The Carrier (52 page)

‘Are you . . .?’ He stops to clear his throat. ‘You’re sure this is where me and Francine stayed? The right room?’

‘You told me your room was called Marjolaine. This is Marjolaine.’ In case he needs any more grounding, I say, ‘You recognised it just now when you saw the name on the door.’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘You’re right. It’s not . . . This isn’t the room in my dream.’

‘No. It’s not. Nor is any other room.’

‘What?’

‘The room in your dream isn’t a room, Tim.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Follow me.’ I pick up the key and move to leave.

He pulls me back. ‘Wait.’

‘No. I’ve waited. I’m sick of waiting.’

His eyes fill with tears. ‘Gaby, I understand that, but I need to stay here for a few seconds. Not much longer than that, not even five minutes, just . . . I need to stand here and know that it’s not this room I’m scared of. It never was.’

‘Right. It never was.’

‘But . . . now you want to take me somewhere else,’ Tim says, his voice full of shadows: the shadow of a handbag against a white wall. Except it wasn’t a wall. ‘You want to take me to the place I should have been scared of all this time, the place I thought was this room. I don’t know if I can do it, Gaby.’

‘What place, Tim? Where is it?
What
is it?’ No point asking; I can see from his face that he has no idea.

‘It’s here, in Leukerbad. It must be if you’re about to show it to me, but . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘There isn’t anywhere else. We didn’t go anywhere else that wasn’t a public place. She wouldn’t have tried to kill me in a public place.’

‘She didn’t try to kill you,’ I tell him. ‘That never happened.’

‘Then why do I dream that she did?’

I take a deep breath. I don’t know if it’s going to be worse or better for him when he has the answer. ‘You’re taking the dream too literally,’ I say. ‘Come. Let me prove it to you.’

This time he doesn’t protest.

We walk along the corridor in silence. Into the lift, down to the ground floor, outside and down the red-carpeted stairs. We turn left, Tim following me as if he doesn’t know where I’m going. Can he really not know? Where else might I be going?

I wish the walk were shorter. I could end this now and just tell him, but I want to give him every chance to get there on his own. As we walk up the hill, past shops, restaurants and wooden chalets, I say, ‘In the dream, does the size of the handbag’s shadow change? Does it get bigger or smaller?’ The weather’s bright and sunny where we are, but there’s snow on the mountains above us. I take care not to look at them.

Tim stops for a second beside a fountain that’s spilling warm water. Leukerbad is famous for its hot springs and likes to show them off, I discovered last time I came here.

I carry on walking.

‘No. The handbag stays the same size,’ Tim says, picking up his pace to catch me up.

‘You said Francine’s walking towards you in the dream, diagonally across the room, getting closer and closer.’

‘Right.’ The wounded expression on his face as I force him to think about his nightmare is too much; I can’t look at him.

‘So the handbag’s shadow ought to grow or shrink, depending on the source of light,’ I say. ‘It ought to get smaller, or bigger and more blurred as she gets nearer.’ I find this immovable law of nature comforting. I doubt Tim does. ‘If she’s walking diagonally across the room towards you, the bag’s either going to be getting further from the wall or closer to it.’

‘It’s a dream, Gaby,’ Tim says. ‘Not a scientific trial.’

He’s almost right: there’s nothing scientific about a symbolic representation of danger in a dream, which is why I’m determined to cling to the one scientific detail: the shadow of an object travelling across a white surface will only stay the same size if the distance between it and the surface doesn’t change as it moves.

We turn another corner and I freeze. Here we are, sooner than I expected. I throw out an arm to stop Tim going any further. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What, Gaby?’

‘Look. Have you been here before? Did you come here with Francine?’ The answer has to be yes. Ahead of us are tall snow-covered mountains. A cable runs from the peak of one of them down to a small wooden building at the bottom of another. There’s a square car sliding down the wire, a slow diagonal through the air.

Tim’s breathing as if it hurts him.

‘There’s your small room,’ I say.

‘The cable car. But . . . I don’t understand. Yes, Francine and I went up in it, but we weren’t alone. There were other people there, a family of four, a Russian family. She wouldn’t have . . .’ His words run out. He’s staring. Trying to piece it together.

‘Wouldn’t have tried to kill you in front of them? No, she wouldn’t. I told you: she didn’t try to kill you at all, in front of anyone or no one. Not in the way you mean. What happened in that cable car, Tim? Did you and Francine talk? Did anything important happen?’

‘She proposed to me. I told you.’ He’s distracted. Can’t keep his eyes still.

‘You told me she proposed, but not where.’

‘She asked me at the top, when the car set off. She said . . .’ He shakes his head.

‘What? What, Tim?’

‘I didn’t answer straight away.’

‘What did you want to say?’

‘I didn’t want her to have asked.’ I force myself not to turn away from the pain in his eyes. ‘She said I had until we got to the bottom to give her an answer.’

A proposal immediately followed by an ultimatum. Nice.

‘I said yes.’

‘When? On the way down?’

‘When we got to the bottom. I’d run out of time. She was my girlfriend, Gaby. What was I doing with her if she wasn’t the right person? I didn’t know there
was
a right person.’

‘All the way down the mountain in the cable car, you were getting closer – not to a handbag containing something that was going to kill you, but to the moment when you handed over the rest of your life to a woman you knew would crush all the joy and hope out of it. That’s what was going to kill you.’

‘She made herself more miserable than anyone else, always,’ Tim murmurs. He’s angry with me.

‘Francine’s crooked arm in the dream – that’s the cable,’ I tell him, needing to have it out in the open. ‘Crooked because the car’s hanging from it and making a dent in its straight line, dragging it down as it moves along. The white wall isn’t a wall, it’s the mountain, covered in snow. The car was at the same distance from the mountain all the way down, and you were watching its shadow moving along the white mountain – that’s why the shadow of what you thought was a handbag stayed the same size. But it wasn’t a handbag, it was a cable car, the one you and Francine were in, Tim.’

‘I can’t stay here.’ Tim starts to march back in the direction of the hotel. I run after him, into the oncoming wind. It stings my face. ‘All this time, thinking she tried to kill me,’ he says. ‘I really believed it.’

‘I know.’

‘It was so vivid.’

I grab his arm, pull him round to face me. ‘It wasn’t too late,’ I say. ‘You could have left her. You
did
leave her, but you didn’t come and find me. You never came looking for me!’

‘You had Sean.’

‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? How did you feel about that?’

Tim stops walking. ‘I thought he was wrong for you. Part of me was glad you had someone, even so. I’d have felt guiltier about not being able to leave Francine if you were completely on your own—’

‘Stop!’ I can’t stand to listen.

‘What do you want me to say, Gaby? That I was jealous of Sean because he had you and I didn’t? Of course I was.’

‘But you didn’t say that, Tim. You said something different. Shall I tell you how I felt about Francine? I
hated
her. Not for being a bitch and putting you through hell every day. For being your wife. She could have been the kindest, loveliest woman on the face of the earth and I’d have loathed her every bit as much. I used to wish she’d drop dead. I Googled her five times a day, looked at the photo of her on her firm’s website, stared into her stony eyes. I’d imagine you in bed with her, watching TV with her, clearing away the supper things together, and I’d wish her dead. Next to you, Francine’s the person who’s inspired my most passionate feelings. There – how do you feel about me now?’

How would you feel if I told you I love Lauren for killing her, and always will, however wrong it is?

‘Wow,’ Tim says.

‘You didn’t feel that way about Sean, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean what you’ve decided it means.’

‘You can live without me, Tim.’
I can’t forgive that.
‘All those years of no contact—’

‘Gaby, you lived without me perfectly well!’

‘It’s not the same. I thought I had no choice. You’d made it clear you didn’t want me anywhere near you.’

‘You could have thought, “Fuck that”, and hunted me down,’ Tim says. ‘You could have turned up on the doorstep and told Francine the truth, provoked a crisis. Can’t you see how unreasonable you’re being? I could live without you, yes, but I don’t want to. I choose not to – ever. What about you? You can live without me, and you’re about to prove it. You’re leaving me, aren’t you?’

I say nothing.

Tim grabs my hands. It hurts. ‘Tell me what I can do to change your mind,’ he says. ‘I’ll do anything.’

‘No. You tell
me
what you can do. Or, better than that, don’t tell me – just do it. Change my mind.’

‘I will.’

‘Goodbye, Tim.’

I walk away, down the hill without looking back. I don’t have to hurry; he won’t follow me. Though I can’t see him, I know he’s still where I left him, deciding we’re doomed, that it’s too late – there is nothing he could possibly do that would be big enough.
Run after me, refuse to let me go. Turn back the clock, do everything differently.

There’s a taxi rank outside a pizzeria at the bottom of the hill path. I get into the first cab in the line, tell the driver to take me to Geneva airport. ‘Which airline are you flying with, miss?’ he asks me in English.

Good question. I think back to Dusseldorf airport, Sean asking me, ‘Who’s the carrier?’

I don’t know who I’m flying with. I’m booked onto the same return flight as Tim, but that’s impossible now. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Take me to any departure gate.’

‘You are going to book a flight when you arrive?’ The driver’s not giving up easily. ‘There are different gates for different destinations. What is your destination?’

‘I don’t know. Sorry. I’ll decide when I get there.’

If I get there.
Maybe Tim will stop me; maybe we’ll decide to stay in Switzerland for the rest of our lives. A new start. Not three hundred and sixty-five minus ninety midnights, but as many as we’ve got left. If I’m lucky – and I have been in my life so far, mostly – I’ll never have to make the decision of where to fly to, never have to face the realisation that there’s nowhere I want to go without Tim.

That’s what I’m going to keep thinking all the way to Geneva airport. I’ve got about two hours, a bit longer if I’m lucky. Two hours is a long time.

‘Stop where you are! Permission to approach denied.’

‘I’m . . . here, sir.’ Sam was standing directly in front of Proust’s desk. Any closer and he’d have been touching it. He stared at the inspector’s upside-down signature on the bottom of a form. The ink was still wet. Shiny.

‘I meant metaphorically stop where you are. I don’t want it.’

How could he know? There was no way. ‘I think we’re at cross purposes,’ Sam said, trying to work out what Proust thought he was about to give him.

‘You mean you’re making me cross on purpose?’ the Snowman snapped, removing the signed form from the top of the pile in front of him and signing the one beneath it without looking at it. ‘I don’t want your letter of resignation, Sergeant.’

‘My—’

‘The one you were about to produce from your jacket’s inside pocket and put on my desk.’

Give it to him. You don’t need permission. It’s not up to him.

With an unsteady hand, Sam extracted the letter from his jacket and held it out for Proust to take.

‘Put it through the shredder,’ the Snowman barked. ‘I’m not interested.’

‘You want me to stay?’ Sam asked.

Proust smiled in the way that an adult might smile at a child’s sweet but naïve suggestion. ‘Neither of us
wants
you to stay – not you and not me – but we’ll both have to put up with you being here. I’m not one for lavish compliments, Sergeant, but you’re the only member of my team who’s halfway normal. Reliably unremarkable.’

‘Sir, I—’

‘If you leave, I won’t be able to avoid having Sergeant Zailer working for me again. Waterhouse would hate it, but he’d have to pretend it was what he wanted. His marriage would hate it even more, and would hasten to its inevitable doom. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?’

‘You want me to stay,’ said Sam. This time he wasn’t asking.

Proust looked up at him. Sighed. ‘Would you like me to send a bunch of flowers to your dressing room? Yes, Sergeant, I want you to stay. You’re the only person I work with that I never have to think about. And I do mean
never
. I’m not thinking about you now, for example. I’m thinking about more important things.’

Sam prayed the Snowman couldn’t read his mind. What did it say about him that he felt flattered when he ought to feel insulted? He would tell Kate later and pretend to share her outrage, while secretly believing Proust wanted to make him feel valued in the only way he knew how.

‘I’m going to have to think about it, sir.’

Proust chuckled. ‘Think all you like. I won’t be thinking about you thinking. I won’t be thinking about you at all, Sergeant, and I’ll be enjoying it very much.’

‘Sir, if you want me to stay . . .’

‘In the immediate short term, I’d rather you left. My office, I mean. Off you go, and take your pointless letter with you.’ Proust waved elaborately, as if for a press photograph, without looking up from his paperwork.

Sam went.

He took his pointless letter with him.