Back in the kitchen, it felt as though I was meeting my possessions after an absence. I boiled the kettle, and realised that I hadn’t done that myself for days, because Nicky had done everything. Almost out of curiosity I opened the fridge, having no idea what was in it, and found cooked meals, in labelled containers, prepared by Nicky before she left, and half a pint of fresh milk.
At the kitchen table, warming slowly as the heating in the house cranked up around me with its familiar clicks and clonks, I began to look at Ben’s schoolbooks.
There were five of them. There wasn’t a great deal of work in each one as it was so early in the school year, but I started to work through them: maths, literacy, spellings, a history project and a news book.
The first page of the news book made me smile.
Ben had drawn a picture of a huge bed, which filled the entire page. In it was a small stick figure. Underneath it he had written, I spent the hole weekend in bed. There was a comment beside it in red ink: Are you sure that’s all you did, Ben? I expect you did something else. The drawing of the bed is nice.
It even made me smile, because it was nonsense, and I thought simply: this is the world I want to be in, the imaginative, funny world that’s my son.
I knew then, with perfect clarity, that if Ben didn’t survive this, then nor could I.
JIM
Five of us turned up: me, and four men in full gear. Black clothing, bullet-proofed jackets, caps that hide your eyes, and shoes with soles that were thick enough to do damage. All my men were armed. All of us wore earpieces, to keep in radio contact. I was leading.
It was 0500 hours. It was dark. Early morning hush was settled over the neighbourhood like a blanket.
We parked quietly around the corner, killing the car engine quickly, and when we got out we didn’t talk, communicating with gestures only. Three of us stayed at the end of the driveway, in the shadows and out of sight, and we waited there silently while I sent two around the side of the property.
We didn’t want anybody slipping out of the back.
Streetlights revealed that the bungalow was in bad condition, in contrast to the neighbouring properties, which were immaculate, their front gardens displaying neatly trimmed lawns, and tended borders, containing closely clipped shrubs like shiny suburban trophies.
The flowerbeds in our bungalow’s garden were overgrown, and the lawn was muddy and unkempt, but the metal gate at the side of the house had shiny black paint on it and its latch didn’t squeak when my two DCs opened it and sidled through it.
My guess was that its decline was recent.
There was a single garage to the side of the bungalow; its door was shut but in good nick, and the driveway had been expensively relaid at some point recently. There was no crunchy gravel to give us away. There was also no vehicle in the driveway, no curtains drawn at the front and no lights on in the house, and I hoped to God the place wasn’t empty.
On my signal, two of the men approached the front door and stood either side of it, tucked in, so that they weren’t visible through the frosted glass in the door, not until they were ready to be.
There was a security light above them, but it didn’t come on. They had a battering ram with them, a black metal cylinder, so that they could break down the door if necessary.
They didn’t look at me. They were focused on the door, waiting to hear my voice in their earpieces. ‘Go,’ I whispered into my radio. I knew the command would transmit loud and clear, and they didn’t hesitate. They rang the bell, hammered on the door, shouted through the letter flap: ‘Police, let us in. Police!’
The noise ripped through the pre-dawn stillness.
By the time a light came on in the hallway of the bungalow the other properties around us were lit up like Christmas trees and we were about to bash the door in.
A woman opened it, just an inch or two at first, suspicious eyes peering through. She looked as though she’d been asleep. She wore tracksuit bottoms, plastic clogs and a nurse’s tabard. My men pushed past her. I followed.
‘Where is he?’ I said.
She pointed towards the end of the hall opposite. One of my men was already down there; the other had gone into the front rooms. I ran down the hall, but even before I’d travelled those few paces I knew it had gone wrong when my man said, ‘In here, boss,’ and his voice sagged. He stood in the doorway just ahead of me and his body language had relaxed, adrenalin gone. There was no threat.
As I pushed past him, he said, ‘He’s not going anywhere.’
In the middle of the room was a hospital bed. In the bed lay a man, his eyes wide balls of fear. He was underneath a white sheet that he’d pulled up to his neck with fingers that scrunched the material tight. A hospital band was visible on his wrist. The only clue to his relative youth was his brown hair. His face hung from his bones and his skin was grey apart from high red spots on his cheekbones, from fever, or morphine. He was hooked up to a pump. An oxygen mask was attached to his face, the elastic digging into his cheeks, and a bag of dark orange urine hung from the side of the bed.
Beside the bed was an armchair, and a table, with books on it, along with a laptop computer, a remote control for the TV that sat on the chest of drawers in a corner, and a cardboard tray for collecting vomit. Beside the door was a wheelchair.
The nurse was beside me now. ‘He’s dying,’ she said. She had tribal scars on her face, two rough, raised lines on each cheek, and eyes that told me that she’d seen death before.
I turned to my man. ‘Search the garage,’ I said, but I already knew that there’d be no sign of Ben Finch.
RACHEL
Zhang phoned me mid-morning. She’d just parked on my street, she said, and no they hadn’t found Ben but could I let her in? She wanted to speak to me.
I listened at the front door for her footsteps, reluctant to open it until I knew she was there. A peek from my bedroom window had told me that overnight the numbers of journalists had dwindled to just two or three, but I didn’t want to give them a photo opportunity.
When I heard her footsteps, and I heard the journalists call out to her, I began to undo the latch, but the expected ring on the bell didn’t come. Instead I heard her curse. I opened the door a crack.
My doorstep was awash with milk. It covered the front door and dripped down onto the doormat at my feet. It pooled onto the short front path and it was littered with broken plastic. A pair of two-pint bottles, my twice-weekly delivery from the milkman: full fat for Ben and his growing bones, semi-skimmed for me. Smashed to pieces.
I pictured hands throwing them, feet kicking them, the impact, the explosion of white liquid, the dirty, messy aftermath, and I knew I was meant to understand it as a rebuke, that it labelled me as a woman with a filthy doorstep: such an old-fashioned taint that marks you out as the worst, sluttish kind of woman. I read it as snide vigilante justice, the domestic equivalent of a white feather through the door.
You can see how my mind was rampaging, now that I was cornered, and alone.
‘Rachel, go back in,’ Zhang snapped. ‘I’ll deal with this. You go in.’
I did as I was told. She borrowed a mop and a plastic bag to gather the debris, and when she came in after cleaning up I said, ‘Do you think somebody did it on purpose?’
‘I can’t say that for sure. It might have been an accident.’
‘You know it wasn’t.’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘Did they see who did it?’ I gestured towards the journalists.
‘They say they didn’t. They say it was like that when they arrived this morning.’
‘They’re liars.’
‘Rachel, it’s nothing. It could have been an accident. Don’t let it get under your skin.’