“I’ve done something bad and I don’t know what to do.”
“What have you done?” And even then I was thinking, it can’t be so bad, Emma’s so hard on herself that whatever she’s done will be easy to put right. I thought that even as I watched her shut her eyes, and press her lips together until her face folded around them and she didn’t look like the girl I knew. Not one bit.
Her next two words were her confession, her downfall, and the first sparks of a wildfire that was to burn through everything we’d had together with startling speed.
“The blog.”
I was slow; I didn’t understand at first. She had to spell it out for me, blow on the sparks until I could see that they were dangerous, and that they would spread uncontrollably.
“I’ve given information to the ‘Where is Benedict Finch?’ blog.”
“You’re the leak?”
She nodded.
I gave myself a nasty bruise on the side of my hand where I slammed it on the dashboard. Pain shot up my arm. It made Emma jump and then she seemed to contract into herself a little more.
“Why?” One puny word, to express all the incredulity and anger that I felt.
“I feel so stupid.”
“Tell me why!”
“Don’t shout,” she said. “Please.”
I watched her as she tried to compose herself. She carefully tucked her hair behind her ears in a gesture that I knew and loved. She took a deep breath, exhaling audibly, and just when I was about to shout at her again she said, “I wanted to punish Rachel Jenner for letting Ben out of her sight in the woods.”
I didn’t expect that.
“What? Why? For fuck’s sake, why would you do that? Why’s that even your business?”
“It got to me, I’m sorry. I started looking at the blog, for research, and I got sucked into it. First I just put a comment, because people were saying some stupid things, but then I found myself agreeing with some of them, and I’ve got strong feelings about it, because it’s a massive issue for me. And I know none of it’s an excuse but I was getting tired, it was hard to cope with the family and I was scared I wasn’t up to the job. I know I shouldn’t have. It was weak. I just couldn’t help thinking about how if she’d been a bit more responsible, then it wouldn’t have happened. Oh God, Jim. I’m so sorry. My head gets so fucked up sometimes. It’s complicated. It’s personal. Something happened that I’ve never told you.”
“What happened?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she shook her head, and covered her face with her hands.
“Emma! What happened?”
Her hands fell away and her voice veered into hysteria.
“Stop shouting! I said stop!”
She wiped at her face brusquely, streaking the sleeve of her coat.
Then she turned to look at me with an expression of vulnerability that I’d never seen on her before and she pleaded. It was awful, that diminishment of her. She said, “Oh God, I’ve been so stupid. It’s so hard for me to explain but please know that I’m trying to be honest with you because I love you. I do. I know we’ve never said that to each other but I think I actually do.”
But I was too angry to hear it. I was facing the charred remains of our relationship, of Emma’s career, possibly of mine too. I said, “Do you know how many resources Fraser’s had to put into finding out who the leak is?”
“I’m sorry.” A bright, high note on a scale.
“You’ve risked that boy’s life!”
“I’m sorry.” The scale descending into tones of hopelessness.
“You owe me a proper explanation.”
“I know. I’m scared you won’t understand.” Just a whisper.
“Try me.” My tone was cynical now. I’d become my professional self, tucked away the things I wanted to say. It was self-protection. I hated myself for doing it, but what choice did I have, really?
She talked then, a slow stream of words and it was breaking her to say them.
“Because I saw the photographs Rachel took, they were photographs of Ben. She loves him. I saw it for the first time, how much she cares about him, because they’re such beautiful pictures and they made me feel so guilty.” She clutched at my arm. “I’m telling you because I don’t know what to do and I want you to help me make it right. You won’t tell anybody, will you? I’ve stopped already. I won’t do it again.”
“You can’t come back from this. You cannot,” I said, but she was pulling her handbag onto her lap, digging through it.
“I’ve got a personal email address for the author of the blog. We can track them down. I’ll get it for you, I’ll get it now.”
She took her phone out. I could see that she had missed calls, but not who they were from, and she ignored them, as she tried with trembling fingers to access her mailbox.
“It’s gone too far. You can’t make it right.”
“We don’t need to tell anybody else,” she said. She looked pale and fearful, her eyes darting nervously from me to the phone and back. “If you help me we can do it. We can get the blog removed.”
“You, not we. I didn’t do this, it’s got nothing to do with me, and actually you do need to tell them. You’re kidding yourself if you think you can get away with it. And you’re compromising me just by telling me, let alone expecting me to help you!”
“Please. I’ll lose my job.” Her eyes were locked on to mine now, wide and wild with panic.
“Do I really need to say that you should have thought of that earlier? What you leaked was spiteful, wicked stuff. Jesus! And now you want me to put myself on the line for you. Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do?”
“Jim.” It was a plea. “I thought you would help me.”
“I thought I knew you.”
She tried to reach out and touch my face, but as her fingers grazed my cheek I said, “Don’t,” and she withdrew her hand quickly, as if I’d scalded her.
I massaged my temples, and I felt an exhausted, debilitating sadness because I knew that this was the end of us, and that I’d made my own bed on this one. It was my own fucking fault. End of.
She took another deep breath. “I did it because of what happened to my sister,” she said, and I could hear that there was bravery in her voice, that she was working up courage for what she was about to say, but for me it was too late for that, because she’d betrayed the police force and the investigation, betrayed Benedict Finch, and betrayed me.
“No,” I said. “I’m not interested. I don’t want to hear it.”
She opened her mouth to reply but something she saw in my face made her close it again, and her features drained of hope.
“Jim…” was all she managed.
“No.”
I didn’t want to hear it because Emma wasn’t the person I thought she was, and I wouldn’t lie for her.
She started working at her phone again, desperately tapping at the screen, and it was too much for me; it was delusional.
I snatched the phone from her, opened the car window, threw it out, and watched it clatter across the pavement and break against the urine-stained wall, pieces of it scattering among dark black puddles, fag butts, and other unidentifiable scraps of filthy rubbish. A passerby paused to give me a look and I told him to fuck off.
“Tell Fraser,” I said to Emma. “Or I will.”
“Jim.”
“You need to go and do the right thing or this could hang us all. Now.”
I started up the car and eased back into the traffic. I couldn’t look at her. In the rearview mirror I could see a vast mural covering the side of an office building: a mother and child. It was a pure image, made of black lines and a white background, the mother’s lips as sensual as Emma’s. I thumped the dashboard again, felt the pain again, and then I took the car in the direction of Kenneth Steele House. On the way, we didn’t speak at all.
When we parked at Kenneth Steele House, Emma got out of the car without a word and I watched her walk across the parking lot, and climb the steps to the entrance, slowly, straight-backed. I gave it a full twenty minutes before I followed her. Twenty minutes of gazing through the windshield at the sharp-tipped silvered-metal railings that encircled the parking lot and wondering whether she was doing the right thing in there.
When I finally got out of the car, my body was protesting with fatigue, and I checked my face in the side mirror to be sure I wasn’t wearing the whole episode for anybody to read. Inside, I said my normal hello to Lesley, who was on reception, and she smiled at me, and I hoped she didn’t notice that I felt like I was wading through shit.
RACHEL
With Zhang not answering her phone, and somebody in the incident room telling me that Clemo and Fraser were unavailable too, I had to turn to John. Or, as the papers would have it, the unimpeachable Mr. John Finch, Consultant Pediatric General Surgeon, and proud owner of a lovely new wife.
He answered the phone with the same haste with which I jumped on every call I received. To give him credit, he quickly managed the disappointment he obviously felt when I said I didn’t have news, took me seriously when I explained about the pictures in the book, and didn’t demur when I asked him to drive me, and the book, to the police station.
Heading up the steps of Kenneth Steele House, I realized I could barely even remember our arrival nearly a week before. The receptionist told us that if we’d like to leave the book with her, then she’d ensure that it was taken up to the incident room.
I said that I’d like to speak to somebody in person. I mentioned DC Zhang and DI Clemo.
She asked us to sit, and we perched side by side on the same sofa we’d occupied on Monday morning.
She made some hushed calls, head down, covering her mouth as if we could lip-read. Then she crossed the foyer, heels clipping the floor noisily, and said, “Someone will be down to see you soon. If you wouldn’t mind being patient.”
She brought us hot tea in plastic cups so thin you could burn your fingers.
John passed the time by looking through Ben’s book methodically, page by page, over and over again. I could barely sit down; I was pulsating with impatience, and after what felt like an interminable wait I approached the desk again.
“Somebody’s coming, they’re rather busy up there this morning,” I was told.
“Can we interrupt them? This is very important.”
“They know you’re here, they’re just in a meeting.”
“Can I just speak to DC Zhang?”
“Please be patient, Mrs. Finch.”
“My name is Jenner.”
“Sorry, Ms. Jenner. DC Zhang and DI Clemo have only recently arrived themselves, and I’ve rung the incident room but they’re both tied up just at the moment. If you can try to be patient, one of them will be down before long, I assure you.”
“Please.”
“I would ask you to sit down again if possible.”
I sat, my knees jigging, hands wringing.
John said, “Perhaps it’s best if we just leave the book here.”
“What if they can’t read Ben’s writing?”
“Rachel…”
“No. I want to hand them over myself, explain them.”
After another ten minutes I felt my patience snap. I took the book from John and said, “If they’re not coming down here I’m bloody well going to go up there.”
“No, don’t do that,” John said, but he was too slow to stop me. I marched to reception, propelled forward by my certainty, and my outrage that nobody had come to listen to us.
“Where are they?” I said to the receptionist.
“Ms. Jenner, if you can just be a bit more patient—”
“Stop asking me to be patient. How can I be patient? My son is missing and if they can’t be bothered to come down here I’m going to go to them. What’s more important than a piece of new evidence that they don’t know about? How is it that I can get the immediate attention of any journalist in the country but not of a single officer investigating my son’s case? Should I take this to the press? Should I?”
I was waving the book at her, brandishing it in her face.
“Please don’t raise your voice, Ms. Jenner.”
“I will raise my voice if I fucking well feel like it. I will raise my voice until SOMEBODY COMES DOWN AND LOOKS AT THIS BOOK!” I slammed it down on the desk in front of her. “THEY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS BECAUSE I WANT MY SON BACK. I WANT BEN AND IF YOU DON’T WANT ME HERE, THEN YOU CAN FUCKING WELL ARREST ME.”
She was no pushover, the receptionist. She spoke to me in a voice that was steel-reinforced. “If you take a seat, I shall phone the incident room once more. If you continue to make a scene, I shall ask one of my colleagues to escort you from the building.”
Up close to the desk, I saw that her handbag was tucked into a corner behind it. It had a newspaper folded on it, and I realized that even here, in this environment, I was probably being judged through the filter of what was written about me; that the receptionist was seeing, in front of her own eyes, the Rachel Jenner from the press conference.
John was at my side, and he coaxed me away then, back to the sofa, and I stared at the few people coming and going through the foyer in front of us with an empty gaze that made many of them take a second look at me.
Within minutes, a man stood in front of us.
“DI Bennett,” he said, sticking a hand out to John first, and then to me. His handshake was painfully strong, and I didn’t recognize him. “Is this it then?”
John stood up and handed him the book and DI Bennett’s big hand seemed to dwarf it. He had a neck that sat in rolls on his collar, narrow wide-set eyes, and the shiny crown of his head took on the glow of the ceiling lights.
“Right,” he said. “Do you want to show me what’s worrying you?”
I showed him the pages that haunted me, and he pored over them, brow hunched.
“I see what you mean,” he said, and then, “He’s a good artist your lad, isn’t he?”
“Will you show it to DI Clemo, or DCI Fraser?”
“Of course I will. I’ll do that right away.”
“Should we stay, in case you have questions?”
“Honestly, the best place for you right now is at home. We know where to find you, and we’ll be in touch with any questions or any information we have, I promise you. And if you phone us with any concerns, at any point, we will always send somebody to talk to you at home about it; there’s no need for you to come here.”
“I tried to phone DC Zhang,” I said.
“Ah well, she’s a bit busy in a meeting right now.”