The Passengers

by John Marrs

  “Where’s this coming from?” he asked, somewhat taken aback. “You made it clear when we first started to date that kids were out of the equation. What’s changed?”

  Sofia stared deep into his eyes and felt warmth radiating from them. She had never been more in love than she was in that moment. “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” she replied. “You know that.”

  “No, really. Tell me.”

  “I’m thirty-eight years old, and neither of us are getting any younger. If I leave it much longer, then nature will take the decision out of my hands. You, me, us . . . I realise now this is what I’ve been waiting for my whole adult life. What do you say?”

  Patrick stopped walking and wrapped his strong arms around his wife’s waist, brought her to his lips, and kissed her. “I say when can we start trying?”

  She curled her fingers through two of his belt loops and led him through the hotel lobby and straight up to their suite.

  Four months later, a chance reflection in an orangery window destroyed everything Sofia had begun to dream of. It was so fleeting that it lasted no more than a second, but she would never forget it.

  They had spent much of the weekend with her niece and nephew in the swimming pool of Sofia’s Richmond home.

  “Patrick, if you dry the kids off, I’ll ask Cook to make a start on lunch.”

  “Okay,” he replied.

  Her husband climbed out of their pool and reached for a towel. Robbie and Paige were on brightly coloured inflatable rafts, racing from end to end using their hands as paddles. “Hurry up, guys,” Patrick said as Paige made her way towards him. He lifted her out and placed her on a sun lounger.

  As Sofia headed to the kitchen, she remembered that she hadn’t taken their drinks order. She turned, then caught a reflection of Patrick on his knees, towelling Paige. As one hand dried her back, the other was held firm upon an area it had no business being. Sofia froze and watched as her husband swiftly slid it away when he realised she had returned.

  Her acting skills disguised the fluctuation in her voice. “What would we all like to drink?”

  “Coke, please,” chirped both children. She hesitated, her eyes locked on theirs, searching for evidence of what she thought she had witnessed. But all they gave back to her were their innocent smiles. She turned and left them alone again with Patrick.

  Throughout the weeks that followed, Sofia replayed that moment over and over again. Had her eyes deceived her? Was she blowing a misplaced hand out of all proportion? Patrick was the man she loved above all others, the only one she wanted children with. How could he be anything other than what she knew him to be? It wasn’t possible. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t cast out the niggling doubt from inside her.

  It was some months later when she returned home from filming in the South of France that she found Patrick alone with Paige and Robbie. Instantly it put her on edge. She hadn’t expected to see them all together, and the memory of Patrick’s misplaced hand returned. She held her breath, waiting in the shadows, watching for signs of inappropriate behaviour. But all three played innocently on a swing Patrick had made by looping a thick rope over a tree’s sturdy branch. “Why are the kids here?” Sofia asked, trying to hide her uneasiness.

  “Your sister asked if I could look after them while she took Kenny to Rome for the weekend,” he replied.

  “You didn’t mention it when we spoke last night.”

  “Their babysitter cancelled last minute. It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  She gave him a lacklustre smile. Patrick placed his camera on a deck-chair and kissed his wife’s cheek. “Can you imagine what it’ll be like when we have our own little Paige running around the place?”

  “Why a Paige? Why not a Robbie?”

  “I don’t know . . . I suppose I’ve been picturing us having a little girl. A mini-Sofia. Someone to follow in your footsteps on the stage. A real daddy’s girl.”

  She blanched at Patrick’s words, and suddenly, being pregnant with his child was the last thing Sofia wanted. The voice inside her, which she relied upon to guide her career, made itself heard—You cannot trust him!

  After a sleepless night, she waited until Patrick had left the house to play an early-morning round of golf before she approached Paige. They sat in the den watching cartoons.

  “Did you have fun with Uncle Patrick yesterday?” she asked, and Paige nodded. “What did you do?”

  “We played in the woods.”

  “With Robbie?”

  “No, he was on his bike.”

  “It was just the two of you?” Paige nodded again. Sofia’s heart beat faster. “And what did you get up to?”

  “I’m not allowed to say,” Paige replied, and put her finger to her lips, making a shushing sound. “It’s a secret.”

  “You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else.”

  “But I promised.”

  “Sometimes it’s okay to break a promise. You trust me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “He took photos of me. He said Mummy asked him to, to show her how I’m growing up.”

  Sofia’s body stiffened. “What kind of photos?”

  “Running around and next to the trees. He used the camera where you have to shake the photographs and they come to life like magic.”

  She was referring to the Polaroid camera Sofia bought him for their holiday in Saint Lucia. Sofia recalled he’d had it with him yesterday in the garden when she’d arrived home. Sofia hurried to the annexe Patrick used as his office. Fuelled by adrenaline and unease, she didn’t know where to begin her search or what she was looking for. She began with the files in his cabinet, and then leafed through books on shelves and drawers stuffed with papers. There was nothing incriminating. But her relief was tempered by frustration. Her inner voice was never wrong. She knew what she had seen that day by the pool.

  The corner of a box poking out from under a stack of old coats caught her eye. Tentatively, she removed the lid and looked inside. It contained many brown A4 envelopes, each addressed to a PO box but with no name, and containing a Dutch postmark on the front. She examined the contents of one. Inside was a glossy colour magazine, containing page after page of indecent images of young girls. Sofia dropped it to the floor, took a step back, and began to hyperventilate.

  She eventually found the strength to continue, and inside the other envelopes were different issues of the same magazine. And at the very bottom was a white envelope, a Dutch address on the front written in Patrick’s handwriting, containing loose Polaroids. Sofia half closed her eyes as she removed a handful; her worst fears were quickly realised. They were clothed and unclothed pictures of Paige. Patrick had taken them not only for his gratification, but to share and arouse other like-minded people.

  Sofia steadied herself against the wall, concerned her legs might give way beneath her. Despite her spinning head, she grabbed the photos, stuffed them into her pocket, put the box back in position, and ran to her bedroom. Once behind the locked door of the en suite, she vomited into the sink. She had never felt pain like it, knowing that the man she loved had robbed a child of her innocence and under their roof.

  Before her niece returned home, Sofia made her promise not to tell her mother about the pictures and in return, she would organise a photo shoot at a studio in London for Paige and her friends. Her niece squealed with delight and swore to remain silent.

  For days, Sofia couldn’t bring herself to leave the bedroom, blaming a virus on her inability to attend rehearsals for a West End play she was performing later that summer. Patrick checked on her regularly, and from under her sheets, she assured him with a sour smile that all she required was bed-rest.

  It was the toughest decision Sofia had ever made in her life. She was torn in two. Patrick had to be stopped, and Paige and other chi
ldren had to be protected from inhumane men like him. Contacting her lawyer to make an appointment with the police would have been the right thing to do. Twice she plucked up the courage to call, and twice she hung up before it was answered. She was using Paige as an excuse for her inertia—Sofia didn’t want to put her beloved niece through such scrutiny. In addition, it would kill her parents knowing they had put their children in the trust of a man they thought of as family but who had exploited their little girl.

  Sofia’s inner voice called her out. You can lie to the world but you can’t lie to yourself. You’re keeping quiet because if you tell anyone, everything you have worked so hard for will be over.

  Even in her confused state, Sofia recognised that by exposing Patrick, it would mean the end of the career she loved. Her reputation, her box-office draw, her body of work . . . none of it would matter once her name was synonymous with a husband who had an active interest in little girls. No director, producer, or actor would risk being associated with someone like her.

  However, despite how much his warped inclinations sickened her, she couldn’t turn off her feelings for him. He had been everything she’d ever wanted in a husband and a friend. They had plans to see more of the world together, invest in business ventures, and start that family. The thought of throwing it all away and starting life again, alone, terrified her. She didn’t have the strength to lose Patrick and her public. So she chose to keep them both.

  Standing outside the door of Patrick’s office, she watched as he ransacked the room in search of his missing Polaroids. Defeated, he went to leave, only to discover his wife, her skin ashen and her eyes raw with sadness. On sight alone, he knew that she was aware of who she was really married to. He opened his mouth but the words weren’t there.

  Sofia thrust a business card into his hand. It contained details for Dr. Peter Hewitt, a psychiatrist. “I’ve made you an appointment for Thursday,” she said. “He’s discreet.” Patrick offered no argument.

  Over the coming months, Sofia made excuses each time her sister asked to come over with the children. She blamed everything from work to illness until, eventually, a baffled Peggy stopped asking. It upset Sofia to push her away, but she couldn’t risk Paige being alone with her uncle.

  Meanwhile, when Patrick attended his twice-weekly appointments with regularity, Sofia often seized the opportunity to search his office for fresh evidence of his compulsions. But there was nothing else to be found.

  Then after a year of living separate lives and sleeping in separate bedrooms, a desperate Patrick begged his wife to take him back.

  “I know what I did was wrong,” he offered humbly. “Dr. Hewitt has helped me to understand why I did what I did . . . how the things that happened to me as a boy I’ve been doing to others and continuing the cycle. I swear on my life that I’m not that man anymore.”

  As he went on to explain how he had changed and now had the tools in place to control further urges, Sofia desperately wanted to believe him. She missed waking up to his smell, feeling the light touch of his fingers as they ran across her body, and the sound of laughter echoing through the corridors of their home. A year without laughter felt like a lifetime.

  Sofia ignored her inner voice and followed her heart. She discarded her contraception, convincing herself that as her fortieth birthday approached, a baby of his own might help to heal the man she loved. And in the weeks that followed, their relationship grew stronger and stronger and she had never felt more loved.

  It was only by chance when she opened the doors to air the summer house in the garden that she discovered Patrick was storing fresh editions of his magazines inside a dusty ottoman. It stunned her. But instead of crumbling to pieces, Sofia closed the lid and walked away. She even found a way to justify his behaviour—if he was gaining sexual gratification from magazine photographs, he wasn’t getting it from a child in the flesh. It was the lesser of two evils.

  However, to continue living with what she knew about him would take great sacrifice. To keep both her marriage and her career, she couldn’t allow the temptation of their own child to come between them. Without discussing it with Patrick, Sofia booked herself into a private hospital to be sterilised.

  As the 1990s merged into the millennium and another two decades passed, the pain of her decision was eased by periods of reliance upon alcohol and tranquilisers. It was only in moments of sobriety that she could admit to herself what a terrible mistake she had made in putting her reputation above all else. She grew to detest Patrick for backing her into that corner, and eventually, theirs became a marriage in name only. Husband and wife spent more time together in the public eye and on red carpets than they did at home. Charity work, especially fundraising for hospitals, became her penance for turning a blind eye to Patrick’s crimes. And when he received invitations to accompany her to openings or visiting children’s wards, he never refused, and Sofia never took her eyes off him.

  One morning, she came off the phone and marched straight to his office, throwing open the door. Patrick was sitting on a sofa, his face obscured by a broadsheet newspaper.

  “My accountant called about a missing £30,000 from an account,” she began.

  “And?”

  “And where is it?”

  “I used it to take care of something.”

  “What ‘something’?”

  “Something that doesn’t concern you. I thought we had an agreement? You live your life and I’ll live mine. No questions asked.”

  “What have you done, Patrick?”

  He lowered the newspaper and sighed. “It was an . . . indiscretion. I needed the money to resolve a misunderstanding.”

  Sofia’s pulse hammered in her throat. “You’ve been caught, haven’t you? You’ve had to pay someone off.”

  “Like I said, you live your life and—”

  “This is my life you’re screwing with too!” she screamed. “Who was it? What did you do?”

  “Some girl’s mother got the wrong end of the stick, and I used the money to ensure no one else got the wrong end of the stick too.”

  “So you, what, paid her off? What kind of a parent would allow you to get away with that?”

  “Are you really lambasting her for turning a blind eye? Pot, kettle, my darling.”

  “What if she comes back demanding more money? Or threatens to go to the tabloids or the police?”

  “She won’t, she signed a non-disclosure agreement. Virtually bit my hand off for the cash.”

  “Where did you get a non-disclosure from?”

  “A lawyer friend of mine drafted it. Fairly standard.”

  “Oh my God,” said Sofia, feeling faint. “How many times have you done this?”

  Patrick peered over the top of his glasses. “Do you really want to know?”

  Sofia did and she didn’t. “This has to stop. You have to turn yourself in to the police; it’s the only way forward.”

  “No. I will not do that. I’d be eaten alive in prison.”

  “Then check yourself into a hospital and get the treatment you need.”

  “There is no treatment for people like me! Surely you must know that? My . . . urges . . . they’re hardwired into my brain. Coping mechanisms do not work.”

  “What then? You’re just going to spend the rest of your life molesting children and paying off their parents?”

  Patrick shook his head. “That’s not a word I like to use.”

  “‘Molest’? Why? That’s what you are, a child molester. I am married to a child molester.”

  “And you have known this for years, so don’t try and convince me this is news.”

  Sofia bit her lip and looked away. “Please, Patrick. We can’t carry on like this. Your behaviour is killing me. I have to tell someone.”

  A rush of tears fell from her eyes, leaving mascara-dark streaks. Patrick placed his newspaper on
the cushions and rose to his feet. Gently, he placed both hands on her shoulders like he was giving her a pep talk. “I’m sorry, Sofia, I really am, but carrying on like this is the only way. If it comes out publicly that you knew about me but we stayed together, or that it was our money I used in return for parental silence, then your life as you know it will be over just as quickly as mine. And I swear to you, I will not go down for this alone. Even though it would pain me to do it, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen the role you played.”

  Sofia saw red, drew her arm back, and slapped him hard across the face. With one hard shove, Patrick pushed her backwards and into the wall, where she lost her footing and crumpled to a heap on the floor. Patrick rubbed his smarting cheek before calmly pouring himself a brandy from a decanter.

  “Can I tempt you?” he asked casually. “It usually helps that blind eye of yours to mist over.”

  “Why would you want to ruin me?” begged Sofia. “What have I ever done to you?”

  “You robbed me of the chance to be a father. I know about your sterilisation. Your doctor called to check on your recovery and was unaware of my ignorance and your deception.”

  “How could I have had your child knowing what you are capable of?”

  “It could have changed something inside me, but I guess we’ll never know for sure, will we?”

  Sofia watched helplessly as Patrick shrugged his shoulders and casually made his way out of the office, sipping from his glass as he walked.

  A loud bang brought her back to the present—an object striking the rear window of her car startled her. Sofia turned to see where the noise had come from, just as a second object hit the door.

  “Jesus,” she shouted, and Oscar barked.

  Tentatively, she looked outside and noticed, for the first time, the streets packed with people, watching as her car slowly passed them. Without her hearing aid, she couldn’t make out what they were shouting, but from their angry gestures and twisted faces, she read their depth of hatred for her. Others began to hurl missiles at her vehicle: stones, rocks, and clumps of earth. She shielded her eyes when, ahead, a man on a bridge held a breeze-block aloft, timing it perfectly as he let go. Sofia screamed as it bounced from the windscreen and onto the bonnet, leaving the reinforced glass with circular cracks like a spider’s web.