Ben (25 page)

Could or would? I don’t like to bang the class drum, but when you open a newspaper and see the people the Queen just invites to tea, you have to question the priorities of her advisors.

I was doing all I could to stay positive. When one letter came back, I fired off another. Even if all I achieved was keeping Ben’s name in the public eye, that had to mean something. I refused to let the government forget about him.

Bert was a regular visitor: on a weekly or monthly basis, dozens of new sightings were dismissed or investigated. There was no
avenue we wouldn’t explore. When Cork psychic, William Thackaberry, said he had traced Ben to Daytona, Florida, I insisted it was followed up by the US police.

Some people found my trust of the abilities of a medium amusing. All I knew was that after so many false alarms and disappointments, I could not afford to turn down any offer of help. In any case, I was beginning to experience my own visitations. Shortly after filming in Kos, I started having dreams about Ben. I’d always seen him on and off; now he was appearing every time I closed my eyes. Not as a nightmare. As a happy little boy who’d never gone missing, never known pain or separation from his parents. I always woke up with a smile on my face – until I realised it had all been my subconscious, and my stomach sank.

The dreams got stronger and more vivid. Then, one night, I woke up to hear Ben crying. Ben, my Ben. As I had done so many times before, I climbed out of bed and crossed the landing to his room. The only way he would be comforted was by my cuddles. Every time I pulled away, he cried again. When he asked me to stay, I just nodded and snuggled in the narrow bed alongside him. The next morning, a confused Simon found me still there. He tried to rationalise it, saying I must have been sleepwalking.

‘No, I wasn’t asleep. I remember every detail.’

The only thing I couldn’t explain was where my Ben had vanished to.

A couple of nights later it happened again, earlier this time, in fact before I’d even nodded off. Once again I made the familiar journey to Ben’s room, treading quietly over his soft, grey cord carpet. And again, Simon discovered me alone in our son’s bed the following morning. For some reason he looked frightened, then
angry. Nothing I said seemed to calm him. Every time I mentioned Ben he got more and more riled, yelling that I was imagining things, until eventually he stormed out.

What Simon saw as my descent into madness I took as a sign of hope. I had to. What other explanation was there for Ben coming back to me each night?

Then one night I was watching television downstairs alone when I remembered I hadn’t put Ben to bed. I called out to where he was playing with his wooden soldiers on the carpet and told him it was time to go up. When he didn’t move, I took his hand and led him up the stairs, got him changed into his pyjamas, washed his face and brushed his teeth and tucked him into bed. After I’d read him a story, I kissed his forehead and switched off the lamp. As I left the room I said, ‘I love you,’ and he said it back.

I went back downstairs and continued watching my programme.

How can I explain that now? Was I hallucinating? Was it a vision? Had I fallen asleep on the couch and started sleepwalking, as Simon said? Or was it something else? I remember with such clarity the whole sequence of events, even now. I genuinely believed I’d put Ben to bed that night.

In the cold light of the following day I took a harsher view.
What is happening to me?
I couldn’t explain it any other way than that I was losing my mind. Every doubt I’d ever had about my abilities as a mother, or Ben’s chances of coming home, flooded back. I wasn’t worthy of him. I couldn’t be; I was clearly insane. Maybe it was a good thing he was taken away. He’d been rescued from a lifetime with a madwoman.

I couldn’t wait for Simon to go out. Then I poured myself a large glass of wine and composed a letter to my mother. ‘I’m a failure.
Ben is better off without me. I can’t even look after myself.’ I knew that what I was about to do next would drive a stake through her heart, but what mattered more was putting an end to the torment. To the endless cycle of waking up and thinking Ben was in his bed and suffering his loss again and again and again.

I didn’t want to die but I didn’t want to live the life that I was trapped in. Ben was my reason for living but he was also killing me – slowly. Who could object to me speeding up the process?

Tears dropped onto the envelope as I sealed the edge and placed it, addressed, on the table. Then I poured another glass of wine and emptied a box of diazepam into my hand. I counted ten tablets. If each one had the power to keep me calm for an entire day, imagine what this many could do. All my problems would soon be over.

As the last pill was washed down with the final sip of pinot grigio, the only regret I had was not doing it in bed. Still, it wasn’t too late. I pulled myself up and waded through the spinning room to the stairs. They went up, turned 180 degrees on a mini landing then carried on to the top. By the halfway point, I knew I’d gone far enough. It looked so comfortable I sat down, then leaned back, lay my head on my arm and closed my eyes.
I’m sorry …

That should have been it. There was no reason for me to expect Simon’s nephew – Shane – to come visiting soon after. Even less reason for him to have discovered the front door ajar. Yet that’s what happened. I was vaguely aware of his voice as he called out Simon’s name, then mine. Then there was a sudden thundering as he spied my foot sticking out from the mezzanine floor and sprinted up. No sixteen-year-old should have to see that.

I was lucky that Shane was older than his years. He dragged me up the remainder of the stairs and into the bathroom. I watched my heels bump over every stair as though they belonged to someone else. I didn’t feel a thing, not even when he appeared with a glass of milk and forced me to drink it. Not even when he bent me over the bath and started shouting at me to throw up. I recognised the words but what could I do? He grabbed my wrist and pushed the milk to my face.

‘For God’s sake, Kerry, do it!’

Eventually I did, then collapsed in a heap. Shane covered me in a towel and ran to call for help.

I don’t know if ten diazepam and a bottle of white wine are enough to kill you, but thanks to Shane I never found out. As far as I’m concerned he saved my life. I had migraines and stomach pains for a week after, and my doctor immediately slashed my supply of antidepressants. I’d let everyone down, she made that very clear. ‘More than anything,’ she said, ‘you’ve let yourself down.’

Mum fluctuated between anger and upset. I needed to believe in myself, she said. And why didn’t I go to her instead of being so stupid?

I knew I’d been irresponsible, but the same dark thoughts that led me to be so selfish prevented me hearing anyone’s advice, however well intentioned. And then, after two weeks of turmoil, the penny dropped. Everyone was right. I had to believe I was a good mum.

Because that’s what the tiny twelve-week-old baby in my tummy needed me to be.

Leighanna Needham was famous from the moment she was born.

I don’t remember much about 9 February 1994, except that my beautiful daughter arrived, unusually, bang on her due date at Northern General Hospital. And there to capture her first smile and burp was our friend from the
Daily Mirror
, Jim Oldfield, and a photographer.

It wasn’t exactly a case of selling the rights like celebrities do in
Hello!
magazine because I think Jim was just trying to do us a favour. A few weeks before the birth, he’d asked if there was anything we needed, and of course I had a list as long as my arm. Every penny that came into our family was spent either on surviving or searching. Even our clothes came mostly from Dad’s boot sales. That left the square root of nothing for virtually everything else.

‘If we give you a £1,000 will that help you out?’ Jim asked. I thought of the price of prams, pushchairs, cots and nappies and practically snapped his hand off. It was good of Jim, really, knowing that I would probably have let journalists in for nothing, just to keep the momentum of Ben’s campaign going. In return, all I had to do was share my daughter’s earliest moments with his
readers. What mother doesn’t want to show off her baby? These days, people post pictures on Facebook; I had the
Daily Mirror.

I’d discovered I was pregnant while still recovering from my overdose. If I’d thought I was a bad parent before, the realisation that I could have damaged my unborn child was devastating. I remember begging my GP to be honest with me, to tell me if I could have hurt my baby. It only took a couple of days to arrange a scan, but I was on edge till the ‘all clear’ came back. I knew this was my second chance.

I couldn’t deny the events of the past few weeks, however. I had tried to take my own life and, for the next few weeks, between Mum and Simon and my nurse, I wasn’t left alone for a minute. They were all looking for any sign that I might try something so stupid again. They were all disappointed.

They didn’t understand that a new baby was the reason I needed to stay alive. I was a mum who wasn’t being allowed to live like one. I had all these maternal instincts and no outlet, no child to give them to. All those dreams and hallucinations of Ben crying out for me weren’t just signs of me cracking up, I realised. They were a mother’s love reaching out for a child, and my body telling me to hold on because a new person was coming who did need me. It wasn’t Ben I was hearing late at night. It was Leighanna.

Looking back at the press reports from 1992 and 1993, Simon and I were asked repeatedly whether we would be trying for another child. As time went by, our answers changed from ‘no’ to ‘yes’. When I did fall pregnant, however, it wasn’t planned. Simon and I were going through a phase of not really getting on. Our
long-term life together was looking shaky at best – something that probably added to my overdose attempt.

To his credit, as soon as I revealed to Simon that I was carrying his child, he couldn’t have been more positive.

‘This is just what we need, Kerry,’ he said. ‘This will bring us closer.’

‘But what about Ben?’

‘This baby has got massive shoes to fill, no doubt about it. Ben is still our little boy and we will find him. But this is a new chance for us. A new start.’

I hadn’t been a nice person to be around for some time, I admit it, and Simon had borne the brunt of it. I very rarely spoke to him, preferring to bury myself in housework just to keep busy. Along the way, I had convinced myself he wanted to leave, ignoring the fact I was driving him away. But his reaction to the baby showed he really did care.

Happy as I was, you don’t just flip out of a suicidal mood overnight. I shared my doubts with the psychiatric nurse.

‘I can’t look after myself, so how can I look after a baby?’

‘You’re a mother, Kerry. You’ll find a way.’

About a month before Leighanna was born we moved house again, to another maisonette in the Foxhill area, just around the corner from Mum and Dad’s new place. By the time my little 6lb 6oz bundle arrived, I genuinely thought the world had got that much better. I was part of a family again, I was a proper mum and I was desperate to take the second chance I’d been given. What could go wrong?

Despite all the protestations of love and a long life together, and the promise that he would never disappear like he had before
Ben’s birth, Simon only stayed with us for a couple of weeks. The only difference this time was that he didn’t walk out by choice.

He was arrested.

New mums are never far from a tear or two at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times.

We were still in Norfolk Park when the police knocked one day looking for Simon. They accused him of burgling someone’s house when he was doing door-to-door selling.

‘Well, Simon doesn’t do that job any more,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t for years. He works on building sites now, with his brother.’

That night I informed Simon the police were looking for him.

‘It must be from years ago. Don’t worry yourself. That’s not going to help the baby.’

He was right. I did have a lot on my plate, with trying to coordinate searches, press interviews and getting ready to move house. Then, one day, as we were decorating the lounge in Foxhill, there was a knock at the door. It wasn’t neighbours welcoming us to the street. It was the police. Without looking at me they read Simon his rights then marched him out. I had paint on my clothes and a crying baby in my arms. And they just took her father away.

Without Leighanna to look after, I would have gone straight to the medicine cabinet again. I already felt so fragile and this was a hammer blow.
Just when I thought things were turning around, it gets ruined again.
The pain of missing Ben was with me every day. Then there was Mum’s trauma-related weight loss, Dad riddled with arthritis because of stress, their own marital problems caused by Dad’s relentless obsession with the case, Ben the dog’s disappearance, all our money worries and endless fruitless searches
– and now this. It was one thing after another, and I just prayed Leighanna could begin to tip the balance back in our favour.