What She Knew

Efforts undertaken by law-enforcement agencies during the initial stages of a missing-child report may often make the difference between a case with a swift conclusion and one evolving into months or even years of stressful, unresolved investigation. While the investigative aspect of a missing-child case is similar, in many ways, to other major cases, few of these other situations have the added emotional stress created by the unexplained absence of a child. When not anticipated and prepared for, this stress may negatively impact the outcome of a missing-child case.

Findlay, Preston and Lowery, Jr, Robert G (eds.), ‘Missing and Abducted Children: A Law-Enforcement Guide to Case Investigation and Program Management’, Fourth Edition, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, OJJDP Report, 2011

RACHEL

John couldn’t stand the waiting. He wanted to do something, so he spent most of the night driving around, circling the woods, following the routes back into Bristol, just in case.

Each time he returned, he sat in my car and asked me to go over what had happened.

‘I’ve told you,’ I said, when he asked for the third time.

‘Tell me again.’

‘How will it help?’

‘It might.’

‘I’m so scared he’s hurt.’

John winced at my words but I needed to say more.

‘He’ll be so frightened.’

‘I know.’ His reply was tight, tense.

‘He’ll be wondering why we haven’t found him yet.’

‘Stop! Just tell me again. From the beginning.’

I did. I told him everything I could remember, over and over again, but it was simple really. Ben was there, and then he ran ahead, and then he was gone. No sign, except a rope swing, gently swaying.

‘Do you think he’d been on it?’ John asked. ‘How was it swaying?’

‘Backwards and forwards. Gently.’

‘Could the wind have blown it?’

‘It might have.’

‘Have you told the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you heard nothing?’

‘No. Just the sounds of the woods.’

‘And you called out to him?’

‘Of course I did.’

And so on. In this way, the hours passed slowly, desperately. We punctuated the time by speaking periodically to the police, getting updates that told us nothing. I rang Nicky more than once, passing on the lack of news, hearing the mounting desperation in my voice echoed in her responses.

Inspector Miller arrived before midnight in full waterproof gear, to oversee the search. The men with dogs changed shift twice. Sodden and tired animals handed over to eager, bright-eyed creatures, straining at their leashes. I gave them Ben’s jumper to sniff, so they knew his scent. The darkness was our greatest enemy, holding back the possibility of a full-scale search.

At 5 am, Inspector Miller called John and me together to tell us what was happening. They were readying themselves for dawn, he said, which would be at 07.37. He ran through a list of the actions that were planned, using police speak that I only partially understood. There were to be more dogs, horses, a sergeant and six; Mountain Rescue were coming, and they’d scrambled the Eye in the Sky.

For the next couple of hours I watched numbly from my car as the scene in the car park transformed. I felt useless, a voyeur.

The ‘sergeant and six’ turned out to be a grilled van, from which seven men appeared, ready to search on foot. Another van brought a generator, lights, a shelter and maps and four Mountain Rescue men. Inspector Miller and WPC Banks worked to organise them. They’d both begun to function with the contained, intense kind of energy of somebody who has a bad secret that they’re not allowed to tell.

Dawn crept in in fits and starts, the pall of total darkness reluctant to retreat. Daylight revealed that the parking area had been churned up by the constant comings and goings during the night. The only blessings were that the rain had ebbed to a persistent drizzle and the wind had died down somewhat, though spiteful, icy little gusts still blew through intermittently.

Four mounted officers congregated at the entrance to the path. Their horses were huge and beautiful, with glossy coats and nostrils that snorted visible puffs into the damp, chilly air. Ben would have loved them. One of them startled as the thud-thud of the search helicopter grew louder overhead. It swooped low over the treetops, before disappearing again.

Katrina arrived soon afterwards. John emerged from his car to greet her and folded his arms around her in a public display of affection the likes of which had never occurred once in our entire relationship. He buried his face into her hair. I lowered my gaze.

She knocked on my car window, startling me. I wound it down.

‘No news yet?’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘I’ve brought these for you, in case you need something.’ She handed me a thermos and a paper bag.

‘It’s just tea, and some pastries. I didn’t know what you like, so I picked for you…⁠’ Her voice trailed away. She was neatly dressed, and she stood there like a prefect at school, well turned out and eager to please. No make-up. That was the first time I’d seen her without it. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Thanks,’ I managed.

‘If there’s anything I can do.’

‘OK. Thanks.’

‘John’s asked me to go back home, in case he turns up there.’

‘OK. Good idea.’

It was awkward and strange. There’s no protocol for meeting your ex-husband’s new wife at the site where your son’s gone missing.

‘Well, I’d best get back there,’ she said, and she turned away, returned to John.

After she’d gone, I looked in the bag of pastries. Two croissants. I tried to nibble one, but it tasted like dust. I managed some sips of tea. It wasn’t sugared, the way I like it, but the heat was welcome.

It was just after Katrina left that Inspector Miller’s radio sprang into life.

They’d found something. It was hard to hear the detail. The radio crackled and spat, words emerging occasionally from the interference. ‘What is it?’ I mouthed at the inspector as he held up a finger to shush me. He beckoned to WPC Banks to join him and they turned away, conferred. John noticed the action and appeared beside me. I felt electrified by hope and dread. Once again the drone of the helicopter travelled over us, making it even more difficult to hear. The Inspector turned to us:

‘Can you confirm once again what Ben is wearing, please?’

‘Red anorak, white T-shirt with a picture of a guitar on it, blue jeans, ripped at the knee, blue trainers that flash.’

He repeated it all into his radio. The voice crackled back at him, asking what size and brand of trainer.

‘Geox,’ I said. ‘Size thirty.’

The inspector turned away again. It took all my self-control not to grab him, to shake out of him what was going on. John was rigid beside me, arms folded tightly across his chest.

It was the awkward twitch of Inspector Miller’s mouth that gave it away when he turned back to us. Whatever they’d found, it wasn’t making him happy.

‘Right.’ He took a deep breath, drawing strength from some internal reserve. ‘The boys have found something that they believe might be significant. It’s not Ben -’ he’d seen the question on my lips – ‘but it might be an item or items of his clothing.’

‘Where?’ said John.

‘By the pond at Paradise Bottom.’

I knew it. It was nearby. I ran. I heard them shout after me, I was aware of the heavy rhythm of someone running behind me, but I didn’t pause, I sprinted into the woods as fast as I could.

Before I even reached the pond I saw them: a group of three men, huddled together, standing in the middle of the path. They watched me as I approached. One man held a bundle in his hands, a clear plastic bag with something in it.

‘I’ve come to see,’ I said, and the man with the bundle said, ‘It would be good if you could confirm whether any of these items belong to Ben or not, but please don’t take them out of the bag.’

He held it out towards me, an offering.

John arrived beside me, his breathing loud and ragged.

I took the bag. It had a weight to it. Droplets of water smeared the plastic outside and in. The contents were wet. I saw a flash of red, some denim, bundled up white cotton fabric. I turned it upside down, and beneath the fabric items were two shoes: blue Geox trainers. They were scuffed, and on one of them the sole was slightly separated from the shoe at the toe, as I knew it would be. I gave the bag a little shake. Triggered by the movement, blue lights flashed along the sole of the shoes.

‘The shoes are named,’ I said. ‘With his initials, under the tongue.’

Through the plastic I managed to pull up the tongue of the shoe. Underneath it were the letters ‘BF’. The ink had bled into the fabric around it.

‘Thank you,’ said the man. He had white hair and a darker grey moustache and eyebrows, and red, pockmarked skin. He took the bag from me, though I didn’t want to give it back to him.

‘Where’s Ben?’ I said.

‘We’re doing our very best to find him,’ the man replied, and the compassion in his voice robbed me of any shreds of composure that I might have had left.

An ugly fear was growing in me like a tumour; it was an idea that I hadn’t wanted to contemplate. John hugged me, tightly. He knew what I was thinking because he was thinking it too.

‘No!’ I shouted and it was the sound of a wild animal, an ululation, an uttering that a mother might make if she saw her offspring being dragged away by a predator.

JIM

The morning after Benedict Finch went missing I woke up early, like I always do. I’ve got a reliable body clock. I never need to set an alarm, although I do, just in case. You don’t want to oversleep. I started the day the way I always do: a cup of good black coffee, made properly in my Bialetti. I drank it standing in my kitchen.

My flat is on the top floor of a tall Georgian building in Clifton. It’s the best area in Bristol, and the flat’s got amazing views because it’s on the side of a steep hill. The front overlooks a big garden, which is nice, but out the back it’s better because I can see a proper slice of the city. I’ve got Brandon Hill opposite, dotted with trees, Cabot Tower on its summit, a couple of Georgian and Victorian terraces below. Just out of sight are modern office buildings and shops, but you can see a bit of Jacob’s Wells Road below, leading steeply downhill to the harbour, where you can go for a night out or a weekend walk. I can’t see the water from my flat, but I can sense it, and gulls often circle and cry out, diving past my windows.

Until I started going out with Emma I didn’t know that this city was built on sea trade that docked there for hundreds of years: sugar, tobacco, paper, slaves. She told me how a lot of human suffering made the wealth that built Bristol, and a lot of men gambled lives and fortunes on that. Emma was an army brat, and the reason she was so well informed was that her dad made her learn a history of every new place they moved her to, and they moved a lot, so she was in the habit of it.

Once she told me about the slavery, I couldn’t get it out of my mind and then I realised how much of the city’s noisy, nervy history is in your face, especially where I live. You’ve got the Wills Memorial Building, pride of the university, towering over the top of Park Street: built on tobacco profits. The Georgian House, perfectly preserved, and a very nice bit of real estate: sugar and slaves. Both of them are less than a quarter of a mile from my flat, and I could name more.

I think about it sometimes because I don’t think cities change their character too much; even after hundreds of years it’s still there as an undercurrent. Now, when I look out of the window each morning, and watch Bristol wake up beneath me, its messy, complicated past is right there as a little bit of a jittery feeling in my bones.

I’d slept well the night before even though it was obvious that there’d been some serious weather overnight. It was still dark when I finished my coffee, and the flat felt cold and draughty. Outside, rain was pelting down and the tips of the trees were getting pushed and pulled in all sorts of directions. A plastic shopping bag was blown up from the street below and went on a crazy dance over the treetops before it got snagged.

Before I got out the board to iron my shirt, I brought Emma a cup of tea. She was still in bed. She always got up a bit later than me.

She was lying in a mess of bedding and hair. She wasn’t a neat sleeper. It was a contrast to the controlled and purposeful way she lived the rest of her life, and one of the rare occasions I was able to glimpse her with her guard down. I felt privileged to be close enough to her to see it.

‘Hello,’ she said when I put the tea down.

‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked her.

‘Mmm. How about you?’ She blinked softly, sleepily. Then she stretched and rubbed her eyes, her movements languid. Emma didn’t rush things. She was watchful and clever, and poised, a cocktail of characteristics that I found addictive, especially when mixed with her beauty. Emma turned heads. I was a lucky man.

‘Solid eight hours,’ I said. I got back into bed beside her. It was warm and comfortable and I couldn’t resist it. Monday morning could wait a few minutes. Emma nestled into my shoulder.

‘I could stay here all day,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

She draped an arm across my chest and I watched her tea going cold and saw the face of my clock count nine minutes before I forced myself to leave the gentle rise and fall of her sleepy breathing. As I pulled the cover away, she roused herself and pulled my face to hers and we kissed. ‘I’ve got to get up,’ I said.

‘Boring,’ she replied, but I knew that if I hadn’t said it, she would have. Emma was always punctual. She smiled, as if to acknowledge my thought, and then she sat up and reached for her tea, grimacing at the first tepid gulp.

I put the ironing board up in front of the kitchen window and watched the red and white lights of the commuter cars coming into the city as I did my shirt.

‘You cycling in?’ Emma asked when she appeared in her work clothes, hair smoothed and tamed into a thick ponytail.

‘Yep.’

‘Trying to build up your celery legs?’ she said. She loved to tease. This wasn’t a side of her she readily showed people either. It made me smile.

‘You love my celery legs,’ I said. ‘You should just admit it. You driving in then?’

She was wearing a business suit, fitted and shapely, and a pair of low heels. She had bright eyes, and a quick smile that morning. She was ready to take on her day.

‘That’s correct, Detective Inspector Clemo, an excellent deduction. See you later.’

Emma and I travelled separately to work. Police officers are allowed to have relationships with each other, it’s not forbidden, but the reality is that it can be frowned upon, because it could complicate things if you end up on a case together. It was my suggestion that we keep our relationship secret for now. We’d only been together for a few months, and I figured what we did in our spare time was our business. Emma agreed. She said she wasn’t bothered if it was secret or not. She was easy like that.

First I heard of Benedict Finch was when I was cycling in. I have a portable digital radio that I listen to when I ride. By the time I left the flat the wind and rain had eased up and, as I dropped down Jacob’s Wells Road towards the waterfront, I enjoyed the feel of the acceleration on the steep downhill and skirted round the water that had pooled around the backed-up drains.

I barely had to pedal when I hit the flat beside the harbour, and, as I was cruising past the cathedral, I caught a 07.30 news update on Radio Bristol. It said that an eight-year-old boy called Benedict Finch had gone missing in Leigh Woods. It happened the previous afternoon while he was out on a dog walk with his mum. Police and mountain teams were looking for him. They were worried.

The city centre proper was starting to get sticky with early Monday morning traffic, but I made good time, and I hit Feeder Road at 07.40 and cycled alongside the canal. The water level was high, the surface pocked with drizzle. A fisherman sat hunched on the bank beside the road, shrouded in waterproofs.

Overhead, traffic roared across the stained concrete flyover, oppressively low, a grubby landmark that greeted me every day on my arrival at work. Behind it daylight was emerging, a slate grey sky with low, racing clouds that were purple above and yellow below. It was a poisonous sky: the death throes of last night’s weather. I remember thinking that it wasn’t a good night for a small boy to be missing. Not a good night at all.

RACHEL

Inspector Miller said that because they’d found the clothing the ‘game had changed’ and they needed to ‘intensify their operation’. He described the woods as ‘a scene’ and said it was a CID case now. What he avoided saying explicitly was what we all knew. Ben wasn’t lost; he’d been taken.

A stolen child is every parent’s worst nightmare, because the first thing you ask yourself is, ‘Who would take a child?’ The answers are all profoundly disturbing. I slipped into a state of shock. John did too. The faces of the uniformed police around us were grim and some averted their eyes, a show of respect that was especially unnerving.

WPC Banks guided John and me into her car and drove us to the CID headquarters. At the end of the long lane that led from the car park to the main road, photographers and journalists had already gathered, and they thrust their faces and their camera lenses up against the car windows, trying to talk to us, take photographs of us. We recoiled from the noise, and the flashlights. We drew away from the windows and into each other. John clutched my hand.

It was a terrible journey. Coming away from the woods felt like an admission that we wouldn’t find Ben; that we were prepared to leave him behind. Within minutes we’d entered the outskirts of the city, and were sucked into its road systems. Busy dual carriageways carried us past new and old industrial buildings, into dense traffic. In the centre the River Avon appeared, parallel to the road, murky water flowing strongly while we lurched to a stop at every light. Plant life clung to its banks, tough and grubby.

My thoughts refused to work coherently and I was gripped by terror, which felt as if it was hollowing me out. My mind couldn’t face the present, so it burrowed into the past, looking for distraction, or perhaps solace, looking for anything that wasn’t this reality. I felt John’s cold fingers clutching mine and I remembered the first time he’d held my hand, as if that would somehow make things right.

It happened the week after we’d met for the first time at a hospital function. John was an exhausted junior doctor, wearing their standard uniform of oxford shirt and chinos, complete with tired sags in the fabric after a long shift. I was a nursing student, there for the free sandwiches and glass of warm white wine. His dark sandy hair fell over his forehead rakishly, and he had a lovely symmetrical, fine-featured face that was handsome in an old-fashioned way. His eyes were a piercing blue, intense and captivating. Ben was lucky enough to inherit those eyes.

Our first conversation was about music, and on that evening, when I was tired of socialising and a little tired of life, it was a tonic. John spoke in a way that was earnest, but gentle too. He asked me if I knew that Bristol had one of the finest concert halls in the country. It was small, he said, in a beautiful neo-classical nineteenth-century church building, and the acoustics were spectacularly good.

He had a lack of pretension when he spoke that I liked instantly. His inbuilt, unquestioning respect for culture transported me back to conversations overheard at my Aunt Esther’s cottage, the place I grew up in, and suddenly I felt as if my life had been drifting for too long, and that it was time to stop.

A week later, we sat in St George’s concert hall, waiting for the concert to begin. It’s a fine, elegant building, built on the side of lovely, leafy Brandon Hill, just a stone’s throw from the shops on Park Street. It’s opposite the Georgian House, which Ben has since visited on a school trip, but at the time I hadn’t known either place existed.

It was a full house. Tickets had been hard to come by. John was animated, full of information. He pointed out the place where a German firebomb fell through the roof one night in 1942, when the building was still in use as a church, and landed on the altar unexploded.

He talked about himself too. He told me that he used to play the violin, that his mother had been a concert-class performer, and his home had been full of music as a child. He told me that work was going well, and that he’d just decided to specialise in general paediatric surgery. I got a sense that his interest in all things was intense, thoughtful and absorbing, whether it was music, architecture, or the small bodies and lives of his patients. He had a rare sensitivity.

The concert began. A violinist, dressed in black, stood centre stage and, with utmost care, he freed the first few notes from his instrument, and they hung crisply in the air around us. He played with an elegance that captivated and seduced, and I felt John relax beside me. When his hand brushed mine and he didn’t move it away, it seemed to give me balance. When he gently held my fingers in his, it felt like a counterpoint to the emotional intensity of the music, and also an encouragement to let myself feel it, become absorbed by it.

This memory: the music, the feelings, flashed through my mind in the car. It was as if I wanted to rewind my life back to that point, and start it over again, to hold on to that perfect moment, so that what came afterwards wouldn’t turn to crap, wouldn’t lead us to now. Which was impossible, of course, because the memory was gone as soon as it arrived. The reality was that instead of comforting me, the cold grip of John’s fingers felt desperate and futile, just as mine must have done to him.

The traffic stayed slow as we travelled through the city centre: taillights and signposts, concrete shapes and scud clouds under a granite sky. The River Avon disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of the road, brown and choppy still, a shopping trolley abandoned on the far bank. I kept my eye on the water, tracking its progress into the city, because I couldn’t stand to look at the people outside the car, all the people who were having an ordinary Monday at the start of an ordinary week, the people who knew where their children were.

The police station was a large concrete cuboid building, Brutalist in style. It was three storeys high, with tall rectangular windows set into each level at regular intervals, like enlarged arrow slits in a castle wall. In typography from around half a century ago, the sign announcing where we’d arrived sat on a thin concrete rectangle above the doors and stated simply: KENNETH STEELE HOUSE.

The inside of the building was startlingly different. It was state of the art, open plan, busy and slick. We were asked to wait on a set of low-slung sofas by a reception area. Nobody gave us a second glance. I went to the loo. I barely recognised myself in the mirror. I was gaunt, white, a spectre. There was mud on my face, and the gash across my forehead was livid and crusty with blood that had strands of my hair caught in it. I looked dirty and unkempt. I tried to clean myself up but it wasn’t very effective.

When I got back to reception, John was still on the sofa, elbows on his knees, head hanging. I took my place beside him. A uniformed officer with a pink face and thinning grey hair came out from behind the front desk and approached us across the wide foyer.

‘It won’t be long,’ he said. ‘There’s somebody on their way down to fetch you just now.’

‘Thank you,’ John said.

JIM

Kenneth Steele House is where I work. It’s the CID headquarters for Avon and Somerset Constabulary. It’s not a pretty building from the outside, and neither is its location. It’s on a strip of trade and industrial estates behind Temple Meads Station in St Philip’s Marsh. It’s a flat inner city area with an isolated, wasteland feel because there’s no housing in the vicinity, and its boundaries are the canal and the River Avon. There’s CCTV everywhere and a fair bit of barbed wire.

I was at my desk by 08.05. I noticed the atmosphere straight away. There was none of the usual Monday morning chatter, only a tension about the place that you get when a big case is in. Mark Bennett – same rank as me but about a hundred years older – popped up from behind the partition that separated his desk from mine before I’d even turned on my PC. ‘Scotch Bonnet wants to see you,’ he said. ‘Soon as.’

Bennett had a bald shiny head, a thick fleshy neck and the eyes of a bull terrier. He looked like a bruiser. Truth was, he was anything but. We’d gone out for a drink once, when I first arrived in Avon and Somerset, and he told me that he’d never gone as far or as fast as he’d wanted to in CID. Then he told me that he thought his wife didn’t love him any more. I’d got out of there as fast as I could. You don’t want that mindset to infect you. ‘Scotch Bonnet’ was Bennett’s nickname for our DCI, Corinne Fraser. It was because she was Scottish, and female, and could be fiery. It wasn’t especially clever or funny. Nobody else used it.

Fraser was in her office. ‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Close the door. Take a seat.’

She was immaculately turned out as usual in a sharp business suit. She was eccentric looking, with frizzy grey hair that didn’t suit her short fringe and puffed out over her ears, but she also had an attractive, delicate face, and implacable grey eyes that could look right through you, or pin you to a wall. I sat down opposite her. She didn’t waste time:

‘As of zero eight hundred hours this morning I’ve got an eight-year-old boy who has almost certainly been abducted from Leigh Woods. We’ve got multiple scenes already, the weather’s been against us, and we’ve lost more than twelve hours since he first disappeared. We’re going to have the press trying to crawl up our arses before lunchtime. I’m going to need a deputy SIO to take on a lot of responsibility. Are you up to it?’

‘Yes, boss.’

I felt blood rush into my cheeks. It was what I’d hoped for: a high-profile case, a senior position. I’d been in CID in Avon and Somerset for three years, putting in the hours, proving myself, waiting for this moment. There were DIs above me in the pecking order, older, just as ambitious. Mark Bennett a case in point. They could have got the role, but it was my time, my chance. Did I think of turning it down? No. Did I think it was going to be a minefield? Maybe. But the words that were doing cartwheels in my head were these: bring it on. Bring. It. On.

A big part of the thrill was getting to work with Fraser. She was tough and clever, one of the best. It was well known that she’d grown up on a shitty council estate in Glasgow. As soon as she could leave home, she’d moved as far away as possible so that she could train as a police officer and start a new life. Problem was, while she was a young DC she’d ended up married to a DCI from Scotland Yard who reeked so badly of corruption that even the Met had to get rid of him eventually. In his spare time he’d knocked her about. She’d ended up in the hospital once but her old man was never charged. The police looked after their own in those days, so long as they were white males.

Her good fortune was that her husband had died before going to trial for corruption. He had a heart attack at the pub. He was dead before he hit the floor. She’d responded by moving to Avon and Somerset as a DS and shooting up the ranks with a combination of astute political play and detective work that was respected for its thoroughness. She was the first woman ever to be made a DCI in Avon and Somerset, and must have been one of the first in England. She wasted no words and her authority was natural. It was the right of someone who’d survived her wilderness years and come out tougher and wiser. She didn’t tolerate whingeing and she didn’t tolerate bullying.

‘First job: interview the parents,’ Fraser said.

‘Yes, boss. Where are they?’

‘At the scene.’

‘Is uniform taking them home?’

‘Not yet.’ She thought about it, tapped her pen on the desk. ‘We need to be sensitive, that’s paramount, Jim, but I’m inclined to bring them in here. Teas and coffees on our terms.’

I knew what she meant. When you interview people in their own homes they feel more relaxed, because it’s familiar, but they are also in control.

‘Use a rape suite,’ she said. It was a concession to sensitivity. Rape suites are nicer than interview rooms. ‘And anyway,’ she added, ‘we’ll need forensics to visit Mum’s home at least, assuming that’s where the kid spends most of his time, and Dad’s home if we think it’s worth it. They’re both potential scenes.’

She picked up the phone. It was my cue to leave. But then she put it down again.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘I was going to ask Annie Rookes to be FLO but she’s tied up. Any ideas?’

I don’t really know what made me say it so reflexively, but I did, and before I’d had a chance to think. ‘What about Emma Zhang?’

Fraser looked surprised. ‘Is she experienced enough? This one’s going to be tough whichever way it plays out.’

‘I think so, boss. She’s very bright, and she’s done the training.’ It was too late to back down now, and anyway, I thought Emma deserved the chance, and I thought she’d be good at the job. It would be a real step up for her, and there was so much to learn from working with Fraser.

‘Zhang it is then,’ Fraser said, picking up the phone again.

It was only once I’d left her office that I hoped I’d done the right thing, for Emma, and for the case too. The family liaison officer role is a crucial one. They’re there to look after the welfare of the victim’s family, but they’re detectives first and foremost. They watch, they listen, they offer support, but above all they keep an eye out for evidence and then they report back to the investigation. It’s a delicate line to tread. The FLO can make the difference between our success and our failure.

We got an incident room set up, quick sharp. Kenneth Steele House is spot on because it’s been refurbished with CID needs in mind, so we’ve got the facilities we need to run as slick an operation as possible, as quickly as possible. The room we were allocated was spacious: two runs of tables down each side with monitors on them, room for the Receiver, Statement Reader and Action Allocator. There was an office set up for DCI Fraser just off the main area, so she could run the show from there, as well as an ‘intel’ room, a CCTV room, an exhibits office and a store. It was an arrangement that meant we could keep everything close; it was proven to work well.

Straight off, we allocated actions to the officers we already had working, to confirm whereabouts of all the local sex offenders who were already known to us and to look through records for previous incidents relating to missing children or any peepers, flashers or attempted abductions in the area. We had four pairs of officers in place and Fraser was adamant that she was going to need ten pairs at least.

At 10 am we got a call to say the parents had been brought in. Fraser said, ‘You should get down there and get straight on with the interviews. Do it by the book, Jim. I want every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. I’m also going to speak to the Super because I think we’ve got grounds to get a CRA out already. The criteria are met. You need to ask the parents for a photograph ASAP.’

CRA stood for Child Rescue Alert. I knew the criteria, you learn them by rote: if the missing child is under sixteen, if a police officer of superintendent rank or higher feels that serious harm or death might come to the child, if the child has been kidnapped and there are sufficient details about the child or abductor to make it useful, then you can issue one. The point of it is to inform police, press and public nationwide that a child is missing. A news flash interrupts TV and radio programmes to alert the public, and border agencies and police forces around the country will be primed to be on the lookout. It’s as serious as it gets.

I took a last look through the questions I’d been preparing for the parents, made myself take a deep breath. This was it. I was as ready as I was going to be. As detectives, we’re trained to know that what you do in the first few hours after a child has disappeared is crucial. Ben Finch had already been missing for more than twelve hours and our investigation was only just launching. I didn’t need Fraser to tell me that operationally speaking we were on the back foot already, or that every step we took from now on would be under scrutiny.

‘Woodley,’ I said to a rookie DC who Fraser had attached to the case. He was a tall, skinny lad with a face only a mother could love. ‘Get me a tea tray ready. Enough for three. And biscuits. Take it down to the rape suite but don’t take it in. Wait for me outside.’

If a female officer in plain clothes brings a tray of tea into a room, everyone assumes she’s from catering. If a male officer does the same, it makes him seem like a nice guy, puts people at ease. Just a little tip I learned from my dad.

RACHEL

They took John and me to different places.

I was interviewed in a low-ceilinged room that was windowless and oppressive. I was met there by a tall young woman, who introduced herself as DC Emma Zhang. She wore a smart, slim-fitting business suit. She had beautiful caramel-coloured skin, and thick black hair tied neatly into a ponytail, deep, dark eyes that were almond-shaped and beautiful, and a warm smile.

She shook my hand and told me that she would be my family liaison officer and she sat down beside me on an uncomfortable sofa with boxy arms and adjusted her skirt.

‘We’re going to do everything we can to find Ben,’ she said. ‘Please be assured of that. His welfare will be our absolute priority, and my role is to keep you informed about what’s happening as the investigation and the search for Ben progresses. And you must feel free to come to me with any queries, or anything at all for that matter, because I’m here to make sure you feel looked after too.’

I felt reassured by DC Zhang, by her apparent competence and her easy, approachable manner. It gave me a modicum of hope.

There was nothing to look at in the room except for a matching pair of armchairs, a meanly proportioned beech coffee table and three bland landscape prints on the wall opposite. The carpet was industrial grey. On one of the armchairs a lone purple cushion sagged as if it had been punched. A door was labelled EXAMINATION ROOM.

A man arrived. He was tall, well built and closely shaven, with thick, dark-brown hair, cut in a neat short back and sides, and hazel eyes. He had large hands and he put a tray down on the table clumsily: the stacked cups slid dramatically to one end, the spout of the pot let free a slug of hot liquid. DC Zhang leaned forward to try to save everything but there was no need. The cups wobbled but didn’t fall.

The man sat down in the armchair beside me and extended his hand to me. ‘DI Jim Clemo,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry about Ben.’ He had a firm handshake.

‘Thank you.’

Clemo cleared his throat. ‘Two things we need from you as soon as possible are the contact details for Ben’s GP and his dentist. Do you have those to hand?’

I took my phone from my pocket, gave him what he wanted.

‘Does Ben have any medical conditions that we should be aware of?’

‘No.’

He made notes in a notebook that had a soft acid yellow cover. It was an incongruously lovely object.

‘And do you have a copy of Ben’s birth certificate?’

My paperwork was disorganised but I did keep a file of Ben’s important documents.

‘Why?’

‘It’s procedure.’

‘Am I having to prove he existed or something?’

Clemo gave me a poker face, and I realised I was right. It was my first inkling that I was involved in a process where I didn’t know the rules, and where nobody trusted anybody, because what we were dealing with was too serious for that.

Clemo’s questions were thorough and he wanted detail. As I talked, I sat with my arms wrapped around myself. He moved a lot, leaning forward at some moments, sitting back and crossing his legs at others. He was always watching me, his eyes constantly searching my face for something. I tried to quell my natural reticence, to talk openly, in the hope that something I told him would help find Ben.

He started by asking me about myself, my own upbringing. How that was relevant I didn’t know, but I told him. Because of my unusual circumstances, the tragedy of my parents’ death, it’s a story I’ve told a lot, so I was able to stay calm when I said, ‘My parents were killed in a car crash when I was one and my sister was nine. They had a head-on collision with an articulated lorry.’

I watched Clemo go through a reaction that was familiar to me, because I’d witnessed it so often: shock, sorrow, and then sympathy, sometimes barely concealed Schadenfreude.

‘They were driving home from a party,’ I added.

I’d always liked that little bit of information. It meant that in my mind my parents were forever frozen as young and sociable, invigorated by life. Probably perfect.

Clemo expressed sympathy but he moved on quickly, asking me who brought me up, where I’d lived, then how I met John, when we got married. He wanted to know about Ben’s birth. I gave them a date and a place: 10 July 2004, St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol.

Beneath the facts my head was swimming with sensations and memories. I remembered a hard and lengthy labour, which started on a perfect scorcher of a day, when the air shimmered. They admitted me to a delivery room at midnight, the heat still lingering in every corner of the city, and as my labour intensified through the long hours that followed, it was punctuated with the shouts of revellers from outside, as if they couldn’t think of going home on such a night.

Before morning there’d been the fright of a significant haemorrhage, but later, after the sun had risen high again, I felt the extraordinary joy of being handed my tiny boy, who I watched turn from grey to pink in my arms. I felt the weightlessness of his hair, the perfect softness of his temples and a sensation of absolute stillness when our eyes met, me holding my breath, him taking one of his first.

I had to detail the years of Ben’s childhood for Clemo, and talk about my relationship with my sister, and with John’s family. It was painful to speak about John’s mother Ruth, my beloved Ruth, who’d become a surrogate parent to me after my marriage, and who now lived in a nursing home, her brain slowly succumbing to the ravages of dementia.

I also had to talk about the break-up of my marriage, how I never saw it coming, how Ben and I had coped since then. I didn’t want to relate these things to strangers, but I had no choice. I steeled myself, tried to trust in the process.

The pace of Clemo’s questions slowed as we got nearer to the present day. He asked in detail about Ben’s experiences at school. I told him they were happy ones; that Ben loved school, and loved his teacher. She’d been very supportive when John and I had been going through the separation and divorce.

Clemo wanted to know how often Ben had visited his dad lately, or any other friends or family. He wanted to know what our custody arrangements were. He wanted details of all the activities that Ben did in and out of school. I had to describe everything we’d done the previous week and then we were talking about Saturday, and then Sunday morning, and what we’d done in the hours we spent together before we went to the woods.

‘Did you have lunch before you went out to the woods?’ Clemo asked. There was a sort of apology in his voice.

‘Is this in case you find his body?’

‘It doesn’t mean that I think we’re going to find a body. It’s a question I have to ask.’

‘Ben ate a ham sandwich, banana, yoghurt and two bourbon biscuits in the car on the way to the woods.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you need to know what I ate?’

‘No. That won’t be necessary.’

Zhang handed me a box of tissues.

We also compiled a list of the people that I’d seen in the woods: the crowd in the car park, including Peter and Finn and the other young footballers and their families, the group of fantasy re-enactors, the cyclists and the old lady who’d helped me when I first lost Ben. I also remembered a man who Ben and I had passed early on in our walk. He was carrying a dog lead, though we didn’t see his dog. It was frustratingly hard to recall what he was wearing, or even what he looked like, and I became upset with myself.

I promised that if I thought of anything or anybody else I would let the police know. They asked permission to look through my phone records, to search my home, and especially Ben’s bedroom. I said yes to it all. I would have agreed to anything if I’d thought it would help.

‘Do you have a photograph of Ben? One that we can release to the public and press?’

I gave him the picture that I kept in my wallet. It was a recent school photograph, not even dog-eared yet as I’d only got it the week before. I looked at my son’s face: serious, and sweet, beautiful and vulnerable. His father’s eyes and dark sandy hair, his perfect skin, scattered lightly with freckles across the nose. I could hardly bear to hand it over.

Clemo took the photograph from me gently. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then, ‘Ms Jenner, I will find Ben. I will do everything in my power to find him.’

I looked at him. I searched those eyes for signs of his commitment, for confirmation that he understood what was at stake, wanting him to mean what he said, wanting him to be on my side, wanting to believe that he could find Ben.

‘Do you promise?’ I said. I reached for his hand, gripped it, startling both of us.

‘I promise,’ he said. He extricated his fingers from mine carefully, as if he didn’t want to hurt me. I believed him.

When he’d gone DC Zhang said, ‘You’re in good hands. DI Clemo is a very, very good detective. He’s one of our best. He’s like a dog with a bone. Once he gets stuck into a case he won’t give up.’

She was trying to reassure me but I was thinking of only one thing.

‘I let him run ahead of me,’ I said. ‘This is my fault. If somebody hurts him, it’s because of me.’

JIM

I was quite pleased with how the interview with Rachel Jenner had gone, but it did shake me up a bit when she took my hand, grabbed it like she was never going to let go. You don’t want that. When you’re working a case you’re always well aware that the victims of crime are real people, but it’s important to keep your distance from them to an extent. If you live every emotion with them, you can’t do your job. For a moment or two, for me, Rachel Jenner had jeopardised that rule.

I took a close look at the photo she’d given me. It was one of those school pictures that everybody has, taken in front of a dappled background. Ben looked like a sweet kid: blue eyes, very clear and bright. Fine-boned. He had tufty light brown hair and a half-smile. He was looking straight into the camera. Ben Finch was a very appealing-looking child, there was no doubt, and I was pleased because I knew that would help.

I handed the photo over to the team.

‘How’s the mother?’ Fraser asked.

Rachel Jenner had been a ball of nerves, understandably, her eyes darting, flinching at shadows, talking quickly, clearly intelligent, but awash with shock.

‘Shocked,’ I said. ‘And a bit guarded.’

‘Guarded?’ Fraser looked at me over the top of her glasses.

‘Just a feeling,’ I said.

‘OK. Worth watching. Talk to Emma, see what her impressions are. I’m going to go and introduce myself shortly, and we’ve called the press in at midday to film an appeal. Are you happy to talk to Dad now?’

I nodded.

‘On your way then.’

I met Emma in the corridor. It was the first chance we’d had to talk.

‘Good interview,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’

We moved to the side of the corridor to let somebody pass. Emma’s hand grazed mine discreetly, lingered there.

‘Did you tell Fraser to take me on as FLO?’ she asked.

‘I might have.’

‘Thank you.’ She gave my hand a little squeeze, then let it go, and stepped away to leave a more respectable distance between us.

‘What did you think of the mother?’ I asked. ‘I just said to Fraser I thought she was a bit guarded.’

‘I agree, but I think it’s understandable. I felt as though it was hard for her to talk about her private life, but I didn’t think she was being obstructive.’

‘No, I didn’t think that either.’

‘She’s grief-stricken. And she feels guilty too because she let him run ahead of her.’

‘That’s not a crime.’

‘Of course it’s not, but she’s going to beat herself up about that for ever isn’t she?’

‘Unless we find him quickly.’

‘Even if we find him quickly I’d say.’

‘Do you think she’s guilty of anything more?’

Emma considered that, but shook her head. ‘Gut instinct: no. But I wouldn’t swear on that one hundred per cent.’

‘You need to keep a very close eye on her. Detailed reports of what you observe, please.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ve got to go. I’m interviewing Dad now.’

‘Good luck.’ She turned to go.

‘Emma!’

‘What?’

‘You will do the best job you can, won’t you? This is a big one. We have to be extremely sensitive.’

‘Of course I will.’

She didn’t look openly hurt, that wasn’t her style, but something in her expression made me regret what I’d said immediately. She was one of the most emotionally intelligent people I knew, perfect for the role, and it was wrong of me to display even the tiniest bit of doubt about her abilities. I was too psyched up myself to be measured in what I said to her; I could have kicked myself.

‘Sorry. I’m sorry. That was out of order. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I’m just… this is such a big one.’

‘It’s fine, and I’m absolutely on it, don’t worry about that.’

She cracked a big smile, making it OK, and her fingers made contact with mine again briefly. ‘Good luck with the dad,’ she added, and I watched her walk briskly away down the corridor before I went to find Benedict Finch’s father.

John Finch was pacing around the small interview room that we’d placed him in. He looked gaunt, and shocked like the mother, but there was also a sense of innate authority. I guessed that in his normal life he was a man more used to being in charge of a room than being a victim.

‘DI Jim Clemo,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry about Ben.’

‘John Finch.’ His handshake was a quick firm clench with bony fingers.

There was a small table in the room, two chairs on either side of it. DC Woodley and I sat on one side, Finch on the other.

I went through the same process as with Ben’s mother, starting him at the beginning with date of birth, childhood, etc. What people don’t realise is that one of the first things we have to do is prove that they are who they say they are, and that the crime they’ve reported really has happened. We’d look pretty stupid if we investigated and it turned out that the people involved didn’t actually exist, that they’d spun us a lie from the outset. And God knows the press and public can’t wait to make a meal out of any instances of police stupidity.

Finch answered my questions in a muted, economical way.

‘I’m afraid we have to spend time on what might feel like irrelevant detail,’ I said to him.

I felt the need to apologise, to try to make the situation slightly easier for this man who was so obviously sensitive and so obviously trying to hide it.

‘But please be assured that it’s essential for us to build up a picture not just of Ben but his family too.’

‘I know the importance of a personal history,’ he said. ‘We rely on it heavily in medicine.’

John Finch’s backstory was quite straightforward. He was born in 1976 in Birmingham, an only child. Dad was a local boy, a GP, and mum was a violinist. Her parents had escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna while her mother was pregnant with her, and then settled in Birmingham. Finch was close to his parents as well as his grandparents throughout his childhood. He was a scholarship boy at the grammar school. He did well and won a place at Bristol University Medical School. He’d arrived in Bristol to start his degree twenty years ago, in 1992, and never left after that. He’d worked his way up and done well. Proof of that was his current position as consultant at the Children’s Hospital. He’d become a general surgeon. I knew just enough about the world of medicine to know that that must be a coveted position in a competitive world.

Finch’s composure first faltered when I wanted to talk in more detail about Ben’s mother, and the reason their marriage ended.

‘My marriage ended because Rachel and I were no longer suited to each other.’

A perceptible stiffening of his body, words a tad sticky as his mouth became drier.

‘It’s my understanding that this came as a surprise to Rachel.’

‘Possibly.’

‘And that there was another party involved?’

‘I have remarried, yes.’

‘Could you give me an idea of why you and Rachel were no longer suited to each other?’

A single bead of sweat had appeared by his hairline.

‘These things don’t always last, Inspector. There can be a host of small reasons that accumulate to make a marriage unsustainable.’

‘Including a younger girlfriend?’

‘Please don’t reduce me to a cliché.’

I didn’t reply. Instead I waited to see if more information would seep from him, just as the perspiration had. It’s surprising how often that works. People have an almost compulsive need to justify themselves. I made a show of looking through notes, and just when I thought he wouldn’t spill, he did.

‘My marriage wasn’t an emotionally fulfilling one. We didn’t…⁠’ He was choosing his words carefully. ‘We didn’t communicate.’

‘It happens,’ I said.

‘I was lonely.’

His eyes flicked away from mine and I saw a frisson of emotion in them when our gazes reconnected, though it was hard to say exactly what. John Finch was definitely a proud man, and unaccustomed to sharing the personal details of his life.

‘Is Rachel a good mother to Ben?’ I asked him. I wanted to catch him when his guard was down. His reply came immediately, he didn’t need to think about it: ‘She’s an excellent mother. She loves Ben very much.’

I took the interview back to practicalities. I asked him what he and his wife were doing on Sunday afternoon between 13.00 and 17.30 hours. He said that they were at home together. He was working and she was reading and then she started to prepare their evening meal. He got a call from WPC Banks at 17.30 to inform him that Ben was missing and he’d driven directly to the woods.

‘Did you make any calls, or send any emails during that time?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I was catching up on paperwork.’

‘I’ve asked Ms Jenner whether she’d be willing for us to look through her phone records, and she’s agreed. Would you be willing for us to do the same?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes.’

‘One more thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you had any incidents at work where patients or their families have been unhappy with you? Could somebody be bearing a grudge against you?’

He didn’t reply to my question immediately, it took him a moment or two to consider it.

‘There are always unhappy outcomes, inevitably, and some families don’t take it well. I have been the subject of legal action once or twice, but that’s normal in my line of work. The hospital will be able to supply you with details.’

‘You can’t remember them?’

‘I remember the names of the children, but not their parents. I try not to get too involved. You learn not to dwell on the failures, Inspector. The death of a child is a terrible thing to bear, even if the responsibility isn’t ultimately yours, because you did everything you could.’

Even through his fatigue, the look he gave me was sharp, and I felt as though there might be a warning in his words somewhere.

I drove out to the woods after the interview. I wanted to see the scene for myself. I took a pool car. The drive gave me a chance to get out of the city for a bit, and think about the interviews, get my thoughts straight. My impressions were that the parents were both private people, though John Finch was possibly more complicated than Rachel, and certainly more proud. They were both intelligent, and articulate, a classic middle-class profile. It didn’t mean that they were whiter than white though. We had to remember that.

In forensic terms the scenes at the woods were carnage. The combination of shocking weather, multiple people, animals and vehicles had churned up the paths and especially the parking area. I took a walk to the rope swing where Ben was alleged to have gone missing and regretted forgetting to bring wellington boots. It was a damp site, with trees crowded round it. It gave me a creepy, sinister feeling like you get in fairy tales, and in some way that was more unsettling than some of the rankest urban crime scenes I’ve visited.

I talked to the scenes of crime officers. They were nice guys, cheerfully pessimistic about their chances of finding anything that might be useful to the investigation.

‘If I’m honest it’s not looking good,’ one of them said, stepping over the crime scene tape. It was bright yellow and hung limply across the pathway that led to the rope swing. He pulled a plastic glove from his hand so that he could shake mine. ‘The conditions are atrocious. But if there’s anything to be found we’ll find it.’

I gave him my card. ‘Will you-’

He interrupted me. ‘Call you if we find anything? Of course.’

We had our first full team briefing with Fraser at 16.00 back at Kenneth Steele House. We gathered around the table, everybody ready to work, tense and serious, trying not to think about where this case could go. A missing kid is the kind of case you do your job for. Nobody wants a kid to be harmed. You could see it on every face there.

‘First things first,’ said DCI Fraser. ‘Codename for this case is Operation Huckleberry. We’re hunting for two people: Ben Finch, eight years old, and whoever has abducted him. They may or may not be together. The abductor may be a member of his family, or he or she may be an acquaintance or indeed a complete stranger. They may be holed up with Ben or they may be living normally on the surface and returning to Ben occasionally. They may already have harmed or murdered Ben. We need to keep open minds.’

She cast her eye around the table. She had everybody’s attention.

‘Expertise is on our side,’ she continued. ‘I’m confident that this team of people represents excellence and I expect it of you. Time is not on our side. It’s been twenty-four hours since Ben Finch went missing. Priority is to confirm Mum’s story, and speak to all the people she says she saw in the woods that day.’

She paused, making sure we were taking it all in.

‘I personally feel that the members of the fantasy re-enactment group who were in the woods during the afternoon are of particular interest, because I suspect that amongst them there’ll be one or two mummy’s boys who are wielding swords at the weekend to make up for being sad pimply little bastards who can’t get a life during the week.

‘Which brings me on to another matter. I think we’re going to need all the help we can get on this one. The number of actions we’ve identified already is daunting, and it’s certain to get worse before it gets better. I’ve asked for more bodies, and I’ve twisted the Super’s arm so that he’s agreed to fund the services of a forensic psychologist for the short term at least, to help us define our primary suspects. His name is Dr Christopher Fellowes. He has teaching commitments, and he’s based at Cambridge University, so he’s not going to be with us in person unless we have a very good reason to bring him over here, but he’ll be available to advise remotely.’

I knew him. We’d worked with him when I was with Devon and Cornwall. He was good at his job, when he was sober.

‘I was going to get Mum and Dad in front of the cameras tonight, but I think we’ll wait until first thing tomorrow morning. I’ve televised a short appeal for information which will do for now, and we’ll put that out with Ben’s photograph. I’ve had preliminary reports from most of you, but if there’s anything new you want to add, speak now.’

One of the DCs put up her hand.

‘We’re not in school. You can keep your hand down.’

‘Sorry. It’s just that I’ve got a possible. We’ve tracked down all but one of the men on the sex offenders list.’

‘Who’s missing?’

‘Name of David Callow. Thirty-one years old. Did time for abusing his stepsisters and posting photographs of himself doing it. His parole officer hasn’t heard from him for a fortnight.’

‘Make him a priority. I want to know who he last saw, and when. Talk to his family, his neighbours, his friends, if he has any. Find out what he’s been doing. Anything else?’

Nobody spoke.

‘Right. There’s a lot to get on with, so let’s get on with it. Any leads, any worries, anything gets on top of you, speak to me. I want to know everything, as it happens. No exceptions.’

WEB PAGE – BREAKING NEWS POLICE – www.aspol.uk/whatsnew

22 October 2012, 13.03

AVON AND SOMERSET CONSTABULARY has activated CHILD RESCUE ALERT to assist in tracing eight-year-old Benedict Finch in Bristol.

A dedicated telephone number has been established for anyone who has seen Benedict or has information about his whereabouts.

This number is 0300 300 3331

Calls to this number will be answered by dedicated members of staff who will take details of any information provided to assist with the inquiry.

By launching Child Rescue Alert, which is supported by all UK Police Forces, it is hoped that the public and media can assist Avon and Somerset Constabulary in safely tracing Benedict.

Police are seeking information specifically from anyone who has seen Benedict or anyone matching his description in the last twenty-four hours.

Benedict is described as being of Caucasian appearance, of slim build and just over four feet tall. He has brown hair and blue eyes and freckles across the bridge of his nose. It is not known what he is wearing.

A recent photograph of Benedict has been widely circulated. It can be seen on the Avon and Somerset Constabulary website.

He was last seen on the main path round Leigh Woods, just outside Bristol, at around 16.30 on Sunday, 21 October when he and his mother were walking their dog. His mother raised the alarm at 17.00 after extensive searching in the woods did not locate him.

Intensive searches led by trained search officers, and including police dogs and mounted police, are taking place in and around Leigh Woods and the surrounding area and members of the public have been assisting.

Benedict is described as bright and clever, a fluent communicator and English is his first language. He is known to his family as Ben.

Spread the word: Facebook; Twitter

RACHEL

My sister Nicky was waiting for me in the foyer at Kenneth Steele House. She was panda-eyed with strain. I fell into her arms. Her clothing smelled of damp cottage and wood smoke and washing powder.

She looks a lot like me. You could tell we’re sisters if you saw us together. She’s got the same green eyes and more or less the same face, and a similar figure, though she’s heavier. She’s not quite as tall as me either and her hair is cut short and always carefully highlighted, so instead of being curly it settles in brushed golden waves around her face, which makes her look more sensible than me.

Nicky told me she’d driven straight from Aunt Esther’s cottage. She held me tightly.

The hug felt awkward. We probably hadn’t been in each other’s arms since I was a child. I wasn’t used to the padded curves of her body, the cotton wool softness of the skin on her cheek. It made me acutely aware of my own frame, its angularity, as if I were constructed from a more brittle material than her.

‘Let’s get you home,’ she said, and she brushed a strand of my hair back behind my ear.

Arriving home was my first taste of how it feels to live life in a goldfish bowl.

Journalists had gathered outside my little two-up, two-down cottage. Ben and I lived on a pretty narrow street of small Victorian terraces in Bishopston, an area that has yellow Neighbourhood Watch stickers in many house windows and loves recycling and having street parties in the summer. Our neighbours were a mix of elderly people, young families and some students. Ours was a quiet street. The biggest drama we’d collectively experienced since I’d lived there was waking up to find drunk students had put traffic cones on top of the car roofs during the night.

The journalists were impossible to avoid. There was a group of them, big enough to spill off the pavement. They called my name, thrust microphones towards us, photographed us as we entered the house, pushed and shoved and tripped up as they ran around each other trying to get in front of us. Their voices were cajoling, and urgent, and to me they had the menace of a mob.

When we got inside, black dots danced at the edges of my vision, the after-effects of the bright white of their flashbulbs, and I could still hear them calling from behind the door. My heart rate didn’t slow until I moved into the kitchen at the back of the house, and there it was silent, and I was able to sit, and breathe, and focus on the placid ticking of my kitchen clock.

Zhang stayed with us for a short while. The scenes of crime officers had visited the house while I was being interviewed. She wanted to check that they’d left everything in order upstairs, in Ben’s room.

She pulled the curtains in the sitting room tightly shut, so that the journalists couldn’t see in. She advised us not to answer the door without checking who was there, and not to speak directly to the press.

‘It’s good that they’re here though,’ she said. ‘It’s all good publicity because it means that as many people as possible will be aware of Ben and will be looking out for him.’

She made sure we had her card with her number on it and then she left us alone. Part of me didn’t really want her to leave. She was more approachable than Clemo by miles. I felt nervous of him, of the authority he exuded, of his matter-of-factness and of the power he suddenly held in our lives. But Zhang was different, more of a kindly guide who might be able to help me navigate this horrendous new reality, and I felt grateful for her.

Everything on the kitchen table was as Ben and I had left it: a snapshot of our last few minutes in the house together.

There was a hat that Ben had refused to wear, a packet of bourbon biscuits that he’d raided just before we left, a much-loved Tintin book and a Lego car that I’d helped him build.

His school report, received in the post the day before, lay on the table too. It had been a pleasure to read, full of effusive praise from his teacher about how hard Ben tried, how pleased she was that he was finding the courage to speak up more in class, and how he was gaining confidence in his schoolwork.

And it wasn’t just the kitchen. There was nowhere in this house that wasn’t imprinted with traces of my son, of course there wasn’t. It was his home.

Even outside, down the short, uneven garden path, I knew that there would be signs of him too: in my garden office my computer would be sleeping, its light blinking unhurriedly. If I went out there and brought it to life I knew the internet history would show a game that Ben had been playing online on Sunday morning. It was called Furry Football and the aim was to play games and earn points to buy different animals, which would form a football team. Ben loved it. I had a daily battle to limit his time on it.

I looked at everything, took it all in, but felt only blankness. All of it was meaningless without Ben. Without him, my home had no soul.

Nicky got busy, typically.

She’d always been like this. She was never still. If there was nothing to do, she would organise an outing, or make an elaborate meal. Activity was her way of relaxing.

When I was younger I could happily spend an afternoon in Esther’s cottage doing nothing more than sitting on the window seat in my little bedroom. I would trace outlines in the condensation on the glass, gaze at the frosty trees outside, and the shapes they carved against the open sky behind them, and watch the birds on my aunt’s feeders fighting for seed. The sharp yellow flash of a goldfinch’s wing was a sight I longed for in the monochrome of a snowy rural winter.

Eventually, driven by the cold, I might make my way downstairs to seek the heat of the fire. Nicky would be there with Aunt Esther. Their cheeks would be flushed from the warmth of the oven and the exertions of whatever activity they’d been engaged in. I would admire the freshly baked cake they’d made or smell the stew that was simmering.

Aunt Esther would take my hands, and say, ‘Rachel, you’re so cold. Have a cup of tea, darling,’ and she would rub them, and I would feel rough gardening calluses on her palm. Nicky would say, ‘Where are your fingerless gloves, Rachel? The ones I gave you for Christmas?’ Then I would slip away from them, their cosy domesticity, and slink into a chair by the fire, pull a blanket over myself, and lose myself in a book, or the dancing of the flames.

In those early days after Ben disappeared, when I was practically catatonic with shock, it was natural for Nicky to become the functioning part of me, just as she always had done. She returned the increasingly frantic messages that my best friend Laura had been leaving on my phone throughout the day, and asked her to come over. She spoke to Peter Armstrong, who told her that the dog’s leg had been broken, but he was comfortable at the vet’s after having it set. She put her laptop on the kitchen table and spent hours online.

On that first day, she found a Missing Kids website, based in the US. On their advice, she made a list of questions for the police. She threw facts out into the room as she learned them. They were ghastly, notes from a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. They made me feel queasy, but she was unstoppable.

She told me that the website advised that bloodhounds are essential for a proper search. That they can follow the scent of a child even if their abductor has picked them up and carried them away. She asked me what dogs the police had used in the woods. I said they’d been German shepherds. She continued to read quietly, scratching notes out on a pad, keeping it shielded from me, her mouth set in a grim line.

After a time she said, ‘Did you see John after your interview?’

‘No, they took him somewhere else.’

‘You should ring him. It would be good to know what they asked him.’

‘He blames me.’

‘This is not your fault.’

I knew it was.

‘What did they ask you? Can you talk about it?’

‘They asked me everything, they wanted so much detail: family history, everything to do with Ben since he was born; anything you could think of basically.’

I didn’t mention that they wanted to know what Ben had had for lunch on Sunday.

‘Did they ask about our family?’

‘They wanted to know everything.’

‘What did you tell them?’ Her eyes lifted from the screen and they were red-rimmed.

‘I told them what happened. What else would I tell them?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She turned back to the screen. ‘It says here that the family should try to agree on a tactic for how to approach relationships with the police, that it’s really effective to do that.’

‘I can’t phone John now.’ I couldn’t face it. I’d committed the worst sin a mother can: I hadn’t looked after my child. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

In Ben’s bedroom I could see very little sign that the scenes of crime officers had been there. One of Ben’s favourite toys lay nestled on his bed, in the tumble of bedding that Ben liked to sleep in. It was Baggy Bear, a doe-eyed teddy with chewed ears, floppy arms, soft fur and a blue knitted scarf that Ben liked me to tie in a certain way. I held Baggy Bear to my chest. I thought, I can’t leave this house now, in case he comes back here. Everywhere, the silence, the absence of Ben, seemed to swell. It felt hostile, like the furtive spread of a cancer.

I lay down on Ben’s bed, and curled up. There was something making me uncomfortable and I shifted position, felt for it. It was his old cot blanket. He called it ‘nunny’ and he’d had it since he was a baby. It was very soft and he would wrap it around his fingers and stroke his face with it to get himself off to sleep. He’d never admit it to anybody but me, but he couldn’t sleep without it. I tried to push away the thought that he’d already had to spend a night without it, that that might have been the least of his worries.

I balled it up, hugged it to myself, along with Baggy Bear. I could smell Ben on the nunny, on the bedding and on his teddy bear. It was the perfect smell that he’d always had. It was the smell of baby hair that has no weight to it, and of the skin on his temples, which was still velvety smooth. It was the smell of trust, freely given, and a perfect, innocent curiosity. It was the smell of our dog walks and the games we’d played together and the things I’d told him, and the meals we’d shared. It was the smell of our history together. I inhaled that smell as if it could revive me somehow, give me some answers, or some hope, and, like that, I just waited. I didn’t know what else to do.

When Laura arrived Nicky let her in and I heard their voices downstairs, hushed and serious. In real life – the life we were living before Ben was taken – they didn’t get on very well. I was the only thing that these two women had in common, and their paths had only crossed once or twice before now. Without me they would never have spent time together, probably not without a large measure of irritation anyway.

As a foil to Nicky’s conservatism, and her serious, thoughtful approach to life, Laura was skittish, playful, inconsistent, rebellious and sometimes downright wild. She was a birdlike person, tiny-framed, with short urchin hair, wide brown eyes and a big laugh. When I’d first met her, when we were both nursing students, right from the start she’d made me laugh, taught me how to play. She was the first person I’d met who did that for me. It thrilled me.

She wasn’t like that one hundred per cent of the time, of course. She had her moments of darkness too, but she kept them private. I only glimpsed them when alcohol had loosened her tongue. ‘I was a mistake,’ she said once. I’d known her for a good few years by then. We were no longer students, although we were still in our habit of going for a big night out at least once a week. Her words were heavy with booze.

‘My parents didn’t want to have me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that two people who were amongst the brightest minds in the country, or so they liked to say, it’s ironic that they should have made such a basic error. Don’t you think?’

Her tone of voice was attempting to be jokey but the corners of her mouth kept dragging down and her eyes were dull and tired.

‘Didn’t they want to have children?’

‘No. It wasn’t the plan. It was never the plan. They were very open about that. If I’m honest I’m surprised they ever had sex. They were old when they had me, too.’ She laughed. ‘They must have stumbled across a manual that told them what to do, and had ten minutes to spare before Newsnight.’

I didn’t have parents, of course, so who was I to pass judgement on how she mocked hers, but there was something unsettling about her tone, and though I’d laughed obligingly at the time, it had made me feel sad.

‘Do you want kids?’ I’d asked her, for I had a secret that night. It was the reason I was sober.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that -’ I thought I saw a look of sadness flash across her face – ‘but never say never.’

She closed her eyes, giving in to the lateness of the hour, and the soporific effects of the wine. I sat beside her, not ready for sleep yet, and slipped my hand underneath my top. I rested it on my belly and thought of the baby growing there. It was Ben. My mistake. Already loved.

The tread of Laura’s feet on the stairs of my house made them creak cautiously, and she paused at the top and said, ‘Rachel?’

‘In here.’

At the doorway to Ben’s room she said, ‘Do you want the light on?’

‘No.’

She lay down beside me, put her arms around me in a hug that was far more familiar than Nicky’s.

‘I didn’t keep him safe,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘Sshh,’ she said. ‘Don’t. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is getting him back.’

Even in the gloaming I could see that her eyes were liquid. A tear escaped and ran down her cheek, pooling by her nose, a trail of black eyeliner in its wake.

We lay there until the darkness outside was becoming a solid mass, leavened only by the glow of the streetlights and the geometric oddments of light that fell from people’s houses.

We’d been told by Zhang to watch the news at 6 pm.

At a quarter to six, I realised that I should have been at Ben’s parents’ evening, to discuss his report.

Laura said, ‘Don’t worry about that. Don’t even think about it. You can go later in the week, once he’s back.’

The first item on the news was a report on flooding in Bangladesh: thousands of people had died.

Ben was the second item.

DCI Fraser, who I’d met briefly, stood on the steps at Kenneth Steele House and appealed to the public to ‘help them with their inquiries’. ‘We’re extremely concerned about this young boy,’ she said, ‘and we would urge anybody who has any information about him, or his whereabouts, to get in touch with us.’

She was immaculate in police uniform. Wildly curly grey hair and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that sat at the bottom of her nose, under sharp eyes, gave her the look of a bluestocking academic.

‘We are also requesting that the public do not organise searches of their own,’ she said. ‘Though we thank the members of the community who are offering their help.’

A helpline number and the photograph of Ben that I’d given the police flashed up, filling the screen.

It’s the strangest thing in the world to find that the story you are watching on TV is your own, to realise that you have entrusted a stranger with finding your child, and to then have to accept that you are as disconnected as anybody else watching, that you are essentially impotent. When Ben’s face had gone from the screen, Laura turned the TV off. I wanted to howl with sorrow, or to rage, but I did neither, because my hands shook and my stomach was turning, threatening to disgorge the tea I’d been sipping, the tiny morsels of toast I’d forced myself to swallow at the behest of my sister.

The call about the press conference came later that evening. The police wanted me to appear in front of the cameras the next morning, to read out a statement appealing for help in finding Ben. They would send a car for me.

‘I can’t leave the house,’ I said. ‘What if he comes home?’

Laura said, ‘I’ll stay here. You’ve got to go. I’ll stay here.’

‘Should I stay?’ said Nicky. ‘I could stay.’

Both of them looked at me, wanting me to decide.

‘Nicky should come with me,’ I said.

Laura was my best friend but Nicky was Ben’s aunt, our only family.

‘She’s right,’ Laura said. ‘You should be there.’ She looked at me. ‘And it can only be good if you appear on TV. People will care more about Ben. They really will. I’ll come over in the morning before you leave, and I won’t leave the house, not even for a minute. Not until you’re back. I promise.’

Laura told my sister that she should choose an outfit for me to wear, that I should be as presentable as possible. She said it was important, even if it felt trivial to think about it at a time like this. She looked closely at the gash on my forehead, and I winced when she touched the edge of it.

‘I don’t think you can put make-up on it, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Nicky said. ‘It’s too raw.’

Laura peered at it. I could see her eyes following its trajectory across my forehead. ‘Let’s see how it looks in the morning,’ she said.

‘Could we cover it with a dressing?’ Nicky asked.

‘No. A dressing will look ugly on TV, and it’ll obscure her face. Worst case, we leave it as it is. It’s not that noticeable.’

We all knew that wasn’t true.

In the kitchen, after Laura had gone, with a promise to return first thing in the morning, Nicky said, ‘Do you trust her? I’m not sure she should be here on her own.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s one of them.’ She gestured towards the front door, the pack of journalists lingering outside, whose voices we’d heard rising and swelling throughout the evening, breaking into laughter now and then.

‘She’s not that kind of journalist,’ I said. ‘She writes for gossip magazines, about make-up. It’s fluff, bullshit. It’s not news.’

‘They’re all the same breed.’

‘She’s my friend. My best friend.’

‘Fine. If you trust her then that’s fine, isn’t it?’

‘I do trust her. I can’t believe you’d say such a thing.’

‘Sorry.’

The kettle was noisily reaching boiling point. Nicky leaned against the counter and lapsed into a thousand-yard stare, but I knew her and I knew that behind it her mind was turning. For the first time, it occurred to me to ask about her family.

‘How are the girls?’

Her attention snapped back to me, a funny look. Guilt, perhaps, swiftly disguised, because she had four daughters safe at home while I was missing my only child.

‘Will you tell them?’ I asked.

‘I think it’ll be impossible to avoid. With it on the TV, and in all the papers.’

‘Do they need you to be with them? Don’t you need to go home?’

‘No,’ she said it firmly. ‘My place is with you right now. They’ll be fine.’ She closed the matter by turning her back on me to make tea with concise, measured movements.

After we went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. All night I kept vigil in Ben’s room. I left the curtains open, and lay in his bed, letting my eyes run over the contours of his belongings. Books, toys and other stuff, collected and arranged by Ben on his shelves, had the stillness of museum exhibits. I sat up, wrapped his duvet around me, and stared into the shadows in the corners of his room, and then moved my gaze outside.

I watched a fox leap the fence into my neighbour’s garden and then slink around, nose to the ground, before finding something it could eat and devouring it, gulping it down in a way that was fast and primitive and ugly. When it was done, it ran its tongue over its chops, savouring, before disappearing into the night.

I felt the various textures of my fear: shivery, visceral, tight, pounding, in turn or all at once. I only fell asleep once, in the small hours, and woke to a sensation of being choked, gasping for air, pushing bedding away from me as if it were hostile, or venomous, and then finding my sister standing in the room with fear on her face saying, ‘Rachel, are you OK? Rachel!’

After that we sat together until it was morning, as if it was just the two of us left in the world.

JIM

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

Transcript recorded by Dr Francesca Manelli.

DI James Clemo and Dr Francesca Manelli in attendance.

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

FM: What I’d like to start with today is a discussion of your relationship with DC Zhang.

JC: There’s not much to say.

FM: You were seeing each other when the Benedict Finch case started?

JC: Yes.

FM: How long had your relationship been going on?

JC: About four months.

FM: And were things going well?

JC: They were, yes. I thought they were.

FM: But you kept the relationship secret from work?

JC: I didn’t want gossip.

FM: Were you embarrassed about the relationship?

JC: No! God no. Anyone would have been proud to go out with Emma.

FM: Why’s that?

JC: She’s very clever, and very gorgeous. Funny, too when you got to know her.

FM: She sounds lovely.

JC: She was even better than that though; I’m not describing her very well. She was different from other girls I’d been out with.

FM: How was she different?

JC: She was just… she wasn’t dull like them. It’s like she’d lived a different kind of life, and she wasn’t afraid to know stuff, and she was always wanting to learn new things, to be a better version of herself. When she was a kid she was an athletics star, and she got top grades, and she’d kept that sense of purpose about her. She talked about life as if it was a given that it was interesting or exciting, not about mortgages or package holidays or where she was going out on Friday night. I don’t want to make her sound manic, obsessed with achievement or anything, because she wasn’t like that, because she was calm with it all. It’s just that she was always striving, you know, to make life better than it was.

FM: So she had high expectations?

JC: Yes, but in a good way. It was refreshing. She was refreshing. That’s the word I’m looking for. She had a different outlook and it was infectious, if I’m honest. I felt like it brought me out of myself, if that makes sense.

FM: It sounds as if your relationship with Emma gave you a sort of zest for life that perhaps you hadn’t ever experienced before?

JC: It did feel like that, yes. I felt excited about us. I felt a sort of pull to be with her.

FM: Did you meet at work?

JC: We did.

FM: Did you see a lot of each other outside of work?

JC: As much as we could. By the time the case went live, she’d kind of moved in with me.

FM: So things were getting quite serious for you?

JC: She kept her own flat, but she stayed over most nights. We didn’t really discuss it, it just sort of happened.

FM: Did you introduce Emma to your family?

JC: Yes, she met them twice, both times when my parents came up to Bristol and we went out for a meal.

FM: How did that go?

JC: It was very nice. They really liked her. She even charmed my dad.

FM: Did you meet Emma’s parents?

JC: No.

FM: Any reason for that?

JC: Not really. I suppose I figured I’d meet them at some point, when she was ready. I knew she wasn’t close to them. She never went to visit them and they never came to see her, or not that I knew of anyway.

FM: Did you wonder why that was?

JC: She said they’d had a falling out.

FM: Did she say why?

JC: She didn’t really explain. I got the impression her dad was quite strict, classic army type, not an easy man, but I’m not really sure to be honest. That was one thing about her – she was very private about her family.

FM: Weren’t you curious?

JC: A bit. But she didn’t make a big deal about it, and we had a lot else going on so I didn’t really think about it.

FM: So you recommended Emma for the FLO role?

JC: I did, yes.

FM: Was that a risk?

JC: I didn’t think so, no. I thought she’d do a fantastic job. Emma was one of the best new DCs to come through in years, everybody said so.

FM: Was it professional of you to recommend her, given that you were having a relationship?

JC: It wasn’t unprofessional.

FM: Are you sure about that?

JC: Yes, I’m sure. Look, I broke a personal rule getting involved with Emma. I never wanted to have a relationship with somebody at work, but when it happened, it felt… it felt totally right. So I went with it, but when this opportunity came up I thought she was absolutely the right person for that role. Genuinely. Why would I put my neck on the line otherwise?

FM: OK. I understand that. It’s clear from your report that this case was a very big moment in your career. ‘Bring it on’, are the words you used, I think.

JC: That’s how I felt.

FM: You were excited.

JC: The challenge of it, the possibility ⁠…

FM: To shine?

JC: I suppose so. I wasn’t going to put it quite like that. It was my first chance to be involved in a very high-profile investigation.

FM: You wanted to prove yourself?

JC: It was a chance.

FM: And your first big task was to prepare for the press conference?

JC: After the initial interviews, yes.

FM: I watched the footage of the conference.

JC: I think everybody did. Once seen, never forgotten.

FM: Indeed. You were there too. I saw you.

JC: I was chairing it.

FM: Why not Fraser?

JC: She believes in giving people a chance. She gave me the responsibility for running it and for drafting the statement that we wanted Rachel Jenner to read. I worked with the forensic psychologist on that. It was a big responsibility.

FM: So your aim was to appeal to Ben’s abductor, to use the mother to obtain their sympathy with the hope that that might persuade them to get in contact with you?

JC: With us, or with somebody around them, somebody they trusted. It was important that they saw Ben as a real person, not just an acquisition, or a means to their own end. It would give him the context of a loving family. It was equally important not to alienate the abductor. We wanted to make them aware that it wasn’t too late for them to give him back, if he was still alive, that it was never too late to do that, even if they were scared of what the consequences might be. We wanted to present a friendly face. At that stage it obviously wasn’t clear whether it was an abduction, or a murder.

FM: So you scripted something for Rachel to read out that would cover all bases?

JC: Yes. That was the idea anyway.

FM: How did you know you could rely on her to get the tone right?

JC: I didn’t know.

FM: Did you consider getting his father to do it?

JC: We considered it, but there was something about him that we weren’t sure would look good on camera. He was a surgeon, he was used to being authoritative. We were concerned that he might appear arrogant. What you want is a mother, a mother’s warmth.

FM: And you were confident in advance that she could deliver that?

JC: We didn’t have time to delve into her psyche. She was his mother. We assumed that she would, because at that stage we had no reason not to.