The Sleeper (37 page)

I struggled to make my eyes focus. I was inside something wooden, I thought. It was a hut or a shack, a shed. Water was lapping near it. I was in Thailand, almost certainly, on Koh Lanta, near the sea.

It was Leon. Leon! I had trusted him implicitly. I had gone to him, jumped through his hoops to prove myself, then told him everything. I remembered him standing there, smiling the gentle smile I had liked so much. I had trusted him, and he had used me to take him to Lara. I could not focus on the details, but I knew I had done a terrible, horrible thing.

All along I knew someone had set Lara up. I had never imagined that it was him. He was her kindly godfather, her greatest supporter and champion.

He was a monster. I had known she was in danger, and I had as good as killed her by coming out here.

I could not move, and it took me several long minutes to work out that this was not just because of whatever he had put over my face, but because he had tied my hands behind my back, and my legs together. My face was all right, though. I tried to speak, and it worked.

‘Laurie,’ I said, and then I remembered about Laurie. ‘Alex,’ I added. Alex was a more realistic source of help, but he was thousands of miles away, and he had no idea. I rolled over to try to work out if my phone was still tucked into my bikini, but it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. A man who would put drugs over your face and tie you up and hide you in a shed was hardly going to leave your phone sticking out of your knickers.

I could not begin to address what this was all about, but I knew I had done the most terrible thing of my life. My absolute joy at finding Lara had lasted seconds before irreversibly changing into its ugly inverse.

He had left me alive. I hoped that Lara was all right. I hoped she had another plan. I was impotent. I lay on the floor and let myself drift off, back into darkness.

I woke up when the water touched my foot. At first, as I drifted into consciousness, I was pleased. It felt lovely. I was sweating and it was getting harder and harder to breathe, and it was not at all like Cornwall or London. I told myself that I would appreciate European weather when I got back. And the water felt lovely, and it was soothing and wonderful.

Then I remembered that I was tied up in something like a little hut in Thailand, and that the water had not been there last time I was awake. That meant that the tide was coming in.

Yet no one would build a hut that would be submerged by high tide. Buildings were not on beaches and rocks. It made no sense, so it could not be happening.

I was more lucid this time, so I wriggled around and tried to investigate. My shoulders were aching, the muscles stretched and sore, and as soon as I noticed that, it became unbearable. He had tied my wrists with orange string, the sort that separates itself out into waxy strands. I imagined it being easy to find it lying around on a Thai beach, and that thought made me suddenly hopeful that I could break it. I was surprised that he had not used something better.

My legs were tied with the same stuff, with lots and lots of it, all the way up and down their length.

The water was getting higher. It could not be the tide. Yet before it had been on my toes, and now it was on my ankles. All the same, I had wriggled around since then, so perhaps I had moved down the hut without noticing. I shifted as far away from the water, lovely as it was, as I could. That was when I discovered that I was also tied to a post on the inside of the shack.

After twenty minutes, I had to admit that the water really was rising. Leon Campion had, somehow, located a hut that would be covered by the high tide. I knew that Alex would be worrying when I hadn’t checked in with him after my meeting with Lara, but I also knew that it would take a long time for that worry to translate into someone actually finding me. It would take far too long. I was on my own.

I cowered as far as I could from the water, but I could not stop it lapping at my legs. Soon it reached my thighs, a warm bath that carried grotesque overtones of spa treatments and paradise beaches. There was no chance that the tide was going to turn and recede before it covered me completely. A man like Leon Campion would not leave something like that to chance. I was going to be submerged in glorious warm seawater until I could no longer breathe.

It was at my waist. It was creeping up my midriff. I rubbed the orange twine furiously against the walls of the hut, but there was nothing that had any chance at all of breaking it. The man knew what he was doing.

I was incensed with my mind. For nearly five years it had kept Laurie alive because I could not bear to lose him. Now, just when I could really have done with hallucinating him next to me, holding my hand, kissing me as the water covered my neck, my chin, my mouth, there was nothing.

There was nothing, and there was nobody.

chapter thirty

Lara

‘Promise you didn’t kill her,’ I murmur.

He strokes my hair.

‘I promise, darling. I’m not a monster! You asked me not to kill her, and so I didn’t.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Really, honestly and truly. I did not kill her.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For you, my darling. Anything. She’s your friend and that means something. She brought you back to me, and that means even more. I owe Iris Roebuck. We both do.’

We are in an outrageously smart villa. Guy is still dead. My darling Guy is dead, and there is nothing I can do about that and there never will be. I have shelved the grief for the past few weeks and I am forcing myself to continue to shelve it now. I will deal with it when I can. Not now. Now I have to focus.

Being with his murderer, and going along with what he wants, and knowing that if I had never met Guy he would still be alive – all of that is making my horrible play-acting almost impossible. Yet I force myself to do it because I have no choice.

The furniture here is tropical hardwood, and there are vases of exotic blooms everywhere. In Bangkok I lived on a pittance, knowing that every baht I saved kept me hidden for longer. I wished for a source of money back then: now I would give anything to go back to skulking poverty, to a world in which Iris was safely in Britain and Leon had no idea where I was.

I could so easily have told him about my contingency plans, the stolen passport and the Hendon wig. If I’d told anyone in the world, it would have been Leon. Now, it turns out, I might as well have done.

The walls are wood-panelled. The air conditioning keeps everything slightly colder than is comfortable. The king-sized bed is massive, and my next challenge is going to be to get Leon to let me sleep in the second bedroom. There is a lock on its door; I have checked. If I could get in there, at least I would be able to breathe.

Leon is watching me from across the room. He is standing up, walking around, looking down at me with satisfaction.

‘Do you remember,’ he says, ‘a day when you were about twelve? I took you out shopping in Marylebone. Do you recall? Just the two of us. That, I think, was when I decided that one day I would be more than a godfather to you. I knew then that you were going to grow up into a beautiful woman. And here you are.’

I do recall that, much as I no longer want to.

‘You bought me a yellow dress.’

‘And some shoes.’

‘They were lovely. I wore them until they were much too small.’

‘You
do
remember.’

‘But Leon – you’re married. You and Sally …’

‘That’s nothing. Sally and I haven’t been together for years. Don’t worry about that. She’s glad to see the back of me.’

‘Does she know … I mean, where does she think you are?’

‘Oh, away. She doesn’t give a fuck.’

‘Oh.’

I have been longing to stop wearing that wig, but now that I no longer have to keep it on, I want it back. It was hot and itchy, but it was a spectacular disguise. No one – not immigration officers, not random police officers, not sleazy men on the Khao San Road – looks beyond hair like that. It defines its wearer completely.

I knew all along that Iris was the weak link in my escape. I knew she might notice her missing passport and connect me with it at some point. I never imagined, however, that she would rush out here and find me, nor that she would confide in Leon, a man she had never met, never seemed likely to meet, before she came.

Despite his promises, I am sure she has paid a horrific price for it. Like Guy, like Rachel, if Iris had never met me she would be alive and living a perfectly happy life, and all of this would have been entirely unimaginable for her. I could have changed this simply by warning her explicitly about him. By being scared to type his name, I have condemned her to … whatever he has done to her. Death.

‘And now,’ muses Leon. ‘Now, what, I wonder, shall we do?’

I stretch and yawn. The back-up plan was Food Street, Singapore. I need to try to get him to take me to Singapore, just in case she has escaped him, or in case she told the police or anyone else where she was going and why.

‘Let’s go to Bangkok.’ I tuck my legs up under myself. ‘I mean, we can’t stay here, can we?’

‘No indeed. We cannot possibly, enticing as it is in many ways.’

He walks over to me as I lie, pretending to relax, on the sofa. When he crouches in front of me, I try not to shrink away. I can smell his breath. I have loved this man, in a paternal way and as, I thought, the sole person in the world who had my best interests at heart, for my whole life. Leon was the person I went to when I sent Rachel to prison. Leon got me back on my feet: I remember him taking me to lunch, writing me emails, calling me at my parents’ house when I was spending days and nights staring at the wall and stewing in a rich broth of self-hatred. When I ran into a police station and demanded to be arrested, Leon was the one who made me retract everything. When, on his advice, I applied for jobs, he wrote me references and told me what to say in interviews.

Now I see that he was only doing it because he wanted to own me.

‘Here’s the thing,’ he is saying, inches from my face. I hope he cannot see how much I don’t want him to kiss me, because if he knew that, I am sure he would do it. ‘I’m not so sure about Bangkok. You’ve just come from there, you see. You know the place inside out. Lying low. I fear I might be at a disadvantage, were you to try to give me the runaround. It’s not a city I have ever visited, you see.’

The skin on my arm is standing up. I can see every little hair.

‘Oh.’ I bite my lip. ‘If I promise to be good?’

‘Lara, my dear. You are going to be good. I’m just covering all the bases.’

‘Don’t make me go to Singapore,’ I say suddenly, then close my eyes tight shut. ‘Please don’t.’

‘Open your eyes. Look at me.’

I do. How had I never been afraid of him for even half a second? I knew he was different from other people. I knew he was ruthless with his enemies, and I suspected that his business methods could be nasty, but I never cared because he was kind to me.

‘It is because of Rachel? The Singapore phobia? The last time you flew there your friend was thrown into a stinking prison?’ I nod. ‘So, I think you need to overcome that, darling girl. It’s something you have to face. You’re with me now. Those things are from the past.’

‘I’m not even allowed into Singapore. They sent me away and wrote something in my passport.’

‘No. They did that to Lara Finch. Lara Wilberforce, should I say. Not to Iris Roebuck. You’re the only Iris Roebuck who’s going to be walking through Singapore immigration any time soon, believe me. And our silly friend, the original Iris, has never been banned from anywhere, that is for sure, because the stupid bitch has never done a single thing in her tiny little life.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m going to book some tickets. You’ve never spent any time there. You don’t know the place. I know it fairly well. It’s where we’re going.’

‘Oh.’

He leans right up close to me. ‘Don’t worry, my Lara. It’s a wonderful place.’

As he taps at his laptop, looking up at me from time to time, I realise that I am too calm. I should be jumping through a window, yelling Iris’s name, calling the police and trying to save her. Yet I am just lying here. He has done something to me, and until it wears off, I am entirely under his control.

chapter thirty-one

Iris

I fought it until the last moment, struggling at my bonds, trying to break the twine. I felt I should have been able to, but, with all my strength, I could not do it. I was as far as I could possibly get from the water, but it was chasing me, inching its way up my body.

I pictured my parents, ostracised by me for five grief-stricken years, answering the door to a police officer. I imagined them rejecting the news at first. Iris? Tied up in some bizarre shed on a beach on a Thai island? No, that cannot possibly be true. And then, gradually, having to accept that, inexplicably, it was.

No one would know why I was here and what I was doing. Leon had caught Lara; for all I knew, he would hide out with her for ever, though (I made myself focus) he would be more likely to make her go along with what he wanted by holding the threat of the police over her head at every stage. Would he take her back to England and make her live with him as his plaything? Had he done this because he loved her or because he hated her?

The idea of him keeping her hidden and at his bidding for ever made me retch, and then I was sick, vomiting noisily into the water that was nearly at my neck. It was disgusting: with few currents, it floated, stagnant, around me until the fish started to notice it, and within a minute they were all around me, even quite big ones, feasting on the floating contents of my stomach. I saw the hole in the wooden wall that they were using as a door, and that made me try to push at the underwater parts of the walls near me. This was not a shack that was in good condition. It might have been rotten, and I might have been able to punch a hole in it.

I did. I kicked away and made a little hole in it. I bent around, my head just above water, and made the hole bigger with my hands. I pulled a whole section away. It made no difference whatsoever to anything, because I was tied on to a strong beam, and that was definitely not going to break. In any case, I was going to die from thirst before long. The heat was so stifling that there was almost no air to breathe.