Free Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton by Sandra Gregory Page B

give it to me and I'll take it through for you.’
    Is this guy for real? Was I that transparent? Was I that obvious? Should I give this stranger the hash? What if he was setting me up? We looked at each other for a minute.Then I took the tiny piece of hash from my pocket and handed it to him. He pocketed it and walked straight through.
    ‘Keep it,’ I said, when I passed through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ section. I should have known then I would never make a drug smuggler, but I just couldn’t read the signs.

    Robert Lock’s mind often wandered. One minute he would be telling me about Japan, where he frequently travelled; the next he would switch to a wholly unrelated subject as if he was talking to someone else. In an instant his eyes could turn chilly, sombre and strange, as if the weight of the conversation itself was impossible to soothe him.
    We were having tea outside one of Bangkok’s European sand- wich shops, where the owner charged the earth for cheeses and German sausages, and Robert was telling me about his planned
    trip to Japan. Nearby was the P Guesthouse in Pra Athit, where Robert was staying. I had booked into the Peachy Guesthouse 200 yards away. It was a beautiful day and a rumble of feet passed us by every few minutes. Robert asked if I would be prepared to take a package to Tokyo for him, for which he would pay me £ 1 , 000 .
    His left hand had swollen terribly, like a large grapefruit; it looked out of proportion to every other part of his body.
    ‘Robert,’ I asked,‘what on earth have you done to your hand?
    Did you trap it in a door or something?’
    It was obviously a stupid question. His face, minutes ago ani- mated, fell harder than a coffin nail.‘No,’ he replied,‘don’t worry about that. I hit an artery instead of a vein.’
    It was drugs he wanted me to smuggle for him. I thought it was precious gems. There were always a lot of rubies, diamonds and emeralds coming in from Cambodia through Bangkok and people would take them out from there. The idea of smuggling gems was wrong but if that’s all it was then it was worth thinking about. I had even begun thinking how I would do it. When I looked at his arm it hit me.
    God, no, it’s not gems. It’s heroin.
    He looked at me and sort of smiled.
    Robert told me he had been injecting heroin for a while although he was trying to get off the needles.The recent accident with his arm had been the result of hitting his artery, which had scared him.What was to be in the package was his personal supply.
    ‘It seems like quite a lot,’ I said,‘if you don’t mind me saying.’ ‘That’s because I’m not putting it in my arm any longer; I’m
    putting it up my nose. It’s taking four times as much for me to put it there as it does to put it in my arm.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    That was his explanation and I shrugged. Bangkok was the kind of place where conversations like these were fairly commonplace. The idea of smuggling heroin seemed absurd,but the £ 1 , 000 struck a chord. It was far more money than I needed for a ticket home.
    ‘I’ll need some time to think about it,’ I said to Robert.We fin- ished our lunch and then we separated.

    That night in my apartment I couldn’t get Robert’s proposal out of my head. It seemed like such a simple solution to everything.
    £ 1 , 000 . One thousand pounds. I counted them over and over and
    the more I counted the more it sounded almost like a legitimate way of earning money. Occupation? Drug smuggler. Lovely. How much do you earn? £ 1 , 000 . Any perks? Oh, yes, a trip to Japan. Wonderful. Sign here…
    Robert’s problems were really not my problems. He’s a big boy and he can take care of himself, so why should I worry about him?
    He wasn’t going to sell it, he said, he was just taking his personal supply on holiday.All I would be doing was earning some money to get myself home. Robert knew what he was doing and assured me that he wasn’t planning to sell it on to anyone else, and