The Carrier (28 page)

‘Arrogant bitch,’ Sean sneers. ‘You can’t bear to fail. That’s what this is about. A man turned you down once, and you have to make him want you – that’s all this is, nothing to do with
love
.’

I swallow hard. I’d like to scrape his words out of my mind, but it’s too late. ‘Make up your mind,’ I say. ‘Either you know me or you don’t.’

‘I don’t want to know you! I wish I’d never met you!’

Sean hauls himself up off the floor, pushes past me on his way downstairs. A few seconds later I hear a loud slam, then the wretched football, noisier than usual. In the bedroom, I shake as I throw things into a suitcase: pyjamas, toothbrush, hairbrush, disposable contact lenses, some clothes.

I’m never coming back here. I don’t want to see any of it again. Sean can keep everything.

I creep downstairs and out of the house, closing the front door gently behind me.

Free.

I run to my car, fumbling with the keys.
Nearly there, nearly gone.
I push the button on the key fob, hear the lock spring open.
Thank God.

‘Gaby,’ a voice behind me whispers. Not Sean, not a voice I recognise. I try to turn, but before I can move, there’s an arm around my neck, squeezing, and I feel my mind slide out of reach to a pinpoint of bright black.

Proust was in his office: good. And no one else was around. This was going to be easy.

From the CID room door, unseen, Simon watched the inspector’s motionless bald head in its glass-sided booth, noticed the way light from the tall lamp in the corner fell on it, as if to draw it to an audience’s attention. Silent, unaware of your presence and facing in the opposite direction, Proust still managed to project an aura of ‘Cross me and your fate will be one of unimaginable horror’.
Bullshit
.
Only things that didn’t exist managed to achieve this level of unimaginability.

Simon stood out of sight, not yet ready to change his relationship with his boss in a way that might prove irreversible, and stared at the dome of shiny pink skin.
An ordinary bald head
.
No one can tell what’s inside just from looking.
Simon knew what was in there: the world’s largest and most remarkable collection of self-serving strategies. No special powers. Proust might not like what he was about to hear, but there would be nothing he could do apart from sulk and snarl, and he did that anyway
.
He could try to get Simon fired, but he wouldn’t risk losing his greatest asset.

‘If there’s something you’d like to say, Waterhouse, I suggest you get in here, be a man and say it. The taxpayer doesn’t pay you to lurk in doorways eyeing me up.’

Simon walked into the inspector’s small corner office and closed the door behind him. He decided to get the work conversation over with first. It would help him to gauge Proust’s mood before he raised the subject of Regan.

‘I know what Tim Breary said in his first interview with Sellers, and I know you committed fraud in order to hide it from me,’ he told the Snowman. ‘I could go straight to Superintendent Barrow.’

‘Oh, get off your high horse, Waterhouse! I feel sorry for the poor, exhausted creature.’ Proust was stacking his papers in neat rectangular piles. ‘Racehorses that trip over Grand National fences and get shot have an easier time of it. And next time, check the evidence before you accuse me.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve replaced the original interview transcript by now,’ Simon said. ‘Doesn’t make it okay that you substituted another version and ordered Sam and Sellers not to tell me.’

‘I agree. That would be unacceptable. It would also be your word against mine that I’d done any such thing. If you imagine that Sergeant Kombothekra and DC Sellers would back you up, you’re more deluded than I thought. Those two haven’t got a backbone between them. As for the buffoon Barrow, I could tell him as many illuminating stories about your code of professional conduct as you could about mine.’

True enough.

‘I’ll be honest with you, Waterhouse: my mentoring of you is mainly self-centred. I only care about keeping you in your job for as long as I’m in mine. The results you get, as a member of my team, reflect well on me.’

‘You wanted Sam to tell me,’ Simon said.

‘Which he evidently did.’

‘No. He said nothing.’ Simon had reached the point where he no longer agreed with his own unreasonable assessment of Sam’s conduct, but he wasn’t yet ready to relinquish it altogether.

‘Then who did? Sellers wouldn’t have dared, and no one else—’ Proust broke off, visibly angry with himself for having allowed an admission to slip out.

‘No one else knew? Are you sure?’

‘Who?’ Proust spat the word at Simon. The phone on his desk started to ring. He switched off his full-beam glare as he answered it, harrumphing at whichever masochist had dialled his direct line. He kept his eyes on Simon and made notes on an inconveniently positioned pad without looking at what he was writing. Rather than move the pad, he crossed his right arm over his chest awkwardly, as if trying to straitjacket himself.

Simon recognised a perfect opportunity when one came along. Proust wasn’t solely focused on him. This was his moment; it would never be easier to say than now. ‘Your daughter knew,’ he said. ‘Amanda. She told me.’

‘Gibbs! Been looking for you everywhere.’ Having found him, PC Robbie Meakin had blocked Gibbs’ path, an acne-spattered obstruction with an annoying grin. Coming back to work after an afternoon spent skiving in the Brown Cow was always a mistake, one Gibbs had only made because if he’d turned up at home before seven, he’d have been unable to avoid his twins’ bedtime or the post-bedtime tidying of the house. He wanted to avoid both those things more than he wanted to avoid work or his colleagues – even Meakin, the nick’s very own happy and proud Super-Dad. Meakin had three kids. Gibbs had heard him . . . what was that word Liv liked? Pontificating. He’d heard Meakin pontificating in the canteen about how the whole kids thing was such hard work, oh yes, but so
worth it.
Fucking creep.
Gibbs wouldn’t have objected if he’d been talking only about himself and his own experience of being a parent, but it was clear he wasn’t; there was nothing Meakin enjoyed more than telling new dads how they should feel and soon would, if they didn’t already.

‘Got a second?’ Meakin asked.

‘Not really,’ Gibbs said curtly.

‘Believe me, you’ll want to see this. It involves Tim Breary.’

Gibbs held out his hand for the papers that were in Meakin’s. He knew without looking that they were all he’d need, as surely as he knew that Meakin would insist on taking up more of his time than was necessary.

‘Shall we grab a cup of tea and then I’ll talk you through it?’ Meakin suggested.

There was probably a way of getting the information while simultaneously denying Super-Dad his moment of glory, but Gibbs couldn’t be bothered to manipulate the situation. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re buying.’

‘Saving the pennies, are we?’ Meakin laughed as they walked along the corridor towards the smell of lamb and cabbage left over from lunchtime. ‘Shocking how expensive kids are, isn’t it?’

Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say it.

‘Worth every penny, though, right?’

‘Too early to tell.’ Gibbs didn’t see why he should have to lie to suit Meakin. By the time his twins grew up, Debbie would have kicked him out for sure, and she and her mother would have turned them against him. However hard he tried, Gibbs couldn’t persuade himself that fatherhood was a sensible investment, financially or emotionally.

‘You don’t mean it.’ Meakin laughed again. ‘Don’t worry, you can admit you love ’em to bits. I won’t tell anyone.’

They’d arrived at the canteen. ‘Why don’t I look at what you’ve got there while you get the teas in?’ said Gibbs, holding out his hand a second time. There was a long queue at the serving hatch; it’d be good to have something to do while he waited.

‘I’ll only be a sec.’ Meakin clung to the bundle of papers that made him temporarily more important and interesting than he normally was. ‘Why don’t you have a seat? I’ll push in and grab the teas.’

Gibbs sat at the only empty table in the room and took his red ball out of his coat pocket, along with some new bands he’d picked up on the walk back from the Brown Cow. He stretched them around the ball. Meakin had joined the back of the queue. Why say he was going to push in and then not do it? Who was that likely to impress?
Idiot.

‘Gibbs.’ Sergeant Jack Zlosnik appeared beside him. ‘Robbie Meakin’s looking for you.’

‘He’s found me.’ Gibbs nodded towards the serving hatch.

‘And you’re still sitting here? He hasn’t told you, then?’

‘No, he hasn’t. Any chance you can tell me while I wait for him?’ Gibbs glanced over at Meakin, who was busy staring straight ahead and had no idea that Zlosnik was about to make all his careful foreplay redundant.

‘It seems your murderer Tim Breary’s been tweeting on Twitter from prison.’

‘Possible, but highly unlikely,’ said Gibbs. ‘Unless he’s overpowered a guard and nicked his iPhone, and that’s not Breary’s style.’ Thanks to Liv, Gibbs knew all about Twitter. He knew that no one who used it would say, ‘tweeting on Twitter’. Liv had been determined to sign him up, insisting that he’d miss out otherwise. He’d chosen an alias – @boringbastardcg – and hadn’t added a picture of himself to his profile to replace the anonymous white egg image. He’d tweeted once so far, to Liv, to say that he was missing her. She’d told him off. Had he forgotten Twitter was public? No, he hadn’t; he didn’t give a shit.

When he couldn’t see Liv in person and his frustration was making him want to head-butt a hole in a wall, he read her Twitter timeline. She mainly tweeted about books and publishing, back and forth with a load of people who did the same. There was often an issue under discussion that Gibbs couldn’t imagine ever giving a toss about: were literary agents becoming superfluous? Were publishers becoming superfluous? Authors? Readers? High street bookshops? Physical books? Apostrophes?

Gibbs thought Liv’s fiancé Dominic Lund was superfluous. Occasionally he wondered if any of Liv’s publisher or journalist Twitter cronies would care to discuss that with his white egg alter ego.

‘All right, then, someone’s been tweeting under Breary’s name,’ said Zlosnik. ‘Someone rang it in because of the nature of what was being said.’

‘Which was?’

‘An SOS, basically. Something about a woman being attacked outside her house. An address in Silsford – Silsford nick spotted the Tim Breary connection and—’

‘What woman? Was there an address?’ Gibbs was on his feet. ‘Have Silsford sent a car? They’re fucking useless, that lot.’

‘I don’t know. Horse Fair Lane, Silsford. Course, the tweeter could be messing about, mistaken . . .’

Gibbs was halfway to the canteen door.

‘Victim’s name’s Gaby Struthers,’ Zlosnik called after him.

Proust slammed down the phone, having contributed no more than the occasional affirmative grunt to the final ten minutes of the conversation. Come to think of it, perhaps the call had ended much earlier, and those last ten minutes had been a sham for Simon’s benefit; Proust wasn’t that good a listener.

‘You were saying, Waterhouse? I told Sergeant Kombothekra and DC Sellers not to tell you, but really I wanted them to tell you? Why would I do that?’

Why this question instead of the one you should be asking?
Hadn’t he heard Simon say, ‘Your daughter told me’? He’d even said her name. Her old name: Amanda. Could Proust have missed it?

‘This might come as a surprise to you, but we don’t all ask for the opposite of what we want. That’s one of the many differences between you and me, Waterhouse. That’s why, when the prospect of marriage to Sergeant Zailer – she of the many careless owners – filled us both with horror, you proposed to her and I didn’t.’

Simon wished that someone would murder Proust. He wished he had the mental strength to do it and take the consequences. The world would be a better place.

‘It wasn’t about making me doubt Tim Breary’s story, was it?’ he said. ‘Drawing my attention to something he said that probably means he didn’t kill his wife – trying to look as if you’re hiding it from me, so that when I find out, it seems more significant than it is. It wasn’t about any of that.’