The Carrier (19 page)

No. They weren’t having an affair. There’s no reason to think that they were.

I picture Tim passing Lauren in the hall I’m standing in, avoiding her eye, pretending not to have noticed her presence . . .

If Dan’s following me as I start to search his house, I’m not aware of it. I run past closed doors, lots of them in a row. Dan and Kerry should apply for change of use and rebrand this place as a door museum. Wrong turn. I go back the way I came, turn right where I turned left.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .

This looks more promising: a patch of light at the end of the hall that must mean an open door. I hear a voice that doesn’t sound like Kerry’s. A woman. As I get closer, she says, ‘I’m interested in your and Dan’s money. You’re obviously not short. Sam says Tim hasn’t worked for some time, so it can’t have been him paying for all this, and a care assistant for Francine.’

Who’s Sam?

‘Where did the money come from? And how come you’re so generous with it?’

I know the answer to that one. I swallow hard and walk into the room.

‘Shall I explain about the money?’ the woman standing in the doorway asked Kerry Jose. To Charlie she said, ‘Without me, there wouldn’t be any – that’s my excuse for butting in.’ She had thick brown shoulder-length hair, this intruder; pale skin, large brown eyes, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Charlie was puzzled by her clothes. They had the unmistakable gleam of designer-expensive, but were heavily creased and dirty in places: muddy, food-stained. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot.

‘Sorry, I’ve come straight from an exhausting delayed-plane endurance test,’ she explained, looking down at herself. She didn’t sound sorry. Her tone would have been better suited to the words ‘Tough shit’. ‘No time to change,’ she added, aiming a challenging stare in Charlie’s direction.

All right, so she was clever; she’d known what Charlie was thinking. And confident: very few people walked into a murder investigation in progress and declared that money wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for them.

Charlie was about to ask the woman for her name when she was distracted by a yelp from Kerry Jose. She turned. Kerry, who was leaning against the Aga rail, had covered her mouth with her hands and was crying. She’d been dry-eyed and calm only seconds ago. ‘Gaby! Oh, thank God!’ Kerry flew across the room suddenly, making Charlie jump, and gripped the dishevelled visitor’s body in a vice-like hug, pinning her arms to her sides.

Unambiguous, then: somehow, this woman was important. She belonged here, though Kerry evidently hadn’t known she was coming.

She even looked as if she belonged. Her appearance, simultaneously affluent and mud-smeared, worked perfectly with the vibe of Kerry and Dan Jose’s sunflower-yellow-walled kitchen, which was a similarly bizarre mix of the aspirational and the shocking. It was a huge room that easily swallowed up two tables, six chairs around each one, and had amazing unframed oil paintings on the walls. It was also one of the messiest domestic spaces Charlie had ever seen. Not a single surface or part of a surface was visible; Charlie had had to balance the cup of tea Kerry Jose had made her on a pile of old Christmas cards, prompting Kerry to say, ‘Yes, use those cards as a coaster, good idea!’

Every counter and tabletop was piled high with unstable towers of things that had nothing in common with each other and didn’t belong together: a telephone directory on top of a board game on top of a box of cereal on top of a book of fabric samples balanced on a tennis racket. Next to that particular tower was a fruit bowl that contained a tape measure, a sheep brooch made mainly of pink wool, a packet of plasters, a rolled-up pair of socks, four old ice-lolly sticks with red and orange staining on their top halves, and a broken bra with the underwiring poking out of the black fabric. Between the two tables – one rustic, wooden and round, one with elegant dark wood legs and a veined white marble top – at least fifteen cardboard boxes were stacked in the middle of the floor. Charlie could only see the contents of the top layer: books, maps, a folded rug, a clock with cracked glass and a bent big hand.

How could anyone live like this? Had Kerry and Dan Jose trained themselves to look only at the paintings when they came in here? Charlie had to admit they were stunning, though she couldn’t work out if they were abstract or not. They seemed to depict women’s bodies merging into mainly blue and green landscapes in a way that made their elbows and knees look like mountains. No faces. No heads, in fact. Sinister but beautiful.

If this were my kitchen, Charlie thought, I’d keep the art and chuck everything else. She and Simon were the opposite of hoarders, she realised. They bought as little as possible, threw away as much of it as they could as soon as they’d eaten or drunk the contents. Charlie could easily see how Kerry Jose might think differently; she could imagine Kerry coming up with what she considered to be a good reason to keep an old ice-lolly stick. Kerry focused on the positive whenever she could; that had been obvious from the brief conversation Charlie had managed to have with her before this Gaby woman interrupted. Also obvious was the almost total absence of a desire to control or steer the conversation; Kerry had seemed happy to let Charlie take their dialogue wherever she’d wanted to, and had answered every question willingly and almost . . . gratefully couldn’t be the right word, could it? That was how Kerry had sounded: appreciative of Charlie’s prompts. The dynamic between Kerry and Dan, her husband, had seemed rather odd too, but Charlie knew it was too early to reach a verdict about that: the three of them had sat at the kitchen table together for less than a minute before the phone had rung and Dan had gone to answer it, and then the doorbell had rung several times – overbearingly, Charlie had thought. That must have been Gaby, that insistent ringing with its air of ‘Is any fucker going to let me in?’

And yet Kerry was delighted to see her. Her arrival had elicited a ‘Thank God’. The two of them were obviously friends of some description, though they looked as if they would have nothing in common: the tassel-skirted, fluffy-jumpered Bohemian and the glossy, assertive businesswoman. Not so glossy today, perhaps, but Charlie could imagine how intimidatingly stunning Gaby would look after a good night’s sleep.

Gaby’s expression was more agonised than delighted. She was trying to shake herself free of Kerry’s embrace. ‘Kerry, don’t. You’ll start me off. I don’t want to waste my limited time with the police crying.’ Kerry backed off, nodding, and wiped her eyes, visibly comfortable with being ordered around.

That’s what’s odd: she and her husband both like to be told what to do
.
They glance at each other hesitantly, hoping for a cue of some kind, unsure who’s in charge. Weird marriage.

Black kettle. Black pot.

‘You are the police, right?’ Gaby’s confident voice broke into Charlie’s thoughts.

‘Sergeant Charlie Zailer.’ She stood up, held out her hand.

Gaby shook it. ‘Gabrielle Struthers, only ever known as Gaby. I’m a friend of Kerry and Dan’s from years ago. Also a good friend of Tim Breary’s.’

‘What you said about not wanting to waste your limited time with the police . . .’ Charlie began, not really knowing where she was going with this, or, come to think of it, what she was doing here without Sam. He’d stuck his head in to say something had come up and he had to nip back into town, told Charlie to text him when she wanted picking up. An obvious ruse. He was hoping she’d be able to connect with Kerry Jose more successfully than he had, get something out of her that he’d failed to extract. She planned to tell him later, proudly, that she’d bypassed the empathetic-emotional route altogether and asked about the household finances instead. As far as she could see, it was the most interesting aspect of the set-up at the Dower House, as well as the most suspicious. Not with regard to Francine’s murder, perhaps, but strange nonetheless, and therefore worth investigating. Fair enough, Tim and Francine Breary were close friends of the Joses, but most close friends weren’t willing to support each other financially till death did them part. A lot of parents wouldn’t even do that for their kids.

Charlie became aware that Gaby Struthers was staring at her, eyebrows raised expectantly. Waiting for her to finish the question she’d started asking.

‘Most people aren’t that keen to talk to us,’ she said. ‘Guilty or innocent, they avoid us if they can.’

‘Guilty or innocent, most people are cowardly and superstitious,’ Gaby said, pulling a chair out from beneath the table so that she could sit down. There was something round and silver on the seat. A napkin ring? No, too big, too sharp edges. A pastry cutter. Charlie knew people owned them – people whose lifestyles were very different from hers. She’d have had more use for a fat giant’s wedding ring, which the silver thing also might have been.

Gaby picked it up, tossed it into a Pyrex oven dish on the table that was full of shells, stones, elastic bands and packets of aspirin.

‘Why’s your time limited?’ Charlie asked her as she sat down. ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’

‘No. I assumed you did. Look, what I’ve got to say won’t take long. Why don’t I just say it and then you can get on with dismissing it, like DC Gibbs did, and talking to the people who’ll tell you what you want to hear instead?’

‘You should know . . . I’m not actually directly involved in the Francine Breary investigation. I used to be CID but I’m not any more. So I don’t know what Gibbs said or did to annoy you, but if there’s a party line on this, I’m not party to it.’

‘You’re not directly involved in Tim’s case?’ Gaby looked at Kerry, who shrugged helplessly.

‘I didn’t have a chance to explain that to Kerry before you arrived,’ Charlie said.
A good friend of Tim Breary’s. Tim’s case
. It was clear what Gaby Struthers cared and didn’t care about here. Was she at all disturbed by Francine Breary’s murder, or was Tim’s welfare her only concern?

‘Then, if it’s not your case, if you don’t work for CID, what are you doing here?’

‘I’m not sure. Sam Kombothekra was coming and he asked me to come with him – he’s the DS in charge.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘Maybe he thinks a woman’s touch is needed.’ She allowed Gaby and Kerry to hear her sarcasm.

‘Needed for what?’ Gaby asked. ‘Is the case still open? Does that mean DS Kombothekra doesn’t believe Tim killed Francine?’ Her pronunciation of Sam’s surname was perfect after only one hearing.

Charlie had to be careful. One option was to answer honestly: ‘Sam thinks everyone in this house is lying about something. The word conspiracy’s been mentioned.’ A line like that, with its shock value, might have a productive effect on Gaby Struthers, but would obliterate the rapport Charlie had been building with Kerry Jose, out of whom the truth, assuming she was withholding it, would have to be coaxed gently.

‘Because he didn’t kill her,’ Gaby said with certainty.

‘Gaby,’ Kerry murmured, closing her eyes. ‘I wish he hadn’t done it as much as y—’

‘He
didn’t
do it, Kerry. On Thursday, I flew to—’

‘Dusseldorf. I know,’ Kerry said, as if it was causing her pain to utter each word. Her eyes were still half closed.

‘You
know
Lauren was on my flight?’ Gaby snapped.

‘I booked her flights for her. She told me she was going to visit friends, that Jason mustn’t know anything about it.’ Kerry sighed. ‘Well, he knows now. He’s on his way to the airport to collect her. She’s not in good shape, apparently. To be honest, I don’t know what’s going on with Lauren.’

‘Dan didn’t know Lauren was on my flight,’ said Gaby pointedly. ‘When I told him a few minutes ago.’

‘I haven’t had a chance to tell him,’ Kerry said. ‘He was in London this morning, only got back about half an hour ago. I’ve been busy talking to Sergeant Zailer.’

‘Please, call me, Charlie.’

‘Do you know
why
Lauren decided to stalk me all the way to Germany?’ Gaby asked. Her manner reminded Charlie of Simon in interview mode.
You’ll tell me what I want to know, or you’ll regret it.
‘How did she even know about me?’

Kerry shook her head. She was hiding behind her long ginger-blonde hair, holding it like a shield in front of her face. With her other hand, she picked at it, made a show of flicking something on to the floor. Charlie didn’t believe there had been anything in her hair that had needed removing; it was an act, to avoid meeting Gaby’s eye.

Interesting.
Kerry hadn’t been afraid when she’d been talking to Charlie alone. And yet she’d been genuinely delighted when her friend had walked into the room; that wasn’t an act.

‘She didn’t tell me anything, ask me for anything,’ Gaby spoke to Kerry as if she’d forgotten Charlie was there. ‘Apart from what she let slip out by accident . . .’

‘Could someone please fill me in?’ Charlie asked, worried she’d fall hopelessly behind if she allowed the two women any more private communion time.

‘I told DC Chris Gibbs the full story this morning,’ Gaby said. ‘He can fill you in on the details. Short version? I went to Dusseldorf yesterday. Lauren Cookson, the care assistant who looked after Francine, followed me there. She blurted out something about letting an innocent man go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit.’

‘What?’ Kerry dropped her hair.

‘She was talking about Tim,’ said Gaby. ‘Somehow she knows he didn’t do it, and since she must have been around Francine every day, since she
lives
here, I believe her a hundred per cent. I also know Tim’s not a killer and never could be. What’s going on, Kerry? Why’s he saying he killed Francine when he didn’t? You must know the truth.’

‘He
killed her, Gaby.’ The muscles in Kerry’s face were tight with anxiety. ‘I’m so sorry, but we were all here. Dan and I—’

‘And Lauren?’ Gaby demanded.

Kerry nodded. ‘Lauren knows . . . what we all know,’ she said almost inaudibly, looking down at the floor. ‘I can’t think why she’d say otherwise.’

‘Gaby, is it okay if I ask you a couple of questions?’ said Charlie.