What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  “John!” I screamed.

  I ran to the door. Glass crunched underfoot. From one end of the street footfalls rang out, the sound echoing. I saw John and, just ahead of him, another figure, both running as fast as they could. They were moving shadows and, in an instant, they’d disappeared around the corner.

  The street stretched away from me, dark and wet, the glow from the streetlamps looking three-dimensional in the rain, orbs of orange fluorescence. I stood in a shard of white light that spilled out of my house and fell around me, making the slick wet surface of the pavement gleam blackly. Opposite, a neighbor opened his front door just a crack.

  “Help,” I said. “Help us.”

  From the corner the men had disappeared around, I heard a scuffle, a thud, a cry of pain, and then I began to run too.

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

  We’re getting to the point in our process where I would like to see some real progress from DI Clemo. He’s still very closed emotionally, and our time is running out.

  FM: I’m so sorry about Emma.

  JC: Don’t be.

  FM: That must have been an extremely difficult situation for you.

  JC: It didn’t help.

  FM: Do we know why she did it?

  JC: I know now, but I didn’t then. It was partly because she just couldn’t cope with the role. That was my fault, I know it was, I fucked up. But that wasn’t the only reason. It was because of something that happened to her . . .

  FM: Take your time.

  JC: Sorry.

  FM: There’s no need to be sorry. You don’t need to tell me now. I’m curious about whether either of you tried to contact each other that night?

  JC: No. We didn’t. I made a choice—my loyalty was to the investigation.

  FM: That’s a very selfless choice.

  JC: Is it?

  FM: I think so. Others might have protected their own interests more.

  JC: I protected my position in the investigation.

  FM: But the personal cost to you was extremely high.

  He tries to answer this, but he can’t seem to find the words. He’s done well so far today and I don’t want this subject to become taboo, so I change tack.

  FM: Tell me what happened that afternoon once you turned your mind back to the investigation.

  JC: Well, that’s the thing. First thing was, I called Simon Forbes, Nicky Forbes’s husband, and asked him to contact me to arrange an interview. But after I did that, we got a break that we didn’t expect. That evening the boys got to the end of the CCTV checks and turned up something significant.

  FM: Which was?

  JC: They traced one of the cars that crossed the bridge about an hour before Ben’s abduction. It was registered to Lucas Grantham, Ben’s teaching assistant.

  FM: I understood that he had an alibi.

  JC: He did, but a piece of evidence like that is enough to make you take a much closer look at an alibi.

  FM: And Nicola Forbes?

  JC: Still a person of interest, but you don’t argue with CCTV. And we had the schoolbook evidence too.

  FM: I felt as if you didn’t put much store in the schoolbook.

  JC:Not on its own. I thought we needed to be careful to understand that it only widened an already considerable pool of people who could have known about the dog walks. But in the context of the CCTV discovery it was much more significant.

  It gives him satisfaction to say that. He is born for this job, I think. But I have another question.

  FM: DI Clemo, did you rest at all that night?

  JC: I did go home, yes. I knew I couldn’t pull another all-nighter.

  FM: And did you get some sleep?

  This question makes him edgy.

  FM: Were you able to sleep?

  He doesn’t answer.

  FM: Were you thinking of Emma?

  JC: I might have been.

  FM: You suffered a very traumatic loss that day. You lost a relationship with somebody you had extremely strong feelings for.

  JC: It was nothing compared to what Benedict Finch might have been going through.

  FM: That doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant. Would you say this time might have been the start of the insomnia that plagues you now?

  JC: I don’t want to talk about it.

  FM: I believe we have to talk about this, or we can’t make progress.

  JC: It’s not relevant.

  FM: I believe it is. Think about it. I’d like to discuss it at our next session.

  JC: Fine.

  He coaxes his lips up into a smile for me, but the look in his eyes is far from happy. I can see that he’s just being polite and I have to remind myself that that is, after all, progress. The problem is, it’s too slow.

  RACHEL

  It was John who had cried out in pain. I found him on the corner of the street, fallen, his head smashed open against the side of the curb, his face damaged too, his ear pulpy. The amount of blood on his face and beneath him was sickening. It was matted in his hair, sticky and dark on the pavement, and it soaked into my knees and covered my hands as I knelt beside him.

  He was unconscious; eyes glassy. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it against his head, trying to stem the blood flow. I screamed over and over again for help.

  When the paramedics came they moved quickly and worked with a quiet urgency that frightened me. There was no joking, and no smiling. Uniformed police officers arrived too. They lent me a phone to ring Katrina, and I told her and then handed the phone to one of the paramedics, who instructed her to meet them at A & E at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

  When they were finally ready to move John, they rolled him carefully onto a stretcher and eased it into the ambulance, one of them seated in the back beside his inert form. It was shocking, that, the absence of him. That, and the amount of blood.

  “Will he be all right?” I asked.

  “Head injuries are very serious,” they told me. “Unpredictable. You did well to call us so quickly.” There were no reassurances.

  Part of me didn’t want to let him go on his own, but the police knew Katrina was meeting him at the hospital and they wanted to take a statement from me. As the ambulance disappeared into the night underneath its pulsing halo of blue light, I walked back down the street. A uniformed officer accompanied me. Two police cars were still parked at drunken angles, blocking off the scene.

  In the house, they took my statement. More officers arrived and took photographs, and then they put the brick in a plastic bag and took it away. They helped me clean up the glass while somebody they’d called boarded up my window. They said they’d station somebody outside the house for the rest of the night.

  One thing the police all agreed on, and they even had a laugh about it, was that it was ironic that nobody from the press had been there to witness the incident. The three journalists and one photographer who’d had the stamina to stake out the house overnight had wandered down the road to get food.

  They’d reappeared, kebabs in hand, shreds of iceberg lettuce falling from them, as the ambulance doors had been slammed shut and John had been driven away.

  It was the only thing to be grateful for.

  I slept in the front bedroom that night, in my own bed, wanting to know that the police car they’d stationed there for the night was just outside, wanting the security of that. In case I had to shout out. Bang on the window. In case I heard somebody creep into my house, wanting to do me harm.

  I took Ben’s duvet and pillow from his bed and brought them with me. I stripped away my own bedding, piling it on the floor, and arranged Ben’s stuff carefully on my bed, with his nunny, and his Baggy Bear.

 
I listened all night for the sound of footfalls again, and I lay rigid when voices loomed out of the darkness. They were the usual Saturday night revelers returning home, but their shouts and their drunken laughter sounded hostile to me now. Every noise I heard that night was laced with menace.

  JIM

  It was Emma who I thought of all the way home. I thought of telling her about the CCTV, that grainy image of Lucas Grantham driving across the bridge in a blue Peugeot 305, his bike on a rack on the back. I thought of driving to her flat and holding her, trying to find a way forward. I felt my exhaustion drug me, dull my senses and my reactions, addle my brain. I felt like part of me was missing.

  I went to bed after midnight. I’d treated myself to a packet of cigarettes, a consolation prize for the demise of the best relationship I’d ever had, and I sucked on one after the other, the smoke hitting my lungs like a wallop, making them ache. I drank most of a pot of coffee far too late. I felt like I should keep working, scouring Lucas Grantham’s background, but my concentration was shot to pieces and so I got under my covers and tasted the bitter residue of the fags mixed with toothpaste on my tongue and thought about the CCTV and what it meant, and thought about what Emma might be doing.

  It wasn’t her that got into my head for the rest of that night, though.

  When I finally shut my eyes and tried to sleep, my brain had a different plan.

  It pulled me back to my past, and it did it swiftly, like an ocean current that’s merciless and strong. It took me back to my childhood, where it had a memory to replay for me, a videotape of my past that it had dug out of the back of a drawer where I’d shoved it, long ago, hoping to forget.

  When the memory starts I’m on the landing at my parents’ house, looking through the banisters. I’m eight years old, exactly the same age as Benedict Finch. I’m at home, and it’s well past my bedtime.

  Down below, the hallway is dark because it’s night and it’s hard to see, but when the front door opens I know it’s my sister, Becky, because of the way she closes it ever so softly, trying not to make a sound. She’s wearing a party dress, which looked pretty when she went out earlier, but now it’s a mess and her tights have got a big rip on one leg. Her eyes look horrible, like she’s been crying black tears.

  She yelps when she realizes my dad’s standing in the hall opposite her. He’s wearing his day clothes and holding a cigarette that glows red. Becky doesn’t move.

  “What did you see?” Dad asks her. His face is in shadows.

  She shakes her head in a tight way, says, “Nothing.”

  “Don’t muck me about, Rebecca.”

  A sob comes from her; it makes her body buckle. “I saw the girl,” she says. “And I saw you.”

  “You shouldn’t have been there,” he says.

  “She was hurt, but you didn’t care.” Becky chokes out her words. “You gave her to that man, I saw you do it, she was begging, she was crying, and you did nothing, you let it happen. They shoved her in the car. I wasn’t born yesterday, Dad!”

  She tries to lift her head and look at him all proud, like she usually is, but instead her back slides down the wall so she’s on the floor. Dad crouches in front of her.

  “Keep your voice down,” he says to her, “or you’ll wake your mum.” He takes her chin between his fingers and wrenches her head up so she’s looking at him.

  I don’t know what to do. I want to look away but I can’t stop watching. I want to stop them both from arguing. I don’t want him to hurt her.

  I see a big china dog on a shelf beside me. It belongs to my mum. She loves that dog. She likes the smooth, nubbly texture of its ears. I pick it up. I don’t want to smash my mum’s china dog and I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I’m desperate to distract Dad and Becky, to stop the thing that’s happening. I throw it, as hard as I can, but it hits the top of the banister and so it smashes right by me and rains shards of china around my feet as well as down onto my dad and Becky below. I see this as if it’s in slow motion.

  Becky screams and I do too, and then my mum comes from her room and turns on the landing light. It freezes the three of us: Becky, my dad, and me. Mum’s wearing just her nightie, long sleeves, hem brushing the carpet, soft fabric, and she just stands there really quiet for a second, then she says to Becky, “Go to bed, love,” and Becky runs up the stairs past us. My dad comes up after her fast, two steps at a time, and before I realize what’s happening his hand is on my arm and it feels so strong and my bones feel like brittle sticks, but my mum is calm, and she says, “Mick, give him to me, he’s hurt. Look, Mick, he’s cut himself on the broken china. Mick . . . Please . . .”

  I don’t remember any further than that. Just as if it were a dream, my mind cut the memory there, at the point when it felt like the stress of it was nipping unbearably hard at the edges of me. And then it replayed, even though I was desperate to sleep, and I felt as if tiredness was collapsing my veins.

  And I knew what it was telling me. It was telling me that people aren’t always what they seem, and it was telling me to fear for Benedict.

  And both of those things made me break out in sweat, even though the night was cold and the duvet was too thin to stop the chill from creeping in around me, and there was no extra body in my bed to keep me warm.

  But, worst of all, it compounded both my guilt that we hadn’t found him yet and my fear for what could be happening to him at that very moment.

  Deep into the small hours of the morning, I felt as if I was coming undone.

  DAY 8

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2012

  The Prolonged Investigation: This phase in the investigative process occurs when it becomes apparent the child will not be quickly located, most immediate leads have been exhausted . . . While some observers might view this stage as one of passively waiting for new information to emerge, in reality, it presents an opportunity for law enforcement to restructure a logical, consistent, and tenacious investigative plan eventually leading to the recovery of the child and arrest of the abductor.

  —Preston Findlay and Robert G. Lowery Jr. (eds.), “Missing and Abducted Children: A Law-Enforcement Guide to Case Investigation and Program Management,” fourth edition, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, OJJDP Report, 2011

  Researchers reported that abductors seldom “stalk” their victim. However, they are usually very skilled at manipulating and luring children. Those lures commonly involve requests for assistance, to find a lost pet, to claim an emergency, calling the victim by name, posing as an authority figure or soliciting the victim by internet computer chats.

  —Marlene L. Dalley and Jenna Ruscoe, “The Abduction of Children by Strangers in Canada: Nature and Scope,” National Missing Child Services, National Police Services, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 2003

  Email

  To: Corinne Fraser

  Cc: Giles Martyn ; Bryan Doughty ; James Clemo

  From: Janie Green

  October 28, 2012 at 08:13

  OPERATION HUCKLEBERRY—WIBF BLOG UPDATE

  Morning, Corinne

  Bryan and I have spoken about developments relating to the WIBF blog this morning—much of which he’s asked me not to refer to directly in email—so we’ll speak about that. However, I can say that activity continues on the WIBF blog, in that last night a post appeared suggesting police incompetency. In spite of that we are confident that what we discovered yesterday has taken the sting out of its tail so that while it remains unpleasant and accusatory, no further privileged information was made public.

  As of this morning, the blog owner has been contacted by ourselves by email and has been asked to take down the blog. We reminded the blog owner of contempt of court and other legal issues and made it clear that we would take action against them if necessary. We’ve not yet received a response, and we are not overly hopeful of their agreement, because the blog has a rapidly growing number of
followers. Best-case scenario might be that the knowledge that we are monitoring extremely closely at least keeps the content somewhat under control, while we look into tracing the identity of the owner from the email address (apparently this could be complicated depending on how smart they’ve been at covering their tracks). However, now that the blog lacks a source of confidential information about the investigation, Bryan, Giles, and I all feel that it shouldn’t be a worry to the extent that it was, even if it remains vindictive and aggressive, which, as you’ll see below, seems to be the tone of much of the media this weekend. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted.

  Roundup of this morning’s press coverage relating to Operation Huckleberry to follow. The supplements are all over it—double spreads, etc.—usual mixture of sensible and scurrilous, some editorial and thought pieces too, and Rachel Jenner in particular is still a target.

  Looking forward, I’m hopeful that with the blog out of the running or at least under control, we might be able to get some more positive material out there to reinforce our efforts and encourage people to come forward.

  Janie Green

  Press Officer, Avon and Somerset Constabulary

  RACHEL

  When dawn came there was no respite from the grip of my nighttime fears, because it was Sunday.

  One week since Ben went missing.

  A lifetime of loss in one week.

  And still no news.

  I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, as I brushed my teeth with slow, ineffective strokes, and I didn’t recognize myself.

  The police ordered a taxi to take me to the hospital. They promised that a squad car would remain outside the house. They promised me that they would protect me.

  The police asked the taxi to collect me from the back of my house so the driver wouldn’t see the press and work out who I was. The driver was an older man, wearing a Sikh turban, with a white beard and white eyebrows. I slunk into the backseat behind him.

  “BRI is it?” he asked.

  “Yes please.”

  “Do you mind which route?”

  “No.”

  On the passenger seat beside him was a newspaper, opened out, and I could see a photograph of Ben. He wanted to talk about it.