Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  As we approached on foot, I began to think we were in the wrong place. The streets were in the wrong formation, and the feel of the place was wrong. Kes knocked on the door to the house which he believed to be our target. An elderly woman opened the door to us, with children at her knees. As soon as we saw the expression of fear on their faces, we realized that Kes had brought us to the wrong place. The woman slammed the door in our faces, and from inside we heard them shouting.

  We moved away fast, and almost immediately we heard shooting behind us. We spread out and ran along the edges of the street to make ourselves harder targets. Alan was out in front, then Kes. Behind Kes was Melanie, and behind her, Ray and I were on opposite sides of the street, Ray to the rear of Melanie.

  The gunfire was sporadic and we would have made it without incident if Kes had not panicked.

  I saw Kes turn to check on the rest of us behind him. When he saw movement behind Melanie, he fired. Ray fell to the ground with half his head missing. I was no distance from him. I saw his brain spill onto the road. Melanie saw it, too. I shouted out Ray’s name, and Kes stopped in the middle of the road. I don’t think he could believe it. He started to run back towards us, but I pushed him on. If we had gone back for Ray’s body, we would have died, too.

  We made it back to our vehicle, and we were able to drive out of the area without being pursued. We were all very upset by the loss of Ray. Alan could not understand what had happened, he hadn’t seen him fall. Kes told him Ray had fallen to enemy fire. Melanie started to protest, but I told her to shut up.

  Later, when we were alone, Melanie said she had seen Kes shoot Ray. I told her that he had been trying to save her life, and that she should never have been there in the first place, and that Ray’s wife must never know that her husband had been killed by one of his best friends.

  As for Kes, he wouldn’t talk about Ray’s death. But I know Kes, and I know how hard this hit him, because it was all his fault.

  When we reported Ray’s death, Kes blamed Melanie, saying that snipers had caught sight of her camera and opened fire.

  That is not true.

  Within the next year, Kes and I both left the army. Alan left a few months after us. When I saw Melanie Jacobs at HazPrep, it was the first time in three years. We arranged to go out for a drink on the 9th January. I drove her to Sydenham, near my house, to my local pub. I wanted to get away from HazPrep because drinking with clients is frowned on, and I didn’t want to explain to anyone about the situation in which we had first met. While we were in the pub, Melanie took a call from her boyfriend, who had driven out to HazPrep to see her. She told him she was unable to see him. She didn’t tell him she was with me.

  I should have realized that Kes Laver might come into the pub. As soon as I saw his face, I knew we were in for trouble. The moment she saw him, Melanie walked out of the pub. Kes later criticized me for socializing with Melanie, because he said she was responsible for Ray’s death.

  Even if she was originally prepared to stay silent about Kes’s part in Ray’s death, I think Melanie changed her mind when she saw him in the pub. Kes knew that if she started to talk, his reputation as a soldier would be on the line. Kes makes a lot of money from security work. If word got around about taking patrols the wrong way, or shooting one of his own men dead, his career would have been finished. But I most of all think he just wanted Melanie dead because he blamed her for the death of Ray.

  The next day, on January 10th, I went over to sit with Melanie at the bar when she again received a phone call, but she got up and turned away from me, so I couldn’t hear what she said. It was short. Probably reception was bad. Almost immediately she excused herself and got up to go outside. I do not know whether this was to make a phone call or whether it was to get away from me because of what had happened with Kes the night before.

  After Melanie had disappeared, I questioned Kes, and he denied any involvement. I did not believe him. Furthermore, he told me that if the police asked, I was not to disclose that we had all known each other in Afghanistan.

  If it was Kes who killed Melanie, he must have waited outside the building, observing her movements inside and seizing the opportunity when she went outside. He’s trained to do that. He can’t always read a map, and he never does things to the letter, but he can wait for hours. We call him Kes, for kestrel. He parachutes like a bird, but even when he’s on the ground he waits like a kestrel hovering with his eye on some weak animal. Like he’s anticipating the pleasure of the kill.

  After that night I did not want to be in close proximity to Kes. I took a job abroad although my family was begging me to stay with them.

  On my return, I realized quickly that Kes blamed his son’s accident on me, too.

  When the police found out that I had known Melanie and called me in for more questioning, Kes was furious.

  Shortly afterwards, my son, Christopher, was kidnapped. Kes never told me directly that he had Christopher—he must have known I would kill him with my bare hands in those circumstances—but he found ways of letting me know that Christopher’s safety relied on what I told the police. He made me volunteer a statement to the police. I told them about Ray Jackson’s death, but nothing about Kes’s involvement. I said exactly what Kes told me to say.

  Then Kes told me he had made contact with the kidnappers, and he gave me a letter that said my son would be returned on payment of a ransom, which his wife, Sheryl, agreed to loan me. He argued with me and with Sheryl about paying the ransom, but I now believe that was for show, in order to distance himself from the kidnapping, and so that I would not ask him to go with me when I went to pay the ransom. In this way, he was able to hand Christopher back to me. I have only gradually worked this out. At the time, I was mad with worry about my son.

  When I heard on the radio that Melanie Jacobs’s body had been found near HazPrep, I knew that I would be questioned again, and I was terrified that Kes would use my son as a hold over me again. I panicked. I didn’t even wait for my wife to come home. I just took my son and left immediately and went to a friend’s house near Carlisle. While I was there I did a lot of thinking. I cannot go through my life in fear of Kes. I am certain that he killed Melanie and that he must answer for it.

  At the bottom, by hand, Mike had scrawled a note: “I returned last night intending to make this statement available through the press and to the police. When I returned home and found Kes in my bed with my wife, I lost it. I do not blame my wife. I blame Kes. He is a predator.”

  When I look up, a doctor is standing there, asking whether I am with Thomas Finney. For a moment I stare at her. Shame washes over me that I have let myself be distracted.

  “Yes, yes, I am.” She looks so formal that for an instant I think my legs are going to give way.

  “Are you the next of kin?”

  “He has no kin. There’s only me.”

  “Well, he’s out of surgery. He has broken four ribs in two places, he’s suffered pneumothorax, which is a collapsed lung, in this case from a chest wound.”

  I am speechless. She smiles and takes my hands.

  “He’ll be in pain for some time. We’ll see how things go, but eventually you’ll be able to take him home in one piece. If you hang on for an hour or so, you’ll be able to see him.”

  And then I surprise myself by hugging her.

  When she has gone, I head outside to get some fresh air. I pass a small room set off the corridor, and through an open door I see Sheryl seated, with Ronald beside her, his head bent close to hers. Justin is there, too. A doctor is speaking to them. He has pulled his chair up close to theirs. He is shaking his head. I know he is telling them that Kes is dead.

  Chapter Thirty

  IVOR Collins stood up when I approached, shook my hand, and stood behind me to adjust the positioning of my chair as I took my seat, rather as I did for the twins so that their food had a better chance of reaching their mouths. His welcome verged on the unctuous. He had invited me to lunch at his club.
It was a sweltering day, but he did not remove his jacket or tie. It was a classy way to bury the hatchet and a sweaty one, since the club did not indulge in anything as modern as air-conditioning.

  “I’m not a monster,” he said as he sat opposite me and clasped his hands together on the linen cloth. “I don’t pull out the fingernails of my journalists. I feed them fine food and wine in an atmosphere of calm sophistication.”

  These last few words had an ironic ring to them. Collins, for all his chair adjusting, came from a background where the men’s clubs were nothing like this leather-and-dark-wood confection. I would have said that neither of us belonged there.

  He handed me a menu. He looked very fine in a slate gray suit with a faint pale line running through it. His blue eyes shone like sapphires in his narrow face, and his white cropped hair was a sprinkling of snow on the sandy beach of his tanned skin.

  I placed the menu, unopened, on the table in front of me. “I wish you’d been straight with me from the start. I saw the file on Sean Howie’s death, but I think you had another complaint from the military about Melanie, accusing her of being to blame for Ray Jackson’s death.”

  He took a deep breath through his nose and lifted a hand discreetly to a waiter. “We did,” he told me. I noticed that he kept his voice low, as did everyone else in this dining room. It was not clear whether this was habit, or a rule of the house, or a self-perpetuating fiction that they all had important secrets to keep. “But I had to take decisions about how to proceed on the assumption that she was alive. It was the only honorable course. She had a right to privacy, as any of us do.”

  He broke off to order water for both of us, tap water. It was, I thought, a nice way to put me in my place: In one fell swoop he reinforced his superiority by ordering on my behalf, and by ordering tap water, he reminded me that this was a business lunch, that the Corporation was paying, and that he was a man of the people. He took up his story again, still speaking so quietly that I had to lean in close to hear what he was saying.

  “When the complaint came to us from the Ministry of Defense—and that’s more than two and a half years ago now—I had a meeting with Melanie. She took it very hard. She swore to me that she was not to blame for Ray Jackson’s death. She told me that the leader had taken the patrol to the wrong place and had drawn fire. She talked about Ray Jackson dying from friendly fire. I advised her that we would continue fully to support her, but that we should not antagonize the military by making counterclaims. I warned her that if the matter escalated, it would inevitably become public, and that whatever the truth of the matter, the military was a powerful organization that protected its own. And there the matter rested. What would have happened if the moment she disappeared I had made public this complaint that we’d had about her, and ruined her reputation, and then she’d turned up alive? As far as I knew, none of this had any bearing on her disappearance.”

  “If only you had told me about the complaint, we might have made the link with Kes Laver,” I told him.

  “It would have been a leap,” he said, sipping and approving the tap water with a nod of his head. “I’m not sure that Kes Laver’s name ever came to my attention.”

  “We’d have got there eventually. You could have trusted me with this information.”

  “Would you have wanted it? You wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Ignore it? Report it? Ignore it, and if anyone found out, you’d have been accused of being dishonest. Report the allegations, and they would have stuck. I was genuinely trying to defend her reputation when I warned you off.”

  “Her reputation and the Corporation’s.”

  “They are indivisible. Anyway, this is irrelevant. If I had been open with you, it wouldn’t have changed anything, she was already dead. And she was not killed because of any demand that we made on her. She was an outstanding woman, but the demands she made on herself were just that, demands she made on herself. We begged her to do things by the book. We ordered her to take greater precautions.”

  “Of course,” I said, “you employed her because she made those demands on herself.”

  “Of course.”

  A waiter hovered. Collins beckoned him over with a minute movement of his fingers. We ordered.

  “And so,” Collins said, “I’m half expecting that you’re going to tell me now that you want to make a documentary about Melanie and how she died.”

  I looked around me, at the opulence and the elegance, at the suits and the ties, at the leather sofas. I wondered how many viewers would be able to understand Melanie and the life she had led. And Collins was right: Allegations have a way of sticking. Now that Mike had beaten Kes to death, his account of that night in Afghanistan would always be disputed.

  “I think I’m going to leave her in peace,” I said.

  Collins nodded approvingly.

  Food arrived, tiny perfect portions of color-coordinated worthiness. We ate. It didn’t take long.

  “Why,” he asked me, “do you think Kes Laver acted as he did? Soldiers do crack up, of course, and so do journalists. They get very close to very terrible things. But they don’t usually end up murdering people.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And now that Kes is dead, we won’t ever know. But from the way that people talk about him, Kes found in the army a sense of family that he couldn’t find anywhere else. When he caused Ray’s death, although it was a mistake, it really felt as though he’d killed a brother. In order to survive, he had to create a fiction that it was Melanie’s fault, not his. She was the only one who wasn’t one of them. The fact that he’d thought he was saving her life when he shot Ray just made it worse. He really began to believe that the whole thing was her fault. When they met in the pub, he must have seen her as a threat to him. But mostly I think he just hated her because he blamed her for Ray’s death. He killed her in revenge for something he did himself. Everything else after that was self-defense. Self-defense, and a strange kind of psychological battle with Mike Darling that culminated in the kidnapping of Christopher.”

  “And why did he attack you? I gather there was an incident in your car.”

  “He tried to kill Mike’s daughter, too. Jacqui suspected Sheryl of taking Mike’s son, and although she was wrong, her suspicions were leading her too close to Kes. It was Jacqui who realized the baby had been kept in Sheryl’s old flat and that Kes and Anita were having an affair. As for me, that afternoon Jacqui told Justin what she’d told me, and he went to his father and challenged him. Kes denied it all, but he knew that I’d put it all together sooner or later about the baby being kept in the flat, and about Kes sleeping with Anita. Kes tried ringing me, and Sal told him I was at the hospital. Sal had been fielding so many calls for me, he neglected to tell me.

  “Kes must have lost control. Mike had gone on the run with Christopher, and Kes was afraid that Mike would crack. Perhaps Kes even thought that if he killed again, it would scare Mike back into silence.”

  Later, when Collins and I had finished our coffee and returned to the office, I received a call from Beatrice. She asked after Finney, as she did every day when she rang, and she thanked me for helping, as she put it, to track down Melanie’s killer. This she also did every day when she rang. And every time she said it, I felt that I should say that it was more a case of him tracking me down. I was deeply unhappy about my own role. I felt that I had missed too much and that I should have paid more attention to some of the things that had been said to me.

  “I won’t ring you every day,” she said to me, “but I just wanted to tell you that I had a telephone call from another of Melanie’s classmates this morning. This friend, Ann, told me that Stella had always been very . . . competitive with Melanie. She told me that Stella has known Sevi for a long time—it was at her house that Sevi and Melanie met. And according to Ann, Stella liked Sevi herself, but he turned her down for Melanie, and ever since she’s been trying to stir up trouble between them.”

  “Do you think she lied?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t know about lying, but I think she certainly embroidered the truth, or exaggerated. People do say the most terrible things; perhaps Sevi did say something he shouldn’t have, and she made the most of it. But of course she never did want to involve the police, she just wanted to sow distrust of Sevi among Melanie’s friends.”

  “As if he didn’t get himself in enough of a mess by faking an alibi.”

  “Poor man,” Beatrice said. “I keep thinking of him sitting in his car waiting for Melanie to call him back, and just yards away that man . . .”

  In their brief conversation with the terrible reception, Sevi had asked Melanie to ring him back. Melanie had left Mike at the bar and gone outside to try to get a clear line. For an hour Sevi had sat there, waiting. And when she didn’t ring, he thought it was because she didn’t want to speak to him. When he realized the next day that Melanie had disappeared, he panicked. The police would never believe his story, he thought, so he concocted an alternative.

  As soon as I had said good-bye to Beatrice, the phone rang again. This time it was Alice Jackson.

  “I heard about what happened,” she said. “I think I need to talk to you.”

  We met during her tea break, and we sat on a bench in Green Park again. Alice didn’t have much time. She was still in her Boots apron, attracting glances from tourists.

  “I tried to tell you that day. I rang you, but I couldn’t get hold of you, so I left a message with someone, a man with a woman’s name.”

  “Sal,” I said. “He told me you had something to tell me about Anita.”

  “That’s it. He was very nice, but I couldn’t really tell him what I wanted to tell you. It was partly about Anita and partly about me. When you came to see me, I told you how kind Kes and Sheryl were after Ray’s death, but I was too embarrassed to tell you that Kes kept touching me. It was so awful, I didn’t know what to do. Sheryl could see what was going on. I couldn’t believe she let him behave like that. In the end I told him not to come and see me again. It was so soon after Ray’s death. It was completely inappropriate.”