Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-five.
We sit in front of a floor-to-ceiling window looking across at the runway, waiting for our boarding call. In front of us sit two rye baguettes with smoked fish and sliced pickles. Lettuce frills out cheerily above a napkin covered in smiling faces. I don’t think either of us are likely to eat.
I listen silently to what Johan is saying, but my mind fights every word. Like everything else that has happened to us, this feels more like a hallucination than my life.
When Johan met Robin, Robin was halfway through a twelve-month contract advising a Swiss billionaire, Valentin Meyer, who lived in Singapore. Robin’s job then, as it is now in his freelance work, was to help this wealthy man disperse a small proportion of his staggering wealth to visible causes.
Meyer’s reputation had suffered as a result of his cooperation with the various triads of a giant, pan-Asian drugs syndicate, and thirty-year-old Robin had unknowingly been hired as part of a reputation management scheme.
He was to help Meyer send very large amounts of money to very good causes—or at least the ones willing to accept that sort of money—with maximum publicity.
He’d been based in Yangon because Meyer’s biggest giving project was in Myanmar.
The relaxed hours had apparently allowed Robin to take on fixer contracts at the same time, which Meyer had encouraged.
As Johan points out, it made sense. Robin was Meyer’s most visible contractor; it stood in Meyer’s favor to have Robin working hand in hand with aid agencies and journalists.
And Robin has always liked to stay busy.
He had been anxious and unhappy when he’d met Johan.
He told Johan, one evening over a beer, that he’d now been in the job long enough to realize that Meyer wasn’t the force for good he’d been sold.
He was thinking of quitting, even though the money was sensational; his real fear was how his boss would react.
“I felt for him,” Johan says, smiling briefly. “He didn’t fill me in on any of the details but I could see it was really eating him. I didn’t think he’d be my scene. Posh British boy. But he was a really decent guy—very helpful, friendly, funny.”
That sounds like Robin. But what do I know?
“When he asked me if I could carry this medication for his boss’s friend, I said yes. I didn’t think about it. He’d done so much to help us by that point, I was glad of the chance to do something in return.”
He sighs, picking up his baguette, finally.
Without any enthusiasm he takes a bite. “I’ve thought about tracking Robin down, over the years.
Trying to ask him if he suffered any guilt, stitched me up like that, threatening to make it worse if I couldn’t get rid of your mum and Prawat.
I couldn’t face him in the end, though.”
“Hang on—what? It was Robin who threatened you?”
“He had a thug in the prison who relayed messages. But yes, it came from Robin.” Johan frowns. “Well, to be precise, it came from his boss. But it was Robin who chose to pass that message on. I was to take the fall and reveal nothing about anyone.”
I stare at my own baguette, trying to turn this into something I can believe in.
My jaw is clenched and throbbing. Images jag in from all directions: Robin changing our babies’ nappies, staying up late to make their birthday cake.
Robin patiently playing hide-and-seek and card games with them, administering cough medicine, rubbing sore legs, blowing raspberries on wriggly bellies.
Robin, their dad. Who carried out the instructions of dangerous criminals.
I start to cry.
—
On the plane Johan falls asleep and, in spite of my best efforts, I can’t stop watching him.
I am sick with shock, with the terror of what Robin might be capable of.
I can hardly bear to think about what he might do now he knows his cover is blown.
And on top of all of this, there is another impossible fact: my father is no longer alive. I will never see him again.
And yet, being next to Johan, absorbing the safety and stillness of his long, peaceful body, I have this strange sense that I may still survive.
That Johan’s instincts about Robin—my instincts about Robin—are correct.
That my children are safe and that I will soon get them back and have some space to process the loss of my father.
At some point I fall asleep, too. I dream that Dad is on a train seat next to me, reading a paper. In my dream I try to talk to him, to express how deeply I want him to be alive, to come back, but I’m unable to say a word.
Dad knows how I feel, though. He’s got a packet of salted nuts in his hand. It’s dark outside the train; I sense it’s winter.
Dad has a nut, then smiles at me and says, “Nothing is insurmountable, Carrie. It all just takes time and, sometimes, a great deal of pain.”
He said this when I got back from Thailand all those years ago, and then again when I had the twins. He was right both times.