The One Day You Were My Husband (60)
“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 how you found out about Carrie?” Mum asked. “If it hasn’t been in the press?”
“We received an anonymous email,” the lawyer said. “From a generic email 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?”
“Not me,” Mum said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“We thought you might know, Carrie,” the lawyer said. “It seems strange that someone would contact your workplace but not tell the press.”
“Could it have been Johan himself? Trying to protect you?” Mum asked me.
“No. He has no means of contacting anyone.”
“Of course,” Mum said. “Then who?”
We both thought about this until the lawyer spoke again. “We’ll need to review this internally before you can start working here as a registrar next week. However, I think I can say on behalf of everyone here that we’d be a lot happier if you came home without any further delay.”
“But I can’t. He’s—”
Mum interrupted. “She will come home. I’ll make sure of it.”
I turned, angrily, but she held up a hand. “Excuse us a moment,” she said, muting our microphone. Outside there was some sort of celebratory procession passing through the street. Bells, drums, chanting, laughter, tendrils of incense snaking through the window. Mum turned off our camera, too.