Out of Mind (35 page)

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?”

“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.”

“As though he could see you were vulnerable, and he took advantage,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Exactly. And that’s what Alan’s wife, Kay, told me was happening with Anita, too. She went over there to see Anita and saw
what was going on. She rang me and told me about it, and that’s what made me ring you. And then, when I heard that he’d tried
to kill you, I realized it was partly because of all this. Because that day, after Kay rang me to tell me about Anita, and
I told her that I would speak to you, she rang Kes and said that I was going to tell you all about how he’d tried to sleep
with me. I think that’s why he tried to kill you. It’s strange . . . that he didn’t manage it, don’t you think?”

I told her I still wasn’t sure whether Kes wanted to kill me or scare me. The same went for his attack on Jacqui. Could he
have killed his best friend’s daughter?

“I hope they’ll take into account what Kes did to Mike,” Alice said, “just for Anita’s sake. If only they could have each
other back, they used to be so good together . . . she hasn’t been herself.”

“Sheryl had given her Valium, and she was taking that on top of whatever it was the doctor had given her for postnatal depression.
I don’t think Sheryl realized what was going on, and I’m not even sure Anita did. She just took whatever pills were around.”

Alice chewed her lip and stared ahead of her. “I was thinking . . . ,” she said eventually. “You don’t think she knew, do
you, that it was Kes who took Christopher?”

“Apparently she seemed genuinely shocked and upset when the police told her,” I said, and Alice looked relieved.

Shortly after that she had to rush off, and when she had gone I sat for a while on the bench in the sun. I remembered Anita
lying in bed and saying that it was all her fault, and I wondered whether at some level she had realized what was going on.
I didn’t want to think so, but the truth is that there is no way of getting at the secrets in another person’s head.

Later, while I was cooking pasta and broccoli for the twins’ tea, my mother called me.

“I’m at Heathrow,” she said. “I decided it was time to come home.”

“Oh no,” I cried, thinking of my father. Had he really gone from the house? Might he have returned? “I thought you were staying
longer. What about Randy?”

“Randy is here with me, he’s come to visit,” Ma said. “Would you like to say hi?”

I rolled my eyes. Since when did my mother say “hi”? But I couldn’t say no. Perhaps this was payback time for all those people
I’d forced to speak to the twins on the telephone.

“Hi,” I said, at a loss.

“Hi,” said a friendly American voice. “When do we get to see you?”

Without so much as an introduction.

“Perhaps tomorrow?” I said weakly.

“Sounds good. I won’t force you to make conversation. I’ll put your mom back on the line,” he said.

My mother told me how much she was looking forward to being in her own house again. I got off the line as quickly as I could
and rang Lorna. She still sounded down, but I had no time to be sympathetic.

“Where is Gilbert?” I demanded.

“I think he’s in France,” she said. “He has some business interests there he has to see to.”

I was speechless. Business interests? He had nothing of the sort. He had a second family. For the first time I realized that
I knew more about my father’s life than my sister, who has been his champion.

“You have to go round there at once and make sure he’s not there,” I told her, “and that none of his things are there. No
toothbrushes, no laundry, nothing.”

“Shouldn’t we just tell her?” Lorna asked. “I never meant to do it behind her back.”

“Okay,” I said bluntly, “you tell her.”

There was silence for a moment, and then she said, in a low voice, that she would go round and check on the house. When I
hung up I reflected that neither of us was used to me giving the orders, and we were even less used to her obeying.

When the children had eaten their tea, their paternal grandparents came around to baby-sit. The children were delighted. They
knew there would be sweets. They knew they would not have to go to bed. They knew there would be endless games. I made a halfhearted
plea for a reasonable bedtime, shut the door behind me, and thought that when I returned I might be changing life for all
of us.

The last time I had visited Finney, the doctor had said to me, “You can take him home tomorrow,” and since then the question
of where “home” was for Finney had vexed me. Was it my child-chaotic home or his bachelor pad? Because wherever I took him
now was home, and home was where you stayed.