What She Knew (42 page)

Operator: All right. You’re doing well. Can you see if he’s got any injuries on him? Is there any blood?

Caller: I can’t see any blood. He’s got bruises up his arm. He’s making weird noises.

Operator: Right, can you carefully move him onto his back, as quickly as you can, and have a look in his mouth if you can, check there’s nothing obstructing it. Keep him lying as flat as you can.

Caller: I’m doing it. God, he’s cold, he’s soaking wet. Oh God. Where are they?

Operator: They’re nearly with you. Can you tell me, how’s his breathing now?

Caller: Bad.

Operator: But he’s still breathing, right?

Caller: I’ve got him on his back.

Operator: Look in his mouth. Is there anything in there? Food or vomit?

Caller: No. His lips are blue.

Operator: Is he still breathing?

Caller: Yes, he is. I’m going to lie with him. I’m going to give him my body heat.

Operator: OK. They’re a few minutes away from you now; they’re making their way along the main path in the woods. Can you give me some more detail about where you are, can you tell me where they need to turn off the main path?

Caller: There’s a pile of logs opposite the entrance. Cut-up logs in a pile. About halfway around the path.

Operator: I’ll let them know.

Caller: I’m lying with him. He’s breathing really bad.

Operator: Can you shout? I want you to stay with him, and tell me straightaway if he stops breathing, but can you shout, to help them find you? They’re very close, but they can’t see you.

Caller: HELP! OVER HERE! HELP!

Operator: Well done. They can hear you. Keep shouting.

Caller: HELP US! HELP! OVER HERE! Where are they?

Operator: Don’t worry, they can hear you and they can see you now.

Caller: I can see them. HERE! QUICK! HE’S HERE!

Operator: Are they with you now?

Caller: Yes, they’re here.

Operator: OK, I’ll leave you with them, OK?

Caller: Yes, thanks, all right.

Operator: Thank you, bye.

JIM

We made it to the woods in one hour. I used blue lights.

On the way in the car we got more details. About Ben Finch’s condition. About Joanna May, and the room in the basement of her flat.

“We interviewed her,” I said to Woodley. “We should have fucking seen it.”

He didn’t respond.

The paramedics were still working with Ben Finch in the woods. They couldn’t get the ambulance to the site so they’d had to stabilize him and move him in stages.

We parked and I ran. I wanted to be with Ben. I wanted to see his clear blue eyes for myself, see if there was life in them. I wanted to tell him that he would be OK, that his mother was waiting for him. I wanted to do that for him at least.

Rain was falling in a downpour, crashing through the canopy above. The trees lining the path were bowed and streaked from it. They arched over me, a skeletal tunnel of bare branches, urging me onward, making me feel as if it was impossible to make progress.

My breathing was ragged and fast, my heart thumping, my clumsy feet tripping over sticks, stones, each other, never moving fast enough. With every step I was soaked some more, but with every step I cared less.

I rounded a bend in the path, and ahead I saw the ambulance, and a stretcher being loaded on board.

I pushed myself, tried to reach them in time, tried to shout out, but it was futile, because they slammed the door shut long before I reached them, and by the time I got there the ambulance had begun the tricky process of turning around.

Mark Bennett was guiding it. I stayed back, stood to the side of the path as the ambulance maneuvered past me, watched him pat the back of it as a farewell.

And Bennett, all dressed up in waterproofs, jaw clenched, and wet from rain, said, “That lad’s not in a good way, Jim. Not at all.” It had got to him. I could see that.

And I said, “I wanted to see him.” I wiped the rain from my face, felt my sodden clothing cling coldly to me.

“Nothing we can do for him now. It’s too late for that. It’s in the hands of the medics.”

And I hated him for saying that, and I hated him for being there when it should have been me, and I hated myself for letting harm come to that boy, any harm at all.

RECORD OF EVIDENCE: AVON AND SOMERSET POLICE, CID

OPERATION HUCKLEBERRY—EVIDENCE BAG 2

AUTHORIZED COPY OF HOSPITAL ADMISSIONS NOTE FOR BENEDICT FINCH, BRISTOL CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, MONDAY, OCTOBER 29 AT 12:07 P.M.

Description of text:

Name: Benedict Jonathan Finch    Age: 8 years  Sex: Male

Date of birth: to be confirmed

Benedict Finch, male, 8 years, identity confirmed by police officer attending scene in the woods. Awaiting confirmation by family member.

On arrival presented with severe hypothermia caused by overnight exposure in Leigh Woods with no shelter and no clothing. Hypothermia-induced coma. Hypotension (BP 78/54); core body temperature 28°C; HR 30 reg. General condition extremely poor. Underweight, dirty, and dehydrated. Significant bruising to left upper arm.

Original stored Item 3, Evidence box 345.112

WEB PAGE
—BREAKING NEWS—www.up2theminute.co.uk/asithappens

October 29, 2012, 14:13

UP TO THE MINUTE brings you a timeline of today’s dramatic developments in the case of missing eight-year-old Benedict Finch.

The significant developments were confirmed by AVON and SOMERSET CONSTABULARY in a hastily arranged press conference this afternoon led by DS Giles Martyn.

10:15 a.m. The body of a young boy is discovered in Leigh Woods near the site where Benedict Finch went missing just over one week ago. The discovery is made by a member of the public who contacted the emergency services. The boy is alive, but barely.

12 noon The search for Benedict Finch is called off, after the boy’s identity is confirmed on arrival at Bristol Children’s Hospital.

12:45 p.m. A small number of people begin to gather outside the Children’s Hospital. They light candles and pray for Benedict Finch and there’s an outpouring of concern on Twitter for his safe recovery.

1:17 p.m. An arrest is made at Bristol Airport and police confirm that they’ve detained a person in connection with the investigation.

2:10 p.m. Police confirm that the person detained in connection with Benedict’s disappearance is a teacher at his school, Joanna May, 27 years old.

In other developments there are unconfirmed reports that Benedict Finch’s mother was treated in an ambulance outside an address in Clifton this morning. It’s thought that the address may be the home of Joanna May.

Keeping You Up to the Minute, Every Minute

Spread the word: Facebook; Twitter

RACHEL

Bristol Children’s Hospital smelled of cleanliness and sickness in equal measure. The only times I’d been there before had been to meet John after work.

We traveled up from the ground floor in a tiny elevator where Wallace and Gromit’s recorded voices told us to “Mind the doors,” over and over again. Shock-eyed and sleep-deprived parents got on and off, checking the sign in the lift for their destinations, fingers running down a list, stopping at “Oncology” or “Nephrology.”

Among them were a mother and baby boy, she wearing a burqa, even her eyes veiled from the world with mesh. Her baby was in her arms, a tube running up his nose, taped in place, his wide brown eyes staring at the ceiling lights. I wondered how she was able to comfort him when she was confined to that garment, when their eyes couldn’t even meet. Did she rest her uncovered fingers on his cheek? Was that skin-to-skin contact enough for them both here, in this hospital?

My heart, hurting for my own son, ached for her too.

The elevator disgorged DI Bennett and me onto the fourth floor.

The decor was wincingly bright, themed in blue and yellow, and featuring aquatic motifs, but somehow all of that felt hopeful; it made my sense of anticipation swell.

In the vestibule outside the elevator doors, where the floor-to-ceiling windows offered us a tumbling, chaotic cityscape view of Bristol, DI Bennett told me that he’d been in the woods with Ben. He couldn’t quite meet my eye, but he held open a door for me and then guided me along the corridor with a light hand on my elbow that was touching if not welcome.

I was met in the corridor outside Ben’s ward by two doctors, who politely ushered me into a room. A nurse was there. She offered me a cup of tea. The chink of china was the only sound in the room as everybody waited for her to pour it.

Ben had been close to death when they found him, they explained to me, his core body temperature dangerously cold, but they’d warmed him up, and he was stable. Battered and bruised, very weak, but stable.

Relief and happiness that he was alive overwhelmed any trepidation I might have felt. They could scarcely hold me back.

“He’s still in a dangerous condition,” they wanted to tell me before they let me see him. “Do you understand that?”

I said I did. I left the tea to go cold on the table.

Do you want me to describe our reunion?

I can tell you that a nurse was outside the door of Ben’s room and that her hand reached out to touch mine when I arrived, just brushed it lightly, even though we were strangers. We exchanged no words but she held the door open for me.

JIM

By the time we got back to Kenneth Steele House, Woodley and I mud-stained and soaking wet from the woods, Fraser had just gone in to interview Joanna May. They’d picked her up at Bristol Airport waiting for a flight out.

We heard everything secondhand. The incident room was fairly buzzing with the news. Relief had broken out across everybody’s faces, though there was an undercurrent of muttering that Benedict Finch was seriously unwell, that it was a wait-and-see job. Nobody was celebrating properly because of that; nobody wanted to.

Fraser had left instructions for Bennett to get down to the hospital and for Woodley and me to go and visit Joanna May’s parents at their house. She wanted us to get to the bottom of the alibi they’d given their daughter and find out what else they knew.

It was three p.m. by the time we pulled into their driveway on a quiet street of semidetached Victorian villas far enough out in suburbia that streetlights were few and far between.

When we arrived, two uniforms made a discreet exit, leaving Woodley and me with a couple, in their seventies, who looked as though they wished the ground would open up and swallow them.

We sat in their living room. There was no tea or coffee. Vast windows inset with a band of decorative stained glass gave us a view of a pair of raised vegetable beds, where bamboo canes protruded from the dark puddle-pocked earth and were tethered into triangular shapes.

On an ornate marble mantelpiece a vase of flowers was crowded by family photographs, which spilled over onto adjacent bookshelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Among the faces in the pictures was Joanna May.

Hanging above the fireplace was a large mirror in a gilt frame, which threw back a reflection of our sorry gathering: Woodley and I standing in the middle of the room, tall and dark like crows; Mrs. May sunk into an armchair, a walking stick propped up beside her, dressings visible on her legs underneath thick brown tights; Mr. May beside her in a matching chair, wisps of white hair over his forehead, cat hair on his trousers; both of them looking stricken.

“She was our fourth child,” said Mrs. May, once Woodley and I had taken a seat on a rug-draped sofa. Her voice was tremulous and careful. “We had five children altogether. Rory died, our eldest son, when he was a toddler, but we were a happy family, weren’t we, Geoff?”

Mr. May reached over and took her hand, squeezed it.

“But she wasn’t right,” he said to Woodley and me, “from the start. As soon as she started interacting with other children, we knew she wasn’t.”

“In what way?” I asked.

Mrs. May lowered her eyes.

“She was so manipulative,” said her husband. “She competed constantly for our attention, she bullied her siblings to get what she wanted, and she was always lying. The lying was constant, it was infuriating.”

It was painful to watch Mr. May talk. Everything he shared with us stripped another piece of his pride away, and undermined more completely the life this couple had built.

“If somebody lies to you habitually, Inspector, you can’t ever trust them,” he said. “It erodes relationships, even between a parent and child.” He ran a trembling hand across the paper-thin skin on his forehead. “We knew the way she behaved was wrong, and that she wasn’t what you might call completely normal, but we never dreamed it would lead to something like this.”

“Is the child all right?” Mrs. May asked. “The boy?” She didn’t seem able to say his name. “We’ve been watching the news.”

“It’s a little early to tell,” I said, “but as far as I know his condition’s stable for now.”

She nodded, swallowed, and made a small sign of the cross.

“I believe,” I said, “that you provided your daughter with an alibi for last Sunday. Is that right?”

“We did, yes,” said Mrs. May. “Your colleague rang us to talk about it, a very nice young lady called, what was she called, dear?”

“DC Zhang,” said Mr. May.

“Can I ask you about that?”

“Well,” said Mr. May. “Yes, well, Joanna came to have lunch with us on that day, and we weren’t really sure exactly what time she went home, but she reminded us it was about four thirty so that’s what we told your colleague.”

“Joanna reminded you?”

“Yes. We asked her because we weren’t sure. We didn’t think to question it, because it could have been four thirty, couldn’t it, Mary?”

Mrs. May nodded. “We never really checked,” she said. “And we started lunch quite late. But I suppose it could have been earlier too. Now that I think about it. We never actually checked the time ourselves.”

“So you weren’t absolutely sure?”

“Not certain, no, but your colleague said that was normal.”

“Would you mind making a statement to that effect?”

“We never thought our daughter would be capable of such a thing,” said Mr. May. “If we’d ever dreamed… oh dear God… would they have been able to find the boy earlier?”