The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  I don’t want to have to answer that question. Love and trust aren’t the same thing.

  “Tell me, then: why did you do it?”

  Uncertainty flickers in his eyes. Then he forces it aside. “I told the police I didn’t have a reason, but that wasn’t true.”

  “Nothing you’re saying is true, Tim. I know you didn’t kill Francine.” I open my bag, take out a piece of paper. “My poem for you,” I say, handing it to him.

  “‘Lied to like a judge I stepped down,’” he reads aloud. “‘My court cleared to the shrieks of the set free. / I know the truth, I know its level sound. / It didn’t speak, or didn’t speak to me.’ Glyn Maxwell, ‘The Sentence.’” He smiles. “Good choice.”

  If I smile back at him, will that change the course of the conversation? Of the rest of our lives? Will he relax, see who I really am and tell me the truth, or take it as a sign that I’m willing to live with the lie and pretend it isn’t one? Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .

  Who really are you, Gaby Struthers? Are you someone who can promise you’ll still love him once you know what he’s hiding from you, whatever it turns out to be?

  Who, really, is Tim Breary? Do you know? What if it’s an unattainable fantasy you’re in love with and not the flesh-and-blood man in front of you.

  “Gaby, you have to believe me.” He leans forward. “I killed Francine. I picked up a pillow, pressed it down over her face and smothered her. I had a motive—one I didn’t tell the police because it won’t help me get out of here any quicker. I’m willing to be punished, but that doesn’t mean I need to add years to my sentence by admitting why. There’s nothing admirable about my reasons for doing what I did, and they’re no one’s business but mine. And yours. I killed Francine because I’ve wanted to for a long time. Ever since I told you I never wanted to see you again.”

  I can hear how much he wants what he’s saying to be true. I still don’t believe him.

  “I can’t explain why I waited years, or why I chose that particular day. Maybe I got tired of not listening to my instincts, not doing what I wanted to do. There was no particular catalyst.” He sounds as if he’s reading from a script.

  “You don’t have to lie to me,” I say. I hate it when people with choices imagine they don’t have a choice.

  And when people who could leave their wives, or be unfaithful to them if they really wanted to, pretend that they can’t?

  “Gaby, listen.” Tim sits down beside me, takes my hand. My body buzzes as if in response to an electric current. I want him to kiss me.

  I don’t mind what the truth is. If he killed Francine, I will still love him. If he didn’t kill her but did something worse that he’s trying to hide, I’ll still love him. Same difference.

  “It wasn’t only the dream,” he says, his breathing fast and ragged around the words. “That day at the Proscenium, the last time we saw each other . . . you were so excited about working out what it meant. I didn’t want to know. Living with my suspicions and a recurring nightmare was bad enough. I thought knowing for sure would be worse.”

  “It won’t be. You can still know for sure.”

  He carries on as if I haven’t spoken. “Next thing I know you’re telling me you’ve been to Switzerland, to Leukerbad . . .”

  “I shouldn’t have done that, not without telling you,” I say.

  “I’m glad you did. Now. Then, I couldn’t get past the dread—of finding out what the dream meant, of course, but it was more than that. You’d gone all the way to Switzerland for me. That was how much you loved me, how important I was to you, and there I was: trapped in a miserable marriage that, yes, I’m well aware any other man would have walked out of without a backward glance, but I knew I never could. I never would have, Gaby.”

  But you did. Am I missing something?

  “You knew I loved you long before I told you about going to Switzerland.”

  “I thought I did,” Tim says. “When I heard you’d gone all the way to Leukerbad for my sake, it . . . I don’t know, it kind of brought it home to me. How strongly you must have felt about me.”

  “You keep saying ‘all the way.’ All the way to Leukerbad, all the way to Switzerland, as if it’s New Zealand or something. I’d go to Leukerbad for a lunch or a spa treatment if there were good ones to be had. And if your dream had been set in New Zealand, I’d have gone there. Flying’s nothing to me. I do it five times a week.”

  Tim sighs. I wish I could tell myself that I don’t mean to give him a hard time, and believe myself. Part of me wants to make him suffer, pay him back for all the pain he’s caused me.

  “Is there anyone apart from me whose recurring dream you’d fly even to London Heathrow to investigate?” he asks. “Or take a break in your busy schedule to think about for five minutes?”

  “No.”

  He looks relieved. We understand each other again.

  “Gaby, what we had . . . it was the best part of my life without a doubt, but it wasn’t real. It was the perfect fantasy. That day, when you told me about going to Switzerland, I thought, no, I don’t want this, it’s too much. I don’t want to know if Francine tried to kill me. Or the guilt of knowing you love me more than you should. I’d let things go too far, and there was no future in it. For both of our sakes, I had to get you away from me and make you stay away.”

  “Don’t pretend anything you did was for my sake, Tim,” I say carefully. Stop, a voice in my head commands. If I don’t stop, the bitterness will pour out of me like lava from a volcano. It could destroy everything.

  Tim rubs his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re right. Want to know what I really thought?”

  Yes. Also, if you really murdered your wife.

  “For years the dream had been bothering me and I’d done nothing about it. Taken no steps to find out what it meant, just hoped it’d go away. Even though I knew it never would. It still hasn’t. And you, a few days after hearing the story, you hop on a plane to Switzerland, and you come back saying you’ve found the answer! It scared me, Gaby. I thought, if she can do that, she can make me leave Francine, and eventually she will.”

  “Only if you’d wanted to,” I say, hurt by what I think he’s accusing me of.

  “I did want to, more than I’ve ever wanted anything,” Tim says. “The temptation was getting too dangerous. You think I didn’t know what a coward I was? I knew, Gaby. I knew that if I didn’t force you away from me, you’d grow to hate me like I hated myself. Why wouldn’t I leave a woman I didn’t love? We didn’t have any children together. What made me think I had to stay? Only the dream? Did I think Francine would hunt me down and kill me, do the job properly second time round?”

  I wish I could answer that question.

  And the rest.

  “You might not want to hear this, but if I’d known how I’d feel as soon as I’d told you we were finished, I think I’d have been able to do it. Leave her. I did, very soon afterward, when I realized that aching to kill her wasn’t a feeling that was going to go away.” Tim looks at me to check I’m taking in what he’s saying. “I was never happy with her, but after I lost you . . .”

  “You didn’t lose me. You threw me away.”

  Tim tries again. “After that day when we . . . said good-bye, my feelings toward Francine changed. Instantly. It was as if someone had flipped a switch inside me. I couldn’t have imagined what a strong urge to kill someone felt like until I experienced it myself. All my energy was going into making sure it didn’t happen. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work. Have you ever wanted to kill someone? No, not wanted to—known you’re going to? That it’s just a matter of when, because, ultimately, you can’t stop yourself and actually it’s the only thing you want or care about?”

  The only person I want to kill is already dead: Jason Cookson.

  “I left Francine to save h
er life,” Tim says.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? If you weren’t with Francine, you could have been with me. Why didn’t you make contact?” If I were playing fair, I would warn him that I won’t find his answer acceptable, whatever it might be.

  He tries to smile, but it doesn’t take. “You’d have told me to fuck right off, wouldn’t you?”

  I force myself to wait a few seconds before speaking.

  “How can you think that? You don’t think it—it’s an excuse.”

  “Yes, you would, Gaby. Your pride wouldn’t have allowed you to do anything else. I knew you were way out of my league: Gaby Struthers the genius, the brilliant success story. Whereas I was a nondescript accountant who was one day going to kill his wife.”

  “You couldn’t be nondescript if you tried,” I tell him, knowing it will make no difference to how he feels about himself.

  “I never wanted to be a murderer,” he says quietly. “I moved halfway across the country to try and make sure I didn’t become one. Tried to kill myself instead of Francine, but that didn’t work. I chickened out and rang Kerry and Dan, soon as I’d done it. I didn’t want to die, Gaby—only because of you. I’d given up on our ever being together, but I knew I couldn’t leave a world that had you in it.”

  Yet you did nothing. You let me think you and Francine were still together, all those years.

  “Why did you go back when Francine had the stroke?” I ask.

  “I wanted to be closer to you. If she was bedridden, an invalid . . .”

  “What? What, Tim?”

  He sighs. “If I no longer had to be scared of her, then I no longer had to be scared of you—the danger that I’d leave her for you. What could she do, lying in a bed, unable to move or speak?”

  “But you didn’t make contact. You were back in the Culver Valley, Francine had no power over you anymore . . . why didn’t you get in touch?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to know me, after the way I’d treated you. To be honest, I was happy just knowing you were nearby.”

  “I might have been happier too, knowing you’d moved back,” I say angrily. “You didn’t give me the chance, though, did you?”

  “I’m sorry, Gaby. I hoped I might . . . I don’t know, bump into you in the street one day. I know how pathetic it sounds, believe me. Look on the bright side: when I killed Francine, I was reborn as a man of action, albeit a cold-blooded murderer.”

  Not funny.

  “You didn’t come back to the Culver Valley for me,” I say. “You could have felt the way you felt about me from anywhere. Francine was the irresistible pull, wasn’t she? New, damaged Francine. How desperate were you to see it firsthand?”

  “Honestly?” Tim’s voice cracks on the word. As if too much truth could break him. “Pretty desperate. Not for the reason you think. It wasn’t about gloating or revenge, not at first. I wanted to see if I was still scared of her. God.” He closes his eyes. “You have no idea how much I needed the answer to that question. It was like a scientific experiment. I was told before I saw her that her mind was still functioning. Her personality too, presumably. But she couldn’t speak at all, could hardly move. So how could she have the power Francine used to have over me?” He shrugs. “It could have gone either way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I might have been as cowed by her as I’d always been. She was still her, still there, alive. Or . . .” Tim takes a deep breath. “I might have looked at her lying there and thought, Fuck you. You have no hold over me now.”

  “And? Which did it turn out to be?”

  “Neither.” Tim smiles. “Life’s never as simple as you hope it’ll be. I knew straightaway that I wouldn’t be able to answer my question unless I spent more time with her. As much time as I could. I needed to get used to the new Francine if I wanted to shake off the old feelings. I suspected that if I did, if I really immersed myself, the time would come when I wouldn’t fear her at all. When I’d be able to say, ‘You know what, Francine? I’m in love with a woman called Gaby Struthers. You probably don’t remember the name—I mentioned her a couple of times, years ago. She used to be a client. Anyway, I want to ask her to marry me, so . . . any ideas about how we sort out a divorce? Obviously you’re laid up, so I’ll take care of all the admin.’” Tim covers his face with his hands and rubs. Trying to rub himself out. “Sorry,” he says through his fingers.

  “Did you still want to kill her?”

  He stares at me, unblinking. “You missed the point,” he says eventually. “I’m asking you to marry me.”

  And if I say yes straightaway, I’ll lose what little bargaining power I have.

  “I love you, Gaby. My wife is dead. Thanks to me. I’m going to be spending the next ten years in prison, at a minimum. If that doesn’t kill your love for me, then please marry me.”

  My heart pole-vaults in my chest. I repeat my question. “Did you still want to kill Francine, when you saw her after she’d had the stroke?”

  “I did kill her,” Tim says. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “I operate on a want-to-know basis.”

  He sighs. “Yes, I still wanted to kill her. It wasn’t the same, though. I also wanted to know whether I was right to want to kill her. Whether the ‘her’ I’d be killing was the same woman I’d been unhappily married to. The more time that passed with her in that state, I just . . . I found it harder to be certain I’d be killing the Francine I wanted to kill. I don’t expect it to make sense to you.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” I tell him. “So, what, you watched her for signs? Clues? What could she have done to prove she was the same old Francine? Or to prove she wasn’t?”

  Tim’s staring at the floor. He doesn’t like where I’m heading: too close to the truth.

  “That’s why you didn’t kill her,” I say. “She could have been changed by what she’d been through, or not. You had no way of knowing. All you could do was sit by her bedside and . . . what? Watch for the sign that you knew would never come? Try to interpret the look in her eyes, gauge the emotional atmosphere around her? Meanwhile, the Francine who’d made you suffer was receding further and further into distant memory, where no one could touch her. Getting away with it. I’d have hated her more at that point, I think. Though, like you, I wouldn’t have been able to murder the body, not without knowing if the woman I hated was still in it.”

  “Please stop,” Tim whispers.

  I stand up, pull my hand away from his.

  “Do you think I’m perfect, Tim? I’m not. Whatever it is that you’re so scared to tell me, whatever you’re trying to atone for and think is worse than killing Francine, maybe I’ve done something as bad.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “And if I had? Would you stop loving me?”

  “I’d love you whatever you did.”

  I hold up my hands. Why can’t he see it? I can’t bring myself to tell him what he should know by heart.

  “Do you know why I left you alone for so long?” I say. “It had nothing to do with you telling me it was over. I’d have put up a fight, but . . . I felt unworthy. Of you. All the time we were together, or whatever you want to call it, you never took anything from me.”

  “What do you mean?” Tim asks.

  “You never asked for anything. It was as if you existed solely for my benefit. You didn’t drain me in the way Sean did: expecting things, requiring me to behave in a certain way, making me feel as if I was a resource, put on earth for his convenience—a malfunctioning resource that stopped doing its job properly years ago. You were the opposite: you helped me with my business, you talked to me about poetry. Every single effect you had on my life was a good one, without exception.”

  “How does that make you unworthy?” Tim asks.

  “My feelings for you were too strong. They felt . . . unnatural. I thought, Maybe I
’m a selfish bitch who can only love someone who gives constantly and asks for nothing in return.”

  Tim’s shaking his head. “I don’t know how you can think that. I might have asked for nothing, but nothing wasn’t what I got. The opposite.”

  “Sean had money,” I say quickly, wanting to get the confession out there before I can change my mind. “Inherited money, like Dan’s. Not as much. Fifty grand. He didn’t want to invest any of it. I didn’t ask him, obviously. . . .”

  “Why’s it obvious?” Tim sits forward in his chair. “He was your partner, and it was a brilliant investment opportunity. Put those two things together—”

  “The company was nothing to do with Sean. If he’d wanted any part of it, he’d have offered. He knew I was looking for investors.” Why does this still hurt, when I don’t love Sean and haven’t for a long time? “I could see his point of view,” I say. “What I assumed was his point of view, I mean. I never asked him, we never talked about it. He had fifty grand and that was it, the extent of his savings. If my company had nosedived . . .”

  “I knew it wouldn’t,” says Tim. “Sean would have known too, if he’d taken an interest.”

  “If he’d thought I could turn his money into ten times as much, he’d have invested,” I say. “When he didn’t offer, I knew he had no faith in me. I let it kill our relationship, and I never said a word, never gave him a chance to explain.” It’s a relief to be telling someone. “Doesn’t that make me the lowest of the low? And if you add in the fact that I fell in love with you as well, round about the same time you were hatching brilliant plans to bring in the millions for me . . . And Dan and Kerry, whose money made Sean’s seem like small change, were suddenly my second and third favorite people in the world, after you. I liked them so much more because of something that had nothing to do with them, because they’d demonstrated so clearly that they were the opposite of Sean: willing to back me when he wasn’t, even though they hardly knew me.”

  Tim smiles. “Are you saying you fell in love with me because I was a talented fund-raiser?”