Burnt Paper Sky (34 page)

Nicky Forbes was on the phone when she opened the door. Her expression told me that we were the last people she expected to see.

She was dressed already but her face was void of make-up and she wore her paleness like a mask. She looked like she was sucking a lemon as she led us into the small kitchen and gestured to us to join her at a small table that was set against the wall.

A smoking cigarette lay in a circular ceramic ashtray that had fag ends crushed into its base. The table and chairs were a shiny orange pine, dented in places. The floor was tiled with small white squares grouted in black and the cabinets were white with a wood trim around the edge.

The room was a throwback to the 1980s, nothing had been updated for years. It wasn’t what I expected from Nicky Forbes, because I’d seen her blog, the pictures of her cooking on her AGA in a perfectly equipped and decorated modern kitchen.

The kettle had just boiled but she didn’t offer us a drink.

‘Are you a smoker, DI Clemo?’ she asked, and she held out the cigarette packet that was on the table.

‘No thank you,’ I said. Woodley shook his head too when she aimed the packet at him.

She dropped it back onto the table where it landed with a slap, and retrieved her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray.

‘I gave this up years ago,’ she said. ‘When I got pregnant with my first daughter.’

She sucked smoke in deeply, her eyes on mine, her gaze direct and challenging.

‘I’m wondering why you’re here,’ she said, exhaling the smoke slowly so that it billowed between us, ‘when my sister is in Bristol frantically trying to get hold of somebody who’ll listen to her when she tells them that she has evidence that Ben’s alive? I’m also wondering why you’re here when you have a suspect in custody? Ben’s teaching assistant? Is that right? Shouldn’t you be trying to gather some evidence against him? Maybe?’

She looked from one of us to the other, and when neither of us replied she slammed the side of her hand on the table, a show of temper that made Woodley jump, but not me.

‘What is the matter with you people?’

Her face was angry red and her manner was that of a teacher demanding an answer. It was all about control with her, I thought. This was an attempt at a display of control from somebody who had lost it. But I wasn’t worried about cracking her; I knew I was a good interviewer, very good.

When I was in my first couple of years of training I spent hours with my dad, honing my interrogation skills, role-playing until he’d caught me out with every dirty trick in the book, and then taught me how to recognise them, and work with them.

‘You’ll hear excuses,’ Dad said to me one night. I was visiting the family home and it was after dinner. Mum was washing up and Dad and I were talking in his study. The window was wide open and outside the late summer heat had just folded itself away, so we were sitting in the early gloom of a cool, velvety night. ‘Blokes will say that you aren’t a magician,’ Dad went on, ‘that you can only do what you do. That’s bullshit. It’s whingeing. It’s for people who aren’t good enough. If you’re worth anything, you can get the truth out of anyone. But you’ve got to be good.’

Two cut glass tumblers sat squat on the table between us, two whiskies. My dad shut the window and switched on his desk lamp. The shade glowed dark emerald and dropped a rectangle of light onto the surface of his desk.

He sat back down. ‘Again,’ he said.

In the kitchen of Nicky Forbes’s cottage I took a chair and pulled it close to her, so we were practically knee to knee.

So here’s the thing.

What do you do when it’s just you? When you know something and nobody will listen? When you want to do something, but you don’t know how dangerous it is, or how much you will be risking? When you have only minutes to decide?

I was used to making decisions about my life that were based on my complicated relationships with others.

Do I need to name them? Most of us have them. They’re generic. They could include your resentment of parents, or a sibling, or your desire to please your family, or a husband, or your fear of losing him. They could include your ambition, or your perception of what parenthood should be. I could go on.

But, at 9 am on Monday, 29 October, all those things fell away. There was just me, and I had a choice. I could believe what was written about me, that I was worse than useless, incapable of a sensible or moral decision, and I could obey DCI Fraser’s request, and wait quietly at home for news.

Or, I could act. I could take the certainty I felt and do something. On my own. Again. Because I was sure.

Don’t think that self-doubt didn’t course through my veins and threaten to weaken me. Don’t think that I didn’t consider the possible risks of acting alone. The risk for Ben, and for myself.

I fought both those things. I fought them because I knew I had to rely, purely and simply, on my instinct as a mother.

‘Be strong,’ Ruth had said. ‘You’re a mother. You must be strong.’

And that was enough for me. I understood in that moment, on that morning, that being a mother had given Ruth a single silken strand, strong as a spider’s web, which had tethered her to her life. It was the string that had led her, time and time again, out of the enveloping and dangerous depths of the labyrinth that was her depression. It had prevented her from slipping fatally and completely away into the dark seductive folds of melancholia, and stopped her sinking into the drowsy escape of a terminal pill overdose, or seeking a tumbling, chaotic fall from a height, and its inevitable brutal, shattering end below.

It hadn’t stopped my own mother. She’d been overwhelmed by the love she felt, by the fear it made her feel. Her emotions had drowned her sanity; such was their power.

But I was different.

I knew my son was alive, and I knew where he was.

So you might wonder what I did.

I opened a drawer in my kitchen and looked over the contents. I chose a vegetable knife. Short and sharp, easy to conceal. I put it into one of the deep pockets of my coat, blade down, beside my phone. I put the keys I’d taken into the other. Then I left my home through the studio at the back, unseen by anybody, and I began to run.

Nicky Forbes was disturbed by my proximity. She shifted, tucking her legs under the table, away from me. Her body language was pure avoidance, but I was OK with that. I’d learned to be patient.

Woodley sat on the other side of her, keeping more distance, his posture relaxed. Good lad, I thought, he’d been listening.

We’d planned to use the Reid technique in the interview. It’s not very nice, but it’s very effective. It’s a well-known technique that makes use of a good-cop, bad-cop routine, so Woodley had a role to play. As well as being my foil, he would be my eyes. He would watch her for body language that would betray her.

Nicky Forbes folded her arms over her chest.

‘Are you finished?’ I said.

She flinched slightly, a small jerk of her head away from her hand, which held her cigarette just in front of her mouth, the smoke curling between us.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘here’s how I see it.’ I kept my voice gentle, but persistent, I wanted her to listen to every word I said.

‘I think what you went through as a child was a terrible thing. I think that when you lost your brother, when you lost Charlie, you never really recovered. Did you? Then you had to bring up Rachel and she was ungrateful, wasn’t she? She never knew how much you had to suffer, or thought about how hard it was for you to keep the secret about your parents and about Charlie.’

She took a deep pull on her cigarette, her eyes on mine. I went on.

‘So when Rachel had Ben that was difficult for you, wasn’t it? You had four daughters, but that’s not the same as having a son, is it? She didn’t know how lucky she was, because for you, having a son would be like having Charlie back.

‘So I think you didn’t have a choice. I think you thought that Rachel was bad for Ben. You reckoned that she couldn’t look after him as well as you. She’s divorced after all, bearing a grudge against her husband and his new wife. That’s not a happy home. And Ben’s been unhappy in the past year; we know that from his teacher. That must have pained you. In fact I think it was really hard for you to bear.’

She gave a small, brusque shake of her head, then she ground the cigarette out in the ashtray, crossed her arms.

‘Four children is a lot, and all girls too. Were you hoping for a son, Nicky? Is that why you wanted to try for another baby this year? Your husband told me. Has it been all about replacing Charlie?’

Her eyes began to glisten with tears, but she didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t draw breath. You mustn’t, because if you do it gives them a chance to deny things, and that can make them stronger, just the act of saying it. You have to carry them on your narrative until they finish it for you, and hand you the ending you’re waiting for.

I inched my chair just a little closer to hers. Her head bowed. I leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees, and looked up at her.

‘You see, I think it was just too much for you in the end. That Rachel had Ben. You knew you could do a better job than her and you wanted a son of your own.’

She shuddered.

‘I know what it’s like to want to protect,’ I said. ‘I can understand why you did it. You’d left your own family; you didn’t want them. You wanted him. And you wanted him for the right reasons. It was a mother’s instinct, a proper mother’s instinct, wasn’t it? You knew you could do a better job than your sister.’

She covered her face with her hands, let out a moan.

I wondered if she was going to break quicker than I thought.

I could almost smell it.

It took me twenty-five minutes to get back there.

I stood in front of Miss May’s house, panting and soaked to the skin. The only dry parts of me were the depths of my pockets where my fingers nestled around the handle of the knife and the hard edges of the keys.

The street was empty and in front of me the slate sky was reflected in polished windowpanes that were speckled with rain, and the black wrought iron railings separating the house from the pavement looked sharp and forbidding.

I approached the house and looked at the names and buzzers beside the front door. None of them read ‘May’. I peered over the wrought iron railings that enclosed a dank courtyard at least twelve feet below ground level.

It was worth a try.

I took the steps down one at a time, slowly, stone treads slick and treacherous. The doorbell wasn’t named. I rang it. No answer.

I got out her keys and tried the Chubb key in the deadlock. It turned smoothly. In went the Yale key too, soft click, and I had to give the door a bit of a shove but it opened and I saw a dark hallway ahead, daring me to step into it.

‘Hello?’ I called. It wasn’t too late to pretend I was just returning the keys, but there was no answer.

‘Ben?’ I called. Nothing. I felt almost disabled by fear, but I forced myself to walk down the dark, narrow corridor. Filtered daylight beckoned me from the other end.

I glanced through an open door on my left. It was a bathroom, and it was immaculate: fixtures gleaming, expensive looking toiletries in a neat row. The door opposite showed me her bedroom. On the bed was a suitcase, lid open, neatly packed.

At the end of the corridor I found her living space. It was large and rectangular, the full width of the back of the house. There was a compact, neat kitchen area and small dining table at one end of it, a sitting area at the other. The room had stripped wooden floorboards and three wide, pretty windows with wooden shutters folded back, sills low and wide enough to sit on. The outside space it overlooked was little more than a light well, but there were pretty furnishings and the whole effect was of artful good taste. It was a flat I might have been envious of under different circumstances.

Standing in the centre of the room, I saw myself reflected in a mirror over the mantelpiece. I looked white as a ghost. My hair, blackened by rain, hung in damp hanks around my face, and patches under my eyes were as dark as storm clouds. My skin looked slack and undernourished, and the injury on my forehead was healed, but prominent. My eyes were darting with fear and something else as well: there was desperation in them, and a glint of wildness.

I looked completely mad.

Doubt coursed through me.

This is what a total breakdown must be, I thought. You find yourself standing somewhere you shouldn’t be, doing something so out of character that you wonder if you’ve become somebody else entirely. You’ve lost the plot, taken a wrong turning, jumped onto a train whose destination is total lunacy.

I must leave, I thought. I must go home.

I would have done that, too, but as I turned to leave I noticed the door. It was in a corner, partially obscured by the kitchen units. An apron, oven gloves and tea towels hung from it on a neat row of hooks. Layers of paint had dulled the panelled detail on it. It was probably a larder, I told myself, or a broom cupboard, and I should just go.

But I found that I couldn’t. I felt compelled to walk towards it and, as I did so, I heard someone whimper and I realised it was me.

I stopped in front of the door. My left palm was moulded around the handle of the knife, and I rested the tip of my index finger on the bottom of the blade, and pressed down a little, feeling it bite into me, making me flinch. There was nothing to be heard apart from the slow drip of rain from somewhere outside. Even the hands on the kitchen clock moved soundlessly.

With a feeling of horror uncurling within, I reached my hand out towards the door and clasped the handle. It turned, but something stopped the door opening. It was jamming at the top.

I reached up to a bolt that was drawn at the top of the door. Tremulous, unreliable fingers fumbled but managed to draw it back.

I opened the door, stepped behind it and there was a soft click as I pulled it shut.

I could see nothing. All around me it was pitch black, and I had to use the light from my phone to see that I was at the top of a short staircase, and that there was another door, also bolted, at the bottom of it.

I started to make my way down. The darkness was so dense that I needed my hands to steady me on the narrow walls.

Two more steps and I reached the door at the bottom of the staircase. Once again, trembling fingers pulled the bolt, pushed the door open.

My fingers felt for a light switch, and found one. The hesitant bulb blinked and then glowed the dull orange of a polluted sunset before it brightened, revealing the room to me, making me gasp.

It took me long moments to absorb what I could see.

It was a boy’s bedroom: freshly painted walls, bright yellow, thick blue carpet on the floor. A rugby poster, and rugby club scarf, both pinned up, some reading books, a teddy bear on the bed, wearing a scarf. There was some clothing, a pair of small slippers, a dressing gown in softest white towelling. A wooden-framed bed made up with a cartoon-patterned duvet set on it, a pile of DVDs and a television set on a table in the corner, a chest of drawers with pirate stickers decorating it.

No Ben. No natural light.

I picked up one of the garments: it was a pyjama top, for a boy, bright red cotton, a dinosaur printed on the front of it, grubby marks around the collar. ‘Age 8’ read the label. I held the top to my face, I inhaled the smell of the fabric, and I knew that Ben had worn it.

He had been here.

My fingers dug into the soft cotton and I held on to it as if it were a living, breathing part of my son. ‘Ben,’ I whispered into it, ‘Ben.’

My eyes roved again, looking for more signs of him.

And what struck me was that there was nothing in that room, nothing at all, not one thing, that was right.

If Miss May had made this space for my son, and I was convinced that she had, then she’d got it wrong. Ben didn’t like rugby. He’d never have chosen bright yellow walls, or a babyish duvet set, or the type of reading books she’d left out for him, and he wouldn’t have liked the pirate stickers on the chest of drawers because he preferred dinosaurs. The bear on the bed was a version of Baggy Bear, but wasn’t him. His ear wasn’t sucked.

This was a room made for an imagined boy, not for my boy, who would never have felt at home here.

And then I saw something else.

Scattered all over the bed, beneath a fresh scar on the wall where it looked as though it had made impact, were the components of a smashed laptop: shards of plastic, electrical bits and keyboard keys, all separated from one another by significant force.

Ben would have liked the laptop. He might have played on it.

But he might not have been allowed to go online, to play his favourite game. The laptop might have been snatched from him, and hurled against a wall in anger.

And would that anger have then been directed towards him?

I fumbled for my phone. The reception was poor, but it was enough. I called 999.

And when I’d finished the call I stood in the middle of that space, with the painful wrongness of it in every corner of my vision, and the shattered computer components a glowering hint of violence, and I began to moan, and it was a dreadful, primitive sound, and the moans turned into a shout for him, a final desperate plea, an ululation, like the one I’d made in the woods one week before.

And I fell to my knees, hope shattered.