The Carrier (45 page)

‘Me.’

‘No. You didn’t send me this card. Kerry did.’

‘Me,’ he says again. ‘I’m The Carrier, Gaby. I wished I’d sent it. As soon as I knew about it, I wished I’d thought of it. Kerry sent it on my behalf, but I’m The Carrier. You must see that. I
do
carry your heart, Gaby. I always have.’

‘It was stupid of me to believe it could have been you,’ I say. ‘I suppose we believe what we want to believe, right?’

‘Please sit down.’ Tim edges towards the door, as if to block it. He thinks I might walk out.

There are chairs: comfortable ones. What is this room? It’s not how I imagined a prison would be.

I sit. ‘I didn’t work it out until I went to the Dower House and found the e. e. cummings book in your room. I’d read the poem hundreds of times in the card, but it was different when I saw it printed in a book. I thought about all the other poems I’d read in books, all the ones you’d shown me, and I realised the card couldn’t have come from you. There’s no way you’d have chosen that poem.’

‘“And it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant / and whatever a sun will always sing is you,”’ Tim quotes. ‘“And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart / i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”.’

He sits down opposite me. He could have come closer. Could be touching me now. There’s a free chair next to me.

Simon Waterhouse is outside. Our invisible chaperone. Francine always used to play that role.

This is too strange.

I don’t want poetry quoted at me. I want Tim’s arms around me. I want to claw at his face in fury. Jason Cookson wouldn’t have come after me if Lauren hadn’t followed me to Germany. That happened because of Tim: the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

I’m not going to say any of that. I’m going to talk about a poem instead.

‘It’s nonsense,’ I say. ‘Moons don’t mean anything. Suns don’t sing, the stars aren’t kept apart by wonder. The poem you asked Simon Waterhouse to give me – that’s much more your style: literal. If a poet has something important to say, he says it as simply as he can. Remember?’

Tim nods.

I open the card. My turn to quote. ‘“To Gaby, I love you. Happy Valentine’s Day, with love from The Carrier.” Those words were written by Kerry. Not you.’

She knew I’d think you’d sent the card. She knew I’d respond in kind and declare my love. She wasn’t trying to help you say what you were too timid to say – she was trying to force a crisis that would break us up. And she succeeded: if there had been no card from The Carrier, I wouldn’t have rushed to your office and told you I loved you too. You wouldn’t have confided in me about your dream, I wouldn’t have gone to Switzerland looking for clues
. . .
You wouldn’t have panicked and told me to get away from you and stay out of your life.

‘I should have told you the truth,’ Tim says. ‘I know that, I just . . . what could I say? I’d have sounded pathetic: “Actually, it’s from one of my friends, but coincidentally, that
is
how I feel about you.”’

‘Did you know Kerry had done it?’

‘Dan told me as soon as it was too late to undo. Kerry was too embarrassed to tell me herself. I don’t know why she expected me to be angry. I was grateful for her impatience. She knew how I felt about you. Better than I did.’

He believes she did it with the best possible motive. Of course.

‘Turns out my literal style isn’t suited to realistic human emotions.’ Tim smiles sadly. ‘Turns out moons do mean something. Suns do sing.’

Feelings. More feelings. I’ve got too many of my own to deal with without adding Tim’s to the mix. What I’m short of is facts.

‘So,’ I say. ‘Who else’s handiwork have you taken credit for, more recently? Whose burden of guilt has The Carrier been carrying?’

‘I killed Francine, Gaby.’

‘Lauren doesn’t think so. Neither does Simon Waterhouse. Neither do I.’

‘Lauren?’ Tim looks at me as if I’ve said something blasphemous. ‘You trust her more than you trust me?’

I don’t want to have to answer that question. Love and trust aren’t the same thing.

‘Tell me, then: why did you do it?’

Uncertainty flickers in his eyes. Then he forces it aside. ‘I told the police I didn’t have a reason, but that wasn’t true.’

‘Nothing you’re saying is true, Tim. I know you didn’t kill Francine.’ I open my bag, take out a piece of paper. ‘My poem for you,’ I say, handing it to him.

‘“Lied to like a judge I stepped down,”’ he reads aloud. ‘“My court cleared to the shrieks of the set free. / I know the truth, I know its level sound. / It didn’t speak, or didn’t speak to me.” Glyn Maxwell, “The Sentence”.’ He smiles. ‘Good choice.’

If I smile back at him, will that change the course of the conversation? Of the rest of our lives? Will he relax, see who I really am and tell me the truth, or take it as a sign that I’m willing to live with the lie and pretend it isn’t one?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
. . .

Who, really, are you, Gaby Struthers? Are you someone who can promise you’ll still love him once you know what he’s hiding from you, whatever it turns out to be?

Who, really, is Tim Breary? Do you know? What if it’s an unattainable fantasy you’re in love with and not the flesh-and-blood man in front of you.

‘Gaby, you have to believe me.’ He leans forward. ‘I killed Francine. I picked up a pillow, pressed it down over her face and smothered her. I had a motive – one I didn’t tell the police because it won’t help me get out of here any quicker. I’m willing to be punished, but that doesn’t mean I need to add years to my sentence by admitting why. There’s nothing admirable about my reasons for doing what I did, and they’re no one’s business but mine. And yours. I killed Francine because I’ve wanted to for a long time. Ever since I told you I never wanted to see you again.’

I can hear how much he wants what he’s saying to be true. I still don’t believe him.

‘I can’t explain why I waited years, or why I chose that particular day. Maybe I got tired of not listening to my instincts, not doing what I wanted to do. There was no particular catalyst.’ He sounds as if he’s reading from a script.

‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ I say. I hate it when people with choices imagine they don’t have a choice.

And when people who could leave their wives, or be unfaithful to them if they really wanted to, pretend that they can’t?

‘Gaby, listen.’ Tim sits down beside me, takes my hand. My body buzzes as if in response to an electric current. I want him to kiss me.

I don’t mind what the truth is. If he killed Francine, I will still love him. If he didn’t kill her but did something worse that he’s trying to hide, I’ll still love him. Same difference.

‘It wasn’t only the dream,’ he says, his breathing fast and ragged around the words. ‘That day at the Proscenium, the last time we saw each other . . . you were so excited about working out what it meant. I didn’t want to know. Living with my suspicions and a recurring nightmare was bad enough. I thought knowing for sure would be worse.’

‘It won’t be. You can still know for sure.’

He carries on as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Next thing I know you’re telling me you’ve been to Switzerland, to Leukerbad . . .’

‘I shouldn’t have done that, not without telling you,’ I say.

‘I’m glad you did. Now. Then, I couldn’t get past the dread – of finding out what the dream meant, partly, but it was more than that. You’d gone all the way to Switzerland for
me.
That was how much you loved me, how important I was to you, and there I was: trapped in a miserable marriage that, yes, I’m well aware any other man would have walked out of without a backward glance, but I knew I never could. I never would have, Gaby.’

But you did.
Am I missing something?

‘You knew I loved you long before I told you about going to Switzerland.’

‘I thought I did,’ Tim says. ‘When I heard you’d gone all the way to Leukerbad for my sake, it . . . I don’t know, it kind of brought it home to me. How strongly you must have felt about me.’

‘You keep saying “all the way”. All the way to Leukerbad, all the way to Switzerland, as if it’s New Zealand or something. I’d go to Leukerbad for a lunch or a spa treatment if there were good ones to be had. And if your dream had been set in New Zealand, I’d have gone there. Flying’s nothing to me. I do it five times a week.’

Tim sighs. I wish I could tell myself that I don’t mean to give him a hard time, and believe myself. Part of me wants to make him suffer, pay him back for all the pain he’s caused me.

‘Is there anyone apart from me whose recurring dream you’d fly even to London Heathrow to investigate?’ he asks. ‘Or take a break in your busy schedule to think about for five minutes?’

‘No.’

He looks relieved. We understand each other again.

‘Gaby, what we had . . . it was the best part of my life without a doubt, but it wasn’t real. It was the perfect fantasy. That day, when you told me about going to Switzerland, I thought, no, I don’t want this, it’s too much. I don’t want to know if Francine tried to kill me. Or the guilt of knowing you love me more than you should. I’d let things go too far, and there was no future in it. For both of our sakes, I had to get you away from me and make you stay away.’

‘Don’t pretend anything you did was for my sake, Tim,’ I say carefully.
Stop
,
a voice in my head commands. If I don’t stop, the bitterness will pour out of me like lava from a volcano. It could destroy everything.

Tim rubs his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. ‘You’re right. Want to know what I really thought?’

Yes. Also, if you really murdered your wife.

‘For years the dream had been bothering me and I’d done nothing about it. Taken no steps to find out what it meant, just hoped it’d go away. Even though I knew it never would. It still hasn’t. And you, a few days after hearing the story, you hop on a plane to Switzerland, and you come back saying you’ve found the answer! It scared me, Gaby. I thought, if she can do that, she can make me leave Francine, and eventually she will.’

‘Only if you’d wanted to,’ I say, hurt by what I think he’s accusing me of.

‘I did want to, more than I’ve ever wanted anything,’ Tim says. ‘The temptation was getting too dangerous. You think I didn’t know what a coward I was? I knew, Gaby. I knew that if I didn’t force you away from me, you’d grow to hate me like I hated myself. Why wouldn’t I leave a woman I didn’t love? We didn’t have any children together. What made me think I had to stay? Only the dream? Did I think Francine would hunt me down and kill me, do the job properly second time round?’

I wish I could answer that question.

And the rest.

‘You might not want to hear this, but if I’d known how I’d feel as soon as I’d told you we were finished, I think I’d have been able to do it. Leave her. I did, very soon afterwards, when I realised that aching to kill her wasn’t a feeling that was going to go away.’ Tim looks at me to check I’m taking in what he’s saying. ‘I was never happy with her, but after I lost you . . .’

‘You didn’t lose me. You threw me away.’

Tim tries again. ‘After that day when we . . . said goodbye, my feelings towards Francine changed. Instantly. It was as if someone had flipped a switch inside me. I couldn’t have imagined what a strong urge to kill someone felt like until I experienced it myself. All my energy was going into making sure it didn’t happen. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work. Have you ever wanted to kill someone? No, not wanted to –
known
you’re going to? That it’s just a matter of when, because, ultimately, you can’t stop yourself and actually it’s the only thing you want or care about?’

The only person I want to kill is already dead: Jason Cookson.

‘I left Francine to save her life,’ Tim says.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? If you weren’t with Francine, you could have been with me. Why didn’t you make contact?’ If I were playing fair, I would warn him that I won’t find his answer acceptable, whatever it might be.

He tries to smile, but it doesn’t take. ‘You’d have told me to fuck right off, wouldn’t you?’

I force myself to wait a few seconds before speaking.

‘How can you think that? You don’t
think it – it’s an excuse.’

‘Yes, you would, Gaby. Your pride wouldn’t have allowed you to do anything else. I knew you were way out of my league: Gaby Struthers the genius, the brilliant success story. Whereas I was a nondescript accountant who was one day going to kill his wife.’

‘You couldn’t be nondescript if you tried,’ I tell him, knowing it will make no difference to how he feels about himself.

‘I never wanted to be a murderer,’ he says quietly. ‘I moved halfway across the country to try and make sure I didn’t become one. Tried to kill myself instead of Francine, but that didn’t work. I chickened out and rang Kerry and Dan, soon as I’d done it. I didn’t want to die, Gaby – only because of you. I’d given up on us ever being together, but I knew I couldn’t leave a world that had you in it.’

Yet you did nothing. You let me think you and Francine were still together, all those years.

‘Why did you go back when Francine had the stroke?’ I ask.

‘I wanted to be closer to you. If she was bedridden, an invalid . . .’

‘What? What, Tim?’

He sighs. ‘If I no longer had to be scared of her, then I no longer had to be scared of you – the danger that I’d leave her for you. What could she do, lying in a bed, unable to move or speak?’

‘But you didn’t make contact. You were back in the Culver Valley, Francine had no power over you any more . . . why didn’t you get in touch?’

‘I didn’t think you’d want to know me, after the way I’d treated you. To be honest, I was happy just knowing you were nearby.’

‘I might have been happier too, knowing you’d moved back,’ I say angrily. ‘You didn’t give me the chance, though, did you?’

‘I’m sorry, Gaby. I hoped I might . . . I don’t know, bump into you in the street one day. I know how pathetic it sounds, believe me. Look on the bright side: when I killed Francine, I was reborn as a man of action, albeit a cold-blooded murderer.’