THE 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?
“Why did you leave?”
“You know. I told you.”
“Why on earth would Sheryl want to kill you?” To me, the idea of Sheryl barreling across the lawn in camouflage and on tiptoes was ridiculous.
Jacqui slumped, if possible, even further. I remembered how I had first seen her, sitting in the garden with Christopher, poised and confident. Now she just looked scared. Justin came to sit by her on the grimy bed.
“Tell her,” he urged, no longer taunting. He took her hand and held it on his lap.
“It was Sheryl who took Christopher,” she said.
Gently, I reminded her that the police had checked Ronald Evans’s house and questioned Sheryl and had decided that neither of them had anything to do with the kidnapping.
“But we were wrong—she didn’t keep him there, she kept him here,” Jacqui said. “I suddenly realized Sheryl still has this flat. She put it on the market when they moved out, but so far they haven’t had a buyer. So we came here last night.”
“We found this.” Justin came forward, holding a scrap of plastic. He handed it to me. It was turquoise blue, with white lettering, part of a letter M.
“It’s come from a packet of nappies,” he said.
“It might have,” I said. There was not enough lettering to be sure. “Where did you find it?”
“It was stuck to the edge of the bin under the sink,” Justin said.
I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink and put my head inside, but there was nothing else to be seen.
“What do you think?” Jacqui asked. She might not have wanted me there, but she wanted vindication. To me, the smell of bodies in the flat was more persuasive than the scrap of plastic, but that was evidence of nothing. I looked around me, trying to imagine Sheryl here with a small baby, drugging his milk, leaving him alone, not caring, ultimately, whether he lived or died. And not any old baby, but Anita’s. I couldn’t imagine it, yet I knew that this was quite possibly a failure of imagination on my part. I could not imagine half the horrors Melanie had witnessed, yet they had occurred.
“I can’t believe Sheryl would do that to Anita, or to a baby,” I said. “I’ve never seen Sheryl be cruel. Have you?”
Jacqui gazed at me, and once again I could see her keen intelligence at work. She glanced at Justin.
“She could have stolen Christopher for herself, then lost her nerve,” Jacqui said. “You say she’s not cruel, but nobody likes her. Justin doesn’t, Kes doesn’t.”
Justin shook his head and turned away. He moved like a caged animal.
“The stairs,” I said to him. “How can you cope with the stairs here?”
“I can’t,” he said. “It took me forever to get up here. I can’t go out. It’s like a bloody prison. C’mon, Jacqui, no one’s after you. I’m going to go back to the house. I can’t stay in here. I’ll go mad.”
Jacqui looked impatient. “Don’t you think Christopher was here?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “It’s possible, I suppose,” I said.
“You should be going.” Jacqui jumped up. “I’ll walk you down.”
In the corridor, she closed the door to the apartment and led the way down the stairs to the next landing, where she stopped and spoke in hushed, urgent tones.
“You think I’m paranoid about Sheryl,” she said.
My heart sank. I could not endure another conversation about Sheryl. I shrugged in agreement.
“Okay, you do. You saw us the other day, right?”
I nodded.
“All right, I’m going to tell you what that was about, and then you’ll understand. I asked her to meet me away from the house like that because I decided to tell her about Kes and Mum.”
“What?”
“Kes and Mum. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You saw what I saw.”
“What did I see?”
“Kes, on the bed, with my mother,” she hissed.
“He scarcely even touched her,” I protested. “She was in a terrible state. He felt sorry for her.”
“Oh, come on, they’re”—her face contorted—“they’re having sex.”
I looked at her in disbelief. Jacqui, I thought, had become as unhinged as her mother. First this obsessive suspicion of Sheryl, and now this fantasy about her mother.
“I thought if I told Sheryl what Kes was up to, she’d put a stop to it,” Jacqui hurried on, her voice still low, casting anxious looks at the door. No wonder, I thought, that she did not want Justin to hear this. The news that Jacqui thought his father was sleeping with her mother would be instant death to their relationship. “She was angry. . . .”
“I saw her walk out,” I said.
“But I think she already knew what was going on between Kes and Mum,” Jacqui insisted, “and if that’s true, she’s got a good reason to want to hurt Mum.”
She looked at me expectantly. My brain slowly caught up with hers.
“You mean you think she could have taken Christopher to get back at Anita for sleeping . . . as you think . . . with her husband.”
“Exactly,” Jacqui agreed. “Then the next day I think she overheard me saying to Sergeant Mann that I had news for her. Then that night she tried to kill me in the garden.”
She looked at me with huge, worried eyes.
“Jacqui,” I said, “you’ve been under a lot of pressure. I’m not saying there’s nothing to what you’re suggesting. But . . . this thing in the garden. Frankly, it seems unlikely.”
Jacqui turned away from me impatiently.
“Jacqui,” I told her, “you’ve got to get Justin out of here. He can’t stay here. He can’t get in and out. He’ll go crazy.”
Jacqui turned to the wall, shaking her head, and eventually I realized she was crying.
“I can’t go back there,” she said, sobbing, “I can’t go back.”
I spent the afternoon in the editing suite, going through the rushes I had gathered for the documentary. I would continue to gather interviews over the next two weeks, but I was beginning to get a feel for how it would look.
I took a break from the rushes to call Lorna. Usually the bouts of exhaustion that she suffers pass in a few hours, and I wanted to check that she had recovered after she left my birthday dinner in Father Joe’s arms.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said in her determinedly upbeat way, “completely back to normal.” But I could tell there was something wrong, and I asked what it was.
“Joe’s gone back, that’s all,” she said.
“I see. Well . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about it now. I just can’t.”
We said good-bye.
Sal called to me from the office. He was at his desk, reading something off the computer screen.
“Look at this. Fred Sevi’s in the shit,” he said. “The minicab driver who reported taking him home from Elephant and Castle now says that he was paid to say that. The driver’s called Paul Dreyer. He says he never saw Sevi before Sevi walked into the minicab offices on January eleventh and asked for a cab to Barnet. On the way he struck up a conversation and offered a payment of five hundred pounds if Dreyer said he’d had him in his cab the night before.”
“Why would the driver change his story now?”
Sal turned away from the screen and swung around on his chair. “Perhaps he got scared?”
I sat down opposite Sal, thinking it through.
“The only reason for Sevi to fabricate an alibi would be because he had something to hide,” I said slowly. I knew I was stating the obvious. And of course both Sal and I knew the next logical leap, that he was guilty of something. If you have nothing to hide, why hide? But these were the same arguments I had found myself making about Mike.
“Well?” Sal was excited by the news.
I found myself speechless, shook my head, shrugged.
“Well?” he demanded again.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said, throwing up my hands. “We’re going round in circles here. I feel like you do, but it’s exactly what we were saying about Mike. Why would Mike lie about knowing Melanie if he’s not guilty of something? And we don’t even know she hasn’t just flipped and run off.”
Sal’s face soured. He didn’t like me throwing cold water on him.
There was a long, tense silence.
“I’m going home,” I said.
“PC Plod waiting for you, is he?”
“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he is.”