Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  A big part of the thrill was getting to work with Fraser. She was tough and clever, one of the best. It was well known that she’d grown up on a shitty council estate in Glasgow. As soon as she could leave home, she’d moved as far away as possible so that she could train as a police officer and start a new life. Problem was, while she was a young DC she’d ended up married to a DCI from Scotland Yard who reeked so badly of corruption that even the Met had to get rid of him eventually. In his spare time he’d knocked her about. She’d ended up in the hospital once but her old man was never charged. The police looked after their own in those days, so long as they were white males.

  Her good fortune was that her husband had died before going to trial for corruption. He had a heart attack at the pub. He was dead before he hit the floor. She’d responded by moving to Avon and Somerset as a DS and shooting up the ranks with a combination of astute political play and detective work that was respected for its thoroughness. She was the first woman ever to be made a DCI in Avon and Somerset, and must have been one of the first in England. She wasted no words and her authority was natural. It was the right of someone who’d survived her wilderness years and come out tougher and wiser. She didn’t tolerate whingeing and she didn’t tolerate bullying.

  ‘First job: interview the parents,’ Fraser said.

  ‘Yes, boss. Where are they?’

  ‘At the scene.’

  ‘Is uniform taking them home?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She thought about it, tapped her pen on the desk. ‘We need to be sensitive, that’s paramount, Jim, but I’m inclined to bring them in here. Teas and coffees on our terms.’

  I knew what she meant. When you interview people in their own homes they feel more relaxed, because it’s familiar, but they are also in control.

  ‘Use a rape suite,’ she said. It was a concession to sensitivity. Rape suites are nicer than interview rooms. ‘And anyway,’ she added, ‘we’ll need forensics to visit Mum’s home at least, assuming that’s where the kid spends most of his time, and Dad’s home if we think it’s worth it. They’re both potential scenes.’

  She picked up the phone. It was my cue to leave. But then she put it down again.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘I was going to ask Annie Rookes to be FLO but she’s tied up. Any ideas?’

  I don’t really know what made me say it so reflexively, but I did, and before I’d had a chance to think. ‘What about Emma Zhang?’

  Fraser looked surprised. ‘Is she experienced enough? This one’s going to be tough whichever way it plays out.’

  ‘I think so, boss. She’s very bright, and she’s done the training.’ It was too late to back down now, and anyway, I thought Emma deserved the chance, and I thought she’d be good at the job. It would be a real step up for her, and there was so much to learn from working with Fraser.

  ‘Zhang it is then,’ Fraser said, picking up the phone again.

  It was only once I’d left her office that I hoped I’d done the right thing, for Emma, and for the case too. The family liaison officer role is a crucial one. They’re there to look after the welfare of the victim’s family, but they’re detectives first and foremost. They watch, they listen, they offer support, but above all they keep an eye out for evidence and then they report back to the investigation. It’s a delicate line to tread. The FLO can make the difference between our success and our failure.

  We got an incident room set up, quick sharp. Kenneth Steele House is spot on because it’s been refurbished with CID needs in mind, so we’ve got the facilities we need to run as slick an operation as possible, as quickly as possible. The room we were allocated was spacious: two runs of tables down each side with monitors on them, room for the Receiver, Statement Reader and Action Allocator. There was an office set up for DCI Fraser just off the main area, so she could run the show from there, as well as an ‘intel’ room, a CCTV room, an exhibits office and a store. It was an arrangement that meant we could keep everything close; it was proven to work well.

  Straight off, we allocated actions to the officers we already had working, to confirm whereabouts of all the local sex offenders who were already known to us and to look through records for previous incidents relating to missing children or any peepers, flashers or attempted abductions in the area. We had four pairs of officers in place and Fraser was adamant that she was going to need ten pairs at least.

  At 10 am we got a call to say the parents had been brought in. Fraser said, ‘You should get down there and get straight on with the interviews. Do it by the book, Jim. I want every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. I’m also going to speak to the Super because I think we’ve got grounds to get a CRA out already. The criteria are met. You need to ask the parents for a photograph ASAP.’

  CRA stood for Child Rescue Alert. I knew the criteria, you learn them by rote: if the missing child is under sixteen, if a police officer of superintendent rank or higher feels that serious harm or death might come to the child, if the child has been kidnapped and there are sufficient details about the child or abductor to make it useful, then you can issue one. The point of it is to inform police, press and public nationwide that a child is missing. A news flash interrupts TV and radio programmes to alert the public, and border agencies and police forces around the country will be primed to be on the lookout. It’s as serious as it gets.

  I took a last look through the questions I’d been preparing for the parents, made myself take a deep breath. This was it. I was as ready as I was going to be. As detectives, we’re trained to know that what you do in the first few hours after a child has disappeared is crucial. Ben Finch had already been missing for more than twelve hours and our investigation was only just launching. I didn’t need Fraser to tell me that operationally speaking we were on the back foot already, or that every step we took from now on would be under scrutiny.

  ‘Woodley,’ I said to a rookie DC who Fraser had attached to the case. He was a tall, skinny lad with a face only a mother could love. ‘Get me a tea tray ready. Enough for three. And biscuits. Take it down to the rape suite but don’t take it in. Wait for me outside.’

  If a female officer in plain clothes brings a tray of tea into a room, everyone assumes she’s from catering. If a male officer does the same, it makes him seem like a nice guy, puts people at ease. Just a little tip I learned from my dad.

  RACHEL

  They took John and me to different places.

  I was interviewed in a low-ceilinged room that was windowless and oppressive. I was met there by a tall young woman, who introduced herself as DC Emma Zhang. She wore a smart, slim-fitting business suit. She had beautiful caramel-coloured skin, and thick black hair tied neatly into a ponytail, deep, dark eyes that were almond-shaped and beautiful, and a warm smile.

  She shook my hand and told me that she would be my family liaison officer and she sat down beside me on an uncomfortable sofa with boxy arms and adjusted her skirt.

  ‘We’re going to do everything we can to find Ben,’ she said. ‘Please be assured of that. His welfare will be our absolute priority, and my role is to keep you informed about what’s happening as the investigation and the search for Ben progresses. And you must feel free to come to me with any queries, or anything at all for that matter, because I’m here to make sure you feel looked after too.’

  I felt reassured by DC Zhang, by her apparent competence and her easy, approachable manner. It gave me a modicum of hope.

  There was nothing to look at in the room except for a matching pair of armchairs, a meanly proportioned beech coffee table and three bland landscape prints on the wall opposite. The carpet was industrial grey. On one of the armchairs a lone purple cushion sagged as if it had been punched. A door was labelled EXAMINATION ROOM.

  A man arrived. He was tall, well built and closely shaven, with thick, dark-brown hair, cut in a neat short back and sides, and hazel eyes. He had large hands and he put a tray down on the table clumsily: the stacked cups slid dramatically to one end,
the spout of the pot let free a slug of hot liquid. DC Zhang leaned forward to try to save everything but there was no need. The cups wobbled but didn’t fall.

  The man sat down in the armchair beside me and extended his hand to me. ‘DI Jim Clemo,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry about Ben.’ He had a firm handshake.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Clemo cleared his throat. ‘Two things we need from you as soon as possible are the contact details for Ben’s GP and his dentist. Do you have those to hand?’

  I took my phone from my pocket, gave him what he wanted.

  ‘Does Ben have any medical conditions that we should be aware of?’

  ‘No.’

  He made notes in a notebook that had a soft acid yellow cover. It was an incongruously lovely object.

  ‘And do you have a copy of Ben’s birth certificate?’

  My paperwork was disorganised but I did keep a file of Ben’s important documents.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s procedure.’

  ‘Am I having to prove he existed or something?’

  Clemo gave me a poker face, and I realised I was right. It was my first inkling that I was involved in a process where I didn’t know the rules, and where nobody trusted anybody, because what we were dealing with was too serious for that.

  Clemo’s questions were thorough and he wanted detail. As I talked, I sat with my arms wrapped around myself. He moved a lot, leaning forward at some moments, sitting back and crossing his legs at others. He was always watching me, his eyes constantly searching my face for something. I tried to quell my natural reticence, to talk openly, in the hope that something I told him would help find Ben.

  He started by asking me about myself, my own upbringing. How that was relevant I didn’t know, but I told him. Because of my unusual circumstances, the tragedy of my parents’ death, it’s a story I’ve told a lot, so I was able to stay calm when I said, ‘My parents were killed in a car crash when I was one and my sister was nine. They had a head-on collision with an articulated lorry.’

  I watched Clemo go through a reaction that was familiar to me, because I’d witnessed it so often: shock, sorrow, and then sympathy, sometimes barely concealed Schadenfreude.

  ‘They were driving home from a party,’ I added.

  I’d always liked that little bit of information. It meant that in my mind my parents were forever frozen as young and sociable, invigorated by life. Probably perfect.

  Clemo expressed sympathy but he moved on quickly, asking me who brought me up, where I’d lived, then how I met John, when we got married. He wanted to know about Ben’s birth. I gave them a date and a place: 10 July 2004, St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol.

  Beneath the facts my head was swimming with sensations and memories. I remembered a hard and lengthy labour, which started on a perfect scorcher of a day, when the air shimmered. They admitted me to a delivery room at midnight, the heat still lingering in every corner of the city, and as my labour intensified through the long hours that followed, it was punctuated with the shouts of revellers from outside, as if they couldn’t think of going home on such a night.

  Before morning there’d been the fright of a significant haemorrhage, but later, after the sun had risen high again, I felt the extraordinary joy of being handed my tiny boy, who I watched turn from grey to pink in my arms. I felt the weightlessness of his hair, the perfect softness of his temples and a sensation of absolute stillness when our eyes met, me holding my breath, him taking one of his first.

  I had to detail the years of Ben’s childhood for Clemo, and talk about my relationship with my sister, and with John’s family. It was painful to speak about John’s mother Ruth, my beloved Ruth, who’d become a surrogate parent to me after my marriage, and who now lived in a nursing home, her brain slowly succumbing to the ravages of dementia.

  I also had to talk about the break-up of my marriage, how I never saw it coming, how Ben and I had coped since then. I didn’t want to relate these things to strangers, but I had no choice. I steeled myself, tried to trust in the process.

  The pace of Clemo’s questions slowed as we got nearer to the present day. He asked in detail about Ben’s experiences at school. I told him they were happy ones; that Ben loved school, and loved his teacher. She’d been very supportive when John and I had been going through the separation and divorce.

  Clemo wanted to know how often Ben had visited his dad lately, or any other friends or family. He wanted to know what our custody arrangements were. He wanted details of all the activities that Ben did in and out of school. I had to describe everything we’d done the previous week and then we were talking about Saturday, and then Sunday morning, and what we’d done in the hours we spent together before we went to the woods.

  ‘Did you have lunch before you went out to the woods?’ Clemo asked. There was a sort of apology in his voice.

  ‘Is this in case you find his body?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean that I think we’re going to find a body. It’s a question I have to ask.’

  ‘Ben ate a ham sandwich, banana, yoghurt and two bourbon biscuits in the car on the way to the woods.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do you need to know what I ate?’

  ‘No. That won’t be necessary.’

  Zhang handed me a box of tissues.

  We also compiled a list of the people that I’d seen in the woods: the crowd in the car park, including Peter and Finn and the other young footballers and their families, the group of fantasy re-enactors, the cyclists and the old lady who’d helped me when I first lost Ben. I also remembered a man who Ben and I had passed early on in our walk. He was carrying a dog lead, though we didn’t see his dog. It was frustratingly hard to recall what he was wearing, or even what he looked like, and I became upset with myself.

  I promised that if I thought of anything or anybody else I would let the police know. They asked permission to look through my phone records, to search my home, and especially Ben’s bedroom. I said yes to it all. I would have agreed to anything if I’d thought it would help.

  ‘Do you have a photograph of Ben? One that we can release to the public and press?’

  I gave him the picture that I kept in my wallet. It was a recent school photograph, not even dog-eared yet as I’d only got it the week before. I looked at my son’s face: serious, and sweet, beautiful and vulnerable. His father’s eyes and dark sandy hair, his perfect skin, scattered lightly with freckles across the nose. I could hardly bear to hand it over.

  Clemo took the photograph from me gently. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then, ‘Ms Jenner, I will find Ben. I will do everything in my power to find him.’

  I looked at him. I searched those eyes for signs of his commitment, for confirmation that he understood what was at stake, wanting him to mean what he said, wanting him to be on my side, wanting to believe that he could find Ben.

  ‘Do you promise?’ I said. I reached for his hand, gripped it, startling both of us.

  ‘I promise,’ he said. He extricated his fingers from mine carefully, as if he didn’t want to hurt me. I believed him.

  When he’d gone DC Zhang said, ‘You’re in good hands. DI Clemo is a very, very good detective. He’s one of our best. He’s like a dog with a bone. Once he gets stuck into a case he won’t give up.’

  She was trying to reassure me but I was thinking of only one thing.

  ‘I let him run ahead of me,’ I said. ‘This is my fault. If somebody hurts him, it’s because of me.’

  JIM

  I was quite pleased with how the interview with Rachel Jenner had gone, but it did shake me up a bit when she took my hand, grabbed it like she was never going to let go. You don’t want that. When you’re working a case you’re always well aware that the victims of crime are real people, but it’s important to keep your distance from them to an extent. If you live every emotion with them, you can’t do your job. For a moment or two, for me, Rachel Jenner had jeopardised that rule.

  I took
a close look at the photo she’d given me. It was one of those school pictures that everybody has, taken in front of a dappled background. Ben looked like a sweet kid: blue eyes, very clear and bright. Fine-boned. He had tufty light brown hair and a half-smile. He was looking straight into the camera. Ben Finch was a very appealing-looking child, there was no doubt, and I was pleased because I knew that would help.

  I handed the photo over to the team.

  ‘How’s the mother?’ Fraser asked.

  Rachel Jenner had been a ball of nerves, understandably, her eyes darting, flinching at shadows, talking quickly, clearly intelligent, but awash with shock.

  ‘Shocked,’ I said. ‘And a bit guarded.’

  ‘Guarded?’ Fraser looked at me over the top of her glasses.

  ‘Just a feeling,’ I said.

  ‘OK. Worth watching. Talk to Emma, see what her impressions are. I’m going to go and introduce myself shortly, and we’ve called the press in at midday to film an appeal. Are you happy to talk to Dad now?’

  I nodded.

  ‘On your way then.’

  I met Emma in the corridor. It was the first chance we’d had to talk.

  ‘Good interview,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  We moved to the side of the corridor to let somebody pass. Emma’s hand grazed mine discreetly, lingered there.

  ‘Did you tell Fraser to take me on as FLO?’ she asked.

  ‘I might have.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave my hand a little squeeze, then let it go, and stepped away to leave a more respectable distance between us.

  ‘What did you think of the mother?’ I asked. ‘I just said to Fraser I thought she was a bit guarded.’

  ‘I agree, but I think it’s understandable. I felt as though it was hard for her to talk about her private life, but I didn’t think she was being obstructive.’