Page 100 of The One Day You Were My Husband
It’s 12:10 a.m.
—
Mum calls just before one, at which point the police are taking a statement. There are officers upstairs checking through our bedrooms; I’ve been given an unbearably kind female officer who’s suggested we sit on the sofa so I can stay under a blanket. I’m still shaking.
“I’ve got them,” Mum says, before I have a chance to speak. “They were all fast asleep in a hotel about three hundred meters from my flat. I told him if he knew what was good for him he’d let me take them. He didn’t put up a fight at all and, Carrie, honestly, I don’t think the kids knew anything was wrong. They were confused at first but then they were full of beans. Granny’s come to take us for a midnight sleepover! Can we have a midnight feast? That sort of thing.”
My hand is on my chest. “They’re safe? They’re OK?”
The police officer is listening intently.
“They’re absolutely fine. They were expecting to be flying from Heathrow to Stockholm Monday morning to see you. They have absolutely no idea anything’s wrong.”
“What? But…what are they doing now? Where are they?”
“They’re in my bed eating Nutella toast and watchingSpongeBob. They’re in their element.”
“And Robin?”
“I left him there. I wasn’t going to take him on until I’d got the kids away. He may still be there, he may not. I’ll leave that for you. And indeed the police, although I doubt they’ll be interested. The kids are absolutely fine and he technically hasn’t done anything wrong, beyond failing to answer your calls.”
“Did he say anything at all?”
“No. He looked bloody terrified, though. As he should. Anyway—I’ve warned them I’ll be putting them to bed soon but that you’d want to speak to them first. Do you need to do any crying or howling first?”
I cry and howl and I thank the universe for my terrible, brilliant mother. Then I speak to my babies on video, their little faces lit up by the phone screen, chocolate smeared on either side of their mouths like clowns’ smiles.SpongeBobbabbles on in the background; Maeve is wearing sequined cat ears on an Alice band. Just like Mum says, they are both under the impression that they’re getting a taxi to Heathrow Monday morning, and from there they’ll be flying out to see me in Sweden. They clearly don’t know about their granddad or indeed anything else. At Mum’s suggestion, I’ve made sure there’s just a blank wall behind me, nothing to suggest I’m in Devon.
I only stop telling them I love them when Mum removes the phone and whispers that I’m beginning to make it seem as if there’ssomething wrong. And of course she’s right, so I bid them a cheerful good night, tell them I can’t wait to see them soon. It would not go well if I told them their Sweden trip was canceled at this time of night.
While I wait for Mum to get the kids to bed and call me back, the police politely take their leave. Like Mum’s predicted, they say there’s no crime to investigate with regard to my children, and that a third-party oral account of a crime Robin may or may not have been involved in in Myanmar is not something they’re going to start investigating now, in the middle of the night.
They tell Johan he’s welcome to go and make a statement about Robin if he so wishes, but they give no guarantees that it would come to anything. And that’s the awful thing about this situation. I don’t know if I evenwantit to come to anything. Robin is my children’s father.
Then I sit on the sofa and close my eyes for a few minutes, until Mum calls back. I seem to have jammed myself right up against Johan, but I haven’t the mental capacity to think about right and wrong. I just need an anchor.
“How did you find them?” is the first thing I ask when Mum calls back. And I’m quite glad the police have gone, because Mum then tells me quite cheerfully that she has a contact at the Met on whom she occasionally “leans hard” when she needs a favor, and that the contact was leaned on with sufficient force tonight to agree to a phone mast triangulation. The area they found Robin’s phone in was not only quite small, but it was also precisely where Mum lives.
There are four hotels in the area immediately around her house, Mum tells me. So she went to each one and, with her usual mix of charm and polite force, managed to learn that Robin and the kids were checked in to the hotel closest to her flat.
“Less than a hundred meters away,” she says. “I cannot understand it, Carrie. What was he up to?”
“Maybe he was going to fly out early to talk to me? Or even to Johan?” I say, although I find that highly unlikely. I imagine Robin would do almost anything to avoid a confrontation with Johan. “Maybe he was going to fly them somewhere else. I don’t know. I just…” Tears fill my eyes again. I am almost empty. It’s nearly two.
“Are you going to call him?” Mum asks.
“I don’t know if I can face it right now.”
“I understand,” she says, even though she doesn’t. My mother is always ready for a fight. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do, Carrie. There’s no way I’m going to get any sleep tonight; I’ll be watching those children like a hawk. So just call. OK?”
Johan watches me for a long time after the call has ended. I watch him back. There are dark circles under his eyes and I see, under the stark ceiling light I never use in our living room, how he, too, has aged. And yet, to me, he’s no less beautiful.
I get up and start pacing. I need to make a plan. Too long, I’ve been carried along in the slipstream of other people’s stories. I need to take action.
I go through to the kitchen and sit at the table, where I find the remnants of a bolognese dinner. A couple of carrots under the table, a curl of spaghetti welded to the wood; speckles of dried mince stuck to the edge where Raffy normally sits. There’s even the remains of a cup of tea in the seat Robin normally takes by the window so he can look at the stars.
Robin, my rock.
I think of the agony I suffered over Johan all those years ago, the despair I felt at having failed to recognize who he apparently was. And then the gratitude when the universe sent Robin my way. Solid, kind, generous Robin: a man I could finally trust.
