The Carrier (18 page)

I smile at him to thank him for opening the gates, and walk past the Volvo into the grounds of Lower Heckencott Hall. Here’s the long, ruler-straight driveway, exactly as I pictured it.

‘Oy!’ the man calls out.

Is he talking to me? I retrace my steps. He looks angry. ‘Who said you could go in there?’ His accent is roughest Culver Valley.

‘I pressed the buzzer for the Dower House and they buzzed me in,’ I lie.

‘No, they didn’t. I opened the gate. No one buzzed you in. They’re busy at the Dower House. They don’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Kerry buzzed me in,’ I say, determined to stand my ground. ‘I’m an old friend. My name’s—’

‘Gaby Struthers.’ He says it as if he’s found me out, even though I was about to tell him.

‘How did you know?’

‘So it’s Kerry you’ve come to see, is it? Not Lauren?’

‘Lauren? Cookson?’ We’re never going to get anywhere if we keep answering questions with questions. ‘Why would I come here to see Lauren? I know she used to work here, but . . .’ I can’t bring myself to say,
But Francine Breary’s dead, and dead people don’t need care assistants
.

He makes a noise that’s halfway between a laugh and a jeer, and leans his arm out of the car window. The movement pushes up his shirt sleeve to reveal a tattoo that would have made me think of Lauren if we hadn’t already been talking about her. Hardly anybody I know has a tattoo. Does she know anyone who isn’t covered in them?

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know Lauren lives here,’ the man snaps, but I’m not listening. I stare at the blue words on his skinny arm: ‘IRON MAN’.

Jason Cookson.
Lauren’s husband, three-time-survivor of the Iron Man Challenge. Gardener-cum-handyman-cum-remover-of-dead-Christmas-trees.

Murderer of Francine Breary?
Maybe.

‘Is Lauren back yet?’ I ask. ‘I’d like to see her too, if she’s—’

‘She’s not.’

‘How did you know who I was?’

‘Lauren said you’d come looking for her.’ He stares at the road ahead. The message is clear: he might have to speak to me, but he doesn’t have to look at me. ‘She doesn’t want you meddling in her life, so you’re wasting your time.’

‘I’m here to see Kerry. I had no idea Lauren lived here until you told me.’

‘You’re bullshitting,’ Jason says to his steering wheel. ‘Word of advice: never bullshit a bullshitter. If I were you, I’d turn round and walk away.’

So he’s a bullshitter, by his own admission.
Interesting.
‘You’re not me,’ I say.

‘You’d better not still be here when Lauren gets back.’

‘Off to pick her up at the airport, are you?’

‘If she comes home and finds you here, she’ll get herself in a right state. Stay away from her. She wants nothing to do with you. She’s scared shitless of you.’

‘Whatever she’s said—’

‘Forget what Lauren said, and listen to what I’m saying: get lost. No one wants you here.’

‘Forget everything Lauren said?’ I ask. ‘Or just the part about Tim Breary being innocent of murder?’

‘Cocky bitch!’ He jabs the air with an angry finger. I preferred it when he wasn’t looking at me. ‘Why don’t you fuck off back to your snooty yuppie house on Snob Street?’

He drives away before I can call him a hypocrite. Though it’s likely to be stupidity rather than a double standard; to apply two different sets of rules to two similar situations would be beyond Jason Cookson’s intellectual capabilities. He must have forgotten that he lives in the grounds of a stately home.

The gates have started to close. I sprint inside, then feel embarrassed, even though no one’s watching me, because there was no need to run. To my left, a path wide enough for a car to drive down follows the line of the wall around the farthest edge of the garden and disappears behind the Hall. I take the most direct route instead: the grass.
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
. . .

One of Tim’s favourite poems: Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. ‘It’s incredible how little people understand when the words and syntax couldn’t be simpler,’ he said during one of our lunches at the Proscenium. ‘Everyone thinks the poem’s a celebration of non-conformity, but it’s nothing of the sort. The writer’s tearing the narrator to shreds for his pompous self-deception, for being too vain to face the truth.’ I asked what the truth was. ‘That all our choices are insignificant,’ Tim said, grinning.

Three quarters of the way across a lawn that’s bigger than most crop-growing fields, I see a two-storey brick and stone building ahead and to the left. The Dower House; it has to be
.
It’s easily large enough to accommodate twelve people, with a clock tower protruding from the middle of its sloping roof, square bay windows and a wisteria that must look beautiful in bloom covering most of its façade.

I can see why Dan and Kerry bought it. It’s softer and more attractive than the Hall, and makes me think of a vicarage from a nineteenth-century novel. I bet Kerry fell in love with it before she’d crossed the threshold, when she first stood where I’m standing now. There’s a generous gravelled parking area outside with three cars parked on it. Does that mean Kerry and Dan have a visitor? Was Jason telling the truth when he said they were busy and wouldn’t want to be disturbed?

I don’t care
.
I need to know why Tim’s lying about killing Francine. Kerry will be able to tell me more than anyone else can.

The presence of so many cars on a weekday suggests that in their new life, Dan and Kerry don’t have Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five jobs. Dan was an accountant when I knew him before. He worked with Tim at Dignam Peacock. Kerry was a care assistant, like Lauren. Perhaps they also met through work. And then one day Kerry said she was leaving. She wouldn’t have said why, wouldn’t have mentioned the money. How surprised must Lauren have been, however many months later, to be offered a job by her former colleague, better paid than any she’d had before and with accommodation in the grounds of Lower Heckencott Hall as a perk?

What will happen to Lauren now that Francine’s dead? Will Kerry find other work at the Dower House for her to do? I shiver as I picture a grey-skinned faceless woman, a stroke victim like Francine, being wheeled in on a trolley as a substitute. To give Lauren someone new to look after.

Why Lauren, Kerry? Tim? Why choose thick, sweary Lauren?

Maybe Jason came first; Dan and Kerry hired him, then found out his wife was a care assistant . . .

Or
. . .

I shake my head to banish the idea. And again, with no luck
.
It’s determined to stick around until I acknowledge its presence, which I don’t want to do because it frightens me.

What if Tim, or Kerry, wanted Francine’s carer to be as stupid and vacant as possible? So that she wouldn’t notice . . . what?

This is useless. I could speculate all day and I still wouldn’t have a coherent theory at the end of it. I take a deep breath, march towards the Dower House’s front door like someone who knows what she’s doing, and ring the bell, hoping it will silence the voice in my head that’s still murmuring all the worst possibilities.

What if Tim and Lauren were . . .? No. No way.

But what if?

He’s one of the few people who doesn’t think he’s better than her, she said. She sounded fond of him. What if she knows Tim’s innocent not because she knows Jason’s guilty but because she was with Tim in a hotel room nowhere near the Dower House when Francine was murdered? What if she’s his alibi, and they can’t tell the police because they’re scared of what Jason would do if he found out?

I’d rather Tim were a murderer than sleeping with Lauren. It makes me feel sick to know this about myself.

There’s a date carved into the Dower House’s stone door-head: 1906. The tails of the 9 and the 6 are threaded through the 0. It makes me think of Lauren’s ‘Jason’ tattoo: red hearts on green stalks wound around the vowels. Did he come up with the design? Did he put on a soppy face or a threatening one as he demanded hearts on stalks? What about her dad, when he asked for the ‘FATHER’ tattoo on Lauren’s arm as his birthday present?

I ring the bell again, more insistently this time. I’ve been alone with my thoughts for too long; I’m starting to feel unreal.

Dan Jose opens the door. His fine fair hair is longer and more dishevelled than it used to be when he worked at Dignam Peacock. He’s got new glasses: square black frames instead of his old silver wire ones. ‘Gaby,’ he announces, as if I might not know who I am.

‘Is Tim sleeping with Lauren Cookson?’ I ask him.

He leaves it a few seconds. Then says, ‘Of course not. There’s been nobody.’

This is more information than I hoped for. Even more surprisingly, it’s good news. I start to cry. Dan steps forward, pulls me into a hug. ‘It’s good to see you, Gaby. Even . . . like this.’

I believe him; of course I believe him. All the same, I can’t get the other, untrue story out of my head: that Tim is involved with Lauren, or was before he had himself sent to prison. Of all the women he’s ever met, he wants her least, respects her least. That’s why he chose her; she’s what he thinks he deserves. He’d have been able to read her his favourite poems and smile to himself when she asked him to stop spouting a load of boring old shite. If he really wanted to prove that the choices we make couldn’t matter less, Lauren would have been his perfect fling.

‘Tim didn’t notice Lauren at all,’ Dan says. ‘It was embarrassing. Kerry tried to have a word with him about it but it had no effect. He didn’t see her in rooms, didn’t say hello to her when he passed her in the hall. I thought it was a snobbery thing, but it wasn’t.’

‘Then what was it?’ I ask. Years since we’ve met, and not even two minutes of small talk. Good.
It would be unbearable to have to go through the whole pointless ‘So, what have you been up to?’ charade.

‘Kerry could tell you better than me,’ Dan says. ‘She reckons that after . . . well, after everything that happened, Tim deliberately shrunk his world, so that there was no one in it but him, me and Kerry. And Francine, obviously, after she had her stroke.’

‘After?’ What a strange thing to say. ‘And before, presumably?’

Dan looks over his shoulder, into the house. I can’t see much, only a mirror above a dark wood cabinet with drawers and legs. There are no lights on in the hall. Despite the reassuring hug, Dan hasn’t invited me in.

What did he mean by ‘everything that happened’? Tim’s and my bust-up? More than that? Were we going to have to do the ‘So, what have you been up to?’ routine after all?

‘There’s a lot you don’t know, Gaby. Tim left Francine shortly after he last saw you, then went back to her after the stroke. I’d . . . I know Kerry would love to talk to you, but now’s not a good time. The police are here.’

Tim left Francine. Tim left Francine.
The words reel in my brain.

Dan’s right: there’s a lot I don’t know because he and Kerry didn’t tell me. A year and two months after I saw Tim for the last time, Kerry wrote me a letter. I’ve still got it; I know it by heart. Tim had moved to the Cotswolds, she wrote. There was no mention of Francine, and I assumed that since she was his wife, she had moved with him. Kerry and Dan had, Kerry told me, since they no longer needed to be in the Culver Valley for work reasons. The letter contained some vague, small-talk-ish mentions of future work plans: Kerry had made a contact at a local nature reserve and hoped to be able to get more involved, Dan was thinking of doing a PhD on narratives of risk and how our attitudes to financial gambles are determined more by the stories we tell ourselves than by our chances of ending up richer or poorer. That part would have made me smile if it weren’t for what followed immediately after it. Tim had asked Kerry to transmit a message to me: I was not to contact him again, ever.

Kerry also wanted me to know that she and I couldn’t be friends any more. I wasn’t surprised. I’d spoken to her only twice on the phone since Tim’s decision to boycott me, and both times she’d sounded uncomfortable. In her letter, she explained how important it was for Tim to know that I was no longer part of her or Dan’s life either, since they were the only two people he could rely on. ‘We’re his whole world now,’ she wrote. I didn’t suspect that this meant Francine was no longer on the scene; I assumed she was in the background, as restrictive and toxic as ever, but that Kerry didn’t want to dwell on the negatives. I thought she meant that she and Dan were the only good things in Tim’s life.

‘Knowing I was meeting you for lunch or even just chatting to you on the phone would kill him,’ the letter went on. ‘You’re his past, we’re his present. If you appear in our present, you’ll spill over into his, and he couldn’t bear that. I really hope you understand. Tim adores you and he always will (no, he hasn’t said so, but I KNOW!) and he can’t cope with the feelings.’

Every night, as I lie beside Sean or on my own in a hotel bed somewhere in Europe or America trying to fall asleep, I write letters to Kerry in my mind, letters I never commit to paper or computer.
I’ve been nothing if not obedient, Kerry. Look how successfully I’ve disappeared: not only from Tim’s life but from my own. I bury myself in the dazzling brilliance of my work and vanish from my home life more and more every day.

‘Which police?’ I ask Dan. ‘DC Gibbs?’ I could have given him a lift from the police station.

‘Have you been talking to Chris Gibbs?’

I tell him I’ve seen Gibbs once. I explain about Dusseldorf, my delayed flight, meeting Lauren. I quote her on the subject of letting an innocent man go to jail for murder.

Dan’s face drains of colour as I speak. ‘Did you tell Gibbs that Lauren said that?’ he asks.

Is he joking? ‘Why do you think I went to see him, Dan?’

‘Fuck.’ He closes his eyes.

‘What’s going on?’ Dan has the opposite of a poker face; always did.

‘Now’s not a good time, Gaby. You’ll have to come back.’

‘I’ll wait till Kerry’s free,’ I say, forcing my way past him and into the house.

‘Why was Lauren on your plane?’ he calls after me.

Good question.
Did Tim tell Lauren about me? Or maybe he tried not to mention me but couldn’t help it, and Lauren guessed that I would always mean more to him than she ever could; maybe she caught him looking at my website or my blog once too often. Was she envious enough to want to see first-hand if she had anything to be jealous of?