“It’s my fault,” I said, but it was a whisper and he didn’t hear. He asked me again.
“I don’t know if I trust her,” I told him. “I don’t know who I trust.”
“I’ve never trusted her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, I’ve just never liked her. I thought she used you.”
“You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
I was absorbing this when my phone rang.
“Can you answer it?” I said. It was still in his hand.
The phone call was short, it furrowed his brow, but I couldn’t decipher it from hearing his responses.
After he’d ended the call with a thank-you, he said, “That was a DC Justin Woodley calling to say that DC Zhang isn’t our family liaison officer anymore.”
“What? Why not?”
“He just said she’s had to step away from the post, didn’t give a specific reason, and that they’d appoint somebody new as soon as they could, Monday at the latest, but in the meantime we should speak to him. Have you met him?”
“I don’t think so. What could possibly have happened? Did you ask?”
“It’s very odd,” said John, “because I thought they said she was in the office this morning.”
“They did.” I curled my legs up onto the sofa, wrapped my arms around myself, and felt the disappointment keenly. I minded very much that DC Zhang was gone because I’d got used to her, started to trust her, and I knew I would miss her. I didn’t like the idea of having a man as our liaison officer, however temporary. It wouldn’t be the same.
“I really liked her,” I said.
“I’m sure DC Woodley or whoever they appoint will be fine.” John wasn’t as perturbed as I was; he had Katrina to lean on. He looked at his watch.
“Look, I can stay here a bit longer, but I have to go home later tonight. You could come to our house.”
“I can’t leave here again. I shouldn’t have left this morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” And I knew I’d be up all night, fearing for Ben and fearing for myself too, but that I had no choice.
“If that’s what you want.”
Later John and I warmed up some of the food that Nicky had left in the fridge: wholesome, beautifully cooked food. It should have sustained us, given us strength, but both of us could only pick at it.
It was at the precise moment that we were getting up to clear the table that we heard a powerful crash, high-pitched and violent. It came from the front room and seemed to make the air cave in around us. It was the sound of shattering glass, and it made us motionless for a moment and the dog barked and then whimpered and then all was quiet again except for the noise of footfalls, somebody running away.
John was up on his feet in an instant. He ran outside.
I followed him, but by the time I got to the front door it was swinging wide open and he was gone.
A bitter wind blew into the room, not just through the door but also through a gaping jagged hole where the front window had been. The curtains, drawn to shield us from the press, were dancing, flapping and turning in the wind like dervishes. Pieces of glass littered the floor, sharp edges everywhere, and in the center of the room lay a brick.
There were letters painted on it. It took me a moment to realize that there were two words on its side, the same two that had screamed at me from the back fence: “BAD” and “MOTHER.” Small, printed carefully. It couldn’t be easy to paint on brick.
“John!” I screamed.
I ran to the door. Glass crunched underfoot. From one end of the street footfalls rang out, the sound echoing. I saw John and, just ahead of him, another figure, both running as fast as they could. They were moving shadows and, in an instant, they’d disappeared around the corner.
The street stretched away from me, dark and wet, the glow from the streetlamps looking three-dimensional in the rain, orbs of orange fluorescence. I stood in a shard of white light that spilled out of my house and fell around me, making the slick wet surface of the pavement gleam blackly. Opposite, a neighbor opened his front door just a crack.
“Help,” I said. “Help us.”
From the corner the men had disappeared around, I heard a scuffle, a thud, a cry of pain, and then I began to run too.
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.
We’re getting to the point in our process where I would like to see some real progress from DI Clemo. He’s still very closed emotionally, and our time is running out.
FM:
I’m so sorry about Emma.
JC:
Don’t be.
FM: That must have been an extremely difficult situation for you.
JC: It didn’t help.
FM: Do we know why she did it?
JC: I know now, but I didn’t then. It was partly because she just couldn’t cope with the role. That was my fault, I know it was, I fucked up. But that wasn’t the only reason. It was because of something that happened to her…
FM: Take your time.
JC: Sorry.
FM: There’s no need to be sorry. You don’t need to tell me now. I’m curious about whether either of you tried to contact each other that night?
JC: No. We didn’t. I made a choice—my loyalty was to the investigation.
FM: That’s a very selfless choice.
JC: Is it?
FM: I think so. Others might have protected their own interests more.
JC: I protected my position in the investigation.
FM: But the personal cost to you was extremely high.
He tries to answer this, but he can’t seem to find the words. He’s done well so far today and I don’t want this subject to become taboo, so I change tack.
FM: Tell me what happened that afternoon once you turned your mind back to the investigation.
JC: Well, that’s the thing. First thing was, I called Simon Forbes, Nicky Forbes’s husband, and asked him to contact me to arrange an interview. But after I did that, we got a break that we didn’t expect. That evening the boys got to the end of the CCTV checks and turned up something significant.
FM: Which was?
JC: They traced one of the cars that crossed the bridge about an hour before Ben’s abduction. It was registered to Lucas Grantham, Ben’s teaching assistant.
FM: I understood that he had an alibi.
JC: He did, but a piece of evidence like that is enough to make you take a much closer look at an alibi.
FM: And Nicola Forbes?
JC: Still a person of interest, but you don’t argue with CCTV. And we had the schoolbook evidence too.
FM: I felt as if you didn’t put much store in the schoolbook.
JC:Not on its own. I thought we needed to be careful to understand that it only widened an already considerable pool of people who could have known about the dog walks. But in the context of the CCTV discovery it was much more significant.
It gives him satisfaction to say that. He is born for this job, I think. But I have another question.
FM: DI Clemo, did you rest at all that night?
JC: I did go home, yes. I knew I couldn’t pull another all-nighter.
FM: And did you get some sleep?
This question makes him edgy.
FM: Were you able to sleep?
He doesn’t answer.
FM: Were you thinking of Emma?
JC: I might have been.
FM: You suffered a very traumatic loss that day. You lost a relationship with somebody you had extremely strong feelings for.
JC: It was nothing compared to what Benedict Finch might have been going through.
FM: That doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant. Would you say this time might have been the start of the insomnia that plagues you now?
JC: I don’t want to talk about it.
FM: I believe we have to talk about this, or we can’t make progress.
JC: It’s not relevant.
FM: I believe it is. Think about it. I’d like to discuss it at our next session.
JC: Fine.
He coaxes his lips up into a smile for me, but the look in his eyes is far from happy. I can see that he’s just being polite and I have to remind myself that that is, after all, progress. The problem is, it’s too slow.
RACHEL
It was John who had cried out in pain. I found him on the corner of the street, fallen, his head smashed open against the side of the curb, his face damaged too, his ear pulpy. The amount of blood on his face and beneath him was sickening. It was matted in his hair, sticky and dark on the pavement, and it soaked into my knees and covered my hands as I knelt beside him.
He was unconscious; eyes glassy. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it against his head, trying to stem the blood flow. I screamed over and over again for help.
When the paramedics came they moved quickly and worked with a quiet urgency that frightened me. There was no joking, and no smiling. Uniformed police officers arrived too. They lent me a phone to ring Katrina, and I told her and then handed the phone to one of the paramedics, who instructed her to meet them at A & E at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
When they were finally ready to move John, they rolled him carefully onto a stretcher and eased it into the ambulance, one of them seated in the back beside his inert form. It was shocking, that, the absence of him. That, and the amount of blood.
“Will he be all right?” I asked.
“Head injuries are very serious,” they told me. “Unpredictable. You did well to call us so quickly.” There were no reassurances.
Part of me didn’t want to let him go on his own, but the police knew Katrina was meeting him at the hospital and they wanted to take a statement from me. As the ambulance disappeared into the night underneath its pulsing halo of blue light, I walked back down the street. A uniformed officer accompanied me. Two police cars were still parked at drunken angles, blocking off the scene.
In the house, they took my statement. More officers arrived and took photographs, and then they put the brick in a plastic bag and took it away. They helped me clean up the glass while somebody they’d called boarded up my window. They said they’d station somebody outside the house for the rest of the night.
One thing the police all agreed on, and they even had a laugh about it, was that it was ironic that nobody from the press had been there to witness the incident. The three journalists and one photographer who’d had the stamina to stake out the house overnight had wandered down the road to get food.
They’d reappeared, kebabs in hand, shreds of iceberg lettuce falling from them, as the ambulance doors had been slammed shut and John had been driven away.
It was the only thing to be grateful for.
I slept in the front bedroom that night, in my own bed, wanting to know that the police car they’d stationed there for the night was just outside, wanting the security of that. In case I had to shout out. Bang on the window. In case I heard somebody creep into my house, wanting to do me harm.
I took Ben’s duvet and pillow from his bed and brought them with me. I stripped away my own bedding, piling it on the floor, and arranged Ben’s stuff carefully on my bed, with his nunny, and his Baggy Bear.
I listened all night for the sound of footfalls again, and I lay rigid when voices loomed out of the darkness. They were the usual Saturday night revelers returning home, but their shouts and their drunken laughter sounded hostile to me now. Every noise I heard that night was laced with menace.
JIM
It was Emma who I thought of all the way home. I thought of telling her about the CCTV, that grainy image of Lucas Grantham driving across the bridge in a blue Peugeot 305, his bike on a rack on the back. I thought of driving to her flat and holding her, trying to find a way forward. I felt my exhaustion drug me, dull my senses and my reactions, addle my brain. I felt like part of me was missing.
I went to bed after midnight. I’d treated myself to a packet of cigarettes, a consolation prize for the demise of the best relationship I’d ever had, and I sucked on one after the other, the smoke hitting my lungs like a wallop, making them ache. I drank most of a pot of coffee far too late. I felt like I should keep working, scouring Lucas Grantham’s background, but my concentration was shot to pieces and so I got under my covers and tasted the bitter residue of the fags mixed with toothpaste on my tongue and thought about the CCTV and what it meant, and thought about what Emma might be doing.
It wasn’t her that got into my head for the rest of that night, though.
When I finally shut my eyes and tried to sleep, my brain had a different plan.
It pulled me back to my past, and it did it swiftly, like an ocean current that’s merciless and strong. It took me back to my childhood, where it had a memory to replay for me, a videotape of my past that it had dug out of the back of a drawer where I’d shoved it, long ago, hoping to forget.
When the memory starts I’m on the landing at my parents’ house, looking through the banisters. I’m eight years old, exactly the same age as Benedict Finch. I’m at home, and it’s well past my bedtime.
Down below, the hallway is dark because it’s night and it’s hard to see, but when the front door opens I know it’s my sister, Becky, because of the way she closes it ever so softly, trying not to make a sound. She’s wearing a party dress, which looked pretty when she went out earlier, but now it’s a mess and her tights have got a big rip on one leg. Her eyes look horrible, like she’s been crying black tears.
She yelps when she realizes my dad’s standing in the hall opposite her. He’s wearing his day clothes and holding a cigarette that glows red. Becky doesn’t move.
“What did you see?” Dad asks her. His face is in shadows.
She shakes her head in a tight way, says, “Nothing.”
“Don’t muck me about, Rebecca.”
A sob comes from her; it makes her body buckle. “I saw the girl,” she says. “And I saw you.”
“You shouldn’t have been there,” he says.
“She was hurt, but you didn’t care.” Becky chokes out her words. “You gave her to that man, I saw you do it, she was begging, she was crying, and you did nothing, you let it happen. They shoved her in the car. I wasn’t born yesterday, Dad!”