Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  “Okay.” I looked expectantly at Stella, but she was holding up her hands defensively. She was small and round and expensively dressed, and I found myself thinking that she was an unlikely friend for Melanie.

  “I don’t want to make more out of this than it is,” she said nervously. “I said what I said in confidence to Mrs. Jacobs. I didn’t mean to involve the press.”

  “But, Stella,” Beatrice protested, “I can’t see how one could possibly make more out of it than it is.”

  Stella shook her head and looked away.

  “Well, I’ll have to say it, then.” Beatrice lowered her voice. “Stella told me that Fred Sevi had threatened to kill Melanie.”

  I leaned back in my chair and addressed Stella. “Did Melanie tell you this herself?”

  Stella nodded wordlessly, her face still turned away from me.

  “When was this?”

  She looked at me. “I don’t want any of this on the television. Or in the newspapers.”

  I hate it when people assume that every journalist they meet is a snake in the grass. On the other hand, there are indeed plenty of snakes winding through the grass. Frankly, if I met a journalist for the first time, I’d keep my mouth pretty tight shut, too. So instead of snapping Stella’s head off, I promised I would not quote her.

  “I spoke to her two days before she went on the course.”

  “In person? I thought you lived in Germany.”

  “On the telephone.”

  Immediately I was skeptical. Give me an e-mail, give me film, give me paper, a tape recording, anything I can see and feel. A telephone call is nothing, it’s a sigh on the breeze, gone with the wind.

  “Why was he threatening to kill her?”

  “If she left him . . . That’s what I mean about blowing it out of proportion . . . it was said in anger. He would kill himself, he would kill her. People say those things, they don’t usually mean them.”

  “But then she disappeared,” Beatrice said earnestly. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  This insistence that Melanie had been murdered was chilling coming from Melanie’s own mother, and Stella gave her a keen glance. But I knew Beatrice didn’t want her daughter dead. She was simply the kind of person who was determined to take no comfort where none was due. She had insisted on looking in a harsh and unforgiving light at all that had happened since Melanie had disappeared and had decided that her daughter must be dead. She did not want to delude herself.

  “Did he say it once or lots of times?” I tried to pin Stella down.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  “Did she say how, or where?”

  “I don’t think it got that specific, but I don’t know. . . . Look, I know it’s your job to ask questions, but I feel as though you’re attacking me. All I wanted to say to Beatrice was that I thought the police should take another look at Fred Sevi. I heard what he’s been saying, that Melanie had post-traumatic stress, that she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I just don’t believe it. She never said anything like that to me, about stress, or hating her job.”

  “Did she talk about having nightmares? Flashbacks? Anything like that?” I tried to sound less aggressive.

  “Nothing. Ever.”

  “What did you talk about, apart from Fred wanting to kill her?”

  I got a sharp glance from Stella for that, but she answered me.

  “We were teenagers together, we’ve always talked about boys . . . men. I got divorced last year. I’m with someone new. We spoke perhaps twice in the year before she disappeared. The first time she was telling me how wonderful Fred was. How he didn’t want to tie her down. Then this last time she said he had become unbearably possessive and wouldn’t let her do her job, and that he had this horrible habit of psychoanalyzing her all the time. It drove her up the wall.”

  “Did she mention any other men?” I asked Stella. I didn’t want to mention names in front of Beatrice. She knew Edwin Rochester, and she might have known the name Mike Darling. She was in such a state of high tension that I believe if I had named them, or said I had any suspicion of them, she would have summoned them to Durham, too, and demanded they explain themselves.

  “I don’t remember her mentioning anyone. Melanie wasn’t the sort who constantly had a boyfriend on the go. That’s why Fred was such a big thing for her. She hadn’t had a serious relationship with anyone for a long time. Her lifestyle didn’t allow it. She was so disappointed when he turned out like he did.”

  “But was she really afraid of Fred?” I still couldn’t really believe what Stella was telling me, and I knew I wasn’t covering it well.

  Stella slumped back in her chair, gazing at me. “I know what you’re saying. She didn’t seem that scared. It was as though she was giving me another example of how unreasonable he was. She wasn’t in hysterics or anything.”

  “And of course he has an alibi,” Beatrice pointed out.

  “He has an alibi,” I agreed.

  “He does? I didn’t know that.” Stella sipped her tea, her dark eyes watching us over the rim of her cup.

  “So either his alibi is faked,” Beatrice summed up carefully, “or his threats weren’t serious.”

  Or, I thought, Stella was making those threats up.

  Stella left us in town, and on the way back I asked Beatrice what she knew about her. Apparently the two girls had been friends since the age of eleven. They had been in the school choir together and the hockey team.

  “Have you ever had reason to doubt Stella’s judgment?” I asked Beatrice.

  She pursed her lips. “Only the normal teenage girl things,” she said. “Boys, staying out. I’d have said the same thing about Melanie. Perhaps there was a little bit of tale telling once or twice, and some amateur dramatics, but nothing I would describe as unusual.”

  For the rest of the drive, she paid little attention to the road and instead talked tirelessly about Melanie. About how proud she had made her parents, but how frightened they had been when she traveled to dangerous places.

  “When she was little, Elliott would spend hours telling her how he was born in another country, and how when he was tiny he remembers playing in the snow in Bucharest, and how he always missed his other country. She told him that when she grew up she was going to see all the other countries in the world, and we laughed. You spend all this time teaching them to be independent and take the world in their hands,” she told me sadly, “and then they do it. They go and take the most dangerous job in the world, and you can’t say a word. You just have to kiss them good-bye and pray they’re okay.” Then, as we arrived back at the house, she said, “Elliott and I try not to scare each other. We scarcely dare talk about it, in case we upset the other one even more. I lie awake in the dark, and then I hear him sigh, and I know he’s awake too, and . . . We’ve been married for forty years. We live in each other’s heads as much as our own. It doubles the pain.”

  At the house, Elliott got out an old photograph album for me and let me thumb through unremarkable pictures of Melanie as a child. I learned that she had three brothers, two of whom lived near Beatrice and Elliott and who had taken turns visiting them each day since Melanie had disappeared.

  Then I sat at Beatrice’s computer, with yet another cup of tea at my elbow, and I went through the few e-mails they’d had from Melanie. I had hoped for more, but they were the e-mails of a woman who knew that her parents were worried and who was telling them as little as possible in order not to frighten them. She wrote about what food was available, about the weather, about the kindliness of the people she had come across. Never about their cruelty.

  “Did you get the impression that she’d had enough?” I asked Beatrice over my shoulder. “Or that she was having a hard time dealing psychologically with some of the things she’d seen?”

  But Beatrice just shook her head. “She would have told us, wouldn’t she?” she asked. But I didn’t know the answer to that.

  When I told them it was
time for me to leave, she took me to the station in her car. As I said good-bye, she leaned across and kissed me on the cheek.

  That night, I got home late and the children were already in bed. There was a message on my answering machine from Maeve. She was so spitting mad that I thought the answering machine might spontaneously combust. She had received a fax from a lawyer acting on behalf of Mike Darling, requiring that the interview he had given me not be used and threatening dire legal consequences if the Corporation failed to comply.

  “Shit,” I muttered. Here was another fine mess I’d gotten Maeve into.

  There was a message from Finney, too, saying he’d heard through the grapevine that Mike Darling had been asked by DCI Coburn to come in the next morning for questioning about the disappearance of Melanie.

  And finally a message from Mike Darling himself, his voice low and intense.

  “Why are you hounding me? Stay out of it, if you don’t want . . . Just stay out of it.”

  I stared at the machine. I had never made a secret of my telephone number, and it didn’t take long for me to work out that Mike could have asked Justin for it. But Darling’s call, coming late at night into the privacy of my kitchen, shook me badly. He sounded as though he were desperate, trapped in a corner. It was like hearing an echo of my own voice after Adam’s murder, and my veins were flooded with shame. I was hounding Mike just as I had been hounded. It was Sevi who had made threats against Melanie’s life, not Mike. I must not pursue the wrong man. Yet his very fear, his defensiveness, pulled me on, as if I were a fox on the trail of a rabbit. If he is innocent, a small voice in my head kept asking, then why is he so scared?

  That night, on the edge of sleep, my head turned into a kaleidoscope of faces and disconnected voices, Beatrice shouting at me in Mike’s voice, Elliott Jacobs waving through his window to Fred Sevi, Stella wide-eyed with fear, her mouth sewn shut as she struggled and fought to speak.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I DID a Google search on Fred Sevi. Part of our conversation had been nagging at me. He’d told me he had a background in military psychology, but I hadn’t followed up on it at the time, and to phone him now and ask just that one question would look unfriendly in the extreme. I managed to find his curriculum vitae on a university Web site. Fred Sevi, born in Istanbul to a Turkish father and a British mother. He had done his initial degree there and had served briefly in the armed forces before moving to Britain for postgraduate studies and training in psychiatry. His doctoral thesis was a study of the psychological impact of wartime service on the soldier, in particular the experience of shooting to kill enemy combatants. The dissertation itself was not available online.

  There was a photograph of Fred Sevi looking darkly handsome, but there were so many things I could not find out. It was impossible to tell, from the patchy information afforded by the Web, whether Sevi had family in Britain, whether he was liked by his colleagues, or what his romantic history was.

  It was the hottest day of the year, with the temperature in the high eighties. Nevertheless, I persisted with my plan, which was to track down Taylor Sullivan. His mother had tried to put me off, but his account of the ambush on the outskirts of Kabul in which Sean Howie had died had now taken on extra significance in the light of my discovery that it was also in Afghanistan that Melanie and Mike Darling had met.

  The M5 had me tearing my hair out, and when I reached Wolverhampton I got lost in an industrial park. For a few horrible minutes, I became convinced that I would never find my way out and that I would live out my days circling nameless roundabouts, glimpsing car parks and prefabricated office buildings at the end of anonymous grass-lined roads, the distant hum of the motorway driving me slowly mad. Eventually, I managed to navigate my way back to the narrow streets of small terraced houses.

  I had the advantage of surprise. Taylor Sullivan wasn’t expecting me. He answered the door to me in running shorts and nothing else. Even before I introduced myself, he grinned and vanished back indoors to “get decent” before he reappeared in a T-shirt and running shoes. He heard me out like that, standing on the doorstep.

  “I spoke to your mother. Did she tell you?”

  Taylor Sullivan gave a lopsided grin and a shake of his head and waited for me to go on.

  “I know you’re under pressure not to speak about what happened, but I wanted to hear about the death of Sean Howie.”

  He shrugged. “I’m out,” he said. “I’m not going back out there for anybody, not queen, not country. Queen wouldn’t go, why should I? Come on in. Nah. Let’s go out. The house is like a friggin’ oven. Yo! Ma!” he yelled inside. “I’m off out. I’ll be back for lunch.”

  We walked through the streets at high speed, Taylor’s long legs eating up the ground.

  “So whaddaya want to know?”

  “I want to know whether you ever met a man called Mike Darling.”

  “Mike Darling, Mike Darling, Mike, Mike, Mike . . . no. Never heard of him.”

  “You’re sure?” I was disappointed.

  “Is that all?”

  “No, I also want to know about Melanie, why you seem to think she had something to do with Sean Howie’s death. I looked at what you wrote, but I don’t see how she was to blame.”

  “Whoa! I thought you wanted to talk about Sean. I never said Melanie was to blame. Nobody’s to blame, man, no man left behind, no guilt, no pain, no casualties, just the white glow of victory.” He punched a fist into the air and gave a bark of laughter.

  “Sean Howie died, and his parents are blaming Melanie, and they’re using your letter as proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem to me to be proof of anything. But Sean Howie’s parents say Melanie pushed the patrol into harm’s way because she wanted to attract fire to get better pictures.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Yeah, well, what? Did she or didn’t she?”

  “Sean Howie was blown in half by a bomb. I’m not kidding. Two halves.”

  “But his parents are saying it could have been avoided if she hadn’t put the patrol in danger.”

  He swung his head to and fro. “I just wrote what happened,” he said. “I never wrote that she led the patrol anywhere. How could she do that? Sean made up his own mind, he wasn’t a baby. I don’t even know if he heard her saying we should go over the bridge.”

  “Are you making this up?”

  “No. I mean yeah, she said it, but she didn’t mean anything by it. It was like, ‘There’s a bridge, guys, weren’t we looking for a bridge?’”

  I was out of breath just walking alongside Taylor. He talked just as fast. Unnaturally fast, as though he couldn’t stop. Pedestrians coming the other way were giving him strange looks. Now I stopped short in the middle of the pavement, and he was a good ten yards ahead of me by the time he’d realized and put on the brakes.

  “She’s getting the blame for the death of this boy,” I told Taylor, “on the basis of what you wrote.”

  Taylor looked to left and right. He had stopped walking, but he wasn’t still. His head was bobbing around, his feet shuffling, as though his muscles liked to keep moving.

  “Don’t you love it?” he said suddenly. He started to dip and pirouette, holding his arms out from his side. He was blocking the pavement, annoying pedestrians who were trying to pass, but he didn’t seem to notice. “After friggin’ Afghanistan, I thank God every day I was born in Wolverhampton.”

  He came to a halt, facing me. “Look, I didn’t want her along. The way I see it, the slightest thing gets fucked up and there’s a journalist there, it’s all over the fucking world. If she’s taking the shit for this, maybe it’s like finally she’s the one that messed up and now she’s got to pay the price.”

  Taylor suddenly lost interest in me and wandered off. He was standing in front of a shop window, inspecting the trainers in the window, his hands stuffed in his pockets. I went over and stood beside him.

  “What would she need to pay
the price for?” I asked.

  “Don’t fucking interrogate me,” he turned and started to shout, his warm breath on my face. “It’s a fucking war, it’s not all neat and tidy like a fucking dinner party. Sean’s mum and dad need to know he died a hero. Don’t you fuck that up.” He thrust his jaw out and hunched his shoulders forward, and because of his height, the pose was aggressive and threatening. I walked away. Shoppers were staring at Taylor, walking around us, keeping well out of range. When I turned back a few moments later, I saw him still standing there, staring once more in the window of the sportswear shop.

  I didn’t get back to London until nearly five. I was hot and sweaty, and there was nothing I wanted more than to see the children and to have a bath. But I went straight back to the Corporation and confronted Ivor Collins. His secretary, Bonnie, tried to stop me because I had no appointment. But I was sufficiently riled to raise my voice and argue with her until he came out to see what was happening.

  “There is no evidence against Melanie,” I told him as he ushered me into his office. “I’ve spoken to Taylor Sullivan. He’s just setting Melanie up as some sort of jinx so that Sean Howie’s parents have someone to blame.”

  Collins looked at me steadily, his narrow head tilted. “If Taylor Sullivan was the only problem, I would entirely agree with you,” he said, “but frankly you’ve just wasted a day on something that wasn’t worthy of your Corporation paycheck.”

  I waited for him to go on, to tell me what was—if Taylor Sullivan was not—the problem. Instead, he bent his cropped white head to his work. I should have contained myself, but the suspicions that I’d been harboring came bubbling to the surface and spewing out of my mouth.

  “So what is this about? Have you got a guilty conscience about Melanie? Is that it?” I demanded. “If it’s true that she cracked up, could it be because you put pressure on her to take ever more risky assignments? Did you push her over the edge?”

  He did not look up.