Ben (17 page)

I just about managed it. Then Malcolm asked one final question.

‘Kerry, if the people who have got Ben are watching now – what would you say to them?’

The bastard. There was no way I could answer that and stay composed, and he knew it.

‘Bring him back. Please, bring him back! I don’t care why, how, just please, please bring him back to me!’

As kind-hearted as he was, when it came to his work Malcolm could be utterly ruthless about getting what he wanted. And what
he wanted was me crying on film. He’d waited, put me at ease with the early questions and then lit the fuse and watched the fireworks.

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be interviewed by Malcolm many times and he always knows which button to press. It feels horrible at the time but I suppose it makes for dynamic, unforgettable television. And if it prompts one person to reveal something they know, it’s worth it. To this day, that has remained my approach to the media: I will do anything to keep them interested in Ben’s story, regardless of the personal cost to myself.

As the English press interest died down, attention from the local media grew. One or two of the interviews were conducted outside the caravan as usual. Some TV crews, seeking a bit of local flavour, filmed us down at the Tree of Hippocrates – perhaps they hoped some of his wisdom would rub off on the police force a stone’s throw away. We certainly did, although perhaps it wasn’t helpful to have said as much in the interviews. We probably could have been more tactful when talking about the Kos police to their compatriots, but we were just being honest.

We didn’t turn down a single interview but there were times it seemed like a never-ending process. Just when we thought we’d seen the back of the media, another stranger with a notepad or a camera would appear at the caravan door. I know in their way they wanted to help but by Friday afternoon I was drained. We were all exhausted, mentally as well as emotionally. I felt like the roadkill I saw lying in the street every day, being picked over by scavenging birds. The birds just do what they have to, but at the end there’s nothing left. That’s exactly how I felt. I poured out my soul again and again, relived the horror time after time. It was intrusive and I wished afterwards none of them had ever come.
It was just one more reason to mistrust Simon. After all, without him, they would never have known.

The initial mood spike created by having the British press take an interest eventually plateaued. Once they’d gone, having taken their pound of flesh, we were left again with the crushing emptiness of our own thoughts.

The only thing that kept us going was the hope that once the national coverage started filtering down in the UK, the authorities there would take notice and get involved. The British Embassy in Greece might have seemed to have washed its hands of us, but they didn’t speak for our country. It was only a matter of time before Britain sent the cavalry. Or so we thought.

What we actually got was Simon.

I got back to the caravan to one day discover a note pinned to the door. It was from Simon, asking me to meet him at the apartment. Without any means of contacting him, I had no choice but to turn up with the key at the suggested time.

The British people had excelled themselves. Simon’s fare had been paid in full by generous strangers. I don’t know if they donated enough to pay for two extra tickets, but his brothers, Paul and Chris, turned up at the apartment as well. They were all riding colourful scrambler motorbikes as none of them had a licence for a car.

I remember staring hard into Simon’s face, looking for a sign. I’d told myself that I would know the second I laid eyes on him whether he’d been involved. When the time came, I honestly didn’t have a clue.

‘Have you brought your ferry and plane tickets?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, I’ve already dropped them off at the police station.’

‘Great,’ I said. But I was thinking,
How convenient.
Had he really brought them, or was he lying? How would I learn the truth?

‘Are you sure you don’t want to come in?’ Simon said.

‘No, I need to get back.’

‘Well, maybe we could go out tonight? You and me. Have a meal, get a drink, and have a proper chat about everything?’

‘Do what?’ I felt the blood rushing to my head. ‘Do you have any idea what I’ve been going through here? We’ve been suffering, Simon, every minute of every day. I don’t even know what food is any more.’

By the time I finished I realised I was screaming, but I couldn’t stop. I felt my knees buckle and I hit the floor hard on my palms. I’d used up all my strength shouting. All I had left were tears. I lay my head on the tarmac and sobbed my heart out.

I don’t think Simon knew what to do. He kept saying, ‘What’s wrong, Kerry? What is it?’ It was his brothers who scooped me up, sat me upright on a wall and tried to calm me down.

Gulping for air between sobs, I managed to force out how Simon had been spotted in a bank in Kos Town the day after he was meant to have left. He looked at me like he’d seen a ghost.

‘That was Monday, not Tuesday. I swear.’

I said nothing.

‘Kerry, you believe me, don’t you?’ He was kneeling in front of me, his hands on my shoulders. ‘I went to the bank on Monday to get money to buy my tickets.’ He stood up, kicked the wall. ‘Kerry, don’t you trust me?’

Now Simon looked ready to cry.

‘I don’t know, Simon. I don’t know.’

The next day Dad made his regular trip to see Christos Bafounis. Uncle Derek and Aunty Nancy had arrived the night before. While Nancy stayed at the caravan to look after Mum, me and Danny, Derek went with Dad into Kos Town. They returned with news.

‘Bafounis says he’s seen Simon’s ticket.’

‘And?’ I said.

‘And nothing. He says it’s just as Simon says. He caught the ferry then the plane on Monday. He wasn’t here Tuesday.’

‘That can’t be right.’

‘That’s what Bafounis says. And, by the way, he wasn’t too happy about it, either.’

‘Why not?’

Dad shrugged. He’d obviously been spending too long at that police station. ‘I think he’d pinned his hopes on it being Simon.’

Bafounis wasn’t the only one. My shoulders slumped and I put my hands over my face. I realised how much store I’d put in that theory. If Simon had him then of course Ben would be perfectly looked after. I had no doubts about that. Ben probably wouldn’t even know we were worried about him. Simon would have just said, ‘We’re going on a little holiday. Mummy will be coming soon.’ Just like I’d told Ben so many times about visiting his Nana.

I would never have forgiven Simon if he had taken Ben, but at that moment I really wished he had. Because if Simon didn’t have Ben, then who did? Simon had had nothing to do with Ben’s disappearance. The truth was far, far worse …

There was nothing to do but cry again.

Simon wasn’t the only person now interviewed by the police. After the Ward brothers had flown home as frustrated by the police investigation as the day they’d arrived, we began to hear from all our island friends and colleagues that they’d also been called in one by one. Monica, Athena and Dino, Manos, Martin, Peter, Dad’s drinking friends – everyone. I didn’t understand what Bafounis was playing at. They couldn’t help with the abduction. Some of them had only recently discovered the news. So what was the point?

‘Character references,’ Dad explained. ‘Bafounis wants to know what we’re like as people.’

‘How does that help him?’

‘It tells him if our friends think we’re the sort of people who might have done something to our own flesh and blood.’

I gasped for fresh air. The very idea of people suggesting that made me sick. I know the police have to do their jobs but this was poisonous. They should have been out looking for Ben, not scratching around for gossip about us. Still, we had nothing to hide.

Throughout the day, however, the poison seemed to spread to us. We couldn’t help picking over every potential permutation.
What had people said about us? Were they judging me for being an unmarried mum, for leaving Ben while I went to work, for being a teenager with a child? Dad had similar thoughts, Mum too. We were already wrecks, emotionally barren and physically stretched. Now we were paranoid as well.

Bafounis wasn’t just speaking to friends. He and his men had also interviewed everyone who could possibly have any information about Ben’s whereabouts. Michaelis was called in for his version of events, as was Dino Barkas, the driver of the digger that had been dumping hardcore earlier in the day. Even Sissy was called to give her own account, as she had spoken to Stephen that day.

The first we knew of this was when we made our daily pilgrimage to Kos Town the following day. Dad and I went straight up to see Bafounis while the others made their way to the café as usual. The chief of security police never seemed happy to see us but today he actually looked up. I could tell he had news. An English-speaking officer told us Barkas had reported seeing a white car parked along the lane on the day Ben had disappeared. He couldn’t identify the passengers but he could tell there were two men in the front and a woman in the back.

‘They took your baby.’

It was the news I’d been dreading and praying for at the same time. On the one hand it was evidence that Ben had been abducted. On the other hand, it was a breakthrough in the investigation. Finally we had something to go on.

Dino had not been able to confirm whether there had been hire car signs on the number plate or bodywork but it had looked like a Suzuki, a popular model with the rental companies. The police were going to check for cars reported stolen and ask Avis and
Hertz and other firms to scour their records for anyone who had previously hired a white vehicle. It would be quite a task: every other hire vehicle seemed to be white.

‘Who do you think was in the car?’ Dad asked the officer.

He shrugged.

‘We are looking.’

He picked up a piece of paper from Bafounis’s desk. On it was a picture of Ben and a lot of writing. It was a ‘Wanted’ poster. I knew it was coming because we’d written some words for it. Seeing it for real and knowing the police would be putting it up around the island was another matter. Even if it had all been translated into Greek, seeing that poster was just another harsh reminder of the fact my baby boy was missing.

Dad and I went back to the coffee bar to update the others. I don’t remember walking there. I couldn’t take in what we’d just heard. After all the whispers and shrugs, to have the police come out and say, once and for all, that Ben had been abducted was sickening. The idea of strangers laying their fingers on my precious boy turned my stomach.

Dad relayed the news.

‘He’s been kidnapped?’ Mum said. ‘Who’d kidnap Ben? We haven’t got any money. We can’t pay a ransom.’

‘Whatever it is we’ll find it somehow and we’ll pay it,’ Stephen said. I loved him for that.

It was Dad’s turn to be quiet now. Finally he said, ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of kidnapping.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘If Ben’s been taken, it’s not to get money out of us. It’s to sell him.’

‘Sell him? Who sells children?’

It was the most preposterous idea I’d ever heard. People didn’t sell children. Had Dad been drinking?

‘I’ll tell you who,’ he said. ‘Gypsies.’

He went on to tell us what certain people at the pub opposite the caravan site and also in Athena and Dino’s coffee bar had been saying to him since they’d read about Ben in the local press.

‘I’ve heard it from too many people. It’s the gypsies. They sell children for illegal adoption. Sometimes they even sell their own.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Kidnapping was one thing. This was human trafficking.
You can’t buy and sell children like they’re bags of sugar.

It got worse. Dad reported the various whispers from his friends. If the snatched kids were lucky, they were sold to the highest bidder and raised with their new family in another country. The less fortunate ones were used as organ donors – whether they could spare the organ or not.

I was in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from. What was Dad even saying? Did he really believe his own words? He’d lived the Irish Traveller life for years. In England, gypsies were unconventional, they had a reputation for petty crime. But they didn’t abduct children to harvest their organs. What made him think Greek ones would?

‘These are not gypsies,’ he said. ‘They’re scum.’

Dad was a man on a mission. As we sat in the café one morning, he announced, ‘I can’t sit here waiting. I need to be looking.’ What we didn’t know was that various friends in various pubs had pointed out to him the sort of locations in Kos where a kidnapped
boy might be smuggled without too much fuss. Conspiracy theories abounded, I knew that much. But we also had no idea that several people had suggested Dad take up their offer of acquiring a handgun. The people he would be coming up against wouldn’t think twice, he was assured, of using a weapon to protect themselves. Mum and I were blissfully ignorant of all this. We just knew every morning he packed a lunch and disappeared for the day, again and again and again.