Burnt Paper Sky (36 page)

By the time we got back to Kenneth Steele House, Woodley and I mud-stained and soaking wet from the woods, Fraser had just gone into interview with Joanna May. They’d picked her up at Bristol Airport waiting for a flight out.

We heard everything second hand. The incident room was fairly buzzing with the news. Relief had broken out across everybody’s faces, though there was an undercurrent of muttering that Benedict Finch was seriously unwell, that it was a wait and see job. Nobody was celebrating properly because of that, nobody wanted to.

Fraser had left instructions for Bennett to get down to the hospital and for Woodley and me to go and visit Joanna May’s parents at their house. She wanted us to get to the bottom of the alibi they’d given their daughter and find out what else they knew.

It was 3 pm by the time we pulled up into their driveway on a quiet street of semi-detached Victorian villas far enough out in suburbia that streetlights were few and far between.

When we arrived, two uniforms made a discreet exit, leaving Woodley and me with a couple, in their seventies, who looked as though they wished the ground would open up and swallow them.

We sat in their lounge. There was no tea, or coffee. Vast windows inset with a band of decorative stained glass gave us a view of a pair of raised vegetable beds, where bamboo canes protruded from the dark puddle-pocked earth and were tethered into triangular shapes.

On an ornate marble mantelpiece a vase of flowers was crowded by family photographs, which spilled over onto adjacent bookshelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Amongst the faces in the pictures was Joanna May.

Hanging above the fireplace was a large mirror in a gilt frame, which threw back a reflection of our sorry gathering: Woodley and I standing in the middle of the room, tall and dark like crows, Mrs May sunk into an armchair, a walking stick propped up beside her, dressings visible on her legs underneath thick brown tights; Mr May beside her in a matching chair, wisps of white hair over his forehead, cat hair on his trousers; both of them looking stricken.

‘She was our fourth child,’ said Mrs May once Woodley and I had taken a seat on a rug-draped sofa. Her voice was tremulous and careful. ‘We had five children altogether. Rory died, our eldest son, when he was a toddler, but we were a happy family, weren’t we, Geoff?’

Mr May reached over and took her hand, squeezed it.

‘But she wasn’t right,’ he said to Woodley and me, ‘from the start. As soon as she started interacting with other children, we knew she wasn’t.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

Mrs May lowered her eyes.

‘She was so manipulative,’ said her husband. ‘She competed constantly for our attention, she bullied her siblings to get what she wanted, and she was always lying. The lying was constant, it was infuriating.’

It was painful to watch Mr May talk. Everything he shared with us stripped another piece of his pride away, and undermined more completely the life this couple had built.

‘If somebody lies to you habitually, Inspector, you can’t ever trust them,’ he said. ‘It erodes relationships, even between a parent and child.’ He ran a trembling hand across the paper-thin skin on his forehead. ‘We knew the way she behaved was wrong, and that she wasn’t what you might call completely normal, but we never dreamed it would lead to something like this.’

‘Is the child all right?’ Mrs May asked. ‘The boy?’ She didn’t seem able to say his name. ‘We’ve been watching the news.’

‘It’s a little early to tell,’ I said, ‘but as far as I know his condition’s stable for now.’

She nodded, swallowed, and made a small sign of the cross.

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that you provided your daughter with an alibi for last Sunday. Is that right?’

‘We did, yes,’ said Mrs May. ‘Your colleague rang us to talk about it, a very nice young lady called, what was she called, dear?’

‘DC Zhang,’ said Mr May.

‘Can I ask you about that?’

‘Well,’ said Mr May. ‘Yes, well, Joanna came to have lunch with us on that day, and we weren’t really sure exactly what time she went home, but she reminded us it was about four thirty so that’s what we told your colleague.’

‘Joanna reminded you?’

‘Yes. We asked her because we weren’t sure. We didn’t think to question it, because it could have been four thirty, couldn’t it, Mary?’

Mrs May nodded. ‘We never really checked,’ she said. ‘And we started lunch quite late. But I suppose it could have been earlier too. Now that I think about it. We never actually checked the time ourselves.’

‘So you weren’t absolutely sure?’

‘Not certain, no, but your colleague said that was normal.’

‘Would you mind making a statement to that effect?’

‘We never thought our daughter would be capable of such a thing,’ said Mr May. ‘If we’d ever dreamed… oh dear God… would they have been able to find the boy earlier?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said, but he lowered his eyes and I could see that it was a question that they would be asking themselves for a very long time.

‘Can I ask, do you have any idea why Joanna might have done this?’ I said.

They exchanged a glance then, and Mrs May gave a small shrug of her shoulders.

Mr May said, ‘Joanna’s infertile. That’s the only sense I can make of it. She only discovered her infertility last spring after she tried to get pregnant using artificial insemination. We didn’t approve. We thought she should be in a stable relationship before she had a baby, but she was insistent, as usual, and so we gave her the money anyway, for the inseminations, and then for the fertility tests, because you try to help your children. You feel responsible for their happiness. I don’t think she would have told us if she hadn’t needed us to pay for it. She doesn’t confide in us. In fact she only contacts us if she wants something. Anyway, it upset her a great deal, the infertility. She wasn’t used to not getting what she wanted. My guess is that she took this boy because she wanted a child. But let me tell you this: don’t expect her to explain why she did it. She never admitted to anything as a child, and I doubt she will now.’

He stood up again, painfully, and made his way to the mantelpiece. He took down a photograph of Joanna May and gazed at it for a moment before showing it to his wife. In the photograph Joanna May was on a beach. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. In her swimsuit she sat beside a body-shaped mound of sand from which the head of a smaller child protruded. She wielded a spade triumphantly and the child was smiling too.

‘I’ll move this I think, Mary,’ said Mr May.

‘Yes, dear.’ Her eyes slid to her lap as he left the room, fingers picking at the fabric of her skirt.

Together, we waited silently for him return, but before he did, the sound of breaking glass made Mrs May flinch.

I approached my son’s bedside with a lifetime of love to give him, and with the humility of somebody who’s been brought to her knees in every way imaginable.

I came to him with a surfeit of relief and emotion that should have made for a perfect Hollywood moment, with full orchestral accompaniment and box of Kleenex required. The works.

But it wasn’t like that.

When I entered the room, I saw that he had his back to me, and he lay curled up under layers of blankets, motionless and small, the outline of his body making an angular shape.

I saw the back of his head, his sandy hair unkempt, without lustre. One of his arms lay on top of the blanket. A garish hospital gown covered some of it, but his forearm protruded, bare until the wrist where a thick bandage was wrapped around it, securing a cannula, which was attached to a tube, down which a transparent liquid crawled, dripping into his vein.

Closer. An oxygen mask was on the pillow beside his head, hissing. I could see the side of his face now, his profile. His lips were chapped and paper-thin eyelids covered eyes that were twitching beneath. His eyelashes were long and beautiful as ever, though they did little to mask the deep dark patches under his eyes and the grey pallor of his skin.

‘Ben,’ I whispered. I touched the skin on his temples with the side of my hand; it was the softest skin you could ever touch. I pushed a strand or two of his hair back from his forehead.

He didn’t respond. He was sleeping the sleep of the dead.

Behind me, the doctor said, ‘He may take a few minutes to wake up properly.’ He was standing awkwardly by the door, keeping his distance. I knew he was there because they were frightened of what my reunion with Ben could do to him.

‘Ben,’ I said. ‘It’s me, Mummy.’

I sat down on the side of his bed. I wanted him to wake up, I wanted him to come to me, to pitch into my arms as if he’d been falling from a great height and had finally landed in a place of safety.

His eyelids flickered open, then shut again.

‘Love,’ I said. ‘It’s Mummy. I’m here. Ben.’

Another flicker and then I had them: bright blue eyes. They didn’t move in the usual way though. They looked past me at first, and it was only when I said his name again that they slid towards me, locked onto mine.

He blinked.

My head sank onto his, my breath on his face, his head motionless beneath me. I kissed him, my tears slid from my cheeks onto his. I felt his lips move, and I pulled back so I could see him better, hear him. ‘What did you say, Ben? What did you say?’

Eyes slid shut again, a twitch of movement in his arm. And I thought, where is my child, the one who could never stay still, whose every movement was brimming with life?

His breathing faltered audibly and I heard the doctor step forward, but it settled again and the doctor contented himself with moving the oxygen mask closer to Ben’s mouth.

I felt terrible, terrible sadness building in me, a feeling so powerful that it hurt, and it made my hands shake. I looked at the doctor, his eyes powerfully kind and his words steady: ‘Give him some time.’

And he was right, because Ben stirred, and his eyes met mine again, and even though they seemed to slip out of focus, his lips moved and this time a word was audible on his outtake of air. ‘Mummy.’ And tears began to roll slowly, silently down his cheeks.

I took him in my arms, even though the doctor stepped forward as if to stop me, then thought better of it. I scooped Ben up, onto my lap, and I held his limp, small body close to mine and in return I thought I felt some strength in his arms, and then it was a firmer squeeze and he clung to me. He did that weakly, and wordlessly, but we stayed like that for so long that eventually the doctor had to prise him gently away.

After the medical staff had laid him back down, they tidied him up, adjusted his cannula and checked that he was properly connected to his machines. When they stepped away, Ben’s eyes met mine with more consciousness in them than they’d had before.

And I smiled, because that was what I wanted from him most of all, a smile. It was the last thing I’d seen on his face before he left me in the woods, and I wanted to see it again. But my smile wasn’t answered, because his eyes moved away again, and the lids slid down over the tears that still fell, and he turned his head away from me.

And here’s the thing: I wasn’t sure whether that was because he was exhausted and dangerously unwell, or because there were things deep inside his eyes that he didn’t want me to see.

It was a beautiful reunion for me. It was. The feel of Ben’s arms around me was everything I’d dreamed of, every second he’d been away. But the other bits, his desperate physical condition, the sorrow that was deeply, soundlessly buried within him, and the way he dodged my gaze, I won’t deny it – this is supposed to be a truthful account after all – they were profoundly frightening.

Did you want catharsis? So did I. But there was none. I’m sorry.