why would you? I don’t need to as much as I used to either. When I was a full-time care worker, I was constantly looking at my watch. Now I tend to judge the passing of time by how hungry I am. Which isn’t always reliable—I’m not exactly known for my tiny appetite!
Anyway. It’
s Dan’s birthday, and the anniversary of Making Memories Night. I’ve been meaning to write to you about this for a while, and what better day than today? You’ll have to pardon my tipsiness. Dan, Tim and I went out for lunch at Passaparola and I had two Kir Royales—and that was before we got started on the wine.
Does the name mean anything to you, Francine? Obviously, you’ve never heard it described as Making Memories Night. Do you even remember what happened? If your reactions seemed reasonable and ordinary to you, perhaps the evening didn’t stick in your mind. It certainly stuck in mine. Over the years, I missed many chances to make clear to Tim how urgently I thought he needed saving from you, but that night was the first time. It only takes one incident to start a pattern, and Making Memories Night set the tone.
It was a few months before your and Tim’s wedding. You were still living in your separate flats, house-hunting, bound together by neither marriage nor mortgage. If I’d waved a metaphorical red flag that night, Tim might have listened. He might have escaped your clutches.
Regrets are pointless, I know, but facing up to mistakes you’ve made is a valuable use of anyone’s time. I was weak and indecisive that evening, and on many subsequent occasions. I allowed you to storm to power, Francine. You were better prepared than I was, with your detailed plan for every aspect of Tim’s life, and your manifesto-like birthday and Christmas card messages: “Happy birthday, darling Tim. No one in this world could love you more than I do.” “I will love you come what may, until my dying day.” You had a knack for picking endearments that sounded like threats.
Dan and I loved Tim too, but we couldn’t marry him. We were married to each other. And Tim needed someone in his bed every night to prove to the world that he’d been chosen, that he wasn’t a reject. It’s common for the children of severely neglectful parents to mistake a desire to control for love.
The Carrier Page 33