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Authors: Sophie Hannah

Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thriller, #Mystery

The Carrier

BOOK: The Carrier
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Table of Contents

Also by Sophie Hannah

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1.
Thursday 10 March 2011

2.
10/3/2011

3.
Thursday 10 March 2011

4.
10/3/2011

5.
Friday 11 March 2011

6.
11/3/2011

7.
Friday 11 March 2011

8.
11/3/2011

9.
Friday 11 March 2011

10.
11/3/2011

11.
Friday 11 March 2011

12.
11/3/2011

13.
Friday 11 March 2011

14.
11/3/2011

15.
Friday 11 March 2011

16.
12/3/2011

17.
Saturday 12 March 2011

18.
12/3/2011

19.
Sunday 13 March 2011

20.
13/3/2011

21.
Sunday 13 March 2011

22.
13/3/2011

23.
Sunday 13 March 2011

24.
14/3/2011

25.
Monday 14 March 2011

26.
16/3/2011

27.
Tuesday 5 April 2011

28.
6/4/2011

Acknowledgements

Also by Sophie Hannah

Little Face

Hurting Distance

The Point of Rescue

The Other Half Lives

A Room Swept White

Lasting Damage

Kind of Cruel

About the Author

As well as writing psychological thrillers, Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet and an award-winning short story writer. Her fifth collection of poetry,
Pessimism for Beginners
, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award. She won first prize in the Daphne du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her psychological suspense story
The Octopus Nest
. Her psychological thrillers
Little Face
and
Hurting Distance
were long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and
The Other Half Lives
was shortlisted for the Independent Booksellers’ Book of the Year Award and a Barry Award.
The Point of Rescue
and
The Other Half Lives
were adapted for television as
Case
Sensitive,
starring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd.

Sophie lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, where she is a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College.

Visit Sophie's website,
www.sophiehannah.com
, and follow her on Twitter at
twitter.com/sophiehannahCB1
.

THE CARRIER
Sophie Hannah

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

1

Copyright © Sophie Hannah 2013

The right of Sophie Hannah to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The extracts from C.H. Sisson’s poetry, copyright © The Estate of C.H. Sisson, reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.

The poem ‘Unscheduled Stop’ by Adam Johnson, copyright © The Estate of Adam Johnson, reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.

The extract from ‘Sonnet’ from
The Jupiter Collisions
by Lachlan Mackinnon, copyright © Lachlan Mackinnon, reprinted by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

The extract from ‘The Somelier and Some Liar’ from
Small Talk
by Nic Aubury, copyright © Nic Aubury, reprinted by kind permission of Nasty Little Press.

The extract from ‘Kings’ from
Collected Poems
by Elizabeth Jennings, copyright © Elizabeth Jennings, reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.

The extracts from
Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990—1995
by Glyn Maxwell, copyright © Glyn Maxwell, reprinted by kind by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Permissions are still in progress for North American rights; Hodder & Stoughton and the author will be happy to acknowledge all permissions for future reprints when confirmed with the rights holder.

Lines have also been included from ‘i carry your heart with me (i carry it in.’ from
Selected Poems 1923—1958
by E.E. Cummings, published by Faber and Faber Ltd. Permissions are still in progress; Hodder & Stoughton and the author will be happy to acknowledge all permissions for future reprints when confirmed with the rights holder.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 73674 8

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Peter Straus, my lovely agent
who has magic powers

POLICE EXHIBIT 1431B/SK – TRANSCRIPT OF HANDWRITTEN LETTER FROM KERRY JOSE TO FRANCINE BREARY DATED 14 DECEMBER 2010

Why are you still here, Francine?

I’ve always believed that people can will their own deaths. If our minds can make us wake up exactly a minute before our alarm clocks are due to go off, they must be capable of stopping our breath. Think about it: brain and breath are more powerfully linked than brain and bedside table. A heart begged to stop by a mind that won’t take no for an answer – what chance does it stand? That’s what I’ve always thought, anyway.

And I can’t believe you want to stick around. Even if you do, it won’t be up to you for much longer. Someone will kill you. Soon. Every day I change my mind about who it will be. I don’t feel the need to try and stop them, only to tell you. By giving you the chance to take yourself away, out of reach, I am being fair to everybody.

Let me admit it: I am trying to talk you into dying because I’m scared you’ll recover. How can the impossible feel possible? It must mean I’m still afraid of you.

Tim isn’t. Do you know what he asked me once, years ago? He and I were in your kitchen at Heron Close. Those white napkin rings that always reminded me of neck braces were on the table. You’d got them out of the drawer, and the brown napkins with ducks around the border, and slammed them down without saying anything; Tim was supposed to do the rest, whether or not he deemed it important for napkins to be inserted into rings only to be taken out again fifteen minutes later. Dan had gone out to collect the Chinese takeaway and you’d marched off to the bottom of the garden to sulk. Tim had ordered something healthy and beansprouty that we all knew he’d hate, and you’d accused him of choosing it for the wrong reason: to please you. I remember blinking back tears as I laid the table, after I’d clumsily grabbed the bundle of cutlery from his hands. There was nothing I could do to rescue him from you, but I could spare him the effort of putting the forks and knives out, and I was determined to. Little things were all Tim would let us do for him in those days, so Dan and I did them, as many of them as possible, putting all the effort and care into them that we could. Even so, I couldn’t touch those wretched napkin rings.

When I was sure I wasn’t going to cry, I turned and saw a familiar look on Tim’s face, the one that means ‘There’s something I’d like you to know, but I’m not prepared to say it, so I’m going to mess with your head instead.’ You won’t be able to imagine this expression unless you’ve seen it, and I’m certain you never have. Tim gave up trying to communicate with you within a week of marrying you. ‘What?’ I asked him.

‘I wonder about you, Kerry,’ he said. He meant for me to hear the pantomime suspicion in his voice. I knew he suspected me of nothing, and guessed that he was trying to find a camouflaged way to talk about himself, as he often did. I asked him what he wondered, and he said loudly, as if to an audience stretching back several rows in a large hall, ‘Imagine Francine dead.’ Three words that planted an instant ache of longing in my chest. I so much wanted you not to be there any more, Francine, but we were stuck with you. Before your stroke, I thought you’d probably live till you were a hundred and twenty.

‘Would you still be scared of her?’ Tim asked. Anyone listening who didn’t know him well would have thought he was teasing me and enjoying it. ‘I think you would. Even if you knew she was dead and never coming back.’

‘You say it as if there’s an alternative,’ I pointed out. ‘Dead and coming back.’

‘Would you still hear her voice in your head, saying all the things she’d say if she were alive? Would you be any freer of her than you are now? If you couldn’t see her, would you imagine she must be somewhere else, watching you?’

‘Tim, don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘You’re the least superstitious person I know.’

‘But we’re talking about you,’ he said in a tone of polished innocence, again drawing attention to his act.

‘No. I wouldn’t be scared of anyone who was dead.’

‘If you’d be equally afraid of her dead, then killing her would achieve nothing,’ Tim went on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Apart from probably a prison sentence.’ He took four wine glasses with chunky opaque green glass stems out of a cupboard. I’d always hated them, too, for their slime-at-the-bottom-of-your-drink effect.

‘I’ve never understood why anyone thinks it’s interesting to speculate about the difference between murderers and the rest of us.’ Tim pulled a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. ‘Who cares what makes one person willing and able to kill and another not? The answer’s obvious: degrees of suffering, and where you are on the bravery–cowardice spectrum. There’s nothing more to it. The only distinction worth investigating is the one between those of us whose presence in the world, however lacklustre and chaotic, doesn’t crush the spirit in others to extinction, and those about whom that can’t be said, however kind we might want to be. Every murder victim is someone who has inspired at least one person to wish them out of existence. And we’re supposed to sympathise when they meet a bad end.’ He made a dismissive noise.

I laughed at his outrageousness, then felt guilty for falling for it. Tim is never better at cheering me up than when he sees no hope of consolation for himself; I’m supposed to feel happier, and imagine that he’s following the same emotional trajectory. ‘You’re saying all murder victims are asking for it?’ I willingly rose to the bait. If he wants to discuss something, however ridiculous, even now, I debate with him until he decides he’s had enough. Dan does too. It’s one of the many million odd forms love can take. I doubt you’d understand.

‘You’re assuming, wrongly, that the victim of a murder is always the person who’s been killed and not the killer.’ Tim poured himself a glass of wine. He didn’t offer me one. ‘To cause someone so much inconvenience that they’re willing to risk their liberty and sacrifice what’s left of their humanity to remove you from the face of the earth ought to be regarded as a more serious crime than taking a gun or a blunt instrument and ending a life, all other things being equal.’

By inconvenience, he meant pain. ‘You’re biased,’ I said. I knew Dan might be back any second with the food, and I wanted to say something more direct than I’d normally have risked. I decided that, in starting this extraordinary conversation, Tim had given me his tacit permission. ‘If you think of Francine as a spirit-crusher, if the only reason you haven’t killed her is that you’d be more scared of her dead than alive . . .’ I said.

‘I don’t know where you’ve got all that from.’ Tim grinned. ‘Hearing things again?’ We both understood why he was smiling: I had received his message and would not forget it. He knew it was safe with me. It took me years of knowing Tim to work out that change is never what he’s after; all he wants is to stow the important information with someone he can trust.

‘You can leave her more easily than you think,’ I told him, craving change – the enormous, irreversible kind – more than enough for both of us. ‘There doesn’t have to be a confrontation. You don’t need to tell her you’re going, or have any contact with her after you’ve left. Dan and I can help you. Let Francine keep this house. Come and live with us.’

‘You can’t help,’ Tim said firmly. He paused, long enough for me to understand – or misunderstand, as I knew he’d insist if I made an issue of it – before adding, ‘Because I don’t need help. I’m fine.’

I overheard him talking to you yesterday, Francine. He wasn’t weighing his every word, planning several conversational moves ahead. He was just talking, telling you another Gaby story. It involved an airport, of course. Gaby seems to live in airports, when she’s not in mid-air. I don’t know how she can stand it – it would drive me insane. This particular story was about the time the scanning machine at Madrid-Barajas ate one of her shoes, and Tim was enjoying telling it. It sounded as if he was saying whatever came to mind without censoring himself at all. Nothing contrived, no element of performance. Very un-Tim. As I eavesdropped, I realised that any fear he once had is long gone. What I can’t work out is: does that mean he’s likely to kill you, or that he needs you to live forever?

BOOK: The Carrier
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