JC: Total shock, obviously. I don’t know what happened just after we left but I can’t imagine it was pretty.
FM: Am I right in thinking that this was a real moment of triumph for you in the case?
JC: Fraser was pleased. Yes. Especially because they’d ruled out Edward Fount, the role-play guy, that same morning.
FM: So you were right about him?
JC: Yep. When Woodley went to pull Fount in – this was while I was with Nicky Forbes – he found him waiting with a woman, another role-play member, and she gave Fount an alibi. They’d gone back to Fount’s flat together after the afternoon in the woods – shagging basically, if you’ll excuse my language – and in spite of the fact that she was nearly twice his age.
FM: And neither of them had mentioned this before because?
JC: Oldest reason in the book: she was married, to the ‘Grand Wizard’ apparently.
FM: Oh my.
JC: Yeah. A bit messy. I won’t repeat what Fraser said when she found out.
He almost smiles.
FM: So you were able to move on from that line of investigation.
JC: Absolutely. Fraser was happy with how things had gone, but she had concerns about how we should handle Nicky Forbes going forward, so she felt that the best course of action would be to re-interview her the following day. Give her and Rachel Jenner time to cool off.
FM: Did Nicky Forbes have an alibi for the Sunday afternoon?
JC: She’d told us that she was at a food fair. A big event, lots of stalls, very busy. It was research for the blog she writes. We sent out DCs to interview all the people she might have had contact with, but they were scattered far and wide, as you might imagine, so we knew we’d need a little time to put together a picture of her movements.
FM: Did you speak to her husband?
JC: Again Fraser felt we should wait on that just a short while. Her strategy was to look into the alibi first, and give the family space while we worked out whether Nicky Forbes could actually be good for it or not.
FM: Did you agree?
JC: Absolutely. You’ve got to fit the pieces into the jigsaw in the right order. Gathering evidence is the single most important objective when you have a suspect. That, and not being sued by your victim’s family. You can’t just apply continual pressure without evidence.
FM: Or you could alienate the family?
JC: Exactly, and they could talk to the press, and so on. You can imagine it and it wouldn’t look good for us. The press had jumped all over the case by then and they’d have been only too ready to have a go at us as well. And, on a practical level, we were nowhere near understanding how the mechanics of an abduction could have worked if Nicky Forbes had carried it out. She had a family in Salisbury so her set-up didn’t look like the perfect profile for a child abduction.
FM: Unless she didn’t want her sister to have Ben, and she’d killed him.
JC: That was one of my hypotheses, and abductors don’t always kill on purpose, sometimes things go wrong and it happens then, but we had to build a proper case before we could act further. I asked Chris Fellowes, the forensic psychologist, to send me his thoughts on Nicky Forbes.
FM: But the profile that your forensic psychologist made for you, the one that fitted Fount so perfectly, hadn’t been much use.
JC: I disagree – we were still considering the non-family abduction as a strong possibility, and that profile could have fitted any number of suspects for that scenario. The thing about the profiles is that you shouldn’t just attach them to one suspect. They’re a resource that you have to use as part of your armoury as a detective. Profiles never solve cases on their own but they can make you think in different ways sometimes, or look at people in a new light. And it’s always good to have another pair of eyes on the case, especially when everyone closely involved is getting tired. You can be in danger of losing perspective.
FM: What was Emma’s view on Nicky Forbes?
JC: To be honest, I didn’t see much of Emma that afternoon. I was too busy holed up with Fraser making a plan.
FM: Did you see her that night?
JC: She said she was knackered. She wanted to go back to her place to get a proper night’s rest and I didn’t blame her for that. I was feeling that way myself. I could have slept on my desk.
FM: But I get the sense you were fired up too.
JC: I was, yes. We all were. Without a doubt. It felt like things were starting to happen.
RACHEL
The immediate aftermath was the first in a series of new body blows.
Nicky swept everything up from the table, all her hard work, gathered it hastily and tried to push it into her bag. Her movements were rough and clumsy.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
I felt as though she was falling apart right in front of my eyes. I wondered if that’s what it had been like when she first went to Esther’s, to live in the cottage, right after it happened, when I was a baby, when her grief must have been unbearable.
And I realised that in the future I would wonder about everything.
From now on it would be impossible to unpick every detail of my history, every assumption that had led to me building a sense of my own identity, and of Ben’s identity. My past had been crumpled up and thrown into the fire, and I would have to sort through the ashes, with only Nicky as my guide. Nicky, who had lied to me for a very long time; Nicky, who said that she’d lied to protect me; Nicky, who I needed.
‘I should leave,’ she said. ‘You’re better off without me. You know, I would never, ever hurt Ben. Can I just say that? I would never hurt Ben.’
Her distress pushed her voice to an acute pitch, and I went to comfort her.
‘I know you wouldn’t.’
She let her bag slide down her shoulder and onto the table, and the papers spilled back out of it. Her head fell onto my shoulder and her body shook.
Are you surprised at my reaction to her? At my willingness to accept what I’d heard and offer her comfort?
It wasn’t the end of it. Of course it wasn’t. If I think back to that day I can remember the stages I went through. I suppose it was like the stages of grief, although this was different. This was the processing of what felt like a betrayal, this was the seeping away of trust.
After the door had clicked shut behind an adrenalin-pumped Clemo and a Zhang who couldn’t meet my eye for the first time, that first interaction Nicky and I had was of course a reflex, an urge to keep Nicky by me, to deny that anything had changed. She’d been my rock, always, and I couldn’t contemplate any other existence. It wasn’t in my DNA. Or I’d thought it wasn’t.
After that exchange we separated. Nicky unpacking her bag robotically, calling on those massive reserves of strength to anchor her to my table, to keep her going as she delved deeper and deeper into whatever the web had to offer her.
I went to my safe place, to Ben’s room, and I immersed myself in him, as was my habit. It was the only place I felt secure. His bedroom had become my womb.
This was my second stage.
I sank onto the beanbag on the floor of his room and I felt as if I was cast adrift in a small wooden boat, shrouded by a watery grey mist. And suspended within each of the millions of fine droplets that made up the mist, was the news, the bombshell that I’d just heard. And in this stage it simply surrounded me, existing, but not yet understood. And within it I felt baseless, disorientated and lost.
The third state was the inevitable churning of my mind, the processing of what I’d learned, and of its implications, the moment the droplets of mist began to settle on my skin and permeate it. It was when the knowledge became part of me and it was irreversible. I had to face up to it.
It led swiftly to the fourth state.
That was the erosion of my trust, where the droplets on my skin turned to acid and began to burn, producing a feeling that was intense and painful, a pins and needles of the mind and the body, and it was so creepy and unsettling that I couldn’t remain still any longer.