“Who sent this? What is this?”
“It arrived this morning. We don’t know who sent it. We’re hoping you can help us find out.”
The shaking in his hands spread to his wrists.
“Is this my fault? Have I done this?”
“Let’s not talk about fault. That’s not going to get us anywhere at this point. Do you have any idea who might have sent it? We think it implies that the sender has had contact with you in a professional capacity. I know I’ve asked you before, but I really need you to think about this again now. Do you know of anybody who might have a grudge against you? A former patient?”
John Finch looked like the most beaten person in the world. He looked like a man watching all his worst nightmares come true. His voice was tight with the effort it was costing him to control it. If I’m honest, I found the interview unexpectedly hard, and I think that’s because I recognized myself in him. I knew that if I was him, I would be broken too, and somehow, although it shouldn’t have, that got under my skin. I don’t know if it was my fatigue, or the way he tried so hard to hold on to his dignity, or perhaps both, but there it was, a small feeling of solidarity with him that I shouldn’t have allowed myself.
“My patients are children, Detective. They don’t tend to bear grudges. In fact their view of the world is often beautifully simple, beautifully fair.”
He ran the fingertips of one hand around his eye socket.
“But they have families, and, sometimes—rarely—you lose a child during surgery, and the families can’t accept it. They blame you. Even when there’s nothing you could have done. Even when the surgery was your only option because without it the child would have died.”
“Can you think of any families who might have cared more than others?”
“Cared enough to take my son in revenge? An eye for an eye?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Like I said before, there were one or two who tried to sue the hospital, but even that isn’t very unusual. It’s a risk we take in our profession.” He passed a hand across his forehead, squeezed his temples. “I can’t imagine them doing anything this extreme, I really can’t, but I suppose there is one family that sticks in my mind as being more persistent than the others. I can give you the name of the child; the father’s details will be on the records at the hospital.”
I pushed a piece of paper and a pen across the desk toward him. “Write down the name for me,” I said. “The one that springs to mind. And write down the person to contact at the hospital.”
He wrote. He passed the paper to me. “Does Rachel know?” he said.
RACHEL
This time, I made no attempt at conversation as Zhang drove me home.
I stared out of the window and thought about Ruth and Ben, and how much they loved each other’s company. I was transfixed by the sight of schoolchildren walking home with parents, or in messy groups without adults, shouting, laughing, jostling each other, dropping bits of rubbish, which the wind picked up and blew around them. It was the start of half-term this afternoon, as Ruth had said, and they were in a celebratory mood.
“Can we go to Ben’s school?”
“We can. Why?” Zhang said.
“I want to get his stuff. It’s half-term.”
She hesitated only momentarily. “Of course,” she said. She pulled into the forecourt of a gas station to turn around and we got stuck behind another car. It was impossible not to see the headlines, murky as they were behind the thick plastic of the forecourt newsstand. The front pages of two newspapers showed a photograph of me at the press conference, beside one of my sister in her nightie, berating the journalists outside my house. This is what I read before Zhang pulled away:
FINCH FURIES
INTIMIDATING: Benedict’s auntie lets rip
SISTERS: who aren’t afraid to look SAVAGE
FEARS GROWING: 5 days missing and counting
And on another paper, underneath a photograph of my boy:
MYSTERY OF BEN’S CLOTHING
New Timeline of Ben’s Disappearance Inside
Zhang still said nothing. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen them or not. I pulled up the hood of my coat and sank down into my seat. I was afraid of somebody recognizing me and I was afraid of what they might say if they did.
Ben’s school was almost deserted as we arrived. We had to maneuver around some orange traffic cones that had been placed as a loose barricade across the entrance to the teachers’ parking lot. Only a few cars remained there; most of the spaces were empty. Zhang parked in a spot where we had a view of the playground, a small tarmacked space with soccer posts painted on one wall and colorful murals on the others. It was a modest little school, with the old Victorian schoolhouse at its heart, and various unprepossessing modern additions tacked on to it over the years.
Right up until the moment when we parked, I thought it was a good idea to visit the school, but as Zhang undid her seat belt and pulled the keys from the ignition, I found myself paralyzed by the fact of actually being there.
It was the sight of the playground. It reminded me that this was Ben’s world, his other world, and that the last time I was here was to pick him up the previous Friday afternoon.
As Zhang turned to me, wondering why I wasn’t moving, images flooded my brain.
The playground on Friday: it had been heaving as usual, crowds of parents waiting for children who were being disgorged from the building in various states.
Some looked as if they’d been catapulted out with the sole purpose of expending excess energy, chasing each other around between huddles of mothers; others looked beaten down by the week, bags weighing heavily on their shoulders. Some were sporting stickers proudly on their sweatshirts; one or two burst into tears at the sight of their parent after a long day of pent-up frustration.
I saw all this in vivid little bursts: baby carriages, mothers laden like packhorses, snacks being distributed, tales of injustice or triumph. Children sent back into the building to get forgotten things. A teacher with a cup of tea in hand; the headmaster wearing a novelty tie on a rare outing from his office, a few parents flocking around him. Cutout figures strung like bunting in the windows of the classroom behind them.
“Are you having second thoughts?” asked Zhang.
“No,” I said. “I want to do this.”
I made myself focus, take a deep breath. In front of me the playground was empty, except for a green plastic hoop, which had been discarded in the middle of the tarmac, and the remnants of colorful chalk marks on the ground, only partially washed away by the rain. I got out of the car.
“Be warned that the school’s hired security,” Zhang said as we crossed the playground to the entrance, “because of the press. They caught a journalist snooping in the school office.”
As we walked, my legs felt as though they weren’t working properly, and there was faintness in my head and my chest. Everything seemed to take on a cartoonlike quality. I visualized the press as an invasive plant, its roots and tendrils growing implacably into every area of my life and Ben’s, looking for action or information to feed off. I felt distinctly unwell, and I wondered if I should go back to the car and let Zhang go in without me, but we’d arrived at the door by then and to articulate how I felt was impossible.
We were admitted to the building by a burly man whom I’d never seen before. He had a shaved head, an earpiece, and a strikingly large beer belly. He checked Zhang’s ID and then let us in.
I led the way to Ben’s classroom. All I wanted was to get Ben’s PE uniform from his peg, and anything else he might have left behind. That’s what I would normally have done at half-term. I would have washed his uniform, and checked he had everything he needed for the next few weeks in the run-up to Christmas. Not to do that would have felt wrong.
It wasn’t to be that simple though. As we neared the door to Ben’s classroom, I saw a big display of artwork, and in the middle of that display was a picture that I recognized, because Ben had made it. My knees buckled.
After that I have only snatches of memory and sensation: confusion, when I came around, because I was on the floor of the corridor and Zhang was propping me up; eyes refocusing again on the display of artwork, seeing painted leaves and branches in all the shades of brown and orange and green and black that wrapped themselves around Ben and swallowed him up when we were in the woods; seeing Ben’s picture among the others and feeling sure that I could see the imprint of his fingers in the smears of paint; feeling an impulse to stand, and put my fingers where his had been, and then an inability to do that.
When they’d got me upright and they were sure I wasn’t going to faint again, they moved me into the classroom and sat me in the teacher’s chair.
Miss May was there, and also the teaching assistant. I heard Zhang’s voice, saying, “She wants his things, that’s all, that’s why we’re here.”
I watched Miss May go over to a row of pegs that ran along one wall of the classroom, and take down the only PE bag that remained there, and behind it there was a label. It was a photograph of a dog, black and white like Skittle, and the name “Ben F.”
Then Miss May said, “Lucas, can you please get…” and I watched the teaching assistant go into the corridor and carefully take down Ben’s painting from the autumn display and put it into a plastic folder. Noticing his receding chin and very red hair. Noticing the sweat under his arms.
Then Miss May was offering to help me to the car, but I found my voice and said no, because I didn’t want the fuss of it, and Zhang said we could manage just fine.
Outside in the corridor, with her arm linked firmly around mine, we walked past the new headmaster. He said, “I’m so sorry,” but the way he looked at me made me feel like an exhibit so I didn’t reply. I just wanted to be at home.
Miss May ran down the corridor behind us, her shoes tapping fast, and just as we reached the door she caught up with us. She had an armful of Ben’s books, which she passed to me, and she said, “I thought you might like these, since you didn’t make it to parents’ evening this week. I thought you might like to look through them.”
So I took them and as Zhang helped me into the car I held them to myself as carefully as if they were an actual baby.
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 the letter?
JC:
We threw everything into it. Obviously.
FM: Was that your call?
JC: It was Fraser’s, actually it was both of ours, and it was the right one.
FM: Was the investigation team excited?
JC: You’re always excited when you’ve got a lead, but you have to be cautious too. You don’t want mistakes. But it was a development and that was good because by then it had been five days and that was getting to people. They were tired; the media were going insane around us. We had the blog to worry about.
FM: What was happening with that?
JC: Behind the scenes Fraser was putting everything she could into finding out who might be behind it. Among others we were looking at Laura Saville and Nicola Forbes as possibles for the leak. We knew that both of them were involved in online journalism in some way already, and they were obviously close to the heart of things. She had to be discreet internally though, partly because we didn’t want to put the wind up anybody if they were up to something, and also because everybody working the investigation was feeling the pressure, and that kind of thing is very bad for morale, putting it mildly.
FM: Including you? Were you feeling the pressure?
JC: Of course. There was a kid’s life at stake.
FM: And did you have any strategies to cope with that?
He speaks to me as though I am an imbecile.
JC: A little boy, eight years old, was still missing after five days. We didn’t have time for “coping strategies.”
FM: OK. I understand that it must have been a stressful period for everyone involved in the investigation. My question is—
He interrupts me; his temper has risen.
JC: Don’t patronize me.
FM: I’m not intending to. That’s a very defensive reading of what I said. I’m simply acknowledging the fact that you felt under pressure and looking at ways that we might explore what that meant for you, and for the investigation.
JC: You have no idea what it’s like to be in the middle of something like that.
FM: So would it be fair to say that by this point in the case you’d moved on from the attitude that you felt when you took on the case? The “bring it on” attitude?
JC: It would, yes, because have you ever thought about what five days of being removed from your family and living in fear could do to a child? That’s one hundred twenty hours and counting. That was on my mind every single second. Why do you think I threw a hand grenade into the middle of that family? Because that’s what it was, making Nicky Forbes confess that stuff to her sister; don’t think I don’t understand that. But I did that for Benedict. Because we had to find him, and if there was collateral damage, then so be it. The letter was no different.
I end our session here, because I fear I’ll push him away entirely if I press him further today. I do wonder whether, if this man doesn’t successfully go through this process and get back to work in CID, I might fear for his long-term stability.
RACHEL
When I got home, Zhang asked me if I wanted her to come in with me but I declined, saying that my sister would be there, even though I didn’t know if that was true. I still felt detached and strange, as if all my senses were dulled and the only thing that mattered were the thoughts that were at a rolling boil inside my head.
Nicky was there. She was sitting in the kitchen and her packed bag was by the front door, her coat draped over it.
“I waited because I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye,” she said.