Out of Mind (17 page)

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.

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.

“Get out now,” he said quietly.

I stood my ground, but still he didn’t look up. He just kept on reading through the sheaf of papers on the desk in front of
him and making tiny neat notes in the margin. Still I stood there. Already I was regretting my outburst. I had no evidence
for my suspicions, just a visceral distrust of bureaucracy. Perhaps Collins was having second thoughts, too.

“See me at ten tomorrow morning,” he said eventually, still without looking up. I turned and left.

I checked my e-mail before I left the Corporation. Sal wasn’t around, but he’d sent me a short piece from the wires saying
that Mike Darling had spent the morning being questioned about the disappearance of Melanie Jacobs. A police spokeswoman was
quoted as saying that the police were grateful to Mr. Darling for “helping with police inquiries,” and that the police were
not treating him as a suspect “at this time.” What interested me most about the brief news item was the name of the police
spokeswoman, which was Sergeant Veronica Mann.

I called her number and invited her to a take-out supper at my house that night.

“Robin, I’m desperately touched that you thought of me out of the blue like that,” she said dryly, “but I think you know it’s
bad timing. For one thing, I’m busy. And for another, I can’t be having supper with a journalist right now. I know you have
a job to do, but don’t screw me in the process, okay? I know you just want to know about Mike Darling. I know you’re involved.
But you’re going to get nothing from me.”

“All right. But you know I wouldn’t create difficulties for you, so anything you can share, think of me. Besides which, I’d
really like to catch up.”

“Me too. Sometime, when this is all over, I want to hear about the kids. And I want the scoop on my old boss—have you managed
to house-train him?”

“I’m still working on it.”

I heard a chuckle from her end of the line. Finney and Veronica had been good colleagues, almost friends.

“You have my sympathy. I heard his ex is back knocking on his door. That can’t be easy for either of you.”

Later that night, once I was at home and the children were in bed, Finney rang me. I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Veronica
Mann, didn’t tell him I knew about Emma. Back in town, knocking on his door. Whatever that meant.

“Did you hear anything about Mike Darling?” I asked.

“Nothing. And if I had, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Thank you.”

“I wanted to know if I could come round for dinner tomorrow night.”

“Sure,” I said lightly.

When I’d said good-bye I sat curled on the sofa and stared at the wall. Dinner in the middle of the week? It sounded to me
as though I was about to be dumped. So this was it. It was a good thing I hadn’t let myself feel safe, then. It had been so
tempting to let myself fall for him completely, but I’d always known that he would leave. Well, I had successfully maintained
my independence. Mission accomplished. Our parting would be painless.

I stood up. I felt vaguely unwell, as though I was coming down with something. My limbs were heavy and there was a dull ache
in my head. I locked up and went to bed.