What She Knew (25 page)

WEB PAGE—www.whereisbenedictfinch.wordpress.com

WHERE IS BENEDICT FINCH? For the curious…

NOTHING TO WATCH?

Posted at 05:03 by LazyDonkey, on Friday, October 26, 2012

This blog wants to recommend a television program to you:

Go to: http://www.itv.com/jeremykyle

You could try:

Episode 198:

I can’t trust you with our son! You spend all your time texting instead of watching him.

Or you might enjoy this:

Episode 237:

Admit you’re a bad mom and you can’t look after your children.

Just a thought. Up to you.

Oh, and one more thing:

Did you know Benedict Finch fractured his arm last year, and his mother didn’t get it treated? He must have been in a lot of pain. Guess she wasn’t bothered. Or perhaps she was just busy doing something else.

RACHEL

First thing in the morning, facing each other across my kitchen table in our dressing gowns, our eye contact patchy, the air between us oscillating with tension, Nicky told me that she was going to leave.

“I think we probably both need some time,” she said. It was a quiet statement, and a very controlled one, but it was also damp with the undercurrent of what we’d been through the day before.

“Just for a day or two, then I’ll come back. Will you be OK do you think?”

I had to clear my throat before replying in order to moderate my own tone and maintain the perfect neutrality of our exchange. The alternative was shouting, or weeping, or accusation, hastily spat out. After spending the night imagining darkly, now the sheer reality and familiarity of my sister’s presence and her own attempt at composure kept me in check.

“OK,” I said. “That’s fine.”

“It’s the girls,” she said, turning away, slotting bread into the toaster.

“Of course you should go.” And I did feel a twinge of guilt then, because Nicky’s girls needed her too.

Steam billowed up from the kettle and settled in a moist coating on the front of one of my kitchen cabinets. Skittle dragged his cast laboriously across the floor and flopped heavily onto my feet. Nicky burned her toast and I watched her back as she took it to the sink and used a knife to scrape the black crumbs from it with sharp motions. They fell in a layer of coarse powder.

“Cook some more,” I said.

“I wanted to leave some for you.”

“It’s OK, I’ll have—” I started to say.

“You need to eat, Rachel!” It was an outburst, her composure splintering abruptly, and she dropped her toast and the knife into the sink and leaned heavily on her palms on the edge of it, so that her shoulders became sharp points on either side of her bowed head. She looked up at the window and the darkness outside meant that her reflection was razor sharp in the glass and our eyes met in that way. She was the first to lower her gaze.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. Can I show you something?”

It was an email that had come from America during the night. Via the Missing Kids website, Nicky had contacted another family whose child had been abducted and they’d replied to her, a message of support.

“Read it,” said Nicky. “They understand.”

She handed me her laptop. Two pages were up: one her blog, the other her email. I couldn’t help noticing that she’d updated her blog:

Dear Custard & Ketchup friends and followers,

This is a heartfelt request for you to please bear with me just for now. I’m sorry to say I need to take a short break from blogging for family reasons. I was hoping to keep you busy with some new Tasty Halloween Treats, but that hasn’t been possible. If you’re looking for Halloween ideas my post from last year is available still and you’ll find lots of fun stuff to make and decorate there. Next to come: Christmas Cheer! Watch this space, I’ll be back as soon as I can…

Nicky x

She saw me reading it. “Simon posted that. He updates it for me sometimes,” she said, and then, “I’m wondering whether we should do a web page for Ben. I could link to it from the blog.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my sister’s blog quite frequently, usually with some awe, especially at its mythologizing and professionalizing of family life. It was like a glossy food magazine, an enviable social diary. It was not my world.

I clicked on the email instead.

Email

From: Ivy Cooper

To: Nicola Forbes

October 25, 2012 at 23:13

Re: Ben

Dear Nicky

BRETT’S LEGACY “DO SOME GOOD”

This is a time of tremendous pain for you and your family. We are praying for Ben, and for your family.

Our son Brett was taken from us seven years ago, and since then we’ve been through things that we never thought we would have to experience. Before he was taken from us, one of Brett’s favorite things to say was, “Mom, let’s do some good,” and we decided to make this a choice for our future, so that we could offer some help to other families who find themselves in the same situation.

We made this decision five years ago, soon after Brett’s body was discovered, and…

I stopped reading. I looked at my sister. “What happened to Brett?” I said.

“Have you read it all? Read to the end, you must. They actually understand what it’s like and it’s such a relief, honestly, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. I’ve been struggling so much to find anyone out there who knows what—”

“What happened to him?” I had to know. I didn’t like the email. I didn’t want to be part of this club: a family of devastated families. I wasn’t ready for that. Ben was going to come back to me. I wasn’t going to be like them.

“It’s not relevant.”

“It’s relevant to me.”

“Brett died,” Nicky said. “Unfortunately.”

“How did he die?”

“Rachel.”

“How did he die?”

“He was murdered, by his abductor. But that’s not the point, and they would never have found out what happened to him if the family hadn’t worked really hard to get the police to pursue the case.”

“Ben’s coming back.”

“I hope he is, God knows I do, you know I do”—she was twisting a tea towel tight between her hands—“but we have to accept the possibility that he might not be back soon, that some harm might have come to him. It’s been six days.”

I couldn’t hear it. Not from Nicky. Not from anybody. Not now. Not ever.

“I’m going to see Ruth,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This wasn’t how I wanted this morning to go.”

JIM

When you work a case like this one, you long for a lead. When you get one, you’re all over it, and that’s how I felt about Nicola Forbes. I’d been ready to chase her to the end of the line.

What you don’t expect is for something else just as strong to turn up, because then it’s a bit like being in a shooting range, trying to decide what to aim at, what’s a decoy and what’s real. Friend or enemy? Where should your sights land?

You can’t always tell straightaway, but sometimes you are presented with a clear and immediate threat, and it’s obvious that you must respond to that.

That’s what happened on day six of the case. The letter arrived, and it changed the game completely.

It came in the morning post. Postmark BS7, addressed to Fraser directly, at Kenneth Steele House. Fraser’s secretary opened it. Her scream could be heard out in the corridor at the far end of the incident room, and she bolted out of her office.

Fraser pulled us in immediately. The letter was in an evidence bag by then, and the secretary was already having her fingers inked next door so we could eliminate her prints. She was shaking and tearful, an extreme reaction for somebody who regularly got to file crime scene photographs.

‘Jim,” Fraser said once we’d closed the door behind us. “Get John Finch in.”

Emma was there too. She didn’t look as though she’d slept. Under her makeup her skin was dull and strained. To anybody else she probably looked more or less her usual self—a tired version of herself, of course—but I could see a few extra small signs of disarray. Her hair wasn’t tied up as neatly as usual, and her shirt didn’t look fresh. You can do that if you want to know every inch of somebody better than you know yourself. I wanted to put my arm around her, ask her if she was coping, but I couldn’t of course. Not there, not then.

Emma’s phone rang just as Fraser finished filling us in. She glanced at it. “It’s Rachel Jenner, boss,” she said. “Should I tell her?”

“Nuh uh,” said Fraser. “Not a word, not yet.”

RACHEL

Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.

Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.

I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved themselves unreliable.

I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.

I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilized society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran ahead of me in the woods, then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be fundamentally good.

And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.

I looked at Zhang’s hand on the wheel, her knuckles white as she gripped it firmly at ten to two, and I realized that beyond my first impressions I hadn’t before thought about who she really was, or what she might be like.

“Do you have a family?” I asked her, as the car idled at a junction.

“I have a mum and dad,” she replied.

“I mean children of your own?” Though as I said it, I realized she was probably too young.

“No.” She shook her head. “I won’t have children for a while, if ever.”

“Oh. You know that already?”

“I do.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Because I’m not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s life yet.”

She said it so simply that it gave me a frisson of shock because I realized that she already knew what I was only just working out—that we should look very carefully indeed before we leap, or believe, or trust—and that this younger woman had recognized that before I did only made me feel more foolish.

I didn’t know how to respond so I fixated on what was around me. Outside, the sky was the kind of gray that looks perpetual and heavy, and the clothing of the people in the street was flattened against them by a strong wind. I retreated back into silence and the slow unfurling of the thoughts in my head, where I was starting to doubt everything I ever thought I’d known.

There was one consolation at that moment when everything weighed unbearably heavily and when suspicion was beginning to edge into every corner of my mind. It was that I was on my way to visit Ruth. I desperately wanted to see her because she was one of my favorite people in the world. Ever since Ben was a baby, she’d been a reassuring presence in my life, offering me gentle, unconditional support, and our friendship had grown alongside him.

Life hadn’t been easy for Ruth. To those who didn’t know her she would appear dignified, proud, and fragile, always chic in a uniform of dark clothes with a scarf neatly tied at her neck, a silky flash of color. As a young woman, she’d had the talent to be a concert violinist, but she’d also felt things so deeply that they could wound her.

Her violin playing had captivated John’s father. “I fell in love with her the first time I saw her play,” Nicholas Finch would proudly tell everyone, in his Brummy accent. In fact, most people who’d heard her play were entranced. She’d trained and performed on the instrument for years, but ultimately found public performance an intolerable pressure, and as a result, when she was in her twenties, shortly after marrying John’s father, she’d sunk deeply into the first of many bouts of depression that she suffered throughout her life.

I first met Ruth in early 2003, a good year for her. She and Nicholas were enjoying his retirement. After a long career as a GP, which had kept him working all hours, finally having him around had helped Ruth remain stable. They were planning to buy a small apartment in the Alps, and they’d taken a successful trip the previous year to Vienna, to see the buildings and neighborhoods that Ruth’s parents grew up in. Lotte and Walter Stern had been musicians too, both successful and well-respected performers before the war, but they’d become refugees, driven from Vienna after Kristallnacht, when Lotte Stern was heavily pregnant with her daughter.