Emily Barr - The Sleeper

I waited for him to catch up, knowing I had propelled him out of sleep and into the middle of something utterly surreal.

‘… He might have killed her by now,’ I finished by saying, ‘but our backup plan was a place called Food Street in Singapore, and so I’m going to head there and see if anything happens.’

‘Iris. No. Let me call the Operation Aquarius guys. They’ll get the police over there to pick him up. Leave this with me.’

It was logical.

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘Have the Thai police look for them. Of course. That would be great.’

‘And you come back. OK? Your involvement stops here. I’ve been desperately worried – with good reason, it turns out. I can’t believe you’re all right. Don’t push it. Come home. You’ve done more than enough, and you don’t want to mess any more with that man. God knows what else he’s done.’

‘I know. Look, I’ll go to Singapore, just in case Lara gets to Food Street, and then I’ll book a flight home. OK? Compromise.’

He paused. ‘OK. Keep me informed. Be in touch. Get a Thai mobile and let me have the number. I’ll … well, I’ll get things happening. I can do this, Iris. You’re not alone.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Promise to keep in touch.’

‘Promise.’

When the fishing boat rescued me, and I realised I was actually alive, I begged the men to say I was dead. It would have been a great plan, had they understood. They were lovely: one of them was big and strong, the other smaller, younger. Both looked after me: they held me as I vomited my watery stomach contents over the side of the little wooden boat, gave me their bottles of water, and tried to ask me what on earth I was doing tied inside an underwater shack.

I coughed and spluttered and was grateful that we could not understand each other. I would not have had a clue where to start.

When I saw it from the outside, I could see that the hut had once been on stilts, and that was why it had been so easily moved. There were others like it, abandoned, nearby, rotting away. Leon had pulled it down the beach to below the tide line, and left it there. He was insane.

The men had wanted to call the police. I said no, and got them to drop me at the beach below the huts. They were incredibly concerned for my well-being, and the older one hopped out of the boat with me, with the intention of taking me to someone in authority – to the woman at the guest house reception at the very least – and handing me over, explaining my ordeal, but I shook him off. In the end I had to shout and cry at them to go away, and they did, with the greatest reluctance.

I would be much safer if they would pretend they had found a body, and if it could somehow reach the media. The chances of their actually doing that were nil. I was going to have to be careful.

The island flashed by outside the taxi window. I did not speak to the driver, and after a few attempts he gave up trying. I looked at the boards advertising interminable ‘full moon parties’, at the strings of roadside cafés and guest houses. In places, signs announced a ‘tsunami zone’. The sun was relentless today, and I had the window open, tropical hot air blasting into my face. There were some people about: locals, travellers, people with backpacks. I had expected this place to be heaving with backpackers, after reading Lara’s old diary, but it was not. In fact, I wasn’t sure people went backpacking any more; not, at least, in the way in which they used to.

Everything looked technicoloured and unreal out there. I did not want to think about the bigger picture. All I could do, right now, was get off the island.

I sat with my face in the hot air, and tried to think of nothing. I was useless, and this was beyond me. Alex was right: all I could do now was leave it to the professionals, get myself to Singapore, check out Food Street just in case, and fly home. Having found her once, I might never do it again.

The taxi pulled up at the ferry terminal on the north of the island, and the driver opened my door, then unloaded my bag from the boot. I stood in the heat, instantly sweating, my head feeling it was about to crack open. When I paid the driver, who was wearing a burgundy Aertex shirt, and he drove away with a smile, I realised I needed to get moving. I could not stand in the mid-afternoon heat, visible to anyone, and expect things to be all right.

Immediately, a wiry man strode over and asked what I wanted.

‘Taxi? Hotel? Restaurant? Boat?’

I exhaled in gratitude. ‘Boat,’ I told him. ‘Thank you.’

‘Ferry to Krabi? Tomorrow morning. Now? You want a private boat?’

I had plenty of cash, so I nodded. Wherever Leon was, and wherever he was heading, he would have to pass through this port. He might already have done so, but I needed to get away as soon as I possibly could.

‘How much?’

Twenty minutes later I was on a speedboat, with a bottle of cold water, paying what I thought was about a hundred pounds to be taken to the pier at the centre of Krabi. It was, as far as I was concerned, money extremely well spent.

I had barely paused in Krabi on my way over. Now I rushed off the boat, thanking the driver, tipping him frenziedly, running into the travel office on the other side of the road. I could hear a dog barking somewhere nearby, and normally that would have scared me, but today I didn’t care. If it rushed at me with its teeth bared, I would kick them all out of its head.

A large woman with her hair in a bun grinned as she saw me coming.

‘Hello, yes?’ She gestured to me to sit down. Two children in formal school uniforms were sitting at the other desk in the room, their heads bent over something, giggling. A faded poster of a smiling young woman was beginning to come off the wall.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Can you sell me a plane ticket to Singapore?’

She pulled a keyboard closer to her. ‘Most certainly I can,’ she agreed. ‘When would you like to go?’

‘Today?’

She shook her head and sucked her teeth. ‘Not today. I am sorry. Too late. Tomorrow. Wednesday.’

I inhaled deeply. ‘Yes. Tomorrow. Thank you.’

‘It will be nineteen hundred baht.’

‘No problem.’ I nearly asked her for a ticket to London, but thought better of it. I would source that online, or when I got to Singapore. Buying it here would not feel secure.

‘Great.’ She grinned at me. ‘Your passport, please? I can book you a taxi to the airport too. You come back here when you want to go.’

I happily acceded to that, and then I was walking through Krabi, the sun too hot, wondering where to go. Krabi had dusty pavements with potholes in them, and the laissez-faire air of a frontier town. Foreigners were meandering around, many of them sweating under the weight of huge bags. It was hot, and one particular fly kept settling on my forehead. I imagined it feasting on my delicious sweat.

I did not even try to summon Laurie. He was gone, and I was all right with it. This was reality: me, on my own, without much of a plan.

I needed to lie extremely low. It was only when I caught sight of myself reflected in the window of a tatty-looking shop, however, that I remembered the other thing I needed to do.

The shop seemed to sell a bit of everything: there were containers of nails, padlocks, pens and hammers. You could buy binoculars here, or, if you preferred, inform yourself thoroughly about the Thai and British royal families. Dust hung in the air.

‘Do you have scissors?’ I asked the man sitting on a high stool reading the paper.

‘Scissors? Yes, I do!’ he said delightedly. ‘Over here. Which sort of scissors?’

I looked at them. His array of offerings ranged from the blunt ones you fail to cut paper with as a child to chunky kitchen scissors with plastic handles.