What to answer? How to disguise my emotions? I managed only to say, ‘He would. Thank you.’
‘Bring him to see me next week. Promise you will.’
I was struggling to hold myself together. I went to stand at the window, keeping my face turned away from her, looking out at the beds of pruned roses in the garden below, at the sweeping, gracious branches of a mature cedar tree. But Ruth was no fool, dementia notwithstanding.
‘What is it, dear?’ she said.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I don’t like to see you like this, my darling. Come, sit with me, talk to me.’
I wanted to, I so wanted to. But the thing is that if I’d told her, it would have destroyed her. So I didn’t.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you next week.’
I put my face to hers, said goodbye, kissed her. She clasped my head to hers and for a moment the sides of our faces rested together. Her skin felt as smooth as gossamer, her cheek bony and delicate, barely there.
‘Bye bye, darling,’ she said. ‘Be strong. Remember: you are a mother. You must be strong.’
JIM
I got one of the DCs to pick up John Finch and bring him in. He was with us within the hour. He looked thinner than he had at the beginning of the week. I put the letter down in front of him.
‘Don’t take it out of the bag.’
He picked the bag up. Fingernails bitten to the quick. Shaking hands. He read out loud:
John Finch will now understand how it feels to lose a child.
It serves him right.
He has been arrogant, and now he will be humbled.
‘By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.’
I watched him closely. He looked as if I’d swung a cudgel at his head, and made contact.
‘Who sent this? What is this?’
‘It arrived this morning. We don’t know who sent it. We’re hoping you can help us find out.’
The shaking in his hands spread to his wrists.
‘Is this my fault? Have I done this?’
‘Let’s not talk about fault. That’s not going to get us anywhere at this point. Do you have any idea who might have sent it? We think it implies that the sender has had contact with you in a professional capacity. I know I’ve asked you before, but I really need you to think about this again now. Do you know of anybody who might have a grudge against you? A former patient?’
John Finch looked like the most beaten person in the world. He looked like a man watching all his worst nightmares come true. His voice was tight with the effort it was costing him to control it. If I’m honest, I found the interview unexpectedly hard, and I think that’s because I recognised myself in him. I knew that if I was him, I would be broken too, and somehow, although it shouldn’t have, that got under my skin. I don’t know if it was my fatigue, or the way he tried so hard to hold on to his dignity, or perhaps both, but there it was, a small feeling of solidarity with him that I shouldn’t have allowed myself.
‘My patients are children, detective. They don’t tend to bear grudges. In fact their view of the world is often beautifully simple, beautifully fair.’
He ran the fingertips of one hand around his eye socket.
‘But they have families, and, sometimes – rarely – you lose a child during surgery, and the families can’t accept it. They blame you. Even when there’s nothing you could have done. Even when the surgery was your only option because without it the child would have died.’
‘Can you think of any families who might have cared more than others?’
‘Cared enough to take my son in revenge? An eye for an eye?’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘Like I said before, there were one or two who tried to sue the hospital, but even that isn’t very unusual. It’s a risk we take in our profession.’ He passed a hand across his forehead, squeezed his temples. ‘I can’t imagine them doing anything this extreme, I really can’t, but I suppose there is one family that sticks in my mind as being more persistent than the others. I can give you the name of the child, the father’s details will be on the records at the hospital.’
I pushed a piece of paper and a pen across the desk towards him. ‘Write down the name for me,’ I said. ‘The one that springs to mind. And write down the person to contact at the hospital.’
He wrote. He passed the paper to me. ‘Does Rachel know?’ he said.
RACHEL
This time, I made no attempt at conversation as Zhang drove me home.
I stared out of the window and thought about Ruth and Ben, and how much they loved each other’s company. I was transfixed by the sight of schoolchildren walking home with parents, or in messy groups without adults, shouting, laughing, jostling each other, dropping bits of rubbish, which the wind picked up and blew around them. It was the start of half-term this afternoon, as Ruth had said, and they were in celebratory mood.
‘Can we go to Ben’s school?’
‘We can. Why?’ Zhang said.
‘I want to get his stuff. It’s half-term.’
She only hesitated momentarily. ‘Of course,’ she said. She pulled into the forecourt of a petrol station to turn around and we got stuck behind another car. It was impossible not to see the headlines, murky as they were behind the thick plastic of the forecourt newsstand. The front pages of two newspapers showed a photograph of me at the press conference, beside one of my sister in her nightie, berating the journalists outside my house. This is what I read before Zhang pulled away:
FINCH FURIES
INTIMIDATING: Benedict’s auntie lets rip
SISTERS: who aren’t afraid to look SAVAGE
FEARS GROWING: 5 days missing and counting
And on another paper, underneath a photograph of my boy:
MYSTERY OF BEN’S CLOTHING
New Timeline of Ben’s Disappearance Inside
Zhang still said nothing. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen them or not. I pulled up the hood of my coat and sank down into my seat. I was afraid of somebody recognising me and I was afraid of what they might say if they did.
Ben’s school was almost deserted as we arrived. We had to manoeuvre around some orange traffic cones that had been placed as a loose barricade across the entrance to the teachers’ car park. Only a few cars remained there, most of the spaces were empty. Zhang parked in a spot where we had a view of the playground, a small tarmacked space with football posts painted on one wall and colourful murals on the others. It was a modest little school, with the old Victorian schoolhouse at its heart, and various unprepossessing modern additions tacked on to it over the years.
Right up until the moment when we parked, I thought it was a good idea to visit the school, but as Zhang undid her seat belt and pulled the keys from the ignition, I found myself paralysed by the fact of actually being there.
It was the sight of the playground. It reminded me that this was Ben’s world, his other world, and that the last time I was here was to pick him up the previous Friday afternoon.
As Zhang turned to me, wondering why I wasn’t moving, images flooded my brain.
The playground on Friday: it had been heaving as usual, crowds of parents waiting for children who were disgorged from the building in various states.
Some looked as if they’d been catapulted out with the sole purpose of expending excess energy, chasing each other around between huddles of mothers, others looked beaten down by the week, bags weighing heavily on their shoulders. Some were sporting stickers proudly on their sweatshirts, one or two burst into tears at the sight of their parent after a long day of pent-up frustration.