Burnt Paper Sky (35 page)

Nicky Forbes’s expression was complicated: proud and defiant, but with a touch of something else too that I read as surrender. We were close to getting a breakthrough, I knew we were, but then Woodley’s phone rang.

It was the world’s most stupid, immature ringtone. Of all things it was the
Star Wars
theme tune, and just like that it destroyed the moment.

Woodley was mortified. I was furious.

Nicky Forbes laughed. ‘You are so fucking incompetent,’ she said.

I felt an ache in my temples as Woodley, instead of turning the phone off, took it out of his pocket and looked at it.

She wasn’t as close to giving up as I’d thought. She was combative. But that was OK. That I knew I could work with, but Woodley wouldn’t shut up, he said, ‘It’s Fraser. I’d better take it.’

Nicky Forbes was watching, not missing a trick. I desperately didn’t want her to get the upper hand. The Reid technique depends on the interviewer keeping control of the process, moving from one stage of the interview to the next. It can be a long process and we’d only just got started. As Woodley slipped out of the room, I tried to regain control. ‘Let’s discuss what you were doing on Sunday, twenty-first October.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s discuss why you are here wasting my time and harassing me when you should be looking for Ben. Where’s Ben, DI Clemo? Where is he? You actually have somebody in custody, and you are here, targeting me. You know nothing about me! Nothing! Do they charge police for wasting their own time? Do they? Because that is what you are doing. My family is everything to me,
it’s everything
. At this moment in time, I can’t cope with it very well, but that is nobody’s business apart from mine and my husband’s. It’s not a criminal offence to take some time out, so stop treating me as if I am some kind of monster. My life has been difficult, and I cope with that the best I can. Do I want a son? YES! Do I want Charlie back? YES! Do I find my family too much to cope with sometimes? YES! Did I take Ben? NO, I DID NOT! Am I a monster? NO, I AM NOT! Do I love my husband, my daughters, my sister and my nephew? YES, I DO! Is that it? Is that all your questions answered?’

It was the way she said it, hand slamming down on the table as she made each point, as if her very existence depended on my understanding those things.

Faced with those words and her certainty, I simply felt everything start to slip through my fingers: the interview, and the case I wanted to build against her.

I pulled my chair back, loosened my collar.

Outside the kitchen door the mist was still thick, and it was impossible to see more than a few metres into the garden.

Get a grip
, I told myself.
Get back into it, hold your nerve, you can do this
, but then Woodley reappeared and when I saw the look on his face I knew that I’d be lucky if I came out of this with even a shred of dignity.

He held his phone up as if it had something written on it that I should read. ‘We have to go,’ he said. Something about the way he said it made me understand that it wasn’t negotiable.

‘Thank you for your time,’ I managed to say to her, and the chair scraped on the floor as I stood. There was a static noise in my head. It had a size and a shape, and it was swelling as if it was being pumped in.

‘Get out,’ she said, quietly, as if she’d never seen a creature more disgusting than me.

Outside, by the car, Woodley said, ‘They’ve found a boy. In the woods. And they’ve found the site where he was held.’

‘Woodley,’ I said, but then I didn’t know what else to say.

I puked onto the thorny stems of one of Nicky Forbes’s neatly pruned rose bushes. Bile and bits of unidentifiable spew spattered around its base, leaving a pattern that can’t be mistaken for anything other than the hot disgorging of somebody’s guts.

I wiped my mouth, straightened up and felt pain ripple across my abdomen.

‘I’ll drive,’ I said, and Woodley handed me the keys.

They prised me up off the carpet, which had been so freshly laid that bits of blue fluff stuck to the knees of my trousers and my forehead and my arms.

They escorted me up from the flat with a blanket wrapped around me and they put me in an ambulance that was parked on the street.

The press were there too, of course they were. Only a few of them arrived quickly enough to photograph me being wheeled into the ambulance, but one person with a camera is all it takes. ‘Rachel! Rachel!’ they shouted, as the shutters fired. ‘Are you all right? Can you tell us what happened?’

Inside the ambulance a paramedic did checks and asked me questions. They said they were treating me for shock.

I refused to lie down. I sat up, blanket wrapped around me. It was all I had the strength to do. Shaking racked my body, like convulsions.

Then it was the turn of the police. They told me they were in pursuit of Joanna May. They said nothing about Ben. Their faces were grim, and I found I had no voice to ask questions.

I had imaginings. I felt as if chunks of me were separating themselves from my body, falling off. I imagined blood creeping in at the edges of my vision, a red tide. It was because I knew I was too late. He had been there, and now he was gone, and what were the odds that she’d keep him alive?

I felt myself let go. I let go of hope.

And then cutting through the murmured voices, I heard the ambulance radio. The dispatcher was calling for somebody to respond to a call in Leigh Woods. Precise location unknown. A young boy found. Status unknown.

They had to sedate me. Blackness fell as swiftly as the blade of a guillotine.

We made it to the woods in one hour. I used blue lights.

On the way in the car we got more details. About Ben Finch’s condition. About Joanna May, and the room in the basement of her flat.

‘We interviewed her,’ I said to Woodley. ‘We should have fucking seen it.’

He didn’t respond.

The paramedics were still working with Ben Finch in the woods. They couldn’t get the ambulance to the site so they’d had to stabilise him and move him in stages.

We parked and I ran. I wanted to be with Ben. I wanted to see his clear blue eyes for myself, see if there was life in them. I wanted to tell him that he would be OK, that his mother was waiting for him. I wanted to do that for him at least.

Rain was falling in a downpour, crashing through the canopy above. The trees lining the path were bowed and streaked from it. They arched over me, a skeletal tunnel of bare branches, urging me onwards, making me feel as if it was impossible to make progress.

My breathing was ragged and fast, my heart thumping, my clumsy feet tripping over sticks, stones, each other, never moving fast enough. With every step I was soaked some more, but with every step I cared less.

I rounded a bend in the path, and ahead I saw the ambulance, and a stretcher being loaded on board.

I pushed myself, tried to reach them in time, tried to shout out, but it was futile, because they slammed the door shut long before I reached them, and by the time I got there the ambulance had begun the tricky process of turning around.

Mark Bennett was guiding it. I stayed back, stood to the side of the path as the ambulance manoeuvred past me, watched him pat the back of it as a farewell.

And Bennett, all dressed up in waterproofs, jaw clenched and wet from rain said, ‘That lad’s not in a good way, Jim. Not at all.’ It had got to him. I could see that.

And I said, ‘I wanted to see him.’ I wiped the rain from my face, felt my sodden clothing cling coldly to me.

‘Nothing we can do for him now. It’s too late for that. It’s in the hands of the medics.’

And I hated him for saying that, and I hated him for being there when it should have been me, and I hated myself for letting harm come to that boy, any harm at all.

Bristol Children’s Hospital smelled of cleanliness and sickness in equal measure. The only times I’d been there before had been to meet John after work.

We travelled up from the ground floor in a tiny elevator where Wallace and Gromit’s recorded voices told us to ‘Mind the Doors’, over and over again. Shock-eyed and sleep-deprived parents got on and off, checking the sign in the lift for their destinations, fingers running down a list, stopping at ‘Oncology’ or ‘Nephrology’.

Amongst them were a mother and baby boy, she wearing a burqa, even her eyes veiled from the world with mesh. Her baby was in her arms, a tube running up his nose, taped in place, his wide brown eyes staring at the ceiling lights. I wondered how she was able to comfort him when she was confined to that garment, when their eyes couldn’t even meet. Did she rest her uncovered fingers on his cheek? Was that skin-to-skin contact enough for them both here, in this hospital?

My heart, hurting for my own son, ached for her too.

The elevator disgorged DI Bennett and me onto the fourth floor.

The decor was wincingly bright, themed in blue and yellow, and featuring aquatic motifs, but somehow all of that felt hopeful; it made my sense of anticipation swell.

In the vestibule outside the elevator doors, where the floor-to-ceiling windows offered us a tumbling, chaotic cityscape view of Bristol, DI Bennett told me that he’d been in the woods with Ben. He couldn’t quite meet my eye, but he held open a door for me and then guided me along the corridor with a light hand on my elbow that was touching if not welcome.

I was met in the corridor outside Ben’s ward by two doctors, who politely ushered me into a room. A nurse was there. She offered me a cup of tea. The chink of china was the only sound in the room as everybody waited for her to pour it.

Ben had been close to death when they found him, they explained to me, his core body temperature dangerously cold, but they’d warmed him up, and he was stable. Battered and bruised, very weak, but stable.

Relief and happiness that he was alive overwhelmed any trepidation I might have felt. They could scarcely hold me back.

‘He’s still in a dangerous condition,’ they wanted to tell me before they let me see him. ‘Do you understand that?’

I said I did. I left the tea to go cold on the table.

Do you want me to describe our reunion?

I can tell you that a nurse was outside the door of Ben’s room and that her hand reached out to touch mine when I arrived, just brushed it lightly, even though we were strangers. We exchanged no words but she held the door open for me.