“We wanted to get it to you quickly.”
“We appreciate that, Ms. Jenner, we really do, and we’ll deal with it immediately. I’m going to personally hand-deliver this to DCI Fraser as soon as I leave you.”
“Thank you,” John said.
Bennett tucked the book under his arm. “I suggest you both go home and get some rest now. The more you rest, the better you’ll cope. Thank you for bringing it in.”
He offered each of us his hand again and then disappeared through a set of double doors that swung dully on their hinges in his wake.
In spite of his politeness, and of the care he took looking at the book, he left me overwhelmed by my own impotence, feeling it in great shuddering waves. John looked at me with fright, as if he was terrified of another scene that he didn’t have the resources to handle, and it was the receptionist who came to my rescue. She emerged from behind the desk and came to me, and sat beside me on the sofa, and put her arms around me. She smelled of perfume and hairspray and she had liver-spotted hands.
“I know,” she said over and over again. “I know.”
And that act of kindness surprised me, and then upset me more, and finally calmed me down, until I was ready for John to take me home.
JIM
In the incident room the blinds on the windows of Fraser’s office were drawn but I could glimpse her silhouette and Emma’s through the slats. Nobody else might have noticed it, but to me their body language spoke volumes: Emma had come clean.
I thought I’d feel relieved but instead it was the final straw, and I couldn’t stand to witness it.
I took myself down to the canteen, tucked myself in a corner to try to write up a report on the morning’s raid with a cup of coffee that would have made British Rail ashamed, but I just got wound up, thinking about it all, and it was hard to concentrate with every nosey parker who walked past my table asking me how the case was going.
I went to the men’s room, locked myself in a stall, and tried to get control of myself.
I sat in there on the closed lid of the toilet bowl, my head resting against the partition wall, eyes shut, breathing through my mouth and trying to pull myself together. I don’t know how long I stayed, but at some point somebody else came in and the shame of it made me get to my feet.
It was Mark Bennett, undoing his fly at the urinals. He was hyped up; his cheeks flushed red with excitement.
“The proverbial’s hit the fan,” he said, not caring that his piss was going everywhere. “Something’s going on. Benedict Finch’s parents came into reception and his mum made a massive scene and brought in one of Ben’s schoolbooks they want us to look at. They asked for you and Zhang, but we couldn’t find you and Zhang was holed up with Fraser ‘not to be disturbed.’ Where the fuck have you been? Got the runs or something?”
I started to answer but he said, “So I went and got the book myself, calmed the mother down, but that’s not the fucking end of it. I took the book straight into Fraser’s office, potential new evidence, thought that was worth disturbing them for, only now she’s got Internal Affairs in there with her and Zhang. I gave her the book, but got my head bitten off for interrupting. Something massive is going on, definitely.”
I washed my hands for show, and he joined me at the sink and then stayed on my heels like a pesky younger sibling as we went back to the incident room, Bennett full of ignorant speculation that made my jaw clench.
As we entered the incident room, the door of Fraser’s office swung open at the other end and Emma walked out, flanked by two men. Fraser was hovering behind, but shut the door before I could read her face. I recognized one of the men: Bryan Doughty, the biggest cheese in Internal Affairs. Bennett and I stood aside as they approached.
“Clemo,” he said, as he passed me.
“Sir,” I replied. He was a shark of a man, intellectually and physically well equipped to take a bite of you. Perfect for the job. He didn’t slow his pace. Emma’s gaze was fixed front and forward.
Even though it was Saturday, about fifteen faces watched them walk the length of the incident room, Emma’s small frame dwarfed by the men beside her. When they exited and disappeared from sight, I realized I’d been biting the inside of my cheek so hard I’d drawn blood.
“I think she’s been a naughty girl,” said Bennett. “Tut, tut, tut. And Doughty’s not going to be happy about being called in on a weekend either.” He was buoyant: the sight of someone else’s career ending in a car crash was actually bolstering his self-esteem.
“Do me a favor and keep your fucking opinion to yourself,” I said.
“What’s the matter with you? Anybody would think you wanted to get into her knickers.” Brave words, but as he said them he was wiping my spittle off his face with an injured expression.
I walked away. I don’t know what I would have done to him otherwise. I knocked on the door of Fraser’s office.
“What’s going on?” I said. I tried to keep my face steady, put my hands in my pockets so the shake didn’t show.
Her expression was grim, her eyes were bloodshot, and she had that pallor you get after days on a case, when your skin’s sagging and you can’t remember what it felt like not to have your shoulders in tight knots.
“Take a seat,” she said. “We found our leak.”
“Emma?”
“Yes, I’m very sorry to say.”
“Fuck me,” I said. “I didn’t have her down as a Judas.”
My head felt tight around the lie. I hoped my voice wasn’t giving me away.
Fraser looked at me hard. “My sentiments exactly,” she said. “And I expect this to be especially hard for you because I know you two were working closely together.” She let her words hang there for a moment, between us, before she went on. “Emma’s confessed to leaking confidential information to the blog. Personal motivations. That’s all I can say at this time. Apart from the bleeding obvious, which is that she’s thrown a promising career down the pan, and the press will have all of our guts for garters if they get hold of it.”
“I feel responsible,” I said. “I recommended Emma for the role. I’m sorry.”
“I’m a big girl. I don’t do things just because one of my DIs has a bright idea. You’ve no need to take this all on yourself.”
She looked at me intently and I still couldn’t work out what the subtext was, whether she knew about Emma and me or not.
She said, “You don’t seem too shocked.”
“I’m shocked, boss, trust me. I just… don’t really know what to say. I feel like we can’t let this hold us back.”
She gave me a brisk nod in agreement. “We’re in the shit. There’s no doubt about that. We don’t have time to waste on this, and we can ill afford to be a man down. We need to regroup quickly, figure out how to fill the gap Emma’s left us, and somebody’s going to have to go through all the work she did.”
“I can do that.”
“But before anything is done, I want you to have a look at this. Bennett’s just brought it up. Hand-delivered by Benedict’s parents. With some drama.”
“Bennett told me,” I said.
“They asked specifically to see you or Emma but we couldn’t find you. Where the hell were you, by the way?”
On the bog, shaking like a school kid hiding from bullies. I didn’t say that. “I went to the canteen to get on with the report on this morning.”
“Without your phone? Ah, never mind. Take a look at this.”
She handed me a child’s exercise book. On the cover, in uneven handwriting: “Benedict Finch. Oak Class. News Book.” I flicked through it. Seeing Ben Finch’s clumsy handwriting gave me a bit of a start, it was such a vivid trace of him. Page after page seemed to be filled with pictures from the woods. It made him very real, very present, disturbingly so.
He’d written descriptions of their regular dog walks and drawn pictures of them too, including the swing.
“So what are we thinking?” I said.
“Well, Ben’s parents are thinking that this means that anybody at school might have known about the regular walks they took, and the route they took, and they’re thinking that there might be something in that.”
“But anybody they knew could have known about the walks. People with dogs walk them regularly and mostly to the same places. There’s only so many routes you can take in the woods.”
“Point taken, but we do have an obligation to look into this, and I think we should. We’re not overrun with options at this point, and I am not going to miss anything, Jim. I’ll not have that on my conscience.”
“So what this actually means is that we can include school staff, or anybody else who might have had access to this book, in the circle of people who might have known about the dog walks. So what do we do? Reinterview school staff?”
Fraser was scribbling a note. “That’s exactly what we do.”
“Start with the teacher and teaching assistant?”
“Yep. And the headmaster. And don’t forget the school secretary too. They always know everything.”
“You know they’ve all got alibis, don’t you, boss?”
“Yeah, yeah, I do. Teacher having lunch with parents, school secretary at cinema with a friend, TA shagging his girlfriend, headmaster playing golf. That good enough recall for you? Do you think I’ve gone senile all of a sudden?”
“No, I just want to be sure we’re not wasting our time on this.”
“I’m looking for information here. I want to dig deeper with these people. Maybe the books will trigger a memory for somebody. And I need to tell you that we’ve had a turn-up on the CCTV as well,” she added. “Confirmation that Ben was with his mother when they drove across the bridge on the way to the woods. They’re still scouring and cross-checking a final half-hour of footage but we should have the results later today.”
Other than that, Fraser said we still hadn’t tracked down the man Rachel said she and Ben spoke to in the woods. She had a DC looking into that, but he was banging his head against a wall because nobody had come forward. It seemed like Rachel Jenner was the only one who’d seen him. Even the regular dog walkers weren’t sure who he might be. In the office they’d started to call him Big Foot.
“Nicky Forbes?” I said, when we were nearly done. My thoughts had kept returning to her, I couldn’t deny it.
“Definitely still of interest, but softly, softly.”
“Of course.”
“First job—get Bennett to look through Emma’s work, clear her desk; everything she was doing, I want to know about.”
“I can do that, boss.”
“I think it’s better if somebody else does it, don’t you, Jim?”
This time, the subtext was crystal clear. She knew. I managed to nod an affirmative and got myself out of her office as quickly as I could.
RACHEL
John drove me home, and came inside with me, guiding me past the three or four journalists who remained doggedly outside my door.
They should have seen me at the police station, I thought. That would have got them going.
For now, they were loitering a few lampposts away from my house and they called out to us in a desultory way, trained like Pavlov’s dogs to know that neither John nor I would talk.
They still frightened me, but not as much as their colleagues who were probably piecing together juicy commentary on our lives for their Sunday supplements, making me into a comment on society, doing it just as John and I unlocked the front door of my home and contemplated the absence that was our son.
Inside, John kept shooting surreptitious glances at me, which made me feel like he was assessing me, gauging my stability.
I let him go up to Ben’s room alone, and he was there for a long time. I expected he was doing what I did: touching objects, remembering, smelling bits of clothing, holding things that Ben had held.
When he was down, I asked him a question that had been on my mind since Nicky had gone.
“Why did you tell the police that Nicky was worried about me after Ben was born?”
He was surprised, but he had a quick answer. “Because she was. She phoned me a lot.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“At the time? I didn’t think you needed to know. You were so tired, and trying so hard. I thought she was being neurotic. It would have upset you.”
“And afterward?”
“I just forgot. She stopped, and it didn’t seem important. Why are you bringing this up now? Did the police mention it?”
“I just wondered,” I said, and I realized that he didn’t know yet, about Nicky, about our family. And I kept the news folded up like a piece of paper I’d tucked into my pocket, because I didn’t know how to say it, and didn’t want to admit that there was a part of me capable of distrusting my own sister.
Later on, John said he should go home. I wanted him to stay, but I didn’t trust myself to admit it out loud, for fear of how it would make me sound. I was aware of my own instability by then, I could feel it seeping out into my speech and my actions, and I didn’t want that look from John again. The one that evaluated me, worked out how to handle me.
He saw I didn’t want to be alone, he saw that at least. “Should I phone Laura?” he asked, and I said, “It’s OK,” but he began to insist and I didn’t know what to do apart from to nod mutely because I couldn’t tell him about her either. About how I’d shooed her away too.
It took her a while to answer the phone and when she did he immediately frowned and he left the room. I listened, my house was too small for secrecy, and heard him say, “Are you drunk?” in an incredulous tone.
I knew he’d have thumb and finger pressed to his temples, as if trying to hold his thoughts together; I knew he’d look as if his weariness were falling off him in pieces.
His end of the conversation was mostly listening noises, murmured words of agreement or appeasement. He spoke very little; she must have been speaking a lot.
“Rachel will understand,” he said after a while. “I’m sure she will.” And then, “I think it’s best if she calls you tomorrow.”
“She’s drunk?” I asked when he reappeared.
“She’s been drinking all afternoon as far as I can tell. You don’t want her around here.”
“What’s she saying?”
“She’s not making much sense. She says to tell you she’s sorry. That the thing is too big for her, whatever that means. That she just wanted to support you. She’s not in a fit state to be coherent. What happened?”