Authors: Catherine Sampson
“I don’t know. I was out. When I got back, Dad told me there’d been this huge row with Kes and that Sheryl was giving him
the money against Kes’s wishes.”
“I’m sure Sheryl had something to do with it,” Jacqui muttered.
“Sheryl paid the ransom. Why would she pay money to herself?” I was exasperated. “Why on earth this fixation on Sheryl? What
harm has she ever done anyone?”
Jacqui looked at Justin, and he shrugged.
“Everyone knows. We all know, and the police know,” he said, and gestured to Jacqui that she might as well go ahead and tell
me.
“She snatched a baby.”
“Years ago,” Justin added with a warning look at Jacqui. “It was years ago. I was just a kid. She was one of Mum’s friends.
She was always around before Mum died, helping out, cooking, cleaning, ironing. I must have been ten or eleven, because that’s
when Mum died. Sheryl was pregnant, only she lost the baby, she had a breakdown, and she took a baby. She was at her friend’s
house, having coffee, and her friend asked her to look after the baby while she ran to the shops. When she got back, Sheryl
was gone and so was the baby. She went crazy looking all over for them, and she called the police. They found them in the
park later that day, Sheryl pushing the pram around like it was her baby. Sheryl acted all offended, like she didn’t know
what all the fuss was about. She said she was going to take the baby back, and her friend should have known she wouldn’t hurt
it. The police wanted to charge her, but once the friend had got her baby back, she was so relieved. She felt bad about getting
Sheryl into trouble, so she told the police maybe she’d misled Sheryl, maybe she’d talked about going to the park and Sheryl
had misunderstood her.”
“But nobody believed that,” I said.
“Nah. Nobody believed that. Everyone knew about the miscarriage. Nobody wanted to talk to her after that.”
“Except your dad,” I said. “He must have ignored what everyone was saying.”
For a moment Justin said nothing, but his face contorted with the effort of putting complex things into words.
“Dad says she needed him,” Justin said eventually, “although I don’t know why that means he had to marry her.”
“He obviously doesn’t love her,” Jacqui said, then looked away, unwilling to venture down the path that would lead to what
she and I had both witnessed. “So you see? She’s a baby snatcher,” she insisted, changing the subject.
“And someone told the police, and that’s why they raided Ronald Evans’s house.”
“They had to know,” she said.
“Yes”—I pushed my chair back and got up to go—“I suppose they did.”
“I’ve got to go, too,” Jacqui said, checking her watch.
“You have?” Justin looked surprised. “Where are you going?”
“It’s nothing, I’ve just got to go and do something,” Jacqui told him, looking embarrassed. “I thought I told you. Anyway,
I’ve got a few minutes.”
I left them there.
Once I was in my car, I had an urge to sit and wait for Jacqui to emerge. What was it she had to do that didn’t involve Justin?
When she appeared, she walked toward me, pulling a mobile phone from her pocket, dialing, speaking. Then she put the phone
away and pulled keys from her pocket, and approached a parked car that I recognized as Anita’s green Mini.
She pulled out of her parking space and headed into town. She was driving impatiently but not particularly fast, and I easily
followed on behind.
My heart sank as she pulled into a multistory car park. Surely, I thought, she was not going to celebrate the reappearance
of her little brother with a clothes-shopping trip. I could see myself trailing behind her to the Gap and Hennes and kicking
myself for the wasted time.
I followed her on a pedestrian walkway out of the car park and into the mall, down an escalator to the basement. She seemed
to know exactly where she was going. If this was shopping, it was at least focused shopping. Again my heart plummeted as she
headed for Burger King. There was a coffee concession opposite, and I sat down with a lukewarm espresso. I could see her quite
clearly inside Burger King through the glass frontage. She approached the counter, handed over some money, and picked up a
tray bearing what looked like a paper cup and a bag of chips. She stood and turned her head, looking for someone. Then she
made for a table in the corner, where a woman was already sitting, her head bowed over a magazine, a paper cup in front of
her.
Jacqui put her tray on the table, and when the woman looked up, I recognized her. Jacqui squeezed into the chair next to Sheryl,
and the older woman shifted away from her. These two were sworn enemies. What’s more, they lived in the same house. What was
it they were discussing that they could not say in front of the others? Sheryl spoke, and Jacqui replied at length, jerking
her head angrily. Sheryl shrugged. She seemed to be arguing, and Jacqui looked increasingly annoyed. Sheryl stood up. She
swept the paper cup onto the floor, tea spilling across the tabletop, and walked out.
I went into the office. I told Sal that if anyone came by looking for me, he should say he hadn’t seen me. I took refuge in
the editing suite. I got the tape of the ransom payment out of my bag, put it in the machine, and watched it through a few
times. I gazed at the figure in black. My gut instinct was that the figure was male and tall. But the loose clothing blurred
the outlines of the body. And without reference points it was difficult to judge size. I rewound it time and time again. I
still had the sense that the whole event had been staged, but any handover of that sort must by its nature be staged. I was
being ridiculous. Maeve could have her pictures. I looked at my watch. She’d missed the midday news, but she could pass it
to the newsroom for the six. She was the head of documentaries, not news, but she would get brownie points for being the one
to pass the film on, and it might keep her off my back for a while. I ejected the tape from the machine and took it into the
office to put it in an envelope for the internal mail. Sal was talking to a young man. He was short, dressed casually in a
Garfield T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes.
“Robin,” Sal introduced us, “this is Edwin Rochester. I just convinced him that you weren’t here. Robin”—he turned to Edwin—“is
an illusion. But you may shake her hand.”
“I’m sorry, I was trying to avoid my boss,” I explained. “I’m so glad you dropped in.”
“Yeah, well, I know you’ve been digging around, and I’d really like to help if I can,” he said. He had an attractive, easy
smile. He pulled up a chair.
“You spent a lot of time with her,” I said.
He shrugged. “We got on pretty well, so we traveled together when we could. We kept bashing into each other around the place.
We pushed things a bit further than some people would. Melanie could talk her way into anything. Her bosses would have been
horrified at some of the things she did. Not that they complained about her pictures. They supplied her with all this stuff,
helmets, body armor, as though she’s going to wear twenty-pound ceramic plates all the time. If she’d been doing things by
the book, she’d have been traveling with a bodyguard—they call them security consultants—but she preferred not to.”
Again I was hearing that past tense. But I didn’t pull him up on it. Who of us by now really believed that Melanie was alive?
“I keep hearing that Melanie was suffering from post-traumatic stress,” I said.
Edwin gave me a look that suggested he didn’t like what he was hearing. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on my desk and
picked at the edge of a newspaper while he thought about his answer.
“I suppose it’s a possibility,” he said carefully, “but she was always solid as a rock when we worked together. Not that I
saw much of her in the last year or so before she disappeared. I saw her maybe twice after Afghanistan.”
“Tell me more about Afghanistan.”
“It’s like stepping back in time.” He leaned back in his chair, swinging it gently to and fro as he spoke. “Scarcely any roads,
and what there are are mined, bridges gone, mud houses, cloth on the windows, no glass. Anything modern is Russian—tanks,
trucks, jeeps, weaponry. And the Afghans. There they are working as drivers and fixers for foreign journalists, and they’re
qualified doctors and lawyers. Intelligent, handsome, with these aquiline noses, melancholy as hell. Crazy drivers. The women
are all in burkas, of course. But hey, you know, the sky is this deep azure blue, and you sit on top of one of those flat-roofed
houses in the evening, and you look up and the sky is full of stars, and it’s the closest you can get to heaven.”
Edwin had raised his face toward the ceiling, and he was smiling. It was all very romantic, but it wasn’t what I had meant.
“I mean, did Melanie ever talk to you about what happened in Afghanistan after you left? Like when you showed her the photos.
What did she say?”
Edwin looked at me. “She made some comment, like that something went wrong, or she didn’t want to talk about it. But that
was it.”
“You took some beautiful pictures of her.”
“Yeah. Well, she was a beautiful person. Not everyone saw it, but I like that look, you know. She played up to it, too. She
knew what I was looking for. She used to mess around like everyone else, but as soon as I pointed a camera at her, she’d do
this aloof, watchful thing. It was so cool.”
He stopped talking, and he watched my face for a moment. “You don’t have the first clue what happened to her, do you.”
I sighed. My head was pounding, and I was exhausted after my sleepless night. Christopher and Melanie. Why had I tied them
together in my head? It seemed an empty hypothesis when I examined it closely, and I feared that I was concocting links and
conspiracy theories simply because since Adam’s death I was prone to seeing them everywhere.
“No,” I said, “I haven’t got a clue.”
I asked him whether Melanie had talked about Fred Sevi or her friend Stella Smith. But Melanie had lived two separate lives.
One she had lived back in Britain, where she had at least attempted to have a normal life. The other life she had lived abroad,
frequently in hostile environments, far from safety.
After Edwin had gone, I addressed the envelope for the internal mail and wrote a brief account of what had happened the night
before, and once the envelope had started on its way I spoke to the news desk about the film I had shot. The editor was bemused
and irritated that I had not handed the film over earlier, but he was glad he would have it for the prime-time news slot.
I returned home still feeling uncomfortable about the film of the ransom payment. My meeting with Edwin had also made me feel
deeply sorry that I had achieved nothing for Melanie. I wanted nothing more than to speak to Finney and to take comfort in
his huge good sense. I wasn’t playing hard to get. I had tried calling him, several times. But he’d been, in turn, busy, in
a meeting, unavailable, out to lunch, and engaged.
I put the children to bed, enjoying William’s good spirits. Hannah, jealous of the attention that William received, was trying
to convince me that she was sick, too. She kept making disgusting but unproductive retching sounds that had William in stitches.
Eventually I got them into bed, switched off their light, and sat at the computer. I could hear Hannah in the bedroom, still
making retching sounds, and William giggling. I ignored them.
My mother had e-mailed to wish me a happy birthday. Which came as a surprise, because I had forgotten what day it was. Actually,
so had she. She was a day early.
Many Happy Returns, but I’m busy trying to persuade myself I’m 21 again, so I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t remind me how
Old you are. I have been Working Out. My Butt is getting Tighter (I am assured. I can’t actually see it without putting my
neck out). I have an ADMIRER. He is American, but he’s a Democrat so that’s all right. Wish me luck.
PS would you like some Birkenstocks for your birthday? I believe they’re quite the Thing.
I saw there were two attachments, and I opened them to find that my mother had e-mailed me two pictures. One was a pair of
very sensible sandals that would soon belong to me. The other was of her paramour, a man with a big smile who must have been
in his fifties. This attachment was titled “Randy.” There was another e-mail from her. I opened it up.
PPS I have just read on the Internet about the missing Baby being Found. What Wonderful News.
It was, of course, quite simply Wonderful News. I held on to that thought and went to sleep.
I
spent the morning in Crawley, home to another of my family of missing persons. A forty-three-year-old woman had disappeared
six weeks earlier while out food shopping two months exactly after her husband of twenty-five years had died of leukemia.
After filming, Dave and I grabbed a quick pub lunch, then we got in the car and headed north on the M23 back toward London,
Dave driving so that I could make some calls. I rang Veronica’s mobile and was surprised she took the call.
“I’ve given you more than twenty-four hours to forgive me,” I said.
She grunted.
“How’s Christopher?”
“He’s alive. He was drugged to keep him quiet. Which could mean that there was only one person involved. It’s possible he
was left alone somewhere, but even so whoever held him could have come and gone knowing he wasn’t going to scream. Anyway,
he’s alive. He’s going to be okay.”
“Are there any long-term effects?”
“There are no guarantees. It’s not the kind of experiment drug companies get permission to do, and we don’t know what doses
he was given.”
“Whoever had him risked doing him real damage.”
“It was a risk, even more so if he really was left for long periods of time on his own. But you don’t have to have a medical
degree these days to get hold of information about dosage, you can just type the name of some drug into your search engine
and away you go. You can probably buy it the same way and have it delivered to your door.”