The Sleeper (41 page)

My wig is itching unbearably. I want to take it off. I know I can’t. I take the two pills and put them in my mouth, stash them in my cheek and pretend to swallow with a slug of beer.

‘Show me.’

I open my mouth wide. Leon stands up and walks over to me. I quickly swallow the pills, which is agonising without liquid, a second before he gets to me. He puts a finger into my mouth and I let him. I do not even bite him. I must be getting ‘moulded’, as he said.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Though I do believe you utilised the last minute. Now. We’ll give them a few minutes to start to work, and then I’m going to have to make a fairly urgent visit to the gents’. You stay with our things. I’m trusting you. This is a test.’

I nod, and take several gulps of water to soothe my throat, which feels as if those two pills gouged out a bloody trail as they descended.

‘Right.’ He looks pained. ‘Trusting you.’

‘OK.’

He makes a quick exit. The moment he is out of sight, I reach for his leather man-bag and grab his phone. I have never been alone like this before, not with his stuff, and I cannot use the precious time to run to the loo and throw up.

I can’t make a call because he would see it in his history immediately, and before anyone turned up we would be long gone.

I go into settings and switch Safari to ‘private browsing’. Then I open it up and go to my Twitter account, ready to post a message to my tens of thousands of followers. I will give details and trust that enough of them are journalists for people to take it seriously and send someone along.

However, I click on the message icon, and find a series of private messages from Iris. That makes my heart stop. I read quickly, then reply.

In Krabi too. Right now – caf
é
on road out of town towards airport. rooftop bar, backpack accommodation, next to coffee shop. Flying to SG tonight. Help.

Then I post a general tweet saying
Help! I am alive and hostage. Lara.
I panic as I write that. Leon could see it very easily. I quickly delete it.

I change Safari back to its normal settings and replace the phone in Leon’s bag. I am still on my feet when he reappears, so I stroll over to the fence and pretend to be looking at the washing. My legs are starting to tingle and I can feel my brain beginning to shut down.

I slump into my seat, my focus blurred, and I feel myself passing the point at which I can be bothered to go and throw up. It would do no good now anyway. I want to sleep. Leon is talking to me.

‘Scrabble,’ he is saying. ‘Once you have your faculties back.’

‘Mm,’ I agree, and I put my head on my table. I should never have let this happen. By the time I come back to full consciousness, I realise, I will be on the flight to Delhi. I will be lost for ever. This is the biggest mistake I could possibly have made. I should have vomited right over the fence, rather than tweeted.

I make a supreme effort, clutch my stomach and say, ‘Loo.’

‘Of course,’ says Leon. ‘I know the feeling. Go ahead. Want me to walk you there?’

My head is swimming. I try to say no, but he takes my arm and stands me up anyway, and, holding tightly to the top of my arm, he walks me to the toilet.

It is around the corner, off an echoing hallway, at the foot of a flight of stairs.

‘I’ll be back at the table,’ he says, ‘because I can see you’re not going anywhere.’

I lock the door and stand for a moment, holding the white wall.

Must focus. Cannot let this happen.

I take my wig off, kneel and throw up everything from my stomach, even though I know it is in my bloodstream now. Throwing up will not help the way I feel, but it might lessen things a little. I am not used to having so much in my stomach, and it is sad to see that curry go, its mushrooms and mangetout floating on the surface of the water. I have to flush it five times before it all goes.

I am washing my hands when a voice says, ‘Lara?’

Because I am so spaced out, it doesn’t even startle me. I look round, and eventually locate the window at the top of the wall. It is barred, with no glass. She is outside, and she must be standing on something, because the window in here is high up in the wall. She is staring in at me, with short hair. We no longer look the same.

‘Hey,’ I tell her. ‘Oh. Hello.’

‘My God, Lara. You’re here. As soon as I read your Twitter message I got in a cab and described this place, and he knew exactly where I meant. It’s the rooftop bar, apparently. Everyone knows it. I can’t believe you’re OK. Are you OK?’

‘He gives me pills. I try to throw them up. Too late with these ones.’

‘Right. Well, look. Go out of here, and through the back, and there’s an exit. I’ll see you there.’

I think about that. My head is swimming.

‘He’ll catch me. I won’t get anywhere, and he’ll catch me and it’ll be worse.’

It takes all the strength I have to say these words. Seeing Iris, knowing that she has found me, lets me be the most together I can possibly be with the drugs coursing around my system.

‘You have to run. Now, Lara. Come on. We’ll get into a taxi and go all the way to Bangkok.’

‘Seriously. Can’t. He’ll find me. Police will believe him. Everyone thinks I killed …’ I cannot say his name, not now. ‘We have to do it properly. I know how to do it. I’ve thought for days. About it. I tell you what to do. You’ll do it?’

I tell her my plan, making a superhuman effort to get the message across. She looks terrified. I leave without waiting for an answer, and stagger back to my table, to my jailer.

‘I was about to come and check up on you,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you’re back.’

I nod and close my eyes.

chapter thirty-five

Iris

I did not want to do this. I had spotted her tweet about being held hostage, and although she had deleted it instantly, I had seen it being retweeted as a screen grab. It would make the news. That meant that Leon would, at some point, see it too. Now that I was aware of the state he was keeping her in, I could see why it was so vague a cry for help.

She was skeletally thin. Her skin was dull and pitted, her eyes lifeless, and I could see that being halfway coherent as she spoke to me had cost her all her strength. As soon as she had the wig on, nobody – not her parents, not Sam, not even poor departed Guy – would have recognised her as Lara Finch or Wilberforce. He had disguised her by destroying her.

I remembered the Lara who had come to my house at Christmas. She had been full of life and sparkle. I remembered us talking about mince pies and the way we would use our skills in a post-Apocalyptic world. Now she had lost it all, lost her verve, herself, everything.

And that was in spite of her efforts to throw up as many of the pills as she possibly could. The man had caught her, and he was killing her. He would destroy her as surely as he had murdered Guy Thomas.

Her idea was crazy, but I was tempted by it. It would give the man exactly what he deserved.

I called Alex. He still did not pick up. There was no sign of the local police anywhere. I did not have time to stop and worry about it. Olivia answered straight away. I knew it was early morning for her.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Lara tweeted something. Was it her?’

‘Yes. She sent me a Twitter message saying where she was and I found her. I saw her. I managed to speak to her while she was throwing up in the loo.’

‘You saw her again! And?’

I wondered how to answer that.

‘She’s alive. Not in a good state. Not at all. But look, Olivia. She asked me to do something that is completely insane. I need a second opinion before I do it.’

I explained the plan. Olivia thought about it. When she spoke, she sounded stronger than I had ever heard her.

‘If you don’t mind taking the risk,’ she said, ‘then I think you should do it. Give the bastard exactly what he deserves. If it goes wrong, we’ll rally round for you. You won’t be going into it alone. I promise you that. We’ll make sure you’re OK, no matter what.’

I found the area Lara had sent me to, eventually. It was surprisingly close to the tourist streets, but I supposed that made sense.

I tried not to be self-conscious as I loitered around, doing my rubbish best to look like the kind of person who did this sort of thing. The street was dingy and narrow, a place to hide in even in bright baking sunlight.

A skinny cat came and rubbed itself hard, viciously in fact, on my legs. A bird screamed somewhere above me. There were potholes in the road, and a pavement only down one side of it. I could feel eyes on me, and I wanted to turn and run. Instead, I walked slowly, stopped for a moment, walked slowly again, stopped again.

I had as much cash as three cashpoints were prepared to give me. I hoped it would be enough.

I walked around that street for twenty minutes, and I was about to give up when the man approached me.

‘You want to buy something?’ he said.

I nodded, afraid of sounding too English if I declared ‘Yes! I do!’

‘What you want?’

I bit my lip, and when I spoke, my words accidentally came out in the voice of a Radio 4 newsreader.

‘Do you happen,’ I asked him, ‘to have any heroin?’

chapter thirty-six

Lara

The airport is small. I lean on Leon’s arm, acting even more idiotic than I actually am, exaggerating my druggedness to try to get him complacent.

I know I have made a stupid plan with Iris. She might have been arrested by now. I could have sent her, like poor, poor dead Rachel, into the black hole of Asian prison. Of all the things to do, I have sent the woman who has shown herself to be my best friend in the world to buy drugs in Thailand.

I wish I’d put the word Krabi on that tweet. I wish I hadn’t written it. I hope no one saw it. But if I’d said where I was, then somebody might be here at the airport to look out for me, just in case. I look around, focusing on people in uniform. There are a lot of them here, but they’re probably airport security. Airports always have people in uniform.

My legs buckle beneath me. That was genuine. The beer and the pills have not reacted well. I am getting worse and worse.

We stand in a check-in queue. Leon looks at me a lot but we do not speak. I am not sure I would be able to say a single word. He puts his suitcase flat on a luggage trolley and sits me down on it. I pull my legs up, like a child.

‘Something she ate,’ I hear him saying to someone. That is a lie. I have eaten nothing, for ages.

Then we are in the departures lounge. It is small, with lots of chairs in rows, and I am leaning on him and forcing my legs to walk. There is a shop and I know what I need to do, and I try to practise the words in my head. I need to say them. I have to go into that shop and buy something. Anything. I need to be carrying an airport shopping bag because that is an essential part of the plan. I cannot quite formulate the words, but I will do it. I will do it before we leave this lounge.

Leon leads me to an area where hardly anyone is sitting, and pushes me down into a chair. He is next to me. I lean my head on his shoulder and close my eyes.

‘Lara! Sweetie! You just need to walk on to the plane, darling, and then you can get back to sleep.’

I let him pull me to my feet. I lean heavily on him, and force my legs to walk. We go to the front of the departure hall, and through a door. Leon shows someone our boarding passes, explaining: ‘My wife’s had a bit of food poisoning, I’m afraid,’ and we follow the crowd down stairs, around corners, and out into the hot sun, which immediately makes my head hurt.

On the plane, I slump against the window and close my eyes. I know I have messed this up, but I can no longer remember why, or what I was supposed to do. I was meant to say something, and then I fell asleep and didn’t do it.

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘You sleep it off.’

I wake with a jolt when the wheels touch the tarmac. I cannot focus on the tannoy announcement, but I know it will be saying we have arrived.

A small part of my brain recognises that I am in Singapore, the place I never, ever wanted to revisit. Last time I was here … In this state I cannot even articulate it. Rachel was with me, and then she went for ever. Her life was gone.

Slowly I remember my half-baked plan. I twist in my seat, wondering whether Iris is on the aeroplane, but all this does is make Leon look away from his paper and notice that I am awake.

‘Singapore,’ he says gently, and he pats my knee with his hand. I am too dopey even to wince. ‘But only in transit, OK? Nothing bad is going to happen here. We’ll be out before we’re even in.’

‘Not going out of the airport?’

‘Almost. As good as. Sadly this shitty little airline takes us to some dump called “the budget terminal”. We can’t transfer from there: we have to go through immigration, transfer to the airport proper and check in there. It’s irritating, sure, but
c’est la vie
.’

I find myself nodding blankly. ‘OK.’

‘That’s my girl.’

I know that he is right. I am his girl. I haven’t seen Iris. I don’t think she is here. I hope she didn’t do her part of the plan, because I certainly haven’t done mine.

It flashes into my mind: I could still do it. After that sleep I am slightly more alert. I have to try. I must make one last-ditch attempt.

I hang back, and Leon waits for me with infinite patience. He likes me being slow and useless. Eventually we are off the plane, walking down the steps in stifling humidity, Leon’s hand, as ever, above my elbow. He supports me as I feel my way to the next step, again and again, with my foot in its impeccably tasteful shoe.

The sky in Singapore is grey and low. I am prickling with the heat. It is tangible in my lungs. I hate this place.

In the building, I see a shop.

‘Can I have perfume?’ I ask, tugging pathetically at his arm. ‘Please, Leon? I want perfume. Will you …?’

He hesitates. ‘You want perfume? Really?’

‘Want to smell nice.’

He laughs. ‘By all means. How can I argue with that? Come on then. We have hours to kill, after all. But sweetie? You are going to have to walk through security at some point. This is the only stalling I’m going to allow you to do. It’s going to be all right.’