Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  ‘The shoes are named,’ I said. ‘With his initials, under the tongue.’

  Through the plastic I managed to pull up the tongue of the shoe. Underneath it were the letters ‘BF’. The ink had bled into the fabric around it.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man. He had white hair and a darker grey moustache and eyebrows, and red, pockmarked skin. He took the bag from me, though I didn’t want to give it back to him.

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ I said.

  ‘We’re doing our very best to find him,’ the man replied, and the compassion in his voice robbed me of any shreds of composure that I might have had left.

  An ugly fear was growing in me like a tumour; it was an idea that I hadn’t wanted to contemplate. John hugged me, tightly. He knew what I was thinking because he was thinking it too.

  ‘No!’ I shouted and it was the sound of a wild animal, an ululation, an uttering that a mother might make if she saw her offspring being dragged away by a predator.

  JIM

  The morning after Benedict Finch went missing I woke up early, like I always do. I’ve got a reliable body clock. I never need to set an alarm, although I do, just in case. You don’t want to oversleep. I started the day the way I always do: a cup of good black coffee, made properly in my Bialetti. I drank it standing in my kitchen.

  My flat is on the top floor of a tall Georgian building in Clifton. It’s the best area in Bristol, and the flat’s got amazing views because it’s on the side of a steep hill. The front overlooks a big garden, which is nice, but out the back it’s better because I can see a proper slice of the city. I’ve got Brandon Hill opposite, dotted with trees, Cabot Tower on its summit, a couple of Georgian and Victorian terraces below. Just out of sight are modern office buildings and shops, but you can see a bit of Jacob’s Wells Road below, leading steeply downhill to the harbour, where you can go for a night out or a weekend walk. I can’t see the water from my flat, but I can sense it, and gulls often circle and cry out, diving past my windows.

  Until I started going out with Emma I didn’t know that this city was built on sea trade that docked there for hundreds of years: sugar, tobacco, paper, slaves. She told me how a lot of human suffering made the wealth that built Bristol, and a lot of men gambled lives and fortunes on that. Emma was an army brat, and the reason she was so well informed was that her dad made her learn a history of every new place they moved her to, and they moved a lot, so she was in the habit of it.

  Once she told me about the slavery, I couldn’t get it out of my mind and then I realised how much of the city’s noisy, nervy history is in your face, especially where I live. You’ve got the Wills Memorial Building, pride of the university, towering over the top of Park Street: built on tobacco profits. The Georgian House, perfectly preserved, and a very nice bit of real estate: sugar and slaves. Both of them are less than a quarter of a mile from my flat, and I could name more.

  I think about it sometimes because I don’t think cities change their character too much; even after hundreds of years it’s still there as an undercurrent. Now, when I look out of the window each morning, and watch Bristol wake up beneath me, its messy, complicated past is right there as a little bit of a jittery feeling in my bones.

  I’d slept well the night before even though it was obvious that there’d been some serious weather overnight. It was still dark when I finished my coffee, and the flat felt cold and draughty. Outside, rain was pelting down and the tips of the trees were getting pushed and pulled in all sorts of directions. A plastic shopping bag was blown up from the street below and went on a crazy dance over the treetops before it got snagged.

  Before I got out the board to iron my shirt, I brought Emma a cup of tea. She was still in bed. She always got up a bit later than me.

  She was lying in a mess of bedding and hair. She wasn’t a neat sleeper. It was a contrast to the controlled and purposeful way she lived the rest of her life, and one of the rare occasions I was able to glimpse her with her guard down. I felt privileged to be close enough to her to see it.

  ‘Hello,’ she said when I put the tea down.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked her.

  ‘Mmm. How about you?’ She blinked softly, sleepily. Then she stretched and rubbed her eyes, her movements languid. Emma didn’t rush things. She was watchful and clever, and poised, a cocktail of characteristics that I found addictive, especially when mixed with her beauty. Emma turned heads. I was a lucky man.

  ‘Solid eight hours,’ I said. I got back into bed beside her. It was warm and comfortable and I couldn’t resist it. Monday morning could wait a few minutes. Emma nestled into my shoulder.

  ‘I could stay here all day,’ she said.

  ‘Me too.’

  She draped an arm across my chest and I watched her tea going cold and saw the face of my clock count nine minutes before I forced myself to leave the gentle rise and fall of her sleepy breathing. As I pulled the cover away, she roused herself and pulled my face to hers and we kissed. ‘I’ve got to get up,’ I said.

  ‘Boring,’ she replied, but I knew that if I hadn’t said it, she would have. Emma was always punctual. She smiled, as if to acknowledge my thought, and then she sat up and reached for her tea, grimacing at the first tepid gulp.

  I put the ironing board up in front of the kitchen window and watched the red and white lights of the commuter cars coming into the city as I did my shirt.

  ‘You cycling in?’ Emma asked when she appeared in her work clothes, hair smoothed and tamed into a thick ponytail.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Trying to build up your celery legs?’ she said. She loved to tease. This wasn’t a side of her she readily showed people either. It made me smile.

  ‘You love my celery legs,’ I said. ‘You should just admit it. You driving in then?’

  She was wearing a business suit, fitted and shapely, and a pair of low heels. She had bright eyes, and a quick smile that morning. She was ready to take on her day.

  ‘That’s correct, Detective Inspector Clemo, an excellent deduction. See you later.’

  Emma and I travelled separately to work. Police officers are allowed to have relationships with each other, it’s not forbidden, but the reality is that it can be frowned upon, because it could complicate things if you end up on a case together. It was my suggestion that we keep our relationship secret for now. We’d only been together for a few months, and I figured what we did in our spare time was our business. Emma agreed. She said she wasn’t bothered if it was secret or not. She was easy like that.

  First I heard of Benedict Finch was when I was cycling in. I have a portable digital radio that I listen to when I ride. By the time I left the flat the wind and rain had eased up and, as I dropped down Jacob’s Wells Road towards the waterfront, I enjoyed the feel of the acceleration on the steep downhill and skirted round the water that had pooled around the backed-up drains.

  I barely had to pedal when I hit the flat beside the harbour, and, as I was cruising past the cathedral, I caught a 07.30 news update on Radio Bristol. It said that an eight-year-old boy called Benedict Finch had gone missing in Leigh Woods. It happened the previous afternoon while he was out on a dog walk with his mum. Police and mountain teams were looking for him. They were worried.

  The city centre proper was starting to get sticky with early Monday morning traffic, but I made good time, and I hit Feeder Road at 07.40 and cycled alongside the canal. The water level was high, the surface pocked with drizzle. A fisherman sat hunched on the bank beside the road, shrouded in waterproofs.

  Overhead, traffic roared across the stained concrete flyover, oppressively low, a grubby landmark that greeted me every day on my arrival at work. Behind it daylight was emerging, a slate grey sky with low, racing clouds that were purple above and yellow below. It was a poisonous sky: the death throes of last night’s weather. I remember thinking that it wasn’t a good night for a small boy to be missing. Not a good night at all.

  RACHEL

  Inspecto
r Miller said that because they’d found the clothing the ‘game had changed’ and they needed to ‘intensify their operation’. He described the woods as ‘a scene’ and said it was a CID case now. What he avoided saying explicitly was what we all knew. Ben wasn’t lost; he’d been taken.

  A stolen child is every parent’s worst nightmare, because the first thing you ask yourself is, ‘Who would take a child?’ The answers are all profoundly disturbing. I slipped into a state of shock. John did too. The faces of the uniformed police around us were grim and some averted their eyes, a show of respect that was especially unnerving.

  WPC Banks guided John and me into her car and drove us to the CID headquarters. At the end of the long lane that led from the car park to the main road, photographers and journalists had already gathered, and they thrust their faces and their camera lenses up against the car windows, trying to talk to us, take photographs of us. We recoiled from the noise, and the flashlights. We drew away from the windows and into each other. John clutched my hand.

  It was a terrible journey. Coming away from the woods felt like an admission that we wouldn’t find Ben; that we were prepared to leave him behind. Within minutes we’d entered the outskirts of the city, and were sucked into its road systems. Busy dual carriageways carried us past new and old industrial buildings, into dense traffic. In the centre the River Avon appeared, parallel to the road, murky water flowing strongly while we lurched to a stop at every light. Plant life clung to its banks, tough and grubby.

  My thoughts refused to work coherently and I was gripped by terror, which felt as if it was hollowing me out. My mind couldn’t face the present, so it burrowed into the past, looking for distraction, or perhaps solace, looking for anything that wasn’t this reality. I felt John’s cold fingers clutching mine and I remembered the first time he’d held my hand, as if that would somehow make things right.

  It happened the week after we’d met for the first time at a hospital function. John was an exhausted junior doctor, wearing their standard uniform of oxford shirt and chinos, complete with tired sags in the fabric after a long shift. I was a nursing student, there for the free sandwiches and glass of warm white wine. His dark sandy hair fell over his forehead rakishly, and he had a lovely symmetrical, fine-featured face that was handsome in an old-fashioned way. His eyes were a piercing blue, intense and captivating. Ben was lucky enough to inherit those eyes.

  Our first conversation was about music, and on that evening, when I was tired of socialising and a little tired of life, it was a tonic. John spoke in a way that was earnest, but gentle too. He asked me if I knew that Bristol had one of the finest concert halls in the country. It was small, he said, in a beautiful neo-classical nineteenth-century church building, and the acoustics were spectacularly good.

  He had a lack of pretension when he spoke that I liked instantly. His inbuilt, unquestioning respect for culture transported me back to conversations overheard at my Aunt Esther’s cottage, the place I grew up in, and suddenly I felt as if my life had been drifting for too long, and that it was time to stop.

  A week later, we sat in St George’s concert hall, waiting for the concert to begin. It’s a fine, elegant building, built on the side of lovely, leafy Brandon Hill, just a stone’s throw from the shops on Park Street. It’s opposite the Georgian House, which Ben has since visited on a school trip, but at the time I hadn’t known either place existed.

  It was a full house. Tickets had been hard to come by. John was animated, full of information. He pointed out the place where a German firebomb fell through the roof one night in 1942, when the building was still in use as a church, and landed on the altar unexploded.

  He talked about himself too. He told me that he used to play the violin, that his mother had been a concert-class performer, and his home had been full of music as a child. He told me that work was going well, and that he’d just decided to specialise in general paediatric surgery. I got a sense that his interest in all things was intense, thoughtful and absorbing, whether it was music, architecture, or the small bodies and lives of his patients. He had a rare sensitivity.

  The concert began. A violinist, dressed in black, stood centre stage and, with utmost care, he freed the first few notes from his instrument, and they hung crisply in the air around us. He played with an elegance that captivated and seduced, and I felt John relax beside me. When his hand brushed mine and he didn’t move it away, it seemed to give me balance. When he gently held my fingers in his, it felt like a counterpoint to the emotional intensity of the music, and also an encouragement to let myself feel it, become absorbed by it.

  This memory: the music, the feelings, flashed through my mind in the car. It was as if I wanted to rewind my life back to that point, and start it over again, to hold on to that perfect moment, so that what came afterwards wouldn’t turn to crap, wouldn’t lead us to now. Which was impossible, of course, because the memory was gone as soon as it arrived. The reality was that instead of comforting me, the cold grip of John’s fingers felt desperate and futile, just as mine must have done to him.

  The traffic stayed slow as we travelled through the city centre: taillights and signposts, concrete shapes and scud clouds under a granite sky. The River Avon disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of the road, brown and choppy still, a shopping trolley abandoned on the far bank. I kept my eye on the water, tracking its progress into the city, because I couldn’t stand to look at the people outside the car, all the people who were having an ordinary Monday at the start of an ordinary week, the people who knew where their children were.

  The police station was a large concrete cuboid building, Brutalist in style. It was three storeys high, with tall rectangular windows set into each level at regular intervals, like enlarged arrow slits in a castle wall. In typography from around half a century ago, the sign announcing where we’d arrived sat on a thin concrete rectangle above the doors and stated simply: KENNETH STEELE HOUSE.

  The inside of the building was startlingly different. It was state of the art, open plan, busy and slick. We were asked to wait on a set of low-slung sofas by a reception area. Nobody gave us a second glance. I went to the loo. I barely recognised myself in the mirror. I was gaunt, white, a spectre. There was mud on my face, and the gash across my forehead was livid and crusty with blood that had strands of my hair caught in it. I looked dirty and unkempt. I tried to clean myself up but it wasn’t very effective.

  When I got back to reception, John was still on the sofa, elbows on his knees, head hanging. I took my place beside him. A uniformed officer with a pink face and thinning grey hair came out from behind the front desk and approached us across the wide foyer.

  ‘It won’t be long,’ he said. ‘There’s somebody on their way down to fetch you just now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ John said.

  JIM

  Kenneth Steele House is where I work. It’s the CID headquarters for Avon and Somerset Constabulary. It’s not a pretty building from the outside, and neither is its location. It’s on a strip of trade and industrial estates behind Temple Meads Station in St Philip’s Marsh. It’s a flat inner city area with an isolated, wasteland feel because there’s no housing in the vicinity, and its boundaries are the canal and the River Avon. There’s CCTV everywhere and a fair bit of barbed wire.

  I was at my desk by 08.05. I noticed the atmosphere straight away. There was none of the usual Monday morning chatter, only a tension about the place that you get when a big case is in. Mark Bennett – same rank as me but about a hundred years older – popped up from behind the partition that separated his desk from mine before I’d even turned on my PC. ‘Scotch Bonnet wants to see you,’ he said. ‘Soon as.’

  Bennett had a bald shiny head, a thick fleshy neck and the eyes of a bull terrier. He looked like a bruiser. Truth was, he was anything but. We’d gone out for a drink once, when I first arrived in Avon and Somerset, and he told me that he’d never gone as far or as fast as he’d wanted to in CID. Then he told me that h
e thought his wife didn’t love him any more. I’d got out of there as fast as I could. You don’t want that mindset to infect you. ‘Scotch Bonnet’ was Bennett’s nickname for our DCI, Corinne Fraser. It was because she was Scottish, and female, and could be fiery. It wasn’t especially clever or funny. Nobody else used it.

  Fraser was in her office. ‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Close the door. Take a seat.’

  She was immaculately turned out as usual in a sharp business suit. She was eccentric looking, with frizzy grey hair that didn’t suit her short fringe and puffed out over her ears, but she also had an attractive, delicate face, and implacable grey eyes that could look right through you, or pin you to a wall. I sat down opposite her. She didn’t waste time:

  ‘As of zero eight hundred hours this morning I’ve got an eight-year-old boy who has almost certainly been abducted from Leigh Woods. We’ve got multiple scenes already, the weather’s been against us, and we’ve lost more than twelve hours since he first disappeared. We’re going to have the press trying to crawl up our arses before lunchtime. I’m going to need a deputy SIO to take on a lot of responsibility. Are you up to it?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  I felt blood rush into my cheeks. It was what I’d hoped for: a high-profile case, a senior position. I’d been in CID in Avon and Somerset for three years, putting in the hours, proving myself, waiting for this moment. There were DIs above me in the pecking order, older, just as ambitious. Mark Bennett a case in point. They could have got the role, but it was my time, my chance. Did I think of turning it down? No. Did I think it was going to be a minefield? Maybe. But the words that were doing cartwheels in my head were these: bring it on. Bring. It. On.