Route Five, Pursat, Cambodia
THE jungle is livid, the air solid with moisture from the monsoon rain. I feel as though I am breathing steam. Our Toyota Land Cruiser kicks up the yellow dust, and it falls limply back to the ground. My knowledge of this country’s history imposes an air of menace. When I stop the car to pee, I don’t wander off into the undergrowth because it is strewn with land mines. I have no intention of getting blown up with my knickers down.
For hours we’ve been driving on a road that is one vast pothole. We set out later than we intended and then lost an hour changing a tire, an operation that took all three of us: Dave, our local driver, and myself. Dave, my cameraman, is the perfect traveling companion. He never gets ruffled, never notices discomfort, takes everything in through cinematic eyes. We listen to Dave’s choice of audiobook, Herodotus’s history of the Persian wars.
“Have you been to this part of the world before?” Dave asks me. Dave is prematurely gray, bespectacled, with a small goatee. He has worked all over the world, but recently my missing persons series has taken us to rather less exotic locations, like Salford and Middlesborough.
I shake my head, pull a face. “Nope.”
“It’s not your kind of thing, is it?” Dave ventures. “Something that takes you away from your kids.”
For a moment I consider telling Dave to keep his nose out of my personal life, but I know I’m overreacting. He’s right. Every time I go away, I have to steel myself.
“Earning us a living means I have to go away sometimes,” I say eventually. “I just like to keep it quick.”
My itinerary doesn’t allow for much slippage. Hannah and William are waiting for me in London, and every day the invisible elastic band between us seems to stretch tighter. The twins are not impressed by professional ambition, particularly in their mother. And to them a week feels like a year, a month like a lifetime.
All this means that, unlike Melanie and Sal, I won’t make a career out of trouble spots. I gaze out the window at this land formed by monsoon and heat, with the history of genocide hanging over it like a cloud. Despite all that I have read, when we pass close to villages I am still shocked by the number of people, adults and children, who are missing limbs. It is a landscape that has existed all my life, and that I have never before seen, and that I would not have seen now if it were not for Melanie, who is now my work, my “story.” How much of the world is that “other” place, the unknown, strange, threatening, or exotic, heavenly or hellish? Melanie had seen it all, bumping across roads like this one, seeing worlds from the window that a tourist would never see, sharing terrain with the people who work the land and on occasion with the soldiers who come to protect or plunder.
In between the fighting and the famines there must have been hours of companionship on the road, and beautiful vistas, and the joy of unexpected friendship from strangers. And for the first time, I think of her in a different way. For the first time, I don’t ask myself why on earth she chose this life. For the first time, instead, I think what an immensely rich life she chose.
“Does Maeve know what you’re up to?”
“I sent her an e-mail the day we left, so she knows I’m in Cambodia,” I said slowly, “and she knows I’m following up on a missing person. I just didn’t happen to tell her that the missing person is Melanie.”
“I think,” Dave said wearily, “that she might not like it.”
“Why do you think I haven’t told her?”
“Brilliant.” His voice was heavily sarcastic.
“I’ll tell her when I get back.”
“Fucking brilliant.”
“I’m making a series on people who just disappear, and that’s what Melanie did. I see no need to explain myself to anyone.” I sounded defensive, even to my own ears.
Dave mulled this over. After a moment he got to the problem that had struck me about thirty seconds after Sal suggested I go to Cambodia.
“Where did you get the budget?”
“Well . . . originally I budgeted for a trip to Russia to follow up a student who disappeared, but then he turned up at his sister’s wedding, so . . .”
“You had wriggle room.”
“I had wriggle room.”
There was silence in the car for a moment. Then he said, “Even the Corporation’s given up on her. You’d think they’d want to keep everyone looking.”
In the early days after Melanie’s disappearance, the assumption in the press was that she had been murdered. When no body was found, and friends and family began to talk about her stressed mental state and the possibility that she had simply chosen to vanish, the Corporation began to come in for flak. Had her editors pushed her too hard? Had Melanie been given sufficient support? Had she been offered counseling for the many horrors she had seen? The speculation was, of course, no more than speculation. Pressure, stress, support: These things were almost impossible to measure objectively. And the Corporation had chosen not to engage in the debate.
“Melanie Jacobs is still missing,” one Corporation spokesman said. “At a time like this we feel it is irresponsible to whip up a storm of rumor and innuendo.”
The speculation had gradually died down, and I suspected that behind the Corporation’s decision to let Melanie’s name slip quietly out of the news was a desire to let sleeping dogs lie. I couldn’t, however, understand why. In my case, the Corporation had failed to support me when it looked as though I was going to be arrested on a murder charge. No such notoriety stained Melanie’s reputation.
“Darling may even have done a runner,” I told Dave. “He must know we’re on our way. I had to make a dozen calls to track him down; someone will have got word to him.”
Dave remained silent, and the silence was less enthusiastic than ever.
“Do you know Melanie well?” Carefully, I avoided the miserable past tense.
“I worked alongside her once. In Sierra Leone.”
“And?”
“And she’s a crazy lady.”
“How’s that?”
“She’s fearless, nothing stops her. She gets herself into situations, any situation if she’ll get pictures out of it. I wasn’t there, but I heard. She was with a stills guy from one of the wires. They were on the road to Masiaka. They went through one rebel roadblock. Just kept going. Then another. At the second one, the rebels opened fire on her. She and the wire guy got out and ran for it. They didn’t get back till the next day. We all thought they were dead then.”
It was a variation on a story I’d heard before. Dave was probably right that it was Sierra Leone. I’d heard a similar story from Sudan.
“There’s a point where tough turns into stupid. Maybe,” Dave mused, “she thought she had to show she was tough because she’s a woman.”
I look at him. Men either think women aren’t trying hard enough or else they think they’re trying too hard.
“Maybe she was just tough,” I said.
The track broadened out to become a clearing in the trees, a dusty open space, with what looked like a string of market stalls and a dozen ramshackle houses high on stilts. Dave checked the map.
“Okay, we’re here.”
We pulled in next to a Subaru SUV parked outside a hut that looked vaguely official. It had a signboard outside and a poster tacked to the wall that illustrated the various shapes and sizes of land mines. I opened the car door and stepped out, groaning with the pleasure of stretching my legs. The sun was lower in the sky than I had expected. I looked at my watch and grimaced. Evening was drawing in; the light was going. I didn’t want to have to come back the next day to film. It would be hard enough to get Mike Darling to agree to an interview at all, without asking him to put it on hold for twelve hours. Dave was thinking the same thoughts.
“It’s going to be a rabbit in the headlights job,” he muttered.
From nowhere, dusty children appeared, crowding around the car. I reached into the back for my bag, dug out some Corporation pencils, and distributed them into eager hands, wishing I’d brought more. Several of the children were missing limbs.
A figure eased his way through the throng. He was dressed in military fatigues. He had wiry, sand-colored hair, broad shoulders on a lean body, and a leathery, freckled, face. His jaw was set. I had seen this face before, in the photograph. I had even seen the expression before, obstinacy under fire, determination that he would not be beaten.
“So you found me,” he said.
A point in his favor already, then. He had known I was on my way and he had not run.
“I’m Robin Ballantyne.” I extended my hand, but he did not take it, and after a moment I let it drop. “Could you spare us some time?”
Darling opened his mouth as if to retort, but then his eyes went to the crowd that had gathered, and instead he jerked his head and led the way inside the wooden shack.
We sat at a simple table. In the center was a tray that bore a glass pot of clear leafy tea and several glasses. Darling took a chair opposite us, and for a moment he just sat, tipping his chair on its back legs, staring at us in unfriendly silence. Then he seemed to come to some unspoken decision. The chair legs hit the floor sharply as he sat forward, reached for the pot, and poured tea into glasses for us. It was a courteous gesture, but his face was dark with displeasure.
“Well?” he demanded. “What’s all this about?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m making a documentary series about people who disappear. People like Melanie, who vanish. We want to look into their state of mind, what might have made them run away. And since you were the last person to talk to Melanie, we would really appreciate it if you would answer a few questions. I know this is short notice . . .”
“It’s not short notice, it’s no notice,” Darling pointed out, his irritation barely in check. “You arrive out of nowhere, uninvited.”
“If we do an interview now, we can be on our way right away. We’ll drive on to the town tonight. We won’t have to bother you after that.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“Then it shouldn’t take long.”
Darling didn’t want us there, but he was savvy enough to know that Dave could film him sending us away, and then it would look very bad for him. I don’t exactly like the idea of shaming people into talking on film, but I’ve honed my persuasive forces pretty well over the years. Sometimes you just can’t walk away empty-handed. Like everything else, it’s a judgment call. There are times when I’ve wished I’d pushed harder, as some lowlife escapes the camera. And I’m afraid there are times when I’ve spent a sleepless night wishing I hadn’t pushed my way into something that should have remained private.
Darling’s eyes caught movement at the door, and he made a halfhearted attempt at social niceties.
“Justin, say hello to Robin and Dave, from the Corporation.”
Justin had pushed open the door and was half-inside, half-out, embarrassed to find us there. He was slightly built, with a white face like a moon and fine white blond hair that he wore to his shoulders. He was handsome in a pale way, even beautiful. He wore jeans and a pale blue T-shirt. He also had a handgun in a holster strapped under his arm.
“Sorry,” he said, “very sorry,” and partly withdrew, so that only his head remained visible in the doorway.
“This is Justin,” Darling repeated, “our resident big kid.”
Justin forced a smile. He must have been about eighteen. His baby-faced looks made him appear placid, but there was a flicker of what looked like real irritation in his huge gray eyes at Darling’s teasing. Still, if there was anger, he sat on it.
“I just came to say food’s ready,” he said. He turned to us and spoke again, and his voice was precise and light. “There’s plenty to go round. Although we’re not up to much in the way of domestic comfort, I’m afraid.”
“Thank you, but we really have to film before the light goes.” I tried to move things along, but Darling was still trying to delay.
“Or should I say Justin’s our resident big girl,” he muttered, and rose from his chair. Again the tone was bantering, but the words were hostile, pushing the boundaries of teasing. “Let’s eat. I’m not going to let my food go cold just to talk to you.”
Outside the hut, at the back, another simple table and chairs had been placed on a wooden veranda. The air was thick with the haze of blackening mosquito coils. Beyond the dirt yard, the countryside turned into scrubland, with patches of elephant grass and bamboo, and beyond that again the hill was forested. Through the dirt there ran a path that in turn led to a small bridge over what looked like a ditch and had once perhaps been a river.
Another man was sitting at the table, one ankle propped on his knee and a glass of beer in his hand. He stood up and reached out to shake our hands, introducing himself as Alan Hudder and passing me a business card that described him as a security specialist. This man was Darling’s age, and he too carried himself like a soldier, although he was thicker around the middle. A few questions, as Alan poured us Anchor beer, served to gather the information that he and Mike had been in the Special Air Service together and that they had learned their mine clearance skills in Africa and Afghanistan. They had left the army to go into the private sector and now worked on short-term contracts for HazPrep.
The mine clearance project came from another international security consultancy, a subcontract of a subcontract of a subcontract of a UN-funded program.
“And why not?” Alan asked rhetorically. “The beer’s cheap.”
I glanced at Dave. He shrugged. We couldn’t hurry this along. We’d just have to settle for an interview in the black of a rural Cambodian night. We’d be lucky if Darling agreed to an interview at all.
A local woman brought a bowl of rice to the table and some plates of wok-fried vegetables and meat. Dave was talking to Alan about Cambodian liquor, and since I was sitting next to him, I talked to Justin, aware all the time that Mike Darling was listening. I learned that Justin was at Warwick University, that he had completed his second year studying geography, and that this was his summer holiday.
“Kes—his dad—wanted us to make a man of him,” Darling said, his voice rising above Justin’s. Justin fell silent, his face contorted in humiliation. But Alan was now on his case.
“I thought I told you to lose the gun.” His tone was hectoring.
“You’ve got one,” Justin retorted.
“Everybody’s bloody got one around here. The difference is, I don’t flaunt it. This isn’t Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
A flush of embarrassment infused Justin’s face.
Dave, whom I had never seen speak unkindly, attempted to change the subject. He asked Justin how it was going.
“I can’t bear the heat,” Justin muttered.
“Or the shits, or the mosquitoes,” Mike added, these things to him mere pinpricks.
Abruptly, Justin stood up and excused himself.
“Gone to drink himself silly,” Alan commented.
I watched Justin’s retreating back, his shoulders slouched in defeat. As he reached the shack, he stopped to kick it hard, then walked on. His lips were moving, as though he was talking to himself. I became aware, after a moment, that Mike Darling was watching my face.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, pouring more beer.
“That we could give Justin a ride back to Phnom Penh and put him on a plane home.”
Mike grinned. “You think we’ve got him clearing mines, but we’re not stupid. He came out a month ago to help out at the local school, teach English to the kids. That was the deal with Kes. And I’m not kidding. He looks like a girl, but he’s stubborn as a mule. He wanted to come along, and he came, we didn’t force him.”
I was unconvinced.
“He’s twenty years old,” Mike protested at my expression, “he’s not as much of a baby as he looks. He’s got to learn that the world’s not all about getting up at lunchtime and slopping around in student bars.”
“He wants to be here,” Alan insisted. “He fancies Mike’s daughter, and this is his way of showing Jacqui he’s not a wuss, that he’s as hard as her dad.”
“Leave Jacqui out of it,” Mike said sharply. “They’ve known each other since they were kids. They’re like brother and sister. That’s an end to it.”
Alan said nothing, but he made a face that suggested Mike was deluding himself. When he spoke again, he didn’t mention Jacqui’s name.
“Justin’s going a bit doo-lally, don’t you think? I don’t know what Kes would think.”
“He’s not much like his dad, that’s true,” Mike said tightly.
We talked a little more, about land mines and the surrounding area, which was still thick with them. The priority was to clear farming land and the land around villages where the children played.
Mike pointed out the areas where the mine clearance teams had been operating.
“We started over there, behind the school,” he told me, “but here we back right into the worst of it. You see the bridge on the track over there? That was once the way into the village; it’s heavily mined.”
In the dark it was impossible to see the markers, the skull and crossbones that defined the area that was still off-limits. It was like knowing there was an animal out there in the dark, waiting to prey on you if you stepped outside your pool of light. It made me eager to be gone.
“Can we film our interview now?” I asked.
If it had not been for the garrulous Alan, I think that even then Mike might just have sent us on our way.
“Why not, Mikey?” Alan joked. “Have you got something to hide?”
Mike puffed out his cheeks. His arms were folded defensively in front of his chest, and he glared at his friend, but Alan had given him no way out. I was eager to seize the moment.
I glanced around for Dave, but he was already setting up the lighting. Our driver had gone off to eat his supper, so Dave was moving the car round to the side of the shack and adjusting the strength of the headlamps. They threw a ghastly light into the darkness. It wasn’t ideal, but we didn’t have time for the big lights. And we probably didn’t have the electricity for them, either. Dave put a tape in the DigiBeta and raised it to his shoulder. At last we were ready to film. Alan was eager to be in on this, too, and I knew Mike would split if I tried to exclude Alan, so I let him tell me stuff I already knew about HazPrep.
Alan couldn’t stop talking, nor could he stop glancing directly at the camera. I didn’t bother to tell him not to. I wouldn’t be using the film.
I asked about Melanie.
“Mike was the last person to see Melanie alive, you should ask him,” Alan said helpfully. Silently I gave thanks for this garrulous man. Nevertheless, that phrase again, “the last person to see Melanie alive,” had my skin crawling.
“The police soon realized I had nothing to do with it,” Mike said, goaded into speaking, his face as white as chalk in the light, his voice defensive. That wasn’t proof of anything, I told myself. In the cold light of the headlamps, it must have felt like an interrogation. “I scarcely knew her. We exchanged a few words in the bar. She said she had to go, and off she went. Everyone in the bar saw her leave. Last I saw of her. Next morning she wasn’t at class, wasn’t in her room, wasn’t anywhere.”
“Why did she go outside? Why didn’t she walk through the building to her room?”
Mike shrugged. “I have no idea. Should I?”
“What did she talk about that night?” I asked.
Mike shrugged again, but unlike Alan, he never took his eyes off mine. It was almost as though he were trying to outstare me, as though I’d give in and go away if he looked at me hard enough. On film it would look menacing. He wasn’t doing himself any favors.
“Same stuff we all talk about, all the time. About how easy it is to get killed. How she sometimes felt like getting out of the profession, leaving it behind.”
“She talked about leaving her job?” I echoed him. “I thought you said you exchanged a few words.”
“We had a few conversations over the three days.”
“Did she say where she was going if she left her job?”
“She wasn’t speaking in those terms”—Mike had become icily exact—“perhaps I’ve overstated it. She simply said that there were times when she didn’t want to see another war. She’d seen several of her colleagues killed.”
“On the day of Melanie’s disappearance, you practiced a hostage-taking situation,” I said. “She was hooded, pushed to the ground, then taken to what she was told was an execution ground. She was expected to talk herself out of trouble. It must have been a frightening experience.”
“Melanie was a good talker, from what I hear. She knew how to talk her way into things, and she knew how to talk herself out of them. She’d been in bad situations before. She’d have had a fighting chance. Not like some of them.”
“But you think she’d had enough of her job.” I tried to pin him down, but he just looked at me as though he were seeing me in the crosshairs of his rifle sights. So I left the question hanging and moved on.
“Melanie’s belongings were still in her room,” I said, “which suggested to the police that she didn’t go by choice.”
“Or that she did go by choice and left her stuff behind.” Mike shrugged. “People do strange things.”
“Do you believe Melanie Jacobs is dead or alive?”
“How should I know?”
“I’m asking what you think.”
He considered. He passed both palms slowly over his face and drew in a great breath.
“I think she’s alive,” he said at last. He made it sound like an article of faith. I let the silence lengthen.
“You knew Melanie,” I said. “She’s been gone for six months, and none of her family or friends has heard anything from her. Does that sound like Melanie to you?”
“I hardly know the woman.”
I could feel that he was willing me not to say what I said next.
“But you had met before,” I said.
He didn’t reply at once, and what started out as hesitation grew into a gulf of silence. His eyes pleaded with me.
“Wasn’t that so?” I prompted him.
“No . . . yes . . . We may have met, I don’t remember.”
I had the photograph in my pocket, but to pull it out hey presto would be the kind of sensationalist journalism that one tries one’s best not to stoop to. Besides, what did it prove? It was just a play of light on film, Melanie’s face hidden. It would be too easy for Mike to say simply that it wasn’t Melanie at all, that the caption was wrong. He might even be right there. Until I’d tracked down the photographer, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure myself that it was Melanie. But the expression on his face told me there was something there.
“Where did you meet?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“When?”
“Three years ago.”
“How?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss special operations.”
We stared at each other.
“What was the nature of your relationship with Melanie?”
“Relationship? We were in the middle of a bloody war.”
Suddenly, in the distance, there was a slurred, argumentative voice raised, complaining. It was Justin. He was fed up with being made fun of, fed up with this hellhole.
Mike, enraged by my questioning, stood up and yelled in the general direction of the voice, “Go home, then, if you’re such a baby. Go on, get the fuck out of here. I’ve had enough of your whining.”
A single shot was fired into the night.
“Fuck,” Mike muttered, as anxious as he was angry. “Where’s the stupid bugger gone?”
He was peering into the night when there was another shot and the sound of a voice, ranting.
“Justin!” he shouted. “Justin!”
About thirty yards from us, a figure emerged into the light thrown by the car headlights. He was walking backward, gun raised above his head, shouting. A child ran up to him, fascinated by the spectacle, and Justin waved him away with the gun. An adult grabbed the child and picked him up, swinging him away from Justin. The boy was crying, his voice rising into the night air and mingling with Justin’s.
“Stop, you idiot!” Mike shouted out, moving forward so that his voice reached Justin. But Justin wasn’t listening. And I realized, in that moment, what it was that had Mike so panicked. It wasn’t the gun. Not only the gun, at least. It was that Justin was wandering drunkenly and witlessly into the minefield.
I started to run toward him, shouting, adding my voice to Mike’s. In the dark it was hard to get my footing, and I stumbled but regained my balance. Still Justin was not listening. Drunkenly, he thought we were shouting to argue with him, not that we were trying to stop him. I was only yards from Justin now, and he was waving his gun around. Next to me, a villager suddenly stopped and grabbed my arm, bringing me to an abrupt halt, too. He pointed at the ground. I could not see what he was alerting me to, but I understood that I was about to step inside the skull-and-crossbones marker that defined the minefield. I stopped short of the minefield and yelled at Justin again. At last, illuminated in headlamps, he seemed to hear us.
Confusion crossed his face, then panic. He took another step backward. He did not see that he was moving toward the small bridge over the gully. I would learn later that no one had dared to walk there for years. Then, as he puts his left foot behind him, there was a tremendous blast that hit us, causing us to stagger backward, deafening us temporarily, spraying debris that reached to our faces, forcing us to close our eyes.
Already my memory of that nighttime drive exists only in snatches. We drive through the night across the potholes, toward Phnom Penh. I’m in the passenger seat, my eye swollen closed, the whole of that side of my face bandaged, blood leaking through the dressing. I’m dimly aware that our driver is casting worried looks at me. Dave is in the backseat, huddled in the corner. Justin lies across the backseat of the car, what remains of his left leg bandaged by Mike, who stopped Justin’s bleeding with a tourniquet, who gave Justin a shot of diamorphine for the screaming pain, and who now holds Justin’s head on his lap.
“Jesus, Kes, what have I done? I didn’t mean this, not this.” I hear Mike mutter under his breath, not once but a hundred times, pleading with Jesus and with Justin’s father, the two entangled, judge and jury who will condemn him for what he has allowed to happen. In my muddy brain, I hallucinate that it is Melanie blown apart in the backseat there with Mike and that we are at the War School, driving through the bomb-strewn woods.