What She Knew

Cases involving child victims are not only burdensome from an investigative standpoint, but are also emotionally exhausting. Law enforcement agencies are commonly tasked with the simultaneous pursuit of multiple, time-sensitive avenues of investigation, often with inadequate resources (i.e., financial, logistical, manpower).

Boudreaux M C, Lord W D, Dutra R L, ‘Child Abduction: Aged-based Analyses of Offender, Victim, and Offense Characteristics in 550 Cases of Alleged Child Disappearance’. J Forensic Sci, 44(3), 1999

WEB PAGE – www.whereisbenedictfinch.wordpress.com

WHERE IS BENEDICT FINCH? For the curious…

NOTHING TO WATCH?

Posted at 05.03 by LazyDonkey, on Friday, 26 October 2012

This blog wants to recommend a television programme to you:

Go to: http://www.itv.com/jeremykyle

You could try:

Episode 198

I can’t trust you with our son! You spend all your time texting instead of watching him

Or you might enjoy this:

Episode 237

Admit you’re a bad mom and you can’t look after your children

Just a thought. Up to you.

Oh, and one more thing:

Did you know Benedict Finch fractured his arm last year, and his mother didn’t get it treated? He must have been in a lot of pain. Guess she wasn’t bothered. Or perhaps she was just busy doing something else.

RACHEL

First thing in the morning, facing each other across my kitchen table in our dressing gowns, our eye contact patchy, the air between us oscillating with tension, Nicky told me that she was going to leave.

‘I think we probably both need some time,’ she said. It was a quiet statement, and a very controlled one, but it was also damp with the undercurrent of what we’d been through the day before.

‘Just for a day or two, then I’ll come back. Will you be OK do you think?’

I had to clear my throat before replying in order to moderate my own tone and maintain the perfect neutrality of our exchange. The alternative was shouting, or weeping, or accusation, hastily spat out. After spending the night imagining darkly, now the sheer reality and familiarity of my sister’s presence and her own attempt at composure kept me in check.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’s fine.’

‘It’s the girls,’ she said, turning away, slotting bread into the toaster.

‘Of course you should go.’ And I did feel a twinge of guilt then, because Nicky’s girls needed her too.

Steam billowed up from the kettle and settled in a moist coating on the front of one of my kitchen cabinets. Skittle dragged his cast laboriously across the floor and flopped heavily onto my feet. Nicky burned her toast and I watched her back as she took it to the sink and used a knife to scrape the black crumbs from it with sharp motions. They fell in a layer of coarse powder.

‘Cook some more,’ I said.

‘I wanted to leave some for you.’

‘It’s OK, I’ll have-’ I started to say.

‘You need to eat, Rachel!’ It was an outburst, her composure splintering abruptly, and she dropped her toast and the knife into the sink and leaned heavily on her palms on the edge of it, so that her shoulders became sharp points on either side of her bowed head. She looked up at the window and the darkness outside meant that her reflection was razor sharp in the glass and our eyes met in that way. She was the first to lower her gaze.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Can I show you something?’

It was an email that had come from America during the night. Via the Missing Kids website, Nicky had contacted another family whose child had been abducted and they’d replied to her, a message of support.

‘Read it,’ said Nicky. ‘They understand.’

She handed me her laptop. Two pages were up: one her blog, the other her email. I couldn’t help noticing that she’d updated her blog:

‘Dear Custard & Ketchup friends and followers,

This is a heartfelt request for you to please bear with me just for now. I’m sorry to say I need to take a short break from blogging for family reasons. I was hoping to keep you busy with some new Tasty Halloween Treats, but that hasn’t been possible. If you’re looking for Halloween ideas my post from last year is available still and you’ll find lots of fun stuff to make and decorate there. Next to come: Christmas Cheer! Watch this space, I’ll be back as soon as I can…

Nicky x’

She saw me reading it. ‘Simon posted that. He updates it for me sometimes,’ she said, and then, ‘I’m wondering whether we should do a webpage for Ben. I could link to it from the blog.’

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my sister’s blog quite frequently, usually with some awe, especially at its mythologising and professionalising of family life. It was like a glossy food magazine, an enviable social diary. It was not my world.

I clicked on the email instead.

Email

From: Ivy Cooper ‹ivycooper@brettslegacy.com›

To: Nicola Forbes ‹nicky_forbes@yahoo.com›

25 October 2012 at 23:13

Re: Ben

Dear Nicky

BRETT’S LEGACY ‘DO SOME GOOD’

This is a time of tremendous pain for you and your family. We are praying for Ben, and for your family.

Our son Brett was taken from us seven years ago, and since then we’ve been through things that we never thought we would have to experience. Before he was taken from us, one of Brett’s favourite things to say was, ‘Mom, Let’s do some good,’ and we decided to make this a choice for our future, so that we could offer some help to other families who find themselves in the same situation.

We made this decision five years ago, soon after Brett’s body was discovered, and…

I stopped reading. I looked at my sister. ‘What happened to Brett?’ I said.

‘Have you read it all? Read to the end, you must. They actually understand what it’s like and it’s such a relief, honestly, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. I’ve been struggling so much to find anyone out there who knows what-’

‘What happened to him?’ I had to know. I didn’t like the email. I didn’t want to be part of this club: a family of devastated families. I wasn’t ready for that. Ben was going to come back to me. I wasn’t going to be like them.

‘It’s not relevant.’

‘It’s relevant to me.’

‘Brett died,’ Nicky said. ‘Unfortunately.’

‘How did he die?’

‘Rachel.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He was murdered, by his abductor. But that’s not the point, and they would never have found out what happened to him if the family hadn’t worked really hard to get the police to pursue the case.’

‘Ben’s coming back.’

‘I hope he is, God knows I do, you know I do -’ she was twisting a tea towel tight between her hands – ‘but we have to accept the possibility that he might not be back soon, that some harm might have come to him. It’s been six days.’

I couldn’t hear it. Not from Nicky. Not from anybody. Not now. Not ever.

‘I’m going to see Ruth,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This wasn’t how I wanted this morning to go.’

JIM

When you work a case like this one, you long for a lead. When you get one, you’re all over it, and that’s how I felt about Nicola Forbes. I’d been ready to chase her to the end of the line.

What you don’t expect is for something else just as strong to turn up, because then it’s a bit like being in a shooting range, trying to decide what to aim at, what’s a decoy and what’s real. Friend or enemy? Where should your sights land?

You can’t always tell straight away, but sometimes you are presented with a clear and immediate threat, and it’s obvious that you must respond to that.

That’s what happened on day six of the case. The letter arrived, and it changed the game completely.

It came in the morning post. Postmark BS7, addressed to Fraser directly, at Kenneth Steele House. Fraser’s secretary opened it. Her scream could be heard out in the corridor at the far end of the incident room and she bolted out of her office.

Fraser pulled us in straight away. The letter was in an evidence bag by then, and the secretary was already having her fingers inked next door so we could eliminate her prints. She was shaking and tearful, an extreme reaction for somebody who regularly got to file crime scene photographs.

‘Jim,’ Fraser said once we’d closed the door behind us. ‘Get John Finch in.’

Emma was there too. She didn’t look as though she’d slept. Under her make-up her skin was dull and strained. To anybody else she probably looked more or less her usual self – a tired version of herself, of course – but I could see a few extra small signs of disarray. Her hair wasn’t tied up as neatly as usual, and her shirt didn’t look fresh. You can do that if you want to know every inch of somebody better than you know yourself. I wanted to put my arm around her, ask her if she was coping, but I couldn’t of course. Not there, not then.

Emma’s phone rang just as Fraser finished filling us in. She glanced at it. ‘It’s Rachel Jenner, boss,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her?’

‘Nuh uh,’ said Fraser. ‘Not a word, not yet.’

RACHEL

Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.

Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.

I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved themselves unreliable.

I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.

I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilised society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran ahead of me in the woods then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be fundamentally good.

And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.

I looked at Zhang’s hand on the wheel, her knuckles white as she gripped it firmly at ten to two, and I realised that beyond my first impressions I hadn’t before thought about who she really was, or what she might be like.

‘Do you have a family?’ I asked her as the car idled at a junction.

‘I have a mum and dad,’ she replied.

‘I mean children of your own?’ Though as I said it, I realised she was probably too young.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t have children for a while, if ever.’

‘Oh. You know that already?’

‘I do.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Because I’m not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s life yet.’

She said it so simply that it gave me a frisson of shock because I realised that she already knew what I was only just working out – that we should look very carefully indeed before we leap, or believe, or trust – and that this younger woman had recognised that before I did only made me feel more foolish.

I didn’t know how to respond so I fixated on what was around me. Outside the sky was the kind of grey that looks perpetual and heavy, and the clothing of the people in the street was flattened against them by a strong wind. I retreated back into silence and the slow unfurling of the thoughts in my head, where I was starting to doubt everything I ever thought I’d known.

There was one consolation at that moment when everything weighed unbearably heavily and when suspicion was beginning to edge into every corner of my mind. It was that I was on my way to visit Ruth. I desperately wanted to see her because she was one of my favourite people in the world. Ever since Ben was a baby, she’d been a reassuring presence in my life, offering me gentle, unconditional support, and our friendship had grown alongside him.

Life hadn’t been easy for Ruth. To those who didn’t know her she would appear dignified, proud and fragile, always chic in a uniform of dark clothes with a scarf neatly tied at her neck, a silky flash of colour. As a young woman, she’d had the talent to be a concert violinist, but she’d also felt things so deeply that they could wound her.

Her violin playing had captivated John’s father. ‘I fell in love with her the first time I saw her play,’ Nicholas Finch would proudly tell everyone, in his Brummy accent. In fact most people who’d heard her play were entranced. She’d trained and performed on the instrument for years, but ultimately found public performance an intolerable pressure, and as a result, when she was in her twenties, shortly after marrying John’s father, she’d sunk deeply into the first of many bouts of deep depression that she suffered throughout her life.

I first met Ruth in early 2003, a good year for her. She and Nicholas were enjoying his retirement. After a long career as a GP, which had kept him working all hours, finally having him around had helped Ruth remain stable. They were planning to buy a small apartment in the Alps, and they’d taken a successful trip the previous year to Vienna, to see the buildings and neighbourhoods that Ruth’s parents grew up in. Lotte and Walter Stern had been musicians too, both successful and well-respected performers before the war, but they’d become refugees, driven from Vienna after Kristallnacht, when Lotte Stern was heavily pregnant with her daughter.

In the summer of 2003, John and I made our first visit together to his parents’ home in Birmingham. I found Ruth and Nicholas charming and welcoming. Their contrasting personalities intrigued me. Nicholas was a big, warm-hearted man with a kindly, relaxed manner, which had won him many friends amongst his patients during his years as a GP. His bonhomie was the opposite of Ruth’s nervous disposition, but she welcomed me cautiously.

Ruth’s mother and father both died in 2004, and she took it hard. As a tribute to them, she preserved many of their traditions long after their deaths. Lotte Stern had kept a special white tablecloth just for making the delicate strudel pastry that she took much pride in. Ruth kept the tablecloth, and more than once made what we called ‘Lotte’s strudel’ with Ben, asking him to stir the filling while she showed him the methods she used to stretch and roll the wafer-thin pastry.

In fact it was the tiny Benedict Finch, only 6lb 13oz when he was born in July 2004, who brought Ruth back to us after her parents’ death. She adored him instantly, she opened her arms to him and never wanted to let him go, and to all of our surprise, she included me in that embrace. Right after Ben’s birth, she came to stay and she helped me through the difficult first weeks and months, and then she never stopped helping. She became a companion to me, a friend and a wonderful grandmother to Ben.

John told me a story about Ruth once. It was a rare confidence about his childhood that he told me just after I’d met her. I think he wanted to explain her to me. It was a story that showed her darkness and her light.

When John was about nine years old, he’d gone to see Ruth after school. It was during one of her periods of depression, and he was ushered quietly into her darkened bedroom to show her a prize that he’d won that day.

Ruth examined his certificate, and then propped it up on her bedside table. She patted the bed beside her. It was a rare invitation and John sat down carefully, desperate not to break the moment, daring to do nothing more than glance around the room, which the drawn curtains had given a chiaroscuro quality, so it felt to him as if he and his mother were drawn characters in a children’s book.

‘Where I am weak,’ she said to him that afternoon, ‘you can be strong. Like your father.’

She held his hand tenderly, examining with the tips of her fingers each of his. He remembered that sensation. Then she spoke to him of music. John explained to me that when Ruth was drained of life, she seemed always to have music left in her, and it was this that was her gift to him, even when she lacked the energy to get him up, make his packed lunch, or take him to school in the morning.

After sitting with his mother until she was too tired to talk any more, John left her room with his little heart beating, relieved to escape her intensity yet longing for more of it.

When we arrived at the nursing home, Zhang said she’d wait in the car.

Ruth was in her room. It was a generous size, one of the nicer rooms upstairs, with large windows overlooking a garden and some mature trees below. It was a thousand times nicer than some of the grey and murky spaces we’d looked around before placing Ruth here.

Those homes were like holding pens, where residents waited for death with little more status than corpses. Loneliness, confusion, pain and the smell of urine and boiled food seemed to be their only companions as the light faded on their lives. Those places had made me shudder, and sometimes weep.

Carpe diem was the lesson to be learned. It’s what I had been trying to teach Ben when I let him run ahead in the woods. Seize the day – be brave – be independent – be thoughtful – don’t be scared to make mistakes – keep learning – all of those things, all the time. And somebody had taken him. More fool me.

Ruth’s chair was turned to face the window. Her hand rested on its arm, her arthritic knuckles gnarled and inflamed, her fingers resting at unnatural angles. Macular degeneration was starting to steal her vision and she had to keep her head at a sideways angle to see me properly. Somebody had done her make-up, there was rouge on her waxy skin, a smudge of the bright lipstick she’d always favoured.

Classical music was playing softly and I was relieved to see that it was a CD as John had requested, and there was no sign of her radio so there was no chance of her hearing about Ben on the news.

‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘Darling.’ She reached for my hands with her own and cupped them stiffly, a favourite gesture of hers.

‘Where’s Ben?’ she said. ‘I missed you on Wednesday. People think I know nothing any more but I do know when it’s Wednesday.’

She was putting a brave face on it, attempting to maintain her dignity, but I knew from her carers that her agitation had been more extreme than she was letting on. She was also more lucid than I’d expected, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful for that or not.

‘He wanted to try chess club,’ I said. ‘I was planning to bring him over here after it finished, but he was feeling poorly when I collected him. I’m sorry. I should have phoned.’

‘You should have,’ she said. Manners mattered to Ruth. ‘I thought it was half-term, that I’d forgotten, I’m a little forgetful nowadays you know,’ she told me, as if this were news, as if I hadn’t been minutely tracking the destructive progress of her dementia since her original diagnosis, ‘but Sister told me she was sure it was next week.’

I’d forgotten that half-term was about to start, of course I had.

‘What was wrong?’ Ruth asked.

‘He had a sore throat, a bit of a temperature, I think it was a virus.’

‘Should he be back at school? Is he wrapped up warm?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and the lie felt as though it might wind its way around my throat, and tighten.

‘Is he working hard?’ she said. Her eyes were milky, and the impotence of her condition wandered around their depths. ‘At the hospital?’

She was confusing Ben and John. It happened often, and I went with it.

‘Not too hard. He’s doing well.’

‘He must practise, when he’s better, because when he is big enough and good enough he must have the Testore.’

The Testore was Ruth’s violin: a beautiful instrument, made in eighteenth-century Milan, her most valued and valuable possession.

‘He’s not showing any signs of growing out of his half-size yet,’ I said.

‘No, but he will. They do, you know.’ A half-smile played on her lips, a memory, and then died away again.

‘What’s he playing?’

‘Oskar Rieding. Concerto in B minor.’

‘The whole thing?’

‘Just the third movement for now.’

‘He must be careful with his bow control. In this passage in particular.’

Ruth began to hum the Rieding concerto, her hand beating time. She had an extraordinary memory for music. Each note she’d ever played, or taught, seemed to have found a place to lodge in her head, all its resonance still alive to her. She’d started Ben on the violin when he was six, insisted on paying for his lessons. He was showing promise, some of the musicality that had travelled from Vienna, through her family, and that thrilled Ruth.

She stopped abruptly. ‘Have you got that?’ she asked, as if I was her pupil myself.

‘Yes. I’ll remind him.’

She pulled herself forwards. Her dress shifted over her skeletal knees, catching on the surgical stockings that she wore on her calves. I noticed a small stain on her pretty yellow scarf. On a table, just within her reach, a shiny golden sweet sat in the middle of a crocheted doily. Her hands scrabbled uselessly to grasp it, but I knew better than to offer to help because that would have upset her. Finally, her fingers got a purchase on it.

‘For Ben,’ she said. ‘I saved it.’

On the rare occasions that Ruth took part in the communal activities in the home, she was ruthless about acquiring the sweets that were sometimes offered as prizes. She hoarded them for Ben.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She went through the same rigmarole to reach something else, a book. She passed it to me. ‘Look at this. I got it from the library. Does it remind you of anything?’ A smile passed across her lips, a rare sight nowadays, usually only bestowed on Ben.

I took the book, ran my hand over its shiny cover, and felt the dog-eared edges. It was a monograph, and its subject was the artist Odilon Redon.

‘The museum,’ I said. ‘When we took Ben to see the dinosaurs and ended up looking at the paintings.’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I’ve marked the page. Can you see?’

I opened the book where she’d inserted a bookmark. It was a garish yellow strip of leather with a design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge embossed in it in gold. Ruth didn’t have many ugly possessions, but this was one of them and she kept it because Ben had bought it for her on a school trip.

‘We looked at the William Scott painting first, do you remember?’ said Ruth.

I did. It was a huge canvas, wall-sized, with an ink-black background and four large formless abstract shapes floating within it, in white, darker black and a complex shade of blue that brought to mind a sunlit Cornish coastline. ‘What is it?’ Ben had asked me, his hand nestled in mine. ‘It’s whatever you want it to be,’ I’d said. ‘I like it,’ he replied. ‘It’s random.’ ‘Random’ was a new word that Ben had learned at school and he used it whenever he could.

In the next gallery Ben had been drawn to a small canvas by Odilon Redon, and a copy of this was revealed when I opened the book. In the museum, Ben had stood in front of it, just inches from it, while Ruth and I stood behind him.

‘What is this one?’ he asked us. In the centre of the painting was a white figure, mounted on a rearing white horse and holding aloft a long stick with a green flag at the top of it, which looked to be fluttering in a hot breeze. Behind the figure were two boats, barely emerging from the thickly painted background, with its suggestions of land, sea, clouds and sky in dusty shades of brown and blue.

‘It’s a bit messy,’ said Ben.

‘The artist has done that on purpose,’ Ruth told him. ‘He wants to suggest a dream to you, a world where stories take place and where you can use your imagination.’

‘What is the story?’

‘Like your mummy said about the other painting, the story is anything you want it to be. It’s everything or nothing.’

‘I would like to have a green flag,’ said Ben.

‘Then you could be an adventurer too, like the person in this painting. Would you like a white horse?’

Ben nodded.

‘And what about a boat?’ Ruth asked him.

‘No thank you,’ he said, and I knew he would say that, because Ben had a fear of the sea.

‘Do you know what I see in this painting?’ Ruth asked him.

He looked up at her.

‘I see a brave person riding a magnificent horse and I wonder where that person is going and where they’ve been,’ she told him. ‘And I also see music.’

‘Where is the music?’ he asked.

‘It’s in there. It’s in the paint, and the sea and the sky and in the story of the person and their horse and the ships,’ said Ruth. ‘All those things give me the idea of music, and then I can hear it in my head.’

‘And for me too,’ he said. He smiled at her, his face lit up. ‘It’s lots of fast notes, like an adventure.’

‘And slow ones too,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you see here – that thick bit of paint, where you can see how the painter smeared it on with his brush? That’s a slow note for me.’

Ben considered that. ‘Can you hear it, Mummy?’

‘Definitely,’ I told him, and in that moment just the sound of his voice, the innocence ringing in it, the eagerness to listen, was music enough. On that day, my son was seven years old, and I suspected already that he might not be the kind of child who could win a running race, or triumph on a rugby pitch, so to see him respond in this way to the paintings was a joy. It gave me so much hope for his future, that sensitivity he had, the way that he might be able to respond so positively to beauty and to ideas. I felt it would enable him to create reserves that he could draw on when he needed to, and I knew I could guide him through that, or at least set him off on his way.

What I hadn’t realised on that day, as Ruth and I took him downstairs to find tea and cake, was that he might need to draw on his reserves so soon. Before he would be ready. Or that he might never get a chance to build them up before they were shattered for ever.

‘Do you want to borrow the book?’ Ruth asked. I was lost on the page, in the image, and her voice pulled me back to now. ‘Ben might like to see it.’

What to answer? How to disguise my emotions? I managed only to say, ‘He would. Thank you.’

‘Bring him to see me next week. Promise you will.’

I was struggling to hold myself together. I went to stand at the window, keeping my face turned away from her, looking out at the beds of pruned roses in the garden below, at the sweeping, gracious branches of a mature cedar tree. But Ruth was no fool, dementia notwithstanding.

‘What is it, dear?’ she said.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I don’t like to see you like this, my darling. Come, sit with me, talk to me.’

I wanted to, I so wanted to. But the thing is that if I’d told her, it would have destroyed her. So I didn’t.

‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you next week.’

I put my face to hers, said goodbye, kissed her. She clasped my head to hers and for a moment the sides of our faces rested together. Her skin felt as smooth as gossamer, her cheek bony and delicate, barely there.

‘Bye bye, darling,’ she said. ‘Be strong. Remember: you are a mother. You must be strong.’

JIM

I got one of the DCs to pick up John Finch and bring him in. He was with us within the hour. He looked thinner than he had at the beginning of the week. I put the letter down in front of him.

‘Don’t take it out of the bag.’

He picked the bag up. Fingernails bitten to the quick. Shaking hands. He read out loud:

John Finch will now understand how it feels to lose a child.

It serves him right.

He has been arrogant, and now he will be humbled.

‘By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.’

I watched him closely. He looked as if I’d swung a cudgel at his head, and made contact.

‘Who sent this? What is this?’

‘It arrived this morning. We don’t know who sent it. We’re hoping you can help us find out.’

The shaking in his hands spread to his wrists.

‘Is this my fault? Have I done this?’

‘Let’s not talk about fault. That’s not going to get us anywhere at this point. Do you have any idea who might have sent it? We think it implies that the sender has had contact with you in a professional capacity. I know I’ve asked you before, but I really need you to think about this again now. Do you know of anybody who might have a grudge against you? A former patient?’

John Finch looked like the most beaten person in the world. He looked like a man watching all his worst nightmares come true. His voice was tight with the effort it was costing him to control it. If I’m honest, I found the interview unexpectedly hard, and I think that’s because I recognised myself in him. I knew that if I was him, I would be broken too, and somehow, although it shouldn’t have, that got under my skin. I don’t know if it was my fatigue, or the way he tried so hard to hold on to his dignity, or perhaps both, but there it was, a small feeling of solidarity with him that I shouldn’t have allowed myself.

‘My patients are children, detective. They don’t tend to bear grudges. In fact their view of the world is often beautifully simple, beautifully fair.’

He ran the fingertips of one hand around his eye socket.

‘But they have families, and, sometimes – rarely – you lose a child during surgery, and the families can’t accept it. They blame you. Even when there’s nothing you could have done. Even when the surgery was your only option because without it the child would have died.’

‘Can you think of any families who might have cared more than others?’

‘Cared enough to take my son in revenge? An eye for an eye?’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head. ‘Like I said before, there were one or two who tried to sue the hospital, but even that isn’t very unusual. It’s a risk we take in our profession.’ He passed a hand across his forehead, squeezed his temples. ‘I can’t imagine them doing anything this extreme, I really can’t, but I suppose there is one family that sticks in my mind as being more persistent than the others. I can give you the name of the child, the father’s details will be on the records at the hospital.’

I pushed a piece of paper and a pen across the desk towards him. ‘Write down the name for me,’ I said. ‘The one that springs to mind. And write down the person to contact at the hospital.’

He wrote. He passed the paper to me. ‘Does Rachel know?’ he said.

RACHEL

This time, I made no attempt at conversation as Zhang drove me home.

I stared out of the window and thought about Ruth and Ben, and how much they loved each other’s company. I was transfixed by the sight of schoolchildren walking home with parents, or in messy groups without adults, shouting, laughing, jostling each other, dropping bits of rubbish, which the wind picked up and blew around them. It was the start of half-term this afternoon, as Ruth had said, and they were in celebratory mood.

‘Can we go to Ben’s school?’

‘We can. Why?’ Zhang said.

‘I want to get his stuff. It’s half-term.’

She only hesitated momentarily. ‘Of course,’ she said. She pulled into the forecourt of a petrol station to turn around and we got stuck behind another car. It was impossible not to see the headlines, murky as they were behind the thick plastic of the forecourt newsstand. The front pages of two newspapers showed a photograph of me at the press conference, beside one of my sister in her nightie, berating the journalists outside my house. This is what I read before Zhang pulled away:

FINCH FURIES

INTIMIDATING: Benedict’s auntie lets rip

SISTERS: who aren’t afraid to look SAVAGE

FEARS GROWING: 5 days missing and counting

And on another paper, underneath a photograph of my boy:

MYSTERY OF BEN’S CLOTHING

New Timeline of Ben’s Disappearance Inside

Zhang still said nothing. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen them or not. I pulled up the hood of my coat and sank down into my seat. I was afraid of somebody recognising me and I was afraid of what they might say if they did.

Ben’s school was almost deserted as we arrived. We had to manoeuvre around some orange traffic cones that had been placed as a loose barricade across the entrance to the teachers’ car park. Only a few cars remained there, most of the spaces were empty. Zhang parked in a spot where we had a view of the playground, a small tarmacked space with football posts painted on one wall and colourful murals on the others. It was a modest little school, with the old Victorian schoolhouse at its heart, and various unprepossessing modern additions tacked on to it over the years.

Right up until the moment when we parked, I thought it was a good idea to visit the school, but as Zhang undid her seat belt and pulled the keys from the ignition, I found myself paralysed by the fact of actually being there.

It was the sight of the playground. It reminded me that this was Ben’s world, his other world, and that the last time I was here was to pick him up the previous Friday afternoon.

As Zhang turned to me, wondering why I wasn’t moving, images flooded my brain.

The playground on Friday: it had been heaving as usual, crowds of parents waiting for children who were disgorged from the building in various states.

Some looked as if they’d been catapulted out with the sole purpose of expending excess energy, chasing each other around between huddles of mothers, others looked beaten down by the week, bags weighing heavily on their shoulders. Some were sporting stickers proudly on their sweatshirts, one or two burst into tears at the sight of their parent after a long day of pent-up frustration.

I saw all this in vivid little bursts: pushchairs, mothers laden like packhorses, snacks being distributed, tales of injustice or triumph. Children sent back into the building to get forgotten things. A teacher with a cup of tea in hand; the headmaster wearing a novelty tie on a rare outing from his office, a few parents flocking around him. Cut-out figures strung like bunting in the windows of the classroom behind them.

‘Are you having second thoughts?’ asked Zhang.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to do this.’

I made myself focus, take a deep breath. In front of me the playground was empty, except for a green plastic hoop, which had been discarded in the middle of the tarmac, and the remnants of colourful chalk marks on the ground, only partially washed away by the rain. I got out of the car.

‘Be warned that the school’s hired security,’ Zhang said as we crossed the playground to the entrance, ‘because of the press. They caught a journalist snooping in the school office.’

As we walked, my legs felt as though they weren’t working properly, there was faintness in my head and my chest. Everything seemed to take on a cartoon-like quality. I visualised the press as an invasive plant, its roots and tendrils growing implacably into every area of my life and Ben’s, looking for action or information to feed off. I felt distinctly unwell, and I wondered if I should go back to the car and let Zhang go in without me, but we’d arrived at the door by then and to articulate how I felt was impossible.

We were admitted to the building by a burly man, who I’d never seen before. He had a shaved head, an earpiece and a strikingly large beer belly. He checked Zhang’s ID and then let us in.

I led the way to Ben’s classroom. All I wanted was to get Ben’s PE kit from his peg, and anything else he might have left behind. That’s what I would normally have done at half-term. I would have washed his kit, and checked he had everything he needed for the next few weeks in the run-up to Christmas. Not to do that would have felt wrong.

It wasn’t to be that simple though. As we neared the door to Ben’s classroom, I saw a big display of artwork, and in the middle of that display was a picture that I recognised, because Ben had made it. My knees buckled.

After that I have only snatches of memory and sensation: confusion, when I came round, because I was on the floor of the corridor and Zhang was propping me up; eyes refocusing again on the display of artwork, seeing painted leaves and branches in all the shades of brown and orange and green and black that wrapped themselves around Ben and swallowed him up when we were in the woods; seeing Ben’s picture amongst the others and feeling sure that I could see the imprint of his fingers in the smears of paint; feeling an impulse to stand, and put my fingers where his had been, and then an inability to do that.

When they’d got me upright and they were sure I wasn’t going to faint again, they moved me into the classroom and sat me in the teacher’s chair.

Miss May was there, and also the teaching assistant. I heard Zhang’s voice, saying, ‘She wants his things, that’s all, that’s why we’re here.’

I watched Miss May go over to a row of pegs that ran along one wall of the classroom, and take down the only PE bag that remained there, and behind it there was a label. It was a photograph of a dog, black and white like Skittle, and the name ‘Ben F’.

Then Miss May said, ‘Lucas, can you please get…⁠’ and I watched the teaching assistant go into the corridor and carefully take down Ben’s painting from the autumn display and put it into a plastic folder. Noticing his receding chin and very red hair. Noticing the sweat under his arms.

Then Miss May was offering to help me to the car, but I found my voice and said no, because I didn’t want the fuss of it, and Zhang said we could manage just fine.

Outside in the corridor, with her arm linked firmly around mine, we walked past the new headmaster. He said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ but the way he looked at me made me feel like an exhibit so I didn’t reply. I just wanted to be at home.

Miss May ran down the corridor behind us, her shoes tapping fast, and just as we reached the door she caught up with us. She had an armful of Ben’s books, which she passed to me, and she said ‘I thought you might like these, since you didn’t make it to parents’ evening this week. I thought you might like to look through them.’

So I took them and as Zhang helped me into the car I held them to myself as carefully as if they were an actual baby.

JIM

Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr Francesca Manelli.

Transcript recorded by Dr Francesca Manelli.

DI James Clemo and Dr Francesca Manelli in attendance.

Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behaviour, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.

FM: So the letter?

JC: We threw everything into it. Obviously.

FM: Was that your call?

JC: It was Fraser’s, actually it was both of ours, and it was the right one.

FM: Was the investigation team excited?

JC: You’re always excited when you’ve got a lead, but you have to be cautious too. You don’t want mistakes. But it was a development and that was good because by then it had been five days and that was getting to people. They were tired; the media were going insane around us. We had the blog to worry about.

FM: What was happening with that?

JC: Behind the scenes Fraser was putting everything she could into finding out who might be behind it. Amongst others we were looking at Laura Saville and Nicola Forbes as possibles for the leak. We knew that both of them were involved in online journalism in some way already, and they were obviously close to the heart of things. She had to be discreet internally though, partly because we didn’t want to put the wind up anybody if they were up to something, and also because everybody working the investigation was feeling the pressure, and that kind of thing is very bad for morale, putting it mildly.

FM: Including you? Were you feeling the pressure?

JC: Of course. There was a kid’s life at stake.

FM: And did you have any strategies to cope with that?

He speaks to me as though I am an imbecile.

JC: A little boy, eight years old, was still missing after five days. We didn’t have time for ‘coping strategies’.

FM: OK. I understand that it must have been a stressful period for everyone involved in the investigation. My question is-

He interrupts me; his temper has risen.

JC: Don’t patronise me.

FM: I’m not intending to. That’s a very defensive reading of what I said. I’m simply acknowledging the fact that you felt under pressure and looking at ways that we might explore what that meant for you, and for the investigation.

JC: You have no idea what it’s like to be in the middle of something like that.

FM: So would it be fair to say that by this point in the case you’d moved on from the attitude that you felt when you took on the case? The ‘bring it on’ attitude?

JC: It would, yes, because have you ever thought about what five days of being removed from your family and living in fear could do to a child? That’s 120 hours and counting. That was on my mind every single second. Why do you think I threw a hand grenade into the middle of that family? Because that’s what it was, making Nicky Forbes confess that stuff to her sister, don’t think I don’t understand that. But I did that for Benedict. Because we had to find him, and if there was collateral damage, then so be it. The letter was no different.

I end our session here, because I fear I’ll push him away entirely if I press him further today. I do wonder whether, if this man doesn’t successfully go through this process, and get back to work in CID, I might fear for his long-term stability.

RACHEL

When I got home, Zhang asked me if I wanted her to come in with me but I declined, saying that my sister would be there, even though I didn’t know if that was true. I still felt detached and strange as if all my senses were dulled and the only thing that mattered were the thoughts that were at a rolling boil inside my head.

Nicky was there. She was sitting in the kitchen and her packed bag was by the front door, her coat draped over it.

‘I waited because I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye,’ she said.

She didn’t notice my disorientation. She did ask me what I was cradling in my arms.

‘Ben’s books,’ I said.

I put them carefully down on the table and then we just stood facing each other and she reached forward to hug me. It was an awkward hug, just as it had been the first morning at the police station, although this time it was worse because her body offered none of the softness that it had before. We were both too wary of each other, and we made do with the minimum of contact, because for the first time in our lives neither of us knew where we stood with the other. And then, as if she knew that was inadequate, Nicky stood in front of me and put her hands on either side of my arms, and rubbed them up and down.

‘Will you be OK?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘I can come back whenever you want, just call me, if it’s too much being on your own.’

‘I can ask Laura to come over,’ I said, and my voice sounded strange, as if I were speaking with a thick tongue.

She hesitated just slightly before saying, ‘OK, good.’

Then we stood there again and her hands fell away from my arms and she looked at me in a way that made me want to start screaming with the uncertainty and the awfulness of it all, so with the last reserves of my strength I said, ‘Just go, Nicky.’

‘Now I’m not sure I should,’ she said. ‘Looking at you now. You’re not OK, are you?’

And I shouted. I shouted, ‘JUST GO!’ because I felt as if I would implode if anybody said anything else to me, and it shocked her so much that she took a step back, and from her reaction I could tell that my expression must be ugly.

She stared at me, and then started to say something, but I couldn’t stand to hear it, so I shouted ‘NOW!’ and it was more of a scream than a word, and then I ran up the stairs so fast that they pounded and I didn’t hear the sound of the door clicking shut behind her, but I did hear the press badgering her to tell them who had been shouting and why, and if she replied to them she did it very quietly or not at all, because within minutes all I could hear were the sounds of my empty house.

Laura came to mop me up. I didn’t ask her to, she just arrived. As I went to answer the door I heard her chatting with one of the journalists on the doorstep. When I let her in she said, ‘How funny. I trained with one of those guys out there.’ She said it lightly, as if they’d run into each other at a party. I wondered which one of them it was. There were a few regulars. Most likely, I thought, to be the youngest of the bunch, the one who could outrun the others and was the last to stop beating on the windows of the car when I was driven away. I didn’t ask her.

She’d brought takeaway food and a bottle of wine with her. Before she arrived I thought I’d tell her everything that had happened. But I didn’t. I couldn’t find the words, they felt trapped inside me, made prisoner by my numbed senses and my decaying ability to trust. Within my head I was jittering, like a withdrawing addict, obsessing over my sister, and what she’d told me, replaying my loss of consciousness at the school.

Laura let me jitter. She calmly laid out our food on the kitchen table and poured us glasses of wine. ‘I know you probably don’t feel like this,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to do it anyway and I won’t be offended if you don’t want it.’

The food and drink she’d brought looked like ancient relics of a life that I’d once enjoyed, but I went through the motions of appearing grateful. I picked at one or two of the dishes, managed just a sip of the wine, which had lost all of the comforting qualities it had before Ben disappeared and tasted like acid in my mouth.

‘Do you want to talk about him?’ Laura asked, breaking our silence. ‘Would it help?’

Laura never ate much; she had the appetite of a sparrow. She toyed with her food for a few moments, while I failed to answer her question, and then she said, ‘Do you remember when you had him? At the very beginning? We couldn’t believe how tiny he was, do you remember that?’

I found my voice. ‘You wouldn’t hold him at first.’

Laura hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she came to see me in the hospital. I lay exhausted in the bed, my body bruised and sore, hormone-drenched and soft, and watched her while she’d stood beside his Perspex crib all trim and well dressed and tanned and pretty in a little summer dress and big sunglasses pushed up on her head – like a postcard from my life before motherhood. I told her she could pick him up, but she’d shaken her head at first.

She smiled at the reminder. ‘I’d never held a baby before. I didn’t want to break him, or drop him.’

‘But I made you.’

‘And he puked on me.’

‘He puked everywhere for the first few months. It was constant washing.’

‘But it was love at first sight, wasn’t it? For you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I envied you that. It was so intense, so private.’

Her fingers sat on the stem of her wine glass and she turned it slowly, delicate wrists flexing. Then she refilled it. More than half the bottle was gone, and I hadn’t had more than a sip.

For the first time I noticed that lines were beginning to form on her elfin face. It was just an impression, they seemed to be there one moment, and gone the next, but they were a reminder that she was ageing, that we were all ageing. I stretched my hand across the table towards her and our fingers linked briefly.

‘I can’t believe this is happening to you,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere and struck you, and Ben. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.’

‘All my feelings hurt.’

Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and she said, ‘Can I tell you something? I want to say it so you know that other people know how you feel. Just a little bit of what you feel anyway.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, and instinctively I felt a reawakening of the feelings of dread that our reminiscences about Ben had briefly put to sleep.

‘I had an abortion.’

‘When?’ This was startling news, shocking too. I thought Laura and I had had the kind of friendship where you lay yourself bare, where the only secrets you keep are to do with your plans for each other’s Christmas or birthday presents.

‘Before you had Ben.’

‘I don’t know what to say. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘You were pregnant.’

And there it was: a wedge in our friendship that I’d never known about.

‘Who was the father?’

‘Do you remember Tom from Bath?’

I did. He was a married man, who she’d met through work.

‘Did he know?’

‘He paid for it. God, Rach, I’m sorry. It’s stupid of me even to mention it now. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through.’

And here’s the thing: I couldn’t deal with it. If Laura wanted us to feel solidarity at that moment then she’d just said completely the wrong thing. It was simply too much to cope with: the intentional loss of a child.

A week previously I would have been there for her, supported her, but at that moment it was viciously, unbearably painful to hear, and my brain, addled with her news, with everything, did a flip.

The exquisite and painful pleasure of our reminiscences about Ben disappeared in an instant. The earlier warmth of her friendship, and her company, suddenly felt frosty and brittle. Goose bumps ran across my skin like squalls agitating glassy water.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no. I can’t hear this now. Why are you telling me this?’

And then another thought, a corrosive one, as the distrust that my sister had sown as a seed now bloomed freely in my mind. I voiced it with a tone that was raw enough to surprise even myself, the tone of somebody who has reached the end of her tether. ‘Are you feeding stories about me to the other journalists? To your friends out there? Is that why you wanted to talk about Ben?’

I got to my feet, and my wine glass tipped over in my hurry to stand, the wine everywhere, pooling on the table, on me, dripping onto the floor and Laura stood too and shock had peeled away any softness in her expression so that her cheeks looked cold and smooth as marble.

‘Jesus, Rachel! I know you must be feeling desperate, but…⁠’

I pushed her. She came around the table towards me, wanting to hug me, and I pushed her away. I grabbed her coat, and her bag and I shoved them at her and I hounded her all the way to the front door, ignoring her pleading words, and her tears, until she was out, and gone, like Nicky, and the press, her so-called friends, took photographs of her on the doorstep while I sat back down at the kitchen table, on the chair that was damp with wine, and I sobbed.

JIM

We worked closely with John Finch all day. The feeling of recognising myself in him didn’t abate, if anything it got stronger as we talked. It troubled me.

He waited at Kenneth Steele House with me while my officers began checking out families who he’d identified for us. We sent a pair of DCs down to the hospital, hoping there weren’t going to be too many confidentiality issues and bureaucratic hoops to jump through before they would release information to us.

‘Do you ever tire of it?’ Finch said to me in a long moment of silence when my thoughts had flown to Emma, to when I might see her next. ‘Do you ever tire of the daily contact with people when their lives are shattered?’

We sat in a windowless interview room around a grey-topped table. A strip light above us threw out a glare that made my temples ache. I didn’t answer him. If I had, I would have lost my separateness, my professional distance. I had to remember that John Finch was not my friend, but it was hard not to answer, because there were parallels between what he did and what I do. For a moment or two I was overwhelmed with a desire to say yes, to talk to him, to compare notes and admit that there were times when it was very, very difficult to stand back. In another universe, I thought, we might have been able to do that, and it would have been nice, but not here, not now.

‘Do you know what this room reminds me of?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘We call it the bad news room at the hospital. It’s where we take families when we have to tell them the worst. It’s exactly like this, except that there are brochures.’

I kept my reply neutral. ‘We’re hoping to bring you good news, Mr Finch.’

‘Do you know how they know?’ he said. ‘The smart ones, the clever families? They see the china teapot and the china cups with saucers, and the door closing behind them, and the unusual number of staff all together in one room, and they ask themselves why all this fuss, just for us? It doesn’t take them long to work it out. They read the situation before we’ve even started talking. They start to grieve before the milk goes into the cups.’

‘Well, you’re safe on that count,’ I said.

In front of us was a tray of four polystyrene cups with grey coffee remains swimming in the base of them. Torn and half-emptied sachets of sugar littered the table like doll-sized body bags.

He understood why I’d given such a shallow response. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course you don’t want to have this conversation because to do so would be unprofessional. That was stupid of me. I’d do the same in your situation.’ He barked out a noise that was supposed to be a laugh, but instead was a noise that crept sullenly around the edges of the room, mocking his attempt at forced jollity.

I wondered then if all the pain and difficulty of his profession, the hopelessness and the encounters with death, had become toxic for John Finch, too toxic to bear any longer.

I let my guard down then, just for a moment, because I was curious.

‘Do you get emotional when you lose a patient?’ I asked him. I wanted to know how much failure hurt him; I wanted to know if he was like me.

‘Very occasionally there’s one that gets to you, no matter how hard you try. It’s very rare. You learn early on, when you’re training, that you have to keep your distance emotionally, because if you don’t, you can’t do your job.’

‘What makes that one stand out?’

‘Sometimes you don’t even know. Once I operated on a boy who reminded me a little of Ben, and I met his mother, she wasn’t unlike Rachel. They reminded me of us, of our family. It wasn’t that long ago, Ben was about seven at the time. The boy’s operation was quite a simple one, but there was bleeding, and he died. His heart failed. There was nothing we could do. It was an unexpected death and when I went to tell his mother, I… I’m afraid I broke down.’

Distress swam deep in his eyes but John Finch had obviously learned to be stoic too. He didn’t lose control, he said, ‘It was unprofessional of me.’

‘It’s understandable.’

‘Do you think so, Detective? Has it ever happened to you?’

I looked at my watch. It was late. I was in danger of confiding. I had to get things back on track. ‘I think we could do with something to eat,’ I said. ‘Chances are, it’s going to be a long night.’

We took John Finch home at ten that night. By midnight, we’d narrowed things down based on the information he’d given us, and we had a standout suspect for the letter. By the early hours of the morning we’d disturbed countless colleagues and we were as certain as you can be. We’d checked and double-checked the details, gone into background, and triple-checked that we had the correct address for our suspect.

Fraser, on what must have been her fiftieth cup of coffee, tasked me with leading a dawn raid. We wanted the element of surprise, and that’s the best time to get it. I chose my men, and we went through our preparations carefully.

We were due to go in at 5 am.