Ben (24 page)

I couldn’t blame a single person for mistaking that boy for Ben: the whole setup fitted the police description to a T. As we made our way to the airport, however, I knew the trip would take its toll. Whatever strength I’d found to get me there had disappeared completely. By the time we landed in Manchester, I was a twitching wreck. I wanted to go to bed and not be disturbed for a month.

I got one of my wishes.

I was home and hiding under the duvet, eyes dry with old tears, when there was a knock at the front door. I couldn’t face getting up. The weight in my head was heavier than my legs. I tried to block out the sound of Simon opening the door and when he came up to the bedroom, I had a pillow over my ears. There was no one I wanted to see or hear.

Or so I thought.

‘It’s the
Yorkshire on Sunday
, Kerry,’ Simon said quietly. ‘I think you should come down and talk to them.’

I stared at the picture for the entire duration of the flight. I studied the family faces again and again but my eyes kept going back to the little boy held up to the camera. If it wasn’t Ben, then somewhere out there he had a twin, that was for sure.

Like the various national papers, the
Yorkshire Post
had been running its own awareness campaign and someone who had just returned from a holiday in Turkey had sent in this snap. Journalist Iain Lovell was so convinced that it was Ben that he’d persuaded the
Post
to pay for him and me to follow the lead. It was unheard of for the local paper to go outside the county, let alone need a passport. Like so many good people I’ve met over the years, they were just desperate to solve the riddle.

The only information we had on the photograph was the name of a town. After the harrowing few days travelling to and from Corfu, this took on the scale of hunting a needle in a haystack. Without Iain’s optimism, I couldn’t have got through it. I wished Mum was there.

We flew into Izmir on the western coast and drove the eighty miles inland and south to Aydin, near where the tourists said they’d taken the photograph in a local market. The problem was, that was as accurate information as we had. Ever the intrepid investigator, Iain contacted the local police station. After the experience I’d had across the water with their Greek compatriots, I wasn’t exactly expecting mountains to be moved.

How wrong can you be? As soon as word reached Aydin’s police chief, Sevkit Ayaz, he took personal control. Watching him amass
a roomful of officers to study the photograph was so impressive, and listening to the animated buzz of their conversations was actually quite thrilling. They were all so focused on helping us.

Then Mr Ayaz and a deputy came over with the photo.

‘My men have identified the village as Cine,’ the chief said, the pride in his officers apparent. ‘My officers will take you there.’

I couldn’t have wished for better service. I was escorted to a police car and, with Iain and photographer Paul Barker following in our hire vehicle, chauffeured the twenty-five miles to the village in question. The Aydin police couldn’t do enough for me. I felt like royalty. They said they were family men who sympathised with my plight. But the Kos force all had wives and children, and they’d succeeded in making me feel like a streetwalker.

Eventually the road became an unmade lane and the car began to slow. Dust thrown up by the wheels gave the scenery a beigey hue beneath the brilliant blue sky. We were nearly there.

I sat in the car while the policeman showed the photograph to a passing local. There was a flurry of conversation and pointed arms. After another short drive we stopped outside a farmhouse and I was beckoned out.
Time for the moment of truth.

Knees weak, I followed the officer to the farmhouse. A second after he knocked I heard voices from the other side of the door. A woman’s, loud and cheerful – and a child’s. He was there. The boy from the photo was inside.

The door swung open and the expectant face of Zayide Sulutas stared back at us. Peeping from behind her skirt was a little blue-eyed face.

I wanted to walk straight back to the car, but the woman deserved an explanation and only I had noticed the truth. Yes, the
child looked exactly like Ben – but Ben from the day he went missing, Ben at twenty-one months. Not Ben as he was today, closer to three. And there was something else.

As the mother listened to the policeman, she instinctively scooped her child into her arms. Like the couple in Kassiopi, she thought we had come to take her baby away and I had to step in.

‘It’s all right,’ I told the officer, ‘it’s not Ben.’

Confused, he relayed the news to the mother who began gushing something in Turkish. Then she slipped her hand underneath the child’s top and pulled down the nappy.

‘Is girl, not boy.’

The policeman looked shocked but I’d noticed immediately. My own grief turned to concern for Zayide and her husband, Neuzat, who’d come to investigate the commotion. They had to understand that it was our mistake, and nobody was going to take their precious little Saliha.

After a tense few minutes they let me hold the little girl so that Paul could get the pictures for Iain’s story. Then we left them there, a happy little family of three. I wanted so much to have what they had. Instead, I’d travelled 2,500 miles to discover a child who was too young and the wrong sex, terrifying a young mum in the process. From Kassiopi to Cine, I’d just brought pain. The last thing I wanted anyone to feel was that I was trying to claim their child. A terrible side-effect of the whole situation was hurting other innocent people. How many more would I make suffer as I tore around the world chasing lead after lead?

Unpalatable though it was, I knew the answer. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to bring my son home.
He’s out there and I will find him. Whatever it takes.

Ben’s third birthday and fourth Christmas were even more painful than the previous year’s. Again, we wrote him cards and opened them on the day, just as Simon and I continued to give each other cards on Mother’s and Father’s Day. Ben might not have been in our house but he was in our lives. Every morning I spoke to his photo on the fireplace and told him about my plans for the day. More often than not, I ended with the same words.

‘Mummy’s going to find you very, very soon.’

It didn’t seem to matter how many sightings we followed up, the result was still the same. Simon went on some trips; Mum and Dad tackled others. Stephen and Danny wanted to help but Stephen had won a place at college and, of course, Danny was still at school. He’d suffered more than a young teen should ever have to and, in hindsight, by trying to protect him we probably shut him out. So many things would have been done differently if we were thinking like clear-headed people. That wasn’t us. It hadn’t been us since 24 July 1991.

We were doing our best to make the search fund stretch as far as possible. Dad’s car boot sales covered most of his flights and more often than not he would sleep on the nearest beach
rather than bear the cost of a hotel room. It wasn’t ideal but if it gave him another night to search for information as one lead after another hit a brick wall, he would do it. It was still preferable to going with a newspaper – I’m not one for washing your laundry in public. There isn’t much worse than having to pose for photographs in the middle of the street after your heart has been skewered once again. We aren’t celebrities.

I began to get more inventive in our fundraising. So many people responded to our publicity interviews asking what could they do – including real celebrities. One of them was the
Antiques Roadshow
star, Eric Knowles, who I met when I was invited to talk about the search on the BBC’s
Pebble Mill
programme. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, Eric asked me what he could do to help. When I wondered if he’d consider hosting a valuation day in Sheffield, he couldn’t agree quickly enough. The local
Star
newspaper publicised the event and supplied Cutler’s Hall for the day. By the time Eric arrived, the queue was already around the block. It was a marvellous day and Eric was on fine form, joking that it wasn’t every day that Yorkshiremen would queue up – and pay – to meet a Lancastrian. We only charged a pound for every item he looked at, but it made enough to keep the Search For Ben account in the black for a few more months.

I’m not a natural public speaker and if I thought of the millions of people watching at home, I would never normally have the nerve to appear on television. When it comes to talking about Ben, though, I usually find the strength from somewhere. One day a producer from the
Calendar
programme rang me with a proposition that put that resolve to the test.

‘We want to take you back to Kos.’

Watching the broadcast a few weeks later with Simon was worse than I actually remembered. The producer had wanted to capture our reactions as we revisited the scene of Ben’s disappearance.

He got mine barely seconds after landing.

The
Calendar
boys must have flicked the cameras on as soon as they were allowed, because on screen you see me stepping out onto the walkway leading to the terminal exit – and then I just disappear.

One minute I’m walking purposefully alongside Mum and Dad. Then I start shaking and I look in pain. My legs are trembling and the camera zooms in on my face. I look terrified. My eyes are red and I’m panicking. And then nothing. It’s like watching a horror film where a soul leaves the body. One minute I was looking at me – Kerry – and the next I was looking at a dead person. An empty vessel. And that’s exactly how it felt.

I was possessed. That’s the only way I can describe the sensation. My legs stopped working, my mind just switched off. I was aware of people around me but not what they were saying. I just somehow stopped
being
.

If
Calendar
hadn’t captured it for the world to see, I’d think I dreamt the whole thing. The experience didn’t last long and soon I was shuffling into the harsh midday sun. I’d been to Kefalonia, Corfu, Turkey and several islands in between without any problems except disappointment. Whatever I’d told myself, clearly Kos was no ordinary destination for me. It never could be. It was the place that stole my son.

For the purposes of the camera, we travelled back to the site of the old caravan then up the mountain road to the farmhouse. Michaelis hadn’t done any more work on the property, although the villa being constructed two years ago was now complete.
Again I was struck by the eeriness of the silence up there: Kos was such a ‘buzzy’ island, the absence of regular traffic noise always stood out. I knew if I stayed there too long I’d convince myself I could hear Ben’s cry. Mum and Dad looked uncomfortable as well, so we left as quickly as we’d come.

We couldn’t visit Kos without paying a call to the police station. For once we had a reason to feel optimistic. Shortly before we’d left England, I’d explained my concerns about the police delays to Sheffield MP Bill Michie. He’d written to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, and had received this response from his office: ‘Mr Dakouras, the former Head of the Kos police, has been routinely transferred to Zakynthos.’ I don’t know if Dakouras’s move was related to the complaints I’d raised about the handling of Ben’s case, but the chance to begin again with a new face had to be a positive.

Unfortunately, Dakouras’s replacement, Mr Kondilis, seemed cut from the same cloth. He was engaging, especially for the television cameras, although his message was as blunt as ever. ‘We are looking,’ he assured us. ‘We don’t give up.’ To help his unstinting investigation, we handed over thousands of new ‘Missing’ posters with the updated image of Ben, and a message translated once again into Greek.

If you believed some of the press reports, baiting the Needhams seemed to be a popular sport in Kos. I did believe them. Unlike Turkey, where everyone bent over backwards to help me – Chief Ayaz actually requested copies of the poster to disseminate in the resorts and to his staff – I could almost hear the whispers of the smear campaign that the whole population seemed to be
conspiring in. I wasn’t comfortable being there. There were no answers for me in Kos, only questions, doubts and accusations.

Douglas Hurd wasn’t the only prominent politician to receive a letter. I tried to put as much pressure on everyone I could think of who might be in a position to help. Obviously that included the Prime Minister. I first wrote to John Major in February, to no avail. A follow-up letter in December produced an immediate response, including an apology for not seeing my earlier message. He said he’d discussed Ben’s case with our ambassador and consul-general during a trip to Athens, and they were doing everything they could to speed up the communication between our countries’ police forces. He was confident that everything that could be done was being done.

A few years earlier, I would have been dancing in the street to receive a personal letter from the Prime Minister. By the end of 1992, it was just another piece of correspondence to add to the pile alongside headed paper from Buckingham Palace and Kensington Gardens. Although both Her Majesty the Queen and Princess Diana, I was told, were following our plight with interest, there was nothing they could personally do.