Out of Mind (24 page)

“You have to hear it, right? You can’t let her go around spreading lies. You’ve got to defend yourself, or she’ll just keep
on bad-mouthing you.”

I shook my head, but I didn’t trust myself to say anything. This man had just lost his son. Was this why Kes had brought me
in—to challenge me to either back off or kick Mike while he was down?

“Yeah, I want to hear what she’s got to say,” Mike said slowly, frowning, “What gives you the right?”

“I haven’t accused anyone of anything,” I repeated.

“Why did you go sniffing around Alice Jackson?” Kes demanded, growing passionate in his defense of his friend. “Why did you
go running to the police? Just tell us, and we can clear it up. We’re not unreasonable. Mike’s done nothing wrong. But you’ve
got to give him the chance to defend himself. What did Alice say to get you going?”

“Alice didn’t tell me anything,” I insisted. I saw that Mike was watching me now like a hawk, his eyes heavy-lidded, dark
slits in his pale face. “She just told me how her husband died in the ambush. Look”—I went on the offensive—“like I said,
this isn’t the time. All I’ve done is tell the police what I found out, which is that you’d met Melanie before. That’s all.
No accusation, nothing. And as for Alice, she didn’t tell me anything that warranted the police. They can ask her themselves
if they want to.”

Kes was shaking his head. “No one even knows if the woman’s alive or dead,” he said, “but you’ve got Mike lined up as a murderer
because he didn’t get verbal diarrhea when he talked to the police? You make me sick.”

Kes spoke to Mike softly. “You see, all this crap, it’s over. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Mike gazed at Kes. “It’s over,” he said uncertainly, then with more confidence, “It’s over, isn’t it? Now I have to get Christopher
back.”

His face contorted. He pushed past Kes and made for the back door, slamming it behind him.

Kes sat on the bed, as if all the energy had drained from him, and I slipped away. I felt sickened that I had let myself be
lured back into this household, and I felt drained by Mike’s despair. I found myself outside the back door, leaning against
the pile of bricks, gasping in the damp air, my eyes closed tight, relief that I was out of the house washing over me. Mike
had left the house through the same door. But there was no sign of him. There was a garden shed, and a light shone at the
small window, but I couldn’t think why anyone would be there in the night.

I turned and took one last look behind me, back into the house. That house, Anita’s room, it had an awful, magnetic quality
to it. The glass door to the garden was propped slightly open, and the lights inside the house shone brightly. I could see
the area from which I had fled. On Anita’s elegant bed I could see not only Anita, still prone, but Kes, sitting with his
head bowed. He turned to look at Anita. I could not see his face. He reached out and let his fingers brush the nape of her
neck, but only for an instant. Then, rapidly, he withdrew his hand and touched his fingers to his mouth, then drew his palm
over his face as though he were washing it clean. I heard a movement behind me and turned to find Jacqui there in the darkness.
In her face I saw misery, but I saw something else as well. I saw calculation. We stared at each other. What had she seen?
What had either of us seen?

T
HAT night, Finney turned up out of the blue. He rang the bell, then turned his key in the lock and stepped tentatively inside
as I reached the hallway, William in my arms.

“Hello.” I must have grinned or shown my pleasure in some way, because relief swept over his face. He raised a supermarket
bag high.

“I’m assuming you haven’t eaten since I last saw you.”

“I’m quite capable of feeding myself.”

“You’re a hopeless liar.” He walked past me and into the kitchen and flung open the door to the fridge. William, I noticed,
was watching Finney carefully. I put him down, assuming he’d run off to find Hannah, but instead he squeezed in beside Finney
for a better view as Finney retrieved the one item sitting on the shelf. “Fish for a Kid’s Dish,” Finney read aloud from the
packaging, and William started to giggle. Finney glanced down at him, noticing him for the first time. “Hang on, what’s this?”
He reached up to the top shelf and poked around. “Salami? Cheese? Cream? What’s going on? Has your mum been shopping?” he
asked William.

“It’s all Carol’s.”

“I rest my case.”

“Finney.” He turned, surprised by my tone. “I tried to call you the other night, and a woman answered.”

He stood there, a pack of Gorgonzola in one hand, salami in the other.

“That would’ve been Emma,” he said. “She’d come round to use the computer.”

“She said you couldn’t talk to me, she said it was a bad time.”

“Then it probably was a bad time.” He was sounding defensive.

“You didn’t phone me back.”

“I didn’t know you’d phoned in the first place.”

“You mean she didn’t tell you?”

I should have handled it better. I should have just trusted him. He was there, after all, in my home, with food for the fridge.
No greater love, surely, hath any man than that he buys groceries for dinner. But my questions had thrown a pall over the
evening.

We tried to talk, but as soon as I began to speak about what had happened at the Darling household, Finney became increasingly
argumentative. What was I doing meddling? Didn’t I realize I was walking straight into the middle of a police investigation?
I nearly asked him, then, whether he was really worried about me meddling in the Darling case or whether he was just angry
with me for challenging him about Emma. Unusually, for me, I managed to bite the question back.

“Okay, okay.” I held up my hands. “Look, I have to fly to Majorca tomorrow morning for filming. I’ll have to leave early.
Do you want to stay or go?”

Finney leaned back in his chair and looked at me from under heavy lids. “I have someone staying at my place,” he said. “I’d
rather stay here.”

I gazed at him. The expression on Finney’s face told me that my questions had to wait.

“Okay,” I said less than graciously, “so stay.”

The next morning Hannah was in high spirits, refusing to eat, refusing to get dressed, scuttling in and around the furniture
so that I couldn’t catch her and remove the ton weight of nappy around her knees. William had tipped juice down his T-shirt
and was outraged and wet, yelling loudly. These things always happened when I least had the time to deal with them. My flight
was at eleven-thirty, but getting to Heathrow would be a nightmare. Finney came into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, running his
hand through hair that was standing on end. He didn’t want to catch my eye, didn’t want to get involved.

“What’s your problem?” Finney’s question to William was rhetorical, but William didn’t see it like that.

“I’m wet!” William howled, omitting the consonants that would have given Finney the clue he needed.

“He’s wet,” I interpreted, making another grab for Hannah, who was standing behind Finney aiming sharp kicks at his ankles.

Finney squinted sleepily down at my son, and eventually his investigator’s eyes identified the problem. He picked up a tea
towel and dabbed ineffectually at William’s T-shirt. With unusually clear enunciation, William yelled, “Don’t want you!”

Finney turned to me, his jaw tight. “Can’t you give them some ice cream or something to shut them up?”

I ignored him, but Hannah had heard.

“Ice cream!” she squealed, then turned it into a chant.

I rolled my eyes at Finney, but he just turned away to pour himself some coffee. Carol walked in.

“All present and chaotic, I see,” she said approvingly. She whipped off William’s wet T-shirt, produced a dry one she just
happened to have with her, and pulled it down over his surprised head, then swung Hannah onto her chair, telling her that
if she kicked people, she would have to go to her room. Hannah hung her head, and Carol turned to me, looking what I can only
describe as smug. She loves it when there is a crisis to be resolved, a mess to be cleared up, a scratched knee to be healed.
She has a transformative ability that I simply cannot match.

“Thank you, Carol,” I said, looking hopelessly at my well-behaved children. I must be doing something wrong.

There was a hammering on the front door. I found Tanya standing there, her face pinched with misery. She barged in furiously
and started immediately to berate me.

“How can you go along with this?” she demanded. “Of all the wrong places to put that man, it’s the worst.”

“I haven’t gone along with anything,” I protested.

“Well, he’s still there. He should never have been there in the first place. What sort of stupid game does Lorna think she’s
playing?”

Finney had been drawn out of the kitchen by our voices and now stood in the hallway, sipping from a mug of coffee. He said
nothing, but Tanya addressed him angrily.

“You do know that Lorna and Robin have set our criminal father up in a safe house?”

She waited for an answer, but he gave her none, his eyes flickering to me, then away again.

I shook my head. “I’ve done nothing of the—”

“She’s told you, hasn’t she?” Tanya interrupted. “That they’ve put him in Ma’s house? Don’t tell me you think it’s a good
idea?”

She listened to the silence that followed her declaration. I looked at the floor, but it wasn’t about to open up and swallow
me, so I had no alternative but to look at Finney. He stood very still, the mug of coffee in his hand. I don’t know what he
saw in my eyes, but in his I saw weary frustration. He turned and disappeared in the direction of the bedroom, and I saw Tanya’s
face fall, but then she gathered force once more and cried after him.

“You’re a policeman, you should send someone around and lock him away.”

The she turned and left, slamming the door behind her.

Finney eventually reemerged. He’d had a go at combing his hair but had not been able to subdue it, and his chin was still
unshaven.

“Check your e-mail,” he said. “There should be a message there from my personal account—I have a friend in the police force
in Paris. I asked him to help me with a little research. He came over—he’s staying at my flat for a day or two with his girlfriend,
turning it into a bit of a holiday—and he put it all together in a file attachment. He didn’t want to do it in Paris. It could
have got him in trouble. Anyway, he said he’d send it last night.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Take a look. I’ve got to run. You may want to think about what Tanya was saying.”

He pulled open the front door, then turned to kiss me, but his heart wasn’t in it. I watched him walk off down the road. If
he was losing faith in me, I had only myself to blame.

I raced around, throwing a change of clothes in a bag to go to Majorca. At the same time, I printed out the message that was,
as Finney had promised, sitting in my in-box. It came from Finney’s personal e-mail account, but there was no indication of
the author’s name. I had no time to read it, so I stuffed the pages into my bag. It wasn’t until I was sitting on the plane
next to Dave, who was snoring even before takeoff, that I had a chance to take a look. I thumbed through the sheets. My father’s
name, Gilbert Ballantyne, appeared every few lines. Most of the documents were in French. Some were transcripts of newspaper
articles, some appeared to be police statements. As I read, I pieced the story together.

Here, then, was the school, a small, private girls’ school specializing in foreign languages. And here the scandal, as described
in a newsmagazine. It began with the arrival of a man at the school gate one day and his request to see the principal. Somehow,
although it was not entirely clear what the man had said to give this impression, the principal’s secretary was under the
impression that the gentleman had a daughter he wished to enroll in the school. When admitted, the man had said, in perfect
French, that he wished to apply for the post of teacher of conversational English. Questioned by a confused principal about
the daughter, the gentleman said that he did indeed have a daughter, that her mother had recently died, and that his intention
in seeking a job—although he was beyond retirement age—was to be able to pay for an education for this girl, who was called
Sabine. The principal was a principled man, who also had a daughter called Sabine. Indeed, one of his principles was to provide
a high-quality private education for what he considered a reasonable price, so that girls such as the motherless Sabine could
attend.

He asked Gilbert Ballantyne for a curriculum vitae, which Ballantyne provided the very next day. It was thick with teaching
experience, in several countries with obscure dialing codes and uncertain e-mail access, and rich in praise for his mastery
of English and English grammar, his precision of explanation, his prowess as a motivator. Gilbert Ballantyne was invited to
bring Sabine along for an interview and to conduct a trial class so that the principal could watch.

Sabine, charming and modest, her eyes still full of pain at the death of her mother, was immediately welcomed into the bosom
of the school. Meanwhile, her father gave his trial lesson, and it was a class of sheer brilliance, as Gilbert teased English
even from those who could scarcely say “How are you?” Their standards of English varied widely, but Gilbert had them working
together so that the more advanced taught the less advanced and the troublemakers were given a pep talk that filled them with
new purpose and direction.

For six months, Gilbert injected new life into the school. Only later did some of the staff look back and wonder at some of
the things that Sabine had said. Once she was overheard to talk fondly of her mother as though she were still alive. On another
occasion she recounted the death of her mother, who had died in a car accident. Yet the very next week she told the story
again, and this time her mother died as a blessed relief after a painful and lingering illness. Sabine was a good student,
with a quick mind and an ear for languages, although some of the teachers noticed the young girl’s disturbing tendency to
draw a tight clique of friends around her and then to play this clique off against those she did not like. Sabine even picked
off those inside her clique whom she had marked out as traitors and inducted new members who swore terrified but exhilarated
allegiance to her. Nevertheless, the teachers understood that this mysterious girl had experienced tragedy too young and must
be given time to heal and mature. Certainly she never caused trouble in class, unless one counted the subtle loss of morale
in some of those she had been close to and was close to no longer.