Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  Sal was asleep at his desk when I walked in on Monday morning, his leonine head on his plump arms.

  “Hi,” I said into his ear, just loudly enough to rouse him. It was cruel, but he’d have done the same to me. He groaned and shuddered. His head reared up, and he regarded me balefully through long-lashed eyes.

  “I just got in from the airport,” he complained, stretching, so that I saw patches of sweat under his arms. “Foul flight, storms all the way from Jerusalem. Struck by lightning three times, aborted landing, lucky to be alive.”

  Sal’s ability to create a story out of nothing is legendary in the Corporation. But he does hate to fly. To do him justice, there may even have been turbulence.

  I sat down and logged in. I checked my e-mail and saw that a couple of dozen messages had stacked up over the weekend. I cast an eye down the list and grimaced. A dozen were from family members of people who, like Melanie, had disappeared without a trace. Their desperation steamed from the cold face of the monitor.

  Sal was watching my face.

  “I seem to remember that I warned you,” he said. “You brought it on yourself. You will be followed by wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments for at least the next decade.”

  I ignored him, but I feared he was right. I had even brought the deluge on myself by setting up a Web site for my series, called Missing People. The site featured photographs of the missing people I was following and some facts about their situations and invited sightings or other news.

  When Melanie disappeared, and days and then weeks passed without a body and with no evidence of murder, I was amazed that DCI Coburn considered the possibility that Melanie had vanished of her own free will. Running away seemed so out of character. Of course, it’s not unheard of for people to fake suicide in order to start life afresh. In many cases, the people who disappear are mentally ill or emotionally fragile. But once in a while someone vanishes who has no apparent reason to leave his or her life behind. As I read about these cases, I began to realize that the stories of these people who had disappeared would make compelling television. I submitted a proposal to my boss for a series of four programs following the stories of two men and two women. I wanted to talk to their families and to their friends and colleagues, to try to reconstruct what had happened in their lives to make them leave.

  My boss is Maeve, who is in turn Head of Current Affairs, parens Documentaries comma Television, close parens, or HCA(D, TV). She’s never made documentaries herself, but she knows a good idea when she hears one. She oversees the commissioning process and is an efficient bureaucrat. Maeve and I have a history. It was Maeve who had failed to stand up for me after Adam’s death, and I hadn’t really forgiven her for that. But she’d done her best to make it up to me, and we worked well together. Anyway, Maeve liked the idea, and I’d been working on it for the past two months, with the result that families of several of those who had disappeared now saw me as their one best hope of finding their missing loved one.

  I looked up. Sal hated it when I didn’t talk to him. He was watching me balefully, puppy-dog eyes waiting for a pat and a kind word.

  “I want you to come with me,” I told him.

  “All right,” he said, and hauled himself obediently to his feet.

  We made our way through miles of corridor. We did not discuss Melanie on the way, or indeed why we were making this trip. Sal, I suspect, rather liked the idea of a mystery tour, but he never liked to stay silent for long, so we analyzed the various colors of carpet that we encountered on our journey.

  “It’s all political,” he said. “Look how faded the reds are, the way the blues seep out of the management offices and leak down toward the editors. Look, it’s purple there, where the blue is murdering the red.”

  “Or the other way round.”

  I spotted a yellow, and that had him floored.

  “Perhaps it was on special offer,” I suggested.

  Sal looked disgruntled.

  “So where are we going?” he asked at last.

  I took him to the east wing, following the instructions Max Amsel had given me when I spoke to him on the telephone the night before. We came to a halt next to a publicity board. A section of wall about a meter square had been given over to publicity photographs, a montage of correspondents all over the world, and a little blurb about how selfless and noble was the Corporation’s pursuit of news.

  “Look,” I instructed Sal. “Although God knows why Max was over here, let alone why he was staring at this.”

  “That’s why he stopped to take a look.” Sal pointed to a photograph. There was Max in Red Square, with the spires of the Kremlin behind him. A nice shot. Max five years younger and somehow five years taller.

  “And there she is.”

  We both knew who he meant. Melanie, flak jacketed and helmeted, hair drawn back behind her head in a ponytail, lying stretched out on the ground in a desert ditch, her camera for an instant removed from her shoulder, her head turned in toward the chest of the man whose body shielded her, a man whose stubborn face was contorted in the act, apparently, of shouting orders. The photograph cannot capture bullets, but their presence is taken as read. These two people are taking cover from incoming fire. They are within inches of their lives. The picture silenced us. Was it a snapshot of an instant’s tenderness, representative in some way of a relationship between these two people? Or was it a photographic misrepresentation? Did the image imply a tenderness, a seeking cover, a protection, that was not, was never, there?

  We both knew it was Melanie for the simple reason that her name was printed underneath the picture. Otherwise the confusion of the scene, the obfuscation of her face, would have meant that she was unrecognizable.

  “So who’s Sergeant Mike Darling?” Sal asked after a few moments, peering at the blurb where Melanie’s protector was named.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, “except that he’s now employed at HazPrep—or he has been, or at least that a man with the same name has been—and that he may or may not have been with Melanie that last day.”

  “Where was this taken?” Sal was frowning.

  I shrugged, then looked around me to check we were on our own before I removed the photograph carefully from the board. It was secured by pins, so the only damage was a little perforation. I turned it over, hoping for some identifying mark on the back. A location, a date, a photographer’s name, any of these would be helpful. There was handwriting, but all it gave was the name Sergeant Mike Darling, scrawled in pencil.

  I removed the slip of paper with the caption that identified Melanie and Mike Darling by name, and slipped it into my pocket along with the photograph. Sal rearranged the other photographs to cover the gap, placing a rather fine, brooding portrait of himself at the center of the board.

  I tried the publicity department, but as I’d half suspected, the woman who worked there said she had no record of a board or photographs in that particular location. She tried so hard to persuade me that I had been hallucinating that eventually I just gave up and walked out.

  At the picture archive, I handed the photograph to a young man whose name tag identified him as Henry and who had elegant wrists and long fingers. He held it under the light to take a good look, then flipped it over to take a look, as I had.

  “I can’t think where it’s come from off the top of my head,” he told me, “and without anything to go on, it’s going to be like the needle in the proverbial haystack.”

  He saw my pleading expression and rolled his eyes. “I’ll make a copy. Leave it with me,” he said, resigned. I thanked him, waited while he copied the photograph, and left my mobile number.

  “Did Melanie’s boyfriend ever get back to you?” I asked Sal when I returned to the office.

  A couple of years back, Sal had briefly pursued Melanie, apparently challenged by her icy reputation. I knew that had he managed once to bed her, he would have lost interest within a week. But she had not allowed him close. Ironically, her
disappearance had aroused in Sal the sort of genuine affection and concern that had not been evident in his overlusty pursuit of her. Like me, Sal had been trying to put two and two together since Melanie disappeared.

  “He told me to get lost. And I quote, ‘I feel that in this case, the harsh light of journalistic scrutiny will only serve to blind us to the facts. This is a job for the men of the police force, not for the boys in the press corps.’”

  “You made that up.”

  “I did not. That’s what he said. Word for word.”

  “Then he sounds as pompous as you,” I told Sal.

  I had never met Melanie’s boyfriend, Fred Sevi. All I knew was that he was a professor of psychiatry at King’s College, that they had known each other for two years and been together for slightly less than that when she disappeared, and that for a long time after she vanished, the police had had him in their sights. Sevi told the police that he and Melanie argued before her departure for the War School. On January 9, Sevi said, he tried to visit Melanie at the War School, calling her mobile to tell her he was there, but that she refused to see him. Melanie’s mother, meanwhile, told the police that her daughter was thinking of breaking off her relationship with Sevi. But without any proof of wrongdoing, it was difficult for the police even to describe Sevi as a suspect. In any case, if one did view him as a suspect, he had an alibi for the evening of Melanie’s disappearance. He had been attending a public lecture on eating disorders in the Institute of Psychiatry’s Wolfson Lecture Theatre. He had gone on to a party afterward near Elephant and Castle. A minicab driver confirmed he had picked Sevi up at five minutes past midnight and taken him to his home in Greenwich.

  My mobile rang. It was Finney, sounding busy, lowering his voice and carefully avoiding mentioning any names.

  “Yes, he was instructing her group that day, and no, they had no knowledge of any prior relationship,” he told me.

  “So what are they going to do about it?”

  “Look, are you sure he didn’t make a mistake?”

  “I just went and looked. Amsel’s right. It’s Darling.”

  “Still, there’s nothing they can do,” Finney said. “He’s left the country.”

  “Didn’t Bentley make that up?”

  “Apparently not. He’s been in Cambodia clearing land mines for the past four months.”

  “Clearing land mines?” I echoed. “So . . . four months . . . that means he left just after Melanie disappeared. What a coincidence.”

  “There’s no reason to think it wasn’t.”

  “So why did Bentley seem so defensive?”

  “Darling annoyed Bentley by leaving on very short notice, as I understand it. But as you saw, Bentley is defensive about the whole thing. A woman disappeared from his estate, and he’s already seen clients canceling because of that. The last thing he wants is to have journalists raising doubts about his staff. Anyway, the police will interview Darling on his return.”

  “Which is?”

  “In another two months.”

  “Oh, come on. He’s never coming back.”

  “There’s something else. He was seen talking to her just before she disappeared. In the bar. He was the last one to speak to her. So they’ve already questioned him, and they were satisfied he had nothing to do with it.”

  “Yes, but the fact that they knew each other and he kept quiet about it changes all that, surely.” I ignored Finney’s instructions not to jump to conclusions. I hung up. Then I went to find Ivor Collins and sweet-talked my way past his secretary and into his office.

  “So,” he said, tipping his head in what I was coming to recognize as his way of asking a question.

  “Melanie knew one of her instructors,” I replied, placing the photograph on the desk in front of him. “His name’s Mike Darling. He was chatting to her in the bar before she disappeared. He’s lied to the police. He told them he’d never met her before, but look at this.”

  Collins was gazing at the photograph where it lay. He had not touched it. He looked concerned.

  “I see,” he said in the rasp that always made me think he was ill, frowning up at me. “Have you told the police?”

  “I have, but Darling is abroad for two months, they say they can’t do anything until he comes back.”

  “It’s certainly an interesting development. I would like to have something to tell Melanie’s parents.” He spoke slowly. “Where is he now?”

  “He’s clearing land mines in Cambodia.”

  “Really?” Collins’s eyebrows rose. “Well, I’ll give it some thought, but I don’t see what we can do except wait, do you?” he said.

  I returned to the office, impatient that the first clue Melanie’s disappearance had given up led to the other end of the earth and exasperated that neither the police nor the Corporation seemed willing to pursue it. Sal was looking at me expectantly, and I told him what I’d learned from Finney and of Collins’s unsatisfactory response. He shook his head in irritation.

  “I can’t believe no one’s prepared just to get on a plane to Cambodia and go and see what Darling has to say for himself,” I complained. “Everyone seems to be content to cross their fingers and wait for her to turn up.”

  “So go,” Sal said.

  I stared at him.

  “Stop whining and go to Cambodia,” he repeated.

  Chapter Three

  Route Five, Pursat, Cambodia

  THE jungle is livid, the air solid with moisture from the monsoon rain. I feel as though I am breathing steam. Our Toyota Land Cruiser kicks up the yellow dust, and it falls limply back to the ground. My knowledge of this country’s history imposes an air of menace. When I stop the car to pee, I don’t wander off into the undergrowth because it is strewn with land mines. I have no intention of getting blown up with my knickers down.

  For hours we’ve been driving on a road that is one vast pothole. We set out later than we intended and then lost an hour changing a tire, an operation that took all three of us: Dave, our local driver, and myself. Dave, my cameraman, is the perfect traveling companion. He never gets ruffled, never notices discomfort, takes everything in through cinematic eyes. We listen to Dave’s choice of audiobook, Herodotus’s history of the Persian wars.

  “Have you been to this part of the world before?” Dave asks me. Dave is prematurely gray, bespectacled, with a small goatee. He has worked all over the world, but recently my missing persons series has taken us to rather less exotic locations, like Salford and Middlesborough.

  I shake my head, pull a face. “Nope.”

  “It’s not your kind of thing, is it?” Dave ventures. “Something that takes you away from your kids.”

  For a moment I consider telling Dave to keep his nose out of my personal life, but I know I’m overreacting. He’s right. Every time I go away, I have to steel myself.

  “Earning us a living means I have to go away sometimes,” I say eventually. “I just like to keep it quick.”

  My itinerary doesn’t allow for much slippage. Hannah and William are waiting for me in London, and every day the invisible elastic band between us seems to stretch tighter. The twins are not impressed by professional ambition, particularly in their mother. And to them a week feels like a year, a month like a lifetime.

  All this means that, unlike Melanie and Sal, I won’t make a career out of trouble spots. I gaze out the window at this land formed by monsoon and heat, with the history of genocide hanging over it like a cloud. Despite all that I have read, when we pass close to villages I am still shocked by the number of people, adults and children, who are missing limbs. It is a landscape that has existed all my life, and that I have never before seen, and that I would not have seen now if it were not for Melanie, who is now my work, my “story.” How much of the world is that “other” place, the unknown, strange, threatening, or exotic, heavenly or hellish? Melanie had seen it all, bumping across roads like this one, seeing worlds from the window that a tourist would never see, sharing terrain with th
e people who work the land and on occasion with the soldiers who come to protect or plunder.

  In between the fighting and the famines there must have been hours of companionship on the road, and beautiful vistas, and the joy of unexpected friendship from strangers. And for the first time, I think of her in a different way. For the first time, I don’t ask myself why on earth she chose this life. For the first time, instead, I think what an immensely rich life she chose.

  “Does Maeve know what you’re up to?”

  “I sent her an e-mail the day we left, so she knows I’m in Cambodia,” I said slowly, “and she knows I’m following up on a missing person. I just didn’t happen to tell her that the missing person is Melanie.”

  “I think,” Dave said wearily, “that she might not like it.”

  “Why do you think I haven’t told her?”

  “Brilliant.” His voice was heavily sarcastic.

  “I’ll tell her when I get back.”

  “Fucking brilliant.”

  “I’m making a series on people who just disappear, and that’s what Melanie did. I see no need to explain myself to anyone.” I sounded defensive, even to my own ears.

  Dave mulled this over. After a moment he got to the problem that had struck me about thirty seconds after Sal suggested I go to Cambodia.

  “Where did you get the budget?”

  “Well . . . originally I budgeted for a trip to Russia to follow up a student who disappeared, but then he turned up at his sister’s wedding, so . . .”

  “You had wriggle room.”

  “I had wriggle room.”

  There was silence in the car for a moment. Then he said, “Even the Corporation’s given up on her. You’d think they’d want to keep everyone looking.”