What She Knew

…children have difficulty determining who will harm them and who will not. For this reason, the onus is on parents to screen those persons supervising and caring for their child, and to educate their children on how to stay and play safe.

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

Hope is essential to your survival.

‘When Your Child Is Missing: A Family Survival Guide’, Missing Kids USA Parental Guide, US Department of Justice, OJJDP Report

RACHEL

I logged on to Furry Football countless times that night. I was hoping to encounter Ben again, of course I was. You would have done the same thing.

But he wasn’t there. Not anywhere. I trawled the online game until I knew every inch of it, every server, every area you could play in. Overnight, avatars with foreign-sounding names came and went, and I could see the ebb and flow of the time zones as they logged on and off: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of children online from all over the world. But not Ben. I never encountered him again. Not once.

The hours searching didn’t breed any doubt in my mind, though, because my conviction that it had been Ben just grew and grew, that feeling so powerfully strong it was as if he’d actually flitted past me in his red anorak, met my eye for a second, and then gone again, just out of reach of my outstretched hand.

I wanted to tell John, I thought he of all people would understand, would feel the enormity of this fleeting contact with our child.

I called the hospital in the hope that he might have improved, that he might even be conscious. A voice that was compassionate and tired-sounding told me that there was no change in his condition. He was stable, that’s all she could confirm, she said.

I imagined him as I’d seen him the night before, the absence of him, his mind curled up tight beneath the bleeding and the swelling and the trauma. Did a very small part of me, just for a moment, envy him that oblivion? Maybe. Was it because I was finding it harder than ever to exist? Probably.

But two things kept my mind engaged that night, kept me alert, jittering. Two things nagged at me with the persistence of a noose slowly tightening around your neck.

If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then why would Ben have disappeared so abruptly from Furry Football? If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then who was looking after him while Lucas Grantham was in custody?

I passed my phone from hand to hand, my fingerprints oily on its screen. Silent, it felt to me a useless object, its very existence mocking both my reliance on it, and the isolation that bred that reliance.

I wanted a phone call from the police to let me know that they were searching properties, that they were knocking down doors and smashing windows as they looked for Ben.

I didn’t want process. I didn’t want twenty-four hours of questioning. Them and Lucas Grantham in a room, with the tea, and the biscuits, and then after that no charges brought and all that time Ben could be somewhere with nobody to care for him, nobody to bring him food, or water, or he could be somewhere with somebody else, somebody who made him log off Furry Football late at night, in a hurry.

But my phone remained mute.

Silently, in its depths, I knew that emails would be pinging in: media requests, contact from friends and families we knew, those who were too scared to speak to me, people who were most content monitoring me from afar.

But the phone itself didn’t ring. The police didn’t call me. Nobody did.

And in that silence those two thoughts went round, and round, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I felt as if I was no longer the wild-eyed fighter, the scrapper, who stood up at the press conference and dared Ben’s abductor, who looked down a lens and into every corner, trying to find an assailant to challenge.

Instead, my nerves were scraped so raw that they lent me the perfect purity of feeling of the addict, ecstatic in the midst of a high, so those two questions loomed large and unanswered in my psyche, like a high-pitched note that will not stop, and, when morning came, I acted as if in a trance.

There were no voices in my head telling me not to do it, when I called a taxi, advising me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to turn up unannounced at the police station again. There was just an impulse to make my voice heard, to tell them what I knew, and what I feared. I wanted to communicate.

The morning was bitterly cold and every outside surface was shiny with rain that had fallen in the night and was close to freezing. It still fell, in fat, intermittent droplets that chilled my hands as I opened the taxi door. ‘Kenneth Steele House,’ I said to the driver, ‘Feeder Road.’

The driver must have just come on shift; he was too preoccupied with trying to clear condensation from his window to talk to me. I watched the moisture disappear from the windscreen incrementally as the fans worked: two spreading ovals of clarity, revealing the city in sharp, unflattering lines. It was 7.45 am. Darkness was beginning to lift from the city and the Monday morning traffic was already starting to build, so we travelled in fits and starts, dirty spray showering the pavement whenever the driver accelerated. Red lights blocked our progress at every junction, and he braked late and hard as we approached them. The city felt grimy and hopeless.

At Kenneth Steele House the receptionist recognised me instantly, launching herself out from behind her desk and intercepting me with the purpose of a sheepdog, who can see that one of his ratty, stupid sheep is about to go astray.

‘Are they expecting you, Ms Jenner?’ she asked, hand on my elbow, guiding me to the sofa in the waiting area, away from the stream of Monday morning arrivals.

‘I need to speak to somebody on the investigation,’ I said. I tried to hold my head up straight, make my voice as steady as possible. A hank of my hair fell across my face and I brushed it away, noticing only then that it was unbrushed and unwashed.

They didn’t take any chances this time. A scene in reception was obviously not going to be on the cards. It took only ten minutes for me to get an audience with DCI Fraser.

I don’t even remember which particular characterless room we met in, but I do remember DCI Fraser. I hadn’t seen her for a week in the flesh, though I’d watched her updating the press on TV. She looked like she’d aged, but I supposed that I did too. Her skin was greyer than before, the crow’s feet by her eyes more pronounced. She’d brought a black coffee in with her and she drank it in three gulps.

‘Mrs Jenner, I know you’re aware that we currently have somebody in custody,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And this morning I’ve already begun a string of interviews which I hope will bring us closer to being sure that we have the right man in custody and therefore to locating Ben.’

She was spelling it out to me. It was Policework 101.

‘OK, so that is my priority this morning, but I wanted to see you personally because I know how difficult it is for you to wait at home for news.’

‘Thank you.’ I did appreciate it. I could tell that she was being kinder to me than she need have been.

‘But I would request that you try to be patient, and do just that. We did get your message last night, and we are acting on it. We’ve done some research this morning, we’ve already talked to one of Ben’s friends, and it seems that the boys who play Furry Football often share identities and passwords.’

‘I know it was him,’ I said. The knowledge was an itch that wouldn’t go away and her words, however kind, were failing to act as a salve.

‘I realise that the idea is terribly attractive, Ms Jenner. Believe me, it’s a tantalising thought that we might be able to communicate with Ben, but you must realise that there’s no way we can confirm that it’s him, and I don’t want you to raise your hopes too much.’

‘Did any of his friends admit that it was them?’

‘Nobody has so far, but you must remember that children aren’t always truthful. Not because they want to lie, but sometimes they’re scared. And it could have been another friend, we’ve only been able to talk to one boy so far this morning.’

‘I’m his mother. I know it was him. He had a new player in his team, a player that he was talking about wanting on Sunday morning. It was a giraffe.’

She ran her index finger up and down a deep line between her eyebrows.

‘Could another child have got the new player?’

‘It was Ben. He’s alive, DCI Fraser. I know he is.’

‘God knows, Ms Jenner, I hope he is too, and I am taking this seriously. It is very useful information, of course it is, and I will not forget it, I am listening to you. But, it is important that we view it in the context of what else is happening in the investigation at this moment.’

She shifted towards me, her eyes penetrating and sincere.

‘Believe me, I shall do everything in my power to return Ben to you safe and sound. I understand that waiting for news must be desperately difficult for you, but we are working around the clock here to make progress, and the bottom line is, every moment we spend with you is time taken away from the focus of the investigation.’

Her words, finally, got through to me, for what worse sin could I commit than to divert their energies from the investigation?

I began to cry again and I wondered if that would ever stop happening, that public leaking of emotions. I didn’t apologise for it any more, it was just something that happened to me that other people had to get used to, like your stomach rumbling, or breaking into a sweat.

‘I didn’t mean to waste your time,’ I said.

She took my hand in hers and the warmth of her hand surprised and disarmed me. ‘You’re absolutely not wasting my time. You’re informing me, and the more information I have, the better. But I can’t just go out there and search every house in Bristol where somebody logs on to Furry Football. It’s impossible. At this stage in the investigation my quickest route to finding Ben is via whoever took him, using all the information I have at my disposal, and this information is logged in my noggin now. I won’t forget it, and nor will my team. We’ll have it in mind whenever we interview somebody or whenever we make a decision. Do you understand that?’

I nodded.

‘Your information is valuable.’

‘OK.’

‘I’ll arrange for somebody to drive you home.’

‘Ben’s alive,’ I said.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said, ‘as soon as there’s any news. Wait at home.’

Heading down to the foyer, vision blurred still, unsteady down flights of identical stairs, feet slapping on the linoleum treads, feeling things slipping away. In the foyer downstairs I was surprised to see Ben’s teacher.

A picture of composure in contrast to my wrecked self, Miss May was perched on a sofa in the waiting area, handbag on her knee, hands draped on top of it. She wore very little make-up. Her hair was pulled back neatly and fastened at the nape of her neck. When she saw me, she got up.

‘They asked me in for interview,’ she said. ‘About Lucas.’ She whispered the name, eyes wide with disbelief, red-rimmed and bloodshot. I wondered whether that name would be whispered more now, only spoken of in hushed terms, because Lucas Grantham might be a child abductor, a predator, a monster.

‘What did they ask you?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’

That didn’t stop me. ‘Anything? Did you think of anything? Do you think they’re right?’

‘I told them absolutely everything I could think of,’ she said.

‘Do you think he did it?’

There was a heightened quality about her, flushed cheeks and quick movements.

‘Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe, definitely maybe. I’m trying to think back over everything, in case there were signs, I’m really trying. There was nothing obvious or I’d have said before, but there are some things, little things that-’

She opened her mouth again as if to say more, and I felt as if she was going to confide something in me, give me a drop of hope, but our conversation was brought to a halt because the officer who had retrieved the books from me and John a few days earlier appeared suddenly beside us, car keys jangling in his hand. ‘DI Bennett,’ he said. ‘OK if I drive you both home together? Apparently you live reasonably close to one another.’

It was 9 am and the rush hour was abating. Bennett drove us through the city centre, where the roads were hemmed in by smog-drenched modern buildings throwing endless reflections of tinted glass back at each other, OFFICE TO LET signs, boarded shopfronts, student accommodation with jauntily coloured plastic windows, and concrete 60s edifices rotting in the pollution, graffiti-covered and stained. At street level, office workers were arriving for work, trainers on, coffees and briefcases in hand.

I broke the silence in the car. There was something I wanted to say to Miss May. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever thanked you properly for all the effort you made with Ben last year, when we were going through our divorce. I really appreciated it. He did too.’

‘He did have a hard time.’ She gave me a wan smile.

‘Well, you helped him a lot.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘They’re such little souls. It’s a privilege to be a part of their lives. You must feel so very empty without him.’

Bennett cursed at a cyclist who was climbing laboriously up the steep slope of Park Street, wobbling into our path with the effort. I fixed my gaze on the tall Victorian Gothic tower at the top, dominating the skyline, Bristol University’s most recognisable building. Beside it was Bristol Museum. I thought of Ben’s favourite things there: the ichthyosaur skeleton, a case of glowing blue crystals, a stuffed dodo and the painting by Odilon Redon.

‘I don’t feel empty,’ I said to Miss May, ‘because I know he’s alive. I know he is. But I do feel very afraid.’

My words petered away, the last few dregs of sand falling through an hourglass.

She looked out of the window, and I worried I’d spoken too freely, exposed the depths of my misery without enough filtering. It’s a line I’ve crossed many times since. If you talk too openly about terrible things people shrink from you.

Her handbag was on the seat between us. It sagged open and in the silence my gaze fell on its contents. A set of keys, phone, plastic-wrapped tissues, A4 papers folded in half, charger cable, hairbrush, a leather document wallet and yet more stuff underneath: the assorted paraphernalia of a life.

When Miss May turned back towards me, her expression was unreadable.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just hard.’

‘No, it’s fine. I just can’t imagine how awful it must be for you. I mean I can’t sleep at night, and that’s just me. I think all the time about how difficult he must be finding it to settle without his nunny.’

My hand went to my mouth, knuckles pressing on it, trying not to let myself break down again.

‘Sorry.’ This time the word caught in my throat.

‘Please don’t be sorry. I totally understand. I’m the one who should be sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you any more than you are already.’

I took deep breaths that shuddered and ached, got control of myself eventually.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘And you’re right. I don’t think he’s ever slept without his nunny before.’

She nodded. The light was murky in the back of the car and her face looked drab and shadowed. Behind her, through the window, prettier streets flashed past now, houses painted in pastels or mellow in Bath stone, attractive even under the flat grey sky.

When I think of it now, that moment has a filmic quality, as if time was stilling.

‘Poor little soul,’ she said.

The parting and closing of her lips was mesmerising. An unsettled feeling prickled at the back of my neck.

I glanced at DI Bennett. He was oblivious to us, concentrating on a turn he was waiting to make, indicator light thudding, his lips slightly parted in concentration.

‘Are you all right?’ said Miss May. ‘Really?’ She was peering at me.

‘I…⁠’ I started to say something, but lost my train of thought. I was trying to deal with the unease I suddenly felt, the sense that something didn’t fit.

‘Ms Jenner?’

Her neck looked long and white as she leaned towards me. I turned away from her and towards the window as I tried to concentrate, to pinpoint the source of my edginess. I replayed our conversation in my head, and the unease crystallised into a thought, a moment of perfect certainty, a bright white light that was terrifying for its clarity.

My throat went dry.

‘Is this it?’ said DI Bennett.

The road was narrow, with cars parked on either side, and we were blocking it. We’d pulled up outside a four-storey Georgian townhouse, fronted by a broad pavement constructed from huge slabs of stone, uneven and worn. The house was part of a long, elegant crescent, which had leafy gardens opposite enclosed by wrought iron railings. The crescent had far-ranging views across the city and the floating harbour, towards the countryside beyond: trees and rooftops in the foreground, then more buildings falling away below, the glint of the river, and beyond, distant fields and hills under rolling grey skies, and on that morning sheets of rain approaching relentlessly, one after another.

And I knew then that I had only seconds to act.

What I did next, I did on sheer impulse.

JIM

I woke up with my head in a vice, mouth dried out and the urge to vomit, which turned out to be unproductive. I was still in my clothes.

Woodley picked me up at quarter past seven. It was still dark, and freezing cold. Woodley had the heaters in the car turned up full, pumping warm air around. I’d just finished fumbling with the seat belt when he tapped the dashboard with the flat of his hand. ‘Ready, boss?’ he said.

‘Are you going to put the address in the satnav then?’ I asked. ‘Or will we guess how to get there?’

He got going. Tucked into the footwell by my feet was a newspaper. I picked it up. The first page headline had moved on from Ben Finch:

SUPER STORM SANDY

Hurricane heads towards New York

Sixty million Americans could be affected by high winds, rain and flooding as super storm expected to make landfall on the East Coast on Tuesday.

I flicked through, found him on page four:

HIT A WALL?

Police investigating missing Benedict Finch still ‘pursuing multiple lines of inquiry’.

I didn’t bother to read on. It wasn’t good, but at least it wasn’t nothing, and they didn’t have news of the arrest yet. The blog was bad, negative publicity was bad, but no publicity was worse.

I dropped the paper back into the footwell.

It was dark and shiny wet on the road, taillights ahead of us blurring when the wipers swiped intermittently. We left the motorway and were immediately on country roads which twisted and turned so that oncoming headlights loomed out of nowhere, blindingly, and forced us into the side where our wheels hit deep puddles, sending spray clattering up onto the windows.

As dawn broke, the landscape around us began to emerge: low rounded hills in washes of black ink against a blue-black sky. The sky finally lightened as we made a steep descent into Pewsey Vale, showing us that it lay flat and wide below us, a dense white mist lingering at its lowest points so that it resembled an inland lake. It was a freezing mist and once we were down into the valley it settled firmly around us so that our headlights were muted and reflected back at us in the whiteness.

As we got closer to the cottage, the lanes got narrower, and the mist thicker still until we could see only yards ahead, and the car decelerated until we were crawling. Tall, dense hedges reared up oppressively on either side of us, and Woodley had to drive carefully to avoid the potholed verges.

We pulled into a lay-by that was about half a mile from the cottage according to the satnav. We were too early to call on Nicky Forbes. It was only 8.30 and we needed to kill a bit of time. Fraser didn’t want her complaining that we were harassing her.

I got out of the car, and lit a cigarette. I went to stand beside Woodley’s window. He wound it down a touch.

‘Did you notice if we passed any houses on the way here?’ I asked.

‘Closest one I saw was about half a mile down the road.’

‘Same here.’

I felt uneasy. The mist was impenetrable, limitless and disorientating, and inhabited by a deep cold so that my toes were already numb. The cigarette was doing me no favours, so I stubbed it out when it was half smoked, carried the butt back into the car with me and saw Woodley’s nose wrinkle when I stuffed it into the ashtray. I felt a curl of nausea in my gut and I rubbed my eyes hard and Woodley said, ‘Are you all right, boss?’

‘Yeah. Why do you ask?’

He went silent, small shake of his head. He looked nervous. He had his phone in his hand and he started to polish the screen with his sleeve. I felt like I should give him some sort of advice, but it was difficult to think what to say.

‘It’s not a normal life this, having this job. You’re outside society.’

I wasn’t saying it well. I wanted him to understand what I meant, but he wasn’t looking at me, and the motion of his hand polishing the phone continued, round and round.

‘Some cases make you grow up fast.’ As soon as I said it, I thought it sounded patronising, but he didn’t seem to care.

‘Have you ever worked on something that’s remained unsolved?’ he asked me.

‘This case will be solved,’ I said. ‘We’re close now. I swear it.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just wondered.’

I thought about it. There were always things that you never got to the bottom of in cases. A dog walker who was never identified, a random white car supposed to have been at a scene, which nobody ever confessed to driving past. That was normal, though sometimes it drove police officers mad, seeking answers that they never got. They couldn’t let it go. I’d seen that happen once or twice, but I’d never worked on anything where we hadn’t got our perpetrator, and I didn’t want this to be the one. Not with a young boy’s life in the balance. Not with the worst of crimes a possibility.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘Do you think she’ll cough?’ Woodley asked.

‘A woman like Nicola Forbes won’t hand us a confession on a plate. We’ve got our work cut out.’

We moved on cautiously through the mist and found the cottage half a mile further along the lane. Above us you could sense the weight of huge trees looming, although only their lower branches were visible as suggestions of their might.

We parked beside a red Volkswagen Golf in front of a wooden fence that was warped and green grey with lichen. I knew from the car’s registration that it belonged to Nicky Forbes.

We approached the cottage through a white wooden gate, and up a short garden path paved in uneven stone. Wet leaves were banked against the threshold and the path was lined with rose bushes, pruned back to their bare bones. The cottage was pretty, cream painted with a silvery thatched roof and small windows set into thick walls. It wasn’t a large place. I guessed it had maybe three bedrooms, one bathroom. Some of the curtains were drawn upstairs, but through a window beside the door I could see into a compact sitting room. The furnishings were plain and tidy. There were books lining the walls and an open fireplace. Yesterday’s papers were open on the coffee table.

As far as I could see, there were no outbuildings at all, but with the mist reducing visibility severely, it was hard to tell.

I pulled hard on the doorbell and we heard it clanging inside.

RACHEL

Miss May peered out of the car window at a house with a glossy black door.

‘This is it. Perfect. Thank you,’ she said.

‘Thank you for helping us with our inquiries,’ Bennett said.

‘It was the least I could do.’

She got out, taking a moment to straighten her coat. Her bag was still on the seat beside me. I could see her keys, but before I could move she leaned down and peered into the back of the car.

‘If there’s anything I can do for you. Truly. Please let me know.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

A car had pulled up behind ours, and the driver sounded the horn sharply, wanting us to move on.

‘They’d better mind their manners,’ said DI Bennett. I could see his narrowed eyes in the rear-view mirror, watching the car behind.

I had one chance. Miss May reached for her bag but before she could get to it I picked it up.

‘Here you go,’ I said. I held it out to her, but as I did so I let it tilt and then fall, so that its contents tipped out onto my lap, and down into the footwells.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ I said.

I leaned down and scooped up her belongings from the dark recesses, blocking her view. I stuffed most of them back into her bag. Half-eaten granola bar, purse, phone, charger, tissues, packet of painkillers, document wallet.

The keys I kept for myself. I slid them between the seat and my thigh.

Behind us, the car horn sounded again.

‘Come on, ladies,’ said DI Bennett.

I handed the bag back to her, careful to hold it by the top, so that it didn’t gape.

‘It’s all there,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

The car behind flashed its headlights.

‘All there,’ I said. ‘Bye.’

‘Take care,’ she said, and shut the car door.

DI Bennett accelerated away. In the side mirror, I could see her standing on the side of the road.

Her keys were digging into the underside of my thigh and I moved them into my coat pocket, careful not to let them make a sound.

It was a ten-minute drive from Clifton Village to my house. We drove along the edge of the Downs, flat, muddy and green, dog walkers and joggers ploughing around its perimeters, trees dotted across the parkland like abandoned livestock, water tower looming.

I listened closely to the police radio. I was terrified that Miss May would contact the police as soon as she tried to get into her house and realised the keys weren’t in her bag. She’d ask for DI Bennett to drive straight back there. I wished I’d taken her phone too.

We skirted around the edge of suburbia, 1930s semis mostly, John and Katrina’s house just round the corner. A few minutes to my place. The radio was spitting out little bits of noise. Nothing about the keys so far, but panic was making me swallow, my mouth awash with warm saliva, which had a bitter, tannic edge from the police station tea.

‘DI Bennett,’ I said.

‘What’s up, love?’

‘It’s what Miss May said, about Ben’s nunny.’

‘What did she say?’ His eyes met mine in the rear-view mirror.

‘Well, it’s just that she wouldn’t know about his nunny.’

‘I’m not sure I’m following you.’

‘He’s embarrassed about his nunny, that’s the thing. It’s an old cot blanket, a ragged thing. He’s had it since he was a baby. He uses it to get to sleep. He would never have told her about it.’

Silence, as he negotiated a roundabout. ‘Couldn’t he have told her about it?’ he asked. Victorian terraces now, narrow streets climbing up and down hillsides.

I leaned forward, between the front seats. ‘He would never tell her, that’s what I’m telling you.’

The radio sputtered again and I raised my voice to drown it out. DI Bennett parked on my street, a few doors away from my house, and turned to face me.

‘Right,’ he said, stringing out the word out, scepticism the subtext. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do then.’ His careful tone of voice made me think he wasn’t taking me seriously, that he was just humouring me. ‘I’ll pass that information onto the boss. Would you like me to do that?’

‘Could we call it in now? I think it’s important.’

‘I’m heading straight back now and I’ll let them know and that’s a promise.’

‘DI Bennett, I don’t think you understand…⁠’

‘I’ve promised, haven’t I? Can’t do more than that. They’ll ring you if they think there’s something in it. You’d better get out, love. Don’t worry about that lot. Come on. I mean it.’

A few journalists were in front of the house, watching us. He wound down the window. ‘Clear off out of her way,’ he shouted. ‘Go on. Get away.’

Another blast from the radio and I knew I had to go, or the news about the keys would surely come through.

I climbed out of the car, my head down and my hood up, and ran for it.

Inside the house I stood there with the keys in my hand, and tried to think what to do. Skittle, still in his cast, wove clumsily between my legs, his tail wagging, wanting affection.

I called Kenneth Steele House and yet again I asked to be put through to Fraser, but I was told she was busy and would call me back. They assured me that they understood how urgent my request to speak to Fraser was, and that they’d pass my message on and somebody would get back to me.

Nicky answered her phone, listened in silence as I blurted the whole story out: Lucas Grantham’s arrest, Miss May in the car on the way back home, everything. ‘Tell the police again,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘Call them back. Make them listen.’

In the background I heard the distinctive sound of the doorbell at the cottage.

‘Where are you, Nicky? I thought you were at home.’

‘I’ve got to get the door. Sorry. I’ll call you back.’

‘Don’t go.’

‘OK hold on, let me just see who it is. I’ll get rid of them.’

I heard the sound of her footsteps, the click of a door opening, a male voice, then Nicky was back on the line, saying: ‘I’m so sorry, I really have to go,’ and it went dead.

JIM

Nicky Forbes was on the phone when she opened the door. Her expression told me that we were the last people she expected to see.

She was dressed already but her face was void of make-up and she wore her paleness like a mask. She looked like she was sucking a lemon as she led us into the small kitchen and gestured to us to join her at a small table that was set against the wall.

A smoking cigarette lay in a circular ceramic ashtray that had fag ends crushed into its base. The table and chairs were a shiny orange pine, dented in places. The floor was tiled with small white squares grouted in black and the cabinets were white with a wood trim around the edge.

The room was a throwback to the 1980s, nothing had been updated for years. It wasn’t what I expected from Nicky Forbes, because I’d seen her blog, the pictures of her cooking on her AGA in a perfectly equipped and decorated modern kitchen.

The kettle had just boiled but she didn’t offer us a drink.

‘Are you a smoker, DI Clemo?’ she asked, and she held out the cigarette packet that was on the table.

‘No thank you,’ I said. Woodley shook his head too when she aimed the packet at him.

She dropped it back onto the table where it landed with a slap, and retrieved her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray.

‘I gave this up years ago,’ she said. ‘When I got pregnant with my first daughter.’

She sucked smoke in deeply, her eyes on mine, her gaze direct and challenging.

‘I’m wondering why you’re here,’ she said, exhaling the smoke slowly so that it billowed between us, ‘when my sister is in Bristol frantically trying to get hold of somebody who’ll listen to her when she tells them that she has evidence that Ben’s alive? I’m also wondering why you’re here when you have a suspect in custody? Ben’s teaching assistant? Is that right? Shouldn’t you be trying to gather some evidence against him? Maybe?’

She looked from one of us to the other, and when neither of us replied she slammed the side of her hand on the table, a show of temper that made Woodley jump, but not me.

‘What is the matter with you people?’

Her face was angry red and her manner was that of a teacher demanding an answer. It was all about control with her, I thought. This was an attempt at a display of control from somebody who had lost it. But I wasn’t worried about cracking her; I knew I was a good interviewer, very good.

When I was in my first couple of years of training I spent hours with my dad, honing my interrogation skills, role-playing until he’d caught me out with every dirty trick in the book, and then taught me how to recognise them, and work with them.

‘You’ll hear excuses,’ Dad said to me one night. I was visiting the family home and it was after dinner. Mum was washing up and Dad and I were talking in his study. The window was wide open and outside the late summer heat had just folded itself away, so we were sitting in the early gloom of a cool, velvety night. ‘Blokes will say that you aren’t a magician,’ Dad went on, ‘that you can only do what you do. That’s bullshit. It’s whingeing. It’s for people who aren’t good enough. If you’re worth anything, you can get the truth out of anyone. But you’ve got to be good.’

Two cut glass tumblers sat squat on the table between us, two whiskies. My dad shut the window and switched on his desk lamp. The shade glowed dark emerald and dropped a rectangle of light onto the surface of his desk.

He sat back down. ‘Again,’ he said.

In the kitchen of Nicky Forbes’s cottage I took a chair and pulled it close to her, so we were practically knee to knee.

RACHEL

So here’s the thing.

What do you do when it’s just you? When you know something and nobody will listen? When you want to do something, but you don’t know how dangerous it is, or how much you will be risking? When you have only minutes to decide?

I was used to making decisions about my life that were based on my complicated relationships with others.

Do I need to name them? Most of us have them. They’re generic. They could include your resentment of parents, or a sibling, or your desire to please your family, or a husband, or your fear of losing him. They could include your ambition, or your perception of what parenthood should be. I could go on.

But, at 9 am on Monday, 29 October, all those things fell away. There was just me, and I had a choice. I could believe what was written about me, that I was worse than useless, incapable of a sensible or moral decision, and I could obey DCI Fraser’s request, and wait quietly at home for news.

Or, I could act. I could take the certainty I felt and do something. On my own. Again. Because I was sure.

Don’t think that self-doubt didn’t course through my veins and threaten to weaken me. Don’t think that I didn’t consider the possible risks of acting alone. The risk for Ben, and for myself.

I fought both those things. I fought them because I knew I had to rely, purely and simply, on my instinct as a mother.

‘Be strong,’ Ruth had said. ‘You’re a mother. You must be strong.’

And that was enough for me. I understood in that moment, on that morning, that being a mother had given Ruth a single silken strand, strong as a spider’s web, which had tethered her to her life. It was the string that had led her, time and time again, out of the enveloping and dangerous depths of the labyrinth that was her depression. It had prevented her from slipping fatally and completely away into the dark seductive folds of melancholia, and stopped her sinking into the drowsy escape of a terminal pill overdose, or seeking a tumbling, chaotic fall from a height, and its inevitable brutal, shattering end below.

It hadn’t stopped my own mother. She’d been overwhelmed by the love she felt, by the fear it made her feel. Her emotions had drowned her sanity; such was their power.

But I was different.

I knew my son was alive, and I knew where he was.

So you might wonder what I did.

I opened a drawer in my kitchen and looked over the contents. I chose a vegetable knife. Short and sharp, easy to conceal. I put it into one of the deep pockets of my coat, blade down, beside my phone. I put the keys I’d taken into the other. Then I left my home through the studio at the back, unseen by anybody, and I began to run.

JIM

Nicky Forbes was disturbed by my proximity. She shifted, tucking her legs under the table, away from me. Her body language was pure avoidance, but I was OK with that. I’d learned to be patient.

Woodley sat on the other side of her, keeping more distance, his posture relaxed. Good lad, I thought, he’d been listening.

We’d planned to use the Reid technique in the interview. It’s not very nice, but it’s very effective. It’s a well-known technique that makes use of a good-cop, bad-cop routine, so Woodley had a role to play. As well as being my foil, he would be my eyes. He would watch her for body language that would betray her.

Nicky Forbes folded her arms over her chest.

‘Are you finished?’ I said.

She flinched slightly, a small jerk of her head away from her hand, which held her cigarette just in front of her mouth, the smoke curling between us.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘here’s how I see it.’ I kept my voice gentle, but persistent, I wanted her to listen to every word I said.

‘I think what you went through as a child was a terrible thing. I think that when you lost your brother, when you lost Charlie, you never really recovered. Did you? Then you had to bring up Rachel and she was ungrateful, wasn’t she? She never knew how much you had to suffer, or thought about how hard it was for you to keep the secret about your parents and about Charlie.’

She took a deep pull on her cigarette, her eyes on mine. I went on.

‘So when Rachel had Ben that was difficult for you, wasn’t it? You had four daughters, but that’s not the same as having a son, is it? She didn’t know how lucky she was, because for you, having a son would be like having Charlie back.

‘So I think you didn’t have a choice. I think you thought that Rachel was bad for Ben. You reckoned that she couldn’t look after him as well as you. She’s divorced after all, bearing a grudge against her husband and his new wife. That’s not a happy home. And Ben’s been unhappy in the past year; we know that from his teacher. That must have pained you. In fact I think it was really hard for you to bear.’

She gave a small, brusque shake of her head, then she ground the cigarette out in the ashtray, crossed her arms.

‘Four children is a lot, and all girls too. Were you hoping for a son, Nicky? Is that why you wanted to try for another baby this year? Your husband told me. Has it been all about replacing Charlie?’

Her eyes began to glisten with tears, but she didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t draw breath. You mustn’t, because if you do it gives them a chance to deny things, and that can make them stronger, just the act of saying it. You have to carry them on your narrative until they finish it for you, and hand you the ending you’re waiting for.

I inched my chair just a little closer to hers. Her head bowed. I leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees, and looked up at her.

‘You see, I think it was just too much for you in the end. That Rachel had Ben. You knew you could do a better job than her and you wanted a son of your own.’

She shuddered.

‘I know what it’s like to want to protect,’ I said. ‘I can understand why you did it. You’d left your own family; you didn’t want them. You wanted him. And you wanted him for the right reasons. It was a mother’s instinct, a proper mother’s instinct, wasn’t it? You knew you could do a better job than your sister.’

She covered her face with her hands, let out a moan.

I wondered if she was going to break quicker than I thought.

I could almost smell it.

RACHEL

It took me twenty-five minutes to get back there.

I stood in front of Miss May’s house, panting and soaked to the skin. The only dry parts of me were the depths of my pockets where my fingers nestled around the handle of the knife and the hard edges of the keys.

The street was empty and in front of me the slate sky was reflected in polished windowpanes that were speckled with rain, and the black wrought iron railings separating the house from the pavement looked sharp and forbidding.

I approached the house and looked at the names and buzzers beside the front door. None of them read ‘May’. I peered over the wrought iron railings that enclosed a dank courtyard at least twelve feet below ground level.

It was worth a try.

I took the steps down one at a time, slowly, stone treads slick and treacherous. The doorbell wasn’t named. I rang it. No answer.

I got out her keys and tried the Chubb key in the deadlock. It turned smoothly. In went the Yale key too, soft click, and I had to give the door a bit of a shove but it opened and I saw a dark hallway ahead, daring me to step into it.

‘Hello?’ I called. It wasn’t too late to pretend I was just returning the keys, but there was no answer.

‘Ben?’ I called. Nothing. I felt almost disabled by fear, but I forced myself to walk down the dark, narrow corridor. Filtered daylight beckoned me from the other end.

I glanced through an open door on my left. It was a bathroom, and it was immaculate: fixtures gleaming, expensive looking toiletries in a neat row. The door opposite showed me her bedroom. On the bed was a suitcase, lid open, neatly packed.

At the end of the corridor I found her living space. It was large and rectangular, the full width of the back of the house. There was a compact, neat kitchen area and small dining table at one end of it, a sitting area at the other. The room had stripped wooden floorboards and three wide, pretty windows with wooden shutters folded back, sills low and wide enough to sit on. The outside space it overlooked was little more than a light well, but there were pretty furnishings and the whole effect was of artful good taste. It was a flat I might have been envious of under different circumstances.

Standing in the centre of the room, I saw myself reflected in a mirror over the mantelpiece. I looked white as a ghost. My hair, blackened by rain, hung in damp hanks around my face, and patches under my eyes were as dark as storm clouds. My skin looked slack and undernourished, and the injury on my forehead was healed, but prominent. My eyes were darting with fear and something else as well: there was desperation in them, and a glint of wildness.

I looked completely mad.

Doubt coursed through me.

This is what a total breakdown must be, I thought. You find yourself standing somewhere you shouldn’t be, doing something so out of character that you wonder if you’ve become somebody else entirely. You’ve lost the plot, taken a wrong turning, jumped onto a train whose destination is total lunacy.

I must leave, I thought. I must go home.

I would have done that, too, but as I turned to leave I noticed the door. It was in a corner, partially obscured by the kitchen units. An apron, oven gloves and tea towels hung from it on a neat row of hooks. Layers of paint had dulled the panelled detail on it. It was probably a larder, I told myself, or a broom cupboard, and I should just go.

But I found that I couldn’t. I felt compelled to walk towards it and, as I did so, I heard someone whimper and I realised it was me.

I stopped in front of the door. My left palm was moulded around the handle of the knife, and I rested the tip of my index finger on the bottom of the blade, and pressed down a little, feeling it bite into me, making me flinch. There was nothing to be heard apart from the slow drip of rain from somewhere outside. Even the hands on the kitchen clock moved soundlessly.

With a feeling of horror uncurling within, I reached my hand out towards the door and clasped the handle. It turned, but something stopped the door opening. It was jamming at the top.

I reached up to a bolt that was drawn at the top of the door. Tremulous, unreliable fingers fumbled but managed to draw it back.

I opened the door, stepped behind it and there was a soft click as I pulled it shut.

I could see nothing. All around me it was pitch black, and I had to use the light from my phone to see that I was at the top of a short staircase, and that there was another door, also bolted, at the bottom of it.

I started to make my way down. The darkness was so dense that I needed my hands to steady me on the narrow walls.

Two more steps and I reached the door at the bottom of the staircase. Once again, trembling fingers pulled the bolt, pushed the door open.

My fingers felt for a light switch, and found one. The hesitant bulb blinked and then glowed the dull orange of a polluted sunset before it brightened, revealing the room to me, making me gasp.

It took me long moments to absorb what I could see.

It was a boy’s bedroom: freshly painted walls, bright yellow, thick blue carpet on the floor. A rugby poster, and rugby club scarf, both pinned up, some reading books, a teddy bear on the bed, wearing a scarf. There was some clothing, a pair of small slippers, a dressing gown in softest white towelling. A wooden-framed bed made up with a cartoon-patterned duvet set on it, a pile of DVDs and a television set on a table in the corner, a chest of drawers with pirate stickers decorating it.

No Ben. No natural light.

I picked up one of the garments: it was a pyjama top, for a boy, bright red cotton, a dinosaur printed on the front of it, grubby marks around the collar. ‘Age 8’ read the label. I held the top to my face, I inhaled the smell of the fabric, and I knew that Ben had worn it.

He had been here.

My fingers dug into the soft cotton and I held on to it as if it were a living, breathing part of my son. ‘Ben,’ I whispered into it, ‘Ben.’

My eyes roved again, looking for more signs of him.

And what struck me was that there was nothing in that room, nothing at all, not one thing, that was right.

If Miss May had made this space for my son, and I was convinced that she had, then she’d got it wrong. Ben didn’t like rugby. He’d never have chosen bright yellow walls, or a babyish duvet set, or the type of reading books she’d left out for him, and he wouldn’t have liked the pirate stickers on the chest of drawers because he preferred dinosaurs. The bear on the bed was a version of Baggy Bear, but wasn’t him. His ear wasn’t sucked.

This was a room made for an imagined boy, not for my boy, who would never have felt at home here.

And then I saw something else.

Scattered all over the bed, beneath a fresh scar on the wall where it looked as though it had made impact, were the components of a smashed laptop: shards of plastic, electrical bits and keyboard keys, all separated from one another by significant force.

Ben would have liked the laptop. He might have played on it.

But he might not have been allowed to go online, to play his favourite game. The laptop might have been snatched from him, and hurled against a wall in anger.

And would that anger have then been directed towards him?

I fumbled for my phone. The reception was poor, but it was enough. I called 999.

And when I’d finished the call I stood in the middle of that space, with the painful wrongness of it in every corner of my vision, and the shattered computer components a glowering hint of violence, and I began to moan, and it was a dreadful, primitive sound, and the moans turned into a shout for him, a final desperate plea, an ululation, like the one I’d made in the woods one week before.

And I fell to my knees, hope shattered.

TRANSCRIPT

EMERGENCY CALL – 29.10.13 at 10 hours 17 minutes 6 seconds

Operator: Ambulance emergency. Hello, caller, what’s the emergency?

Caller: I’ve found a boy.

Operator: OK, where have you found him?

Caller: I’m in the woods, Leigh Woods, just over the Suspension Bridge. My dog found him. He’s lying on the ground. He’s covered in a bin bag.

Operator: Can he talk to you?

Caller: He’s all curled up. He won’t wake up.

Operator: So he’s not conscious then.

Caller: No, he’s not conscious.

Operator: Is he breathing?

Caller: I don’t know.

Operator: OK, do you think you can check for me? If he’s breathing?

Caller: He’s curled in on himself, I can’t see his face properly. Hang on.

Operator: How old is the boy?

Caller: I don’t know, maybe seven or eight. He’s quite little. He’s so white, he’s really white. Oh God you’ve got to send somebody quick.

Operator: They’re already on their way. It doesn’t delay them for me to ask you some questions, so don’t worry about that. I need you to have a look and see if he’s breathing or not, OK?

Caller: He’s freezing cold to touch. And he’s in a state. Oh God. Oh my God. He’s not even wearing anything except underwear. Jesus, oh my God…

Operator: All right, you’re doing really well and help is on its way, they won’t be long now. Can you tell me whereabouts in the woods you are?

Caller: I’m off the main path. By a swing. Help, quickly, help.

Operator: The whole time we’re talking, they’re on their way to you, so don’t worry about that. Have you managed to check if he’s breathing?

Caller: Oh God, it’s him, isn’t it? I think it’s Ben Finch, it’s the missing… [the phone goes dead]

Operator: [Calls back but gets voicemail.]

JIM

Nicky Forbes’s expression was complicated: proud and defiant, but with a touch of something else too that I read as surrender. We were close to getting a breakthrough, I knew we were, but then Woodley’s phone rang.

It was the world’s most stupid, immature ringtone. Of all things it was the Star Wars theme tune, and just like that it destroyed the moment.

Woodley was mortified. I was furious.

Nicky Forbes laughed. ‘You are so fucking incompetent,’ she said.

I felt an ache in my temples as Woodley, instead of turning the phone off, took it out of his pocket and looked at it.

She wasn’t as close to giving up as I’d thought. She was combative. But that was OK. That I knew I could work with, but Woodley wouldn’t shut up, he said, ‘It’s Fraser. I’d better take it.’

Nicky Forbes was watching, not missing a trick. I desperately didn’t want her to get the upper hand. The Reid technique depends on the interviewer keeping control of the process, moving from one stage of the interview to the next. It can be a long process and we’d only just got started. As Woodley slipped out of the room, I tried to regain control. ‘Let’s discuss what you were doing on Sunday, twenty-first October.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s discuss why you are here wasting my time and harassing me when you should be looking for Ben. Where’s Ben, DI Clemo? Where is he? You actually have somebody in custody, and you are here, targeting me. You know nothing about me! Nothing! Do they charge police for wasting their own time? Do they? Because that is what you are doing. My family is everything to me, it’s everything. At this moment in time, I can’t cope with it very well, but that is nobody’s business apart from mine and my husband’s. It’s not a criminal offence to take some time out, so stop treating me as if I am some kind of monster. My life has been difficult, and I cope with that the best I can. Do I want a son? YES! Do I want Charlie back? YES! Do I find my family too much to cope with sometimes? YES! Did I take Ben? NO, I DID NOT! Am I a monster? NO, I AM NOT! Do I love my husband, my daughters, my sister and my nephew? YES, I DO! Is that it? Is that all your questions answered?’

It was the way she said it, hand slamming down on the table as she made each point, as if her very existence depended on my understanding those things.

Faced with those words and her certainty, I simply felt everything start to slip through my fingers: the interview, and the case I wanted to build against her.

I pulled my chair back, loosened my collar.

Outside the kitchen door the mist was still thick, and it was impossible to see more than a few metres into the garden.

Get a grip, I told myself. Get back into it, hold your nerve, you can do this, but then Woodley reappeared and when I saw the look on his face I knew that I’d be lucky if I came out of this with even a shred of dignity.

He held his phone up as if it had something written on it that I should read. ‘We have to go,’ he said. Something about the way he said it made me understand that it wasn’t negotiable.

‘Thank you for your time,’ I managed to say to her, and the chair scraped on the floor as I stood. There was a static noise in my head. It had a size and a shape, and it was swelling as if it was being pumped in.

‘Get out,’ she said, quietly, as if she’d never seen a creature more disgusting than me.

Outside, by the car, Woodley said, ‘They’ve found a boy. In the woods. And they’ve found the site where he was held.’

‘Woodley,’ I said, but then I didn’t know what else to say.

I puked onto the thorny stems of one of Nicky Forbes’s neatly pruned rose bushes. Bile and bits of unidentifiable spew spattered around its base, leaving a pattern that can’t be mistaken for anything other than the hot disgorging of somebody’s guts.

I wiped my mouth, straightened up and felt pain ripple across my abdomen.

‘I’ll drive,’ I said, and Woodley handed me the keys.

RACHEL

They prised me up off the carpet, which had been so freshly laid that bits of blue fluff stuck to the knees of my trousers and my forehead and my arms.

They escorted me up from the flat with a blanket wrapped around me and they put me in an ambulance that was parked on the street.

The press were there too, of course they were. Only a few of them arrived quickly enough to photograph me being wheeled into the ambulance, but one person with a camera is all it takes. ‘Rachel! Rachel!’ they shouted, as the shutters fired. ‘Are you all right? Can you tell us what happened?’

Inside the ambulance a paramedic did checks and asked me questions. They said they were treating me for shock.

I refused to lie down. I sat up, blanket wrapped around me. It was all I had the strength to do. Shaking racked my body, like convulsions.

Then it was the turn of the police. They told me they were in pursuit of Joanna May. They said nothing about Ben. Their faces were grim, and I found I had no voice to ask questions.

I had imaginings. I felt as if chunks of me were separating themselves from my body, falling off. I imagined blood creeping in at the edges of my vision, a red tide. It was because I knew I was too late. He had been there, and now he was gone, and what were the odds that she’d keep him alive?

I felt myself let go. I let go of hope.

And then cutting through the murmured voices, I heard the ambulance radio. The dispatcher was calling for somebody to respond to a call in Leigh Woods. Precise location unknown. A young boy found. Status unknown.

They had to sedate me. Blackness fell as swiftly as the blade of a guillotine.

TRANSCRIPT

EMERGENCY CALL – 29.10.13 at 10 hours 38 minutes 28 seconds

Operator: Hello, ambulance and emergency, how…

Caller: Oh my God, thank God. I’ve been disconnected. Can you hear me? I’ve been trying to call, trying to call you back. I was talking to somebody, but my phone went dead and I couldn’t get a signal again. I’ve found that boy. I’ve found him. But he’s in a really bad way.

Operator: Where are you, caller?

Caller: Please, hurry up.

Operator: Can you tell me where you are?

Caller: I’m in Leigh Woods, by a rope swing. Off the path. Are they looking for us? Should I go to the path?

Operator: Hold on just a second, OK… [consults somebody briefly]… All right, help is already on its way, they’re nearly with you, but it’s best if you stay with the boy and I really need you to tell me if he’s breathing if you can.

Caller: He is breathing, but it’s really bad breathing. I can’t feel a pulse in his arm. He’s freezing cold. I’ve put my coat on him.

Operator: Right. Is he conscious at all?

Caller: No, he’s not.

Operator: All right. You’re doing well. Can you see if he’s got any injuries on him? Is there any blood?

Caller: I can’t see any blood. He’s got bruises up his arm. He’s making weird noises.

Operator: Right, can you carefully move him onto his back, as quickly as you can, and have a look in his mouth if you can, check there’s nothing obstructing it. Keep him lying as flat as you can.

Caller: I’m doing it. God, he’s cold, he’s soaking wet. Oh God. Where are they?

Operator: They’re nearly with you. Can you tell me how’s his breathing now?

Caller: Bad.

Operator: But he’s still breathing, right?

Caller: I’ve got him on his back.

Operator: Look in his mouth. Is there anything in there? Food or vomit?

Caller: No. His lips are blue.

Operator: Is he still breathing?

Caller: Yes, he is. I’m going to lie with him. I’m going to give him my body heat.

Operator: OK. They’re a few minutes away from you now; they’re making their way along the main path in the woods. Can you give me some more detail about where you are, can you tell me where they need to turn off the main path?

Caller: There’s a pile of logs opposite the entrance. Cut-up logs in a pile. About halfway round the path.

Operator: I’ll let them know.

Caller: I’m lying with him. He’s breathing really bad.

Operator: Can you shout? I want you to stay with him, and tell me straight away if he stops breathing, but can you shout, to help them find you? They’re very close, but they can’t see you.

Caller: HELP! OVER HERE! HELP!

Operator: Well done. They can hear you. Keep shouting.

Caller: HELP US! HELP! OVER HERE! Where are they?

Operator: Don’t worry they can hear you and they can see you now.

Caller: I can see them. HERE! QUICK! HE’S HERE!

Operator: Are they with you now?

Caller: Yes, they’re here.

Operator: OK, I’ll leave you with them, OK?

Caller: Yes, thanks, all right.

Operator: Thank you, bye.

JIM

We made it to the woods in one hour. I used blue lights.

On the way in the car we got more details. About Ben Finch’s condition. About Joanna May, and the room in the basement of her flat.

‘We interviewed her,’ I said to Woodley. ‘We should have fucking seen it.’

He didn’t respond.

The paramedics were still working with Ben Finch in the woods. They couldn’t get the ambulance to the site so they’d had to stabilise him and move him in stages.

We parked and I ran. I wanted to be with Ben. I wanted to see his clear blue eyes for myself, see if there was life in them. I wanted to tell him that he would be OK, that his mother was waiting for him. I wanted to do that for him at least.

Rain was falling in a downpour, crashing through the canopy above. The trees lining the path were bowed and streaked from it. They arched over me, a skeletal tunnel of bare branches, urging me onwards, making me feel as if it was impossible to make progress.

My breathing was ragged and fast, my heart thumping, my clumsy feet tripping over sticks, stones, each other, never moving fast enough. With every step I was soaked some more, but with every step I cared less.

I rounded a bend in the path, and ahead I saw the ambulance, and a stretcher being loaded on board.

I pushed myself, tried to reach them in time, tried to shout out, but it was futile, because they slammed the door shut long before I reached them, and by the time I got there the ambulance had begun the tricky process of turning around.

Mark Bennett was guiding it. I stayed back, stood to the side of the path as the ambulance manoeuvred past me, watched him pat the back of it as a farewell.

And Bennett, all dressed up in waterproofs, jaw clenched and wet from rain said, ‘That lad’s not in a good way, Jim. Not at all.’ It had got to him. I could see that.

And I said, ‘I wanted to see him.’ I wiped the rain from my face, felt my sodden clothing cling coldly to me.

‘Nothing we can do for him now. It’s too late for that. It’s in the hands of the medics.’

And I hated him for saying that, and I hated him for being there when it should have been me, and I hated myself for letting harm come to that boy, any harm at all.

RECORD OF EVIDENCE: AVON AND SOMERSET POLICE, CID

OPERATION HUCKLEBERRY – EVIDENCE BAG 2

AUTHORISED COPY OF HOSPITAL ADMISSIONS NOTE FOR BENEDICT FINCH, BRISTOL CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, MONDAY, 29 NOVEMBER AT 12.07 pm

Description of text:

‘Name: Benedict Jonathan Finch  Age: 8 years  Sex: Male

Date of birth: to be confirmed

Benedict Finch, male, 8 years, identity confirmed by police officer attending scene in the woods. Awaiting confirmation by family member.

On arrival presented with severe hypothermia caused by overnight exposure in Leigh Woods with no shelter and no clothing. Hypothermia induced coma. Hypotension (BP 78/54); core body temperature 28°C; HR 30 reg. General condition extremely poor. Underweight, dirty and dehydrated. Significant bruising to left upper arm.’

Original stored Item 3, Evidence box 345.112

WEB PAGE

BREAKING NEWS www.up2theminute.co.uk/asithappens

29 October 2012, 14:13

UP TO THE MINUTE brings you a timeline of today’s dramatic developments in the case of missing eight-year-old Benedict Finch.

The significant developments were confirmed by AVON and SOMERSET CONSTABULARY in a hastily arranged press conference this afternoon led by DS Giles Martyn.

10.15 am The body of a young boy is discovered in Leigh Woods near the site where Benedict Finch went missing just over one week ago. The discovery is made by a member of the public who contacted the emergency services. The boy is alive, but barely.

12 noon The search for Benedict Finch is called off, after the boy’s identity is confirmed on arrival at Bristol Children’s Hospital.

12.45 pm A small number of people begin to gather outside the Children’s Hospital. They light candles and pray for Benedict Finch and there’s an outpouring of concern for his safe recovery on Twitter.

1.17 pm An arrest is made at Bristol Airport and police confirm that they’ve detained a person in connection with the investigation.

2.10 pm Police confirm that the person detained in connection with Benedict’s disappearance is a teacher at his school, Joanna May, 27 years old.

In other developments there are unconfirmed reports that Benedict Finch’s mother was treated in an ambulance outside an address in Clifton this morning. It’s thought that the address may be the home of Joanna May.

Keeping You Up To the Minute, Every Minute

Spread the word: Facebook; Twitter

RACHEL

Bristol Children’s Hospital smelled of cleanliness and sickness in equal measure. The only times I’d been there before had been to meet John after work.

We travelled up from the ground floor in a tiny elevator where Wallace and Gromit’s recorded voices told us to ‘Mind the Doors’, over and over again. Shock-eyed and sleep-deprived parents got on and off, checking the sign in the lift for their destinations, fingers running down a list, stopping at ‘Oncology’ or ‘Nephrology’.

Amongst them were a mother and baby boy, she wearing a burqa, even her eyes veiled from the world with mesh. Her baby was in her arms, a tube running up his nose, taped in place, his wide brown eyes staring at the ceiling lights. I wondered how she was able to comfort him when she was confined to that garment, when their eyes couldn’t even meet. Did she rest her uncovered fingers on his cheek? Was that skin-to-skin contact enough for them both here, in this hospital?

My heart, hurting for my own son, ached for her too.

The elevator disgorged DI Bennett and me onto the fourth floor.

The decor was wincingly bright, themed in blue and yellow, and featuring aquatic motifs, but somehow all of that felt hopeful; it made my sense of anticipation swell.

In the vestibule outside the elevator doors, where the floor-to-ceiling windows offered us a tumbling, chaotic cityscape view of Bristol, DI Bennett told me that he’d been in the woods with Ben. He couldn’t quite meet my eye, but he held open a door for me and then guided me along the corridor with a light hand on my elbow that was touching if not welcome.

I was met in the corridor outside Ben’s ward by two doctors, who politely ushered me into a room. A nurse was there. She offered me a cup of tea. The chink of china was the only sound in the room as everybody waited for her to pour it.

Ben had been close to death when they found him, they explained to me, his core body temperature dangerously cold, but they’d warmed him up, and he was stable. Battered and bruised, very weak, but stable.

Relief and happiness that he was alive overwhelmed any trepidation I might have felt. They could scarcely hold me back.

‘He’s still in a dangerous condition,’ they wanted to tell me before they let me see him. ‘Do you understand that?’

I said I did. I left the tea to go cold on the table.

Do you want me to describe our reunion?

I can tell you that a nurse was outside the door of Ben’s room and that her hand reached out to touch mine when I arrived, just brushed it lightly, even though we were strangers. We exchanged no words but she held the door open for me.

JIM

By the time we got back to Kenneth Steele House, Woodley and I mud-stained and soaking wet from the woods, Fraser had just gone into interview with Joanna May. They’d picked her up at Bristol Airport waiting for a flight out.

We heard everything second hand. The incident room was fairly buzzing with the news. Relief had broken out across everybody’s faces, though there was an undercurrent of muttering that Benedict Finch was seriously unwell, that it was a wait and see job. Nobody was celebrating properly because of that, nobody wanted to.

Fraser had left instructions for Bennett to get down to the hospital and for Woodley and me to go and visit Joanna May’s parents at their house. She wanted us to get to the bottom of the alibi they’d given their daughter and find out what else they knew.

It was 3 pm by the time we pulled up into their driveway on a quiet street of semi-detached Victorian villas far enough out in suburbia that streetlights were few and far between.

When we arrived, two uniforms made a discreet exit, leaving Woodley and me with a couple, in their seventies, who looked as though they wished the ground would open up and swallow them.

We sat in their lounge. There was no tea, or coffee. Vast windows inset with a band of decorative stained glass gave us a view of a pair of raised vegetable beds, where bamboo canes protruded from the dark puddle-pocked earth and were tethered into triangular shapes.

On an ornate marble mantelpiece a vase of flowers was crowded by family photographs, which spilled over onto adjacent bookshelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Amongst the faces in the pictures was Joanna May.

Hanging above the fireplace was a large mirror in a gilt frame, which threw back a reflection of our sorry gathering: Woodley and I standing in the middle of the room, tall and dark like crows, Mrs May sunk into an armchair, a walking stick propped up beside her, dressings visible on her legs underneath thick brown tights; Mr May beside her in a matching chair, wisps of white hair over his forehead, cat hair on his trousers; both of them looking stricken.

‘She was our fourth child,’ said Mrs May once Woodley and I had taken a seat on a rug-draped sofa. Her voice was tremulous and careful. ‘We had five children altogether. Rory died, our eldest son, when he was a toddler, but we were a happy family, weren’t we, Geoff?’

Mr May reached over and took her hand, squeezed it.

‘But she wasn’t right,’ he said to Woodley and me, ‘from the start. As soon as she started interacting with other children, we knew she wasn’t.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

Mrs May lowered her eyes.

‘She was so manipulative,’ said her husband. ‘She competed constantly for our attention, she bullied her siblings to get what she wanted, and she was always lying. The lying was constant, it was infuriating.’

It was painful to watch Mr May talk. Everything he shared with us stripped another piece of his pride away, and undermined more completely the life this couple had built.

‘If somebody lies to you habitually, Inspector, you can’t ever trust them,’ he said. ‘It erodes relationships, even between a parent and child.’ He ran a trembling hand across the paper-thin skin on his forehead. ‘We knew the way she behaved was wrong, and that she wasn’t what you might call completely normal, but we never dreamed it would lead to something like this.’

‘Is the child all right?’ Mrs May asked. ‘The boy?’ She didn’t seem able to say his name. ‘We’ve been watching the news.’

‘It’s a little early to tell,’ I said, ‘but as far as I know his condition’s stable for now.’

She nodded, swallowed, and made a small sign of the cross.

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that you provided your daughter with an alibi for last Sunday. Is that right?’

‘We did, yes,’ said Mrs May. ‘Your colleague rang us to talk about it, a very nice young lady called, what was she called, dear?’

‘DC Zhang,’ said Mr May.

‘Can I ask you about that?’

‘Well,’ said Mr May. ‘Yes, well, Joanna came to have lunch with us on that day, and we weren’t really sure exactly what time she went home, but she reminded us it was about four thirty so that’s what we told your colleague.’

‘Joanna reminded you?’

‘Yes. We asked her because we weren’t sure. We didn’t think to question it, because it could have been four thirty, couldn’t it, Mary?’

Mrs May nodded. ‘We never really checked,’ she said. ‘And we started lunch quite late. But I suppose it could have been earlier too. Now that I think about it. We never actually checked the time ourselves.’

‘So you weren’t absolutely sure?’

‘Not certain, no, but your colleague said that was normal.’

‘Would you mind making a statement to that effect?’

‘We never thought our daughter would be capable of such a thing,’ said Mr May. ‘If we’d ever dreamed… oh dear God… would they have been able to find the boy earlier?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said, but he lowered his eyes and I could see that it was a question that they would be asking themselves for a very long time.

‘Can I ask, do you have any idea why Joanna might have done this?’ I said.

They exchanged a glance then, and Mrs May gave a small shrug of her shoulders.

Mr May said, ‘Joanna’s infertile. That’s the only sense I can make of it. She only discovered her infertility last spring after she tried to get pregnant using artificial insemination. We didn’t approve. We thought she should be in a stable relationship before she had a baby, but she was insistent, as usual, and so we gave her the money anyway, for the inseminations, and then for the fertility tests, because you try to help your children. You feel responsible for their happiness. I don’t think she would have told us if she hadn’t needed us to pay for it. She doesn’t confide in us. In fact she only contacts us if she wants something. Anyway, it upset her a great deal, the infertility. She wasn’t used to not getting what she wanted. My guess is that she took this boy because she wanted a child. But let me tell you this: don’t expect her to explain why she did it. She never admitted to anything as a child, and I doubt she will now.’

He stood up again, painfully, and made his way to the mantelpiece. He took down a photograph of Joanna May and gazed at it for a moment before showing it to his wife. In the photograph Joanna May was on a beach. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. In her swimsuit she sat beside a body-shaped mound of sand from which the head of a smaller child protruded. She wielded a spade triumphantly and the child was smiling too.

‘I’ll move this I think, Mary,’ said Mr May.

‘Yes, dear.’ Her eyes slid to her lap as he left the room, fingers picking at the fabric of her skirt.

Together, we waited silently for him return, but before he did, the sound of breaking glass made Mrs May flinch.

RACHEL

I approached my son’s bedside with a lifetime of love to give him, and with the humility of somebody who’s been brought to her knees in every way imaginable.

I came to him with a surfeit of relief and emotion that should have made for a perfect Hollywood moment, with full orchestral accompaniment and box of Kleenex required. The works.

But it wasn’t like that.

When I entered the room, I saw that he had his back to me, and he lay curled up under layers of blankets, motionless and small, the outline of his body making an angular shape.

I saw the back of his head, his sandy hair unkempt, without lustre. One of his arms lay on top of the blanket. A garish hospital gown covered some of it, but his forearm protruded, bare until the wrist where a thick bandage was wrapped around it, securing a cannula, which was attached to a tube, down which a transparent liquid crawled, dripping into his vein.

Closer. An oxygen mask was on the pillow beside his head, hissing. I could see the side of his face now, his profile. His lips were chapped and paper-thin eyelids covered eyes that were twitching beneath. His eyelashes were long and beautiful as ever, though they did little to mask the deep dark patches under his eyes and the grey pallor of his skin.

‘Ben,’ I whispered. I touched the skin on his temples with the side of my hand; it was the softest skin you could ever touch. I pushed a strand or two of his hair back from his forehead.

He didn’t respond. He was sleeping the sleep of the dead.

Behind me, the doctor said, ‘He may take a few minutes to wake up properly.’ He was standing awkwardly by the door, keeping his distance. I knew he was there because they were frightened of what my reunion with Ben could do to him.

‘Ben,’ I said. ‘It’s me, Mummy.’

I sat down on the side of his bed. I wanted him to wake up, I wanted him to come to me, to pitch into my arms as if he’d been falling from a great height and had finally landed in a place of safety.

His eyelids flickered open, then shut again.

‘Love,’ I said. ‘It’s Mummy. I’m here. Ben.’

Another flicker and then I had them: bright blue eyes. They didn’t move in the usual way though. They looked past me at first, and it was only when I said his name again that they slid towards me, locked onto mine.

He blinked.

My head sank onto his, my breath on his face, his head motionless beneath me. I kissed him, my tears slid from my cheeks onto his. I felt his lips move, and I pulled back so I could see him better, hear him. ‘What did you say, Ben? What did you say?’

Eyes slid shut again, a twitch of movement in his arm. And I thought, where is my child, the one who could never stay still, whose every movement was brimming with life?

His breathing faltered audibly and I heard the doctor step forward, but it settled again and the doctor contented himself with moving the oxygen mask closer to Ben’s mouth.

I felt terrible, terrible sadness building in me, a feeling so powerful that it hurt, and it made my hands shake. I looked at the doctor, his eyes powerfully kind and his words steady: ‘Give him some time.’

And he was right, because Ben stirred, and his eyes met mine again, and even though they seemed to slip out of focus, his lips moved and this time a word was audible on his outtake of air. ‘Mummy.’ And tears began to roll slowly, silently down his cheeks.

I took him in my arms, even though the doctor stepped forward as if to stop me, then thought better of it. I scooped Ben up, onto my lap, and I held his limp, small body close to mine and in return I thought I felt some strength in his arms, and then it was a firmer squeeze and he clung to me. He did that weakly, and wordlessly, but we stayed like that for so long that eventually the doctor had to prise him gently away.

After the medical staff had laid him back down, they tidied him up, adjusted his cannula and checked that he was properly connected to his machines. When they stepped away, Ben’s eyes met mine with more consciousness in them than they’d had before.

And I smiled, because that was what I wanted from him most of all, a smile. It was the last thing I’d seen on his face before he left me in the woods, and I wanted to see it again. But my smile wasn’t answered, because his eyes moved away again, and the lids slid down over the tears that still fell, and he turned his head away from me.

And here’s the thing: I wasn’t sure whether that was because he was exhausted and dangerously unwell, or because there were things deep inside his eyes that he didn’t want me to see.

It was a beautiful reunion for me. It was. The feel of Ben’s arms around me was everything I’d dreamed of, every second he’d been away. But the other bits, his desperate physical condition, the sorrow that was deeply, soundlessly buried within him, and the way he dodged my gaze, I won’t deny it – this is supposed to be a truthful account after all – they were profoundly frightening.

Did you want catharsis? So did I. But there was none. I’m sorry.