Ben (31 page)

The press campaigns that we ran in the beginning were targeted at holidaymakers and locals, asking them to be vigilant and keep an eye out for Ben. Later on, we expanded that message to reach young boys themselves. So I started saying in appeals, ‘If you’re a boy of Ben’s age and you don’t look like your family and you have a birthmark on your nape and above your right knee and you don’t have a birth certificate, ask the question and if you don’t like the answer, get in touch.’

It’s a long shot but people who have been adopted in mysterious circumstances, like Mariana Faithful, often grow up with a sense of doubt; something in the back of their minds produces questions about their background. And I know that if Ben is anything like his sister, then he’ll be the sort to ask those questions.

I’ve never known a child as inquisitive as Leighanna. Her earliest words had question marks at the end. She loved books, and before you turned a page she’d point to a picture and ask, ‘Who could be this?’

Her thirst for knowledge didn’t stop at books. I love having family photos around the place, so obviously Leighanna was one day jabbing her pudgy little fingers at those.

‘Who could be this?’

I laughed. It wasn’t the best picture of my dad but I was surprised Leighanna needed to ask.

‘That’s Granddad.’

Then she moved along the row.

‘Who could be this?’

‘That’s Nana.’

‘Who could be this?’

‘That’s your Uncle Danny.’

And then she’d reach the framed image of the smiling toddler clapping at the camera.

‘Who could be this?’

I felt my stomach churn.

‘That’s your brother,’ I said. ‘That’s Ben.’

I tried to make it as matter-of-fact for her as possible, but it tore my heart watching her take it in. What was going through her head? She knew her granddad, her nana, her uncles. She could put memories and experiences to their names and their pictures. What did this word ‘brother’ mean to her as a two-year-old?

As she got older and saw that my brothers were always around, the questions got harder.

‘Where is my brother?’

Nobody teaches you how to explain to a youngster what a missing person is. How much do you reveal? Is it better to be open, or protect her by trying to cover it up? I took it step by step, talking about Ben when she asked and telling her, ‘He doesn’t live with us right now but he’ll be home soon.’ I didn’t know and I still don’t know now if I did the right thing. I needed her to understand that she had a brother because when he came home I
wanted them to have a relationship. But I didn’t want to scare her. I didn’t want her to think that she could be taken from me as well.

My tears are never far away but seeing your daughter cry is the most upsetting feeling in the world. The more she grew up to understand about Ben, the harder it hit.

Maybe in trying to make her feel special and involved I was in danger of achieving the opposite. Boarding all those planes, having the media thrust in front of her, waiting in so many police stations across the world seemed like an adventure we shared. Maybe that all had a detrimental effect. But I just wanted her near me, and to be near her, and for there to be no secrets.

When Leighanna did her trawl of the family photo albums, there was one picture she didn’t find. Simon’s. After everything we’d been through, I couldn’t stomach having his face watching me at home. But I would never be one of those mums who tries to influence a child against her father. I was the one with the problem with Simon, not Leighanna. One of the reasons I hated him so much was for being so selfish and getting locked up and not being around to see his daughter grow. A child deserves a father. My daughter didn’t have that and I wished she did. That was why I was so grateful to Mum and Dad when they offered to take Leighanna to see Simon after he was transferred to Everthorpe Open Prison in Brough, Yorkshire.

In June 1997 the visits stopped – because Simon was released, three and a half years into his five-year sentence. I couldn’t have been happier for Leighanna to have her father back in her life, although I admit I was shocked to discover he’d found a new partner while inside. There are various organisations that encourage people to write to prisoners, and Simon had struck up a pen-pal
relationship with a woman, whom he later married. Naturally, the
Express on Sunday
ran a headline saying, ‘Ben Parents Fight Over Little Sister’. We didn’t fight. I was just concerned about Leighanna having to accept a stranger so soon after getting her dad back.

Unfortunately for Leighanna, that problem quickly disappeared as Simon moved to be with his new partner. There were a few visits, and then he stopped coming and the phone stopped ringing.

I was angry at the way Simon appeared to have cut off contact. We’d already lost one child – how could he walk away from another? I suppose he loved this woman enough to do anything, but it did make me sad for Leighanna.

Fortunately there was another man in her life. I’d met Pierce Mount one night when I’d been out with my friend, Joanna, at the Capital Club in Sheffield. We were dancing, minding our own business, when this tall, tanned, handsome guy came over, grabbed my wrist and checked the time on my watch. Stranger things have happened in clubs but I couldn’t help watching him walk away. The cocky sod must have known I would be. He suddenly stopped walking, turned around then showed me his own watch.

Normally I stay away from any sort of arrogance like that, but I admit I was intrigued. The guy, Joanna said, was a professional boxer, trained by Brendan Ingle and a close friend of Prince Naseem. I wasn’t surprised. It takes a certain confidence to get into the ring and this Pierce had it in spades. What he didn’t have, though, was a girlfriend. According to his mates, having one wasn’t his style: they liked to joke that he was too much in love with himself to be serious with anyone else. For most people that would have been a warning; I saw it as a challenge. It was like
being back at school and hearing that Darren or Simon weren’t the settling-down kind. I’d proved everyone wrong then, and I could do it again.

It worked. We got together and I discovered that behind the bravado and the vanity, Pierce actually had a heart of gold. When I saw how amazing he was with Leighanna, I knew we had a future. We didn’t ask her to call him ‘Daddy Pierce’ but when she did, I knew it was the seal of approval I needed for him to move in and share our life and home.

That should have been the start of something brilliant but, as usual with me, there was a hiccough. Joanna was going out with Robert Baxendale and told me that my old love, Robert’s brother, Mick, had split from his wife and was going through a tough patch. Naturally I contacted him as a friend. Within minutes of seeing each other, however, we both knew the friendship would turn again into something more. I anguished about finishing with Pierce but I knew it was unfair to string him along. On 10 October 1998, I told Pierce I was leaving him for Mick.

The following night, Mick was stabbed to death.

You never think you’ll be involved with a murder case. Part of me thinks I handled it better because of what I’d been through with Ben. Another part thinks it affected me more. I’d already had someone precious snatched from me. Now it had happened again. It wasn’t fair.

The details of the murder did not make pleasant reading. From police reports, it was a case of Mick defending the club from drug dealers. He was a black belt in karate and could snap a man in two. But he and the other doormen were no match for a group of scum with knives. Mick died that night in hospital.

The last thing on my mind was the bad timing of my confession to Pierce. When I did get around to thinking of myself, I assumed I’d lost two men. But Pierce said he would stand by me if I wanted him to. I had to admit I did, and for several years we were happy. Pierce threw himself into the Search For Ben campaign and organised boxing events and charity nights to raise money. We even appeared with Leighanna in an edition of
OK!
magazine. We really were a happy family.

Every family goes through its domestic upheavals but at the same time as I was trying to build some sort of a family life for Leighanna, I was fighting to keep momentum in the search for my son.

It was getting harder and harder to come up with angles to keep Ben’s hunt in the press. A lot of journalists I would consider friends admitted that without a fresh sighting or lead, there wasn’t anything they could do. One or two of them suggested I write a book about our family’s ordeal. It wasn’t something I was keen on at first, but as with every other decision I make, I asked myself, ‘Would it help the case?’

We were recommended to an agent who was happy to take our project on. He lined us up with the wonderful Melanie McFadyean from Channel 4’s
Cutting Edge
programme and she wrote a great proposal. Unfortunately, editors came back with the same response. They were very sad for us but as a book, the story didn’t work because it had no ending, good or bad. It wasn’t enough that by publishing it they could possibly speed up the ending and help us find Ben sooner.

As far as publicity was concerned, it was back to the drawing board and back, once again, to calling on the national and
local media to channel our on-going progress. Then, one day, the
Sheffield Star
ran a headline that said: ‘Cash And Kerry’. In it, they accused me of not giving an interview unless they paid a fee. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never asked for a penny for myself, not now or at any time in the last seven years. Having the support of the press was the lifeblood of Ben’s campaign. Why would I do anything to jeopardise that?

It turned out that the
Star
had not made up the story. Our agent had applied the normal rules of his business to our situation and decided our time should command a fee. That was quite normal for his usual clients but we weren’t celebrities. We were desperate people grateful for every inch of copy we could get. With the book project stalled, we parted company amicably.

After a couple of negative headlines, I was relieved to see that public goodwill was still on our side. Kevin Johnson wasn’t the only person provoked into action by 1997’s
Cutting Edge
‘Lost Boy’ documentary. Soon after its broadcast exposed my parents’ tireless trek around mainland Athens and Veria in the face of police inertia, letters started appearing in newspapers calling for the country to boycott Greece as a tourist destination until that country’s authorities took Ben’s abduction seriously.

It’s a powerful feeling knowing that complete strangers are rooting for you. We were contacted one day by a woman called Christine Bennett who said she wanted to raise money to help us afford to follow up potential sightings. She and her nephew, Daniel Barton, kicked it off by completing a sponsored cycle ride from Chester to Frodham. There were also pub collections, a magic show for children, an adult disco and a bring-and-buy sale.

People like Christine show all that’s good in the world – and they pop up in the most unexpected places. I was stunned to
receive a call from someone in the marketing department at the Iceland chain of supermarkets. Would we be interested in having Ben’s details put on all their cartons of milk? I didn’t need to be told that it was a common way of promoting missing persons in America. Even if they just put Ben’s picture on one pint, that’s better than nothing. The idea of hundreds of thousands of people being reminded of him every time they sat down to breakfast or a cup of tea was incredible.

I’m truly grateful for every individual act on Ben’s behalf and every single report of a sighting, however slight it might seem. Having said that, some people have gone to tremendous lengths on my behalf, none more so than a lovely couple called John and Tish Cookson. In 1996 they were on holiday in Haraki, Rhodes, when they spotted a young fair-haired boy playing with a group of Greek kids. John was intrigued when the others referred to the boy as the ‘Blond One’. When the Cooksons realised the boy spoke Greek, and so wasn’t a tourist, alarm bells rang. With Tish keeping look-out and pretending to pose for pictures, John took several snaps of the boy.

As soon as the Cooksons returned from Rhodes, they got the pictures developed and sent them to us. Unfortunately, the images weren’t sharp enough to be conclusive. On top of all the other pictures we were receiving at the time, we decided not to follow this one up personally.

Some people would have been put off by our reaction, but not John and Tish. When it came to booking their holiday the following year, they decided to go back to the same village. This time they made a point of tracking down the boy at his school and took pictures of him there, and again on the beach with friends.
Yet again, however, the results weren’t clear enough to justify us or the police or a newspaper dipping into their pockets to investigate. If money were no object I’d have been over to Rhodes like a shot. Sadly, we could really only afford to pursue sightings that looked positive.

So it was, two years after their first contact with the Blond One, John and Tish went back for a third time to Rhodes. They’d bought a high-quality video camera for the occasion and refused to leave until they’d secured decent footage. That wasn’t all they did.

John had read about DNA testing in paternity disputes. If police could prove a man was the father, they could also prove a child was his son. The only question was: how were they going to acquire it?

As it turned out, the boy made it very easy for them. When he saw John on the beach one day, the boy became fascinated by John’s tattoos. It was perfectly natural for John to tousle the boy’s head – and, in the process, he ended up with a beautiful single blond hair.

Now the media became interested. And as soon as I saw the video, so did I. I played that tape over and over and every time the boy looked more and more how I thought Ben would be. He had cute stuck-out ears, the same kind of nose and prominent eyebrows, the same skinny frame and even a double crown in his hair. I couldn’t see any birthmarks, but what I could see was enough for my hopes to rise.