The Carrier (5 page)

Simon appeared by her side. ‘I don’t know any Regan Murrays,’ he said to the one in front of him.

‘This is a little bit awkward. Can I come in?’

‘Not unless you give us a good reason,’ Charlie told her.

‘Not unless anything,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t know you.’

Listen to us
, Charlie thought.
Host and hostess of the year.
This was what happened when you dealt with dangerous, untrustworthy people every day of your working life.

‘You do know me,’ Regan Murray protested, pushing the door open as Simon tried to close it. ‘Or, rather, you’d know my name – what my name used to be. Murray’s my husband’s name, which I took when we got married, and Regan . . . it wasn’t the name I was born with. If you’ll let me in, I’ll explain.’

‘It might have to work the other way round,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ve got about ten seconds.’

The woman shielded her eyes from the rain with her hand, so that she could get a better look at Simon as she spoke to him. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘I’m Amanda Proust. Your boss’s daughter.’

‘Lisa? It’s me. You’re not going to fucking believe this. Guess where I am now? On another fucking coach. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. All of us, on coaches taking us
away
from Cologne airport, when we’ve just spent two fucking hours getting there. They’ve said the crew that’s supposed to be flying us home have gone past their limit, or something. What? Dunno. Everyone’s saying we’re off to a hotel, but no one really knows anything. No, I dunno. I’ll ask Gaby. Lisa says, is there anyone on here from the airline who might know what’s going on?’

‘No one,’ I say. ‘Just us and the driver. Who speaks no English.’ No point in shielding Lisa from the awful truth. When we boarded this coach for the first time, outside Dusseldorf airport, I assumed Bodo Neudorf would be coming with us. He seemed to be very much one of the gang at that point: helping elderly passengers and children up the steps, leaning in and counting us all every so often, as if the trip to Cologne airport was his own personal project. I assumed he would wish to oversee it from start to finish, but apparently not. When the door finally slid shut he was on the wrong side of it, having delegated the job of being our reassuring Fly4You liaison guy to nobody.

I turned and watched his lean, straight-backed figure shrink into the distance as we drove away, and was struck by the deceptiveness of appearances. It looked as if we had abandoned him, but he would be fine; we, on the other hand, were alone, all two hundred of us – alone in a hollow, uncontoured way that felt endless, a way that someone like Sean wouldn’t be able to imagine and has certainly never experienced. No one has, unless they’re a regular air traveller. Or perhaps severely depressed, or terminally ill and on the brink of death. There is nothing more isolating than hurtling through a stormy German night with a random collection of anxious strangers, all chasing the rumour of a plane.

‘Lisa says, how can the crew have gone past their flying limit when they’ve been sitting on their arses necking cups of tea and waiting for us all night? She says it’s not like they’ve been flying anyone else around to kill time, is it? Someone’s been lying to us!’

Lisa: thirty-three-year-old nail technician with two toddlers from a previous relationship, now married to Wayne Cuffley and stepmother to twenty-three-year-old Lauren Cookson, who looks much younger than she is, and whom I am currently sitting next to. I’m on her Jason side, not her Father side. The Jason tattoo is even bigger, with red hearts on green stalks inside the holes of the ‘a’ and the ‘o’. Jason is Lauren’s caretaker-cum-gardener-cum-handyman husband. He has done the Iron Man Challenge three times.

It would be hard to overstate how much I have learned about Lauren and her family in the past two hours – more than I would have thought possible. All she knows about me is the one detail I have volunteered: that my name is Gaby.

‘The time they spend hanging around Cologne airport waiting for us counts as time on duty,’ I tell her. ‘Do you really want someone who’s been awake too long to fly you home?’

‘I don’t care who flies me home, long as someone does,’ Lauren says shakily into her phone. ‘Lisa, I swear, I’m going crazy here. I’m panicking. I need to get home. What? Yeah, course I will.’ She clutches my arm. ‘Lisa says I have to stick with you.’

Thanks, Lisa.

‘What? No, I can’t. Oh, Lisa, don’t ask me that – if I told you, it’d do your head in. It’s doing my fucking head in. Jason thinks I’m at Mum’s. No, he doesn’t know I’m in Germany. Don’t tell Dad, will you? He’d only worry – he’s as bad as Jason. What? No, I told Jason I’d be back by half eleven, quarter to twelve. He’s going to go mad when I’m not back by then. What am I going to do? I’m on a coach being carted off somewhere, I don’t even know where . . .’ She starts to cry again. ‘What? Yeah, all right. Yeah, I will. Just . . . don’t say anything to Dad, will you? Cheers, Lisa.’

No! No! Don’t go, Lisa!

‘I have to try to keep calm,’ Lauren tells me, wiping her eyes. ‘Easy for her to say. I’m not good at being calm. Especially when I don’t know where I’m going, or how I’ll ever get home, if I ever will. It’s lucky you’re looking after me. If I was on my own, I’d go apeshit.’

Tell her. Tell her, now, that you’re not looking after her, that you never agreed to do anything of the sort.

‘I’m stressed, that’s what it is,’ she says. ‘This is what I get like. Jason’s not frightened of anything, he never panics, but me? I lose it when I get stressed, big time.’

I push away a barrage of self-pitying thoughts along the lines of ‘When do I get to cry and physically assault strangers?’ and ‘Why can’t I be looked after?’ Ten more minutes of Jason-this-but-I-that might actually make my head explode. I’ve already heard that Jason doesn’t mind rain and snow, but Lauren hates both; Jason can sleep brilliantly on coaches, but Lauren can’t; Jason’s good at planning whereas Lauren can’t think more than two minutes ahead; Jason knows what to do in a crisis and Lauren doesn’t.

And I’ve missed another opportunity: failed for the third time to ask her to leave me alone, to make it clear that I’m not responsible for her. I should have done it when she fell into my arms sobbing, but I didn’t. I should have done it when she rang Lisa the first time, as the coach set off from Dusseldorf airport, and told her she’d made a new friend: a nice middle-aged lady called Gaby who was looking after her. I didn’t.

Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she’s more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn’t.

‘What am I going to do?’ she asks me.

There’s a book in my bag that has magic powers: at least three hundred pages I haven’t yet read, and the ability to make this all-night coach ordeal bearable. What’s stopping me from getting it out and opening it? Is it my reluctance to discover what ‘apeshit’ means to somebody whose idea of normal involves wailing in public? If I make the decision to disappoint Lauren, I’ll have to suffer the consequences for God knows how long. There can be no getting away from her until we land in Combingham.

Or do I want her to carry on burdening me with her problems so that she’ll owe me – so that I won’t feel rude when I ask again about the innocent man who’s going to prison for murder? I’ve already asked about him once, at Dusseldorf airport. I asked as soon as I humanely could, after I’d disentangled myself from our awkward embrace and she’d pulled herself together a bit. She clammed up. ‘Nothing. Forget it,’ she said. So far, I haven’t been able to. Perhaps she’ll let her guard down and bring it up again if I encourage her to talk.

‘Jason doesn’t know you’re in Germany?’

‘No. I’ve never lied to him before. Four years we’ve been together. This is the first lie I’ve told him. I couldn’t tell him the truth.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because. I couldn’t. Keep your nose out, all right?’

I can’t force her to tell me. Although her mouth is at least as much to blame as my nose is. She shouldn’t have mentioned her about-to-be-wrongly-convicted acquaintance if she wasn’t prepared to share the full story.

I look at my watch. ‘You’re not going to be back by quarter to twelve UK time. It’s impossible.’

‘I know! That’s what I’m saying: Jason’s going to go mental.’

‘What will he do?’

‘He thinks I’m at my mum’s. He’s going to ring her, isn’t he? Obviously. And she’s going to tell him I’m not there. They’ll both go off their heads. Believe me, you do
not
want to see Jason angry. Or my mum, for that matter.’

‘Which one are you more scared of?’ I ask.

She looks at me, puzzled, as if I’ve introduced a topic that’s unrelated to what we were talking about. ‘Jason. I’m not normally scared of Mum, not unless I’ve been taking the piss and she’s going to find out.’

Impatience buzzes in my veins. I’m going to have to skip a stage. ‘Ring your mum,’ I say. ‘You haven’t lied to her yet, so you’re still in credibility credit. You’ve told her nothing, right? As far as she knows, you’re at home with Jason this evening. Ring her now, tell her the truth. Get her to ring Jason and say you’re at her house, you’ve got food poisoning, you can’t come to the phone . . . Et cetera.’

‘What do you mean, I haven’t lied to Mum?’ No one else on the coach is speaking at all. Everybody is listening to Lauren’s shrill voice; it’s better at travelling than she is. ‘Course I’ve lied! I’ve said I’m at her house – how can I tell her that without letting on that I’ve lied?’

‘You haven’t lied to
her
. You haven’t told
her
you’re at her house, have you?’

Lauren inspects me disdainfully. ‘Well, I couldn’t do that, could I?’ she says. ‘Mum’s at her house. She knows I’m not there. She can see with her own eyes.’

Deep breath.
‘I know that, Lauren. My point is: if you tell her the truth now, confide in her about how you’ve had to lie to Jason . . .’

‘No.’ She shakes her head vigorously. ‘She’d ask me why.’

Aha. Progress. ‘And you don’t want to tell her?’

‘Maybe I could tell her, but not with you right in my face, not with all these people earwigging. Thinking they’re better than me.’

‘Oh, give it a rest,’ I snap before I can stop myself.

‘What?’

‘Your favourite refrain: “Everyone thinks they’re better than me”. Does the innocent man you’re sending to prison think he’s better than you?’

‘I told you: I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ I say casually. ‘I must have forgotten.’

‘No,’ Lauren mutters after a few minutes. ‘He’s one of the few people that doesn’t think it.’

And you’re rewarding him by letting him go down for murder. Interesting.
In the silence that follows, I wonder if I will try to do anything for this unidentified innocent man once I get back to England. Probably not. What could I do? Go to the police and tell them what I know?

Yes. I could do that. Whether I will or not is another matter. In situations of severe abnormality, I find it hard to imagine what I might do once restored to my normal setting. Sean doesn’t understand this. Many times he’s berated me over the phone, when I’ve been in an airport or a train station or a car hire office, for not knowing if I will or won’t want dinner when I get home.

‘It’s not me sending him to prison,’ Lauren says sulkily, doing a convincing impression of someone who does, in fact, want to talk about it. ‘Do I look like the police?’

‘Letting him go to prison, sending him there – is there a difference?’

‘Yes, there is. There’s a fucking big difference.’ She passes her phone from one hand to the other and back again.

‘Can you stop swearing? Give me that fag packet from your bag – I’ll write down twenty new describing words for you to learn.’

‘I’ll do what I fucking well want, Little Miss Stuck Up Bossy Bitch.’ She shakes her head. ‘Sending him to prison’d be . . . it would be . . . not the same as . . .’

‘Here’s what you’re trying to say,’ I chip in helpfully. ‘Actively doing harm to someone is more morally culpable than failing to step in and prevent harm done by others. Right? The difference between positive and negative responsibility; sins of commission versus sins of omission. Yes?’

‘Are you always like this?’ she sneers at me. ‘I feel sorry for whichever poor sod’s married to you.’

The coach slows down. Its engine makes a noise that’s halfway between a rumble and a belch. If the driver were sitting closer to us and spoke English, I might wonder if he was waiting to hear my response to Lauren’s insult.

‘I’m not married,’ I tell her. ‘And what you feel is embarrassed because you didn’t understand what I said, even though it’s so simple, an egg sandwich could understand it. And before you ask me again: yes, I do think I’m better than you. I wouldn’t take it too personally, though. Secretly, I think I’m better than a lot of people. You might too if you were me. Eight years ago I founded a company that invented a part for a surgical robot: a tactile feedback glove, it’s called.’

The coach picks up speed. Thank Christ. Now I can admit to myself that I was worried by the belching noise; it sounded ominously breakdown-esque. Mercifully, the engine now sounds as if it’s in tip-top nick and we are racing into the night once again. Soon we’ll arrive at a hotel and I’ll be able to crawl into a minibar and a nice clean bed.

I carry on telling Lauren about myself and my achievements, lowering my voice so that no one else hears. ‘My company was bought by a bigger one for a staggering amount of money. Close to fifty million dollars. I didn’t get that money personally – well, I got a decent chunk, but my investors got most of it – but it did leave me wondering why so many people don’t ever really try and achieve anything big, creatively. Anything world-changing. I’m not talking about you – I wouldn’t expect you to be scientifically innovative, because you’re obviously not clever enough, but other people I know, people I was at university with. Potentially brilliant people. Why don’t they try to do more?’

Lauren is gawping at me, her mouth open. ‘Fifty
million
dollars?’ she says.