CHAPTER 88
“Did she check in?”

The woman tapped at her terminal, frowning slightly.

“Yes. She booked the ticket, paid for it, checked in online, and that is the last interaction I can find, Mr Rhodes”

“Do you have a number for the office in KL?”

“I can ring them for you, sir”

She picked up a phone handset, and I heard a series of beeps as she typed in a number and then, after a short wait, she launched into a flow of Chinese, in which all I could pick out were my wife’s name and ‘Singapore’. Eventually, my woman put down the phone and sighed.

“Nothing, Mr Rhodes. Do you have a number for where she was staying?”

“It was with family, and the numbers are all on her phone”

“Ah. I am so sorry, but I cannot think of any way I can help further”

“Um… Do you have, are you able to print off a record of the booking?”

“Certainly. Is there anything else I can help you with”

“No. Thank you”

I left the airport with a couple of sheets of paper but no wife, almost literally wetting myself with fear, and all I could think of doing was to ring someone else.

“Andy Chisholm. How can I help you?”

“Andy, it’s Mike Rhodes”

“Oh, hi. I didn’t look at the display, sorry. You sound a bit off. Something up?”

“Yes. Maryam. I don’t know where she is”

“Where are you, Mike?”

“Changi airport”

“Right. Pen and paper?”

“Er… yes”

He dictated a number, confirming that I had it right.

“Find somewhere you can be on your own, then ring me on that number in about five minutes. I am going to grab a privacy pod”

I ended up at abusing a ‘disabled’ toilet, so that I could have a locked door, and rang the number. He answered immediately.

“Pardon the French, Mike, but what the fuck do you mean you can’t find her?”

I ran him through the journey and the reasons for it, and could hear some scratching, clearly as he wrote down the substance of my story.

“Got that print handy?”

“Yes”

“Mike, go home. I will make enquiries, but I will also make calls, and some of those will be to what is now your and Maz’s Commission, okay? I know several people there. Go home, reassure your boy, and I will get back to you, and most probably one of Bobby’s lot”

“Okay…”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t even think of driving. You are spaced out”

“I don’t…”

“I know you don’t have a car, Mike. Get home, settle down, and I will set things going and be with you”

He cut the call, and I shambled out, to a very accusing stare from an older local woman, and, somehow, I got back to the house. Andy was absolutely right about me, and it was only a bus driver pointing at my eyes that let me realise that I was crying.

Not twice. Please, not two women I loved.

Ish was already home, and he looked at me in real shock, before rushing to the kitchen, where he set about making a pot of tea. Some deep instinct in him stopped any questions before he could ask them, and he simply brought the tea, poured my cup, and then sat cuddled into me on the sofa, wordless, until the doorbell rang.

He answered it at a run, and returned with Andy and Gary, who looked at the boy, his brow furrowed.

“Ish, we need to speak to Dad about some things. Did you want to swim for a bit. Or something?”

The lad looked at me, eyes slightly narrowed as he tried to blink back his own tears.

“It’s about Mum, isn’t it?”

All I could do was nod, and he simply settled back into his place next to me.

“Mum and Dad say we’re a family, always. Dad needs me”

He was crying now, so I just hugged him as Andy examined the print, and Gary talked me through the phone conversation of the previous evening. As I finished, the doorbell rang once again, and Andy answered it, returning with a blonde woman of around Gary’s age.

“Mike Rhodes, this is Dani Klimova, from the Aussie mission. Sorry to do this, but can you talk us through things again, so we’re all on board”

I did so, feeling steadily less connected to the room, while Dani made notes on a tablet.

“Mike?”

“Sorry?”

She patted my arm.

“You’re drifting away, mate. Bloody understandable as, in my view. I asked if you had a copy of her passport”

“I have the passport itself”

“Sorry?”

“She travelled on her Malaysian one. I haven’t got a copy of that one”

“Right. Complicates… Is there tea in that pot?”

“Ish made me some when I got in”

“I’m really dry. Do you think you might…?”

He was off to the kitchen like a shot, as Dami whispered, “Would have been easier if she’d travelled as one of ours rather than one of theirs. Can you think of anywhere that might have a record or a copy of her passport details?”

Andy patted her arm.

“I know a man who will. Bobby, Mike. Her citizenship application will have included passport details. Dani, Bobby Nguyen, bloke that your lot brought up for the trade talks”

“Ah. I’m not involved with that lot. Give me his details and I’ll mail him thanks, Ish! Dry as, in this weather”

“We have some cold drinks in the fridge, Miss”

Gary asked for one, and we had a few more moments of privacy, in which Dani was able to slip in that awful phrase ‘honour killing’, even though it came with the words ‘Don’t immediately assume’, which still didn’t help much.

That afternoon remains a blur to me, as I was only technically there in the sense that my body was present; I certainly wasn’t.

After the three had departed, Gary promising to send word to Mrs Chao via Audrey, I did my best to make something edible and easy for Dad and Lad, but neither of us had any appetite worth mentioning.

He went up to bed that night without his e-reader, and when I followed later, I caught the sound of sobs as I passed his door. I opened the door slowly, and went to sit next to him on his single bed.

“Ish, it’s going to be okay. Would you like to sleep with me tonight?”

He looked up at me, then slowly shook his head.

“No, Dad. We need to leave it for if Mum comes home tonight”

“Then… I’m going to change, and then you can budge over”

We slept that first night, and several others, wrapped together, as we waited and waited for our love’s return.

I will give Gary and Dani their due, for they pushed as hard as they could, updating me every couple of days for the first month, but there always seemed to be a dead end to each line they followed. I, we, had other support, of course, especially when both Bets and her family, and the Butts, on separate occasions, flew up to spend a week or so with us. We did the rounds of the various sites, including Haw Par Villa, where Kul did his best to be insufferable, but it was still WRONG to be without her, and that was the first month, and then the second swept by, and a fucking third one, and NOTHING worked. Dani was superb, and every so often she cracked a little so that I saw the stress on her, but Maz was still lost. I carried on with the training for Mrs Chao and Mr Lee, but I did it alone.

Five months after she had left for the funeral, I had a joint visit from four people, Audrey joining the others for the first time, and from the look on all of their faces, I knew it was going to be even more shit news, and I wasn’t wrong. I was all too fucking right.

Andy started the apologies, and they were sincere, because all four of them were sincere, all four of them were our friends, do not shoot the honest messenger, all of that, but the message they brought was far too shitty for me to push hate and loss aside.

“It’s from the top, Mike, in DfID and DIT. International Development, and International Trade. They’ve got the hots for ASEAN and trade deals, and they don’t want that hindered because of one woman, and she’s a Malay anyway, and so on and so fucking forth. Sorry, Ish”

Dani was nodding, her anger and frustration clearer than ever.

“Not my lot, Mike. They signed their deals, but they are still pushing. Aussie girl, ey? Trouble is with the Selangor coppers. We have offered and offered to send some of ours to liaise, and all we have got back is that she is one of theirs, and it is none of our business, and, Ish?”

The lad was already in tears, but he looked straight at Dani.

“Yes?”

“I am sorry, but this is something your Dad might want to talk about later, just the two of you. I’d like him to do that, not for me to do so”

“You want me to go to my bedroom?”

“Just for a few minutes, I promise. Your Dad can explain later, just the two of you together. Family stuff, like it should be”

He fairly ran up the stairs, tears flowing, and Dani turned back to me.

“I’ll get straight to it, Mike. Local police refuse point blank to engage. Their citizen, their business, none of ours, and ‘Oh! Can we please have one of our citizens returned to his family?’, that’s what they were asking”

“Sorry?”

She flicked her eyes upwards, and I suddenly understood.

“They want our fucking son?”

“Yes. According to them, he’s a Malay by ancestry, so can he be returned to the bosom of his loving family, et cetera”

“They can fuck off and die!”

She nodded, a twisted grin spreading across her face.

“My answer, basically, just without the swearing. Only just, though. Once I’d put the fucking phone down, though… Bastards”

Audrey spoke up, finally.

“Mrs Chao has spoken to your people in England, Mike. She has decided that from now on, whatever training needs remain can be met via video conference, with an occasional oversight visit. The video part can be done from Perth without much trouble with time zones”

Gary said his own piece, explaining how Beaton would be ensuring that Sheffield were happy with the new arrangements, and then Andy asked how soon we would like to go home. ‘We’ as in Ish and me, of course; not Maz. Never again Maz.

So we packed it all up, and had a kids’ pool party for Ish to say his farewells, and then it was another farewell, to Weyhill Close, as international trade priorities left no room for the powers that be to worry about one unimportant woman.

Neither of us spoke during the flight, not until we had said our little piece to the Border people, and I had assured them that I had left behind all the food, all the plant material, all our animals and all of our wife and mother, and we walked out into the sunshine again, this time without the humidity, but with all of the Butts and almost everyone we knew in Perth, who wrapped us up and wept for and with us.

They took us home, and Geeta and Dal took Ish back to theirs as the rest of us started the process of drinking me unconscious.

The years passed, without my lost last love, every so often interrupted by a visit to Singapore for a tweak to the famous matrix, and eventually my son and I agreed that if we had nowhere to leave flowers for Maz, we would leave them with my first love so that she could pass them on.

In the end, my life should have been over, but it couldn’t be, for it was sitting nest to me on a Boeing 777 as we droned away to the North West and my other family.

I would cope. My son needed me, but oh how I needed him.