Out of Mind (2 page)

I left Collins’s office ten minutes later, empty-handed. As I trod the lengths of corridor back to my office, I felt increasingly
dissatisfied. Collins had not dismissed me, he had not tried to stop me asking questions, but he had met each of my inquiries
with a sad shake of the head and an apology that there was nothing new he could tell me, his blue eyes filled with concern
that looked genuine.

Surely, I thought, it was impossible that Collins had no more information now than the day Melanie vanished. I simply could
not believe it. And as I thought it over, the whole thing began to ring alarm bells in my head. When Adam Wills had been killed,
I had become chief suspect, and the Corporation had failed to stand behind me. Was the Corporation now abandoning Melanie
to her fate as it had abandoned me? I had been a suspect in a murder investigation. It was perhaps understandable that my
employer should want to pretend I had nothing to do with them. But there was no such stain on Melanie’s reputation.

The next day, Beatrice rang me and asked whether I would mind terribly going to HazPrep and checking one last time whether
there was something, anything, that the police might have missed. I agreed immediately. If Collins was not going to stand
up for Melanie, then I would have to. I found myself fired by an angry zeal that, had I been honest with myself, I would have
realized had more to do with what had happened to me nearly two years earlier than with what had or had not happened to Melanie.

Now, as hedgerow gave way to high brick wall topped with razor-sharp wire, I recognized the War School from the TV coverage
of Melanie’s disappearance. HazPrep had not allowed journalists inside to film in their grounds at the time, nor had it allowed
its staff to give interviews, with the exception of the director, Andrew Bentley. So there had been lots of pictures of this
exterior wall and the blue metal gate. I called Bentley from my mobile, as he’d instructed, and the gate slid open.

We parked by the manor house, a sprawling stone building surrounded with topiary at the top of a small hill. Bentley was waiting.
I had expected combat fatigues, but he wore a dark blue business suit and what looked to my amateur eyes like a regimental
tie. All I knew of his history was that he had been an officer in the Special Boat Service. His short dark hair receded to
show a large circle of glossy bald head, his shoulders pushed the suit to its limits, and his unbuttoned jacket revealed a
chest that sat above his waist like a V. I could see my face in his shoes.

“Hello?” Bentley greeted Finney with an interrogative and shook his hand.

“This is Tom Finney,” I said, and left it at that.

“Good God, you’ve got a carful.” Bentley peered into the backseat.

“It’s the weekend . . . ,” I started, but he waved away my excuses.

“Plenty of space for them to run around. I’ve got kids myself.”

I was pleased to find someone who didn’t blanch at the sight of children, but by the time I’d managed to dislodge William
and Hannah from the car, Bentley and Finney had turned and were already heading toward the house. It was an English summer’s
day, the early sun now overcast with clouds that threatened rain, and Finney was wearing a leather jacket and jeans. Unlike
Bentley, who made a suit look like a uniform, Finney was incapable of making even a suit look like a suit. I hadn’t introduced
Finney as a police officer, but it seemed to me, as they strode off together, that the two men had recognized in each other
the formal manner of men who work in hierarchical institutions and the bearing of those who expect a certain measure of respect.
They were deep in conversation.

I gathered up the children and hurried after them. Inside the house, we followed Bentley along a ground-floor corridor, and
he stopped outside a door, the top half of which was glass.

“This is one of our seminar rooms,” he said quietly. “It’s being used, but you’re welcome to take a look. A lot of what we
teach is risk assessment and self-awareness. We need to tell camera operators like Melanie that their camera looks like a
rocket-propeled grenade launcher. They may think they look innocent enough, but they don’t. And a camera operator needs minimum
four seconds of film, which is a long time to stick your neck out with bullets flying ”

I stepped up and looked through the glass. A dozen men were in there, sitting on metal chairs chosen for function rather than
comfort, arranged in a circle, each with a notebook at his elbow. Two of them were passing notes to each other. A third looked
close to sleep. I recognized only one of them, a man called Max Amsel. Max is one of the Corporation’s war correspondents.
Short and stout, he is Austrian by birth and was once told by a Corporation executive that he would never make a broadcaster
because his accent was too strong. Now he speaks a smooth standard English. Only if you listen very closely can you hear the
slightest of clipped edges.

An instructor stood at the front of the class, holding up a flak jacket and describing its many fine properties. Props were
stacked on shelves around the edges of the room—first-aid kits, helmets, a pair of boots, and what I assumed were models of
grenades, land mines, and mortar shells. Two old-fashioned blackboards stood at the front of the room, and a large flat-screen
TV was mounted on the wall. On the blackboard were diagrams of explosions, of the trajectory of shrapnel, with stick figures
crouching, ducking, running. On the second, there was writing in white chalk:

“Be the Grey Man.”

“Shut the Fuck Up or Die,” was scrawled in pink chalk beneath it. Someone had wiped over the words in a halfhearted attempt
to erase them, but they were still clearly legible.

Bentley followed my eyes. “In a group hostage situation it’s generally good policy to keep your head down,” he murmured in
my ear. “I think the commentary was added by one of our clients. Some of them think they’re real jokers.”

I moved aside to let Finney take a look through the glass, and then we moved on. We climbed the staircase to the room Melanie
had occupied. The single bed was covered in a grass green counterpane. There was a small chest of drawers beside it, olive
green curtains hung at the window, the carpet was moss green, the walls beige. It was a room in camouflage. This must be what
happens when you leave interior decoration up to a bunch of former soldiers. A narrow wardrobe was empty of anything but hangers.
Through another door, a shower room was hung with pristine towels. The room had long ago been wiped clean of any vestige of
Melanie.

“The police sealed it off.” Bentley was standing in the doorway, as though crossing the threshold might make him disappear
as Melanie had. “They turned it upside down, but as far as I know they didn’t find anything unusual, and there was no sign
of forced entry. In the end someone from the Corporation came and packed up her things.”

“Who was that?”

Bentley shrugged. “I don’t remember the name. We shook hands. She was late thirties, perhaps early forties, light brown hair.
I can check with my secretary if it’s important.”

“If you could. Did you spend any time with Melanie?”

Bentley shook his head. “I had meetings in London the first two days she was here. The course runs like clockwork. My instructors
don’t need me breathing down their necks.”

We followed Bentley outside again and along a dirt path from the dining room toward the woods. A light rain was falling, and
the children galloped around us, shrieking with delight as they got wet and the soggy earth began to cling to their sandals.

“Am I right in remembering it had snowed?” Finney asked. “Did Melanie leave tracks?”

“The snow hadn’t settled on the path around the house itself—there was too much foot traffic. After that . . . well, we don’t
know which direction she took, of course. The guard at the gate did not see her. There was snow and ice on this path down
to the wood, but no one even noticed Melanie was gone until midday on January eleventh. When she didn’t turn up at class,
the instructor assumed she was sick and had stayed in her room. So the alarm wasn’t raised until the afternoon. By which time
we’d had a dozen men and women tramping up and down here. I think the sun even shone. So all we had left was sludge. Look.”
Bentley came to a halt and pointed up ahead. “We call this the booby trap trail, we want our clients to learn how to use their
eyes and their brains. Here, look, the path forks and one route has been blocked off with a log. You should ask yourself,
Who did that? Why did they do that? Is someone you can’t see forcing you to choose this path through the woods? There’s a
hut over there, it would provide excellent shelter. Someone’s piled firewood in the doorway—you’d have to clear it away before
you could get in—”

“And it would blow up in your face,” Finney said, finishing the sentence for him. Bentley nodded.

Bentley’s analysis of what we saw around us was delivered with clinical calm. I felt a chill creep into my bones. The beech
trees in these woods had been here for a century or more, their thick foliage keeping out what little daylight there was.
Even the rain fell more thinly here.

“And here’s our execution ground,” Bentley said, his voice still bare of inflection. He stood in a clearing in the trees.
A perfectly circular patch of ground had been concreted over and a high brick wall constructed along one section of the perimeter
with rough windows built into it. It looked like a theater set.

“Not that an execution ground has to look like anything in particular, but when we’re doing this exercise we want our clients
to be able to identify this as a defined area, a killing zone, in which their efforts to save themselves take place.”

William hurtled past me and ran out into the center of the concreted area, then stopped and shouted something unintelligible
toward me. We all stared at him. I had to stop myself from bodily seizing him up and carrying him out of this godforsaken
place.

“William wants a ball, Mummy,” Hannah told me.

I told her that I didn’t have a ball with me, and she ran to William to pass on the message. He started to scream and stamp
his feet.

“What happened that day?” Finney asked Bentley. “Did Melanie say the right thing, did she talk herself out of it, or would
she have been executed?”

Bentley puffed out his cheeks, and I thought he seemed uncomfortable with Finney’s question. When he spoke he had to raise
his voice so that he we could hear him over William’s tantrum.

“We don’t deal in right or wrong answers here. We preach first psychological preparation and avoidance, and if that fails
we teach problem-solving techniques. No one pretended to execute Melanie that day, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re not
here to terrorize people. There’s no need to. Our clients are not stupid. They know what they are getting themselves into.
As I understand it, Melanie had extricated herself from some tight situations.”

William had fallen silent and was gazing at the ground as the drizzle became heavier, the raindrops fatter. They fell and
burst against the concrete stage like ten thousand tiny explosions. Bentley glanced at his watch.

“My men will be using this area for a training exercise in a few minutes. Let’s go and get some lunch.”

The dining room was almost empty, just a few tables occupied by people who looked like staff getting an early lunch. We took
a table by the window and sat down. Bentley pointed out the adjoining bar, where Melanie had last been seen. She had been
on the course for three days and was due to leave on the fourth. The bar had a separate exit into the grounds. It was through
this exit that Melanie had left at ten p.m.

“Why go outside at all?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it have been quicker to go through the dining room?”

“It would have been quicker. Also it was dark outside, and cold. But there is another entrance by the bedroom wing, and people
do take the overland route. Usually to have a cigarette or make a phone call. The entire building is a no-smoking zone, including
the bar. And mobile phone reception is bad inside the building and marginally better outside. I seem to remember someone said
they thought she was speaking into her mobile just before she left.”

“Her mobile . . .” Finney was thinking aloud. “I don’t think it’s been found, am I right?”

“Right,” I agreed. My knowledge of the newspaper reporting on Melanie’s disappearance was second to none. “The police checked
her phone records, and there was an electronic signal logging off from the local transmitter shortly after ten that night.”

“Which means either that the battery ran out or that someone switched the phone off,” Finney said, “but either way the phone
was somewhere in this area at that point.”

“The transmitter’s footprint covers a much greater area than just HazPrep, of course,” Bentley said quickly. “And we shouldn’t
forget that she might have switched it off herself as she left the area, so she couldn’t be tracked.”

“She hasn’t used it since,” I pointed out.

“Anyone who’s technologically literate would know not to use their mobile if they wanted to disappear,” Bentley responded.
“From what I’ve seen of these guys, camera operators are using sat phones and videophones, and GPS units, and digital editing.
If she’s out there, Melanie Jacobs knows what she’s doing.”

As he spoke, I felt a warm, wet sensation spread over my lap. Hannah, more asleep than awake, had done the inevitable. I could
feel the urine trickle down my legs and see it splashing into a little puddle on the floor.

“Here—” I dumped William on Finney’s lap and grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the table. “I’m sorry, we’re going to
need someone with a mop over here.”

Andrew Bentley looked blankly at the pool, then waved a waitress over with some urgency. Hannah and I retreated to the ladies’
to mop up in privacy, but she was embarrassed and would not stop howling. I picked her up and cuddled her and looked at the
two of us in the mirror. You wouldn’t have thought we were related. Hannah had her dead father’s dark good looks. Huge tears
were running from swollen eyes down her plump freckled cheeks, and her mouth was wobbling. In the mirror I was pale in comparison,
my red blond hair cut in a short, messy bob. My eyes were huge with tiredness, and I was thin from running around chasing
after the children and trying to work and having too little time to eat.