Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  “Why would the driver change his story now?”

  Sal turned away from the screen and swung around on his chair. “Perhaps he got scared?”

  I sat down opposite Sal, thinking it through.

  “The only reason for Sevi to fabricate an alibi would be because he had something to hide,” I said slowly. I knew I was stating the obvious. And of course both Sal and I knew the next logical leap, that he was guilty of something. If you have nothing to hide, why hide? But these were the same arguments I had found myself making about Mike.

  “Well?” Sal was excited by the news.

  I found myself speechless, shook my head, shrugged.

  “Well?” he demanded again.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said, throwing up my hands. “We’re going round in circles here. I feel like you do, but it’s exactly what we were saying about Mike. Why would Mike lie about knowing Melanie if he’s not guilty of something? And we don’t even know she hasn’t just flipped and run off.”

  Sal’s face soured. He didn’t like me throwing cold water on him.

  There was a long, tense silence.

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  “PC Plod waiting for you, is he?”

  “Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he is.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I had just got the children to bed when Finney turned up. His timing is usually immaculate. On occasion he will ring at six-thirty or seven to see what stage the children have reached so that he can calculate at what time he should appear—a bath is thirty minutes, a bedtime story fifteen. We took a candle and a bottle of wine outside into the garden. It had been a hot, clammy day, and it was still uncomfortably warm inside the house. Outside, a breeze had begun to stir.

  We were still awkward with each other, extra nice, aware of how we still tottered on the edge of the abyss. Finney volunteered to cook, so he set about roasting a mound of pink sausages and dunking pale strips of potato in boiling oil.

  William came to find me in the garden, wanting water. I sent him back to his bed clutching a beaker, his little feet placing themselves carefully, toes splayed. Then Hannah bounded out, giggling, reporting that she’d had a bad dream. She accepted a brief hug, beamed at me, stuck her tongue out at Finney, and was sent bounding back to bed. William reappeared in tears, to tell me that Hannah had spilled water all over his bed, which she had. I went in to change the sheets and settle the children again. I waited outside their room for a few minutes to see if they reappeared. Then I checked my e-mail. There was a message from my mother.

  Trouble in Paradise, I’m afraid. Today a grim silence at the dinner table. Nancy and DeeDee have had an argument, and it has something to do with the menfolk, but quite Who, When, Where, I can’t say. I feel a little awkward. They need their Privacy.

  I joined Finney at the garden table, in the light of the candle. He brought out a roasting pan of browned sausages, a bowl of golden chips, and a pot of yellow mustard. The silence suited us well. We ate, and then there was a moment when we both found ourselves just sitting and looking at each other.

  “We’re still here,” Finney said.

  “We are.”

  The phone rang. Or rather phones rang. My landline, my mobile, Finney’s mobile, all at once. They all told the same story.

  In Reigate, a middle-ranking factory manager named Ryan had been made redundant. Distraught, he paced his house. His wife, Izzy, was worried but sympathetic. They would be all right, she reassured him; she would take on more hours at her temping agency, the kids would be fine, they might even earn some money themselves one day. He must retrain, learn how to use computers. She looked ahead, to light at the end of the tunnel. Still he paced. He felt closed in. All he could see from the windows of their house was the brickwork of other people’s houses.

  “Come on, let’s you and me go for a walk while the kids are at school,” Izzy said. “We’ll get a pub lunch, and we’ll have a walk in the fields. It’s a beautiful day, and my laundry can wait. I don’t feel like doing it anyway in this heat, all that bending down.”

  They didn’t go for walks in the countryside very often. Never mind. They found a pretty village, and after a lunch of fish and chips, Izzy asked the barmaid, and the barmaid asked the barman to recommend a walk.

  “Go out the back,” he said. “You’ll see a path. It goes through the woods and then up onto the hill, and you’ll have a lovely view over the valley.”

  They found the body in the woods. They hadn’t been looking. It was the last thing either of them would have expected to happen that day, or indeed any day of their lives. And their interest in the countryside was a straightforward one: fresh air and sunshine, perhaps a view. They weren’t digging around for rare mushroom species or plucking at leaves for their scrapbooks. They didn’t even have a dog to take for a walk. There was a dog, a cheerful dalmation, but he was running ahead of his owner, coming the other way. Izzy and Ryan stopped to admire the animal’s handsome spots and his fine face as he came to an abrupt stop and sniffed the movement of air that was almost a breeze.

  “Mind you, there are sheep around, you wouldn’t have thought you’d let a dog off the lead here,” Izzy said.

  The dog set off, away from the path and into the undergrowth. They heard him barking and thought little of it. But the dog emerged and stopped in front of them, hackles raised, and barked again, ran off again, returned to bark, and so on.

  “It’s as if he’s trying to get our attention,” Izzy said. She thought Ryan would think her silly for saying that. But it was Ryan who crashed off into the undergrowth behind the dog while she waited on the path. She thought maybe there was a sheep in trouble. Either that or a dead rabbit.

  She heard the dog barking again and then Ryan’s voice.

  “Izzy, Izzy,” he called for her desperately. He plunged out of the undergrowth, a sheen of nausea coating his face. He’d grabbed the dog by his collar and seemed to be trying to restrain him, stopping him from running back in. But as he saw Izzy, he dropped to his knees and the dog escaped his grip and plunged back in again.

  “There’s something in there,” he cried. “Dear God, oh my God. Izzy, help me.”

  The grave was outside the HazPrep estate, farther down the valley, but the route, along a little-used track through the woods, would have been quick and easy in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Despite the razor wire at the main entrance to HazPrep, there was no such boundary to the estate land running through the woods.

  “It was a shallow grave,” Veronica told Finney. “Maybe the killer didn’t have much time to dig, but more likely he was slowed down because the ground was frozen in January. Then, when the summer came, the rain washed the earth downhill.”

  It wasn’t Veronica’s case, but she’d rung Finney as soon as she heard.

  “It will take a while to make an identification,” she said, “it’s been so wet this year and hot on top of that. But there are some shreds of clothing, a belt buckle, and a watch. There’s a mobile phone, too. Coburn is pretty sure this is Melanie Jacobs. There’s not much doubt.”

  While he was talking to Veronica, I was on the landline with Maeve. Clearly upset, she described to me the discovery of Melanie’s body and gave me the same précis that Veronica had given Finney but embroidered with miserable speculation.

  Sal had left a message on my mobile, so I called him back. This man who had seen so much death so very close up and who had reported it on national television was so distraught by the news of Melanie’s death that he was almost unable to communicate. He sobbed uncontrollably. We did not speak for long. We said good-bye and I hung up, worried by this sudden dam burst of grief.

  I sat back down at the table. The candle had blown out in the breeze, and Finney was trying to relight it. I watched its struggling flame. It kept going out, and Finney kept relighting it, until in the end he threw down the matches in exasperation and left it as it was. I didn’t even realize I’d started to shake until Finney went an
d fetched me a jacket, and I could scarcely get my arms into it. I turned and tried to smile at him, but that didn’t work, either.

  “I failed her,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I was supposed to find out what had happened.”

  “Well, now you know, there’s nothing you could have done for her.”

  “But the sightings . . .”

  “It’s classic. Power of suggestion. Perfectly decent people, no one trying it on, it’s just a kind of mass hallucination.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  COME away with me for the weekend,” Finney said next morning, leaning over me as I lay staring at the wall, “we both need a break.”

  I rolled over and gazed up at him. I had not slept all night. Hannah and William had crawled into my bed in the early morning. Usually when Finney is there they cling grimly to the outer edge of my side of the bed, but this time they had set up camp in the valley between my pillows and Finney’s. They were still asleep, squashed together, a mountain range of arms and legs.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’ll talk to Carol. She’ll understand.”

  “I’ve been away a lot, William’s not keen.” Did Finney understand, I wondered, that this kind of competition for my time and attention was one of the things that frightened me?

  “Give me two nights.”

  Taking my leave of Hannah and William was a long-drawn-out affair. There were so many final hugs and kisses that I nearly missed the last call. At Heathrow I ran through the departure hall and at last caught sight of Finney. I shouted his name, and he looked to see that I was carrying luggage, and it was only then, when I hoisted my bag over my head so that he could see, that he allowed himself to smile.

  It was a short, bumpy ride to Paris, an hour of enforced closeness, Finney’s knees jammed up against the seat in front, our shoulders pressed together.

  We checked into a small hotel on the rue de Seine on the Left Bank, where Finney surprised me by addressing the receptionist in more than passable French. Our room was tiny, on the fifth floor. The wallpaper was decorated with little pink flowers, and there were plump embroidered cushions on the bed. I opened the window and looked out at the street, the warm noise of city traffic wrapping itself around me. I had spoken that morning to Beatrice on the telephone, and the conversation had been going around and around in my head ever since. Finally Beatrice had some of her answers. She had a body to bury. But the discovery had only made her other questions more urgent. Who could have done this to her daughter? Finney came and stood behind me. I closed my eyes and leaned back into him.

  “I have a life-affirming idea,” I said eventually. “Let’s eat.”

  We ate in a small restaurant in the maze of streets off the boulevard St. Germain. I could not face crowds, so we chose a restaurant that was quiet and expensive, decorated not in the rich colors of the tourist bistro, but in shades of gray. There were a few tables of affluent local residents at a comfortable distance from us, their conversations providing an agreeable background noise for our meal. We ate and drank in almost total silence.

  After our meal, we walked by the Seine, below the golden Gothic spires of Notre Dame, and then went back to the hotel, to our womblike room. Finney opened the windows to let the city in, and we undressed in silence and went to bed.

  The next morning, breakfast consisted of coffee and toast at a café on a cobbled street, tourists gathering around us, one group looking noisily for eggs and bacon and English tea.

  “So how do you know where to stay in Paris?”

  He looked less like a police officer than ever here in the sun, relaxed, happy. I realized how much my view of him was defined by the way I had met him.

  “You think I’m a Philistine, don’t you.”

  “No. . . . Well, a little bit.”

  “I spent six months here with the Paris police force, supposedly coordinating our efforts to curtail drug-smuggling operations.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “Coordinating is a fine art.”

  I sipped at my coffee. “Why did you join the police, Finney?”

  “Why not? You don’t share your father’s view of the police as the reactionary forces of oppression, do you?”

  “No . . . well . . . a little bit.”

  He scowled. “We’re a necessity.”

  “So are sewers.”

  He raised his eyebrows. There was an irritated glint in his eye. “Thank you. Look, I’m a steady guy. It’s a steady job, a steady income, steady demand,” he told me. “Isn’t that what your media friends think?”

  “You like to stick your nose into other people’s business, just like me,” I said. “You lot are no different from journalists.”

  “Now that,” he said, “is below the belt.”

  Across the street, a table of backpackers were photographing one another, their poses getting a little more raunchy with each click of the shutter, their laughter getting louder, reaching a crescendo of delight when one of the girls hitched up her skirt, sat astride the lap of another girl, and kissed her. Finney had his back to them.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said vaguely, not wanting to apply my mind. “More of the same, I suppose.”

  We smiled at each other. We had agreed, in the middle of the night, that we would not be distracted. With Melanie dead, the urgency of my quest was gone anyway. I had wanted to save her, not find out who had killed her. The shock of the discovery of her body had receded, and in its wake I realized that we had, all her friends, been mourning her for months. It was her body, decayed and destroyed, that was the shock, that and the knowledge—

  now a certainty, not a suspicion—that she had died at someone else’s hand, with real violence. It had been a long and lingering death for those left behind. But at least we knew it had not been a long or lingering death for Melanie.

  Despite our resolution not to be distracted by her, we had used the hotel computer to check the news on the Internet. We learned that initial indications were that Melanie had been killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head. It had been a clean, professional killing. The remnants of a hood remained, covering her head. There were no indications of rape or of mutilation. One newspaper was reporting that the last call to Melanie’s mobile phone was from Fred Sevi, at two minutes to ten in the evening on January 10.

  “It was him,” I muttered. “Why did I get so hung up on Mike?”

  I buried my head in my hands. Panic overwhelmed me. I had made a man’s life hell. I had repeated history, only this time I was the predator.

  “Stop jumping to conclusions,” Finney said. “It’s a mobile phone, not a gun. Sevi could have been calling her from Dundee. They’ll go over all that.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but why did she come out of the bar if not to speak on the phone? You heard Andrew Bentley. Why did she walk outside, if it wasn’t to speak on the phone?”

  “You heard Bentley, too. She may just have wanted a cigarette.”

  I shook my head. “Whoever wanted to kill her needed to get her outside, he couldn’t just hang around and wait.”

  We walked by the Seine for an hour, and every time I tried to bring up Melanie’s death, Finney blocked me. Eventually I gave up. And when I had been silent for a long time, he spoke again.

  “I thought,” he said carefully, “that we might try to track down the mysterious Sabine.”

  “I thought,” I said equally carefully, “that you were fed up with my crazy family.”

  “You are all barking mad. With the exception of Patrick.”

  “Patrick? Why should he be let off the hook?”

  “He’s male, and he has no Ballantyne blood,” Finney said with forensic accuracy. He made a gesture, resting his case, and I scowled.

  “Anyway,” Finney went on, “if, as seems possible, I’m stuck with them—you—then it follows that I should know the worst.”

  I gazed at him. “If y
ou know about Gilbert, you know the worst.”

  Adding Gilbert to our holiday was like igniting a stick of dynamite. But if there was one thing that united Finney and me (and surely there must always be one thing, beyond sex, that keeps unlikely couples together), it was a restless curiosity. So that if a stone presented itself, however innocent it looked, we were both incapable of leaving it unturned.

  “You have your sources,” I suggested.

  “I have my sources.”

  We took the subway to Montmartre, to the rue Ravignan. I expected nothing and expected even less when we found ourselves faced with a locked door and an entrance buzzer. Finney pressed an apartment number and, when a woman answered, said, again in good French, that we had been sent by Gilbert Ballantyne. To my surprise, the woman buzzed us in. We climbed a winding, red-carpeted staircase to the second floor, where a girl dressed in black was already waiting for us at an open door. She looked at us with mousy eyes half-hidden by lank hair, obviously disappointed that Finney was not whom she had expected.

  “Sabine?”

  “Maman?” she called back into the apartment, and an older woman appeared, her blond hair swept onto her head, pale, sun-spotted skin stretched tight over high cheekbones, long earrings dangling almost to her shoulders, a younger, thinner, taller version of my mother. And living in an alternative universe. She stood, an elegant and sophisticated woman in an elegant and sophisticated hallway. My mother would not have endured this lack of clutter. It was indecently tidy.

  Finney filled the gap left by my confusion, introducing us as friends of Gilbert Ballantyne. The woman’s face fell. She flapped her hand, urging us inside and looking up and down the corridor outside to check that no one had seen or heard us.

  “Gilbert, il n’est pas ici,” she said defensively. I took in polished wood, gilt-framed glass, pretty pictures, flowers.

  “Do you know where he is?”