The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  Here goes.

  26

  16/3/2011

  Sam took the last of the letters from Simon. They were sitting on the floor of a chairless attic room in the Haffner Hotel in Germany, the room Gaby Struthers and Lauren Cookson would have shared when their plane was delayed, if Lauren hadn’t fled. Who wouldn’t run, Sam thought, from a room like this? It was a space no one would choose to enter, let alone spend time in, unless what they had in mind was a death pact or the filming of a movie in which everybody was supposed to be depressed all the time. The curtains were mottled with filth, the carpet was a collage of shiny bald patches. A previous resident of the room had discarded a shriveled pink Elastoplast in a corner that the cleaners, assuming any ever came up here, had failed to spot and remove. There was nothing on the walls apart from jagged lightning flashes of plaster where the paper had peeled off. Actually, the walls reminded Sam of Simon and Charlie’s living room, but he’d kept that thought to himself.

  A stale smell hung in the air: old alcohol and sweat. It made Sam wish he’d never left the civilized Proscenium Library.

  He passed the letter back to Simon once he’d read it. “More of the same.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s not your fault. You were right: a plastic wallet full of hidden letters in a hotel toilet cistern in Germany, brought all the way from Lower Heckencott in the Culver Valley—it sounds as if it’s going to be useful. Sounds as if it could hardly fail to be significant. Yeah, we could have sent uniforms to pick it up, but—”

  “Not what I meant,” Simon cut him off. “I’m sorry about . . . you know. How I’ve been. You were unlucky, that’s all.” He dropped the pile of letters on the floor as if they were nothing but an irritation, and drew his knees up to his chin. He looked like someone waiting for a giant to reach down and whack him over the head. Although perhaps the grimness of the room was contributing to that effect, Sam conceded.

  He waited.

  “I’m low-level angry most of the time, never really know why,” Simon told him. “You got the brunt of it. This time.”

  Sam wanted to meet him halfway, but was afraid that if he said, “Well, to be fair, I should probably have told you sooner,” things might take a turn for the less cordial; Simon might retract his apology. “Let’s put it behind us,” he said, pleased to be forgiven whether he’d done anything wrong or not.

  “It was useful,” said Simon.

  “For you, maybe.” Sam smiled to take the sting out of his words. “You thrive on conflict and drama.” You thrive on not thriving. Turn your own negative energy and everyone else’s into . . . Sam didn’t know what.

  “No, I meant the wallet.” Was that a half smile from Simon? “The letters. Read them again.”

  Sam picked up the one nearest to him. “What, you think they tell us something?”

  “I think they’ve told me something they’ve not told you. They might if you ask nicely.”

  “Not who killed Francine?” Sam wouldn’t have missed that.

  “Something more important than who. They tell us why.”

  Was this some kind of trick? Simon’s revenge?

  “I can’t see it,” Sam said. “I see hearts and grudges and insecurities and regrets poured out on paper, that’s all.” He fanned out the pages on the floor in front of him. Odd words jumped out: “memories,” “hammer,” “twist.” He knew looking like this wasn’t going to help, but he was too impatient to read the whole lot again. Was Simon going to make him?

  Any chance of cutting me a bit of slack, as I’m resigning soon? In a few weeks it won’t be my job to work things out anymore. Sam had been trying to think of a way to broach the subject all day; the last thing he wanted was for Simon to take his decision personally, and he couldn’t think how to phrase it to ensure that didn’t happen.

  “I can’t see any motive here.” He gestured at the letters. “Can’t see a why.”

  Simon nodded. “You won’t do. Because you don’t know who.”

  “But we agreed these letters don’t tell us who.” Which means . . . “You know who killed Francine?”

  “You would too if you weren’t thinking of killing her in the wrong way.”

  It took Sam a few seconds to disentangle the grammar: “thinking in the wrong way about killing her.” That had to be what Simon meant.

  “Who? Dan Jose?”

  “Dan?” Simon grinned at the idea. “The man who took a brave moral stand against the deception that’s landed his best friend in prison by admitting he’s been lying about everything and then still refusing to tell you the truth? He’d never kill anyone—he’d never do anything. Kerry Jose?” Simon anticipated Sam’s next question. “No. You read Dan’s assessment of her: wants to be fair to everyone. Needs to be seen to be good. She admits in one of the letters that she’d quite like to kill Francine, but it’s a fantasy—she knows she never will. Lauren: the only one in the Dower House who actually liked Francine. If you can like a slab of meat lying prone in a bed,” Simon added as an afterthought. “Lauren never knew the bitch who made everyone’s lives a misery. She missed out on her family Christmas to be with Francine, lobbied to have her included in the Dower House celebrations. And tended to her needs, day after day—paid extremely well for it too, with the perk of five-star accommodation and a job for her husband thrown in. Why would Lauren want to murder Francine? She wouldn’t. There’s no way.”

  “Then . . . Jason?” Sam asked, knowing that it was the wrong answer and that was why Simon was steering him toward it. He was ruthless when he had something to show off about. Sam had come to the conclusion that he enjoyed making other people feel stupid; he was an intellectual sadist. This knowledge did nothing to diminish Sam’s affection for him. “Do you also know who killed Jason?”

  “That was Lauren,” said Simon, as if it was obvious and hardly mattered. “Wayne Cuffley might have been trying to protect her, but he gave the game away with his inconsistencies, asking you if he could be the one to tell her Jason was dead. As you pointed out, he could have done it already before turning himself in. According to him, he’s first taken the plates off his car and delivered us the body so that Lauren doesn’t have to worry if Jason’s dead or alive, then he’s come and handed himself in so that she doesn’t have to live with the uncertainty of not knowing who knifed her husband. If he’s that bothered about Lauren being kept up to speed, there’s no way he wouldn’t have told her what he’d done while he was still free and in control. His story doesn’t add up. Only purpose of telling it was to drum it into our heads: Lauren doesn’t know what’s happened to Jason—one, she doesn’t know he’s dead; two, she doesn’t know who killed him. All bullshit.”

  Lauren cared about Francine. Lauren killed Jason. Put the two together . . .

  “Jason didn’t kill Francine,” said Simon, apparently reading Sam’s mind. “He saw who did, though. Through a window.”

  Awe wasn’t an emotion Sam felt often, but he felt it now. “How do you know?”

  Simon frown-smiled, running through his theory one last time before presenting it, to check the logic was sound. “Obvious. The lie about where Jason was when Lauren found the body and screamed, the one parroted by everyone at the Dower House. Since Jason didn’t kill Francine, why not tell the truth about where he was and what he was doing when she died?”

  “But . . . how do you know he didn’t kill her?” Sam asked again. If he’d already been given the answer, he’d missed it.

  “Because I know who did,” Simon said. All so simple, if your surname was Waterhouse. “So did Jason. He knew before everyone else, apart from Francine herself and the person who smothered her with a pillow. He was outside, cleaning the windows like everyone said in the second version of the story. Except it wasn’t the lounge windows at the front of the house, it was Francine’s bedroom windows. Also ground floor, but at the back. When Charlie start
ed grilling Kerry about what exactly Jason had been doing in the lounge—had he been repairing something, and if so, what?—Kerry panicked, and reached for what she hoped would be a more plausible lie: Jason had been cleaning windows. True. Any good liar knows to pack as much truth as possible into a lie. Kerry changed one detail: lounge, she said, instead of bedroom. It was crucial that no one found out Jason was an eyewitness. He’d have been asked to describe what he saw. His version would have been checked against Tim Breary’s confession—it was too risky, when what he’d have been describing would have been a lie. He could easily have slipped up over any number of tiny details. Simpler to have him not witness anything and just recite Tim’s version of what happened, like everyone else at the Dower House.”

  Tim Breary. In all the speculation, Sam had almost forgotten him.

  “So if it wasn’t Kerry, Dan, Lauren or Jason, then . . .”

  “Tim must have murdered Francine?” Simon completed Sam’s question for him. “No. He mustn’t and he didn’t. Tim wanted Francine alive, not dead. After what she’d put him through, he couldn’t get enough of the new balance of power between them. Of not being scared of her, of making her suffer for a change. Words can be weapons just as much as a knife or a gun is, and Francine couldn’t fight back. Tim was addicted to tormenting her: telling her stories about Gaby Struthers, the woman he really loved. Reading her poems about decaying forty-year-old bodies. Knowing that, however much Francine hated hearing it all, she couldn’t get away. He wouldn’t have put an end to that, I don’t think—ever. Why do you think he didn’t make a beeline for Gaby Struthers, soon as he moved back to the Culver Valley after Francine’s stroke?”

  Did Sam need to bother shaking his head in bafflement, or would Simon take it as read?

  “He still wasn’t free, that’s why. Still wasn’t available. He craved Francine in a way he never had before she was laid low, got a power kick out of punishing her. The urge to carry on was so overwhelming, even the thought of Gaby nearby wasn’t enough incentive to give up. Breary was addicted. Didn’t want to face up to it, though, so he told himself he was conducting an inquiry: Was Francine the same Francine he’d known, or not? How to arrive at an accurate ethical evaluation of her? Some inquiry, that never gathers any data,” Simon said dismissively.

  Sam was only half listening. He was trying to think. Gaby Struthers had an alibi; she couldn’t have done it. Who, then? “I’m out of ideas,” he admitted. “Even desperate ones. If you want me to know who murdered Francine, you’re going to have to tell me.” Sorry to be a disappointment. Again.

  “No one murdered Francine,” said Simon.

  “No one? But . . .”

  “You’ve seen her dead body?” That infuriating half smile again.

  “Yes!” More than once. What the hell was he implying? It had to be a joke.

  “She’s dead, for sure,” Simon said. “Legally, it might or might not be murder. Depends on the judge, I suppose. Or a jury. I wouldn’t call it murder, though, personally. I’d call it the opposite.”

  “Who killed her?” Sam asked. Simon couldn’t quibble about the word “killed,” surely.

  “The person who’d have wanted to murder her least of all. Her only ally at the Dower House.”

  “You mean . . . Lauren?”

  Simon nodded.

  But a minute ago, he’d said . . . No, Sam realized. Simon had said only that Lauren hadn’t murdered Francine. Not that she hadn’t killed her.

  “What I’m wondering is, did Kerry and Dan Jose share the addiction? Did they get the same sadistic kick out of writing these letters that Tim Breary did from his little bedside chats, or were they doing it just to give Tim moral support, like Dan Jose says in the last letter?”

  Sam was at a loss. He decided to sit it out, be a good listener, since he couldn’t contribute. Like Francine Breary.

  “Moral support,” Simon repeated with contempt. “Letters that very thoughtfully and analytically rip Francine’s character to pieces—taunt her and condemn her in any and every way they possibly can. Talk about kicking a person when they’re down. Meanwhile, Breary’s doing the verbal equivalent—torturing his wife, basically. What else can you call it? There she is, trapped in a bed, can’t move or speak, and he’s telling her all the things he knows are going to make her wish she was dead if she doesn’t already. It’s psychological torture. And Kerry Jose, who knows all about it—she thinks it’s good therapy for Tim! Tim’s processing his fear, she thinks—getting it out of his system, making progress. How sick is that? Kerry decides it’s okay to let him punish and emotionally torture an invalid who can’t fight back, and Dan goes along with it.”

  Simon swore under his breath, looked up at the ceiling. “Day after day, a punishment that never ends. Francine gets it rammed down her throat over and over again that her life was never what she thought it was, her husband never loved her like he said he did. She’s become nothing more than a receptacle for his bitterness. And Kerry’s, and Dan’s. The letters, which are Kerry’s idea of fair, let’s not forget! That’s balanced, in their crazy heads. The well-adjusted moderate response: writing long vicious denunciations that are oh-so-polite and articulate and sensitively worded, so it’s almost impossible to spot what’s really going on.”

  He was right. Right that it was hard to spot too. Kerry’s and Dan’s accounts painted Tim as the chief victim, with the two of them coming a close joint second. The first time he’d read the letters, even knowing Francine had been murdered, Sam had had little sympathy for her; such was the skill of Kerry and Dan Jose’s narrative.

  “Kerry and Dan want it both ways,” Simon went on angrily. “They want to show solidarity with Tim, but they don’t want to harm Francine, or so they imagine. So they never read her their letters! But they write them—sit there for hours by her bed, writing them, pouring in all their resentment. Does it occur to them that Francine might wonder what the fuck they’re doing, sitting there writing shit she never gets to see? And then stuffing them under her mattress! So she knows she’s lying on it, whatever it is.”

  “If Francine was as much of a control freak as the letters suggest, she’d have hated that,” Sam said, pleased to be able to contribute something at last. “Maybe they knew that not knowing what they were writing would torment her. That could have been part of the buzz.”

  “For Kerry, yeah,” Simon agreed. “Could well have been. If you think you’re too good and fair to ever hurt anyone deliberately, you’ve got to find a way of doing it that you can hide—even from yourself. Especially from yourself. I think that’s what the letters were, for Kerry. Dan . . . I don’t know. Best-case scenario, he was trying to support his friend and his wife, and Francine was a means to that end. If he didn’t want to make her suffer, then he treated her like an object. Like a . . . muse for bile and hate. It might not be the same straightforward emotional torture Tim Breary was serving up, but it’s still pretty depraved.”

  “So Lauren knew what they were all doing?” Sam asked. “She must have done.”

  “Must have,” Simon echoed. “Course, part of the motivation behind Kerry’s rule about her and Dan never reading their letters aloud was that: she couldn’t risk Lauren hearing. She must have known Lauren had overheard Tim a fair bit—in Francine’s room, persecuting her with his stories about Gaby. Kerry didn’t want Lauren to realize Francine was being assaulted from all sides—not by one person but by three. Three clever, articulate attackers who saw nothing wrong with making a woman who couldn’t move or speak lie there day after day, soaking up all their venom.”

  “Do you think that’s what Kerry meant when she wrote that someone would kill Francine soon, but she didn’t know who?” Sam asked. “Was she thinking of Lauren?”

  “Lauren or Tim,” Simon answered without hesitation. “Kerry was terrified one of them’d do it, but she didn’t know which. Lauren, to get Francine the fuck out of that hous
e where she was being abused and mistreated, or Tim because once he wasn’t scared of Francine anymore and he’d said everything he wanted to say to her, once she served no function for him—”

  “But—sorry, I’m interrupting—in one of the letters Kerry begs Francine to stop breathing.”

  “Yeah, but not because she wants her dead and gone.” Simon shuddered. “That’s Kerry being fair again: ‘Spare yourself the ordeal of getting murdered, Francine—and don’t forget to be grateful to me for the tip-off.’ And don’t forget”—Simon jabbed his finger in the air to make it clear that he meant Sam this time—“all these letters are performance pieces. Everyone’s editing themselves, thinking the others are going to be reading the results at some point. They all know where the letters are hidden—why wouldn’t they read each other’s? Dan’s hoping Kerry’ll be pulled up short by what he wrote about her being in love with Tim Breary. If she brings it up and tells him there’s not a single grain of truth in his suspicion, he’ll feel better. If she doesn’t mention it, he’ll feel worse.”

  “So . . .” Sam struggled to keep up. “Kerry didn’t want Francine to die?”

  “Did she fuck! Oh, she probably kidded herself sometimes that it was what she wanted, and maybe part of her did. Or wanted Tim to think she did, when he read her letters to Francine. Mainly, though, she didn’t want there to be nothing stopping Tim and Gaby Struthers shacking up together. She wanted Tim living with her and Dan, at the Dower House. His addiction to the wife he hated and tormented suited her down to the ground—she still got to be the good woman in his life, the one he relied on. Once he was blissfully happy with Gaby, she’d have been relegated to second place. She’d have hated it.”

  “Why kill Francine?” Sam asked. “If Lauren cared about her and wanted to protect her from . . .” He stopped, reluctant to use the word “attack.” Though Simon was right: there was no word that better described what Francine Breary had been subjected to. A sustained attack, albeit written and verbal rather than physical. “Why didn’t Lauren . . . I don’t know, report Tim’s mistreatment of Francine to Social Services?”