The Carrier (7 page)

She’s saying all the things I want to be saying. Except the bit about Hugh Grant – I’d prefer the young David Bowie, but he’s not here either. I want to be walking away, like the redhead, out of this crappy hotel. So why aren’t I? I
can’t
– cannot, will not – share a bedroom with Lauren.

I feel something around my wrist. Her. She’s handcuffed me with her fingers again. ‘Don’t you even think about it,’ she says tearfully. It ought to sound like an order she has no right to give me, but all I hear is desperation. Something bad has happened to her, I think suddenly. It isn’t only the delayed plane. She’s traumatised; that’s why her reaction to hearing that the flight had been rerouted to Cologne was so over the top.
Something to do with her reason for coming to Germany. Maybe something to do with a murder.

Does her mother know what’s wrong with her? Is that why she told Lauren to make sure she stayed with me? Is the former Mrs Wayne Cuffley, first wife of “Husband”, so worried about her daughter that she’s pinning all her hopes on a woman she’s never met?

‘Promise you won’t go off and leave me,’ Lauren hisses reproachfully, as if her imagining my betrayal and it happening are one and the same.

‘I promise,’ I say blankly. Part of my brain has gone numb. There’s no way out. A sleepover with Lauren Cookson in the worst hotel in Europe. No point thinking about it. Not when you have to do it.

She lets go of my arm. ‘That’s all right, then.’

It is as far from all right as Cologne is from Combingham.

‘We’re lucky, we are.’

‘Are we?’ If we are, I must be suffering from cognitive dysmorphia.

‘We’re together,’ Lauren says. ‘A lot of these poor sods are going to have to share a bedroom with a total stranger.’

Simon was making coffee for Regan Murray, spilling water and granules everywhere. Subconsciously-deliberately, Charlie guessed, so that he’d have to waste ten minutes cleaning up after himself, and perhaps make the drink again because his first attempt was a mess. Waste wasn’t the word Simon would have used: in his book, if it succeeded in postponing a difficult conversation, it was time well spent.

Was there any reason to assume the conversation with Proust’s daughter would be difficult? Stupid question.

‘Better ring your sister and tell her not to come,’ Simon said in a monotone. ‘What did she want, anyway?’

‘You’re asking me
now
?’ Charlie nodded towards the closed door. To consolidate their image as ungracious hosts, she and Simon had left Regan Murray alone in the lounge and shut themselves in the kitchen.

‘She’s an intruder. Let her wait. What does Liv want, and why the secrecy?’

‘Not secrecy – reluctance to get involved,’ said Charlie. ‘On my part. Liv wanted me to ask you. I said no, because I knew there was no point, you’d never agree. If she wants to try and persuade you, that’s up to her.’

‘So she said she’d come round tonight. And you didn’t tell me.’ Simon was picking up individual granules of instant Kenco and transferring them from the worktop to the mug. Some were too wet from the pools of water they’d been lying in; they’d lost their solidity, and smeared across his fingertips.

‘Like I said, I wanted nothing to do with it. But—’

‘Tell me, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Give me a chance! I was about to say, let’s skip the bit where we demonstrate that what I want couldn’t matter less, since we’re short of time. Liv wants to beg you – wanted me to beg you on her behalf – to go to her and Dom’s wedding.’

Simon looked up. ‘Why wouldn’t I? I’m married to you: her sister. You’re going, aren’t you?’

Charlie was surprised. ‘Yes, but I assumed, and Liv assumed, that you’d be giving it a morally judgemental wide berth. Have you decided you approve of infidelity?’

‘Not my infidelity, not my business.’ Simon picked up the mug. Water dripped from it onto the floor. He tilted it to wipe its bottom on his shirt, spilled coffee on his trousers, put the mug back on the worktop. ‘What do you think I’m going to do? Co-opt Liv and Dom’s wedding into my courageous moral odyssey by boycotting it? That’d make me a pompous arsehole. Which I’m not.’

‘Since when?’ said Charlie. ‘No one notified me.’

‘Very funny.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be. All right, since you’re full of surprises tonight: Liv also wanted me to ask you if you’d read something. At the wedding. I told her there was no way you’d stand up in front of a crowd of media luvvies and lawyers . . .’

‘I’ll read,’ said Simon.

‘You
will
?’

‘Why me, though? She’s got plenty of people to choose from who love the sound of their own voices – all her friends.’

‘She came over all coy when I asked her why you. I think she wants to show you off: her brother-in-law, the brilliant detective.’

‘As long as I don’t have to introduce myself, say my name, any of that shit. If all I have to do’s walk up to the front, read, go and sit down, I’ll do it. I’ll read a passage from
Moby-Dick
.’

He sounded enthusiastic, for Simon. Charlie felt guilty. ‘Not quite,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She wants you to read something else. And I’m not telling you what it is.’

‘Why not?’

Because I’m incapable of relaying the information in a neutral tone of voice. Because I think it’s utterly ridiculous, and I don’t want to influence you
.

‘Well?’ said Simon. ‘I’m waiting.’

He wasn’t the only one. Charlie glanced at the closed kitchen door. She was starting to feel jumpy. ‘Can we discuss this later?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what our intruder wants?’

Simon turned away. ‘Why’s she got two names?’ he said.

‘You’re asking the wrong person, Simon. She’s sitting just through there. I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you.’

‘How does she know our address? What’s she doing turning up here at ten o’clock on a Thursday night?’ He often referred to particular hours of particular days in a way that implied they were only acceptable if nothing at all happened in them. He could be alive, awake, bored out of his skull, but still nothing was allowed to fill those prohibited zones. Other more fortunate diary slots – nine on a Monday morning, say – were allowed to contain events. Charlie had never got to the bottom of this peculiar time apartheid, and now wasn’t the moment.

‘If I’m reading, I’m reading what I want to read,’ Simon said quietly.

‘What? Oh.’ He was back to Liv’s wedding. At which there was zero chance of his being allowed to read any part of
Moby-Dick
.

‘She looks like him. It’s like having a piece of him in the house.’

Back to Proust’s daughter again. Switching between subjects so quickly wasn’t like Simon. Nor was it like him to be diverted from obsessive thoughts about an ongoing case. He was more anxious than he was willing to acknowledge, and there was no need for it. ‘Tell her you’re not prepared to talk to her and ask her to leave,’ Charlie suggested.

The kitchen door swung open. Regan Murray stood on the threshold. ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘However much you might want to.’

‘Our mistake was to let you in,’ said Charlie, putting herself between Simon and this diluted female version of the Snowman: a protective barrier. ‘There’s no reason for you to be here. Any communication that needs to take place between Proust and Simon can happen at work. They have no personal relationship outside work, and I’m pretty sure whatever you want to say is something personal, which makes it something we don’t want to hear.’

Regan stepped sideways so that she could see Simon. ‘You asked why I’ve got two names, and how I knew your address.’

‘Did you have your ear pressed against the door?’ Charlie asked.

‘I got your address from my mum’s address book. I have two names because—’ She broke off with a sigh. ‘Well, the surname part’s obvious. Murray is my married name.’

‘That makes a good tongue-twister,’ Charlie told her. ‘You could even add a bit: “Murray is my married name, I married Mr Murray”. Did you know opera singers repeat tongue-twisters before concerts, to make their lips more flexible? I heard it on the radio.’

‘I changed my first name to Regan two months ago. Dad doesn’t know. Neither does Mum. I didn’t want to be Amanda any more because my father chose that name for me, so I changed it. It’s easy enough to do. Not so easy to tell my parents.’ She smiled at Simon, who was resolutely not looking at her. He’d been staring at Charlie since Amanda-Regan had walked in, as if he wanted her to take care of the situation. Not, obviously, by prattling on about tongue-twisters, though Simon would have been the first to admit that it was impossible to get to the good ideas unless you went via the bad ones.

‘Is that my coffee?’ Regan asked, pointing to the mug.

Charlie handed it to her.

‘Thank you. Are you familiar with the name Regan?’ she asked. ‘From
King Lear
?’

‘And from every council estate in the Culver Valley,’ said Charlie.

‘Regan is Lear’s spineless traitor daughter who doesn’t love him but pretends she does.’

‘You chose Regan over Goneril?’
Yes, this is really happening. You are standing in your kitchen, beside a statue of your husband, debating King Lear’s baby name choices with Proust’s daughter.

‘I’m too spineless to tell my father I’ve changed my name,’ Regan said to Simon, ignoring Charlie completely. ‘He’d ask me why, and I’d be too frightened to tell him the truth. I’d end up hating myself more for creating another opportunity for him to win.’

The thing about people who hate themselves, Charlie thought, is that you totally identify and sympathise at the same time as massively not wanting them as house guests. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that the expression “son of a bitch” is so well known, but no one ever calls anyone a “daughter of a bastard”?’ she asked, looking around.
All responses welcome. The more the merrier.
‘Is it some kind of odd sexism, do you think?’

‘I’m terrified of him,’ Regan went on. ‘Have been for forty-two years. And if I don’t want him to know I’ve changed my name, I can’t tell Mum either. She’s his faithful lackey. They both want me to carry on being scared of Dad. It suits them fine. If I wasn’t scared, I might start telling the truth about my childhood.’

Charlie tried, subtly, to fill her lungs with plenty of oxygen for the ordeal ahead. This was potentially worse than anything she could have imagined, in that it threatened not to finish soon. Childhoods, typically, were eighteen years long.

‘I grew up in a totalitarian regime,’ said Regan. ‘There’s no other way to describe it. I don’t think I need to describe it, not to you two.’

Thank you, Lord.

‘I’m sure you can imagine what I went through. You know what my dad’s like.’ Regan took a sip of her coffee, winced, then tried to hide it. ‘The reason I’m here – and I’m sorry it’s so late on a weeknight, I’m sorry I didn’t write or ring first to ask if it was okay. For weeks I didn’t think I’d be brave enough to contact you at all, and then tonight, when I realised I was, I knew I just had to do it, before I woke up and found I’d turned into a coward again.’

‘The reason you’re here?’ Charlie prompted.

Regan rewarded her with a small smile, for saying something sensible, finally. ‘I’m trying to come out from under the shadow. You know? With the help of a good therapist, I’m trying to build myself a proper life, build myself into a proper person.’

‘That’s been on my to-do list for years,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s making the time, though, isn’t it?’

‘Can you give the mockery a rest?’ Simon muttered.

‘It’s okay,’ Regan told him. ‘I know I’m putting you both in an awkward position by sharing this with you. You have to say something, and what can you say?’

Charlie could think of lots of things. They all had the word ‘fuck’ in them.

‘Go on,’ said Simon.

Regan looked stunned by this encouragement to speak. It took her a few seconds to recover from it. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Well . . . it’s still early days. I’m nowhere near ready to confront my dad, but I’m taking steps in that direction. Important steps, my therapist says. Choosing a name for myself that isn’t the name he gave me was the first one.’

‘Regan’s a baddy in
King Lear
,’ Charlie pointed out.

‘When you’re brought up by someone like my father, you feel like a baddy every time you have a thought or feeling about him that isn’t hero-worship. Like a traitor. Regan is who I am at the moment. When it no longer feels like me, I’ll change my name again.’

Charlie laughed. ‘And your shrink’s given this her stamp of approval? I’d get a new shrink.’

‘Will you shut up?’ said Simon. ‘You know nothing about it.’

Not quite true. Last year, thanks to one of Simon’s cases, Charlie had met a psychotherapist who’d talked a lot of sense: a woman named Ginny Saxon. Ginny had offered an interpretation of Simon: why he was as he was. Charlie had never told him. She didn’t know if she ever would. She couldn’t decide if it would be helpful or harmful to pass on Ginny’s theory about the psychological syndrome he might be suffering from. She’d have liked to ask someone’s advice, but if she couldn’t tell Simon, she certainly couldn’t tell a third party. For several months, she’d been wishing she didn’t know anything about it herself, as if wishing could make the knowledge go away.

‘Step two is this,’ Regan was saying. ‘Coming here, meeting you, Simon. I know it sounds mad, but . . . you matter to me. You’re my symbol of courage, in my head – the only person who’s ever stood up to my dad. Openly, I mean. Lots of people loathe him and do nothing about it – everyone he knows, apart from my mum – but no one’s ever told him what they think of him to his face apart from you.’

Simon cleared his throat. ‘How do you know I’ve done it?’

‘Dad talks about you a lot,’ said Regan. ‘Mainly to Mum, but also to me, sometimes. He always says the same thing: that he’s only ever been loyal and supportive and encouraging to you. That you throw it back in his face every day, betraying and insulting him whenever you can.’

‘That’s not how it is. Or how it’s ever been,’ Simon said woodenly. Charlie wanted to help him, but she could hardly advise on how best to conduct the conversation while it was still in progress, and once it was over it would be too late. He needed to decide: either not to engage at all, or to immerse himself wholeheartedly and in the manner of a human being.