Burnt Paper Sky (8 page)

One of the DCs put up her hand.

‘We’re not in school. You can keep your hand down.’

‘Sorry. It’s just that I’ve got a possible. We’ve tracked down all but one of the men on the sex offenders list.’

‘Who’s missing?’

‘Name of David Callow. Thirty-one years old. Did time for abusing his stepsisters and posting photographs of himself doing it. His parole officer hasn’t heard from him for a fortnight.’

‘Make him a priority. I want to know who he last saw, and when. Talk to his family, his neighbours, his friends, if he has any. Find out what he’s been doing. Anything else?’

Nobody spoke.

‘Right. There’s a lot to get on with, so let’s get on with it. Any leads, any worries, anything gets on top of you, speak to me. I want to know everything, as it happens. No exceptions.’

My sister Nicky was waiting for me in the foyer at Kenneth Steele House. She was panda-eyed with strain. I fell into her arms. Her clothing smelled of damp cottage and wood smoke and washing powder.

She looks a lot like me. You could tell we’re sisters if you saw us together. She’s got the same green eyes and more or less the same face, and a similar figure, though she’s heavier. She’s not quite as tall as me either and her hair is cut short and always carefully highlighted, so instead of being curly it settles in brushed golden waves around her face, which makes her look more sensible than me.

Nicky told me she’d driven straight from Aunt Esther’s cottage. She held me tightly.

The hug felt awkward. We probably hadn’t been in each other’s arms since I was a child. I wasn’t used to the padded curves of her body, the cotton wool softness of the skin on her cheek. It made me acutely aware of my own frame, its angularity, as if I were constructed from a more brittle material than her.

‘Let’s get you home,’ she said, and she brushed a strand of my hair back behind my ear.

Arriving home was my first taste of how it feels to live life in a goldfish bowl.

Journalists had gathered outside my little two-up, two-down cottage. Ben and I lived on a pretty narrow street of small Victorian terraces in Bishopston, an area that has yellow Neighbourhood Watch stickers in many house windows and loves recycling and having street parties in the summer. Our neighbours were a mix of elderly people, young families and some students. Ours was a quiet street. The biggest drama we’d collectively experienced since I’d lived there was waking up to find drunk students had put traffic cones on top of the car roofs during the night.

The journalists were impossible to avoid. There was a group of them, big enough to spill off the pavement. They called my name, thrust microphones towards us, photographed us as we entered the house, pushed and shoved and tripped up as they ran around each other trying to get in front of us. Their voices were cajoling, and urgent, and to me they had the menace of a mob.

When we got inside, black dots danced at the edges of my vision, the after-effects of the bright white of their flashbulbs, and I could still hear them calling from behind the door. My heart rate didn’t slow until I moved into the kitchen at the back of the house, and there it was silent, and I was able to sit, and breathe, and focus on the placid ticking of my kitchen clock.

Zhang stayed with us for a short while. The scenes of crime officers had visited the house while I was being interviewed. She wanted to check that they’d left everything in order upstairs, in Ben’s room.

She pulled the curtains in the sitting room tightly shut, so that the journalists couldn’t see in. She advised us not to answer the door without checking who was there, and not to speak directly to the press.

‘It’s good that they’re here though,’ she said. ‘It’s all good publicity because it means that as many people as possible will be aware of Ben and will be looking out for him.’

She made sure we had her card with her number on it and then she left us alone. Part of me didn’t really want her to leave. She was more approachable than Clemo by miles. I felt nervous of him, of the authority he exuded, of his matter-of-factness and of the power he suddenly held in our lives. But Zhang was different, more of a kindly guide who might be able to help me navigate this horrendous new reality, and I felt grateful for her.

Everything on the kitchen table was as Ben and I had left it: a snapshot of our last few minutes in the house together.

There was a hat that Ben had refused to wear, a packet of bourbon biscuits that he’d raided just before we left, a much-loved Tintin book and a Lego car that I’d helped him build.

His school report, received in the post the day before, lay on the table too. It had been a pleasure to read, full of effusive praise from his teacher about how hard Ben tried, how pleased she was that he was finding the courage to speak up more in class, and how he was gaining confidence in his schoolwork.

And it wasn’t just the kitchen. There was nowhere in this house that wasn’t imprinted with traces of my son, of course there wasn’t. It was his home.

Even outside, down the short, uneven garden path, I knew that there would be signs of him too: in my garden office my computer would be sleeping, its light blinking unhurriedly. If I went out there and brought it to life I knew the internet history would show a game that Ben had been playing online on Sunday morning. It was called Furry Football and the aim was to play games and earn points to buy different animals, which would form a football team. Ben loved it. I had a daily battle to limit his time on it.

I looked at everything, took it all in, but felt only blankness. All of it was meaningless without Ben. Without him, my home had no soul.

Nicky got busy, typically.

She’d always been like this. She was never still. If there was nothing to do, she would organise an outing, or make an elaborate meal. Activity was her way of relaxing.

When I was younger I could happily spend an afternoon in Esther’s cottage doing nothing more than sitting on the window seat in my little bedroom. I would trace outlines in the condensation on the glass, gaze at the frosty trees outside, and the shapes they carved against the open sky behind them, and watch the birds on my aunt’s feeders fighting for seed. The sharp yellow flash of a goldfinch’s wing was a sight I longed for in the monochrome of a snowy rural winter.

Eventually, driven by the cold, I might make my way downstairs to seek the heat of the fire. Nicky would be there with Aunt Esther. Their cheeks would be flushed from the warmth of the oven and the exertions of whatever activity they’d been engaged in. I would admire the freshly baked cake they’d made or smell the stew that was simmering.

Aunt Esther would take my hands, and say, ‘Rachel, you’re so cold. Have a cup of tea, darling,’ and she would rub them, and I would feel rough gardening calluses on her palm. Nicky would say, ‘Where are your fingerless gloves, Rachel? The ones I gave you for Christmas?’ Then I would slip away from them, their cosy domesticity, and slink into a chair by the fire, pull a blanket over myself, and lose myself in a book, or the dancing of the flames.

In those early days after Ben disappeared, when I was practically catatonic with shock, it was natural for Nicky to become the functioning part of me, just as she always had done. She returned the increasingly frantic messages that my best friend Laura had been leaving on my phone throughout the day, and asked her to come over. She spoke to Peter Armstrong, who told her that the dog’s leg had been broken, but he was comfortable at the vet’s after having it set. She put her laptop on the kitchen table and spent hours online.

On that first day, she found a Missing Kids website, based in the US. On their advice, she made a list of questions for the police. She threw facts out into the room as she learned them. They were ghastly, notes from a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. They made me feel queasy, but she was unstoppable.

She told me that the website advised that bloodhounds are essential for a proper search. That they can follow the scent of a child even if their abductor has picked them up and carried them away. She asked me what dogs the police had used in the woods. I said they’d been German shepherds. She continued to read quietly, scratching notes out on a pad, keeping it shielded from me, her mouth set in a grim line.

After a time she said, ‘Did you see John after your interview?’

‘No, they took him somewhere else.’

‘You should ring him. It would be good to know what they asked him.’

‘He blames me.’

‘This is
not
your fault.’

I knew it was.

‘What did they ask you? Can you talk about it?’

‘They asked me everything, they wanted so much detail: family history, everything to do with Ben since he was born; anything you could think of basically.’

I didn’t mention that they wanted to know what Ben had had for lunch on Sunday.

‘Did they ask about our family?’

‘They wanted to know everything.’

‘What did you tell them?’ Her eyes lifted from the screen and they were red-rimmed.

‘I told them what happened. What else would I tell them?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She turned back to the screen. ‘It says here that the family should try to agree on a tactic for how to approach relationships with the police, that it’s really effective to do that.’

‘I can’t phone John now.’ I couldn’t face it. I’d committed the worst sin a mother can: I hadn’t looked after my child. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

In Ben’s bedroom I could see very little sign that the scenes of crime officers had been there. One of Ben’s favourite toys lay nestled on his bed, in the tumble of bedding that Ben liked to sleep in. It was Baggy Bear, a doe-eyed teddy with chewed ears, floppy arms, soft fur and a blue knitted scarf that Ben liked me to tie in a certain way. I held Baggy Bear to my chest. I thought, I can’t leave this house now, in case he comes back here. Everywhere, the silence, the absence of Ben, seemed to swell. It felt hostile, like the furtive spread of a cancer.

I lay down on Ben’s bed, and curled up. There was something making me uncomfortable and I shifted position, felt for it. It was his old cot blanket. He called it ‘nunny’ and he’d had it since he was a baby. It was very soft and he would wrap it around his fingers and stroke his face with it to get himself off to sleep. He’d never admit it to anybody but me, but he couldn’t sleep without it. I tried to push away the thought that he’d already had to spend a night without it, that that might have been the least of his worries.

I balled it up, hugged it to myself, along with Baggy Bear. I could smell Ben on the nunny, on the bedding and on his teddy bear. It was the perfect smell that he’d always had. It was the smell of baby hair that has no weight to it, and of the skin on his temples, which was still velvety smooth. It was the smell of trust, freely given, and a perfect, innocent curiosity. It was the smell of our dog walks and the games we’d played together and the things I’d told him, and the meals we’d shared. It was the smell of our history together. I inhaled that smell as if it could revive me somehow, give me some answers, or some hope, and, like that, I just waited. I didn’t know what else to do.

When Laura arrived Nicky let her in and I heard their voices downstairs, hushed and serious. In real life – the life we were living before Ben was taken – they didn’t get on very well. I was the only thing that these two women had in common, and their paths had only crossed once or twice before now. Without me they would never have spent time together, probably not without a large measure of irritation anyway.

As a foil to Nicky’s conservatism, and her serious, thoughtful approach to life, Laura was skittish, playful, inconsistent, rebellious and sometimes downright wild. She was a birdlike person, tiny-framed, with short urchin hair, wide brown eyes and a big laugh. When I’d first met her, when we were both nursing students, right from the start she’d made me laugh, taught me how to play. She was the first person I’d met who did that for me. It thrilled me.

She wasn’t like that one hundred per cent of the time, of course. She had her moments of darkness too, but she kept them private. I only glimpsed them when alcohol had loosened her tongue. ‘I was a mistake,’ she said once. I’d known her for a good few years by then. We were no longer students, although we were still in our habit of going for a big night out at least once a week. Her words were heavy with booze.

‘My parents didn’t want to have me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that two people who were amongst the brightest minds in the country, or so they liked to say, it’s ironic that they should have made such a basic error. Don’t you think?’

Her tone of voice was attempting to be jokey but the corners of her mouth kept dragging down and her eyes were dull and tired.

‘Didn’t they want to have children?’

‘No. It wasn’t the plan. It was never the plan. They were very open about that. If I’m honest I’m surprised they ever had sex. They were old when they had me, too.’ She laughed. ‘They must have stumbled across a manual that told them what to do, and had ten minutes to spare before
Newsnight
.’

I didn’t have parents, of course, so who was I to pass judgement on how she mocked hers, but there was something unsettling about her tone, and though I’d laughed obligingly at the time, it had made me feel sad.

‘Do you want kids?’ I’d asked her, for I had a secret that night. It was the reason I was sober.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that –’ I thought I saw a look of sadness flash across her face – ‘but never say never.’

She closed her eyes, giving in to the lateness of the hour, and the soporific effects of the wine. I sat beside her, not ready for sleep yet, and slipped my hand underneath my top. I rested it on my belly and thought of the baby growing there. It was Ben. My mistake. Already loved.

The tread of Laura’s feet on the stairs of my house made them creak cautiously, and she paused at the top and said, ‘Rachel?’

‘In here.’

At the doorway to Ben’s room she said, ‘Do you want the light on?’

‘No.’

She lay down beside me, put her arms around me in a hug that was far more familiar than Nicky’s.

‘I didn’t keep him safe,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘Sshh,’ she said. ‘Don’t. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is getting him back.’

Even in the gloaming I could see that her eyes were liquid. A tear escaped and ran down her cheek, pooling by her nose, a trail of black eyeliner in its wake.

We lay there until the darkness outside was becoming a solid mass, leavened only by the glow of the streetlights and the geometric oddments of light that fell from people’s houses.

We’d been told by Zhang to watch the news at 6 pm.

At a quarter to six, I realised that I should have been at Ben’s parents’ evening, to discuss his report.