Ben (33 page)

Once again I made my feelings clear in a letter to the prime minister. Previously, in 1997, Mr Blair had responded, as usual, that ‘the embassy in Athens has made the Greek police fully aware of the importance that the British government attaches to finding Ben’. He added: ‘If I felt there was more that could be done, I can assure you that I would take a personal interest in ensuring it was.’ Four years later, it was the same blanket assurance that the Greek police were doing all they could.

Well, maybe that was right. Maybe they were doing all they could. So why not let British police do all they could and see if there was a difference?

I have to say, ten years down the line, I felt that certain people were beginning to wish I’d go away. I refused to let that happen, but keeping Ben’s name in the media became harder and harder. As a result, sightings dried up from dozens a month to almost nothing from one year to the next. Of the few that made it through, Mariana flew to Sydney to pursue one report, while a family in Bulgaria were named as potential suspects later.

While the authorities and media seemed to be turning their backs on Ben, I’m proud to say that some decent people were prepared to do the opposite. A Welsh private investigator called Ian Crosby got
in touch in 2003 and announced that, with my blessing, he’d like to take on Ben’s search – free of charge. Obviously I was delighted for any help I could get. Among the many avenues Ian pursued was something so simple I couldn’t believe no one had suggested it before: he set up a website called www.BenNeedhamInfo.com where visitors could read all about the case, see the latest computerised images of Ben and, most importantly, get in touch with us about any sightings. I knew very little about the internet at the time but I was blown away. The idea that anyone could tap into that page from anywhere in the world was incredible.

Ian understood the media’s reluctance to tread the same ground so he also tried to enlist celebrities to publicise Ben’s cause. Uri Geller was an early supporter and through him and former
Oliver!
actor Mark Lester, we received written support from Michael Jackson. If the King of Pop couldn’t get Ben’s name into the papers, nobody could.

Despite the hard work of a lot of people, there was a real despondency among the whole family at this time. Media appearances, police visits and sightings are incredibly stressful for all of us, but at least when you’re busy you don’t feel so useless. Every day I wasn’t doing something to further Ben’s search I felt like I was betraying him. But what could I do? Options were seriously few and far between.

The only positive to come from the media silence was the chance to focus on our own home lives, and God knows we needed to do that. Shortly after Leighanna, Pierce and I moved to a new house in Ecclesfield in 2001, Pierce and I split up. In all honesty, I probably let the relationship continue beyond its natural length because of
how much Leighanna loved him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for my little girl, and that counts for a lot. Not enough, though, for me to lie to myself. I didn’t love him any more.

Within no time I was enjoying having a house for just me and my eight-year-old daughter. Selfish as it sounds, I loved not sharing her with someone else. And when she was teased about Ben at school – because some kids can be like that – it felt natural that I was the one to put my arm around her. Pierce or her friends can say they know how she feels, but no one knows like me.

Speaking of Leighanna’s friends, her best pal, Shannon, was the daughter of a guy called Pat. Pat and his brother, Ricky, owned a fencing business and in 2003 I joined as a receptionist. It wasn’t demanding work but it paid the bills, with a little left over each month for the Ben Needham Search Fund. It also stopped me obsessing about the case for a few hours every day.

There was another perk to the job I hadn’t foreseen. A fencer who worked there was a handsome fella called Craig Grist. We always had a laugh in the office or on the phone, so when he asked me out one night I assumed it was as mates, nothing more. Unexpectedly, the evening went well. So well, in fact, that on 19 June 2006 under the beautiful Cyprus sky, I became Mrs Kerry Grist.

The wedding took place in Cyprus for a very good reason: Mum and Dad and Danny had moved there the year before. By the end of 2004 they had been running, very successfully, three tips and recycling plants. Business was good. So good, in fact, that they decided to cash in their chips while they were still young enough to enjoy the benefits.

My parents’ decision to sell up and relocate once again was hard for me to take, but I knew they had to do it. Their health and
their relationship needed it. Even in Lincolnshire they had felt under scrutiny, like they had in Sheffield. I knew the feeling. If it weren’t for Leighanna and my job, which I found surprisingly fulfilling now that my so-called ‘receptionist’ duties appeared to include making a lot of the decisions, I might even have joined them.

But there was also Craig to consider. Like others I’d gone out with since Simon, he had the difficulty of caring for someone knowing that she was a woman on a mission. Some, like Pierce, actually embraced wholeheartedly the ‘Ben’ campaign, but even he couldn’t help feeling on the outside to some extent. I would never be entirely any man’s while Ben was still missing. That part of my life had to come first. To his credit, Craig was very supportive. His real problem, sadly, was with Leighanna. The combination of her missing Pierce, being angry at not seeing Simon, and hitting teen-age meant that she wasn’t always the model stepchild for Craig. He did his best, but there were countless days when the age-old refrain of, ‘You can’t tell me what to do – you’re not my real dad’ filled the house.

Shortly after my marriage, Pat left the business and a few years later, Ricky would decide to do the same. I’ve never been shy about taking an opportunity so I said to Craig, ‘Why don’t we buy it? I can run the business side of things and you can do the fencing.’

So we did. From receptionist to owner and managing director in six years. Not bad for a working-class girl.

Even with so much going on in my private life, I still never stopped badgering the media for attention. Every birthday, every anniversary, every single opportunity I could think of, I was on the phone to my contacts and pals at the papers or TV stations. They all said the same thing: they’d love to help, but they couldn’t get it past their editors without something new.

Even my great friend Mark Witty, a producer and journalist for the
Calendar
programme, was left scratching his head. Mark has done more than most over the years to keep Ben’s name in the public eye. Without his programmes, a lot of doors would not have opened for me, I’m convinced of that. But on this occasion, even Mark had to say, ‘I need something, Kerry. Just give me something –
anything
– and I’ll clear the schedules for you.’

But there was nothing. No police updates of note, no help from officialdom and no in-coming phone calls from the media whatsoever. Until, that is, Friday 4 May 2007.

It was six o’clock in the morning and whoever had rung the house phone that early was about to get a piece of my mind. Or so I thought. I didn’t actually have a chance to say anything because as soon as I picked up the phone, I heard the voice of a friendly journalist.

‘Kerry, have you got a comment about the little girl who was snatched in Portugal last night?’

Now they wanted to listen.

I looked down from my bedroom window at the mass of men and women filling my lawn and pathway and those of the two houses either side. After years of shouting into thin air, it seemed like every journalist with a car had found their way to my front door. And they all wanted to talk about the same thing: Madeleine McCann.

I never listen to the radio at work and I only ever play CDs in the car. Yet driving home the night before, I had caught the tiniest snippet of news as I changed discs. It had been something to do with a family in Portugal but I didn’t know what, and I definitely didn’t know how massive it would become. Not until the bombardment of interview requests began.

It wasn’t an impressive sight watching grown adults squabbling amongst themselves, and jostling to be next in the queue to talk to me. Not when there was a little girl missing, two distraught parents and someone who knew firsthand exactly how it felt. I know they all had deadlines, but it wasn’t the press’s finest hour in my eyes.

I did twenty-seven interviews that day. In each one I learnt a little bit more about the news from Praia da Luz. My heart went out to Gerry and Kate. I knew exactly what they were going through. The tragedy was, there was nothing I could say or do that would make them feel better. If anything, the opposite was true. Twenty-seven times I was asked the same question:

‘What’s your message for Madeleine’s parents?’

Twenty-seven times I replied, ‘I’m the last person they want to hear from. Their child has been missing one day. My son has been gone sixteen years. They have to believe that Madeleine will be found today, tomorrow, soon. What they don’t want is to have their worst-case scenario staring out at them from newspapers.’

Obviously no journalist was satisfied with that as an answer. ‘You must have some advice for them, Kerry?’

I did. As far as I could tell, the Portuguese police were being as unsatisfactory as the Kos force had been with us. At best, I could advise the McCanns to keep an eye on the investigation, to not assume anything was being done unless they saw it with their own eyes, and to keep the police honest and on it and doing everything in their power. We’d made the mistake once of trusting the police to be pulling up trees in the hunt for my son. The truth was they didn’t bother. Not for a long time. Not until it was too late.

The only thing I could say with any certainty was that no parent should have to endure the loss of a child.

By the end of that day I was exhausted. The questions had stirred up every emotion I’d gone through sixteen years ago. My pain – that I’d learned to live with over time – was as raw as ever. Of course, my heart was broken for the McCann family but,
honestly, as I waited for Craig and Leighanna to come home, I could only think of Ben.

That didn’t change over the next few days. Every stage the McCanns went through, I remembered experiencing myself. The shock, the denial, the disbelief, the rage, the fear. I could empathise with every second.

Well, almost. Some things were happening in Portugal that I could not relate to. I watched the news open-mouthed as official after official and dignitary after dignitary arrived in the Algarve to lend their support to the hunt for three-year-old Maddy. The British ambassador was on camera pledging aid, the Portuguese ambassador in London did the same, and was that the spokesman for Tony Blair saying that the prime minister was following the case personally? Not only that, the deputy PM, John Prescott, raised the subject in a House of Commons speech and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, called the McCanns direct, all within days of Madeleine’s disappearance. I could not have been happier that officials were taking the situation seriously. But I have to be honest; it opened an old wound for me. Where was my help? Where was my statement at Prime Minister’s Questions? Where was my ambassadorial aid? In 1991, we couldn’t even get the consul to become involved.

Maybe Ben’s disappearance would have got this level of attention if it had happened now. Maybe it was just a case of bad timing, of technology catching up, of public reaction to cases of child abduction changing. Something told me not. The more I looked at what was happening to the McCann family, the more I felt they were being treated differently to us because they were different.

What were we back in 1991? Working-class people living in a caravan and a rented apartment in a foreign country, trying to make an honest living. We didn’t have money and we didn’t have connections. We stood shaking buckets at pop fans outside Wembley Stadium; the McCanns had a high profile ‘Fighting Fund’. By October 2007, it already held more than £1 million in donations to finance independent investigations. Richard Branson, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur, then set up a separate fund to cover Kate and Gerry’s legal fees. Several famous and wealthy people contributed, as well as members of the public.

The media and public response was phenomenal. JK Rowling supplied a ‘Madeleine’ poster to all bookshops selling her latest Harry Potter book. Maddy’s father did a publicity tour of the United States. He and Kate later met President Bush at the White House and even had an audience with the Pope. Sixteen years earlier, us Needhams had rotted on our own in Kos until the money ran out, often only eating when a friendly journalist bought us a meal at the local taverna.

I don’t begrudge Kate and Gerry one bit. I would have done the same and more if I’d had the opportunity or the connections. But I didn’t, and it was very easy to believe that they were getting preferential treatment because they were richer than us and, to be frank, middle class. I honestly felt that, in the public’s eyes, they were seen as the better people.