Out of Mind (4 page)

“Look,” I instructed Sal. “Although God knows why Max was over here, let alone why he was staring at this.”

“That’s why he stopped to take a look.” Sal pointed to a photograph. There was Max in Red Square, with the spires of the Kremlin
behind him. A nice shot. Max five years younger and somehow five years taller.

“And there she is.”

We both knew who he meant. Melanie, flak jacketed and helmeted, hair drawn back behind her head in a ponytail, lying stretched
out on the ground in a desert ditch, her camera for an instant removed from her shoulder, her head turned in toward the chest
of the man whose body shielded her, a man whose stubborn face was contorted in the act, apparently, of shouting orders. The
photograph cannot capture bullets, but their presence is taken as read. These two people are taking cover from incoming fire.
They are within inches of their lives. The picture silenced us. Was it a snapshot of an instant’s tenderness, representative
in some way of a relationship between these two people? Or was it a photographic misrepresentation? Did the image imply a
tenderness, a seeking cover, a protection, that was not, was never, there?

We both knew it was Melanie for the simple reason that her name was printed underneath the picture. Otherwise the confusion
of the scene, the obfuscation of her face, would have meant that she was unrecognizable.

“So who’s Sergeant Mike Darling?” Sal asked after a few moments, peering at the blurb where Melanie’s protector was named.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, “except that he’s now employed at HazPrep—or he has been, or at least that a man with
the same name has been—and that he may or may not have been with Melanie that last day.”

“Where was this taken?” Sal was frowning.

I shrugged, then looked around me to check we were on our own before I removed the photograph carefully from the board. It
was secured by pins, so the only damage was a little perforation. I turned it over, hoping for some identifying mark on the
back. A location, a date, a photographer’s name, any of these would be helpful. There was handwriting, but all it gave was
the name Sergeant Mike Darling, scrawled in pencil.

I removed the slip of paper with the caption that identified Melanie and Mike Darling by name, and slipped it into my pocket
along with the photograph. Sal rearranged the other photographs to cover the gap, placing a rather fine, brooding portrait
of himself at the center of the board.

I tried the publicity department, but as I’d half suspected, the woman who worked there said she had no record of a board
or photographs in that particular location. She tried so hard to persuade me that I had been hallucinating that eventually
I just gave up and walked out.

At the picture archive, I handed the photograph to a young man whose name tag identified him as Henry and who had elegant
wrists and long fingers. He held it under the light to take a good look, then flipped it over to take a look, as I had.

“I can’t think where it’s come from off the top of my head,” he told me, “and without anything to go on, it’s going to be
like the needle in the proverbial haystack.”

He saw my pleading expression and rolled his eyes. “I’ll make a copy. Leave it with me,” he said, resigned. I thanked him,
waited while he copied the photograph, and left my mobile number.

“Did Melanie’s boyfriend ever get back to you?” I asked Sal when I returned to the office.

A couple of years back, Sal had briefly pursued Melanie, apparently challenged by her icy reputation. I knew that had he managed
once to bed her, he would have lost interest within a week. But she had not allowed him close. Ironically, her disappearance
had aroused in Sal the sort of genuine affection and concern that had not been evident in his overlusty pursuit of her. Like
me, Sal had been trying to put two and two together since Melanie disappeared.

“He told me to get lost. And I quote, ‘I feel that in this case, the harsh light of journalistic scrutiny will only serve
to blind us to the facts. This is a job for the men of the police force, not for the boys in the press corps.’”

“You made that up.”

“I did not. That’s what he said. Word for word.”

“Then he sounds as pompous as you,” I told Sal.

I had never met Melanie’s boyfriend, Fred Sevi. All I knew was that he was a professor of psychiatry at King’s College, that
they had known each other for two years and been together for slightly less than that when she disappeared, and that for a
long time after she vanished, the police had had him in their sights. Sevi told the police that he and Melanie argued before
her departure for the War School. On January 9, Sevi said, he tried to visit Melanie at the War School, calling her mobile
to tell her he was there, but that she refused to see him. Melanie’s mother, meanwhile, told the police that her daughter
was thinking of breaking off her relationship with Sevi. But without any proof of wrongdoing, it was difficult for the police
even to describe Sevi as a suspect. In any case, if one did view him as a suspect, he had an alibi for the evening of Melanie’s
disappearance. He had been attending a public lecture on eating disorders in the Institute of Psychiatry’s Wolfson Lecture
Theatre. He had gone on to a party afterward near Elephant and Castle. A minicab driver confirmed he had picked Sevi up at
five minutes past midnight and taken him to his home in Greenwich.

My mobile rang. It was Finney, sounding busy, lowering his voice and carefully avoiding mentioning any names.

“Yes, he was instructing her group that day, and no, they had no knowledge of any prior relationship,” he told me.

“So what are they going to do about it?”

“Look, are you sure he didn’t make a mistake?”

“I just went and looked. Amsel’s right. It’s Darling.”

“Still, there’s nothing they can do,” Finney said. “He’s left the country.”

“Didn’t Bentley make that up?”

“Apparently not. He’s been in Cambodia clearing land mines for the past four months.”

“Clearing land mines?” I echoed. “So . . . four months . . . that means he left just after Melanie disappeared. What a coincidence.”

“There’s no reason to think it wasn’t.”

“So why did Bentley seem so defensive?”

“Darling annoyed Bentley by leaving on very short notice, as I understand it. But as you saw, Bentley is defensive about the
whole thing. A woman disappeared from his estate, and he’s already seen clients canceling because of that. The last thing
he wants is to have journalists raising doubts about his staff. Anyway, the police will interview Darling on his return.”

“Which is?”

“In another two months.”

“Oh, come on. He’s never coming back.”

“There’s something else. He was seen talking to her just before she disappeared. In the bar. He was the last one to speak
to her. So they’ve already questioned him, and they were satisfied he had nothing to do with it.”

“Yes, but the fact that they knew each other and he kept quiet about it changes all that, surely.” I ignored Finney’s instructions
not to jump to conclusions. I hung up. Then I went to find Ivor Collins and sweet-talked my way past his secretary and into
his office.

“So,” he said, tipping his head in what I was coming to recognize as his way of asking a question.

“Melanie knew one of her instructors,” I replied, placing the photograph on the desk in front of him. “His name’s Mike Darling.
He was chatting to her in the bar before she disappeared. He’s lied to the police. He told them he’d never met her before,
but look at this.”

Collins was gazing at the photograph where it lay. He had not touched it. He looked concerned.

“I see,” he said in the rasp that always made me think he was ill, frowning up at me. “Have you told the police?”

“I have, but Darling is abroad for two months, they say they can’t do anything until he comes back.”

“It’s certainly an interesting development. I would like to have something to tell Melanie’s parents.” He spoke slowly. “Where
is he now?”

“He’s clearing land mines in Cambodia.”

“Really?” Collins’s eyebrows rose. “Well, I’ll give it some thought, but I don’t see what we can do except wait, do you?”
he said.

I returned to the office, impatient that the first clue Melanie’s disappearance had given up led to the other end of the earth
and exasperated that neither the police nor the Corporation seemed willing to pursue it. Sal was looking at me expectantly,
and I told him what I’d learned from Finney and of Collins’s unsatisfactory response. He shook his head in irritation.

“I can’t believe no one’s prepared just to get on a plane to Cambodia and go and see what Darling has to say for himself,”
I complained. “Everyone seems to be content to cross their fingers and wait for her to turn up.”

“So go,” Sal said.

I stared at him.

“Stop whining and go to Cambodia,” he repeated.

Route Five, Pursat, Cambodia

T
HE jungle is livid, the air solid with moisture from the monsoon rain. I feel as though I am breathing steam. Our Toyota Land
Cruiser kicks up the yellow dust, and it falls limply back to the ground. My knowledge of this country’s history imposes an
air of menace. When I stop the car to pee, I don’t wander off into the undergrowth because it is strewn with land mines. I
have no intention of getting blown up with my knickers down.

For hours we’ve been driving on a road that is one vast pothole. We set out later than we intended and then lost an hour changing
a tire, an operation that took all three of us: Dave, our local driver, and myself. Dave, my cameraman, is the perfect traveling
companion. He never gets ruffled, never notices discomfort, takes everything in through cinematic eyes. We listen to Dave’s
choice of audiobook, Herodotus’s history of the Persian wars.

“Have you been to this part of the world before?” Dave asks me. Dave is prematurely gray, bespectacled, with a small goatee.
He has worked all over the world, but recently my missing persons series has taken us to rather less exotic locations, like
Salford and Middlesborough.

I shake my head, pull a face. “Nope.”

“It’s not your kind of thing, is it?” Dave ventures. “Something that takes you away from your kids.”

For a moment I consider telling Dave to keep his nose out of my personal life, but I know I’m overreacting. He’s right. Every
time I go away, I have to steel myself.

“Earning us a living means I have to go away sometimes,” I say eventually. “I just like to keep it quick.”

My itinerary doesn’t allow for much slippage. Hannah and William are waiting for me in London, and every day the invisible
elastic band between us seems to stretch tighter. The twins are not impressed by professional ambition, particularly in their
mother. And to them a week feels like a year, a month like a lifetime.

All this means that, unlike Melanie and Sal, I won’t make a career out of trouble spots. I gaze out the window at this land
formed by monsoon and heat, with the history of genocide hanging over it like a cloud. Despite all that I have read, when
we pass close to villages I am still shocked by the number of people, adults and children, who are missing limbs. It is a
landscape that has existed all my life, and that I have never before seen, and that I would not have seen now if it were not
for Melanie, who is now my work, my “story.” How much of the world is that “other” place, the unknown, strange, threatening,
or exotic, heavenly or hellish? Melanie had seen it all, bumping across roads like this one, seeing worlds from the window
that a tourist would never see, sharing terrain with the people who work the land and on occasion with the soldiers who come
to protect or plunder.

In between the fighting and the famines there must have been hours of companionship on the road, and beautiful vistas, and
the joy of unexpected friendship from strangers. And for the first time, I think of her in a different way. For the first
time, I don’t ask myself why on earth she chose this life. For the first time, instead, I think what an immensely rich life
she chose.

“Does Maeve know what you’re up to?”

“I sent her an e-mail the day we left, so she knows I’m in Cambodia,” I said slowly, “and she knows I’m following up on a
missing person. I just didn’t happen to tell her that the missing person is Melanie.”

“I think,” Dave said wearily, “that she might not like it.”

“Why do you think I haven’t told her?”

“Brilliant.” His voice was heavily sarcastic.

“I’ll tell her when I get back.”

“Fucking brilliant.”

“I’m making a series on people who just disappear, and that’s what Melanie did. I see no need to explain myself to anyone.”
I sounded defensive, even to my own ears.

Dave mulled this over. After a moment he got to the problem that had struck me about thirty seconds after Sal suggested I
go to Cambodia.

“Where did you get the budget?”

“Well . . . originally I budgeted for a trip to Russia to follow up a student who disappeared, but then he turned up at his
sister’s wedding, so . . .”

“You had wriggle room.”

“I had wriggle room.”

There was silence in the car for a moment. Then he said, “Even the Corporation’s given up on her. You’d think they’d want
to keep everyone looking.”

In the early days after Melanie’s disappearance, the assumption in the press was that she had been murdered. When no body
was found, and friends and family began to talk about her stressed mental state and the possibility that she had simply chosen
to vanish, the Corporation began to come in for flak. Had her editors pushed her too hard? Had Melanie been given sufficient
support? Had she been offered counseling for the many horrors she had seen? The speculation was, of course, no more than speculation.
Pressure, stress, support: These things were almost impossible to measure objectively. And the Corporation had chosen not
to engage in the debate.

“Melanie Jacobs is still missing,” one Corporation spokesman said. “At a time like this we feel it is irresponsible to whip
up a storm of rumor and innuendo.”