Emily Barr - The Sleeper

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.