‘Cook some more,’ I said.
‘I wanted to leave some for you.’
‘It’s OK, I’ll have-’ I started to say.
‘You need to eat, Rachel!’ It was an outburst, her composure splintering abruptly, and she dropped her toast and the knife into the sink and leaned heavily on her palms on the edge of it, so that her shoulders became sharp points on either side of her bowed head. She looked up at the window and the darkness outside meant that her reflection was razor sharp in the glass and our eyes met in that way. She was the first to lower her gaze.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Can I show you something?’
It was an email that had come from America during the night. Via the Missing Kids website, Nicky had contacted another family whose child had been abducted and they’d replied to her, a message of support.
‘Read it,’ said Nicky. ‘They understand.’
She handed me her laptop. Two pages were up: one her blog, the other her email. I couldn’t help noticing that she’d updated her blog:
‘Dear Custard & Ketchup friends and followers,
This is a heartfelt request for you to please bear with me just for now. I’m sorry to say I need to take a short break from blogging for family reasons. I was hoping to keep you busy with some new Tasty Halloween Treats, but that hasn’t been possible. If you’re looking for Halloween ideas my post from last year is available still and you’ll find lots of fun stuff to make and decorate there. Next to come: Christmas Cheer! Watch this space, I’ll be back as soon as I can…
Nicky x’
She saw me reading it. ‘Simon posted that. He updates it for me sometimes,’ she said, and then, ‘I’m wondering whether we should do a webpage for Ben. I could link to it from the blog.’
I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my sister’s blog quite frequently, usually with some awe, especially at its mythologising and professionalising of family life. It was like a glossy food magazine, an enviable social diary. It was not my world.
I clicked on the email instead.
From: Ivy Cooper ‹ivycooper@brettslegacy.com›
To: Nicola Forbes ‹nicky_forbes@yahoo.com›
25 October 2012 at 23:13
Re: Ben
Dear Nicky
BRETT’S LEGACY ‘DO SOME GOOD’
This is a time of tremendous pain for you and your family. We are praying for Ben, and for your family.
Our son Brett was taken from us seven years ago, and since then we’ve been through things that we never thought we would have to experience. Before he was taken from us, one of Brett’s favourite things to say was, ‘Mom, Let’s do some good,’ and we decided to make this a choice for our future, so that we could offer some help to other families who find themselves in the same situation.
We made this decision five years ago, soon after Brett’s body was discovered, and…
I stopped reading. I looked at my sister. ‘What happened to Brett?’ I said.
‘Have you read it all? Read to the end, you must. They actually understand what it’s like and it’s such a relief, honestly, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. I’ve been struggling so much to find anyone out there who knows what-’
‘What happened to him?’ I had to know. I didn’t like the email. I didn’t want to be part of this club: a family of devastated families. I wasn’t ready for that. Ben was going to come back to me. I wasn’t going to be like them.
‘It’s not relevant.’
‘It’s relevant to me.’
‘Brett died,’ Nicky said. ‘Unfortunately.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Rachel.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He was murdered, by his abductor. But that’s not the point, and they would never have found out what happened to him if the family hadn’t worked really hard to get the police to pursue the case.’
‘Ben’s coming back.’
‘I hope he is, God knows I do, you know I do -’ she was twisting a tea towel tight between her hands – ‘but we have to accept the possibility that he might not be back soon, that some harm might have come to him. It’s been six days.’
I couldn’t hear it. Not from Nicky. Not from anybody. Not now. Not ever.
‘I’m going to see Ruth,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This wasn’t how I wanted this morning to go.’
JIM
When you work a case like this one, you long for a lead. When you get one, you’re all over it, and that’s how I felt about Nicola Forbes. I’d been ready to chase her to the end of the line.
What you don’t expect is for something else just as strong to turn up, because then it’s a bit like being in a shooting range, trying to decide what to aim at, what’s a decoy and what’s real. Friend or enemy? Where should your sights land?
You can’t always tell straight away, but sometimes you are presented with a clear and immediate threat, and it’s obvious that you must respond to that.
That’s what happened on day six of the case. The letter arrived, and it changed the game completely.
It came in the morning post. Postmark BS7, addressed to Fraser directly, at Kenneth Steele House. Fraser’s secretary opened it. Her scream could be heard out in the corridor at the far end of the incident room and she bolted out of her office.
Fraser pulled us in straight away. The letter was in an evidence bag by then, and the secretary was already having her fingers inked next door so we could eliminate her prints. She was shaking and tearful, an extreme reaction for somebody who regularly got to file crime scene photographs.
‘Jim,’ Fraser said once we’d closed the door behind us. ‘Get John Finch in.’
Emma was there too. She didn’t look as though she’d slept. Under her make-up her skin was dull and strained. To anybody else she probably looked more or less her usual self – a tired version of herself, of course – but I could see a few extra small signs of disarray. Her hair wasn’t tied up as neatly as usual, and her shirt didn’t look fresh. You can do that if you want to know every inch of somebody better than you know yourself. I wanted to put my arm around her, ask her if she was coping, but I couldn’t of course. Not there, not then.
Emma’s phone rang just as Fraser finished filling us in. She glanced at it. ‘It’s Rachel Jenner, boss,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her?’
‘Nuh uh,’ said Fraser. ‘Not a word, not yet.’
RACHEL
Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.
Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.
I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved themselves unreliable.
I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.
I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilised society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran ahead of me in the woods then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be fundamentally good.
And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.