Burnt Paper Sky Page 8

  Everything on the kitchen table was as Ben and I had left it: a snapshot of our last few minutes in the house together.

  There was a hat that Ben had refused to wear, a packet of bourbon biscuits that he’d raided just before we left, a much-loved Tintin book and a Lego car that I’d helped him build.

  His school report, received in the post the day before, lay on the table too. It had been a pleasure to read, full of effusive praise from his teacher about how hard Ben tried, how pleased she was that he was finding the courage to speak up more in class, and how he was gaining confidence in his schoolwork.

  And it wasn’t just the kitchen. There was nowhere in this house that wasn’t imprinted with traces of my son, of course there wasn’t. It was his home.

  Even outside, down the short, uneven garden path, I knew that there would be signs of him too: in my garden office my computer would be sleeping, its light blinking unhurriedly. If I went out there and brought it to life I knew the internet history would show a game that Ben had been playing online on Sunday morning. It was called Furry Football and the aim was to play games and earn points to buy different animals, which would form a football team. Ben loved it. I had a daily battle to limit his time on it.

  I looked at everything, took it all in, but felt only blankness. All of it was meaningless without Ben. Without him, my home had no soul.

  Nicky got busy, typically.

  She’d always been like this. She was never still. If there was nothing to do, she would organise an outing, or make an elaborate meal. Activity was her way of relaxing.

  When I was younger I could happily spend an afternoon in Esther’s cottage doing nothing more than sitting on the window seat in my little bedroom. I would trace outlines in the condensation on the glass, gaze at the frosty trees outside, and the shapes they carved against the open sky behind them, and watch the birds on my aunt’s feeders fighting for seed. The sharp yellow flash of a goldfinch’s wing was a sight I longed for in the monochrome of a snowy rural winter.

  Eventually, driven by the cold, I might make my way downstairs to seek the heat of the fire. Nicky would be there with Aunt Esther. Their cheeks would be flushed from the warmth of the oven and the exertions of whatever activity they’d been engaged in. I would admire the freshly baked cake they’d made or smell the stew that was simmering.

  Aunt Esther would take my hands, and say, ‘Rachel, you’re so cold. Have a cup of tea, darling,’ and she would rub them, and I would feel rough gardening calluses on her palm. Nicky would say, ‘Where are your fingerless gloves, Rachel? The ones I gave you for Christmas?’ Then I would slip away from them, their cosy domesticity, and slink into a chair by the fire, pull a blanket over myself, and lose myself in a book, or the dancing of the flames.

  In those early days after Ben disappeared, when I was practically catatonic with shock, it was natural for Nicky to become the functioning part of me, just as she always had done. She returned the increasingly frantic messages that my best friend Laura had been leaving on my phone throughout the day, and asked her to come over. She spoke to Peter Armstrong, who told her that the dog’s leg had been broken, but he was comfortable at the vet’s after having it set. She put her laptop on the kitchen table and spent hours online.

  On that first day, she found a Missing Kids website, based in the US. On their advice, she made a list of questions for the police. She threw facts out into the room as she learned them. They were ghastly, notes from a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. They made me feel queasy, but she was unstoppable.

  She told me that the website advised that bloodhounds are essential for a proper search. That they can follow the scent of a child even if their abductor has picked them up and carried them away. She asked me what dogs the police had used in the woods. I said they’d been German shepherds. She continued to read quietly, scratching notes out on a pad, keeping it shielded from me, her mouth set in a grim line.

  After a time she said, ‘Did you see John after your interview?’

  ‘No, they took him somewhere else.’

  ‘You should ring him. It would be good to know what they asked him.’

  ‘He blames me.’

  ‘This is not your fault.’

  I knew it was.

  ‘What did they ask you? Can you talk about it?’

  ‘They asked me everything, they wanted so much detail: family history, everything to do with Ben since he was born; anything you could think of basically.’

  I didn’t mention that they wanted to know what Ben had had for lunch on Sunday.

  ‘Did they ask about our family?’

  ‘They wanted to know everything.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’ Her eyes lifted from the screen and they were red-rimmed.

  ‘I told them what happened. What else would I tell them?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She turned back to the screen. ‘It says here that the family should try to agree on a tactic for how to approach relationships with the police, that it’s really effective to do that.’

  ‘I can’t phone John now.’ I couldn’t face it. I’d committed the worst sin a mother can: I hadn’t looked after my child. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

  In Ben’s bedroom I could see very little sign that the scenes of crime officers had been there. One of Ben’s favourite toys lay nestled on his bed, in the tumble of bedding that Ben liked to sleep in. It was Baggy Bear, a doe-eyed teddy with chewed ears, floppy arms, soft fur and a blue knitted scarf that Ben liked me to tie in a certain way. I held Baggy Bear to my chest. I thought, I can’t leave this house now, in case he comes back here. Everywhere, the silence, the absence of Ben, seemed to swell. It felt hostile, like the furtive spread of a cancer.

  I lay down on Ben’s bed, and curled up. There was something making me uncomfortable and I shifted position, felt for it. It was his old cot blanket. He called it ‘nunny’ and he’d had it since he was a baby. It was very soft and he would wrap it around his fingers and stroke his face with it to get himself off to sleep. He’d never admit it to anybody but me, but he couldn’t sleep without it. I tried to push away the thought that he’d already had to spend a night without it, that that might have been the least of his worries.

  I balled it up, hugged it to myself, along with Baggy Bear. I could smell Ben on the nunny, on the bedding and on his teddy bear. It was the perfect smell that he’d always had. It was the smell of baby hair that has no weight to it, and of the skin on his temples, which was still velvety smooth. It was the smell of trust, freely given, and a perfect, innocent curiosity. It was the smell of our dog walks and the games we’d played together and the things I’d told him, and the meals we’d shared. It was the smell of our history together. I inhaled that smell as if it could revive me somehow, give me some answers, or some hope, and, like that, I just waited. I didn’t know what else to do.

  When Laura arrived Nicky let her in and I heard their voices downstairs, hushed and serious. In real life – the life we were living before Ben was taken – they didn’t get on very well. I was the only thing that these two women had in common, and their paths had only crossed once or twice before now. Without me they would never have spent time together, probably not without a large measure of irritation anyway.

  As a foil to Nicky’s conservatism, and her serious, thoughtful approach to life, Laura was skittish, playful, inconsistent, rebellious and sometimes downright wild. She was a birdlike person, tiny-framed, with short urchin hair, wide brown eyes and a big laugh. When I’d first met her, when we were both nursing students, right from the start she’d made me laugh, taught me how to play. She was the first person I’d met who did that for me. It thrilled me.

  She wasn’t like that one hundred per cent of the time, of course. She had her moments of darkness too, but she kept them private. I only glimpsed them when alcohol had loosened her tongue. ‘I was a mistake,’ she said once. I’d known her for a good few years by then. We were no longer students, although we were still in our ha
bit of going for a big night out at least once a week. Her words were heavy with booze.

  ‘My parents didn’t want to have me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that two people who were amongst the brightest minds in the country, or so they liked to say, it’s ironic that they should have made such a basic error. Don’t you think?’

  Her tone of voice was attempting to be jokey but the corners of her mouth kept dragging down and her eyes were dull and tired.

  ‘Didn’t they want to have children?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t the plan. It was never the plan. They were very open about that. If I’m honest I’m surprised they ever had sex. They were old when they had me, too.’ She laughed. ‘They must have stumbled across a manual that told them what to do, and had ten minutes to spare before Newsnight.’

  I didn’t have parents, of course, so who was I to pass judgement on how she mocked hers, but there was something unsettling about her tone, and though I’d laughed obligingly at the time, it had made me feel sad.

  ‘Do you want kids?’ I’d asked her, for I had a secret that night. It was the reason I was sober.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that –’ I thought I saw a look of sadness flash across her face – ‘but never say never.’

  She closed her eyes, giving in to the lateness of the hour, and the soporific effects of the wine. I sat beside her, not ready for sleep yet, and slipped my hand underneath my top. I rested it on my belly and thought of the baby growing there. It was Ben. My mistake. Already loved.

  The tread of Laura’s feet on the stairs of my house made them creak cautiously, and she paused at the top and said, ‘Rachel?’

  ‘In here.’

  At the doorway to Ben’s room she said, ‘Do you want the light on?’

  ‘No.’

  She lay down beside me, put her arms around me in a hug that was far more familiar than Nicky’s.

  ‘I didn’t keep him safe,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault.’

  ‘Sshh,’ she said. ‘Don’t. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is getting him back.’

  Even in the gloaming I could see that her eyes were liquid. A tear escaped and ran down her cheek, pooling by her nose, a trail of black eyeliner in its wake.

  We lay there until the darkness outside was becoming a solid mass, leavened only by the glow of the streetlights and the geometric oddments of light that fell from people’s houses.

  We’d been told by Zhang to watch the news at 6 pm.

  At a quarter to six, I realised that I should have been at Ben’s parents’ evening, to discuss his report.

  Laura said, ‘Don’t worry about that. Don’t even think about it. You can go later in the week, once he’s back.’

  The first item on the news was a report on flooding in Bangladesh: thousands of people had died.

  Ben was the second item.

  DCI Fraser, who I’d met briefly, stood on the steps at Kenneth Steele House and appealed to the public to ‘help them with their inquiries’. ‘We’re extremely concerned about this young boy,’ she said, ‘and we would urge anybody who has any information about him, or his whereabouts, to get in touch with us.’

  She was immaculate in police uniform. Wildly curly grey hair and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that sat at the bottom of her nose, under sharp eyes, gave her the look of a bluestocking academic.

  ‘We are also requesting that the public do not organise searches of their own,’ she said. ‘Though we thank the members of the community who are offering their help.’

  A helpline number and the photograph of Ben that I’d given the police flashed up, filling the screen.

  It’s the strangest thing in the world to find that the story you are watching on TV is your own, to realise that you have entrusted a stranger with finding your child, and to then have to accept that you are as disconnected as anybody else watching, that you are essentially impotent. When Ben’s face had gone from the screen, Laura turned the TV off. I wanted to howl with sorrow, or to rage, but I did neither, because my hands shook and my stomach was turning, threatening to disgorge the tea I’d been sipping, the tiny morsels of toast I’d forced myself to swallow at the behest of my sister.

  The call about the press conference came later that evening. The police wanted me to appear in front of the cameras the next morning, to read out a statement appealing for help in finding Ben. They would send a car for me.

  ‘I can’t leave the house,’ I said. ‘What if he comes home?’

  Laura said, ‘I’ll stay here. You’ve got to go. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘Should I stay?’ said Nicky. ‘I could stay.’

  Both of them looked at me, wanting me to decide.

  ‘Nicky should come with me,’ I said.

  Laura was my best friend but Nicky was Ben’s aunt, our only family.

  ‘She’s right,’ Laura said. ‘You should be there.’ She looked at me. ‘And it can only be good if you appear on TV. People will care more about Ben. They really will. I’ll come over in the morning before you leave, and I won’t leave the house, not even for a minute. Not until you’re back. I promise.’

  Laura told my sister that she should choose an outfit for me to wear, that I should be as presentable as possible. She said it was important, even if it felt trivial to think about it at a time like this. She looked closely at the gash on my forehead, and I winced when she touched the edge of it.

  ‘I don’t think you can put make-up on it, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Nicky said. ‘It’s too raw.’

  Laura peered at it. I could see her eyes following its trajectory across my forehead. ‘Let’s see how it looks in the morning,’ she said.

  ‘Could we cover it with a dressing?’ Nicky asked.

  ‘No. A dressing will look ugly on TV, and it’ll obscure her face. Worst case, we leave it as it is. It’s not that noticeable.’

  We all knew that wasn’t true.

  In the kitchen, after Laura had gone, with a promise to return first thing in the morning, Nicky said, ‘Do you trust her? I’m not sure she should be here on her own.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s one of them.’ She gestured towards the front door, the pack of journalists lingering outside, whose voices we’d heard rising and swelling throughout the evening, breaking into laughter now and then.

  ‘She’s not that kind of journalist,’ I said. ‘She writes for gossip magazines, about make-up. It’s fluff, bullshit. It’s not news.’

  ‘They’re all the same breed.’

  ‘She’s my friend. My best friend.’

  ‘Fine. If you trust her then that’s fine, isn’t it?’

  ‘I do trust her. I can’t believe you’d say such a thing.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  The kettle was noisily reaching boiling point. Nicky leaned against the counter and lapsed into a thousand-yard stare, but I knew her and I knew that behind it her mind was turning. For the first time, it occurred to me to ask about her family.

  ‘How are the girls?’

  Her attention snapped back to me, a funny look. Guilt, perhaps, swiftly disguised, because she had four daughters safe at home while I was missing my only child.

  ‘Will you tell them?’ I asked.

  ‘I think it’ll be impossible to avoid. With it on the TV, and in all the papers.’

  ‘Do they need you to be with them? Don’t you need to go home?’

  ‘No,’ she said it firmly. ‘My place is with you right now. They’ll be fine.’ She closed the matter by turning her back on me to make tea with concise, measured movements.

  After we went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. All night I kept vigil in Ben’s room. I left the curtains open, and lay in his bed, letting my eyes run over the contours of his belongings. Books, toys and other stuff, collected and arranged by Ben on his shelves, had the stillness of museum exhibits. I sat up, wrapped his duvet around me, and stared into the shadows in the corners of his room, and then moved my gaze outside.

  I watched a fox l
eap the fence into my neighbour’s garden and then slink around, nose to the ground, before finding something it could eat and devouring it, gulping it down in a way that was fast and primitive and ugly. When it was done, it ran its tongue over its chops, savouring, before disappearing into the night.

  I felt the various textures of my fear: shivery, visceral, tight, pounding, in turn or all at once. I only fell asleep once, in the small hours, and woke to a sensation of being choked, gasping for air, pushing bedding away from me as if it were hostile, or venomous, and then finding my sister standing in the room with fear on her face saying, ‘Rachel, are you OK? Rachel!’

  After that we sat together until it was morning, as if it was just the two of us left in the world.

  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 behaviour, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.

  FM: What I’d like to start with today is a discussion of your relationship with DC Zhang.

  JC: There’s not much to say.

  FM: You were seeing each other when the Benedict Finch case started?

  JC: Yes.

  FM: How long had your relationship been going on?

  JC: About four months.

  FM: And were things going well?

  JC: They were, yes. I thought they were.

  FM: But you kept the relationship secret from work?

  JC: I didn’t want gossip.

  FM: Were you embarrassed about the relationship?

  JC: No! God no. Anyone would have been proud to go out with Emma.