Emily Barr - The Sleeper

I turned, recognising the voice, not able to place it. Before I could even make the connection, which made no sense, he was right there, pressing something to my face, and although I kicked and struggled, belatedly beginning to piece things together, it was no good. I felt my senses deserting me, flying away into the air, everything that made me cogent dissipating until it was gone.

chapter twenty-eight

Lara

I pulled off an escape. I tricked everyone, when the only person I wanted to trick was him. And he found me. He killed my lover, the person I adored, in front of me, telling me it was for my own good. And now he has found me again.

And I am back on the train, living again through those most terrible minutes of my life.

I pushed open the narrow door of the sleeper compartment, expecting to see Guy, woozily wanting to kiss him, ready to spend the rest of the night squashed into his arms. He was lying on the bed in a pool of dark red blood. There was a knife. I ran to him, held him, tried to shake him awake. I pulled the knife out of his neck. I didn’t realise there was someone else in the cabin until he spoke.

He puts Iris down carefully, lying her on the sand as if he actually cared about her. I suppose he owes her something: she brought him directly to me. I should have been more specific about my instructions not to trust anyone, but I did not even want to type his name, out of some kind of paranoia that he would have an alarm that would sound if I did. I thought someone would have seen him on the train, that when she said she had worked it out, she really had pieced it together.

But she thought it was Jake. Jake was long ago, and he has nothing to do with any of this. I always thought it was Jake who would come to get me one day, too. I have imaginary Jake to thank for the fact that I was constantly prepared for an escape. It never occurred to me, though, that Iris would think that, because it never occurred to me that she would, somehow, read my old diary.

‘Right,’ he says, with a smile, and though I have thought of little else for weeks, I cannot reconcile the man I thought he was with the man I now know him to be. ‘Here we are then. That’s her taken care of for now. Back where we left off. How are you, gorgeous girl? How have you been? You’ve done so well. I told you to get away, and you did. I’m proud of you.’

I cannot look him in the eye.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I found you. Like I told you on the train, I’m in love with you. That means I’ll do anything for you, Lara. Anything.’ He laughs. ‘I think I’ve proved that by now.’

I knelt beside Guy, turned the knife over in my hands and stared at it. I stroked his face. I needed to call for help but I felt I was still dreaming. Then someone touched the top of my head, standing behind me, and I looked around.

‘You weren’t meant to see this,’ said Leon. ‘I just couldn’t bear the fact that he had his dirty great hands all over you. Sorry, sweetheart. Don’t hate me. I always knew I’d have to tell you some day, and soon, but I didn’t quite mean it to happen like this.’

I stood there, unable to compute what he was saying, as he told me that he’d always loved me, right from when I was a little child. ‘I didn’t mind when you were with Finch,’ he said, with distaste, ‘because you didn’t love him, not really. You were still my Lara. We were special. But this one. He was going to steal you. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t let it happen.’

‘I thought it would be Jake,’ I remember saying, stupidly.

‘You were wrong,’ he said.

I had always been prepared for an ambush, though not that one, and I sprang, shocked and numb, into action. I had known I might have to run away quickly from someone who wanted to hurt me, and I had everything I needed. I just hadn’t expected it to be Leon.

He watched me and smiled.

‘Probably best you get out of here,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll come and find you when I can.’

I thought I was assembling my emergency kit out of nit-picking paranoia. In fact it transpired that I had done exactly what I needed to do, though I was not fleeing from someone who hated me but from someone who loved me dementedly.

As the train pulled into Reading, I stepped down from a door in cattle class, with a little group of other people, wearing the wig I’d had made in Hendon to look exactly like Iris’s hair. I swished it over my face and scurried through the open ticket gates in a clutch of strangers, and then I was on a coach to Heathrow.

I chose Bangkok because it was the only place where I knew someone like me would be able to disappear, where I could live on next to no money. I moved farther and farther from the places where the Westerners were, sleeping in the cheapest places I could find that still let me feel halfway safe, eating from street stalls, regularly getting alarmingly ill. Logging on to computers and watching in horror as the fact that I was a murderer swept across the globe, and scanning the reported sightings of me with terror. None of them was here, or anywhere near. I wanted to tell the world that it was Leon, not me. I wanted to talk to Sam, to my parents, to Olivia, who, I could see from the world’s press, was standing up for me. I wished we had not wasted so much time hating each other, when the real bad guy was simmering away unnoticed in our midst.

In the end, Bangkok was too much. I lost all sense of everything, and I fled to the only other place I could imagine: Koh Lanta.

Iris, who brought Leon right to me without meaning to, is knocked out cold, and my godfather, the man I loved and trusted for thirty-five years, is grinning at me conspiratorially, as if now I am going to agree with him that all obstacles are out of our way and we will be together for ever.

Guy has died because of me. Now Iris is going the same way. I cannot escape from this place because it is surrounded on all sides by rocks.

There is only one thing I can possibly do. I swallow hard and attempt to play for time.

‘Well, you really seem to want me, Leon,’ I say, with grotesque coquetry. The words stick in my throat, but I force them out. ‘You found me here. Well done. You win.’

He steps closer to me. He looks ridiculous, in a white T-shirt that is too tight over his horrible nipples, and a pair of long shorts, and flip-flops. Heat does not suit Leon Campion.

‘You mean it?’ he says. ‘You’ll give it a go? Me and you? I’m like one of those princes from the old stories. I’ve been through all sorts of trials for you. Do I win the hand of the fair maiden?’

I walk up to him and kiss his cheek. ‘Of course you do.’ I push the words up through my throat. ‘Now. What are you going to do with Iris? Please don’t hurt her. Please, Leon. She’s my friend. She’s done you no harm. She’s helped you. Don’t kill her.’

I smile at him and wish I could work out what is behind his eyes. He considers my request.

‘All right,’ he agrees with a sigh. ‘For you, Lara, I won’t. Don’t say I never do anything for you, my love. I will take her away, but I will not kill her. You have my word.’

chapter twenty-nine

Iris

I woke bleary and hot. The air was stifling and I was gulping down scalding air, taking shallow, panicky breaths. As soon as I realised that, I made an effort to slow them down, to slow my heartbeat, to take stock of whatever was going on.

I had no idea where I was, but I could hear water. It was half dark, but that was because I was inside a structure of some sort. I was surprised to be alive, and then I wondered whether I might be dead.

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.