Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-seven.
He doesn’t answer.
What are you doing? I write, simply. Johan comes to join me. He leans against the worktop, far too tall for this old, low-ceilinged house.
I panicked, Robin replies less than a minute later.
I show it to Johan.
Call me, I write. Right fucking now.
Robin calls immediately. “Look, Carrie, I’m sorry,” he says, in his voice. His calm, kind voice. “I’m really sorry. I had a little panic that you’d…”
“That I’d what? Call the police?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“So you decided to disappear with our children as a deterrent? Seriously?”
“I admit it wasn’t my best…well, it wasn’t—”
“What were you doing? Why were you in a hotel in Lancaster Gate?”
Robin sighs. “I know, I know. Probably silly, but I was worried something would kick off and that I might need to—I don’t know. Lie low.”
“What does that even mean? You were going to do a runner? With our children?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Don’t you dare sound outraged!”
“I just wanted to be near your mum’s in case I needed to drop them there for a while.”
“So you could run off to Heathrow and disappear? I…Robin. Who are you? What is this?”
“I’m so sorry. Truly sorry. I was young, when it all happened. I was frightened. I did what my boss ordered me to do. He was a dangerous man, Carrie, but I’ve regretted it ever—”
“Don’t. Don’t even.”
“OK.” He sounds meek.
I take a deep breath. “I want to know one thing only. Did we meet by accident? Or did you track me down?”
Johan is watching me intently.
“Of course I didn’t track you down.” Then Robin hesitates. “Well, not entirely.”
I close my eyes.
“The charity gala had been planned for a long time before you got a job at the Royal Marsden. But yes, a couple of months before the gala I found out that you’d started working at the hospital.”
“How?”
He hesitates. “I looked you up.”
I close my eyes.
“And that’s why you were there that night? Because you wanted to see me in person?”
There’s a long silence. Johan watches me in the way he always used to when I was on a call from the hospital.
There’s respect in the way he’s looking at me—pride, even—but also detachment.
Johan never interfered, or piled in to support me, like Robin does.
He never used to feed me “helpful” advice in a whisper or on a piece of paper, like Robin does; he never sat there listening.
I have only ever seen these qualities of Robin’s as supportive. Now I’m unsure.
“Yes,” my husband says eventually. “I did ask if I could come to the gala. I normally left those things to Andrew and his wealthy chums—I’ve never had the kind of spare cash needed for donations.
But, yes—I did hope to clap eyes on you.
I still felt so guilty—not just about Johan, but about you, this woman I’d never met yet heard so much about.
But, darling, I never planned to fall in love with you.
I never even planned to talk to you, I just…
look, I’m being honest with you now, at least. I’m not some sort of—”
I cut in. “Don’t tell me what you are and what you’re not. I have no grounds whatsoever to trust you.”
“I know this is all terrible. I have gone over it again and again in my head, over the years. Should I tell her? Should I just come clean? But what purpose would it have served? We were happy, Carrie! You were happy! You were looked after and safe!”
“What purpose would it have served?” I am incredulous. “What purpose would it…Oh my God. And that wasn’t ‘looked after and safe.’ That was pathological deception.”
I stand up. I walk back and forth between the table and sink, sickened yet certain I will not let Robin steer this conversation. I will not let anyone steer a conversation that involves me and my life again.
“Did you know Johan had got out of prison? That he was back in Sweden? And Robin, do not bullshit me.”
“I did know, yes,” he says, as if this is irrelevant information. “But I—”
“Is that why you paid for my hotel in Stockholm? To make sure I wasn’t staying anywhere near where Johan works or lives? Is that why you were weird about me going in the first place? Why you kept saying you were worried it would be ‘too much’?”
“Of course not! That hotel was my treat. I wanted you to have somewhere easy to stay. Somewhere walkable to the conference. And I was concerned for your well-being he says. “It was a big deal for you to fly out there after all these years.”
I don’t believe him.
“We can work this out,” he says firmly. “Carrie. I know you’re extremely upset right now. You’re going to be feeling very emotional, especially with your father’s—”
“Stop right there.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Firstly, you will not use my father’s death to tell me I need a little lie-down.” I take a breath. “And, secondly, do not come anywhere near us until you hear from my lawyer.”
There’s an astonished silence. Then Robin says, “Carrie? Did you just threaten me with a lawyer?”
“You tracked me down and pretended to be a charming stranger.” My voice is stronger than I feel, for which I am grateful.
“You tracked me down, Robin. That goes beyond stalking. That’s…
I don’t even know what that is. But you can be clear about one thing, and that’s that the lawyer is not a threat. It’s a very sincere promise.”
Silence again. When he speaks, there’s a slide of condescension in his voice. “Um, Carrie. I think you’ve forgotten that you don’t have a lawyer. It was me who took care of all that sort of thing.”
“And I think you’ve forgotten who I am,” I say. “Although perhaps you never knew.”
Robin forces a laugh, but I know he’s beginning to panic.
“Darling. I know this is all awful, but there’s so much I need to explain to you.
I mean, the situation out there in Myanmar was deadly.
My boss, Valentin, he was directly involved with the biggest crime ring in Southeast Asia.
I’d have been dead in minutes if he stopped trusting me.
I did what I did because I had no choice. ”
“Everyone has a choice.”
“In this world, yes. In that world, no. But look, there’s so much you don’t know, Carrie.
I did my best for both of you—I persuaded my boss to send a great deal of money to Johan in prison; he never did that sort of thing normally.
I kept Johan protected the entire time. I intervened with your hospital trust so they’d force you to come home—I wanted you to get the hell out of there.
Not because you were making things difficult for us, but because I was worried you’d somehow get sucked into it all and then I’d have ruined two people’s lives. ”
“Oh, you definitely managed that.”
“And in the deal I did with the authorities I made sure the Thai police left you out of it, Carrie. I did that to help you!”
I hear my voice rise to a shout. “What else did you do to help me, Robin? Track me down and get a ring on my finger?”
There’s a long silence.
“Like I said,” my husband continues, when he’s found his voice again. “I never planned to fall in love with you. But just to be clear, you are not going to try to take my children away from me. I’m their father.”
I can’t speak.
“Do not give our children the broken childhood you had, Carrie. Do not turn into your mother.”
I end the call.
Johan’s still watching me. He doesn’t say a word, although there’s the slightest ember of a smile in his eyes.
I look away from him and come back to myself, to the quiet and streamlined space in my head. This was me in an emergency operation. One action, then the next. Never any bigger-picture panic. Just this action, now. It was what made the best surgeons, Yanika had always said.
After a few minutes I pick up my phone again. I have my next action.
I open up Google and type in Andrew Heynes Foundation redundancies.
I scroll through six pages of results before giving up. There is nothing there about mass redundancies.
Six months ago, Robin told me he and “countless others” were made redundant because his long-term boss, Andrew Heynes, had been charged with financial fraud.
No redundancies were reported at all. The Heynes Foundation is still going strong, and indeed there’s a picture of Andrew opening a new women’s health unit at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee just a few days ago.
I have no idea why Robin left, but it had nothing to do with redundancies.
And Andrew Heynes never committed fraud.
Briefly, I wonder why I never looked any of this up at the time, but I know the answer. I’ve never questioned anything Robin has told me. Not a word.
Johan gets up and turns the kettle on. He’s going to make another teh tarik; I know it.
This is what he used to do for me at midnight when I was still studying.
Workaholic Carrie, Carrie who didn’t always manage to eat a full dinner, Carrie who misjudged her work-life balance most days.
He didn’t try to change that Carrie; he made no attempt to protect her from herself.
He simply watched her do her own thing, and loved her anyway.
Robin used to pick me up from my desk and carry me upstairs, both of us laughing, if I worked past eleven.
He essentially force-fed me when I was too anxious to eat.
He made my appointments, took on most of our admin, ran our diary.
And I used to allow this; I loved him for it.
I reveled in the unfamiliar sensation of being cared for.
But is it really care, when we are protected from the consequences of our own mistakes? When we are rescued the moment things get tough? I think that can only ever be control.
I pause for a moment, considering my next action, then I call my mother.
“I have a job for you,” I say when she answers.
“Good. I need a distraction. I’m close to going around to that hotel and burning it down.”
—
We walk up through my garden and onto the open moor. A few purple feathers of cloud hover here and there, but mostly the sky is a great symphony of stars.