Ben (35 page)

Plans were made, a date was set. Then somebody spoilt it. My visit to London was suddenly part of a documentary. I heard every excuse going from the production team: it would help Ben, it would help Maddy, it would help Kate, it would help me. I’d had twenty years of saying ‘Yes’ to the media. This was the first time I said ‘No’.

It wasn’t until much later, in May 2012, that Kate and I finally got the opportunity to meet. Friday 24th was named ‘International Missing Persons Day’ and to mark the occasion, the charity Missing People was launching a Europe-wide ‘hotline’ number that could be called free-of-charge to give information about a missing person. As well as Ben and Madeleine, thousands of people go missing by running away from home for various reasons, and their loved ones don’t know where they are. This free number – 116000 – can also be used to leave messages for them.

As parents of high-profile missing people, Kate and I were both invited to a reception at 10 Downing Street the night before we were due to meet. Our host was Home Secretary Theresa May, who could not have been more supportive about Ben’s search. Kate was incredibly shy but we shared a few moments, unobserved by cameras and reporters.

While that conversation will remain private, I said I would be happy to talk about International Missing Person’s Day the following morning on ITV’s
Daybreak
breakfast programme. It would mean being collected from my London hotel at five in the morning, but the chance to spread the word about the hotline was too good to resist. The car arrived on schedule and I was spirited to the studios on the south bank of the River Thames. The make-up team assured me that no one would know
it was so early by looking at me. At that moment, that was all I cared about!

I’ve done plenty of television programmes, many of them live. Even so, waiting in the wings to be summoned to the interview sofa by host Aled Jones was very nerve-racking. What I didn’t know was it was about to get worse. Just as I heard the presenters wrapping up their previous piece, I was handed a copy of that morning’s
Daily Mirror
and told, ‘This is what Aled will be asking you about.’

The front-page headline was printed two inches high, but I could not take it in. Not at first. Slowly the fog cleared and the words, ‘Is Lost Ben Buried Under Rubble?’ screamed out. I needed to sit down – and not on a sofa in front of millions.

The story claimed that Dino Barkas had decided to announce now, twenty-one years later, that Ben had almost certainly been killed by accident during the building works at Iraklis. The body, the JCB digger driver said, was buried under rocks he himself had dumped that day.

In other words, he was saying Ben was dead.

I felt so sorry for Missing People. It’s incredibly difficult for an individual or a charity to get publicity. I know how hard it has been for me. They’d managed to secure a spot on the UK’s leading morning television programme to promote their new international initiative, with me as the spokesperson, and now it was going to be hijacked. There was no doubt about that. With no preparation at all, I was going under the media scalpel.

I hope I gave a strong account of myself. The idea of Ben being injured and buried during the building works down the hill from Michaelis’s farmhouse was one I’d heard before. As Aled Jones put the
Mirror
’s claims to me, picking his words with care, I gave the only answer I could.

‘Ben is alive. He is not under that rubble.’

Obviously Aled pushed for an explanation, and I was happy to give one. Yes, building work had been taking place down the hill from Michaelis’s farmhouse. Yes, Dino was transporting rubble from that site up around the fields behind Michaelis’s property to dump at the top of the lane. But did he come onto land where Mum, Dad, Danny, Stephen, Michaelis – or Ben – were?

No.

What’s more, the mound of earth pictured on the front page of the
Mirror
was already there when Ben disappeared. I remember that same night, Mum and Dad sat on it while we discussed what happened next.

By the time I left the South Bank I was a nervous wreck. On the train journey back to Sheffield, my phone didn’t stop ringing. How did I feel about the mound being dug up? What was my reaction to the claim that Ben was dead? Would I try to stop police digging up the site? You name it, I was asked it. The journalists could smell blood.

I gave everyone the same answer.

‘I have every confidence that Ben is still alive. More than that – I
know
he is. However, if the authorities wish to excavate the land identified by Dino Barkas, then I will not stand in their way. I do not believe Ben is buried there, so I am happy it will cross off another line of enquiry.’

I was still giving that answer four months later, when asked about rumours of an imminent excavation. One of my case workers from South Yorkshire Police, the brilliant Jane Morley, surmised that any search of the area was unlikely to happen soon because of the amount of preparation involved. International paperwork, as I well knew, took months to pass from one hand to another. So she was as surprised as I was to hear from Matt Fenwick himself that a date for the search of the farmhouse site had been set for two weeks later, in October 2012.

British officers were finally going to Kos.

After five years in Cyprus, Mum and Dad had then moved to a quiet village in the west of Turkey. Danny had remained behind to
work on his career as an Elvis tribute act. The new house was only a boat ride from Kos but it seemed a million miles from anywhere.

I’d felt like a new person the second I’d arrived for my first visit. All the emotional baggage that weighed me down on the Greek islands and mainland, and even in England, just seemed to disappear. For the first time in years, I felt like I could relax; I experienced a sense of peace I had not enjoyed anywhere else, before or since.

So when my parents decided to return to England in 2010, I refused to let that sever my link with the place. That is how, in October 2012, when South Yorkshire Police were descending on Kos, I was instead on the other side of the Aegean Sea, on what was originally going to be a relaxing two-week holiday.

To be fair, Matt Fenwick could not have been more upfront with me. He and his boss, Detective Superintendent James Abdy, had first flown out to Kos twelve months earlier and I’d been updated every step of the way. One year later, in September 2012, Matt gave warning that a decision on the dig was imminent. The second he got the go-ahead to take a team to the island, he was on the phone to me. We decided that I should take as much holiday as possible then transfer over to Kos. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to enjoy myself with that hanging over me, but I said I’d give it a try.

I managed five days in my Turkish idyll. It really does reach out to me and I feel comfortable there. Nobody associates me in the region with a tragedy, like in so many other places. I can blend into the background and just be me. It’s for that reason I haven’t named the village here.

Mum and Dad and Danny had flown out with me, as much to hold my hand during what was coming next as for the holiday itself.
In preparation, I closed my Facebook account, my email and turned off my phone: as soon as the British media got wind of the police’s movements, I would get no peace. The last thing I wanted was to have a pack of fifty reporters descend on my little haven in the sun. If they couldn’t contact me, they couldn’t ask me where I was.

The only call I decided in advance to take was from Lucy Thornton at the
Daily Mirror
. They’d broken the excavation story and had been running it prominently ever since. I didn’t mind that the
Mirror
was, in my opinion, peddling an angle that was wrong, as they almost single-handedly kept Ben in the news from May to October. The least I could do was grant them an interview.

Lucy was happy enough talking by phone. The problem came when she said she’d need a picture to run alongside the story. Jokingly I replied, ‘The only person I’ll pose for is Andy.’ Andy Stenning was the photographer who had been in floods of tears with me when we’d discovered little Panos in Kassiopi wasn’t Ben. I wasn’t even sure if Andy worked for the paper any more; I just knew he was a face I could trust.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Lucy said. ‘But we already have a guy in Kos. The editor might just want to use him.’

‘Fine,’ I said and that was that. The following morning, there was a knock at the door and standing there was Andy. It honestly felt like seeing an old friend. You don’t know someone till you’ve shared their pain, and we had shared plenty. I knew then that I was not about to be stabbed in the back.

I wasn’t needed in Kos, although Matt and I agreed it would probably be politically advisable for me to be present. Dad was more essential. He took the ferry out to the island on the Thursday to help target the police search: he could point out what was there
before 24 July 1991, and what had appeared since. Originally, the police hoped that Michaelis would join them as well. Sadly, he passed away a fortnight before the search. He never did achieve his dream of renovating that farmhouse. To this day there has been no work on it since Ben’s disappearance although, weirdly, a new cottage was built adjoining it. Whatever the reason, it died with Michaelis.

I planned to join Dad in Kos on the Friday. The night before, however, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. I don’t know if it was worry but my throat swelled up, and I couldn’t speak or eat. I was sick all through the night and hollow the following day. My planned rendezvous with Lucy at the seaport in Bodrum was off. There was no way I could face the three buses – from the village to Ortaca, Ortaca to Mugla then Mugla to Bodrum – needed to get there. As she was in the country anyway, Lucy made her way inland to me instead. She took one look at the budget apartment I was staying in and said, ‘You won’t get better here.’ An hour later, I was in a five-star hotel round the corner. By Saturday night, I was well enough to use the Jacuzzi in my room. Lucy even sent me down for a massage.

Her expense account’s generosity didn’t stop there. There was no way we were going near one bus, let alone three. A car took us directly to the port and then it was just a question of waiting for the ferry to depart. As I sat on the top deck, I realised I was shivering, even though the sun was pounding down. I didn’t want to hear those giant engines start up. That would mean we were on our way and, I finally admitted to myself, I did not want to arrive.

Over the past few days I’d been as ill as I’d ever felt. The sickening feeling as the ship pulled into view of Kos was worse. This
wasn’t a normal visit. Twenty-one years ago I had cried as I left the island, convinced I was leaving my son behind. Now I was dreading arriving in case we found him.

I wasn’t going there to catch up with Chief Bafounis or pick up some paperwork or follow up a sighting. It wasn’t for pleasantries with the magistrate or prosecutor’s office. It was because of the mission already underway on that mountain. The mission to dig up the remains of my darling Ben’s body.

The harbour was soon in sight and with it the police station and the castle. I couldn’t help flinching, cowering from the view in my mother’s arms. I never enjoyed going back to the place where my life had ended. This time, even after the ship had docked, my hands needed to be prised from the rail. I was close to having to be carried off.

There were so many emotions. Fear, pain – but mainly rage. What got to me most was not the dread that Ben would be found. I knew with all my heart that he was not going to be discovered under any rubble. It was the certainty of the police’s actions that I could not come to terms with. If the Greek police, who had to authorise the search, truly believed that Ben could be buried in the farmhouse grounds, then why had it taken more than two decades for them to go anywhere near it with a shovel? Why had it taken the British police a couple of months to do what another force hadn’t bothered to do in twenty-one years?

I found myself rehearsing the speech I would give the first man in Greek uniform I saw.

‘If you seriously believe Ben is buried there, then why the hell have you waited till now to look? You’ve put me through twenty-one years of crap. You’ve wasted my life. And why? Because
you couldn’t be bothered? Because you didn’t want to waste the money? Because it was too hot to get all sweaty with a spade?

‘I need to know!’

I think it was a relief for everyone that the only official greeting party was two members of the British police force.

I could not fault South Yorkshire Police’s organisation. From transport, to our hotel rooms at the Kipriotis Panorama Hotel – ironically out near Ramira beach, where Mum and Dad parked their caravan the day they first arrived – there was a sense that they had everything covered. If they were half as effective at the dig site, we could all be confident that whatever conclusion they reached would be the right one.

And yes
, I thought again,
If Matt Fenwick had been running Ben’s case twenty-one years ago, my son would have been back the next day.