The Sleeper (34 page)

When he finished telling me, he grabbed me by the wrist. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Lara,’ he said. I couldn’t pull away.

I started crying because I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do. I would try, and I did try, and I am trying and I will never stop trying, but it is pointless. I raged at him, told him I hated him, all of that. He didn’t give a shit. He never loved me, or even particularly liked me. He’s just a businessman, and he’s moving his business on somewhere else.

He told me that he too had been carrying. As if that would somehow make me like him again. He never usually actually carries it: a couple of times he’s had Derek tip the authorities off against him, so that he would walk through just before me and they’d pull him over, leaving me to stroll through an unguarded Customs area. But this time he did. This time we pulled off something massive, and all it took was the ruthless sacrifice of my best and only friend.

Before I left, he gave me a much smaller backpack and said I had to take it. ‘You’re checked into a private room at the YMCA, and all your stuff is there,’ he said.

I couldn’t look at him. I gave the small bag back, but he made me take it.

‘Seriously, Lara,’ he said. ‘You’ve earned it. Don’t be stupid.’

It was my clothes, a room key and a tiny amount of cash, plus a piece of paper with the hotel room number and a safe combination on it. We have done it that way before, but only once. Normally we just get in a taxi together.

So I took it, and left. I didn’t even look at Jake.

I got a taxi back to the airport and ran into the arrivals hall. When I tried to go backwards through Customs, hoping she’d be somewhere around there, unsmiling men in suits stepped out and stopped me. They were small and slight, but very uncompromising. There were no smiles, and the eye contact was stony.

I broke down completely. I just couldn’t hold it together. I wailed and screamed and cried. It destroyed any chance there had ever been of their taking me seriously.

‘My friend,’ I kept saying. ‘She’s here.’

First they ejected me from the Customs area, and then from the entire airport. I kept confessing, again and again. The first time I told them I’d carried drugs, they asked to look through my bag. They took it away for a bit, but there was nothing interesting about it.

After that, with no evidence and nothing but increasingly wild ranting to go on, they picked me up and threw me right out.

I sat on the concrete outside Changi airport (a tidy place where no one sits on the concrete), and I knew I was at the lowest point of my life.

A policewoman came and told me to move. She was quite nice, but when I started ranting, she changed. That gave me an idea, and I tried to act madder and madder in the hope of being arrested and finding my way into the judicial system.

In the end she took my bag, found that I had money and a YMCA key, and put me in a taxi there.

The money was in a portable safe, blocks and blocks of it. I tried to make a plan, but it was hard. I had to get Rachel out of wherever she was, all on my own. Last time I was properly on my own, I was walking down the Khao San Road in Bangkok, about to meet Jake. I would give anything to be able to go back and walk straight past.

I went to the police and told everything to a terrifying man who had an air of such authority that I quailed as I spoke. I almost wet myself when I told him all about our smuggling thing, but I was so relieved to be confessing that I managed to carry on.

The sole point I was trying to get across was that Rachel was a tiny player, unwittingly involved, and she should be released. I could feel, though, that my ‘why don’t you let her off this once’ line was not going to go down well.

He did write it all down, though. He was only interested in Jake and Derek, so I told him absolutely everything I knew about both of them. I know nothing will happen to them. I realised as I spoke that those aren’t even their real names.

And when I kept talking about Rachel, he wouldn’t even confirm that she’d been arrested. He wouldn’t tell me anything about her whatsoever. Then, since I hadn’t got any drugs or any proof of anything I was saying, he told me to go.

‘I believe your tale, Miss Wilberforce,’ he said. ‘Even without evidence. And for this reason I am instructing you to leave Singapore as soon as you can, and not come back.’

He took my passport and put something in there, and later I realised I had been politely deported, in my own time.

That was two days ago. I haven’t left. I need to go and visit Rachel before I do.

She’s been in the papers here a bit, but because she’s from NZ, I doubt there’ll be anything in the British papers. I moved out of the YMCA, and into this horrible hostel. Partly because this feels like a good place for keeping a low profile, and also because I like the squalor in a strange sort of way.

She was arrested with a kilo of heroin in her bag. That comes with an automatic death penalty.

April 29th
On the plane

They didn’t like me at passport control. I didn’t care. I hoped they’d arrest me, but of course if they want you to leave a country and they only find out you haven’t when you’re on the way out anyway, they’re hardly going to detain you.

I screamed as they put me on the plane. I hated them. I swore at them. It was perverse: I wanted to be arrested and they wouldn’t take me. They just sent me home. Once the plane doors were locked and we were in the air, I stopped. I couldn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. I can’t do anything. I will never do anything but try to get Rachel out.

Jake is such a fucking bastard. I hate him beyond anything, and if I can ever get even with him, I will.

May 15th
Mum and Dad’s house

I’m going to choke on the horrible stale air if I stay here a moment longer. I cannot bear it. They are so preoccupied with trivialities. Who cares? Who cares when the bins go out or what the neighbours are doing?

I managed to find news about Rachel on a New Zealand website. I am never going to see her again, because there’s every chance she’s going to be executed.

My friend is going to die, because of me. She’s likely to be hanged, as far as I can discover. My very best friend, the only real friend I’ve ever had, is going to be suspended by a noose around her neck until she is dead.

It’s my fault. If she hadn’t met me, she would be going back to New Zealand and carrying on with her life. I have killed her by being a drug smuggler. Whichever way you look at it, I’m evil.

And I know I’m powerless to stop it. I’m writing letters every day. I’m keeping copies of them all because I do so many of them I’d forget otherwise.

I can’t give up on her. Mum and Dad are worried about me. Because I’m not being the good girl any more.

They have no idea.

September 21st

I saw something in the paper.

I’d kept this book hidden so tightly away, wrapped in a cloth, at the very top of the back shelf of my wardrobe. This is the only place I can write it down. I don’t want this in my home any more.

I was reading the Saturday paper today, sitting in my flat on my own, fighting off the urge to revisit all this stuff. My place is just a studio in north London, and not in one of the parts that people consider ‘nice’. In an area, in fact, that is best known for its women’s prison, which sometimes feels like the universe taunting me and making sure I never forget.

The flat itself is nice enough. All mine (rented), though I’ve just made an offer on a little terraced house in Battersea. But I’m not very good at being on my own yet. I actually need a boyfriend or something, I think, to stop my mind attempting to swerve into bad places.

I was reading the paper, trying not to think about R. Every moment of every day I try not to think about her. And there it was, suddenly: a blurry photograph of him. Jake. ‘Mastermind of drug ring arrested in Thailand’, it said. His name wasn’t Jake; it was actually Donald, and it seems that his ‘tiny little operation working below the official radar’ was nothing of the sort. He was arrested in Bangkok: not at the airport, not for smuggling, but after police trapped him. It didn’t say much, but I think he recruited a young woman, an undercover officer.

I should be happy. I should not be hysterical, crying and shaking and throwing things around the flat. I know this stops him doing it to anyone else, and I know that he, unlike R, deserves it. But it brought everything back. I can’t control myself.

So Jake is in prison. So is Rachel, caught in the crossfire. I’m sure they’ve got Derek by now too, or that they’re about to. Jake would hardly protect him.

I sat in a tiny room in Singapore and told the police everything about Jake. I took them to him, I am certain of it. Rachel and I did it. They listened to me a little after all.

Out of everyone I knew who was involved in this business, I’m the only one who got away.

I’m the one who ruined everyone else’s lives.

I looked Rachel up. She’s still alive. I wrote to her again, but I know the best I’m going to get is another stiff, furious letter from her brother telling me to leave her alone.

January 24th

One more entry. Then I’m going to hide this book somewhere. I can’t throw it away, and I can’t ever open it again.

Today I met a man. After turning down people asking me out for drinks, ignoring people approaching me in the street, everything, I finally met one. I knew I would know him when I met him, and I have.

He’s not Jake, and that is why I have chosen him. He doesn’t make me feel wild and impulsive. I didn’t want to fling my clothes off when he looked at me. But he feels safe. He would never ask me to risk my life to make him rich.

Saturday afternoon, and I was in Soho on my own. I have friends from work but I can’t really be bothered with them. R was the only friend I had, and look what I ended up doing to her. I killed her.

She wrote me one letter, months ago. I burned it in the sink because I couldn’t bear it, and now I wish I had it. She said she had known what she was doing.

It’s not actually your fault as much as you think
, she wrote.
I asked Jake if I could do what you were doing. He told me not to tell you because he didn’t want you worrying about me. So it’s not quite what you thought.

It explained why she had been so terrified on the plane. But I was not thinking about it, and that was taking all my energy.

The plan was to stroll around and enjoy London, and perhaps end up at the cinema or an art gallery. In my head I was in Changi jail, the exact place where I should have been. I was with Rachel, Rachel who hated me so much she would not let me visit her, would not speak to me, just got her brother to tell me to go away. I pictured her crammed into a cell with other prisoners, unable to understand them, stripped of all dignity.

I pictured her dead. I tried to shut it out, but I knew that today was the day she was scheduled to be hanged.

And I suddenly couldn’t take it. I went into a bar and bought a bottle of beer and sat by the window on my own. All I was going to do was get drunk. It was raining.

There was condensation on the inside of the window. I drew a prison on it. Just a square building, but one with bars on the window. I drew a stick Rachel outside it.

Just before I could put the noose around her neck, someone interrupted me. An ‘Is this seat taken?’ interruption.

I said no. I thought he wanted to take the chair away to join his friends, but he sat on it, at my tiny table, instead.

And then I looked at him. He was nice-looking. I need someone. He felt safe. He, I thought, would do. He could save me.

I ordered a coffee, to pretend I hadn’t been drinking on my own in the afternoon. If he’d asked about the empty beer bottle, I would have told him. He didn’t, and so I won’t.

We talked a bit. He was fine. Then, somehow, we went to the cinema. It was gloriously ordinary. He was normal. He was not going to recruit me for anything. He was smitten with me, and I knew I was safe.

His name is Sam.

part four

Thailand

chapter twenty-five

Iris

Everything almost made sense.

The sun was hot and high, but it was a hazy, choking warmth, not the blazing heat I had imagined. This city was too much for me to take in, and all I could do was cling on to the edge of my seat and squeeze my eyes tightly closed whenever it got too much.

That did not, of course, block out the smell, which was a mixture of dust and dirt, food cooking, rubbish rotting, dizzying heat and toxic waste. I had never thought of air as anything other than a pure and negligible thing, but now it was assaulting me. It was hot in my nose, in my throat, in my lungs, and it made me cough.

I was in the back of a tuk-tuk, which was vibrating violently underneath me as its engine strove to compete with the proper vehicles, and there was far too little between me and a potential grisly end under the wheels of a lorry. I barely cared. It had happened to Laurie, and it would almost be fitting if it happened to me. I had hidden away for all those years exactly to escape things like this.

The tuk-tuk was open to the world on both sides, and it was only the fact that it was moving, blasting my face with fiery hot wind, that was stopping me collapsing in the face of the hostile climate. I was not built for this.

When I opened my eyes, I noticed that we were weaving in and out of cars, lorries and taxis, all of them a million times better armed for the roads than we were. The buildings were higgledy-piggledy, some of them crumbling concrete, some modern glass and steel. There were stalls selling street food, people shouting, people everywhere.

I was propelled right off the seat by a sudden application of the brakes, and my driver turned and grinned.

‘We’re here?’ I asked.

‘We here,’ he agreed, and I paid him gratefully and watched him rattling away. As I stood on the pavement and felt my body still tingling with the remembered vibrations, I wanted to cry.

It had seemed such a clever idea, flying to Thailand to find Lara, either hiding from the terrifying Jake/Donald or under his control (or, possibly, dead at his hands). Now that I was here, I could see instantly how ridiculous it was. I had come nowhere close to finding out what had become of her in London, and that was a city I knew, home to her family and the people who loved her and were desperate to trace her. Now I was on a continent in which I knew not a single person (except, if she were still alive, Lara), on the trail of a convicted drug smuggler who had, as far as I could tell from the internet, been transferred to an Australian jail four years ago, and released two years after that; at which point, ominously, he seemed to have vanished without trace. He could have been anywhere.