What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  His breathing faltered audibly and I heard the doctor step forward, but it settled again and the doctor contented himself with moving the oxygen mask closer to Ben’s mouth.

  I felt terrible, terrible sadness building in me, a feeling so powerful that it hurt, and it made my hands shake. I looked at the doctor, his eyes powerfully kind and his words steady: “Give him some time.”

  And he was right, because Ben stirred, and his eyes met mine again, and even though they seemed to slip out of focus, his lips moved and this time a word was audible on his outtake of air. “Mummy.” And tears began to roll slowly, silently down his cheeks.

  I took him in my arms, even though the doctor stepped forward as if to stop me, then thought better of it. I scooped Ben up, onto my lap, and I held his limp, small body close to mine and in return I thought I felt some strength in his arms, and then it was a firmer squeeze and he clung to me. He did that weakly, and wordlessly, but we stayed like that for so long that eventually the doctor had to pry him gently away.

  After the medical staff had laid him back down, they tidied him up, adjusted his cannula, and checked that he was properly connected to his machines. When they stepped away, Ben’s eyes met mine with more consciousness in them than they’d had before.

  And I smiled, because that was what I wanted from him most of all, a smile. It was the last thing I’d seen on his face before he left me in the woods, and I wanted to see it again. But my smile wasn’t answered, because his eyes moved away again, and the lids slid down over the tears that still fell, and he turned his head away from me.

  And here’s the thing: I wasn’t sure whether that was because he was exhausted and dangerously unwell, or because there were things deep inside his eyes that he didn’t want me to see.

  It was a beautiful reunion for me. It was. The feel of Ben’s arms around me was everything I’d dreamed of, every second he’d been away. But the other bits, his desperate physical condition, the sorrow that was deeply, soundlessly buried within him, and the way he dodged my gaze, I won’t deny it—this is supposed to be a truthful account after all—they were profoundly frightening.

  Did you want catharsis? So did I. But there was none. I’m sorry.

  EPILOGUE

  CHRISTMAS 2013—ONE YEAR,

  FIVE WEEKS AFTER

  WEB PAGE—www.twentyfour7news.co.uk/bristol—3:15 PM GMT Dec 11, 2013

  JOANNA MAY GUILTY OF BENEDICT FINCH ABDUCTION

  by Danny Deal

  Joanna May pleaded guilty to the abduction of 8-year-old Benedict Finch in front of Mr. Justice Evans at Bristol Crown Court today.

  The 27-year-old abducted Benedict Finch after becoming obsessed with having him for herself, it can now be revealed, after she discovered she was infertile.

  May was arrested and charged with the abduction after Benedict was discovered abandoned in Leigh Woods. She had been keeping him in the basement of her flat in Mortimer Crescent, Clifton, for nine days during October 2012.

  May had displayed symptoms of fantasist behavior in the past and shown an “unhealthy” interest in a friend’s baby.

  This information can now be reported after the judge, Mr. Justice Evans, lifted an order banning publication.

  May stared ahead and showed no sign of emotion during her time in court.

  The judge told May she had committed “a heinous and dreadful act that harmed in extreme ways the emotional and physical welfare of a vulnerable young child” and that the abduction had left Benedict’s family suffering “eight days of torturous uncertainty” and “unforgivable harassment and vilification by the media.”

  Julian Paget, QC prosecuting, described May as “calculating, manipulative, arrogant, and extremely dangerous.”

  Members of Benedict Finch’s family were in court to hear the verdict but showed little emotion and declined to comment.

  Sentencing will take place next week.

  286 comments and 7 people are discussing this article

  Simon Flynn

  This is a truly chilling case. Let’s hope she gets the sentence she deserves. My thoughts are with Benedict Finch’s family.

  Jean Moller

  She is a vile piece of scum. Hahahahahaha Joanna May, everyone inside prison will know what you did and there will be degradation heaped on you. I hope you’re never released. Pain to you.

  Anthony Smith

  Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  Samantha Singh

  Hopefully this will be able to bring some closure for her family. Thinking of them and poor little Benedict.

  Patricia Gumm

  For the sake of the family and for Ben we should be thankful that justice has been done. And we should spare a thought too for the other poor children who suffered her as a teacher without knowing the evil in her heart.

  Jasleen Harper

  Are we going to pay for her to wallow in prison with satellite tv and psychotherapy now? People like her should be put to work cleaning up after shit like them.

  Cliff Downs

  Jasleen, we shouldn’t use language like that out of respect for Ben and his family.

  Simon Flynn

  The news is a 24/7 monster. It devours all information and we feed it with our opinions, so we can’t be shy of expressing ourselves even if we don’t like the language other people use. It’s called free speech.

  Comments are now closed

  RACHEL

  A few weeks ago, somebody asked me if I thought Ben and I could have some closure once the trial was over. I was lost for words, truly; because the fact of it is that we might never have “closure.” If only life were that simple. There are some events and uncertainties that you take to the grave, and they threaten to tumble you every single step of the way.

  If closure is a search for answers, and an attempt to clear away ambiguity, then let me tell you how far we’ve got.

  Here’s what I know for sure:

  I know that in the woods that Sunday afternoon, my child willingly walked away with Joanna May, his hand in hers. He looked up into her eyes, he trusted her, and he believed what she told him.

  She took him to her car, after making him change into clothes that she provided him with. Skittle followed them. Joanna May hadn’t been prepared for that so she kicked the dog, to make him go away, and, in doing so, she broke his leg. Then she drove Ben away. She avoided routes where CCTV cameras lay in wait for her.

  Out of everything that happened to him in that week, Ben talks about her treatment of the dog most of all. His mind circles around it, trying to make sense of her cruelty. What bothers him most is that she made him leave Skittle there, in pain, whimpering on the ground. It was the first sign he had that she wasn’t a stable person.

  After that, I know very little for sure, except that it was Ben I met on Furry Football one week later. There is a void, a seven-day hole in his life between the two events.

  The evidence tells us a little more. The smashed laptop and bruising consistent with finger marks on Ben’s upper arm indicate that her anger at finding him playing the computer game pitched her into a state of mind dangerous enough that she drove him back to the woods and dragged him through the darkness back to the place where she first took him.

  She left him there, dressed only in his underwear and with a black bin bag to shield him from the rain. In doing so, she humiliated and frightened him and the exposure almost killed him.

  We know that once she’d returned home after that she booked a flight for late the following morning, and packed a suitcase, and placed her passport in a travel wallet, which she put in her bag.

  We also know that Lucas Grantham was her downfall, because the police phoned very early that morning to ask her in for an interview about him. She took a gamble, and went to Kenneth Steele House, not wanting to arouse suspicion, knowing she could still make her plane.

  Though she wasn’t to know that we would end up in a car together, and that she would make a little verbal slip, wh
ich would lead me to steal her keys.

  I imagine her standing on that broad sidewalk outside her home as DI Bennett and I drove away, rifling through her handbag for the keys to the flat, not finding them, and then replaying the moment in the car when her belongings fell to the floor, and most likely putting two and two together, or at least deciding that she couldn’t afford the time to retrieve them or to track down a spare set. As far as the police could tell, she made absolutely no attempt to enter the flat and gather her stuff before I got there, probably because she had her passport in her bag already. We know that she was in a cab to the airport only twenty minutes after DI Bennett and I dropped her off, so she didn’t dither. I like to think it was the moment when the hunter became the hunted, when her breath quickened, and she began to look over her shoulder.

  And that is the sum of all I know for sure.

  Here’s what I don’t know:

  Why she took him, or how she treated him.

  Why don’t I know that?

  Because Ben won’t speak of it.

  Why not?

  We don’t know. I guess that aside from the things he’s willing to say, there must be other things he can’t remember, things he’s confused about, or things he might be frightened of talking about.

  I think he doesn’t like the way the eyes and attention of everybody around him sharpen when he so much as mentions that room or Miss May. I think that makes him feel uncomfortable, and ashamed. He doesn’t want to be the center of attention; he would rather it all went away.

  So we have to be careful, because we don’t want to make things worse, damage him further, or send him into a shell where he doesn’t communicate at all. That can happen to children in his situation. I’ve read about it.

  And though I hate to say it, I do sometimes wonder if he’s trying to protect her with his silence. They did, after all, have a close bond before this happened.

  And why can’t we get the rest of what we need to know from Joanna May?

  Because she and Ben have something in common, beyond the eight days he spent in her home. What they have in common is that she refuses to speak about it as well. She has ever since her arrest. Her guilty plea has been her only word on the matter.

  Just when we need her to talk, she has decided to remain silent. As is her right.

  And so we speculate. We have built a story that seems to fit the scant evidence. And the story goes like this:

  In return for Ben’s trust, for the way he slipped his hand in hers so easily, Joanna May led him to a place where she incarcerated him against his will.

  I think she did it because she either loved Ben or she wanted to very much. It was a distorted, selfish love that was the product of a damaged mind, but I think it existed.

  I think that she formed a bond with him during the first year she taught him, and she began to want him for herself. Her diagnosis of infertility, which has emerged in the public domain now, was simultaneous with my divorce, with me asking her to help us support Ben, and I think that at this very vulnerable time in her life, when her urge to be a mother was strongest, she might have mistaken him for a child who wasn’t loved enough, or cared for enough, and thought that taking him could solve both her longing for a child and Ben’s sadness.

  That thought must have grown stronger for months until it was fully fledged, and formed into a careful plan, which she executed flawlessly one year ago on Sunday, October 21.

  Once she’d incarcerated him, I think she began a process of trying to make him believe that his family was bad for him and she was the right person to care for him.

  We don’t know what her long-term plans were, but Ben has hinted to us that she might have been planning a trip for them and I suspect she was going to take him away. I don’t know where, or how.

  The bedroom she made for him is testament to her desire to make his environment nice, to look after him well, and I actually think she meant to, even though it was in reality no more than a carefully decorated cell.

  But I think it went wrong, the reality of having him. I don’t think she anticipated how much he would miss home, or miss me, and his father and his stepmother, or his dog. I don’t think she expected him to be so desperately unhappy without us. She didn’t realize that he was already deeply loved, and that he loved so much in return.

  Those are the motives we attribute to her, the timeline we fabricate to explain things. And we continue to try to fill in more gaps.

  We speculate that Joanna May underestimated the tech savvy of a young boy. Why else would she have let him have access to a laptop? Was she tired of trying to entertain him down there, had she exhausted all other ideas? Did she think it was safe because it would be impossible for him to log on? How enraged was she when Ben found a WiFi signal down in that basement that didn’t need a password?

  Enraged enough to put his life in danger, and I think that was because it made her feel that she’d lost control, that she’d bitten off more than she could chew. Her solution? To take him back to the woods and abandon him there, then to come home and organize her exit.

  Is it because she really did love him that she didn’t take that final step and murder him at that point, to silence him forever? I think so, although the thought makes me recoil.

  To confirm our various hypotheses, we’ve all tried to coax more information out of Ben: therapists, doctors, psychiatrists, us. But for the most part he’s chosen silence, perhaps as a way of feeling in control. And we must accept his silence. We must content ourselves with our guesswork.

  I wish now that I’d valued more the words that tumbled freely out of him before he was taken. I wish I’d collected them and kept them safely in packages that I wrapped up carefully, secured with a ribbon, and stored in a safe place for the future. I wish I hadn’t been too distracted to listen to every word he said. I wish I hadn’t let him run ahead of me. There is so much that I wish, and all of it is pointless now. Beyond pointless.

  Ben is not the child he used to be. Trust is difficult for him, because he doesn’t understand why John and I didn’t find him earlier, or why the teacher he adored turned out to be somebody bad.

  He has pretty good attendance at school, considering, though it’s not uncommon for John or me to get a phone call to say that he’s unable to cope, again, that he’s gripped by a migraine so severe that he can’t open his eyes, again, and then we go to get him.

  Emotionally, his daily existence is volatile and unpredictable. He can be fine for days at a time, and then something sets him off balance. Then he can be desperately clingy, or angry, depending on the form his sadness takes. His emotions are powerful and visceral. Very, very occasionally he fights us, kicking and hitting. More often, he cannot last the night without waking and screaming in terror.

  When that happens, I run to him and lift him from his bed, and I bring him into bed with me, where we lie, eyes wide, bodies together, and I hold him to me and wait for his teeth to stop chattering, and watch carefully for the sheen of sweat on his brow that signals the fever that sometimes rises after these nightmares.

  I bring Skittle to sleep on the bed with us too, because the dog is the object of Ben’s most uncomplicated affections. I get pleasure from watching them play together, Ben’s gentleness with Skittle, and the dog’s adoration of him. When Ben goes to John’s house now, the dog goes with him. Her claws have made scratches all over the parquet floor, but nobody minds.

  And even when Ben and I lie together during those long nights, even though our hearts pump fast and in unison, I wonder if sometimes we remain a hundred miles apart, because his mind still crouches in the woods on his own, cold to the core, or perhaps in that basement, flinching as a laptop shatters against a wall, pieces falling around him, sensing the advance of a person who wants to drag him away, even though he’s covered his face with his hands, even though he cowers.

  These are my imaginings, for, as I said, Ben won’t speak of it.

  His silence torments me, because I want to make
him better, but it’s her silence that I truly loathe, for Ben can’t help it, but she is an adult and she knowingly withholds information that could help us to understand better what happened, and therefore to heal him more quickly, and that I cannot forgive her for.

  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.

  FM: I’ve read your account of what happened on the last day of the Benedict Finch investigation.

  He nods curtly.

  FM: I’m sorry that things went wrong for you that day.

  JC: That’s putting it mildly.

  FM: How have you been feeling lately?

  He’s moving a lot, he can’t settle. His gaze is shifting around the room. He’s expressing avoidance with every movement he makes. He doesn’t answer.

  FM: Can I be frank with you?

  JC: Please.

  FM: We have almost used up your allocation of sessions that CID is prepared to fund. You arrived late to the second to last session we had, and you didn’t turn up at all last week. I am concerned about your commitment to this process.

  JC: There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel much better, in my head, I mean.

  FM: That’s not good enough, DI Clemo. That judgment has to come from me.

  JC: I just said: I feel better.

  FM: Do you want to know what I think?

  I catch him off guard with this, and his reply is a little petulant.

  JC: Isn’t this supposed to be about what I think?

  FM: My professional assessment of the situation is that you avoided our last session because it’s getting painful for you to talk. Which means that this is exactly the point where you need to attend.

  He worries at his hairline with his fingertips. The signs of profound fatigue are written all over his face, and obvious to see in his body language too. You would not have to be a professional to spot these.