Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  “Are you aware of what I have been through because of you?”

  Jacqui tries to walk past him, but he grabs her upper arm in a surprisingly tight and painful grip.

  “What?” Jacqui demands. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “It was you who told the police you thought I had the boy,” Ronald continues furiously, “trying to make yourself important. I’ve never hurt a fly. The idea of abducting a child is abhorrent.”

  “So what if it was me?” Jacqui says, and pulls her arm out of his grasp and runs off.

  “You won’t be allowed to get away with it,” his voice calls after her.

  Jacqui has come in for worse abuse from Sheryl.

  “He’s an old man,” Sheryl tells her, quietly and white with anger, “a frail old man, and you set the police on him, and you humiliated me.”

  “I don’t know why you think it was me.” Jacqui is defiant, even as she retreats. But later she sits sobbing on the step just outside the back door and rings Veronica Mann on her mobile.

  “You told them it was me,” she cries. “You said it would be a secret.”

  “I have not told them a thing.” Veronica Mann sounds impatient, as though she has better things to be doing. “They must have worked it out for themselves; it won’t have been difficult.”

  “Ronald said they wouldn’t let me get away with it.” Jacqui’s voice rises. “But I was just trying to do the right thing for Christopher. I know you don’t believe me, but—”

  “Listen, Jacqui, they’re upset. But Christopher is back now, that’s all that matters, isn’t that right?”

  Jacqui hangs her head. She takes a deep breath. “I really think you shouldn’t give up trying to find out who took Christopher,” she says to Veronica.

  “We have not given up,” Veronica tells her. But what she does not say is that the police have many things on their plate.

  Jacqui bites her lip. “I mean, there are things you should know about what is going on here. I know you think I wasn’t right before, but I want to talk to you again.”

  “I will be there tomorrow,” Veronica tells her, and thinks, resigned, And I will hear another grand conspiracy theory.

  “Tomorrow,” Jacqui repeats, thinking about Justin’s physiotherapy sessions. “Okay. I’ll be here.”

  Jacqui puts her phone back in her pocket dejectedly, staring at the ground and rubbing her eyes clear of tears. She sees the flicker of a shadow on the ground, as though something or someone has moved at the window to her right.

  That night, Jacqui and Justin are entangled in the blankets in the garden shed, their only illumination a powerful flashlight that they have propped in the corner and across which Jacqui has draped a pair of red panties. The flashlight, thus clad, casts a semicircle of red light across the timber roof. Jacqui has brought two or three flashlights here by now, but they get lost, one by one, in the bedding.

  Justin is propped against a wall of cushions, Jacqui lies across his naked chest, the blankets are pulled tight around them, and they are silent, kissing, when a loud groan of hunger from Justin’s stomach makes them collapse in giggles.

  “What’ve we got to eat?” he asks.

  Jacqui scrabbles around in a box by the door. “Eggs,” she offers helpfully, holding up a carton.

  “What are we going to do with those?”

  They laugh again. When Jacqui’s with Justin, the fear recedes.

  Jacqui delves into the box again but shakes her head. “That’s all there is. I’ll go and get you something.”

  “Nah. I’ll be all right.”

  “You can’t go to sleep hungry,” she tells him. “I’ll go and get some biscuits or something, I’ll be back in a minute. Can I take the torch?”

  There is a minute hesitation before he says, “Yeah, take it, I’m not going anywhere.”

  Jacqui removes the panties from the flashlight, pulls on a T-shirt, and heads out into the night. Justin waits in the sudden pitch dark, counting the seconds till her return, feeling a terrible pain in his missing leg. He has been trying to limit the number of painkillers he is taking, because he can’t think clearly when he’s full of them. In the dark, strange, unpleasant thoughts occur to him about the people he loves. He becomes panicky. He won’t even let himself think about the future. His prosthesis is lying somewhere, abandoned, buried in the blankets. He begins to search for it in the dark.

  Jacqui makes her way across the lawn, enjoying the breeze and the damp grass on her bare feet. There are few lights on in the house; it must be nearly midnight. Just one in her parents’ bedroom and two at Kes and Sheryl’s end of the house. She finds this interesting. She has been wondering how Kes and Sheryl can sleep together. She finds it more credible that her own parents can at least continue to sleep in the same bed, since they seem to be in denial. Probably, she thinks, they can lie in the same bed and each pretend they’re on his or her own. The light in Christopher’s room is out; presumably he was asleep hours ago. She lets herself in through the back door.

  Jacqui goes to what passes for the kitchen and is pleased to see that amid the meager supplies—these days no one seems to be thinking about grocery shopping or even about eating—there is a packet of chocolate digestives. She seizes this and two cans of beer, then runs lightly on the same noiseless feet back the way she has come, proud of her spoils.

  She tracks back across the lawn, taking a different path this time, perhaps a little shorter. Now, walking away from the illuminated house and into the darkness, she feels suddenly afraid. She is aware of a tiny knot of panic sitting under her ribs. Suddenly she comes to a halt. She has heard something. She listens. Perhaps the noise came from the garden shed, perhaps it is Justin moving around.

  She starts to walk again, but now the sound is closer at hand; she can hear breathing, and now she begins to run, and behind her, feet pound. She feels a hand grab for her but manages to evade it, slithering like a snake from its grasp. She is a dancer, and she pushes her bare feet into the earth and springs to one side, wrong-footing her assailant. She calls for help, and suddenly Justin’s voice is shouting her name, and she can just make out the shape of him in the door frame of the shed, a flashlight in his hand, shining it across the orchard so that it reaches her. And suddenly she is alone again, her assailant vanished into the night.

  She races to Justin and almost bowls him over.

  “What was that all about?” he wants to know. “And where’s the food?”

  “I dropped it. Out there,” she gasps. “Didn’t you see her?”

  “See who?” Justin sometimes thinks Jacqui’s paranoid. All that stuff about Sheryl and Ronald Evans had been an embarrassment.

  “Sheryl,” Jaqui says, her voice high and panicked. “Sheryl was trying to kill me.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  THE next morning I rang Finney and told him about Jacqui’s telephone call.

  “That explains it, then.” His voice didn’t express surprise; it rarely does.

  “That explains what?”

  “They’ve gone. They’ve been camping out in the garden, but the shed is abandoned. They’ve taken Anita’s Mini. No one saw them go, which probably means they didn’t want to be seen. They’ve taken clothes and food. It looks as though they’ve moved out.”

  “Who was it who noticed they’d gone?”

  “Sheryl, of all people. The only adult who isn’t a parent of one of them.”

  “And there was no note, nothing? Jacqui usually rents with friends. Could they have gone there?”

  “They’ve checked, she’s not there.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  As we said good-bye, I realized he had given up telling me this was none of my business. Anyway, my guess was pretty straightforward. I dialed Justin’s mobile number, and when he answered I asked where I could find him and he gave me an address.

  Outside the Europa supermarket, men were unloading loaves of bread in w
ire trolleys from a van. It meant that the tradesman’s entrance was open, and I managed to slip in and up the stairs. On the first floor there were small, dusty offices, none of which seemed to be manned. I walked up another flight of stairs. This, Justin had told me, was Sheryl and Kes’s old flat, abandoned when they’d moved to Sydenham. I tried to imagine Sheryl here: Sheryl supervising men carrying a leopard-skin sofa up the narrow stairs; Sheryl tottering up in high heels and leather trousers; Sheryl lugging up a carrier bag with a chandelier clanking around inside. The stairs were steep and claustrophobic, with small, high windows and years of grunge washed into the seams. Voices, the noises of a supermarket and of the busy street outside, wafted up inside the building.

  On the second floor, I found three flats. Number 1C, Justin had said. I rang the bell. The door looked pretty solid, a heavy gray, forbidding metal. But it vibrated gently to a soul beat. Nobody came, so I tried knocking, once politely and then a second time hard enough that my fist hurt. I waited again, and eventually the door opened on a chain, the music got louder, and Jacqui peered out. When she saw me her face twisted. I waited while she went through her by now familiar internal argument: Was I friend or foe? More help or hindrance?

  “May I come in?” I asked. She had told me, after all, about the attempt on her life. She had chosen me—or had allowed Justin to choose me—as her confidante. She didn’t know whom to trust, but she needed to trust someone. She took a step back and opened the door.

  Inside, the flat showed signs of earlier occupation by Sheryl. There was a swagged curtain at a tiny metal-framed window, and something that might have called itself an armoire stood hunched under the low ceiling. The paint was peeling, and the distinctive smell of mold came from a doorway that opened onto a bathroom. Justin emerged leaning on his crutches. When he saw me, he stopped still. How, I wondered, had he got up the stairs?

  “How did she know?” Jacqui asked him.

  He shrugged. “I told her.”

  Jacqui looked awful, unwashed, unbrushed, clearly still dressed in yesterday’s clothes.

  “They’ve probably all guessed where we are,” she said.

  “Well, none of them can be bothered to come looking for us.”

  Jacqui gave him a dark, dismissive look. “She came,” she said.

  She turned her back on me and walked past Justin. I followed her into what turned out to be both bedroom and sitting room, barely furnished with what Sheryl had decided to leave behind: a sofabed, extended to its full width. The walls, a nasty shade of pink, were naked. There was a small table here, too, which probably counted as the dining area, but there were no chairs. Jacqui sat on the edge of the bed. There was a sleeping bag laid out on top of it, and dirty cushions that had served as pillows, but otherwise no bedding. It struck me that there was a strange odor about the place, as though it had been closed up too long with too many bodies inside. Had it really built up in the few hours that Jacqui and Justin had been there?

  “Why did you leave?”

  “You know. I told you.”

  “Why on earth would Sheryl want to kill you?” To me, the idea of Sheryl barreling across the lawn in camouflage and on tiptoes was ridiculous.

  Jacqui slumped, if possible, even further. I remembered how I had first seen her, sitting in the garden with Christopher, poised and confident. Now she just looked scared. Justin came to sit by her on the grimy bed.

  “Tell her,” he urged, no longer taunting. He took her hand and held it on his lap.

  “It was Sheryl who took Christopher,” she said.

  Gently, I reminded her that the police had checked Ronald Evans’s house and questioned Sheryl and had decided that neither of them had anything to do with the kidnapping.

  “But we were wrong—she didn’t keep him there, she kept him here,” Jacqui said. “I suddenly realized Sheryl still has this flat. She put it on the market when they moved out, but so far they haven’t had a buyer. So we came here last night.”

  “We found this.” Justin came forward, holding a scrap of plastic. He handed it to me. It was turquoise blue, with white lettering, part of a letter M.

  “It’s come from a packet of nappies,” he said.

  “It might have,” I said. There was not enough lettering to be sure. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was stuck to the edge of the bin under the sink,” Justin said.

  I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink and put my head inside, but there was nothing else to be seen.

  “What do you think?” Jacqui asked. She might not have wanted me there, but she wanted vindication. To me, the smell of bodies in the flat was more persuasive than the scrap of plastic, but that was evidence of nothing. I looked around me, trying to imagine Sheryl here with a small baby, drugging his milk, leaving him alone, not caring, ultimately, whether he lived or died. And not any old baby, but Anita’s. I couldn’t imagine it, yet I knew that this was quite possibly a failure of imagination on my part. I could not imagine half the horrors Melanie had witnessed, yet they had occurred.

  “I can’t believe Sheryl would do that to Anita, or to a baby,” I said. “I’ve never seen Sheryl be cruel. Have you?”

  Jacqui gazed at me, and once again I could see her keen intelligence at work. She glanced at Justin.

  “She could have stolen Christopher for herself, then lost her nerve,” Jacqui said. “You say she’s not cruel, but nobody likes her. Justin doesn’t, Kes doesn’t.”

  Justin shook his head and turned away. He moved like a caged animal.

  “The stairs,” I said to him. “How can you cope with the stairs here?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “It took me forever to get up here. I can’t go out. It’s like a bloody prison. C’mon, Jacqui, no one’s after you. I’m going to go back to the house. I can’t stay in here. I’ll go mad.”

  Jacqui looked impatient. “Don’t you think Christopher was here?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. “It’s possible, I suppose,” I said.

  “You should be going.” Jacqui jumped up. “I’ll walk you down.”

  In the corridor, she closed the door to the apartment and led the way down the stairs to the next landing, where she stopped and spoke in hushed, urgent tones.

  “You think I’m paranoid about Sheryl,” she said.

  My heart sank. I could not endure another conversation about Sheryl. I shrugged in agreement.

  “Okay, you do. You saw us the other day, right?”

  I nodded.

  “All right, I’m going to tell you what that was about, and then you’ll understand. I asked her to meet me away from the house like that because I decided to tell her about Kes and Mum.”

  “What?”

  “Kes and Mum. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You saw what I saw.”

  “What did I see?”

  “Kes, on the bed, with my mother,” she hissed.

  “He scarcely even touched her,” I protested. “She was in a terrible state. He felt sorry for her.”

  “Oh, come on, they’re”—her face contorted—“they’re having sex.”

  I looked at her in disbelief. Jacqui, I thought, had become as unhinged as her mother. First this obsessive suspicion of Sheryl, and now this fantasy about her mother.

  “I thought if I told Sheryl what Kes was up to, she’d put a stop to it,” Jacqui hurried on, her voice still low, casting anxious looks at the door. No wonder, I thought, that she did not want Justin to hear this. The news that Jacqui thought his father was sleeping with her mother would be instant death to their relationship. “She was angry. . . .”

  “I saw her walk out,” I said.

  “But I think she already knew what was going on between Kes and Mum,” Jacqui insisted, “and if that’s true, she’s got a good reason to want to hurt Mum.”

  She looked at me expectantly. My brain slowly caught up with hers.

  “You mean you think she could have taken Christopher to get back at Anita for sle
eping . . . as you think . . . with her husband.”

  “Exactly,” Jacqui agreed. “Then the next day I think she overheard me saying to Sergeant Mann that I had news for her. Then that night she tried to kill me in the garden.”

  She looked at me with huge, worried eyes.

  “Jacqui,” I said, “you’ve been under a lot of pressure. I’m not saying there’s nothing to what you’re suggesting. But . . . this thing in the garden. Frankly, it seems unlikely.”

  Jacqui turned away from me impatiently.

  “Jacqui,” I told her, “you’ve got to get Justin out of here. He can’t stay here. He can’t get in and out. He’ll go crazy.”

  Jacqui turned to the wall, shaking her head, and eventually I realized she was crying.

  “I can’t go back there,” she said, sobbing, “I can’t go back.”

  I spent the afternoon in the editing suite, going through the rushes I had gathered for the documentary. I would continue to gather interviews over the next two weeks, but I was beginning to get a feel for how it would look.

  I took a break from the rushes to call Lorna. Usually the bouts of exhaustion that she suffers pass in a few hours, and I wanted to check that she had recovered after she left my birthday dinner in Father Joe’s arms.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she said in her determinedly upbeat way, “completely back to normal.” But I could tell there was something wrong, and I asked what it was.

  “Joe’s gone back, that’s all,” she said.

  “I see. Well . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now. I just can’t.”

  We said good-bye.

  Sal called to me from the office. He was at his desk, reading something off the computer screen.

  “Look at this. Fred Sevi’s in the shit,” he said. “The minicab driver who reported taking him home from Elephant and Castle now says that he was paid to say that. The driver’s called Paul Dreyer. He says he never saw Sevi before Sevi walked into the minicab offices on January eleventh and asked for a cab to Barnet. On the way he struck up a conversation and offered a payment of five hundred pounds if Dreyer said he’d had him in his cab the night before.”