The Carrier (39 page)

Charlie hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. She’d been hoping for an earlyish night tonight to compensate. Who am I to judge Lizzie Proust? she thought. Would Lizzie be able to understand Charlie not daring to say, ‘I’m going inside now – I refuse to spend the whole night in the car,’ in case it broke some kind of spell?

‘I should be able to make sense of this case,’ Simon said. ‘I’m exactly like Breary. I put every emotion under the microscope.’

‘Even your passionate love for me?’ Charlie asked, having first put all the usual low expectations in place.

‘No. Too big. Wouldn’t fit under the lens.’ Simon smiled at her.

‘Excuse me? Could you say that again?’

He turned away. ‘One day we’ll never see each other again. Do you ever think about that?’

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘When one of us dies.’

‘I never, ever think about that.’

‘I do. All the time. I try not to let it ruin everything,’ Simon added in a more upbeat tone.’

‘Well, that’s . . . good. I think.’ Charlie wished she’d brought the vodka out to the car. Her heart was doing athletics inside her chest.

‘It’s not true, is it? Those stupid
West Side Story
lyrics: “Even death won’t part us now”. Yes, it will. It has to. You’re going to be reading out a lie.’ Simon pushed his seat further back, put his feet up on the dashboard on either side of the wheel. ‘Why don’t they care about
living
a lie? Do you think Liv pretends when she’s with Dom? Pretends he’s Gibbs?’

‘In what context?’ Charlie asked mock innocently. ‘You mean when they’re in the supermarket? Or when they’re in a restaurant?’ She grinned to herself. She wasn’t going to worry about death. At some point – when she was in her late fifties, maybe – she would find a way round it, even if that meant making herself believe in something preposterous.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Simon. ‘In bed.’

There was a time not all that long ago when he wouldn’t have been willing to utter those words. As a couple, they were making progress. Amazing progress, actually. Charlie knew she ought to appreciate every step in the right direction, instead of wanting more from him than he could give. ‘I wish I could tell you I’ve no idea, but sadly I know the answer,’ she said. ‘Liv’s tried pretending, but it doesn’t work. Dom and Gibbs are too different, technique-wise. I can provide more detail if you’d like me to, but I’d advise against. Spare yourself. It’s too late for me, but you can still escape.’

‘I pretend,’ Simon said almost inaudibly.

Charlie was in no doubt about what she’d heard. ‘Is that why we’re sitting in a dark car?’ she asked evenly. She was getting good at keeping her feelings out of her voice. ‘So you can’t see me? Will that make the pretence easier, when we get into bed?’

‘Don’t be stupid. I didn’t mean that. It came out wrong.’

Ah. My entire life knows how that feels.

‘I don’t mean I pretend you’re someone else. Why would I? There’s no one else I want to be with.’

Charlie waited. Was this going to be another brilliant/shit thing, in the tradition of ‘I love you but we’re both doomed to die’?

‘I’m talking about me,’ he said.

‘You mean . . .’ Charlie stopped to check: implausible, yes, but there were no other possibilities. ‘You mean you pretend
you’re
someone else?’

Simon said nothing.

‘Who?’
Fucking fuck fuck.
Was that a crass question? Charlie knew Simon well enough to know that no name would be forthcoming.

Gordon Ramsay? Nick Clegg? Colin Sellers? Ugh, please not.

‘No one real, just . . . I don’t know. A physical manifestation of no one or nothing. A symbolic figure without an appearance, standing in for me. I can only carry on if I never think about it being me. If I let myself see it as a scene I’m part of, that’s when it doesn’t go well.’

This is where you tell him that a shrink he once met has a theory that neatly explains everything that’s wrong with him: it’s the perfect opportunity.

‘Do you think that makes me a freak?’ Simon asked.

‘No.’
I think it makes you someone with a common but rarely diagnosed psychological condition. If I tell you its name, you’ll never be able to get it out of your mind. Trust me, I know.
Emotional Incest Syndrome. You can call it EIS if you prefer, or CIS: Covert Incest Syndrome.
Can you cure it, though? If not, what’s the point of knowing you suffer from it? What if it only makes you feel more like a freak?

So much easier to change the subject.

To prove to herself that she was nothing like Lizzie Proust, Charlie said, ‘You need to tell Sam everything you haven’t told him. The sonnet, everything Gaby Struthers told Gibbs, the lot.’
There, see? I’m not scared of telling my husband things he doesn’t want to hear if I’m sure he needs to hear them.

‘What?’ Simon sounded surprised. Not angry, thankfully. ‘Where’s that come from?’

‘I’m not preaching forgiveness,’ said Charlie. ‘This is about the proper rules of competition. Getting there first only counts for something if you’re both starting from the same point. Why don’t you blindfold Sam and lock him in a cupboard? That way you’ll definitely find the answer before he does.’

‘That’s how you see it?’

‘It’s how it might look to others, definitely.’

Simon swore under his breath. Then some more. It was what he always did when he realised he was wrong and Charlie was right.

It might as well be the middle of the night, Sam thought as he walked out through the double doors of the police station into the car park. Spilling was well known for being silent and deserted even on weekend evenings; people who wanted nightlife went to Rawndesley. And tended not to live in staid, respectable Spilling in the first place.

Sam loved the silence and the calm, though in certain company he pretended to find it stifling. He looked at his watch: ten o’clock. His wife Kate would be pleased to see him home before eleven, when he’d told her to expect him. Privately, he had hoped to be home by ten and therefore assumed he’d never manage it. ‘Rounding up to the nearest disappointment,’ Kate called it.

Exchanges like the one he’d just had with Proust were eroding Sam’s spirit. He would hand in his notice as soon as he’d sorted things out with Simon. He couldn’t leave with the situation as it was between them. He hadn’t admitted to Kate how bad he felt about Simon’s unsubtle and wholehearted rejection of him as a friend and colleague. How could he explain it? It was as if his heart had something heavy pressing on it. Kate would laugh at him if he told her how empty and insubstantial Simon’s disdain made him feel – that’s if he was lucky. The scarier possibility was that Kate would ring Simon and yell at him, which Sam couldn’t risk. If that happened, he’d have to resign from the planet Earth, not merely from Culver Valley Police.

‘Resignation season again, is it?’ Kate had been saying lately, as if it were all a big joke. Sam didn’t mind her teasing him. He found it comforting; how bad could things be if she was giggling about it? She didn’t believe he’d ever hand in his notice; soon she would see that she was wrong. Sam resolved never to tell her that it was a helpful hint from Charlie this afternoon that had finally made up his mind.

He knew what she’d say: ‘For God’s sake, Sam, you’re playing right into her hands. She wasn’t trying to help you at all. She’s done this deliberately to undermine your confidence and make you think you need to slink off in disgrace because you’re such a rubbish detective. You’re not, by the way, and I can’t believe you’d trust Charlie’s motives further than you can throw them. Yesterday she told you she regretted walking out of her job and leaving it open for you; now she’s hoping you’ll be good enough and spineless enough to return the favour. Which is exactly what you mustn’t do. You don’t even know she’s right. It’s a hunch, that’s all. Like all hunches, it’s more likely to be wrong.’

Sam felt his face heat up as he realised he’d been talking to himself inside his head, writing Kate’s lines in their imaginary dialogue, the words he desperately wanted and needed to hear.
Pathetic.
And unfair to Charlie, who, Sam believed, had genuinely been trying to help him: not to rescue his lacklustre career as an also-ran, but to heal the rift with Simon. ‘I shouldn’t be giving you this,’ she’d said, pressing a folded sheet of white A4 paper into Sam’s hand. ‘I’m on a mission to persuade Simon to stop being a knob and start talking to you again, but in the meantime . . .’

‘What is it?’ Sam had asked.

‘A poem. Simon went to Combingham to see Tim Breary yesterday. Breary gave it to him, asked him to pass it on to Gaby Struthers. Breary and Struthers are both members of the Proscenium Library in Rawndesley – a library that has the biggest and best collection of poetry books, past and present, in the western hemisphere. Apparently.’

Sam had wondered why Charlie was staring at him in a peculiar way, as if waiting for him to realise something.

‘That poem might be in a book in the Proscenium, don’t you think?’ she’d said eventually. ‘Given their exhaustive collection.’

‘I suppose so. What are you getting at?’

‘Read the poem,’ she said. ‘It’s very ambiguous – no clear message. I can’t see why Breary would want it passed on to Gaby Struthers. On the surface, it reads like a love poem, but it’s not, not really. So maybe it’s not about the poem itself and what it’s saying – maybe that’s not the intended message. What if Breary wants Gaby to go to the library and find the relevant page of the relevant book? Obviously it’s a long shot, but—’

‘You think he’s left a message for her in the book?’ Sam asked.

‘Not really,’ said Charlie cheerfully. ‘But if you have that idea in front of Simon, he’ll be impressed, and more likely to forgive you. Just don’t tell him I gave you the poem, if you can possibly avoid it, or he’ll have my head on a spike.’

Sam had been excited until he’d realised how utterly humiliating it was: Charlie giving him ideas that he could pretend were his own. It had been the signal he couldn’t ignore that it was time for him to move on.

Before he went, he would do a version of what she’d suggested: he would have her idea in front of Simon if and only if he could prove it to be worth having. First thing Monday, he would go to the Proscenium and see if he could track down the sonnet, even though he was certain that the successful closing of this case wasn’t going to depend on clues hidden in books, but, rather, on successfully interpreting the complex web of relationships and secrets at the Dower House.

Sam would have loved to hear Simon’s angle on it. Alone, he couldn’t work it out. No, it was more than that: he couldn’t work out whether there was anything
to
work out. Maybe the story of the Brearys, the Joses and Gaby Struthers was no more abnormal than most people’s life stories. Look at Gibbs and Olivia Zailer; look at Sellers and his one-hour stands in cheap B&Bs with any woman under the age of sixty who’d have him. And Simon, who’d asked Charlie to marry him when they were no more than colleagues – ones who had never dated, never slept together. And Charlie had said yes. Crazy, all of it.

So perhaps it wasn’t so remarkable that Tim Breary had been unhappy with his wife, and in love with Gaby Struthers, but had decided to stay in his miserable marriage despite there being no children to keep him there. Sam reminded himself that he only knew what Dan and Kerry Jose had told him. Mainly Kerry; she did most of the talking for the two of them. Knowing first-hand how bad a liar she was, Sam had believed her on this occasion. She’d told the story naturally and effortlessly.

After ordering Gaby to give up on him, Tim Breary did exactly what he’d insisted he never would or could: he left Francine, didn’t tell Gaby, jacked in his job, abandoned the Joses and the Culver Valley, and moved to a squalid bedsit in Bath. Several months later he tried to kill himself, except he undermined his suicide attempt by summoning Dan and Kerry to rescue him. Which they did, both locally and more generally: they rang an ambulance and got Tim the medical attention he needed, and shortly afterwards they abandoned their jobs in order to look after him practically, emotionally and financially. They were happy to do it, Kerry said – all of it. They no longer needed their salaries; thanks to Tim, and to Gaby Struthers, they had recently become extremely wealthy.

Tim was adamant that he wouldn’t go back to the Culver Valley because it contained Francine, so Kerry and Dan bought a barn conversion near Kemble, in the Cotswolds. Kerry had shown Sam photos, pressing her hand against her heart and becoming tearful as she talked about her former home and how she’d hated having to leave it.

So why had she? Sam had asked and she’d answered, but he hadn’t understood, and had been too polite to tell her that her explanation clarified nothing. Why were the Joses so willing to relocate every time Tim Breary changed his mind about where he needed to be? Kerry had found work in the Cotswolds, helping out on a nature reserve – ‘the only genuinely fulfilling job I’ve ever had’, she’d called it – and Dan had been in the middle of a PhD which required him to go to London once a week during term time. By car or by train, Kemble was half an hour nearer to London than Spilling was. This was the part Sam didn’t get: having moved once for Tim’s sake, why did the Joses agree to do it again? When Francine had her stroke and Tim decided he wanted to go back to the Culver Valley to look after her, why didn’t Kerry and Dan say, ‘Sorry, but we can’t come with you this time’? Instead, Kerry gave up her dream job and the home that she loved, and uprooted herself a second time.