Ben (16 page)

I wiped the perspiration from my forehead. This whole conversation had got me worked up and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Was this the excuse my dad had been waiting for to turn me against Simon for abandoning me so cruelly when I was pregnant? Or did he genuinely believe there was a chance he’d taken Ben?

‘Dad, are you sure you’re remembering this right? You did have a drink yesterday.’

There was a noise like a harrumph from Mum, but she said nothing.

‘I know what I heard, Kerry. I think we should consider it seriously.’ He stared at me and, voice low and earnest, said, ‘Can you honestly say you don’t believe Simon has it in him?’

I paused. As upset as I had been, I still hadn’t wanted my parents to know about the callous way he’d walked out on me. The way he’d made me wait at Jane’s and not shown up until three days later. He was Ben’s father after all, and I had wanted to be loyal. Even so, what would Simon have to gain from kidnapping Ben? Surely he didn’t think he could just take Ben back to Sheffield and then I’d just follow him home?

Once the idea was planted, it took root very quickly. There would be no going back for me and Simon if he was responsible for Ben’s vanishing act. On the other hand, part of me prayed that he
had
taken him. At least my boy would be safe with someone he knew and loved. It wouldn’t be long before he was back in my arms.

‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ I said.

‘You need to have it out with him. We’ll call him tomorrow.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll know if he’s lying the second he opens his mouth.’

Whether he was involved or not, Simon had a right to know what was going on. It was now Day 6 since Ben had gone missing. It was time we told the family. Simon has told me since that we had spoken a couple of times since Ben disappeared, but I was so distressed I can’t remember the calls or what was said. He definitely didn’t know about Ben. The conversation I will never forget is the moment I told him Ben had gone.

On Monday morning, Simon called me at the hotel. Dad was there with me and we were grateful for the use of the phone, but I wished it wasn’t such a public place. Phones in 1991 still had leads, so Manos dragged it as far as the cable would stretch to give us as much privacy as possible. Even so, anyone coming to reception for anything would have seen and heard us.

I really didn’t want to tell Simon. I realised I was in a state of denial. Saying what had happened, putting it into words, felt like it would make the nightmare real. When I heard his voice, I struggled to hold myself together, and took a deep breath.

‘All right, Kerry?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know how to tell you this.’ More deep breaths. My throat felt like it was made of paper. ‘I don’t even know where to begin to explain.’ Another breath. I closed my eyes and held the receiver against my forehead, willing the words to form. ‘It’s a long story,’ I said eventually, ‘but, basically, Ben’s gone missing.’

Silence. Simon’s turn to be lost for words. Then, quietly: ‘How?’

I started with the details, as matter of fact as I could. Simon took it all in calmly. Then he asked when it had happened.

‘Last Wednesday. The 24th.’

‘The 24th! You waited a week to tell me?’

I had to let him rant. I tried to say we thought we were doing the right thing. That there was no point worrying him if Ben was going to be handed in the following day. That that was genuinely what we had thought would happen.

‘You couldn’t have done anything and it would have been cruel to tell you. I thought we were going to find him.’

‘So why are you telling me now?’

‘Because …’

I couldn’t finish that sentence. Why
was
I telling him now? I realised the line had gone quiet.

‘Simon? Simon? Simon!’

His voice crackled back into life. He was sobbing uncontrollably. I could barely make out the words.

‘I’ll call you back!’ he shouted, then hung up.

I was shaken. Simon’s reaction had rocked me. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with Ben’s disappearance after all. Dad took the phone and called his sister, Nancy, and her husband, Derek. He relayed the same facts I’d said, as unemotionally as possible. His voice sounded small.

‘Eddie, do you want us to come out?’ Aunty Nancy said.

Dad went silent. He thought of Mum, so fragile and only recently talking again. He thought of me, trying to be strong, to remain positive. And he thought about his own binge, so pathetic a way of hiding the pain.

‘Please,’ he said.

That was the last phone call either of us wanted to make, so Dad arranged for Nancy to call everyone else. There was one more conversation I needed to have, though. And as soon as the phone started trilling, I braced myself.

Simon was back in control of his emotions. He asked for more information and I told him as much as I could about the police investigation. He said that he would try to get a flight and come out. I was about to hang up when I remembered something.

‘Simon, the police asked if you could bring your ferry and aeroplane tickets.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. They just asked.’

‘Fine,’ he said. Then he hung up again for good.

I sat with my knees up to my chin, my arms wrapped round my legs, holding two of Ben’s little plastic cows. The adrenaline caused by making those phone calls had carried me home. Then I’d crashed. Dad and Stephen had made the daily trek to the police station for an update. If I closed my eyes I could see Ben. Strange as it sounds, that hurt. I didn’t want to see him in my dreams; I wanted him in my arms.

Saying those words to Simon – ‘Ben’s gone missing’ – had somehow made it worse. I hadn’t told anyone before. It was no longer a bad dream. By articulating it, I’d made it real.

Mum spoke to me. Danny spoke to me. Ben the corgi tried to scramble onto my lap. I don’t remember saying or doing anything. Not even when Dad and Stephen returned. They didn’t have any news. I knew that before they opened their mouths. What was the point in listening?

The rest of Day 7 passed in the same despondent fug. Day 8 was a landmark. It was Wednesday 31 July. Ben had been missing for a full week.

It was also a full week since I’d been back to my own apartment. I couldn’t face it, not even to use the shower. There were too many reminders of Ben in that place. I didn’t want to be there alone. I wasn’t strong enough to be anywhere alone.

Unfortunately, being around the others wasn’t much help either.

Looking at us, you’d have thought a decade had gone by. I hadn’t seen Mum eat more than a slice of toast in the time since Ben had gone. The rich suntans that Dad and the boys had when
I’d arrived seemed to have faded. The bags under the eyes, the drawn faces, told their own story. We were zombies. Existing, not living. We’d been gradually losing it mentally, now our bodies were catching up with our minds.

I remember walking with Mum to the shop, being surrounded by holidaymakers without a care in the world, buying food I didn’t care about and she wouldn’t eat. We were barely going through the motions of normal family life. We didn’t feel like people any more. Life, as we all knew it, was on hold.

The previous day, Mum and Dad had had a chat about his disappearing act on Saturday. Mum had told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to be strong.

‘You’re the dad; you’re the man of the family. You need to be here for us, and for Kerry.’

Dad had agreed and so far had been true to his word, but what could he do? If we weren’t sitting miserably outside the caravan, we were nursing a coffee in the café next door to the police station. Dad was as frustrated as the rest of us. He was suffering as much as anyone. There was no law that said he had to handle it better than me or Mum or Stephen or Danny.

Over the weeks that followed, the café became a home from home for all of us. As we were never made to feel welcome in Bafounis’s office, the café next door was the next best place. We spent a lot of time there just sitting, staring at the harbour, nursing cups of coffee or juice, and waiting. Always waiting. Sometimes all of us would pop in to see Bafounis, or usually just Dad or me would make the journey. Then we’d go back to our coffee until it was time to go home.

There was a TV in the caravan that had never really been used because it only picked up local programmes, and most of family life was lived outside, anyway. For the last week, however, it had been on pretty much constantly. The gabble of Greek newsreaders and game-show hosts was somehow more soothing than listening to our own thoughts.

I remember at one point noticing the ten o’clock news was on. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other: time had lost its value for us. If our caravan beds didn’t have to become sofas in the mornings, I don’t think I would even have bothered getting up. The hours and now the days were blurring into each other. If anything, sleep was the only release we had. But I hated falling asleep in case I missed the moment someone knocked on the door.

Right on cue, there was a knock on the door.

‘Ben!’

I couldn’t help it. It was the response I had to everyone and everything. Why else would there be someone outside at that time of night? It had to be good news.

Dad opened the door and we looked down on a tired-looking guy with neat, blond-brown hair, dressed in jeans, a shirt and jacket. He smiled when he saw us.

‘Eddie Needham?’

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘My name’s Martyn Sharpe. I’m a journalist. I want to tell the world your story.’

I’ve had my fingers burned many times over the years by reporters and newspapers and gossip columns. People tell me I should be more guarded. Maybe I would be if my first experience of the media wasn’t as nice as Martyn.

He said he was from the
Sun
. He wanted to write the story of Ben’s disappearance. He said the publicity could help find him. It wasn’t just in the UK that the
Sun
was massive. I think everyone who came to Kos read it, even if it was two days late by the time copies arrived.

We had nothing to hide. Even so, did we want a journalist in our lives? Would the police want us to do it? Probably not. That was all the persuasion we needed. Christos Bafounis made us feel like we were inconveniencing him every time we turned up. And, besides, Martyn was a Yorkshireman. We knew who we’d rather trust.

We invited him into the caravan and watched while he got his notebook and pen out, and made himself comfortable at the table. There were no Dictaphones in those days and he didn’t have a camera. When he looked up, there were five washed-out faces staring at him like he was an exhibit in a zoo. I’m sure he had a long list of questions, but Dad went first.

‘How the hell did you find us?’

Martyn laughed. ‘Palm Beach Hotel. The night porter gave me directions. It’s been quite a journey.’

I watched him warily. The idea of a national newspaper being interested in us was mind-blowing. We were just a family.

Then Martyn asked his first question and any doubts about co-operating vanished. The whole story poured out. Dad led the answers but we all chipped in, with Martyn scribbling in his book like crazy to keep up. I think he only asked a couple of things and we just spoke and spoke until Danny was asleep in Mum’s arms. The rest of us weren’t far behind.

It was such a relief to feel like we were actually doing something positive, even if we were just talking. I saw my family come
alive for those few hours. I felt alive as well. I had to thank Martyn for that. He was a saviour for my family. We’d all been rotting for so long, withdrawing into ourselves and dying from the inside. We could barely seem to get a flicker of interest from the Greek police two miles away and this guy had flown out all the way from the UK to hear what we had to say. Somebody who spoke English who wanted to help. I swear him arriving kept us alive a few more days.

The only downside came as Martyn was leaving, and Dad asked how the
Sun
had even heard of us.

‘I heard about you on
Calendar
,’ Martyn said. ‘Otherwise I would never have known.’

Calendar
is a teatime magazine programme broadcast by ITV’s Yorkshire Television. On Tuesday night they had run an appeal for money by a man who desperately needed the airfare to get to Greece to help search for his missing son.

That man was Simon. He’d been approached by the press and had agreed to an interview.

It turned out Martyn Sharpe wasn’t the only journalist who watched
Calendar
. Over the next two days, the entire British media descended on our caravan. The
Daily Mail
were there at breakfast, the
Daily Mirror
at lunch, and the rest gradually over the next twenty-four hours. By the time the Sunday papers arrived, they were looking for new angles. I remember the
News of the World
only wanted to speak to Stephen. To each one we said the same things. I doubt we were very impressive. We were numb inside, talking on autopilot. I’m sure they wanted us to be excitable and entertaining, but we didn’t have it in us. We had the facts, no more. The pain had wiped out any emotion.

The
Mail
was the first paper to ask for photos, and not just of us. They asked to see the farmhouse and the area where Ben could have wandered. Dad offered to go with them, but in the end we all piled into the Land Rover with him. It was unspoken, but I think on some level we just wanted to be together: no one should have to go to the farmhouse on their own.

In the end, there was a queue of photographers calling out instructions, asking us to do this, turn there, all the while click-click-clicking away. Posing like we were at a family wedding left an unsavoury taste my mouth. Worse, though, was to come.

Malcolm Brabant was the BBC’s Athens correspondent. Obviously he hadn’t seen Yorkshire Television’s programme, but the news industry must be a small world because he turned up shortly after the last English paper. Talking to a television camera is incredibly nerve-racking: you have to think so much more about what you’re going to say. You have to select the right words first time and make sure you get your message across. I think Malcolm spoke to Mum and Dad first. I was panicking by the time my turn came. I just thought,
Right, deep breath, stay focused and composed, get everything out that we want to say – then collapse.