The Carrier (20 page)

‘Ask away.’

‘Where were you on 16 February?’

‘The day Francine was murdered?’ Gaby reached into her bag, pulled out a dark brown leather diary with ‘Coutts 2011’ embossed on its front cover.

‘How do you know that’s when Francine was killed?’ Charlie asked.

‘How does anyone know anything? Google. 16 February: I was in Harston, a village near Cambridge.’

‘All day?’

Gaby nodded. ‘Got up at 5 a.m., got there for 7, was in meetings all day.’

‘Meetings?’ All day, in a village? First the church hall about the flower arrangements, then the post office to discuss the padded envelope window display?

As if she could read Charlie’s mind, Gaby said impatiently, ‘Sagentia’s UK head office is in Harston – they’re a product development company. We’ve outsourced a small but crucial part of our work to them. Google my name if you want to know more about what that work is, and ring Luke Hares at Sagentia if you want confirmation that I was there all day on 16 February.’ After a pause, Gaby added, ‘I didn’t kill Francine Breary any more than Tim did. Christ, if he was going to kill her he’d have done it years ago.’

Charlie saw Kerry Jose stiffen. She decided not to pursue it for the time being and mentally filed Gaby’s comment for future reference.

‘You said you were going to tell me everything I needed to know about the money.’

‘Happy to,’ said Gaby. ‘In a nutshell, Kerry and Dan have got plenty and Tim’s got none.’ Kerry had put the kettle on and was putting a teabag into a mug. ‘What’s happened with the Heron Close house?’ Gaby asked her.

‘It was repossessed. Tim hasn’t worked since he left Francine, which wasn’t long after you last saw him. He didn’t have hardly any money saved. Couldn’t make the mortgage payments.’

Gaby laughed. ‘Did he care? He hated that house.’

Charlie watched Kerry’s features jerk and reset themselves. It would be useful if this could continue to happen every time Gaby revealed a detail that Kerry had hoped to keep secret; for Charlie, it was like having a yellow brick road of significance to follow.

‘After Francine had her stroke, she couldn’t make the payments either. I’m . . .’ Kerry made a choking noise, gagging on her own words. She tried again. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch, Gaby. I wanted to tell you everything – about Tim leaving his job, leaving Francine, but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Well, I explained in the letter I wrote you. Did you get it?’

Gaby nodded.

‘I just couldn’t,’ Kerry said, her eyes filling with tears.

‘Can we come back to the money,’ Charlie prompted. ‘So Tim and Francine had a house on Heron Close that was repossessed . . .’

‘Yes. Dan and I support – supported – Francine, still support Tim,’ said Kerry. ‘Always will.’

‘That’s extremely generous,’ Charlie said.

‘We’re family,’ Kerry said firmly. ‘Not literally, but we’re all he’s got and he’s all we’ve got. And it’s not as if Dan and I are going to have children.’ Her face reddened as she realised what she’d said. ‘There are . . . pathologies in my biological family that I don’t want to risk passing on,’ she explained.

‘Kerry and Dan wouldn’t be wealthy if it weren’t for Tim,’ said Gaby, as Kerry brought her mug of tea over to the table. ‘Have you heard of Taction?’

Charlie shook her head.

‘The Da Vinci surgical robot?’ Gaby said it as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world
.
‘At the moment, the Da Vinci’s the only one on the market, but there are a couple of companies working on new robot models that’ll be cheaper to manufacture and less invasive than the Da Vinci if they can be made to work. That’s a big “if”. There are no guarantees, but if the front-runner competitor makes the killing it hopes to make, it’ll be partly thanks to me. My first company, the one I created and sold, invented a tactile fabric.’

‘Taction?’ Charlie guessed.

Gaby nodded. ‘We designed it specifically to be used in the manufacture of tactile feedback gloves. We also designed a prototype glove that doesn’t work with the Da Vinci, but another company’s incorporated it into the design of a rival surgical platform they’re working on. The glove provides whoever’s operating the robot with data that closely simulates what she’d feel with the five fingers of her own hand if she were performing manual laparoscopic surgery.’

So . . . I’m sitting here talking to some kind of cutting-edge technological genius superstar.
Charlie kept the thought to herself; Gaby Struthers didn’t appear to be in need of a boost to her confidence.

‘In order to fund our development and trialling, we needed money.’ she said. ‘Tim advised me on where to get it from. He brought me investors – all the investors I needed.’

‘So Tim was your . . . what, your business partner? Your accountant?’ Charlie asked.

‘My accountant, eventually. At first, though, he just saw exactly what my business needed, and he got it for me.’

‘You mean the money to make your product?’ Charlie asked.

‘Yes, but not only that. I could have gone to any number of venture capital firms with my business plan and they’d have fallen into my lap,’ said Gaby, with what Charlie was starting to recognise as her characteristic modesty and self-effacement. ‘They’d also have wanted control, and they’d have tried to squeeze me out. That’s what these people do. I wasn’t having that. It was
my
company, my expertise going into the product. I knew that if we succeeded, the investors would get the lion’s share of the money – that was fine, I had no problem with that. But I had a huge problem with the idea of big slick bastards in suits wading in and telling me how to run the show because – at the risk of sounding big-headed – I knew what I was doing, better than they ever could.’

‘Gaby’s company sold for nearly fifty million dollars,’ said Kerry. ‘To Keegan Luxford.’

Charlie nodded. She knew she should say, ‘Wow,’ or something like that. She wondered if Keegan Luxford would be interested in buying anything of hers for fifty million dollars. Simon’s brain, perhaps. Even that was a non-starter. Removal and delivery would be too complicated. ‘So Tim found you investors who’d hand over the money but let you do what you wanted with it?’

‘Exactly,’ said Gaby. ‘He only asked people he knew well, who trusted him. He had unwavering confidence in me.’ She looked uncertain for a second. ‘I never really understood why.
I
knew I could make it work, as much as you can ever know with something so high-risk and speculative, but Tim can’t have known. He just . . . believed in me, the way devoutly religious people believe in God. Faith. Somehow, Tim managed to convey that faith to enough of his clients and acquaintances, who all invested. He told them the best thing they could do was let me get on with things in my own way.’

‘He knew it was true, and it was,’ said Kerry.

‘Or he was in love with me and that was all he cared about,’ Gaby fired back at her. ‘Maybe he didn’t care if his clients and friends lost all their money as long as he got to impress me and be the one who solved all my problems.’

‘Gaby, stop.’ Charlie heard authority in Kerry’s voice for the first time since she’d arrived at the Dower House. ‘Poor Tim. You’re not being fair and you know it.’

Poor Tim? Poor wife-smothering Tim? Charlie felt as if she’d been cast adrift on waves of oddness, without a map or a pair of oars. Or even a boat.

‘I’m sorry.’ Gaby sounded as if she meant it. She covered her face with her hands for a few seconds. ‘Ignore me. I had no sleep last night. You’re right, Tim would never have advised his clients to act against their own best interests. I don’t know why I said that.’ She sighed. ‘All along, he claimed to know I’d succeed, that there was no risk at all, only an enormous profit to be made by all involved. I knew no such thing, but he
knew
. I just find it hard to believe sometimes, that’s all. How can he have known?’

‘We knew too,’ Kerry told her, squeezing her arm. ‘Tim’s confidence in you was so powerful, we didn’t doubt him for a second, him or you. And you
did
pretty much know, Gaby – you’re being modest. Why else would you have spent all that money on the whole Swiss—’

‘That’s nothing to do with anything,’ Gaby cut her off abruptly.

Charlie felt her inner antennae twitch as the mood in the room changed.

‘I’m just saying, you must have known there was a very good chance—’

‘Kerry, for fuck’s sake, can we drop it?’

This role reversal was unexpected: suddenly Gaby was the cagey one and Kerry the big-mouth.
The whole Swiss
. . . what? Tax avoidance was all Charlie could think of.

‘Tim wasn’t as honest with you and Dan about your investment as you think he was,’ Gaby muttered into her cup of tea.

‘You and Dan invested in Gaby’s business?’ Charlie asked Kerry.

‘Three hundred thousand pounds,’ said Gaby.

‘Everything we had,’ Kerry confirmed. ‘Aside from our earnings from work, which weren’t much. Dan was an accountant, so he had what seemed like a decent salary at the time. I was earning peanuts as a care assistant.’

‘You invested all your savings, the lot?’ Charlie allowed her incredulity to be obvious.

Kerry looked at Gaby as if she wanted her to take over the telling of the story.

‘Dan’s mother died, left him the money,’ Gaby said. ‘He didn’t want it. He and his mother hadn’t spoken for years before she died. She was a bitch – always threatening to cut him out of her will.’

‘She threatened to do it when he wanted to marry me,’ Kerry contributed. ‘We both thought she had. That’s the last time Dan spoke to her, just before we got engaged. She refused to come to the wedding. I wasn’t good enough for her precious son, I was
just
a home carer. From tainted stock.’ Kerry started to cry, wiping the tears away discreetly as if she imagined she could hide them.

A look from Gaby warned Charlie not to ask. ‘Nice woman,’ Charlie said. To say nothing would have seemed heartless.

‘So then she dies, and Dan finds out he’s got all this money,’ Gaby picked up the story again. ‘But it’s hers, the same money that was used to bribe and blackmail him for most of his life, so he doesn’t want it. Kerry didn’t see it that way.’

‘No, I didn’t. What kind of fool gives away three hundred thousand pounds on principle? We argued about it. Endlessly.’ Kerry shuddered. ‘It’s the only time we’ve ever come to blows about anything. I couldn’t bear for Dan to give the money away, wherever it came from, but he wouldn’t listen. He said we were fine as we were, and how could he live with himself if he accepted an inheritance from Pu—’ A deep flush spread across Kerry’s face. ‘From his mother,’ she corrected herself.

Gaby grinned. ‘I forgot you used to call her Pue. PUE,’ she told Charlie. ‘Pure Undiluted Evil. Didn’t Tim coin that one?’

Kerry nodded.

Charlie sipped her tea. ‘So when Tim came along suggesting you invest the three hundred thousand in Gaby’s company . . .’

‘It was the perfect solution.’ Kerry’s eyes lit up, as if she’d just this second worked it out. ‘We could give away the money – all of it – and the money we’d get back wouldn’t be
hers.
It’d be different money, money from whichever company bought up Gaby’s. Keegan Luxford, as it turned out.’

Inheritance laundering, Charlie thought.

‘Different money, and a hell of a lot more, if things went according to plan – which, thankfully for all of us, they did,’ Gaby said. ‘Meanwhile I’d have spent Dan’s mum’s money getting my product to trial stage – about which I had no moral qualms, I have to say. She wasn’t
my
bitch of a mother.’ Gaby and Kerry exchanged a smile; they’d clearly had a version of this conversation before, probably many times.

‘Tim and Francine couldn’t invest,’ Kerry told Charlie. ‘They didn’t have a lump sum like we did, so Tim couldn’t benefit from his own brilliant life-changing advice. That’s another reason why Dan and I will always look after him.’

‘They could have had lump sums coming out of their ears,’ Gaby said quietly. ‘Francine wouldn’t have let Tim invest a tenner in GST. Not even a fiver.’

Kerry’s mouth twitched. She tensed in her chair. What was it that she didn’t want Charlie to know? That Francine and Tim hadn’t had the best marriage in the world? That Francine had been a controlling cow who’d made Tim’s life a misery? If it were true, Charlie couldn’t work out why it should be such a big secret, when Tim Breary had confessed to killing his wife weeks ago and confirmed his guilt in every conversation he’d had with the police ever since.

‘What’s GST?’ she asked.
Guilty Smothering Tim?

‘The company I sold: Gaby Struthers Technologies.’

Charlie said to Kerry, ‘So you moved Tim and Francine in with you, paid for full-time care for Francine . . .’ She lost her thread. Gaby had pushed back her chair and stood up suddenly, as if she’d remembered something urgent.

‘Gaby?’ Kerry stood too.
Follow the leader
. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I want to see Tim’s room. His room here. I need to see it.’

Kerry stared at her, blinking as if she hadn’t understood the words. Charlie waited.

‘I’m not sure I should let you. God, Gaby, I hate saying no, but without Tim’s permission . . .’

‘You’ll have to physically stop me,’ said Gaby, halfway to the door.

Kerry made as if to follow, then hesitated. She looked at Charlie, a plea in her eyes. ‘Is there something in Tim’s room that you don’t want Gaby to see?’ Charlie asked.

‘No,’ Kerry said too quickly. She twisted her hair around her hand.

‘Let her go, then. Tell me about the day Francine was murdered. What exactly happened?’

I run upstairs and nearly crash into Dan on the landing. I’d completely forgotten about him. He doesn’t seem to be on his way anywhere; he’s just standing there. His guilty eyes tell me everything I need to know. ‘So, you’re up here skulking, are you? Avoiding the cosy chat with the cops? You’re not a natural liar, Dan. You must be sick of lying about Francine’s death.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Gaby.’

‘Don’t you trust yourself not to blurt out the truth?’