Out of Mind (29 page)

My mobile rang. I grabbed it from the table, eager for any excuse not to answer the question. It was Mike, although he didn’t
stop to introduce himself, just launched into a tirade. I pulled a face of disbelief at Tanya.

“What do you want from me?” he shouted. “Why are you coming here to harass my wife? Leave me alone, leave my family alone,
and leave my friends alone. If this goes on, I swear you will be sorry.”

He hung up.

“What was that?” Tanya asked. She was standing stock still. “I could hear him from here.”

“He’s upset,” I said, “he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

But we didn’t gossip any more after that, and when I gathered up the sleeping twins to put them in the car, Tanya helped me
with them and watched me get into the driver’s seat, hugging her arms around her against the evening chill.

“I wish you had Finney with you,” she said. “Take care.”

She waved me off. When I looked in the mirror, she was already back inside, closing her front door.

I
got home and locked up, hardly able to stay awake. When the phone rang I snatched up the receiver, ready to snap at whoever
was ringing. I was afraid it would be Mike with more warnings to stay away. But when I heard Justin, apologetic and anxious
as ever, I staggered as far as the sofa and lay down, with my eyes closed, to listen.

“I’ve got Jacqui with me,” he said. “She’s really scared, and she wants to talk to you so someone knows what’s happened. The
police won’t listen to her anymore. I think maybe she’s imagining it. . . .”

At this point, the telephone was grabbed out of his hand, and Jacqui started to tell me her story.

Justin and Jacqui have established what can only be called a love nest in the grounds of the house at the edge of the wood.
In fact it’s a garden shed, but like a bird building a home, Jacqui has stolen cushions and blankets, one by one, from the
house and piled them high in the tiny wooden shack. Jacqui’s need to create this warm and soft environment for their lovemaking
springs from something deep inside her, something that is made more urgent by Justin’s severed limb. She wants to surround
him with the comfort he has longed for ever since his mother died.

They have created this haven in secret—which fact on its own lends an erotic frisson. The atmosphere inside the house is now
so oppressive that neither of them feels they can breathe. They know without discussing it that their respective parents will
freak out if their precious child sleeps with the other parents’ precious child inside the house. But they also know that
their respective parents are so distracted that they don’t give a damn what goes on in the garden shed.

Justin, his time filled with doctors and physiotherapy, challenged by his own impaired and painful body, and his loins on
fire for Jacqui, pays only glancing attention to the eddies and flows of misery inside the house. When they lie down together,
there is nothing on Justin’s mind except his body, made whole, her body, and the fact that he loves her.

Jacqui’s body is equally consumed. Their frequent bouts of sex distract her intermittently from the fact that she is terribly
frightened. She has developed a quick, soft way of walking around the house that gets her from room to room discreetly. She
watches her mother and father and sees that the return of Christopher, which she thought would save them, has not done so.

Jacqui is also frightened of Ronald Evans, who passed her in the street two days after the police raid on his house and laid
into her.

“Are you aware of what I have been through because of you?”

Jacqui tries to walk past him, but he grabs her upper arm in a surprisingly tight and painful grip.

“What?” Jacqui demands. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

“It was you who told the police you thought I had the boy,” Ronald continues furiously, “trying to make yourself important.
I’ve never hurt a fly. The idea of abducting a child is abhorrent.”

“So what if it was me?” Jacqui says, and pulls her arm out of his grasp and runs off.

“You won’t be allowed to get away with it,” his voice calls after her.

Jacqui has come in for worse abuse from Sheryl.

“He’s an old man,” Sheryl tells her, quietly and white with anger, “a frail old man, and you set the police on him, and you
humiliated me.”

“I don’t know why you think it was me.” Jacqui is defiant, even as she retreats. But later she sits sobbing on the step just
outside the back door and rings Veronica Mann on her mobile.

“You told them it was me,” she cries. “You said it would be a secret.”

“I have not told them a thing.” Veronica Mann sounds impatient, as though she has better things to be doing. “They must have
worked it out for themselves; it won’t have been difficult.”

“Ronald said they wouldn’t let me get away with it.” Jacqui’s voice rises. “But I was just trying to do the right thing for
Christopher. I know you don’t believe me, but—”

“Listen, Jacqui, they’re upset. But Christopher is back now, that’s all that matters, isn’t that right?”

Jacqui hangs her head. She takes a deep breath. “I really think you shouldn’t give up trying to find out who took Christopher,”
she says to Veronica.

“We have not given up,” Veronica tells her. But what she does not say is that the police have many things on their plate.

Jacqui bites her lip. “I mean, there are things you should know about what is going on here. I know you think I wasn’t right
before, but I want to talk to you again.”

“I will be there tomorrow,” Veronica tells her, and thinks, resigned, And I will hear another grand conspiracy theory.

“Tomorrow,” Jacqui repeats, thinking about Justin’s physiotherapy sessions. “Okay. I’ll be here.”

Jacqui puts her phone back in her pocket dejectedly, staring at the ground and rubbing her eyes clear of tears. She sees the
flicker of a shadow on the ground, as though something or someone has moved at the window to her right.

That night, Jacqui and Justin are entangled in the blankets in the garden shed, their only illumination a powerful flashlight
that they have propped in the corner and across which Jacqui has draped a pair of red panties. The flashlight, thus clad,
casts a semicircle of red light across the timber roof. Jacqui has brought two or three flashlights here by now, but they
get lost, one by one, in the bedding.

Justin is propped against a wall of cushions, Jacqui lies across his naked chest, the blankets are pulled tight around them,
and they are silent, kissing, when a loud groan of hunger from Justin’s stomach makes them collapse in giggles.

“What’ve we got to eat?” he asks.

Jacqui scrabbles around in a box by the door. “Eggs,” she offers helpfully, holding up a carton.

“What are we going to do with those?”

They laugh again. When Jacqui’s with Justin, the fear recedes.

Jacqui delves into the box again but shakes her head. “That’s all there is. I’ll go and get you something.”

“Nah. I’ll be all right.”

“You can’t go to sleep hungry,” she tells him. “I’ll go and get some biscuits or something, I’ll be back in a minute. Can
I take the torch?”

There is a minute hesitation before he says, “Yeah, take it, I’m not going anywhere.”

Jacqui removes the panties from the flashlight, pulls on a T-shirt, and heads out into the night. Justin waits in the sudden
pitch dark, counting the seconds till her return, feeling a terrible pain in his missing leg. He has been trying to limit
the number of painkillers he is taking, because he can’t think clearly when he’s full of them. In the dark, strange, unpleasant
thoughts occur to him about the people he loves. He becomes panicky. He won’t even let himself think about the future. His
prosthesis is lying somewhere, abandoned, buried in the blankets. He begins to search for it in the dark.

Jacqui makes her way across the lawn, enjoying the breeze and the damp grass on her bare feet. There are few lights on in
the house; it must be nearly midnight. Just one in her parents’ bedroom and two at Kes and Sheryl’s end of the house. She
finds this interesting. She has been wondering how Kes and Sheryl can sleep together. She finds it more credible that her
own parents can at least continue to sleep in the same bed, since they seem to be in denial. Probably, she thinks, they can
lie in the same bed and each pretend they’re on his or her own. The light in Christopher’s room is out; presumably he was
asleep hours ago. She lets herself in through the back door.

Jacqui goes to what passes for the kitchen and is pleased to see that amid the meager supplies—these days no one seems to
be thinking about grocery shopping or even about eating—there is a packet of chocolate digestives. She seizes this and two
cans of beer, then runs lightly on the same noiseless feet back the way she has come, proud of her spoils.

She tracks back across the lawn, taking a different path this time, perhaps a little shorter. Now, walking away from the illuminated
house and into the darkness, she feels suddenly afraid. She is aware of a tiny knot of panic sitting under her ribs. Suddenly
she comes to a halt. She has heard something. She listens. Perhaps the noise came from the garden shed, perhaps it is Justin
moving around.

She starts to walk again, but now the sound is closer at hand; she can hear breathing, and now she begins to run, and behind
her, feet pound. She feels a hand grab for her but manages to evade it, slithering like a snake from its grasp. She is a dancer,
and she pushes her bare feet into the earth and springs to one side, wrong-footing her assailant. She calls for help, and
suddenly Justin’s voice is shouting her name, and she can just make out the shape of him in the door frame of the shed, a
flashlight in his hand, shining it across the orchard so that it reaches her. And suddenly she is alone again, her assailant
vanished into the night.

She races to Justin and almost bowls him over.

“What was that all about?” he wants to know. “And where’s the food?”

“I dropped it. Out there,” she gasps. “Didn’t you see her?”

“See who?” Justin sometimes thinks Jacqui’s paranoid. All that stuff about Sheryl and Ronald Evans had been an embarrassment.

“Sheryl,” Jaqui says, her voice high and panicked. “Sheryl was trying to kill me.”

T
HE next morning I rang Finney and told him about Jacqui’s telephone call.

“That explains it, then.” His voice didn’t express surprise; it rarely does.

“That explains what?”

“They’ve gone. They’ve been camping out in the garden, but the shed is abandoned. They’ve taken Anita’s Mini. No one saw them
go, which probably means they didn’t want to be seen. They’ve taken clothes and food. It looks as though they’ve moved out.”

“Who was it who noticed they’d gone?”

“Sheryl, of all people. The only adult who isn’t a parent of one of them.”

“And there was no note, nothing? Jacqui usually rents with friends. Could they have gone there?”

“They’ve checked, she’s not there.”

“Where, then?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

As we said good-bye, I realized he had given up telling me this was none of my business. Anyway, my guess was pretty straightforward.
I dialed Justin’s mobile number, and when he answered I asked where I could find him and he gave me an address.

Outside the Europa supermarket, men were unloading loaves of bread in wire trolleys from a van. It meant that the tradesman’s
entrance was open, and I managed to slip in and up the stairs. On the first floor there were small, dusty offices, none of
which seemed to be manned. I walked up another flight of stairs. This, Justin had told me, was Sheryl and Kes’s old flat,
abandoned when they’d moved to Sydenham. I tried to imagine Sheryl here: Sheryl supervising men carrying a leopard-skin sofa
up the narrow stairs; Sheryl tottering up in high heels and leather trousers; Sheryl lugging up a carrier bag with a chandelier
clanking around inside. The stairs were steep and claustrophobic, with small, high windows and years of grunge washed into
the seams. Voices, the noises of a supermarket and of the busy street outside, wafted up inside the building.

On the second floor, I found three flats. Number 1C, Justin had said. I rang the bell. The door looked pretty solid, a heavy
gray, forbidding metal. But it vibrated gently to a soul beat. Nobody came, so I tried knocking, once politely and then a
second time hard enough that my fist hurt. I waited again, and eventually the door opened on a chain, the music got louder,
and Jacqui peered out. When she saw me her face twisted. I waited while she went through her by now familiar internal argument:
Was I friend or foe? More help or hindrance?

“May I come in?” I asked. She had told me, after all, about the attempt on her life. She had chosen me—or had allowed Justin
to choose me—as her confidante. She didn’t know whom to trust, but she needed to trust someone. She took a step back and opened
the door.

Inside, the flat showed signs of earlier occupation by Sheryl. There was a swagged curtain at a tiny metal-framed window,
and something that might have called itself an armoire stood hunched under the low ceiling. The paint was peeling, and the
distinctive smell of mold came from a doorway that opened onto a bathroom. Justin emerged leaning on his crutches. When he
saw me, he stopped still. How, I wondered, had he got up the stairs?

“How did she know?” Jacqui asked him.

He shrugged. “I told her.”

Jacqui looked awful, unwashed, unbrushed, clearly still dressed in yesterday’s clothes.

“They’ve probably all guessed where we are,” she said.

“Well, none of them can be bothered to come looking for us.”

Jacqui gave him a dark, dismissive look. “She came,” she said.

She turned her back on me and walked past Justin. I followed her into what turned out to be both bedroom and sitting room,
barely furnished with what Sheryl had decided to leave behind: a sofabed, extended to its full width. The walls, a nasty shade
of pink, were naked. There was a small table here, too, which probably counted as the dining area, but there were no chairs.
Jacqui sat on the edge of the bed. There was a sleeping bag laid out on top of it, and dirty cushions that had served as pillows,
but otherwise no bedding. It struck me that there was a strange odor about the place, as though it had been closed up too
long with too many bodies inside. Had it really built up in the few hours that Jacqui and Justin had been there?