Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  “I can’t compete,” he told me. “Even my dad’s name, his real name’s Kevin, but everyone calls him Kes, it’s short for kestrel. Dad says it’s because he’s done more parachute jumps into enemy territory than anyone ever. There were always four of them. You’ve met Mike and Alan, and then there’s my dad, and Ray Jackson. When Ray died, that was when they all decided to get out of the army. They’re like blood brothers. I haven’t been to war, and I don’t want to go. Dad was like . . . born to go to war. That’s the way his brain works. Mike is straight down the line, black and white, friend or foe, everything has a right way and a wrong way. But Dad’s like, forget the rules, let’s play it by ear. They always joke that Mike’s the one that wrote the book and Dad’s the one that tore it up. But they’ll both think I’m an idiot. And I’ll be living with both of them like the resident bloody cripple.”

  I stopped him and got him to back up and explain what he was talking about. Once he started to pour it all out, he couldn’t stop. He hated his stepmother, Sheryl, who had married his father only a year after his mother died of leukemia. Now that his dad had left the army and gone into the private security sector, there was serious cash coming in for the first time. He’d been earning 250 pounds a week with the SAS, but he could quadruple that doing contract security work in Saudi and make thousands as a bodyguard in Afghanistan or Iraq. When Sheryl was left a part share in a decrepit house near Sydenham Hill Wood, she had insisted that Justin’s father move out of their modest Norwood flat and had persuaded Mike’s wife, Anita, that they should go into partnership. Anita and Mike would buy the other share of the house, and they would renovate it, turning the ground floor into a gallery for Anita’s paintings. The second floor would be an apartment for Kes and Sheryl and the third floor an apartment for Mike and Anita.

  I caught myself looking somewhat dispassionately at Justin. Of course I was sympathetic, but I have to say that what interested me more than Justin’s misery was the fact that he was going to share a house with the family of Mike Darling, the last man known to have seen Melanie before her disappearance.

  “Dad’s there about one month in three, and Mike just upped and left four months ago.”

  “So I heard,” I said. “Why did he do that?”

  Justin shrugged. “He just flipped. Around the time that woman disappeared. He was questioned by the police, because he’d been having a drink with her before she vanished, and he was so pissed off, he completely lost it. Not with the police, but at home he was yelling and screaming—they had no right to interrogate him, he was being treated like a criminal. Then he said he needed to get away. That’s what Jacqui says, anyway. Jacqui’s mum, Anita, she’d just had a new baby, so she didn’t want Mike to go, she was begging and pleading and crying, saying Mike had promised he wouldn’t go away again, but he went anyway. So Jacqui’s gone to live with her mum to look after the baby because she can’t cope. She’s got some kind of postnatal thing.”

  “Postnatal depression?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “What about you and Jacqui, then?” I asked unthinkingly. Every time he mentioned the name of Mike’s daughter, his voice took on a worshipful tone. And the two of them had clearly kept in touch somehow while Justin was in Cambodia. It sounded to me as though when Justin had left Britain, their childhood friendship had been hovering on the brink of an entirely new and hormonally driven relationship. If Justin had gone to Cambodia to prove himself a man to Jacqui, however, things had not gone as he would have hoped.

  “What about it?” His voice had become flat again. “She’s a dancer. She’s not going to be interested in a one-legged freak.”

  “You’ll have to ask her about that,” I said.

  Justin sank into a sulky silence, and I kicked myself. It wasn’t exactly a sympathetic response. But what else was I supposed to say? I can’t even guarantee myself love. I can’t go around guaranteeing it for other people.

  Chapter Five

  London

  I returned home to my haunted house. The wailing and the bumps in the night have nothing to do with anything supernatural. Hannah and William do the wailing and the bumping. It’s Adam, who willed us his flat and who is therefore both ghost and patron of our home. We saw next to nothing of Adam when he was alive. He’s there now, though. Not in chilly blasts, thank God, or I’d have moved out long ago and left him to haunt himself. He’s a rather warmer presence than that. Sometimes I find myself talking to him—I get on better with him now he’s dead. But usually I can’t even hear myself think, let alone listen out for ghostly voices.

  When I arrived from the airport, I let myself in through the basement door. The house is large and semidetached, and once upon a time a medium-grand family would have occupied the whole thing. Nowadays, unless you’re a millionaire, you get a bit of a house, not the whole place. This one had been split, and Adam had bought the basement—which gave us the garden—and the first floor. This meant that from the street we either had to go down steps to the basement door, which was ours alone, or we could take the steps up to the red-painted door that was originally the main door to the house and which we shared with the flats above. The basement resonated only to the breathing of sleeping children. Their bedroom and mine were both downstairs, along with a big kitchen and dining room, which had been knocked into one. Carol had retired to her room upstairs. During my working day, Carol looks after Hannah and William in our flat, along with one other child, a three-year-old boy whose single mother is my neighbor and works as a legal assistant in the city. The arrangement works for all of us. My neighbor gets a child minder next door. She can drop off and pick up in an instant. The kids have a playmate. And because my neighbor pays a portion of Carol’s salary, the financial pressure on me is relieved slightly. Once in a while, the system breaks down and we all get ratty, but for the most part it works.

  I could hear Carol’s television whispering and the occasional burst of studio laughter. She always retreats to her room when the children go to bed, and she hates to be disturbed unless she’s baby-sitting and a child wakes up. Usually she’s out on a Friday night, but my traveling had put a stop to that this week. I would have to make it up to her. Carol had become so indispensable that even the slightest chance that she might go was enough to make me quiver with anxiety.

  I think I would know if she was unhappy, because she’s not the type to fake it. I know that we have diametrically opposed views on a vast range of issues. But the only reason I know that is because she likes nothing better than to get a good political argument going. At least I know that she appreciates me as a sparring partner. But I have to live with the knowledge that if she finds someone she disagrees with more, she may end up leaving me for that person. Of course I don’t pay her a fortune, either, although it feels as though I do.

  I went straight to the twins’ room and kissed them on their smooth foreheads, pale in the sliver of light from the hallway. I gazed down at them. I was tempted to wake them to say hello, but it wouldn’t have been wise. In less than two weeks they seemed to have grown, their plump little legs reaching farther in their beds, arms longer. They share a room because we need a room for Carol, but I wish I could separate them because bedtime every night is a riot. At three years old they are like puppies, their bodies like bundles of industrial springs. The commandments of later childhood—thou shalt not launch thyself headfirst off the bed, thou shalt not beat thy twin to a pulp, thou shalt not lob food at thy mother—are still just the stuff of nightmare, a glimpse into a bleak future.

  I went to the kitchen and dug in the fridge. There seemed to be a lot of rather excellent food in there, and I assumed that was thanks to Carol’s boyfriend, Antonio, who runs an Italian deli. My head was throbbing. I was too tired for anything but a tub of pumpkin soup that I opened and warmed in a saucepan. I sat and drank the soup and tore a crust from a loaf of bread, loving the feeling of sitting at my own table in my own home, gazing around me and recognizing with pleasure the familiar thi
ngs, the toy box full to overflowing, the two pairs of tiny Wellingtons standing by the door onto the garden, the rainbow-colored plastic cutlery draining next to the sink. Then I called Finney. His first name is Tom, but when we were first introduced in a police interrogation room, we weren’t on first-name terms. It is Finney that has stuck, and he professes not to mind. Sometimes, just to wind me up, he calls me Ballantyne, which makes my skin turn cold. I called him at home, but there was no answer. I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight. I tried his mobile, and he answered sleepily.

  “Where are you?” I demanded.

  “I’m in front of your telly, where do you bloody think I am? Where have you been, more to the point? I got here two hours ago with food.”

  I told him about the delayed flight, and all the time I was talking, I was walking up the stairs, and then I opened the door to the sitting room, where I found Finney stretched out on the sofa, mobile to his ear. He’d kicked his shoes off, and his shirt and tie were all over the place from being asleep. The television was on, sound muted. I grinned, he grinned back. I turned off my mobile, and he did the same.

  “How did you get in? You didn’t disturb Carol, did you?”

  He pulled me down on top of him. He took my face gently between his hands and examined my wound.

  “You gave me a key.”

  And even as I was kissing him, I was thinking, I can’t believe I did that.

  The next day, Dave and I drove to King’s College. I sent Dave off to get coffee in the student canteen and caught Fred Sevi between lectures in his office. He wore his dark hair to his ears, and his jeans and hooded fleece were indistinguishable from his students’, but he did not appear to be playing at youth. It seemed to me, rather, that Sevi had simply absorbed the informality of the air around him, that he did not want to exist anywhere but here, among his students. I could not imagine him donning a bow tie to woo the media. Quietly courteous, he rose to greet me, shook my hand unsmilingly, and sat back down at a table so overwhelmed by paper that his desktop’s flat-screen monitor was buried. His eyes observed me coolly.

  “I think my colleague Sal wanted to meet you,” I told him, “but it didn’t work out.”

  “I was not eager to get involved in a media circus,” he said. “I thought I should leave this up to DCI Coburn. I thought the police would have found Melanie by now. I’m beginning to give up on them. . . . But hope is tenacious. You’ve heard there’s been a sighting.”

  I had seen it on the agency wire before I left the office. In Cumbria, a group of walkers had seen a woman answering Melanie’s description, with a rucksack and long dark hair, buying groceries in a village shop. Later, a separate caller had contacted the police, reporting that a woman who looked like Melanie Jacobs had come on her own into his bar, just three miles from the village shop, and had drunk a lager before leaving, also on her own. None of the witnesses could really explain why Melanie Jacobs had leapt to their minds when her photograph had scarcely touched the newspapers or the television for the past five months. Nevertheless, to have two such calls, and in such close geographic proximity, meant that the police could not ignore them. Moreover, the barman assured them that he had gone home and Googled Melanie’s picture to test it against his memory. I was glad that I had decided to ignore Maeve and pursue Melanie’s story.

  “Do you think it’s Melanie?” I asked Sevi.

  He gave a dismissive grimace and shook his head. “I don’t think Melanie is the Lake District type,” he said. “If she’s run, she’s gone to chase hellfire and damnation.”

  I risked a smile—he had captured Melanie perfectly in that image—and his mouth moved in what might have been a response.

  “You must miss her,” I said, emboldened by my progress through his reserve.

  “I hardly ever saw her,” he said. “I’m used to missing her.”

  When Melanie disappeared, one of the things that got DCI Coburn excited about Sevi was that he had refused to give interviews to the media. Coburn felt that this might be indicative of a sense of guilt, a fear that he might give himself away in the glare of the spotlight. I understood from Finney that even in his meetings with the police, Sevi had been awkward and uneasy. So it was with little hope of success that I told him now that I wanted to interview him on film and that I had Dave on hand to do so, if he would agree.

  Sevi gave a funny little laugh, just a twitch of the lips and an exhalation of air. “You lot never give up, do you?”

  “You never know when something’s going to spark someone’s memory,” I said. “Maybe if someone is moved by seeing you talk about Melanie, they’ll share some information they’ve been keeping from the police.”

  “And if not, I can console myself that I made touching television. And now, in our newest reality show, the grieving boyfriend speaks.”

  “You would just be doing your best for Melanie,” I told him.

  Sevi’s eyes rested on my face, a small smile on his lips.

  “What efforts have you made to find her?” I asked him. It came out as a challenge, but I always get snippy when academics start sneering at the media.

  The small smile disappeared. “If she went of her own free will,” he said slowly, “then she will come back of her own free will. If she did not go of her own free will, then there is nothing that any of us can do. By now she is dead.”

  The only sound was the clock ticking on his bookshelf.

  “Very well,” he said after a moment. “If the police can’t manage it, I suppose we’ll have to depend on their poor cousins in the investigative media.” He fell silent, aware perhaps that he was overdoing his contempt for me. “I don’t mean to be unhelpful, but our lives were private. It’s not in my nature to bare them to public scrutiny, and it wasn’t in Melanie’s. I don’t think she would like it. . . .” For the first time, I saw a spasm of loss cross his face. “But you’re right. It might help. I will do your interview for you.”

  “I’ll call Dave,” I told him. “I’m afraid there will be some messing around with lights, but we’ll try to make it as painless as possible.”

  Sevi waited while we set up. He must have had a million other things to do, but he showed no impatience. He didn’t even busy himself with e-mail or paperwork, and when his telephone rang he cut short the conversation, telling whoever had called him that he was in the middle of something and would call back. My first question, to make him relax, was to ask how he and Melanie had met. He answered me shortly that it had been at the party of a mutual friend. Then he just carried right on speaking. He did not relax in front of the camera, but talked more quickly than he would have done normally and rarely stopped.

  “As you know, I’m a psychiatrist. I have had some experience working with the military. One of the points we had in common was this fascination with the psychology of the warrior. What happened to a man in battle? Why choose war? How does a soldier feel about the fact that he is allowed to kill a man at war but not in his front room? It was part of her fascination to me, of course, too. She was, in a way, a field-worker for me. Look out for this, I would say to her. And when she returned, she would report back. She would tell me about the interplay of journalism and war, the growth of trust, the sudden volte-face when, on occasion, she filmed something the military didn’t want made public and she became untrustworthy in their eyes. We debated the moral difficulty of reporting on the wrongness of a war when you are dependent on those who are fighting it for your protection. We were . . .” He paused, searching for the right words. “Intellectually, entirely complementary.”

  “You moved in together,” I prompted when he stopped for breath.

  “For what it was worth,” he agreed. “She was away more than she was around. But I can’t switch off the part of me that’s a psychiatrist. I’m trained to read the signs, and when the signs are displayed, well . . .” He made a little gesture with his hands. “I read them. So when Melanie started to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress, I couldn’t not point it out
to her. She was a woman who loved her work—”

  “I’m sorry,” I couldn’t help interrupting him, “you’ve used the past tense repeatedly. . . .”

  “Have I?” Fred Sevi frowned. “Surely, linguistically, I’m not implying that she’s dead by deploying the past tense. I’m simply describing our history, which was necessarily in the past at this point.”

  “I’m sorry. Please continue.”

  He stared at me for a moment, apparently unable to go on.

  “You say she exhibited specific symptoms of post-traumatic stress?” I tried again, and this time he gathered himself to respond.

  “Yes, well, the first time it happened a car backfired and she hit the pavement. It was hard to miss, a classic case. She was depressed, she had trouble sleeping, she had nightmares, she hated crowds, she started at loud noises, she had flashbacks, she no longer enjoyed sex.”

  Interviewees who volunteer details of their own sex lives on film are usually exhibitionists. But Sevi, I think, was simply so used to looking at sex as a measure of psychological well-being that he saw no shame or awkwardness in it.

  “Did you ask Melanie how this post-traumatic stress started?”

  “She blew up at me on half a dozen occasions I asked her about it. She would not communicate with me, and not just about that. Gradually she grew more withdrawn, our relationship deteriorated. She said she just needed more rest. She continued to report from war zones, despite my explicit request that she should not go. She was inevitably sleepless the night before she left. And irritable, unpleasant to live with. She became almost obsessive about the weights of relative body armors—she was already overloaded with her camera.”

  “You’ve told the police all this?”

  “Certainly. It seems absolutely pertinent to her disappearance. And I think I can say that the police are beginning to think, like me, that Melanie has disappeared of her own accord.”