The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  “What could she have said? It’s just talking, isn’t it? Not even shouting, not aggressive. Calm, quiet. She’s overheard a man chatting to his invalid wife, that’s all. And she’s read some letters that people have tried to hide, and, yes, she knows they’re bad news. Very bad.” Simon hauled himself to his feet and started to walk round the room. He was limping; pins and needles.

  “Instinctively, she knows exactly what the letters mean,” he said. “They mean deliberate cruelty, but someone like Lauren, not the brightest in the world, how’s she going to put that into words and make sure she’s believed over the likes of Tim Breary with his collection of poetry books and exclusive library membership, and Dan Jose with his economic theory research and his old-fart tweedy suits? Educated millionaires who write touchy-feely letters full of anecdotes and insights and therapeutic airing of everything that’s been bothering them that they’ve never had the guts to express until now. Poor fucking them! Who do you think Social Services are going to prioritize in that situation? The husband and best friends, or the chippy hired help? Lady-of-the-Manor Kerry, with her original art on the walls of her listed building, or tattooed, anorexic Lauren who can’t open her mouth without a stream of foul language spilling out?”

  “When you put it like that . . .” Sam muttered.

  “Lauren can feel exactly what’s wrong, but she can’t think it through,” said Simon. “And she’s married to Jason, which is confusing for her. That’s what abuse is, she probably thinks. Psychological torture’s what Jason does, so how can this be the same and as bad when it’s so different? She can’t answer her own questions, she’s getting more and more desperate. Then, I’m guessing, one day she overhears Dan Jose read a letter aloud to Francine for the first time. The cruelty’s escalating, she thinks—though not in those precise words. How bad could it get? Answer: very. She has to get Francine out of the Dower House. So she does it the only way she knows how—she takes a pillow and puts an end to an unremittingly miserable life.”

  “A mercy killing,” Sam said quietly.

  “In the truest sense, yes.”

  “What about Tim Breary’s confession?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but I think there’s a good chance Francine’s death broke the spell,” Simon said. “The addiction, whatever you want to call it. Think about it: Lauren tells Tim what she’s done and she tells him why. She’s distraught. He sees his behavior through her eyes. Feels guilty, maybe. Hard to see how he could feel good about turning a basically decent young woman into a killer. Hopefully it brought him to his senses.”

  “He confessed to protect Lauren,” said Sam. “Or Jason strong-armed him: ‘You caused all this trouble for my wife and therefore me; you’re taking the blame.’”

  “Partly, maybe,” said Simon, staring out of the window. “Could have been a bit of both, but neither was the main force driving him.”

  “Gaby,” said Sam, not knowing quite what he meant.

  “Gaby,” Simon repeated expressionlessly. “Breary still wanted her, and with Francine dead, there was nothing to stop him, except his conviction that he didn’t deserve her.”

  “Even more so now, presumably,” Sam said.

  “Right. Soon as Gaby found out the truth about how he, Kerry and Dan had been treating Francine, she’d want nothing to do with him—that’s what he thought.”

  “So he pretended he’d killed Francine,” said Sam. Finally, he felt as if he was getting somewhere. “It’s still bad—it’s murder, it’s worse—but in a different way. In a way that seems less grim and repellent, somehow. More . . . honest.”

  “More male,” said Simon. “Less humiliating. Straightforward evil of the masculine variety: brutal, yes, but not despicable, not pathetic. You murder the person you hate. It’s a show of force. There’s something effeminate about subtly torturing your helpless wife with carefully chosen words. If Lauren had admitted to killing Francine, the truth would have come out—Breary would have been certain that’d scupper his chance with Gaby. At the same time, he didn’t want Gaby to be under any illusions about his moral character—he wouldn’t have seen that as being fair to her.”

  “So he tells Lauren he’ll take the blame.” Sam took over the story. “In doing so, he protects her, which, given the circumstances, feels like the right thing to do, and he can finally be honest with Gaby, he thinks, even though he’s being anything but. Still, he feels as if his . . . badness is out in the open. So many of Kerry and Dan’s letters mention his lack of self-esteem.”

  “Exactly,” said Simon. “He’s going to be labeled a murderer and punished, and it’ll wipe his slate clean. He can say to Gaby, ‘Look, this is how bad I am. I’ve done the worst thing a person can do. Can you forgive me?’ Whereas he wouldn’t have dared ask her the same question in relation to what he’d really done.”

  “Yes. That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Sam asked. He still wasn’t sure.

  “Perfect sense,” he heard a woman’s voice say. He turned.

  Gaby Struthers stood in the doorway. “Correct in every detail,” she told Simon.

  “How do you know?” Sam asked her.

  “How do you think?”

  “Tim told you?”

  Gaby nodded. “And Lauren. She so desperately wanted to tell the truth and be told she’d done nothing wrong. Tim deprived her of that chance by insisting on protecting her. He begged her to let him take the blame. Jason backed him up. So did Kerry and Dan, once they saw how desperate he was to bury the truth. He convinced them that the only thing he had to live for now was me, that I’d want nothing to do with him if I found out he’d mistreated his bedridden wife until her care assistant had been driven to kill her out of pity.”

  “But he thought you’d forgive him for killing her,” said Simon.

  “You don’t need me to explain the difference,” Gaby told him. “You’ve said it all already: a sudden murderous impulse on the one hand, and on the other, constant passive-aggressive victimization over a period of years, slow and insidious.” She looked very serious suddenly. “You were right when you called it an addiction. Tim didn’t plan to torture anyone. He just got caught up in something stronger than he was. I’m not justifying what he did—it was wrong, but—”

  “There’s no ‘but,’” Simon said.

  “If you were Tim, if you’d had his exact life experiences and been through exactly the same formative psychological process that he went through, can you honestly say you’d have behaved differently?”

  Did that question make sense? Sam wondered. If Simon were Tim Breary, would he have behaved as Tim Breary behaved? Yes. Obviously.

  “What about Lauren?” Gaby asked. “Is there a ‘but’ for her? She also killed Jason.”

  “We know,” Simon said.

  “He attacked her on Friday, after he attacked me. She decided enough was enough. Another life she felt she had no choice but to take.”

  “I’m sympathetic, but I’m not sure the law will be,” said Simon. Sam had been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t wanted to say it.

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t be,” said Gaby. “Still. The law will have to find her first.” A smile played around the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know, obviously—I’m just guessing—but I’d imagine that Lauren might be out of reach by now. It could be that when you go to the Dower House to look for her, you’ll find it empty.”

  “If you know where she is, you’d better tell us,” said Simon. It could have been intended as a threat, but Sam heard only weariness.

  “I don’t know anything,” Gaby replied smoothly. “I’m speculating.”

  “Are Kerry and Dan with her?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know where any of them are, but I doubt Lauren would be capable of getting far without support. Or of staying hidden indefinitely. Don’t you agree? You’ve met her.”

  “We’ll find her,” Simon tol
d Sam: a show of bravado, for Gaby’s benefit.

  “I’m sure you will, if you look long and hard enough,” she said. “Or you could not look quite so hard and catch bad guys instead. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be for?”

  Before Simon or Sam could answer, she’d gone.

  27

  TUESDAY, 5 APRIL 2011

  “Marjolaine,” Tim says, staring at the door at the far end of the corridor. He’s stopped several feet away from it, white-faced. I know how hard it’s going to be for him to come any closer. I’m not going to try and persuade him. It has to be up to him. I tried to solve the mystery of his nightmare years ago, when he wasn’t ready, and I drove him away.

  “I’d forgotten that the rooms had names and that ours was called Marjolaine,” he says, almost whispering. “They’re all named after flowers, or herbs. I remember Francine saying.”

  “You don’t have to come with me, but I’m going to go inside,” I tell him. “Okay?” I booked the room for one night in order to have the access I needed this afternoon, even though Tim and I aren’t staying. We’re here for the day only. Tim would never have agreed to stay at Les Sources des Alpes in any case, even if I’d suggested it. If he’s wondering why I booked us outbound and inbound flights on the same day instead of suggesting we stay overnight at a different hotel, he hasn’t mentioned it.

  Another thing he hasn’t mentioned since getting out of prison: that I’ve spent every night at the Combingham Best Western and he’s spent every night at the Dower House, both of us alone. I know and understand his reasons. He doesn’t want to rush me.

  Damn his reasons to hell. They make no difference.

  Be fair, Gaby. He’s the one who suggested this, coming here. That’s huge, for him.

  Huge for Tim isn’t good enough for me anymore. I need him to do things that are huge by my standards. Nothing less will do.

  The key is gold, heavy, shaped like a bell. I unlock the door and walk in. To anyone but Tim, this would look like an ordinary hotel room. He calls my name from the corridor, anxious because he can’t see me.

  I can’t stand this. What if I wait for him to decide to come in and he never does? “The walls aren’t even plain white,” I shout back. They’re wallpapered: a pattern of pastel-colored squares against a cream background. “Tim, I promise you, you won’t be scared of this room the second you set foot inside it. It’s not the room from your nightmare. It’s enormous, for one thing.”

  He’s moving. I feel the vibration in the floor. When he comes in, I expect him to stop in the doorway, but he strides over so that he’s standing right next to me, our arms touching. He looks around. I listen to his jagged breathing.

  “Are you . . . ?” He stops to clear his throat. “You’re sure this is where me and Francine stayed? The right room?”

  “You told me your room was called Marjolaine. This is Marjolaine.” In case he needs any more grounding, I say, “You recognized it just now when you saw the name on the door.”

  “Yes. Sorry.” He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “You’re right. It’s not . . . This isn’t the room in my dream.”

  “No. It’s not. Nor is any other room.”

  “What?”

  “The room in your dream isn’t a room, Tim.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Follow me.” I pick up the key and move to leave.

  He pulls me back. “Wait.”

  “No. I’ve waited. I’m sick of waiting.”

  His eyes fill with tears. “Gaby, I understand that, but I need to stay here for a few seconds. Not much longer than that, not even five minutes, just . . . I need to stand here and know that it’s not this room I’m scared of. It never was.”

  “Right. It never was.”

  “But . . . now you want to take me somewhere else,” Tim says, his voice full of shadows: the shadow of a handbag against a white wall. Except it wasn’t a wall. “You want to take me to the place I should have been scared of all this time, the place I thought was this room. I don’t know if I can do it, Gaby.”

  “What place, Tim? Where is it? What is it?” No point asking; I can see from his face that he has no idea.

  “It’s here, in Leukerbad. It must be if you’re about to show it to me, but . . .” He shakes his head. “There isn’t anywhere else. We didn’t go anywhere else that wasn’t a public place. She wouldn’t have tried to kill me in a public place.”

  “She didn’t try to kill you,” I tell him. “That never happened.”

  “Then why do I dream that she did?”

  I take a deep breath. I don’t know if it’s going to be worse or better for him when he has the answer. “You’re taking the dream too literally,” I say. “Come. Let me prove it to you.”

  This time he doesn’t protest.

  We walk along the corridor in silence. Into the lift, down to the ground floor, outside and down the red-carpeted stairs. We turn left, Tim following me as if he doesn’t know where I’m going. Can he really not know? Where else might I be going?

  I wish the walk were shorter. I could end this now and just tell him, but I want to give him every chance to get there on his own. As we walk up the hill, past shops, restaurants and wooden chalets, I say, “In the dream, does the size of the handbag’s shadow change? Does it get bigger or smaller?” The weather’s bright and sunny where we are, but there’s snow on the mountains above us. I take care not to look at them.

  Tim stops for a second beside a fountain that’s spilling warm water. Leukerbad is famous for its hot springs and likes to show them off, I discovered last time I came here.

  I carry on walking.

  “No. The handbag stays the same size,” Tim says, picking up his pace to catch me up.

  “You said Francine’s walking toward you in the dream, diagonally across the room, getting closer and closer.”

  “Right.” The wounded expression on his face as I force him to think about his nightmare is too much; I can’t look at him.

  “So the handbag’s shadow ought to grow or shrink, depending on the source of light,” I say. “It ought to get smaller, or bigger and more blurred as she gets nearer.” I find this immovable law of nature comforting. I doubt Tim does. “If she’s walking diagonally across the room toward you, the bag’s either going to be getting farther from the wall or closer to it.”

  “It’s a dream, Gaby,” Tim says. “Not a scientific trial.”

  He’s almost right: there’s nothing scientific about a symbolic representation of danger in a dream, which is why I’m determined to cling to the one scientific detail: the shadow of an object traveling across a white surface will only stay the same size if the distance between it and the surface doesn’t change as it moves.

  We turn another corner and I freeze. Here we are, sooner than I expected. I throw out an arm to stop Tim going any farther. “What?” he says. “What, Gaby?”

  “Look. Have you been here before? Did you come here with Francine?” The answer has to be yes. Ahead of us are tall snow-covered mountains. A cable runs from the peak of one of them down to a small wooden building at the bottom. There’s a square car sliding down the wire, a slow diagonal through the air.

  Tim’s breathing as if it hurts him.

  “There’s your small room,” I say.

  “The cable car. But . . . I don’t understand. Yes, Francine and I went up in it, but we weren’t alone. There were other people there, a family of four, a Russian family. She wouldn’t have . . .” His words run out. He’s staring. Trying to piece it together.

  “Wouldn’t have tried to kill you in front of them? No, she wouldn’t. I told you: she didn’t try to kill you at all, in front of anyone or no one. Not in the way you mean. What happened in that cable car, Tim? Did you and Francine talk? Did anything important happen?”

  “She proposed to me. I told you.”
He’s distracted. Can’t keep his eyes still.

  “You told me she proposed, but not where.”

  “She asked me at the top, when the car set off. She said . . .” He shakes his head.

  “What? What, Tim?”

  “I didn’t answer straightaway.”

  “What did you want to say?”

  “I didn’t want her to have asked.” I force myself not to turn away from the pain in his eyes. “She said I had until we got to the bottom to give her an answer.”

  A proposal immediately followed by an ultimatum. Nice.

  “I said yes.”

  “When? On the way down?”

  “When we got to the bottom. I’d run out of time. She was my girlfriend, Gaby. What was I doing with her if she wasn’t the right person? I didn’t know there was a right person.”

  “All the way down the mountain in the cable car, you were getting closer—not to a handbag containing something that was going to kill you, but to the moment when you handed over the rest of your life to a woman you knew would crush all the joy and hope out of it. That’s what was going to kill you.”

  “She made herself more miserable than anyone else, always,” Tim murmurs. He’s angry with me.

  “Francine’s crooked arm in the dream—that’s the cable,” I tell him, needing to have it out in the open. “Crooked because the car’s hanging from it and making a dent in its straight line, dragging it down as it moves along. The white wall isn’t a wall, it’s the mountain, covered in snow. The car was at the same distance from the mountain all the way down, and you were watching its shadow moving along the white mountain—that’s why the shadow of what you thought was a handbag stayed the same size. But it wasn’t a handbag, it was a cable car, the one you and Francine were in, Tim.”

  “I can’t stay here.” Tim starts to march back in the direction of the hotel. I run after him, into the oncoming wind. It stings my face. “All this time, thinking she tried to kill me,” he says. “I really believed it.”