“Yes, boss.”
“Good work, Jim.”
I had a spring in my step as I went back to the incident room. It might have been adrenaline-fueled, but that was good enough for me. I wanted to be thoroughly prepared for the interview, not one little pebble left unturned. I knew the real work started now because we only had twenty-four hours to charge him.
I sat down at my desk and got on with reading all the background we had on Lucas Grantham. I thought back to when I’d first met him at the school, the way he’d seemed a bit pathetic. I’d had no inkling then that he’d been lying to us, though Woodley had thought he was a bit shifty. I didn’t want to think I’d missed something I should have noticed.
But I never got to finish my research, because we had another turn-up. Nicky Forbes’s husband arrived. Unexpectedly. Asking for me.
Simon Forbes was as posh as I might have expected. I’d Googled his wine company the day before. It was high end, the website slick and impressive, and he was obviously very well connected. He was a tall bear of a man, with very dark hair that was graying at the temples and red veins on his nose, which probably came from years of wine tasting. He was dressed in corduroy trousers, a checked shirt, and a tweed jacket, the kind of thing that people wore at the country shows my mum used to take us to when we were growing up.
“It’s very kind of you to come in,” I said. “It wasn’t necessary.”
I’d found somewhere to take him and we’d just sat down opposite each other.
“What I have to tell you might be best said face-to-face,” he said. “It’s about my wife, but it’s a very delicate situation because I have four daughters to consider.”
There was a quality of warmth about him that I hadn’t anticipated. He had a kind, patient manner that was appealing, even under the circumstances.
“I believe,” he said, “that you might have been under the impression that my wife was living at our family home in Salisbury?”
“Entirely under that impression, because that’s what Mrs. Forbes informed us.”
“I’m afraid that she hasn’t been living at that address for just over a month. She moved out at the end of September.”
He spoke quietly and clearly while my mind frantically tried to process what this meant.
“Do you know where your wife moved to?”
“She’s living in the cottage where she grew up. It’s in the Pewsey Vale, about a forty-five-minute drive north of Salisbury.”
“Did your daughters go with her?”
I wondered if this had been an acrimonious separation, if he was here to cast blame on a wife he loathed, to muddy the waters around her in advance of a custody dispute.
“No. Nicky didn’t just leave me; she left all of us.”
“Can I ask why?”
“The specific occasion was”—he cleared his throat—“the specific catalyst for her to actually pack her bags and leave was an argument we had.”
“What did you argue about?”
“It’s a bit complicated, but we had recently talked about having another child.”
“A fifth child?”
His reply bounced off my surprise.
“Yes. I’m aware that some people might think that five children is an excessive number, but Nicky wanted to try again, and I’d previously agreed to support her wish, happily I might say, because of something she’d suffered. I felt I should support her. Do I need to explain about her background?”
“We know about that.”
“So you understand she has a longing for a son. To replace Charlie.”
Those words felt solid to me, like a remnant jettisoned from an explosion, a twisted shard of metal, turning in midair, glinting.
“I understand,” I said. “You said you’d previously agreed to having another child, so had something changed? Did you no longer feel that way?”
He looked like a man who was having to haul up strength from a great depth.
“My wife gives the appearance of coping, always coping, she makes a career of it, but it takes its toll. She’s become very controlling of our time. That was the source of the argument. I was trying to ask her to relax, to give us space to breathe in the house. This scheduling of the girls’ time down to the last minute affects them, and affects us too. In my view, life had become a bit joyless. We had no time to do things together as a couple, or a family, ever, and I told her that I’d begun to wonder if another baby would be too much, for both of us.”
“How did she react?”
“Badly. Very badly. She felt that I’d betrayed her.”
“Did she say that?”
“She did. She freaked out, for want of a better expression. I’ve never seen her so angry, or distraught. And I’m afraid I lost my temper, I was at the end of my tether, and I told her that I thought we might need some space from each other.”
“And how did she react?”
“She stormed out of the room, the expression on her face was awful, and I didn’t follow her, I let her go. Grace, our second daughter, was waiting in the hall, ready to go to a riding lesson. That’s how scheduled our lives were—we barely had time for an argument! Anyway, I didn’t want to make any more of a scene in front of Grace so I called out to Nicky that I was driving Grace to her lesson, and I cooled off a bit while I was there, and I regretted some of the things I’d said, and I hoped Nicky had too, that we might discuss things more calmly that evening. But when Grace and I got home, she’d gone.”
“Gone?”
“Completely. She’d packed a case, and driven away. She’d told our eldest daughter to look after the two little ones until I got home but didn’t tell her why. And, unfortunately, the girls saw Nicky put her suitcase in the car, and they could see that she was very upset, so when I got back they were in a bit of a state, to put it mildly. It was a terrible shock for all of us.”
“Have you spoken to her since?”
“We speak a lot, but it’s very frustrating. She won’t discuss the future with me. She won’t plan or meet up to talk. She just says she needs more time. I’m trying to be patient, but I’m angry about the effect it’s having on the girls. We all love her, that’s the thing, of course we do, but we can’t always be what she wants us to be.”
If I’d judged Simon Forbes harshly at first, on the basis of his website, his profession, and his appearance, then I’d been a fool. This was a sensitive, intelligent man, with apparently extraordinary reserves of patience, and he’d been hurt.
I drew breath. “Do you think your wife is unstable?” I asked him.
“She’s walked away from her children. That’s not the behavior of somebody who’s stable.”
“Are you here because you believe that she might be responsible for what’s happened to Ben?”
The question was painful for him—he’d had to put aside his pride to come here and tell me this stuff—and as he struggled to formulate an answer, I watched him try to put aside his love for his wife too, but he didn’t quite manage it.
“I wouldn’t go that far, I just thought you ought to be aware of our situation. She hasn’t even told her sister.”
“Thank you, Mr. Forbes. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
I walked him to the main entrance; it felt like the least I could do.
Outside, on the top of the steps, waxed coat done up and leather driving gloves pulled onto thick, strong-looking fingers, he spoke again.
“I don’t know what my wife has or hasn’t done, Inspector. I can’t guess at that. I’m just telling you what I think you should know. And in return I ask that you respect our family’s dignity as much as you possibly can. I want to avoid inflicting any further pain on our daughters. Ben’s disappearance has been extremely difficult for them as it is.”
“Have you told your sister-in-law about this?”
“To be honest, I assumed Nicky would have told Rachel, but when I realized that wasn’t the case, I thought I would spare her this, which is why I’m here, telling you. Rachel must be going through a living hell already.”
As soon as he’d turned his back on me, I bolted back into the building and took the stairs up to the incident room three at a time.
RACHEL
On Sunday night, after dark, I still thought of nothing apart from the fact that Ben had been gone for one week. Seven days, one hundred and sixty-eight hours, thousands of minutes, hundreds of thousands of seconds. And counting.
My thoughts were suddenly full of the woods as if, now that seven days had passed, the memories had swollen, and germinated into a vivid sensory overload.
The bright blue sky and the kaleidoscopic intensity of the backdrop of beautiful, colorful, crisp autumn leaves replayed in my head like a movie reel. I saw Ben’s flushed cheeks, the gauzy mistiness of his breath, floating momentarily, a piece of him, of his warmth, in the air, then evaporating into nothing.
I would have seen more, lost myself in those memories, but my phone rang. It was the police, letting me know that a DC Woodley, my interim FLO, was on his way to call on me. They apologized for the lateness of the call. It was already half past eight at night.
DC Woodley arrived at nine. He was very tall and very skinny with an elongated neck and a large nose. He looked as if he was about seventeen years old.
He introduced himself awkwardly, and then he said that we should probably sit down, and he licked his top lip nervously when he said it.
At my kitchen table we sat under the stark central light. Unlike my sister, I didn’t think to make the room cozy by switching on other lights, or boiling a kettle. I’d lost my social niceties a week ago. I only wanted to hear what he’d come to tell me.
“We’ve arrested somebody,” he said. “We haven’t charged them yet, but they are at Kenneth Steele House and they are under arrest.”
“Who?”
“Lucas Grantham. Ben’s teaching assistant.”
My mind curled around this information and then recoiled at the ghastliness of it. Lucas Grantham spent all day of every weekday with my son. He spent more hours with Ben than I did. And I didn’t know him at all; he was a stranger to me.
For DC Woodley, and his patient, insistent questioning, I tried to remember anything I could, any mention of Grantham that Ben had made, but there was nothing beyond the entirely bland. Ben had hardly ever mentioned him, favoring Miss May, whom he had known for longer.
I scraped my mind for my impressions of him. They’d been fleeting. We were only a few weeks into term, after all, and Lucas Grantham was new to the school, like the headmaster. I forced my mind to work back through any memories of him when I’d collected Ben’s schoolbooks from school just a few days before, but I had none really, just the vaguest sense of him being there at all. And then those thoughts were interrupted by a question that I had to ask:
“If Lucas Grantham took Ben, then where is he?”
“We’re undertaking extensive searches at his property, and at properties he’s associated with. We’re doing everything we can to locate Ben. In the next twenty-four hours we’re going to be questioning everybody around him. I’m afraid I can’t give you any more information than that at present, but we wanted you to hear this from us, and not from anybody else. Please know that we are doing what we think is best in order to return Ben to you safe and well. That’s our priority.”
“Do you believe that?”
“That we’re doing our best? Yes. Absolutely. I’d swear on my mother’s life.”
He actually put his hand over his heart when he said that. Then, just as he was readying himself to leave, he said, “One more thing, Ms. Jenner?”
“Yes?”
“Have you heard from your sister?”
“No,” and I realized that she’d never phoned me back. “Why?”
“It’s the role of the FLO to make sure that all family members are doing fine, so it’s really just a follow-up after the difficult interview she had with DI Clemo.”
“She’s fine so far as I know.”
When he’d gone I tried to phone Nicky, to tell her, but it went to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. I’d heard about voicemail hacking. I knew we would be targets. I wasn’t going to give the journalists that advantage.
I tried Nicky’s house in Salisbury but her youngest daughter answered and said that her mummy wasn’t there and her daddy wasn’t either and her sister who was looking after her was on her mobile phone. I gave up, I didn’t even say who it was because Olivia was only nine and leaving a message with a nine-year-old is complicated and unreliable. I knew Nicky would phone me back when she saw my missed call.
I thought again about the TA and thought about what he might have done.
In one sense it allowed me to feel a surge of relief. It allowed me to let go of the germ of suspicion I’d been guiltily harboring about my sister. That was a release of pressure I was grateful for, definitely. I gave silent thanks for the fact that I hadn’t accosted her with my suspicions about her, or accused her outright. That might help us repair.
On the other hand, the news threw up a scenario that made my guts clench, because the question that lurched around my head was: What would a man like Lucas Grantham want with a boy like Ben?
There was no answer I could come up with that wasn’t somehow horrific. And so I didn’t feel a complete sense of relief, as I might have at the news of the arrest, of course I didn’t, because that would be impossible until Ben was back in my arms again.
I went online again later, curious to see if the arrest had been made public. Not yet.
Instead, some members of the online community were marking the week’s anniversary of Ben’s disappearance by saying that he was probably dead. That he had to be.
As if to underscore this theory, one or two of them had posted photographs of lit candles to mark the anniversary. Online shrines, the flickering flame a public display of emotion, which I found sanctimonious, ugly, and cruel.
Others took a more cerebral tack, including one who caught my eye because he was quoting the same websites that Nicky had been looking at before she left, to prove his hypothesis. I clicked on the link he provided, and instantly I wished I hadn’t, because right in front of my eyes was one of the research documents that Nicky had tried to stop me from reading in the first few days after Ben disappeared:
Abduction Homicide… victims were more likely to be killed immediately or kept alive for less than 24 hours, with a few victims being kept alive for 24 to 48 hours or more than three days (Boudreaux et al., 1999). Hanfland, 1997, reported even more shocking findings. He stated that 44% were dead in less than an hour, 74% of the victims were dead within the first 3 hours, and 91% within the first 24 hours.