They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

34 23 July 2007 — Looking back

I got real.

Albazi wanted full payback in three days, and that wasn’t going to happen. Which meant, as Nicos so eloquently put it, I had three days to get my shit together and then vanish.

I was putting my trust in a complete stranger, by his own admission a drug dealer, and yet strangely I did now completely trust him. Or maybe I just really, desperately wanted to trust him?

Nicos was taking care of everything. I was going to have to change my name, but he was dealing with that. I was going to have to change my appearance. And, just as importantly, he drummed into me repeatedly that, if I went ahead with this, I would have to leave everyone and everything I loved in Brighton behind. There would be no tearful reunion. No, ‘Hi, darling, I’m home. I’ll explain...’

The more I tried to think straight about the enormity of it all, the harder it got. I was schoolgirl-excited one moment, then scared witless the next. There really were only two options, or so it seemed. Either I fessed-up to Roy and we figured out something together. Or I just disappeared. But either way our house was already mortgaged to the hilt and I really didn’t know how much Roy could do, other than arresting Albazi. That would be a short-term solution, for sure. But a long-time nightmare for me, because the longer I left it, the more likely it was that Roy would find out I was pregnant.

I lay awake for much of that night, my scalp feeling tight, like it was a bathing cap. I was leaving my husband, my friends, my parents and every other part of my life. Three days in which I had to seem totally normal to everyone, while all the time planning not a weekend break, or a fortnight’s holiday in the sun, but my complete disappearance. For ever.

I would be gone. Properly gone. With a man I barely knew, who had made all the arrangements, which included coming up with some new identities. All I had to go on was just my gut instinct that he was some kind of a guardian angel. I guess I’ve always believed that somehow people like Nicos find us at times in our lives when we need them.

It was that way handsome Roy Grace, with his Paul Newman eyes, had found me all those years back. And now Nicos just appeared. He told me it was the first time in his life he had been in the Casino d’Azur. He told me he wasn’t sure why he had gone in, but the moment he saw me, he knew the reason.

Sounds corny, but in my muddled state I guess I was ready to believe anything.

I was up against two ticking clocks. It felt like those ones you see on top of briefcase bombs in movies, with big red digital countdowns, so you can see time is running out for the hero to defuse them. But I was pregnant and that bomb was not going to be defused — not after all those years of trying for a baby.

Finally, I had what I wanted most of all in the world.

I should stop taking the Valium, I knew. I would, I promised myself and my baby, I would stop as soon as the stress was off. I think my baby knew, I felt we already had a bond, an understanding between us. My baby was cool, we were already a team. A very cool team.

But as those days and hours ticked away my confidence was ebbing, too. I didn’t see Nicos, we just spoke on the ‘job’ phone he’d given me, and that wasn’t helping calm me much either. None of it was feeling real. I walked around and around the house — it wasn’t a big or grand house in any way, it was pretty ordinary. The estate agents had it in their brochure as four-bedroom, but in reality it was three bedrooms plus a large cupboard with a window, but I’d always loved it. Well, until I compared it with Tamzin’s. Built in the 1930s with a few pieces of timber on the front facade to give a mock-Tudor effect, it had a tiled carport out front and a small, fenced garden at the rear, which I’d turned into something very exotic, with stones and flowing water and pathways and greenery. A proper sanctuary. We’d spent so many back-breaking hours creating this I would of course be sad to leave it, and felt sentimental at times during those days.

There was much about the interior I’d be sad to leave, too. The Little Greene-branded paint in the shade of ‘flint’ throughout the rooms, and mostly black furniture — all part of my minimalist interior plan. But was there anything I wanted to take with me for my new life, wherever that would be? Nicos had talked about Valencia in Spain and Jersey in the Channel Islands. I had no idea what, if anything, might work out with him, but he was my portal into my new life at this moment. Once I was out and with a new identity, I could decide whether there was any future with him, or perhaps with someone, somewhere in the world, who I had not yet met.

I desperately wanted to talk to Becky. But she was in Australia with a big time difference. Not that that was an issue. I guess the issue was that if I told her what I was planning, for sure at some point soon after I’d gone Roy would call her and then she would have to lie to him — or worse — not lie.

Nicos had drummed into me repeatedly: Tell no one.

I told no one.