What She Knew

An abduction may occur for many reasons, including a desire to possess a child, sexual gratification, financial gain, retribution, and the desire to kill. Research findings indicate that when a child is killed, the motivation may be either emotion-based, where the abductor seeks revenge on the family; sexual-based, where the offender seeks sexual gratification from the victim; or profit-based, which involves most often ransom for money (Boudreaux et al, 2000 & 2001). Moreover, child homicide usually follows an abduction and is not the reason for the abduction.

Dalley, Marlene L and Ruscoe, Jenna, ‘The Abduction of Children by Strangers in Canada: Nature and Scope’, National Missing Children Services, National Police Service, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 2003

WEB PAGE – www.twentyfour7news.co.uk/bristol – 7.22 AM BST 27 Oct 2012

Where is Benedict Finch?

The Blogosphere Rises – People power or vigilante justice?

By Danny Deal

Officers working on the Benedict Finch case have been frustrated by the emergence of a blog, which has stirred up the media frenzy.

Apparently written by somebody close to the case, the blog has been blamed for leaking details of the case and stirring up suspicion against the family of Benedict Finch.

DCI Corinne Fraser said last night, ‘We don’t know who is writing this blog, but it is a vindictive piece of work. At this time we are very concerned for the well-being of the family of Benedict Finch, as well as for the lad himself, and we would ask people to remain calm, and respect this family’s situation, and not pay heed to this blog, which is the work of an uninformed and unreliable individual. Our efforts at this time are all concentrated on finding this lad.’

She also added that police are still ‘pursuing multiple lines of inquiry’ and are ‘hopeful of a significant development soon’. She declined to comment on what that might be.

James Leon QC stated that ‘anybody, either a media organisation or an individual, can be prosecuted under contempt of court laws if their comments published online are found to be prejudicial at trial’.

3 people are discussing this article

Donna Faulkes

People should be able to say what they like

Shaun Campbell

If the police cant find him then at least somebody’s saying what everybody’s thinking

Amelie Jones

Its stupid to write this and not say what it is that people cant say

RACHEL

In the early hours of the morning I woke to find myself drenched in sweat again, consumed by that scooped-out feeling of loss that was brutal and all-consuming and was no longer tempered by having people close to me.

I began to consider the thought that Ben might not come home.

I began to consider the reality that I might have to exist in, should that happen.

It would be intolerable.

My obsessive, jumpy thoughts drove me downstairs, and out of the back door into the night. The wind was still sharp and it sent me running across the garden to my studio, and in that short distance made its way coldly between the folds of my nightwear so that by the time I let myself in I was shivering so violently that I felt like a shaken bag of bones.

I didn’t dare turn on the lights, in case of being seen through the glass doors, top-lit in all my falling-apart glory. My neighbours, like my friends, felt like adversaries now, potential spies. Instead I just turned on my computer, and sat in its frigid blue glow. Then, compulsively, slowly, knowing I shouldn’t, feeling unable to stop, I began to look online.

I found myself castigated further. In the absence of news about the case, editorial pieces had emerged, primarily in the broadsheets. And if I’d ever hoped before reading them that they might provide a more balanced view of our family’s situation, then I was wrong, delusional. They were as brutally judgemental as the red tops.

Almost without exception they discussed the case, and my performance at the press conference, in the context of my single motherhood, and they used it as a stick to beat me with, or a label with which to stigmatise me.

Those editorial pieces asked a lot of questions about me, and about Ben’s case. You can imagine that, can’t you? Perhaps you read them. They questioned my morals and they cast doubt on my fitness to raise a child. They condemned me roundly for my slack parenting in letting Ben run ahead in the woods. They blamed me, made a social pariah of me. Single mother, failed mother, person of dubious social status, target.

Here’s what they didn’t ask: they showed no curiosity whatsoever about whether I’d considered the decision to let Ben run ahead, or any of the factors I might have taken into account; they didn’t examine the sense of loss I had to overcome when John left me, or my efforts at rebuilding, or my longing to be a good mother in his absence; they didn’t ask how much I loved Ben.

Nowhere did any journalist mention the hardship of single parenthood, the evenings spent alone, the pressures of making difficult decisions without support, the painful absence of a partner who might have been there if life had turned out differently.

These were people, I thought, with a growing sense of desperation, who would have put me in a workhouse a hundred years ago, and a few centuries before that strapped me into a scold’s bridle, or built a tall bonfire just for me to sit atop, and lit it with flaming torches, which underscored with flickering light their hard-bitten features, their lack of mercy or compassion.

And nowhere, in any of the hundreds of words written, did any of them lay a scrap of blame at John’s door. In contrast, he was the object of sympathy, protected by his gender and his profession: paediatric general surgeon, his new wife a deserved salve for his pain, not a cause of the breakdown of our marriage. One of them even featured a photograph of John and Katrina looking like a perfect unit, irreproachable in their togetherness.

I was their target because I was socially unacceptable, and so they did everything they legally could: they publicly lanced me with words which were written, examined and edited, each process carefully honing them in a calculated effort to push people’s buttons once they were published, to froth up public opinion around them so that my situation could titillate others, could thrill and bolster the minds of the smug and judgemental. Schadenfreude. Conservatism. Better the worst happens to somebody else, because, quite frankly, they must have done something to deserve it.

And they felt entitled to do that, these so called ‘thinkers’, as they sat comfortably behind their desks with their reference books and their own unexamined moral compass, because I was nothing to them. Ben and I were simply the commodity that would sell their papers, nothing more. And these were the very papers that I used to read, that I used to carry down the road from the shop and bring into my home.

It was cowardly, yellow journalism, and I knew that. The problem was, knowing it wasn’t enough to stop every single word from chipping away any final scraps of self-respect or dignity that I might have had left. I was only human, after all.

And I suppose I’m interested now to know whether it troubles you to read these things, to know that the rug you’re standing on so securely can be whipped out from under your feet rapidly and completely? Or do you feel safer than that? Do you assume that your foundations are more secure than mine, and that my situation is too extreme to ever befall you? Have you noted the moments when I made mistakes that you might have avoided? Do you imagine that you would have behaved with a more perfect maternal dignity in my situation, that you would be unimpeachable? Perhaps you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to lose your husband in the first place.

Be careful what you assume, is what I’d say to that. Be very careful. I should know. I was married to a doctor once.

I’m also interested to know how uncomfortable you feel now. Whether you’re regretting our agreement. Remember the roles we allocated each other? Me: Ancient Mariner and Narrator. You: Wedding Guest and Patient Listener. Do you wish you could shuffle away yet? Refill your glass perhaps? Now that my grip is loosening whose side are you on? Mine, or theirs? How long will you stay with the underdog, given that she’s so beaten now, so unattractive? Displaying here and there signs of mental instability.

If I were to make a final bid to keep your attention I suppose I would say that if it troubles you to hear these things from me, to witness my descent, then perhaps you can take heart from the fact that it pains me very, very deeply to confess them.

When, finally, the darkness outside my studio began to dissolve that morning, I pulled my chair away from the computer, tore my horrified eyes from the screen. With ice-cold fingers I pulled my dressing gown around me and I watched the grainy night contours of my garden morph slowly into a strangely lit morning where the rising sun tinted the pendulous clouds so that they were not entirely black, but coloured instead with bruised fleshy tones, burnished in places. It was the kind of light that nobody would mistake for hope.

Back in the kitchen, it felt as though I was meeting my possessions after an absence. I boiled the kettle, and realised that I hadn’t done that myself for days, because Nicky had done everything. Almost out of curiosity I opened the fridge, having no idea what was in it, and found cooked meals, in labelled containers, prepared by Nicky before she left, and half a pint of fresh milk.

At the kitchen table, warming slowly as the heating in the house cranked up around me with its familiar clicks and clonks, I began to look at Ben’s schoolbooks.

There were five of them. There wasn’t a great deal of work in each one as it was so early in the school year, but I started to work through them: maths, literacy, spellings, a history project and a news book.

The first page of the news book made me smile.

Ben had drawn a picture of a huge bed, which filled the entire page. In it was a small stick figure. Underneath it he had written, I spent the hole weekend in bed. There was a comment beside it in red ink: Are you sure that’s all you did, Ben? I expect you did something else. The drawing of the bed is nice.

It even made me smile, because it was nonsense, and I thought simply: this is the world I want to be in, the imaginative, funny world that’s my son.

I knew then, with perfect clarity, that if Ben didn’t survive this, then nor could I.

JIM

Five of us turned up: me, and four men in full gear. Black clothing, bullet-proofed jackets, caps that hide your eyes, and shoes with soles that were thick enough to do damage. All my men were armed. All of us wore earpieces, to keep in radio contact. I was leading.

It was 0500 hours. It was dark. Early morning hush was settled over the neighbourhood like a blanket.

We parked quietly around the corner, killing the car engine quickly, and when we got out we didn’t talk, communicating with gestures only. Three of us stayed at the end of the driveway, in the shadows and out of sight, and we waited there silently while I sent two around the side of the property.

We didn’t want anybody slipping out of the back.

Streetlights revealed that the bungalow was in bad condition, in contrast to the neighbouring properties, which were immaculate, their front gardens displaying neatly trimmed lawns, and tended borders, containing closely clipped shrubs like shiny suburban trophies.

The flowerbeds in our bungalow’s garden were overgrown, and the lawn was muddy and unkempt, but the metal gate at the side of the house had shiny black paint on it and its latch didn’t squeak when my two DCs opened it and sidled through it.

My guess was that its decline was recent.

There was a single garage to the side of the bungalow; its door was shut but in good nick, and the driveway had been expensively relaid at some point recently. There was no crunchy gravel to give us away. There was also no vehicle in the driveway, no curtains drawn at the front and no lights on in the house, and I hoped to God the place wasn’t empty.

On my signal, two of the men approached the front door and stood either side of it, tucked in, so that they weren’t visible through the frosted glass in the door, not until they were ready to be.

There was a security light above them, but it didn’t come on. They had a battering ram with them, a black metal cylinder, so that they could break down the door if necessary.

They didn’t look at me. They were focused on the door, waiting to hear my voice in their earpieces. ‘Go,’ I whispered into my radio. I knew the command would transmit loud and clear, and they didn’t hesitate. They rang the bell, hammered on the door, shouted through the letter flap: ‘Police, let us in. Police!’

The noise ripped through the pre-dawn stillness.

By the time a light came on in the hallway of the bungalow the other properties around us were lit up like Christmas trees and we were about to bash the door in.

A woman opened it, just an inch or two at first, suspicious eyes peering through. She looked as though she’d been asleep. She wore tracksuit bottoms, plastic clogs and a nurse’s tabard. My men pushed past her. I followed.

‘Where is he?’ I said.

She pointed towards the end of the hall opposite. One of my men was already down there; the other had gone into the front rooms. I ran down the hall, but even before I’d travelled those few paces I knew it had gone wrong when my man said, ‘In here, boss,’ and his voice sagged. He stood in the doorway just ahead of me and his body language had relaxed, adrenalin gone. There was no threat.

As I pushed past him, he said, ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

In the middle of the room was a hospital bed. In the bed lay a man, his eyes wide balls of fear. He was underneath a white sheet that he’d pulled up to his neck with fingers that scrunched the material tight. A hospital band was visible on his wrist. The only clue to his relative youth was his brown hair. His face hung from his bones and his skin was grey apart from high red spots on his cheekbones, from fever, or morphine. He was hooked up to a pump. An oxygen mask was attached to his face, the elastic digging into his cheeks, and a bag of dark orange urine hung from the side of the bed.

Beside the bed was an armchair, and a table, with books on it, along with a laptop computer, a remote control for the TV that sat on the chest of drawers in a corner, and a cardboard tray for collecting vomit. Beside the door was a wheelchair.

The nurse was beside me now. ‘He’s dying,’ she said. She had tribal scars on her face, two rough, raised lines on each cheek, and eyes that told me that she’d seen death before.

I turned to my man. ‘Search the garage,’ I said, but I already knew that there’d be no sign of Ben Finch.

RACHEL

Zhang phoned me mid-morning. She’d just parked on my street, she said, and no they hadn’t found Ben but could I let her in? She wanted to speak to me.

I listened at the front door for her footsteps, reluctant to open it until I knew she was there. A peek from my bedroom window had told me that overnight the numbers of journalists had dwindled to just two or three, but I didn’t want to give them a photo opportunity.

When I heard her footsteps, and I heard the journalists call out to her, I began to undo the latch, but the expected ring on the bell didn’t come. Instead I heard her curse. I opened the door a crack.

My doorstep was awash with milk. It covered the front door and dripped down onto the doormat at my feet. It pooled onto the short front path and it was littered with broken plastic. A pair of two-pint bottles, my twice-weekly delivery from the milkman: full fat for Ben and his growing bones, semi-skimmed for me. Smashed to pieces.

I pictured hands throwing them, feet kicking them, the impact, the explosion of white liquid, the dirty, messy aftermath, and I knew I was meant to understand it as a rebuke, that it labelled me as a woman with a filthy doorstep: such an old-fashioned taint that marks you out as the worst, sluttish kind of woman. I read it as snide vigilante justice, the domestic equivalent of a white feather through the door.

You can see how my mind was rampaging, now that I was cornered, and alone.

‘Rachel, go back in,’ Zhang snapped. ‘I’ll deal with this. You go in.’

I did as I was told. She borrowed a mop and a plastic bag to gather the debris, and when she came in after cleaning up I said, ‘Do you think somebody did it on purpose?’

‘I can’t say that for sure. It might have been an accident.’

‘You know it wasn’t.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘Did they see who did it?’ I gestured towards the journalists.

‘They say they didn’t. They say it was like that when they arrived this morning.’

‘They’re liars.’

‘Rachel, it’s nothing. It could have been an accident. Don’t let it get under your skin.’

But it was too late for that.

We went down to my studio, taking the dog. I couldn’t bear to be near the front door, with its smeary residue of vandalised milk that shamed and frightened me.

In the studio I put the heater on this time, embarrassed in front of Zhang to indulge in the pre-dawn masochism that had compelled me to sit in the cold while I looked online.

Zhang told me about the letter then, and about the dawn raid that had turned up a dying hoaxer.

‘He was a broken person,’ she said. ‘His child died during surgery, when Mr Finch was operating.’

‘Was it John’s fault?’

‘No. It was a very risky operation. The father had been informed of that, and the child would have died without it. John wasn’t at fault. Nobody was.’

‘Was it a boy or a girl, the child?’

‘I don’t know. Apparently the death drove the father mad. He’d been bringing the child up alone anyway because the mother had died. Also to cancer. He wrote a series of letters to the hospital threatening legal action, but he had no case against them, so it was hopeless. And now he has terminal cancer himself. The whole family, wiped out by that disease.’

‘How did he know about Ben?’

‘He saw it on the telly, recognised John, and he thought it was a chance to get back at him. That’s all it was, a spiteful act. I’m sorry. We’re not back at square one though. We’ve got other avenues to pursue.’

Her words were reassuring in themselves, but I could see that it cost her an effort to arrange her features into an expression of optimism.

As she stood up to leave, my photographs caught her eye.

On the wall above my desk was a collage of pictures I’d taken over the years, and almost without exception they were portraits of Ben. They were my best work.

They were mostly in black and white, and mostly taken on old-fashioned film and developed and printed by me, in a dark-room I’d rigged up in the garage of our family home. John had been happy to hand the garage space over to me. He wasn’t a DIY man.

My camera of choice had been a Leica M20, given to me by Ruth and Nicholas. I processed the films myself, and spent hours poring over the negatives, deciding which ones to print.

The printing process was a joy: the murky red light in which images of Ben emerged from the chemical soup, a kind of alchemy, painting with light, bringing something from nothing. It was a wobbly, unreliable, unpredictable process, yet it yielded images of such beauty and power, and I never tired of it.

The photographs I took weren’t the brightly lit studio prints that are ubiquitous now, where families are pictured against glaring white backgrounds, mouths agape, dental work on show, in poses they’ve never before adopted. Artifice, all of it.

I preferred to work with light and form, with what was there already. I started with the idea that I would be lucky to capture just a scrap of the beauty of my child.

Once, when Ben was about five years old, I came downstairs very early one summer morning to find a dawn light so softly crystalline that it seemed to have an ethereal presence of its own.

I roused Ben gently and before he was fully awake I asked him to sit at the breakfast table. It had been a hot night and he wore just pyjama shorts. He sat and gazed at the camera with a frankness that was perfect. In the finished photograph, it’s as if you can see into his soul. His hair is messy, his skin has the texture of velvet and the contours of his slender arms are perfect. There are no harsh lines in the picture. Blacks fade into greys and into whites, and shadows draw the features of his face and torso. They describe sleepiness and innocence and promise and truth. Only deep in Ben’s eyes is there a glint of something that is of its moment. It’s a flash of light, a white pearl, and although nobody else could tell, I know that the pearl is the reflection of the window, and of me, taking the photograph.

It’s the best photograph I’ve ever taken, and probably the best I ever will take.

Zhang stared at that photograph for a very long time. She held her coffee and stood in front of it and in time steam stopped curling above her hands. Then she looked at the others too, the various manifestations of Ben, of Ben as he was to me.

He was a toddler examining something on a summer lawn, with a lightly furrowed brow just visible under a sun hat; he was a close-up of two chubby baby feet and a study of hands with tiny, fragile fingernails and knuckles that had new-born wrinkles but not yet any solidity; he was his profile, the softness of the skin on his temples, the crisp curls of his eyelashes just visible behind; he was a distant silhouette jumping a rock pool on a spectacular cliff-edged winter beach.

There were so many and Zhang studied each one. Occasionally her radio made a sharp noise, a crackle or static or a voice. She ignored it.

‘These are just beautiful,’ she said.

I was lost in the pictures myself when she said it, and her sincerity was unexpected, and felt unfiltered.

‘You’re the first person outside the family to see them,’ I said.

‘Truly? I’m honoured. I really am.’

Her voice caught. She had to take a moment to compose herself.

‘I tried to learn photography when I was younger,’ she said. ‘My dad bought me a camera, an old-fashioned one. It was a film camera. I was fifteen years old. He set me a project. He told me to go out and take photographs. He drove me to a place called Old Airport Road, in Singapore, where I grew up, because he was in the army you see. Anyway, on Old Airport Road there’s an old-fashioned food court, so you know what I mean, lots of stalls selling street food of every different kind, a photographer’s dream really. My dad told me to take photographs of the food. I had to ask permission from the stallholders and my dad sat and watched while I spent ages preparing my shots and looking at the different angles and shapes, and after two hours I’d taken my twenty-four photographs. We dropped the film off to be developed and I couldn’t wait to go and collect it the next day, I was so excited. I had one of those ideas you have when you’re young, you know: I’m going to take one roll of film and be a famous photographer. I was that excited. But when I went back the next day and the girl in the shop gave me my packet of photographs, I pulled them out, and every single one of them was black.’

It was the most I’d ever heard her talk. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Well, I looked at my dad, I had the same question on my lips, and he said, “That will teach you not to leave the lens cap on.” I was so angry with him for not telling me.’

‘Did he know? While you were taking the photos?’

‘He did. That’s what he’s like though. He believes you should learn things yourself, do things the hard way.’ She smiled wanly. ‘It worked. I never did it again.’

‘That’s what I was trying to do for Ben,’ I said. She kept her eyes on the photographs. ‘In the woods, when I let him run ahead. Because I thought that being independent would let him feel life, be enchanted by it, not fear it, or feel that he has to follow a set of rules to get through it. Because it’s tough.’

She said nothing. She turned away for a moment and the silence was awkward. When she turned back her eyes were red and she put a hand on my arm, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. I really am.’

Once Zhang had gone I went back into the house, driven by the need to be near the landline in case of news. The silence was hard to bear and I tried to console and calm myself by looking at Ben’s books again. I revisited the page where he’d drawn himself spending the whole day in bed, before I turned over to see what he’d written next.

The following page was startlingly colourful by comparison. Greenery filled every corner: trees and plants in strong confident lines, and a dog that was obviously meant to be Skittle. Short straight lines slanted across the page, over the other images, as if somebody had spilled blue hundreds and thousands across it.

On Sunday Mummy and Skittle and me walked in the woods, he’d written. It was raining all the time.

I turned another page. The next week’s drawing was very similar. Ben had written: We walked in the woods agen on Sunday. I found a very big stick and brung it home.

There was a comment in red ink: Your walks sound lovely, Ben. Excellent drawing.

Another page. A different drawing: a picture of a bowling ball, a crowd of children. I went to Jack’s bolling party and Sam B won, he’d written.

Red ink: Brilliant!

Another page: trees and foliage again, a swing hanging from a branch, a child beside it, wearing red. Ben was a good artist for his age, the images were clear.

In the woods I went on a big swing and mummy went on her phone.

Red ink: That sounds like so much fun for you!!

A thud of understanding in my chest that was so violent it felt as though it was knocking the breath out of my lungs. It turned my lips and mouth dry and made me look again at the book, as if my eyes were attached to it by strings, and rifle the pages backwards and forwards until I was sure.

‘It’s somebody at school,’ I said, although there was nobody there to hear me. In response there was just a single thud from Skittle’s tail, an acknowledgement that I’d spoken out loud.

With shaking hands I picked up my phone and I dialled Zhang over and over again, but every time I just got a message telling me to leave her a voicemail.

JIM

A phone call from Emma woke me up. Fraser had sent me home to catch up on a couple of hours’ kip since I’d worked through the whole of the night preparing for the raid. The buzzing of my mobile dragged me up out of a deep sleep, where the disappointment that we’d wasted so much time and budget and were no nearer to finding Ben Finch was feeding me vivid, uncomfortable dreams.

Emma said she wanted to talk, said she would come over, wouldn’t say what it was about.

I was out of the shower and dressed by the time she arrived, about to call Fraser to check I hadn’t missed anything that morning. ‘I’ll come down,’ I said to the intercom. ‘Do you mind if we talk on the drive in?’

I pounded down the stairs of my building and I took her in a hug when I found her on the pavement outside, but she was somehow awkward and I only got a bit of a dry-lipped peck on the cheek in return. She had a pool car with her, a green Ford Focus that hadn’t been properly cleaned out since a couple of sweaty DCs camped in it for a surveillance job. She handed me the keys. She was old-fashioned like that sometimes. My dad would have loved it.

We set off into the city, and within minutes we’d got locked in a traffic system round Broadmead where Saturday shoppers and roadworks had brought everything to a standstill.

It was one of those moments where it seems surreal that ordinary lives go on around you, that other people can actually afford to tolerate delays, when all you can focus on is the gigantic ticking clock that’s your head, counting time on somebody else’s life.

We were diverted onto Nelson Street, the city’s so-called open-air street art gallery, where graffiti murals covered every dank, depressing concrete facade available: psychedelic art meets calligraphy meets art deco meets the recesses of the minds of a dozen artists from around the world. A dreamscape all of its own.

I waited for Emma to start talking, but the whole time she sat motionless beside me, coat buttoned, collars pulled up, scarf wrapped high on her neck, just staring out front.

‘Em?’ I said when the silence started to get to me. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

Still she said nothing. If anything, her silence seemed to have settled deeper on her, like it meant to bury her. I pulled over into a loading bay.

‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

The ignition was still running and the wipers squealed as they made a pass across the windscreen.

There was so much happening in her eyes that I felt my insides wrench.

‘Emma?’ I said. Whatever the thing was, I was desperate to sort it, to make it right. I put my hand on hers, but she kept her fingers curled away from mine, pressing her palm flat onto her leg.

‘I don’t know how to say it.’ Her voice was small, as if she’d swallowed half of it.

‘For Chrissakes try.’

She made me wait for an answer until I was fit to burst.

‘I’ve done something bad and I don’t know what to do.’

‘What have you done?’ And even then I was thinking, it can’t be so bad, Emma’s so hard on herself that whatever she’s done will be easy to put right. I thought that even as I watched her shut her eyes, and press her lips together until her face folded around them and she didn’t look like the girl I knew. Not one bit.

Her next two words were her confession, her downfall, and the first sparks of a wildfire that was to burn through everything we’d had together with startling speed.

‘The blog.’

I was slow; I didn’t understand at first. She had to spell it out for me, blow on the sparks until I could see that they were dangerous, and that they would spread uncontrollably.

‘I’ve given information to the “Where is Benedict Finch?” blog.’

‘You’re the leak?’

She nodded.

I gave myself a nasty bruise on the side of my hand where I slammed it on the dashboard. Pain shot up my arm. It made Emma jump and then she seemed to contract into herself a little more.

‘Why?’ One puny word, to express all the incredulity and anger that I felt.

‘I feel so stupid.’

‘Tell me why!’

‘Don’t shout,’ she said. ‘Please.’

I watched her as she tried to compose herself. She carefully tucked her hair behind her ears in a gesture that I knew and loved. She took a deep breath, exhaling audibly, and just when I was about to shout at her again she said, ‘I wanted to punish Rachel Jenner, for letting Ben out of her sight in the woods.’

I didn’t expect that.

‘What? Why? For fuck’s sake, why would you do that? Why’s that even your business?’

‘It got to me, I’m sorry. I started looking at the blog, for research, and I got sucked into it. First I just put a comment, because people were saying some stupid things, but then I found myself agreeing with some of them, and I’ve got strong feelings about it, because it’s a massive issue for me. And I know none of it’s an excuse but I was getting tired, it was hard to cope with the family and I was scared I wasn’t up to the job. I know I shouldn’t have. It was weak. I just couldn’t help thinking about how if she’d been a bit more responsible then it wouldn’t have happened. Oh God, Jim. I’m so sorry. My head gets so fucked up sometimes. It’s complicated. It’s personal. Something happened that I’ve never told you.’

‘What happened?’

She didn’t answer. Instead she shook her head, and covered her face with her hands.

‘Emma! What happened?’

Her hands fell away and her voice veered into hysteria.

‘Stop shouting! I said stop!’

She wiped at her face brusquely, streaking the sleeve of her coat.

Then she turned to look at me with an expression of vulnerability that I’d never seen on her before and she pleaded. It was awful, that diminishment of her. She said, ‘Oh God, I’ve been so stupid. It’s so hard for me to explain but please know that I’m trying to be honest with you because I love you. I do. I know we’ve never said that to each other but I think I actually do.’

But I was too angry to hear it. I was facing the charred remains of our relationship, of Emma’s career, possibly of mine too. I said, ‘Do you know how many resources Fraser’s had to put into finding out who the leak is?’

‘I’m sorry.’ A bright, high note on a scale.

‘You’ve risked that boy’s life!’

‘I’m sorry.’ The scale descending into tones of hopelessness.

‘You owe me a proper explanation.’

‘I know. I’m scared you won’t understand.’ Just a whisper.

‘Try me.’ My tone was cynical now. I’d become my professional self, tucked away the things I wanted to say. It was self-protection. I hated myself for doing it, but what choice did I have, really?

She talked then, a slow stream of words and it was breaking her to say them.

‘Because I saw the photographs Rachel took, they were photographs of Ben. She loves him. I saw it for the first time, how much she cares about him, because they’re such beautiful pictures and they made me feel so guilty.’ She clutched at my arm. ‘I’m telling you because I don’t know what to do and I want you to help me make it right. You won’t tell anybody, will you? I’ve stopped already. I won’t do it again.’

‘You can’t come back from this. You cannot,’ I said, but she was pulling her handbag onto her lap, digging through it.

‘I’ve got a personal email address for the author of the blog. We can track them down. I’ll get it for you, I’ll get it now.’

She took her phone out. I could see that she had missed calls, but not who they were from, and she ignored them, as she tried with trembling fingers to access her mailbox.

‘It’s gone too far. You can’t make it right.’

‘We don’t need to tell anybody else,’ she said. She looked pale and fearful, her eyes darting nervously from me to the phone and back. ‘If you help me we can do it. We can get the blog removed.’

‘You not we. I didn’t do this, it’s got nothing to do with me, and actually you do need to tell them. Look at me! You’re kidding yourself if you think you can get away with it. And you’re compromising me just by telling me, let alone expecting me to help you!’

‘Please. I’ll lose my job.’ Her eyes were locked onto mine now, wide and wild with panic.

‘Do I really need to say that you should have thought of that earlier? What you leaked was spiteful, wicked stuff. Jesus! And now you want me to put myself on the line for you. Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do?’

‘Jim.’ It was a plea. ‘I thought you would help me.’

‘I thought I knew you.’

She tried to reach out and touch my face, but as her fingers grazed my cheek I said, ‘Don’t,’ and she withdrew her hand quickly, as if I’d scalded her.

I massaged my temples, and I felt an exhausted, debilitating sadness because I knew that this was the end of us, and that I’d made my own bed on this one. It was my own fucking fault. End of.

She took another deep breath. ‘I did it because of what happened to my sister,’ she said, and I could hear that there was bravery in her voice, that she was working up courage for what she was about to say, but for me it was too late for that, because she’d betrayed the police force and the investigation, betrayed Benedict Finch, and betrayed me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested. I don’t want to hear it.’

She opened her mouth to reply but something she saw in my face made her close it again, and her features drained of hope.

‘Jim…⁠’ was all she managed.

‘No.’

I didn’t want to hear it because Emma wasn’t the person I thought she was, and I wouldn’t lie for her.

She started working at her phone again, desperately tapping at the screen, and it was too much for me; it was delusional.

I snatched the phone from her, opened the car window, threw it out and watched it clatter across the pavement and break against the urine-stained wall, pieces of it scattering amongst dark black puddles, fag butts and other unidentifiable scraps of filthy rubbish. A passer-by paused to give me a look and I told him to fuck off.

‘Tell Fraser,’ I said to Emma. ‘Or I will.’

‘Jim.’

‘You need to go and do the right thing or this could hang us all. Now.’

I started up the car and eased back into the traffic. I couldn’t look at her. In the rear-view mirror I could see a vast mural covering the side of an office building: a mother and child. It was a pure image, made of black lines and a white background, the mother’s lips as sensual as Emma’s. I thumped the dashboard again, felt the pain again, and then I took the car in the direction of Kenneth Steele House. On the way, we didn’t speak at all.

When we parked at Kenneth Steele House, Emma got out of the car without a word and I watched her walk across the car park, and climb the steps to the entrance, slowly, straight-backed. I gave it a full twenty minutes before I followed her. Twenty minutes of gazing through the windscreen at the sharp-tipped silvered-metal railings that encircled the car park and wondering whether she was doing the right thing in there.

When I finally got out of the car, my body was protesting with fatigue, and I checked my face in the wing mirror to be sure I wasn’t wearing the whole episode for anybody to read. Inside, I said my normal hello to Lesley who was on Reception, and she smiled at me, and I hoped she didn’t notice that I felt like I was wading through shit.

RACHEL

With Zhang not answering her phone, and somebody in the incident room telling me that Clemo and Fraser were unavailable too, I had to turn to John. Or, as the papers would have it, the unimpeachable Mr John Finch, Consultant Paediatric General Surgeon and proud owner of a lovely new wife.

He answered the phone with the same haste with which I jumped on every call I received. To give him credit he quickly managed the disappointment he obviously felt when I said I didn’t have news, took me seriously when I explained about the pictures in the book and didn’t demur when I asked him to drive me, and the book, to the police station.

Heading up the steps of Kenneth Steele House, I realised I could barely even remember our arrival nearly a week before. The receptionist told us that if we’d like to leave the book with her then she’d ensure that it was taken up to the incident room.

I said that I’d like to speak to somebody in person. I mentioned DC Zhang, and DI Clemo.

She asked us to sit and we perched side by side on the same sofa we’d occupied on Monday morning.

She made some hushed calls, head down, covering her mouth as if we could lip-read. Then she crossed the foyer, heels clipping the floor noisily, and said, ‘Someone will be down to see you soon. If you wouldn’t mind being patient.’

She brought us hot tea in plastic cups so thin you could burn your fingers.

John passed the time by looking through Ben’s book methodically, page by page, over and over again. I could barely sit down; I was pulsating with impatience, and after what felt like an interminable wait I approached the desk again.

‘Somebody’s coming, they’re rather busy up there this morning,’ I was told.

‘Can we interrupt them, this is very important?’

‘They know you’re here, they’re just in a meeting.’

‘Can I just speak to DC Zhang?’

‘Please be patient, Mrs Finch.’

‘My name is Jenner.’

‘Sorry, Ms Jenner. DC Zhang and DI Clemo have only recently arrived themselves and I’ve rung the incident room but they’re both tied up just at the moment. If you can try to be patient one of them will be down before long, I assure you.’

‘Please.’

‘I would ask you to sit down again if possible.’

I sat, my knees jigging, hands wringing.

John said, ‘Perhaps it’s best if we just leave the books here.’

‘What if they can’t read Ben’s writing?’

‘Rachel…⁠’

‘No. I want to hand them over myself, explain them.’

After another ten minutes I felt my patience snap. I took the book from John and said, ‘If they’re not coming down here I’m bloody well going to go up there.’

‘No, don’t do that,’ John said, but he was too slow to stop me. I marched to reception, propelled forward by my certainty, and my outrage that nobody had come to listen to us.

‘Where are they?’ I said to the receptionist.

‘Mrs Jenner, if you can just be a bit more patient-’

‘Stop asking me to be patient. How can I be patient? My son is missing and if they can’t be bothered to come down here I’m going to go to them. What’s more important than a piece of new evidence that they don’t know about? How is it that I can get the immediate attention of any journalist in the country but not of a single officer investigating my son’s case? Should I take this to the press? Should I?’

I was waving the book at her, brandishing it in her face.

‘Please don’t raise your voice, Ms Jenner.’

‘I will raise my voice if I fucking well feel like it. I will raise my voice until SOMEBODY COMES DOWN AND LOOKS AT THIS BOOK!’ I slammed it down on the desk in front of her. ‘THEY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS BECAUSE I WANT MY SON BACK. I WANT BEN AND IF YOU DON’T WANT ME HERE THEN YOU CAN FUCKING WELL ARREST ME.’

She was no pushover, the receptionist. She spoke to me in a voice that was steel-reinforced. ‘If you take a seat, I shall phone the incident room once more. If you continue to make a scene I shall ask one of my colleagues to escort you from the building.’

Up close to the desk, I saw that her handbag was tucked into a corner behind her desk. It had a newspaper folded on it, and I realised that even here, in this environment, I was probably being judged through the filter of what was written about me; that the receptionist was seeing, in front of her own eyes, the Rachel Jenner from the press conference.

John was at my side, and he coaxed me away then, back to the sofa, and I stared at the few people coming and going through the foyer in front of us with an empty gaze that made many of them take a second look at me.

Within minutes, a man stood in front of us.

‘DI Bennett,’ he said, sticking a hand out to John first, and then to me. His handshake was painfully strong, and I didn’t recognise him. ‘Is this it then?’

John stood up and handed him the book and DI Bennett’s big hand seemed to dwarf it. He had a neck that sat in rolls on his collar, narrow wide-set eyes, and the shiny crown of his head took on the glow of the ceiling lights.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Do you want to show me what’s worrying you?’

I showed him the pages that haunted me, and he pored over them, brow hunched.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said, and then, ‘He’s a good artist your lad, isn’t he?’

‘Will you show it to DI Clemo, or DCI Fraser?’

‘Of course I will. I’ll do that right away.’

‘Should we stay, in case you have questions?’

‘Honestly, the best place for you right now is at home. We know where to find you, and we’ll be in touch with any questions or any information we have, I promise you. And if you phone us with any concerns, at any point, we will always send somebody to talk to you at home about it, there’s no need for you to come here.’

‘I tried to phone DC Zhang,’ I said.

‘Ah well, she’s a bit busy in a meeting right now.’

‘We wanted to get it to you quickly.’

‘We appreciate that, Ms Jenner, we really do, and we’ll deal with it immediately. I’m going to personally hand-deliver this to DCI Fraser as soon as I leave you.’

‘Thank you,’ John said.

Bennett tucked the book under his arm. ‘I suggest you both go home and get some rest now. The more you rest, the better you’ll cope. Thank you for bringing it in.’

He offered each of us his hand again and then disappeared through a set of double doors that swung dully on their hinges in his wake.

In spite of his politeness, and of the care he took looking at the book, he left me overwhelmed by my own impotence, feeling it in great shuddering waves. John looked at me with fright, as if he was terrified of another scene that he didn’t have the resources to handle, and it was the receptionist who came to my rescue. She emerged from the desk and came to me, and sat beside me on the sofa, and put her arms around me. She smelled of perfume and hairspray and she had liver-spotted hands.

‘I know,’ she said over and over again. ‘I know.’

And that act of kindness surprised me, and then upset me more, and finally calmed me down, until I was ready for John to take me home.

JIM

In the incident room the blinds on the windows of Fraser’s office were drawn but I could glimpse her silhouette and Emma’s through the slats. Nobody else might have noticed it, but to me their body language spoke volumes: Emma had come clean.

I thought I’d feel relieved but instead it was the final straw, and I couldn’t stand to witness it.

I took myself down to the canteen, tucked myself in a corner to try to write up a report on the morning’s raid with a cup of coffee that would have made British Rail ashamed, but I just got wound up, thinking about it all, and it was hard to concentrate with every nosy parker who walked past my table asking me how the case was going.

I went to the men’s room, locked myself in a stall, and tried to get control of myself.

I sat in there on the closed lid of the toilet bowl, my head resting against the partition wall, eyes shut, breathing through my mouth and trying to pull myself together. I don’t know how long I stayed, but at some point somebody else came in and the shame of it made me get to my feet.

It was Mark Bennett, undoing his fly at the urinals. He was hyped up; his cheeks flushed red with excitement.

‘The proverbial’s hit the fan,’ he said, not caring that his piss was going everywhere. ‘Something’s going on. Benedict Finch’s parents came into reception and his mum made a massive scene and brought in one of Ben’s school books they want us to look at. They asked for you and Zhang, but we couldn’t find you and Zhang was holed up with Fraser “not to be disturbed”. Where the fuck have you been? Got the runs or something?’

I started to answer but he said, ‘So I went and got the book myself, calmed the mother down, but that’s not the fucking end of it. I took the books straight into Fraser’s office, potential new evidence, thought that was worth disturbing them for, only now she’s got Internal Affairs in there with her and Zhang. I gave her the book, but got my head bitten off for interrupting. Something massive is going on, definitely.’

I washed my hands for show, and he joined me at the sink and then stayed on my heels like a pesky younger sibling as we went back to the incident room, full of ignorant speculation that made my jaw clench.

As we entered the incident room, the door of Fraser’s office swung open at the other end and Emma walked out, flanked by two men. Fraser was hovering behind, but shut the door before I could read her face. I recognised one of the men: Bryan Doughty, the biggest cheese in Internal Affairs. Bennett and I stood aside as they approached.

‘Clemo,’ he said, as he passed me.

‘Sir,’ I replied. He was a shark of a man, intellectually and physically well equipped to take a bite of you. Perfect for the job. He didn’t slow his pace. Emma’s gaze was fixed front and forward.

Even though it was Saturday, about fifteen faces watched them walk the length of the incident room, Emma’s small frame dwarfed by the men beside her. When they exited and disappeared from sight, I realised I’d been biting the inside of my cheek so hard I’d drawn blood.

‘I think she’s been a naughty girl,’ said Bennett. ‘Tut, tut, tut. And Doughty’s not going to be happy about being called in on a weekend either.’ He was buoyant: the sight of someone else’s career ending in a car crash was actually bolstering his self-esteem.

‘Do me a favour and keep your fucking opinion to yourself,’ I said.

‘What’s the matter with you? Anybody would think you wanted to get into her knickers.’ Brave words, but as he said them he was wiping my spittle off his face with an injured expression.

I walked away. I don’t know what I would have done to him otherwise. I knocked on the door of Fraser’s office.

‘What’s going on?’ I said. I tried to keep my face steady, put my hands in my pockets so the shake didn’t show.

Her expression was grim, her eyes were bloodshot and she had that pallor you get after days on a case, when your skin’s sagging and you can’t remember what it felt like not to have your shoulders in tight knots.

‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘We found our leak.’

‘Emma?’

‘Yes, I’m very sorry to say.’

‘Fuck me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have her down as a Judas.’

My head felt tight around the lie. I hoped my voice wasn’t giving me away.

Fraser looked at me hard. ‘My sentiments exactly,’ she said. ‘And I expect this to be especially hard for you because I know you two were working closely together.’ She let her words hang there for a moment, between us, before she went on. ‘Emma’s confessed to leaking confidential information to the blog. Personal motivations. That’s all I can say at this time. Apart from the bleeding obvious which is that she’s thrown a promising career down the pan and the press will have all of our guts for garters if they get hold of it.’

‘I feel responsible,’ I said. ‘I recommended Emma for the role. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m a big girl. I don’t do things just because one of my DIs has a bright idea. You’ve no need to take this all on yourself.’

She looked at me intently and I still couldn’t work out what the subtext was, whether she knew about Emma and me or not.

She said, ‘You don’t seem too shocked.’

‘I’m shocked, boss, trust me. I just… don’t really know what to say. I feel like we can’t let this hold us back.’

She gave me a brisk nod in agreement. ‘We’re in the shit. There’s no doubt about that. We don’t have time to waste on this, and we can ill afford to be a man down. We need to regroup quickly, figure out how to fill the gap Emma’s left us, and somebody’s going to have to go through all the work she did.’

‘I can do that.’

‘But before anything is done, I want you to have a look at this. Bennett’s just brought it up. Hand-delivered by Benedict’s parents. With some drama.’

‘Bennett told me,’ I said.

‘They asked specifically to see you or Emma but we couldn’t find you. Where the hell were you by the way?’

On the bog, shaking like a school kid hiding from bullies. I didn’t say that. ‘I went to the canteen to get on with the report on this morning.’

‘Without your phone? Ah, never mind. Take a look at this.’

She handed me a child’s exercise book. On the cover, in uneven handwriting: ‘Benedict Finch. Oak Class. News Book’. I flicked through it. Seeing Ben Finch’s clumsy handwriting gave me a bit of a start, it was such a vivid trace of him. Page after page seemed to be filled with pictures from the woods. It made him very real, very present, disturbingly so.

He’d written descriptions of their regular dog walks and drawn pictures of them too, including the swing.

‘So what are we thinking?’ I said.

‘Well, Ben’s parents are thinking that this means that anybody at school might have known about the regular walks they took, and the route they took, and they’re thinking that there might be something in that.’

‘But anybody they knew could have known about the walks. People with dogs walk them regularly and mostly to the same places. There’s only so many routes you can take in the woods.’

‘Point taken, but we do have an obligation to look into this, and I think we should. We’re not overrun with options at this point and I am not going to miss anything, Jim. I’ll not have that on my conscience.’

‘So what this actually means is that we can include school staff, or anybody else who might have had access to this book, in the circle of people who might have known about the dog walks. So what do we do? Re-interview school staff?’

Fraser was scribbling a note. ‘That’s exactly what we do.’

‘Start with the teacher and teaching assistant?’

‘Yep. And the headmaster. And don’t forget the school secretary too. They always know everything.’

‘You know they’ve all got alibis don’t you, boss?’

‘Yeah, yeah I do. Teacher having lunch with parents, school secretary at cinema with a friend, TA shagging his girlfriend, headmaster playing golf. That good enough recall for you? Do you think I’ve gone senile all of a sudden?’

‘No, I just want to be sure we’re not wasting our time on this.’

‘I’m looking for information here. I want to dig deeper with these people. Maybe the books will trigger a memory for somebody. And I need to tell you that we’ve had a turn-up on the CCTV as well,’ she added. ‘Confirmation that Ben was with his mother when they drove across the bridge on the way to the woods. They’re still scouring and cross-checking a final half-hour of footage but we should have the results later today.’

Other than that, Fraser said we still hadn’t tracked down the man Rachel said she and Ben spoke to in the woods. She had a DC looking into that, but he was banging his head against a wall because nobody had come forward. It seemed like Rachel Jenner was the only one who’d seen him. Even the regular dog walkers weren’t sure who he might be. In the office they’d started to call him Big Foot.

‘Nicky Forbes?’ I said, when we were nearly done. My thoughts had kept returning to her, I couldn’t deny it.

‘Definitely still of interest, but softly, softly.’

‘Of course.’

‘First job – get Bennett to look through Emma’s work, clear her desk; everything she was doing, I want to know about.’

‘I can do that, boss.’

‘I think it’s better if somebody else does it, don’t you, Jim?’

This time, the subtext was crystal clear. She knew. I managed to nod an affirmative and got myself out of her office as quickly as I could.

RACHEL

John drove me home, and came inside with me, guiding me past the three or four journalists who remained doggedly outside my door.

They should have seen me at the police station, I thought. That would have got them going.

For now, they were loitering a few lampposts away from my house and they called out to us in a desultory way, trained like Pavlov’s dogs to know that neither John nor I would talk.

They still frightened me, but not as much as their colleagues who were probably piecing together juicy commentary on our lives for their Sunday supplements, making me into a Comment On Society, doing it just as John and I unlocked the front door of my home and contemplated the absence that was our son.

Inside, John kept shooting surreptitious glances at me, which made me feel like he was assessing me, gauging my stability.

I let him go up to Ben’s room alone, and he was there for a long time. I expected he was doing what I did: touching objects, remembering, smelling bits of clothing, holding things that Ben had held.

When he was down, I asked him a question that had been on my mind since Nicky had gone.

‘Why did you tell the police that Nicky was worried about me after Ben was born?’

He was surprised, but he had a quick answer. ‘Because she was. She phoned me a lot.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘At the time? I didn’t think you needed to know. You were so tired, and trying so hard. I thought she was being neurotic. It would have upset you.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘I just forgot. She stopped, and it didn’t seem important. Why are you bringing this up now? Did the police mention it?’

‘I just wondered,’ I said, and I realised that he didn’t know yet, about Nicky, about our family. And I kept the news folded up like a piece of paper I’d tucked into my pocket, because I didn’t know how to say it, and didn’t want to admit that there was a part of me capable of distrusting my own sister.

Later on, John said he should go home. I wanted him to stay, but I didn’t trust myself to admit it out loud, for fear of how it would make me sound. I was aware of my own instability by then, I could feel it seeping out into my speech and my actions, and I didn’t want that look from John again. The one that evaluated me, worked out how to handle me.

He saw I didn’t want to be alone, he saw that at least. ‘Should I phone Laura?’ he asked and I said, ‘It’s OK,’ but he began to insist and I didn’t know what to do apart from to nod mutely because I couldn’t tell him about her either. About how I’d shooed her away too.

It took her a while to answer the phone and when she did he immediately frowned and he left the room. I listened, my house was too small for secrecy, and heard him say, ‘Are you drunk?’ in an incredulous tone.

I knew he’d have thumb and finger pressed to his temples, as if trying to hold his thoughts together, I knew he’d look as if his weariness was falling off him in pieces.

His end of the conversation was mostly listening noises, murmured words of agreement or appeasement. He spoke very little; she must have been speaking a lot.

‘Rachel will understand,’ he said after a while, ‘I’m sure she will.’ And then, ‘I think it’s best if she calls you tomorrow.’

‘She’s drunk?’ I asked when he reappeared.

‘She’s been drinking all afternoon as far as I can tell. You don’t want her round here.’

‘What’s she saying?’

‘She’s not making much sense. She says to tell you she’s sorry. That the thing is too big for her, whatever that means. That she just wanted to support you. She’s not in a fit state to be coherent. What happened?’

‘It’s my fault,’ I said, but it was a whisper and he didn’t hear. He asked me again.

‘I don’t know if I trust her,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know who I trust.’

‘I’ve never trusted her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve just never liked her. I thought she used you.’

‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked.’

I was absorbing this when my phone rang.

‘Can you answer it?’ I said. It was still in his hand.

The phone call was short, it furrowed his brow, but I couldn’t decipher it from hearing his responses.

After he’d ended the call with a thank you, he said, ‘That was a DC Justin Woodley calling to say that DC Zhang isn’t our family liaison officer any more.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘He just said she’s had to step away from the post, didn’t give a specific reason, and that they’d appoint somebody new as soon as they could, Monday at the latest, but in the meantime we should speak to him. Have you met him?’

‘I don’t think so. What could possibly have happened? Did you ask?’

‘It’s very odd,’ said John, ‘because I thought they said she was in the office this morning.’

‘They did.’ I curled my legs up onto the sofa, wrapped my arms around myself and felt the disappointment keenly. I minded very much that DC Zhang was gone because I’d got used to her, started to trust her, and I knew I would miss her. I didn’t like the idea of having a man as our liaison officer, however temporary. It wouldn’t be the same.

‘I really liked her,’ I said.

‘I’m sure DC Woodley or whoever they appoint will be fine.’ John wasn’t as perturbed as me; he had Katrina to lean on. He looked at his watch.

‘Look, I can stay here a bit longer, but I have to go home later tonight. You could come to our house.’

‘I can’t leave here again. I shouldn’t have left this morning.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ And I knew I’d be up all night, fearing for Ben and fearing for myself too, but that I had no choice.

‘If that’s what you want.’

Later John and I warmed up some of the food that Nicky had left in the fridge: wholesome, beautifully cooked food. It should have sustained us, given us strength, but both of us could only pick at it.

It was at the precise moment that we were getting up to clear the table that we heard a powerful crash, high-pitched and violent. It came from the front room and seemed to make the air cave in around us. It was the sound of shattering glass, and it made us motionless for a moment and the dog barked and then whimpered and then all was quiet again except for the noise of footfall, somebody running away.

John was up on his feet in an instant. He ran outside.

I followed him, but by the time I got to the front door it was swinging wide open and he was gone.

A bitter wind blew into the room, not just through the door but also through a gaping jagged hole where the front window had been. The curtains, drawn to shield us from the press, were dancing, flapping and turning in the wind like dervishes. Pieces of glass littered the floor, sharp edges everywhere, and in the centre of the room lay a brick.

There were letters painted on it. It took me a moment to realise that there were two words on its side, the same two that had screamed at me from the back fence: ‘BAD’ and ‘MOTHER’. Small, printed carefully. It couldn’t be easy to paint on brick.

‘John!’ I screamed.

I ran to the door. Glass crunched underfoot. From one end of the street footfall rang out, the sound echoing. I saw John and, just ahead of him, another figure, both running as fast as they could. They were moving shadows and, in an instant, they’d disappeared around the corner.

The street stretched away from me, dark and wet, the glow from the streetlamps looking three-dimensional in the rain, orbs of orange fluorescence. I stood in a shard of white light that spilled out of my house and fell around me, making the slick wet surface of the pavement gleam blackly. Opposite, a neighbour opened their front door just a crack.

‘Help,’ I said. ‘Help us.’

From the corner the men had disappeared around, I heard a scuffle, a thud, a cry of pain, and then I began to run too.

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.

We’re getting to the point in our process where I would like to see some real progress from DI Clemo. He’s still very closed emotionally, and our time is running out.

FM: I’m so sorry about Emma.

JC: Don’t be.

FM: That must have been an extremely difficult situation for you.

JC: It didn’t help.

FM: Do we know why she did it?

JC: I know now, but I didn’t then. It was partly because she just couldn’t cope with the role. That was my fault, I know it was, I fucked up. But that wasn’t the only reason. It was because of something that happened to her…

FM: Take your time.

JC: Sorry.

FM: There’s no need to be sorry. You don’t need to tell me now. I’m curious about whether either of you tried to contact each other that night?

JC: No. We didn’t. I made a choice – my loyalty was to the investigation.

FM: That’s a very selfless choice.

JC: Is it?

FM: I think so. Others might have protected their own interests more.

JC: I protected my position in the investigation.

FM: But the personal cost to you was extremely high.

He tries to answer this, but he can’t seem to find the words. He’s done well so far today and I don’t want this subject to become taboo, so I change tack.

FM: Tell me what happened that afternoon once you turned your mind back to the investigation.

JC: Well that’s the thing. First thing was, I called Simon Forbes, Nicky Forbes’s husband, and asked him to contact me to arrange an interview. But after I did that, we got a break that we didn’t expect. That evening the boys got to the end of the CCTV checks and turned up something significant.

FM: Which was?

JC: They traced one of the cars that crossed the bridge about an hour before Ben’s abduction. It was registered to Lucas Grantham, Ben’s teaching assistant.

FM: I understood that he had an alibi.

JC: He did, but a piece of evidence like that is enough to make you take a much closer look at an alibi.

FM: And Nicola Forbes?

JC: Still a person of interest, but you don’t argue with CCTV. And we had the schoolbook evidence too.

FM: I felt as if you didn’t put much store in the schoolbook.

JC: Not on its own. I thought we needed to be careful to understand that they only widened an already considerable pool of people who could have known about the dog walks. But in the context of the CCTV discovery they were much more significant.

It gives him satisfaction to say that. He is born for this job, I think. But I have another question.

FM: DI Clemo, did you rest at all that night?

JC: I did go home, yes. I knew I couldn’t pull another all-nighter.

FM: And did you get some sleep?

This question makes him edgy.

FM: Were you able to sleep?

He doesn’t answer.

FM: Were you thinking of Emma?

JC: I might have been.

FM: You suffered a very traumatic loss that day. You lost a relationship with somebody you had extremely strong feelings for.

JC: It was nothing compared to what Benedict Finch might have been going through.

FM: That doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant. Would you say this time might have been the start of the insomnia that plagues you now?

JC: I don’t want to talk about it.

FM: I believe we have to talk about this, or we can’t make progress.

JC: It’s not relevant.

FM: I believe it is. Think about it. I’d like to discuss it at our next session.

JC: Fine.

He coaxes his lips up into a smile for me, but the look in his eyes is far from happy. I can see that he’s just being polite and I have to remind myself that that is, after all, progress. The problem is: it’s too slow.

RACHEL

It was John who had cried out in pain. I found him on the corner of the street, fallen, his head smashed open against the side of the kerb, his face damaged too, his ear pulpy. The amount of blood on his face and beneath him was sickening. It was matted in his hair, sticky and dark on the pavement, and it soaked into my knees and covered my hands as I knelt beside him.

He was unconscious; eyes glassy. I peeled off my jumper and pressed it against his head, trying to stem the blood flow. I screamed over and over again for help.

When the paramedics came they moved quickly and worked with a quiet urgency that frightened me. There was no joking, and no smiling. Uniformed police officers arrived too. They lent me a phone to ring Katrina, and I told her and then handed the phone to one of the paramedics who instructed her to meet them at A & E at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

When they were finally ready to move John, they rolled him carefully onto a stretcher and eased it into the ambulance, one of them seated in the back beside John’s inert form. It was shocking, that, the absence of him. That, and the amount of blood.

‘Will be he all right?’ I asked.

‘Head injuries are very serious,’ they told me. ‘Unpredictable. You did well to call us so quickly.’ There were no reassurances.

Part of me didn’t want to let him go on his own, but the police knew Katrina was meeting him at the hospital and they wanted to take a statement from me. As the ambulance disappeared into the night underneath its pulsing halo of blue light, I walked back down the street. A uniformed officer accompanied me. Two police cars were still parked at drunken angles, blocking off the scene.

In the house, they took my statement. More officers arrived and took photographs, and then they put the brick in a plastic bag and took it away. They helped me clear up the glass while somebody they’d organised boarded up my window. They said they’d station somebody outside the house for the rest of the night.

One thing the police all agreed on, and they even had a laugh about it, was that it was ironic that nobody from the press had been there to witness the incident. The three journalists and one photographer who’d had the stamina to stake out the house overnight had wandered down the road to get food.

They’d reappeared, kebabs in hand, shreds of iceberg lettuce falling from them, as the ambulance doors had been slammed shut and John had been driven away.

It was the only thing to be grateful for.

I slept in the front bedroom that night, in my own bed, wanting to know that the police car they’d stationed there for the night was just outside, wanting the security of that. In case I had to shout out. Bang on the window. In case I heard somebody creep into my house, wanting to do me harm.

I took Ben’s duvet and pillow from his bed and brought them with me. I stripped away my own bedding, piling it on the floor, and arranged Ben’s stuff carefully on my bed, with his nunny, and his Baggy Bear.

I listened all night for the sound of footfall again, and I lay rigid when voices loomed out of the darkness. They were the usual Saturday night revellers returning home, but their shouts and their drunken laughter sounded hostile to me now. Every noise I heard that night was laced with menace.

JIM

It was Emma who I thought of all the way home. I thought of telling her about the CCTV, that grainy image of Lucas Grantham driving across the bridge in a blue Peugeot 305, his bike on a rack on the back. I thought of driving to her flat and holding her, trying to find a way forward. I felt my exhaustion drug me, dull my senses and my reactions, addle my brain. I felt like part of me was missing.

I went to bed after midnight. I’d treated myself to a packet of cigarettes, a consolation prize for the demise of the best relationship I’d ever had, and I sucked on one after the other, the smoke hitting my lungs like a wallop, making them ache. I drank most of a pot of coffee far too late. I felt like I should keep working, scouring Lucas Grantham’s background, but my concentration was shot to pieces and so I got under my covers and tasted the bitter residue of the fags mixed with toothpaste on my tongue and thought about the CCTV and what it meant, and thought about what Emma might be doing.

It wasn’t her that got into my head for rest of that night, though.

When I finally shut my eyes and tried to sleep, my brain had a different plan.

It pulled me back to my past, and it did it swiftly, like an ocean current that’s merciless and strong. It took me back to my childhood, where it had a memory to replay for me, a videotape of my past that it had dug out of the back of a drawer where I’d shoved it, long ago, hoping to forget.

When the memory starts I’m on the landing at my parents’ house, looking through the banisters. I’m eight years old, exactly the same age as Benedict Finch. I’m at home, and it’s well past my bedtime.

Down below, the hallway is dark because it’s night and it’s hard to see, but when the front door opens I know it’s my sister Becky because of the way she closes it ever so softly, trying not to make a sound. She’s wearing a party dress, which looked pretty when she went out earlier, but now it’s a mess and her tights have got a big rip on one leg. Her eyes look horrible, like she’s been crying black tears.

She yelps when she realises my dad’s standing in the hall opposite her. He’s wearing his day clothes and holding a cigarette that glows red. Becky doesn’t move.

‘What did you see?’ Dad asks her. His face is in shadows.

She shakes her head in a tight way, says, ‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t muck me about, Rebecca.’

A sob comes from her; it makes her body buckle. ‘I saw the girl,’ she says. ‘And I saw you.’

‘You shouldn’t have been there,’ he says.

‘She was hurt, but you didn’t care,’ Becky chokes out her words. ‘You gave her to that man, I saw you do it, she was begging, she was crying and you did nothing, you let it happen. They shoved her in the car. I wasn’t born yesterday, Dad!’

She tries to lift her head and look at him all proud, like she usually is, but instead her back slides down the wall so she’s on the floor. Dad crouches in front of her.

‘Keep your voice down,’ he says to her, ‘or you’ll wake your mum.’ He takes her chin between his fingers and wrenches her head up so she’s looking at him.

I don’t know what to do. I want to look away but I can’t stop watching. I want to stop them both from arguing. I don’t want him to hurt her.

I see a big china dog on a shelf beside me. It belongs to my mum. She loves that dog. She likes the smooth, nubbly texture of its ears. I pick it up. I don’t want to smash my mum’s china dog and I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I’m desperate to distract Dad and Becky, to stop the thing that’s happening. I throw it, as hard as I can, but it hits the top of the banisters and so it smashes right by me and rains shards of china around my feet as well as down onto my dad and Becky below. I see this as if it’s in slow motion.

Becky screams and I do too and then my mum comes from her room and turns on the landing light. It freezes the three of us: Becky, my dad and me. Mum’s wearing just her nightie, long sleeves, hem brushing the carpet, soft fabric, and she just stands there really quiet for a second, then she says to Becky, ‘Go to bed, love,’ and Becky runs up the stairs past us. My dad comes up after her fast, two steps at a time, and before I realise what’s happening his hand is on my arm and it feels so strong and my bones feel like brittle sticks, but my mum is calm, and she says, ‘Mick, give him to me, he’s hurt. Look, Mick, he’s cut himself on the broken china. Mick… Please…⁠’

I don’t remember any further than that. Just as if it were a dream my mind cut the memory there, at the point when it felt like the stress of it was nipping unbearably hard at the edges of me. And then it replayed, even though I was desperate to sleep, and I felt as if tiredness was collapsing my veins.

And I knew what it was telling me. It was telling me that people aren’t always what they seem, and it was telling me to fear for Benedict.

And both of those things made me break out in sweat, even though the night was cold and the duvet was too thin to stop the chill from creeping in around me, and there was no extra body in my bed to keep me warm.

But, worst of all, it compounded both my guilt that we hadn’t found him yet, and my fear for what could be happening to him at that very moment.

Deep into the small hours of the morning, I felt as if I was coming undone.