Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  The woman looked helplessly at Sabine.

  “Il a disparu,” she said, and made an explosive sound that she matched with her hands and that I guessed meant “just like that.” “Mais, c’est normal.”

  “Normal?” I echoed.

  “Lui, c’est comme le soleil. Un jour il est là et puis il disparait.”

  I stared at Sabine. She regarded me with something that I could describe only as malice.

  The woman was examining Finney. “Vous êtes de la police?” she asked nervously.

  Finney shook his head. Not here, not technically. He pulled a face that suggested the very thought was laughable.

  “Alors?” She raised her hands. She was not being impolite. She simply did not know what to do with us. Nor did we know what to do with her. Finney kept her chatting—no, she had no idea when Gilbert would be back. No, she had no forwarding address for him. Did Gilbert owe us money? It sometimes happened that people would come to this door claiming that Gilbert had borrowed from them. Were we journalists? I knew Finney was giving me time to think, time to decide how much to tell her of my identity. The daughter—this girl I now realized must be my half-sister—watched me through narrowed eyes. She knows, I thought. And she wants nothing to do with me. Nor I with her.

  “We’re late,” I said quietly to Finney. “It’s time for us to go.”

  He nodded. We made our excuses.

  “You don’t want to get to know them better?” he asked me as we walked away. We could feel the eyes of Sabine and her mother on us from the doorway. I remembered the accounts Finney had gathered for me, the suggestion of Sabine’s facility with lying.

  “I know enough already,” I told him. “The woman is nothing to me. And the girl . . . her mother’s a charming romantic, and her father’s a petty crook. But she’s something else altogether. Something nasty.”

  We walked in silence for a moment, and I thought Finney might be thinking me mad. But eventually he said, “You may be right.”

  I wondered what more he knew about Sabine, but this time I resisted the urge to find out. Did I envy Sabine and her mother their shrug of the shoulder, the lack of accusation? I couldn’t imagine any one of my family comparing Gilbert to the sun. Not with a straight face.

  Finney had little patience with sightseeing. By early evening we had abandoned the line at the Louvre and instead walked by the river. I lit a candle for Melanie in Notre Dame. Then I surprised myself by lighting one for my father.

  We returned to the hotel to shower and found ourselves once more in bed, and later we lay there and watched the sun set slowly over the city. Eventually, as hunger reminded us that it was dinnertime, we pulled our clothes back on. When my mobile rang, I seized it up from the floor where it had fallen, my imagination suddenly, guiltily, with the children. It was Jane. I breathed again. Then immediately I wondered why she was calling me here. I assumed she was wallowing in cosy domesticity with Q, both of them absorbed in baby Rosemary. I could hear the baby crying.

  “Hi,” I could hardly hear her. “Rosemary sounds unhappy.”

  “She’s got colic. I don’t know what to do about it, she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep . . .” I could hear the shudder of real exhaustion in her voice. I realized guiltily that my hugely competent friend Jane had joined the ranks of mothers on the edge of collapse and that I had been leaving her to get on with it. “Anyway,” Jane’s voice dragged on wearily, “I know you’re not interested in colic. Did you hear the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Q just called me. Ridiculous, he’s halfway around the world, and he knows more than me about what’s going on here. Mike Darling has run off.”

  “What do you mean, run off?” The phrase made me think of a little boy racing out of the room and up the stairs.

  “I don’t know any more than that.”

  I sat down hard on the bed. Finney paused in the act of buttoning his shirt and turned to me.

  “Where did he go?”

  “They don’t know. He seems to have vanished.”

  Behind Jane, the sound of Rosemary’s crying rose again, high-pitched and insistent.

  “I have to go.” Jane sounded at the end of her tether.

  “Where’s Q?”

  “In Washington, with the prime minister.” Jane’s voice was distant, as though she were pulling away from the telephone. “He’ll be back next week.” And then the phone went dead.

  I leaned against the balcony, looking back into the room as Finney dialed Veronica’s number and smiled, spoke, then listened. He glanced across at me. When he hung up, he came out onto the balcony and we stood side by side, looking out over the city.

  “No phone calls to your buddies in the newsroom. That’s the deal.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “Okay, okay. Tell me.”

  “She’s right. Darling’s on the run. He’s taken the boy. Coburn rang to ask Darling to come in and answer more questions.”

  “Was there something about Melanie’s body that made them want to talk to him?”

  “It was found on land bordering HazPrep, of course they want to talk to him. Perhaps they wanted to rattle him.”

  “They must have succeeded.”

  “Anita was out at the doctor’s, but Sheryl was there when he got the phone call. Apparently he put the receiver down and just grabbed Christopher and went outside. She followed him out to the car, she says he was clearly in a state of panic, and she demanded to know where he was going, but she says he wouldn’t tell her. He pushed her away, fastened Christopher in the car seat, and drove off.”

  Just then Sal rang me on my mobile, and he said aloud what I was thinking.

  “He bloody did it.” Sal was exultant. I wondered what had happened to his grief. “The bloody bastard killed her. He’s on the run.”

  Finney was glaring at me, warning me not to say too much. But it was impossible to cool the level of Sal’s speculation. And the connection was inevitable. There were no television pictures, the police had lost him, but Mike Darling’s car was a white SUV. Even in the imagination, history was reborn. The man in this car was fleeing because he had been found out.

  “Mike Darling bloody killed her,” Sal insisted. When I refused to be persuaded, he hung up on me, upset, as though I was betraying Melanie.

  “It’s time to go back,” I said to Finney. “It’s not just Mike Darling, it’s everything. It’s Jane, she’s sounding exhausted, Rosemary’s screaming. I feel as though there are things I should be doing. We can come back some other time.”

  He nodded. “We can come back,” he agreed.

  He turned away. We packed in silence.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I’D rung Jane when we arrived back in London and found her on the way to the emergency room with Rosemary, who was burning with fever. She had called her mother, in Perth, and Q in Washington. Both had said they would come home, but it would take hours. Now I sat in the hospital corridor, my eyes glued wearily to the television bracketed to the wall. The volume was turned down low. The pictures were of Mike Darling’s house, the driveway empty of the large white vehicle that was usually parked there.

  Jane and Rosemary had vanished into a room for tests. We had been there for hours. Jane, usually so utterly in charge, was like a lamb here, being sweet as pie to everyone, desperate for them to help her child. In my role as stand-in for Q, I had been her muscle, constantly reminding staff that we were waiting, making sure we weren’t forgotten.

  I wanted to talk to Finney, but I’d had to turn off my mobile. I wanted to see the twins, but for now Jane was my priority. Baby Rosemary’s temperature was dangerously high by the time we got her to the hospital. She was no longer crying. She was floppy and quiet, and her skin was covered in purple blotches. A Dr. Yenz was checking now to eliminate meningitis as a possibility.

  Jane reappeared with Rosemary in her arms. She gave me a wobbly smile.

  “They think sh
e’s fine,” she told me, “it’s just a virus. But we have to wait until her temperature comes down.”

  So I sat with her while she tried to pull herself together, digging paper hankies from my bag so she could wipe her eyes. Jane had peeled off Rosemary’s hot outer clothes, and now the baby was lying on a blanket on her lap.

  “This is so silly,” Jane said. “Q’s on a plane for nothing. Can you hold Rosemary while I go and ring him? Maybe I can still get hold of him.”

  I held Rosemary on my lap while Jane disappeared. She came back a few minutes later, looking sober. “He hadn’t even set out to the airport. He’s been on air solidly since I called. . . . I thought he’d just have walked out. But I suppose he couldn’t. Still”—she breathed in—“at least he didn’t race off for nothing.”

  All the time I was aware, in the margins, of the news pictures on the television. Q, doing a stand-upper in front of some huge public gathering in Washington, a great frown of worry on his face, as though he were worried about the state of the world, whereas in fact I knew that he was worried about the state of his child. Then pictures of HazPrep estate, a file photo of Melanie, then a picture of Mike Darling in uniform.

  There were well-thumbed magazines in the room and a coffee machine in the corner. Once in a while a nurse came in to check Rosemary’s temperature.

  “Her color’s nice and even now,” the nurse told us cheerfully, “she’s going to be fine.”

  I worked my way through a stack of magazines. They seemed to be published on some other planet. I tried to bend my head around the diary of a catwalk model, but I couldn’t work out why the poor skinny thing had bothered to write it, let alone why anyone agreed to publish it. I peered at photos of the latest fashions. There was a great deal of oversize turquoise jewelry, worn with flamenco-style skirts. I glanced down to confirm what I was wearing. Jeans again, faded through wear rather than through design, raffishly threadbare at the knee. I looked briefly at the travel section, which featured Paris. I looked at my watch. If we’d stuck to our plan, we would only now be heading for the airport.

  “I’m going outside for a minute to call Finney,” I told Jane, touching her shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

  Outside, there was a small garden, with a fountain that wasn’t working and a bench surrounded by flowers. I kicked off my shoes and rested my feet in the dry grass. The air was heavy. Another thunder storm was gathering. I was about to dial Finney’s number when he rang me.

  He was at home. I could hear music in the background. I told him what was going on and that I would stay with Jane until Rosemary was allowed to go home.

  “Is there any news of Darling?” I asked.

  “There’s been a sighting or two, according to the TV,” Finney told me, “but there must be thousands of men in Nissan people carriers with baby seats in the back. His mother is up north, maybe he’s going up to see her. But look”—he lowered his voice—“there’s one thing. You were right. Fred Sevi has admitted to Coburn that he went out to HazPrep on the night of the tenth.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’d already told the police that he’d tried ringing Melanie at around ten, but that the connection was terrible and they hung up. That fitted with the records for Melanie’s number, and because it seemed to fit it seems they didn’t look at the call log more closely at that point. Anyway, after the taxi driver came forward they checked the call records again, and this time they realized that although Sevi’s call went through a different transmitter from the one Melanie’s phone was logged on to, in fact the transmitter his phone was using covered the area surrounding HazPrep. So there was no way he could have been calling from the center of London. Sevi now admits that he left the party at Elephant and Castle after about half an hour and that he drove out to HazPrep again on the tenth, like he did the night before, and that he rang her from outside just before ten, and begged her to allow him in, or to come out. He said she refused again.”

  “Why didn’t the guard see him like he did the night before?”

  “Sevi says he pulled off the road about half a mile from the gatehouse. Says it was too humiliating to have the guard see him there a second night pleading with Melanie to come out.”

  “Does Coburn believe him?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. He hasn’t arrested him yet. Sevi says that once Melanie had refused to come out, he turned around and drove home.”

  “I thought reception was bad.”

  “Good enough for her to refuse . . .” He paused and then said heavily, “If you believe Sevi. The bare facts are that we know he called her from outside on the road, and that she left the building, and that she disappeared and he manufactured an alibi. It doesn’t look good.”

  “Maybe that’s why he manufactured the alibi,” I said.

  I promised to call him later, and thought about our conversation as I headed back to the waiting room. I don’t know why I felt I had to defend Sevi, except that Finney had so many times told me not to jump to conclusions, and now it seemed to me that he was doing just that. Perhaps I just had a guilty conscience. I had dismissed Stella’s allegations that Sevi had said he would kill Melanie. But now I was wondering whether I should have put pressure on Stella to go to the police.

  Baby Rosemary’s temperature was coming down rapidly, and Jane was returning to combative normal.

  “If we’re here, we might as well talk. I want to know why you’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Avoiding you?” I was genuinely shocked. “Is that what you think?”

  “You’ve scarcely come near us.” Her voice was accusatory, all the tension bursting out of her. “You haven’t even rung me. You were supposed to be the one who knew about all this stuff. You were the one who was going to tell me what to do. I was relying on you. I don’t know anyone else with babies. All my friends have five-year-olds.”

  I stared at her, and slowly the truth of what she was saying dawned on me. I’d been so excited when Jane got pregnant. I’d as good as promised to go through childbirth for her. I tried to explain. The truth was I’d thought Jane could do anything, and I’d thought she had Q with her, which she didn’t, not really. I told her all this, and she looked mildly mollified.

  As we talked, and I watched Jane with Rosemary, I saw how they had become part of each other. Jane was exhausted by sleeplessness, but she touched Rosemary and talked to her with an instinctive understanding of what she needed. I thought of Anita and sensed that in her there was a deeper problem. Perhaps it was a combination of the years of stress worrying about her husband at war and postnatal depression and Valium. But where Jane and Rosemary were an organic whole, Anita and Christopher seemed dislocated.

  Eventually, an impossibly young doctor came and spoke to us. Rosemary’s temperature was back to normal, she could go home. He smiled at us sympathetically. He had not come across many parents in his short career. Had we been worried?

  Jane’s mother arrived. She shook herself like a dog, then removed her head scarf and wrung it out, creating a pool on the floor.

  “It’s pissing it down,” she said, her Perth accent even stronger than her daughter’s. She was even more imperious than Jane and fiercely protective of her only grandchild. She dismissed me, and I left ahead of them, leaving Jane to gather up her baby’s things.

  I stepped out of the hospital into driving rain. The warmth had gone out of the air when the sun went down and the clouds broke. It was like stepping into a cold shower in a dark bathroom. I ran to the car, my head lowered into my collar, yanked open the door, and threw myself into the driver’s seat. About half a gallon of rain came in with me.

  I sat there for a moment, listening to the rain pounding on the roof. Then I called Carol to tell her I was on my way home. The children had been in bed for hours and I told myself that I would take the day off tomorrow so that I could spend some time with them. I tried to call Finney. We were like young lovers, calling each other all the time. We would be texting each other before we knew
it. His line was busy. I dropped my phone on my lap and put the key in the ignition.

  As I was about to turn the key, there was movement from the backseat. Startled, I twisted round, and as I turned, a hand snaked in front of me and snatched my mobile phone from my lap. I cried out, but another hand came from behind and fixed itself over my mouth.

  My heart pounded so hard that it threatened to explode through my ribs. I squirmed and hit out blindly behind me, trying to make contact, trying to dislodge the hand, all without success. I bit hard into leather and had the satisfaction of hearing a grunt of pain. The hand loosened, and I lunged for the door, but then he had me again, slamming my head back against the headrest.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” he hissed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure approach the car, a man in overalls, a hospital employee. I drew breath to scream, but then I felt the cold hard metal of a knife against the soft flesh under my chin.

  “Drive,” he instructed. Shaking, my pulse racing, I clutched the steering wheel and tried to steady my feet on the pedals, pulling jerkily out of the parking bay.

  He indicated with his hand which way I should go, and I complied, driving out of the main gates of the hospital, to the right and then turning left. He had lowered the knife, and it jabbed into my side. I could feel it slicing through the fibers of my clothing, scratching my skin, drawing blood. It filled my head with fear.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. My voice was shaking, but I knew I must speak, knew I should engage him, distract him from his purpose. He didn’t answer, but I couldn’t bear to be silent. It made me feel better to hear my own voice.

  “Who are you? What’s your name? Why are you doing this?”

  With every question I could sense his irritation growing, but I knew he would not kill me here. There were too many people. Too many cars. We turned right, then right again, then left, and now the roads were emptier. I fell silent. At every junction, every set of lights, I was tortured with indecision. At every turn, I chose to obey. But now I knew I’d made a mistake. Better to have fought while there were people around. Better to have risked it. I thought of Hannah and William, asleep in bed. What had I done? We were on a small road, trees on one side and on the other side, below us, the Thames. Panic rose, my heart pounded, my throat constricted with terror. I had driven myself to my own grave.