Follow You Home (20 page)

Chapter Forty-One

I
paced the flat, watching the sky grow dark outside, puzzling over everything Edward and I had been talking about. Claudia Sauvage had told me that in order to recover from my PTSD I needed to be able to confront what had happened to me, to slowly peel back the protective layers I had built in my mind and deal with the reality of the events that had frightened me so much.

But that hadn’t happened. Instead, those layers had been ripped away, burned as if they’d been struck by the Molotov cocktail chucked into Edward’s office, and now I felt like that guy in
A Clockwork Orange
—strapped down, eyes clamped open, forced to stare at the most horrific scenes, the evidence of humanity’s darkest heart. With no warning, the horror would flash into my real life, replacing it whole. When I looked at the framed photographs on the wall, I saw the Polaroids pinned up in that house. Walking into my bedroom, I found an emaciated woman with black spaces instead of teeth manacled to my bed, grinning at me. A neighbour’s baby cried out and I imagined it locked in that tiny coffin, beating against the lid.

I prowled into the kitchen, desperate for a drink, but I had poured all the alcohol down the sink. I clawed at my own face, sucked in deep breaths, tried desperately to calm myself.

If I concentrated on the puzzle, maybe that would work.
Camelia
. What did she want? I grabbed a fresh piece of paper and tried to summarise what we knew, or at least what we thought we knew, so far.

Camelia and her partner had keys to my flat. They must have obtained these in Romania, which meant they had to be the thieves from the train.

They had broken into my flat, searched it, taken my laptop and brought it back again. I presumed they must have looked through it, but why return it? I had searched it for viruses and spyware when I got it back, and it was clean.

Then they had come back again with the dog.

Finally, on two occasions Camelia had tried to seduce me, succeeding the second time, but stopping when I was unable to give her the information she wanted.

What was that information?

Something illegal.

I closed my eyes and went back to that night in the train carriage. The thief—Camelia—had taken our passports, our money, tickets and keys. There were other valuables in our bags, like the camera. Why didn’t they take that? My phone had been sitting on my chest and would have been easy to take, but they had left it.

Why?

Because . . . The answer was almost there. I forced myself to concentrate. Why take only the items that would most inconvenience us, forcing us to cut short our trip around Europe? The loss of our passports meant we had to fly home. Was that their intention, to get us to come back here? To leave Eastern Europe? It almost felt like a prank, an act of mischief, something the thieves barely benefited from.

I sat up. Did that mean the theft wasn’t the point?

My mind flashed back to the CCTV video. The male intruder searching drawers and cupboards, the woman holding the dog on its leash. Did they really bring the dog so it would attack me? Why the roundabout method when they could just wait for their chance out in the world to get me? Why the dog? I pictured it now on the slightly grainy video clip. Straining at the leash, sniffing around.

‘Fuck!’ I shouted.

Sniffing around.

I had it.

The wait for Edward to return was agonising. Finally, I heard his car pull up outside and a moment later he pressed the buzzer to be let in. I had been over and over my logic in my head and was sure I was correct. I knew what Camelia was after. I knew what this was all about.

Drugs.

It was the only thing that made sense. Camelia and her partner, whoever that was, had planted drugs in my and Laura’s backpacks. Then they took our passports, knowing this would mean we’d have to go home. Two middle-class English people, respectable-looking, normal, not acting shiftily because we were oblivious to what we were carrying. The perfect drug mules. The plan must have been to intercept us once we were back in London, to retrieve the drugs before we found them.

They couldn’t have known that we would be thrown off the train. Or that we would leave our backpacks in a police station in Romania. I laughed when I thought about this. I would love to have seen their faces when they found this out. Then I thought about what would have happened if Laura and I hadn’t left the backpacks behind, if we’d been caught at customs trying to bring illegal drugs into the country, and my laughter died.

I went through it again. They had broken in, searched my flat, then come back with a dog to see if it could sniff out the drugs. I guessed they had left it here when it failed to find anything, probably in a fit of temper, wanting to punish me. Then Camelia had come back for another try, clearly believing that I must have sold the drugs: that was the illegal act she wanted me to admit to.

In my moment of triumph, having figured out the mystery, I didn’t stop to think about the rest of it: how this connected to all the other strange and horrible stuff that had been going on. Like, what did they hope to achieve by firebombing Edward’s office? Had they killed Jake? If so, why on earth had they? Why attempt to push Laura under a Tube rather than try to get information out of her? If I’d thought about it in any depth, I would have realised this violence just didn’t fit. If I was a vicious drug dealer I wouldn’t pussyfoot around. I would have waited here for me, grabbed me and tortured the information out of me.

But, sure I’d solved the puzzle, I didn’t wonder about that. The main question that bugged me was why they had waited so long to try to retrieve the drugs. It had been three months. What was the explanation for that?

Edward came into the flat and before I could open my mouth to tell him about my Eureka moment, he said, ‘You will never guess what I just saw.’

He ushered me into the living room, as if this was his own flat, and threw himself down on the sofa. I remained standing.

‘So . . . I went to the address you gave me, where Laura’s staying. When I parked I could see a woman standing by the gate. It was her.’ He pointed at the picture of Laura on the wall.

Edward went on. ‘I was about to get out of the car, call to her, but she went into the garden. She was acting . . . Well, I don’t know her, don’t know what she’s normally like, but she was acting weird. Like she was in shock or something. As if she hardly knew where she was.

‘I went up and looked through the gate. It was odd—I could hear a woman’s voice coming from somewhere in the garden, but I couldn’t see anyone. I didn’t want to scare her, because then I thought she’d never talk to me, but I wanted to see what she was doing. Was she talking to someone? I could hear only one voice. The voice sounded frightened, almost . . . on the verge of hysteria.’

‘That’s what she’s been like recently,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Anyway, I opened the gate as quietly as I could and went into the garden. I could see Laura clearly now. She was gesticulating, miming what looked like one person striking another. And then I realised she was talking to someone else.’

He paused dramatically, then said, ‘Describe Alina to me.’

‘Alina? She was quite tall, skinny, pale skin. Black hair with red streaks in it. She wore a black leather jacket and black jeans. Quite attractive if you’re into that sort of thing. Why do you want to know that now?’

‘Because I just saw Laura talking to her.’

‘What? But—’

‘Daniel, unless I’ve developed the ability to see ghosts too, Alina is very much alive.’

Part Five
Romania
August–November 2013

Chapter Forty-Two

A
lina stopped as she stepped between the trees and looked up at the dark canopy of the forest, black branches knitted together against the sky, the faintest watery trace of moonlight seeping through. She was a city girl. She wouldn’t hesitate to walk through a dark underpass, to cross one of Sibiu’s roughest housing estates. Give her the darkest spaces of the city any day over this creepy, silent place.

Still, she was desperate for a piss and there was no way she was going to squat in front of the English couple, even if they promised to look away. She would find a spot here, close to the edge of the forest, not too far in, and then they could be on their way, so she could try to salvage this plan, make sure it worked despite what had happened.

The plan had been Ion’s idea. Ion . . . She still couldn’t decide if she really liked him or not. He was good-looking, confident and capable in bed, with no hang-ups, unlike some of the more sensitive writer and artist types she’d been with. When Ion had told Daniel that he was writing a book she’d had to work hard to keep her face straight. Ion had borrowed that line straight from Alina’s ex, a guy whom Ion mocked on a regular basis. All that stuff about collaborating on a graphic novel was bullshit too. Ion had no interest in her artwork, though he liked it when she drew naked women, would urge her to give them bigger breasts, curvier butts. He was an idiot really. He wasn’t even that tough, even though he talked the talk. He was a schemer and a dreamer. He wasn’t a violent thug. She wouldn’t have been with him if he was.

Anyway, once this was all over, when she had her cut of the money, she had decided she was going to leave him. She would use the money to buy herself enough time to finish her graphic novel. It was called
Mirela
and was the story of a girl who walks the earth after she is murdered by a cabal of serial killers, seeking revenge. Mirela finds everyone who is connected to her suffering and kills them in a variety of imaginative ways. Alina had already been working on it for two years, spending every spare minute, when she wasn’t at her shitty waitressing job, immersed in this tale of blood and redemption.

She didn’t think Ion would care too much when she left him. He would have his money, and Alina knew he had a thing for
Camelia
, who had moved to London last year, dreaming of making her fortune. The last Alina heard, Camelia was working as a
fucking
stripper or something. It suited her. Camelia had been showing everything to the boys at school in exchange for cash since she was fourteen. She traded on her beauty—a slutty, obvious kind of beauty—and Alina was pretty sure the girl would either end up married to a millionaire or murdered in an alley. Her fate lay in the hands of men.

Alina was different. She was going to make her own way, succeed or fail because of her own talents and luck. She accepted that, sometimes, other people would get hurt along the way. She felt guilty about wrecking the English couple’s holiday, for example, but not
too
guilty. They already had money, they were privileged without realising it, soft and gullible. What was the worst that could happen to them? As Ion had pointed out, people like that—
wholesome
, middle-class English people—didn’t get pulled aside at airports. With their passports stolen, their grand tour would be cut short. Oh, how her heart bled! They would go home, get married, start having babies, and they would soon forget all about their truncated trip. Best of all, they would never know what they had carried through customs. They would live on in blissful ignorance, while Ion, Alina and, unfortunately, Camelia experienced for the first time how it felt to have money.

It had all started with a stroke of luck. Ion knew a guy called Kris who had ripped off a drug dealer in Sibiu and had given the cocaine to Ion for safe keeping while Kris tried to convince the drug dealer that he was innocent. Ion, who dreamed of being a gangster but was too soft to do anything about it, had gone along with it, thinking it would impress his friends. With grim inevitability, the dealer and his gang had tortured and killed Kris. Ion, fearing he would be next, had suggested to Alina that they go away for a while. He sold it to her as a romantic adventure.

Then came the good fortune. They got as far as Hungary when Ion heard that the dealers had been arrested and charged with Kris’s murder. They would be in prison for a long time. At which point, Ion revealed to Alina that he had half a kilo of pure cocaine in his suitcase.

She was furious. He had smuggled the drugs across the
Hungarian
border. Was he so stupid that he didn’t know what happened to people caught with such a large quantity of drugs? Life in jail. For both of them.

But Ion had a plan, which he laid out to her over the next hour. It involved Camelia, which immediately put Alina’s back up. But Ion had already spoken to the little slut and she’d assured him that she knew someone through her pole-dancing club who would be interested in buying the drugs. ‘I can’t sell them back home,’ he said. ‘It’s much too risky. If the gang who originally owned the drugs found out, I’d be dead.’ So they needed to get the coke to London.

Alina stared at him. Carrying the drugs into Hungary was stupid enough, but taking it through an airport, or on a boat, into the UK? That was insane. They argued for a while about Eurostar, and how risky it actually was, when Ion let slip that he would surely get searched at customs because of his previous conviction for possession, which Alina hadn’t known about.

‘But you could do it,’ he said. ‘If you love me . . .’

‘Who said I love you?’ she asked. ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not risking going to jail.’

They fought some more until, eventually, Ion said, ‘Then we’ll have to find someone to take it for us.’

Before that, they decided to head back into Romania, to Sibiu. They would have to cross the border again, but on the train h
ere the
guards had been half-asleep. If they took the night train back, t
he guard
s would probably be comatose.

They spotted the English couple at Budapest Station. They didn’t look like typical backpackers: they had a more well-to-do air about them; they looked cleaner, and the guy was carrying an expensive camera. Ion nudged Alina and whispered his plan to her. It was a crazy scheme.

‘Why,’ Alina asked, ‘don’t we go to the airport and find an
English
couple there?’

Ion shook his head. ‘What opportunity do you think we’ll get at an airport to put the drugs into somebody’s bag? This is perfect.’

Yet again, they argued, until Ion eventually sighed and said, ‘OK, let’s see how it plays out.’

She agreed, almost certain that nothing would happen. That they would end up back home with the drugs.

Except . . . the opportunity did arise. Ion chatted them up, spinning a lie about how they were going to see her parents, who were actually both dead. Alina felt awkward and withdrawn at first, intimidated by this wealthy English couple, until she realised that she had no reason to feel like that, and she had decided to play along, to be friendly. She actually quite liked them, especially Laura, who was sweet and far less pretentious or stuck-up than Alina expected. She felt genuine sympathy for Laura when that creep stared at her. Daniel was OK too, even if he was typically eager to talk about himself. But she still didn’t think they’d get the opportunity to put the cocaine into the couple’s backpacks, unless one of them could lure the English couple to the buffet car, or hope they both went to the toilet at the same time, leaving their bags in their new friends’ care.

Then Ion spotted the empty sleeper compartment and persuaded them to go for a nap, promising to keep an eye out for guards. After they went, Ion and Alina sat in tense silence for a while, before Ion said, ‘Wait here’, and carried his own bag out of their carriage. When he came back five minutes later he was sweating.

‘Well?’ she whispered.

‘I did it,’ he whispered back. ‘They were sleeping like babies. Two hundred and fifty grams in each backpack. They each had a small bag of dirty laundry at the bottom of their packs. I put them in those.’

‘In dirty laundry?’

‘Yeah. Well, I figured they’re not going to stop to wash their underwear on the way home. I took their passports, tickets and bank cards too. I got some keys too, in case Camelia needs
them, an
d the girl’s phone, a nice Samsung. Daniel just has a crappy, scratched-up iPhone 5 with a cracked screen so I didn’t bother. Why don’t people take care of their gadgets . . .’

Alina shook her head, wondering if she was dreaming. ‘What are you talking about? What about the guards? When they come through to check passports, what will they do? Won’t they arrest them?’

‘What for? This is why I’m a genius. They’ll tell them they need to leave Romania. That as soon as we get to the end of the line they’ll have to head home. I imagine they’ll escort them to the airport and put them on the plane back to England. Whatever, they’ll be forced to go home.’

‘A genius.’ She laughed and he looked hurt.

‘Why do you have to be such a bitch? You won’t be complaining when you get your hands on the money.’

Feeling a little contrite, she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

He harrumphed. ‘Good. I’m starving. The buffet car will be open now. I’m going to get something to eat. Maybe while I’m gone you can think about why you have to be such a bitch to me.’

She watched him stomp off through the carriage, in the opposite direction to the sleeper carriages, contrition turning to anger. She was sick of being called a bitch. Maybe she should put him in her comic book, one of Mirela’s misogynistic vi
ctims . . .

After Ion had been gone a few minutes, the door he’d left through opened and the border guards entered. They woke the few other people in the carriage and checked their passports. They spent a while talking in low voices to one passenger who was outside of Alina’s line of vision.

She felt sweaty and tense. She didn’t share Ion’s confidence about what the guards would do when they discovered the English couple’s passports were missing. What if they searched their bags? The plan would be over before it had begun, though she reminded herself there was nothing to link the drugs to her and Ion. Still, it would mean the loss of the money she was already counting on. She tried to relax but when the guards got to her she fumbled with her own passport, dropped it on the floor, making them snap at her to hurry up. For whatever reason, they were in a bad mood and highly alert. So much for them being semi-comatose. As she retrieved her passport, someone stepped past her, heading in the direction of the sleepers; she just caught a glimpse of a man’s legs.

Eventually, after asking her a dozen questions that made her sweat, the guards left the carriage and headed towards the sleepers. Where was Ion? Chatting up the girl in the buffet, no doubt. She got up, went to the other end of the carriage and peered into the next one, but there was no sign of Ion. When she turned around she saw the old man whose bags she’d carried walking towards her through the carriage, presumably on his way back from the toilets, which were located just before the sleepers. She smiled at him and waited for him to take his seat then went towards the sleepers and peered through the greasy glass.

She could see the guards standing outside one of the compartments. Daniel and Laura’s? Then a border guard broke away from the group and came rushing towards her, through the door, almost knocking her over, and hurried away out the door at the far end of the carriage. She returned to her seat and waited, wishing
Ion would
come back. What if Ion was wrong about what the guards
would d
o? What if they arrested the English couple and searched their bags? She had a sudden attack of conscience. She liked them. They seemed nice, harmless. A happy couple with a bright future, planning to have a baby and get married. If the guards found the drugs, Daniel and Laura’s lives would be destroyed. And, she thought selfishly, the money Ion had promised would vanish before she ever got her hands on it.

The border guard came back through the carriage, the ticket inspector following. Holding the door open, she could hear raised voices, Daniel protesting. What should she do? The passports and tickets were here, in Ion’s bag, and she could grab them, tell Daniel and Laura that they must have dropped them on the seat.

If she could reason with the guards, persuade them that she had seen the English couple with their tickets and passports when the Hungarian guards came through, that they were innocent victims of theft, that they were foolish foreigners who didn’t understand that they shouldn’t be in the sleeper carriage . . . It was her best option. She slipped through the door and went to join the party.

But it hadn’t gone well, had it?

That was the fucking understatement of the century.

Treading her way into the forest, twigs cracking beneath her feet, her eye on a spot a few feet ahead where she could piss, she almost laughed. The guards had been hostile, called her a ‘punk bitch’, and she had got angry, lost her cool, called them ‘fascist lapdogs’. That had been it. The next thing she knew they were being marched back to the carriage—Ion still AWOL—and the train was slowing to a halt and then they were thrown off. Her phone was left behind and she had no cash. She couldn’t wait to get to a pay phone, to call Ion, to tell him what a fucking idiot he was and how this was all his fault.