Ben (27 page)

But also, I think they’d both admit now that they were actually a little scared to look after their granddaughter. I’d never blamed them for anything so maybe I was insensitive this time round. But clearly having such responsibility for Leighanna opened old scars. It made them doubt themselves. Could they be trusted? Were they worthy? In my eyes they were and always would be. But they were nervous. However you look at it, I’m not proud. I didn’t respect their feelings. At that time, I didn’t respect anything or anyone.

Over the next month I left Leighanna with Mum and Dad for longer and longer until, eventually, I didn’t go back for her at all.

A couple of weeks later I came home, very much the worse for wear, and found my front door had been smashed in. I screamed and staggered into the house, praying the burglars weren’t still there. The place was exactly as I’d left it, apart from in one room. The intruders seemed only to have been interested in Leighanna’s clothes, her toys and her cot.

It didn’t take too long for me to deduce that Mum and Dad had come for Leighanna’s things. They’d given up on me.

People think depression is about feeling sad. It’s not. It’s about feeling nothing at all.

I don’t know if it was a continuation of post-natal depression or still the guilt of Ben reverberating through me that drove me so far off the rails. I couldn’t face being a bad parent for a minute longer. At that moment, I was glad Dad had taken Leighanna away. She deserved better than me. That’s honestly what I thought.

I realise now that I was ill, I was unstable and, as I was about to learn, I was unthinking as well. For the latter, I was about to be seriously punished.

It’s one thing to admit opinions with such candour to yourself but to elaborate them to a journalist is stupidity itself. If I hadn’t been in such a destructive spiral of self-obsession I would have worked out what was going on. When I did, it was too late.

It began with Mum being interviewed on a sighting. Why, the journalist enquired, wasn’t I there?

There were plenty of trips that Mum and Dad had made without me. We were a team. At one point, Mum was following a lead
on one island, I was on another and Dad on a third. Mum could have replied with that. Instead, with her usual openness, she said, ‘Kerry’s had a breakdown under the strain of it all. She was physically incapable of coming.’

The
Sheffield Star
picked up on the story and asked for an interview. I clearly wasn’t in the right frame of mind but I said yes. The usual mantra: this might be the piece of publicity that works. I regretted it the second I saw their front page headline: ‘Kerry Gives Up Her Daughter’. Did I learn from it, though? No. When the
Express on Sunday
came calling, I again convinced myself that the positives outweighed any harm it could do. I began the conversation with my guard up but I quickly defaulted to my usual candid self and told them exactly how bad my life was. My son was missing, I was on antidepressants, Ben’s father was in prison, I had no income and I was struggling to cope so much that Leighanna was currently staying with my mum and dad. I was even honest enough to say that there was a chance Ben had been taken by someone who could afford to give him a better life than I could.

The
Express
, of course, span that quote. They ran the huge headline: ‘I Don’t Want My Ben Back – Says Mother As She Shuns New Baby’. It was hurtful, and they twisted my words. I can’t remember word for word but I never said that. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him back. It was that in my current state of mind I honestly questioned whether I deserved him.

That story did an awful lot of damage, some of which I still see when I encounter people who clearly remember it. I don’t know how some of those newspaper people can sleep. Any family’s situation can be distorted if you try hard enough. Peer closely enough, and you see the paper over everybody’s cracks.

We were living under a microscope. Even Danny’s school progress made the local press. I was reliant on the media for help in finding Ben and so I never dared to turn anyone away, even when I was medically incapable of proceeding.

Having a journalist turn against me was one thing. Hearing that a Member of Parliament was repeating the
Express
’s claims as though they were fact had me tearing out my hair. Kevin Johnson was just one of millions of people who would be affected the following year by a Channel 4
Cutting Edge
documentary about Ben. As I’ve said, a tiny minority aside, I’ve always felt overwhelming support from the British public: the unending supply of photographs and goodwill messages that kept pouring in told me that Ben was never far from people’s thoughts. So it was no surprise to me when I heard that Kevin, a complete stranger, had written to his local MP requesting more action from officialdom. The request had been passed to my own MP, David Blunkett. Between me, my parents and Simon’s father, Cliff, there wasn’t an influential politician or holder of public office that we hadn’t implored via mail – I’ve got replies from John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron to prove it. Even though we were the ones in the spotlight, receiveing letters from members of the public made MPs think about it more. They appreciated it wasn’t just the concern of one family, it was the concern of the whole constituency and beyond. Ben was the nation’s child.

David Blunkett had, till that point, been very fair in his correspondence with us. I don’t know what changed, but his reply to Kevin was very unwelcome:

‘Regrettably Ben’s mother appears to have disengaged from what has happened and I understand her second child is now being cared for by the grandparents.’

That is an MP’s letter to a stranger. It’s one thing me being gossiped about on a bus or in the street, but from a man who, weeks later, was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Employment, as far as I was concerned it was unforgiveable.

Fortunately, the MP’s response did not put Kevin off. He launched a petition calling for Parliament to recognise the British people’s love for Ben and their desire to have the full weight of the country’s resources dedicated to finding him. He presented the thousands of signatures to MP Margaret Hodge who promised to take it to directly to Robin Cook in the Foreign Office. I cry when I hear about people like Kevin – complete strangers – who just want to help.

I was too weak emotionally to respond to the
Star
and the
Express
’s revelations in any other way than try to kill the pain through my new hedonistic lifestyle. When that didn’t work, I tried once again to kill the pain more permanently.
They can’t attack me if I am dead, can they?
I remember the thought going through my mind and my trembling hands scrabbling at the lid of the diazepam bottle. This time I would have no Shane to save me. This time would be it.

I think I passed out before I’d even swallowed half the amount I intended to. I don’t know how much time had elapsed, but I felt terrible when I opened my eyes. Spying the tablets lined up on the table sent a shiver through me. I remembered little about what I’d
done and even less about why. It was Thursday. In a couple of hours I’d be at work. Why would I want to stop myself going there?

I don’t know exactly how antidepressants work, but it’s possible in taking half a dozen I had a rapid injection of calmness. All suicidal thoughts left me. Once again, I just wanted to party. On paper, however, it was just another response to the same problem. Suicide was one route out of pain. Drunken oblivion was another. They were all my attempts to try and hide from the suffering.

My local politician had written me off publicly, a national newspaper had held me up for criticism and my family couldn’t bear to talk to me, yet none of these events was enough to make me sort myself out. I didn’t honestly think anything ever would be until one day, when I received a surprise phone call from a shaky-voiced Simon in prison.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s my dad, Kerry. He’s dead.’

I couldn’t explain it at the time but the passing of Cliff Ward, one of the sweetest, most generous men I have still ever known, sent a bolt right through me. Even as I hung up, tears streaming down my face, I knew my life was changing again. Cliff was really upfront, he worked tirelessly trying to get governments behind us, he was not afraid to show his emotions and he really cared about people. Basically, he was just the best example of a family man.

As I dried my eyes it felt like I was wiping away more than tears. After months of darkness, I was seeing cracks of light again. My head was clearing and I knew exactly what I had to do.

Half an hour later I took a deep breath and knocked on the front door of my mum’s house. She opened it and just stared as
I stepped past her into the front room, where my daughter was sitting in her pyjamas laughing at a book. Leighanna looked up and said, ‘Mummy!’ like I’d been gone a day and not months.

Thank you, Cliff.

Fuelled by the knowledge that I was over my problem and fully focused, and freed of their enforced parental duties, Mum and Dad began following up leads again. As destructive as the past year or two had been, without it I’m convinced I would still be in the dark place I was when we first returned to England. It was ultimately cathartic, although hell for everyone at the time. We’ve never spoken, as a family, about that episode of my life. It’s possible Mum and Dad will learn things in this book that they didn’t know. The only important thing at the time was that we all knew I was back for good.

The fifth anniversary of Ben’s disappearance brought us all down, though. On paper it’s just another day, no different really from the 23rd July 1996, or the 25th. In our hearts it was a milestone and, psychologically, a blow to be felt in the solar plexus.

Five years. My precious baby has been missing five years.

Were we any closer to finding him? Despite the tens of thousands of miles travelled and pounds spent, I had to say we weren’t. We had new leads almost every day, and there was always hope that the next sighting would be ‘the one’. Getting up every day
and knowing you’d made absolutely zero difference for five whole years was a hurdle that until recently I would have been incapable of surmounting. With Mum and Dad’s help, and the love of Leighanna and my brothers, I saw the positive. Everything we had done, however unsuccessful ultimately, had narrowed the search. It was happening painfully slowly, but it was a process of elimination.

Being a hands-on mum again gave my day-to-day life shape. My parents had Danny and, to a lesser extent, Stephen, to give them a reason to get up in the morning. As the boys grew older, even that was becoming less of a call. We really had to pull together to keep each other motivated and our heads above water. If one of us looked like sinking, the others were there, just like we had been there for each other in Kos five years earlier.

We didn’t know it, but 1996 would be the year we came closest yet.

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of Ben’s disappearance, Mum and Dad flew to Athens to conduct a press conference for the European media. There were two major pieces of news for the journalists to get their teeth into. First, we had another updated image of Ben to disseminate. I was grateful to the police boffins who’d created it, although it’s surreal watching your child grow up through a computer’s eyes. He will always be twenty-one-months old to me until the day I see him again with my own eyes.

Second, there was a reward.
TV Quick
’s offer of £3,000 was still on the table and the
Yorkshire Post
and
Sheffield Star
had added their own financial incentives. Yet an anonymous businessman had suddenly contacted us to say he wanted to donate considerably more. Dad handled everything, as usual, including
arranging the meeting with our mysterious benefactor. After his wife or partner rang en route to confirm directions to the house, Dad put the phone down and said, ‘I swear that was Princess Di!’

I’m not at liberty to say who it was – it wasn’t the Princess of Wales – but they arrived in a gold-plated Rolls-Royce. It would have stood out anywhere. Parked next to Dad’s battered old Transit, it looked like something from another planet.

When the couple departed, we were all left shaking our heads.

‘£500,000,’ I said. ‘£500,000!’

Like so many people who have helped us over the years, this man just wanted to do what he could to speed up Ben’s return. Where others could write letters, he could write cheques. The reward was never an official one sanctioned by the police or authorities, but unveiling this news in Athens, Mum and Dad felt like they were reading out the lottery results. A sharp intake of breath echoed around the conference hall, then the journalists broke out into a chorus of cicada-like questions, all spoken at once. Now we had their attention.

Unfortunately, when it came to news coverage and column inches in the newspapers, the conference was unexpectedly bumped down the list. One of Greece’s most popular actresses, Aliki Vougiouklaki, had died the day before. She was, therefore, the lead item on the TV news and on front pages. Our reward was relegated, if covered at all.