Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  ‘Now listen to me, Jim. You do no such thing. You go home and you sleep. You look like shit.’ She paused, let me absorb the insult, and then she asked, ‘How are you feeling about Emma?’

  That blindsided me. Totally. It took me a moment to pull together a reply.

  ‘Disappointed, of course. But I’m focused on moving forward, boss.’

  ‘Don’t fuck about with me; you know what I’m asking. I’m not blind.’

  ‘Honest truth, boss, I am focused on moving forward, but I’m gutted too. Of course I am.’

  ‘I’m only going to ask you this once, do you think it’s affecting your judgement?’

  ‘Not at all. Not one bit.’

  She leaned back in her chair, her mind working it through, before she replied. ‘OK. So you go first thing to interview Nicky Forbes, because I don’t want to leave any stone unturned. Get back here as quickly as you can afterwards. We couldn’t be more stretched for resources so I shouldn’t really be letting my deputy go.’

  ‘Boss—’

  ‘I’m indulging you here, Jim, so don’t push it. I’ve got a list of interviews as long as my arm that relate to Lucas Grantham.’

  ‘I just wanted to know if I would go alone or not.’

  ‘I can’t send anybody else. I need every body I can get.’

  She took off her glasses, which made her look suddenly vulnerable, and she rubbed her eyes, which were reddened around the rims. As it was late, and her guard seemed to be down just a little, I asked her something: ‘Boss, do you think he’s still alive?’

  ‘You know the statistics as well I do. We just have to do what we can.’

  Back at my flat, I looked through the case files, poring over every detail, memorising the events that took place when Nicky Forbes was a girl, rereading all the notes I took after Simon Forbes came in.

  It was a jubilant phone call to Fraser that I made at midnight.

  ‘I found a hole in Nicola Forbes’s alibi. Last Sunday she said she was attending a food festival. She was definitely there in the morning, but nobody can confirm that they saw her between 13.30 and 22.00 when her husband maintains that she Skyped him from the cottage.’

  ‘I thought we’d confirmed her alibi?’

  ‘People said they thought they’d seen her, but it’s a really big event. Tons of stalls selling produce, cookery demonstrations, that kind of thing, hundreds of folks attending and although she’s quite well known nobody can actually guarantee that they saw her during the afternoon. They all say she was definitely there that day, and a friend says that they had lunch together, but after 13.30 none of it’s reliable.’

  ‘Good work, Jim,’ she said. ‘Take Woodley with you in the morning.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t spare anybody.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  I didn’t have the energy to go to my bed. I lay on my sofa, the window cracked open even though it was freezing outside, and I smoked and tried to fight away the memories of Emma that could upset the perfect balance I felt: the poised moment when a case is about to come together one way or another, and when you’re right in it.

  I checked my phone. Woodley and I had been texting and mailing, finalising directions and details for the morning.

  What I didn’t expect to find in my inbox was an email from Emma. Its title: ‘Sorry’.

  Email

  To: Jim Clemo

  From: Emma Zhang

  28 October 2012 at 23.39

  SORRY

  Dear Jim

  I hope you read this because I owe you an explanation. If you are reading it: thank you.

  I should never have done what I did. It was unforgivable. I should never have contributed to the blog and I should never have expected you to help me. It was a terrible position to put you in.

  When I walked past you in the incident room this morning it was the hardest moment of my life because all I wanted to do was rewind the clock, and not do what I did, so we could still be together. When I was with you I felt happy, and protected, and I threw all that away for the worst and most stupid of reasons.

  I owe you an explanation for why I did it, and here it is. It’s not an excuse:

  When I was six years old my dad went outside to mow the lawn and asked me to look after my little sister. She was two. Her name was Celia. We were playing in my bedroom. I left her for just a few minutes to go to the loo. When I came back I couldn’t find her. I called my dad. He found her wedged down the side of my bed. She’d got stuck, and suffocated. She died before we got her out.

  My dad blamed me for her death, but I was just a child too. What he did wasn’t responsible because he was the adult in charge, he shouldn’t have left her in my care. I didn’t know you could die like that.

  But he was tough like that, always, you’ve no idea how tough he was. He never let me be a child. I miss Celia every day.

  When I heard what Rachel Jenner did to Ben, how she let him run ahead, I wanted to punish her, because you shouldn’t leave kids unsupervised. They can come to harm. I thought it meant that she was a person who didn’t deserve to have a child, that she didn’t love him properly. I thought she was like my dad. I realised I was wrong when I saw the photographs she’d taken of him. They were so beautiful, I felt as though they would break my heart there and then.

  I didn’t mean to do what I did. The blog sucked me in. It was a kind of compulsion, so hard to resist.

  I don’t know if that’s because the FLO role was too much for me. Perhaps I’m not good at bearing other people’s problems. It freaks me out. I should have been stronger, more professional, and I should have pulled out of the investigation, but I didn’t, and then it got so hard to fight the urge to contribute to the blog because I felt so angry. I try hard to quell it, but I carry a lot of rage with me about what happened to Celia and to me, and I confused my history, and my anger at my dad, with Rachel’s present, and I wanted to punish her for his sins.

  I try not to let it show, because I’m usually very good at pleasing people, and making everything right, but I’m not always a well person, and even when I work hard to keep it under control, my past messes with my mind sometimes.

  I behaved in an arrogant and disgusting way, and that’s something I’ll have to live with, just like I’ll have to live with losing my career, and I deserve that.

  I know we can’t be together any more, but I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me just a little, or try to understand.

  I’ve told all of this to Internal Affairs. I’m in the process now. They’ve suspended me and I’m under investigation. I’m not allowed to communicate with you so please delete this after you’ve read it.

  Know this though, Jim. I love you. Our times together were amazing and I’ll miss you always. So thank you.

  Emma x

  When I finished reading I hit ‘delete’. But then I went into my trash folder and moved the email back into my inbox.

  In one of my kitchen cupboards I found a bottle of whisky, a gift from my parents when I moved in, so far untouched. Normally, I’m not much of a drinker, but that night I opened it. I didn’t bother with mixers. I drank a large quantity of it, much more quickly than I should have done. It was enough to make the room tilt before I passed out.

  DAY 9

  MONDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2012

  …children have difficulty determining who will harm them and who will not. For this reason, the onus is on parents to screen those persons supervising and caring for their child, and to educate their children on how to stay and play safe.

  Dalley, Marlene L and Ruscoe, Jenna, ‘The Abduction of Children by Strangers in Canada: Nature and Scope’, National Missing Children’s Services, National Police Service, Canadian Mounted Police, December 2003

  Hope is essential to your survival.

  ‘When Your Child Is Missing: A Family Survival Guide’, Missing Kids USA Parental Guide, US Department of Justice, OJJDP Report

>   RACHEL

  I logged on to Furry Football countless times that night. I was hoping to encounter Ben again, of course I was. You would have done the same thing.

  But he wasn’t there. Not anywhere. I trawled the online game until I knew every inch of it, every server, every area you could play in. Overnight, avatars with foreign-sounding names came and went, and I could see the ebb and flow of the time zones as they logged on and off: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of children online from all over the world. But not Ben. I never encountered him again. Not once.

  The hours searching didn’t breed any doubt in my mind, though, because my conviction that it had been Ben just grew and grew, that feeling so powerfully strong it was as if he’d actually flitted past me in his red anorak, met my eye for a second, and then gone again, just out of reach of my outstretched hand.

  I wanted to tell John, I thought he of all people would understand, would feel the enormity of this fleeting contact with our child.

  I called the hospital in the hope that he might have improved, that he might even be conscious. A voice that was compassionate and tired-sounding told me that there was no change in his condition. He was stable, that’s all she could confirm, she said.

  I imagined him as I’d seen him the night before, the absence of him, his mind curled up tight beneath the bleeding and the swelling and the trauma. Did a very small part of me, just for a moment, envy him that oblivion? Maybe. Was it because I was finding it harder than ever to exist? Probably.

  But two things kept my mind engaged that night, kept me alert, jittering. Two things nagged at me with the persistence of a noose slowly tightening around your neck.

  If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then why would Ben have disappeared so abruptly from Furry Football? If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then who was looking after him while Lucas Grantham was in custody?

  I passed my phone from hand to hand, my fingerprints oily on its screen. Silent, it felt to me a useless object, its very existence mocking both my reliance on it, and the isolation that bred that reliance.

  I wanted a phone call from the police to let me know that they were searching properties, that they were knocking down doors and smashing windows as they looked for Ben.

  I didn’t want process. I didn’t want twenty-four hours of questioning. Them and Lucas Grantham in a room, with the tea, and the biscuits, and then after that no charges brought and all that time Ben could be somewhere with nobody to care for him, nobody to bring him food, or water, or he could be somewhere with somebody else, somebody who made him log off Furry Football late at night, in a hurry.

  But my phone remained mute.

  Silently, in its depths, I knew that emails would be pinging in: media requests, contact from friends and families we knew, those who were too scared to speak to me, people who were most content monitoring me from afar.

  But the phone itself didn’t ring. The police didn’t call me. Nobody did.

  And in that silence those two thoughts went round, and round, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I felt as if I was no longer the wild-eyed fighter, the scrapper, who stood up at the press conference and dared Ben’s abductor, who looked down a lens and into every corner, trying to find an assailant to challenge.

  Instead, my nerves were scraped so raw that they lent me the perfect purity of feeling of the addict, ecstatic in the midst of a high, so those two questions loomed large and unanswered in my psyche, like a high-pitched note that will not stop, and, when morning came, I acted as if in a trance.

  There were no voices in my head telling me not to do it, when I called a taxi, advising me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to turn up unannounced at the police station again. There was just an impulse to make my voice heard, to tell them what I knew, and what I feared. I wanted to communicate.

  The morning was bitterly cold and every outside surface was shiny with rain that had fallen in the night and was close to freezing. It still fell, in fat, intermittent droplets that chilled my hands as I opened the taxi door. ‘Kenneth Steele House,’ I said to the driver, ‘Feeder Road.’

  The driver must have just come on shift; he was too preoccupied with trying to clear condensation from his window to talk to me. I watched the moisture disappear from the windscreen incrementally as the fans worked: two spreading ovals of clarity, revealing the city in sharp, unflattering lines. It was 7.45 am. Darkness was beginning to lift from the city and the Monday morning traffic was already starting to build, so we travelled in fits and starts, dirty spray showering the pavement whenever the driver accelerated. Red lights blocked our progress at every junction, and he braked late and hard as we approached them. The city felt grimy and hopeless.

  At Kenneth Steele House the receptionist recognised me instantly, launching herself out from behind her desk and intercepting me with the purpose of a sheepdog, who can see that one of his ratty, stupid sheep is about to go astray.

  ‘Are they expecting you, Ms Jenner?’ she asked, hand on my elbow, guiding me to the sofa in the waiting area, away from the stream of Monday morning arrivals.

  ‘I need to speak to somebody on the investigation,’ I said. I tried to hold my head up straight, make my voice as steady as possible. A hank of my hair fell across my face and I brushed it away, noticing only then that it was unbrushed and unwashed.

  They didn’t take any chances this time. A scene in reception was obviously not going to be on the cards. It took only ten minutes for me to get an audience with DCI Fraser.

  I don’t even remember which particular characterless room we met in, but I do remember DCI Fraser. I hadn’t seen her for a week in the flesh, though I’d watched her updating the press on TV. She looked like she’d aged, but I supposed that I did too. Her skin was greyer than before, the crow’s feet by her eyes more pronounced. She’d brought a black coffee in with her and she drank it in three gulps.

  ‘Mrs Jenner, I know you’re aware that we currently have somebody in custody,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this morning I’ve already begun a string of interviews which I hope will bring us closer to being sure that we have the right man in custody and therefore to locating Ben.’

  She was spelling it out to me. It was Policework 101.

  ‘OK, so that is my priority this morning, but I wanted to see you personally because I know how difficult it is for you to wait at home for news.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I did appreciate it. I could tell that she was being kinder to me than she need have been.

  ‘But I would request that you try to be patient, and do just that. We did get your message last night, and we are acting on it. We’ve done some research this morning, we’ve already talked to one of Ben’s friends, and it seems that the boys who play Furry Football often share identities and passwords.’

  ‘I know it was him,’ I said. The knowledge was an itch that wouldn’t go away and her words, however kind, were failing to act as a salve.

  ‘I realise that the idea is terribly attractive, Ms Jenner. Believe me, it’s a tantalising thought that we might be able to communicate with Ben, but you must realise that there’s no way we can confirm that it’s him, and I don’t want you to raise your hopes too much.’

  ‘Did any of his friends admit that it was them?’

  ‘Nobody has so far, but you must remember that children aren’t always truthful. Not because they want to lie, but sometimes they’re scared. And it could have been another friend, we’ve only been able to talk to one boy so far this morning.’

  ‘I’m his mother. I know it was him. He had a new player in his team, a player that he was talking about wanting on Sunday morning. It was a giraffe.’

  She ran her index finger up and down a deep line between her eyebrows.

  ‘Could another child have got the new player?’

  ‘It was Ben. He’s alive, DCI Fraser. I know he is.’

  ‘God knows, Ms Jenner, I hope he is too, and I am taking this seriously. It is very useful info
rmation, of course it is, and I will not forget it, I am listening to you. But, it is important that we view it in the context of what else is happening in the investigation at this moment.’

  She shifted towards me, her eyes penetrating and sincere.

  ‘Believe me, I shall do everything in my power to return Ben to you safe and sound. I understand that waiting for news must be desperately difficult for you, but we are working around the clock here to make progress, and the bottom line is, every moment we spend with you is time taken away from the focus of the investigation.’

  Her words, finally, got through to me, for what worse sin could I commit than to divert their energies from the investigation?

  I began to cry again and I wondered if that would ever stop happening, that public leaking of emotions. I didn’t apologise for it any more, it was just something that happened to me that other people had to get used to, like your stomach rumbling, or breaking into a sweat.

  ‘I didn’t mean to waste your time,’ I said.

  She took my hand in hers and the warmth of her hand surprised and disarmed me. ‘You’re absolutely not wasting my time. You’re informing me, and the more information I have, the better. But I can’t just go out there and search every house in Bristol where somebody logs on to Furry Football. It’s impossible. At this stage in the investigation my quickest route to finding Ben is via whoever took him, using all the information I have at my disposal, and this information is logged in my noggin now. I won’t forget it, and nor will my team. We’ll have it in mind whenever we interview somebody or whenever we make a decision. Do you understand that?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Your information is valuable.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll arrange for somebody to drive you home.’

  ‘Ben’s alive,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said, ‘as soon as there’s any news. Wait at home.’