The Carrier (35 page)

Tim was keen to turn the conversation back to business planning. He told me it didn’t matter that I wasn’t prepared to become a tax exile and move to Switzerland. I only needed to be willing to waste fifty thousand pounds. He and Dombeck Zurbrugg would then do the work and set up a labyrinthine scheme that I would never use. The important thing was that Tim would be able to tell his clients that I was so confident of making a fortune, I was willing to spend a fortune on tax planning. ‘A lot of companies in Switzerland and the Isle of Man offer similar services, but DZ are the best and the most expensive,’ he said. ‘If I tell my high net worths you’re spending fifty grand with DZ at this stage, believe me, they’ll be queuing up to invest. They’ll think, this woman knows she’s going to make hundreds of millions.’

He turned out to be right. My wasting fifty grand on the Swiss set-up that I never used brought in all the investors I needed, and all of them were Tim’s clients apart from Dan Jose, who was Tim’s best friend. But that’s jumping ahead. That night, after Tim told me he would never leave Francine, I told Sean I wasn’t feeling well and was going to sleep in the spare room. I stayed up all night, weeping – with frustration as much as sadness, to be honest. How could Tim accept so readily that what he wanted wasn’t possible? I’m the sort of person who believes that anything and everything is possible. Anyone who doesn’t believe that makes me angry.

By morning, my optimism had returned and I’d decided that it was up to me to show Tim that there was a brave man inside him, waiting to be let out. I drew up the romantic equivalent of a business plan and made a concerted effort to make him love me more – so much that he would soon be thinking, ‘Who’s Francine, anyway?’, as willing to discard her as if she were a used paper napkin. (Are you disapproving of this, Lauren? If you are, then perhaps you’ve not yet met a man you love as much as I love Tim. I needed him. For me, Tim was the difference between feeling a hundred per cent alive and feeling one per cent alive. It’s easy to abide by a principle when you aren’t in the grip of a blazing need that won’t be denied.)

My campaign worked. One day, in the Proscenium’s restaurant while we were having lunch, Tim reached for my hand under the table. It was the first time we’d touched, apart from brushing against each other by-accident-on-purpose. Other people were there who might have seen. Tim knew he was being indiscreet, but was willing to take the risk. I thought to myself, ‘No matter what happens from now on, even if my heart ends up in pieces, this makes it all worth it, this moment.’

From then on we held hands regularly, under as many of the Proscenium’s tables as we could: in the restaurant, the reading room, the drawing room. People must have noticed, but everyone pretended not to. One day, Tim asked me if I’d be willing to have dinner with him. I was over the moon, then puzzled when he told me that Dan Jose and his wife Kerry would be there too. ‘They’re eager to meet the genius who’s going to make them rich,’ he said. I was confused. The way he’d started the conversation – ‘Will you have dinner with me, Gaby?’ – had sounded like a different proposition. ‘So this is a business dinner?’ I asked. ‘Nope,’ Tim said cheerfully. ‘Dan and Kerry are my closest friends. It’s about time they met you. If they don’t know you, and know you and me together, then they don’t know me, and I think they ought to, since they’re my elective family. Is that okay with you?’ I told him it was more than okay. Only a matter of time until Francine’s history, I thought.

Tim and I never had dinner alone, but the dinners with Kerry and Dan (our chaperones, as Tim called them) became a regular thing. So did kissing. I was blissfully happy for a few months, thinking things were going my way. Then I started to get angry. Tim’s love for me was plain to see, but he hadn’t said he loved me, not once. I hadn’t said it either, and at a certain point I decided I wouldn’t, not unless he said it first.

We went to Switzerland together to meet the Dombeck Zurbrugg people. Same hotel, separate rooms. It killed me, Lauren: the sheer, outrageous waste of it. Tim mumbled something about it not being easy for him. That was on our first night there. I hoped he might see sense in time for us to spend the second and last night of the trip together. It didn’t happen. On the way to the airport for the flight home, I lightheartedly mentioned the ninety midnights plan again, and Tim turned to me in the back of our taxi and said, ‘Gaby, what we’ve got now . . . I really don’t think I’ll ever be able to offer you any more. Francine would know if anything happened. She’d sense it, I’m sure she would. I just . . . it’s a line I can’t cross. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I understood. No sex, ever: that was what he was telling me. He asked if it was okay with me, if I could handle it. Every cell of my body was wailing, ‘No!’ and ‘You fucking hypocrite! “Francine would know if anything happened”? But so much
is
happening, all the time – we stand on the street kissing passionately, our bodies locked together, and Francine doesn’t know anything about it! At least if we had sex we’d be likely to do it more discreetly, in a room with the curtains shut!’ I didn’t say any of that to Tim, Lauren. Instead, I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ I said it because a) if you want to tempt a man to leave or cheat on his wife, turning into a wailing harpy isn’t the best approach, and b) I finally woke up and realised I might have to accept Tim’s limits. If he could never leave Francine or be properly unfaithful to her, I faced a stark choice: either lose him altogether or live with the best he could do.

It wasn’t a choice, Lauren. I couldn’t lose him. I resigned myself to a tortured existence. And then, to my astonishment, less than two weeks later, something momentous happened. On Valentine’s Day. Sean didn’t get me anything, not even a card. He and I had never bothered with Valentine’s Day. I’m so not a Valentine’s kind of person that I didn’t think to send Tim a card either, but a card for me arrived at my work that morning. There was a poem in it by a poet called e. e. cummings, a passionately romantic poem. You’ll find it on the internet if you Google ‘i carry your heart with me, i carry it in my heart’. The card contained the words ‘I love you’ and was signed ‘The Carrier’. It could only be from Tim, I thought. Tim was the carrier of my heart, and he knew it.

I left work immediately and went to his work, where I’d never been before. We always met at The Proscenium. I walked into his office, sat on his desk and said, ‘I love you too, Tim. I’m sorry I didn’t send you a card, but yours has made not only my day but my entire life.’ He looked terrified. Instantly, I felt stupid and crass and insensitive. I realised that Tim had signed his card ‘The Carrier’ for a reason. To write the words ‘I love you’ and sign the card in his own name would have been too much for him, given his fear of Francine. He’d have been paranoid that any such card with his signature at the bottom might fall into her hands. He needed to hide behind the safety of a pseudonym. Feeling clumsy and painfully exposed, I started to apologise, but Tim interrupted me and said, ‘Do you really love me, Gaby?’ He looked so wary, it made me laugh. I told him I adored him and had from the second I’d met him. I told him I felt as if there was a magnet in my gut, pulling me towards him, every moment of every day. He said, ‘That’s it. That’s how I feel about you too. We need to try and work something out, don’t we?’ I didn’t dare say a word, couldn’t believe he meant what I thought he meant. But he did. I think hearing me say I loved him made a difference.

The next time we had lunch together, Tim told me about his recurring nightmare. Did he think that was the first step towards us ‘working something out’? I don’t know. I also don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t mustered the courage to tell me about the dream. Maybe we’d still be having lunch together at the Proscenium twice a week, and dinner with Kerry and Dan once a month. Maybe we’d still be kissing passionately in doorways and car parks. Or perhaps I’d have grown tired of the hypocrisy and demanded to know how Tim was able to tell himself that he wasn’t being unfaithful to Francine when any fool could see that he was. If he’d got drunk every Friday night and screwed a different nameless woman he picked up in a nightclub, that would have been less of a betrayal of his marriage than what he was doing with me. How could he not see that? Even now, years later, the irrationality of it makes me want to howl with rage.

Tim had (has?) a recurring nightmare in which Francine tries to kill him. Or is about to try to kill him: he always wakes up before it happens. In the dream, he’s trapped in a small room with her, the hotel room they stayed in when they went on holiday to Leukerbad in Switzerland. She proposed to him on that trip, and he’s convinced that she also tried to kill him, because ever since they got back he’s been woken regularly by this nightmare. Francine is crossing the room diagonally, walking towards him. Tim’s cowering in a corner, shaking, unable to keep still. He can’t actually see Francine, only her shadow against the white wall, moving closer. Her arm looks funny, thin as string and with a kink in it, as if it’s been broken and healed badly. She’s carrying a handbag. In the bag is something she’s going to use to murder Tim; he doesn’t know what. He always wakes up before she reaches him.

After he’d told me about the dream, I understood a bit better why he was so scared of Francine. If he honestly believed she’d made an attempt on his life and might do so again, then, yes, I could see why he wouldn’t risk leaving her. What I didn’t understand was how it was possible for her to have tried to kill him and him not remember. I know people occasionally talk about trauma and memory loss, but I just didn’t buy it. If your partner tries to kill you, generally you know about it consciously. You don’t rely on hints in dreams.

I went to Switzerland, Lauren. A bit like you following me to Dusseldorf, I followed Tim’s nightmare. I didn’t think it would do me or him any good necessarily, but I was in love with him and obsessed with trying to help him. I thought the hotel staff might remember something. Maybe if I asked the right questions, one of them would say, ‘Oh, yes, Tim Breary – he stayed here with his girlfriend and she plunged a screwdriver into his carotid artery in the middle of the night.’ I booked myself into the hotel they’d stayed in: Les Sources des Alpes in Leukerbad. Same room. I had to bribe the hotel staff to trawl through old files to find out which room had been theirs.

Would you believe me if I told you I solved the mystery, Lauren? Well, I did. There were no clues in the room or in the hotel, but one day I went for a walk and I saw the answer. I saw that nothing was what Tim thought it was, and I realised his nightmare wasn’t a memory. It was a metaphor (something that represents something else). Which meant that, in all probability, Francine hadn’t tried to kill him, which explained why he had no conscious memory of her doing so.

Thrilled and proud of my discovery, I couldn’t wait to tell Tim. Now my biggest regret is that I didn’t keep my mouth shut. As soon as he heard that I’d been to Leukerbad, his behaviour towards me changed completely. I should have spotted it instantly and started to backtrack, but I was too full of myself and my great discovery. I told him I thought I knew what his dream meant, at least in part, and he completely freaked out. He wouldn’t let me tell him, said I should leave him alone, get away from him and stay away, or he might say something he’d regret, which of course was worse than if he’d actually said whatever it was that was in his mind. I imagined the worst possible thing: ‘I don’t love you and I never have. This was all a terrible mistake. I’ll hate you until the day I die.’

You’ll have noticed I haven’t told you what I found out in Leukerbad, about Tim’s dream. Since he refused to be told, and felt so strongly that I had no business knowing, it would hardly be fair for me to tell anyone else.

So, there you have it: my relationship with Tim and how it ended. Since then, my life’s been monochrome. Diminished. I didn’t realise quite how much until I met you and suddenly my past was dragged into my present.

I’ll be honest with you, Lauren: I’m devastated to think of Tim in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. But at the same time, I’m excited, because it’s an opportunity for me. For me and him, for us. Years have passed, Francine is dead, and Tim needs my help. I have hope burning inside me again. It’s agony, but I prefer it to the numb detached feeling I had before when I thought all I had to look forward to was a life spent watching Sean watch football.

In order to help Tim and save both our lives (yes, that really is how it feels) I first need your help, Lauren. I don’t know who killed Francine. You do, I think. Please, please, tell me what’s going on. Or tell the police. Please be brave. Do the right thing. Don’t let Tim pay the price for someone else’s wrongdoing. I know you’re too good a person to let that happen. I know you’ll read this and decide that the man I’ve described in this letter – the Tim I know, with all his mysteries and flaws, all his fears and hypocrisies, all the love he feels that he can’t express – deserves better than to be framed for a crime he didn’t commit.

Yours sincerely,

Gaby x (07711 687825)