The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  That’s what I should have told him on Making Memories Night, after you’d stormed upstairs in a rage. I’ve always wanted to ask you, Francine: at what point did you decide to turn Dan’s and my bedroom into your tantrum headquarters? Halfway up the stairs? Did you stop and think about it? The bathroom or the spare room would have been a more appropriate choice. We heard the door slam, and Dan mouthed, “Our bedroom?” at me.

  Wherever you’d chosen to locate your protest, it would have been inappropriate. All Tim did was criticize a hotel you’d asked him to look at in a brochure—possible honeymoon accommodation. It wasn’t as if your parents were the owners, or the place meant something to you emotionally. Your only connection to the Baigley Falls Hotel (I will never forget its name) was that you had seen a picture of its swimming pool and terrace and thought it looked nice.

  The blurb beneath the picture said, “The minute you arrive at Baigley Falls, you’ll start making memories.” “What if we don’t?” Tim asked. “Do you think they’ll throw us out? What if they insist we bring each new memory we make down to reception, so that they can inspect it?” Dan and I laughed, but you didn’t get the joke, did you, Francine? “Why would they do that?” you asked. “How could they? You can’t see a memory.” I wondered how you managed to hold down a job as a lawyer, deaf to nuance as you so manifestly were. Tim ditched the lighthearted approach and explained that memories, if they happened, ought to come into being without any strain or effort on anyone’s part, or else there was something false about it. You stood your ground, determined to misunderstand. “So you don’t want to try to remember any part of our honeymoon,” you said quietly. “I won’t need to try,” Tim said. “Trying to remember is for shopping lists and exam crib sheets, not honeymoons.” Dan and I made things worse by joining in. I said, “They probably take photos of you when you arrive to sell you when you leave.” Dan said, “The blurb might as well say, ‘Don’t live in the moment; do everything you do in order to look back on it later.’”

  You shut down at that point, Francine. Shut us all out. You got up, left the room, marched upstairs. The next thing we heard was the slamming of our bedroom door, so loud it shook the house. Tim ran up after you. I should have tried to stop him, but I didn’t. Dan and I heard him saying your name over and over again, trying to reason with you. We heard what sounded like him straining, pushing against the door. Ten minutes later he came back down and stood in the middle of the lounge, looking more baffled than I’ve ever seen anyone look. “What’s going on?” Dan asked. Since nothing had happened to warrant your storming off, he assumed he’d missed something. Tim shrugged, a defeated gesture that said, “You know as much as I do.” I told Tim there was no lock on our bedroom door, and he mouthed, “She’s leaning against it.” “Did she think we were taking the mickey out of her?” I asked, going over the conversation again in my mind, feeling guilty before I’d even worked out what I’d done wrong, if anything. “She can’t have. We weren’t.”

  Tim’s mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. He read the message, and, with both hands, started to key in his reply. I turned to Dan, incredulous; Francine had sealed herself away in our bedroom, and Tim was replying to a random text message? The look Dan gave me, casting his eyes upward, set me straight: of course the message wasn’t random. It was from on high. That much was obvious from the expression of intense concentration on Tim’s face as he jabbed away with his thumbs. You’d refused to open the door and talk to him face-to-face, Francine, but you’d sent him a communication from upstairs. Even though I knew it had to be true, I couldn’t believe it. “Tim?” I said. “Are you replying to a message from Francine?” He nodded. “What’s she said?” I asked. He wouldn’t tell me, just moved farther away with his phone to the other side of the room, as if he thought I might snatch it from his hands. That was the first time he protected you, the first of hundreds.

  Did you appreciate his trying to shield you from the condemnation you deserved, Francine? Long after there was any point, he still made the effort. He knew that Dan and I knew exactly how unreasonable and vicious you were, yet he hid as much of your atrocious behavior as he could, from everybody. To spare himself the public humiliation, yes, but it wasn’t only that. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that he never stopped believing you had a good side to your character, Francine. I think he thought that to tell us about all the awful things you’d done would actually be misleading—it would make us latch on to the badly behaved you and imagine that was all there was to you.

  How many messages did you and Tim send each other while you were shut in Dan’s and my bedroom? Ten? Fifteen? There was quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing by text before you deigned to emerge. You didn’t come back into the lounge to say good-bye or sorry. Dan and I didn’t figure in your calculations at all: we were the suckers who’d provided the stage for your scene, nothing more. Not people with feelings who mattered, not Tim’s friends who had been looking forward to spending a fun evening with him. On Dan’s birthday too—not just any old evening.

  You waited for Tim outside the house. Having spent a good hour and a half standing in our lounge jabbing at his phone, he was suddenly in a desperate hurry to leave, on your orders. He apologized to us—not on your behalf, but as if he were the one who’d ruined the evening. I said, “No need to apologize,” then regretted it once he’d left, in case he thought I’d meant no need on anyone’s part rather than no need on his.

  I never found out what was in those messages, Francine. I’d still love to know. Was it out-and-out sweary aggression and accusations from you, and fawning contrition from Tim for having offended you? I bet it was more subtle and passive-aggressive: “You claim you love me, but then you mock me in front of your friends. I’m sure you’re having more fun laughing at me among yourselves than you would if I were there.”

  Once you and Tim had gone, Dan turned to me and said, “What was that all about? Pre-wedding nerves, do you think?” It was such an absurd and inadequate justification that I burst out laughing and started crying at the same time. You’ll probably think me a wimp for crying, Francine. All I can say in my defense is that until you embedded yourself in my life, I wasn’t used to having my evenings wrecked by random acts of emotional violence. (I never saw you cry, not once, no matter how allegedly upset you were.)

  Dan’s “pre-wedding nerves” comment quickly became one of our regular jokes. It’s still one that never fails to make us laugh, even now, years later. Whenever someone’s reported on the news as having done something unspeakable, Dan and I turn to each other and say, “Pre-wedding nerves, do you think?” and laugh uproariously.

  If I could turn back the clock to Making Memories Night, I would say, “Tim, you can’t marry her. She’s twisted. Her reactions and her behavior are too abnormal to brush aside. If you stay with her, she’ll make you suffer every day. She’ll start by canceling the honeymoon—to punish you for questioning her choice of hotel.”

  Okay, I admit it: I’m cheating. Shocked as I was by your behavior that night, Francine, even I wouldn’t have predicted that you’d take it out on your honeymoon. Tim was back at the office two days after the wedding, trying to pretend it was actually quite useful not to have to go away when he had such a backlog of work.

  I said nothing. I let him believe that I still liked you, understood that you were sensitive and prone to stress, could see what he saw in you. I consolidated my cowardice into a position, which I laid out for Dan. “We have to be clever here,” I explained. “Tim’s inviting us to join him in the lie he’s choosing to live. If we make an issue about Francine, we’ll draw his pretense to his attention in a way that’ll make him too uncomfortable. He’ll feel guilty for staying with her, guilty for inflicting her on us. We’ll drive him away. We have to pretend we don’t notice any of it and just go along with it, or we’ll lose him.”

  I’ve started to wonder, Francine: what would Tim say if I were to kill you, and if I then told hi
m I’d done it? Instead of writing letters in which I speculate about who else might do it and when, I could do it myself. In an ideal world, I’d do it purely to experience the feeling, then undo it immediately afterward. I’m not sure I want you gone, from a personal point of view. Having you here like this protects Tim, and he’s all I care about. But, as contradictory as it might sound, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy putting an end to your life.

  Would I ever have the courage, Francine? Would I be brave enough to make your last memory of all?

  19

  SUNDAY, 13 MARCH 2011

  “I’m going to show you the first photograph,” says DC Simon Waterhouse. “I want you to tell me if you’ve seen this man before.”

  I’m in a police station. There are police everywhere. He can’t hurt me here.

  “It’s only a picture,” Charlie Zailer says quietly next to me. “You’re totally safe in this room. And you don’t have to look till you’re ready. Simon won’t turn it over until you say the word.”

  I nod. Nothing happens. Is he waiting, literally, for a word rather than a gesture?

  Should I tell him to go ahead? I don’t want to try and identify the man who attacked me anywhere near as much as I want not to have to see his face again, but DC Waterhouse set out the order of events when he came in and took over: first the photographs, then some questions, then he’ll take me to see Tim.

  I would rather drive to HMP Combingham myself, or have Charlie drive me. If she and I were alone, I might be able to persuade her to tell me what’s changed. She left the room to take a call, and when she came back she looked rattled and had DC Waterhouse with her. Now she’s moved round to my side of the table. Either she can’t stand to be near him or she thinks I need protecting from him. She has seemed nervous since he joined us, and it’s making me want to get away from her, from both of them. I thought I’d feel safe in the same room we were in yesterday, but everything’s wrong today: the hard table and chairs are where the armchairs should be, the blind’s not down, the grilles of the ventilation units are visible through the window; I can see their multiple slat-mouths, hear them breathing at me.

  I’m struggling to get my own breathing under control, and my body temperature. My feet are painfully cold, as if I’ve been planted in ice.

  What if I’m like this in front of Tim? I can’t be. Somehow, I must leave this room with more strength than I brought in here.

  “Gaby?” says Charlie. “You okay?”

  “Show me the photograph.”

  Waterhouse turns it over and places it on the table in front of me. It’s all there: the same short hair, small square forehead, thin lips; the same brown skin tags on the neck. I couldn’t think of the name for them on Friday, but that’s what they’re called.

  I lunge for the picture and rip it in half, and again. I carry on tearing until I can’t anymore because the pieces are too small. “Sorry,” I say, not meaning it.

  “Have you seen him before?” Charlie asks. Clearly a non-verbal answer won’t do.

  “On Friday, outside my house.”

  “He was the man who warned you to keep away from Lauren? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie sweeps the fragments of the photograph across the table, away from me. I’d like to be able to set fire to the disconnected parts of his face. Together, they still add up to him. Burning would sort that out, but it’s not allowed in a police station.

  “Gaby? Is there anything you’d like to ask us?”

  “Is Lauren all right? Where is she? Tell me you haven’t left her at the Dower House.” Why am I the only person who cares about her safety?

  “Why are you so worried about Lauren?” Waterhouse’s question is a mirror image of my unspoken one.

  “Because she’s married to Jason, who’s a killer, and who sends his heavies round to people’s houses to . . .” My throat closes, choking off the end of my sentence.

  “To what? What did he do to you, the man in the picture? He did more than warn you, didn’t he? Or else why did you tear up his photo?”

  I could say that I object to being given orders by strangers, which is true. Or I could say nothing.

  “You haven’t asked us anything about him,” says Waterhouse. “Is that because you already know who he is? Gaby?”

  “How could I know?”

  “Don’t you want to know his name? Most people would be curious.”

  “Would they? I’m sure Jason Cookson’s got lots of thuggy friends, any of whom’d be willing to intimidate a woman on his behalf. I don’t care what Thug X’s name is—he could just as easily have been Thug Y or Thug Z.”

  “Do you care about us finding and punishing X, Y or Z for what he did to you? You don’t seem to.”

  “It’s not illegal to warn someone to stay away from someone else, is it? No, I don’t care about you punishing him.” Whatever you did wouldn’t be enough. I’d rather not have to know his name.

  “Please, Gaby, can you seriously consider telling us what really happened on Friday?” says Charlie. “It would help us so much, and it might help Tim. If you’d rather speak to me in private, DC Waterhouse can leave us alone for a bit.”

  Is this how the police make people talk when they don’t want to: by misrepresenting them until they feel they have no choice but to protest and set the record straight? “The reason I’m holding back has nothing to do with embarrassment or an inability to utter the word ‘vagina’ in front of a man,” I say. “I told you: I wasn’t sexually assaulted.”

  “Then why not tell us exactly what happened?” Charlie asks.

  “How do I know you won’t tell Tim? He can’t find out.”

  “Why is that so important?”

  “I’m worried he’ll see me as damaged goods if he finds out that Jason’s thug friend violated my honor—that’s what I’d say if I were a simpering cliché, right?”

  “And if you were you?” Charlie asks.

  No idea, sorry. I haven’t been me for a long time. In order to be me, I need Tim. Which makes me a different kind of cliché.

  Waterhouse is trying to cut the plastic surface of the table with his thumbnail; he has absented himself without leaving the room. Was it my reference to the female anatomy that sent him into automatic shutdown mode, or doesn’t he know how to handle women who behave like men? I’ve met that before: I meet it nearly every time I leave the house. Until Friday, I met it when I returned to the house as well, but not anymore, not since I left Sean.

  Never again in my own home.

  It would be dishonest not to acknowledge the downside: that I no longer have a home.

  “I don’t want Tim to feel guilty, and I know he would,” I tell Charlie, who is a better interviewer than Waterhouse even when he isn’t ignoring me. He makes me feel as if everything I say is the wrong answer; Charlie does the opposite. “What happened to me wasn’t Tim’s fault any more than it was mine. It was Jason’s fault and the man who . . . did what he did to me, but Tim wouldn’t see it that way. He’d trace it back to himself and feel responsible: if he hadn’t confessed to Francine’s murder, Lauren wouldn’t have turned up in Düsseldorf and said what she said to me. I wouldn’t have gone to the Dower House on Friday and met Jason, who wouldn’t have decided he needed to keep me quiet by whatever means necessary.”

  “What means?” Waterhouse asks.

  “Give me a cast-iron guarantee that whatever I tell you will go no further than this room.”

  “You care more about Tim’s feelings than you do about your own,” says Charlie. It doesn’t sound like a question. “So do Kerry and Dan Jose.”

  “You won’t understand, not knowing Tim, but however much he matters to us, it’ll never be enough to compensate for how little he matters to himself. We’re his ego: me, Kerry and Dan.”

  And I wish I didn’t have to be. I wish he were
stronger. I wish I could say for certain that he’d drop everything for me as I have for him.

  I crush the thought in my mind, tell myself I’m being unreasonable. I can’t expect everyone to be as bold and reckless as me.

  “You need to tell us what happened to you on Friday.” Waterhouse’s deep voice has the force of an unexpected blow. “This is about a whole lot more than Tim Breary, his ego and his dead wife, as of last night.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  His flat stare contains no willingness to compromise: if I want to be told, I first have to tell.

  I direct my answer to Charlie. “Jason’s emissary put a plastic bag over my head and taped it round my neck. I thought I was going to suffocate, but then he tore a hole in the plastic near my mouth so that I could breathe. He’d taped my wrists together behind my back. I don’t know when he did that. I think I must have blacked out from the shock. I know he put his arm round my neck and squeezed. That was his first move when he came up behind me: crushing my windpipe.”

  “I should have insisted on taking you to the hospital,” says Charlie.

  “Would have been a waste of time. Physically I’m fine.”

  “Carry on,” Waterhouse says. It feels like an intrusion, though the three of us are supposedly taking part in the same conversation.

  “When you’re ready, Gaby.” Charlie gives him a look that makes me wonder if she’s tired of being his antidote.

  Like me and Tim? No. I push the thought away.

  “There’s no rush.”

  “Thanks, but I’d rather get it over with.” Why do people always want you to linger over the bad stuff? Take your time recounting the details of the worst experience of your life at a rate of one word per day, make the story last for three years instead of an hour. No, thanks. “He said he’d come to teach me a lesson. I asked what it was, but he wouldn’t tell me straightaway—that would have been too quick and easy. I had to suffer first, so that the lesson would make an impression on me. He undid my belt and my trousers, pulled them down to my knees, pulled my underwear down. At that point I thought he was going to rape me and kill me, but he didn’t. Instead he asked me all kinds of sick questions: what was the worst thing he could do to me? What’s the most frightened I’ve ever been? Was I more frightened or more humiliated by what he was doing to me? That sort of thing.”