“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:
Devastated to hear about Ben please let us know if there’s anything we can do. Clarke Family xxx
Can’t imagine what you’re going through. We’re thinking of you and Ben. Sacha x
To the insultingly practical:
Don’t worry about returning Jack’s coat with what’s happening we understand completely. Thinking of you. Love Juliet xx
“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 had 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 marveled at how the mundane activities that life demanded still needed to be done, even while the worst was happening.
I even felt resentful toward my body, toward 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 footfalls. 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 colors and tacky plastic cupboards had put off many people, but I could see that underneath the tatty decor 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 color 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 afterward, 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 breakup, especially in the beginning, 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 conked me out, knocked me into my unconscious, where I dreamed of being surrounded by looming trees and by foliage with sharp edges, and by shadows and dark tunnels where you could get lost forever.
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.
JIM
Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr. Francesca Manelli
Transcript recorded by Dr. Francesca Manelli
DI James Clemo and Dr. Francesca Manelli in attendance
Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behavior, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.
FM:
So not a good day on the case for you, your second day?
JC:
No. It’s not what I would have wanted, but you pick yourself up, keep on going, try to put things right. By the end of the day we had lots to think about.
FM: I wonder if you feel that the press conference knocked your confidence?
JC: Because of what the mother did?
FM: Yes.
JC: No. It didn’t. I’d make that call again. Nobody could have predicted that she was going to do what she did. If I’m honest, I didn’t think it was fair for me to take the rap for it.
FM: Did you say that to DCI Fraser?
JC: No. I’m proud, I’m not suicidal. She was just venting anyway. That’s what she’s like so I didn’t take it too seriously.
FM: How was the case progressing overall?
JC: We had stuff going on. We all sat down together at about fourteen hundred hours that night. Fraser was still bitching and moaning about the press conference to start off with, but she settled down because we had a few obvious leads so there was a feeling that we might be getting somewhere.
FM: What were the leads?
JC: We were still looking into the fantasy role-play folks. The majority had alibis, but one of them in particular was being difficult, refusing to answer questions, and that got Fraser’s goat. He didn’t have an alibi and she liked him for the abduction.
FM: How was he being difficult?
JC: He claimed that the only authority he would recognize was the Order of Knights who ruled his fantasy world, which basically meant that he refused to talk to us. Wouldn’t answer any questions. On a point of principle.
FM: Is that allowed?
JC: He can claim what he likes and we couldn’t make him talk to us. Fraser decided to interview him herself. She wanted Woodley and me to go with her the next day, pay him a visit at home and see if we couldn’t shake something out of him.
FM: And the pedophile? The one you were trying to trace?
JC: He was a definite concern. We still didn’t have a location for him, but the DC who was on the case reckoned his mum knew where he was and it was eating her up not telling us. She was going to pay her another visit. We had the psychologist working on possible profiles for abductors and other than that we were drawing up lists of people to interview, checking alibis, and responding to all the calls that had come in after our appeals.
FM: Did you have a large response?
JC: Huge, almost overwhelming. Fraser had pulled together as big a team as she could but it was still going to be hard to follow up everything quickly. As a priority, we needed IDs on the cyclist Rachel Jenner mentioned seeing in the woods and the lone male walker, so we were focusing on those.
FM: What was the atmosphere like among the team?
JC: Totally adrenalized. Everyone wanted to get on with it, find the kid.
FM: Had there been a public reaction to the press conference?
JC: That was an issue. Even that first night there was already a massive online backlash against Rachel Jenner. People were saying, or insinuating, everything under the sun, online news sites included. We were dreading the headlines the next morning.
FM: What kind of things were they saying?
JC: The headings were “Mother’s Angry Outburst,” that kind of thing. Not too bad yet but it was the comments that people were making that were worrying us. On Facebook hundreds of people were discussing the case and they weren’t holding back. They thought she was guilty.
FM: And what did you think?
JC: Couldn’t rule it out. She certainly had the opportunity to do something to Ben, and we hadn’t verified her story yet.
FM: What was your gut instinct?
JC: That she was volatile.
FM: Meaning?
JC: She could have done it.
FM: You weren’t convinced of her innocence after her display of grief at the press conference?
JC: Grief isn’t proof of innocence. If she’d done something to Ben she could still have been feeling distress.
FM: True.
JC: I felt she could have murdered him, or killed him by mistake, and hidden the body and made up the story about the woods. It’s a pretty unlikely scenario but by no means impossible. We asked the forensic psychologist to look at the footage from the conference and give us his thoughts about Rachel Jenner.
FM: So apart from the negative press, were you happy with the response to the press conference? Did any good come of it?
JC: We did get some positive response. Like I said, we had a lot to manage but once we’d weeded out the nutters, we were hoping something would come of it, maybe a sighting, maybe people to add to the list we had to interview.
He’s got me interested. If truth be told, this case fascinated me at the time, as it did many people. I must have let this show, the fact that I’m finding what he’s telling me compelling, because he leans forward, asks me the question that’s really on his mind.
JC: How many sessions do you think it will take until you can sign me off?
I have to put my professional face firmly back in place.
FM: That’s impossible for me to say. All I can say is that you’re making good progress so far.
He sits back again, but he’s agitated. His right knee jiggles up and down.
FM: I’m interested in the work that the forensic psychologist was doing. Can you tell me more about that?
JC: He’d not submitted anything in writing at this point, but Fraser and I had both talked to him.
FM: And what were his thoughts?
JC: They were a mixed bag.
FM: Can you describe them to me?
JC: It’s not nice stuff.
FM: I’m interested. It’s not a million miles away from what I do.
JC: The main distinction that profilers make in child abduction cases is between family and nonfamily abduction.
FM: Is either one more likely?
JC: Statistically, a family abduction, because it’s usually the result of divorce or custody arrangements that have gone bad. You often read about kids who are kidnapped and taken abroad by a parent. Rarely, a family abduction involves a member of close family: an uncle, or a stepfather maybe, who harbors an unhealthy sexual interest in a child, but in those cases the victim is usually a girl.