Chapter Thirty-Four #2
Robin is logged into my Roof account, where he’s keeping an eye on my host’s inbox.
But with one click of a button he can switch to my traveller inbox, where there is a series of messages between me and Johan.
He’s always known Johan’s name. He has a reasonable idea of what he looks like, but even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t matter.
Our messages sit in an unmistakable furrow of old intimacy.
They talk of our meeting, of our phone conversation.
And then he messages to say he’s on his way over.
Please wait for me, he writes, and that’s the last thing my husband will have read last night.
Has he read the message Johan sent ten minutes ago, too? The tenderness of his tone, the kiss at the end?
Please no.
I start the car engine and then turn it off. I don’t know what to do. Rain has started to fall again. It’s a sudden downpour, hammering the windscreen of this toy car with a cold, dedicated fury.
I call Robin again but he doesn’t answer, and I don’t blame him. Total honesty, we promised each other. No secrets, no gray areas, and—true to his word—Robin has told me everything, right from the start.
So did I, until I found my Johan Kullberg again.
No, I whisper, into my cold little car. No, no. This will devastate Robin. It will lay him out. And our children…My eyes fill with tears. No, no, no.
It doesn’t matter that nothing happened. It was all there. For both of us. And it’s still there this morning. I still feel his arms around me after Nicola’s phone call last night, my almost unbearable longing for more. My heart has already betrayed Robin, even if my hands are clean.
Paralyzed, I sit behind the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do next.
My phone rings, breaking the silence. I scrabble for it, but it’s not Robin. It’s Maeve’s gymnastics club. It’s the Devon under-tens championships this afternoon and Maeve is on the squad, but she hasn’t turned up for their extra practice. Robin hasn’t called and he’s not answering his phone.
Where are my children? Where has Robin taken them? What is he doing?
A few years ago, a man in Tavistock murdered his wife and children after discovering his wife had been sleeping with his school friend.
I remember how it had sat in my nervous system, the knowledge of this appalling act just a few miles away.
I remember his neighbors saying to the news crews that he had always seemed like such a sweet man: quiet, hardworking, always friendly. And yet.
People do unimaginably awful things when they’re cuckolded, Dad had said to me.
We’d met in Ashburton for a coffee while Robin took the twins swimming and I’d seen the Tavistock murders on the front page of the Western Morning News.
I couldn’t let it go. It can send the sanest of folk completely over the edge.
Even Robin?
“Stop it,” I tell myself, loudly. Of course not Robin. These thoughts are no more than a marker of my overwhelm, the bottomless shock of losing my dad, the fallout of seeing Johan.
I send Robin a message saying that I know what he’s seen.
Absolutely nothing happened, I write. I didn’t even know he was out of prison until a few weeks ago.
I should have told you—it’s just been such a shock, I haven’t been thinking straight.
I’m so sorry, Robin. So, so, so, so, so sorry.
But please know that nothing happened. We just talked about his arrest and imprisonment.
There was a lot of stuff I needed to know. Please call me. Xxxxxx
—
By the time I return the hire car ninety minutes later, I’ve had no reply.
I know, rationally, that he’ll just be devastated, or angry, or both, that he’ll have needed to get out of the house. I know that he won’t want to talk to me anymore than I’d want to talk to him if I’d stumbled across an intimate message chain between him and a woman from his past.
But the longer I don’t know where my children are, the sicker I feel. I call Nicola and I call Mum; neither reply. I call Maya again and she answers this time, but is only able to whisper that she is at the register office and can’t talk.
I’m just about to call Robin again when Johan phones.
“Carrie. Where are you?”
I tell him I’m in a taxi, on my way to my apartment to pack my suitcase and leave for the airport.
He says something under his breath that I think is a Swedish swear word. “When will you be at the airport?”
“Maybe two hours from now?”
“I’m coming to meet you there. I’m coming to England with you.”
“What?”
“Oh, Carrie…I’m sorry. It’s about Robin. Your husband. I really don’t want to be telling you this, but he…uhh, he—”
“What? Johan, what about Robin?”
“Are you flying SAS?” he asks. I can hear him running up some stairs. A drawer is opened, the sounds of scrabbling. A zip.
“Yes. But Johan…” Running again, then the sound of keys, some beeping.
“I’ll see you in terminal five. Text me your flight details. I’ll get a seat on your plane.”
“You’re scaring me. What do you know? Are the children OK?”
“I’m sure they will be. But I need to talk to you again, face-to-face. Wait for me by airport security, OK?” I hear a door slamming, a deadlock turning.
“Johan, stop!” I’m shouting. “Tell me what’s happening. Now!”
“It was Robin,” he says. He’s out of breath; he must be walking fast, maybe even running. The sound of a car door opening, closing, the engine starting. “Robin was my fixer in Myanmar. It was him who gave me the pills to carry, for his boss. Robin is the reason I went to prison.”
I think my heart actually skips a beat. “I’m sorry?”
I hear the sound of gears changing, then his indicator: a cheerful ticking in the eye of this tornado.
“I didn’t know who your husband was. I didn’t know anything about your new life, Carrie.
I forbade myself from googling you. Then yesterday you called him by his name.
There are hundreds of thousands of Robins in this world; I didn’t think anything of it.
But the name stuck itself to my subconscious and I found myself googling Robin Carghill.
Out of interest, I suppose. I found him straight away.
Loads of stuff about the Heynes Foundation, a profile on LinkedIn.
But I kept going—I don’t know why, I just got carried away looking at this man who nearly destroyed my life.
I got to page four of Google and there was your name.
Something to do with a sponsored bike ride on Dartmoor that you and him did together. ”
I wrap my arms around myself.
No.
“I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I just cannot believe it.”
No.
“I find it very disturbing, Carrie. There’s no way he wouldn’t have known who you were when you met. I used to talk about you constantly when we worked together. I showed him pictures of you. Fuck,” he adds. “Roadworks.”
My taxi pulls up outside my apartment building. I pay the driver, probably too much, but I need to be out of that car, in the fresh air.
“I don’t think it can be the same Robin,” I say. “I…I met him completely by chance. At a hospital fundraiser. And Robin’s…Robin’s a good man, Johan. A really good, kind man, who’s done nothing but look after us all. It can’t be…”
Johan listens, not saying anything, but I can hear the sounds of a car driving. I know he’s still there, and I know he’s giving me a moment to come around to the idea.
“I’m sorry,” he says, after a long pause.
“And for what it’s worth, I thought he was a good guy, too.
I’ve even had moments when I can find some grain of understanding why he stitched me up the moment he saw authorities arrived on his doorstep.
This, though. This is a whole new level of wrong, Carrie. How long have you been together?”
“Eight years,” I whisper. I’m inside the lobby of my building now.
Slowly, carefully, I go over to the mobility chair that lives by the lift, and I sit down on the ergonomic seat.
I grip the handle with one hand, my phone with the other, and I’m back in that film again.
The one where a normal woman finds herself in a crazy plot, disaster all around her.
This cannot be my life. This man Johan’s describing cannot be the father of my children.
I grip the chair. I think I might faint.
“It’s him,” Johan says, gently, into my ear. “Once I put your names together I found several more pictures of you two. There’s no mistake. I’m sorry.”
“No,” I whisper.
“Look, you said he’s gone missing. What did you mean?”
“I mean…he’s not answered my calls or messages.
I told him Dad had died and he hasn’t said a single word.
He’s canceling my calls. My Roof guests tell me the house is deserted…
He told them he had to go away last minute for some astronomical event.
But there was a storm in the UK last night.
The sky wouldn’t have been visible to anyone. ”
“And…?”
My voice trembles. “He read our messages on Roof. I think that’s why he’s gone. He knows we’re in touch. He knows it’s you. He knows we were together last night.”
Johan says the Swedish swear word again. Then—“Well…I’m not surprised he’s panicking. He’ll know it’s only a matter of time before I work out who he is. Hang on—busy intersection…”
I sit, frozen, until Johan speaks again. “Did you speak to him last night? Did he seem odd?”
I think back to our calls yesterday and it was all there, of course.
I just wasn’t looking. “Yes. He was odd. We spoke at lunchtime yesterday when I was driving—he was strangely clingy. Kept saying he really missed me. But then later on when I video called at the kids’ teatime, he was weird.
Distant to the point of seeming angry. I just assumed he was fed up with the children, but I think he’d actually just found out we were meeting. ”
Johan’s voice is firm. “Your kids are going to be fine. You’ve been with this man eight years. He’s their dad! And while I cannot understand what he was up to, getting together with you, I do know that if he was some sort of psychopath you’d have known by now.”
Would I? The man who held me through my pregnancy, through the twins’ hospitalization.
The man with whom I shared my deepest fears as we lay in the dark at night, the man who has made me hundreds of pancakes, lasagnas, shepherd’s pies—his love of comfort food, planetary systems and constellations, his amiable bumbling around with retired astronomy nerds, his years of work to funnel rich peoples’ money into deserving causes.
Who is he? Did he deliberately track me down? What was he after?
“It will be OK,” Johan repeats.
“But where is he? Where’s he taken the kids?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll help you find them. I don’t believe something terrible is going to happen, Carrie. I just don’t think he was ever that sort, and I don’t think you do either.”
“Then why are you coming to England? Why are you getting on the first plane to come and help me if you don’t believe anything bad is happening?”
He goes silent.
“I just don’t like any of this,” is what he says eventually, and I can hear the anxiety in his voice now. It sends terror through my body.