Ben (21 page)

Asking holidaymakers to get involved was a stroke of genius. By contrast, I couldn’t see any value in the Q&A session. We’d
already been interviewed by every reporter in the land. What difference would this make? What difference
could
it make?

We were so naïve about the power of the media. Two decades later, with reality TV and the internet and social media, I think now most people would know how to get publicity. We didn’t have a clue how it worked. Why would a normal, working-class Yorkshire family know we could have asked for payments from the journalists who came over to Kos? We weren’t looking to profit from our tragedy, but imagine how different our lives would have been if they’d paid for their exclusives. If we could have afforded medical attention we could have stayed out there a lot longer. Where was the advice from the embassy or the Foreign Office to take advantage of these opportunities?

We just didn’t know how to play the game. Shortly after returning from Kos, we decided to get in contact with the children’s campaigner Esther Rantzen, so we rang the Childline number in the phonebook. When I told a journalist this years later, she laughed.

‘Why didn’t you just call the BBC and ask to be put through to Esther Rantzen’s office?’

It never occurred to us that that was even a possibility. Normal people don’t phone the BBC!

For all my doubts about the press conference, it was only a couple of days later when DS Norburn came to see me.

‘It’s started,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a sighting.’

Bert placed a folder on our dining table and sifted through its contents. I was sitting opposite him, but I felt like a viewer watching on TV. Could that thin, blue folder really hold the key to Ben’s whereabouts?

‘We’ve actually had several phone calls,’ Bert said.

‘What? People have seen Ben?’

‘So they claim. We’re pursuing each one.’

He warned me not to get too excited. The various calls so far had been from people in many different places. One of them might have spotted Ben, but it was unlikely he’d moved around that much, even living with an itinerant gypsy family.

Bert could have told me all that on the phone. The reason he’d come was in that folder. He slid a glossy five-by-four image across the table.

‘Take your time, Kerry. Tell me what you think.’

A moment earlier it had felt like the world had stopped spinning. Now it was in hyperdrive. As I pulled the photograph towards me I thought my heart would burst from beating so fast. Was this really it? Had someone seen my beautiful boy?

My eyes darted over the picture. In the foreground were two children posing on a beach. But it was the small blond figure in the background that the photographer had wanted us to see. I studied the smiling blond toddler then took a deep breath. Bert didn’t have to ask.

‘It’s not him,’ I said. ‘It’s not Ben.’

I didn’t need a DNA test or to check for the strawberry birthmark. That wasn’t my son. I wished it was but it wasn’t. In the space of five minutes I’d been lifted to the moon then dumped back on the ground.

The photograph was just one of the sightings from holidaymakers. The other half-a-dozen leads were just the bones of descriptions: ‘Boy, blond, blue-eyed, beach, Zakynthos.’ Without a picture there was nothing I could do. These, Bert said, would
now go through the channels to be investigated. Unfortunately, those channels could not have been harder to navigate. Bert would send the sightings via South Yorkshire Police to the Foreign Office who would pass them on to Interpol who would redirect them to Athens who would post them to the appropriate island authority. If anything proved how little Greece was co-operating with the UK, it was that: Bert wasn’t even allowed to contact them directly.

‘What do we do in the meantime?’ I asked.

‘We wait.’

It could take months for a response, Bert admitted, as frustrated by the process as I was. Once again I wished we had money. However vague one or two of those leads seemed, I would have flown to the four corners of the earth to follow them up.

I barely said another word while Bert gathered his papers. As I closed the front door, his parting words – ‘This is just the start, Kerry. We’ll find him’ – hung in the air.

The reach of the press conference was staggering. The segment shown on
Calendar
alone seemed to have been watched by everyone in Sheffield. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to receive a knock on the door one night. I opened it and there was Simon.

I could thank my medication for being calm enough to be civil. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, but we hadn’t parted on the best of terms in Kos. So estranged were we that it was only seeing me on local TV that had let him know I was even back in the country.

He asked if we could talk and because everyone else was sitting down to their tea, I followed him out to his car. We sat in there for a while and then, as the engine was running to power the heater anyway, went for a drive.

I think ‘clear the air’ is the best phrase for it. After two hours we were closer than we had been all year.

Knowing that Simon’s alibi had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb by South Yorkshire Police had removed all those lingering doubts I’d had about him. They’d seen his passport stamp, his ferry ticket and even a bank statement proving he really did pick up ticket money wired from his father to Kos. I wasn’t the only one to have leapt to conclusions. He showed me newspaper headlines from England that had accused him outright of abducting his own son. These had run before he’d even come out to help with the search. Where the press had got their information from I had no idea, although the police could not be ruled out. Either way, Simon must have felt terrible.

Above everything else, I finally appreciated that it wasn’t just my son who had been taken. It was his son, too. Our son. We would never lose that connection and it was unfair of me, selfish even, to assume he wasn’t suffering as much as me. Simon was in pain too, and he had no one to confide in. Whereas I came from an emotional family, Simon took after his mother, who always managed to seem detached from everything. Cliff couldn’t speak about Ben without crying. Whether Simon and his mother had their moments in private or not, it made it easy sometimes to assume they didn’t care.

By the end of the night I was thoroughly confused. I had no feelings for Simon as a partner any more and yet there was something there. Like troops who return from the frontline with an unshakeable bond, I felt we would always be linked by Ben. It made sense to stay in touch.

My grandma thought that was the least we could do. She’d always liked Simon and suggested we’d both be happier if
we put our differences behind us and rekindled our relationship once again.

‘You need each other.’

Mum and Dad had each other, my brothers had each other – why shouldn’t I have Simon to lean on, especially with such a trying time fast approaching?

Two years old is a landmark in a child’s life. When babies are born they’re measured in days, then weeks, then months. But two – that’s when you start saying ‘years’. On 29 October my son turned two years old, and he didn’t even know it. All the diazepam in the world could not have stopped the tears when I thought of Ben not being made a fuss of on his own birthday.

I still bought him a card and I told him in the message how much I loved him. Mum and Dad did the same. Amanda, Donna and Shaun, the children of Simon’s sister, Jane, wrote a lovely poem:

We think about you every day

We pray for you at night

We hope that God will keep you safe

Until that special day

That you come back to stay.

What should have been a happy time for the whole family was one of the hardest days of our lives. Christmas, as expected, was hell on earth.

It was no surprise to anyone when I moved in with Simon in February 1992. Once again, the place wasn’t exactly a candidate for
Location, Location, Location
. In fact, I didn’t mind it being a
bedsit as much as I was disappointed to have to move to the other side of town again, back to Norfolk Park. It was quite a distance from my family in Ecclesfield. I also fell outside the reach of my GP, which meant an end to her counselling sessions.

I tried to make a go of it, I really did, but I felt a cloud hovering over me every moment I was in that flat. Simon didn’t know what to do. When your bed is in your living room it’s so tempting not to get up. So I didn’t. Day after day passed and I wouldn’t leave my bed, let alone the flat. Unless I had a visit from Mum or a journalist, then what was the point?

I also made an exception for DS Norburn when he arrived with replies from Kos about the sightings from last year. To say the island’s responses were unsatisfactory is an understatement. Each separate sighting was returned with the note ‘No’ or ‘Not Ben’ alongside it. That was it. No explanations, no evidence. What did they mean, ‘Not Ben’? What had they done to verify? Seen a birth certificate? Checked the birthmarks? What? I needed details.

I don’t think Bert had ever seen such amateur communication from one force to another. It was almost as though Kos was trying to annoy us. He agreed to request more information although, based on this effort, neither of us was expecting to be impressed by the result. Then, as ever, we waited.

On the plus side, new sightings were coming in all the time. Every other week Bert came to the flat with a handful of photographs. I was so grateful to people for taking the time to send their holiday snaps in, but sometimes it was all I could do not to laugh at them. One was as close to Ben the corgi as he was Ben my son.

Bert laughed. ‘I only bring you the good likenesses. You should see some of the others!’

Speaking of Ben the dog, more tragedy for our family was just around the corner. With his quarantine period coming to an end, there was the little matter of finding £1,200 to pay for his release. Obviously we didn’t have that kind of money. If we did, then as much as I loved that little dog, I would have used it for plane journeys. Danny couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t hand over the cash. He’d visited the kennels several times. He was desperate to get Ben back.

Dad put out an appeal for help in the local press and it worked – sort of. The kennel agreed to waive most the fee and Aunty Jean paid the difference. After six long months, Danny and Ben were reunited. Sadly, the story had an unhappy ending. Barely a year later, Ben would go missing, just like his namesake. Danny had a theory that the dog was looking for our caravan. He might be right, but we never saw Ben the dog again.

While Bert and the South Yorkshire Police were doing their best to progress the investigation, others were following their own leads. In April 1992 I received a phone call from a
Sun
journalist called Shan Lancaster. She said, ‘We’ve received a report that a boy fitting Ben’s description has been spotted on the island of Kefalonia. Do you want to follow it up?’

‘There’s no way I can afford it,’ I said, a dark cloud fully engulfed my mind.

‘We’re willing to pay if you’re willing to go.’

Wow.

A guy who worked on the docks had said that his children came in one night and saw the tail end of the coverage of Ben’s disappearance on television. Without knowing the full story, they
both looked at the picture on the screen and said, ‘We played with him today.’

The father was shocked. Adults can be mistaken and often have a tendency to tell you what you want to hear. But children have no agenda. Why would these kids make up something quite so random? That was what made them such credible witnesses. And that is why Simon, Shan, a photographer and I found ourselves on a flight to Kefalonia the following day.

However blue the sky was outside the plane window, my mood was still very dark. Not even the prospect of finding my son was lifting me. When I had Ben in my arms I would cry with joy. Until then I just wanted to get it over with.

We met the docker and his lovely children, ten-year-old Panayota and her brother Georgos. Shan and Simon did most of the talking to the dad via an interpreter. Then Panayota started speaking and I was rapt.

‘I was standing smiling at a blond boy of about three who was waving from the queue for the ferry to the mainland,’ she said. ‘I waved back and the little boy laughed and jumped up and down. I went to play with him. He was giggling and dancing.’

I clung onto Simon for support. This darling, dark-haired girl was describing exactly how Ben behaves when he finds new playmates. I’d seen him chuckle and giggle and show off like that more times than I could remember.

There was more. ‘He was not Greek but he said some words I understood. When I saw a picture of the lost English baby I recognised him.’

Panayota went on to describe how she and her brother played with Ben till the ferry came. They watched as he got into a red car with two women, then boarded the ship.

The children went over it all again in front of a policeman, and I knew they believed they’d seen my son. I believed they’d seen him, too.

Unfortunately, it didn’t help us at all. It had taken two months for the news to reach us. Ben could be anywhere now. The temporary light that had come on in my head began to dim. I wanted to go home.

I don’t know what Shan had expected to find. It was a long shot that Ben would have returned to where the children had seen him. It was a dock: people came there to board boats and move on. But, I suppose, she got a story. And, from our point of view, she kept it in her millions of readers’ minds. I just wished I hadn’t had to endure the crushed expectations.

The
Sun
also paid for hundreds of posters to be put up featuring Ben’s face, the message, ‘Have you seen this child?’ and a contact number – as well as their logo, of course. The picture was almost a year old but it was all we had.

I was desperate to leave but Shan had another lead for us. A village inland called Skala was home to two brothers, Spiros and Stavos Solomon. They had also registered a sighting of a boy who fitted Ben’s description. When we showed them the poster they both nodded.