“I’m so sorry,” I said.
At home, Nicky and Laura and I watched in silence as the footage from the conference played on national TV.
I’d been filmed in close-up. I looked as if I’d crawled out of a primitive encampment after a long siege. The injury on my head was prominent; it drew the eye like a disfigurement, and livid red spots on my pale cheeks made me look feverish, and deranged. My eyes sagged with grief and exhaustion, and roved around the room, restless and jumpy. Every flaw and muscle twitch and emotion was visible on my face, and the moment when I addressed Ben’s abductor was the worst. There wasn’t a trace of dignity or vulnerability, or love for my son. I simply projected a raw, ugly rage that looked heinous, and unnatural.
And yes, the blood on my hands was visible.
When I finally disintegrated, and was hustled from the room where the conference was being held, I looked like somebody fleeing a crime.
I don’t know why I’m describing all this to you, because unless you’ve been living in Timbuktu you’ve probably seen it. In fact even if you had been living there you’d have been able to look it up online.
The footage went viral. Of course it did. I understand these things now.
My sister and Laura reacted in ways that summed up what was to be the response of the whole country, Nicky representing the minority view.
Laura: “Everybody’s going to blame you. They’re going to say you did it. You look guilty.”
Nicky: “No, they won’t, they can see how much you love him, how brave you are.”
Peter Armstrong came around later on. I hadn’t spoken to him since he’d taken Skittle away from the woods to get treatment, but he’d phoned regularly and Nicky had kept him updated. He was coming over to bring the dog home. He was sanguine about the reaction to the press conference.
“It’ll blow over,” he said.
He was a slender man with a stomach that had been concave since his divorce. He had dark hair that circled a significant bald patch, and stubble. He wore jeans, a loose sweater, and trendy trainers that looked too young for him. He worked as a web designer, mostly from home, and I’d always thought he needed to get out more.
“And anyway, it’s only ever a minority of people who overreact to these things. As soon as they find Ben, everybody will forget. Don’t dwell on it. Keep faith, Rachel. Your friends will still be there for you.”
We were kneeling around the dog basket, petting Skittle. The dog’s hind leg was in a pristine cast, which dragged behind him when he tried to walk. Now he was lying down, his tail managing a drowsy thump or two, but no more. He was wondering where Ben was. I was wondering what he’d seen.
“The police spoke to the vet,” Peter said. “They asked if Skittle’s injury could tell them anything about how he got hurt.”
“And?” said Nicky.
I could tell she liked Peter. He was the opposite of her husband in looks. Simon Forbes was twice the size of Peter. He had the unruly dark hair that their girls had inherited, albeit a tad salt-and-peppery around the edges by now, and dressed in corduroys, well-worn brogues, and pressed shirts in country checks under old-fashioned blazers. However, aside from this difference, the two men did share a gentle, sensible quality that appealed to my sister.
“The vet said that the leg looked as if it was broken with one clean blow, but that could have happened in different ways. It could have been a fall, or it could have been somebody striking him. No way to tell which.”
For a second or two there was silence in the room, an emptiness, which nobody wanted to fill with words, because we were all thinking about what that might mean for Ben, and how bad that could be.
“How’s Finn?” I asked Peter.
“Finn’s upset. He can’t wait to have his buddy back.” He struggled to keep himself composed. “But he’s OK. He’s OK, I think.” He didn’t look sure. “School is working hard to handle things.”
I hadn’t thought of that yet, of how Ben’s disappearance would affect the other children.
“What are they doing?” Nicky put some tea down in front of Peter.
“Thank you,” he said. “Well, they’re not ignoring it; the head has spoken to the children about it, I know that much.”
“What’s he like?” Nicky wanted to know.
“He’s new.”
“People say he’s a drip,” I said. I hadn’t met him myself, but that was the consensus in the playground, swiftly delivered by parental posses after the man had been in the job for less than two months.
“Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” said Peter.
Peter was a smoother-over of problems, an appeaser. “I think to be fair he’s been lying low, getting to know the role, and the staff.”
This was a polite way of saying that nobody had seen him since he started because he hid in his office most of the time, and that he hadn’t yet begun to tackle any of the school’s most obvious and urgent issues.
“He’s very experienced, so we’re hoping he’ll be good for the school in the long run.” Peter was also an optimist.
“Miss May?” I asked. She was Ben’s teacher, Finn’s too.
“I think she’s been good.” Peter sounded surprised. He wasn’t a fan of Miss May. I thought it was because she intimidated him, and maybe because he fancied her just a bit. He’d never admit to it, but I’d seen Peter blush when they talked in the playground. She was young and pretty and had a high attendance among fathers at parents’ evening.
I liked her on the whole, which was good, because this was the second year in a row that she’d been teaching Ben. There were certainly worse teachers Ben could have gotten: disheveled and angry Mr. Talbot, for example, who never marked any work and shouted. Or sociopathic Mrs. Astor, who hated children pretending to be animals and was frequently off sick with stress.
Ben had been shy of Miss May at first, but she’d swiftly won him and the other pupils over by demonstrating that she could do a backflip in front of the class, and then cemented their relationship by helping him after John and I separated.
Ben had melted down after John moved out. He’d become tearful and emotional and sometimes angry. It was so out of character, that, very reluctantly, and against all my instincts to be private, I’d had to go into school and tell Miss May what had happened, and ask her to help us pick up the pieces. She’d done that in spades, offering Ben copious amounts of support, and I had to credit her for helping us rebuild our lives since Christmas.
“From what I can gather from Finn, she’s been talking to the children about it, but not letting them dwell on it,” Peter said. “She seems to be keeping them busy. She was in the playground yesterday after school, talking to parents, as was the head, which people were pleased about. Most of the staff were, actually. It’s beyond the call of duty I’d say.”
Peter was prone to using military metaphors in his speech. It was one of the things that had put me off accepting his offer of a date when he’d tentatively asked me out after my split from John became public knowledge. It was at odds with his creative-type persona, as if he’d somehow manufactured that personality type for himself, and not arrived there naturally.
“I’m not sure about that,” said Nicky. “I’d say it’s exactly what they should be doing.”
“What are they telling the children?” I asked. “About Ben?”
“They’re telling them that he went missing in the woods, that’s the phrase they’re using, ‘went missing,’ and that everybody is looking for him.” Peter took a noisy sip of tea. “Finn’s been having nightmares since Sunday, because of being there in the woods with us I think.”
The thought of Finn’s concern and the memory of his anxious face in the parking lot made me feel Ben’s absence more vividly than ever. I thought of Baggy Bear upstairs, on Ben’s bed, and his nunny. I thought of Ben without either of his favorite objects, without me, without comfort, somewhere out there, going through something that none of us could imagine.
I crumpled.
“Oh I’m sorry,” said Peter. “I’m so sorry. I’ve put my foot in it. That’s the last thing I meant to do.” He looked at his watch. “I should go.”
Nicky showed him out, said all the things that I couldn’t, like “thank you” and “we’ll let you know if we hear anything,” and “thank you again.”
I found Laura in the front room. She was on the sofa, hunched over her tablet.
“I think this has the potential to go wrong for you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all over the Net. Facebook, Twitter, comments on news websites, everywhere.”
“What is?”
“I was right. They’re saying you’ve done something to Ben.”
JIM
Ben Finch’s primary school reminded me of my own: small neighborhood school, hodgepodge of portable classrooms clustered around a Victorian building on a cramped site.
Fraser told me to take DC Woodley to the school with me, which was annoying in one way because he had a tendency to behave as though he had L-plates stuck on his back, even though he’d been in CID for more than a year. On the other hand, if anyone was going to witness my humiliation at being demoted, however temporarily, to the role of school liaison officer, I suppose he was a good choice because he was too weedy to gloat. “No gumption,” my dad would have said about him, and probably worse.
The school secretary fussed around us, boiling the kettle, and looking disappointed when we didn’t want tea or coffee. She wanted to talk. It’s not uncommon. When something traumatic has happened, everyone connected to it has his or her own version of the story to tell. It’s why the press finds it so damn easy to fill columns; almost everybody wants to get their few minutes of fame.
The secretary told us she’d known something was wrong when Rachel Jenner hadn’t returned her calls on Monday morning, because it was so unlike her. The school automatically called parents, she said, when a child didn’t turn up and there’d been no word from them. She clutched a mug that read: “Don’t talk to me until this is empty!” Fixed to the side of her computer monitor there was a photograph of Ayers Rock under a pink and orange sunset, and a Bible quote, which claimed that faith moved mountains. Both of them irritated me.
“How often is Ben Finch absent from school?” I asked her.
“Hardly ever! He’s a lovely boy, ever so polite, ever so good. I couldn’t tell you what his schoolwork is like, mind you, you’d have to ask Miss May or the head about that, but I can tell you he’s a lovely boy. He brings the register in to me in the mornings and he always has a smile. I say to him, ‘Benedict Finch, you’ll go far with those super manners.’ ”
She got teary, removing her glasses to wipe her eyes.
“Sorry,” she said, and followed that with a little outtake of air, a puff of distress that dispersed into the room. “You will find him, won’t you, Inspector?”
“We’ll do our best,” I said.
The headmaster’s office was cramped. We sat around his desk on rigid molded plastic chairs that didn’t fit my body shape in any way.
“I’m sorry, Detective Inspector,” he said, “I was in the middle of a special assembly when you arrived and I didn’t want to alarm the children by running off. They’re rattled enough already. Damien Allen, by the way.”
He had a sleepy quality about him, heavily lidded eyes, a jowly face under hair that was in need of a cut, and a ponderous voice that would have had me dozing off before the end of any assembly. I shook his extended hand and found his grip loose.
“I’m new to this job,” he added. “It’s not ideal.”
I took that to mean the situation, not the job.
Ben’s teacher shook hands more earnestly; she had a bit of a pincer grip and she was one of those people who shake for longer than you’ve anticipated. It’s an anxiety thing. They don’t want to let go of you in case you disappear just when they need you.
Like the head, she was holding herself together quite well, but there were signs of distress in the way she clasped her hands tightly together and she looked on the verge of tears. She was a good-looking woman too: nicely dressed, neat figure as if she went to the gym a lot, soft fair hair down to her shoulders, nice eyes.
They told us that for the past forty-eight hours they’d had their hands full, dealing with children who were understandably frightened and confused about what had happened to Ben, and they’d also been inundated with phone calls and emails from parents who wanted information and reassurance, and were questioning the school’s security procedures.
“It’s a level of panic,” the head said tiredly, “which suggests that there’s a precedent for the disappearance of one child to lead to a rash of kidnappings.”
I did what I was supposed to do. I promised we’d keep them updated and that we’d send an officer to attend a meeting for parents. We spoke about counseling for the children, but I explained the police view was that it was a bit too soon, that it was something to discuss down the line, depending on the outcome of the case.
“We’ll need a list of staff at school,” I told the head. “In order of those who have the most direct contact with Ben.”
“We thought you might,” he said, “so we’ve started to draw one up, and we’ll send that over to you as soon as it’s complete.”
“We’ll need that as soon as possible.”
“I appreciate that, Inspector, and I’ll prioritize it, of course. However, there are a large number of people involved with the school and we want to make sure we include anybody who Ben might have crossed paths with.”
“It’s not just teaching staff,” said Miss May. “There are the teaching assistants, support staff, catering assistants…”
“Domestic staff, site maintenance, parents who help out with clubs… ,” the head went on.
“Fine,” I said. “Comprehensive is good, but why don’t you send me over what you’ve got so far, so we can make a start and then you can forward any other names as you think of them.”
“Of course,” said the head. “Of course. I’ll ask Anthea to do that.”
He waved a chubby hand at the glass panel set into his office door. Behind it, the secretary hastily turned away and sat down at her desk, pushing her glasses self-consciously up her nose and trying to look busy. I wondered how many of his conversations she eavesdropped on.
I felt a headache coming on. Dealing with the school was going to be a minefield. We were going to have to work all the hours God gave just to get through background checks on everyone who might have had contact with Ben.