by Susan Lewis
‘Husband leave her with debt,’ the old woman answered.
Penny’s eyes closed at the pitiful injustice of it. ‘How long has she been here?’ she asked.
The old woman was about to answer, when they heard the heavy tread of boots coming across the yard.
‘He bring food,’ the old woman said in answer to Penny’s look.
Penny didn’t even want to imagine what kind of food it was. All she was interested in was getting someone to find her a lawyer.
‘The court find you a lawyer,’ the police officer answered, sliding a tray of inedible gunge under the door.
‘But when?’ she cried. ‘You can’t hold me here like this . . .’
‘You eat,’ he barked.
‘I don’t want your damned food,’ she raged. ‘I want to get out of here. Have you told the British Embassy you’re holding me? You have to tell someone at the Embassy.’
‘I don’t have to do anything,’ he told her haughtily.
Penny’s eyes flashed with impotent fury. ‘Not one single mouthful of that filth is passing my lips until you get me a lawyer,’ she seethed.
The man grinned; then, sliding a key into the lock, he pushed the door open. ‘You in luck,’ he said. ‘The lawyer, he here. Come this way, please.’
Feeling the shame of her stained, damp clothes, Penny got up from the bed and, keeping her head high as he snapped on the handcuffs, she followed him across the yard and round to the front of the police station.
Inside, it was heaving with people, all shouting and waving pieces of paper, or trying to get to the men in the crowded cell at the back. Penny was ushered through quickly and taken into a small, bare office where a portly, middle-aged Filipino with horn-rimmed glasses and a white embroidered shirt worn loose over his navy slacks was waiting for her.
‘Ah, Miss Moon,’ he said, getting to his feet and waving her to a chair as her hands were freed. ‘My name is Atilano Sombillo. I have been appointed by the court to represent you. Please, sit down.’
Penny did as she was told, trying to control her badly shaking hands as she pushed a clump of matted, damp hair from her face. Already she was thinking that there was something not quite right about this, that something, or maybe it was someone, was missing from the normal order of things, but she was too nervous and exhausted to grasp the suspicion and pin it to a rational explanation.
The lawyer and policeman spoke for a few minutes and Penny looked around at the peeling paint, frosted-glass window and pin-dotted map of metropolitan Manila. It was still hard for her to believe she was there, so very far from home, so terrifyingly isolated from everyone she knew and all that was familiar. As another tremor of fear vibrated through her she reminded herself firmly that she had a lawyer now – someone who was going to help her to prove that it was all a mistake, that she had been set up – and that the living terror that she might never get out of there would soon be a thing of the past.
At last the policeman left and Sombillo sat down and opened the file in front of him. Penny waited only until the door had closed before saying. ‘The heroin wasn’t mine. I had no idea it was there. Someone planted it.’
Sombillo’s head came up and a quick panic bit into Penny’s heart as she saw the expression on his face. It was a burlesque of the long-suffering attorney who had heard it all before.
‘It’s true!’ Penny cried. ‘I’m telling you, someone planted it.’
Sombillo didn’t answer as he continued to scan his notes.
‘Have you contacted the British Embassy?’ Penny demanded. ‘Do they know I’m here?’
He nodded patiently. ‘Yes, they know.’
‘Then I want to see someone. Surely I have that right.’
‘I’m sure they will send someone in due course,’ he answered, looking down at the case notes again. ‘Now, let me see. One point two kilograms of heroin.’ He nodded again and raised his eyes back to hers. ‘This is a very grave situation, Miss Moon.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ she snapped. ‘But I’m telling you, it was planted on me.’
His solemn eyes gazed at her through the thick lenses of his spectacles. ‘I should advise you,’ he said earnestly, ‘that to change your story at this stage is not going to look good when we go in front of a judge.’
‘What do you mean, change my story?’ Penny said, her head starting to spin. ‘I haven’t spoken to anyone until now to give a story.’
‘I understand that you were informed of your rights at the time of your arrest,’ Sombillo said.
Penny shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I think so, but it all happened so fast . . .’
‘It says here,’ he told her, ‘that you were informed of your rights, but that you waived them and confessed to being in possession of an illegal substance, namely heroin.’
The dizziness in her head increased to such an extent that her stomach churned with fear. ‘I never confessed to a thing,’ she told him. ‘Why would I when the heroin wasn’t mine?’
Sombillo sighed and folded his hands on the desk. ‘I should advise you that it would be in your own best interests if you were to make a clean breast of this now and provide me with the details of how you came by this heroin and for what purpose you intended it.’
Penny stared at him in abject horror. ‘Didn’t you hear a word I just said?’ she demanded. ‘The drugs were planted on me, so why don’t you try asking me who might have planted them?’
Sombillo grimaced. ‘OK. Tell me,’ he said, as though humouring her.
‘I think,’ she said, forcing her rising temper under control, ‘that it was a Chinese by the name of Benny Lao.’
‘I see. And who is Benny Lao?’
‘He’s . . . he’s a Hong Kong Triad member.’
Sombillo’s eyebrows arched incredulously towards the ceiling. Then, continuing as though she’d never mentioned Lao, he said, ‘Who sold you the heroin?’
‘I don’t believe this!’ Penny cried, hitting her hand on the table. ‘Why aren’t you listening to me? It’s your job, your duty as a lawyer, to hear what I have to say, so why are you presuming I’m guilty before you’ve even heard my side of the story?’
‘Because, Miss Moon,’ he said, ‘you told the police you were guilty.’
‘That’s a lie!’ she shouted.
‘And in my opinion,’ he went on, ‘your association with a certain Christian Mureau is not helping the situation.’
‘Then fuck your opinion,’ she cried, infuriatingly close to tears.
‘To become abusive with me isn’t going to help your case at all,’ he admonished.
‘The only thing that is going to help my case is for you to listen,’ she cried. ‘I’m telling you that I have never smoked, snorted, injected, smuggled, bought, peddled or even touched a single milligram of an illegal substance in my life. You can check it out. Speak to the people at the Embassy, they’ll tell you. I don’t have any kind of criminal record at all.’
He frowned curiously and looked back at his notes. ‘Then how do you account for the fact that it says here that you are wanted in your own country for the falsification of passports, travelling under an assumed name and, er, let me see, ah yes, that you are also wanted in France for the harbouring of a known criminal.’ He stopped and looked up at her with a benign little smile.
All Penny could do was stare at him as the numbing chaos in her mind splintered her anger into a thousand pieces and left her reeling with shock and terror. It was as though her last flicker of hope had just been extinguished by a raging wind of injustice.
‘This information was delivered to me this morning by your Embassy,’ he informed her. ‘So it would appear that whilst you don’t actually have a criminal record as such, you do have a number of charges outstanding against you.’ He pressed down the top of his pen, annotated the document in front of him, then said, ‘Now, perhaps we can return to the matter at hand. One point two kilograms of heroin were found in your possession last night—�
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‘Whatever charges might be outstanding against me,’ Penny cut in, ‘they bear no relevance to what I am charged with now.’
‘Quite,’ he said. ‘I was merely pointing out that your claim that you have no criminal record, whilst true at this moment, is quite probably a temporary situation. To continue: a narcotics test was carried out at the premises of the Aurelio Hotel at approximately ten o’clock last night which showed the substance found in your bag to be of an illegal nature.’ He looked up. ‘China White, to be more precise,’ he stated blandly.
Penny’s fear was like acid burning into her thoughts, leaving them ragged and unformed and making it almost impossible for her to gauge what she was saying. ‘Have you arrested Christian Mureau?’ she demanded.
‘I’m afraid that is priviliged information,’ he responded.
‘If you have,’ she persisted, ‘then he will tell you that the heroin was planted on me.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said, leaving her in no doubt that Christian’s word would carry about as much weight as it would take to transport her to jail for the next twenty-five years.
‘It was put in my suitcase by a man called Benny Lao,’ she went on doggedly. ‘I swear I had never seen it before the moment the police officer took it out of the case.’
Sombillo blinked, then turned towards the door as a lower-ranking officer knocked and put his head in. ‘Telefono,’ he said.
‘You will excuse me,’ Sombillo said, getting up from his chair.
Penny watched him walk to the door, then sank her head into her hands as it closed behind him. She had never known such a terrible sense of foreboding as this. Discovering that she was wanted in England and France had added new and horrible dimensions to her already terrifying sense of abandonment. And Sammy, what the hell was happening to Sammy now?
Defeat was creeping into her bones, telling her that there was no way she was going to get out of here: she was going to have to face whatever judgment was passed on her and maybe spend the best part of her life in a Filipino prison for a crime she hadn’t committed. The appalling injustice of it made her want to lash out at this preposterous little man who was refusing to listen to a word she said. What the hell kind of lawyer was he to presume his client to be guilty without even hearing what she had to say? There was something terribly wrong here, something that wasn’t adding up at all, but in her weakened and agitated state she seemed unable to make her mind function.
Then quite suddenly her head jerked up as she finally realized who was missing here. Chief Superintendent Jalmasco. No arrest was ever made for a charge like this without an immediate interrogation and no one had asked her a single damned thing from the moment she’d been arrested until now. And yet there was a confession. Jesus Christ, how could she have been such a fool? Why hadn’t she worked this out before? Jalmasco and Sombillo were both in Benny Lao’s pay. They were all in Lao’s pay.
Her heart was racing as she tried to make herself think clearly. Then her eyes fell on the file in front of her. She grabbed it and spun it round on the desk. Please God, she wasn’t going to find a forged confession. But she did. It was there in black and white and signed by a hand that was so like her own that under any other circumstances she’d have sworn it was hers. Trembling with outrage and terror, she sifted frantically through the papers, scattering them over the desk in her hunt for the Embassy-headed notepaper that would tell her whether or not the charges in England and France were real. She found nothing bearing either the Royal crest or the Republican insignia of France, but what she did find turned her blood to ice.
Picking up the photograph, she sat back in her chair, too stunned for the moment to do anything but stare down at the clear, smiling image of her own face as her mind flashed back to the moment when Jalmasco had introduced himself the night before, looking first at her, then at something he was holding in his hand. Everything in her was recoiling from the sudden onslaught of all the ramifications this photograph presented. The background was fuzzy, but not too fuzzy for her to see where she was when the photograph had been taken. She remembered the moment clearly: she’d been in the gazebo in the Chinese Gardens with Christian when a Filipino boy had appeared out of nowhere and asked if he could take their picture. Yet there was no sign of Christian in the photograph she was holding. It was of her and her alone.
Her eyes moved sightlessly to the middle distance as the unthinkable question loomed horribly in her mind: had Christian known what the boy was doing when he’d set up his camera and, as the evidence here showed, focused his lens only on her? She could only conclude that Christian must have, for being in the position he was in he would surely never have allowed a stranger to take his photograph. And if he had known and that photograph had now turned up here in the hands of a lawyer who was so bent on establishing her guilt . . .
The photograph slipped from her fingers as shock drained the blood from her face. She couldn’t be right about this. Surely to God she couldn’t. He loved her, he’d do anything in the world for her, give her anything, take her anywhere; he’d even come back for her if David . . . Her eyes closed and, taking a breath, she forced herself past it. She’d believed everything he’d told her, she’d felt nothing but love and pity and heartbreaking empathy with his suffering. And all the time he had been . . .
Her hand flew to her head. She was unable to form the words, unable to make herself believe that he would do this to her. He’d bought the photographer, the police, the lawyer . . . Dear God in heaven, who else had he bought? But why? Why would he do it? To punish her for not going with him? It was the only explanation she could think of, yet—
Hearing Sombillo’s voice outside, she hurriedly stuffed the photograph and papers back into the file, spun it round to face his side of the desk and waited for the door to open. She had no idea how she was going to play this now, whether she should let him know what she had discovered or whether, for the time being, she should keep it to herself.
‘I apologize for the interruption,’ he said, coming back into the room. ‘I took the opportunity to order you a coffee. I imagine you could use one.’
‘I believe,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye, ‘that I have the right to change my lawyer at any time of my choosing. I wish to exercise that right as of this moment.’
‘I see,’ he said, scratching his face and showing no sign of either surprise or offence. ‘May I ask why?’
‘No.’
‘Then may I remind you of the seriousness of the charges you are facing?’
‘It is precisely because of their seriousness that I wish to change my lawyer,’ she said, unable to keep the tightness from her voice.
‘I should advise you,’ he said, ‘that I have tried a number of death penalty cases—’ He stopped as the shock registered on her face. ‘Do I take it,’ he went on carefully, ‘that you were unaware that the possession of more than forty grams of an opium-based drug is punishable by death in the Philippines?’
Weak with hunger and beaten half senseless by the repeated onslaughts of fear and shock, Penny started to sway in her chair. ‘Death?’ she repeated dully as the image of the geomancer closing her hand flashed in her mind.
‘I’m afraid so, Miss Moon,’ Sombillo answered. ‘I thought a woman in your position would have known that.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, her voice barely more than a croak as a single, unbearable thought circled her mind. He had sentenced her to death. Christian, the man who had made love to her so tenderly, the man for whom she had so very nearly given up everything, had sentenced her to die in a Filipino jail.
‘Would a glass of water help?’ Sombillo offered.
Penny looked at him with unblinking eyes. ‘I want to speak to someone at the British Embassy,’ she said hoarsely.
‘All in good time,’ he said, smiling.
‘Didn’t you hear me!’ she suddenly screamed. ‘I want to speak to my Embassy!’
‘Now, please, try to keep calm,’ he said
soothingly. ‘I understand what—’
‘I am demanding my rights as a British citizen to speak to my Embassy,’ she yelled. ‘You can’t hold me here without notifying the British Government—’
‘On the contrary, Miss Moon,’ he interrupted. ‘The police are empowered to hold you for up to thirty-six hours without informing anyone, which they frequently do. So perhaps you should consider yourself one of the lucky ones, since your Embassy are already aware of your arrest and you already have a lawyer.’
‘You call yourself a lawyer!’ she spat. ‘What kind of lawyer is it that tries to persuade his client to sentence herself to death? What kind of lawyer takes money from a known criminal to make sure that death . . .’
Sombillo was clicking his tongue and shaking his head. ‘These are very serious allegations you are making against me,’ he scolded. ‘Perhaps it would be in your own best interest if you returned to your cell and took some time to cool off and recognize the seriousness—’
‘I do recognize the damned seriousness!’ she screamed. ‘I more than recognize it, I’m fucking living it! Now get me a real lawyer. Get me someone who’s not in Christian Mureau’s pay!’
‘Are you seriously suggesting that Mr Mureau has managed to bribe the head of Narcotics Command, not to mention all the other officers who took part in your arrest last night and myself—’
‘I’m not suggesting it!’ she seethed. ‘I’m saying it right out. He’s paid the whole god-damned lot of you to do this to me . . .’
‘Miss Moon,’ he said gravely, ‘though it is totally against the regulations for me to tell you this, under the circumstances, I think that you should know that Mr Mureau is at present also in the custody of the Philippine National Police and I can assure you it is most unlikely that he will manage to buy his way out.’
The breath left Penny’s body as though she’d been punched. He was lying, he had to be. Unless Lao had set them both up . . . But no, it was Christian who had allowed the photograph to be taken and it was Christian who had removed them from the Manila Hotel to the wilderness environs of the city, where the entire judicial system could no doubt be bought for a sum that wouldn’t even dent his fortune. And it was Christian who had let her return to the hotel alone though there had been no reason for him not to return with her and remain there until it was time for him to go and meet the boat. No reason except he had known that she was going to be arrested, because he had set the whole thing up in order to . . . To what? She still couldn’t think why he would do it except to punish her for letting him down. Unless of course he was afraid that she would tell what she knew. But even that didn’t make sense, since he was fully aware of how little she really knew, and, besides, she had no idea where he planned to go from here. So maybe he was in custody – maybe Sombillo wasn’t lying about that the way he was about everything else.
