Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  John and Katrina’s house was only ten minutes’ drive away, on a quiet suburban street where everybody had driveways and two cars parked on them at the weekend. The house was semi-detached, art deco in style, painted white, and had long, linear windows along the front of it, which would normally give a view into both their sitting room and office. When we arrived the curtains were drawn in both rooms, and there were journalists lounging on their low front wall like teenagers at a bus stop. They leaped to their feet at the sight of us.

  John opened the door and ushered us in quickly. He looked dishevelled, and he was unshaven.

  ‘In the kitchen,’ he said.

  ‘John,’ I said, before we stepped out of the hallway. ‘I’m so sorry about the press conference, so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to…⁠’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘At least you didn’t just cry like a baby.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me that John might be berating himself for his own behaviour. I’d thought mine so much worse.

  ‘Don’t be ashamed,’ I said, but he was already on his way into the kitchen.

  Before I joined him I couldn’t help noticing the parquet floor in the hallway, and remembered what Ben had said about it: ‘There’s a shiny floor, but I’m not allowed to skid on it.’

  Katrina stood in the kitchen beside a small round table. Like John, she appeared haggard and undone somehow. She was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, a cardigan over it. She looked very young. She glanced at John as if expecting him to play host and when he didn’t she asked, ‘Can I get anything for you? Would you like a cup of coffee? Or water? Or tea?’

  It was awkward being in their house, I can’t deny it, but together we made a flyer, and in some ways it was a relief to have something constructive to concentrate on.

  Ben’s photo was prominent in our design, as was the phone number to contact. The word ‘MISSING’ ran along the top of the page. The plan was to print out one hundred copies there and then and Katrina said she would get more done at a local print shop. She and Nicky discussed how and where we should distribute them.

  When we were done, Nicky said, ‘John, Katrina, do you mind if I ask, can either of you think of anybody who might have done this? Anybody at all?’

  John’s reply was curt. ‘I’ve told the police everything I can think of.’

  ‘Are you sure you can’t think of anything odd at all, people behaving strangely around him, anything like that?’

  Katrina said, ‘We’ve gone round and round in circles talking about this, haven’t we, John?’

  He had his elbows on the table, his hands flat on its surface. It was almost a position of surrender. He nodded at her. ‘We have,’ he said. ‘And I can’t think of anything.’ His eyes were so bloodshot they looked painful.

  ‘It’s the teaching assistant I wonder about,’ said Katrina.

  ‘He only started this term,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Katrina. ‘That’s what bugs me. We don’t know who he is. He’s an unknown quantity.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’ I asked John.

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘Not once, he’s never out in the playground.’

  John shrugged. ‘The police will be talking to everybody,’ he said. ‘They’ve assured me of that. I don’t see what we can do.’

  ‘Anybody else you’ve thought of?’ Nicky asked.

  John had had enough. ‘Don’t you think I haven’t spent every second of every day going through this in my mind? I can’t think of anything else that would help. God knows I wish I could!’

  He slammed the flat of his hand down on the table and it juddered.

  ‘Of course,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  In the silence that followed, Katrina stood up and began tidying up mugs. My eyes roved round, taking in John’s new home. Their kitchen was white and shiny, the granite surfaces immaculate. The only sign of disorder in the room was a large pin board, covered with stuff. I stood up and went to look at it, lured over there by one image in particular. It was a drawing, made by Ben.

  The drawing was of three adults and a child. Each person was named underneath: Mummy, John, Katrina and Ben. We all stood equidistant from each other. Ben stood between John and me. ‘My family’ he’d written above it and on each of our faces was a smile.

  And in that moment I realised that Ben had managed to do what I hadn’t done, couldn’t do: he’d moved on. I began to cry.

  I felt an arm around my shoulders. It was Katrina, and what she said next made me realise for the first time that she had a heart, and feelings of her own.

  ‘Would you like to see his room?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes.’

  She took me upstairs. On the landing, the first door we came to had three colourful wooden letters on it that spelled out: ‘BEN’. She opened it and I stepped inside. ‘Take as long as you like,’ she said. She went back downstairs.

  The room had been beautifully decorated. It was light, and fresh, with pale walls and striped bedlinen. The bed was made up with care. The duvet had been smoothed and tucked in and somebody had carefully arranged three or four soft toys against the pillows, which were plumped up and welcoming.

  The walls were hung with two framed pictures of Tintin book covers, Ben’s favourite ones, and a Minecraft poster. There was a child’s desk in the corner, and on it a stack of scrap paper, a container full of colouring pens and pencils and a lamp, bright red, in the shape of an elephant. A half-finished drawing lay waiting to be completed beside the iPad that John had given me the day before he left us, but which had ended up belonging to Ben. It had felt impossible for me to deny him that, in the absence of his father, and he often left it at John and Katrina’s house so that he didn’t have to negotiate with them over computer use, because there was only one in the house.

  A large rug covered the floor and there was an electric railway set assembled on it, a train with carriages attached, ready to depart. A light shade, patterned like the moon, hung in the centre of the room, and from it, carefully suspended on a thread, one above the other, hung three home-made paper aeroplanes.

  I sat on the bed for a long time, until John appeared in the doorway.

  ‘This room is lovely.’ I wanted him to know that.

  ‘Katrina planned everything with Ben and she painted it herself.’

  There was no reproach in his voice, which he might have been entitled to, just a dreadful sadness.

  I could see that an extraordinary amount of care and attention had gone into the creation of the room. It was painful to me to hear that Katrina had done the work, but not nearly as painful as the fact that Ben had never once described it to me.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said and I saw suddenly how I’d taken everything Ben told me about his life at his dad’s and twisted it into a sordid, unhappy shape.

  No skidding on the floor had meant that Ben wasn’t allowed to play, and that wasn’t the end of it. Every time Ben had come here I’d festered at home, and questioned him afterwards, mining him for information that I could use to paint their marriage, and especially Katrina, in a negative light. I’d never allowed for the fact that Ben might have been happy here, that John and Katrina might have made an effort to make things nice for him, that she had, in fact, welcomed him with open arms.

  Everything my son had told me, I’d taken and made into something unpleasant or sad, until he’d simply stopped telling me things. He was a sensitive child. He knew what upset me.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to John, and he said, ‘I am too.’

  I heard in his voice the self-blame that was my companion too.

  ‘I keep thinking about how scared he must be, without us,’ I said.

  ‘He misses you even when he’s here, so God knows how he’s feeling.’

  ‘Do you think he knows we’re looking for him?’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’

  They were words of reassurance, but John’s eyes told a di
fferent story. I read in them a quality and depth of despair that matched my own, and that frightened me even more.

  When we got home, Nicky and I decided to park the car a few streets away and see if we could approach the house via the alleyway that ran along the back, avoiding the press pack. It was a narrow passage, not wide enough for a car, and occupied mostly by rubbish bins and foxes. It separated the ends of our gardens from the allotments behind. From it, you could directly access my garden studio, where I did my photography. Once in the studio, it was only a few metres across the garden into the house. Our garden wasn’t big. There was just enough room for a small football net and a Swingball set.

  Our gamble paid off because the journalists hadn’t bothered to camp out there. As we squelched along, avoiding puddles, we saw it at the same time. On the fence panel facing my studio door somebody had been busy with a can of spray paint. In scorching orange letters, neon bright against the dull grey slats of wood, dripping in places because it was so fresh, two words had been sprayed: ‘BAD MOTHER’.

  When I sank on to the sodden, stony ground in front of the panel of defaced fencing, grit digging into my hands and my knees, Nicky knelt down beside me and coaxed me up. She took me indoors and phoned Zhang.

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’ I asked Nicky, but she just shook her head, and lifted her hands in a gesture of Who knows?

  It boiled over: the fear, and the anger, the frustration and the terrible impotence I felt too. I was being persecuted. It was personal, and that was terrifying. And it wasn’t just in cyberspace; it had come to visit me at home.

  Some of my anger was directed at myself, because of Katrina, because I’d got it so wrong about her and John, because I’d been so bitter and so stupid that I’d forced Ben to lie to me. At eight years old, he’d felt he had to protect me from the fact that they had a nice life together, that they cared for him.

  But my anger was mostly directed at whoever painted those words, because it made me feel very, very afraid.

  In my kitchen, in front of Nicky, I threw a plate across the room and it shattered into pieces against the wall. Another followed it, and then a mug, some cutlery. I threw everything as hard as I could and then I looked for more things to throw.

  ‘Don’t!’ shouted Nicky. ‘Don’t do this. Please!’

  She manhandled me. She took hold of me, gripping my upper arms. She sat me down on one of the kitchen chairs and she knelt on the floor in front of me.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked her. ‘What’s happening to him?’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Nicky again, her voice quieter this time, and her face close to mine. ‘Please don’t.’

  I stopped resisting her, and I sobbed until my throat was sore and my eyes were swollen almost shut.

  JIM

  Fraser and I had a pre-meet before the whole team got together for the evening briefing. She was looking at her computer screen as I took a seat.

  ‘Woodley’s bringing in our friend Edward Fount of fantasy world fame in the morning,’ she said. ‘And Christopher Fellowes, the forensic chappie, has sent me a profile that we can use when we’re considering the non-family abduction option. You’ll not be surprised to hear that it’s an almost perfect description of Mr Fount.’

  ‘I still think he’s not our man.’

  She took off her reading glasses to study me. ‘I know that, I take your point, but I can’t dismiss him on a hunch. This isn’t an episode of Columbo.’

  In spite of everything, that made me smile. Columbo had been a favourite childhood show.

  Fraser went on. ‘Can we run through who else we’re looking at? Rachel Jenner?’

  ‘Chris emailed me his thoughts on her.’

  ‘He’s been a busy boy today, which is good, because he’s expensive enough. He should have copied me in on that. Can I see it?’

  I got the email up on my laptop, winced a little in anticipation of her reading the first paragraph.

  Email

  From: Christopher Fellowes

  To: James Clemo

  24 October 2012 at 15:13

  Re: Rachel Jenner

  Jim

  Thanks for your mail – good to hear from you.

  I’ve had a chance to watch the footage from the press conference. Would it be terribly wrong of me to say WHAT A COLOSSAL BALLS-UP? I hope it’s not your neck that’s on the line for that one, but somebody’s ought to be. We’d worked up a good script for her. What a waste.

  You wanted me to pull together some thoughts about Rachel Jenner as a potential suspect. Seeing as we don’t yet know whether this is an abduction, or a murder, I think the way forward for now is to keep in mind that these are very different crimes which throw up differing motives and therefore profiles. I’ve detailed these for you:

  Family abduction

  In my view this is only a small possibility in this case, because in the vast majority of family abductions a mother taking a child would keep the child with her, and both would travel somewhere where they felt the father would not be able to reach them or harm them. However, it is worth looking into whether other family members might have helped her to conceal the child, in order to keep him away from his father. Family abduction by a parent almost always takes place after a divorce where custody arrangements are disputed.

  NB I am not excluding the possibility that another family member (i.e. somebody who is not a parent) could have taken Benedict, for motives of his or her own that don’t relate to the ones I’ve outlined above. That would be a separate scenario entirely.

  Filicide

  Much more complicated, this. Generally there are a few different motives, not all of which are relevant to this case. The two most likely to be relevant to Benedict Finch’s disappearance, in my view, are as follows:

  Accidental filicide/battering – usually an impulsive act characterised by a loss of temper; often occurs in context of psychosocial stress and lack of support. Did she lose her temper with him in the woods? Or perhaps before they left home and hid his body somewhere en route?

  Mentally ill filicide – complex this one. Filicide often seems like a rational act to these women; older children more likely to be victims. A large percentage of these women are already known to social services or mental health services and have pre-existing diagnoses that could include melancholia, manic depression, schizophrenia or assorted character disorders.

  Munchausen’s Syndrome also worth considering here, in which case the family would certainly already be known to medical services, though probably unlikely if Dad is a medic.

  Worth mentioning also two other categories:

  Mercy killing – a murder committed out of love, usually to spare a child suffering, which could be caused by disease or perhaps the potential loss of a mother if the mother herself is contemplating suicide. It’s not unusual for a parent or parents to take their own life simultaneously in this scenario.

  Spouse revenge filicide – the killing of a child in ‘revenge’ for something, often infidelity. The aim is to ‘get back’ at the spouse.

  Please bear in mind that these are first thoughts only but they should give you something to go on. I’d be on the lookout for custody disputes, previously existing psychological or psychiatric issues; previous involvement with social services; mother’s predisposition to suicide; revenge impulses pertaining to her husband (did he cheat on her?); and check out her support network. No doubt you’ve done many of those things already.

  I would need to come and meet Rachel Jenner if you want to progress these any further in terms of getting a detailed psychological picture of her. On the basis of what I saw in the press conference, she certainly possesses the capacity for uncontrolled outbursts of anger and a potential impulse for revenge (i.e. her threats to Ben’s abductor).

  Of course none of this rules out the possibility that the perpetrator of this crime (whether it be abduction or murder) is a non-family member – which DI Fraser and I have spoken ab
out. I’m currently formally writing up my thoughts on that and will send directly to DI Fraser and cc you in on.

  Please give me a call if you’d like to discuss.

  Best, Chris

  Dr Christopher J Fellowes

  Senior Lecturer in Psychology

  University of Cambridge

  Fellow of Jesus College

  ‘Forward it to me please, Jim,’ she said once she’d read it. ‘There’s some good stuff in there. I’ll edit and pass on to the rest of the team. We should also take note of his point about the wider family.’

  ‘The sister interests me, but that’s all the wider family there seems to be. There’s also a friend, Laura Saville, who Emma’s met at the house.’

  ‘Has she been interviewed?’

  ‘Not yet, but she’s a priority. And on top of that the school have sent over a very long list of people that Ben could have had contact with.’

  ‘Anybody stand out?’

  ‘I met with the head teacher and Ben’s class teacher. They were very obviously stressed out, but trying to be helpful. The Head’s a little defensive I’d say, it’s obviously a nightmare for him, especially because he’s only been in the job since the beginning of this school year. They raised one or two concerns about Rachel Jenner that you already know about.’

  ‘You mean the broken limb that the child had?’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t see any evidence of wrongdoing there. I do think she’s been depressed though, that’s pretty clear, and it might be the most significant thing from our point of view.’

  ‘Teacher?’

  ‘Late twenties I’d say, eager to assist, perhaps not the sharpest tool in the box, but seems perfectly nice. They’re behaving like people struggling to cope in a difficult situation.’

  ‘Understandably.’

  ‘The only one who rang a few alarm bells was the teaching assistant.’

  ‘He’s got an alibi, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He does, the Head does and the teacher does, and they all check out.’

  ‘So what rings bells for you?’