What She Knew (2 page)
There are nights when this quiet torments me and I rise, usually well beyond midnight, and I dress again, and then I walk the streets under the sodium-orange glow of the streetlights, where the only life is a shadowy turbulence at the periphery of my vision, a fox perhaps, or a broken man in a doorway.
But even walking can’t clear my mind completely because as I put one foot in front of the next I dread even more the return to the flat, to the bed, to its emptiness, to my wakefulness.
And, worst of all, I dread the thoughts that will circle once again in my mind.
They take me straight to those dark, vivid places that I’ve worked so hard to lock away during the day. They find those hidden places and they pick the locks, force the doors, pull away the planks of wood that have been nailed across the windows, and they let light into the dark corners inside. I think of it as harshly lit, like a crime scene. Center stage: Benedict Finch. His pellucid blue eyes meeting mine, and in them an expression so innocent that it feels like an accusation.
Late into the small hours I sometimes get the sleep I crave, but the problem is that it’s not a refreshing blackness, a chance for my mind to shut down. Even my sleep allows me no respite, because it’s populated by nightmares.
But whether I’ve been awake or asleep, when I rise in the morning, I’m often fetid and dehydrated, wrung out before the day has even begun. Tears might have dampened my pillow, and more often than not sweat has soaked my sheets, and I face the morning with a sense of dread that my insomnia hasn’t just blurred the boundaries between day and night, but has unbalanced me too.
I think, before it happened to me, that I might have underestimated both the restorative power of sleep and the destructive power of a shattered psyche. I didn’t realize that exhaustion could bleed you dry so completely. I didn’t realize that your mind could fall sick without your even noticing: incrementally, darkly, irrevocably.
I’m too embarrassed to tell anybody else about these things, and the fact that the effects of my insomnia stay with me as day breaks, woven into the fabric of it. The exhaustion it breeds makes my coffee taste metallic and the thought of food intolerable. It makes me crave a cigarette when I wake. It fuels my cycle ride to work with adrenaline, so that I’m nervy, riding dangerously close to the curb, misjudging a junction so that the thud of a car forced into an emergency stop just behind me makes my legs pump painfully fast on the pedals.
In the office, an early meeting: “Are you OK?” my DCI asks. I nod, but I can feel sweat breaking out along my hairline. “I’m fine,” I say. I last for ten minutes more, until somebody asks, “What do you think, Jim?”
I should relish the question. It’s an opportunity to put myself forward, to prove myself. A year ago, I would have. Now I focus on the chipped plastic shard on the end of my pen. Through the pall of my exhaustion I have to force myself to raise my head and look at the three expectant faces around me. All I can think about is how the insomnia has smeared the clarity of my mind. I feel panic spreading through my body as if infused like a drug, pushing through arteries, veins, and capillaries until it incapacitates me. I leave the room silently and once I’m outside I pound my fist into the wall until my knuckles bleed.
It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it’s the first time they make good on their threat to refer me to a psychologist.
Her name is Dr. Francesca Manelli. They make it clear that if I don’t attend all sessions, and contribute positively to the discussions with Dr. Manelli, then I’m out of CID.
We have a preliminary meeting. She wants me to write a report on the Benedict Finch case. I start it by writing down my objections.
Report for Dr. Francesca Manelli on the Events Surrounding the Benedict Finch Case by DI JAMES CLEMO, Avon and Somerset Constabulary
CONFIDENTIAL
I’d like to start this report by formally noting down the objection that I have both to writing it and to attending therapy sessions with Dr. Manelli. While I believe that the Force Occupational Health Service is a valuable asset, I also believe that use of it should be discretionary for officers and other staff. I shall be raising this objection formally through the proper channels.
I recognize that the purpose of the report is to describe the events that occurred during the investigation of the Benedict Finch case from my own point of view. This will provide the basis for discussion between myself and Dr. Manelli, with the aim of ascertaining whether it will be useful for me to have long-term support from her in dealing with some of the issues that arose from my involvement in that case, and some personal issues that affected me at around that time also.
I understand that I should include details of my personal life where relevant, including where it relates to DC Emma Zhang, as this will allow Dr. Manelli to form a whole view of my decision-making processes and motivations during the period that the case was live. The progress of my report will be reviewed by Dr. Manelli as it’s written, and what I produce each week will form the basis for my talking sessions with Dr. Manelli.
Dr. Manelli has advised that the bulk of this report should be a description of my personal recollections of what took place, though it may also include transcripts of our conversations or other material where she feels that is appropriate.
I agree to do this only on the understanding that the contents of this report will remain confidential.
DI James Clemo
BEFORE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2012
In the UK, a child is reported missing every three minutes.
—www.missingkids.co.uk
The first three hours are most critical when
trying to locate a missing child.
—www.missingkids.com/keyfacts
RACHEL
My ex-husband’s name is John. His new wife is called Katrina. She’s petite. She has a figure that can make most men drink her in with their eyes. Her deep brown hair always looks shiny and freshly colored, like hair in magazines. She wears it in a bob, and it’s always carefully styled around her pixie face, framing a pert mouth and dark eyes.
When I first met her, at a hospital function that John was hosting, months before he left us, I admired those eyes. I thought they were lively and sparky. They flashed around the room, assessing and flirting, teasing and charming. After John had gone, I thought of them as magpie eyes, darting and furtive, foraging for other people’s treasure to line her nest.
John walked out of our family home on Boxing Day. For Christmas he’d given me an iPad and Ben a puppy. I felt the gifts were thoughtful and generous until I watched him back his car out of the driveway that day, neatly packed bags stowed on the backseat, while the ham went cold on the dining table and Ben cried because he didn’t understand what was happening. When I finally turned and went back into the house to start my new life as a single mother, I realized that they were guilt-gifts: things to fill the void he would leave in our lives.
They certainly occupied us in the short term, but perhaps not as John intended. The day after Boxing Day, Ben appropriated the iPad and I spent hours standing under an umbrella in the garden, shivering, shocked, while the new Cath Kidston Christmas slippers my sister had sent me got rain-soaked and muddy, and the puppy worked relentlessly to pull up a clematis when I should have been encouraging it to pee.
Katrina lured John away from us just ten months before Ben disappeared. I thought of it as a master plan that she executed: The Seduction and Theft of My Husband. I didn’t know the detail of how they kindled their affair but to me it felt like a plot from a bad medical drama. He had the real-life role of consultant pediatric surgeon; she was a newly qualified nutritionist.
I imagined them meeting at a patient’s bedside, eyes locking, hands grazing, a flirtation that turned into something more serious, until she offered herself to him unconditionally, the way you can before you have a child to consider. At that time, John was obsessed with his work. It consumed him, which makes me think that she must have done most of the running, and that the package she offered him must have amounted to a seductive proposition indeed.
I was bitter about it. My relationship with John had such solid and careful beginnings that I’d assumed it would last forever. It simply never occurred to me that there could be a different kind of ending for us, which was, I now realize, extremely naïve.
What I hadn’t realized was that John didn’t think like me, that he didn’t view any problems we might have had as normal, surmountable. For him things boiled under the surface, until he couldn’t cope with being with me anymore, and his solution was just to up and leave.
When I rang my sister right after he’d gone she said, “Didn’t you have any idea at all?” and her voice was strained with disbelief. “Are you sure you paid him enough attention?” was her next question, as if the fault was mine and that was to be expected. I hung up the phone. My friend Laura said, “I thought he was a bit detached lately. I just assumed you guys were working through it.”
Laura had been my closest friend since we were at nursing college together. Like me, she hadn’t stuck with bedpans and body fluids. She’d quit and switched to journalism instead. We’d been friends for long enough that she’d witnessed the birth and growth of my relationship with John as well as its demise. She was observant and forthright. That word “detached” stayed with me, because if I’m being really honest, I hadn’t noticed it. When you have a child to look after, and when you’re busy developing a new career as well, you sometimes don’t.
The separation and divorce tore me apart, I’ll admit to that. When Ben disappeared I was still in mourning for my husband. In ten months you can get used to some of the mechanics of being alone, but it takes longer for the hurt to heal.
I went to Katrina’s flat once, after he’d moved in with her. It wasn’t difficult to find. I pressed on her door buzzer, and when she answered the door I snapped. I accused her of being a home-wrecker, and I might have said worse things. John wasn’t there, but she had friends around, and, as our voices rose, the three of them appeared behind her, mouths open, aghast. They were a perfectly groomed Greek chorus of disapproval. Glasses of white wine in hand, they watched me rage. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I never quite got around to apologizing.
You might wonder what I look like, if my husband could be lured away by such a pert little magpie. If you saw the press conference footage, you’ll already have an idea, though I wasn’t at my best. Obviously.
You’ll have seen that my hair looked straggly and unkempt, in spite of my sister’s efforts to tame it. It looked like witch’s hair. Would you believe me if I said that under normal circumstances it’s one of my best features? I have long, wavy dark blond hair that falls beneath my shoulders. It can be nice.
You’ll certainly have noticed my eyes. That’s the closeup shot they replay most: bloodshot, desperate, pleading eyes, red-rimmed and puffy from the tears I’d shed. You’re going to have to take my word for it that normally my eyes look pretty: they’re wide and very green and I used to think they flattered my pale, clear skin.
But what I really hope you noticed was the smattering of freckles across my nose. Did you see those? Ben inherited them from me, and it always pleased me beyond measure to see that physical trace of myself in him.
It would be wrong of me to give you the impression that the only thing I was thinking about was Katrina, when Ben disappeared. On the afternoon when it happened, Ben and I were walking the dog in the woods. It was a Sunday, and we’d driven out of Bristol and across the Clifton Suspension Bridge to reach the countryside beyond.
The bridge traversed the Avon Gorge, a great crevasse in the landscape, carved out by the muddy-banked River Avon, which Ben and I could see flooding its basin far below, brown and swollen at high tide. The gorge was the boundary between city and countryside. The city hugged one side of it, teetering on its edges, and the woods hugged the other, trees running densely hundreds of feet down the steep cliffs until they petered out beside the riverbank.
Once we’d crossed the bridge, it took us only five minutes to be parked and loose in the woodland. It was a beautiful late autumn afternoon, and, as we walked, I was relishing the sounds and smells and sights it offered.
I’m a photographer. It’s a career change I made when I had Ben. I walked away from my previous incarnation as a nurse without a single regret. Photography was a joy, an absolute passion of mine, and it meant that I was always looking at the light, thinking about how I could use it in a photograph, and I can remember exactly what it was like as we walked that afternoon.
It was fairly late, so what light remained had a transient quality to it, but there was just enough brightness in the air that the colors of the leaves above and around me appeared complex and beautiful. Some of them fell as we walked. Without a whisper of protest, they let go of the branches that had sustained them for months, and drifted down in front of us to settle on the woodland floor. When we began our walk, it was still a gentle afternoon, allowing the change of seasons to unfold quietly and gradually around us.
Of course Ben and the dog were oblivious to it. While I composed photographs in my mind, both of them, with misty breath and bright, wild eyes, ran and played and hid. Ben wore a red anorak and I saw it flash down the path in front of me, then weave in and out of the trees. Skittle ran by his side.
Ben threw sticks at tree trunks and he knelt close to the leaf-strewn ground to examine mushrooms that he knew not to touch. He tried to walk with his eyes closed and kept up a running commentary on how that felt. “I think I’m in a muddy part, Mum,” he said, as he felt his boot get stuck, and I had to rescue it while he stood with a socked foot held precariously in the air. He picked up pinecones and showed me one that was closed up tight. “It’s going to rain,” he told me. “Look.”
My son looked beautiful that afternoon. He was only eight years old. His sandy hair was tousled and his cheeks were pink from exertion and cold. He had blue eyes that were clear and bright as sapphires. He had pale winter skin, perfectly unblemished except for those freckles, and a smile that was my favorite sight in the world. He was about two-thirds my height, just right for me to rest an arm around his shoulders as we walked, or to hold his hand, which he was still happy for me to do from time to time, though not at school.
