I spent all morning trying to get hold of Finney to tell him that Mike Darling was on his way back to Britain. It wasn’t my place to tell DCI Coburn what his job was, but his ability to conduct a criminal investigation far outshone mine, and my priority was to find out what had happened to Melanie. When I eventually reached Finney, he heard me out, but he was reluctant to get involved.
“I’m not going to tell them what to do,” he told me in a low voice, “they’ll find out soon enough that he’s back. Coburn’s a professional. He knows what he’s doing.”
I dragged Sal to the canteen for coffee. He hated any place that didn’t serve alcohol and sneered around him at anyone who dared to come close.
“I’ve seen an allegation that Melanie led a patrol into danger just to get the pictures. Is that possible?”
“It sounds unlikely.” Sal’s eyelids were still heavy, and he looked as though he were sleep-talking, but I knew his brain was wide awake. “But Robin, you know the line between truth and finessed truth doesn’t actually exist.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“All right.” Sal hunched his shoulders and appeared to warm to the subject. “Just for argument’s sake, you understand. If you see a correspondent reporting from Moscow, with a window onto Red Square behind him, is he in Moscow?”
“Yes.”
“Correct. Is there a window onto Red Square behind him?”
“Probably not. There’s most likely a screen, with prerecorded film of Red Square that loops round and round. Watch long enough and the same clouds scud across the same bit of sky.”
“Is that faking it?” Sal is great on rhetorical questions, and he answered himself. “Not at all, it’s just misleading.”
“It’s faking it,” I disagreed.
“Call it what you will. Faking it, being creative, that’s my point.” Sal made an expansive gesture. “How about this? You’re making a documentary about Arizona. You need some filler shots, you’ve got so much bloody sand that it’s pouring out your ears. You have some great film you shot in New Mexico with wheeling birds in the sky. Vultures, eagles, parrots, I don’t know one bloody bird from the next. You edit them in. Hey presto, New Mexican parrots in the sky above Arizonan deserts. Faked, misleading? Does it matter unless you’re a bird?”
“Or an ornithologist,” I said. “Here’s one. An anchor in the studio in London. He’s just read a news report about a shootout in Atlanta. The correspondent in the U.S.A. is on the screen. He describes the shooting in dramatic detail as though he were there, or had at least interviewed a witness. . . .”
“But actually he just watched it on CNN, I know, I know, it happens. But all of these are trivial. Trivial . . .” Sal savored the word. “Okay. You’re on top of a hill in Afghanistan in a lull in the fighting, Northern Alliance fighters with a few dug-in tanks on your hilltop, Taliban opposite, everyone just sitting and waiting. So peaceful you could hear a pin drop. Down below is a village, women and children going about their business. On top of the hill, the men with the guns see you arrive with a bloody big camera, and they say hey-ho, here we go, helpful as anything. Shall we take a potshot to make your trip worthwhile? Set up your camera over there, maybe you’d like to stand in that trench we’ve helpfully dug.”
Sal broke off. Reached for his coffee and pulled a disapproving face as the cold liquid hit his throat.
“And?”
He shook his head, shrugged. “Well, they’d probably have fired the guns sometime. If not that day, maybe the next. If not then, maybe in a week’s time. You might as well get it on film while you’re there.”
When Lorna called and reminded me it was time for our weekly lunch, I tried to back out of it. In the end I couldn’t say no. By the evenings my big sister is exhausted. She’s returned to work on a part-time basis and her office is around the corner from mine, so we grab what we can when we can.
She suggested we meet in a café called Dolce Vita, and I agreed. There’s never any point in disagreeing with Lorna. When I got there she waved me over to the window where she’d secured a table and greeted me as she often did, with an imperative rather than a hello.
“Sit,” she ordered, “and relax.”
It was hot outside and like a greenhouse by the window, but Lorna always feels cold, so I put up with it. I found myself almost blinded by the sunlight, so I dug my sunglasses out of my bag.
“Did I miss something? You’ve won an Oscar?” Lorna inquired. I glared at her. “Seriously, how’s your face?”
She reached out across the table, and I allowed her to remove my sunglasses and lift my hair back from my scar.
“I can hardly see it,” she said. “I don’t know what all the fuss was about. Okay, let’s order, or we’ll never get our food.” She beckoned a waiter and ordered, on my behalf as well as hers, two grilled vegetable salads. “That is what you want, isn’t it?” she checked as he turned to go.
“That’s fine.”
She’s my sister, so my expression immediately alerted her to the fact that my mind was not on grilled vegetables, and when I said nothing, she persisted.
“It’s nothing,” I told her, and refused to budge. Lorna sticks her nose into everyone’s business. You have to give her the verbal equivalent of a light smack to keep her out of it.
Lorna was annoyed, but there was also something eating her up, something making her excited and jumpy.
“Joe is coming over,” she told me.
I had introduced Lorna to Father Joe Riberra nearly two years ago, and it was difficult to forget the bolt of electricity that seemed to pass between them as they shook hands that first time. I knew they’d been in e-mail contact since, but I didn’t know whether sexual energy of that sort could flourish in the ether. Had she converted him to lust, or had he converted her to the Lord?
It soon emerged that Lorna had seen a program a couple of days before about the celibacy of the priesthood, and it was now obsessing her. Did I realize that celibacy was not a dogma of the church, but a regulation, that the pope could change it at will? she asked. Did I realize that many priests had left the official Catholic Church in order to marry but continued in a breakaway church? Did I realize that in the early church, priests had married and had defied calls to abstain from sex, that they had had children, and that some popes were even the sons of popes, and that it was not until the year 1139 that Pope Innocent II finally decreed that priests must not marry?
“It sounds as though you made notes.”
“I just remember because it’s so interesting,” she retorted. “Don’t you think it’s interesting? We’ve all grown up thinking Catholic priests have to be celibate, but they don’t, not really.”
“Lorna,” I said gently, “you’d have to convince him, not me, and I would think he knows most of this already.”
She stared at me. “I have to have him,” she said, tears rising to her huge eyes.
I gazed at her, and my heart went out to her. When we were young, she was the dominating force, the stunning beauty, the razor-sharp mind. For the past few years, she had been physically incapable of taking control of her life. Now, as she recovered her energy, she seemed to want to grab hold of everything and bend it to her will, as though all of this—a hunger for love, the need for sex—had roared back to her in full throttle.
There were many times, when we were young, when Lorna had comforted me. But it has always been impossible to comfort her. When I started to speak, she waved me off the subject. I waited, as always, on her whim. When she spoke again, it was in a conversational tone.
“Gilbert,” she said, and as soon as she uttered his name I knew this topic might be easier for her, but not for me, “he ran into trouble in France.”
“What kind of trouble?” My voice sounded heavy.
“I dread to think. Business trouble, I suppose. He’s not very forthcoming, but he needed a place to stay, so I’ve let him stay at Ma’s. Well, Ma’s not there.” She was immediately on the defensive, and with good reason. “The place is empty; it might as well be used or it’s just going to waste.”
My jaw had dropped. I was appalled.
“She’ll kill you,” I said. Which was not, in my view, an exaggeration. What Ma would do when she returned to find her former husband and Antichrist installed in her home was too horrible to contemplate.
Lorna had that obstinate look in her eye that we all missed so much while she was ill and that now irritated me beyond reason.
“She’ll never know. He’ll be gone long before she gets back. He understands it’s just temporary, but he’s so grateful. He’s got nowhere else to go.”
“And why is it he has no friends?” I challenged her. “Could it be that he is untrustworthy and dishonest, and takes advantage?”
“He has me.” Lorna was gruffly defensive.
“You’re mad,” I told her, and I was really angry. Angry that she was unable to let well enough alone, angry that she was willfully antagonizing our mother, angry that she was getting me involved.
For an hour I tried to talk Lorna out of installing Gilbert in Ma’s house, but either she didn’t see it or she relished the prospect of baiting Ma. I suspected the latter, and by the time I left the restaurant we were scarcely speaking.
When I got back to my desk, I found an e-mail waiting from my mother.
It’s all very pretty, obviously. But what is the Point? What am I supposed to be Doing with myself? I’m Bored. I think I will be back later this week. I’m going to ring up and find out about planes. I haven’t unpacked, I don’t think I belong here. Nancy seemed quite Normal in London, but I can’t get the hang of her here.
It was as well she had not overheard my conversation with Lorna, or she would indeed be on the next plane. I replied.
You’re scarcely off the plane, Ma, give it a chance. For heaven’s sake RELAX.
And then I remembered that was exactly what Lorna had told me to do before she sent my blood pressure rocketing.
That afternoon, several things fell into place. Henry from the photo archive finally rang me and gave me the name of the photographer who had taken the picture of Mike and Melanie: Edwin Rochester. I had never heard the name, but I called around and learned that he was a young freelancer. I rang around some more—by now I was calling way beyond the circle of my immediate acquaintances—and within another hour I had a mobile phone number for him. When I finally got through to him, it felt a little like tracking down Father Christmas. Except that he had a New Zealand accent. He was at Heathrow, he told me, about to fly off to Chechnya. How could he help me? I could hear him scratching his head at first when I described the photograph. But then he got it. Afghanistan, he told me; the photograph had been taken on the road from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif in late October three years earlier, just before the launch of the air war. I got to my feet and fired questions at him while I paced the room. This new piece of information was a revelation. Afghanistan, between Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, north of the Salang Pass, on a road of stark, arid beauty with minefields to right and left and the bright fertility of an irrigated valley in the distance. That was where Mike Darling and Melanie had met for the first time. And immediately my brain made the connection with Sean Howie, who had died in an ambush in Kabul. Melanie had been there, too, weeks later.
“What happened?” I asked over the sound of the airport announcements at his end.
“Melanie and I were driving north to join the Northern Alliance. It was a pretty hellish journey. We spotted this patrol stuck a couple of hundred meters away in a little valley. They’d been following a jeep track off the main road—God knows where they were heading—and we saw them from the road and drove down out of curiosity. We might even have offered to give them a tug. But as soon as we got there, we came under fire from the ridge. A couple of them were out of the vehicle trying to move some rocks, and we’d just got out our jeep to go and talk to them, so when they started firing we were all the way out in the open, and we hit the ground. That’s when I took the photo.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, there was some shooting back and forth, and after a while they scarpered and we got out of there. Melanie stayed with the patrol.”
“They asked her along?”
Edwin gave a bark of laughter. “You must be kidding. Those guys can’t stand journalists. Melanie was muttering to me that she wanted to stick around. She’d been trying to find a way to spend time with special forces, but I wasn’t interested, I had to get on to Mazar-e-Sharif. So Melanie told me to drive on and leave her there, and that she’d catch up with me later. So that’s pretty much what I did. The next time those guys turned around, they’d have just found her there with her backpack and her camera.”
“You just left her there? In the middle of Afghanistan?”
“Hey”—he sounded defensive—“you can’t argue with Melanie when she’s got an idea in her head.”
I shook my head in disbelief. But the fact was that she had survived. Besides, something else was nagging at me.
“So how did the photo get to have Darling’s name on it if the SAS are so publicity shy?”
“I showed the photos to Melanie later, when we were both back in London. She must have told me his name, and I must have written it on the print and forgotten about it. I was in a hurry when I gave those prints to the publicity department, didn’t really look at what was in the envelope, just dropped it off and ran. I guess someone in the publicity department didn’t realize Darling’s name shouldn’t have been used. Actually, his face shouldn’t have been used, either, but there you go. You say you found the picture on a publicity board? It must have been up there for years.”
“Nothing went on between Mike and Melanie did it?” I had to ask, although it felt ridiculous. From what Edwin had just told me, the photograph was taken when they met under fire. No tenderness then, just a rude introduction.
“Between the guy in the picture and Melanie?” Edwin repeated the question incredulously, as though it sounded as ridiculous to him as it did to me. “If so, she didn’t tell me about it.”
I could hear from his breathing that he was walking through the terminal.
“Hey, that’s my flight they’re calling. Darling and Melanie?” he repeated again, wonderingly, as though he might need a few hours to think it over. “Nah,” he said eventually. “They’d just met, what could have gone on out there? Although anything could have happened after I left. She stayed on with them. Can’t help you with that.” In the background I could hear a woman’s voice asking for his boarding pass. “Sorry, gotta go.”
I said good-bye, but the phone had already gone dead.
As I hung up, I realized I’d failed to ask him all the questions a producer should ask: What is your schedule? Could you make some time to answer some questions on film for me? I didn’t beat myself up about it. I knew Edwin would have said no anyway. Trying to get any journalist on the receiving end of an interview is like persuading a pig to fly. They’re not attracted by the moment of fame: They know that what goes up comes down.
Finney called me to say he’d passed on my message about Mike’s return.
“Did you know, incidentally,” he asked, “that Veronica Mann is now working down there?”
Veronica Mann had worked with Finney when he was investigating the death of Adam. I had seen them both as the enemy then, but Finney had become my lover and Veronica my friend. Not that we had seen much of each other in the past year.
“You told me she got transferred. What was that about?”
“Some jerk making trouble for her. I dealt with him. But she wanted a change of air.”
“Will she have anything to do with the investigation of Mike Darling?”
“I don’t even know if there’s going to be an investigation of Mike Darling,” he warned me. “Don’t hold your breath.”
I hung up, frustrated and in need of coffee. So I took a walk to the canteen and then to thank Henry in the picture library. He reached under the counter and brought out a buff envelope full of still photographs taken by Edwin Rochester in Afghanistan. I thanked him again and took the photos back to the office.
Edwin Rochester operated on that spot where journalism meets art and history. I thumbed through the black-and-white prints. I was familiar with news photographs. But the play of light and the careful composition of the frame lent these photographs an almost spiritual dimension in Edwin’s hands. This is what still photography can do that the movie camera rarely achieves. The movie camera appears to offer more, a continuous flow of images, no danger of boredom, nothing missing, no gaps; there is the energy, the flow of real life. Yet it is the still photograph that forces the viewer’s eye to dwell and examine life minutely, to confront the expression on the face, the twist of a limb, the stance of victor or defeated.
Mostly these were pictures of combatants and civilians caught in the crossfire. But there were pictures of village boys leading jeeps through the shallows of a river, and of donkey convoys. There were photographs of Melanie, too, in cafés, in hotel rooms, on her own, with other journalists. Two pictures were of a picnic on an unidentified hillside in an unidentified country, a blanket spread on the ground, Melanie smiling with a hunk of bread and cheese in her hand, and then, presumably having eaten her fill, lying on her back in the deep grass, eyes closed in sleep. I don’t know why they were there, in the envelope with the other pictures. They were surely of no use to the Corporation. I rang up Henry and asked him why these photographs were stored in the photo archive, but all he could suggest was that Edwin Rochester had forgotten they were in the envelope, and that tallied with what Edwin had told me on the phone.
In several of these images, Melanie looked exhausted. Typically, she had a slight smile on her face, and she was holding a cigarette between her fingers. She dressed for comfort—T-shirts and jeans—and her hair was loose over her shoulders. She allowed the gray to show in among the brown. She was tall and strong, born to carry a camera. In one photograph she wore a sleeveless shirt, and the muscles on her arms were defined and powerful.
I flicked through the collection, and it occurred to me how very many photographs there were and how sympathetic they were, catching her in different lights, in different moods, her eyes always distant, watching, full of knowledge.
That night I went back to the videotapes, and I went straight to the Afghanistan film, fast-forwarding, stopping only to check faces. At last I found it, a nighttime scene in a narrow street of mud houses, four men who had adopted local dress, gathering together. I recognized Mike Darling, his face partially swathed in a scarf.
I froze the image.
I had discounted Afghanistan after reading the account of Sean Howie’s death. The whole story there was something and nothing, Melanie’s involvement so minimal that I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with her death. But now I knew something else had happened in Afghanistan.
I gazed at the screen, and slowly, out of context, I thought I recognized two other faces. There was Alan Hudder, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d met in Cambodia. In Afghanistan he had looked less fleshy, more focused. The other face I recognized was that of Kes. He stood talking with the group in a low voice, apparently giving instructions. He was gesturing with his hands. The fourth face was so heavily swathed in cloth I could not see it. The screen went blank. I frowned, suspecting mischief, then I glanced at the digital readout, which had stopped at forty-two minutes, and I realized that this at least was not a mystery. Melanie had simply run out of tape.