Burnt Paper Sky (19 page)

On the night of Wednesday, 24 October, after working all hours, basically until I was ready to drop, I dreamed of Emma and I dreamed of Benedict Finch too. I remember this because in the moment before waking properly, when the dream was most intense, I clutched her, pulled her to me, and expected her to understand why. She’d been in the dream with me after all.

Instead I scared her. She yelped and sat up, confused by being woken abruptly.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

I realised my mistake then. Her voice, her actual real voice, chased the shadows of the dream away.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

She relaxed, fell back onto the pillows and looked at me with sleepy eyes. She said, ‘You look exhausted,’ and then, ‘What time is it?’

I’d forgotten for a moment that dreams are private.

The dream starts at Portishead lido, where I’m meeting Emma for a coffee in the café. I sit down opposite her. We’re the only customers. Across the room, amongst a host of empty tables, there’s one that has a ‘reserved’ sign on it. Outside, the water in the Bristol Channel looks grey and squally under clouds that are darkening, filthy and low. I feel as if we’re in the last place on earth. I crave a cigarette.

‘I like it here,’ says Emma.

‘Really?’ I say. ‘I feel as if I’m in an Edward Hopper painting.’

She laughs. ‘
Nighthawks
? I know what you mean.’

‘Something like that,’ I say. I don’t know what the painting is called, just that it shows a stark bar, only four people in it, muted colours, and a big dose of bleakness as its theme.

‘You don’t like it?’ says Emma.

‘No, it’s fine. It’s nice.’

Emma starts talking fast. She’s brimming with ideas that spill out of her and bounce off in different directions, as if you’d tipped out a basket of tennis balls and suddenly they’re bouncing everywhere at once, their individual trajectories too fast and too random to track.

Her dark eyes flash and dart, and her skin is a soft, dusky brown. Her lips are full. In repose, her face is symmetrical, perfectly proportioned. When she’s animated she looks intelligent, intense and engaging. When she smiles it’s surprisingly mischievous.

As she talks, Emma disentangles the string of her tea bag from the handle of her cup and dances the bag up and down. It releases dark curlicues of flavour that creep through the hot water and mesmerise me. I’m enjoying the moment, loving her company, but my cosy trance is broken abruptly by a silence that’s weighted with suspense, like a breath held, because Emma’s stopped talking, and she’s fixated on the table that’s on the other side of the café, the one that’s reserved.

‘Jim,’ she whispers. ‘He’s right under our noses. Look.’

I turn and I see him too. Benedict Finch is sitting a few feet away from us and I realise that the table was reserved for him. He’s wearing his school uniform, just like in the photo we put out of him. He’s a really beautiful child.

I get up, but my motion is retarded, and I can’t move towards him as quickly as I want to. The air around me is viscous and intolerably heavy. Where my bones should be I feel only weakness, a confusing absence of strength.

While I make only a few paces of progress, Benedict Finch stands up and peels off his school sweatshirt and top, and then his trousers, shoes and socks. He’s wearing swimming trunks. He smiles at me and says, ‘I’m going to take a dip,’ and still I can’t move any faster. I haven’t even covered half the ground between us.

Benedict Finch strolls towards the doors that separate the café from the pool outside, and disappears through the glass, ghost-like. I reach the doors just after him but I’m trapped behind them. I hear Emma say, ‘Jim, we’ve got to get him. I don’t think he can swim.’

Outside Benedict Finch is standing on top of a very high diving board. I don’t know how he got there because I can see that it’s been cordoned off, and the ladders removed. I bang on the doors, I shake the handles and I shout until I’m hoarse, but Benedict Finch, bold as brass, jumps, and it’s then that I realise the worst thing of all, which is that there’s no water in the pool. None at all.

And I can’t look. I pull Emma into my arms.

Of course then I wasn’t dreaming any longer. I was awake, and I’d woken Emma up and I had to say sorry and I told her it was three o’clock in the morning and she should go back to sleep.

She didn’t though. After a while, she said, ‘Jim? Are you awake?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m bothered by Rachel Jenner. There’s something about her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s unstable.’

‘I know.’

‘Even her sister seems to treat her like she’s made of china or something.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I don’t trust her.’

‘Do you think she’s harmed Ben?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling right now. But I think she could have done.’

‘Trust your instincts. Talk to Fraser about it, and keep your eyes peeled when you’re with the family. If Rachel Jenner’s done something she might well let it slip.’

‘I am already. I will.’

I reached over and ran my hand up and down her arm, then let it rest on her skin, which was always perfectly soft. I felt myself getting drowsy, but after a while Emma got up. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, and she said, ‘I can’t sleep. I’m going to read for a bit next door. I’m fine. Go back to sleep.’

After she left, I was asleep again in moments, my hand resting on the warm spot on the bed where she’d been.

I slept the night in Ben’s bed again, inhaling the perfect smell of him, worrying that it was fading away. I couldn’t think of sleeping anywhere else.

When I woke up my body ached, crying out for proper sustenance, which it hadn’t had for days. I could feel my hip bones protruding where they hadn’t before, my stomach concave.

My eyes drank in what they could in the dim light before dawn.

I could see Ben’s posters, his
Dr Who
figurines, the silhouette of his piled-up boxes of Lego.

I could just make out the dark stain on his carpet where he’d left a felt tip pen with its lid off and I remembered how cross I’d been with him when he did it.

It had been our first week in the house, one of the first weeks in years when I’d had to wonder how I was going to pay for everything, now that I wasn’t cushioned by John’s salary. I’d shouted at Ben, and he’d cried. Had he thought, I’d raged at him, how many hours somebody would have to work to pay for a carpet like that? Had he? Did he realise what life was like for most people? I’d been so angry.

The memory was a sharp pain. It made me sit up and pull a cushion to myself, hunch over it, and cry with great gulping sobs. It made me detest my previous self-absorption and shallowness. It made me wonder whether I’d been everything I could be to Ben, especially in the past year. Whether I’d let him down terribly, filtering his needs through my own, letting my anger and depression seep between us, where it shouldn’t have been.

I couldn’t forgive myself.

It was a noise from outside that got me out of Ben’s bed to stand at the window. It was the creak of a fence, the thump of a landing. In my back garden was a man; he was standing in the shadows, beside my studio, half concealed by shrubbery, but only half. He wore a dark coat and a beanie hat. A camera obscured his face, its long lens trained on the back windows of my house. Kitchen first then a slow tilt up towards me. He was scavenging, like the fox. I stepped back, snapped Ben’s bedroom curtains shut. From behind the curtain I pounded on the window.

‘Get out!’ I shouted. ‘Go away!’

My sister ran into the room. She moved me aside and peered through the curtains to see the shadow of him disappearing over the fence into my neighbour’s garden. The stairs rumbled as she rushed down and outside to confront him, but he’d gone.

Out the front the rest of the press pack feigned ignorance. As I watched, standing back from the window in my own bedroom, shaking from cold, Nicky went out into the street in her rosebud print nightie, hair greasy and wild, nipples on show, goose bumps on her flesh and told them what she thought of them.

‘You are vandalising our family!’ she shouted and her words echoed up and down the quiet street, interrupted only by the mechanical dawn chorus of the camera motor drives.

Sometimes on a case you get a bit of information that feels electric, like static under the skin, especially when it’s very unexpected.

I was awake before 6 am, feeling bruised from my dream at first, because it had lingered with me into the morning, and got mixed up with the tiredness I felt, and the disappointment that we weren’t making as much progress as we’d have liked.

But that didn’t last long, because I checked my phone and saw an email that had just arrived very late the night before from one of the blokes we had digging up background on people.

It was a new bit of information, and it changed what we knew about somebody close to Benedict, and to be sure that I acted on it properly, I knew I had to damp down my feeling of excitement and follow procedure. I had to make sure I did things right.

So in order to do that, I had four conversations before I paid a visit to Rachel Jenner’s house that morning.

6.15 am: FRASER

I paced around my bedroom, waiting for her to answer. She picked up quickly.

‘Jim,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping there’s a good reason for this. You do know I bite the heads off orphans before I’ve had my first coffee?’

‘Nicola Forbes,’ I said.

‘What of her?’

‘She hasn’t been entirely honest with us. Understatement.’

I gave her a synopsis.

‘OK, you’ve got me interested. I’ll see you in my office in an hour.’

‘If you don’t mind, boss, I’ll go and talk to John Finch first.’

‘Do you think you should talk to Rachel Jenner first?

‘My feeling is that she doesn’t know about this.’

‘OK. Keep me posted.’

6.45 am: EMMA

I was up and dressed by now, one espresso down, and the Bialetti foaming on the hob again already, because although I was more fired up than I had been for days I’ll admit I was feeling my lack of sleep just a touch, and I needed to drive that feeling back, so I could stay on the ball completely.

Emma was on the sofa and groggy as hell, her forehead all scrunched up as she tried to fight her way back to consciousness from a deep sleep. I knelt down beside her, whispered that I’d made her a cup of coffee, and held it near her face so she could smell it. When she’d managed to open her eyes, I filled her in on what I’d learned. That woke her up properly, like a shot of adrenalin straight into the arm.

7 am: Ex-DI TALBOT

Ex-DI Talbot was the man who’d sent me the information. Officially, he was retired, but now and then he came in to work on cases as a civilian when extra bodies were needed. We always wanted him on a case because he was a proper bloodhound. He’d been digging into background on the individuals closest to Ben, and he’d stumbled on this information about Nicola Forbes. I wanted every detail from him. I wanted to hear it from him directly; to be sure I hadn’t misinterpreted his email.

8.30 am: JOHN FINCH

The last was John Finch. When he opened the door to his house he was in checked pyjama bottoms and a crumpled T-shirt, a pair of reading glasses pushed up onto his head. His knees buckled and I realised I should have called ahead.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘There’s no news on Benedict’s whereabouts just yet, but if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to have a word with you about Nicola Forbes.’

He regained his composure impressively well. The man had nerves of steel. By the time his wife had reached the bottom of the stairs in the hallway behind him, wrapping a white dressing gown around herself, he had pulled the door open further and invited me in graciously.