Out of Mind (8 page)

I went to the kitchen and dug in the fridge. There seemed to be a lot of rather excellent food in there, and I assumed that
was thanks to Carol’s boyfriend, Antonio, who runs an Italian deli. My head was throbbing. I was too tired for anything but
a tub of pumpkin soup that I opened and warmed in a saucepan. I sat and drank the soup and tore a crust from a loaf of bread,
loving the feeling of sitting at my own table in my own home, gazing around me and recognizing with pleasure the familiar
things, the toy box full to overflowing, the two pairs of tiny Wellingtons standing by the door onto the garden, the rainbow-colored
plastic cutlery draining next to the sink. Then I called Finney. His first name is Tom, but when we were first introduced
in a police interrogation room, we weren’t on first-name terms. It is Finney that has stuck, and he professes not to mind.
Sometimes, just to wind me up, he calls me Ballantyne, which makes my skin turn cold. I called him at home, but there was
no answer. I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight. I tried his mobile, and he answered sleepily.

“Where are you?” I demanded.

“I’m in front of your telly, where do you bloody think I am? Where have
you
been, more to the point? I got here two hours ago with food.”

I told him about the delayed flight, and all the time I was talking, I was walking up the stairs, and then I opened the door
to the sitting room, where I found Finney stretched out on the sofa, mobile to his ear. He’d kicked his shoes off, and his
shirt and tie were all over the place from being asleep. The television was on, sound muted. I grinned, he grinned back. I
turned off my mobile, and he did the same.

“How did you get in? You didn’t disturb Carol, did you?”

He pulled me down on top of him. He took my face gently between his hands and examined my wound.

“You gave me a key.”

And even as I was kissing him, I was thinking, I can’t believe I did that.

The next day, Dave and I drove to King’s College. I sent Dave off to get coffee in the student canteen and caught Fred Sevi
between lectures in his office. He wore his dark hair to his ears, and his jeans and hooded fleece were indistinguishable
from his students’, but he did not appear to be playing at youth. It seemed to me, rather, that Sevi had simply absorbed the
informality of the air around him, that he did not want to exist anywhere but here, among his students. I could not imagine
him donning a bow tie to woo the media. Quietly courteous, he rose to greet me, shook my hand unsmilingly, and sat back down
at a table so overwhelmed by paper that his desktop’s flat-screen monitor was buried. His eyes observed me coolly.

“I think my colleague Sal wanted to meet you,” I told him, “but it didn’t work out.”

“I was not eager to get involved in a media circus,” he said. “I thought I should leave this up to DCI Coburn. I thought the
police would have found Melanie by now. I’m beginning to give up on them. . . . But hope is tenacious. You’ve heard there’s
been a sighting.”

I had seen it on the agency wire before I left the office. In Cumbria, a group of walkers had seen a woman answering Melanie’s
description, with a rucksack and long dark hair, buying groceries in a village shop. Later, a separate caller had contacted
the police, reporting that a woman who looked like Melanie Jacobs had come on her own into his bar, just three miles from
the village shop, and had drunk a lager before leaving, also on her own. None of the witnesses could really explain why Melanie
Jacobs had leapt to their minds when her photograph had scarcely touched the newspapers or the television for the past five
months. Nevertheless, to have two such calls, and in such close geographic proximity, meant that the police could not ignore
them. Moreover, the barman assured them that he had gone home and Googled Melanie’s picture to test it against his memory.
I was glad that I had decided to ignore Maeve and pursue Melanie’s story.

“Do you think it’s Melanie?” I asked Sevi.

He gave a dismissive grimace and shook his head. “I don’t think Melanie is the Lake District type,” he said. “If she’s run,
she’s gone to chase hellfire and damnation.”

I risked a smile—he had captured Melanie perfectly in that image—and his mouth moved in what might have been a response.

“You must miss her,” I said, emboldened by my progress through his reserve.

“I hardly ever saw her,” he said. “I’m used to missing her.”

When Melanie disappeared, one of the things that got DCI Coburn excited about Sevi was that he had refused to give interviews
to the media. Coburn felt that this might be indicative of a sense of guilt, a fear that he might give himself away in the
glare of the spotlight. I understood from Finney that even in his meetings with the police, Sevi had been awkward and uneasy.
So it was with little hope of success that I told him now that I wanted to interview him on film and that I had Dave on hand
to do so, if he would agree.

Sevi gave a funny little laugh, just a twitch of the lips and an exhalation of air. “You lot never give up, do you?”

“You never know when something’s going to spark someone’s memory,” I said. “Maybe if someone is moved by seeing you talk about
Melanie, they’ll share some information they’ve been keeping from the police.”

“And if not, I can console myself that I made touching television. And now, in our newest reality show, the grieving boyfriend
speaks.”

“You would just be doing your best for Melanie,” I told him.

Sevi’s eyes rested on my face, a small smile on his lips.

“What efforts have you made to find her?” I asked him. It came out as a challenge, but I always get snippy when academics
start sneering at the media.

The small smile disappeared. “If she went of her own free will,” he said slowly, “then she will come back of her own free
will. If she did not go of her own free will, then there is nothing that any of us can do. By now she is dead.”

The only sound was the clock ticking on his bookshelf.

“Very well,” he said after a moment. “If the police can’t manage it, I suppose we’ll have to depend on their poor cousins
in the investigative media.” He fell silent, aware perhaps that he was overdoing his contempt for me. “I don’t mean to be
unhelpful, but our lives were private. It’s not in my nature to bare them to public scrutiny, and it wasn’t in Melanie’s.
I don’t think she would like it. . . .” For the first time, I saw a spasm of loss cross his face. “But you’re right. It might
help. I will do your interview for you.”

“I’ll call Dave,” I told him. “I’m afraid there will be some messing around with lights, but we’ll try to make it as painless
as possible.”

Sevi waited while we set up. He must have had a million other things to do, but he showed no impatience. He didn’t even busy
himself with e-mail or paperwork, and when his telephone rang he cut short the conversation, telling whoever had called him
that he was in the middle of something and would call back. My first question, to make him relax, was to ask how he and Melanie
had met. He answered me shortly that it had been at the party of a mutual friend. Then he just carried right on speaking.
He did not relax in front of the camera, but talked more quickly than he would have done normally and rarely stopped.

“As you know, I’m a psychiatrist. I have had some experience working with the military. One of the points we had in common
was this fascination with the psychology of the warrior. What happened to a man in battle? Why choose war? How does a soldier
feel about the fact that he is allowed to kill a man at war but not in his front room? It was part of her fascination to me,
of course, too. She was, in a way, a field-worker for me. Look out for this, I would say to her. And when she returned, she
would report back. She would tell me about the interplay of journalism and war, the growth of trust, the sudden volte-face
when, on occasion, she filmed something the military didn’t want made public and she became untrustworthy in their eyes. We
debated the moral difficulty of reporting on the wrongness of a war when you are dependent on those who are fighting it for
your protection. We were . . .” He paused, searching for the right words. “Intellectually, entirely complementary.”

“You moved in together,” I prompted when he stopped for breath.

“For what it was worth,” he agreed. “She was away more than she was around. But I can’t switch off the part of me that’s a
psychiatrist. I’m trained to read the signs, and when the signs are displayed, well . . .” He made a little gesture with his
hands. “I read them. So when Melanie started to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress, I couldn’t not point it out to
her. She was a woman who loved her work—”

“I’m sorry,” I couldn’t help interrupting him, “you’ve used the past tense repeatedly. . . .”

“Have I?” Fred Sevi frowned. “Surely, linguistically, I’m not implying that she’s dead by deploying the past tense. I’m simply
describing our history, which was necessarily in the past at this point.”

“I’m sorry. Please continue.”

He stared at me for a moment, apparently unable to go on.

“You say she exhibited specific symptoms of post-traumatic stress?” I tried again, and this time he gathered himself to respond.

“Yes, well, the first time it happened a car backfired and she hit the pavement. It was hard to miss, a classic case. She
was depressed, she had trouble sleeping, she had nightmares, she hated crowds, she started at loud noises, she had flashbacks,
she no longer enjoyed sex.”

Interviewees who volunteer details of their own sex lives on film are usually exhibitionists. But Sevi, I think, was simply
so used to looking at sex as a measure of psychological well-being that he saw no shame or awkwardness in it.

“Did you ask Melanie how this post-traumatic stress started?”

“She blew up at me on half a dozen occasions I asked her about it. She would not communicate with me, and not just about that.
Gradually she grew more withdrawn, our relationship deteriorated. She said she just needed more rest. She continued to report
from war zones, despite my explicit request that she should not go. She was inevitably sleepless the night before she left.
And irritable, unpleasant to live with. She became almost obsessive about the weights of relative body armors—she was already
overloaded with her camera.”

“You’ve told the police all this?”

“Certainly. It seems absolutely pertinent to her disappearance. And I think I can say that the police are beginning to think,
like me, that Melanie has disappeared of her own accord.”

“If you’re right, and she was suffering from post-traumatic stress, do you think she might have panicked at HazPrep, that
the staged situations might have set off some uncontrollable fear?”

“It’s possible,” he said slowly. “You understand, these panic attacks are unpredictable. No matter how much she knew, intellectually,
that these events were not real, it is possible . . . yes, it’s certainly possible that she might have felt uncontrollable
and unreasonable fear.”

“Might she have run?”

“Run where?”

“There’s been a sighting of a woman in Cumbria,” I reminded him. We had already talked about it, of course, but now I wanted
his reaction on film.

“If she felt, as you are suggesting, that her state of mind was causing her to lose her ability to do her job,” he said slowly,
“then I think she would run to somewhere she could test herself, where she could force herself to confront her fears. I think
she would pursue danger.”

“You don’t think she would seek out safety?”

He thought for a minute.

“I thought, as I’ve said, that when we met she was doing that, seeking me out, seeking out safety, security, as an antidote
to the conditions she worked under. But in fact she paid no more than lip service to the idea of settling comfortably. She
was a woman who needed danger to feel alive.”

“The night before Melanie disappeared . . . ,” I started the sentence carefully. Now that we were at the end of the interview,
I could afford to ask the questions that might annoy him. “I believe you went to the HazPrep compound to try to see her.”

There was the minutest of hesitations before he answered.

“I did.”

“Could you tell me why?”

He gave a snort of irritation, but after a minute he said, “Before Melanie went on the training course, we’d had a disagreement.
A couple of days after she had left I became upset . . . I drank more than I should have. I drove out there to see her, to
smooth things over. I rang her on my mobile phone. She refused to speak to me or see me. I realized that I’d gone too far
and went home again.”

“The next night was the night that Melanie disappeared.”

“That is so. I was at a public lecture.”

“You didn’t try to ring her?”

Sevi shifted uncomfortably on his seat. “Actually, I think I do remember trying to get hold of her after the lecture. It had
slipped my mind.”

“It slipped your mind,” I repeated. “It must have been the last time you spoke to her.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, it was. Although the conversation was so brief that it scarcely counted. She just told me how bad the
reception was, and I told her I’d try the next day. Look, I think it’s really lunchtime.”

I nodded at Dave, and he stopped filming.

“Did you ever hear Melanie refer to a man called Mike Darling?” I asked Sevi as Dave cleared the equipment away.

Sevi pulled a face. “Who is he?”

“A former special forces soldier, and one of the instructors on her course. They’d met once before.”

“No.” Sevi looked surprised. “I didn’t think she knew anyone at HazPrep—but then she wouldn’t have been aware of it herself
before she went there. And I haven’t, of course, seen her since.”

He gathered up some papers into a backpack and stood up.

“Can I offer you some lunch?” I asked. “Unless you have plans?”

“I have no plans,” he said slowly. He thought for a moment, his mouth twisting in indecision. I wondered whether he was regretting
his earlier hostility. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said at last. “Let me show you my favorite eatery.”