Ben (22 page)

‘That is him. That is the baby.’

The only difference, they said, was that the ‘baby’ they saw had longer hair – and was dirtier. ‘He was with some gypsies,’ Spiros told us. ‘We noticed because gypsies are dark people and he was such a fair child.’

There was that word again: gypsies. If they had snatched Ben, then it looked like they hadn’t sold him on. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn’t bear to think about it.

We were in Kefalonia for three days. I don’t remember much else except yearning to get back home. To bed.

A week after returning we heard of another series of sightings, this time in a large city on the Greek mainland. Tellingly, it was only a short ferry distance from Kefalonia. A British couple had reported seeing a boy they swore was Ben in a gypsy camp in Patras. When they approached, the gypsies sent the boy inside and scared the couple away. It sounded like the same group who had been in Kefalonia. The trail was getting hotter.

Yet, even though
TV Quick
magazine were offering to foot the bill for my flight, it wasn’t enough.

‘I can’t go, Simon.’

‘Come on, Kerry, it might be him.’

I knew he was right. I prayed he
was
right. I was convinced the last sighting was real and there was a good chance the same boy had travelled to Greece, especially if he was part of a gypsy community now. That’s why I wanted Simon to go and investigate. We needed to be sure. I just knew I couldn’t go with him.

‘I’m sorry, Simon. I can’t do it. I can’t face coming home again empty-handed.’

She can’t be bothered to go and look for her own son.

What would the gossips in Kos make of that? Those same people who said I hadn’t wanted Ben in the first place, who said I’d probably sold him myself, would be having a field day if they’d known I’d turned down the opportunity to go with Simon to investigate a sighting. But I didn’t care about them. I didn’t care about anything. The cloud hovering over me was becoming the only thing in my life.

I’d been in Norfolk Park for six weeks. That meant twelve missed counselling sessions with my old GP. Just as I never appreciated how much they helped me, I never saw how quickly I crumbled without them.

I know I was impossible to live with. When Simon returned empty-handed from Patras, as I’d dreaded he would, he tried to help. Blaming the bedsit for my ills, he promised to find us somewhere better and in May he succeeded. For the first time, our local celebrity worked in our favour as the council were persuaded to let us have a two-bedroom maisonette that we could get ready for when our son was returned. Not having a room for Ben had seemed so wrong. Like we’d forgotten all about him, moved on.

Before Simon joined us the first time in Kos, he had put what he couldn’t sell of our belongings into his brother Steve’s loft. As soon as we settled in, he reclaimed our things. Why he thought an ironing board was worth hoarding I’ll never know. But the teddies, cars and little toys that belonged to Ben were almost all we had left to remind us of him. Soon after, Simon decorated the spare room with colourful Winnie-the-Pooh stencils and we housed all those toys in there. The room was ready but unmistakeably empty.

Seeing my lethargic attempts at trying to help decorate was the final straw for Mum. She marched me back to my old doctor’s and demanded something be done to help me. The next day, a psychiatric nurse came to my new home and we talked. I don’t remember what was discussed but for a short while at least, I felt like a fire victim spluttering and gasping gulps of fresh air. I was suffering but I was alive. I looked forward to her next visit.

I hate how depression clipped my wings so tightly. Another promising lead, again in Corfu, came in via
TV Quick
and once more Simon pursued it alone. All I could think about was sleep. I should have gone if only to say thank you to the magazine for putting up a £3,000 reward for information leading to the discovery of Ben – it sounded even better as 1,000,000 drachmas. Both numbers were emblazoned on new posters, which Simon pasted up all over Corfu. For some people, a little financial incentive is the difference between getting involved or not. Hopefully it would make a difference.

When Simon returned two days later I could barely look at him. The hurt in his eyes just exacerbated the pain behind mine. He’d found the blond boy that witnesses had said was Ben and, for the first time, actually had to step closer to be sure it wasn’t him.
The likeness was strong and – the telling factor in this instance – the child actually was English. But his name was Christopher and his passport proved it. The whole trip was just another expensive wild goose chase.

Simon attended as many sighting visits as the media would fund, each time with the same heart-breaking result. There was no sign of the calls from the public drying up, especially after a Scottish businessman paid for 5,000 reward posters to be disseminated to UK passengers flying out to Greece. Thomas Cook also publicised the case to their customers, and South Yorkshire Police even launched a series of holiday items – hats, T-shirts, etc – featuring Ben’s details. I couldn’t help thinking,
If only the Kos police had shown half this interest …

The ordeals of Ben’s second birthday and third Christmas had been almost impossible to get through. Another anniversary threatened to be even worse. As we entered July 1992, the calls from the national media began. Whether they all had the 24th ringed on their calendars or they just copied each other, I don’t know, but the phone rang off the hook for a couple of weeks. Everyone wanted to know how I would feel on the first anniversary of my son’s disappearance.

The honest truth is, I felt better before I read some of the coverage.

One or two of the bigger papers did their own investigations. The
Sunday Times
sent Carol Sarler over to Kos and the things she came back with made my blood freeze and boil in rapid succession. In a few days, she discovered more than the Kos police had managed in – deep breath – a year. Most startling of all, she even found another family who knew exactly how I was feeling.

On 24 July 1990 – exactly a year before Ben was taken – a young Finnish holidaymaker called Virpi Maria Hunnele was raped and killed on that same Iraklis hillside, according to Carole, no more than 400 yards from the farmhouse. The girl’s family went through hell trying to discover what had happened to their seventeen-year-old daughter. They smashed their heads against the same brick wall I’d found myself up against: the Kos police.

The same Kos police who hadn’t thought to mention this case to us.

As the
Sunday Times
article suggested, could it really be a coincidence that two youngsters disappeared from virtually the same spot in exactly the same year? Could two seemingly random crimes occur in the middle of nowhere like that?

I knew what Carole was getting at and my head supported her logic. My heart just said, ‘No’. To agree with her was to accept that Ben might have suffered like Virpi had twelve months earlier. A mother’s brain can’t even compute that as possibility. Not without evidence. The Hunnele family had it, even if they didn’t have a perpetrator. I couldn’t accept it. For the first time, I actually wanted to believe Ben had been taken by gypsies. I wanted him to have been illegally adopted, sold to a rich parent. The alternative was too vile for a human mind to entertain, not even for a second.

I was in bits reading. Then I got to the parts about me. Carole had spoken, she said, to dozens of people in Kos. They virtually queued up to get their two-penn’orth in. And they all said the same thing: ‘The family did it.’

It didn’t matter that no two people could agree on the same member of the family or the same reason. It seemed good enough for them to sling mud at me, Simon, Stephen, Mum and Dad.
After all, we’d brought shame to their island, the island where no crime ever, ever happened.

I learnt a lot from that article. While most of the people who came forward did so anonymously, I didn’t need their names to know who some of them were. The only quote that troubled me came from the local who said Ben was always ‘starving and used to come to me for ice cream and chocolate and I would try to feed him’. I had my strong suspicions as to who that might be and, if I was right, why would she say something like that? Her English wasn’t always as good as she sometimes seemed to think it was. Maybe she had just got her answer wrong. I hoped so.

I didn’t care that some of those interviewed accused me of all sorts of sexual shenanigans. It gives me no pleasure to say that there were plenty of people who judged me for being an unmarried mum. If I looked at a man, I must be sleeping with him. If I had a drink after work it was to find a lover for the night. That was certainly a feeling I got from several of the police investigating our case.
Greek girls, married or not, don’t behave like that …

The accusations against me were so laughable no one in their right mind could believe them. The ones about Ben, however, were daggers in the heart. One is still etched on my memory today: ‘A hot potato – I used to call him that because it was as if no one wanted to hold on to him. He was just passed from one person to another.’

I’ve cried about that quote more than any other over the years. What sort of a person has such blackness inside them that they could say that about a mother who has lost her baby?

Ben wasn’t a ‘hot potato’ – he was loved by so many people, we all shared him. My mum and dad were still young enough to
have children. Of course they wanted to look after him. They were almost as much parents to Ben as I was. When Simon came out, Ben was with him too. That’s a positive. Anyone can see that.

About the only supportive voice in the whole
Sunday Times
article was that of Chief Dakouras. It was nice to see him say, ‘I now know this family are not involved in any way with the disappearance of their child,’ but why had it taken so long? And why hadn’t he done anything to quash the local rumour-mill?

While Dakouras dithered, South Yorkshire Police marked the anniversary by producing a ‘new’ image of Ben for use on new ‘Missing Child’ posters. Using the same technology they employ to produce ‘photofit’ likenesses of criminals, their computer department manipulated one of the most recent pictures of Ben and artificially ‘aged’ him. The result was a happy-looking boy of almost three years old – and another blow for me.

I shouldn’t need a computer to let me see my son grow up.

By the end of July, the press had left me alone once again. There were no more phone calls, no more interview requests. And no more reasons to get up in the morning. I realised it wasn’t the bedsit in Norfolk Park that was responsible for my dark moods. Days began to blur once again, the pain of missing Ben grew stronger and sharper. Just seeing his room, his toys and his empty bed brought me lower every day. And then one morning, with the house all to myself, I found a reason to get up.

I walked into the bathroom, took a razor from the cabinet and slashed it across my wrists.

I didn’t want to die. I just wanted the pain to stop.

If I could have slept, gone into coma or been anaesthetised I would have taken it. I wanted to close my eyes and wake up when Ben was found. That was impossible, so I did the next best thing.

It took the sensation of steel slicing skin to bring me to my senses. I looked at the horizontal cut in my arm, then at the razor. It was like looking through somebody else’s eyes, like I’d been hypnotised. Then I snapped out of it, screamed, dropped the blade to the floor and grabbed a towel to stem the flow of blood.

I wasn’t badly hurt. It stung for a while but not enough to dial 999. The scar’s still there, although faint. It is only recently I confessed to Mum I’d done it. Like so many things, she took the blame on her shoulders for not spotting how ill I’d become.

There was a reason I didn’t confide in her earlier. I was ashamed, angry with myself for being so stupid.
You need to get a grip. It won’t help Ben if you’re a wreck.