Burnt Paper Sky (13 page)

The children’s eyes turned to us and they started to get to their feet. Chairs scraped and papers fell off tables as they stood.

‘This is Mr Clemo and Mr Woodley,’ said Miss May. She whispered to me, ‘I’m not going to tell them you’re policemen.’ Then she addressed them again: ‘What do we say, children?’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Clemo, good afternoon, Mr Woodley,’ they chanted.

‘Well done, class,’ said Miss May, and she favoured them with a big smile. ‘Sit down and carry on.’

They sat down with a collective bump, duty done. The young man came to the door. ‘This is Lucas,’ said Miss May. ‘Or Mr Grantham, as the children call him. He’s our teaching assistant for Oak Class.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. No handshake, instead he held his hands in front of him, fingers interlocked, and in motion, as if he were working his way along a set of prayer beads. ‘It’s just awful, I can’t believe it.’ He had freckles on the back of his hands too.

‘We’ll need to have a word with you at some point very soon,’ I said.

‘Right! Of course, whenever,’ he said. Close up, he looked tired and slack-jawed. He had a weak chin and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

‘Have you noticed anything different from usual about Benedict Finch’s behaviour lately?’ I asked him. I kept my voice down so the kids didn’t hear me.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’

Behind him a space at one of the tables caught my eye, an empty chair where presumably Ben Finch should have been sitting, surrounded by his schoolmates, having an ordinary day.

‘Nothing? Are you sure?’ I said. He was starting to irritate me.

‘No,’ he said. He shook his head slowly, his lips tucked in between his teeth. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket.

‘We have to get going,’ I said. ‘Though we’ll need to interview you as soon as possible. Somebody will be in touch to arrange that.’

The children were starting to fidget and talk. Miss May hushed them gently.

‘Whenever you like,’ said Lucas Grantham. ‘Of course. If it’ll help.’

In the car, Woodley said, ‘It’s a bloody nightmare how many people could have had contact with him.’

‘I know, and we’re going to need background and alibis on every single one of them. Plus we need to check out the incident with the broken arm with the hospital.’

‘Do you think there’s anything in it?’

‘No, because it seems completely clear that Rachel Jenner didn’t inflict the injury on him. It was an accident. But we’ll check it out anyway and I think we should take the possibility that she was depressed seriously. We’ll pass that on to Fraser and Zhang straight away.’

‘What did you think of the teaching assistant?’

‘Of interest,’ I said. ‘Definitely.’

‘Yeah, I thought he was a bit shifty.’

Woodley sat in silence for a few moments, then he said, ‘Strange isn’t it? Being back at school?’

The car was poised at the school entrance, indicator light ticking.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You forget how small you were once. Don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so. When did you leave primary school then? Last week? Short memory you’ve got. Is that why they kicked you out? Couldn’t remember your times tables?’

It was a sport in the office, ribbing Woodley because he looked young, or because he had a nose you could ski off.

‘Ha ha, boss,’ he said, but he shut up then and I was glad because I was actually thinking about how vivid my memories of being primary school age were, and it was making me scared for Benedict Finch, because of all the bad things that can be done to a child that age, so very easily.

Laura and Nicky wouldn’t let me go online. They said I shouldn’t read the stuff people were saying, that it would upset me. They were united in this. I was still in denial, still sure that people wouldn’t actually, really accuse me. Even then, in those first hours after the press conference, I was naïve enough to retain a delicate mesh of middle-class confidence around me. I’m a good citizen, I thought. People will know that. I used to be married to a doctor.

I should have had more sense though, because outside the house the journalists were gathering in greater numbers than before, drawn there since the press conference.

Inside, we’d had to take the phone off the hook, and seal the letter flap with masking tape. I stayed in the back of the house, as far away from them as possible.

Nicky went out for supplies and bustled back into the house within minutes, holding bags from the local corner shop. ‘I couldn’t get any further,’ she said. ‘They followed me. And they’ve dropped rubbish everywhere.’

She found a black bin liner under my sink and took it back out to the front of the house, where, in tones strident enough for me to hear, she ordered the journalists to clear up what they’d dropped in the street and in my postage-stamp sized front garden.

Back inside, still bristling, she started to unpack a selection of canned food. ‘They’re lovely in the shop,’ she said, ‘aren’t they? They locked the door so I could shop without the journalists and then they gave me this to give to you.’

It was an envelope. On the front was handwritten ‘To Benedict and his Mother’.

‘They said they can order in anything you want,’ Nicky went on, shoving the cans into cupboards. ‘Or if we can’t get to the supermarket they said they can get stuff for us that we can pick up, which might be nice because we can’t live off this.’ She held up a loaf of white sliced bread.

I opened the envelope. Inside was a small card. An elegant pair of hands was drawn on the front, with tapered fingers and palms together, in prayer. Beaded bracelets hung around the wrists.

‘What religion are they?’ Nicky asked, looking over my shoulder.

‘Hindu,’ I said. ‘I think.’

Inside the card was a handwritten message, in careful, formal lettering. ‘We have shed tears for you and we wish you and Benedict every strength and we pray that he will be home soon. Ravi and Aasha and family.’

‘I barely even know them,’ I said. I thought of my frequent visits to the shop, the small talk with the owners, a lovely couple, but strangers really, and I felt deeply moved by the card.

‘You’ve had other messages,’ Nicky said. ‘I just wasn’t sure you were up to them.’

‘Show me.’

Nicky had commandeered my mobile phone, in order to field calls and messages from friends, and other families that we knew well and not so well.

They were mostly texts from people I knew, an outpouring of reaction to the story appearing on the news. The texts ranged from the predictable:

To the insultingly practical:

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said. ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

Nicky read it. ‘It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. They’re trying to be nice.’

‘As if I care about a stupid coat.’

‘They don’t expect you to. Don’t think the worst. It’s supposed to be a nice message.’

There were emails too, but I tired of reading them. The messages made me feel either sad or angry or resentful and I was feeling all of those things enough already. Needling at me, too, were the messages that weren’t there, from friends who I would have expected to support us. ‘Have there been voicemails?’ I asked Nicky. ‘Don’t you think people should leave a proper message?’

‘There’ve been one or two,’ she said. ‘I wrote them down. People probably don’t want to tie up the phone line.’

I looked over the messages she’d carefully recorded. There were still at least two friends conspicuous by their absence from these lists. Were they being kind by not contacting me? Was that a thoughtful response? Or had they backed off now that I was tainted by misfortune, now that I was the person to whom the worst had happened, the one at the sharp end of the statistical wedge, where nobody else wants to be.

I sat there, the card in my hands, while Nicky trawled the web again, searching deeper and deeper for advice and information, for anything that might help us, as if it were a sort of addiction.

I had an impulse to phone John. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about the press conference, and that I was sorry I let Ben run ahead in the woods. I increasingly felt a desperate need for him to absolve me of the things I’d done wrong. It felt like the only way I could lessen my pain. But he didn’t answer his mobile, and Katrina answered their landline.

‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘He’s out driving the streets, looking for Ben. He hasn’t been home since the press conference.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

‘Yes.’

I didn’t want her to say anything about it. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said quickly.

Laura went home. She had cats to feed. I marvelled at how the mundane activities that life demanded still needed to be done, even while the worst was happening.

I even felt resentful towards my body, towards its demands for sleep, for food, for drink, for bodily functions. I thought that life should stop until Ben was found. Clocks should no longer tick, oxygen should no longer be exchanged for carbon dioxide in our lungs, and our hearts should not pump. Only when he was back should normal service resume.

Anything else was an insult to him, to what he might be suffering.

Nicky continued to work, propelled by some kind of manic internal engine, as if an internet search might yield a vital clue, or trigger a revelation. Once she’d finished looking online, she began to design a flyer, and to come up with plans for distributing it.

I tired of being in her orbit, and I went upstairs, my fingers running along the dado rail. Just above it, visible against the white paint, were Ben’s finger marks. He always ran, never walked, whether he was going up or down the stairs. Ignoring my shouts to slow down, he would have one hand on the banister and one hand on the wall to steady himself, and I would hear rapid footfall. Usually I only noticed the marks made by his grubby fingers when they exasperated me, but now they seemed unbearably precious. I traced over them with my own fingers as I went up.

The house had been in a total state when we moved in. John, who’d viewed it because he was paying for some of it, advised me not to buy it. Horrible dark colours and tacky plastic cupboards had put off many people, but I could see that underneath the tat and the tack there were some pretty, original features and I’d been excited by their potential. I’d tackled Ben’s bedroom first. Ben and I had spent a brilliant day putting the first coat of paint over the horrible dark maroon colour left by the previous owners.

‘Go on,’ I’d said to Ben, ‘just slap the paint on.’

‘What, anywhere?’ he’d asked, hardly believing his luck, a wide smile dimpling his cheeks.

‘Anywhere,’ I’d said, and to prove my point I’d dipped my brush in the tub of pristine white undercoat and written ‘BEN’ in huge capital letters on the wall. He’d loved the forbidden thrill of painting all over the walls, and he’d quickly got into it. We’d drawn pictures, written silly words and had much fun until the room was covered in a patchy layer of undercoat.

It had felt good for both of us: we were taking possession of the house. The plan had backfired a bit because we never quite managed to smooth the wall out afterwards, and even now that there were two coats of pale blue covering the undercoat it was possible to make out raised areas where some of our pictures and words had been. Neither of us minded that though. In fact we liked it.

Remembering, I eased my body down into the dent in his mattress that had taken on my shape now, obliterating his, and I touched the wall, feeling for those raised areas of paint.

I tried to make myself focus, to think through what had happened in the woods, to recover every detail. I was desperate to discover, somewhere in my mind, something significant, but I remembered nothing new.

Then I thought about John, driving the streets, desperately searching for Ben, and I thought about Katrina, and I regretted every moment that I’d let Ben be with them over the past year, and not with me.

She hadn’t even wanted him in their home at first. That had been clear from what Ben had told me. ‘She doesn’t let me slide on the floor in the hall,’ he’d complained, and I’d been furious, imagining him tiptoeing through their perfect house, unable to relax in case he did something wrong. I recalled Ben’s reluctance to spend weekends with them after the break-up, especially at first, when things still felt raw, and unstable. I came bitterly to my usual conclusion that Katrina didn’t deserve Ben, and I didn’t deserve to have to go through her to get to John.

My thoughts circulated fruitlessly like this until finally sleep coshed me, knocked me into my unconscious, where I dreamed of being surrounded by looming trees and by foliage with sharp edges, and shadows and dark tunnels where you could get lost for ever.

In the small hours I woke up and reached for my phone. I opened the internet browser and Googled ‘News Benedict Finch’. When the results came up I only needed one or two clicks before a feeling of dread coursed icily through me.