The Sleeper (40 page)

I wished Alex would call me back. I tried Sam again, and after a difficult conversation he gave me Olivia’s number.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not your personal directory enquiries service. I don’t sit by the phone thumbing through my numbers wondering which of the people I despise you’re going to want to speak to next. You’re busy because of the diary I sent you, aren’t you? You could at least tell me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘I really am. I owe you. I’ll tell you everything as soon as I’m back.’

He exhaled. ‘Oh, who gives a shit? It’s actually nice to get a call from someone who wants something I’ve got. No one else bloody bothers any more. No one knows what to say to me, and now all the excitement’s over, I’m kind of on my own.’

‘Oh Sam.’ I wondered whether to tell him what was happening, that he had been right about Leon Campion, and I had been wrong. ‘Look, I’ll come and see you, I really will.’

‘Sure.’

Olivia took on board everything I was saying instantly.

‘Oh my
God
,’ she said. ‘Leon. The fucker. I cannot believe it. He’s doted on her all her life. She trusted him more than anyone. My parents trusted him. He’s in the inner circle. The absolute fucker. I’d kill him right now with my bare hands. The bastard. And you know, even as you were
saying
that, I realised I wasn’t surprised. Maybe I already knew it in a fucked-up way. Right. So you’re in Thailand, and you saw her? You’ve actually seen her?’

‘Oh, Olivia,’ I said. ‘Yes, I did. I saw her, but suddenly Leon was there. I saw her for less than a minute. Alex, from Cornwall. The police detective who was briefly involved in the investigation. He’s getting the police here on to them. I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to get caught up in red tape and statements. Leon’s gone, with her, and all I can do is head to Singapore and find a place called Food Street, which was our meeting place if things went wrong. I’ll be there late tomorrow night. My flight from Krabi’s at six. I’ll go straight there and wait, and I’ll leave messages, and if there’s a Food Street hotel I’ll stay in it.’

‘I can’t really believe you’re in a place called Crabby. It doesn’t sound pretty.’

‘It’s not pretty,’ I allowed, ‘but it’s good. I like it. I won’t see any of it apart from the courtyard of my guest house, but there was a woman who sold me a plane ticket and a man who helped me cut my hair and the hotel people set my phone up. So it’s good.’

‘Fair enough. So we have no idea where that absolute fucker has taken my sister?’

‘No, except that she’s travelling as me, so if his name and mine appear on any flight lists, that’ll be them.’

‘And if it’s just his name, it’ll mean we’ll never see her again. Even though it turns out she was alive all along, she might not be now.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the police here already know, so there’s no point in my going to them right now. I’m not going to tell the parents, either. Not until there’s something to report. I’ll tell you what I am doing, though – I’m going to see Sally, his wife.’

‘Oh God. Really? Be careful.’

‘
You
be careful. You nearly died. You saw Lara.’

‘I thought it was Jake. When I realised there was someone behind me. Right up until I placed his voice, which must have been just before I blacked out.’

‘Jake?’

‘Her boyfriend from years ago. It’s a long story. I never imagined Leon. I mean, I helpfully showed up at his office and told him she’d flown to Bangkok on my passport. When I told him I thought it was Jake, he leapt on it, you know. He made me feel I was definitely right.’

‘Suited him perfectly. Well, keep me informed. Please, Iris, I beg you. Every step of the way. If I wasn’t so pregnant I’d be out there, at your side, in a fucking flash. But call me. Will you? Will you call me every day?’

She sounded so strained and sad, so uncharacteristically vulnerable, that I wanted to rush to her side and hug her.

‘Of course I will,’ I promised. ‘Of course. Look after your baby and I’ll do the rest. I’ll do whatever I possibly can.’

I hung up feeling desperate and impotent. All I could do was fly to Singapore, go to our meeting place and wait. I was sure nothing would happen. She could have been anywhere. He could have taken her to Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur, both of which were closer than Singapore, and on from there to any place in the world.

If only Alex would answer his phone. I would know if the police had managed to do anything. I stared at my mobile, willing it to ring. Nothing happened.

I picked up my bag and started walking towards the taxi office.

chapter thirty-four

Lara

The long wig makes my head so hot and itchy that all I want to do is take it off. Every time I try, reaching up reflexively, he pushes my hand away. Then he takes my hand and holds it. I try to pull away because his big dry hand is making mine sweaty and slippery, but he just holds tighter.

We are in the back of a car, and we’re heading into Krabi, from the airport. We went to the airport first so Leon could buy our tickets to Singapore. From there, he has told me, we have tickets booked to Delhi, and in Delhi we will change on to a flight to Kathmandu, where our new life will begin.

I am managing to keep making myself sick, but I am still feeling wrong. The wooziness of the drugs is almost gone, but the fact that I throw up almost everything I eat means I’m still at a huge disadvantage. I struggle to focus. My stomach rumbles often, but he doesn’t seem to have realised, yet, what that means.

I miss food.

I close my eyes. I sleep whenever I can, because it is the only place I can go to escape him. He saw me crying on the boat across from Koh Lanta.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

The man who murdered my lover and the friend who came to rescue me. The man who let the world think I’d killed the man I adored, the man who came out to Thailand and trapped me, who was taking me to the mountains so he could keep me like a pet. He wanted to know what the matter was.

‘Nothing,’ I told him.

We are sitting in a restaurant on the main road out of Krabi. It is an odd place for Leon to have chosen, a completely normal tourist restaurant, open to the world on three sides. There is no polished and varnished hardwood, no artfully arranged tropical stems, no air conditioning.

I see him wincing at the clientele, with their backpacks and their sweaty hair. Leon is doing his best to dress down and be inconspicuous, and is wearing grey shorts and a white T-shirt. He doesn’t stand out at all; he is extremely good at this.

He picks a table at the edge of the restaurant, beyond a row of wooden pillars and away from the road. We are next to a wire fence and a house, with a row of pastel-coloured garments drying on a frame outside. I look as surreptitiously as I can at the window. There is a vase with plastic flowers in it on the windowsill and no sign of anybody inside.

I look back at Leon.

I am wearing the travelling clothes he bought for me: a plain green T-shirt and a pair of slim-fitting capri pants. There is a green flower clip in my wig, and strappy green sandals on my feet. I always liked Leon’s sense of style. Now it makes my skin crawl. I am trying not to think about a future in a little house in a remote area of Nepal, just Leon and me, for ever. He will dress me up, his doll, in clothes he will buy from the internet, and no one will ever bother to question why. He will never trust me enough to let me go anywhere or do anything on my own. I will be his toy, his pet, his object, and we will stay there until one of us dies.

I picture the tiny house on the mountainside with the spectacular view of dramatic landscape, deep blue sky, snowy peaks. When we get there I will start letting him drug me again, just to block it out. I will beg him to tranquillise me.

He is looking at me with the same warmth in his eyes that he always had.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ he says, leaning forward and looking at me with the gentle concern I am used to seeing on his face.

‘Yes,’ I say, speaking slowly, as I always do, to feign druggedness. ‘Leon?’

‘Lara?’

‘Why …’ I unfocus my eyes, frown in concentration. ‘Why did you kill Guy? You never even told me how you felt about me. You should have told me first.’

He nods and signals for a waitress.

‘One green chicken curry, one green vegetable curry, one boiled rice and two beers, please,’ he says crisply, and she writes on her little pad, reads it back to him and leaves. I wonder whether I could pass her a note, but if he caught me, the consequences would be intense. All the same, I am going to have to take a risk at some point. I have no pen and no paper, but I could go to the loo and ask the staff to call the police as I passed them.

I can only do it if it has a high chance of working, but I have to try something, because my time is running out.

‘You won’t follow this, but I’m going to explain it to you anyway, before you have your medication,’ he says, tipping all the rice on to his plate. I am not allowed carbs because I have to stay slim.

‘OK,’ I say, in my dreamy voice.

‘As you now know, I’ve loved you for a long, long time. Not in a creepy way, because I would never have touched you as a child or a teenager. I mean, I haven’t even touched you in that way now, have I? Not yet. I’m waiting for it to be perfect. I adored you. My marriage to Sally was happy enough, most of the time. But my heart has belonged to you, Lara, for the past twenty years.

‘You really didn’t know? I thought you did. I thought we had a connection that even you would have noticed. We were both in our dull little marriages to people who didn’t get us, not at all, not properly. We had each other. We were special, and I was patient, because I knew that one day we’d be together. I always knew that. Always.

‘Then you came to me for a job, wanting to come to London, where I was, and wanting to escape Sam Finch and everything he stood for.

‘I knew our time had come. I would wait until you and Sam cracked apart, and then I would step in and save you. I’d give you everything. The first thing I was going to do was bring you to the Himalayas on the holiday of a lifetime. After that, we’d do whatever you wanted. I had so many plans and ideas, Lara. I was going to live out my twilight years in absolute happiness. Me and Lara Wilberforce. It was the only thing I ever wanted.’

‘And here we are.’

He looks at me sharply.

‘As soon as Guy Thomas appeared on the scene, I knew I had a serious problem. You may remember I told you to steer clear of him? In the pub that night when Olivia had announced her happy news? I did hope it was a flash in the pan, a catalyst that would expedite your exit from your marriage. But then you were both leaving your partners. You were wild about him. You were going to have a new life together. I had to step in then and there. Immediately. I knew I could look after you, if you were grieving. Darling, I never meant for anyone to think
you’d
killed him. That was why I got something into your drink, so you’d crash out and be out of the way. But when I saw that it did look that way, and when you took off into darkest Reading, I wondered if that might not work for us after all.’

Staying calm while he says all this costs me almost everything. I blink back the tears. The only thing I want to do is run into the nearest police station. I hate him. I hate him, and I hate my parents for pushing me into his sights when I was a baby – for making him stand in a church and promise to look after me – and I hate myself for spending my entire fucking life thinking he was a kindly, concerned godfather, thinking that the person who was after me was Jake.

Most of all, however, there is a ragged, gaping hole in my being where Guy ought to be. If Leon gets me to that mountain, I will throw myself off a precipice the first chance I get.

Suddenly he is brisk.

‘You hate me now, and that’s just the price I have to pay for a while. You can’t go to the police because you’re wanted for murder, so don’t even think about that. You won’t always hate me, you know. You’ll come round to my way of thinking. I haven’t touched you, have I? I don’t want you to have to force yourself to go through with anything. I want you to come to me willingly, and offer yourself.’

He genuinely appears to believe this might happen.

‘Though when we get to the mountains, perhaps a little seduction might be in order on my part. We’ll celebrate our new life. But we’ll have all the time in the world. I’ll have to keep you inside for a few years. You’ll understand that. No jumping off mountain paths or bridges. No passing notes to villagers. Nothing like that. Until I can see in your eyes that you’re ready, I’m going to carry on taking precautions.’

‘But you won’t even want me,’ I tell him. ‘Now you’ve got me. Hasn’t the whole point been that you
couldn’t
have me?’

I am feeling much stronger for eating this food. Even Leon wouldn’t sprinkle ground-up tranquillisers over food in a restaurant. The beer is going right to my head.

‘You need your medication,’ he observes. ‘That was sharp. You’re right: in some ways, the reality of being with you day and night is not what I’d hoped. That will change. Your skin was always perfect, and now it’s – well, I won’t be cruel. And your figure. Scrawny. And we can mould your behaviour until it’s right. I expected more grace from you, my darling, I have to say. A little more poise.’

He looks at me as if I ought to apologise. I do not, and this, I suspect, proves his point.

‘In any case,’ he continues, passing me two pills, ‘you’d better take these. If you knock them back with the beer, they should keep you beautifully calm until we’ve been into Singapore and out again. I realise that flying into Singapore is a difficult thing for you, but those days are far behind you. Rachel’s long departed this life, and everyone has moved on.’

I wish he was not the only person who knows about my drug-smuggling past. Every time he mentions it, I feel he is holding it over me. I wish he had not given me genuinely good advice at that time. I wish it were not the case that he single-handedly got me back on my feet and showed me that I had to carry on with my life in spite of everything. I hate it that I will always owe him for that.