Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-two.
Dear Carrie,
It is a requirement that you attend.
Regards
Sima Barak
Legal and Compliance
Imperial College Healthcare Trust
“The important thing to note is that you two are not actually married,” Mum said, as we entered the Klong Prem complex three days later.
On the manicured lawn in front of the prison’s smart white edifice, a man in a heavy boiler suit and wide-brimmed hat strimmed verges under the violent sun.
“I’ll get a lawyer friend to look into this, but don’t think you can be disqualified by association with someone you don’t have any legal ties to. ”
“But I’m wearing his ring, Mum, and I live with him. I can’t pretend he’s just some bloke I met in a bar. And besides, I surely can’t be disqualified for something I knew nothing about.”
“Carrie!” Mum was getting angry. “Your career is on the line! You were never married to Johan—do you understand? It is critical that you stick to this. It is the truth, apart from anything else.”
Tears stung my eyes as I stared down at the carefully watered greenery. “I thought you cared about the underdog,” I said. “I thought you were all about fighting for people in terrible situations. Why are you so keen to divorce us now?”
“I have no opinion on your relationship with Johan,” Mum said flatly. “I just don’t want, in the middle of all this, for you to lose your job. You’ve spent years getting to this point, Carrie.”
She turned, marching toward the visitor center, and I followed her, just like I always had.
Mum had been with Prawat almost nonstop over the past forty-eight hours, calling people who had useful information: people at the prison and justice system, people who might be able to get basic help to Johan.
I couldn’t afford to fall out with her now.
“So,” Mum said a few moments later, as if nothing had happened. She had no real idea how to handle my feelings. “About today. I think when you get to see Johan you should be focusing on—”
“I’ll be focusing on what exactly has happened,” I interrupted. “I need to know who pushed him into this corner.”
“You still think he’s been forced?”
“Don’t you?”
Mum took her sunglasses off for a moment, cleaning them with the corner of her sleeveless blouse. She had looked immaculate every day from the moment she’d arrived here.
“I’m not sure,” she said, after a pause.
She resumed walking. “I find it hard to imagine how anyone with a decent life, who doesn’t particularly need money, could persuade themselves to take that kind of risk.
Most drug couriers do it because they’re desperate.
And I don’t see Johan as some dissolute posh boy, either; I don’t believe he’d mess around with drugs just for fun.
But the way he spoke to you—what he said about being answerable to dangerous people—I have to say, the red flags started waving at that point.
I’m struggling to see how he could be referring to anything other than a criminal organization. ”
I closed my eyes.
“I am on your side, Carrie.” Her voice was terse. “I flew here quite certain Johan had been stitched up. But it’s feeling less plausible now.”
I walked straight to the cafe kiosk at the back of the waiting area while Mum registered us with the guards.
I bought a red lime soda for me and sweet tea for my mother.
I stared vacantly at the washing-up sink while the woman got our drinks.
Scrubbed, sparklingly clean, yet emptying into a filthy bucket of scum-covered water underneath.
It defied belief that this kiosk, this sink, this waiting area, was becoming part of my daily routine.
I took our drinks to a shiny table with fixed benches, directly under a suspended fan.
“Carrie,” Mum whispered, arriving opposite me. “Is that Johan’s family?”
They were sitting on a row of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, talking quietly.
I had been on a handful of video calls with them from Johan’s London flat—cheerful, conversational calls; friendly fascination from both sides—and had warmed to them immediately.
But now their ease, their simple warmth, was gone. These people were broken.
We went over and I introduced myself. Johan’s father and brother got up and shook my hand, but his mother, who had swollen eyes, didn’t move. For a few terrible moments after names were exchanged, nobody said anything at all.
“He is seeming better,” Johan’s brother said bravely. “They have given him other medications and he is eating well now. But I think it will be a lot of time before he looks like he has health again.”
I looked at him keenly, this distinct but completely recognizable subtranscript of Johan’s DNA.
There was a long conversation about food, which they said Johan was able to buy from other prisoners who’d set up food rackets within the prison grounds.
I asked as many questions as I could about his health but was able to infer little—his family had been unable to get any specific detail from the prison authorities.
“Thank God you’ve been able to get money through to him,” I said. “Has the Swedish Embassy helped facilitate?”
“We—ah, no,” Johan’s father said. His legs were covered in swollen mosquito bites, pasted sporadically with antihistamine cream. “We thought the money must be coming from you.”
Mum got out her notebook and wrote something down. “Not us,” she said briskly.
“You have sent him nothing?” Johan’s mother asked. She was looking at me with something akin to disgust. “Nothing at all?”
“Until three days ago, I couldn’t even get in to see him. I’ve had nothing but closed doors since he was arrested. I’d do anything to be able to help him, but the Swedish Embassy won’t talk to me. Nobody will,” I added bitterly.
Mum put a steadying hand on my arm. “We have a charity called Prisoners Abroad in the UK. They can arrange money for British nationals who’ve been imprisoned. Do you have something like that in Sweden? Could the money be coming from there?”
“No,” Johan’s father said. “Or, if there is, they do not know about Johan yet. And besides, it sounds like he is getting a very generous amount.”
Mum watched him. “Right,” she said. “Well, that’s something we can try to figure out. For now I’m going to go and negotiate with the guards. It’s meant to be no more than two visitors per day, but I’ll try to get you all in.”
Within a few minutes she had pulled it off. Johan’s parents would visit him first, then me and his brother, Lucas. I think the guard she’d shouted at a few days earlier was actually quite taken with her, which was typical.
Mum went off to the toilet while Kerstin and Fredrik went through with the first group of visitors, and I sat down at one of the long tables with Lucas.
“Please,” I said. I spread my fingers out on the table, like an offering. “You guys seem to know so much more than me. What is going on? What happened?”
“Johan is arrested for taking methamphetamine into this country,” Lucas told me, without any hesitation. “From Myanmar.” His voice was factual, almost to the point of detachment; he had no more idea how to process this information than I did.
Locally, the drug was known as yaba. It had come up in Mum’s list of hypotheses but even she had agreed it was not the sort of thing a middle-class kid from Sweden would be mixed up with.
The drug was catastrophically addictive and its infiltration into Thailand had been devastating.
It was yaba, Lucas said, in his hesitant English, that had sparked the government’s war on drugs in 2003.
Thousands of people gunned down without any judicial process—simply eliminated.
Many had no connection whatsoever with the drug.
“But that is how seriously the government is to take it,” he said. “The drug is spreading across the country like fires. Children are now being addicted to it. Many people are dying. The government wants to protect their peoples. Johan has chosen the worst drug.”
“But Lucas,” I interjected. “You know him. Do you really believe it?”
Lucas didn’t respond.
Johan had dropped the shipment off in Chinatown the morning after he flew in, he said, but the police only learned of his part when they arrested the man to whom the drugs were ultimately delivered.
Like Mum told me, they hadn’t been able to find him until the night before our wedding, when he’d withdrawn cash from an ATM down on Koh Samui.
Within twenty-four hours, the convoy had arrived on the beach and taken Johan away.
“He insists that he did it,” Lucas said. “Definitely. He was not a—what is the word? Droga mula.”
“Drug mule?”
“Ja, yes, drug mule. Johan says he knew what he was doing, definitely.”
His body crumpled, the energy of information sharing now spent. “I do not understand it, too,” he said quietly. “I know my brother. He is not this type of person. Never.”
We sat in silence while I thought about Johan’s late arrival on our first night.
The strangeness of his energy and mood the next day in Chinatown, his insistence that we go to Nana, rife with prostitutes and prowling men.
What was going on in those first twenty-four hours?
Had the story about the dive permits been a smoke screen?
“There were no clues?” Lucas prompted. “Nothing happening that was strange?”
I told him what I remembered.
“I think the problem with the diving permits was real,” Lucas said. “He was emailing us about this problem, too.”
“It has to have been. I saw the email from the fixer in Myanmar, telling him everything was sorted. But I suppose…” I hesitated.
It felt like the first real betrayal to say this out loud.
“I suppose he could have used the permit thing as a red herring for the real cause of his anxiety. There was something else in the fixer’s email.
At the end, something like, ‘No other problems.’ I wonder about that. ”