Burnt Paper Sky (29 page)

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 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 realises 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 banisters 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 realise 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.

When dawn came there was no respite from the grip of my night-time 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 recognise myself.

The police organised 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 didn’t see the press, and work out who I was. The driver was an older man, wearing a Sikh turban, white beard and white eyebrows. I slunk into the back seat 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.

‘You heard about this little boy then?’

‘Yes,’ I made myself say. I was desperate he shouldn’t recognise me. I pulled my scarf up around my chin, moved my hair so that it obscured my face.

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Yes it is.’ I pressed myself against the window, staring out as the taxi descended into the city. We were driving through deserted residential streets where the only sign of life was a mangy fox panting sickly in the shelter of an evergreen hedge.

‘My wife, she says the mother’s done it. She can feel it in her bones. That’s what people are saying, you know, the mother’s done it. But you know, I don’t think she did. It’s unnatural, to do that. We had an argument about it last night, you know?’

I could sense he was trying to meet my eye in the mirror, gauge my opinion. I looked away. It was impossible to answer him.

We turned onto Cheltenham Road, abruptly in the city centre now, pubs and bars all shut up on either side of us. A pair of homeless men sat on a stoop together, shrouded in blankets. They were sharing a cigarette. They had bulging red alcoholic faces and broken teeth.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘this is what I said to my wife…⁠’

He wanted to give me his wisdom. Perhaps his wife turned away from him at this point last night, wanting to stick to her own view, perhaps he won her over with it.

‘I said to her that if you’ve been called those things, accused like the mother is, you never get over it. That’s the shame of it. If she’s guilty, she deserves it, if she’s innocent, then people have done her wrong.’

We swung around the Bear Pit roundabout, the swift curve of it making my stomach quail, dirty shop windows advertising bridal wear and discount trainers blurring in front of my eyes. Yards ahead, I saw the magistrates’ court, and the hospital buildings.

‘I’ll get out here,’ I said at a red light. ‘Can you stop?’ desperate to escape him, that kind man, before he saw who I was.

‘Are you sure, love?’ Eyes in the mirror again, a frown line above them. ‘Are you OK? Are you sick? You don’t look too well. Sorry, I thought you were visiting somebody, I didn’t know you were sick. Shall I take you to A & E?’

I opened the door while we were at the light, pushed some cash at him, got out. He had to drive on because the light turned green and somebody behind him landed a fist on their horn.

My scarf wound tightly up my face, my hair arranged like a pair of curtains that were mostly shut, in the plate glass outside the hospital entrance my reflection told me I looked like somebody with something to hide.

Nine o’clock Sunday morning, on Fraser’s instructions, Bennett and I were knocking at a heavy wooden door set in a stone wall on a wide pavement in the posh end of Sea Mills and listening to the sound of birdsong while we waited for a reply.

The woman who opened it had the same flaming red hair as Ben’s teaching assistant. She wore an extravagantly colourful kimono over a pair of pyjamas and had bare legs and feet. Her toes curled in as the cold hit them. She was polite but perturbed. She was Lucas Grantham’s mother.

‘He’s here but he’s still asleep,’ she said, when we asked if we could have a word with him. ‘He got in late last night.’

‘Anybody else at home?’ Bennett asked her.

‘No. Just us. Nobody else lives here.’

The house was unusual, 60s built I’d have guessed, single storey, wrapped in an L-shape around a large garden. Impenetrable looking from the outside, the interior was flooded with light because almost every wall facing the garden was made of glass.

She asked us to wait in a modest-sized sitting room. There was nothing showy about this home apart from the architecture. The furnishings weren’t new and the walls were lined with shelves in cheap brown wood, which carried hundreds of books. Visible across the garden was a room at the end of the house, which looked like an artist’s studio.

In a far corner of the garden was a very large mound, covered in grass, and at one end of it was a corrugated metal door that you reached by walking down a few steps.

‘Do you know what that is?’ Bennett said, in a voice that told me he’d quite like to educate me.

‘It’s an Anderson shelter,’ I said. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of engaging in his usual one-upmanship. I’d wanted to do this interview with Fraser but she was still firefighting back at HQ after Emma’s confession. We’d only been out together for half an hour but already I was tolerating Bennett at best.

When Lucas Grantham appeared, his pale skin was whiter than I remembered, freckles running over it like a nasty rash. He wore a crumpled T-shirt, which looked like he’d slept in it, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms.

His mother had dressed herself and Bennett said, ‘Make us a cup of coffee would you, love? While we have a chat with Lucas.’

I winced as I saw pride flicker in her face before she made a calculation and quelled it in the face of our authority. She left us with her son.

The three of us sat down around a low coffee table, and I pulled a photograph from my file and put it down in front of Grantham. It showed his car, crossing the suspension bridge, at 14.30 on Sunday, 21 October, time and date clearly printed on the photograph.

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Oh fuck. I told Sal we shouldn’t have done this, I told her.’

‘Done what, son?’ said Bennett.

‘Now you’re going to think that I’ve done something to Ben Finch. Truth is, I don’t even know him very well! I don’t. He’s a nice kid, he’s good at art, but that’s all I know!’

‘Reel it back in, son,’ said Bennett. ‘Reel it back in. Let’s start at the beginning.’

Grantham’s panic was palpable now, hands rubbing up and down along his thighs, clawing at his knees. Eyes darting from Bennett, to me, to the photograph, to the doorway where his mother might reappear.

‘Who’s Sal?’ I asked him.

‘That’s my girlfriend.’

‘The one who gave you the alibi?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The alibi that said that the two of you were at Sal’s flat on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-first of October?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is that true?’

‘No.’ His face twists.

‘Why did you lie, Mr Grantham?’ Bennett again.

‘Because I knew what you’d think.’

‘What would we think?’

‘That it was me that took Ben. Of course you’d think that! I would, anybody would. That’s why Sal helped me get an alibi.’

‘And did you? Did you take Ben Finch?’ I took back the questioning.

‘No!’ He shook his head violently.

‘Did you hurt Ben Finch?’

‘No.’

‘Did you see Ben Finch?’

‘No! I swear it. I wasn’t even in the same bit of the woods as him.’

‘So what were you doing?’

‘I was cycling the trails at Ashton Court.’

‘With anybody?’

‘On my own.’

‘What time did you get home?’

‘About five o’clock. Sal can confirm that.’

‘Sal who helped you fabricate an alibi?’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Do you know we could charge both of you for this?’ I was so angry I could have throttled him.

‘Do you mind, Mr Grantham,’ Bennett said, standing up, moving to the window, ‘if we take a look in your Anderson shelter?’

‘Why? Why would you do that? I was cycling, that’s the truth, it’s the truth I swear it.’

His mother was in the doorway now, as he knew she would be, and she had a tray of mugs in her hands. It wobbled.

‘Oh my God, Lucas,’ she said. ‘What have you done?’

‘Mum, I’ve not done anything. I promise.’

‘God help us,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been secretive, God knows you have, but please tell me you’ve nothing to do with this.’

It wasn’t the display of loyalty you might have expected from a mother. Bennett and I exchanged a glance.

‘Do you think you might be willing to come to the station with us for a bit more of a chat?’ I asked Lucas.

He nodded, his pale eyes cast down, his cheeks flaming.