Out of Mind (16 page)

Later that night, when I had put the children to bed, Alice rang me in tears.

“I just had a phone call from Mike Darling,” she said. “He’s just got back from abroad, and he was ringing to tell me not
to speak to you. And when I said I already had, he told me that was stupid, and that you just wanted to make trouble.”

“That’s not true.”

“He said you couldn’t be trusted, that you just wanted to stir up rumors.”

“No,” I repeated, “that’s not true.”

“Are you sure? Because I’ve had enough.” Her voice was still wavering, but her warning was delivered clearly enough. “Do you
understand that? I can’t take any more, I’m just beginning to put things back together. If you make trouble for me, I will
make sure you pay for it. Do I make myself clear? I don’t know what you’re up to, but just leave me out of it.”

I tried again to reassure her that I was not intending to make trouble for her. But she wasn’t in a mood to be convinced.
She had, after all, known Mike much longer than she had known me; he had been her husband’s friend, and she had no reason
to think he would mislead her. I put down the receiver, worried and uncomfortable. I had almost nothing to go on. I was just
following my nose, digging around to see what turned up. But I was playing with people’s lives. I didn’t want to do Alice
any harm.

This was the first I had heard that Mike had returned from Pursat. Alan’s wife, I thought, must have told him that I had been
asking about Ray. One way or another, fresh off the plane from the other side of the world, Mike Darling had made it his priority
to warn his friends not to speak to me. The battle lines were drawn.

I
went to Durham on the train in a child-free carriage. It was unnaturally silent, except for the drumming of fingers on laptop
keyboards and the hiss of the automatic door every time a shame-faced commuter took a call out in the corridor. I’d come on
my own, without Dave, because with Ivor Collins’s ban ringing in my ears, it would have been a tad antagonistic to go traveling
the country with a film crew. Nor could I raise the hopes of Melanie’s parents by telling them I was making a documentary
on their daughter’s disappearance if I was not at all sure that I would be allowed to.

Melanie’s mother, Beatrice, had telephoned me.

“We’d like it if you’d come to see us in the next couple of days if it’s at all possible,” she’d said. It had sounded more
like a command than an invitation. Her own pursuit of her vanished daughter had been efficient and energetic, if limited by
her situation. But Beatrice’s determination that I should visit did not mean there was news. It might just be that they wanted
to hear about my visit to HazPrep. I had reported back briefly by e-mail before my trip to Cambodia but had not since had
time to follow up.

Both Beatrice and Elliott Jacobs received me at the door of their house, as though they had both been waiting for my arrival.
Of course, I had met them once before, at King’s Cross station with Melanie, but this time, without her, I was struck by the
echoes of her face in theirs.

“So good of you to come,” Elliott said as he shook my hand, and in an instant I was seated in a sun-bathed sitting room, a
cup of tea and a plate of biscuits at my elbow. The room was a jungle of flora, nurtured and allowed to roam, as far as I
could see, pretty much at will. Potted ivy had trained itself up over the mantelpiece, and vast ferns filtered the sunlight
that shone through the bay window. Here and there, there were flowers and buds, but the blooms seemed incidental in among
the foliage.

“We call this our greenhouse,” Elliott said. “We’ve never been much into home decorating, but we love our plants.”

I saw, through the leaves, a piano, and on top of it a selection of photographs, including a large one of Melanie standing
in a graveyard.

“One of her friends, a young man called Edwin Rochester, sent us that a few weeks ago,” Beatrice said, following my eyes.
She picked up the photograph and handed it to me. “It was a lovely gesture,” she said, “very thoughtful. And I think he’s
a very good photographer. He’s captured Melanie perfectly.”

Melanie was smiling into the lens more cheerfully than I had seen in others of Edwin’s photographs, as though she knew this
one was destined for her parents’ piano. She was, I would have said, putting on a good face.

“She was filming in Bucharest, where Elliott was born, and where his parents are buried,” Beatrice explained, standing next
to me, “so it was very special for us. She was so dedicated to her job.” Beatrice gazed down at the photograph. “And we are
very proud of her, so we can’t understand why—”

“You’ve heard that someone’s seen her in Cumbria?” Elliott interrupted his wife.

“We can’t be sure, Elliott,” Beatrice warned him.

“It sounds exactly like her,” Elliott told me. “She loved to camp when she was little. Loved to be outdoors. We went camping
two years ago, just Melanie and me, and she said the peace and quiet was like water to her, and she was so thirsty for it.”

“Where did you camp? Did she know the Lake District?”

“She knew it,” Beatrice allowed, but her voice carried more doubt than Elliott’s.

“We camped at Coniston Water. And for once it didn’t rain. Well, there were showers, but no downpours. It was out of season;
we took it very easy, we had nothing to rush for. That’s what she needs now, after all the things she’s seen, peace and quiet.
We should leave her be until she’s had her fill, and then she’ll come back to us.”

I looked up at Beatrice and saw such agony on her face that the platitude I had been about to voice was silenced. Into the
quiet came the ring of the front-door bell. Beatrice hurried out and came back leading by the hand a woman of about my age
whom she introduced as Stella Smith.

“Stella is Melanie’s school friend,” Beatrice said. “She lives in Germany, but she’s back for a couple of weeks to visit her
parents, and I wanted you to meet her.” She turned to Elliott. “We’re just going to nip out for a girls’ cup of coffee,” she
told her husband. He looked surprised and mildly hurt at this abandonment, and I felt embarrassed to leave like that, but
Beatrice explained as we got into her car.

“I simply can’t talk about Melanie in front of him.” She sounded almost angry at her husband’s continued hopefulness. “He
won’t let himself see things as they are, and if I forced it on him, it would break his heart.”

She drove us into town, pushing the speed limit and paying little attention to other drivers. Instead she explained to Stella
who I was, at which Stella fell silent and sat looking stonily out the window.

Inside a tearoom near the castle, Beatrice leaned conspiratorially across the table and explained to me that Stella and she
had already talked and that she wanted me to hear what Stella had to say.

“Okay.” I looked expectantly at Stella, but she was holding up her hands defensively. She was small and round and expensively
dressed, and I found myself thinking that she was an unlikely friend for Melanie.

“I don’t want to make more out of this than it is,” she said nervously. “I said what I said in confidence to Mrs. Jacobs.
I didn’t mean to involve the press.”

“But, Stella,” Beatrice protested, “I can’t see how one could possibly make more out of it than it is.”

Stella shook her head and looked away.

“Well, I’ll have to say it, then.” Beatrice lowered her voice. “Stella told me that Fred Sevi had threatened to kill Melanie.”

I leaned back in my chair and addressed Stella. “Did Melanie tell you this herself?”

Stella nodded wordlessly, her face still turned away from me.

“When was this?”

She looked at me. “I don’t want any of this on the television. Or in the newspapers.”

I hate it when people assume that every journalist they meet is a snake in the grass. On the other hand, there are indeed
plenty of snakes winding through the grass. Frankly, if I met a journalist for the first time, I’d keep my mouth pretty tight
shut, too. So instead of snapping Stella’s head off, I promised I would not quote her.

“I spoke to her two days before she went on the course.”

“In person? I thought you lived in Germany.”

“On the telephone.”

Immediately I was skeptical. Give me an e-mail, give me film, give me paper, a tape recording, anything I can see and feel.
A telephone call is nothing, it’s a sigh on the breeze, gone with the wind.

“Why was he threatening to kill her?”

“If she left him . . . That’s what I mean about blowing it out of proportion . . . it was said in anger. He would kill himself,
he would kill her. People say those things, they don’t usually mean them.”

“But then she disappeared,” Beatrice said earnestly. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

This insistence that Melanie had been murdered was chilling coming from Melanie’s own mother, and Stella gave her a keen glance.
But I knew Beatrice didn’t want her daughter dead. She was simply the kind of person who was determined to take no comfort
where none was due. She had insisted on looking in a harsh and unforgiving light at all that had happened since Melanie had
disappeared and had decided that her daughter must be dead. She did not want to delude herself.

“Did he say it once or lots of times?” I tried to pin Stella down.

“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

“Did she say how, or where?”

“I don’t think it got that specific, but I don’t know. . . . Look, I know it’s your job to ask questions, but I feel as though
you’re attacking me. All I wanted to say to Beatrice was that I thought the police should take another look at Fred Sevi.
I heard what he’s been saying, that Melanie had post-traumatic stress, that she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I
just don’t believe it. She never said anything like that to me, about stress, or hating her job.”

“Did she talk about having nightmares? Flashbacks? Anything like that?” I tried to sound less aggressive.

“Nothing. Ever.”

“What did you talk about, apart from Fred wanting to kill her?”

I got a sharp glance from Stella for that, but she answered me.

“We were teenagers together, we’ve always talked about boys . . . men. I got divorced last year. I’m with someone new. We
spoke perhaps twice in the year before she disappeared. The first time she was telling me how wonderful Fred was. How he didn’t
want to tie her down. Then this last time she said he had become unbearably possessive and wouldn’t let her do her job, and
that he had this horrible habit of psychoanalyzing her all the time. It drove her up the wall.”

“Did she mention any other men?” I asked Stella. I didn’t want to mention names in front of Beatrice. She knew Edwin Rochester,
and she might have known the name Mike Darling. She was in such a state of high tension that I believe if I had named them,
or said I had any suspicion of them, she would have summoned them to Durham, too, and demanded they explain themselves.

“I don’t remember her mentioning anyone. Melanie wasn’t the sort who constantly had a boyfriend on the go. That’s why Fred
was such a big thing for her. She hadn’t had a serious relationship with anyone for a long time. Her lifestyle didn’t allow
it. She was so disappointed when he turned out like he did.”

“But was she really afraid of Fred?” I still couldn’t really believe what Stella was telling me, and I knew I wasn’t covering
it well.

Stella slumped back in her chair, gazing at me. “I know what you’re saying. She didn’t seem that scared. It was as though
she was giving me another example of how unreasonable he was. She wasn’t in hysterics or anything.”

“And of course he has an alibi,” Beatrice pointed out.

“He has an alibi,” I agreed.

“He does? I didn’t know that.” Stella sipped her tea, her dark eyes watching us over the rim of her cup.

“So either his alibi is faked,” Beatrice summed up carefully, “or his threats weren’t serious.”

Or, I thought, Stella was making those threats up.

Stella left us in town, and on the way back I asked Beatrice what she knew about her. Apparently the two girls had been friends
since the age of eleven. They had been in the school choir together and the hockey team.

“Have you ever had reason to doubt Stella’s judgment?” I asked Beatrice.

She pursed her lips. “Only the normal teenage girl things,” she said. “Boys, staying out. I’d have said the same thing about
Melanie. Perhaps there was a little bit of tale telling once or twice, and some amateur dramatics, but nothing I would describe
as unusual.”

For the rest of the drive, she paid little attention to the road and instead talked tirelessly about Melanie. About how proud
she had made her parents, but how frightened they had been when she traveled to dangerous places.

“When she was little, Elliott would spend hours telling her how he was born in another country, and how when he was tiny he
remembers playing in the snow in Bucharest, and how he always missed his other country. She told him that when she grew up
she was going to see all the other countries in the world, and we laughed. You spend all this time teaching them to be independent
and take the world in their hands,” she told me sadly, “and then they do it. They go and take the most dangerous job in the
world, and you can’t say a word. You just have to kiss them good-bye and pray they’re okay.” Then, as we arrived back at the
house, she said, “Elliott and I try not to scare each other. We scarcely dare talk about it, in case we upset the other one
even more. I lie awake in the dark, and then I hear him sigh, and I know he’s awake too, and . . . We’ve been married for
forty years. We live in each other’s heads as much as our own. It doubles the pain.”

At the house, Elliott got out an old photograph album for me and let me thumb through unremarkable pictures of Melanie as
a child. I learned that she had three brothers, two of whom lived near Beatrice and Elliott and who had taken turns visiting
them each day since Melanie had disappeared.