Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Lucas sat back in his chair. There was a great heaviness in his body, which I knew well. Like me, he was finding it harder with the passing of each hour to believe that Johan was innocent—that the man we both loved was someone we could trust.
—
Kerstin and Fredrik returned soon after, and suddenly Lucas and I were in the relatives’ queue. Lucas seemed unable to respond to my small talk, so I stopped. This young man, no matter how calm he might have appeared earlier, was fraying at the edges, too.
Johan did look better. In the past three days, he had improved visibly and he walked to the counter unaided. He saw me and smiled, which threw me into still greater confusion. Johan Kullberg was the only person I truly knew; it was unthinkable that he could be involved with crime rings or drugs.
And yet.
“Hey, Carrie,” he said softly, before I handed the phone to Lucas. “How are you doing? Are you OK? Are you sleeping?”
I told him I was, but he knew I was lying.
Lucas, holding the phone receiver between us—and, very decently, talking in English—had much to impart from the Swedish Embassy.
There was now an open line between the Swedish foreign office and the Thai authorities, he said, although nobody was giving much away about the sort of conversations they were having.
“But we are working hard to getting your trial to happen with more speed than is normal, and we think there is progress.”
After a brief catch-up, Johan gestured at me to take the phone.
For several moments we just stared at each other.
“Carrie,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry I was hard on you last time.”
“Nobody’s at their best right now,” I replied gratefully. This was the Johan I had married. I slapped a mosquito dead on my thigh. “Don’t even think about it. You look a lot better—do you feel better?”
“Yes. I was only two days into the antibiotics on your last visit. I’m still weak but I’m largely OK. Physically, at least.”
We looked at each other for another few moments. Johan should have been back in Myanmar, diving, in a few days. I should have been heading back to his flat in a few days—our flat—to study, prepare, watch the leaves turn gold and the streets fill with school kids.
Then: “I love you, Carrie,” he said miserably. He held the phone with both hands, as if he were holding me. Lucas, kindly, unperched himself from his metal stool and moved away.
“I love you, too,” I whispered. Today’s phone was working perfectly.
“But, Johan, please. I can’t take anymore of this.
Lucas has just told me you’re being charged with smuggling methamphetamine in from Myanmar.
And now my trust have called me into some possible disciplinary thing later on. I have to know what’s happening.”
“Your trust? You mean your hospital?”
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes. “No…Oh God, Carrie, I’m so sorry.”
I couldn’t see his legs, but I could tell one of them was jiggling.
“Carrie, listen. If there’s trouble with your job you really have to go back to London.
This is going to drag on for months. Years, probably.
You absolutely must not, cannot sacrifice all those years of training and backbreaking work.
Not for me. Not for…well, this.” He gestured around us at the peeling paint, the stained wall his brother was leaning against, a hostile watchtower crouching under the scorching sun.
“You can’t just send me away,” I said. “You need to talk to me.”
He sighed. “Here’s the headline, Carrie. I made some poor decisions. Very poor. In doing so I’ve ruined my life, and my family’s lives. But I can’t bear to ruin yours, too. You need to go.”
He stood up.
My heart plummeted. “Hang on. What? Johan…?”
After a moment, he sat down again. Even with the corridor space between us, I could see his hands were unsteady.
“I did bring yaba into the country, yes,” he said.
“And I could try to explain it to you, but I don’t think you could ever understand.
The bigger picture, it’s…” He looked away. “Well, it’s big.”
“Who was it for? Were you being paid? Are they paying you now? Is that where your money’s coming from?”
“I can’t talk to you about the other people. I can’t talk to you about any of this, Carrie. It’s not safe.”
I sighed. “You’ve got to give me some more information. We can’t help you if you won’t tell us anything.”
“I haven’t got to give you information,” he said after a long silence. His leg was jiggling again. “And you’d be a lot better off just leaving here. I mean it. As soon as you can.”
I closed my eyes for a moment.
Lucas appeared at my shoulder. I handed him the phone.
They spoke in Swedish for a bit. I had always loved hearing Johan speak Swedish, and thanks to my lessons I understood some of what they were saying.
It was mostly about Johan’s parents, how worried Lucas was about them.
Further up the row of visitors’ stools, a verbal fight had broken out between a woman and the man she was visiting.
He was covered, shaved head to toes, in tattoos, his eyes dangerous lamps in a thick tangle of inky patterns.
Lucas switched to English. “Are you being moved to the new cells?”
Johan said he was, that he’d managed to bribe his way out of the hell-like remand block and into a cell with only four other men. “I might even have the luxury of a rollmat to sleep on,” he said, although there was no smile in his eyes.
“This is good news.” Lucas seemed determined to look for positives, which was probably what Johan needed. I cursed myself for pursuing my own agenda so relentlessly. Why couldn’t I just show up here and be kind and helpful? He was in hell.
“Has the new lawyer visited yet?” Lucas was asking.
I sat up. “There’s a new lawyer?”
“Ja—I have a new lawyer. An English-speaking one. He came to visit me yesterday, actually—that was a first. Meeting my own lawyer. He said I might get a trial within the next six months. Some ‘friend’ is leaning on a judge, and it’s going well.
But it’s since come to my attention that the friend is your mum, Carrie.
Well, not your mum, precisely, but her contacts. ”
Lucas nodded. “The embassy cannot do this sort of thing.”
“Oh, wow,” I said, hopeful for a brief moment.
I’d barely seen Mum the past three days.
I hadn’t wanted to think too hard about it, but I had begun to wonder if she’d been spending “quality time” with Prawat.
She’d been especially energized in the mornings, charging around our room before leaving “to fight.”
“I’m told she’s been pulling a lot of strings,” Johan said.
The jiggling recommenced. “Her and her ex. I believe they even have a line of communication, somehow, with someone senior in the Department of Corrections. But, as I said last time, Carrie—and you have to take this seriously, you have to listen—it is not good for me to have this new lawyer, or any of the other advantages. I was safer with the Thai-speaking lawyer who never even came to visit. Who’s no more likely to get me off these charges than you are. ”
“But…why?”
“The situation here is delicate. I…” He looked around him. “I don’t want to end up in more danger than I already am.”
When I didn’t respond, he carried on. “I’m getting protection, Carrie.
And trust me, I’ve needed it. There are some animals in this place.
I’m getting food, clean water; I’m being moved to a less awful block.
The basics are being taken care of. Any interference beyond that could tip the balance and no matter how well-intentioned, it could really harm me. ”
“Are you involved with a criminal organization?” I blurted out, after a terrible pause. “Are you being controlled? Is that what you mean?”
Johan stared at me for a long time before looking away. Lucas seemed to have stopped breathing while he waited for his brother to reply. His big brother, with whom he would have run around a garden wearing nappies, playing with stuffed toys and plastic dinosaurs and skipping ropes.
“You really should go back to London,” was Johan’s reply, and his voice had become angry for the first time. “You’re out of your depth. We both are. But I at least know how to play this.”