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.
‘Don’t!’ shouted Nicky. ‘Don’t do this. Please!’
She manhandled me. She took hold of me, gripping my upper arms. She sat me down on one of the kitchen chairs and she knelt on the floor in front of me.
‘Where is he?’ I asked her. ‘What’s happening to him?’
‘Don’t,’ said Nicky again, her voice quieter this time, and her face close to mine. ‘Please don’t.’
I stopped resisting her, and I sobbed until my throat was sore and my eyes were swollen almost shut.
JIM
Fraser and I had a pre-meet before the whole team got together for the evening briefing. She was looking at her computer screen as I took a seat.
‘Woodley’s bringing in our friend Edward Fount of fantasy world fame in the morning,’ she said. ‘And Christopher Fellowes, the forensic chappie, has sent me a profile that we can use when we’re considering the non-family abduction option. You’ll not be surprised to hear that it’s an almost perfect description of Mr Fount.’
‘I still think he’s not our man.’
She took off her reading glasses to study me. ‘I know that, I take your point, but I can’t dismiss him on a hunch. This isn’t an episode of Columbo.’
In spite of everything, that made me smile. Columbo had been a favourite childhood show.
Fraser went on. ‘Can we run through who else we’re looking at? Rachel Jenner?’
‘Chris emailed me his thoughts on her.’
‘He’s been a busy boy today, which is good, because he’s expensive enough. He should have copied me in on that. Can I see it?’
I got the email up on my laptop, winced a little in anticipation of her reading the first paragraph.
From: Christopher Fellowes ‹cjfellowes@gmail.com›
To: James Clemo ‹clemoj@aspol.co.uk›
24 October 2012 at 15:13
Re: Rachel Jenner
Jim
Thanks for your mail – good to hear from you.
I’ve had a chance to watch the footage from the press conference. Would it be terribly wrong of me to say WHAT A COLOSSAL BALLS-UP? I hope it’s not your neck that’s on the line for that one, but somebody’s ought to be. We’d worked up a good script for her. What a waste.
You wanted me to pull together some thoughts about Rachel Jenner as a potential suspect. Seeing as we don’t yet know whether this is an abduction, or a murder, I think the way forward for now is to keep in mind that these are very different crimes which throw up differing motives and therefore profiles. I’ve detailed these for you: