The Carrier (15 page)

‘Is that what your company makes? Intelligent string?’

‘We’re trying. We’re not quite there yet.’
We need another twenty million pounds’ worth of investment. Fancy chipping in?

Gibbs looks annoyed. ‘I’ve seen string,’ he says. ‘How d’you make it intelligent? It’s just string.’

I’m too tired to explain that what my colleagues and I are struggling to create is not the kind of string he’s picturing, that you buy in a ball from the hardware shop. If I did, he’d probably ask me why I call it string when it isn’t. ‘I need to sleep,’ I say. ‘Can I . . . how soon can I talk to Tim?’

‘That’s for HMP Combingham to decide,’ says Gibbs. ‘That’s where he’s remanded.’

The word makes my heart thud like a dropped lead ball.

Tim. In jail.
Because Francine’s dead.
If I could get in, I would: live there with him forever if I had to.

Where are these thoughts coming from? Who is the person having them, this doormat who would sacrifice everything she’s worked for to live in prison with a man who rejected her? I don’t recognise myself at all.

Gibbs hands me a hanky from his trouser pocket. ‘What are you thinking that’s made you start crying?’ he asks.

I was doing so well and now it’s ruined. Lauren Cookson ruined it, and I hate her. I hate her for making me feel like this again, when I thought I’d beaten it.

I am not, in fact, thinking at all. Things are crashing through me: that would be a more accurate way to describe it. ‘What’s the nearest hotel to the prison?’ I ask, standing up. I can’t bear to be in this cramped room for another second.

‘Aren’t you going home?’ Gibbs jolts to his feet. Is he about to grab me and force me down into my seat?

‘Yes. Right.’ I dab at my eyes with the hanky. ‘I have to go home first.’

I have to go home so that I can tell Sean I’m leaving.

‘There’s no need to visit me as often as you do,’ Tim Breary said to Simon.

‘From your point of view.’

‘I wouldn’t presume to speak from yours.’ Breary smiled. He and Simon were in the room at HMP Combingham known unofficially as ‘the parlour’. It was spacious, newly decorated, comfortably furnished, and only ever used by top-ranking prison staff for important meetings – apart from now. Simon had asked for it for this interview, and been surprised to get it. He was hoping that a change from the usual grey dingy backdrop to his stand-offs with Tim Breary would make all the difference.

Breary seemed not to have noticed the new setting. ‘I’m not bored or lonely in here, and I won’t be, however long I stay,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a couple of friends and I’m reading a lot, even for me. Dan and Kerry have very kindly donated more books to the library than the poor orderly in charge knows what to do with.’ If Breary was trying for a neutral expression, he was failing. He looked pleased with himself. ‘A handful of recidivist offenders have been introduced to the early works of Glyn Maxwell that otherwise might not have been,’ he said.

Simon assumed Glyn Maxwell was a poet. Everyone Breary mentioned who wasn’t his dead wife or Dan or Kerry Jose was a poet.

‘“Don’t forget,”’ Breary said in his quoting voice, which was both louder and gentler in tone than the voice he used to admit to killing Francine. ‘“Nothing will start that hasn’t started yet. / Don’t forget / It, its friend, its foe and its opposite.”’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ Simon was determined not to get impatient. Suspects often talked nonsense as a way of warding off questions they didn’t want to answer, but Breary didn’t have the standard bad attitude. His manner towards Simon was almost . . . caring had to be the wrong word, but it was close to that. Simon was becoming increasingly convinced that Breary’s aim was not to obstruct but to entertain and communicate – to make a connection of some kind. And his nonsense wasn’t nonsense, though it risked sounding as if it was. Simon found he wanted to dismantle each interview once it was over, analyse it line by line. Was Breary’s cryptic approach a way of denying or disguising the need to connect?

Don’t forget / It, its friend, its foe and its opposite.

Everything about the man sitting opposite him puzzled Simon and had from the start. Breary was a comfortable actor, revelling in the ongoing performance that was his everyday behaviour, yet he seemed entirely genuine at the same time. How was that possible? His articulate charm wasn’t smarmy in the way that it easily might have been. There was something restful about being in a room with him. Even when he was determinedly withholding information, there was still the sense that, in his presence, what you were hoping for might happen.
Totally false, based on nothing.
Simon could well believe that Breary had persuaded some of the more easily led scrotes that they were as interested in the early poems of Glyn Maxwell as they were in where their next skag fix was coming from.

Today, Breary’s projected bonhomie was more palpable than usual. He seemed less guarded than when Simon had spoken to him previously. Was it the room, with its chairs arranged in a friendly semi-circle? Simon was glad he’d requested it. He wanted Breary relaxed and expansive, imagining he’d got away with pretending to be a murderer.

Simon was certain he was nothing of the sort, and he was prepared to sit here all day – all night too, if he had to – in order to hear Breary admit as much. He’d switched off his phone, and relished the idea that Sam Kombothekra would by now have contacted Charlie and discovered that, as far as Simon was concerned, Sam’s perfidy had released him from his contractual obligations to Culver Valley Police for as long as he wanted that release to last. Proust wouldn’t see it that way, but Simon had another trump card lined up for that round of the game.

‘I’ve been doing a bit of writing myself,’ Breary said. Then he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I make sure to tear up all my creations once they’re finished.’

When Simon didn’t answer, Breary looked at the empty armchairs that dotted the space between them, as if he might get a reaction from them instead. Three empty green chairs.
Francine Breary, Dan Jose, Kerry Jose
. The other players, the absent ones. Simon wondered about the peripherals, Lauren and Jason Cookson. They lived with the Joses, had both been in the house when Francine was killed.
No empty chairs for them.

All five – Breary, the Joses and the Cooksons – had separately said, when asked, that it was unusual for the five of them and Francine all to be at home at the same time. Tim Breary, by his own account, had chosen a moment when the house was at its fullest to murder his wife, except his story was that he hadn’t chosen, hadn’t thought about it at all; he’d found himself doing it, without warning or anticipation, for no reason he was aware of.

‘What have we done to deserve so much extra visiting time?’ he asked Simon. ‘Is it you or me that’s getting special treatment? Ah, that’s your shy face. That means it must be you. Are you going to let me in on your secret?’

‘If you let me in on yours,’ Simon deflected. He hated the idea that he had a ‘shy face’, and that Breary recognised it. He was embarrassed by the preferential treatment he received from HMP Combingham, and a couple of other prisons too. When Charlie teased him about what she insisted on calling his celebrity status, he usually left the room. It didn’t stop her. Next time she tried it, Simon would tell her Tim Breary had never heard of him, so his reputation couldn’t be as powerful as she liked to pretend it was.

‘Why did you kill your wife?’

‘I’ve already told you: I don’t know. I wish I did. I’d like to be able to help you, but I can’t.’

Prison wasn’t normally good for anybody, but Breary looked no more under-nourished or sunken-eyed in here than he had as a free man.
Odd.
Usually, the skanky estate lowlifes held up better; it was less of a change for them. Upper-middle-class professionals tended to deteriorate rapidly, mentally and physically.

Not Tim Breary. His eyes glowed with what Simon wanted to call anticipation, though he wasn’t sure he could justify the choice of word; it was no more than a half-formed impression. Breary’s skin, too, looked particularly buffed today, as if whatever gave skin its nourishment had spruced it up from within. It was frustrating not to be able to reach inside the man’s head and uncover the cause of his wellbeing, drag it out into the light.

‘Are you pleased Francine’s dead?’

‘A new question. Excellent.’ Breary seemed to be giving the matter some thought. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No, I’m not pleased.’

‘You seem it.’

‘I know,’ Breary agreed. His smile faded, as if the discrepancy bothered him as much as it did Simon. ‘Maybe . . . Maybe one day I will be, but at the moment I’d rather . . .’ His words tailed off.

‘Rather someone hadn’t killed her?’

‘I’d rather
I
hadn’t killed her. Death should happen naturally. And I say that as someone who once cut his wrists and ankles open.’

This was news to Simon. He made sure to show no shock. ‘And as someone who, more recently, murdered his wife?’

‘Yes. I didn’t think that worth adding because you know about it already.’ The first hint of irritation from Breary. ‘There’s no point trying to catch me out. You won’t succeed.’

‘You say death should happen naturally, yet you took a pillow, put it over your wife’s face and smothered her.’

‘No mystery there. I acted in a way that was out of kilter with my beliefs, as I’ve been doing for most of my life. I’ve always thought it polite: a way of showing courtesy towards the dearly held principles of others, if I deny my own. The spirit of family-hold-back, rolled out across the plain of ethics, if you like.’

Simon didn’t. Was Breary crazy? No, that was too easy
.
‘Why did you cut your wrists and ankles open?’

Breary frowned. ‘Do we need to talk about that?’ He said it as if it was Simon rather than himself that he was tactfully trying to spare.

‘I’d like to know.’

‘I did it and shouldn’t have done it for the same reason: the world is better off if I have no influence on anything or anybody in it. That’s the dilemma of those of us who know we don’t matter. Are we more influential if we commit an act of violence to remove ourselves once and for all, or if we do our best to fade into the background?’

Simon tried to picture the foreground capable of making Breary fade. He failed. There weren’t many people whose conversation was so unpredictable, or so dramatic.

‘“You send an image hurrying out of doors / When you depose a king and seize his throne,”’ Breary said, proving Simon’s point. ‘“You exile symbols when you take by force.”’

‘What’s that?’

Breary held up a finger to indicate that he hadn’t finished. ‘“And even if you say the power’s your own, / That you are your own hero, your own king, / You will not wear the meaning of the crown.”’

‘Did you write that?’

‘I don’t have that kind of talent. A poet called Elizabeth Jennings wrote it.’

‘What does it mean? Not about kings,’ Simon clarified. ‘About you. What made you think of it, in connection with cutting your wrists?’ The suicide attempt was something new and solid, he told himself: consolation for the stalemate on Francine’s murder. He made a mental note to ask Dan and Kerry Jose about it.

‘It means what I said before,’ said Breary. ‘Let nature take its course. Take no lives – your own or anyone else’s. Don’t force the world to do your bidding, don’t unseat a monarch and try to take his place. “You will not wear the meaning of the crown.”’

‘Like you aren’t wearing the meaning of HMP Combingham?’ said Simon. ‘You’ve deposed a murderer and seized his throne. Or hers. Was that what you meant? That you might get a life sentence, but it’ll be easy for you to serve the time, knowing that its meaning – the punishment aspect – doesn’t apply to you?’

Breary threw back his head and laughed. ‘Simon, that’s brilliant. Wrong, but brilliant.’

Praise was the last thing Simon wanted, and he couldn’t remember asking to be called by his Christian name in this interview or any of its predecessors. He was fighting the uncomfortable feeling that he and Tim Breary weren’t part of the same reality and that there was nothing he could do to change that. ‘When my colleague DC Sellers interviewed you, you said that people often don’t know why they commit murder.’
That’s what I’ve heard second-hand from a woman called Regan. Let’s hope it’s true.
‘Did you research what real murderers do and don’t say? You must have wanted to make sure you got it right, not being a murderer yourself.’

‘I didn’t research anything,’ said Breary. ‘And if I had, would that prove I didn’t kill Francine?’

Simon thought so, but sensed he was about to be told why he was wrong.

‘Haven’t you ever had an experience and wondered if anyone else has had the same experience? Looked into it, maybe, to see if you have company in your predicament?’

‘No,’ Simon said truthfully. ‘Why would what’s happening to me have anything to do with anyone else and their life?’

Breary sat forward. ‘Are you being serious?’

A dangerous question when asked in that half-amused, half-shocked tone. Simon knew it well: less a genuine enquiry than a recommendation that you abandon your seriousness because the asker finds it inappropriate. The best answer, always, was ‘no’, unless you wanted to embarrass yourself, and Simon didn’t. He let the silence run on.

‘Sorry,’ Breary said. ‘I’m starting to want to work you out, just as you’re probably about ready to give up on me. The question is, would I rather understand or be understood?’

‘And the answer?’

‘Understand.’

Same here. Every time.

‘I’m not giving up on anything,’ Simon told him, aware of a tightness in his chest that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier. Why was it so hard to keep people on the right side of the barrier? Strangers turning up at his door wanting to talk about shared bullying trauma, murder suspects wanting to solve him as if he were a puzzle . . . That was life, when you boiled it down: one human puzzle trying to solve another. Simon wished he could resign himself to not knowing, and that everyone he met would be content not to know him.