Burnt Paper Sky (16 page)

She flicked the mirror back up brusquely.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I agree that he looks good for it on paper, but he couldn’t take his eyes off your legs in there, and your…⁠’ I felt shy suddenly.

‘My what, DI Clemo?’

‘Your shoes, your red shoes.’

‘Oh right. Well, for a moment there I thought you were going to say something else.’

Woodley snorted from the back seat and then tried to turn it into a cough.

‘So what’s your point, Jim?’

‘My point is that somebody interested in children is not usually interested in women, especially not in a fetishistic way. He couldn’t take his eyes off the red shoes. I was watching him.’

‘I still want him brought into the station. We can’t possibly rule him out because he looked at my shoes. You know that as well as I do. Woodley, I saw what you did at the end there. Very smart. When we bring him in, I want you to interview him and get to the bottom of his dirty little mind whichever way it bends.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ I could hear the sound of a grin in Woodley’s voice.

‘I’m not your “ma’am”,’ she said. ‘“Boss” will do. Right, come on, Jim, what are we waiting for?’

Halfway through the morning Nicky announced, ‘I’ve spoken to John. He wants us to go round to his house so we can agree together on a design for a “Missing” flyer, and print some there. He’s got a laser printer.’

I’d never been to John and Katrina’s new house. Not past the front door anyway. I’d spent plenty of time standing on the gravel outside when I’d dropped Ben off for the weekend.

‘Will Katrina be there?’

‘I expect so, yes, but at this point I think you need to think of her as another pair of hands. She wants to help and we need all the help we can get.’

I thought of the blog and the comments I’d read this morning.

‘Any port in a storm?’ I said.

‘Exactly!’ she said, and she smiled just a little.

It pleased Nicky when I said that because it’s what our Aunt Esther used to say. ‘You’d been through a storm,’ she would say if we ever discussed the circumstances that had led us to live with her. ‘A terrible storm, and I was your port.’

‘A safe haven,’ Nicky would say and Esther would agree.

Esther had taken us in after our parents’ death. She was our mother’s much older sister. She brought us to her house immediately after the accident that killed our parents and we never left after that. She sheltered us from gossip, which sometimes hung around us like a cloud of biting midges. She gave us the chance to have a childhood, or her version of one.

It wasn’t a usual upbringing, because Esther was a spinster, who’d always lived alone. She taught English Literature A level to the children of the local wealthy at a small private school and could quote a huge amount of poetry by heart. She also played bridge and had a passion for growing roses. She wore knee-length skirts and flat shoes, with simple cardigans, and had bobbed flyaway white hair that she clipped back with kirby grips. She kept gold-topped milk in the fridge, which the birds had invariably pecked at before she brought it in in the morning, so each lid had neat puncture marks in it when it arrived on the breakfast table.

I don’t think Esther was a naturally maternal figure. She was unaccustomed to young children apart from a regular annual visit she’d made to our family before our parents died, so when Nicky and I arrived suddenly in her life she treated us as miniature adults, and shared her passions with us. She surrounded us with art and music and books, she pointed out the possibility of beauty in life. Nicky drank this up as if it were nectar, and fell into Esther’s arms gratefully.

I was different. When I was growing up I always felt like the baby that I’d been when we arrived there, a bit of an addendum to their lives, too little to understand things properly, always in bed when the proper conversations took place. It was ironic, as I’d never known our mother or father, that I was the one who found it most difficult to accept Esther in her role
in loco parentis
, while Nicky, nine years old when we arrived, wouldn’t leave her side.

As a teenager I’d meanly thought that Esther was fusty, tweedy and better suited to another era, more like other people’s grandparents than their parents. I’d rejected her gentle offerings of culture and knowledge because they hadn’t immediately bolstered me, or given me an obvious direction or purpose. That came later in life, when I took up photography, when I sat beside John in St George’s concert hall and fell in love with him and with classical music, and then I regretted that I’d never thanked her for what she did for us before she died.

It was because things hadn’t always been easy when we were growing up that it pleased Nicky whenever I said a kind word about Esther. It pleased her immensely.

I agreed to go to John’s house. Laura came round to housesit because I still couldn’t stand to leave it empty. Just in case. Nicky and I had to fight through the journalists to get to Nicky’s car. They jostled us, shouted questions at us. We ignored them, but the questions hurt. They were aggressive, and accusatory. Some of the photographers ran alongside the car as we pulled away, lenses at the windows, snapping away at our white, scared faces.

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 different 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.