The Carrier (41 page)

‘I’m going to show you the first photograph,’ says DC Simon Waterhouse. ‘I want you to tell me if you’ve seen this man before.’

I’m in a police station. There are police everywhere. He can’t hurt me here.

‘It’s only a picture,’ Charlie Zailer says quietly next to me. ‘You’re totally safe in this room. And you don’t have to look till you’re ready. Simon won’t turn it over until you say the word.’

I nod. Nothing happens. Is he waiting, literally, for a word rather than a gesture?

Should I tell him to go ahead? I don’t want to try and identify the man who attacked me anywhere near as much as I want not to have to see his face again, but DC Waterhouse set out the order of events when he came in and took over: first the photographs, then some questions, then he’ll take me to see Tim.

I would rather drive to HMP Combingham myself, or have Charlie drive me. If she and I were alone, I might be able to persuade her to tell me what’s changed. She left the room to take a call, and when she came back she looked rattled and had DC Waterhouse with her. Now she’s moved round to my side of the table. Either she can’t stand to be near him or she thinks I need protecting from him. She has seemed nervous since he joined us, and it’s making me want to get away from her, from both of them. I thought I’d feel safe in the same room we were in yesterday, but everything’s wrong today: the hard table and chairs are where the armchairs should be, the blind’s not down, the grilles of the ventilation units are visible through the window; I can see their multiple slat-mouths, hear them breathing at me.

I’m struggling to get my own breathing under control, and my body temperature. My feet are painfully cold, as if I’ve been planted in ice.

What if I’m like this in front of Tim?
I can’t be. Somehow, I must leave this room with more strength than I brought in here.

‘Gaby?’ says Charlie. ‘You okay?’

‘Show me the photograph.’

Waterhouse turns it over and places it on the table in front of me. It’s all there: the same short hair, small square forehead, thin lips; the same brown skin tags on the neck. I couldn’t think of the name for them on Friday, but that’s what they’re called.

I lunge for the picture and rip it in half, and again. I carry on tearing until I can’t any more because the pieces are too small. ‘Sorry,’ I say, not meaning it.

‘Have you seen him before?’ Charlie asks. Clearly a non-verbal answer won’t do.

‘On Friday, outside my house.’

‘He was the man who warned you to keep away from Lauren? Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

Charlie sweeps the fragments of the photograph across the table, away from me. I’d like to be able to set fire to the disconnected parts of his face. Together, they still add up to him. Burning would sort that out.

‘Gaby? Is there anything you’d like to ask us?’

‘Is Lauren all right? Where is she?
Tell me you haven’t left her at the Dower House.’
Why am I the only person who cares about her safety?

‘Why are you so worried about Lauren?’ Waterhouse’s question is a mirror image of my unspoken one.

‘Because she’s married to Jason, who’s a killer, and who sends his heavies round to people’s houses to . . .’ My throat closes, choking off the end of my sentence.

‘To what? What did he do to you, the man in the picture? He did more than warn you, didn’t he? Or else why did you tear up his photo?’

I could say that I object to being given orders by strangers, which is true. Or I could say nothing.

‘You haven’t asked us anything about him,’ says Waterhouse. ‘Is that because you already know who he is? Gaby?’

‘How could I know?’

‘Don’t you want to know his name? Most people would be curious.’

‘Would they? I’m sure Jason Cookson’s got lots of thuggy friends, any of whom’d be willing to intimidate a woman on his behalf. I don’t care what Thug X’s name is – he could just as easily have been Thug Y or Thug Z.’

‘Do you care about us finding and punishing X, Y or Z for what he did to you? You don’t seem to.’

‘It’s not illegal to warn someone to stay away from someone else, is it? No, I don’t care about you punishing him.’
Whatever you did wouldn’t be enough.
I’d rather not have to know his name.

‘Please, Gaby, can you seriously consider telling us what really happened on Friday?’ says Charlie. ‘It would help us so much, and it might help Tim. If you’d rather speak to me in private, DC Waterhouse can leave us alone for a bit.’

Is this how the police make people talk when they don’t want to: by misrepresenting them until they feel they have no choice but to protest and set the record straight? ‘The reason I’m holding back has nothing to do with embarrassment or an inability to say the word “vagina” in front of a man. I told you: I wasn’t sexually assaulted.’

‘Then why not tell us exactly what happened?’ Charlie asks.

‘How do I know you won’t tell Tim? He can’t find out.’

‘Why is that so important?’

‘I’m worried he’ll see me as damaged goods if he finds out that Jason’s thug friend violated my honour – that’s what I’d say if I were a simpering cliché, right?’

‘And if you were you?’ Charlie asks.

No idea, sorry. I haven’t been me for a long time. In order to be me, I need Tim. Which makes me a different kind of cliché.

Waterhouse is trying to cut the plastic surface of the table with his thumbnail; he has absented himself without leaving the room. Was it my reference to the female anatomy that sent him into automatic shut-down mode, or doesn’t he know how to handle women who behave like men? I’ve met that before: I meet it nearly every time I leave the house. Until Friday, I met it when I returned to the house as well, but not any more, not since I left Sean.

Never again in my own home
.

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge the downside: that I no longer have a home.

‘I don’t want Tim to feel guilty, and I know he would,’ I tell Charlie, who is a better interviewer than Waterhouse even when he isn’t ignoring me. He makes me feel as if everything I say is the wrong answer; Charlie does the opposite. ‘What happened to me wasn’t Tim’s fault any more than it was mine. It was Jason’s fault and the man who . . . did what he did to me, but Tim wouldn’t see it that way. He’d trace it back to himself and feel responsible: if he hadn’t confessed to Francine’s murder, Lauren wouldn’t have turned up in Dusseldorf and said what she said to me. I wouldn’t have gone to the Dower House on Friday and met Jason, who wouldn’t have decided he needed to keep me quiet by whatever means necessary.’

‘What means?’ Waterhouse asks.

‘Give me a cast-iron guarantee that whatever I tell you will go no further than this room.’

‘You care more about Tim’s feelings than you do about your own,’ says Charlie. It doesn’t sound like a question. ‘So do Kerry and Dan Jose.’

‘You won’t understand, not knowing Tim, but however much he matters to us, it’ll never be enough to compensate for how little he matters to himself. We’re his ego: me, Kerry and Dan.’

And I wish I didn’t have to be. I wish he were stronger. I wish I could say for certain that he’d drop everything for me as I have for him.

I crush the thought in my mind, tell myself I’m being unreasonable. I can’t expect everyone to be as bold and reckless as me.

‘You need to tell us what happened to you on Friday.’ Waterhouse’s deep voice has the force of an unexpected blow. ‘This is about a whole lot more than Tim Breary, his ego and his dead wife, as of last night.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

His flat stare contains no willingness to compromise: if I want to be told, I first have to tell.

I direct my answer to Charlie. ‘Jason’s emissary put a plastic bag over my head and taped it round my neck. I thought I was going to suffocate, but then he tore a hole in the plastic near my mouth so that I could breathe. He’d taped my wrists together behind my back. I don’t know when he did that. I think I must have blacked out from the shock. I know he put his arm round my neck and squeezed. That was his first move when he came up behind me: crushing my windpipe.’

‘I should have insisted on taking you to the hospital,’ says Charlie.

‘Would have been a waste of time. Physically I’m fine.’

‘Carry on,’ Waterhouse says. It feels like an intrusion, though the three of us are supposedly taking part in the same conversation.

‘When you’re ready, Gaby.’ Charlie gives him a look that makes me wonder if she’s tired of being his antidote.

Like me and Tim?
No. I push the thought away.

‘There’s no rush.’

‘Thanks, but I’d rather get it over with.’ Why do people always want you to linger over the bad stuff?
Take your time recounting the details of the worst experience of your life at a rate of one word per day, make the story last for three years instead of an hour.
No thanks
. ‘He said he’d come to teach me a lesson. I asked what it was, but he wouldn’t tell me straight away – that would have been too quick and easy. I had to suffer first, so that the lesson would make an impression on me. He undid my belt and my trousers, pulled them down to my knees, pulled my underwear down. At that point I thought he was going to rape me and kill me, but he didn’t. Instead he asked me all kinds of sick questions: what was the worst thing he could do to me? What’s the most frightened I’ve ever been? Was I more frightened or more humiliated by what he was doing to me? That sort of thing.’

‘Twisted fuck,’ Charlie mutters.

Did Lauren hear my answers? I can’t go anywhere near the possibility in my mind: the idea that there was an audience. I block it out.

‘His plan was to scare me, then spare me,’ I say. ‘Fill my mind with the worst that could happen, then release me, give me a chance to be good and follow his orders: to stay away from Lauren, say nothing to anyone about what he’d done to me. Or else next time would be worse. He didn’t say that, but it was clear what he meant.’
And here I am telling the police.
My vision rocks; I have to close my eyes. Am I trying to prove to myself that I’m not scared of next time? It won’t work. I’m petrified; every cell in my body knows it.

‘What happened then, after he warned you?’ Charlie asks.

‘Once he was satisfied I’d learned the lesson he wanted me to learn, he cut my wrists free and walked away.’

‘I’m so sorry, Gaby.’

‘Thanks.’ Is that the appropriate response? I’ve always hated the linguistic fusing of apology and sympathy. There’s something messy about it. I’d have preferred her to say, ‘That’s the most horrendous thing I’ve ever heard.’ Except it isn’t; she’ll have heard far worse stories than mine, the sort that generate shocking headlines: ‘Raped and Abandoned to Die’, ‘Raped, Tortured and Left to Starve’. Who’d bother to read ‘Not Raped and Not Even Injured’?

‘I’m going to show you another picture,’ says Waterhouse. Six seconds later, he reaches into his folder. I wait for his hand to reappear but it doesn’t, not straight away. ‘Are you ready?’ he asks.

I wish he’d just show me instead of trailing it. If I need to be warned, that must mean there’s something to dread.

He holds up the photograph in front of me. ‘That’s Jason Cookson,’ I say, as repelled as I was on Friday by the coiffed-pubes beard and the kink in the shoulder-length hair. Maybe it’s not from being worn in a ponytail; maybe that’s just how it grows.

‘For clarity, can you tell us if and when you’ve met this man before?’ Waterhouse says.

‘I told Charlie yesterday. I met Jason on Friday at the Dower House. The gates opened as I arrived, and he drove out.’

‘Did he identify himself to you as Jason Cookson?’

‘No. He didn’t need to. I knew it was him.’

‘How?’

‘The tattoo on his arm: “Iron Man”. Lauren told me in Germany that Jason had done the Iron Man Challenge. Three times,’ I add unnecessarily.

‘Aside from the tattoo, did you have any other reason for believing the man in the car was Jason Cookson?’ Waterhouse asks.

‘Yes. The way he talked about Lauren and warned me off going anywhere near her. It was . . . proprietorial, protective. Why? What does it matter how I knew?’

‘You didn’t know. You can’t know something that isn’t true.’

He looks at Charlie. I can’t make sense of his words, but I can read his eyes, and hers: they’re having a silent argument about which of them should tell me. Tell me what?

‘The man in this picture isn’t Jason Cookson,’ Waterhouse says eventually. ‘He’s Wayne Cuffley, Lauren Cookson’s father.’

The room tips. I close my eyes until the feeling passes, until I’m ready to put things back in the right order. Could I have been wrong? I can’t think. I need to be scientific about it: measure my certainty before I speak. First I need to track it down.

‘But . . . he’s too young. He’s about forty, isn’t he?’ I know this proves nothing. I hear Lauren’s voice in my head:
In twenty years’ time, I’ll be forty-three. No forty-three-year-olds have great-grandkids.

Some forty-year-olds have twenty-three-year-old daughters, though.

‘Wayne Cuffley is forty-two,’ Waterhouse says. ‘He’s only six months older than Jason Cookson.’

‘Yesterday you said Jason might as well have had “Thug” tattooed on his forehead to add to his collection,’ says Charlie. ‘It didn’t sink in until this morning. I realised you must have meant his collection of tattoos, and I knew he didn’t have any. There are no tattoos anywhere on Jason’s body.’

How can she know? Has she seen every part of his body? The idea makes me want to throw up.

All I have to work with is a strong desire to tell her she must be mistaken, her and Waterhouse. I want the man I met at the gates of the Dower House to have been Jason because I hate being wrong. It’s not enough.
I can think of no reason why Lauren’s dad shouldn’t have completed the Iron Man Challenge at least once. And I know he’s a fan of tattoos; Lauren had ‘FATHER’ tattooed on her arm at his request – her spare arm, the one that hadn’t already been appropriated by Jason’s name. I wonder if Wayne Cuffley has a ‘DAUGHTER’ tattoo that I didn’t spot on Friday. Jason didn’t reciprocate; maybe Wayne didn’t either. Do all the men in Lauren’s life treat her as their own personal graffiti wall?