I read Goodnight Moon to the children determinedly through a chorus of giggles and shrieks. The house in Goodnight Moon with its high ceilings and its fireplace and its rich paintwork, warm carpet, and striped heavy drapes, is not unlike our flat. The rooms are cavernous, and I sometimes look up from the book and half expect to see a little old lady sitting in a rocking chair by the fireplace and whispering, “Hush.” I close the book, switch on a tape of nursery songs, lean over to kiss twin foreheads, spend a few moments begging them to be quiet, then make my way to the kitchen, holding my breath in case one of them hears my footsteps and calls out to me. I can still hear flurries of laughter, and Hannah shouting out, “Good night, toilet!” to a squeal of delight from William, and there is even the thump of a foot on the floor, but I ignore it.
I toast a piece of bread and grill a tomato on top with garlic, chopped basil, and butter, which is all the cooking I have energy for. Then I collapse on the sofa and put in a videotape, turning the volume down low so that the sound of gunfire doesn’t disturb the children. After a few minutes I put my supper aside, unable to carry on eating.
These are images of hell on earth, a pendulum of violence that Melanie clings to as it swings from continent to continent. In Gaza she runs with the camera filming through a cloud of tear gas. I can hear it catching in her throat, hear those who are running alongside her crying out, see them falling to the floor, clutching at their eyes.
In Kosovo she tours sites of mass graves on open green hills. She is handed a white paper suit to cover her clothes in order to enter a bullet-riddled house, the site of a massacre, that is full of rotting bodies. She is handed a mask, because inside investigators are piecing bodies together like jigsaws. She stops filming to put on the protective gear. She and her fellow journalists process in, walk from room to room, pausing here and there, as if they were looking to purchase real estate. In the village, a group of women wail for a son whose body is exhumed from a mass grave and transferred, in a sheet, to a coffin.
In Fallujah she films body parts in the streets, patrolling troops, burned flesh. She is there when a roadside bomb goes off, and four soldiers are felled in an instant, quivering on the ground, waiting for help, blood spilling from them. It is the sound that makes my flesh ice over, the high-pitched cries of pain. They are grown men, but their screams sound like a newborn demanding help to stay alive.
In several of the film clips, especially in Rwanda and in Iraq, there are images that would never have made it onto television even in the middle of the night when no one is watching. Images so evil that they would leave a bloody stain on the television screen. Men and women and children turned into gaping wounds, fly-crawling orifices, brains liquefied, entrails raw, flesh pierced and punctured, eyes open with the spirit fled. She must have known these images would never be shown, so I wonder why she films them. Is it because she wants to campaign, back in headquarters, for a more bloody telling of the story? There are journalists who believe that to report war in the way it arrives, sanitized, on the evening news, is essentially to misrepresent the truth. Is it because she feels these things must be documented, whether or not they are ever shown? Or could it be a morbid fascination born of being too long around the dead?
Suddenly it seems ridiculous to me to suspect Mike Darling of anything when all at once the accepted version of Melanie’s disappearance seems to make perfect sense. Which horror of all these was the worst? What one thing makes a person break who has already seen so very much? Because it seems to me, as the images flicker across the scene, that to break is inevitable.
When the telephone rings, I am relieved of the obligation to watch, and I find myself filling my lungs with air as though I have been drowning. It is Q, Rosemary crying in the background.
“Are you free at one for lunch tomorrow?” the new father asks. “I may have something for you.”
The day Lieutenant Sean Howie died in Kabul three years ago, his parents were not there. Nor were the superior officers who would later try to determine how exactly he had died. At least the commanding officers had access to evidence, to witness reports, to forensic clues. His parents, however, had only the little that they could glean from talking to their son’s friends, and they had little enough to say. Some could not bring themselves to talk about Sean’s death, and others were intimidated by the cloak of secrecy the Ministry of Defense had thrown over the events of that night. The little information his parents had they transcribed, and that meager record of their son’s last minutes they sent to Ivor Collins and to the army, because they blamed both Melanie and the army for his death.
I don’t know how Q got hold of the dossier, but he passed it to me over a hurried lunch the next day.
“It’s a photocopy,” he said in a low voice, “but I’m assuming it’s the information that matters. As you can see, the Corporation received it a year ago, months after the boy died.”
I thanked him. “Though I’m not sure how far I can go with this,” I said. “Can I ask how you got hold of this?”
“I have a friend in personnel,” he said, and winked.
Back at home in the evening, I thumbed through the pages of printout. The complaints against the army were fairly well documented. Sean Howie’s parents had a letter from their son complaining about the communications equipment his unit had been issued with. It had a tendency to go off frequency, as indeed it had done on the night he died.
This claim was backed up by photocopies of other soldiers’ letters home, letters that had been passed on by friends. One soldier sent a wish list of equipment to his mother, including walkie-talkies, and asked her to buy it on the Internet and get it sent to him, but Lieutenant Sean Howie asked for nothing. He just joked about his vulnerability.
“I suppose it gives the enemy a fighting chance,” he wrote once, “which otherwise they wouldn’t have, given as how they’re not what you’d call crack troops. I never thought I’d be fighting a war without good coms. What next? Hey, lads, you’re way too good to fight people this badly trained, so we’re going to take away your body armour. Maybe we should pretend to be crap so they don’t take away our guns.”
There was a photocopy, in the dossier, of a brief note from the army, saying that the issue of the failed communications equipment was being looked into. That note was dated two months after the death of Sean Howie. I looked for a subsequent document that might give the findings of this investigation, but there was nothing.
There was, however, an extract from a letter Sean Howie had written to his girlfriend, dated just one day before he was to die. The rest of the letter was blacked out.
“We’ve got a camerawoman with us,” Howie wrote. “She’s a bit standoffish, keeps herself to herself. Still, she likes the action, her camera’s never off her shoulder. The only thing she’s ever interested in is where the shooting is, and whether that’s where we’re going, and if not why not.”
That was the last word from Sean Howie. If he wrote again, there was no record of it among the papers I had been given.
The next transcript in the dossier came from a fellow soldier, Taylor Sullivan, describing the ambush in which Howie was killed.
We were on the road out of town when we realized we couldn’t raise anyone on the coms. We carried on and out of the town, thinking we’d catch up with the others. We didn’t think we were lost, just that we’d got a bit behind. It’s so hot, we’re all boiled up and we’re all on the lookout for trouble, a bit on edge. Mel, the camerawoman, is with us, we’re all crammed up, and she’s always got her head stuck out because she wants to see what’s going on, and she says, “Look, there’s a bridge, wasn’t there a bridge on the route?” And Sean, who’s driving, says you must be crazy, I’m not going over there without any cover. I thought Sean was right. Melanie wants us to engage with the enemy, because that’s how she gets her pictures. But we just wanted to get home safe. But Phil mutters something about Sean being too scared to move—it’s like if Melanie said that’s the way to go, Phil thinks she must be right. He was a bit soft on her, although I didn’t see the attraction. Sean gets all fired up, and they have a bit of an argument. Sean asks Phil to repeat what he said, and Phil says what’s the point, you heard me, first you get us lost, then we’re going to get shot at while we sit here dithering. Sean is really pissed off, and he’s got to show he’s up for anything, and he drives towards the bridge. There’s this whacking great pipe on the road, and we have to drive around it at an angle to get onto the bridge. I know we should have thought about it, but it all happened so fast. Once we’re on the bridge we realize the pipe blocks off a retreat because we can’t reverse at that angle. Sean, who has sixth sense, says something about how it’s too quiet. Then he says, “Fuck,” and something explodes at the front of the vehicle, knocking us sideways, and the Land Rover collapses and tips onto its side, and we fall on top of each other, and the engine’s groaning and smoking, and we pile out, and someone’s screaming, and Phil’s wetting himself, and we’re under fire, and we’re sheltering under the Land Rover, returning fire where we can, and then up rolls the Land Rover that was behind us in the patrol, and I know they can get us out of there. But I don’t see Sean anywhere, and when I go and open the door of our Land Rover, he falls out, and you can see he’s dead. I’m not going to go into details, obviously, but I want you to know that he must have died instantly. The rest of us got out in one piece, but Sean didn’t, and I want you to know that he died because of his bravery in the service of his country.
Taylor Sullivan had printed his telephone number at the top of the page, but when I called, it was a woman’s voice that answered. I explained who I was and that I would like to speak to Taylor. But that, it seemed, was a problem.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said in a voice so quiet, I had to strain to hear, “but my son was asked not to speak to anyone about what happened, and although the investigation’s over it’s probably better for all of us if he doesn’t go over it all again in his head. He should never really have written to Sean’s parents at all, although of course he felt he must. Anyway, it’s all there. If you’ve seen the letter, you’ve seen all there is. He goes over it again and again, and it’s always just as he wrote it.”
I tried to persuade her, but in her quiet and polite way she was unmovable.
I called Finney. I just wanted to talk. The misery of last night’s videos and today’s dossier was heavy on me. I was trying not to rely on Finney for moral support, of course, trying to maintain my independence. But that all seemed trivial in comparison with the world as I was seeing it through Melanie’s eyes. How, I wondered, could she not have needed Sevi to comfort her? Finney sounded cheerful enough, but there was something in his voice that made me realize I had no idea what he was doing or who he was with. I pictured him at the other end of the line, in jeans and a sweater, dark, graying curls in need of a cut. Finney’s wife left him even before Adam left me.
Finney is self-sufficient. He grew up in a children’s home. It was a kind place, but still he had to learn to look out for himself. No one ever expected him to go to university, so he never expected to go. Instead he’s gone from one institution to another, from orphanage to police force. I once met the woman who ran Finney’s orphanage—she had since retired—and she told me that Finney was remarkably self-contained. She said that he spoke very little, yet he possessed a clarity of purpose that led the other children to accept him as their leader even when he ignored them.
He is entirely familiar with the selection of ready-to-cook meals at his local supermarket and has mastered the art of the two-for-the-price-of-one shop. He hates watching television. He reads rapidly, and for information, not for pleasure.
I imagine him, the sitting room window thrown wide onto his tiny yard to let in the sun, lying on his oversize sofa, remote control within arm’s reach on the carpet, his eyes closed. He listens to a small selection of music that he loves. He has a soft spot for gospel music—something I know only because I walked in on him one day and found him singing an improvised bass harmony. He stopped as soon as he saw that I was there, and neither of us has mentioned it since.
He listens to the radio for hours, in particular to the news and to current affairs programs, although he is scathing about journalists. And he likes silence. When I telephoned there was a woman’s voice in the background, and I didn’t know whether it was the television, the radio, or a live woman.
“Do you want to come over?” I offered.
He sighed. “I’ve got a couple of things I have to do here.”
“Okay. I’m going to take a trip down to Mike Darling’s house on Saturday, do you want to come? No kids. We could have a pub lunch on the way.”
Adam’s parents, Norma and Harold, were scheduled to come and take the children out for the day. There was a pause, and I fancied I could hear Finney thinking. I guessed he wanted to warn me off Mike Darling again but that he didn’t dare.
“Can I let you know in the morning? I’m sorry, I’m just busy with things . . .” His voice was low and distracted.
I assured him that was fine. I put the phone down and stared at it, as though it could tell me more. It wasn’t like Finney to play hard to get.