Burnt Paper Sky (32 page)

I logged on to Furry Football countless times that night. I was hoping to encounter Ben again, of course I was. You would have done the same thing.

But he wasn’t there. Not anywhere. I trawled the online game until I knew every inch of it, every server, every area you could play in. Overnight, avatars with foreign-sounding names came and went, and I could see the ebb and flow of the time zones as they logged on and off: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of children online from all over the world. But not Ben. I never encountered him again. Not once.

The hours searching didn’t breed any doubt in my mind, though, because my conviction that it had been Ben just grew and grew, that feeling so powerfully strong it was as if he’d actually flitted past me in his red anorak, met my eye for a second, and then gone again, just out of reach of my outstretched hand.

I wanted to tell John, I thought he of all people would understand, would feel the enormity of this fleeting contact with our child.

I called the hospital in the hope that he might have improved, that he might even be conscious. A voice that was compassionate and tired-sounding told me that there was no change in his condition. He was stable, that’s all she could confirm, she said.

I imagined him as I’d seen him the night before, the absence of him, his mind curled up tight beneath the bleeding and the swelling and the trauma. Did a very small part of me, just for a moment, envy him that oblivion? Maybe. Was it because I was finding it harder than ever to exist? Probably.

But two things kept my mind engaged that night, kept me alert, jittering. Two things nagged at me with the persistence of a noose slowly tightening around your neck.

If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then why would Ben have disappeared so abruptly from Furry Football? If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then who was looking after him while Lucas Grantham was in custody?

I passed my phone from hand to hand, my fingerprints oily on its screen. Silent, it felt to me a useless object, its very existence mocking both my reliance on it, and the isolation that bred that reliance.

I wanted a phone call from the police to let me know that they were searching properties, that they were knocking down doors and smashing windows as they looked for Ben.

I didn’t want process. I didn’t want twenty-four hours of questioning. Them and Lucas Grantham in a room, with the tea, and the biscuits, and then after that no charges brought and all that time Ben could be somewhere with nobody to care for him, nobody to bring him food, or water, or he could be somewhere with somebody else, somebody who made him log off Furry Football late at night, in a hurry.

But my phone remained mute.

Silently, in its depths, I knew that emails would be pinging in: media requests, contact from friends and families we knew, those who were too scared to speak to me, people who were most content monitoring me from afar.

But the phone itself didn’t ring. The police didn’t call me. Nobody did.

And in that silence those two thoughts went round, and round, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I felt as if I was no longer the wild-eyed fighter, the scrapper, who stood up at the press conference and dared Ben’s abductor, who looked down a lens and into every corner, trying to find an assailant to challenge.

Instead, my nerves were scraped so raw that they lent me the perfect purity of feeling of the addict, ecstatic in the midst of a high, so those two questions loomed large and unanswered in my psyche, like a high-pitched note that will not stop, and, when morning came, I acted as if in a trance.

There were no voices in my head telling me not to do it, when I called a taxi, advising me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to turn up unannounced at the police station again. There was just an impulse to make my voice heard, to tell them what I knew, and what I feared. I wanted to communicate.

The morning was bitterly cold and every outside surface was shiny with rain that had fallen in the night and was close to freezing. It still fell, in fat, intermittent droplets that chilled my hands as I opened the taxi door. ‘Kenneth Steele House,’ I said to the driver, ‘Feeder Road.’

The driver must have just come on shift; he was too preoccupied with trying to clear condensation from his window to talk to me. I watched the moisture disappear from the windscreen incrementally as the fans worked: two spreading ovals of clarity, revealing the city in sharp, unflattering lines. It was 7.45 am. Darkness was beginning to lift from the city and the Monday morning traffic was already starting to build, so we travelled in fits and starts, dirty spray showering the pavement whenever the driver accelerated. Red lights blocked our progress at every junction, and he braked late and hard as we approached them. The city felt grimy and hopeless.

At Kenneth Steele House the receptionist recognised me instantly, launching herself out from behind her desk and intercepting me with the purpose of a sheepdog, who can see that one of his ratty, stupid sheep is about to go astray.

‘Are they expecting you, Ms Jenner?’ she asked, hand on my elbow, guiding me to the sofa in the waiting area, away from the stream of Monday morning arrivals.

‘I need to speak to somebody on the investigation,’ I said. I tried to hold my head up straight, make my voice as steady as possible. A hank of my hair fell across my face and I brushed it away, noticing only then that it was unbrushed and unwashed.

They didn’t take any chances this time. A scene in reception was obviously not going to be on the cards. It took only ten minutes for me to get an audience with DCI Fraser.

I don’t even remember which particular characterless room we met in, but I do remember DCI Fraser. I hadn’t seen her for a week in the flesh, though I’d watched her updating the press on TV. She looked like she’d aged, but I supposed that I did too. Her skin was greyer than before, the crow’s feet by her eyes more pronounced. She’d brought a black coffee in with her and she drank it in three gulps.

‘Mrs Jenner, I know you’re aware that we currently have somebody in custody,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And this morning I’ve already begun a string of interviews which I hope will bring us closer to being sure that we have the right man in custody and therefore to locating Ben.’

She was spelling it out to me. It was Policework 101.

‘OK, so that is my priority this morning, but I wanted to see you personally because I know how difficult it is for you to wait at home for news.’

‘Thank you.’ I did appreciate it. I could tell that she was being kinder to me than she need have been.

‘But I would request that you try to be patient, and do just that. We did get your message last night, and we are acting on it. We’ve done some research this morning, we’ve already talked to one of Ben’s friends, and it seems that the boys who play Furry Football often share identities and passwords.’

‘I know it was him,’ I said. The knowledge was an itch that wouldn’t go away and her words, however kind, were failing to act as a salve.

‘I realise that the idea is terribly attractive, Ms Jenner. Believe me, it’s a tantalising thought that we might be able to communicate with Ben, but you must realise that there’s no way we can confirm that it’s him, and I don’t want you to raise your hopes too much.’

‘Did any of his friends admit that it was them?’

‘Nobody has so far, but you must remember that children aren’t always truthful. Not because they want to lie, but sometimes they’re scared. And it could have been another friend, we’ve only been able to talk to one boy so far this morning.’

‘I’m his mother. I know it was him. He had a new player in his team, a player that he was talking about wanting on Sunday morning. It was a giraffe.’

She ran her index finger up and down a deep line between her eyebrows.

‘Could another child have got the new player?’

‘It was Ben. He’s alive, DCI Fraser. I know he is.’

‘God knows, Ms Jenner, I hope he is too, and I
am
taking this seriously. It is very useful information, of course it is, and I will not forget it, I am listening to you. But, it is important that we view it in the context of what else is happening in the investigation at this moment.’

She shifted towards me, her eyes penetrating and sincere.

‘Believe me, I shall do everything in my power to return Ben to you safe and sound. I understand that waiting for news must be desperately difficult for you, but we are working around the clock here to make progress, and the bottom line is, every moment we spend with you is time taken away from the focus of the investigation.’

Her words, finally, got through to me, for what worse sin could I commit than to divert their energies from the investigation?

I began to cry again and I wondered if that would ever stop happening, that public leaking of emotions. I didn’t apologise for it any more, it was just something that happened to me that other people had to get used to, like your stomach rumbling, or breaking into a sweat.

‘I didn’t mean to waste your time,’ I said.

She took my hand in hers and the warmth of her hand surprised and disarmed me. ‘You’re absolutely not wasting my time. You’re informing me, and the more information I have, the better. But I can’t just go out there and search every house in Bristol where somebody logs on to Furry Football. It’s impossible. At this stage in the investigation my quickest route to finding Ben is via whoever took him, using all the information I have at my disposal, and this information is logged in my noggin now. I won’t forget it, and nor will my team. We’ll have it in mind whenever we interview somebody or whenever we make a decision. Do you understand that?’

I nodded.

‘Your information is valuable.’

‘OK.’

‘I’ll arrange for somebody to drive you home.’

‘Ben’s alive,’ I said.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said, ‘as soon as there’s any news. Wait at home.’

Heading down to the foyer, vision blurred still, unsteady down flights of identical stairs, feet slapping on the linoleum treads, feeling things slipping away. In the foyer downstairs I was surprised to see Ben’s teacher.

A picture of composure in contrast to my wrecked self, Miss May was perched on a sofa in the waiting area, handbag on her knee, hands draped on top of it. She wore very little make-up. Her hair was pulled back neatly and fastened at the nape of her neck. When she saw me, she got up.

‘They asked me in for interview,’ she said. ‘About Lucas.’ She whispered the name, eyes wide with disbelief, red-rimmed and bloodshot. I wondered whether that name would be whispered more now, only spoken of in hushed terms, because Lucas Grantham might be a child abductor, a predator, a monster.

‘What did they ask you?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’

That didn’t stop me. ‘Anything? Did you think of anything? Do you think they’re right?’

‘I told them absolutely everything I could think of,’ she said.

‘Do you think he did it?’

There was a heightened quality about her, flushed cheeks and quick movements.

‘Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe, definitely maybe. I’m trying to think back over everything, in case there were signs, I’m really trying. There was nothing obvious or I’d have said before, but there are some things, little things that—’

She opened her mouth again as if to say more, and I felt as if she was going to confide something in me, give me a drop of hope, but our conversation was brought to a halt because the officer who had retrieved the books from me and John a few days earlier appeared suddenly beside us, car keys jangling in his hand. ‘DI Bennett,’ he said. ‘OK if I drive you both home together? Apparently you live reasonably close to one another.’

It was 9 am and the rush hour was abating. Bennett drove us through the city centre, where the roads were hemmed in by smog-drenched modern buildings throwing endless reflections of tinted glass back at each other,
OFFICE
TO
LET
signs, boarded shopfronts, student accommodation with jauntily coloured plastic windows, and concrete 60s edifices rotting in the pollution, graffiti-covered and stained. At street level, office workers were arriving for work, trainers on, coffees and briefcases in hand.

I broke the silence in the car. There was something I wanted to say to Miss May. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever thanked you properly for all the effort you made with Ben last year, when we were going through our divorce. I really appreciated it. He did too.’

‘He did have a hard time.’ She gave me a wan smile.

‘Well, you helped him a lot.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘They’re such little souls. It’s a privilege to be a part of their lives. You must feel so very empty without him.’

Bennett cursed at a cyclist who was climbing laboriously up the steep slope of Park Street, wobbling into our path with the effort. I fixed my gaze on the tall Victorian Gothic tower at the top, dominating the skyline, Bristol University’s most recognisable building. Beside it was Bristol Museum. I thought of Ben’s favourite things there: the ichthyosaur skeleton, a case of glowing blue crystals, a stuffed dodo and the painting by Odilon Redon.

‘I don’t feel empty,’ I said to Miss May, ‘because I know he’s alive. I know he is. But I do feel very afraid.’

My words petered away, the last few dregs of sand falling through an hourglass.

She looked out of the window, and I worried I’d spoken too freely, exposed the depths of my misery without enough filtering. It’s a line I’ve crossed many times since. If you talk too openly about terrible things people shrink from you.

Her handbag was on the seat between us. It sagged open and in the silence my gaze fell on its contents. A set of keys, phone, plastic-wrapped tissues, A4 papers folded in half, charger cable, hairbrush, a leather document wallet and yet more stuff underneath: the assorted paraphernalia of a life.

When Miss May turned back towards me, her expression was unreadable.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just hard.’