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. Thejiggling 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 tolisten—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.”
Twenty-three.
My video meeting took place the next morning. There were four of them on screen: four people interested only in the damage I could potentially cause their hospital trust. Two were older men, one of whom called our wedding a “drunken backpackers’ affair.” There was a female lawyer and an HR assistant with a headset, transcribing as we went.
My heart raced as they moved through the formalities. I thought back to the day I’d first met Johan, when I’d raged at the policeman. My near miss prescribing the wrong medication to a post-op patient when Johan went to dive in the North Sea. And now this: ten thousand times worse.
I had never had any trouble before I’d met him. Not so much as a speck on my record. Was this the penalty for falling in love?
For a brief moment, as the lawyer explained why the meeting needed to take place, I imagined cutting Johan off. It was a dizzying prospect. Simply resecting this nightmare from my life, like a tumor.
—
The severity of my situation, they told me, hung on the extent to which I had known about Johan’s sideline in drug smuggling.
That, at least, was easy: I hadn’t had the faintest idea. But when I began to add that I was struggling to believe he’d actually done it, Mum actually kicked me. “Carrie’s happy to give consent for you to access her phone, email, anything else you need to be satisfied that she had no knowledge whatsoever of the situation,” she said. And when I interrupted to say that I did not give any such consent, she spoke over me again. She told them that, having investigated the situation fully herself, she could see there was no evidence whatsoever that Johan’s clandestine actions would have any impact on my ability to provide safe medical care.
She was singing from her own hymn sheet now.
“There’s been a fair amount of press in Sweden,” the less offensive of the two men said. “But only two small pieces here in the UK. Thankfully, none of them seem to know who you are or what you do for a living, and you haven’t been pictured—there’s just a passing mention of how Kullberg was arrested on a Thai island where he’d been having a ‘holiday fling’ with ‘a young British woman.’ ”
A holiday fling.
“But this is dangerous. The anti-NHS press will go out of their way to blow this up, if they catch on.British surgeon fights for drug-dealer husband’s rights in Thai jail, or some such. The possibilities are as endless as they are grim.”
“Can I ask howyoufound out about Carrie?” Mum asked. “If it hasn’t been in the press?”
“We received an anonymous email,” the lawyer said. “From a genericemail address; it didn’t have a proper name. We can’t share it with you for obvious reasons, but it was a surprising communication. It was written as if wishing to protect you from further harm, Carrie, rather than trying to cause you trouble—it didn’t seem hostile.”
I looked at Mum. “But who would do that?”
