Burnt Paper Sky (17 page)

‘Don’t!’ shouted Nicky. ‘Don’t do this. Please!’

She manhandled me. She took hold of me, gripping my upper arms. She sat me down on one of the kitchen chairs and she knelt on the floor in front of me.

‘Where is he?’ I asked her. ‘What’s happening to him?’

‘Don’t,’ said Nicky again, her voice quieter this time, and her face close to mine. ‘Please don’t.’

I stopped resisting her, and I sobbed until my throat was sore and my eyes were swollen almost shut.

Fraser and I had a pre-meet before the whole team got together for the evening briefing. She was looking at her computer screen as I took a seat.

‘Woodley’s bringing in our friend Edward Fount of fantasy world fame in the morning,’ she said. ‘And Christopher Fellowes, the forensic chappie, has sent me a profile that we can use when we’re considering the non-family abduction option. You’ll not be surprised to hear that it’s an almost perfect description of Mr Fount.’

‘I still think he’s not our man.’

She took off her reading glasses to study me. ‘I know that, I take your point, but I can’t dismiss him on a hunch. This isn’t an episode of
Columbo
.’

In spite of everything, that made me smile.
Columbo
had been a favourite childhood show.

Fraser went on. ‘Can we run through who else we’re looking at? Rachel Jenner?’

‘Chris emailed me his thoughts on her.’

‘He’s been a busy boy today, which is good, because he’s expensive enough. He should have copied me in on that. Can I see it?’

I got the email up on my laptop, winced a little in anticipation of her reading the first paragraph.

‘Forward it to me please, Jim,’ she said once she’d read it. ‘There’s some good stuff in there. I’ll edit and pass on to the rest of the team. We should also take note of his point about the wider family.’

‘The sister interests me, but that’s all the wider family there seems to be. There’s also a friend, Laura Saville, who Emma’s met at the house.’

‘Has she been interviewed?’

‘Not yet, but she’s a priority. And on top of that the school have sent over a very long list of people that Ben could have had contact with.’

‘Anybody stand out?’

‘I met with the head teacher and Ben’s class teacher. They were very obviously stressed out, but trying to be helpful. The Head’s a little defensive I’d say, it’s obviously a nightmare for him, especially because he’s only been in the job since the beginning of this school year. They raised one or two concerns about Rachel Jenner that you already know about.’

‘You mean the broken limb that the child had?’

‘Yes, but I can’t see any evidence of wrongdoing there. I do think she’s been depressed though, that’s pretty clear, and it might be the most significant thing from our point of view.’

‘Teacher?’

‘Late twenties I’d say, eager to assist, perhaps not the sharpest tool in the box, but seems perfectly nice. They’re behaving like people struggling to cope in a difficult situation.’

‘Understandably.’

‘The only one who rang a few alarm bells was the teaching assistant.’

‘He’s got an alibi, doesn’t he?’

‘He does, the Head does and the teacher does, and they all check out.’

‘So what rings bells for you?’

‘He was just a bit shifty. Woodley thought so too.’

‘Who interviewed him formally?’

‘I can’t remember off the top of my head.’

‘Did they raise concerns, do you know?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to interview him yourself?’

‘No. It’s only a feeling, and I don’t want to spook the school unless we’ve got a very good reason to. The headmaster sent over the full list of people Ben might have had contact with yesterday evening, and I think we should wait and see what that might throw up. There are at least twenty people on it so it’ll take time to check them out and interview them, but let’s leave the teaching assistant alone until we see what comes of that.’

‘Agreed. We don’t want another witch hunt on our hands. It’s bad enough already. By the way, have you seen the blog?’

‘Blog?’

But she was looking at her watch. ‘We should go. People need briefing. I’ll talk about it in the meeting.’

We walked into a packed briefing room and took our seats. Prominent at the head of the table was DS Martyn.

‘Don’t mind if I join you, do you, DCI Fraser?’ he asked. He had an unusually low voice.

His presence at the meeting was a sign of how high profile the case was. He wore full uniform. His hair was curly but thinning so it looked like spun sugar. He had slab cheeks and a drinker’s nose. He reminded me of some of my dad’s friends. He was on his way to a function at the Marriott Hotel, he told us, so he couldn’t stay long.

His presence was a downer, it gave the meeting a formal edge, took away the conspiratorial atmosphere that Fraser usually managed to foster. She kicked things off. First bit of news was that there’d continued to be a high rate of calls to the tip-line, so she was pleased about that.

Fraser talked people through progress and shared our thoughts with the room, told them about the stuff Chris Fellowes had sent over. She divvied out the workload and allocated actions. Priority was given to trawling through the list that the school had provided.

‘Speak to as many people as you can,’ she said. ‘We need to form as clear a picture as possible of the networks around this child.’

Fraser asked for updates and a sharp-faced DC called Kelly Dixon started us off. She told us that she’d located the paedophile. He’d been at a comic convention in Glasgow on Sunday afternoon, manning a stall. He hadn’t been anywhere near Benedict Finch. He had, however, crossed paths with an incalculable number of under-sixteens during the course of the afternoon, a clear breach of the terms of his release, and as a result he was cooling his heels back in the cells.

‘Jesus,’ said Fraser. ‘That’s a result of sorts anyway.’

The next item was the blog. If things had been bad for Rachel Jenner up to now, then it turned out that they were about to get worse.

‘It won’t have escaped anybody’s attention,’ said Fraser, ‘that our victim’s mother behaved in an unconventional manner at the press conference yesterday.’

‘Understatement,’ boomed DS Martyn.

Fraser tried to contain her irritation. ‘That behaviour seems to have triggered somebody to write a very vindictive blog, which aggressively targets Rachel Jenner, implying that she is responsible for Ben’s abduction, or worse. Woodley, would you like to explain?’

Woodley cleared his throat. His mouth was dry when he spoke. Nerves. ‘Normally we wouldn’t expect a blog like this to attract very much attention,’ he said, ‘but the author has placed several links to it on Facebook which has inevitably led to it being shared and mentioned on Twitter and re-tweeted over and over again. It’s had thousands of hits.’

He looked at Fraser who said, ‘In English, please, for the older generation.’

‘It’s gone viral,’ he said.

‘Still none the wiser,’ she said. I saw Emma smile discreetly. We all knew Fraser was more IT-savvy than she let on, but there were others in the room who might need this spelled out.

‘Everybody’s looking at it. Thousands of people already, with the potential for it to spread to tens of thousands.’

Fraser continued. ‘Right. Which means it’s a possible problem for us because it could stoke people up, and the last thing we want is trial by internet. We must remember: in spite of her performance in front of the press we have no evidence to suspect that Rachel Jenner’s done anything at this stage, although if she’s charged in the future, this is a potential contempt of court issue.’

‘Can we find out who the author is?’ asked DS Martyn.

‘Not easily,’ said Woodley. ‘It’s somebody calling themselves LazyDonkey, but we’ve got no way of knowing who they are.’

‘We’re monitoring closely for now, hoping things will calm down,’ said Fraser. ‘I’ll get legal eyes on it if it’s still a problem in twenty-four hours. Right! Anyone got anything to add?’ She looked around the room.

‘Excuse me, boss,’ Emma said. Her phone was vibrating. ‘It’s Rachel Jenner’s home number.’

‘Speak of the devil,’ said DS Martyn. His fingers were working at a red lump on his neck.

‘Can I take it?’ Emma asked Fraser.

Fraser gave her the nod.

Nicky phoned the police and then she and Laura scrubbed the fence. They wouldn’t let me help them in case there were photographers, and I was in no state to anyway.

While I sat on the sofa, cocooned in a blanket to try to stop my body shaking, they worked together in the cold to erase the evidence that somebody out there wanted everybody to think that I’d hurt my son.

It was pointless though, a Sisyphean task, because while they scrubbed, fingers frozen and arms aching, we all knew that other people were at work elsewhere, spreading the message far more effectively, and without getting their hands dirty.

It has a very destructive effect, being publicly vilified, or being aggressively targeted by others, however much you rationalise it and tell yourself that only the worst kinds of people do that sort of thing.

I felt hemmed in by hatred, and I felt physically afraid. If somebody was brazen and motivated enough to graffiti that close to my property, what would stop them going further? Would they break in? Would they hurt me?

Fear for Ben had inhabited every cell in my body since Sunday, and governed my every thought and every action, but now it was to be joined by something else: fear for myself.