Out of Mind (30 page)

“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 sleeping . . . 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.”

“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.”

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.”