The Carrier (17 page)

Breary seemed to be chewing and swallowing air; his jaw and Adam’s apple were working frenetically. It was a few seconds before he was able to speak. ‘Don’t mention my name. Don’t tell Gaby the poem’s from me.’

The request was so staggeringly inappropriate, Simon would have felt like a sadist if he’d pointed it out.

He was still wondering if and how he should respond when Tim Breary said, ‘Tell her it’s from The Carrier.’

POLICE EXHIBIT 1441B/SK – POEM ‘SONNET’ BY LACHLAN MACKINNON.

A HANDWRITTEN COPY OF THIS POEM WAS GIVEN BY TIMOTHY BREARY TO DC SIMON WATERHOUSE ON 11/3/2011 AT HMP COMBINGHAM, WITH REQUEST FOR IT TO BE PASSED BY DC WATERHOUSE TO GABRIELLE STRUTHERS

POLICE EXHIBIT 1433B/SK – TRANSCRIPT OF HANDWRITTEN LETTER FROM TIMOTHY BREARY TO FRANCINE BREARY DATED 25 DECEMBER 2010

I pull up on the grass verge where the narrow road comes to a stop. Tim’s house is hiding from me: the Dower House, in the grounds of Lower Heckencott Hall. I can’t see it, but I know it’s behind these high wooden gates, thanks to a consensus of search results. The Hall is Grade I listed and features on websites called things like ‘Architectural Treasures of the Culver Valley’ and ‘Britain’s Finest Historical Houses’.

Tim’s home
, I correct myself.
Not
his house
. One of my searches yielded a PDF of plans for an extension drawn up by Roger Staples Design Studios for Daniel and Kerensa Jose. That makes sense; Dan and Kerry are the ones with the money. Thanks to nethouseprices.com, I know they paid £875,000 for the Dower House in February 2009.

Kerry never told me her name was short for Kerensa. Tim would have known. I hate myself for hoping that Francine didn’t. It makes no difference to anything, but I prefer to think of her as ignorant, an outsider.

The conviction Kerry planted in my mind six years ago is still stubbornly, crazily there: Francine might have been married to Tim, but she didn’t belong in his life. ‘You’re the fourth quarter of our quartet,’ Kerry told me once when Dan and Tim were late to meet us at Omar’s Kitchen. The idea took root, fast and firm. I believed her because I needed it to be true.

I still need it to have been true when she said it.
If it was true once . . .
It must have been; Kerry told me about her dad – something she, Dan and Tim had agreed never to tell Francine.

Rain drums on the roof of my car like an angry reminder, chastising me for letting down my guard and admitting to weakness. It doesn’t matter that no one heard me apart from me. Life punishes the needy; admit you can’t live without something and it’s taken away.

I don’t need Tim in the way that I used to. I’ve proved I can live without him. I want to help him, that’s all.

If my scientist colleagues could hear me trying to talk Fate round, they’d think twice about ever working with me again.

I understand that whatever this is, it is not Tim being returned to me. No one has invited me back into anything. Look at those closed gates.

When I knew Kerry and Dan, they had no gates to hide behind. They lived on Burtmayne Road in Spilling, in a two-bedroom gardenless terrace that was all front; from the street it fooled you into thinking it was double its actual size, but it was only one room deep. Tim and Francine lived a two-minute walk away on Heron Close, in a three-bedroom detached newbuild with a garden so overlooked by other identical detached newbuilds that Tim referred to it as ‘the theatre in the round’, though never in Francine’s presence according to Kerry.

And now Tim lives here, with Kerry and Dan. And I live with Sean.

DC Gibbs asked for my address; it was one of his first questions, a formality. 47 Horse Fair Lane, Silsford, I recited. It sounded like an address and nothing more. When I left the police station, I headed straight for the Dower House, uninvited and probably unwelcome. Coming here felt as accidental and incongruous as going home would have.
I knew I needed to sleep, but couldn’t imagine doing it in my own bed. The idea that I have a bed, a home, a boyfriend, strikes me as something I might have wanted to believe even though it’s never been true: as if I found a collection of things all conveniently together in one place, pretended they were mine, and everyone else was too polite to object.

Stop driving yourself crazy. Do something useful.

I open the car door, close it again. The go-away gates are too off-putting. I tell myself that if Tim lives here then my feelings for him justify my being here. And there’s no ‘if’ about it: the news websites all agree that this was where Tim and Francine were living at the time of Francine’s death. Rent-free: that’s the part I worked out on my own. Kerry and Dan would skip down the street naked before they’d charge Tim rent. He might have tried to insist on paying his way, but they wouldn’t have let him.

The idea that I might see Kerry again – that she might be in her house now, behind these gates – makes my eyes water. I blink away the tears. I was so devastated when Tim walked out of my life, it was only months later that I was able to see past the loss of him to the smaller sadness of Kerry being gone too. I didn’t know her for long, but I missed her more than I’d expected to. She’d helped me in the most important way I have ever been helped: she explained Tim to me. Not completely – that would be impossible, given that Tim is Tim – but enough. Kerry made sense of my life for me when I’d lost my grip.

I mustn’t allow myself to hope that she can do it again.

The rain stops as suddenly as it started. I get out of the car, leaving my bag on the passenger seat but taking my switched-off phone with me.
A compromise.
If I suddenly decide I’m ready to talk to Sean, I can switch it on and lose no more time. Though before ringing him I’d probably want to listen to the eighteen angry messages he’s left, to gauge his mood, and after listening to them I’d probably be even less keen to speak to him than I am now, so what’s the point?

Which is also my gut reaction to the millionaire’s fortress in front of me: what’s the point of trying to get in, when so much design effort has gone into keeping people out?
The sign says ‘Lower Heckencott Hall’, but it ought to say, ‘Abandon hope all ye who want to enter here’, a subtle but crucial variation on the well-known phrase. I try not to feel intimidated by the carved stone gateposts, the intercom system with its two buzzers, the high stone perimeter wall with even higher hedges forming an extra layer of protection above it. Now that I’m standing, I can see, in the distance, a repeating pattern of identical windows: the top two storeys of a vast square building that must be the Hall. The long, straight driveway makes its presence felt while hiding out of sight – longer than a street with thirty families living on either side, judging by the position of the house in relation to the gates.

Despite its trappings of privacy, Lower Heckencott Hall looks public and practical, with its rigid corners and inflexible lines. I picture a large dusty meeting room within its walls, full of men shouting and waving leaflets in the air. One of my search results described it as ‘the grandest example of vernacular architecture in the south of England’. Another called it a mansion, which strikes me as way off the mark; ‘mansion’ implies a lavishness that’s absent here. There are no flourishes, no softening details, no decorative touches, just a stone cube with nothing but windows to break up the monotony of the façade. Not even a sloped roof; the Hall is a flat-top.

The word jolts me back twelve years, to when I first met Sean in the gym at Waterfront Health Club. I don’t want to think about him, but he keeps invading my mind. Is it a guilt reflex, because I know I’m probably going to leave him?

Not probably. Definitely.

Probably.

When he asked me out, instead of saying yes or no, I told him I had a confession to make and blurted out that for months I’d thought of him as Sexy Boiled Egg because his flat-top hairstyle created the illusion of someone having removed the dome of his skull. ‘Obviously that’s partly complimentary and partly not, and you might not want to have dinner with me now you know,’ I said. Sean laughed politely. It was clear he found my admission neither funny nor charming nor offensive – merely an obstacle to him getting his question answered. When he saw that I was waiting for an answer too, he said, yes, he still wanted to take me out for dinner. He told me the venue, the date and the time as if it were a pre-existing arrangement: The Slack Captain in Silsford, the following Saturday; he’d pick me up at seven thirty.

He arrived with a brand new crew cut, looking a little thuggish and four hundred times sexier. I thanked him for coming to collect me and told him – in case it hadn’t occurred to him, and for future reference – that we could have met at the restaurant. I didn’t say that the Slack Captain wasn’t my idea of a restaurant. ‘We could have met there,’ Sean agreed, ‘except that I invited you.’ I asked what that meant and he said, ‘It means dinner’s my treat and my responsibility. I pick you up, and I drive you home afterwards.’ Still in the dark, I decided to drop it; his four-hundred-times-sexier appearance made perfect sense even if his words didn’t.

I shunted aside my unease about his having fixed all the details of our date before I’d agreed to go out with him, decided his rapid hair response meant that he was flexible and open-minded, and told him so, making a joke about it being easy to keep an open mind if someone’s sliced off the top of your head. Sean gave me a flattening look and I stopped laughing.

He asked for the bill while chewing his last mouthful of steak. I’d finished my main course a few minutes earlier, but I hadn’t realised our dinner was over. It didn’t occur to Sean that I might want pudding or coffee; he didn’t, so why would I?

He doesn’t want a career that involves getting stuck overnight in Dusseldorf; why do I?

I force the image of him out of my mind –
horizontal on our sofa; gone – and am about to press the lower buzzer on the intercom, the one labelled ‘The Dower House’, when the gates start to open with what looks like great reluctance. I hear a car engine and picture a silver Mercedes, a chauffeur in uniform. He might die before there’s a gap wide enough to drive through.

I stand to one side as a grubby blue Volvo S60 emerges. It stops at the gateposts. The driver’s tinted window slides open and I see a skinny man of about my age with a goatee beard and straggly shoulder-length brown hair that has an indent, as if he’s recently worn it in a ponytail. He stares at me. There’s a dead Christmas tree lying across the back seat of his car and, on top of it, a bulging green garden refuse sack.