Emily Barr - The Sleeper

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.